Abstract

Cleckley's Mask of Sanity is indeed a brilliant and seminal work, but to read it is to recognize that the condition delineated in its pages differs importantly from the psychopathy most of us have in mind today, and certainly from the psychopathy Hare had in mind when he devised Psychopathy Checklist-Revised in "an attempt to develop a new research scale for the assessment of psychopathy in prison populations."1 Cleckley's psychopaths stay out of prison as a rule, instead passing into and out of psychiatric hospitals in what Cleckley depicts as an absurd, unending cycle. Such crimes as they commit are almost never crimes of violence, and they appear to Cleckley, and the reader, not so much as threats to society as...