On Moral Judgements and Personality Disorders
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چکیده
Psychopathic personality has always been a conten tious concept, but it continues to be used in clinical practice and research. It also has its contemporary synonyms in the categories of antisocial personality disorder in DSM-III (American Psychiatric Associa tion, 1980) and “¿ personality disorder with pre dominantly asocial or sociopathic manifestations― in ICD—9(World Health Organization, 1978), and some overlap between these and the legal category of psychopathic disorder identified in the English Mental Health Act 1983 is commonly assumed. Although the literal meaning of †̃¿ psychopathic' is nothing more specific than psychologically damaged, the term has long since been transmogrified to mean socially damaging, and as currently used, it implies a specific category of people inherently committed to antisocial behaviour as a consequence of personal abnormalities or deficiencies. The most frequent objection to the concept has beenthatsuchacategoryisafiction. Vaillant(1975), for example, regards it as a misleading stereotype, while Karpman (1948) claimed that it is “¿ a myth... a nonexistent entity―. Similarly, Wulach (1983) suggests that the notion of a specifically antisocial personality exaggerates the difference between the deviant and the conforming, while minimising indivi dual variations among the antisocial. Counterclaims that the term is clinically meaningful commonly rest on anecdote, but Cleckley's concept of psychopathic personality has inspired research that seems to validate it to some extent (Cleckley, 1976; Hare, 1986). However, research fmdings have not been sufficiently consistent to eradicate suspicions that the term remains a speculative construct (Blackburn, 1983a). This paper reappraises the current utility of the concept as a diagnostic category of personality disorder. Blashfield & Draguns (1976) have noted that to fulfil the communicative and predictive purposes of psychiatric classification, a category within a diagnostic scheme should denote a homo geneous group whose members share a set of reliably identified characteristics. Homogeneity is clearly central to the issue of whether psychopathic personality is more than a mythical entity, and the present discussion therefore examines the extent to which current uses of the term identify a homo geneous category.
منابع مشابه
On moral judgements and personality disorders. The myth of psychopathic personality revisited.
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