Psychopathic Personality
Definition
An early clinical construct describing a person capable of superficial charm and social functioning but lacking remorse, deep emotional attachment, or the capacity to learn from punishment, most fully described by Hervey Cleckley.
Related terms
- Punitive Superego
- An overdeveloped, harshly moralistic conscience that generates chronic unconscious guilt, which some psychoanalytic writers linked to offending committed in order to be...
- Weak Superego
- A poorly formed conscience that leaves too little internal restraint on the id's demands, linked to inconsistent or absent parental authority in...
- Aichhorn
- August Aichhorn, the Austrian educator whose 1925 book Wayward Youth applied psychoanalytic ideas directly to institutionalised delinquent youth in Vienna.
- Delinquent Ego (Latent Delinquency)
- Aichhorn's term for an ego that never learned to tolerate the delay between wanting something and having it, a disposition that ordinary...
- Emotional Displacement
- William Healy and Augusta Bronner's idea that delinquent acts can substitute for the satisfaction of blocked emotional needs, particularly a need for...
- Healy and Bronner (Emotional Displacement)
- William Healy and Augusta Fox Bronner's theory that delinquency can function as a substitute satisfaction for blocked emotional needs, based on comparing...
- Id, Ego and Superego
- Freud's three-part structural model of the psyche: the id holds instinctual drives, the ego mediates between drive and reality, and the superego...
- Id, Ego, Superego
- Freud's three-part structural model of the mind: the id holds instinctual drives, the ego negotiates between the id and reality, and the...
- Latent Delinquency
- August Aichhorn's term for an ego that never learned to defer instinctual demands, leaving a young person prone to offending once ordinary...
- Moral Insanity
- James Cowles Prichard's 1835 term for a morbid perversion of feelings, temper and habits occurring without any notable impairment of intellect or...
Explained in these topics
- Psychoanalytic Theories of Crime and the Psychopathic Personality
- Psychoanalytic Theories and Psychopathic Personality (UGC-NET Unit III)A clinical construct describing a personality marked by superficial charm, absence of remorse, and shallow emotional response, given its fullest statement by H...