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
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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
- An underdeveloped conscience that fails to restrain the id's demands, leaving impulse control to weigh far less than immediate gratification.