Tony Blair: "vulnerable", according to Gullhaugen's redefinition of psychopathy
Ice cold, hard and emotionless. Such is the psychopath -- we think. Until we get a glimpse behind the mask. Researchers have for decades been almost unanimous in their accord with the popular perception that psychopaths are made in a certain way, and will forever remain that way.
But Aina Gullhaugen, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, disagrees.
Nature or nurture?"A lot has happened over the past few years in psychiatry," Gullhaugen says. "But the discipline is still characterized by the attitude that a certain group of people are put together in such a way that they cannot be treated. There is little in the textbooks that says that these people have had a hard life. Until now the focus has been directed at their antisocial behaviour and lack of empathy. And the explanation for this is based on biology, instead of looking at what these people have experienced."
Through her experience as a psychologist, Gullhaugen has found, in fact, that there is a discrepancy between the formal characteristics of psychopathy
and what she has experienced in meeting psychopaths.
Gullhaugen thought if psychopathic criminals are as hardened as traditional descriptions would have it, you would not find vulnerabilities and psychiatric disorders among them. She wondered if perhaps we have asked the wrong questions, and studied the issue in the wrong way.
With the same intense desire to get behind the mask as Clarice had in her meeting with Hannibal Lecter in the movie "The Silence of the Lambs," Gullhaugen has burrowed into the minds of psychopaths.
Comment: If there is perhaps some value to be salvaged from Gullhaugen's research data, it appears to suggest that there are very few psychopaths left in prisons - they have all been transferred to the TSA, the SEC, the police forces, the courts, the corporations, the military, the halls of Congress...
It has been amazing to Sott.net that during the Anders Breivik trial no one in Norway raised the possibility that he is a psychopath, instead preferring to believe that he was 'schizophrenic', 'psychotic', 'insane' or 'poorly raised', etc.
Gullhaugen is welcome to continue 'looking for the Hannibal behind the Cannibal' - looking into the bottomless void, in other words - until she finds the human she mistakenly believes is behind their Mask of Sanity, but meanwhile the rest of us in the reality-based community have to deal with the consequences of psychopaths' actions day after day.