Fictional portrayals of psychopaths

Psychopaths in fiction, also known as sociopaths, are some of the most notorious characters, but may only vaguely or partly relate to the concept as used with varying definitions by mental health professionals, criminologists and others. The character may be identified as a diagnosed psychopath within the fictional work itself, or by its creator in discussing their intentions with the work; this might be distinguished from opinions of audiences or critics that a given character appears to show behaviors or personality traits associated with psychopathy. Such characters are often portrayed in an exaggerated fashion and typically in the role of a villain or antihero, where the general characteristics of a psychopath are useful to facilitate conflict and danger. Because the definitions and criteria in the history of psychopathy have varied over the years and continue to change even now, many characters in notable films may have been designed to fall under the category of a psychopath at the time of the film's production or release, but not necessarily in subsequent years. There are several stereotypical images of psychopathy which only partly overlap and can involve contradictory traits: the charming con artist, the deranged serial killer, the successful corporate psychopath, or the chronic low-level offender with Juvenile delinquency.

Early depictions

In the 19th century the diagnostic categories of monomania or moral insanity (moral at that time meaning either emotional or ethical) made their way into works of literature, covering numerous eccentricities, obsessions or breakdowns - and sometimes acts of apparently senseless criminality and violence. This period also saw the rise of crime fiction such as sensation novels, where often someone in a local community who appeared normal would turn out to be criminally insane, and detective novels, playing on increasing anxieties about the characters of people in the newly expanding and diversifying industrial cities. The term 'psychopath' came into use in the late 19th century (as did the term it would often be confused with, psychotic), and also spanned a very wide range of conditions (etymologically and originally equivalent to 'mentally ill'). Neverthless an early rise to prominence followed its use in a Russian trial between 1883 and 1885 concerning a child murder, contributing to the release of a probable false confessor while the original suspect was found guilty. 'Psychopaths' began to appear in vaudevilles, ditties (songs) and press articles. The psychopathy defense was reported internationally as having enabled a remorseless female child killer to go free, a usage still quoted in dictionaries today.

Early 20th century

The meaning gradually narrowed, initially as 'psychopathic inferiors' covering all of what today might be called personality disorders and various other conditions, then intertwining with the terminology of the 'sociopath' (and eventually antisocial personality disorder), though psychopathy remained variously defined in both broad and narrow ways.

Early representations of psychopaths in film were often caricatured as sadistic, unpredictable, sexually depraved, and emotionally unstable (manic) characters with a compulsion to engage in random violence and destruction, usually with a series of bizarre mannerisms such as giggling, laughing, or facial tics. Up until the late 1950s, American cinematic conventions usually relegated the psychopath to roles of genre villains such as gangsters, mad scientists, supervillains, and many types of generic criminals. Examples of this type are Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White Heat, and Antonio 'Tony' Camonte (Paul Muni) in the 1932 version of Scarface. Homosexuals were also referred to as psychopaths under the broad definition then in use (the American Psychiatric Association in the first DSM in 1952 would list it under 'sociopathic personality disturbance'.

One exception to this mundane depiction during this period is the character of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in the 1931 Fritz Lang film M (short for Murder). Lorre portrays Beckert as an outwardly unremarkable man tormented by a compulsion to ritualistically murder children to satisfy abnormal erotic desires, which he claims is due to psychopathy. A German film (and allegedly based on real life Peter Kürten), it was released in America from 1933 and has been seen as indicative of a turning point in American media depictions of psychopaths. Until the 1930s psychiatrists typically applied the diagnosis to unemployed males or 'hypersexual' women, but several psychiatric, cultural and economic trends, together with sex crime panics, converged to transform the popular psychopath into a violent, male, sexual deviant or criminal - a threat to innocence, gender roles and the social order.

Mid 20th century

The arrests and resulting notoriety of serial killers John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy led to an additional increase in the way psychopathy was both perceived and portrayed in film. An increasing interest in realistic depictions of psychopaths led to the formation of a new hybrid of traditional psychopaths from early film and late-19th Century literature with the high-functioning behaviors detected in psychopaths such as Bundy and Dahmer.

One of the earliest real life cases which had a pervasive influence on American movies was that of Ed Gein, arrested in 1957. A farmer who had stayed living with his mother until her death, he had then killed two women and also dug up female bodies from the local cemetery and made various items out of their skin. Rumours spread that he was also a sexual necrophiliac, cannibal or transvestite, though these appear to have been unsupported other than by brief affirmations from Gein to leading questions by interrogators. Gein was found mentally ill and legally insane before trial, deemed to have had schizophrenia (psychosis including delusions and hallucinations) for at least 12 years, though at least one media psychiatrist dubbed him instead a 'sexual psychopath'. Robert Bloch, a prolific pulp horror writer whose mother was a social worker, says his 1959 novel Psycho was based on the Gein murders and the idea of an apparently sane person in a local community committing heinous crimes, but not necessarily on Gein himself despite numerous similarities. The protagonist Norman Bates is portrayed as an apparently regular American who secretly cross-dresses and murders a naked woman in the shower while switched into a personality based on his domineering mother, both in the book and as played by Anthony Perkins in the infamous 1960 Hitchcock film Psycho. Neither the book or film elaborates on the term 'psycho', though it is commonly taken to refer to either psychotic or psychopath. The psychiatrist describes Bates as having a split personality. Multiple Personality Disorder was at that time very popular (cf 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve) and is commonly confused with schizophrenia. Bloch later wrote a script for the 1966 film The Psychopath, the original working title for which was 'Schizo'.

A different thread within fictional portrayals of psychopathy continued to focus on low-level rebelliously antisocial characters. The title of the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, starring a culturally iconic performance by a young James Dean, came from a 1944 book of the same name detailing The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, in which psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner also discussed psychopaths in general as pointlessly selfish individuals who appear unable to accept society's rules. In 1962's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel), the protagonist Randle McMurphy is repeatedly referred to by the authorities, other patients and himself as a possible or definite psychopath. He states he was told by a previous doctor that this "means I fight and fuh-pardon me, ladies-means I am he put it overzealous in my sexual relations"; a note from the same doctor is then read out: "Don't overlook the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis".[1] In the script for the popular film adaptation in 1975, only the latter is retained and the term psychopath is never used.

Late 20th century

The 1973 film Badlands involved two lead characters based loosely on a young serial killing couple from the late 1950s, Charles Starkweather (who was influenced by watching Rebel Without a Cause) and Caril Ann Fugate. While the male lead Kit (Martin Sheen) is sometimes described as a psychopath or sociopath, psychologist Robert D. Hare, a leading proponent of the assessment of psychopathy, has identified Holly (Sissy Spacek) as exemplifying his concept of a psychopath due to her poor emotional sense of the meaning of events and her attempted mask of normality. However, writer and director Terrence Malick has said he considered Kit's shallow bitter insensitivity to be a result of suffering and neglect growing up in the Midwest, and 15-year old Holly, though immature and humorously mis-estimating her audience, to be a quite typical Southern (born in Texas) girl wanting to help narrate and come off well but still give the hard facts, and not dwell on herself or on personal tragedies as that would not be proper.

The cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, as portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the Academy Award-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, is perhaps the most infamous fictional 'psychopath'. Lecter is intelligent and sophisticated, and his disarming charisma and wit disguise his true nature as a serial killer. He spends most of the film in a cell, taunting protagonist Clarice Starling with clues to the identity of another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, in exchange for intimate details of Starling's troubled childhood. The Lecter movies were based on books by Thomas Harris, where his patient evaluations are all different but they call him a sociopath as they can't understand him. In the movie he is simply referred to as a pure psychopath. In 2013 Harris revealed that he originally based the Lecter character on Alfredo Balli Trevino, a Mexican physician who had killed and chopped up his homosexual lover who was also a doctor, in what was classed as a crime of passion over a financial dispute. While Lecter is not described as homosexual, Buffalo Bill is bisexual and (pseudo) transgender and trying to use the skin of victims to look like a woman, based in part on the Ed Gein case.

American Psycho was also published in 1991, later turned into a movie (2000). Bret Easton Ellis has told interviewers that the book is a satire on shallow consumerist lifestyles, but also that the writing of the violent scenes was based on fictional horror and FBI material on serial killers, along with how he imagined "a psychotic who worked on Wall Street" (Patrick Bateman) would describe the incidents. This along with analyses based on the book or film that the Bateman character is a psychopath again suggests a conflation of psychosis and psychopathy.

21st century

The book and film The Corporation discussed the legal fiction, especially in America, that a business entity is a legal personality, and concluded that it inherently meets the criteria for being a psychopath, which some consider to be a metaphorical usage.

Numerous characters in television shows are informally described as psychopaths by the actors who play the parts, including in the UK the characters Natalie Buxton in Bad Girls, and Sean Slater and Micheal Moon in EastEnders, and Dexter Morgan in the American show Dexter. One Chicago academic has argued in a review of TV trends that the contemporary fantasy of sociopathy is of someone whose emotional disconnection from others in society, rather than being the hindrance that it can represent in real clinical cases, enables them to be an amazingly successful manipulator due to a breakdown in the social contract.

See also

• History of psychopathy

Further reading

• Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Other Bad Guys: What do personality labels contribute to popular discourse? Steven Reidbord, M.D., January 2013, Psychology Today.
• Portrayal of psychopathy in the movies Hesse, M. (2009). International Review of Psychiatry, 21(3), 207-212 (Login needed for full text).
• Is James Bond in fact a psycho? Stephen Dalton, The National, UAE, Oct 29, 2012 (cited study, was actually about the 'dark triad')
• Rating of personality disorder features in popular movie characters BMC Psychiatry 2005, 5:45
• Mass media, 'monsters' and mental health clients: the need for increased lobbying. J Psychiatr Ment Health Nurs. 2001 Aug;8(4):315-21.
• Looking for the Hannibal behind the Cannibal: Current status of case research (2012) Hege J. Tunstad interviewing Aina Sundt Gullhaugen
• Hollywood’s Misrepresentation of Psychopathy Fielding on Film, Apr 5, 2012