October 12, 2015

Psychiatric Diagnosis of a Leader




[From article]
Does this sound like someone we all know?
“Poverty of emotional feelings, lack of remorse or shame, superficial charm, pathological lying, egocentricity, a lack of insight, absence of nervousness, an inability to love, impulsive antisocial acts, failure to learn from experience.”
It’s a summary (by Richard Lynn) of the first ten of sixteen behavioral traits of the psychopathic personality from the classic work on the subject, Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity. The book will be seventy-five years old next year.
[. . .]

 

Of course like all personality disorders, psychopathology is distributed widely, in less virulent forms, across a large population. Nearly everyone feels depressed occasionally, but only about 7% of Americans are clinically depressed. However, the distribution of psychopaths or sociopaths (Cleckley in later editions uses the words interchangeably) is not geographically random. There is undoubtedly a high concentration in Washington, D.C. But even among Democrats, few display so blatantly so many of the classic features described by the Georgia psychiatrist as the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
[. . .]



With a few notable exceptions, Jack Cashill’s Deconstruction Obama, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief, Dinesh d’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Steve Sailer’s America’s Half-Blood Prince, biographies of the President have flown to the remainder table at warp speed -- deservedly. One day, when candid, thorough, dispassionate studies of our first post-racial President are written, we’ll have a better idea of the psychopathology this cold-blooded seducer of a nation. Before they sit down with their notes, Obama’s future biographers might want to take a look at The Mask of Sanity.



http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/10/the_mask_of_sanity_psychopathinchief.html

October 12, 2015
The Mask of Sanity: Psychopath-in-Chief?
By Jay Michaels

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