Rob Kall: Of course, that's exactly what Robert Hare advocates for. Robert Hare is a developer of the symptoms widely used to identify or detect psychopathy 314. But, but we're getting ahead. My question was, why'd you write this book?
M.E. Thomas: Oh yeah, why, why did I write the book? So I originally started writing a blog, and I wrote the blog largely as a sort of personal journaling exercise. I had recently suffered several set backs in both my professional and personal life in my late twenties. And I had been sort of casually diagnosed as a sociopath by one of my friends years earlier, a friend a casual acquaintance who was a co worker of mine. And at the time I didn't think much of the term sociopath. But then when I was going through this difficult time, I thought what is the common denominator between all of this failure? Failure in my relationships, failure with my job, I thought it must be me, there must be something that I'm doing that's making me, act this way.
So I started exploring sociopath. Googled it, started looking up some research. Found that there wasn't really that much that was helpful for sociopaths. Found that there was a lot of stuff that was extremely negative, and biased. And so I also thought, I can have some sort of resource for people to look at that's going to be more neutral and helpful. Trying to help sociopaths, or help people who are dealing with sociopaths, or are dealing with sociopathy. Rather than just sort of writing them off as human trash.
Rob Kall: Okay, so I've read almost all of your book. I would have finished it except I got a call for a last minute interview that I had to take. But I read ninety five percent of it, it's a very interesting book. Looking at your Amazon reviews, they're all over the place, from people who give you one to people who give you five. And it's some very interesting stuff in there. So let's start off, how would you describe what a sociopath is, what are the characteristics of a sociopath from your understanding?
M.E. Thomas: To my understanding of a sociopath is kind of different than something like anti social personality disorder. A sociopath for me is more this personality type that has been identified as existing by psychologists, for you know, over the past two centuries. People having knowledge that there are people who do bad things, and yet they're not delusional, they're rational, you know. So the term insanity sans delirium. You know these people have a moral insanity about them. And they're making rational choices, but they're just rational choices that most people wouldn't make.
And the term, when I think of sociopath I think of probably the sociopath as defined by Hervey Cleckley, right, who wrote The Mask of Sanity in the early part of the twentieth century. And looked at people who are very, functioning, can be very functioning in society. They tend to be superficially charming, they tend to be kind of glib, they tend to not really have strong emotions, you know, except maybe primitive emotions. They tend to be manipulative, they're, they lack empathy is probably the biggest one. They don't respond in the same sorts of emotional ways, to emotional stimulus as most people do. And they also, they're own emotional world seems to be stunted to the extent that they don't feel guilt, and because they don't feel guilt, then they don't really have a conscience either. The same way most people have a conscience that is largely informed by their feelings of guilt.
Rob Kall: In one portion of your book, you, you bring up the idea of vampires, you compare sociopaths to vampires in some way.
M.E. Thomas: Right, well I think that especially, I mean we, we have seen a resurgence in popular vampire stories and movies. And I think when you look at some of the characteristics it seems they're, they're almost uncannily similar to the point where it seems like the, the myth of the vampire may have its origins in the existence of sociopaths. And how do you describe a sociopath? You describe it in these sort of other worldly ways, they're very cold there, they suck out the life of people, and sociopaths have been referred to before as emotional vampires. Because they seem to prey on the emotions of others.
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