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Since the last edition of this book was prepared, many additional psychopaths have been observed pursuing their vivid patterns of maladjustment. A few encouraging reports of successful therapeutic measures have emerged. The number of patients concerned is, however, too small to furnish substantial evidence that a regularly effective means of dealing with the psychopath’s disorder has been discovered. It is my increasingly strong belief that the immediate and practical goal of all concerned with this problem should be to promote a general understanding that these people have a social disability that is real and extremely serious. Adequate means must be provided to control legally these severely disordered patients like those long ago provided, and available today, for far less incompetent patients of other types. Even if a truly curative therapy is never devised, perhaps half the damage, crime, waste, useless disorder, and sorrow caused now by psychopaths could be eliminated by a reasonably wise use of such legal measures for control.

In the present revision I have attempted to make clearer my concepts of the psychopath’s confusing and paradoxical disorder. It is not easy to convey this concept, that of a biologic organism outwardly intact, showing excellent peripheral function, but centrally deficient or disabled in such a way that abilities, excellent at the only levels where we can formally test them, cannot be utilized consistently for sane purposes or prevented from regularly working toward self-destructive and other seriously pathologic results. Impressed by its effectiveness as used by Henry Head to distinguish a complex and deep type of aphasia, I chose the term semantic to indicate my concept of a personality disorder which appears to have, at least hypothetically, some important similarities.

In previous editions I evidently failed to convey accurately or adequately the concept I had formed. From correspondents, from reviews of the book, and from comments in studies on the psychopath published by others, I find I did not make my intended meaning sufficiently clear. Some readers were misled by my use of the term semantic to believe I claimed that the basic pathology in this disorder, or its cause, is deficiency in the understanding of speech or some other linguistic difficulty. Some comments, on the other hand, gave me the impression that it was assumed I had found fault with the psychopath because he could not achieve a final and absolute understanding of life’s meaning at levels more or less eschatological. I have restated my concept with the aim of making it more explicit, with the hope of being more articulate.

A sweeping revision of our whole nomenclature of psychiatric illnesses has been made since the last edition. This has encouraged me in the task of trying to set off and delineate more clearly other types of personality disorder that may be compared and contrasted with that of the psychopath. I find I have had to deal not only with my primary subject but, in order to do so satisfactorily, to comment also on nearly all the material treated in general textbooks of psychiatry.

It is a privilege to acknowledge the help of Dr. Lester Bowles, whose wisdom and fine human qualities have enriched the Department of Psychiatry and stimulated my own efforts.

I also wish to thank Dr. Fred B. Thigpen, Dr. B. F. Moss, and Dr. W. P. Robison. As residents in psychiatry, their excellent clinical judgment and genuine spirit of inquiry have contributed substantially to the material presented here.

Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen, my medical associate of many years, has played a major part in the development and the revision of this work. His observations and his thought, available to me during innumerable pleasant and stimulating hours of discussion, have assisted and profoundly influenced my own conclusions to a degree that amounts to real collaboration. Without his limitless generosity in relieving me over long periods of heavy and urgent responsibilities in teaching and in clinical activity, it would have been impossible for this volume to be written. My debt to him in this, and my gratitude, I can acknowledge but cannot fittingly express.

HERVEY M. CLECKLEY