Very depressing story about a woman who could not stay away from a very, very bad man who eventually ended up gouging one of her eyes out and blinding her.
The story is interesting not only in that the woman has made some seriously insane choices regarding men, but also for the portrayal of Shane Jenkin, who is either a psychopath or a sociopath (they are very hard to tell apart).
I really must tell you that violence does not equal sociopathy. Psychopathy does not equal violence. There are many violent persons who are not sociopathic. You can be quite violent without meeting Hare criteria for psychopathy. Rather than describing a violent person, instead psychopathy defines a particular type of violent person.
Similarly but even more so, criminality does not equal psychopathy. The world is full on non-sociopathic criminals. Local jails are full of them. Once again, instead of being synonymous with criminality, psychopathy merely explains a certain type of criminal.
It is important to note that most psychopaths probably do not spend one day in jail in their lives. These are controlled psychopaths. They tend to drift towards fields such as the military, police, medicine, law, business and of course politics where sociopathy is not only not a liability but is actually a benefit. All of these fields are utterly swarming with controlled sociopaths. I call these people “legal criminals.” It is not that they do not break the law, but more that if they do, they commit white collar crimes. More likely they tend to skirt the edges of the law and always push to break the rules. It is not an exaggeration to say that the legal criminal sociopaths have been running our society for many years now.
Psychopathy is more than violence. It is an entire personality style and way of thinking, behaving and viewing the world. I do not have time to go into the odds and ends of the sociopathic style, but if you are interested, check out Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist PCL-1 and the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder in the DSM. Harvey Cleckley’s classic book The Mask of Sanity is of course the seminal work on the subject.
But this article is also instructive. Shane Jenkin is a textbook uncontrolled psychopath. If you want to learn how these people operate, look at how he lived his life.
