The Antisocial Personalities 1st Edition

David Lykken's brilliant book is a thoughtful, and articulate exposition of his theory about biological, psychological, and social causes of crime and antisocial behavior. It says:1. Various traits such as fearlessness, impulsiveness, aggressiveness, and muscular body type, are highly heritable.2. Those with average measures of such traits who are incompetently raised in asocial environments will go on to commit the majority of violent crimes; these are sociopaths.3. Those with very high measures of such traits, almost regardless of their nurturing environment, will become psychopaths - fortunately, these are much fewer in number.4. The solutions to the problems created by the sociopaths are better parenting training, use of alternative rearing environments (foster care), and parental licensing.Along the way, you'll also get an introduction to evolutionary psychology, a review of various taxonomies of psychopathy and sociopathy, the evidence for Lykken's psychophysiological basis of psychopathy (low fear quotient), and even a short chapter on bull terriers. Lykken writes with a forceful and deeply personal, non-academic style, but avoids the lurid sensationalism of sadism and torture that attracts many readers (and writers) to the antisocial personality. He dispatches psychoanalytic theory in two paragraphs. Most of the book will be accessible to the intelligent layperson; the few more technical sections can be skipped without loss of the flow of his argument.I first borrowed this from the library, but bought it and read it again; it's that good. It has profound implications for our current society. Liberals won't like the emphasis on behavioral genetics; conservatives might not like the state interference of his proposed parental licensing - tough luck for ideologues. Anyone who is a parent, might become one, or knows someone who is, should read this book. I'm wondering if the person who gave this book a 2-star review actually did read it, because Lykken discusses Hare's work at considerable length.

Lykken was a no-nonsense experimental psychologist who also was a clinician (seeing a range of distressed or malfunctioning people) and a social engineer. While other psychologists criticize social conditions from a more or less psychoanalytic position, Lykken strongly takes into account breeding of temperament---as with dogs. He discerns with etiological reasoning a dozen different types of sociopaths, and is not afraid to use the term "psychopath"---primary and secondary---according to neurological rigidities. He provides many case history examples. His experimental work with prisoners and others who screen out as psychopathic show how congenital neurological insensitivity to pain stimuli and punishment is at the root of intractable, unconscionable behavior. To my mind this is of the essence in our understanding and trying to change our secretive, mendacious, catastrophic cultural and political system---which presently allows sociopaths and psychopaths to dominate corporate, governmental, and military regimes. Lykken would teach and license good parenting, essential in preventing sociopathy, and would somehow reduce the proportion of psychopaths in the population. But more practically, we must develop and adopt means of screening them out before allowing them to take control of our major institutions. Here is where many social psychologists and educators need to refocus their energies.

This is the sort of literature to be read critically (or just avoided altogether) for the following reasons: 1. it is a good sample of pseudo-psychological studies designed to perpetuate anti-black racism. 2. David Lykken, the author, read a highly selective literature, which has historically criminalized the poor and the impoverished men of color (someone like Daniel Patrick Moynihan appears as a prophet in this book. See p. 214). 3. Scholarly speaking, the author did not bother to read sociological studies on the prison system in the US nor the prolific literature on critical race theory. Thus Lykken approaches official statistical data in absurdly uncritical ways, and like many sexist and racist conservative politicians, elected African-American single mothers as "breeders" of criminals (for a response to the vicious attacks on African-American women, please read Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America). 4. Even the growing literature on psychopathy, which unveils the fact that manipulators without conscience have been increasingly occupying powerful positions in the business, political, and legal world, is nowhere in the Lykken's text. Rather than acknowledging (and explaining) the massive crimes of corporate CEOs, Lykken, a modern Cesare Lombroso, chased the victims of poverty and racial profiling, including those he labeled "illegitimate" (another example of the author's moralistic understanding and myopic view of family). Now let me give you a taste of Lykken's ignorance of contemporary studies on race, uncritical understanding of statistical data, and affiliation to biological racism (from the introduction of his book, page IX): "In chapter 15 I come to grips with the fact that African Americans, who constitute only one eighth of the U.S. population, are responsible for about one half of the crime (and for virtually all the crime within the Black community itself). Because I have an African-American daughter-in-law and four grandchildren whom society, in its curious way, will classify as "Black," this problem is of personal concern to me. I try to demonstrate that Black sociopaths are being created in the same way as White sociopaths, that the same preventive strategies will be required in both cases, and that genetic racial differences probably do not play a major role."

Satisfied

Notes in the book