Psychopathic drift: A current of social distress

Camuso, M. (2003). Psychopathic drift: A current of social distress (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003). UMI no. 3107136.

The psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous frontrunner of a new kind of personality, which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over. (Mailer, 1958, p. 282)

This paper is a theoretic study that investigates how the struggles present in North American culture are fostering a generalized form of psychopathy and what this phenomenon suggests about the changing nature of human consciousness.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology which signify underlying changes in the organization of personality in response to environmental, historic, and social changes. In the turmoil of today's milieu, psychopathy has become the role model for psychosemantic learning (attitudes, behavioral dispositions, beliefs, habits, values). Constitutional psychopathy is a disorder of the emotions which affects feelings, instincts, and volition in a pathologic way. Psychopathic drift refers to adaptational behaviors that mimic the psychopath's detached disregard for others as a neurologic defense against anxiety and conflict. This is a perceptual style of cognitive and emotional alienation used to separate the person from the impact of some aspect of its external or internal reality.

Paradoxically, the fact that psychopathy has reoccurred throughout time and culture indicates a personality variable that nature finds necessary in her continual experiments to build bigger and better models of humanity. The be dismissed without thought as to how they may be developing our capacities to experience archetypal realities on an entirely different level. This study discusses the rise of the psychopath as role model as the possible entry of the new God-image (the next level of consciousness) intruding itself into the human psyche via its negative and destructive side. The iconic psychopath may be an intermediary figure borne of the disruptive shift from a psychologic consciousness to an energetics consciousness.