psychopath

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psychopath The psychiatric label for individuals, commonly young males, who behave in disruptive, anti-social ways, showing little guilt or strong emotional ties. By way of explaining the behaviour, psychoanalysts point to a failure of superego development, learning theorists to an inability to learn from experience. Whether psychopathy is a mental disorder is contested. Barbara Wootton asserted the impossibility of differentiating such a behaviourally delineated condition from delinquency.

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