‘Undiagnosed Sociopath’
26th February 2020
Kevin Williamson calls for a time-out.
As we abandon moral language for clinical language, we run into technical difficulties. Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman describes the 2020 presidential election as one that may be a contest between “a self-proclaimed socialist and an undiagnosed sociopath.”
There is no such thing as an “undiagnosed sociopath” because there is no such thing as a “diagnosed sociopath”—“sociopath” is not a clinical diagnosis. It is, like much of the psychological jargon that infests our journalism and our public discourse, less a medical term than a pop-culture trope, something that people pick up from watching too many police procedurals and reading too much self-help literature. (Any self-help literature is too much.) Like “empathy,” “sociopath” is really a literary conceit. The same holds broadly true for “psychopath.” Some terms, such as “narcissist,” straddle the line between medicine and pop culture. We love to engage in amateur diagnosis and to pathologize our rivals, family members, romantic disappointments, etc.