1. I discovered this quote, which was written in Morton Prince’s own hand in a book I purchased (Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, 2nd edition: Longmans, 1908) some years ago. The original copy remains in my personal collection.
2. Since psychopaths have developed an extraordinary capacity to act as if they were perfectly normal, i. e., sane, they must be skilled in a cunning manner to dissociate any real guilt that they should feel about their antisocial behavior. If they fail to dissociate they would then be forced to face the guilt as most ordinary people would. In this sense they lack the common decency to go crazy, for that’s what they would do if they felt the guilt.
3. It may be of some value to clarify the historical background of the use of the term psychopath. The tendency to view moral failure as illness, instead of as sin or as an expression of some evil principle inherent in the universe, is scarcely new in the Western world. The ancient Greeks considered that certain kinds of behavior, either antisocial or else not in the individual’s self-interest, were plainly caused by forces outside the individual. Homer, in the eighth-century b. c., portrayed humans as subject to the whims of the gods; the gods acted upon humans by affecting their feeling center, or thymus, which was thought to reside under the sternum more or less in the area of the thymus gland. The Homeric formula for describing rash, ill-considered, or antisocial behavior typically had it that this or that god put madness in one’s breast; alternatively, it was said that Zeus, or whoever, had taken away one’s understanding.
4. Some twenty-seven hundred years later, in 1809, Pinel introduced the term “insanity sans delire,” subsequently taken up by Morel (B. Morel, Traite des degenerescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espece humaine et des causes qui produisent ces varietes maladives [Paris, London, New York: Hachette [1857]) to indicate an illness affecting the moral part of one’s being. As a classificatory term, “insanity without delirium” opened the way first for “psychopathy” then “sociopathy” and more recently “antisocial personality” as means of indicating an illness of the moral part of one’s being that was largely manifested by behavior injurious to fellow humans, though, as a matter of fact, Pinel applied his term to cases that today would be diagnosed as forms of bipolar affective disorder, or manic-depressive insanity. It fell to the Englishman James Pritchard (J. Pritchard, Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind [Philadelphia: Caley and Hall, 1837]), who was a disciple of Pinel’s, to be the first to describe a more circumscribed kind of disorder that he termed “moral insanity”: “madness, consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper habit, moral disposition, and natural impulses, without any remarkable [i. e., observable] disorder or defect of the intellect or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusions or hallucinations” (p. 16).
5. Walker and McCuble (N. Walker, and S. McCuble, “From Moral Insanity to Psychopathy, in Crime and Insanity in England [London: University of Edinburgh Press, 1972]) have been able to trace the history of the notion of moral insanity from Pritchard’s term all the way to the early twentieth-century term “psychopathy.” As it happened, Pritchard’s (J. Pritchard, Different Forms of Insanity in Relation to Jurisprudence [London: Hippolyte Baidliere, 1842]) case histories almost without exception ascribed the onset of the disorder to a specific illness or traumatic event. But among Pritchard’s contemporaries and his immediate successors within English psychiatry, the term “moral” was delimited by the exclusion of any kind of physical injury, organic disease, or other physical factors as contributory causes. Thus “moral” came to refer specifically to the emotional aspects of insanity and “moral insanity” to serious mental disorders not characterized by hallucinations, delusions, or manifest disorders of thinking.