Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior,   ISBN:9781572308640

Customer Rating: 

Michael Stone and Joel & Ethan Coen fans and Donnie Darko's of the world, -this- one's for you. (I may need a month laying out on the beach, myself, after wading through this thing.)

I'd read Millon's other work on the antisocial and sadistic personalities. I'd read Stone's, Bobby Hare's and Reid Meloy's stuff. I can administer a PCL-R from memory. I thought this would be "edifying." It's more like -really disturbing-.

Millon and his estimable crew, including all the afforementioned along with criminal behavior stalwarts like Eysenck, Blackburn, Lykken, Parris, Dorr, Dolan, and the emminent Otto Kernberg, cover the whole nasty matter as well as it ever been done in any single volume I've ever seen and very much -then- some.

At the tariffs for which it is available here, the society-damning piece by John Lykken is worth the price of admission all by itself. The same could be said about Bridget Dolan's inside look at the therapeutic community model most widely used in the Veterans' Administration Health System's immense, nationwide substance abuse treatment program (the largest by far in the world).

Or Henry Richards' -superior- examination of the developmental path to the likes of "Anton Chigruh." Or Kernberg's incredible grasp of object relations as it applies to the full range of deviant behavior. Anyone who thinks he can tangle with these people without understanding Otto's grasp of transference and counter-transference in this milieu is probably out of his mind.

The sociology or criminal justice major can legitimately expect to build 75 percent of his major papers through the master's level on the material and references laid out here. If one has the wherewithall to tolerate the affective upshots and questions one may ask about -themselves-, the foundation for a career in probation, corrections or rehabilitation management is all here in 450 pithy pages. I daresay this book will demystify a lot of complexities for police detectives and even cops on the beat.

If you're dealing with psychopaths, you're playing with fire. Here's a hose.

SighKoBlahGrr

Customer Rating: 

Offers a wonderfully comprehensive collection of current theories and trends, but is (for the most part) *very* dry reading.

Customer Rating: 

Utilizing this book in writing a paper for graduate school, I found it to be very helpful and thorough. The foremost experts in antisocial personality disorders and psychopathy have collaborated to comment on everything from history and etiology, to recent developments in comorbidity and treatment. A must have for anyone interested in the subject.

-Lee Cohen