Quote of the Week...from Tana French

Psychopaths have very low anxiety levels...she fits the clinical definition: no conscience, no empathy, pathological liar, manipulative, charming, intuitive, attention-seeking, easily bored, narcissistic...turns very nasty when she's thwarted in any way.     ---Tana French

The above quote I took from Tana French's crime novel In the Woods, which I just read and reviewed on 12/1.  The character speaking the quote is Cassie Maddox, an Irish police detective who speaks from her own past personal experience with a psychopath and is well-versed on the subject: the "she" in the quote is a teenage girl currently being investigated.  Now I have to be careful about attributing a character's quote to a story's author: sometimes the message is antithetical to the writer's actual beliefs...so I had to use my discernment here and concluded that Maddox is clearly the most reasonable character in the book and generally reflects French's views...I've seen this done on sites like BrainyQuotes where an author will often be quoted from one of his or her fictional works...

Being socially-oriented creatures as we humans are...even someone like myself who is introverted and pretty reclusive...it's very difficult to believe that there are people walking the planet with absolutely no social consciousness or empathy and who lie with impunity about what others may have said or done without it ever causing the slightest feeling of guilt.  But I know they're out there and I feel I've been victimized by psychopaths in the past when out of the blue I seem to be ostracized by others when I haven't done anything to merit any scorn.  I look back on these times and note the presence of certain individuals who I realized were casual liars and enjoyed working up people in conversation while backbiting about others.  Psychopaths will simply fabricate slander about their chosen victim and claim that he or she told them horrible things and committed horrible acts...and accomplish this with the full emotional expression that almost all of us would associate with someone being truthful.  I've concluded that there isn't a lot I can do whenever I suspect someone like that is around, other than avoid the hell out of them and pity the poor suckers who buy into their fiction. Can you think of anyone in the news who fits the above expressed description of a psychopath?  It's easy to look at people like Jim Jones, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson and see them in hindsight for what they were.  But while the deceit and manipulation is going on, it's not so easy...especially if they're acting like they're on your side and they have succeeded in getting you emotionally invested in them...