ExtremePrivilege t1_iysue1y wrote on December 3, 2022 at 10:06 PM

Interesting! My doctorate is in Pharmaceutical Sciences, not Psychiatry, but I found this an engaging thought experiment anyway. I did not read your analysis because I’d prefer to come to my own conclusions but I will ask this: did Hannibal spend so much time becoming Moloch that he actually BECAME Moloch? It seems like he ultimately identified as the giant he was pretending to be. I’ve heard a saying that if one wears a mask long enough it ceases to be a mask. Obviously, Hannibal’s hypothesis was more or less proven the moment the healer enthusiastically offered aid, so why continue to his own self destruction?

Thanks for the post!

Unity-Druid OP t1_iytp2hg wrote on December 4, 2022 at 2:06 AM

There’s a book called The Mask of Sanity by Harvey M. Cleckley which was one of the first to compare the appearance of psychopathy between different psychopaths. The book is from 1941 and so obviously quite outdated, but Cleckley’s metaphor of a mask remains quite relevant. Many ASPD patients I’ve worked with have described feeling as though they are constantly wearing a mask, or as though they are a mask with nothing behind it. I.E. if the constructed character they present to the world were removed, they would have no internal frame of reference at all. It follows, then, to ask ask to whom the suffering belongs: the psychopath, or the mask?