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 The book is from 1941 and so obviously quite outdated, but Cleckley’s metaphor of a mask remains quite relevant.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?