Albeit great progress in psychopathy research, the traditional approach in which the entity is regarded as a unit of psychopathy leads current research on psychopathy to a limited study. By excluding those who show psychopathic traits only in certain ...
Albeit great progress in psychopathy research, the traditional approach in which the entity is regarded as a unit of psychopathy leads current research on psychopathy to a limited study. By excluding those who show psychopathic traits only in certain situations, psychopath theory cannot cope with the new kind of psychopathic aspect in criminology. For example, psychopath theory could not be applied to online offenders who behave in an extremely violent and aggressive way only in cyberspace. It is because they are not showing the psychopathic trait in real life, although the psychopathic trait should be ‘stable across time and consistent across situation’ in order to validate the basic condition of personality disorders defined by American Psychiatric Association. Thus, this article attempts to re-conceptualize psychopathy by introducing the concept of ‘identity’ as a unit of psychopathy, which premises multiple identities in an entity. Many studies on identity have demonstrated each individual can have a ‘repertoire of identities’ and the identity salience varies according to the social context unlike the assumption of the traditional psychopath theory that each entity has only one identity. Under this new approach, online offenders, whose psychopathic trait of their online identities is stable across time and consistent, can be included in the category of psychopath. It is not simply a question of abstract concept, psychopathy unit, but also involves pragmatic considerations such as etiology, treatment and legal issue. Conceptualization of identity may be another challenging job, but the existing discourse of identity in philosophy, psychology and sociology will aid to constitute the concept of identity from the criminological viewpoint.