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bonds, and he tends to be promiscuous. His own emotional world is mostly a poor imitation of natural emotions. Cleckley acknowledged that this unique suite of personality traits could suit the psychopath equally well to a career in business as to one in crime.
    Nowhere else have I recognized the sociopath inside me more than in Cleckley’s clinical profiles, more than half a century old. From his observations of hundreds of patients, Cleckley distilled what he believed to be sixteen key behavioral characteristics that defined psychopathy. Most of these factors are still used today to diagnose sociopaths/psychopaths and others with antisocial disorders. They include the following:
         •  Superficial charm and good intelligence
         •  Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
         •  Absence of nervousness or psychoneurotic manifestations
         •  Unreliability
         •  Untruthfulness and insincerity
         •  Lack of remorse and shame
         •  Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
         •  Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
         •  Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
         •  General poverty in major affective reactions
         •  Specific loss of insight
         •  Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
         •  Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without
         •  Suicide threats rarely carried out
         •  Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated
         •  Failure to follow any life plan
    If you’ve ever recognized yourself in a horoscope and thought, “Hey, maybe there is something to this astrology business,” then you understand my encounter with Cleckley’sbook. Not everything is quite right, but many things are spot-on, and in general, it’s frighteningly accurate. My lack of life direction, my cold treatment of friends, my inability to focus on my job—the psychological pattern underpinning many of my problems was laid bare. I was particularly amazed by his descriptions of his patients, some of whom I shared so much in common with that I felt he could have been writing about me. There was one woman in particular, Anna, whose description seemed like a fictionalized version of myself:
    There was nothing spectacular about her, but when she came into the office you felt that she merited the attention she at once obtained. She was, you could say without straining a point, rather good-looking, but she was not nearly so good-looking as most women would have to be to make a comparable impression. She spoke in the crisp, fluttery cadence of the British, consistently sounding her “r’s” and “ing’s” and regularly saying “been” as they do in London. For a girl born and raised in Georgia, such speaking could suggest affectation. Yet it was the very opposite of this quality that contributed a great deal to the pleasing effect she invariably produced on those who met her. Naive has so many inapplicable connotations it is hardly the word to use in reference to this urbane and gracious presence, yet it is difficult to think of our first meeting without that very word coming to mind, with its overtones of freshness, artlessness, and candor
.
    It’s clear that Cleckley was taken by her. I love the way he describes her idiosyncrasies: the accent, her artlessness, her eternal youthfulness, her attractiveness that seems to besomething more than mere beauty, her intelligence, and her charm. These describe me as well. She loves
The Brothers Karamazov
, but Cleckley later discusses how Anna does not have the highbrow tastes and prejudices that accompany the typical “intellectual” of her education and breeding, treating gossip magazines with the same interest as the music of Russian composers. Again, he could have been writing about me. Cleckley goes on to tell about how Anna quite sincerely taught Sunday school,