---
title: "History of psychopathy"
chunk: 3/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychopathy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:22.648437+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Early 20th century ==
Some writers would still use psychopathy in the general sense of mental illness, such as Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud in Psychopathic Characters on Stage. By contrast influential German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who had  previously included a section on moral insanity in his psychiatric classification scheme, was by 1904 referring to specific psychopathic subtypes all involving antisocial, criminal or dissocial behaviour, including: born criminals (inborn delinquents), liars and swindlers, querulous persons, and driven persons (including vagabonds, spendthrifts, and dipsomaniacs). The influential Adolf Meyer (psychiatrist) spread the concept of constitutional psychopathy when he emigrated to the US, though unlike Koch he separated out cases of what was termed psychoneurosis.
After World War I German psychiatrists dropped the term inferiors/defectives (Minderwertigkeiten) and used psychopathic (psychopathisch) and its derivatives instead, at that time a more neutral term covering a wide range of conditions. Emil Kraepelin, Kurt Schneider and Karl Birnbaum developed categorisation schemes under the heading 'psychopathic personality', only some subtypes of which were thought to have particular links to antisocial behaviour. Schneider in particular advanced the term and tried to formulate it in less judgemental terms than Kraepelin, though infamously defining it as ‘those abnormal personalities who suffer from their abnormality or from whose abnormality society suffers.’ In a similar vein, Birnbaum, a biological psychiatrist, suggested from 1909 a concept similar to sociopathy, implying the social environment could determine whether dispositions became criminal or not.
From 1917 a forerunner to later diagnostic manuals, called the Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane, included a category of 'psychoses with constitutional psychopathic inferiority'. This covered abnormalities in the emotional and volitional spheres associated with episodic disturbances which did not fit into the established categories of psychosis: "The type of behavior disorder, the social reactions, the trends of interests, etc., which the psychopathic inferior may show give special features to many cases, e. g., criminal traits, moral deficiency, tramp life, sexual perversions and various temperamental peculiarities." Constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis was listed separately as one term to apply to patients considered 'Not insane'. Meanwhile, the American Prison Association had its own definition, in which psychopathic personalities were considered non-psychotic and characterized by failure to adjust to environment, lacking purpose, ambition and proper feelings, while often showing tendencies towards delinquency, lying and various eccentricities, perversions or manias (including dromomania (compulsion to travel or experience new lifestyles), kleptomania (stealing), pyromania (fire-setting) etc.). In the UK the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 included the category of moral imbeciles, who were not intellectually idiots but displayed from an early age an alleged mental defect coupled with alleged vicious or criminal propensities, and on whom punishment has little or no deterrent effect. Cyril Burt and others pointed out that 'psychopathic personality' was used in a broader and somewhat different way in America than in the UK.
In the first decades of the 20th century, "constitutional psychopathic inferiority" had become a commonly used term in the US, implying the issue was inherent to the genetics or makeup of the person, an organic disease. As a category it was used to target any and all dysfunctional or antisocial behavior, and in psychiatric categorization it labeled a broad range of alleged mental deviances, including homosexuality. Some courts began to develop "psychopathic laboratories" for the classification and treatment of offenders; the term psychopathic was chosen to avoid the social stigma of "lunacy" or "insanity", while emphasizing variance from normality rather than simply a mental hygiene issue. Nevertheless, at least one such laboratory issued a report on eugenic sterilization initiatives. From the 1930s, "sexual psychopath" laws (a term going back to Krafft-Ebing) started to be implemented in many US states, allowing for the indeterminate psychiatric commitment of sex offenders.
From the late 1920s American psychologist George E. Partridge influentially narrowed the definition of psychopathy to antisocial personality, and from 1930 suggested that a more apt name for it would be sociopathy. He suggested that anyone, and indeed groups of people acting together, could be considered sociopathic at times, but that sociopaths – or technically 'essential sociopaths' - were chronically and pervasively so in their motivation and behavior. In 1933, American Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan first coined the term "Psychopathic child," which is now thought to be the first formulation of autism spectrum disorder, to describe interpersonal deficiency which starts from childhood. Scottish psychiatrist David Henderson published in 1939 a theory of "psychopathic states" which, although he described different types and unusually suggested that psychopaths might not all be criminals, included a violently antisocial type which ended up contributing to that being the popular meaning of the term. In the 1940s a diagnosis of autistic psychopathy was introduced, later coming to wider notice and renamed Asperger syndrome to avoid the stigma of the term psychopathy.