当良知沉睡 – The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

杀人犯、连环杀手、大规模杀戮狂人身上明显的暴力特征和巨大的社会危害性，让我们很容易辨认出他们是反社会人格者。但我们通常意识不到、也分辨不出身边真实存在的大量”非暴力型反社会人格者”。他们通常不会公然违法，所以法律拿他们没什么办法。他们以普通人的面目隐藏在你周围，随时可能伸出魔爪，毁掉你的生活！

作者是哈佛医学院的精神病专家，专门为受过心理创伤的人提供治疗。25年来，她治疗过数以百计的成年人，他们大多数都遭遇了反社会人格者的控制或心理摧残。这些施恶的人可能是陌生人，但更多的是受害者的父母、长辈或兄弟姐妹。

本书取材于作者多年的咨询实践，通过多个不同类型反社会人格者的真实案例，深度剖析其三大特征：魅力十足、追求刺激、无同情心。更重要的是，本书要告诉善良的人如何辨认反社会人格者，以及如何自我保护，防止被操纵与伤害。

有无良知是正常人和反社会人格者之间的区分标准，本书也重点探讨了良知在”正常”世界中所扮演的角色，并指出两个令人欣慰的事实：

缺乏良知的反社会人格者往往走向自我毁灭；

提升道德和良知，才能让生活更加幸福。

Who is the devil you know?

Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?

In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.

We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win.

The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.

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