“Psychopaths have appeared in stories from all cultures: from Shakespeare… to the villain Ximen Qing in the seventeenth-century Chinese epic Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase)…
Psychopaths also appear in existing preindustrial societies, suggesting they are not a cultural artifact of the demands of advancing civilization but have been with us since our emergence as a species. The Yorubas, a tribe indigenous to southwest Nigeria, call their psychopaths arana-kan, which they describe as meaning “a person who always goes his own way regardless of others, who is uncooperative, full of malice, and bullheaded. Inuits have a word, kunlangeta, that they use to describe someone whose “mind knows what to do but he does not do it,” and who repeatedly lies, steals, cheats, and rapes.
Psychopaths are typically described in historical contexts as monsters, evildoers, people who lack the emotional connections that bind the majority of us, as well as the inhibitions that those connections engage… Clinicians have written about psychopaths since the birth of psychiatry in the early 1800s.”
— from The Psychopath Whisperer by Dr. Kent Kiehl
