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It is a privilege to have been asked to comment on the forensic psychoanalytic gem that Symington's (1980) paper, “The response aroused by the psychopath”, represents. As a psychoanalyst with many years of experience working with psychopathic offenders, I find myself comfortably aligned to Symington's implicit view that forensic psychoanalysis offers a richness of understanding and an associated coherent approach to treating such patients that is lacking in mainstream psychological and psychiatric approaches. These mainstream approaches, whose focus is on the behavioural dimensions of the character disorder, often see the condition as either largely beyond help or modifiable only by altering the conscious thought of the patient.
Symington uses Heathcliff, a central character in Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights, to introduce us to such a vertex on the internal world of the psychopath. Heathcliff is a good choice as he is not the typical romantic hero, one who may be initially brooding and cold, only later to be revealed as a kind and sensitive soul. Instead he is an arch villain revealed to be increasingly malevolent. In keeping with the dream that Earnshaw has early in the novel, that of a ghost attempting to enter the house, the character of Heathcliff was written about at a time (1840s England) of wretched poverty in industrial towns such as Liverpool, where Earnshaw found him. The conditions in these towns were like a living hell. The privileged classes feared some horrible revolt and revenge from this group that Heathcliff can be seen to represent. Whatever her intention in weaving this theme into her novel, Brontë nonetheless appears, as Symington notes, to be more focused on exploring a type of individual character that was equally threatening and for whom revenge was a central driving force. Symington refers to this revenge motive of Heathcliff to explain the seemingly paradoxical idea that the problems of the psychopath were attributable to emotional c