You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This comprehensive book on the behaviour and mind of the psychopath is divided into four parts, namely: Origins, Part I. Structure and Dynamics, Part II. The most interesting formulation in Part III differentiates between two kinds of human aggression, the affective and the predatory. Part IV, Treatment, is clearly psychodynamic and object relations-oriented, and is related to what is to be expected and what was found during psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy and in particular to transference and countertransference phenomena. Incidentally, the four sections can be studied separately, and this is helpful if one's interest is more or less confined to what the author has to say in one or two sections. This reviewer felt that more linkage between the sections would have made the task of reading the whole book more interesting and rewarding. The readers have to do a lot for themselves in going from one part to another part of the whole. The work of other workers in the field is described and set out well, but it was thought that Dr Molloy's own original and valuable contributions were not sufficiently highlighted.
I found the most valuable part of the book to be the concept of two kinds of aggression and aggressive behaviour in the human being, the affective and the predatory. At core, it would seem that affective aggression springs up as a reaction to a danger situation and is accompanied by feelings in touch with the apprehension of that situation, whether realistically appraised or not. The predatory form of aggression is that of the hunter, a coldly efficient exploiter and—or course in this case, and in many cases—killer. Certainly, one can relate to the concept clinically. What I would like to know are Molloy's views about the origins of these two types. Unconscious determination to bear no psychic pain, therefore, never feeling for the quarry, towards which there is only a predatory relationship, or ethologically pursuing the p