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Antisocial personality disorder. This has also been called dry rot of the superego, or cancer of the conscience or various terms like that. These are people we basically don’t like because they don’t follow the rules of society. They lie, they cheat, they steal, they are irresponsible. They are the people who often end up in prison because of their antisocial behaviors. The are very frequently promiscuous and they often leave a trail of children behind them that they do not support. They are very poor at running away, abandoning their families, new families, things of that type. They are also very insensitive to other people, may engage in unthinking cruel behaviors to others or to animals.
Now the sociopath may be superficially charming and may con men are sociopathic, but there is a real superficiality to this. They don’t really lock into other people and they don’t have a sense of responsibility to others. Now with the co-morbidity with this group not surprisingly, there is the impulse/control disorders, including explosive disorder - people who periodically get into a rage and punch out someone - are features of the other cluster B disorders, including histrionic, borderline.
They are very prone to substance abuse. Many people with cocaine, heroin and so forth, are also sociopaths and interestingly, they, like hysterics, are prone to various somatoform disorders or somatization disorders. As time has gone by, and quite contrary to psychoanalytic theory it turns out that sociopaths and histrionics have much more in common than they have different from one another. Basically what is going on here is that culture has shaped men in such a way that they are somewhat more antisocial and women so that they are somewhat more dramatic.
But there’s a big slop over because neither are very … have very much depth, in terms of their feelings towards others, and don’t have very much regard for the social mores. So the histrionics are often promiscuous themselves, they with multiple marriages. They are, while they are very seductive and may dress in such a way to attract attention and get men involved.
They like, sociopaths, are very prone to exaggeration, dramatic overstatements and overt lies. They are also prone to impulse control disorders, such as kleptomania, compulsive shopping, things of that type. They are the ones who don’t worry too much about paying the credit card bills but just let it run up and then declare bankruptcy. They may be themselves rather suggestible and gullible. Now the co-morbidity for histrionic is impulse control disorders and the other cluster B disorders, panic disorders. Very interesting. I’m not sure why, but histrionics seem to be particularly prone to panic disorder, certainly to somatoform and somatization disorders. Substance abuse is very common. We have to be very careful about that, and they also tend to be susceptible to major depression and to rejection sensitivity.