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Twenty-eight-year-old Sickert had given up the theater for art and was a student of the American master James McNeill Whistler.
Walter Sickert was center stage of his own drama. He never hesitated to admit he was pathologically selfish. Today he would be diagnosed a psychopath, a narcissist. Typical of people with personality disorders, he had compulsions, and the media was one of them. He was addicted to newspapers, tabloids and journals.
He moved in high circles that ironically included the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and in later life he would give painting lessons to Winston Churchill.
Ellen loved Sickert all her sad, lonely life despite his cold heart, his pathological lying, his self-centeredness and his habit of disappearing for days or weeks without warning or explanation.
The psychiatric community defines psychopathy as an antisocial behavioral disorder. It’s more dominant in males than females and statistically five times more likely to occur in the male offspring of a father suffering from it. Symptoms, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, include stealing, lying, substance abuse, financial irresponsibility, cruelty, running away from home, promiscuity, fighting, a lack of remorse and an inability to deal with boredom.
psychopaths feel no remorse for their criminal acts and have no empathy.
Violent psychopaths have no concept of guilt. They don’t have a conscience. Typically they blame the victim.
Modern research on prison inmates diagnosed as psychopathic shows that more than 80 percent of those studied were abused as children.
Recent research studies by British neurocriminologist Adrian Raine estimate that as much as 25 percent of the male criminal population and as much as 1 percent of the entire male population is psychopathic. It’s estimated these individuals commit as much as 65 percent of all crime.
