I apologise for the title. This is merely to posit the term CUNT as a psychiatric term.

I apologise for the title. This is merely to posit the term CUNT as a psychiatric term. It’s a concept that emerges during a conversation with the neurospychologist Paul Broks (Prospect columnist and author of an extraordinary book about people suffering from neurological disorders, Into the Silent Land), who believes that diagnostic criteria for psychopathy as they appear in DSM IV, the official dictionary of mental illnesses, place too much emphasis on the social content and circumstances of the condition when these, strictly speaking, merely give it shape and expression. Broks argues that people may manifest psychopathic-type behaviour—murderous and psychotic—without actually being psychopaths. That is to say, they do not possess the neurological features that (he argues) define the psychopath. Conversely, people do not have to manifest an extreme behavioural disorder to be psychopathic. The defining feature of psychopathy is complete indifference to society and other people, and this can appear, Broks points out, in a politician or artist as much as in a serial killer. (He has written about psychopathic politicians for Prospect.) It may be best defined as a purely neurological disorder, in which elements of neuro-wiring (I’ll give the technical explanation another time, when I, er, understand it…) fail to make the links that are native to the average, non-psychopathic individual in possession of “theory of mind” – that is, crudely speaking, the sense that other people have feelings too. Thus, Broks proposes, psychopaths should be diagnosed simply as Cruel, Unfeeling, Narcissistic Types. The reason I apologise for the title of this entry is that, really, it’s a tautology. All psychopaths are, by Broks’ definition, cunts.