Antisocial Personality Disorder In The Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe once said, “Men have called me mad but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” It is until reading one of Poe’s works that one begins to question the mind of Poe and his characters. Especially in stories such as “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, it takes an extremely deranged mind to write in the detail and ideology as he did. In the short story, “The Black Cat”, the narrator tells his story of a cat he cherished. After a fateful night of drinking, he comes home and attacks his wife and cat, resulting in the cat losing its eye. The narrator later discloses how he finds a new cat that oddly resembles his past one, who he later believes is out to get him. As psychologists have began to analyze Poe’s works, they have began to wonder what in his mind allowed him to write such deep and sinister literature. Many people read

When looking at the perspective of the narrator and the story he told, it can be shown beyond a doubt that he suffers from antisocial personality disorder, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Antisocial personality disorder can be described as a person that disregards the best interests of themselves and the people around them by most commonly turning to substance abuse and anger. This can be tied with schizophrenia as this disease causes paranoia, delusions and a fake reality that those who have it begin to believe in. More times than not, these people become ill-tempered and lask out on themselves or others. This leads to the third mental illness, alcoholism. Not only did the narrator admit to being an abuser of alcohol, but he also demonstrated the three most common warning signs, aggression, fear and a lack of restraint. It was because of these three mental illnesses that the narrator acts the way he does and became obsessed on the idea of the demonic