Iago Psychopath Analysis
Iago’s behaviour and how that makes him a psychopath.
Hans Jürgen Eysenck mentioned in his book Crime and Personality the following definition of a psychopath: Individuals who have considerable difficulty in social adjustment, without the traditional lack of intelligence or structural brain disease. Among the symptoms are lack of emotional control, unsatisfactory adjustment to social standards, irresponsibility of characters and impulsiveness. “The psychopath can usually verbalize all the social and moral rules but he does not seem to be able to understand them and to obey them in the way others do.” (Eysenck 54) Fred West characterizes Iago in Shakespeares’ Othello as a psychopath in his article “Iago the Psychopath” because of his manipulations and false honesty, yet his definition overlooks important characteristics such as his failures in relationships, parasitic lifestyle. unreliability and irresponsibility.
As West mentioned, Iago has no motives. “His motives-or excuses- come more as afterthoughts, not as stimuli toward the heinous actions he perpetrates.” (West 29-30) This is a bit of an understatement. Iago will commit any crime without apparent reason or with high risks of him being discovered, more than people usually do. This becomes very
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Besides the lack of motives and his egocentricity, his failures in relationships, such as the relationship with Emilia, his parasitic lifestyle, unreliability and lack of responsibility are also proof of the fact that Iago is a psychopath. Perhaps he repressed this for a long time, but as Andrew Bradley says in his Shakespearean Tradegy: “[The play] shows us not a violent man, [...], but a thoroughly bad, cold man, who is at last tempted to let loose the forces within him, and is at once
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