Psychopathy

The story of the word

German psychiatry produced Psychopathie in the nineteenth century as a wide label for constitutional abnormality of character, covering far more people than it does now. Julius Koch's 'psychopathic inferiority' of 1891 was the broad version; Hervey Cleckley narrowed it in 1941 to the specific profile clinicians now test for. ψυχή originally meant breath, the thing that leaves the body at death, and only later the mind that psychology claims to study.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → German coinage → English

First recorded

19th century