I’ve been watching “Dexter” since its rebroadcast on network television. The story line is that Dexter is a sadistic psychopath (or is sociopath?), but was diagnosed early in life by his adoptive father (a police detective) and redirected by him to practice his “hobby” on other psychopaths and sadists. Dexter can’t feel normal human emotions to others such as desire, love or empathy, but has learned to outwardly mimic the appearance of those feelings to fool those around him.
Granted that this is a television program, and if the writers are playing fast and loose with real psychological conditions, feel free to set this straight. But it seems that books, film and television seem to equate this lack of emotion with psychopathic or sociopathic behavior. Are the two really one and the same thing? Or is psychopathy really just a smaller subset of a type of person who feels no emotions, with another subset who lead relatively harmless lives? If so, can you describe what sort of person this would be?