Slip-ups and the Dangerous Mind: Seeing Through and Living Beyond the Psychopath is a practical approach for understanding and dealing with the deviant individual who would charm you with one face and victimize you with the other. In a world filled with selfish psychopaths you must ultimately deal with his or her multiple strategies and avoid being manipulated. This book allows you to identify the characteristics of the psychopath, pick out the lies and story telling, and expose his or her true personality. You may feel defeated by the psychopath at work, in business, in love relations, at school, or at home, but with careful observation and knowing their motivations, you can defeat their threats, avoid their captivating appeals, and learn to avoid their lack of empathy and lack of remorse, see their narcissism, and not confuse the psychopath's grand vision with motivations to take your time, energy, and money. Many cues give them away, including unusual sentence structure, moral failings, aggression and callousness, lies and contradictions, body language, false love, and inability to complete tasks. The reader can learn how to counteract their missions to deceive and hurt, first by admitting to their deceptions before it is too late, and second by folding the cards in a losing game and moving on down the road. Keep in mind that one can not teach them to be principled or moral in their dealings. Sometimes it's better to get out of bad situations before they get worse. It is still true, however, that social and economic change is often initiated by the psychopathic personalities, and but for their ceaseless obsessions we would still be drawing animal pictures on the cave wall. Our evolutionary history shows that survival and reproduction depend not only on altruism, parental love, and identification with the tribe, but also on the dark traits of selfishness, aggression, duplicity, risk taking, and even murder, traits that psychopaths display in the extreme, and traits that we all share to a degree. In the end, our knowledge of the psychopath depends on realizing that male and female traits, roughly formed during natural selection for success, overlap with those of a Dangerous Mind. To know ourselves is to know the psychopath. Slip-ups and the Dangerous Mind is a strategy for acceptance of ourselves and the pursuit of truth in the evaluation of others.
About the Author: Del (Wolf) Thiessen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied animal and human reproductive and social behavior. He has published ten academic books and more than 250 research publications. He graduated from San Jose State College with a B.A. in psychology, and completed his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California at Berkley. He researched alcohol preference among animals at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, later moving to the University of Texas. His interests are in evolution and behavior, reproductive and other social behaviors, abnormal behaviors, and the influence of the arts and music on scientific theories. His hobbies include billiards, writing novels and nonfiction books, magic, and raising animals on his ranch in Texas. He can be contacted through his website, www.darksideofthebrain.com.