Vladimir Putin takes off the ‘Mask of Sanity’

By Dr. David Bernstein, Maastricht University and CEO, SafePath Institute | April 7th, 2022

For the past six weeks, we have experienced shock and horror at the savagery that Vladimir Putin has unleashed on Ukraine. And yet, with each new act of terror, we still seem surprised at his capacity for ruthless, wanton destruction. In fact, many commentators have expressed surprise that Putin, who had previously been so careful and measured in his aggression towards the West – choosing targets, such as Georgia, Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, that were calibrated to avoid a Western response – would now engage in a brazen assault on the whole of Ukraine. However, we can explain this seemingly uncharacteristic behavior when we consider that Putin appears to be a psychopath.

In 1941, the psychiatrist, Hervey Cleckley, published ‘The Mask of Sanity,’ his seminal work on psychopathy. He proposed that psychopaths have psychological disturbances that are just as severe as those of schizophrenics, although they are not psychotic. Instead, their insanity is a moral one, hidden behind an appearance of normality: the mask of sanity. Cleckley’s book includes many case descriptions of psychopaths in everyday life: doctors, lawyers, and so forth. He observed that in certain situations, for example, under the influence of alcohol, the mask of sanity would come off to reveal the psychopath’s true nature. In fact, he speculated that keeping on the mask requires effort, and that psychopaths experience a feeling of relief or even pleasure when they remove it.

In my own research and writing, I have pointed out that psychopaths have different sides to themselves, different emotional states. In Schema Therapy, which I adapted to treat psychopathic patients, we refer to these sides as ‘modes.’ In fact, we all have different ‘sides’ to ourselves: ways that we think, feel, and behave in different situations. However, the modes in psychopaths are often extreme. In many circumstances, psychopaths can come across as friendly, affable, and cooperative. However, these same individuals can suddenly, “out of the blue,” commit assault or even murder. Sometimes these acts are instrumental, designed to attain a goal like getting transferred to another facility, or getting revenge for a perceived slight or wrong. At other times, the motivation may be a whim (“I felt like doing it!”), or the ‘fun’ of giving into one’s sadistic urges.

In these descriptions, we see two of the psychopath’s most central modes. We call his pleasant, charming side the ‘Conning Manipulator mode.’ It is the mask of sanity that he usually presents to the world – a side that uses deceit and manipulation to achieve its goals, while keeping his agenda hidden from public view. When the psychopath takes off the mask, it often reveals another side, the ‘Predator mode.’ This side uses cold and often calculated aggression to destroy someone or something, to ruthlessly eliminate a threat, obstacle, or rival. When a psychopath is in Predator mode, he behaves in a way that is emotionless, even robotic. It is “just business.”

In Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we see the monstrous face of the Predator mode, the face that he kept carefully hidden behind the mask. In fact, this face had been there all along, if we had only chosen to see it: in the devastation of Chechnya and Syria, the propping up of Assad, the murder of political opponents, and so on. And yet, Putin had always managed to exercise enough self-control not to reveal this side of himself to the West. Experts on psychopathy like Robert Hare have noted that self-control is one of the hallmarks of a ‘successful psychopath’- for example, the ‘snakes in suits’ that inhabit the business world and politics.

This raises the question, why did Putin lose his self-control now? Was it his isolation during the pandemic? Surrounding himself with ‘yes-men’ who reinforced his nationalism and insulated him from reality? Paranoia? Or a rational calculation that Ukraine’s movement towards Europe represented a threat to his regime?

All of these factors probably played a role, but there is another factor, a psychological one, that may have tipped the balance from contemplation to invasion: the gratification of unmasking the Predator mode. Destroying with impunity. Demonstrating the power to determine who lives and dies. Dominating the world stage while the West looks on in helpless horror.

Putin has been steadily accumulating power since his rise to the Russian presidency in 2000. With each new accrual of power, he unleashed his aggression in a manner that was proportional to his ability to get away with it. Now, after spending the past ten years amassing a nearly unmatched arsenal of state-of-the-art weapons, he apparently calculated that he could unleash their devasting force on Ukraine. On the one hand, he appears to have colossally miscalculated, underestimating the bravery and resourcefulness of the Ukrainians, as well as the West’s economic response. However, we must admit, by showing the world his ‘ace in the hole’ – the nuclear card – he has managed to terrify Western leaders, reducing them to bystanders as he bombs and lays siege to cities and wantonly murders civilians. Nuclear terror is the supreme fulfilment of the Predator mode. It is the power to destroy the world, just because you can.

The historian Robert Caro has spent his career studying politicians and power. He coined the phrase, “power reveals the person.” By this he means that successful politicians often go to great pains to hide their true motives, as well as their true natures, until they have achieved power. Once they have the power to act with impunity, they take the mask off, revealing the person, and the hidden agenda, that was there all along. Putin apparently felt that he had accumulated enough power to reveal his true nature for the Western world to see. Perhaps he likes it that way. At the same time, he has been careful to maintain the mask for the Russian people, to whom he is still a hero fighting Nazis in Ukraine. Apparently, revealing his true nature to his own people is a risk he cannot afford to take.