Personality disorders (psychopathies) mean a stable pathology (deformation) of a person developing in childhood and been kept throughout their life. The pathology manifests itself in the disintegration of the personality, manifested at such an extent that it violates adaptation and complicates interpersonal relationships.
Psychopathic personalities are people who, in the words of K. Schneider, suffer themselves and make other people suffer due to mental characteristics of the former. Personal deviations in such patients can undergo certain modifications, increase, or on the contrary, soften. Patients do not understand their personality disorders to be strange and require medical (psychiatric) care. Since pathological changes in case of psychopathy inhibit natural social adaptation, social criteria are important for their diagnosis.
Even in ancient times, Cicero (the 1st century B.C.) considered that "like defects of a body, there are defects of the psyche that make life difficult to people, who have them, but the term has not yet been selected for defects of the psyche". Ph. Pinel (1809) was one of the first psychiatrists to have described such personality anomalies and called them "mania without delirium". The term "psychopathy, psychopathies" was initially present at the Russian writers N. Leskov and A. Chekhov (1885); after that, it was used in psychiatry by
V.M. Bekhterev (1886).
V.Kh. Kandinsky (1890) considered the incorrect organisation of the nervous system to be the basis of psychopathy, which led to extreme variability, inconstancy and disharmony of the entire mental life. He believed that the cause of this pathology was hereditary burden or influence of external hazards on the central nervous system in the early postnatal period. The most profound study of psychopathy is the classical work of P.B. Gannushkin (1933), where the author gave a detailed description of its statics, evolution, and systematisation. In the current ICD-10 classification, personality disorders are described in section F60.