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I was going to ask this question but then it looks like someone beat me to it.What piqued my interest?Ian Fleming's introduction of the character Mr. Bond in his first novel, Casino Royale.**Is James Bond a psychopath?After a day of winning (up 3 million francs on 10),Bond sat motionless, gazing out of the window across the dark sea, then he shoved the bundle of banknotes under the pillow of the ornate single bed, cleaned his teeth, turned out the lights and climbed with relief between the harsh French sheets. For ten minutes he lay on his left side reflecting on the events of the day. Then he turned over and focused his mind towards the tunnel of sleep.His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold."It's the taciturn mask - the cold, expressionless face - that makes you think so.Or perhaps it's the feigned smile that he so often gives to M.But I don't think he is.Bond is an inherently good, empathetic character, who's forced to be cold by the traumatic death of his parents at a young age, the loss or departure of too many women he once cared about, and the "danger-money" that is his profession.Being cold and calculated (to the point of compulsion) did not come naturally to Bond. Instead, it was a learned trait. But one that he threw himself into once he discovered his ability, and the ability for distraction that came with it."Doing all this, inspecting these minute burglar-alarms, did not make him foolish or self-conscious. He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession. Routine precautions were to him no more unreasonable than they would be to a deep-sea diver or a test pilot."He learned also to find the thrill in all of it, and to let his passions out in equally measured ways."Bond's car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4 1/2-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers, he had bought it almost new in 1933 and had kept it in careful storage through the war... [He] drove it hard and well and with an almost sensual pleasure. It was a battleship-grey convertible coupé, which really did convert, and it was capable of touring at ninety with thirty miles an hour in reserve."Likewise for women.No longer willing to risk rejection or attachment:"Women were for recreation.""He wanted to sleep with [them] but only when the job had been done."On his second encounter w/ Vesper, his Casino Royale flare,"He remembered her beauty exactly. He was not surprised to be thrilled by it again."For Bond, all of these things were diversions. Not in the batting, teasing, and carelessly destructive way a psychopath might treat them. But as a means of escaping himself. Of avoiding the pain that was buried within.So too was the mask.“Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.”More likely then, Bond was precisely the opposite of a psychopath.A deeply empathic and principled man who wanted to do well, but recognized his own capacity to do evil.This made him depressed, disappointed, alcoholic, and a bit of a cynic."Please kill me."Good and evil tore at him equally.Or perhaps good a little more than evil. Which is why he did what he did:"You see, when one's young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong, but as one gets older it becomes more difficult. At school it's easy to pick out one's own villains and heroes and one grows up wanting to be a hero and kill the villains."He had learned good. But he had never really learned evil. And he was coming to terms w/ it's presence in himself and in the world around him.Were he to look at it too closely, it would overwhelm and engulf him, as also it would were he ever to let down the mask he had concocted.“There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition.”So he persisted as he did.Enjoying what pleasures he could find when and where he could find them."He knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the swing tang of rape [sic]. Loving her physically would each time be a thrilling voyage without the anticlimax of arrival. She would surrender herself avidly, he thought, and greedily enjoy all the intimacies of the bed without ever allowing herself to be possessed."All the while, keeping in mind that none of them would last."It seemed fantastic to Bond that human relationships could collapse into dust overnight and he searched his mind again and again for a reason."That no reason ever comes is the painful reality.And so, is James Bond a psychopath?I don't think so.Just a man who felt and understood the world all too well.