Hopefully, many of you read this blog because you want to know how a trained psychiatrist deals with the issues you also face. I am not glad to be eternally tied to a psychopath, but since I am, you and I share the same challenges. We can reflect on these challenges together and we will all be better and stronger. This week I received an email from one of my ex-husband's family members, so I will put off the planned discussion of psychopathic anxiety to address the issues raised by the email. The email points to the trivializing of the sociopath's/psychopath's behavior that family members often do. This week give some thought as to how you will deal with others who trivialize a …
Evil – a simple definition
I love my wikipedia. I learn a lot I didn't know and I refine my thinking by finding fault too. (The problem is knowing what is worth learning and what needs unlearning!) Consider the wikipedia definition of evil: Evil is generally defined as any activity which takes advantage of another person for one's own benefit....(In contrast, good is helping others, even sometimes self-sacrificially; see saint, sainthood.) There's something dodgy about the form of this definition and also something very familiar about its implications. For one thing, it fits with the the lable 'anti-social' which refers to behaviour which has ill effects, but good intentions - "well, in his culture that behaviour …
There is no drabber place to be
Why is it that in the popular media super-psychopaths like serial killers are portrayed has having such rich inner lives? (Consider the highly cultured Hannibal Lecter.) That's not right at all. Anthony Lane, film reviewer for the New Yorker, makes the point well: There was a time when, as a God-fearing member of the community, you could commit a single murder, drop a couple of clues, and wait to be unmasked. Now it's all serial slayers, stacking up bodies like air miles. Filmgoers are supposed to find this multiplicity enticing, and we are constantly being invited to enter into the “mind” of the serial killer, but in truth there is no drabber place to be, and the idea that there might be a …
Josef Fritzl – psychopath
By now everyone knows about the astounding case of incest, etc. in Austria. No doubt some are going to excuse Josef Fritzl by suggesting that he must be a mad man. Others (for instance here) will find fault with society. These rationalisations are because for regular people the immensity of the crimes are blinding. But there are enough clues already that what Fritzl is is a psychopath and as such is responsible for his actions. Take one small detail - the alleged role of drugs in the case. Franz Polzer, the Austrian police chief leading the investigation, said Fritzl had given the impression, during protracted interrogations, that after 24 years he now actually believed the web of …
The opposite of love is … what?
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel is just one person who has said the following: "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference". In other words, the opposite of love is not hate, as might have been expected. We've all heard this contention and been struck by it. Yes, we've thought, it is terrible to be ignored. (Pretty awful being hated too, of course.) But I'm grateful to Dawn Eden for mentioning another powerful proposition. Eden, promoting her book 'The Thrill of the Chaste', is currently visiting Canadian high schools. The students seemed interested when I told them what Pope John Paul II called "the opposite of love." It's not hate, as some of them guessed when I asked them what …
Is your ___________ “a sociopath”?
This semester I am teaching social psychology and biological psychology at a local university. This week the issue of human affiliation and attachment came up in both courses. Recently a new understanding of human affiliation and attachment has arisen in the scientific literature and I was very pleased to see that the new insight already made it into both of the textbooks. The new understanding really helps us to understand sociopathy so I will discuss it here with the help of one of my students and one of our readers. Human affiliation has two levels to it. The first is our general tendency to avoid being alone and to seek out the company of others. The second is a deeper level that …
The paradox of psychopathy, non-psychopathy, and evil
The blogger, Sir William, has a post ”˜What is evil? which employs what is a very common way of talking about psychopathy and evil. Psychopaths do exist but they are not fully human: they are animals who lack one of the qualities which defines our species. This is a very comforting explanation for those who have been on the receiving end of psychopathy. It seems to answer the question how could someone do something like that? Answer, because they're not really a ”˜someone'. They're actually and animal, not a human being. How does this line of thinking account for evil committed by non-psychopaths? When an ordinary person does bad things to another person they must, on some level, belie …
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“The conscience is a vital organ”
Isn't it strange how the mind works? I read with approval Dr Leedom's latest post. In it she manages to be at once hard-nosed, realistic, and still keep positve. There are very real differences in the brains of those with psychopathic traits, she writes, but the brain is plastic and therein lies just a sliver of hope. For some reason the opening lines of Martin Amis' novel House of Meetings came back to me. It is set in the Soviet Union: Dear Venus If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids. Amis has also written a stunning nonfiction …
The Moral Brain
Scientists are actively working on solving the mystery of what is different about the brains of people who have traits of sociopathy/psychopathy. Notice that I say “traits” because virtually none of the studies only include subjects who score above 30 on the PCL-R. These studies then by definition are about sociopathic traits and not psychopathy (see my post from last week). When I first realized that I had to understand sociopathic traits in order to properly raise my at-risk son, I studied the traits and organized them according to what I understood about human motivation and the organization of the brain. In my opinion, sociopathic traits form three categories, I call The Inner Triangle. T …
The Borderline Personality as Transient Sociopath
Editor's note: This article was submitted by Steve Becker, LCSW, CH.T, who has a private psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and clinical consulting practice in New Jersey, USA. For more information, visit his website, powercommunicating.com. It is not unusual in my clinical experience to see, sometimes, some quite chilling sociopathic activity from my “borderline personality-disordered” clients. When someone has a “borderline personality,” it's quite likely, among other things, that he or she will present with a history of emotional instability; a pattern of chaotic interpersonal relationships; and poor coping skills under stress, reflected in self-destructive/ destructive acting-out and a tendenc …