This week we are continuing to discuss The Psychopathic Mind by J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D. The author is diplomate in forensic psychology, former Chief of the Forensic Mental Health Division for San Diego County and Past President of the American Academy of Forensic Psychology. As I said last week, my initial reaction to the book was rather negative because I believe this author has made some assertions that have become the basis for inaccurate folklore that has spread over the internet (to be discussed in the coming weeks). But Dr. Meloy made up for all that by setting the record straight on a very important issue—the spectrum of psychopathy.
The idea that psychopathy is a spectrum and that “sociopaths/psychopaths” vary in severity means that there is no real point at which “normal” stops and “sociopath/psychopath” starts. Any decision about where to draw this line (after gathering information on a large group of people) is in a sense arbitrary.
The idea that “psychopathic disturbance” (as Dr. Meloy calls it) is a spectrum can be very confusing. Many people feel a sense of relief when they finally figure out that the person who has harmed them is “a sociopath.” By “sociopath” they mean categorically different from everyone else, a different type of human. Now I am saying there is really no category, just an extreme on a continuum.
I want to point out that we talk about the extremes of the continuum of traits as if they are categories all the time. Think about the adjectives tall, genius, beautiful, athletic etc. and you will realize that although these concepts exist in theory, it can be difficult to correctly place individuals into any of these categories on a strictly yes/no basis. The only time it is easy is when you are dealing with the extreme cases.
It is however; very important to understand how the interaction between spectra and categories affects us. For example, if you are used to being with players in the NBA, most everyone outside of the NBA will seem “short” and the perception of “tall” will also be skewed. To the NBA, 6’2″ is short!
This problem of perception while in the midst of an extreme population has created a problem for forensic psychology. When Dr. Hare first developed the psychopathy checklist, it was thought to differentiate criminals who are “psychopaths” from other criminals who are “not psychopaths.” Well, I maintain that this is exactly the same as calling a 6’2″ NBA player “short.”
I am also concerned with how our perception of psychopathy changes when we see it in the community. When we are in the community a person who has “a little” psychopathy stands out as a 6’2″ person would in a crowd. Many pose the question, “Is my _______ a jerk or a psychopath?” When we understand psychopathy as a spectrum we see that such distinctions are not very useful. It is more useful to ask “How much psychopathic disturbance does my ________ have?”
I have looked extensively in the scientific literature for the exact Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) scores that might indicate mild, moderate and severe psychopathic disturbance. If you are following what I am saying you will immediately realize that these definitions are important in determining just how many “psychopaths” there are. When I searched the literature several years ago, I reported on this blog that about 10% of the population has significant psychopathy. That 10% figure corresponds to a cut-off score of about 12 on the PCL-R.
In The Psychopathic Mind, p. 318 Dr. Meloy says the following:
Mild psychopathic disturbance 10-19
Moderate psychopathic disturbance 20-29
Severe psychopathic disturbance 30-40
This is more or less what I also determined given my clinical experience and reading of the literature. You might ask why I harp on this so much and why am I harping on it again? The reason I bring this all up is to help those of you who are stuck in a relationship with someone who has “mild psychopathic disturbance.” Steve Becker also talked about the problem of “mild psychopathy” this week When he’s just a bad dude, though he did not call it that.
In what I am about to say I depart from Meloy and give you my own opinion.
The nature of “Mild Psychopathy”
Psychopathic disturbance as Meloy also describes it is a disorder of motives. Since we all have these motives psychopathy is a spectrum. Psychopathy is an imbalance between love and power motives along with degrees of poor impulse control.
A person who is severely affected with psychopathy has no love motives at all. If we could perfectly measure the love motive, we could indeed form a category of those who have NO capacity for love. That category probably also includes some individuals with “moderate disturbance” and all with “severe disturbance.”
Individuals with mild psychopathy have some ability to love. Because they can love a little, what they do is particularly harmful to “loved ones.” They switch back and forth, in and out of “loving” states. When they are in a loving state, they truly have no emotional or other memory of their experiences outside of that state. Similarly when they are in the “power mode” they have no access to the memories of the love mode. It’s as if they have a split personality. Their poor partner is left asking, “Will the real ________ please stand up?”
The dilemma for partners and family members, is that both states are real. Those involved with the “mildly psychopathic” have to make a tough decision. They have to decide whether or not to let go of a person who they have shared real intimacy with. That is much harder than letting go of someone with severe psychopathic disturbance where the entire relationship was a sham.
Liane, I think this one article is THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLE ON LOVE FRAUD OR ANY OTHER SITE ON THE INTERNET about this subject.
Let me repeat that:
I think this ONE article is THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLE ON LOVE FRAUD OR ANY OTHER SITE ON THE INTERNET about this subject.
This answers I think ANY question that a person involved with a psychopath could have about the disorder.
The “tall and short” of it is so much like the concept of “mentally retarded” that law enforcement uses to decide whether an inmate is retarded and therefore cannot be tried for his life in a death penalty case, or whether s/he can even be tried at all because they have no understanding of what the did as being wrong.
MENSA (the group for high IQ individuals) accepts the people in the top 2% of the IQ scores but that doesn’t mean the person inh the 97th percentile isn’t “as smart” as the people in MENSA, or even that IQ tests are good judges of “smart” in the first place.
Your example of the NBA player at 6’2″ being “short” vs. the same person in a general population being “tall,” is a great one, because in the end, “everything is relative.” Like the old joke about the two guys running from the bear chasing them and one guy says “can you outrun a bear?” and the other guy says “I don’t have to, I just have to out run YOU!”
I have found some of Meloy’s writings to be almost “word salad” or “psychobabble,” but other of his writings make perfect sense even if somewhat difficult to read. He is not an easy to read author though.
Thank you again, Liane for this article!
I say, “Amen” Dr. Leedom. Thanks so much for this. It explains so much about the percieved ugliness that sits alongside the niceness in these disordered relationships.
Thank you Dr. Leedom for this article, you put into words what I already felt about about the S/P’s. You are very clear and concise, this makes so much more sense than the Bad Dude analogy.
some comments and a question, Dr. Leedom:
first, we on lf often talk about ‘the mask slipping’ – which suggests many of us frame a spath’s true nature as the ‘power mode’, and the ‘love mode’ as a manufactured presentation used to move in the world. the paradigm you are suggesting is much different.
The ‘they can’t really love’ paradigm that many of us espouse on lf comes from cultivating a paradigm that is ‘most safe.’ big evil= don’t go there, and in this way is very useful.
I have to say that if i thought that the lying evil one i tangled with cared for me, it would be a much harder proposition at this point. I don’t need to live in the memory of all the things that i wanted and thought I had. it would serve to keep me bound.
I do have some problems with the idea/ or your use of the term ‘split personality’. In layman’s terms that brings it too close to MPD to me. Being with spaths and folk with MPD are completely different experiences.
Now the question – the spath of my acquaintance was someone who creates a few dozen characters (sockpuppets) for every scam she pulls. Her latest modus is to troll the internet, infiltrate forums and blogs and start weaving her story unitl some dupes get good and caught in her web, then she starts to love bomb them. Now – I was threatened by 3 of the sockpuppets when i knew that the whole ‘story’ was a scam, BUT the lovely boy character who i was involved with (on phone/ on line) was loving toward me. I felt that I shared real intimacy with him….but, he did not even really exist. Given that she ‘created a story’, and one that ripped my heart out (illness, operations, death, etc.), how would *I* work with your hypothesis?
What I do think is most important about this article is that it brings our choices back to a base line of: not good for me/ good for me and my responsibility/ choice for myself.
One step regarding how would *I* work with your hypothesis?
A person’s “identity” or who they are is a tree rooted in ability to love. A person who is completely incapable of love, or who is in other words severely psychopathic can have no fixed identity.
Other individuals who are less psychopathic have an “identity disturbance” with some core of an identity.
If everything in your case was a sham, you were dealing with a severely psychopathic individual. I wrote this piece to help those who may recognize that fragments of the person are not a sham. Those individuals who have fragments of “self” are still psychopathic and so are dangerous.
Regarding multiple personality. Many experts say that the core of psychopathy entails an ability to “dissociate’. In The Psychopathic Mind, Meloy devotes a chapter to psychopathy and MPD. But that discussion is beyond the scope of this blog.
Dr. Leedom – Thank you for your reply.
‘A person’s “identity” or who they are is a tree rooted in ability to love. A person who is completely incapable of love, or who is in other words severely psychopathic can have no fixed identity.’ Your statement is very powerful. I will take it with me today and ponder it.
I won’t go into this in depth but, i see the ability to disassociate in people who have multiple personalities as being triggered by trauma. I may be wrong about that. I have known a few people in my life who did dissociate to the extreme of living out of different ‘personalities’, and all had very truamatic and difficult early lives. I will read the Meloy book and see what he has to say. The ppath’s main ‘boy’ sockpuppet was MPD, and I have come to wonder if she didn’t have a misdiagnosis of MPD at some point. She WAS terrible good at faking it.
best,
one step
Dear One_step,
I’m not Dr. Leedom but I do have an idea about your question, and I imagine others do as well, so if you would allow me to answer….
\
I think the PERP of your con-job is the ONLY person you were dealing with. The “sock puppets” she invented were only Made to SUCK you IN, because you would not have been sucked in by the REAL HER. So, therefore she USED these other imaginary people and invented these imaginary people for the purpose of GETTING you involved with them. So I would rate your PERP as WAY UP THERE on the scale of “really bad dudes/dudettes” since nothing about these inventions was true and their “lives” were complete shams.
Any “relationship” you really had was with the PERP herself, in the guise of her FALSE and contrived “personality.” That’s pretty evil if you ask me.
Your feelings, however, were real and your pain and anxiety were real. If that makes any sense.
As for what responsibility/choice you had, I think any time we have a deep caring “relationshiip” with someone we should at least know they exist in the FLESH before we fall too deeply into caring for them. I’m sure she had some “reason” you couldn’t meet these people in the flesh, though. I would think in the future though someone refusing to meet in the flesh might be a big red flag for you.
In my situation, there’s no doubt that my P-sperm donor or my P-offspring are HIGH, one scoring a full 40 and the other scoring a 38 if you scored them by the PCL-R (and the P-offspring would only miss the 2 points for “many short term marriages or relationships” because he has been locked up for so long he hasn’t had the opportunity to meet women. LOL Otherwise he WOULD score on that as well.
I’ve worked with some “snakes in suits” to borrow the title of the book by Robert Hare, PhD, that might score a 12 or a 15, but they were PLENTY TOXIC and destroyed lives, careers, and companies, though they probably never would have thought of killing anyone or robbing a bank.
Look at Bernie Madoff—he probably actually wouldn’t score all that high on the PCL-R, but look at how much DAMAGE he did to others in his GREED and CONTROL. It amazed me though when he agreed to go to prison and protect his wife and kids as much as possible, so maybe he had some ability to love some people some of the time, or some altruistic bones in his body.
My personal opinion is that there is SO MUCH overlap between the various “personality disorders” that it is extremely difficult to separate one from another, plus there are high and low levels of different traits in each person. Where one starts and another one stops, who the heck knows, even most professionals don’t. I think the continuum aspect of it is the best analogy we can have. Where the professionals draw a line between “having” and “not having” significant amounts of the/a disorder really doesn’t effect whether these people are ones we should keep on interacting with or not. WE must individually determine where WE draw the line between this person is “bad for me” and this person has some “bad traits but I can live with them.” MY husband wasn’t perfect (like me! LOL Joke!) and he had some traits that drove me ape cheet, but they were ones that I could LIVE WITH…..he didn’t cheat on me, he didn’t beat me, he was reliable, and he was kind to me, and he loved me and was proud of me. So because he didn’t have toxic traits that hurt or belittled me in ways I could not cope with, we had a happy life together. I trusted him and he trusted me. We were first and foremost FRIENDS.
I admit that him being an engineer was a trial and a tribulation because engineers think they know everything about everything mechanical or electric even if they don’t know squat about it, and they won’t listen to reason. But, you can learn to live with them in spite of that terrible character flaw! Most of the time they ARE right, but on those things that they are NOT right about, you just do yourself! Or hire it done! LOL
oxy – not sure if you were reiterating my own observations or if you were trying to show me something you think I might not get inside – but i know i was ONLY dealing with ppath whack job. I continue to unravel all the bits of it, and asking how i would use Dr. L’s hypothesis was genuine – as it seemed like i might have fit into both ends of the experience – almost consistent loving behavior from the main character, BUT the whole she-bang was doo doo. Was it possible that the ppath WAS being loving to me through that character? I sure felt something coming from him. But I don’t think so, and I really appreciate the, ‘nooo, she was shows sever ppath disturbance’ responses. I know it might look SO obvious that she is on the extreme end of whackjob but YOU know that it takes time to really ‘get’ it right down to our bones. Each person’s experience is very different, but we all go through a process of getting all the information that makes us strong down to our bones.
I have a lot of engineers around me at work. My condolences once again for the loss of your good man, and for having lived with an eng. 😉
Dear One_step,
Hey, darling I lived with TWO! My first husband was an engineer too! So I have lots of experience.
No, I didn’t mean to act like you didn’t get it, cause I know you do, but what I meant was that SHE (the perp) I think was on the HIGH SIDE of the ruler, maybe not as high as say Ted Bundy, but none the less on the HIGH side of it all. Her “loving” presentations could NOT in my opinion have been REAL since the “puppet” she was talking through was NOT REAL. It was almost like she was in a way acting like a child with an imaginary friend and yet it was MORE Sinister than that, as she was Not a child playing pretend. She was an adult using her “imaginary” friends to emotionally HARM OTHERS and she KNEW she was harming them.
Also, you have to take into consideration that this was a con for a con’s sake. She wasn’t having sex with you, she hadn’t moved into your house to mooch off you, you weren’t a potentially million dollar pot of gold to steal, so I think it was just to mind fark you….for her own evil “FUN” and THAT I think is REALLY SICKO!
oxy- 2 engineers…bbaaaa karma!
i am not convinced that her being loving ‘couldn’t’ be real even if the characters weren’t. i am not saying i believe it – i think she is a being without the capacity, BUT as a model, i don’t know that any ‘loving’ presentation can be seen as real….even if the person is in front of you. not sure if i am being clear enough…and i am not going to spend too much time on this, but i think the hypothesis Dr. L is writing about poses an interesting paradigm that deserves consideration from many angles.
i tend to see the ppath’s ‘body of work’ and not just her con of me when i think of her. she has actually moved in with others as the dear friend of the dearly departed. She WAS setting me up for something more…don’t know what though. the pic she used to be the sister who was trying to set me up didn’t look anything like her and she wouldn’t have been able to move forward with a replica con, and move in on me.
another of her effective cons: a person who became dangerously suicidal when she convinced him that she was both his raped birth mother and rapist father via one of her online scams.
and yes, she wasn’t in my physical space, but don’t assume there wasn’t any sex involved. the wired generation is endlessly inventive, even if we don’t all have ‘imaginary friends.’