With the release of the Mask of Sanity in the 1940s Dr. Hervey Cleckley began the quest to describe a syndrome called psychopathy, in which affected individuals prey on others without remorse. Since people affected by the syndrome are socially disordered the syndrome has also been called sociopathy. Dr. Robert Hare extended the work of Cleckley and carefully documented the symptoms of the disorder. All this research has lead to two basic conclusions:
1. It is quite remarkable that individuals who choose a lifestyle of remorseless predation of other people are so similar in their behaviors and personality traits.
2. Equally important is the idea that non-disordered people do not “regularly” prey on others.
These two very profound conclusions have been the cause of a dilemma that is outlined by the following statement by a prominent psychopathy researcher:
Clearly, not all people who are violent or callous or sadistic are psychopathic. In fact, it is probably the case that most of the cruelty in the world is not perpetrated by psychopathic individuals. Similarly, although psychopaths commit a disproportionate share of the violent crime, it seems to me that they do not commit even the majority of the violent crime.
Over the last two weeks I have thought about the above dilemma, particularly since attending the Battered Mothers Custody Conference. The dilemma was also discussed at the conference in the form of questioning whether “all batters are psychopaths/sociopaths.” I want to answer this question for you in and extend the answer to the broader context of psychopathy/sociopathy and humanity.
All though I have the utmost respect for the quoted psychopathy researcher, I disagree strongly with his views. I believe that ALL people who are violent, callous or sadistic (in the sense that these traits persist in them) are psychopathic.
Over the last 7 years a number of studies show that the group of traits and behaviors that group together in psychopathy act like a “dimensional trait.” By dimensional trait I mean that psychopathy is similar to height. Just as there are short people and tall people and also what we consider short and tall changes according to age, gender and geography, there are people who are more or less psychopathic. The dilemma only happens when we attempt to categorize a person and call him or her “a psychopath/sociopath.” Scientists and mental health professionals disagree about where to draw the dividing line to indicate “a psychopath,” just like you and I might disagree as to what height makes for a “tall person.”
The dimension, psychopathic is also different from height in a very important respect- that is stability. Whereas height is very stable, psychopathy is only relatively stable and is affected by aging, mood disorders, substance abuse and social environment.
Now I want to explain the source of the confusion around the dimension psychopathic. The source of the confusion is a failure to understand that one issue underlies psychopathy and is the cause of the observed fact that a group of traits and behaviors cluster together in psychopathy/sociopathy.
The cause of psychopathy/sociopathy is an addiction to power. The addiction to power can start at any age but as in most addictions it usually begins by the early 20s. Also like other addictions, the earlier a person becomes addicted to power, the worse the addiction. Addictions that begin early are very resistant to treatment and carry a very poor prognosis. Psychopathy/sociopathy that starts prior to age 10 (puberty) is the most devastating.
The idea that an addiction to power underlies psychopathy/sociopathy has important micro and macro implications for human society. On a micro level the family is affected by psychopathic individuals who are obsessed with the pursuit of interpersonal power at the expense of family members. Violence, callous manipulation and sadism are all part of that power fix. The person that abuses family members does so because it makes him or her feel powerful. That is true whether the abuser is mother, father, brother, sister or any other relation.
The macro level is just as important. Our institutional leaders, if addicted to power produce widespread abuse in our society. Institutional leaders are bosses, politicians, teachers and the like. When we examine risk for “psychopathy” in leaders, it is useful to consider the phenomenon of addiction as applied to power.
Last night we went to The Cheesecake Factory to celebrate my daughter’s 18th birthday. I had one frozen mango marguerita, likely one of six I will have in all of 2009. I will also likely drink 4 glasses of wine and about three beers all year. There are many people who cannot drink just one drink because the pleasure of alcohol sets off a chemical reaction in their brains. Once they have one drink they develop a compulsion to keep drinking.
Power with me works the same way. I dislike telling other people what to do. I have had to learn to manage this dislike in order to adequately mother my children. Good parenting requires the thoughtful, careful exertion of interpersonal power. Some parents become addicted to that power and become what are called “authoritarian parents.” They are so bossy and dictatorial their poor children never learn to think for themselves.
Institutional leaders are like parents. Leadership requires thoughtful, careful exertion of interpersonal power. For a psychopathic, power-addict the first time they lead the meeting fills them with pleasure and delight. They become obsessed with the feeling and so obsessed with power. Since love and power motives are mutually exclusive, eventually power consumes the person’s entire being and he/she develops all the qualities of “a psychopath.”
Let us look at domestic violence again. Men and women who abuse their partners mentally, emotionally sexually and physically are not normal people who are the subjects of the influence of a violent society. They are power addicts. Just like there are societal factors in alcoholism, gambling and other addictions, there are societal influences on psychopathy. These societal influences no more cause psychopathy or power addiction, than they do alcoholism. Drinking causes alcoholism and exerting power causes psychopathy- in people with an inborn predisposition.
Please comment on what I have written. If you disagree please state your reasons. Let’s have a debate.
Oxy, one of the most useful books I found on the “garden variety psychopath” was “The Socially Skilled Child Molester.” (I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in LF, but it bears repeating.) The author’s purpose in writing the book was to help people distinguish patterns that differentiate the innocent from the guilty — to help protect the innocent and well-meaning Boy Scout leader who gives a hug to a tired Cub Scout from the deliberate predator who is working under cover of the uniform and badges.
The author points out two styles: the Groomers and the Grabbers. The Groomer becomes the best friend of the parents who are too busy to take their kid skiing; the guy who will happily babysit while the parents take a well-deserved weekend out of town. Or it might be the pediatrician who does dubious rectal exams. Or perhaps the coach, who takes advantage of out-of-town games, and threatens the kid with being kicked off the team. The Grabber is the sort of sketchy person you might already suspect who grabs, does damage, and moves on to the next town before he gets caught.
I felt this book described the grooming nature of the P who targeted me. His presentation of his worthiness and tender kindness was seamless. He also had a Boy Scout leader uniform, and I have reports that he molested his own sons. Who knows who else! He was a leader in AA and in his church — great stages for his noble Christian persona.
I don’t care what the label is — as long as it puts people on high alert, and preferably leads to him being isolated where he can’t do more damage.
CORRECTION: That should be C-ommit not “ommit felonies”—yea, Rune, BELLING THE CAT would be nice wouldn’t it?
Remember the story “The Scarlett Letter” ?
It seems that there is little agreement on may of the terms used for the disordered. It also seems to me that many reserve the term psychopath for those who have committed serious violent crimes and have been caught. Some seem to think the term sociopath is for those who have displayed “milder” behaviors.
First, the crime committed may apperar more tall or short. It is my opinion that many disrdered psychopathic people may do enough to stay just above the law. They may never murder or committ theft, but they are as dangerous to us in terms of the emotional pain and suffering they inflict. So whether they are or have been in jail may be irrellevent. THey may be smarter. Look at the violent crimes committed by individuals who have never had a criminal record before. Their hunger for power pand personal gain, I believe, can grow taller at any given moment. I recall the X telling me at one point that when people disagree with him, he feels so angry that he could just beat someone violently. I think he has that potential but may not have “snapped” at that point. I also recall him telling me he was an adreniline junky. It took me a while to realize it had nothing to do with skydiving or white water rafting. it had more to do with the rush of a big family fight in the middle of a restaurant or the rush of pulling a lie off on me or the drama of a bar fight where he can rush in and appear the victim or the hero.
In addition, we may all disagree on a particular person and their level of psychopathy, based on how we view them or veiw our interaction with them. In the beginning I was very sure this man was filled with integrity and was trustworthy. He has friends now who see him this way while my friends see him simply as a pathalogical lying jackass…..we see what we want to see and we ignore what we don’t want to see. EVEN PROFESSIONALS ARE CONNED. How can you possible get a good diagnosis?
The abuse of power seems to be a common theme. I work in Human Resources and my expertise is in leadership and organizational development. I am not a psychologist. I am certified to assess individuals in terms of their behaviors as they relate to competencies at work. One of the most basic things taught in the best OD programs is POWER and influence and how it is perceived as well as abuse of power. Eevn in terms of how others react when the “power figure” enters a room or requires you to do something int he workplace. People follow. People are conscietious and will do what they are asked. Studies in a teach ing hospital have shown instances where residents did thinkgs that were unethical and immoral simply because their hard driving, narcissistic mentor told them to do it.
Sexual harrassment in the workplace is more about power than it is about sex. I believe, based on Liane’s article that they may not always be as tall or short as they rate in an assessment. I thinkthe tallness can fluctuate. I think they all have similar potential to be dangerous. Some of us got away with fewer losses than others. We know they are disordered. We also need to consider that they are potentially tall in terms of danger. Some just may never get caught. I too like the term moral insanity. We need some strentgh behind the term so as to not poo poo the fact that many of these dangerous people have not yet been caught by the law or imprisoned. They just do a good job fooling us and others.
None of them have good basics. Honesty, Integrity, Respect, Loyalty or Fidelity…… That’s the first test.
EyeoftheStorm,
“I agree that therapists have to be careful about labeling someone who is not present…”
We all need to be careful about what we take on face value. Last Monday we had a poster who claimed to be a victim of a sociopath. In reality, she was a Jehovah’s Witness participating in the disfellowshipping and shunning of a scapegoat. After a careful read of all of her posts, the truth became nauseatingly apparent.
Did that make the poster a sociopath? After all, she and her fellow cultists were deliberately tormenting a person to the point of insanity and despair. In the past disfellowshipped, shunned Jehovah’s Witnesses had even committed suicide. What kind of people could do such a thing?
In a nutshell: a mob. Mobs do horrifying things. Sometimes entire cultures perpetuate great evil. How do the individuals live with themselves? How can they justify their behavior? Needless to say, that’s complicated. We call Hitler evil, and he was. But here’s the hard part: he personally never soiled his hands with violence. He couldn’t bear to witness cruelty. Other people did that for him, and not just the select few we all love to scapegoat. Thousands of people did evil things within his regime, and they didn’t suffer many qualms about it either.
Often the presence of evil presents itself like a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle. You know the evil is there, but it takes concerted effort to figure out exactly where it is. The more people that are involved, the bigger the picture and the harder the puzzle is to solve.
In the case of families and other small social units, sometimes finding the evil is as easy as figuring out what the elephant in the room is. What issue, event or circumstance will no one in the group acknowledge? If you know that, the puzzle solves itself on the spot.
Group evil is hard to pin down. Sometimes we call it a “rogue regime”, a “cult” or a “mob”. On a small scale, we may call it “dysfunctional”. It seems that sometimes the psychopath is the organization. It’s one of several reasons why I believe most of the evil in the world is committed by “normal” people. They’re normal in the sense that few people can resist group think.
There are other circumstances under which normal people do horrible things. It seems we can be never endingly creative in justifying what we want.
Elizabeth Conley: I worked with many anti-social personalities. Actually, I think where I worked was the dumping grounds for anti-social personalities with a few of us “normal” folks sprinkled here or there to make sure the work got done … cause their prestegious families needed to have their dysfunctional sons or daughters work somewhere! If this is the case, and the “powers overseeing this place knew” … then shame on them for letting us “normal” folks take the brunt of their evil all these years.
What I witnessed was how anti-social co-workers would make a comment about a new person “e.g. oh, she thinks she’s really something” or, “she/he looks really sneaky or slimy or slick”. By the end of the day, it was amazing how the majority of my surrounding co-workers felt the same way about the new person that started that day. I realized, most people don’t know that they are being conditioned of how they think by someone else just dropping a simple line here or there to sabotage another. Of course these new employees never made it past the first week.
If you are in the office environment … pay attention to who drops little negative hints about another … and see how fast it spreads throughout the office … now, the majority of your fellow co-workers and the bosses think the same way…. and they have no clue, how that idea came into their minds.
It’s subtle yet, lethal.
Peace.
Hello, Elizabeth….Glad you are back! That is a great post (8:37 a.m.), and I absolutely agree.
It echoes much that is in the book, “The Lucifer Principle” by Howard Bloom, which you might enjoy reading especially since his premise will be clear immediately to you.
Bloom also gives a very interesting history of the term “the pecking order”, and points out how this behavior goes on in all groups!
The term “pecking order” orginally appeared in the observations/research of a Norwegian naturalist named Thorlief Schjelderup-Ebbe (TSE). After WWI, TSE spent some time on his parents’ farm. He observed when the hens were fed, they approached the trough with a seeming orderliness and peace that actually was disguising a vicious form of competition.
TSE began to notice that this orderly approach to dining was not arbitrary. The same hen ate first every day, the same hen ate second every day, and so on down the line! When TSE placed an new hen into the chicken yard, the normally peaceful routine turned into a barroom brawl with some birds being pecked viciously to the point of death.
During this shuffling of status and position as the new bird tried to establish her place in the social order, TSE realized something fascinating. Some birds received hardly and pecks, while others were easy targets and paid the price. When order was restored, the hen with no pecks ate first and the most viciously attacked at last. The hens had established a social order and TSE called this a “pecking order”. Naturalists began discovering that is process exists in various forms in many species including ours.
So one’s place in the pecking order determines more than how many feathers you lose. It can determine a lot about your life! Group behavior is fascinating indeed and many of the practices and rituals are masking and disguising something deeper!
Eye: So when we’re ravaged by the S/P, we may be the hen thrown into the new environment, but we’re not able to defend. It’s another way the S/P destroys lives, both by the explicit and implicit damage, and then the way that the damage continues as we are kicked around by an uncaring society that likewise responds to our vulnerability.
Early on, I came to believe that naming the disorder was important to me. I had two choices. I could look at the S/P through a religious/spiritual lens and pronounce him “demonic” or “evil,” or I could look through the psychological/scientific lens and pronounce him “psychopath” or “sociopath.”
Either way, my choice would be looked upon by a majority of the uninitiated as evidence of my own instability. No one, I have learned, wants to HEAR the word “evil.” No one, not even professionals who work with victims every day, wants to HEAR and UNDERSTAND the word “psychopath.”
Right now, at this point in our evolution as a species, people like us are doing important work. We are teaching that, yes Virginia, there really is an Evil Spirit; and yes, Dr. Virginia, there really are psychopaths out here in the wild. I think people like us are acting as a bridge between old ideas and new ideas. We’re doing the work M. Scott Peck envisioned in “People of the Lie.”
In the end, we might reach some new understanding and give our new shared knowledge a new name. But for right now, I think of psychopathy much like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart thought about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
EyeoftheStorm: Well, the pecking order was alive and well where I worked. The managers had their cronies that were allowed to wreak chaos in that place, day in and day out. These folks should have been incarcerated years ago, but got away with such vicious low life antics to keep stirring the pot … they ran that place through chaos … which is a managerial technique … laziest of techniques, but a technique just the same. All the titles could only talk with equal titles and lower titles were talked down to. Slavery was alive and well in that place. Believe it or not, many of those people thought this was normal. I don’t want to get started on the Achilles heals that would uncover and how they would do you under … and forget about what I knew about the computers and databases … all games … I hope Obama gets his folks overseeing all the technical aspects throughout this country or he is doomed by the ones that will smile to his face and sell him out every chance they will get.
I’m shaking my head now, most co-workers had no clue that the anti-socials were just that … anti-social. Only a hand full of “real” people knew what they were dealing with, yet they played the game of being deaf, dumb and blind.
In our state it seems to be like this all over in the work force … and the frustration from the work force … if you don’t realize it … you go home and kick your spouse and kids in the butt … and they in turn take their frustrations out on others in their lives … and the kick in the butt goes full circle.
Peace.
Actually Rune, what I’m trying to say is that sometimes people do bad things and there’s no N/P/S in the picture at all.
Sometimes “normal” human behavior is awful.
Sometimes social animal behavior is awful.
Oh by the way – I hate chickens! I once had a job feeding chickens. Someday I hope to get a job feeding chickens…
…to tigers!