19 - The Psychopath

Psychopaths are individuals who continually participate in antisocial acts. They feel no guilt, remorse, or shame for their wrongdoings. They have a careless disregard for the rights of others. Psychopaths are devoid of any real feelings and values. They have no true emotions. They are immune to anxiety or fear and, therefore, they are not worried about punishment or obeying rules. A psychopath can destroy a colleague, a neighbour, a member of the family without so much as a backward glance or a flicker of guilt. They have no genuine loyalties. They have one focus: to be winners themselves even if it is at the expense of someone else. The “genuine” psychopath can use these qualities to be a sharp and ruthless business person.

Psychopaths appear incapable of either designing or following a life plan with worthwhile goals. They may be moved to antisocial behaviour without warning and become suddenly aggressive or violent without provocation or reason. Unfortunately, psychopaths have developed no sound insights to account for their behaviour. Therefore, selfimprovement can be a lengthy and difficult process. Basically, they do not have the will to change or improve.

By now you are probably curious to know how or why a person feels this way. Earlier in this course, you studied Freud and the three parts of the personality—the id, the ego, and the superego or the conscience. The conscience gives us inner moral principles and a sense of right and wrong. The psychopath has no conscience. If you asked a psychopath: is this situation right or wrong, good or bad, they can recite the correct answer. The problem is they have no commitment to follow through and behave in the correct manner.

In summary, the psychopath is intelligent, outwardly charming, vain, impulsive, deceptive, unreliable, callous, insincere, egocentric, emotionally undeveloped, demanding of immediate need satisfaction, and unresponsive to interpersonal relationships. They are skilled liars. They are social predators doing whatever they want to whomever they can trick or control.

Approximately 1% of the population is psychopathic. The observation once a psychopath, always a psychopath is likely true. Psychopathy is not a type of mental illness characterized by the onset of symptoms at some time. Many experts now believe that psychopaths are born; they are not formed from negative elements in their upbringing. Many psychopaths come from normal loving homes; they are not always the victims of abuse. One theory suggests that in the psychopath’s formative years, the mechanism that develops the conscience is faulty. In the shaping of a conscience, the conditioning process involves the pairing of a stimulus (punishment) with a response (fear, anxiety, guilt). When a person matures, threats are not necessary to convince the normal person to refrain from antisocial behaviour; they have become self-disciplined. In the case of the psychopath, the socialization process just described has been severely interrupted.

Another theory states the origin of the psychopathic personality can be explained by the parental rejection hypothesis. Some parents make no secret that they did not want a child in the first place. These unwanted children may be frequently abused by the parents. Psychopaths are alienated from parents with serious consequences:

• They disregard social standards and values.
• They disrespect authority in general, which they view as an extension of parental influence.
• They do not develop empathy or emotional identification with others.
• They learn to hate instead of love.

There are psychopathic children. Even some preschoolers can show these deviant characteristics: lack of empathy, fearlessness, being highly active, reacting to others as if they have no feelings, and not being concerned with respect to other people.

Why is the psychopath so potentially dangerous? Without a conscience, psychopaths are capable of committing any crime from robbery to murder. Psychopaths can destroy people they have close relationships with by ruining them financially or tearing them apart psychologically and emotionally. When people have no concern for their fellow human beings, they are seriously disadvantaged in interpersonal relationships. They do not see themselves as being abnormal. They are not committed to counselling or therapy. They are not interested in rehabilitation.