Without Conscience

by Robert D. Hare

  In eight months Jeffrey was out. He went directly to Elyse’s house and dazzled her anew, but her roommates were not impressed. Jeffrey propositioned one roommate and crawled into bed with the other while she slept. In the latter incident, he forced the young woman’s shoulders down and held her fast, seeming to enjoy the fear on her face as he kept her from escaping. Needless to say, with Jeffrey in the house night and day, the communal living arrangement collapsed.

  It was soon clear that he had no intention of leaving and no intention of finding a job. Still, Elyse kept trying to find work for him. The first interview he had was successful, but his first day on the job he stole all the money out of the cash register and disappeared for five days. Then a friend called to tell Elyse that Jeffrey was dealing drugs. When he showed up, light-hearted and talking a mile a minute, she confronted him. He denied all wrongdoing. And she believed him. She was on a yo-yo of believing, disbelieving, and believing again.

  Elyse’s parents stepped in and insisted that she consult a psychiatrist—they were fearful of her relationship with Jeffrey. They were immune to his charm and referred often to his “strange, flat eyes.” But the psychiatrist was not so wary. He found Jeffrey “optimistic,” “upbeat,” “quite a character.” Somehow, seeing the doctor taken in opened Elyse’s eyes. She decided to break it off with Jeffrey then and there. Out on the street, she told him it was over. He grabbed her arm and stared her in the eye. “I’ll never let you go, you know,” he insisted, and she suddenly had a glimmer of what her parents meant about his eyes. “I’m always going to be with you, Elyse.”

  Within days she moved to another apartment—and Jeffrey began to stalk her.

  Messages reached her—he’d kill himself if she didn’t see him, he’d never let up until she did. But then the messages changed. Jeffrey wasn’t going to kill himself; he was going to kill Elyse. Soon afterward he found her, broke down the door to her apartment, and grabbed her by her hair. Fortunately, her brother had decided to come over early from work and walked in just in time. At the sight of her brother, Jeffrey calmed down instantly. He smiled, said a casual hello, and left the apartment.

  And that was that—the storm was over. He never came back. For years afterward Elyse got reports that Jeffrey had been arrested, mostly for robbery and fraud, once for assault. He went to jail; he got out and worked on a fishing boat for a while. The last she heard, he was back in prison for a long term. Often she wondered how she could have trusted him so completely from the beginning.

  She never came up with an answer, and the knowledge of how close she had come to being swallowed up by Jeffrey’s charm and then his anger kept her on guard with the men she met for a very long time.

  Elyse, a former student of mine, now knows a lot about psychopaths, from both personal experience and formal training. But she still finds it difficult to understand how people like Jeffrey can so easily worm their way into someone’s life and then simply move on. “For him,” she said, “the rules of behavior were written in pencil, and he had a big eraser.”

  EVER SINCE THE release of the book and the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, reporters and television interviewers have been asking me if Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, the terrifying central figure who is both a brilliant psychiatrist and a cannibalistic murderer, provides us with an accurate picture of the psychopath.

  Clearly, as portrayed, Lecter has many of the characteristics of the psychopath. He is egocentric, grandiose, callous, manipulative, and remorseless. But he also seems more than a bit crazy. This is not surprising, given that both Lecter and the serial killer in the movie, Buffalo Bill, a transvestite who skins his female victims, bear some resemblance to a real-life psychotic serial killer, Edward Gein.

  The head of the psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane in which Lecter is housed said, “Oh, he is a monster. A pure psychopath. So rare to capture one alive.”

  This is of course a grossly inaccurate statement, one that reflects the common assumption that all psychopaths are grisly serial killers who torture and maim for kicks. If Lecter is a psychopath, he is far from a typical one. If he did exist—he’s a fictional character, after all—he would be a member of a rather select club. Serial killers are extremely rare; there are probably fewer than one hundred in North America. In contrast, there may be as many as 2 or 3 million psychopaths in North America. Even if almost all serial killers were psychopaths, this would mean that for every psychopath who is a serial killer, there are 20,000 or 30,000 psychopaths who do not commit serial murder.

  In other words, portrayals of psychopaths that focus on grotesque and sadistic killers such as Lecter give the public a highly distorted view of the disorder. In most instances it is egocentricity, whim, and the promise of instant gratification for more commonplace needs, not the drooling satisfaction of bizarre power trips and sexual hungers, that motivate the psychopath to break the law.

  BREAKING THE RULES

  Society has many rules, some formalized in laws and others consisting of widely accepted beliefs about what is right and wrong. Each protects us as individuals and strengthens society’s fabric. Fear of punishment certainly helps to keep us in line, but there are other reasons why we follow the rules:

  • a rational appraisal of the odds of being caught

  • a philosophical or theological idea of good and evil

  • an appreciation of the need for social cooperation and harmony

  • a capacity for thinking about, and being moved by, the feelings, rights, needs, and well-being of those around us

  Learning to behave according to the rules and regulations of society, called socialization, is a complex process. On a practical level it teaches children “how things are done.” In the process, socialization—through parenting, schooling, social experiences, religious training, and so forth—helps to create a system of beliefs, attitudes, and personal standards that determine how we interact with the world around us. Socialization also contributes to the formation of what most people call their conscience, the pesky inner voice that helps us to resist temptation and to feel guilty when we don’t. Together, this inner voice and the internalized norms and rules of society act as an “inner policeman,” regulating our behavior even in the absence of the many external controls, such as laws, our perceptions of what others expect of us, and real-life policemen. It’s no overstatement to say that our internal controls make society work. Our collective amazement and fascination with the psychopath’s utter disregard for rules suggests, by comparison, the power our “inner policemen” actually have over us.

  However, for psychopaths like Jeffrey, the social experiences that normally build a conscience never take hold. Such people don’t have an inner voice to guide them; they know the rules but follow only those they choose to follow, no matter what the repercussions for others. They have little resistance to temptation, and their transgressions elicit no guilt. Without the shackles of a nagging conscience, they feel free to satisfy their needs and wants and do whatever they think they can get away with. Any antisocial act, from petty theft to bloody murder, becomes possible.

  We don’t know why the conscience of the psychopath—if it exists at all—is so weak. However, we can make some reasonable guesses:

  • Psychopaths have little aptitude for experiencing the emotional responses—fear and anxiety—that are the mainsprings of conscience.1

  In most people, early childhood punishment produces lifelong links between social taboos and feelings of anxiety. The anxiety associated with potential punishment for an act helps to suppress the act. In fact, anxiety may help to suppress even the idea of the act: “I considered taking the money but I quickly put the thought out of my mind.”

  But in psychopaths, the links between prohibited acts and anxiety are weak, and the threat of punishment fails to deter them. Perhaps for this reason, Jeffrey’s record of arrests and convictions looked like the criminal history of an amnesiac: No punishment ever had the slightest effect in dissuadin
g him from gratifying his impulses.

  PSYCHOPATHS ARE VERY good at giving their undivided attention to things that interest them most and at ignoring other things. Some clinicians have likened the process to a narrow-beam searchlight that focuses on only one thing at a time. Others suggest that it is similar to the concentration with which a predator stalks its prey.

  This unusual ability to focus attention may or may not be a good thing, depending on the situation. For example, star athletes typically attribute much of their success to the power of concentration. A batter who takes his eye off the ball to watch a bird fly by, or who is momentarily distracted when someone shouts his name, is unlikely to improve his batting average.

  On the other hand, many situations are complex and require that we pay attention to several things at the same time. If we concentrate on only what we find most interesting, we may miss something else of importance, perhaps a danger signal. This is what psychopaths often do: They pay so much attention to obtaining rewards and enjoying themselves that they ignore signals that could warn them of danger.

  For example, some psychopaths earned reputations for being fearless fighter pilots during World War II, staying on their targets like terriers on an ankle. Yet, these pilots often failed to keep track of such unexciting details as fuel supply, altitude, location, and the position of other planes. Sometimes they became heroes, but more often they were killed or became known as opportunists, loners, or hotshots who couldn’t be relied on—except to take care of themselves.

  • The “inner speech” of psychopaths lacks emotional punch.

  Conscience depends not only on the ability to imagine consequences but on the capacity to mentally “talk to oneself.” Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria, for example, has shown that internalized speech—the inner voice—plays a crucial role in regulating behavior.2

  But when psychopaths talk to themselves they are simply “reading lines.” When Jeffrey attempted to rape Elyse’s roommate, he may have thought to himself, “Shit. If I do this there’ll be hell to pay. Maybe I’ll get AIDS, she’ll get pregnant, or Elyse will kill me.” But if these thoughts did run through his mind they would have had about the same emotional impact on him if he’d thought, “Maybe I’ll watch the ball game tonight.” So, he never seriously considered the effect of his self-gratifying behavior on any of the people involved, including himself.

  • Psychopaths have a weak capacity for mentally “picturing” the consequences of their behavior.3

  Concrete rewards are pitted against vague future consequences—with the rewards clearly the stronger contender. The mental image of the consequences for the victim are particularly fuzzy. So, Jeffrey saw in Elyse not a companion but rather a “connection”—a supplier of shelter, clothing, food, money, recreation, and sexual gratification. The consequences to her of his actions didn’t even enter his consciousness. When it became clear that he’d squeezed all he could out of his association with her, he simply moved on to another source of goodies.

  THEY PICK AND CHOOSE

  Of course, psychopaths are not completely unresponsive to the myriad rules and taboos that hold society together. After all, they are not automatons, blindly responding to momentary needs, urges, and opportunities. It is just that they are much freer than the rest of us to pick and choose the rules and restrictions they will adhere to.

  For most of us even the imagined threat of criticism functions to control our behavior. We are haunted to some degree by questions about our self-worth. As a consequence, we continually attempt to prove to ourselves and others that we are okay people, credible, trustworthy, and competent.

  In sharp contrast, the psychopath carries out his evaluation of a situation—what he will get out of it and at what cost—without the usual anxieties, doubts, and concerns about being humiliated, causing pain, sabotaging future plans, in short, the infinite possibilities that people of conscience consider when deliberating possible actions. For those of us who have been successfully socialized, imagining the world as the psychopath experiences it is close to impossible.

  RUNNING PARALLEL TO the seawall in West Vancouver where I do my jogging is a railway track, used only a few times a day. About a year ago the signals controlling the car-crossing were activated and traffic began to back up. I had just finished my run and was cooling off nearby. It soon became clear to me that although the signals continued to flash, they had malfunctioned and no train was coming. However, the car at the front of the line did not move, even after most of the other cars began to pull around it. When I left about ten minutes later, the signal lights were still flashing and the first car still hadn’t budged.

  Think about the driver of that car and the psychopath as occupying opposite ends of a continuum of internal restraint. The former slavishly follows the rules, and the latter simply ignores them. One passively accepts the supreme authority of the inner voice that says “no”; the other tells it to “get lost.”

  This inner voice presents problems for those whose beliefs put them in conflict with society. As a piece of graffiti written during the French student revolts of 1968 put it, “There is a sleeping cop in all of us. He must be killed.”

  PSYCHOCINEMA

  The public’s fascination with the smooth con artist and the cold-blooded killer, unbounded by the dictates of society and conscience, has never been stronger. Goodfellas, Misery, Pacific Heights, Sleeping with the Enemy, In Broad Daylight, Love, Lies, and Murder, Small Sacrifices, Cape Fear, In a Child’s Name, and the particularly explicit chiller The Silence of the Lambs, are just a few of the most popular movies at this writing. True and reenacted crime shows, such as Hard Copy, A Current Affair, and America’s Most Wanted, are now a television staple.

  Bruce Weber, in a February 10, 1991, New York Times article called “Cozying Up to the Psychopath That Lurks Deep Within,” reminded us that the story-teller’s fascination with “the perversely twisted mind” is nothing new: “From Iago to Norman Bates, Dr. Jekyll to Harry Lime, Vladimir Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert to David Lynch’s Leland Palmer/Bob, the logic of villainy has been fictionally explored, on the page, the stage and the screen, over and over. Even when failed by their powers of sheer imagining, writers and actors have drawn inspiration from grim reality: Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Dick and Perry, Gary Gilmore, Charles Manson, not to mention Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Richard III. By now, Saddam Hussein is undoubtedly a twinkle in some wordsmith’s eye.”

  The question is, Why? What accounts for the terrific power that the personality without conscience has over our collective imagination? “Clearly, evil is alluring,” wrote Weber, “and not just to those who would dramatize it. From mild naughtiness to vicious criminality, the performance of bad deeds is something the rest of the population evidently wants to know about. This is one way to explain why the psychopath, that personification of remorseless evildoing, has such an established place in the public consciousness.”

  Weber pursued this line of thought with forensic psychiatrist Ronald Markman, who (along with Dominick Bosco) wrote Alone with the Devil, a book about Markman’s professional work with murderers. The psychiatrist suggested that as an audience we identify with psychopaths, living out our fantasies of life with no internal controls. “There is something inside them that is also inside us and we are attracted to them so we can find out what that something is,” Markman wrote. In Weber’s interview he went even further: “We’re all psychopaths under the skin.”

  Psychiatrist Joanne Intrator, at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, offers a course titled The Psychopath in Fact and Film, in which she explains how film lends itself to this form of identification, raising moviegoing from a level of casual curiosity to an act of emotionally charged voyeurism. She said that cinema “allows us to slip easily into the vicarious pleasure of the voyeur. A darkened room subdues our conscious moral world and allows us another focus of an inner state not dominated by the constraints of superego [conscience]. In the dark we are enjoying, with a
subtle consciousness, aggressive and sexual pleasure at seemingly no cost.”4

  These cinematic experiences may have a beneficial effect on psychologically healthy people, reminding them of the danger and destructiveness that psychopathy carries with it. On the other hand, these experiences may also serve as powerful role models for those with poorly developed internal standards, serious psychological problems, or feelings of alienation from mainstream society.

  REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

  In 1944, psychoanalyst Robert Lindner wrote a classic study of criminal psychopathy, Rebel Without a Cause.5 Lindner viewed psychopathy as a plague, a terrible force whose destructive potential is greatly underestimated. He described psychopaths in terms of their relationship to society:

  The psychopath is a rebel, a religious disobeyer of prevailing codes and standards a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program; in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to him alone; he is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, under no matter what guise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires, [p. 2]

  The culture may change but the psychopathic “rebel” remains the same. In the mid-1940s, Lindner wrote that psychopaths were often to be found at the edges of society where they “sparkle with the glitter of personal freedom, the checks and reins of the community are absent and there are no limits either in a physical or in a psychological sense.” [p. 13]

  Today the psychopath appears to be everywhere among us, and we must ask ourselves some important questions. Why is our fascination with psychopathy growing—in our movies, on television, in our mass market books and magazines? Why are more and more crimes of violence being committed by young people? And what is it about our society that leads one expert to say: