Savage Spawn

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Science accomplishes wonderful things, but even the hardest science lurches along dim pathways that are shadowed by biases, hunches, and guesswork. Scientists are seldom as knowledgeable—or as effective—as they claim to be.

  Decades after the initial hoopla promulgated by the biological determinists, the level of understanding about the causes and mechanisms of mental and behavioral problems remains primitive, even in instances where medical treatments have proved highly effective, such as medication for psychosis and depression. Thus, we are much better at suppressing schizophrenic symptoms with Thorazine than at figuring out why and how Thorazine works.

  In psychiatry and psychology, most biological explanations have centered around insufficient or disrupted levels of a neurotransmitter (brain chemical) called serotonin, but irregularities in serotonin have been used to explain every psychiatric symptom from obsessive-compulsive behavior to psychosis to depression to psychopathy, creating what is essentially a neurochemical wastebasket with no power to predict or discriminate between individual disorders.

  And once again politics rears its nasty little head. For as the health-care dollar shrinks and jockeying for patients among mental health professionals intensifies, each discipline heads for the heavy artillery. In the case of psychiatrists, it’s the medical degree, and organized psychiatry has fought to medicalize as many behavioral deviances as possible in order to attain control over treatment delivery (and reimbursement).

  Psychiatric logic is that if it’s a disease, only a physician should treat it. This exact argument was used decades earlier, unsuccessfully, when psychiatrists tried to restrict non-M.D.’s from practicing psychotherapy. Today few psychiatrists would claim any primacy in the delivery of the “talking cure,” and in fact many psychiatrists denigrate psychotherapy as a lower-level service best relegated to paraprofessionals (under a psychiatrist’s supervision, of course).

  As part of the campaign to medicalize deviance, the American Psychiatric Association began producing a series of Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals, small-print, phone-directory-sized tomes chock-full of numerical diagnostic codes easily adaptable for computerized insurance billing. Known as DSMs—the current model is number IV—these volumes have become the billing bibles of the mental health industry.

  I am not dismissing the DSMs as mere political tools. Much of the research they’ve generated is excellent and has gone a long way toward getting mental health professionals to think scientifically about psychological disorders. Any systematic classification is certainly an improvement over the sloppy, often opinion-based diagnostic taxonomy of the past.

  The problem is one of overzealous application: Some disorders simply don’t lend themselves to the disease model, and nowhere is this truer than in the case of psychopathy/sociopathy, which, whether you view it as a dysfunction of the individual or as a reaction to societal oppression, or even as chemistry gone wrong, persists in sounding a lot more like nasty behavior than an illness.

  That, of course, creates tremendous cognitive dissonance among psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health workers. It’s an economic threat as well. Why pay clinicians of any stripe to treat meanness and viciousness, or acts of protest grounded in the struggle against oppression?

  Hence a new syndrome: antisocial personality disorder (DSM 301.70), or APD.

  Let’s examine the DSM description of APD: “A history of continuous and chronic antisocial behavior in which the rights of others are violated, persistence into adult life of a pattern of antisocial behavior that began before the age of 15, and failure to sustain good job performance over a period of several years (although this may not be evident in individuals who are self-employed or who have not been in a position to demonstrate this feature, e.g. students or housewives). The antisocial behavior is not due to either severe Mental Retardation, Schizophrenia, or manic episodes.

  “Lying, stealing, fighting, truancy, and resisting authority are typical early childhood signs. In adolescence, unusually early or aggressive sexual behavior, excessive drinking, and use of illicit drugs are frequent. In adulthood, these kinds of behavior continue, with the addition of inability to sustain consistent work performance or to function as a responsible parent and failure to accept social norms with respect to lawful behavior. After age 30 the more flagrant aspects may diminish, particularly sexual promiscuity, fighting, criminality, and vagrancy.”

  Take two life sentences and call me in the morning.

  Call them psychopaths, sociopaths, or antisocial personalities—these are the people we think of as bad.

  I will continue to call them psychopaths, because the term antisocial personality disorder is unwieldy, bland, and lends no more insight than did sociopathy. And because psychopathy has a nice, novelistic ring to it. It’s a juicy term, connotative of evil, and this is a juicy, evil creature we’re dealing with.

  Let’s take a closer look at the beast.

  VI

  Dissecting Evil

  Researchers have identified two distinct components of psychopathy: the impulsive aspect, featuring lack of self-control and delay of gratification, failure to respond to long-term punishment, and high levels of sensation and thrill seeking (the fun of crime); and the interpersonal aspect, featuring inflated self-

  esteem, pathological lying, callousness, unemotionality, detachment, and lack of empathy (other people are garbage) (27).

  The Book of Deuteronomy describes a “stubborn and rebellious son” whose incorrigible behavior merits death by stoning (28). Talmudic commentary clarifies that an actual case of incorrigibility meriting execution was improbable and, in fact, may have never occurred (29). Rather, the intention was to present a teaching case—a metaphorical warning of the danger that results when incorrigibility reaches dangerous proportions in a young person.

  What is fascinating is how closely the elements that make up the stubborn and rebellious son match our contemporary understanding of psychopathy: extreme lust and gluttony (impulsive factors) and crime (interpersonal factors). Talmudic sages living two thousand years ago realized what some modern scholars have come to learn rather painfully: If extremes of bad behavior are not quelled very early in childhood, they are extremely difficult to reverse.

  There are no actual data regarding rates of rehabilitation as they relate to age, but clinical experience has taught us that the older the child, the less pliable his behavior. The optimist in me wants to say, Never give up on anyone. But the chances of eliminating entrenched psychopathic behavior in an adolescent are extremely low, if not zero.

  Nevertheless, it’s important to examine the components of psychopathy in order to tease out how they impact upon crime. Young psychopaths are not a totally homogeneous group and vary in terms of where they fall along the impulsive and interpersonal dimensions. Those high in impulsivity are more likely to be explosive; those loaded on the latter tend to commit cold, cruel, premeditated crimes.

  Further complicating the picture, there does exist a very small subset of psychopaths who display schizoid symptoms—schizophreniclike weirdness and extreme social isolation that approach but never reach full-blown madness. Schizoid psychopaths are violent hermits who act odd but understand what they are doing and possess the ability to plot, scheme, and evade capture. They are true psychological islands with no need whatsoever for intimacy or social connection. Even in prison they are feared and shunned, and they often exhibit the highest levels of cruelty.

  Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski comes across as one of these evil isolates. His deviant behavior began in childhood. Bright enough to elude identification for decades, Kaczynski might very well have stretched his criminal career till the day of his death if his brother hadn’t turned him in. As is typical of psychopaths, Kaczynski evinced no remorse and arrogantly attempted to justify his crimes using a combination of neo-Luddite and radical environmentalist pseudophilosophy. However, his writings reveal his primary motive to be hurting and killing other people. Fortunately, schizoid
psychopaths are extremely rare—a minority among a minority.

  Though variations in psychopathy do exist, psychopaths as a group are less variable than normal people. As one veteran detective once told me, “If you’ve met one career criminal, you’ve met ’em all. They’re out of the cookie cutter.”

  This is certainly true of organized serial killers. As a crime novelist, I’m loath to admit this, but the Bundys and Gacys of this world are worlds away from brilliant, charmingly evil Hannibal Lecter. In fact, stripped of their lies and their evasions, real-life serial killers are flat, stereotypical, and downright boring—walking versions of Gertrude Stein’s classic description of Oakland: There’s no there, there.

  How do they get that way?

  No one knows, but two schools of thought have emerged along the same old ideological battle lines that have divided psychology—and its ancestors, philosophy and theology—since their inceptions as formal fields of study: genetics versus environment.

  The nature-nurture tango probably dates back to the first curious human, but like most megaquestions, it remains an unanswerable parlor game. And like most dichotomies, the controversy has endured well past the point of usefulness. Time and time again, the most reasonable result of nature/nurture research turns out to be the middle ground: Most human behavior is the result of the interaction between inborn traits and environment. Scientists will continue to tease out specific proportions of acquired versus inborn influences because scientists are curious people and they need to publish articles in scholarly journals in order to achieve tenure. But these calculations have very little usefulness for public policy.

  By point of illustration, let’s say, purely hypothetically, that we discover criminality to be 30 percent environmentally related and 70 percent genetic. Where does this lead us proactively? Do we forget about child rearing and schooling because most bad behavior is inherited? Or do we redouble our efforts to improve the environment because 30 percent is a large chunk? Even if we opt to design programs, there’s no reason to weigh them 30 percent toward environmental change to 70 percent toward genetic manipulation, because there’s no reason to assume that proportion of cause has anything to do with proportion of optimal solution. The same would hold true if the environment played only a 10 percent role, because a tenth of something as important as criminality bears close attention.

  Nevertheless, the nature/nurture debate rages within the pages of academic journals and on talk shows. And once again, “scientific” opinions are often influenced more by political attitudes and personal preconceptions than by facts.

  Environmental determinism—the nurture side—has tended to be favored by those scholars who see themselves as social liberals, because belief in a strong governmental role in improving the quality of life depends upon the conviction that human behavior is tractable. Similarly, those mavens adhering to either libertarian or anarchic views that denigrate the role of government, or fiscally conservative ideologues with a jaundiced view of economic and social tinkering, are comfortable attributing human behavior to DNA-mediated brain chemistry because the resultant social pessimism goes a long way in justifying refusal to fund social programs.

  Time and time again these two extreme views butt heads in the dreary corridors of government like a pair of deranged rams. When politics rears its ugly head, truth suffers.

  But the average person understands. You don’t need a Ph.D. or a think-tank job to figure it out.

  It’s both.

  Does any reasonable person deny that environment strongly affects people? Or that inborn factors are a total wash? (Actually, during tumultuous times, ideological rigidity can lead to some pretty strange mental pretzels. When I was in graduate school during the early 1970s, radical feminist doctrine put forth the view that sex-role behaviors and attitudes—the visible manifestations of femininity and masculinity—were 100 percent learned: Give a boy a doll and he’ll abandon cowboys and Indians, hand a girl a rifle and she’ll grow up tough and macho. A brief visit to any newborn nursery would have dispelled this nonsense—even casual observation would have revealed differing rates of activity, muscularity, vocal pitch, and so on in the blue versus the pink bassinets. Ditto for the merest exposure to preschools, baby-sitting, or child rearing. But why let reality cloud your dogma?)

  With regard to psychopathy, environmental theory has focused upon social factors such as poverty and abuse and psychological issues such as disruption of parent-child attachment, especially during the first two or three years of childhood. Studying the infant-toddler period makes intuitive good sense because much emotional conditioning occurs during this period and one of the most striking aspects of psychopathy is gross abnormality of the emotional system.

  During early childhood, the foundations of interpersonal relationships are laid as the baby bonds with parents or caretakers by experiencing satiation of bodily needs, receiving physical and emotional nurturance, and learning to associate physical satisfaction with affection. Toddlers also develop specific strategies of coping with anger, fear, and frustration, and they begin to identify with other people at a rudimentary level and to reciprocate affection. The first signs of altruism and sympathy for others usually appear during toddlerhood, supplanting the infant’s inborn narcissism.

  Psychopaths make it to adulthood without ever developing the capacity for empathy and sympathy, though they learn to be quite good at imitating both. They view people as objects, which allows them to exploit, manipulate, and inflict high levels of pain on others without regret—what’s wrong with cheating or stabbing a thing? It’s not that they lack an understanding of morality and the rules of conduct—many psychopaths subscribe to some kind of moral code. In fact, imprisoned criminals often spout a strong law-and-order line. It’s just that they believe the rules apply to others, not them.

  Psychopaths are also quite enthusiastic about defending themselves physically—whether or not defense is necessary—and they display a heightened sense of interpersonal threat, perceiving aggression and hostility in the behavior of others when it doesn’t exist (30). Like cornered animals, they are likely to lash out violently when they feel trapped.

  Though calm, cool, and excellent sleepers, psychopaths are by no means devoid of emotion. They experience anger and pleasure and boredom at high levels—indeed, they crave and often chase pleasure with a staggering single-mindedness. But anxiety, worry, and ambivalence are muted or absent, though the psychopath can mimic them—role playing of the most malignant variety.

  Skillful, intelligent psychopaths can learn kindness, sensitivity, and morality as abstractions and weaknesses to be exploited, but they don’t integrate these qualities into their personalities.

  Psychopathy, like any other personality dimension, takes time to develop, and young killers such as Johnson and Golden can be thought of as incompletely fashioned criminals: impulsive, unsophisticated, lacking even the flawed judgment of adult psychopaths. Despite clear evidence of premeditation, as master felons the boys were pathetic duds—boasting about their intentions to anyone who’d listen, leaving behind mountains of evidence. No Sherlock was necessary to figure out whodunit. Lacking access to guns, their misdeeds would likely have expressed themselves as some variant of schoolyard bullying, perhaps a knifing. Equipped with a firearms arsenal, their faulty reasoning, low impulse control, and lack of smarts had just the opposite result: mindless carnage.

  It seems logical that disruption of the parent-child bonding process has something to do with this emotional warp. The problem is, the kind of data it would take to pinpoint how specific processes of emotional scrambling occur are hard to obtain, for we are generally unable to study and observe large numbers of children and family from the moment of birth through adulthood with the kind of detail necessary to establish causation. Some of the more thought-provoking studies about the biology of psychopathy have been produced in countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where national registries are maintained, but large-scale American data are con
spicuously lacking.

  One alternative to multigenerational longitudinal research involves studying kids who already exhibit high degrees of aggression, violence, and/or criminality and attempting to relate those characteristics to various measurements of early childhood disruption. Numerous studies have been carried out on the relationship between criminality and abuse, divorce and marital separation, and the intrusion of violence into the child’s life, either directly or through the media.

  Family breakdown, as exemplified by divorce and separation, is clearly related to a host of psychological problems in children, including school problems, truancy, alcoholism, and drug use, all of which are often precursors of criminal behavior. Childhood aggression seems to predict alcoholism and drug use in adolescence; in turn, substance abuse seems to predict adult criminality, especially when combined with parental alcoholism and drug use (5, 6, 31–33).

  Seems to, because statistics are valid only for groups and are mathematically irrelevant when making predictions about individuals. Statistics can also be monkeyed with easily by experts in order to support whatever conclusions the researcher wants them to buttress.

  One example of this is the misuse of a statistical concept commonly bandied about in the popular press: correlation, which is a mathematical expression of coexistence between two or more variables. Correlation is not, by itself, causation. Correlations simply state probability associations. A positive correlation means that when X is present, Y is more likely to be present. A negative correlation means the presence of X is more probable when Y is absent.

  Correlations can be causal—smoking cigarettes is both correlated with and a cause of lung cancer. Putting a gun to one’s head and pulling the trigger is highly correlated with, and causally linked to, infliction of a fatal wound.