The Sociopath Next Door

by Martha Stout PhD

  I believe there is a shinier side of this coin, too, one that begs the question of why certain cultures seem to encourage prosocial behavior. So much against the odds, how is it that some societies have a positive impact on incipient sociopaths, who are born with an inability to process interpersonal emotions in the usual way? I would like to suggest that the overriding belief systems of certain cultures encourage born sociopaths to compensate cognitively for what they are missing emotionally. In contrast with our extreme emphasis on individualism and personal control, certain cultures, many in East Asia, dwell theologically on the interrelatedness of all living things. Interestingly, this value is also the basis of conscience, which is an intervening sense of obligation rooted in a sense of connectedness. If an individual does not, or if neurologically he cannot, experience his connection to others in an emotional way, perhaps a culture that insists on connectedness as a matter of belief can instill a strictly cognitive understanding of interpersonal obligation.

  An intellectual grasp of one's duties to others is not the same attribute as the powerfully directive emotion we call conscience, but perhaps it is enough to extract prosocial behavior from at least some individuals who would have behaved only in antisocial ways had they been living in a society that emphasized individualism rather than interrelatedness. Though they lack an internal mechanism that tells them they are connected to others, the larger culture insists to them that they are so connected—as opposed to our culture, which informs them resoundingly that their ability to act guiltlessly on their own behalf is the ultimate advantage. This would explain why a Western family by itself cannot redeem a born sociopath. There are too many other voices in the larger society implying that his approach to the world is correct.

  As a tiny example, had Skip the American been born into a strongly Buddhist culture, or Shinto, would he have killed all those frogs? Perhaps, or perhaps not. His brain would have been the same, but all the people around him would have maintained that respect for life was necessary. Everyone in his world would have been of the same mind, including his wealthy parents, his teachers, his playmates, and maybe even the celebrities he saw on television. Skip would still have been Skip. He would have felt no honor for the frogs, no guilt if he murdered them, no repugnance, but he might have refrained from doing so because his culture had unanimously taught him a lesson, something on the order of proper table manners, about how to fit in—a lesson that his perfectly good intellect had mastered. Sociopaths do not care about their social world, but they do want, and need, to blend in with it.

  Of course, I am implying that our own culture would teach a child like Skip that he could torture small animals and still be passably disguised among us, and regretfully, I think this reflects a fair assessment of our current plight.

  Warriors

  Within the context of human society as a whole, across all cultures, is there anything about the lack of caring and the absence of conscience that could be considered positive, or at least useful? As it happens, from a certain point of view, there is one such thing. Whether the victim be a frog or a person, sociopaths can kill without experiencing anguish; thus, people who have no conscience make excellent, unambivalent warriors. And nearly all societies—Buddhist, Shinto, Christian, or purely capitalist—make war.

  To some extent, we can think of sociopaths as being shaped and maintained by society because nations so often require cold-blooded killers, from anonymous foot soldiers to the conquerors who have made, and continue to make, human history. Sociopaths are fearless and superior warriors, snipers, undercover assassins, special operatives, vigilantes, and hand-to-hand specialists, because they experience no horror while killing (or while ordering killing) and no guilt after the deed is done. By far most people—the bulk of our armies—cannot be so emotionless, and if they are not carefully conditioned, most normal people make fourth-rate killers at best, even when taking the lives of other people is deemed to be necessary. A person who can look another person in the eye and calmly shoot him dead is unusual, and in war, valuable.

  Strangely, some acts are so emotionally bankrupt that they require the absence of conscience, just as astrophysics requires intelligence and art requires talent. Of warriors who can operate without conscience, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes, in On Killing, “Whether called sociopaths, sheepdogs, warriors, or heroes, they are there, they are a distinct minority, and in times of danger a nation needs them desperately.”

  But these same nations pay a concealed price within their borders for the glory they bestow on their steel-cold killers in the field. The path to such glory does not go unnoticed by others for whom guiltless killing is a special aptitude, others who will never find themselves working behind enemy lines. The self-appointed remain at home, among the rest of us, and mainly invisible. From Rambo to Baghdad, the glorification of killing—the glamorizing of the deepest infraction of normal conscience—has been a lasting feature of our mainstream culture, and may well be the most pernicious environmental influence of all on the vulnerable sociopathic minds in our midst. The owner of such a mind does not necessarily kill, but as we are about to find in the next chapter, when he does, he is not always the person one would have suspected.

  EIGHT

  the sociopath next door

  It may be that we are puppets—puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

  —Stanley Milgram

  I wanted to talk to someone, and I think it's because my father's in prison.” Hannah, the pretty, thin-lipped twenty-two-year-old who was my new patient, directed this barely audible remark to her right, toward one of my bookshelves. After a moment, she looked at me directly, shyly, and repeated herself: “I need someone to talk to. My father's in prison.”

  She made a tiny gasp, as if the effort of this much speech had exhausted her lungs, and then she was silent.

  Especially when people are very frightened, a certain amount of doing therapy is simply knowing how to paraphrase the comments of the person seated before you without sounding judgmental, or patronizing. I bent forward slightly, my fingers laced around my knee, and tried to recapture Hannah's gaze, which had now dropped to the rust-colored Oriental rug between our chairs.

  I said quietly, “Your father's in prison?”

  “Yes.” She looked up slowly when she answered, almost surprised, as if I had gleaned this information telepathically. “He killed a man. I mean, he didn't mean to, but he killed a man.”

  “And now he's in prison?”

  “Yes. Yes, he is.”

  She blushed, and her eyes filled.

  I am always impressed by the fact that even the tiniest amount of being listened to, the barest suggestion of the possibility of kind treatment, can bring such an immediate rush of emotion. I think this is because we are almost never really listened to. In my work as a psychologist, I am reminded every day of how infrequently we are heard, any of us, or our actions even marginally understood. And one of the ironies of my “listening profession” is its lesson that in many ways, each of us ultimately remains a mystery to everyone else.

  “How long has your father been in prison?” I asked.

  “About forty-one days. There was a really long trial. They didn't keep him in prison during the trial.”

  “And you felt that you needed to talk to someone?”

  “Yes. I can't . . . It's just so . . . Depressed. I think I'm getting depressed. I have to start med school.”

  “Med school? You mean in September?”

  It was July.

  “Yes. I wish I didn't have to.”

  The tears came, soundless ones, no weeping noises, as if the rest of her were unaware she was crying. Streams fell from her eyes and rolled down onto her white silk shirt, making translucent stains. Apart from this, her demeanor remained unchanged, stoic. Her face did not fall.

  I am always moved by stoicism. Hannah's was extreme.
I was hooked.

  Using both forefingers, she shoved her straight black hair into submission behind her ears. Her hair was so shiny it looked as if someone had polished it. She gazed past me, at the window, and asked, “Do you know what it's like for your father to be in prison?”

  “No, I don't,” I said. “Maybe you'll tell me.”

  And so Hannah told me her story, or this part of it.

  Her father had been the principal of the public high school in the middle-class suburb where Hannah was raised, in a different state, a thousand miles west of Boston. According to Hannah, he was an extremely likable man who naturally drew people to him—a “star,” as Hannah put it—and was much loved by the students, the teachers, and nearly everyone else in the small community that surrounded the high school. He was always at the cheerleading practices and the football games, and whether or not the home team won was personally important to him.

  Born and raised in the rural Midwest, he had “strong conservative values,” Hannah said. He believed in patriotism and a mightily defended country, and also education and self-betterment. Hannah was his only child, and for as long as she could remember, he had told her that, even though she was not a boy, she could be whatever she wanted to be. Girls could be whatever they wanted to be. Girls could be doctors. Hannah could be a doctor.

  Hannah loved her father dearly. “He's the sweetest, most moral man in the world. He really is,” she told me. “You should have seen all the people who came to the trial. They just sat there and cried for him, cried and cried. They felt so sorry for him, but there was nothing they could do. You know? Nothing they could do.”

  The killing took place on a March night when Hannah, a college sophomore at the time, happened to be home on spring break. In the wee hours, she had been wakened by a very loud noise outside her parents' house.

  “I didn't know it was a gun until later,” she told me.

  She got up sleepily to look around, and found her mother standing just inside the open front door of the house, weeping and wringing her hands. The March air was rushing in.

  “You know, it's the weirdest thing. I can still close my eyes and see her standing there like that—the wind was blowing her bathrobe around—and it was like I knew everything, everything that happened, right at that moment, before I even knew anything. I knew what had happened. I knew my father would be arrested. I saw it all. Well, that's like a picture from a nightmare, right? The whole thing was like a nightmare. You can't believe it's happening in real life, and you keep thinking you'll wake up. Sometimes I still think I'm just going to wake up, and everything was just some kind of horrible dream. But how did I know everything before I even knew anything? I saw my mom standing there like . . . like it was happening in the past, like déjà vu or something. It was weird. Or maybe not. Maybe it just seems that way now, when I remember it. I don't know.”

  As soon as she saw Hannah, her mother grabbed her, as if pulling her daughter out of the way of an oncoming train, and screamed at her, “Don't go out there! Don't go out there!” Hannah made no move toward the outside, nor did she press her mother for an explanation. She just stood there in her terrified mother's embrace.

  “I'd never seen her like that before,” Hannah said. “Still, like I keep wanting to say, it was almost as if I'd been through it already. I knew I'd better stay inside.”

  At some point—Hannah is not sure how long this took—her father came in by the wide-open front door, to the place where she and her mother stood clutching each other.

  “He didn't have the gun in his hand. He dropped it out there in the yard somewhere.”

  Wearing only pajama pants, he stood before his little family.

  “He looked fine. He was sort of panting, but I mean he didn't look frightened or anything, and for just a second, just about half a second, I thought maybe everything was going to be okay.”

  As she told me this, Hannah's tears came again.

  “But I was too scared to ask him what happened. After a while, Mom let go of me. She went and she called the police. I remember she asked him, ‘Is he hurt?' And he said, ‘I think so. I think I hurt him really bad.' And then she went into the kitchen and she called the police. That's what you're supposed to do, right?”

  “Right,” I said. It had not been a rhetorical question.

  In bits and pieces, Hannah learned what had happened. Earlier during that awful night, Hannah's mother, always a light sleeper, had heard noises coming from the living room, sounds like breaking glass, and had roused her sleeping husband. There were more noises. The man of the house became convinced there was an intruder to be dealt with, and got out of bed to prepare. Carefully (according to his wife, later)—by only the dim illumination of a tiny book light—he took out the gun box that he kept in the bedroom closet, unlocked it, and loaded the gun. His wife pleaded with him simply to call the police. He never even replied to this entreaty. He hissed at her commandingly, “Stay here!” And still in near darkness, he left for the living room.

  Seeing him, or, more likely, hearing him, the prowler fled the house by the front door. Hannah's father gave chase, shot at the man, and “by sheer blind luck,” as one of his attorneys would put it later, hit him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. As it happened, the intruder fell on the sidewalk between the lawn and the curb. This meant, technically, that Hannah's father had shot an unarmed man on the street.

  Strangely, incredibly, no neighbors came out of their houses.

  “Everything was so quiet after. So very, very quiet,” Hannah said to me there in my office.

  The police arrived quickly after Hannah's mother called them, followed by a few more people and a silent ambulance. Eventually, her father and her mother were taken away to the police station.

  “My mother called her sister and my uncle to come stay with me for the rest of the night, just like I was suddenly a little girl all over again. They weren't any help. They were pretty hysterical. I think I just felt really numb.”

  The next day, and in the following weeks, the situation occupied the local media's interest. The shooting had taken place in a quiet middle-class suburb. The shooter was an ordinary middle-class man with no known history of violence. He had not been drunk, nor had he been using drugs. The dead man was a known felon, a drug addict, and just before he was shot, he had broken into the house through a window. No one except the prosecuting attorney disputed that he was a robber, or that Hannah's father had pursued and shot him because he had been an intruder in the house.

  This was a victim's rights case. This was a gun-control case. This was a get-tough-on-crime case. It clearly illustrated the dangers of being a vigilante. Or maybe it demonstrated conclusively that home owners ought to have increased rights. The ACLU got mad, the NRA even more so.

  There was a long trial, as Hannah had said, and then an appeal and another long trial. In the end, Hannah's father was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison. The attorneys said it was more likely to be “only” two or three.

  The news of a high school principal sentenced to ten years in prison for shooting a burglar on his front lawn aroused strong emotions. There were protests on all sides: The decision was unconstitutional. It defied common sense and natural law. The convicted man was a dangerous self-appointee and a rights violator. He was an American hero and a family-protector. He was a violent madman. He was a martyr to the cause, to any number of causes.

  Through all of this, impossibly, Hannah was going to college, making A's, and applying to medical schools, activities dogmatically insisted upon by her embattled father.

  “He just wouldn't allow my life to be ruined by all the ‘stupidity.' That's what he said.”

  And Hannah got into nearly every medical school she applied to, despite her father's predicament. She told me that “if anything, the whole thing probably helped me get in. He was a cause.”

  Finished with her narrative, Hannah searched through a small leather h
andbag, found a tissue, and began to blot her cheeks and dab at the streaks on her shirt. This she did even though there was a full box of tissues in plain sight on a little table just at her left elbow.

  “So you see, I don't really need ‘therapy' exactly. But I really would like to talk to someone. I really don't want to be this depressed when I start med school. I don't know. Do you think it would be all right for me to see you?”

  Hannah had affected me with her story, and with her demeanor. I felt tremendous sympathy for her, and I told her so. To myself, I wondered how much help she would actually be able to accept from me, the psychological trauma therapist she had called because she had seen my name in a newspaper article. Out loud, we agreed to meet once a week for a while, so Hannah could have someone to talk to. The medical school she had finally chosen was in Boston, and at her mother's urging she had moved east right after her college graduation, so she could be “settled in” before classes started, and away from the craziness back home. Her mother felt the situation with her husband was “negative” for her daughter. I thought I had seldom heard such an understatement, and I assured Hannah that, yes, it would be all right for her to see me.

  After she left, I paced around my office for a minute or two, staring out the tall windows onto Boston's Back Bay, walking over to riffle papers on the wide, cluttered desk, and then returning to the windows, as I often do after a session in which someone has told me a great deal, but not nearly everything. As I paced, I was interested not so much in the legal and political questions of who, what, when, and where, but rather in psychology's perennial question of why.