The Sociopath Next Door

by Martha Stout PhD

  Theologians and scientists agree also that the human mistakes tending to contravene our normally benevolent nature are twofold. The first mistake is the desire to be personally in control of others and of the world. This motivation involves the illusion that domination is a worthwhile goal, an illusion that is most fixed in the sociopathic mind. And the second tragic error is moral exclusion. We know there to be endless danger in deciding that the “other” is something less than human—the other gender, the other race, the foreigner, the “enemy,” and perhaps even the sociopath himself—which is why the question of what to do with the moral outlaw is such an uneasy one in theology and also in psychology. How do we face the potentially cataclysmic challenge of people who simply “don't have well-developed human lives”? So far, psychology has left this question completely unanswered, though it would seem an ever more pressing issue as time goes by and technology is proliferated. After all, the devil is evolving, too.

  As for the question of who is more fortunate, the person ruthlessly engaged only in exactly what he wants to do, or you, who are obligated by your conscience—once again, I ask you to imagine what you would be like if you had no seventh sense. But this time as you envision your huge influence and wealth, or your permanent leisure without guilt, imagine it while bearing in mind what conscience and only conscience can bring to a life, what it has brought to yours. Picture clearly the face of someone you love more than all of your earthly possessions, someone for whom you would run headlong into a burning building if this were required of you—a parent, a brother, a sister, a dear friend, your life partner, your child. Try to picture that same face—a parent's, or a daughter's, or a son's—weeping in grief, or smiling in peace and joy.

  And now imagine for a moment that you could look forever and feel absolutely nothing, no love, no desire to help or even to smile back.

  But do not imagine this careening emptiness too long, though it would stretch throughout a lifetime if you were a person without conscience, someone who could guiltlessly do anything at all. Rather, return to your feelings. In your mind, see the face you love, touch a cheek, hear the laughter.

  Conscience blesses our individual lives with just this kind of meaning every day. Without it, we would be emotionally hollow and bored, and would spend our days pursuing repetitive games of our own misguided creation.

  For most of us, most of the time, conscience is so ordinary, so daily, and so spontaneous that we do not even notice it. But conscience is also much larger than we are. It is one side of a confrontation between an ancient faction of amoral self-interest that has always been doomed, both psychologically and spiritually, and a circle of moral minds just as ageless. As a psychologist and as a citizen of the species, I vote for the people with conscience, for the ones who are loving and committed, for the generous and gentle souls. I am most impressed by those individuals who feel, quite simply, that hurting others is wrong and that kindness is right, and whose actions are quietly directed by this moral sense every day of their lives. They are an elite of their own. They are old and young. They are people who have been gone for hundreds of years and the baby who will be born tomorrow. They come from every nation, culture, and religion. They are the most aware and focused members of our species. And they are, and always have been, our hope.

  notes

  Introduction: Imagine

  now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population: See K. Barry et al., “Conduct Disorder and Antisocial Personality in Adult Primary Care Patients,” Journal of Family Practice 45 (1997): 151–158; R. Bland, S. Newman, and H. Orn, “Lifetime Prevalence of Psychiatric Disorders in Edmonton,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 77 (1988): 24–32; J. Samuels et al.,“DSM-III Personality Disorders in the Community,” American Journal of Psychiatry 151 (1994): 1055–1062; and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Statistical Sourcebook (Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 1991).

  This condition of missing conscience: For the past two hundred years, sociopathy, variously conceptualized, has been called by a variety of different names in the Western world. For a detailed discussion of the history of such labels and diagnoses, see T. Millon, E. Simonsen, and M. Birket-Smith, “Historical Conceptions of Psychopathy in the United States and Europe,” in Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior, eds. T. Millon et al. (New York: Guilford Press, 1998).

  According to the current bible of psychiatric labels: American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994). For detailed descriptions and critiques of the APA field trials used to evaluate the current diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder, see W. Livesley, ed., The DSM-IV Personality Disorders (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).

  Other researchers and clinicians: See, for example, R. Hare, “Psychopathy: A Clinical Construct Whose Time Has Come,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 23 (1996): 25–54.

  And sociopaths are noted especially: The accepted expression is “shallowness of emotion,” although in the case of sociopathy, a more accurate description would be “absence of emotion.”

  As I have detailed in case studies: M. Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001).

  Robert Hare: R. Hare et al., “The Revised Psychopathy Checklist: Descriptive Statistics, Reliability, and Factor Structure,” Psychological Assessment 2 (1990): 338–341.

  Of his subjects, Hare: R. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), p. 207.

  And Hervey Cleckley: H. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, 5th ed. (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1976), p. 90.

  with its known relationship to behaviors: For a review of research on problems associated with sociopathy, see D. Black and C. Larson, Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also D. Dutton, with S. Golant, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile (New York: Basic Books, 1995); G. Abel, J. Rouleau, and J. Cunningham-Rathner, “Sexually Aggressive Behavior,” in Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, eds. J. Curran, A. McGarry, and S. Shah (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1986); L. Grossman and J. Cavenaugh, “Psychopathology and Denial in Alleged Sex Offenders,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 178 (1990): 739–744; J. Fox and J. Levin, Overkill: Mass Murder and Serial Killing Exposed (New York: Plenum Press, 1994); and R. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1996).

  From nowhere, a line from a thirty-year-old apocalyptic song: Black Sabbath, “Luke's Wall/War Pigs,” Paranoid. Warner Bros. Records, 1970.

  what novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald: Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night.

  Chapter 1. The Seventh Sense

  In the fourth century, the Christian scholar Saint Jerome: See G. Evans, Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Leiden, NY: E. J. Brill, 2002).

  Jerome's illustrious contemporary, Augustine of Hippo: See Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford, OH: Oxford Press, 1998), and R. Saarinen, Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought from Augustine to Buridan (Leiden, NY: E. J. Brill, 1994).

  A solution to the theological dilemma over conscience: See T. McDermott, ed., Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation (Allen, TX: Thomas More, 1997); B. Kent, “Transitory Vice: Thomas Aquinas on Incontinence,” The Journal of the History of Philosophy 27 (1989): 199–223; and T. Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  Freud proposed that in the normal course of development: See S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), and S. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, in ibid.

  Chapter 2. Ice People: The Sociopaths

  Robert Hare writes: R. Hare, Without Conscience, p. 208.

  Ja
ne Goodall says the chimpanzees she observed: J. Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 210–211.

  Chapter 3. When Normal Conscience Sleeps

  to borrow an expression from Ervin Staub: E. Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also E. Staub, “Ethnopolitical and Other Group Violence: Origins and Prevention,” in Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions, eds. D. Chirot and M. Seligman (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), and N. Smith, “The Psycho-Cultural Roots of Genocide,” American Psychologist 53 (1998): 743–753.

  One explanation is our trancelike state: For descriptions and examples of dissociative states, see M. Stout, The Myth of Sanity. For a discussion of how dissociative phenomena may affect whole populations, see L. deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations (New York: Karnac, 2002).

  In 1961 and 1962, in New Haven, Connecticut: S. Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 371–378. See also S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Perennial, 1983), and T. Blass, ed., Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000).

  Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall: S. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 30.

  In his book On Killing: D. Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996), p. xv.

  As Peter Watson writes: P. Watson, War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 250.

  In contrast, research involving Vietnam veterans: J. Stellman and S. Stellman, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorders among American Legionnaires in Relation to Combat Experience: Associated and Contributing Factors,” Environmental Research 47 (1988): 175–210. This research, involving 6,810 randomly selected veterans, examined the relationship between symptoms of PTSD and participation in the killing process, and was the first study to quantify levels of combat.

  Chapter 4. The Nicest Person in the World

  Doreen Littlefield is what personality theorist Theodore Millon would call: Many people have tried to identify different kinds of sociopaths. One of the most interesting typologies is Theodore Millon's. Millon identifies ten subtypes of psychopathy: covetous, unprincipled, disingenuous, risk-taking, spineless, explosive, abrasive, malevolent, tyrannical, and malignant. He notes that “the number 10 is by no means special. . . . Taxonomies may be put forward at levels that are more coarse or more fine-grained.” Millon's taxonomy is detailed in T. Millon and R. Davis, “Ten Subtypes of Psychopathy,” in Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior, eds. T. Millon et al.

  on average only about 20 percent of prison inmates in the United States: See R. Hare, K. Strachan, and A. Forth, “Psychopathy and Crime: A Review,” in Clinical Approaches to Mentally Disordered Offenders, eds. K. Howells and C. Hollin (New York: Wiley, 1993), and S. Hart and R. Hare, “Psychopathy: Assessment and Association with Criminal Conduct,” in Handbook of Antisocial Behavior, eds. D. Stoff, J. Breiling, and J. Maser (New York: Wiley, 1997).

  Chapter 5. Why Conscience Is Partially Blind

  Relatedly, people without conscience have an uncanny sense: See L. Robins, Deviant Children Grown Up: A Sociological and Psychiatric Study of Sociopathic Personality (Huntington, NY: Krieger Publishing, 1974).

  Benjamin Wolman: B. Wolman, Antisocial Behavior: Personality Disorders from Hostility to Homicide (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), p. 136.

  We raise our children, especially girls: See D. Cox, S. Stabb, and K. Bruckner, Women's Anger: Clinical and Developmental Perspectives (Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge, 1999); L. Brown, Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 166; L. Brown, “Educating the Resistance: Encouraging Girls' Strong Feelings and Critical Voices” (paper presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the Association of Moral Education, Calgary/Banff, Canada, 1994); C. Gilligan, “Women's Psychological Development: Implications for Psychotherapy,” Women and Therapy 11 (1991): 5–31; and L. Brady, “Gender Differences in Emotional Development: A Review of Theories and Research,” Journal of Personality 53 (1985): 102–149.

  As for the boys: See D. Kindlon and M. Thompson, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000), p. 99.

  Chapter 6. How to Recognize the Remorseless

  in the 1945 interrogations that preceded the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: Reported in R. Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001), p. 373.

  Chapter 7. The Etiology of Guiltlessness: What Causes Sociopathy?

  studies on twins have shown that personality features: For a detailed discussion of such findings, see L. Eaves, H. Eysenck, and N. Martin, Genes, Culture and Personality (New York: Academic Press, 1989).

  A number of such studies have included the “Psychopathic Deviate” (Pd) scale: For a review of twin studies that have used the Pd scale, see H. Goldsmith and I. Gottesman, “Heritable Variability and Variable Heritability in Developmental Psychopathology,” in Frontiers in Developmental Psychopathology, eds. M. Lenzenweger and J. Haugaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  In 1995, a major longitudinal study: M. Lyons et al., “Differential Heritability of Adult and Juvenile Antisocial Traits,” Archives of General Psychiatry 52 (1995): 906–915.

  Still other studies have found: See T. Widiger et al., “A Description of the DSM-III-R and DSM-IV Personality Disorders with the Five-factor Model of Personality,” in Personality Disorders and the Five-factor Model, eds. P. Costa and T. Widiger (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1994), and C. Cloninger, “A Systematic Method for Clinical Description and Classification of Personality Variants,” Archives of General Psychiatry 44 (1987): 579–588.

  The Texas Adoption Project: See L. Willerman, J. Loehlin, and J. Horn, “An Adoption and a Cross-Fostering Study of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Psychopathic Deviate Scale,” Behavior Genetics 22 (1992): 515–529.

  a heritability estimate of 54 percent can be derived: For more on how heritability estimates are derived for psychopathic deviance and other characteristics, see P. McGuffin and A. Thapar, “Genetics and Antisocial Personality Disorder,” in Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior, eds. T. Millon et al., and D. Falconer, Introduction to Quantitative Genetics (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1989).

  Some of the most interesting information about cortical functioning in sociopathy: See S. Williamson, T. Harpur, and R. Hare, “Abnormal Processing of Affective Words by Psychopaths,” Psychophysiology 28 (1991): 260–273, and J. Johns and H. Quay, “The Effect of Social Reward on Verbal Conditioning in Psychopathic and Neurotic Military Offenders,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 26 (1962): 217–220.

  In related research using single-photon emission-computed tomography: J. Intrator et al., “A Brain Imaging (SPECT) Study of Semantic and Affective Processing in Psychopaths,” Biological Psychiatry 42 (1997): 96–103.

  In fact, there is some evidence that sociopaths: See R. Hare, Without Conscience.

  This arrangement promotes a sense of order and safety: J. Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

  Research tells us that adequate attachment in infancy: For a discussion of attachment theory, see D. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).

  In 1989, when the Communist regime in Romania fell: For further discussion of Ceauşescu reproductive policies, see G. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

  And then a couple in Paris wo
uld discover: See P. Pluye et al., “Mental and Behavior Disorders in Children Placed in Long-Term Care Institutions in Hunedoara, Cluj and Timis, Romania,” Santé 11 (2001): 5–12, and T. O'Connor and M. Rutter, “Attachment Disorder Behavior Following Early Severe Deprivation: Extension and Longitudinal Follow-up. English and Romanian Adoptees Team,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 39 (2000): 703–712.

  In Scandinavian child psychiatry: See M. Lier, M. Gammeltoft, and I. Knudsen, “Early Mother-Child Relationship: The Copenhagen Model of Early Preventive Intervention Towards Mother-Infant Relationship Disturbances,” Arctic Medical Research 54 (1995): 15–23.