Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior

by Robert I. Simon

  Today, psychiatric clinicians question some of the qualities Cleckley attributed to the psychopath. For example, we no longer agree that psychopaths are charming. Some of them, particularly the aggressive ones, have all the charm of a rattlesnake. Dr. Otto F. Kernberg, a widely respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, believes that persons with antisocial personality disorder are basically suffering from a severe type of narcissistic personality disorder. They form only exploitative relationships and lack moral principle. Roughly defined, the psychiatric concept of narcissism refers to a person’s sense of selfimportance and uniqueness. Narcissism may be healthy or pathological. In the psychopath, it is pathological in the extreme and is malignantly transformed into living, breathing evil.

  Pathological Relationships and the Emptiness Within

  As noted above, the psychopath typically manifests pathological selfimportance, or narcissism, displayed as excessive self-centeredness. Other characteristic traits are grandiosity (displayed as nonsexual exhibitionism), recklessness, overambitiousness, an attitude of superiority, overdependency on admiration, and, alternating with these characteristics, bouts of insecurity and emotional shallowness. The reckless grandiosity of psychopaths usually causes them to fail at any enterprise, often spectacularly. Clinicians sometimes quip that psychopaths “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” and that for psychopaths, “nothing succeeds like failure.” The two fundamental distinguishing characteristics of psychopaths are the inability to feel ordinary human empathy and affection for others and the perpetrating of repeated antisocial acts.

  Why do some people do these terrible things? We now know that empathy has something to do with an anatomical structure, mirror neurons; these have been found in monkey brains and human brains. The cells are located in the brain’s motor cortex, where muscle movement and control are initiated. Mirror neuron circuitry allows us to “step into the shoes” of others, to feel their pain. The more empathetic the person, the stronger the person’s mirror neuron response. And the weaker the mirror neuron response, the less empathy he or she has. Psychopathic personalities may have a dearth of mirror neurons.

  Much of what the world calls evil originates in the pathological selfcenteredness of individuals who pursue instant gratification and use others for their self-aggrandizement. Understanding the concept of evil in this way, we can see that by far the greatest evils perpetrated by ordinary people are done to the extent that these people share the personality characteristics of psychopaths. That is to say, the evils are committed in the exploitation of others. For instance, psychopaths can have lustful sex, but for them the experience is devoid of any intimacy or commitment; the partner is essentially an instrument of masturbation. A vibrator or other inanimate object might serve the psychopath just as well. Psychopaths are incapable of falling in love. People are like tissues to be used, generally for unpleasant purposes, and then discarded. Is not this entitled selfishness that destroys the capacity for empathy with other human beings the heart of evil?

  For psychopaths, the world is a giant dispensing machine from which they obtain goodies without giving up any coins. In their relationships they devalue the other person, they are greedy, they appropriate others’ property or ideas and feel entitled to do so. They distrust and are unable to depend on others, another part of their stunning incapacity to empathize with, or commit to, other human beings. A patient-victim of a psychopath once described to me that failure of empathy in unforgettable terms. Her cold, distant, scientist father could tell how many cubic centimeters of tears she shed, but he could never understand why she shed them.

  I recall a patient who came to me for treatment of his depression. It soon became clear that his depression was secondary to the life problems caused by marked antisocial personality traits. From the first session, he addressed me as “Bob,” assuming an easy familiarity, even though I had introduced myself as Dr. Simon. The “Bob sign,” as I had discovered from past patients who had addressed me familiarly, was an absolutely unfailing indicator of a short-lived or nonexistent therapy. These persons are unwilling to accept a patient status, this status being, among other things, a deep personal wound. They often leave after a few sessions.

  This patient also came late to many sessions, missing others entirely. The patient produced countless excuses for not paying his bill. He constantly referred to others as “scumbags” and “dirtballs,” projecting onto others his contempt for antisocial acts that he was clearly guilty of committing himself. His pervasive view of me was that I existed only for his needs, that I was not a person with any needs of my own, and that no matter what he did, I would be there to supply him with positive stroking.

  In very short order, I began to feel an intense dislike for the patient, another sure sign that the treatment was going nowhere. Seeing that my attempts to interpret his behavior toward me were met with a quizzical contempt, I asked him directly what he was hoping to gain from treatment. After that session, I never saw him again. Although I must confess that I was relieved, I was left with an unshakable feeling of having been used and depreciated. I had become another failed relationship for him that he could cast on the heap of his other wrecked relations, convinced that all people were worthless “scum.” The tragedy is that he was destined to repeat this pattern endlessly and destructively without any reparative insight. Because of his intense selfcenteredness and grandiose image of himself, he could not tolerate any insights without feeling the threat of psychological disintegration. His antisocial acts were driven by the need to exploit and depreciate others to maintain a grandiose, powerful view of himself.

  The master spy Jack Walker’s exploitation of others is described by author Pete Earley:

  John A. Walker, Jr., had an uncanny skill to see the fragilities of those around him. He was able to identify flaws in their personalities and, like a chameleon, he became whatever he needed to become, whatever they wanted him to be, in order to take advantage of them, manipulate them, and profit from their weaknesses. This was not done by chance. It was calculated, precise.

  Although psychopaths can detect the foibles of others readily and exploit them, they lack psychological insight into their own vulnerabilities. For instance, their devaluation of everyone else as a defense against the enormous envy that they feel toward others creates a blind spot in their interaction with the world. It often happens that while the psychopath is busy conning his or her victims, he or she is easily gulled by another predator.

  Psychopaths experience chronic feelings of emptiness and of personal isolation. They have stimulus hunger, a need for constant stimulation, perhaps to dispel their diffuse sense of the meaninglessness of life. Some find this state unbearable and kill themselves. But what keeps the vast majority of them from doing so? Dr. Kernberg describes the motivation of the most common type of psychopath, the passiveparasitic type:

  [He or she finds] gratification of receptive-dependent needs —food, objects, money, sex, privileges—and the symbolic power exerted over others, by extracting such gratifications from them. To get the needed supplies while ignoring others as persons and protecting oneself from revengeful punishment is the meaning of life. To eat, to defecate, to sleep, to have sex, to feel secure, to take revenge, to feel powerful, to be excited, all without being discovered by the surrounding dangerous though anonymous world—this constitutes a sort of adaptation to life, even if it is the adaptation of a wolf disguised to live among the sheep, with the real danger coming from other wolves, similarly disguised, against whom the protective “sheepishness” has been erected.

  The conflict that psychopaths experience is not that of the normal person, between the push of internal impulses and the pull of conscience, but the conflict between their own impulses and the rest of society. Unable to self-reflect, unable to feel sadness about lost opportunities or relationships, stuck in a pattern of deep mood swings, psychopaths exhibit a value system that is more like that of a child than that of an adult. What they admire are outward things
—beauty, wealth, power, adoration by others—and what they discount (and despise) are hard-won abilities, achievements, acceptance of responsibility, and loyalty to ideals. The psychopath is a study of the triumph of style over substance. As Jack Walker stated, “Everyone is corrupt… everyone has a scam.” Therefore, psychopaths have no conscience to trouble them and prevent them from such usual psychopathic activities as lying, cheating, stealing, forging, swindling, and prostitution (among the crimes of the passive-exploitation, parasitic type of psychopath), or from assault, armed robbery, and murder (among the crimes of the aggressive psychopath). Earley summed up his impressions of Walker in this way:

  Most of the criminals whom I have met as a journalist seem to have had some moral code of conduct, however twisted and slim, beyond which they could not trespass without traces of guilt and occasional remorse. John didn’t. He was totally without principle. There was no right or wrong, no morality or immorality, in his eyes. There were only his wants, his own needs, whatever those might be at the moment. In John’s world, only fools believed that they were their brothers’ keepers. . . . John could say to me, with all seriousness, during one of our last sessions together, “I have lived every fantasy that I have ever had. I’ve done everything I wanted to do. And the real mistake I made in life was letting myself be surrounded by weak people.”

  Largely because psychopaths lack any moral center, and because they also project their own desires onto others, they are unable to imagine moral, ethical qualities in others. At Walker’s sentencing hearing, Judge Harvey said to the defendant, “One is seized with an overwhelming feeling of revulsion that a human being could ever be as unprincipled as you.” Walker said nothing to the judge at that time, but later told Earley, “I figured Harvey would grandstand for the press. Fuck ’em.”

  Here again is the fundamental difference between normal human beings and psychopaths. As Kernberg puts it, “The antisocial personality’s reality is the normal person’s nightmare; the normal person’s reality is the nightmare of the psychopath.” For example, most people would find spying against their country to be utterly repugnant and could not imagine doing so. In contrast, the psychopath who spies finds commitment to another person, to family, and to country ridiculous, and cannot imagine making or keeping such commitments.

  After his conviction in 1995, Aldrich Ames, the CIA agent turned KGB spy, responded to a CNN interviewer who asked why he had committed his crimes, “You might as well ask why a middle-aged man with no criminal record would put a bag over his head and rob a bank.” And he added, “At the time that I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union…I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the United States government, or to the West as well, would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests…. And I would say that this belief of the noninjurious nature of what I was doing…permitted me to do what I did for much more personal reasons. The reasons that I did what I did were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly…. It was a matter of pursuing an intensely personal agenda, of trying to make some money that I felt I needed very badly, and in a sense that I felt at the time, one of terrible desperation.”

  While Robert Hanssen felt he was keeping his commitments to his wife and family, he stockpiled pornographic images on his computer and dallied with a stripper, giving her expensive presents, including a Mercedes, a computer, and a sapphire necklace. He expressed contempt not only for his FB I associates but also for his KG B handlers, believing he was too smart and too sophisticated to be caught, except by a betrayal.

  The Psychopaths Among Us

  At one time, people thought there were few psychopaths among us, but now that estimate has to be revised upward. Moreover, society is beginning to recognize that psychopaths, more than people with any other mental disorder, threaten the safety, security, and serenity of our world. The history of humankind is replete with the incredible destruction inflicted by nations upon one another. What is less readily visible is the harm done to individuals, to families, and to society by antisocial behavior. And it is important, finally, to understand that the antisocial tendencies that emerge in psychopaths are harbored by every human being.

  A national comorbidity survey found that 5.8% of males and 1.2% of females showed evidence of lifetime risk for psychopathy. Antisocial personality disorder is most commonly diagnosed in the 26- to 40-yearold age group; in those older than 40, the incidence diminishes. Approximately 20% of prison inmates are psychopaths, and they are responsible for more than 50% of violent crimes. In maximum-security prison populations, 75% or more of the inmates may have the disorder.

  The combination of minimal brain dysfunction, attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorder, which contributes to antisocial personality disorder, is more common in boys than in girls. Another part of the difference can be traced to socialization and acculturation norms: girls are taught to control overt expression of anger, more so than boys. Onset of antisocial symptoms typically occurs for boys at age 7, though for girls the symptoms show up (albeit in less severe form) at around age 13. The age difference at onset may be related to the biological differences between the sexes.

  Other studies show that antisocial boys are more likely to come from large families in which their interaction with other deprived, aggressive boys fosters the development of antisocial behavior. When the family shows a predominance of girls, such antisocial behavior in the boys is inhibited. Antisocial girls come from families that tend to be more troubled than those of antisocial boys, but both male and female siblings from extremely troubled families are at great risk for developing antisocial personality disorders.

  The causes of antisocial personality disorder cannot be ascribed to social class, cultural conflict, membership in a deviant subgroup (such as a gang), keeping bad company, residing in a high-crime neighborhood, or even brain damage. Important factors in the development of the disorder are maternal deprivation during the child’s first 5 years, which leads to insufficient nurturing and socialization, and having an antisocial or alcoholic father, even if he is not in residence. Other studies, however, show that adequate discipline can decrease the risk in children whose parents are antisocial. More moderate correlations between adult antisocial behavior and certain other childhood factors have been found. These factors include early-onset conduct disorder (before age 10 years) with or without accompanying hyperactivity, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and mild signs of neurologic deficit. Emerging evidence indicates that the brains of psychopaths do not process feelings and emotions properly. Neuroimaging studies show that psychopaths use different areas of their brain in regulating emotion than do normally functioning individuals. Twin and adoption studies also indicate a possible genetic factor. The most plausible model for causation involves many factors, with a combination of genetic, developmental, and environmental factors all interacting to produce an antisocial personality.

  But I must again emphasize that the tendency toward antisocial behavior is present in everyone, to varying degrees, and in every vocation—including that of world leaders. A classic set of experiments by Dr. Stanley Milgram has dramatically demonstrated this point. In Milgram’s study, subjects were brought into a setting that looked like a learning laboratory. They were asked to administer what they were told were mild electrical shocks to other subjects (who were actually Milgram’s colleagues) when they did not come up with the correct answers to questions being put. As the experiment progressed, the subjects were asked to administer more and more severe punishment, even though the people being shocked were objecting and voicing their pain. Although the subjects often expressed disapproval of what they were being asked to do, the majority of them complied with the commands of the experimenter and continued to deliver the shocks, even when the selector button read “Danger: Severe Shock.”

  Milgram wrote that the study revealed the “sheer strength of obedient tend
encies manifested in this situation.” The subjects followed the instructions of the experimenter, even though the experimenter had no authority to enforce the command to shock the victim. The subject was free to walk away at any time, but most did not. The study demonstrated that ordinary, decent people would knuckle under and unquestioningly obey authority to severely harm another person. But it further demonstrated that ordinary people, under the sanction of “authority,” could clearly manifest sadistic behavior that in any other context would be dubbed antisocial.

  The social context that permits or suppresses those antisocial tendencies present in all humans is an important factor in the actual emergence of antisocial behavior. In a retrospective study, the background and personality development of a group of German SS officers were investigated. These men had participated in the mass murders at Nazi concentration camps. The investigators wanted to know about their behavior before and after they started such work. They found that the SS men had invariably displayed severe personality disorder symptoms from early childhood. The researchers theorized that it was these disorders that allowed the men to commit murder in the concentration camps, so long as their SS training and the command structure of the concentration camps sanctioned such behavior. It was possible to learn this because after the SS men were captured, they reverted back to their prior non-antisocial personality functioning, both during and after imprisonment. Among the SS officers, the tendency toward antisocial behavior was present to a greater degree and surfaced in a socially facilitating situation.

  Doctor, Lawyer, Entrepreneur

  More than 150 years ago, Gogol wrote a description of the psychopath Nozdryov in his book Dead Souls. His prediction that the Nozdryovs of the world would not die out was quite correct. Psychopaths, particularly the passive predator types, continue to exist at every socioeconomic and cultural level of our society. “Corporate” psychopaths regularly perpetrate spectacular scandals on Wall Street. In fact, if one wants to study psychopaths, one should go to Wall Street. Sometimes it is hard to tell the successful person from the psychopath. For example, entrepreneurs regularly manipulate other people, but this manipulation is goal-oriented, aimed at establishing a lucrative business. The psychopath’s manipulation is different. It becomes the means of providing instant gratification of his or her needs, rather than a way of dealing with the reality at hand, or it may be the sheer pleasure in perpetrating a scam—conning people and making them appear foolish. The entrepreneur’s life is productive, whereas the psychopath’s may only seem productive for a while, but will inevitably become self-destructive. For example, the psychopath’s need to express a hostile impulse or to get even, no matter what the personal cost may be, frequently derails him or her from any long-term attempt to achieve positive goals.