Psychopathy and Its Growing Understanding



Years later in the 1990’s, I encountered in a periodic moonlighting prison consultation job the story which I confirmed to be true through public press stories, the tale of a father and son that jolted my thinking about psychopathy into an entirely new direction.

I should give the reader additional contextual background of my psychiatric training and general orientation at the time. I was moonlighting to pay the bills of a growing young family, in residency, and also in psychoanalytic long-term training and my own analysis. My salary as a resident in psychiatry barely paid my psychoanalytic fees and I had to moonlight most weekends at various jobs to make our family’s living monies. So I was highly steeped in clinical psychiatry, psychotherapy and as a child psychiatry fellow in that level of training at the time, very developmentally oriented. Psychopathy did not fit into anything I had learned, been taught in residency, except that psychopaths were “future felons,” and were untreatable for some reason by conventional psychiatric-psychological means. Little did I know at the time that research in other centers, perhaps especially in British Columbia at Simon Frasier University was starting to study psychopathy in new ways and by the 1990’s began to produce a different and useful set of new paradigms through which to understand psychopathy. I am largely referring to the seminal work of Robert Hare and his circle of researcher-clinician trainees whose collective works now known and accepted,

The tale of the imprisoned father and son was quite unique. Both were imprisoned for murder, though in different states’ penal systems. The father was somewhat famous in public circles at that time in the early 1980’s. His son had never known who his father was. He happened to see a news account of his father’s legal appeals in the news at his prison and saw a photography of his father. He immediately saw the uncanny resemblance of himself to the photo of this man and realized that this man was his biological father. He wrote his father in the father’s prison and they started up a relationship by mail. Much was made of the similarities of their cases. They committed murders in their early 20’s by way of robberies. Both were serving life sentences. They resembled each other to an almost astonishing degree. The implication in research and forensic circles was these two men, being father and son, related so closely genetically, were living examples of one view of psychopathy, that it was more genetically determined than some development or psychiatric mental illness. By then, it was standard fare that one of the outstanding clinical features of psychopathic persons was the innate, from at least childhood onward, the total lack of empathy toward others.

By then, it was standard fare that one of the outstanding clinical features of psychopathic persons was the innate, from at least childhood onward, the total lack of empathy toward others. Other almost universal characteristics included the perversion [meaning serious change] of their reward brain systems, that heinous acts of hurting other creatures [such as animal killing in childhood] and persons gave them thrills or pleasure. In the rest of us, these sorts of things elicit the more common and ordinary reactions of disgust, fear, shock, fright and so on.

In an article in the June issue of the magazine, The Atlantic, entitled “When Your Child Is A Psychopath,” author Barbara Bradley Hagerty, writes of an 11-year-old girl in a residential treatment who was diagnosed as a child to be psychopathic. The article chillingly describes the very early behaviors as a toddler that this girl displayed that in retrospect were clear indicators of the psychopathy to come. Her story confirms some of the points I referenced above, lack of empathy, cruelty to persons going so far as to start choking her younger infant siblings repetitively and other intentional acts to harm and even kill. Also, what points again to a genetic origin to her ‘behavioral set’ as a psychopath was that she was reared in a good sounding family and that she was adopted.

Our growing understanding of the differences in psychopathic persons in the last several decades has produced a raft of books in popular literature such as The Psychopath Among UsWithout Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among UsThe Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience, and The Sociopath Next Door  and many other popular titles. Also, the new recognition of mass shooters and their personal histories and behaviors have heightened to some extent the workings of the psychopathic personalities. Televisions that tell of investigations and profiling of such persons have also made the general notions about psychopaths and serial killers more familiar in the lore of current culture and discussions.

Finally, brain imaging research is beginning to identify the structural and operational differences in the brains of psychopaths. Whether all this in the decades to come will lead to truly definitive and effective treatments will be an open question and challenge for the foreseeable future.


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