Category: Antisocial Personality Disorder

What is emotionally absent in the psychopath is most important. More mature feelings that require whole-object relatedness and a capacity for secure attachment are missing.These include anger, fear, guilt, depression, sympathy, gratitude, empathy, remorse, sadness,loneliness and reciprocal joy – emotions that are broad, deep and complex. Instead, the emotional life of the psychopath centers on his internal management of envy (Kernberg,1984) and shame (Kohut, 1968), two affects that often precede intentional destruction of he object in real life. The damaged object diminishes envy since there are no longer any qualities worth possessing; the damaged object diminishes shame since it can no longer threaten as a source of humiliation.

AGGRESSION

Psychopathic individuals do not struggle with tensions of ego-dystonic aggression, since the impulse to aggress is either immediately acted out, or remains a source of aggressive fueling of the grandiose self-structure without conflict or ambivalence. Rorschach research has counter-intuitively found that antisocial and psychopathic individuals at all ages do not see percepts engaging in aggression as often as normals. They do, however, produce more aggressive objects with which they identify (Gacono & Meloy, 1994).Empirical research has established that psychopaths engage in two modes of violence more frequently than other non psychopathic criminals (Meloy, 2005). Affective violence, characterized by an emotional reaction to an imminent threat, is common among psychopaths,especially in the face of immediate frustration or humiliation. Predatory violence, characterized by a lack of emotion, careful planning and preparation, and the lack of autonomicarousal, is also frequent among psychopaths, and is emblematic of the homicides and sexualhomicides which a few of them commit (Woodworth & Porter, 2002; Porter et al., 2003)

We are just beginning to understand the brain of the psychopath (Patrick, 2006). His mind is another matter. Recent neuroimaging research has begun to functionally map the abnormalities of the psychopath’s brain (Kiehl et al., 2001, 2003), and such findings help us to biologically ground the clinical and forensic extremes of his behavior. But a theory of the psychopath’s mind is also important (Meloy, 1988). It guides empirical research. It puts flesh on the bone of empirical findings. It specifies the motivation and meaning of the psychopath’s behavior. And most importantly, it helps us understand his discrete experience of the world, and thus shapes our realistic perception of the risks he poses to himself and others.

Freud understood the psychopath, but devoted little time and thought to investigating his mind. He wrote in 1928, “two traits are essential in a criminal: boundless egoism and a strong destructive urge. Common to both of these, and a necessary condition for their expression, is absence of love, lack of an emotional appreciation of (human) objects” (p. 178). We define the psychopath’s personality nearly eighty years later in essentially the same twofold manner: his pathological narcissism and his cruel aggression. There is also a general recognition that both of these characteristics are fueled by an absence of emotional attachment to others: the bond that keeps most people from physically violating those whom they love.

http://www.yorku.ca/rweisman/courses/sosc6890/pdf/meloypaper-psychopathy.pdf