Lark's Psychology Page - Where Is The Psychopath?

Psycopathology - Cont'd.

Copyright Lark Ritchie 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997.

Where Is The Psychopath?

Beginning at the last stage and working to the beginning, we will proceed to dissect the psychopath, and at each stage, respond to what appear to be inconsistencies and arguments in the previous assessments.

First of all if we consider Erikson's last stage "Integrity vs. Despair", the psychopath is an integrated personality. He functions according to himself and the personality he maintains seems to suit his needs. Like all "normal" individuals of the population his "profile" may vary, but like the normal population, he will not be identified strictly and categorically as "this persons profile is superimposed exactly on the profile of the classic psychopath, ergo, he is a psychopath". The fundamental differences between the psychopath and what we consider to be a "normal" person is that his profile varies in significant characteristics, primarily in the areas which Erikson has identified as the sixth and seventh stages of development;" Generativity vs. Self Absorption" and "Intimacy vs. Isolation". Using the vertical model, and comparing positioning on other stages, he appears to be positioned from a functional point of view, as a normal individual.

On the Generativity vs. Self Absorption scale, there is relatively little concern for others in a general sense, including society. He tends towards Self Absorption in that his personal needs and comforts are of prime concern. Concern for social norms and laws are incidental. Concern for others, even a dependent child, take a lesser value than concern for self. According to our concepts regarding action-sets, this individual holds values of "self" over "others", and this value construct is set on a prior stage of development, and continues to operate on its own and within the consolidated actions sets which have allowed him to develop further. If this is taken as correct, then we must examine the earlier stage scripts to understand the psychopath.

On the Intimacy vs. Isolation scale, the psychopathic individual can be described as not having a strong affinity towards Intimacy. Neither does he have a sense of Isolation. He may be placed somewhere near the mid point of the scale. His personality is such that Isolation does not seem to be a factor with which he can identify. If this is indeed so, then his personality action-sets or consolidated action-sets have placed minimum value on both intimacy and isolation. In other words, it matters none to him, or at the most, a position on this scale is considered relatively inconsequential in determining his behaviour. He can steal, be promiscuous, commit assault, and violate the rights of others. This is not to say that he has no sense of intimacy, for he may consider others to be friends or allies, as in the case of "Rex" (Appendix 2), and experience some form of stress when such a relationship is violated. With such concepts he finds little value in considering others in relation to himself in the general sense because there id little value placed on intimacy and the need for intimacy in the personal sense.

Examination of the fifth stage, "Identity vs. Role Confusion", positions the psychopath much toward the "Identity" pole of the scale. He has a strong identity. His personality constructs seem to be stable, and his views of others, although possibly not those of the general population, hold to be true for him, and when evaluated against his constructs, tests of other's actions are proved to be consistent with his concepts of how they should behave. His aggressiveness is justified, because others, whether people or animals are treated as objects rather than beings with feelings such as his. Normally, If a person has a strong sense of identity, then he should, after reaching a behavioural plateau, work towards searching for intimacy. In the case of the psychopath, he rarely sees this as a need since people (in his constructs) are similar to him, and without the need for emotional relationships.

On the "Industry vs. Inferiority" scale, the psychopath in many cases has proven to be "Industrious" within his own rights. The sense of Inferiority seems to be none existent. He can be relatively successful in his endeavours to meeting his own objectives, although such endeavours and objectives may not be considered "right" by the rest of us. He can for long periods of time "elude the bill collectors", "survive without a full time job", "travel in relative independence, living on his own personal resources", "face danger with a smile", and "beat any guy in the house", and he is proud of it. He is industrious, but only from his own perspective, and that perspective seems to be based on survival. Future developments in actions sets will allow him to compare himself with others on a "survival" level, and find them lacking in resource, and consequently, perceive them with lesser value. Again, on this stage, formulation of action-sets consider himself primarily, and alternatively, do not consider "others" as a factor in any consequence resulting from his expression of actions. Future action-set consolidations built from sets on this stage do not create a conflict at subsequent stages of operation. His constructs from prior stages seem to fit well with his current experiences, and do not create inconsistencies within the structures. Still, the considerations of and for others are seem to be inconsequential. Therefore the structures on which "others" are based must be on some earlier stage.

We are now on the stage Erikson calls "Initiative vs. Guilt". The psychopath appears to have no guilt. We may place him close to the Initiative side of the scale. He can express all of the actions mentioned above and feel little or no remorse for his actions. He has initiative to do what he wants, and initiative to experiment with new behaviours. He can "pull a con", invent a lie, or create a scenario because he has initiative. He can turn the tables on one who challenges him, and project guilt away from himself. In "real time operation" he operates on this stage when moved to defensive reaction, not as a regression, but as a resource bank from which he can draw a new behaviour "on the fly". The lack of consequential guilt indicates that his behaviour sets found on this stage still do not consider others as a factor in consequence in relation to himself. The incorporation of these sets with others will always be consistent with his current constructs and can be considered "integrated". Where then was "others" dropped from the process of action determination and eventual selection? Let's move to Erikson's second stage.

On the second stage of development, Erikson identified the scale as "Autonomy vs. Doubt". Action-sets developed here are fairly primitive, and involve very few levels of processing when developed. The consequences of expressed action-sets thus can be considered to be either "black" or "white", with very few "shades of grey". These action-sets are built when the personality is very young (years two and three), and when concepts are shallow, but of utmost significance. Structures consolidated on this stage comprise action-sets and basic structures formulated on this and the first stage of development. They usually concern control over environment and selection evaluated against consequence involved interaction with the parent or parents. On the integrated adult stage, they are still primitive in nature, and the dynamics involved center around gaining and maintaining control of the immediate environment.

The adult psychopath when placed on this scale is most likely placed near the "Autonomy" edge rather than the "Doubt" edge. He is confident in his expressed actions, he can tell a beautiful story, he is charming and attractive, and he is impulsive. He is also quick to reject authority and discipline, cannot forego immediate pleasure for future gains, long range goals are close to meaningless for him, and he has a talent for being irritating to others. He acts as though no one but he exists and no one but he matters. But he is strong in his concepts, he is strong in his actions, and he is strong in his values. "I matter! - No one else!"

At first glance we would say "Ahhh! We've found where the 'others' were lost! He's a child! A little toddler who's a pain in the ass and has never fully grown up! He's a strong child!" On first glance, this appears to be true. But if we consider how action-sets are formed and how, along with newly developed action-sets, they incorporate pre-developed, tested, and statistically safe modules into subsequent structures, we have to test this supposed discovery, and to do that we have to set ourselves back in time upon the stage as it was being constructed. On this stage of development, the individual is formulating and testing his actions based on consequence to the self as derived from others. He is attempting to formulate actions which will allow him a high sense of autonomy. He is testing his actions against the outside world. We assume he is evaluating consequences based on parental feedback, because that is what the normal child does. This is not the normal child, nor is this the normal adult. This is the psychopath. And the psychopath is developing his personality based on prior formulations which are even more basic than those of the two or three year old child. He is developing methods by which and through which he can survive, and even on this stage he is different from the normal individual.

Although on first observation, the child is seen as modifying behaviour and can be considered "normal" in that he expresses actions which conform to expectations, he is in reality doing so because the consequences of full confrontation with the parent is a threat to being, or self existence. His processes, rather than based on will the consequence lead to positive affection or negative affection from an "other", the evaluations are made on "Can I survive if I pull this off?". Such a child on closer scrutiny will have the characteristics of independence, coldness, busy-ness, and relative inattention to others merrily "doing his own thing". For him others are a part of his world only as the relate to survival. He needs them to be fed, he needs them to be clothed and sheltered, he needs them for entertainment, but he does not need them to determine his actions to fulfill an emotional need. The need for emotional "others" which would have played a key role in the determining of consequences in the current stage action-set development process were left behind in the primary stage - with Erikson's model, on the "Trust vs. Mistrust" stage.

The primary stage then sets the concept of "others". As described previously, in infancy, the regular and constant interaction of the mother and infant lay the foundations for trust in the infant. It is the basis for an internal model reflecting what the infant can expect from the environment, in physical and emotional terms. In normal circumstances, the experiences of the infant are positive and allow for the child to experiment further. When the child experiences events which do not build a sense of trust in its environment, he or she may be handicapped in the formation of healthy subsequent stages.

I suggest that the loss of "others' as a factor in the process of building actions sets happens on this stage. It is on this stage that the concepts of self are first formed and set into the basic mental structures which will be incorporated into other consolidations of the personality. If we consider the arguments of Piaget on child development, the newborn is active in constructing his knowledge of reality. As discussed by E. Mavis Heatherington, and Ross D. Park , "Although the child's thought processes and conceptions of reality are modified by his encounters with the world about him, the child also plays an active role in interpreting the information he is gaining from experiences, and adapting it to the knowledge and conceptions of the world he already has." Piaget's experiments with children at the age of 4 through 12 months indicate that the child has some awareness of object permanence, and near the end of the stage of "coordination of secondary schemata" (to 12 months) a child will search for a teddy bear when the bear is replaced by a toy truck. This awareness then suggests that the child can hold the concept of an object, and I infer that the child at this time views the parent as an object and can formulate and test action-sets directed at the parent.

When the parent care for a child in this early stage begins with extreme affection (talking to, cuddling, playing with, and caressing), actions by which the child becomes aware of comfort and positive care giving then a concept of trust is formed. When the parental care is inconsistent, inadequate, or rejecting then the child forms a concept from which he is mistrustful of the world and those people in it. This attitude of fear and suspicion is subsequently used to build its further action-sets which will as the stages develop, be consolidated with other action-set structures. A child holding these concept formations will be a candidate for the neurotic disorders. What happens with the child who has been fondled, cuddled, caressed, played with, and talked to who suddenly experiences for a period of time, both positive affection and the extreme wrath of a mother or father who has "reached the end of his or her tether" or "had the final straw", either through an inadequate coping personality, or accumulated stress? How does such a child resolve such an inconsistency? Consider the cases of teenage pregnancy in the lower socioeconomic ranks, when a young mother plays at motherhood only to have the reality of single parenthood come crashing down upon her. Consider also the effects on the child of parents who married before maturing taking on the responsibilities a new role of parenting. Consider the marriage which attempts to solve its marital problems by having another baby. In all of such cases, there is a high probability that the child will initially be cared for with the best of attentions, for periods of varying length. If the consistency of positive care giving has lasted for a short period of time, and then becomes sporadic, then the child may develop an attitude of mistrust as described above. When the positive care giving lasts beyond the first year of life the same my happen. But at the stage which Piaget defines as coordination of secondary schemata, when the developing child has formed a stable and statistically safe concept of what an "other" is how are such parental outbursts directed at the child handled? I suggest that the child experiences a primitive form of dissonance, which to him, is a major dissonance. Unable to hold two opposing views; one of a loving and gentle other, and the other of a terrifying and hateful other, the child opts for the only reasonable concept which will continue to allow personality development and survival of the self. He regresses to his earliest states of concept formation and reformulates new hypotheses. And that hypothesis is "The "other" does not truly exist in an emotional sense", or if they do, then consequences involving them may be insignificant. Although such concepts cannot be proven in fact, they may be inferred through the study of conduct disorders in children, family histories, and social workers case histories. One last point before we move on to treatment.

Because this early stage is very primitive, and because the loving positive care was naturally received by the child in an innocent state, the concept of love and positive care is not rejected completely, but stored for future use should the proper conditions again arise. Such a concept cannot be stored with the readily accessible range of behaviours within the normal contiguous stage, because to even accidentally use this construct within an incorporation would lead to consequences which allow for major dissonance, I suggest that this concept is left on the first stage, and a new stage constructed to manage the survival of the infant. This primary vestigial stage in the case of the psychopath left to his own, rarely, if ever is accessed again. As in Multiple Personality Disorder, the child has dissociated his initial personality formations on its embryonic stage of development. I also suggest that this initial embryonic personality is co-concious. I further suggest that this embryonic personality is accessible should the proper conditions be set, or a decompensation be extreme enough to cause an individual to regress to this very early stage of concept formation, keeping in mind that the stages are to be viewed in the horizontal rather than the vertical orientation . Since the child is young and adaptable, a return to consistent loving care may in its own time, resolve the dissociation, and cause the integration of the personalities even before a parent has recognized any problem with the child. Perhaps this is the "colicky baby".

The model I have presented allows for perception of the psychopath in a way that understanding is possible. Whether it can fully tested remains to be seen. It is in this thinking that I propose that an aggressive approach to treatment the psychopathic personality be chosen.

Treatment of the Psychopath

What About Rex?

If we look at Rex as laid out on the vertical model, we would probably position him somewhere on the "Intimacy" scale nearer to intimacy t than the center point. We are justified in this placement because of the manifestations of stress concerning his friend. This stress, I suggest, is a result of his experiencing cognitive dissonance. Here's what may run through his thoughts.

"I had a friend... or at least I thought he was my friend... Damn! How could a friend inform on me? Friends don't do that! Which is real? Is he my friend? Is he using ME??? What is real? Maybe both none of it's real... Maybe it's ME who is wrong? Was I wrong? Am I the sucker? Did he suck ME in? How could he do that to me?"

He is experiencing Cognitive Dissonance. And he doesn't know how to handle the two opposing facts. Are they facts? No... They are concepts, one internal and one sent to him by the outside world. He experiences discomfort because it is one of the few times that he has had to consider an "other" for a long time. And he considers that "other" in terms of himself. He says "this bastard is crippling me!" Think about that word. ME. What does "me" mean? "Me is an objective pronoun. The use of the objective pronoun assumes a verb which has had an effect on the object "me". That's the guy who was hidden away many years ago because he didn't want "me" to be destroyed. That's the guy who said "no matter how big and terrifying you are, you'll never, never, never, never get to do that again, because YOU DON'T MATTER TO ME! - EVER! EVER! EVER! EVER! You're GONE!"

"Me" is the key to the Psychopath. The job of the Psychopath is to find, the "me".

Sad and threatening as it may seem, the therapist in this case failed in my judgment, because he did not establish contact with Rex fast enough to intervene at the crisis. Rex walked out... Consider the passage at the beginning of this paper.

" Did you ever notice that therapists are so goddamned cautious? They always wait for me. They never really come after me... They just wait for me to come out... I think they are afraid people will pronounce their job title as 'THE-RAPIST'... I need someone who's not afraid of me."

Here is a passage from the discussion on psychopaths from the textbook in which the case of Rex was described.

"The traditional view of Antisocial Personality Disorder is that These individuals have failed to internalize family and societal standards for behaviour and consequently have no conscience and feel no guilt. It is typically assumed that without a conscience to inhibit unacceptable behaviour and without guilt to serve as a punishment for such behaviour, anyone would frequently act on aggressive, self centered, antisocial impulses. The various authors who adopt this view disagree as to whether this failure to develop conscience and guilt is a result of genetic factors, family factors, or the interaction of the two; but whatever the cause, this view implies that, in order to be effective, treatment would have to instill conscience. Unfortunately no effective way to do so has yet been developed."

Preparing For The Hunt

The hunt for the "me" in a client like Rex must focus on having him focus on his "me".

A hunt for a client referred by the correctional systems will be more difficult. The therapeutic team must come to be more actively involved with some playing "good guys" and some playing "bad guys", and the bad guys must be "pretty bad". Their role is to cause a formation of the concept of "me" by applying personal stress on the client. The client must eventually ask himself and others "why are they doing this to "me"? In this case, the pressure must continue by more than one bad guy. The action cannot be perceived as being only one antagonist. The client must have a feeling of apprehensiveness, which will slowly be relieved by the "good guys", and primarily by the prime therapist, who will be seen as a significant other, in that pressure subsides in his presence.

Once a clear concept of "me" has been established, the hunt can begin.

A more fluent and aggressive modification Carl Roger's Client Centered techniques can help in this respect. The therapist must be a real person using the technique rather than a model therapist using Roger's methods. He must be more active, his restatements of the client's words must be more in the form of a conversation, but nonetheless, they must be Rogerian.

If we consider that the psychopath is usually intelligent, then the therapist must be equally intelligent. The client must be attracted to the therapist, and the therapist must be entertaining to be attractive. To the client, the therapist will be considered a "good guy to know", or one he may try to outwit. The therapist must subtly recognise the game, and be open to interaction, always one step ahead, without being evident, hence the requirement for a resource team and a mentor.

He and the resource team must realise the concept of a horizontal stage and the method of operation of the individual on that stage. He must work toward allowing the client to explore the experience of major dissonance and be aware that the focus must be on the action-sets which will be proven to be stressful. He will have a psychodynamic-humanistic approach in which he, at the same time builds a rapport with the client in which a trust can be formed. For an excellent exploration of this idea the reader should study the ar ticles "Experience as Knowing: Utilizing Therapist Self Awareness" which discusses therapist awareness and empathy, "Resistant Clients: Confrontation, Interpretation, and Alliance" , and "A Cognitive-Humanistic Approach To The Hard -to_reach Client"

The resource team and the prime therapist must see himself as an "honourable and personally committed hunter" and actively pursue the client, both baiting, and stalking, and moving the client to experience the unpleasant feelings of relationships with others and regress that person to the that early area of the stage so that a new script may be formulated. This is not to say the therapist is to be devious, for the client will recognise deviousness quickly. He knows himself. The therapist must want to find and recover the being, rather than create a case study for his notebook.

Rather than attempt to solve the problem quickly the therapist's objective should be to maintain the client's dissonance for as long as possible while an alliance is being formed. The actual techniques must be those which with the therapist is comfortable, but the object remains the same. He must become actively involved with the client in a game of "catch me if you can". As the bond between therapist and client begins to form, the stress of the original major dissonance will begin to subside. One method to build the personal relationship more quickly will be to have longer, more informal one-on-one sessions with the client. For example, a walk in the park, an overnight camping trip or a quiet canoe trip. Ideally the setting should be one that the client is relatively unfamiliar and inexperienced with, and the therapist most familiar. The objective during these sessions is to maintain a sense of novelty within the client, where new action sets are required to be constructed, and an understanding that the novelty is contingent on the therapist as an individual. It is essential that these qualities are a part of treatment, because the continual need to form action-sets allows for acceptance and practice of the process and older structures to be modified and re-integrated onto the personality.

Along the way, the client may have many transgressions, and these should be displayed by the therapist as non verbal "Ya let me down, Rex, ya let me down..." The objective here is to have the client form an identification with the therapist, and an awareness of the "other", which is the stuff in and on which the client must reformulate his basic action-sets and scripts. Further into the process, the non-verbal disappointments may be expanded to outwardly expressed verbal interaction, since the attachment bonds will have been established.

Once a true bond is formed, and the determination of this must be made at a deeply analytical level by therapist, mentor, and resource team, discussion of therapeutic intervention should be discussed with the client. By this time, the processes of transference will have begun, and should be subtly encouraged rather than denied. The prime therapist will be becoming the loving parent.

To Continuation of this paper...

© 1997 Lark Ritchie. Contact me at this address..