The Sociopath Next Door (30 page)

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.

Jane 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.