Psychoanalysts, Psychologists and Psychiatrists Discuss Psychopathy and Human Evil

Sheldon Itzkowitz, Elizabeth F. Howell, Sheldon Itzkowitz, Elizabeth Howell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429557491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Abnormale Psychologie

Evil - along with its incarnation in human form, the psychopath - remains underexamined in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature. Given current societal issues ranging from increasingly violent cultural divides to climate change, it is imperative that the topics of psychopathy and human evil be thoughtfully explored.

The book brings together social scientists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts to discuss the psychology of psychopaths, and the personal, societal and cultural destruction they leave as their legacy. Chapters address such questions as: Who are psychopaths? How do they think and operate? What causes someone to commit psychopathic acts? And are psychopaths born or created? Psychopaths leave us shocked and bewildered by behavior that violates the notions of common human trust and bonding, but not all psychopaths commit crimes. Because of their unique proclivities to deceive, seduce, and dissemble, they can hide in plain sight; especially when intelligent and highly educated. This latter group comprise the "successful or corporate" psychopaths, frequently found in boardrooms of corporations and amongleaders of national movements or heads of state.

Addressing a wide range of topics including slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, the individual as psychopath, the mind of the terrorist, sexual abuse, the role of attachment and the neurobiology of psychopathy, this book will appeal to researchers of human evil and psychopathy from a range of different disciplines and represents essential reading for psychotherapists and clinical psychologists.

Chapter 1

Psychopathy and human evil

An overview^{1, 2}

Sheldon Itzkowitz

The term “psychopath” elicits thoughts of serial killers; pedophiles; sadistic, intentionally cruel persons; or acts of genocide at the hands of tyrants such as Stalin or Hitler. However, psychopathy runs along a spectrum; not all psychopaths are serial killers or mass murderers. There are psychopaths, who may be thought of as “sub-clinical” (LeBreton, Binning & Adorno, 2005) or “successful” (Stevens, Deuling & Armenakis, 2012) unless they commit a fatal error. They are adept at avoiding exposure to either the mental health or criminal justice systems. In fact, these psychopaths are often highly successful and often achieve positions of status in the world of governance or corporations, in which case they have been referred to as “corporate” psychopaths (Boddy, 2010; Wellons, 2012). In this chapter I offer an overview, first addressing the more pathological end of the spectrum, followed by a brief discussion of the more “successful” end, those who share many of the same characteristics but have enjoyed a different outcome in life, e.g. successful psychopaths. In this discussion, to better understand the psychology of psychopaths, I link the following foundational psychological processes: failures in healthy attachment (e.g. disorganized attachment), problems in mentalization (including the inhibition of reflective functioning), malignant narcissism and dissociation. I highlight the work of key theoretical figures, notably Erich Fromm.

Serial killers

It is an unfortunate truism that acquaintances and neighbors of the sub-group of psychopaths known as serial killers are often surprised, shocked even, when they discover the heinous crimes committed so close to home. For example, Yamamoto (2016) writes of Lonnie David Franklin Jr., aka the “Grim Sleeper,”

neighbors who live in the same South Los Angeles neighborhood as the man accused of slaying nine women and one 15-year-old over two decades are shocked, saying they could never imagine he would do anything remotely like this … [There is] disbelief that Franklin could have killed women and dumped their bodies in alleys and trash bins around Southern California. Rosie Hunter lived down the street from Franklin when she was 10 or 11 years old. All she remembers is a neighborhood mechanic always helping people.

Or in the Associated Press (2009) article about Anthony Sowell,

The man who lived in the house of rotting corpses never gave people a reason to wonder what he was really doing behind closed doors … The suspected serial killer seemed so harmless that when he invited neighbors over for a barbecue in his driveway, they came. So benign that when he beckoned women inside his house that smelled of death, they apparently went willingly.

“Genocide,” writes Bollas (1995),

is the quintessential crime of the twentieth century, and genocide is exemplified by the serial killer, a genocidal being who swiftly dispatches his victims and converts the human into the inhuman, creating meaningless deaths that sully the concepts of living and dying.

(p. 185)

For Bollas the serial killer is created in childhood by severe relational trauma. Of the men who become serial killers of “anonymous people” he states they “have suffered a kind of emotional death” (p. 187). He believes the impact of early trauma is overwhelming and drastic and he explains, “In place of a once live self, a new being emerges, identified with the killing of what is good, the destruction of trust, love, and reparation” (p. 189).

How then do they walk among us, sit next to us at work, live in our neighborhoods and even befriend us? How do we understand the surprise and shock of neighbors or co-workers upon learning the “nice, quiet man” living or sitting so closely is someone convicted of committing unthinkably violent and sadistic crimes? The emotional death that Bollas describes is similar to the emptiness, isolation and loneliness that some understand as characteristic of dissociation. Can we conceptualize the previously unknown aspect of this person that suddenly appears and kills as a well-hidden aspect of a psychopath—in which attachment has been dissociated (see Chapter 2), or as a deeply dissociated rageful self-state based on an internalized representation of the person’s abuser when he was a child, in someone with a dissociative disorder?

Defining evil

Stone’s contemporary definition of evil, referring to, “the actions of another person or group that evokes horror, revulsion, shock and fright” (Chapter 4, p. 95) is remarkably similar to Erich Fromm’s. Fromm believed that evil was defined as actions performed consciously and intentionally by someone or a group that intentionally inflicts or causes the victim(s) to suffer physical, psychological or bodily harm and where the perpetrator(s) of evil suffers no real felt sense of remorse or regret over their actions, having no concern for the harm they inflict (Fromm, 1964, 1991).

Erich Fromm’s position on evil

The term “malignant narcissism” was first coined by Fromm (1964), but many others, including Kernberg, have since used it and similar terms to refer to the actions of people who carry the diagnosis of “psychopath” (Itzkowitz, 2017). Beginning with DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition), the diagnosis of “psychopath” was replaced by “antisocial personality.”

Fromm was a Marxist and a psychoanalyst. His Marxist leanings grounded his theory of psychoanalysis, and his concept of character in human relations, class structure and the significant impact of society and culture. Where Freud believed that aggression and destructiveness were connected with a fixed quantity of instinctual energy, Fromm saw character as part of the personality that is acquired and shaped by interpersonal-relational experience (Funk & Shaw, 1982). Thus, he uncoupled the etiology of pathological hatred from the instincts and relocated it in the harmful and corrupting elements of human experience as embedded in society. For Fromm, hatred of oneself and hating others are intricately connected and not disparate. As such, he saw destructiveness and the need to destroy as an end product of the obstruction of people’s freedom to experience and express themselves to their fullest potential.

In 1947, Fromm wrote, “the degree of destructiveness is proportionate to the degree to which the unfolding of the person’s capacities is blocked” (p. 218). In this regard he was referring to the powerful negative role that cultures, societies and governments can have by controlling, obstructing or constricting the development and evolution of the minds and actions of individuals. Therefore, the breeding ground of violence and destructiveness lay in cultures and societies that strangulate the individuals’ freedom and ability to thrive and evolve beyond their current life situation.

Fromm (1964), years before Kohut, discussed two forms of narcissism: the benign and the malignant. The benign form of narcissism is associated with and emerges from a productive orientation to living. Joy, self-satisfaction, pride and narcissistic gratification are derived from the fruits of one’s labor or production. Productivity is in the service of living. Benign narcissism is self-correcting because the object of one’s narcissism is the work, the materials, the process, even the outcome, and the narcissism is balanced by the fulfillment and investment in the work itself. “[B]ut the very fact that the work itself makes it necessary to be related to reality, constantly curbs the narcissism and keeps it within bounds” (p. 77).

In contrast is the malignant narcissist, whose pride, joy and gratification derive from her/his possessions, body, looks, wealth, house, job, etc., rather than anything he/she produces. It is a form of what Fromm termed “non-productivity” and it lacks the “corrective element” seen in benign narcissism. For the non-productive malignant narcissist, one’s “greatness” or grandiosity lies in what one has and not in one’s achievements. Therefore, the need to be related or connected to others is limited and in the process of maintaining one’s “greatness” or grandiosity, one becomes less related to reality (ibid.). One has to continually feed and support such narcissism “in order to be better protected from the danger that my narcissistically inflated ego might be revealed as the product of my empty imagination. Malignant narcissism, thus, is not self-limiting” (ibid.).

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm (1973) developed and elaborated on his concepts of the biophilic and the necrophilic orientations to living. The necrophilic orientation is what concerns us in discussing the psychopath and human evil. In contrast, “The biophilic orientation develops from within the context of a loving supportive family whose members are themselves biophilic; they love life” (Itzkowitz, 2017, p. 85). Such families are not only loving but also infused with warmth, protectiveness and encouraging of curiosity and growth. Cultures and societies can help facilitate a biophilic orientation. Funk and Shaw (1982) write,

security in the sense that the basic material conditions for a dignified life are not threatened; justice in the sense that nobody can be an end for the purposes of another; and freedom in the sense that each man has the possibility to be an active and responsible member of society.

(p. 136)

Implicit in the development of Fromm’s biophilic orientation is family, community and culture that facilitate and enhance the growth of the individual’s sense of worth, esteem, pride, goodness and respect. Gilligan proposes that it is this positive sense of self that can serve as an inoculation against the propensity for violence. He theorizes that there are several precursors to violence, which he identifies as forms of shame, a deep personal and chronic sense of shame. In writing about violent men Gillian explains that they are people who feel “vulnerable not just to ‘loss of face’ but to the total loss of honor, prestige, respect and status—the disintegration of identity” (p. 112).

Gilligan (1997) notes that emotional health and the stability of a robust sense of self emerges through human interaction within community and culture. He writes, “The relationship between culture and character is an unavoidable socio-psychological reality” (p. 96). The elements of selfhood, community and culture are so connected for Gilligan that they become psychically conjoined to the extent that a threat to the survival of one’s culture becomes tantamount to the survival of the self. Violent, incarcerated men cling to a sense of self-esteem and respect to avoid overwhelming feelings of shame and humiliation, which must be avoided at all costs. Shame and loss of respect is tantamount to death: “People will sacrifice anything to prevent the death and disintegration of their individual or group identity” (p. 97). Membership in a sub-group, within the prison system, helps bolster one’s sense of esteem, self-respect, safety and cohesiveness. When the sub-group is threatened or shamed, members are likely to experience this as a threat to their individual identity and self-esteem. Similarly, when a member is threatened or assaulted the sub-group defends their shamed comrade to restore the status of both the individual and the group and to maintain honor, respect and group cohesion. Gilligan (2009), quoting an inmate, writes,

My life ain’t worth nothin’ if I take somebody disrespectin’ me and callin’ me punk asshole faggot and goin’ “Ha! Ha!” at me. Life ain’t worth livin’ if there ain’t nothin’ worth dyin’ for. If you ain’t got pride you got nothin’.

(p. 106)

The means by which respect, honor and self-esteem is restored is by violence, a causative factor of inmate-on-inmate violence.

Regarding group or social narcissism, Fromm similarly believed that the majority of a group’s members, if not the whole, sustains the ideology of the group. Adherence and devotion to group ideology forms the basis of membership, and the feeling of belongingness inflates individual members’ narcissistic needs and enhances group cohesiveness. Cheliotis (2010) clarifies that the underlying ideology of the group need not be reasonable, and I would extend this to include rational as well; the ideology may in fact be pathological. It is developed and sustained by consensus and like-mindedness of the group (see Chapter 8).

In “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” Freud (1921) makes the argument that group membership often results in identification with the authority of the leader, thereby swapping one’s conscience for that of the leader. In the process, previous inhibitions are abandoned and a new freedom to act in tandem with group mores provides increased pleasure. He writes, “A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master. It has such a thirst for obedience that it submits instinctively to anyone who appoints himself its master” (p. 81). Obviously, the danger lay in submitting to the moral authority of a corrupt, maniacal, psychopathic leader.

Returning to Fromm’s ideas on human evil, we discover his syndrome of decay that includes necrophilia, narcissism and incestuous-symbiosis. It combines malignant narcissism with the love of all that is dead and a regressive, symbiotic-incestuous fixation, which “prompts men to destroy for the sake of destruction, and to hate for the sake of hate” (p. 19; emphasi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Brief descriptions of chapters
• Preface
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Psychopathy and human evil: an overview
• 2. Outsiders to love: the psychopathic character and dilemma
• 3. Sexual desire, violent death, and the true believer
• 4. The place of psychopathy along the spectrum of negative personality types
• 5. The perpetrators: the receivers and transmitters of evil
• 6. The Other within: white shame, Native American genocide
• 7. American hierarchy: White, “good”; Black, “evil”
• 8. Sympathy for the devil: evil, social process, and intelligibility
• 9. Die Hitler in uns (The Hitler in us): evil and the psychoanalytic situation
• 10. Dissociation and counterdissociation: nuanced and binary perceptions of good and evil
• 11. Dancing with the Devil: a personal essay on my encounters with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church
• 12. The developmental roots of psychopathy: an attachment perspective
• 13. The murder of Laius
• 14. Psychopaths and the neurobiology of evil
• Index