Rebel Without a Cause (3 page)

That the psychopathic super-ego is weak has been mentioned by authors who have regarded such a statement as self-explanatory.
They have, however, failed to set forth the reasons for this enfeeblement of the mechanism which includes such precepts as authority and morality, and which holds the organism within traditional bounds. While a deficiency in the deterministic aspect of functioning, an intelligence of a peculiar quality, a fixation of libido at an early stage and other factors account for the style of life of psychopaths, yet our explanation would be inadequate were we to disregard the uncompromising fact of super-ego stunting. There seems to be little doubt that the special features of psychopathic behavior derive from a profound hatred of the father, analytically determined by way of the inadequate resolution of the Oedipus conflict and strengthened through fears of castration. Now since the father (or his surrogate) is the channel through which society—construed in its broadest sense and including all precepts, commands and conditions for satisfactory social living—is introjected, and since the father is hated and resented, the super-ego is correspondingly under-developed. If, as Devereux has held, the formula Father = Society should be reversed as Society = Father (or whoever it is who interferes with the child’s energetic attempts to obtain the attention and affection of the mother), the end-result, the effect upon the development of a satisfactory social attitude, is unaltered. Allers’
Wille zur Gemeinschaft,
(hopelessly translated to “will to community”) if it could be freed from its mystical implications, would be a highly useful explanatory concept, based as it is upon the notion that in the course of development this ‘feel’ for communal living is dwarfed (or missing) and the psychopath subsequently maintains his life on a zoological plane which expresses his complete independence of social demands. It may well be that somewhere in all this speculation the differential factor among the patterns of psychopathy, psychoneurosis and psychosis is to be found. Perhaps here is also to be found the reason why the psychopath shows, as Cleckley suggests, a complete semantic incomprehension of the rights of others, which is one of the most important features in the psychopathic syndrome. Psychopaths invariably show a naive inability to understand or appreciate that other individuals as well have rights: they also are inaccessible to and intolerant of the demands and pleas of the community, scornful of communal enterprise and spirit, suspicious of the motives of community-minded people or their representatives in public service. That the super-ego—for it is to this term all other concepts and suggestions resolve—is stunted and
not merely crippled in certain directional aspects, is shown by the psychopath’s
unselected exploitation of everyone and everything.
Just like the infant the psychopath will trade upon the good-will and sympathy of all without distinction, without plan, system, program or choice. He victimizes and exploits randomly and not for profit but instant gratification, his aggressiveness pointed at society-as-a-whole, while he is patently indifferent to individuals. So with a labile, unformed, literally sickly superego; and with a libidinous component fixed at a stage of immaturity, the constraint and caution so necessary for freedom from conflict is missing; and the rampant, unreined conduct typical of psychopathy results.

Modern analytic theory predicates criminality and all other activities of an aggressive or debasing order upon the prepotency of the
Death Instinct,
which is believed to exert an influence sufficient to catapult an individual toward self-destruction. It has become fashionable for our topic to be considered in this light: the psychopath is thought by some to suffer from the result of the ascendancy of death desires (Thanatos, Fatum) over his instincts to live (Eros). This explanation is eminently facile, appealing especially to those who are metaphysically disposed. But in the psychopath we are presented with the curious fact of his intense egoism as the natural outgrowth of a powerful ego-component which, in collusion with energetic and primitive libido demands, avidly engorges experience for selfish ends. How the ‘Death Instinct’ could operate in the face of such performing is unclear to this writer. Cleckley has pointed out that no psychopath ever commits suicide. In an Adlerian sense it is of course possible to see in this egoism an over-compensated denial of forceful impulsions to die; but the present writer can find no evidence to support this view, although he readily cedes to the dialectical notion of opposition in all natural processes. He does, however, recognise in psychopathic behavior the expression of the need for punishment, for atonement, for expiation of guilt, of which the ultimate consequence may well be death.

That the psychopath is burdened with guilt and literally seeks punishment has been observed by the author in countless cases. The clue to this strange situation lies, as one would suspect, in the Oedipus situation. Deprived of an avenue to satisfactory post-Oedipal adjustment and continuously beset by consequent incest and parricidal
phantasies, the emergent guilt can be assuaged only through expiation. “I have sinned against my father and I must be punished” is the unverbalized theme of psychopathic conduct: and for this reason they very often commit crimes free from acquisitional motives, marry prostitutes or, in the case of women, apportion their charms occupationally in an attempt at self-castigation. That such activities constitute a species of ‘neurotic gain’ is also to be considered. The fact of punishment sought, received and accepted does not complete the tale: there is in addition a narcissistic ‘yield’ which derives directly from the punitive act and mediates the original need. This is naturally on a subliminal level of apprehension, unreportable directly but always noticeable.

No accounting of the psychopathic syndrome—or for that matter any other facet of psychopathology—can be considered even relatively complete if it confines itself solely to the precipitating mechanisms. Man is a creature united in all respects; his organism psychologically and physiologically interdependent. He is a being constantly modified; a creature of the predisposing, unalterable facts of heredity and endowment, and the moderating, sometimes traumatic precipitating experiences of a social environment viewed in its broadest sense. Behavior as we know it on Market Street or as we view it microscopically in the clinician’s office is the mathematical (possibly geometrical) resultant of these precipitants and predisposants—the hammer of environment shaping the individual against the anvil of heredity. The factors already outlined are conceived of by the author as precipitants, as crucial and dramatic events effecting changes in the organism. Such changes, however, must produce the psychopathic personality only when they occur in an organism already prepared or predisposed for the psychopathic role. They act very much as catalytic agents in the chemist’s experiments.

The paucity of work on the physiology and biology of the psychopath is appalling. It would seem that in all but a few instances researchers have thrown up their hands; and yet there is scarcely another investigative field that is so important when it is considered that the social ravishment directly attributable to psychopathy staggers imagination.

We can, at present, only speculate as to the nature of the sub-structure
of psychopathy. Such speculation derives from the tentative proposals of latter-day research. The fact that the behavior of the psychopath appears to be a type of reaction that expresses itself through primitive responses awakens suspicion of malfunctioning in the higher cortical regions which are presumed to exercise restraint and control over those lower ‘centers’ through which basic drives and motives are mediated. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that since these higher centers are phylogenetically more recent, a specific
anlage
of psychopathy may be a structurally defective brain. Certainly the empirical evidence is sufficient; psychopaths behave in the restraint-free manner clinically described as lacking in judgment; they are swayed by few considerations other than the immediate satisfaction of infantile wishes and whims of the moment; their ‘sense’ of community responsibility is absent, and they lack such inhibitions as more social individuals express.

While autopsy findings have not yet indicated a quantitative difference between the neural structuralization of such persons and individuals of different personality organization, there are some grounds for suspicion that qualitatively (especially from the side of function) differences exist. Silverman has shown that the ‘brain-wave’ patterning of criminal psychopaths is recognizably of a different order than similar tracings from other groups. At the same time the striking resemblance of psychopathic behavior manifestations to the sudden, marked, crucial and permanent defects of character and temperament which follow upon such diseases as some of the encephalitides, epilepsies, head injuries, choreas and brain lesions of various kinds bespeak neuroanatomical aberrance of function or organization.

The responses obtained from the randomly-selected adult when his great bodily systems,
i.e.
respiratory, circulatory, etc. are tapped and measured, are rhythmical and repetitious, following a circumscribed pattern that is easily detected. The pattern from the psychopath—as recent research has shown—is different and (if the former is conveniently accepted as the normative) arrhythmic. This arrhythmicity, then, is characteristic of the psychopath in the physiological as well as the psychological sphere, and lends physical substance to the hitherto meaningless concept of ‘instability.’ Since these bodily processes accompany, support and presumably govern psychological
activities, it is conceivable that psychopathic behavior is maintained by this aberrant variety of functioning once it has been evoked by analytic precipitants.

Another provocative research conclusion refers to the more sensitive organization of physiological preparatory devices for action which the psychopath seems to possess. In a word, he appears to be more
delicately-poised
than his fellows; and he is provided with a curious animal ability to marshal support for hair-trigger movement. This physiological finding as it appears in studies of emotion causes consideration of the challenging proposition that anticipatory functioning is more highly developed among psychopaths than other individuals; a statement made more tenable when one recalls that the earliest psychological activity of man is somatic expectancy, the reaching forward of the infant to the next stage in the digestive cycle. That this should persist into adult life; that it should appear in a measurable group of organic processes, lends testimony to the view of psychopathy as a prolongation of infantile habits and patterns.

Some of the symptoms of psychopathic personality appear to succumb to a physiological explanation. Much of the mystery of the psychopathic reaction, especially of its eruptive, episodic character, is explicable by resort to an hypothesis based upon Cannon’s notion of
homeostasis,
a cornerstone of modern physiology. It may well be that the protest, aggression and hostility of the psychopath are merely homeostatic adjustments operating to restore a disturbed organismic balance. In other words, it is quite likely that the overt destructiveness of the psychopath is designed to fulfill a need for return to that state of dynamic equilibrium which characterizes the normal condition of man. The titanic internecine strife between analytically determined drives or needs and social or superego prohibitions perhaps engenders an amount of tension beyond the bounds of tolerance, to the point where unless it is relieved the organism is threatened with disintegration and destruction. So, in order to restore a balance and achieve a relative quiescence, the personal or social aggression is released with such explosive force that it expresses itself as an attack, a burglary, a murder.

It is within the realm of possibility that the intention of the overt psychopathic symptom, as we see it on the ward, in the street, the
courtroom or the consulting room is to relieve the tension produced by underlying conflicts and restore the internal balance. If such is the case, some of the specific signs of the disorder no longer need puzzle us. As an instance, it has been noted that the emotional response of the psychopath to his depredations or other acts is lacking; and this (it follows) is to be expected since a state of dynamic equilibrium, of inner physiological and psychological peace, has been obtained through the release which produced the aggression, the asociality. Furthermore, if the homeostatic interpretation of the disorder is sufficient to the case we may have hold of a reason for diagnostic distinction between psychopathy and other conditions. For example, when the drainage is incomplete and inadequate, leaving a residue of tension and distress, guilt and remorse arise to form the symptoms manifest as in neuroses.

We have so far sketched the individual precipitating mechanisms which touch off the psychopathic personality patterning; and we have touched upon the possible predisposants of the condition. Since, however, behavior does not take place in a vacuum nor is it ever independent of the peculiar setting against which it is staged, we have yet to remark concerning the social milieu which acts to awaken latent psychopathy in the same manner as any one or group of psychological factors already discussed.

It is a thoroughly unoriginal contention of the writer that modern society provides amply for those conditions which make for traumatization of the personality along the specific lines which lead to the evolution of the psychopathic type. These conditions flourish, for the most part, in cities or densely-populated areas resembling cities where personal and familial privacy (among other factors) are absent, and where infancy and early childhood are more than normally hazardous periods. They do not have to be stressed here, since only the conveniently deaf have failed to hear the sociologist’s condemnation of the manner in which we permit a broad segment of our population to live, and the psychologist’s monotonous belaboring of the unwholesome effects of pernicious environmental factors.