Hatred by Willard Gaylin

Author:Willard Gaylin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2010-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Psychopath

When we first moved to New York City from the less sophisticated environs of Ohio, my wife would read with anxiety the headlines in the tabloids, to which we had not been previously exposed. She would be particularly concerned with the group that came under the heading: “Model Boy Kills Mother!” She would ask me, as a budding psychiatrist, how that could happen. I explained that by definition anybody who killed his mother was not a “model boy.” Invariably these model boys had evidenced less than model behavior in their past. Most were psychopaths.

Hate groups are not societies of psychotic or borderline psychotic individuals. Their members are more likely to be people who have been labeled by psychiatrists as either psychopaths or sociopaths. The psychopath is a severely flawed individual who illogically, but rationally, has been excluded from the category of the mentally ill. Illogically, because the mental distortions of the psychopath are in many ways as extreme as those of the schizophrenic. Rationally, however, because society could not function if psychopaths were allowed the privileges of the sick role. Given the kind of damage to their personhood they evidence and the actions to which this may lead, psychopaths will constitute the majority of chronic criminals. They must be held accountable, so psychiatrists have considered them “abnormal,” but not ill.

The psychopath is identified by the absence of a clearly defined moral system, one of the essential features that distinguishes Homo sapiens from lower animals. The psychopath is described as having no conscience mechanisms. Psychopaths operating without conscience or with severely limited ones are fairly prevalent, if not in our own lives, in the newspapers and television. They are found among the thugs who earn a living by knocking old ladies over the head with a lead pipe to get the meager contents of their purses; those who sell crack cocaine to indulge their penchant for the easy life; the corporate executives who in the face of negative research findings encourage the public to purchase carcinogenic substances like cigarettes; the Ponzi artists of Wall Street; the despots of the African states that starve their own people to accumulate Swiss bank accounts to support their decadent existences.

Obviously, “psychopathic,” like “paranoid,” is a term that represents a spectrum of people with varying degrees of pathology. The label indicates the presence and nature of the pathology, not necessarily the degree. Just as there are degrees of paranoia, there are degrees of psychopathy. When racism was rampant in the American South, not all racists became members of the Klan. And when the Klan’s battle against integration was clearly lost, not all of them remained as active and aggressively obsessed with hatred as the Eastview 13 Klavern in Birmingham, Alabama. Indeed, when the time came to make a “political statement” on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, not all members of this Klavern would have had it in them to throw a dynamite bomb into the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four innocent girls aged eleven to fourteen.

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