Antisocial Behavior by Benjamin B. Wolman

Author:Benjamin B. Wolman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615922475
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Wealthy Families

Some sociopaths come from families rich in money and poor in love who did not teach the child moral values or foster inhibitions of impulses. The sociopaths learn to get whatever they want without consideration for others. Vacillating, morally weak, hyperpermissive, and uncaring parents foster selfish, sociopathic personality development. A description of a young sociopathic patient may elucidate the point.

The nineteen-year-old man who took LSD sat in my office, and admitted taking hallucinatory drugs. He was in a state of panic; he felt he was losing his mind.

“Doc,” he whispered, “what else could I do? What is this all about?”

He trembled. He was both scared and bewildered. He came to me asking for help, wanting to get rid of the unbearable tension and the terrorizing fight.

He was a bright young man, a student at a private university. His father was a real-estate broker, his mother was a socialite, and his older sister was married to a business executive. They lived in a mansion in a fashionable community on Long Island. They owned three new cars and belonged to a country club. The father was a board member of a charity organization and the mother was president of a church sorority.

Prolonged emotional deprivation and parental rejection are crucial factors in the development of the narcissistic-instrumental type sociopath. Parental rejection fosters extreme narcissism. Thus “it is the narcissism, resulting from rejection, which accounts for the inability of the child to form an object relation to his mother in the first year of life, to his siblings later, and to others.”

Most psychoanalytic studies indicate the lack of maternal love as the main determinant in the development of a self-centered, narcissistic personality. Children who did not receive maternal love tend to withdraw interest from objects and remain fixated in a primitive personality structure. Failing to develop a superego, they remain unable to experience guilt feelings for antisocial behavior.

According to Karpman, “[Plsychopathic development for the most part indicated a clear-cut psychogenic relationship with inadequate opportunity in the first years for the establishment of a meaningful primary mother relationship of cathexis … the absence of accepting parents who … provide the child with the capacity or wish to become socialized.”5

A weak or defective superego is regarded by Eissler to be the product of parental misguidance or the lack of guidance.6 A mother’s self-contradictory, unpredictable, and shifting emotional attitudes, or frequent substitutions of maternal figures, all interfere with healthy identification and formation of an adequate superego. The presence of an inadequate superego explains why children appear to experience very little anxiety. Superego deficit, together with extreme hypercathexis of the self, are not conducive to internalization of fear, which is the basis of anxiety. Should a hyperinstrumental person ever feel guilty, his guilt feeling is immediately projected and the blame is placed on the allegedly hostile environment.

Levy distinguished between the “deprived” and “indulged” psychopath.7 The emotionally deprived child is unable to identify with his or her parents or parental substitutes. He or she develops a weak superego and is unable to exercise moral self-control.

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