Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (7 page)

Walker seemed not to be worried that family members knew about the spying. He felt impervious to discovery. In fact, the spy ring itself was a clumsy and bumbling operation, yet it escaped detection for almost two decades. Barbara Walker had warned her husband that she would expose him, but she hoped that he would heed her warning and flee the country. He did not. She finally turned him in during the fall of 1984 when she told the FBI about his espionage. On May 19, 1985, he was tailed by the FB I to a lonely road in a Maryland suburb of Washington. There, Walker made a drop of secret documents intended for his KGB handler and was finally arrested.

After his arrest, Walker seemed unconcerned for his future, stating with open bravado, “I’m a celebrity.” He knew what he had to sell, even though the coin this time was different. He agreed to tell the government everything about his espionage activities and to testify against his best friend, Jerry Whitworth, in exchange for a plea bargain for himself and his son. The fourth ring member, his brother Arthur, had already pleaded guilty, been fined $250,000, and been sentenced to three life terms. Whitworth was fined $410,000 and sentenced to 365 years in prison. In exchange for his cooperation, Jack Walker received one life term, as did his son. Michael Walker was released on parole in 2000 at age 37. Jack Walker’s expected release date is 2015, when he will be 77 years old.

Psychopaths who commit espionage often betray their country for money, sex, and the thrill of illicit behavior such as conning others, even an entire nation. They are in stark contrast to persons who commit espionage for strongly held beliefs and principles—in other words, those who are ideologues.

People who commit antisocial acts are not necessarily psychopaths. The widely held public notion that the psychopaths among us are crazed killers is also wrong. Psychopaths are people who have severe antisocial impulses. They act on them without regard for the inevitable and devastating consequences these actions may bring to themselves and others. Many psychopaths are not criminals, but they are the predators among us, chronic parasites and exploiters of the people around them. Psychopaths use psychological cues and push emotional buttons to manipulate the vulnerable for their own purposes. They are unable to put themselves in other people’s shoes, any more than a snake can feel empathy for its prey.

By Their Acts Ye Shall Know Them

Everyone has antisocial impulses. The vast majority of individuals who take personality tests that measure one’s degree of psychopathy do not score zero. Psychiatrically healthy people score within a certain numerical range well above zero but do not rise to the level of a psychopathic personality. In other words, normally functioning people possess some antisocial traits.

Who has not had the wish to take something that belongs to another, or to take harmful advantage of someone for one’s own benefit? Good men and women have such impulses but curb them. Bad men and women act them out. The mayhem and personal suffering that psychopaths inflict on society is enormous. Then too, over the course of their lives, psychopaths demand a disproportionate amount of time and financial expenditure, particularly from health care professionals. When they are children, psychopaths are usually delinquent and difficult to manage. As they get older, their predatory behavior usually costs individuals and society both suffering and money. If they become criminal, the costs of incarcerating them are high. So, too, are the costs to society for caring for their deserted and traumatized families.

Not all criminals are psychopaths; in fact, many are not. And not all psychopaths are criminals; in fact, again, many are not. Psychopaths exist at all levels of society, in all walks of life. No profession, however noble, is spared its cadre of them. We know them, if we know them at all, by their acts.

Originally, the term
psychopath
was used in psychiatry to refer to all personality disorders. Later, as we came to understand the spectrum of personality disorders, the definition narrowed. In 1941, in his classic book
The Mask of Sanity
, Dr. Hervey Cleckley gave the psychopathic personality a clinical definition. He described the psychopath as having the traits of guiltlessness, superficial charm, egocentricity (extreme self-centeredness), incapacity for love, an absence of shame or remorse, a lack of psychological insight, and an inability to learn from past experience.
Antisocial personality disorder
, the current official term for psychopathy, was the first personality disorder to be officially recognized within psychiatry and to be included in the earliest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, known to all mental health practitioners as DSM.

DSM-II, published in 1968, changed the term
psychopath
to
sociopath
, and more clearly refined it:

This term is reserved for individuals who are basically unsocialized and whose behavior pattern brings them repeatedly into conflict with society. They are incapable of significant loyalty to individuals, groups or social values. They are grossly selfish, callous, irresponsible, impulsive and unable to feel guilt or to learn from experience and punishment. Frustration tolerance is low. They tend to blame others or offer plausible rationalizations for their behavior. A mere history of repeated legal or social offenses is not sufficient to justify this diagnosis.

The current version, published in 1994 with text revisions in 2000 (DSM-IV-TR), emphasizes antisocial behavior, more than personality traits and their motivation, in the definition of antisocial personality disorder. The diagnostic criteria for the antisocial personality rely heavily on the research of Dr. Eli Robbins, work that has demonstrated that this disorder is stable and continuous, lasting from childhood through adulthood. This latest version of DSM stresses predisposing childhood factors, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and conduct disorder. It also emphasizes criminal behavior over the essential narcissistic features of the disorder. Although the latest DSM also lumps together all delinquents, it does give consideration to the social, economic, and cultural determinants of their delinquency.

Laypersons and some professionals use the term
psychopath
to pejoratively label people who engage in antisocial activities, or simply people that they plainly dislike. Dr. Cleckley’s original research demonstrated long ago that the antisocial behavior of common criminals and the antisocial behavior of psychopaths are different. Criminals often have standards that they will not go beyond, or families to whom they will never be disloyal. Although it may seem contradictory, some nonpsychopathic criminals have principles and a conscience. An example of this distinction can be made in the case of a career criminal who is surprised in the middle of a robbery and kills two officers to escape capture and imprisonment; he views killing or being killed, which he regrets, as an unavoidable occupational hazard both for himself and the police. The criminal psychopath who kills does so casually, or even for no apparent reason. He feels absolutely no remorse, nor does he give the killing a second thought beyond maneuvering to avoid the consequences.

Psychopaths can be passive or aggressive. Passive psychopaths tend to be parasitic and exploitative of others, whereas aggressive psychopaths commit major crimes. Passive psychopaths (referred to as passive-parasitic, exploitative, or predatory) have frequent scrapes with the law but usually manage to squirm out of serious trouble and punishment. Passive psychopaths commit mostly white-collar crimes. The more aggressive ones, particularly the sexually sadistic, may commit serial sexual murders. Their need for constant stimulation through sexual arousal appears to be a motivating factor in their crimes.

For the most part, however, the average, everyday psychopath among us (and within us) appears to the outside world as a model of normality. As Cleckley wrote,

There is nothing odd or queer about him, and in every respect he tends to embody the concept of a well-adjusted, happy person…. He looks like the real thing…. More than the average person, he is likely to seem free from minor distortions, peculiarities, and awkwardness so common even among the successful…. Everything about him is likely to suggest desirable and superior human qualities, a robust mental health.

Today, psychiatric clinicians question some of the qualities Cleckley attributed to the psychopath. For example, we no longer agree that psychopaths are charming. Some of them, particularly the aggressive ones, have all the charm of a rattlesnake. Dr. Otto F. Kernberg, a widely respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, believes that persons with antisocial personality disorder are basically suffering from a severe type of narcissistic personality disorder. They form only exploitative relationships and lack moral principle. Roughly defined, the psychiatric concept of narcissism refers to a person’s sense of selfimportance and uniqueness. Narcissism may be healthy or pathological. In the psychopath, it is pathological in the extreme and is malignantly transformed into living, breathing evil.

Pathological Relationships and the Emptiness Within

As noted above, the psychopath typically manifests pathological selfimportance, or narcissism, displayed as excessive self-centeredness. Other characteristic traits are grandiosity (displayed as nonsexual exhibitionism), recklessness, overambitiousness, an attitude of superiority, overdependency on admiration, and, alternating with these characteristics, bouts of insecurity and emotional shallowness. The reckless grandiosity of psychopaths usually causes them to fail at any enterprise, often spectacularly. Clinicians sometimes quip that psychopaths “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” and that for psychopaths, “nothing succeeds like failure.” The two fundamental distinguishing characteristics of psychopaths are the inability to feel ordinary human empathy and affection for others and the perpetrating of repeated antisocial acts.

Why do some people do these terrible things? We now know that empathy has something to do with an anatomical structure, mirror neurons; these have been found in monkey brains and human brains. The cells are located in the brain’s motor cortex, where muscle movement and control are initiated. Mirror neuron circuitry allows us to “step into the shoes” of others, to feel their pain. The more empathetic the person, the stronger the person’s mirror neuron response. And the weaker the mirror neuron response, the less empathy he or she has. Psychopathic personalities may have a dearth of mirror neurons.

Much of what the world calls evil originates in the pathological selfcenteredness of individuals who pursue instant gratification and use others for their self-aggrandizement. Understanding the concept of evil in this way, we can see that by far the greatest evils perpetrated by ordinary people are done to the extent that these people share the personality characteristics of psychopaths. That is to say, the evils are committed in the exploitation of others. For instance, psychopaths can have lustful sex, but for them the experience is devoid of any intimacy or commitment; the partner is essentially an instrument of masturbation. A vibrator or other inanimate object might serve the psychopath just as well. Psychopaths are incapable of falling in love. People are like tissues to be used, generally for unpleasant purposes, and then discarded. Is not this entitled selfishness that destroys the capacity for empathy with other human beings the heart of evil?

For psychopaths, the world is a giant dispensing machine from which they obtain goodies without giving up any coins. In their relationships they devalue the other person, they are greedy, they appropriate others’ property or ideas and feel entitled to do so. They distrust and are unable to depend on others, another part of their stunning incapacity to empathize with, or commit to, other human beings. A patient-victim of a psychopath once described to me that failure of empathy in unforgettable terms. Her cold, distant, scientist father could tell how many cubic centimeters of tears she shed, but he could never understand why she shed them.

I recall a patient who came to me for treatment of his depression. It soon became clear that his depression was secondary to the life problems caused by marked antisocial personality traits. From the first session, he addressed me as “Bob,” assuming an easy familiarity, even though I had introduced myself as Dr. Simon. The “Bob sign,” as I had discovered from past patients who had addressed me familiarly, was an absolutely unfailing indicator of a short-lived or nonexistent therapy. These persons are unwilling to accept a patient status, this status being, among other things, a deep personal wound. They often leave after a few sessions.

This patient also came late to many sessions, missing others entirely. The patient produced countless excuses for not paying his bill. He constantly referred to others as “scumbags” and “dirtballs,” projecting onto others his contempt for antisocial acts that he was clearly guilty of committing himself. His pervasive view of me was that I existed only for his needs, that I was not a person with any needs of my own, and that no matter what he did, I would be there to supply him with positive stroking.

In very short order, I began to feel an intense dislike for the patient, another sure sign that the treatment was going nowhere. Seeing that my attempts to interpret his behavior toward me were met with a quizzical contempt, I asked him directly what he was hoping to gain from treatment. After that session, I never saw him again. Although I must confess that I was relieved, I was left with an unshakable feeling of having been used and depreciated. I had become another failed relationship for him that he could cast on the heap of his other wrecked relations, convinced that all people were worthless “scum.” The tragedy is that he was destined to repeat this pattern endlessly and destructively without any reparative insight. Because of his intense selfcenteredness and grandiose image of himself, he could not tolerate any insights without feeling the threat of psychological disintegration. His antisocial acts were driven by the need to exploit and depreciate others to maintain a grandiose, powerful view of himself.