Some Characteristics of the Psychopathic Personality
Betty Joseph, a British psychoanalyst, first read this paper at the 21st International Psychoanalytic Congress in Copenhagen, July 1960. It was published that same year in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Joseph relies on the work of Melanie Klein and illustrates, through the analytic case of a young, noncriminal psychopath, the impulse-feeling-defense triad of greed-envy-devaluation in such patients. If the psychopath spoils that which he hungrily wants—the goodness in others—it is not worth having. Joseph posits this dynamic as a defense against anxiety, guilt, and depression, which may be true in her example. However, neurotic personality organization must be achieved to nurture such socialized feelings; this level of personality will not exist in the more primitive, less conflicted primary psychopath, whose greed, envy, and derogation are adaptive aspects of his aggression and psychological homeostasis.
In this paper I shall discuss some characteristics of the psychopathic personality. I use the term here in the sense in which it is generally employed in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. I cannot, in a paper of this length, discuss the analytic literature on the subject but would refer particularly to Alexander (1930), Bromberg (1948), Deutsch (1955), Fenichel (1945), Greenacre (1945), Reich (1925), and Wittels (1938). It will be seen that my approach to the problem is essentially dependent upon an understanding of the work of Melanie Klein (1935, 1946, 1957).
I shall limit myself to describing and discussing one psychopathic patient whom I have had in treatment for about three years. I shall then draw certain conclusions from this case which seem to me, both by comparison with other psychopathic patients and from a perusal of the literature, to be relevant to the psychopathology of the non-criminal psychopath in general.
X was 16 when he came into treatment. His family is Jewish. His father is a somewhat weak and placating man; he works in a large industrial concern, but originally trained as a lawyer. The mother, of French origin, is an anxious and excitable woman who looks younger than her age. She started running a small café a few months before treatment started. There is a daughter who is two years younger and is more stable than X. There seems considerable tension between the parents, but both are concerned about X. X was referred for restless, unhappy and unsettled behaviour. He could not stick to anything, had no real interests, and was doing badly at school. His mother was anxious about his precocious sexual development and interests.
X was breast-fed for about two months; he was then put onto the bottle, as the mother had insufficient milk. He cried a lot between feedings. He appeared to have become increasingly difficult with his mother since puberty, but was overtly fairly friendly with the father despite frequent flare-ups. He went to boarding-school at 13 and on his holidays had one or two vacation jobs but could not stick to them. He seemed interested only in earning a lot of money in the easiest possible way. At 16 he was moved from boarding school to a cramming college in London in order to come to analysis. At this period he started to mix with a group of restless, near-delinquent teenagers who had no regular careers, training, or jobs, and himself remained just on the outer fringe of delinquency. He and his friends went to endless parties where there was a lot of petting with girls until all hours of the night, and they had virtually no other interests.
At college he despised and mocked his teachers, did almost no work, and cut his lectures. His two ideas for his future career were to be a lawyer or to go in for catering (his parents’ careers). Soon he added a third, that of being a psychoanalyst! He was extremely demanding and exploiting with his parents, getting everything he could out of them, money, food, training, and then manifestly throwing away his opportunities. About all this he showed no apparent sense of guilt, but was very bombastic, and maintained a picture of himself as being in some way special and unique. He seemed emotionally very labile and impulsive and was apparently easily influenced by his group. He would often talk in a somewhat maudlin and sentimental way. Although he considered himself universally popular, he had in fact no real friends. In appearance he was slim, with a rather effeminate gait.
It seemed to me that X was in fact clearly a psychopathic personality. His difficulties did not seem to be just those of normal adolescence; he lacked obvious neurotic symptoms; he was not psychotic and had a severely disturbed character formation. As I have suggested, he was impulsive, had a weak ego, and was apparently lacking in a conscious sense of guilt. His object relationships were primitive; he was shallow in affect and very narcissistic.
In analysis X attended regularly, but there were periods when he would become very aggressive, would twist my interpretations, throw them back at me, verbally attack and mock me, or would argue and cross-question like a sadistic lawyer. At other times he was on the whole co-operative, often very smooth to the point of being placating; but there was a shallow type of response to my interpretations. He seemed consciously to pay little attention to them, would vaguely say “Yes” and go on to something else, and would not from one session to another show any continuity or refer back to insight he might have gained.
I shall now discuss three interrelated characteristics which I believe to be fundamental to X’s psychopathic state. First, his striking inability to tolerate any tension; second, a particular type of attitude towards his objects; and third, a specific combination of defenses with whose help he maintains a precarious but significant balance.
X constantly shows his difficulty in tolerating any kind of tension. On a primarily physical level, he tears at his skin and bites his nails when he experiences any irritation; he was unable to establish proper bladder control until well into latency. He reacts to any anxiety by erecting massive defenses. He cannot stand frustration and tends to act out his impulses immediately with little inhibition. Nevertheless, as I shall indicate later, a great deal that appears to be an uncontrolled acting out of impulses can be seen on further analysis to consist of complicated mechanisms to avoid inner conflict and anxiety.
As to the second point—his particular type of attitude to his objects—X is, as I have described, extremely demanding and controlling, greedy and exploiting. What he gets he spoils and wastes; then he feels frustrated and deprived and the greed and demands start again. I want to show how this pattern is based on a specific interrelationship between greed and envy. To give an example: he must have analysis, he must have the sessions at the times he wants, it does not matter how difficult it is for his parents to afford the fees, but when he has it he mocks, he disregards, and he twists the interpretations. As I see it, he knows that he wants something and will grab, almost to the point of stealing, but then his envy of the giver—of the analyst, teacher, at depth the good parents—is so intense that he spoils and wastes it, but the spoiling and wasting lead to more frustration and so augment the greed again, and the vicious circle continues. Melanie Klein in discussing an aspect of this problem says, “Greed, envy and persecutory anxiety, which are bound up with each other, inevitably increase each other.”
As to my third point, I am suggesting that the nature of the anxieties aroused by this interrelationship between greed and envy leads to the establishment of a characteristic series of defense mechanisms. These I shall describe in more detail, and I shall suggest how they enable X to maintain a particular type of balance. I shall show how X, despite his greed, exploitation, and impulsiveness, is not a criminal; despite his envious, omnipotent incorporation of his objects, his cruelty towards them, his apparent lack of concern for them, and his resultant inner persecution, he has not become psychotic. The balance that X achieves is, as I see it, the psychopathic state—a state in which profound guilt and depression, profound persecution, and actual criminality are all constantly being evaded.
The group of defense mechanisms mainly used by X to keep this precarious balance is centered on the maintenance and actual dramatization of powerful omnipotent phantasies which are largely based on massive splitting and excessive projective and introjective identification. So long as these mechanisms are effective, X’s balance can be held and breakdown warded off. I have given some instances, such as his inability to visualize any career for himself other than that of his parents or myself. Or, when he was attempting to study economics for his General Certificate of Education, he immediately saw himself as a future writer of textbooks or an economic adviser to governments—not as a beginner student. I have also instanced how, when he was attending college, early on in the analysis, he in fact did no work, cut lectures, and mocked and derided his teachers as he did myself in the transference. But when faced with the reality of exams he would firmly maintain that he could easily catch up in the two or three weeks that remained.
These defenses depend upon a total introjection of, and magical identification with, the idealized, successful and desirable figures—the parents, analyst, writers of textbooks. This type of introjection enables him to ward off the whole area of depressive feelings. He avoids any dependence on his objects, any desire for or sense of loss of them. In addition, since he has swallowed up these idealized objects, and in his feelings stolen their capacities, he avoids envy and all competitiveness, including his oedipal rivalry. He has all the cleverness—the teachers and I are stupid, not worth his while attending to, we are the failures. Thus he splits off his wasting, failing self, his failure to make good and use what is available, and projects it into the teachers and myself. He is also magically reparative, can put forth everything right, e.g. the exams. In this way, failure, guilt, and depression are completely obviated.
Similar mechanisms are at work in his choice of friends. I have stated how, for a long time, he mixed only with a group of unsuccessful, near delinquent young people. It became clear that he projected into them his own criminal self—they stole, they lied, not he; thus he avoids actual criminality and the guilt that could result. It is interesting to note, however, that on the one occasion when he did get arrested by the police, along with a delinquent friend—mistakenly as it turned out—he lived in a state of near collapse for days, confirming that in fact it is the intensity of his fear of persecution that prevents his being a criminal.
A similar method of avoiding actual criminality and persecution and yet living out his stealing impulses by projective identification can be seen in the following type of behaviour. He would give a friend 10s. to hand over to a storeman who would “lift” a coat from a warehouse and get it round to X. X is constantly having to evade his inner persecuting figures and superego. These he would project into the police and parents, or, at college, his teachers, and then he allied himself with his delinquent friends against them. At other times he would identify with his inner accusing figures and turn violent accusations against his erstwhile friends, containing his criminal self. At yet other times he would appear to do a great deal of wheedling, cajoling, and bribing of his internal figures as if constantly trying to prove that his criminal impulses were not what they seemed, as is indicated in the example of the coat “lifted” by the storeman.
Naturally the constant use of projective identification to rid himself of the bad parts of the self and inner objects leaves him feeling more persecuted externally. This he deals with either by flight—for example, he eventually could not face his college and teachers at all; or by a manic, mocking, controlling attitude, as I have described in regard to his behaviour with myself and his teachers.
The need to project these various internal figures into the external world to avoid both inner persecution and the possibility of guilt plays a role of great importance in motivating psychopaths to maneuver rows, brawls, and fights in their outside environment to get themselves noticed and punished and attacked for apparently petty reasons. X, when his environment did not persecute him and when he seemed to be more settled and happy to be getting more insight, became noticeably accident prone. He poured boiling oil on his foot and cut off the tip of his finger as if he now had to play out the role demanded by his slashing and burning internal figures. It was also obvious that he unconsciously felt that such attacks were justified. He managed in a striking manner to neglect his scalded foot. I shall later indicate how such unconscious guilt and inner persecution drove X into actual stealing and into actually being rejected.
I have so far been trying to show some of the main mechanisms that X constantly used to avoid guilt, depression, inner and external persecution, and actual criminality. I want now to mention a more extreme defensive process which may occur when these ordinary mechanisms of omnipotence and projective identification fail him, and when he is momentarily faced with psychic reality. This process—a massive fragmentation of the self and inner objects—could be seen at certain periods in the analysis when the nature and need for his omnipotence were being interpreted; then one might get a sense of immediate chaos. X might become extremely angry and abusive with me, shouting at me for being ridiculous, or he might appear to collapse, yelling “All right, all right, all right,” as if he were falling completely to pieces. In these situations parts of the self and internal objects that had previously been split off and projected out and kept at bay by his holding on to the idealized omnipotent phantasies, are, by virtue of the interpretations, brought back into contact with the self. At this moment a new violent splitting and falling to pieces of projective identification takes place, since the patient feels overwhelmed by his impulses and by his emerging guilt and his internal objects; at once the bad, for example “ridiculous” parts, as well as his inner persecuting figures, are projected into the analyst, who is attacked and abused, or is placated in a desperate masochistic manner—as with X crying, “All right, all right, all right.” This splitting is now of a diffuse fragmenting type, making one aware of his nearness to schizophrenic disintegration, and his absolute need for the omnipotent defences that prevent it. In the second part of this paper I shall bring more detailed material to illustrate some of the main points that I have been making—especially the interconnection between greed, envy, and frustration in X and the nature and functioning of his characteristic defenses.
The material I am quoting occurred about a month before a Christmas holiday. My previous patient had in fact just left, but X arrived early, and instead of going as usual to the waiting room, came straight to the consulting room, opened the door, looked in, realized his error, shut the door and then went to the waiting room.
At the beginning of the session he told a dream, which was that he was in a place like a bar which also served food; his penis seemed to have come through the zip opening of his trousers. He put it back, but then it was as if he pulled it out again; he thought that people would realize that he was a homosexual, or a pervert. There were other men, perhaps sailors, in the bar. His associations were to a bar in a village near a town D, where he had stayed during the previous summer holidays. The bars there were closed on Sundays, but everyone went to the bar in the nearby village which was really meant only for travellers passing through. The penis showing through the trouser opening refers to a party the previous weekend when X got a bit drunk and a boy had his trouser opening showing. X then described how he went into a public lavatory a week or so before: the notice on the door said “Vacant,” but when he opened the door he saw a man’s bag standing on the floor inside, then realized that there was a man in the lavatory saying something to him as if inviting him to come in. X was alarmed and fled.
Briefly, I am suggesting that X was showing his feelings about the coming Christmas holidays, when I was felt to be the shut bar, and he turned away to the open bar, the homosexual relationships with men, experienced as a drinking and feeding, which I connected with fellatio phantasies. As I was speaking he said that he was just thinking about masturbation phantasies he had had about sucking his own penis. He then seemed to trail off, saying that he had a heavy bag of school books with him and wished he could leave it here in my flat. I pointed out that he seemed to be turning my flat into the lavatory scene that he had experienced the previous week, for he had started the session by pushing open the door as if maintaining that it said “Vacant” and was proposing to push the bag in here too.
I shall now bring together the main points that I tried to convey to him and that I want to discuss here. First there is the dramatization of the whole situation in the transference. There is also the avoidance of the frustration and anxiety about my being shut, as the mother, unavailable over the Christmas holiday, by turning greedily to the ever-open bar. But the bar is run by men; he turns to the father inside the mother, my room being a combined parent figure. There is a reference to his greed: last weekend he was a bit drunk; but the greed leads at once to envy of the person who can feed, so he incorporates the feeding penis, which is equated with the breast, and omnipotently sucks from his own penis in his masturbation phantasies and will, apparently, feed the other men—the sailors. His trousers then become the ever-open bar. Thus, all feelings of anxiety about loss and possible rejection by the mother are obviated; his need and desire for her are in the men who are split-up aspects of the father. But now the father containing these bits of himself becomes an object of terror, as is seen in the association about the flight from the man in the lavatory. In the dream there is a breakthrough of persecutory fears; he puts his penis back again, as if afraid of the greed of the sailors. X achieves his omnipotent solution by becoming homosexual, meaning that he now contains the penis-breast. But the guilt and persecution about the stealing of the breast is evaded, since the actual homosexuality is projected into me as the father seducing him.
There are two further points I want to make. First, that the homosexual collusion with the men—there are no women in the dream—is mirrored in his placating relationship with his actual father, in which both quietly denigrate the mother. Second, I am trying to show here the depth of X’s omnipotent phantasies.* I have already stressed his need to have both his parents’ careers, and he finally chose the one based on his mother’s, both her immediate one and her original maternal feeding one. In this material it becomes clear that at depth what X feels he must have is the mother’s breast stolen by the father and fused with the father’s penis.
I shall now bring material to illustrate more fully an aspect of what I described earlier as X’s particular type of attitude to his objects. I shall show some of his ways of avoiding his deepest guilt towards his first object, especially his method of dramatizing a situation in which he is thrown out, and thus punished, for a petty crime, rather than enduring the deeper underlying guilt which would lead him to experience the depressive position.
X decided to take up catering as a career and by now was able to start in a realistic way; he was accepted at a catering college and found a job in the kitchen of a good hotel where he could get preliminary experience. He was good at the work, and, for the first time since he had been in analysis, very happy in what he was doing. Suddenly, after being there just a month, he arrived saying that the chef had given him the sack, but he did not know why, except that they were cutting down staff. This reason did not convince him. Throughout the session he spoke very restrainedly, kept telling how very helpful and nice everyone had been, the work place, the employment agency, adding frequently, “I didn’t fall to pieces, I didn’t fall to pieces,” and then went back to everyone’s niceness. When I showed him both his belief that the chef had now stolen his job and his potency, and his fear of facing his own despair, persecution, and hate, he suddenly said that he thought that the chef was a crook. He had once overheard a conversation which seemed to indicate that in a previous job the chef had stolen some hams. As he described this X became panicky, saying “My anger’s coming out,” and went back to describing how nice and helpful everyone had been. Right at the end of the session when speaking of his fear of his anger he said “It’s like when I went to the cinema on Saturday, they showed the film of a plane crash, where fourteen people were killed. Tears came right up behind my eyes—ordinarily you act as if you felt tearful, but this was real, it caught me by surprise, I stopped it, but in a way I was glad the feelings came.”
I want to stress three points here: first, his fear of falling to pieces if the hate, the persecution and despair were allowed to come through and overwhelm him, just as he seemed to be liable to fall to pieces in the session that I instanced earlier when his omnipotence was being analyzed and he was momentarily facing psychic reality. Second, his attempt again to deal with the guilt by projecting the stealing parts of the self (as will emerge later) and the oedipal impulses towards the mother, and the robbing, castrating internal figures into the chef standing for the father, and at first even denying his fear about him. Third, the profound idealization of the self, being so quiet and constructive, and of the whole outside world other than the chef.
But this splitting and idealization are now aimed also at keeping his good objects alive and safe. This can be seen by the emergence of depressive feelings; for example, the strikingly sincere way in which he spoke of the plane crash, and his fear about the crashing of his constructive work, at depth his good internal objects. But he had in fact brought about this partial crash, the loss of the good job. The reason for this emerged more clearly three days later when in response to interpretations he said that he thought that he might have been given the sack for stealing food from the hotel. Three times he had taken sandwiches home with him. So the criticism of the chef for stealing became clear.
But as I shall now try to show, this petty stealing of the sandwiches, which almost certainly got him the sack was, as I suggested at the beginning of this paper, not just an acting out of greedy impulses, but a more complex method of avoiding the deeper guilt and anxiety about stealing by the spoiling of his good object—at depth the mother’s breast. This was shown the following day, when he arrived complaining that although he had got a new job he had only been paid one pound to keep him going. “I can’t manage, I have to pay rent. I can’t manage, I shall have to borrow. At the hotel the menu is in French and I can’t understand it.” I suggested that what he could not properly understand was how he got into all these muddles with money, and I should add that there was an important connection here with the French menu, the French mother’s food.
He spoke of plans for paying the money back and went on to say he had had a bad night; his hot water bottle had leaked, the stopper wasn’t in properly, and the bed got damp. I suggested that the real problem was that he felt that the money, just like the analysis and his other opportunities, seemed somehow to leak away and not get used properly. He spoke about a difficulty in plans for the day; how to manage the suitcase he had with him. If he took it to work, the doorman would go through it when he left to make sure he wasn’t stealing anything, and he would be so embarrassed as it was full of soiled linen. I showed him his anxiety about taking in stuff from me, the hotel, in a stealing way, that is, not to use it himself: for example, to have a good meal but to slip it out secretly and make it into a mess represented by the soiled linen, as he did with the analysis, when the sessions again and again got lost and chaotic. He said that at the previous job it was true he did get three good meals a day, but then went to the lavatory three times a day to defecate.
Thus, the real nature of his guilt, his self-accusations, here projected onto the doorman, concern his turning his good meals at once into feces, my good interpretations into disregarded stuff, which are then just defecated or leaked out.
There are two points that I want to stress here. First, I believe that it is this type of envious spoiling that is the really critical point of the guilt in these patients, leading in X to a fear of loss and rejection. This guilt and anxiety he avoids by getting himself actively thrown out of his job for apparently petty, greedy stealing. Second, it is this spoiling and wastage that leaves these patients always dissatisfied, feeling, as they express it, that “the world owes me something,” and this stirs up greed again. Of course, this dissatisfaction is increased by their guilt, which also prevents them from feeling able to use and enjoy what they do get.
CONCLUSION
I am suggesting in this paper that the psychopathology of X might be considered to be typical for a large group of non-criminal psychopaths. It seems that he is particularly unable to tolerate frustration and anxiety; that he approaches his objects with an attitude of extreme greed and stealing; and that the greed and experience of desire lead immediately to feelings of intense envy of the object’s capacity to satisfy him. He attempts to obviate his envy both by spoiling and wasting what he gets from the object, thus making the object undesirable, and by omnipotent incorporation of the idealized object. He is faced with profound anxieties on many levels. He cannot face and work through the depressive position both because of the intensity of the persecution of his internal objects and his guilt; and because he is partially fixated in the paranoid-schizoid position owing to the strength of his envious impulses and splitting. I have tried to show how, faced with these various anxieties and impulses, he manages to keep a precarious balance, avoiding criminality on the one hand and a psychotic breakdown on the other. I have discussed the nature of the defense mechanisms—based on omnipotence, splitting, and projective and introjective identification which keeps this balance going—and am suggesting that this balance is the psychopathic state.
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* Editor’s Note: Dragan Svrakic identifies two kinds of grandiose fantasies: free floating and structured. The former is “free” in the inner world and able to be temporarily projected into any feeling, thought or action; the latter is permanently attached, usually to a particular self-representation, such as physical appearance, or to a successful career. See D. Svrakic (1989). Narcissistic personality disorder: A new clinical systematics. European Journal of Psychiatry, 3:199–213.