The Response Aroused by the Psychopath
The British psychoanalyst Neville Symington wrote this literary and clinical paper, which was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1980. Although arguably he overestimates the emotional and moral development of psychopathic persons—implying love, guilt, and a rigid morality—he ventures with great clinical insight into the countertransference aroused by these patients. His exposition of our collusion, disbelief, and condemnation when encountering a psychopath is masterful. He shows especially keen insight into our disbelief and condemnation as superego defenses against our own sadism: impulses to be cruel and vengeful toward psychopathically disturbed patients, who often deeply hurt and betray others.
What do we mean by “psychopath”? We need to know this before we can understand the response which he arouses. The term psychopath or psychopathic covers a wide range of observable phenomena but there is one common denominator: the overriding determination to attain certain goals, and these by flouting the values which the society holds sacred. This was a point made succinctly by Edward Glover (1960): “Moral obliquity is in fact the hallmark of the psychopaths who engage the attention of the courts.”
It was, for instance, a value of this country to accumulate wealth by hard work and saving and correspondingly taboo to obtain this by robbery or fraud. But this alone would mean that all revolutionaries are psychopaths, so there is another important diagnostic criterion: the criminal psychopath always acts in isolation. This is why Karl Marx saw the criminal as a reactionary and not a revolutionary.
On the subject of psychopathy, the standard psychiatric and psychological literature is unrewarding. The psychoanalytic writings are more helpful and in particular that of Freud, Melanie Klein, Glover and Hyatt Williams, but an important aspect of psychopathy, though noted, is underemphasized. I think this lacuna is supplied by Emily Bronte in her novel Wuthering Heights. The protagonist of the book, Heathcliff, is a psychopath. Characters of his kind are often found in novels; the arch-villain is a well-known stereotype and in fact Emily’s sister, Ann, writes about such a one: Lord Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But here the villain, as is usually the case, is described “from outside” and the writer’s purpose is to arouse our disgust and condemnation. In Wuthering Heights the reader is left with no illusions about Heathcliff, but Emily’s aim is to enlighten the reader and to evoke neither condemnation nor praise. I will give a resumé of the story for those who have forgotten it or do not know it:
The action takes place in two properties on the Yorkshire Moors—Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange—which are separated from each other by a distance of three miles. Wuthering Heights is the estate of the Earnshaw family and has been in the family for some generations and similarly Thrushcross Grange belongs to the Linton family. One day old Mr. Earnshaw goes on a trip to Liverpool and while there picks up a young gypsy brat who is homeless. He is adopted by him and his wife, much to the latter’s annoyance. His origin, background and name are unknown and so he is simply called “Heathcliff.” He grows up together with the two Earnshaw children, Hindley and Catherine. Old Earnshaw has special affection for Heathcliff and he exploits his position. From Hindley he gets things he wants by blackmail. On one occasion old Earnshaw brings home two colts and gives one to Hindley and the other to Heathcliff. A few days later Heathcliff’s becomes lame so he demands that Hindley swap, saying that he will show the old man the bruises Hindley has given him if he refuses. Hindley submits.
The children grow up, and Heathcliff, we discover, loves Catherine but when she is of age she decides to marry Edgar Linton. By this time old Earnshaw has died and Hindley, master of the home, humiliates Heathcliff and has reduced him to servant status. Catherine tells her confidante, Ellen Dean, an old family retainer, of her decision to marry Edgar Linton but Heathcliff overhears and disappears for three years. In the meantime Hindley’s wife has a child called Hareton and she dies, and then Catherine marries Edgar Linton.
After three years Heathcliff, unexpected and uninvited, appears on the doorstep of Thrushcross Grange, having gone to lodge at Wuthering Heights. Although Hindley hates Heathcliff, his greed for money overcomes his natural sentiments. He is an expert at playing on people’s weaknesses. He now has some money of his own and is a fully grown man. He becomes a regular visitor at Thrushcross Grange and Edgar allows it for Catherine’s sake. It is not long before Heathcliff starts to flirt with Edgar’s sister, Isabella, who becomes totally infatuated with him. Catherine sees them kissing in the garden and there ensues a row between Heathcliff and Catherine in which the former abuses the latter. Ellen Dean rushes off to fetch Edgar Linton, who rushes at Heathcliff, but Catherine, instead of defending her husband, goes to the defense of Heathcliff.
Eventually, with the help of two laborers, Heathcliff is ejected from the house and banished from it. Catherine, who is now pregnant, declares that if she cannot have Edgar and Heathcliff she will make sure that neither of them can have her and she determines that she will die and so she starves herself and becomes delirious. Heathcliff elopes with Isabella and marries her and then returns with her to Wuthering Heights. With the help of Ellen Dean, Heathcliff sneaks in to see the dying Catherine and they declare their love for each other. Catherine dies but not before a baby daughter is born to her and she is also named Catherine.
Heathcliff is now governed by one ruling passion: to possess everything that belonged to Catherine and to oust all other contenders. He is determined to become owner of both Wuthering Heights and Thrush-cross Grange. When Hindley Earnshaw dies of drink it emerges that Heathcliff is now the owner of Wuthering Heights. Hindley had mortgaged his property to pay his debts incurred through gambling which Heathcliff had encouraged. The mortgagee of the property is, of course, Heathcliff, so on Hindley’s death the property becomes his. Isabella flees from Heathcliff to the south of England and there she has a baby boy whom she names Linton.
Twelve years later Isabella dies and Edgar Linton goes to collect the young Linton and brings him to Thrushcross Grange, but hardly has he arrived in the house when Heathcliff sends to claim his son so the young Linton goes to his father at Wuthering Heights. Despite strict instructions from Edgar Linton, Heathcliff manages, when the two children are of age, to bring Catherine and Linton together through various deceptions. Then he captures the two and forces them to marry. Edgar Linton, now dying, realizes that unless he changes his will all his property will go to Catherine and therefore fall into Heathcliff’s hands, so he sends messengers to summon his solicitors but Heathcliff sends contrary messages and so Edgar dies before the solicitors reach him. So now Heathcliff is also master of Thrushcross Grange. All that was associated with his beloved Catherine now belongs to him.
Now his goal is achieved but instead of satisfaction, life becomes an empty abyss and all he wants now is to die. Like his beloved Catherine he starts to starve himself but he first desecrates the grave and makes a place for himself next to Catherine. Then he dies and is buried next to his beloved tormentor, Catherine. His son, Linton, had died shortly before him so the final irony is that the whole estate of Heathcliff passes to Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw, who marry at the end of the book.
Heathcliff’s relationship with Catherine is key to understanding his character and makes Emily Brontë’s formulation a precursor of object relations theory. Explanation which focuses on the death instinct, guilt, impulses and tension cannot be left out. It is impossible to give an account of psychopathy without taking account of this, and Emily Bronte was well aware of it. Where Heathcliff came from, what his parentage was and even his nationality is deliberately left unknown. The biological organism with its genetic inheritance, impulses and instincts is therefore given recognition but onto this foundation Emily grafts a character structure that is a product of his relationship with Catherine. The relations between Heathcliff and Catherine need to be understood both as symbolical of an intrapsychic conflict and the early relationship of infant with mother. The internal relations within the unconscious can only become literature by translating them into adult love relationships. In this way great novels frequently describe an intrapsychic conflict.
Heathcliff and Catherine become close friends when Hindley goes off to college for three years. The bond between them was all the stronger because Catherine’s mother had died some years before. Catherine becomes quasi mother to Heathcliff. In the relationship of Heathcliff to Catherine is symbolized the bond between infant and mother at a very early developmental stage.
While in their early teens, old Earnshaw dies, and Hindley returns with a wife whom he has secretly married. He is now the master of Wuthering Heights and puts Heathcliff to work on the farm, treats him as a servant and humiliates him in various ways. Heathcliff swears revenge. Then comes the biggest blow for Heathcliff: Catherine decides to marry Edgar Linton of Thrushcross Grange and we get a crucial insight into the psychology of the relationship between the two. Ellen Dean, who narrates the story, asks Catherine why she is going to marry Edgar Linton and she answers that Edgar has position and money. Ellen Dean asks, “What about Heathcliff?”
Catherine’s answer is staggering: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that’s not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
And a few minutes later she says,
I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always in my mind—not as a pleasure any more than I am a pleasure to myself—but as my own being—so don’t talk of our separation again—it is impracticable.
And later in the book, when Catherine has just died, Heathcliff says of her, “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul.”
Heathcliff, the psychopath, is merged psychologically with his primary love object and separation from it is unbearable. He says his love for Catherine is a thousand times stronger than the love Edgar Linton has for her but it is a love that will suffer any behavior in the beloved just because it is the product of the loved one. Heathcliff says that if his and Edgar’s positions were reversed he would never have raised a hand against Edgar, even though he hated him, for as long as she had regard for him but then he says: “The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood!”
This can only mean that he is furious with Catherine for her attention to Edgar Linton, but he will always protect her from his own violently vengeful feelings. As soon as Catherine is dead he is determined upon Edgar Linton’s downfall, and he also brutally attacks her brother Hindley, which he would not have done while she was alive. The revenge of the psychopath is so intense that he is terrified of experiencing it towards his primary love object with whom his own survival is so intimately bound up. The needs of survival do not allow him to attack his primary love object. Talking of the baby’s dilemma Bion (1962) says, “Fear of death through starvation of essentials compels the resumption of sucking. A split between material and psychical satisfaction develops.”
So desire for revenge becomes displaced from his primary love object onto other figures. He protects this one figure with all his strength and destroys all others in order to do so. What the world sees is the figures whom he destroys but not the invisible figure whom he protects. When treating a psychopath, the analyst frequently becomes this protected figure in the transference; and I think one of the reasons this type of patient is so difficult to treat is that if interpretations begin to bear on this protective screen, the analyst becomes a focus of paranoid fury which is not expressed verbally, but acted out, either towards people outside of the treatment situation or towards the analyst in some concrete way, like burgling his home or attacking him or a member of his family. Unless this paranoia is laid bare I do not think the patient’s psychopathy can be treated more than superficially and this creates a difficult problem. But surely in prison the problem can be tackled with safety? But how many would allow themselves to become the focus of a determined vendetta that might not be worked through, a vendetta that might put the analyst’s family at risk? It was no surprise that weapons were smuggled in to the Baader-Meinhof group at Stuttgart Prison. Officers protecting these prisoners would know that their families and themselves would be at risk from the group’s confederates outside if they had not done so. I do not offer a solution, but it is healthier to recognize that very often we collude with the criminal psychopath for our own safety, and we should not deceive ourselves about it or blame others for doing so. In Wuthering Heights one of the most fateful aspects of the novel is that all, even Edgar Linton, submit to Heathcliff’s undying determination.
It is often asserted that the criminal psychopath is amoral and not bound by any ethical system; nothing could be further from the truth. He is intensely moral and generally speaks in puritanical terms. Hatred for the primary love object is displaced and acted out in external behavior, so feelings of guilt are frequently displaced onto something quite venial. A criminal once borrowed £2 from a forensic psychiatrist; a few days later he battered an old lady and nearly killed her. Some time later he was enormously guilty at not having repaid the money to the psychiatrist, but had no apparent remorse about the elderly lady who was his victim. The criminal’s ethical system is built around an internal figure. The end justifies any means, but there always is an end. In the story of Heathcliff we see an example of this where he marries Catherine’s sister-in-law, Isabella, to take revenge on Edgar Linton. His ethical goal is individual, personal and remains unseen by those around him and by himself also. Klein (1934) has given expression to the way in which the positive factor is not seen by those in his social environment:
One of the great problems about criminals, which has always made them incomprehensible to the rest of the world, is their lack of natural human good feeling; but this lack is only apparent. When in analysis one reaches the deepest conflicts from which hate and anxiety spring, one also finds there the love as well. Love is not absent in the criminal, but it is hidden and buried in such a way that nothing but analysis can bring it to light.
I want to dwell further on internal objects and ethical systems. Within the psychical system there is a subject which is the ego and objects to which it relates with feelings of love, hate or a mixture of both. Subject and object are used in the grammatical sense of subject and object of a sentence; in fact objects are usually figures of people experienced internally. These are the significant caring figures of childhood but altered according to the infant’s own perception and feelings so the internal mother may be quite other than that consciously experienced. So the psychopath consciously may proclaim his mother to be a saint but unconsciously feel her as a bitter, persecuting figure.
It is these internal objects or inner figures that mobilize energy; someone will cross the world in pursuit of a loved one and also in search of a hated enemy. Motivation flows from the presence of these inner figures but they have a conscious representative in the external world. So a man devoted to the improvement of conditions for some minority group, like the Maltese or Cypriots, has a loved figure within him that he wishes to care for and in analysis this can be traced to the minority group which becomes the conscious representative of the unconscious inner figure. Then there is the man who dedicates his life to combating some evil like racism which he vehemently hates, and again the emotional force comes from a persecuting inner figure. In these cases the internal object has undergone a process of sublimation, but with the psychopath, due to failure in symbol formation, this has not occurred. He is dedicated to an inner unseen figure and in pursuit of her destroys all objects in his path. All the world can see is that he sweeps aside the values which most people hold sacred as Glover (1960) has observed:
In order to obtain an accurate picture of the “criminal psychopath” it is essential to keep constantly in mind that the main feature of criminal psychopathy, viz. moral obliquity, is estimated by social rather than clinical considerations. The lack of “moral fibre” is measured by the degree to which the criminal psychopath ignores and contravenes social codes.
For Heathcliff, the motivating inner figure is the dead Catherine, who yet remains alive for him. When Catherine dies, his only way of taking hold of her is to possess entirely all the material possessions which were associated with her: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. But the point is this: it is he who has killed her and he is so guilty that he has to keep her alive. By keeping her alive he does not experience the guilt for her death. When he does finally own all that belonged to Catherine he feels in an empty abyss and says, “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable!”
He has one last desire: to die and be buried next to Catherine, so he starves himself and makes sure that he will be buried beside her. What he pursues so ruthlessly is a lost object which has become persecuting to him. The persecuting figure is similar to the one Freud (1917) describes in “Mourning and Melancholia,” but there are two important differences. The depressive persecutes his object mentally inside himself; all is conducted within the mental sphere. The depressive is suffering from a loss that has occurred later developmentally when symbolization has been satisfactorily established. The psychopath’s loss has occurred earlier, when the infant is still stretching for his object and holding it to himself in a tactile way, and before he can internalize it within the unconscious. The psychopath has suffered a loss which occurred when mother and infant were still a unit. In Kleinian language, the infant has sustained a loss while in the paranoid-schizoid position. The projective and introjective mechanisms by which the infant separates himself from mother have not completed their work. So the infant has lost not just mother but a part of himself. It is precisely this which Heathcliff poignantly describes when Catherine dies.
The envy and destructive forces towards the primary love object are so powerful that they have to be deflected both from the self and from the object. The psychopath cannot say, “I feel I would like to kill my mother” because unconsciously he has killed her, and the guilt and depression about it is so enormous that it is projected powerfully into those significant others of his environment. He is mother and if for one instance the depression comes home, as it were, he kills himself.
How do people respond to the psychopath? Let us listen first to how those surrounding Heathcliff responded. Ellen Dean says of him as a child: “From the very beginning he bred bad feeling in the house.”
One of the most evident signs of psychopathy is the presence of confusion and bad feeling. One person is set against another and suspicion is rife, but the cause is never rooted out. In these days when it is fashionable in institutions to analyse group phenomena on a systems theory basis the presence of psychopathy is often missed. It is thought that all can be resolved if everyone’s role is clear and that by “talking through,” harmony can be reached. This may work in the absence of a psychopath but not when one is present in a group. The psychopath scorns such genteel methods of dealing with problems. He will create more confusion out of it so that “talking through” will provide no solution.
Another time Ellen Dean says, “I wondered often what my master saw to admire so much in the sullen boy who never, to my recollection, repaid his indulgence by any sign of gratitude.”
People expect that the psychopath will respond to goodness and kindness and show gratitude in the end. This is a pious wish; the experience of those working with psychopaths is the opposite. Experience belies the wishes and longings of those brought up to adhere to the Christian ethics of Western society. After the incident where Heathcliff blackmails Hindley, Ellen Dean says of him, “I persuaded him easily to let me lay the blame of his bruises on the horse; he minded little what tale was told since he had what he wanted.”
He did not care as long as he got what he wanted. Material gain sweeps all other considerations aside. Ellen Dean also notes that he did not seem to mind being abused physically or verbally by Hindley and she says, “He complained so seldom … that I really thought him not vindictive—I was deceived completely, as you will hear.”
The psychopath is extremely vindictive but does not show it in word or gesture at the time of the injury. He stores it up and responds in action later. When normal people tell a lie it is registered on a G.S.R., but not with the psychopath.* The psychopath does not belie his feelings. People around do not feel him to be vindictive and vicious. I once refused a request to a psychopath and he just said blandly, “Oh, that’s alright, don’t worry” and went off cheerily and the next day he burgled my flat. The rage and vindictiveness is so split off that people do not believe he has done what he has, even when the evidence is incontrovertible.
Even Catherine says of Heathcliff to Isabella, who was later to marry him, “He’d crush you like a sparrow’s egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge. I know he couldn’t love a Linton; and yet he’d be quite capable of marrying your fortune and expectations. Avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. There’s my picture; and I’m his friend.”
And soon after Isabella has married him she writes to Ellen Dean and asks, “Is Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?”
It is possible to classify the responses aroused by the psychopath under three headings: collusion, disbelief and condemnation.
In the novel, after Isabella has married Heathcliff and is living at Wuthering Heights, Ellen Dean goes to visit her, in response to a forlorn letter from her. There she meets Heathcliff, now banned from Thrush-cross Grange, but he persuades Ellen Dean to help him sneak in unseen to visit the dying Catherine; against her better judgement she agrees, because she feels that if she does not, worse will happen. She is also afraid of Heathcliff, who threatens her. The psychopath is so desperate that he persuades people with a pressing urgency to carry out his wishes. To obtain what he wants is all important, and he will seduce, cajole and threaten in order to obtain it. The despair and ultimate emptiness calls forth a collusive response in those to whom he appeals. A beseeching call for help which only you can answer is difficult to resist. It revives in us early feelings when we also were totally helpless. In treatment the psychopath will try every means to get us to do something, other than give interpretations. He makes a desperate appeal to us to lend him money, give him longer sessions, get him a glass of water, allow him to use our telephone and so on.
In themselves these requests are harmless enough, but to collude is to spell disaster; it is equivalent to agreeing that it is impossible for the patient to introject a good object, and ultimately, to give the analyst up. Once a patient tried to persuade me to go for a drink with him after the session, telling me he needed to feel I was human. I did not accede to his request. Later it was possible to analyze that he hated me for my happiness with my family and friends. In taking me for a drink he was wanting to lead me into drunkeness, then drugs, and so destroy the happiness I had. On this occasion the word “human” was not so benign as first appeared. In treatment the cry of the psychopath is frequently “You give me absolutely nothing—give me something concrete.”
It is essential to help the psychopath pass through this “dark night of the senses” and that we do not, from our own anxiety, prevent him from doing so.
There is another type of collusion which is more difficult to define but it haunts the atmosphere of Wuthering Heights from start to finish. It is that ultimately it is hopeless to resist the determination of the psychopath. In the novel this is typified by Edgar Linton who becomes helpless in the face of his rival. He forbids Heathcliff entrance to his home yet he is defied; he forbids his daughter to go to Wuthering Heights but Heathcliff subtly interferes and thwarts his plans. He goes to fetch his nephew, Linton, when Isabella dies, but when Heathcliff demands the child he submits without a murmur. Finally Heathcliff kidnaps his daughter and forces her to marry his son. Edgar Linton’s only response is to die. All the people close to him die: Catherine, Isabella, Edgar Linton, Hindley, and his own son, Linton.
The psychopath projects his own inner despair into those around him and achieves his short-term goals in this way. He controls those around him through powerful projective mechanisms. He makes others feel what he dare not feel himself. Only at the end of the book does Heathcliff himself cry out with despair and then it is his turn to die. When I have made an interpretation to a psychopath that gets in touch with his despair there is a momentary flash of horror accompanied by some statement such as: “I’d bloody kill myself if I thought that,” and then the projective armor clashes to again. What he says is true: there is a symbolic equation between the ego and the hated object in the unconscious. If the depression comes home it leads to an actual killing, so he has to push it away.
Through strong projective mechanisms, the psychopath stirs our own primitive sadism and this leads to a twofold response: either disbelief or condemnation. These are two ways of dealing with our own sadism. This attitude of disbelief is expressed commonly enough in such exclamations as: “Surely he can’t be as bad as that.” Yet when Heathcliff elopes with Isabella, he gives her clear evidence as to his character. As the two are leaving Thrushcross Grange he takes her favorite dog, puts a rope around its neck and hangs it from a tree, and yet she still adheres to an illusory picture of him and he despises her for it.
The psychopath despises the person who holds on to an illusion that he is good; unconsciously he knows that it is a rejection of an important part of him. It is the renewed experience of a mother who could not contain his sadistic impulses in the first few weeks of life. Despite the evidence, Isabella keeps a protective screen around him. Just as Heathcliff maintains a protective screen around his Catherine, so he arouses the same response in relation to himself. Remember he is Catherine; that is not a literary metaphor but a psychological fact. Because the psychopath unconsciously hates the person who has an illusion about him, he will always give a strong clue about the hidden side of his character.
Some years ago my flat was burgled one weekend when I was away and it seemed certain to have been done by one or more ex-prisoners that I had been concerned with. Two men had been observed climbing up a ladder into my flat on the Saturday night so it was known that two men had been involved in the burglary. A day or two later an ex-prisoner came to see me, slapped me on the back and said, “Oh I know, Neville, we’ve had the odd rows but I really think it’s diabolical when someone burgles your flat after all you do for us.”
I had an immediate presentiment that he was one of the culprits. Consciously it was the old trick; I was bound to say to myself, “It can’t be him,” but unconsciously he was telling me the truth, using a reaction formation defense. Shortly afterwards the police arrested him for the crime. One of the objects stolen from my flat was a check book. Another man whom I knew quite well came to me and said with pride: “Look, I’ve opened a bank account and here’s my check book,” and he showed me his new check book. He was showing me that it was he who had stolen my check book. He was the other man who was arrested. This need to leave evidence of his real character is the unconscious determinant of clues left by the criminal that lead to his arrest.
To adhere to the evidence rather than disbelieve requires us to accept our own sadism which we deny all the harder when it is being stirred by the psychopath. Our disbelief is reinforced by the Christian value system which says that man, like God, is good. We are all familar with the counsels “Blessed are the Meek” and “Blessed are the Merciful.” Our desire to be acceptable in terms of these standards puts additional pressure on us to deny our own sadism. If we accept what we see in the psychopath then we have to accept our own sadism. It may be more comfortable to believe that he and ourselves are good.
When Wuthering Heights was first published in 1847 the critics complained of the stark brutal quality of Heathcliff. Even Charlotte, Emily’s sister, tried to persuade her to temper her characterization of Heathcliff for propriety’s sake, but Emily refused. She was not going to moderate the way she saw things. The public wanted an illusion and not the real psychopath whom Emily portrayed. The uncompromising way in which revered values and standards are swept aside by the psychopath shocks us today just as it did our Victorian forebears.
The other reaction is to deny our sadism by projecting it back onto the criminal psychopath. Frequently criminals feel that they are being victimized and their perception is accurate. They are particularly suitable scapegoats onto which we can project our own sadism, but to relate with neither disbelief nor condemnation is extremely difficult. The two sets of reactions could be clearly seen in the debate as to whether Myra Hindley should be given parole or not.* The same split can be seen in the response aroused by the psychopath who goes into a psychiatric hospital where he is met with disbelief and in the prison where he meets condemnation.
Both disbelief and condemnation are products of the same emotional neglect: the failure to accept the psychopath as he is. The foundation stone of any treatment is to respond with neither disbelief nor condemnation. To be present to the psychopath as he is becomes the sine qua non for successful treatment. The psychopath does stir our sadism and tries to induce our disbelief or provoke our condemnation. When we come to terms with this in him and in ourselves we have laid a basis for a fruitful analysis. Of course it must not remain in the mental sphere but be demonstrated actively in the treatment situation. Only then do we reach the unconscious phantasies wherein his difficulties lie.
SUMMARY
Heathcliff, the protagonist of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, is a psychopath, and the article analyzes his character from an object relations perspective. It highlights the powerful ambivalent feelings towards the primary love object as the source of the psychopath’s determination and energy. The loving feelings are kept hidden and the hatred is displaced onto suitable objects in the environment. The loving feelings emerge in an analysis, as they do in Emily Brontë’s characterization of Heathcliff. The cause of his condition is traced to an object loss that has occurred before symbolization has taken place.
The response which the psychopath arouses is considered under three aspects: collusion, disbelief and condemnation. The psychopath is desperate for concrete goods that he can tangibly lay hold of. People collude with him because their own infantile longings are aroused. Disbelief in the psychopath’s greed and destructiveness is a defense against sadism in those who treat him. So also is condemnation, which occurs when people project their cruel and vengeful feelings onto the psychopath. The foundation for a successful treatment is to be present to the psychopath as he is.
REFERENCES
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Brontë, E. (1847). Wuthering Heights. London: Penguin Books.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. Standard Edition, 14:243–258. London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
Glover, E. (1960). The Roots of Crime. London: Imago.
Klein, M. (1934). On criminality. In: Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
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*Editor’s Note: The actual research on deception as measured by the polygraph in psychopaths and normals is limited and equivocal; more research is needed to test the ability of psychopaths to “beat” a polygraph exam in realistic settings.
*Editor’s Note: This was the infamous “Moors murders” case in Britain in 1966. See F. Harrison (1986). Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders. Bath: Ashgrove Press.