Empathy for the Psychopath

Joseph Burgoin
Social Behavior
·
Unbearable Emotion
61

The New York Times magazine ran a chilling article yesterday about psychopathic children, and how the features that lead to anti-social personality disorder and sociopathy may be identified as early as age five. If you haven't already seen it, I suggest you give it read.

Researchers uniformly focus on lack of empathy as the best predictor for future psychopathic behavior. They emphasize the need to teach these children how to empathize "before it's too late," but they seem to have no idea how to do that. Efforts to teach these children ways to read and recognize emotional responses in other people only made them more effective manipulators. Instilling a system of rewards and punishments only made them more careful and secretive. According to the researchers, these children "lack humanity" because they seem unable to feel and connect with other human beings. So how to teach them empathy and help them to become "human" like the rest of us?

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Anders Breivik, You and Me: What We Have in Common

Joseph Burgoin
Shame/Narcissism
·
Social Behavior
51

When an anti-Islamic loner explodes a bomb outside a government building, killing eight people, then travels to a nearby island where he guns down 69 more, we naturally view that man as a dangerous lunatic. His paranoid tirades against multi-culturalism and "Eurabia", along with his grandiose view of himself as crusading member of the fictional Knights Templar, make him seem delusional and psychotic -- someone entirely "other" and so unlike ourselves that he might as well belong to a different species. We would never do anything so cruel and violent, of course, and we find it virtually impossible to identify or empathize with this man in any way.

And yet, Anders Breivik is a member of the human race, just as we are. His emotional states and thought processes in fact differ only in degree and intensity from some of our own. I invite you to join me in an exploration of this troubled man's psychology -- not in order to create sympathy for him, not to blame society or violent online gaming platforms for his actions, not to argue on behalf of clemency from the court, but rather to learn something about ourselves and to make "insanity" seem a little less strange and "other". For what it's worth, my personal view is that Anders Breivik is so psychically damaged, so emotionally troubled that he will remain a danger to society while alive and should be permanently isolated to eliminate the possibility of his doing more violence.

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Mothballing Your Parents

Joseph Burgoin
Relationship Issues
·
Social Behavior
36

Last night, we were out at our favorite restaurant, celebrating my daughter Emma's birthday. After a fine meal, we came home and sat up late, discussing, as we often do, the fact that she seems more like 26 than 14 -- not precocious in a pseudo-mature way, but genuinely older than her age. People with New Age tendencies have referred to Emma as an "old soul"; I think of her as a born psychotherapist, with insight and intuition that are remarkable for one her age. She enjoys adult conversation and loves to talk about what makes people tick.

While this is wonderful on one level, on another, it makes Emma's life difficult. With her intuition and good people skills, she gets on well with just about everyone at school, but her emotional maturity also makes it difficult to find true peers in the Eighth Grade. Last night, she talked about feeling a little isolated and alone; she said she couldn't bear to imagine a time when her parents wouldn't be around. Unlike many teenagers I've known, she loves to spend time with us and our friends; she still enjoys hiking with us in Colorado, hanging out on the deck in the evenings and making "pleasant conversation," as she calls it. She told us she was afraid she'd feel completely alone in the world without us.

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‘Butterfly’s Child’ by Angela-Davis Gardner: A Review

Joseph Burgoin
Relationship Issues
·
Social Behavior
9

For the last 12 years, I've belonged to a writer's group that meets every Thursday afternoon for two hours. We read our works-in-progress, giving support and constructive criticism to each other; we spend years reading and listening to different drafts of our books, so it's an important event, something to celebrate, when a book by one of our members comes out in print.

Butterfly's Child by my friend and classmate Angela Davis-Gardner was first published in hard cover last year; today is the release date for the paperback edition. Random House, her publisher, has organized what they call a "blog tour" -- a number of reviews by influential bloggers coordinated with the appearance of the novel in bookstores. I'm not one of those "influential bloggers," but I'm showing my support by joining the blog tour and letting you know about this wonderful book.

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Narcissistic Rage and the Failure of Empathy: ‘Citizen Kane’

Joseph Burgoin
Shame/Narcissism
·
Social Behavior
68

<a href="http://www.linkedtube.com/tTgWstGZF2M5657fc455259d7a97d106a00bababae6.htm">LinkedTube</a>

BELOW IS A VERSION OF THE TEXT FOR THE PRECEDING VIDEO:

A number of visitors to this site took issue with my earlier post and video about The Social Network -- they felt that the fictional Mark Zuckerberg actually suffers from Asperger's Syndrome instead of narcissistic personality disorder. In my view, those two labels from the DSM-IV actually represent two artificially distinct entities; they share a number of features and in truth exist along a spectrum. In this post, instead of trying to demonstrate the features of any particular label, I'd like to discuss two psychological traits that show up in a number of apparently distinct diagnostic entities, and I'll use the main character from that classic film, Citizen Kane, to demonstrate them. The first of these features -- a lack of empathy -- is a diagnostic criterion of both narcissistic personality disorder and various disorders that feature autism symptoms. The second, narcissistic rage, features in both borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.

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