"My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have a disease. I call it the 'power disease.' They want to rule and control other people. They are a more important plague than cancer, pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put together. They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use each other. They use people as nothing more than instruments to cast aside when they don't need them anymore. The structure we have now is, the sicker you are socially, the more likely it is that you'll come out at the top of the heap." - Dr. John Gofman

If you're like me, you get into disputes with narcissists over their casual dishonesty and cruelty to other people. Trying to reform narcissists by reasoning with them or by appealing to their better nature is about as effective as spitting in the ocean. What you see is what you get: they have no better nature. The fundamental problem here is that narcissists lack empathy.

Lacking empathy is a profound disturbance to the narcissist's thinking (cognition) and feeling (affectivity). Even when very intelligent, narcissists can't reason well. They don't understand the meaning of what people say and they don't grasp the meaning of the written word either. Because so much of the meaning of anything we say depends on context and affect, narcissists (lacking empathy and thus lacking both context and affect) hear only the words.

Narcissists are generally not candidates for conventional analytical treatment, since psychological analysis is a dialogue and narcissism is a soliloquy.

More often than not, it's the children and other victims of narcissists who often seek psychotherapy in order to come to terms with the damage suffered at the hands of narcissists.

Continue reading "Narcissistic Personality Disorder: How to Recognize a Narcissist", "Narcissism 101″

"That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened."

For his first paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdown timer. When it reached zero, they got a "harmless but painful" electric shock while an electrode taped to their fingers measured perspiration. Normal people would start sweating as the countdown proceeded, nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths didn't sweat. They didn't fear punishment - which, presumably, also holds true outside the laboratory. In Without Conscience, he quotes a psychopathic rapist explaining why he finds it hard to empathize with his victims: "They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don't really understand it. I've been frightened myself, and it wasn't unpleasant."

In another Hare study, groups of letters were flashed to volunteers. Some of them were nonsense, some formed real words. The subject's job was to press a button whenever he recognized a real word, while Hare recorded response time and brain activity. Non-psychopaths respond faster and display more brain activity when processing emotionally loaded words such as "rape" or "cancer" than when they see neutral words such as "tree." With psychopaths, Hare found no difference. To them, "rape" and "tree" have the same emotional impact - none.

Hare once illustrated this for Nicole Kidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her prepare for a role as a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could she show the audience there was something fundamentally wrong with her character?

"I said, 'Here's a scene you can use,'" Hare says. "You're walking down a street and there's an accident. A car has hit a child in the crosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child's lying on the ground and there's blood running all over the place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, 'Oh shit.' You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you're not repelled or horrified. You're just...interested. Then you look at the mother and you're really fascinated by the mother, who's emoting, crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes, you turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimicking the facial expressions of the mother." He then pauses and says, "That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened."

Continue reading "How Can You Tell If Someone is a Psychopath?", "Psychopaths Among Us", "The Mask of Sanity"