Psychopathy is the nexus of fear, power and sadism. This confluence is the psychopath's survival strategy.
Why is that?
You're asking the right person.
Because my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of clinical psychology.
And how more clinical can you get than being a psychopath?
Okay.
We have to go back in time. Time travel is an essential part of psychological practice ever since Breuer and Sigmund Freud. So we go back to the psychopath's childhood.
Psychopathy is most probably genetically determined. It is a very strong, very pronounced, hereditary component. It's a brain abnormality, very similar to psychosis, let's say.
But psychopathy is genetically predisposed, but it's a genetically predisposed reaction to an environment which is hostile, dysfunctional, abusive and traumatizing.
Early childhood ambience which has distorted the psychopath, ruined the child, didn't let the child become, mature into a functioning adult.
Psychopathy is therefore the outcome of bad upbringing by bad parents and dead mothers.
Psychopathy is anxiolytic.
Today we know that at the core of psychopathy there is an anxiety disorder. Psychopath is very anxious.
Of course it would be anxious if you grew up in an environment which was out to get you, to take you down, to destroy you, to abuse you, to beat you up, to hurt you, to ruin you, to devastate you. If you grow up in such an environment of torture and torment and the anticipation of rejection and pain and hurt and worse, mutilation maybe, maybe even death. If you grow up in such an environment, of course, you're likely to develop anxiety on a level that qualifies as anxiety disorder. So psychopaths are anxious.
Psychopathy, the mental illness, the construct of psychopathy, is actually a response to this anxiety. One could even say that psychopathy is anxiolytic. It reduces anxiety, ameliorates, mitigates and controls it.
So now we have at the core an anxiety disorder and a set of acquired learned responses to this anxiety, which put together qualify for the label of psychopathy.
The psychopath may have grown up in an environment which was abusive and traumatizing, or as a child, he may have provoked with his misconduct he may have provoked hostility rejection and punishment.
I encourage you to go to my video to my YouTube channel and search for conduct disorder and even oppositional defiant disorder.
Conduct disorder is psychopathy for kids. It's early childhood psychopathy.
So there are two etiologies of psychopathy.
Either you, you as a psychopath, either you've grown up in an environment which was really life-threatening or with your misbehavior with your egregious misconduct you provoked hostility rejection and punishment it amounts to the same ultimately. It's an environment that cannot be trusted.
This distrust, mistrust, the belief that you're on your own, no one is ever going to love you, no one is ever going to care for you, you can't trust anyone. It's you and only you it's either you or nothing this belief underlies this value system underlies because the psychopath indeed grows up in circumstances under circumstances and in environments which cannot be trusted, rationally at least.
So psychopathy is anxiolytic.
Now the psychopath as a child faces two choices. He can motivate people through love or he can motivate people through fear.
These are the two major groups of motivators. People are motivated by love or they're motivated by fear.
As a child, if the psychopath, the budding psychopath wanted to associate with others to socialize to ask others for help to integrate with others to fall in love to any sort of interpersonal interhuman interaction the child could have chosen love it's a very strong power and harnessed it could yield favorable outcomes in other words it's self-efficacious.
Yet the psychopath as a child has learned to distrust love more than anything else.
The psychopath distrusts love because love is fickle. It's ephemeral. It's transient. It's not trustworthy. And it has always been linked in the history of the child about to become psychopath, it's always been linked, love to betrayal, rejection, abandonment, hurt, pain. Love is a bad experience.
And so the psychopath, the child when he grows up and becomes a psychopath, the antisocial child with conduct disorder later becomes a psychopath, the child learns that one could not rely on love as a foundation. It's not a foundational asset.
One can abuse love, one could leverage love, one could manipulate love in order to motivate others by pretending to love, by faking love, by going through the motions.
That's legitimate, as long as one doesn't really fall in love, as long as one doesn't really catch emotions.
Emotions are death. Emotions, that's the antonym of survival. It's either emotions or being alive.
And so the psychopath has learned as a child that love should go out the window. Love is a bitter, disappointing, disenchanting, disillusioning, hurtful experience. Never again.
So there's no love in the repertory of the psychopath, except, as I said, as a Machiavellian instrument.
And then it's not really love. It's the faking of love. It's the robotic choreography of love. Enough to convince the intended target or mark that he or she is being loved.
What the psychopath trusts implicitly and explicitly is fear.
The psychopath believes that fear is a consistent motivator. Fear is stable. Fear is safe. Fear is secure. And above all, fear is predictable.
When you use fear as a way to motivate people, so the psychopath believes, you can predict and anticipate their behaviors with 100% security and certainty.
Of course, this is counterfactual. It's absolutely untrue.
But what's the psychopath's choice?
He distrusts love. He abhors love. He is angry at love. He's had horrible experiences with love, starting with his own family, his mother and so on.
So he doesn't want to do love. He doesn't know to do love. And even had he been known to do love, he would have suppressed it, he would have repressed it.
But he knows to do fear.
And that's the only tool in his toolbox, fear. It's always there, it's easy to induce, and it guarantees results.
So the psychopath believes. this is a counterfactual narrative of course people rebel, people strike back, people push back, people go to the police, you know, people become unpredictable when they are terrorized and blackmailed and extorted.
But the psychopath would rather not contemplate this because if he were to give up on fear he would have been left with nothing, with no interpersonal strategy, because love is out the window, fear is inefficacious, what else is there?
And so the psychopath settles on fear, but fear requires having power over people. If you want someone to fear you, you need to have power over them.
When they know that you have power over them, they know that you can hurt them. They know that you can damage them and break them and cause them pain and take away their nearest and dearest, their possessions. The minute you have power over someone, the complement of power is fear.
And so the psychopath is obsessed with power. Is power hungry?
But not in the way that the narcissist is.
Both psychopathy and narcissism are compensatory strategies.
The psychopath compensates with his antisocial behavior and mindset for the underlying anxiety.
The psychopath uses psychopathy to basically convince himself that there's no risk, no danger, no menace, no threat.
It's a form, psychopathy is a form of self-deception.
The psychopath broadcasts to the world, I'm invulnerable, I'm untouchable, I'm invincible, I'm scary, don't get near me, I'm unbridledI'm uncontrollable, I'm reckless, and terrifying.
But this consistent messaging, this consistent signaling is mostly for himself.
The psychopath is trying to convince himself that there's no risk, no reason to fear. He externalizes fear because otherwise the fear would have consumed him.
So, psychopathy is a compensatory mechanism for anxiety.
But the psychopath is truly obsessed with power. He wants to have real power.
This is not a grandiose fantasy, as is the case with narcissism.
The narcissist imagines having power, imagines his or her own superiority, godlike perfection, and that's enough. The narcissist doesn't care about reality. The narcissist is 100% embedded in fantasy.
He is vigilant. He is protective of the fantasy, the narcissists. He is very fragile and vulnerable.
The fantasy of the narcissists is attacked. The narcissists is in panic and lashes out, becomes aggressive and violent and so on.
But it is the fantasy that concerns the narcissist.
The psychopath is concerned with reality. Psychopath's reality testing is intact. Psychopath doesn't live in fantasy.
He uses fantasy. He shares fantasies with others in order to motivate him to behave in ways which are conducive to favorable outcomes. He uses fantasy as he uses anything else. He uses empathy. He uses love. He uses fantasy. Psychopath anything else. He uses empathy. He uses love, uses fantasy.
Psychopaths would use anything to accomplish goals, to secure outcomes.
But they are very, very grounded psychopaths, very reality-based. They're feet on the ground at all times.
And so the psychopath really seeks power. And he seeks power over other people because that way he can scare them. He can induce in them and inculcating them fear. Then using this fear he can motivate them to do his bidding, to cater to his needs, to help him to accomplish his goals.
So he needs real power but how would the psychopath convince himself that he does indeed have power over others?
By hurting them?
The psychopath hurts other people as a way to probe them, as a way to test them.
The psychopath inflicts pain and hurt and damage on other people because he wants to learn the outside limits of his own power, the extent of his control over these people, over his victims. He victimizes people simply in order to establish a hierarchy and to ascertain how far he can go.
And so when he encounters backlash, he stops.
Psychopaths bully and like all bullies, basically, they know when to stop. Essentially, when they encounter fear, when they experience fear.
So the psychopath imposes fear on others by exercising his power to hurt them until such point as they hurt him and impose fear on him and then the roles are reversed.
At any rate, this is the sequence.
The psychopath says the world is hostile. The world is evil. The world is out to get me. The world is how to take me down. Everyone hates me, everyone envy me.
I need to defend myself. I need to protect myself. I need to anticipate other people's movements and decisions and choices, and I need to act first, preemptively.
And to do this, I need to have power over people. And to have power over people, when I have power over people, I can induce in them fear and anxiety and terrorize them and then they would do my bidding or they will let me be as a minimum they would let me be they wouldn't target me they wouldn't try to victimize me and then it will be clear that I'm untouchable and therefore I'm godlike, therefore I'm immune.
And so there's a hierarchy there.
But as you can see, the only way to prove to himself that he has power over people is to hurt them.
So this is sadism.
The psychopath's sadism is instrumental. The psychopath uses sadism. The psychopath sadism is instrumental. The psychopath uses sadism, uses the infliction of pain on others, in order to test the limits of his power, in order to induce them fear which would not generate adverse outcomes for the psychopath.
But of course the psychopath enjoys hurting other people, but he enjoys hurting other people, not the way the classical sadist does.
The classical sadist enjoys hurting other people because they are like toys. He's playing with them and it gives them the sensation of omnipotence, God-like omnipotence, especially the sexual sadist.
The psychopath enjoys hurting other people because this constitutes his reality testing.
By hurting other people, he comes to learn about himself. He becomes self-aware through other people's anguish.
He observes the outcomes of his actions and then he says okay I've learned something about myself, I've learned something about my power, I've learned something about my victims and targets.
And there is a sense of enlightenment, there is a sense in the psychopath of having improved himself, bettered himself, as if torturing other people, tormenting them, hurting them, causing them pain is the path to self-enlightenment, is the path to self-perfection, is the path to self-awareness and self-consciousness and self-control.
It is, other people are learning materials, study aids.
The psychopath hurts other people because this way he can hone and refine and fine tune his survival strategy and exercise power in order to induce fear in a much more efficacious way, much more efficient way.
The more experience the psychopath has in hurting other people, the more he knows about how far he can go, what outcomes is likely to secure, and which kinds of people he can tackle, and which kinds of people he has to avoid.
In other words, he becomes a master of his trade. He becomes more professional, more of an expert.
And this is always a good feeling, perfecting your skills. It is always a good feeling perfecting your skills, it's always a good feeling.
So the psychopath skill is pain and hurt and power and control and fear. This is his material, this is his profession, and of course his raw material are people.
So it's not exactly sadism in the clinical sense, there's no enjoyment of the pain itself, there is an enjoyment of what the pain reveals, the other people's pain reveals to the narcissist about himself, which allows him to become more self-efficacious and more self-aware.
Now psychopaths induce fear and exercise power in every which way possible.
Some of them are in your face. Some of them are passive aggressive. Some of them threaten blackmail and extortion. Some of them are underhanded. Some of them are totally overt and ostentatious even. Some of them brag and are proud of what they're doing. Some of them pretend to be remorseful and moral. Some of them play dead. Some of them play scared. They act as if they've learned the lesson, as if they were terrified by the outcomes of their actions, as if the adversary or the counterparty succeeded to scare them, succeeded to wake them up, succeeded to reform them somehow.
This playing dead strategy is the most pernicious. This is with the psychopath thus, while broadcasting and signaling that he is scared, he is reformed, he is remorseful, he regrets things, he has learned his lesson. While he is broadcasting this, he's actually planning his next strike, his contemplating a counter strategy.
But a psychopath would transition. There's no type constancy.
In certain settings, a psychopath can be in your face with an old lady whose money he wants. And then in prison, he is likely to play dead or submissive and be at worst passive aggressive.
So the environment, environmental cues and context alter the mixture between fear, power, and hurt sadism. They alter the percentages within the cocktail of these unsavory ingredients depending on the environment.
Important to understand the psychopath comprehends only the language of fear. Fear is the only coinage and the only form or mode of communication, only signal that the psychopath can somehow relate to.
Psychopath is blind to love. It means nothing to him. Intimacy, nothing. Allegiance, affiliation, nothing. Friendship, absolutely nothing. None of these language element, none of these forms of human communication and signaling, none of these values and beliefs bear any meaning in the psychopath's world.
Psychopath is reactive to a single stimulus, fear.
If you want to modify the psychopath's behaviors, you need to induce in him fear.
Now, the psychopath may play dead may pretend to be afraid you will find out in due time because if he's just pretending to be afraid he's going to strike and he's going to strike badly or he may be really afraid there's no way of telling but there's no other strategy in any case.
So if you're forced into a situation where you have to manipulate the psychopath, control the psychopath, prevent certain behaviors by the psychopaths or misbehaviors at risk of being hurt or damaged by the psychopath or misbehaviors at risk of being hurt or damaged by the psychopath in other words if you are absolutely faced with a need to interact with the psychopath the language you should use is the language of power the language of fear you should communicate I can hurt you and I can hurt you badly and I'm not afraid to do this and I also have no moral qualms and inhibitions. If the need arises, I will hurt you and I will hurt you as badly as you are I'm more crazy than you I'm more of a psychopath than you you should out psychopath out psychopath the psychopath.
At any rate this is the inner world of the psychopath fear is safe love is not.