Good Evening Friends,

Folks, before moving on to toilets we must first make sure we're clear about my (as far as I know) theory of the motivation of the sociopath. He enables himself to do murder (particularly of family members) by trying to split his Self (yes, capital S) into two parts: the innocent, good part and the evil, guilty part.

The phenomenological mechanism we saw in the movie, Secret Window (with John Turturro and Johnny Depp) was precisely what the sociopath desperately try to bring about. This is the infinite direction toward which they grope.

What about love? What about their feelings for their friends, family, lovers, husbands, wives , parents, and children they kill? Do they simply not have human feelings, or is something in them "missing," as is implied in the popular media?

I said that they manage to compartmentalized their feelings into their "good" avatar quite apart from the "dark half."

Also: remember how we talked about there actually being three personalities at work in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Hyde, Jekyll, and (to generalize for the sake of speed) Hyde-Jekyll, the form of Hyde with the moderating conscience of Jekyll in operation.

We used this to conceive of a tripartite psychological apparatus in operation within the sociopath. The "lover." The "killer." The "lover/killer," a fusion state that, generally speaking makes murder seductive, almost sexually satisfying.

This indoctrination takes place both upon the sociopath, herself, as well her would-be partner-in-crime. This duel indoctrination dynamic definitely took place in the movie, Body Heat with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt. "Matty," (Turner) convinced herself and Ned Racine (Hurt) that killing her rich husband promised a kind of erotic satisfaction in and of itself - her "lover/killer" personal.

I would roughly compare this dynamic with the way television advertising had once worked to persuade people that smoking cigarettes was "cool." Seriously. And by the way, given what we know that the cigarette companies knew - back in the fifties - about the hazards of smoking, we were really be told something like: slowly killing yourself is way cool! Think about that.

Where does "Mr. Hyde" come from in the first place? I think, here, the analysis presented by Mr. Bradshaw in his book, Family Secrets, and in his work generally. I think his conception of "Narcissistic deprivation" is helpful. ND is something usually associated with a woman, the mother, especially if she's a stay-at-home mom.

We talked about what ND is, the non-mirroring of Self in the face of the mother, such that he cannot get his narcissistic needs met, thus enabling him to develop a positive self-image, to oversimplify, feel "loved." Such a child grows into a man or woman who spends his or her whole life trying to get what the mother had not been able to give, in a variety of dubious ways. But, Mr. Bradshaw says, this is a "wound that must be grieved."

A mother who subjects her child to Narcissistic deprivation seems like a perfectly "loving" woman to her child, indeed, she dotes on him. But this doting takes the form of trying to mold the child into what she wants him to be, not what he wants to be. A component of this is that she will usually signal to the child, in subtle but unmistakable ways, that certain behavior is unacceptable: like anger, for instance.

In his book, John Bradshaw confesses that this is precisely what happened to him with his mother. When he got angry he saw that his mother became upset - not at the source of his anger. Not even at the way he was responding to whatever it was, judging his reaction either to be too little or too much. No, his mother became upset at the very fact of his anger.

His becoming angry, apparently was out of line with her image of him, of what she wanted him to be. So he suppressed and denied his own anger. But it did not go away, of course. Bradshaw quotes Carl Jung in saying that whatever is deemed unacceptable in me, splits off and becomes more savage.

Bradshaw says that his suppressed anger became rage later in life, when he became a husband and a father. He would have rage attacks, raging at people, "not often but enough that it was impactful." Frothing at the mouth stuff.

Finally, the reason the sociopath goes through this convuluted internal psychological process because he does not feel comfortable personally or directly expressing anger in general, much less the kind of anger one might act upon. Again, this was precisely the dynamic at work in the movie, Secret Window.

Writer Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) wanted to punish his wife for having had an affair. A character that turned out to be a part of him, Shooter (John Turturro) did all the things "Mort" had wanted to do but didn't have the "stomach" for.

There is a great scene in the movie when Rainey seems to be seriously coming undone to put it politely. He asks "What's happening to me?"

Shooter comes down the stairs of Rainey's country house saying "Oh, I think you know. I think you got a real good idea."

Rainey: You're not real.

Shooter: Me? I'm real, Mr. Rainey. I'm real cause you made me. You thought me up. Gave me my name. Told me everything you wanted me to do. I did them things so you wouldn't have to. Didn't have the stomach to do it yourself, but you knew I did."

"Shooter" killed Rainey's dog, and burned down the house that the writer's ex-wife lived in, and two men, before he killed his ex-wife and her new husband. At this time, though, Shooter and Rainey became intergrated and the writer came to accept the Shooter part of himself and be glad for it. Such a person might easily kill again.

Not so with Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner in Body Heat). I think once her rich husband was done away with and the money was safely and solely in her hands, she had no need to kill again and wouldn't have.

wingedcentaur