Good Morning Friends,

Something quick before I shove off to work. As you can probably tell by now, I am resistant to the idea that the sociopath "lacks a conscience." I reviewed, last time, a bit of what we've been discussing concerning the somewhat, excitingly fluid nature of identity. For the most part I have argued that this is a natural, positive, and necessary process. Remember we determined that there is no Self without others in much earlier posts. Sometimes it is counterproductive at best and harmful, if not checked by diligent self-examination or "defragmentation," to use a computer term.

Here's my question: If the sociopath only pretends to feel, how can anyone tell this from outside observation, and if it is somehow determined that he does not "feel," are we sure that he is not merely asserting feelingless(ness) after the fact - after his crimes have been revealed? Remember the Donovan's Brain analogy from last time. The disembodied brain had become so powerful that it could and did communicate with Dr. Patrick Cory telepathically.

It, the brain, told Dr. Cory things about his past, shared memories with the scientist. It also could and did make Cory forget things - like how he had his wife committed to an insane asylum to get her meddlesome presence out of the way.

I am saying that the "peer pressure" (using term imprecisely) apparatus we have been discussing serves to make the so-called sociopath think that he does not or never had had "human feeling."

But why and how would anyone make some people think that they do not "feel?" Remember, the sociopath is presented to us, the public, as people almost born without a conscience and therefore capable of anything!

Of course, most people - I hope - do not deliberately set out to deceive people into thinking they do not feel. On the other hand, we could say - from the point of view of Existential ethical analysis that this is precisely the role of Satan in Christian mythology: to make people think they do not love God and God does not love them and to trigger the fear = greed = violence trigger causing people to "sin." Maybe. Maybe not.

But a dysfunctional family/organizational apparatus may serve to produce this effect. I am going to refer to John Bradshaw's book, Family Secrets and what he calls "Narcissistic deprivation." This effects a parent, who himself or herself, get their Narcissistic needs met by their parents for whatever reason. Such a parent has a kind of "wound" in their soul and will set their own children to meet those needs that should have been met by their grandparents. Follow me?

Bradshaw says that the primordial experience of an infant's life is looking into the face of, usually his mother, and seeing himself. We need someone to admire us, to love us unconditionally. But what happens when the child looks into his mother's face and does not see himself, rather he observes her looking at him in search of herself. In his book, John Bradshaw says this was precisely his childhood experience.

Such a child becomes his mother's "little man," a kind of surrogate husband. He then, obviously suffers from Narcissistic deprivation. Bradshaw says that he had found, in his work with many celebrities and in himself, that he spent decades of his life doing public appearances, lectures, appearing on media, getting applause, sometimes standing ovations, and searching the thousands of faces in the audience - for himself and not finding himself.

Narcissistic deprivation is a "being wound" that needs to be grieved. And so on and so forth. We'll talk about that next time. I will try to persuade you that the application of this dynamic in family relations can set up a feeling-suppressing mechanism known as a "lack of conscience."

Once this happens, then the 'normal' fear = greed = violence operation can come into play. In other words, the so-called sociopath has sufficiently distances himself from his family in order to be able to do violence against them.

There's something else. Remember to, from the examples we discussed about the movies "Body Heat" with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt and "Secret Window," with Johnny Depp and John Turturro, that the sociopath tries to split her Self into two parts: this innocent half and the dark half, if you like. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

To be continued,

wingedcentaur