John’s early life had been disturbed — he’d never known his father, and his mother had been in a criminal gang and later joined a cult. She hadn’t mothered him or been available. He’d grown up in the care of various people and had been physically and sexually abused. There was only one person in John’s early life who seemed to have offered him any kind of a nurturing relationship — a woman only a few years older than he who’d tried to care for him until he became a teenager. John ran away and began to live on the street when he was 16 years old.

Will to power

John showed features of a psychopathic personality structure: a psychology organized, above all, around the need to exert power over others. A key diagnostic feature is their wish to “get one over” on other people; they seek experiences in which they’ll feel that they have exercised their power and control over others (“omnipotent control”). Such people will shamelessly recount stories of their exploits if they feel you’ll be impressed by their tales of power. They may or may not be involved in antisocial behaviour (the DSM IV combines features of psychopathic personality with antisocial behaviour to define its antisocial character).

Psychopathic characters vary in their capacity for violence. Many aren’t physically violent — such as “con men.” More functional types are often involved in activities that require risk-taking, subterfuge and a willingness to subordinate the means to the end of exercising power and influence, i.e. risky business ventures, politics, the military and intelligence work, advertising, cult leaders. Positions offering opportunities to wield raw power are areas that attract psychopathic personalities.

Hard to please

There’s growing evidence that biological factors help to shape this group of people — higher tendencies toward aggression and a higher threshold for pleasurable experiences have been noted. Psychopathic people are less likely to feel satisfied with the simple pleasures of a nice night out, for example, and require more exciting and dangerous activities. They notoriously experience less anxiety than most people — “autonomic hyporeactivity” — and so are less likely to avoid behaviour that has caused them trouble in the past. Impulsivity and substance abuse are also common features.

Psychologically, these individuals have suffered from a failure to make significant attachments as children, and often had no loving figure in their childhood. This experience leaves them with no internalized experience of love, caring or even a sense that others have feelings. This lack of a capacity to connect shows in the psychopathic character’s difficulty in relationships — which tend to be exploitative — and unreliability in situations requiring fidelity, such as being a spouse, parent or employee.

Therapeutic caveat

Some of these people do learn to control behaviour that causes them trouble as they age. With the loss of peak physical strength past 40, omnipotent feelings diminish and the possibility of some intervention may open up. But the lack of a relational capacity and the tendency to try to exercise omnipotent control over a therapist makes treatment outside a closed institutional setting fraught with difficulty.