Confessions of a Sociopath (5 page)

I was not offended. I was already well accustomed to the idea that there was something pointedly different about me that could not be altered. I realized early on that other people did not treat their lives as if it were a complicated game in which all events, things, and people could be measured with mathematical precision toward achieving their own personal satisfaction and pleasure. Somewhat more recently, I also noticed that other people felt
guilt
, a special kind of regret that did not arise from negative consequences but from some amorphous moral dictate that had taken root in them from consciousness. They felt bad in a way that I never felt when they hurt others, as if the hurt they had caused was so cosmically connected to the goodness of the universe as to reverberate back to them. These things I had pretended to feel for many years, had attempted assiduously to mimic the manifestations of, but had never actually felt in my life. I was more curious than anything. If there was a label for who I was, then maybe I could learn something more about myself. In fact, I had no trouble recognizing myself in the descriptions I found in my research.

It turned out that my officemate had been acquainted
with a man she discovered was a sociopath. Rather than live out the sob story of the con artist’s innocent victim, she had maintained a deep and enduring friendship with him. In retrospect, her willingness to regard me as a human being despite her firm belief that I was a sociopath offered me the possibility that I could be understood and accepted as I was. She was proof that not all people with consciences and empathy were appalled by the existence of people like me.

I was actually glad that there was a word for it, that I wasn’t the only one like this. It must be a similar feeling to that of people who discover for themselves that they are gay or transgendered: in their bones, they’d known it all along.

Years had passed from that tentative self-diagnosis to my period of introspection after being fired. Once the word
sociopath
had entered my consciousness and my initial satisfaction with finding a label had faded, I had treated it as an unimportant oddity, like an interesting but irrelevant quirk, until eventually I forgot it. But as my life crumbled around me, I knew that I couldn’t keep living like I had been before, acknowledging that I was different but ignoring the differences. I was so desperate for answers that I had begun seeing a therapist, but she was nothing more than a thing for me to toy with, and even then, she was too expensive for the limited satisfaction our sessions gave me. But through those therapy sessions, I had remembered that summer internship and that casual diagnosis of “sociopath.” I sensed there were answers about myself there, so I started reading a book that just happened to be available in its entirety online, written by the father of the modern concept of psychopathy, Dr. Hervey Cleckley.

Cleckley, in his groundbreaking book
The Mask of Sanity
, first published in 1941, presented the profile of the personality he called the psychopath, but which we now commonly
refer to as the sociopath. Cleckley explained that a psychopath was extremely difficult to diagnose, because his mental faculties were fully intact, as was his ability to function in society as a seemingly normal human being, even a particularly successful one. Cleckley wrote:

According to Cleckley, psychopaths are antisocials who excel at seeming social—seeming to feel, desire, hope, and love like everyone else. They exist virtually indistinguishable among society. In fact, the psychopath excels in many ways that others do not. Cleckley’s psychopath is uncommonly charming and witty. He is unflappable and eloquent, keeping his cool under pressure. Under this “mask of sanity,” however, is a liar, a manipulator, a person who disregards his obligations with little to no sense of responsibility. He is exciting because he is impulsive, whimsical, and prone to making the same mistake multiple times. His narcissism keeps him from forming any real emotional bonds, and he tends to be promiscuous. His own emotional world is mostly a poor imitation of natural emotions. Cleckley acknowledged that this unique suite of personality traits could suit the psychopath equally well to a career in business as to one in crime.

Nowhere else have I recognized the sociopath inside me more than in Cleckley’s clinical profiles, more than half a century old. From his observations of hundreds of patients, Cleckley distilled what he believed to be sixteen key behavioral characteristics that defined psychopathy. Most of these factors are still used today to diagnose sociopaths/psychopaths and others with antisocial disorders. They include the following:

If you’ve ever recognized yourself in a horoscope and thought, “Hey, maybe there is something to this astrology business,” then you understand my encounter with Cleckley’s
book. Not everything is quite right, but many things are spot-on, and in general, it’s frighteningly accurate. My lack of life direction, my cold treatment of friends, my inability to focus on my job—the psychological pattern underpinning many of my problems was laid bare. I was particularly amazed by his descriptions of his patients, some of whom I shared so much in common with that I felt he could have been writing about me. There was one woman in particular, Anna, whose description seemed like a fictionalized version of myself:

It’s clear that Cleckley was taken by her. I love the way he describes her idiosyncrasies: the accent, her artlessness, her eternal youthfulness, her attractiveness that seems to be
something more than mere beauty, her intelligence, and her charm. These describe me as well. She loves
The Brothers Karamazov
, but Cleckley later discusses how Anna does not have the highbrow tastes and prejudices that accompany the typical “intellectual” of her education and breeding, treating gossip magazines with the same interest as the music of Russian composers. Again, he could have been writing about me. Cleckley goes on to tell about how Anna quite sincerely taught Sunday school, volunteered for the Red Cross, and engaged in haphazard same-sex liaisons, one time with a nurse after being universally adored during a hospital stay. There were incredible parallels to my own life, from such seemingly insignificant ones like teaching Sunday school or being a model hospital patient to relatively more prominent ones like fluid sexuality. I was floored.

Cleckley does clearly lay out why he believes that Anna fits his criteria, primarily because of her lack of remorse about her lascivious lifestyle, but it’s clear that she is not just a sum of points on a checklist to him. She is a person. And it wasn’t the checklist that I identified so strongly with upon reading Cleckley’s book; it was the people. Even Cleckley acknowledged that the checklist was just a gross generalization of why these people seemed so similar to each other—despite their vast differences in education, background, socioeconomic status, criminal history, etc.—and yet so different from the rest of the world. I could quibble with whether or not I met a criterion like “unreliability,” but I could not deny the remarkable similarities that I shared with Cleckley’s patients.

Cleckley’s book was widely popular, circulating beyond a purely academic or medical audience. He edited the volume several times, making efforts to create as exhaustive a profile as possible of the modern-day psychopath. Cleckley
understood that psychopaths and sociopaths, while sometimes or even often engaged in extremely antisocial acts, could also live lives completely undetected, adapting to their surroundings well enough to pass as normal, even to become contributing members of society.

Because Cleckley realized that there were sociopaths in the world who either do not engage in criminal behavior or are too clever to ever get caught, what began as a study of solely male patients in mental institutions became a much larger volume that included women, adolescents, and people who had never been institutionalized. Many of his later subjects, like Anna, had learned to live relatively normal lives within the general populace. From my own experience, I was sure that, had Cleckley peered into the classrooms of today’s law schools and offices of mega law firms, he would have found plenty of viable test subjects.

Now that I knew that I was not alone, that there were people out there much like me, I wanted to find out more about us.

In 1819, John William Polidori wrote a novella called
The Vampyre
, inspired by a fragment by Lord Byron, which would spark a vampire craze across nineteenth-century Europe and influence Bram Stoker and the modern vampire genre. The title character of Polidori’s novella was based on the wayward Byron himself. The vampire enters London high society and beguiles all who cross his path with his mysterious and contrary manners. Accompanying a young gentleman companion southward through Rome and Greece, he seduces and murders young women, unbeknownst to his companion, only to die himself from an apparent murder. A year later, however, the vampire reappears in London, where he seduces and marries his companion’s sister, leaving her drained of blood on her wedding bed.

At once beautiful and treacherous, the vampire occupies the unique position of the appealing monster. He is far from deranged or wild and, in fact, his manners are superior to those of the people he meets. His demeanor is uncanny and yet beguiling, his eyes hollow but intoxicating. His apparent deficits attract his victims and his peculiarities engage them, while he views them as nothing more than objects. The vampire does not seek his lonely existence; he merely lives it out to its fullest measure, unable to function any other way. He drinks blood because it fulfills him; he toys with people because it amuses him. His soul cannot rest.

The gothic vampire is the sociopath writ large, charismatic and sophisticated, a predator walking among us undetected. His
myth dates back to the medieval period and is rooted in Slavic spirituality, based on a clear distinction between the body and the soul. An unclean soul gave rise to the vampire, whose continuing existence was both unnatural and interminable.

Sociopaths have been around for a long time, always at the margins. We exist in every culture. According to a 1976 anthropological study by Jane Murphy, members of the Yoruba tribe in Africa called cold souls
arankan
, “which means a person who always goes his own way regardless of others, who is uncooperative, full of malice, and bullheaded.” The Yupik-speaking Inuit knew antisocial members of their tribe as
kunlangeta
, of whom it was said “his mind knows what to do but he does not do it”; he is someone who “repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” This concept of an individual who has the mental capacity to understand social norms but refuses to follow them is the key to the clinical diagnosis for modern-day sociopathy.