The Mark of Cain: Psychoanalytic Insight and the Psychopath

368 Pages·2001·168.13 MB·English

by  J. Reid Meloy

The Mark of Cain
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The Mark of Cain
Psychoanalytic Insight and the Psychopath
Edited by J. Reid Meloy
~ THE ANALYTIC PRESS
2001 Hillsdale, NJ London
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© 2001 by The Analytic Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be stored, transmitted, or
reproduced in any form whatsoever without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by
The Analytic Press, Inc., Publishers
Editorial Offices:
101 West Street
Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642
www.analyticpress.com
Set in Palatino 10.5 / 12 by
Christopher Jaworski, Qualitext
[email protected]
Index by Leonard S. Rosenbaum
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reid Meloy, J., 1949-
The mark of Cain: psychoanalytic inSight and the psychopath /
edited by J. Reid Meloy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 0-88163-310-0
1. Antisocial personality disorders. 2. Psychopaths.
I. Meloy, J. Reid.
RC555.M37 2001
616.85'82-dc21
200122679
Printed in the United States of America
1098765432
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This book is dedicated to
the students and faculty of the
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
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Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go into the open country."
While they were there, Cain attacked his brother Abel and
murdered him.
The Lord said, "What have you done? Hark! Your brother's
blood that has been shed is crying out to me from the ground .. .
You shall be a vagrant and a wanderer on earth."
So the Lord put a mark on Cain, in order that anyone meeting
Him should not kill him. Then Cain went out from the Lord's
presence ...
Genesis 4:8-16
Two traits are essential in the criminal: boundless egoism and a
strong destructive impulse. Common to both of these, and a
necessary condition for their expression, is the absence of love,
the lack of an emotional valuation of (human) objects.
Sigmund Freud, "Dostoevsky and Parricide"
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
SECTION I. DEVELOPMENT AND PSYCHODYNAMICS 1
1 Introduction to Section I 3
]. Reid Meloy
2 Primary Affect Hunger 25
[1937] David M. Levy
3 Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life 35
[1944] John Bowlby
4 Conscience in the Psychopath 43
[1945] Phyllis Greenacre
5 Psychopathic Behavior Disorders in Children 63
[1947] Lauretta Bender
6 Latent Delinquency and Ego Development 79
[1949] Kate Friedlander
7 Sanctions for Superego Lacunae of Adolescents 91
[1949] Adelaide M. Johnson
8 The Impostor: Contribution to 115
Ego Psychology of a Type of Psychopath
[1955] Helene Deutsch
9 The Antisocial Tendency 133
[1956] D. W. Winnicott
10 Time and the Character Disorder 145
[1964] Milton H. Miller
11 Psychopathy, Freedom, and Criminal Behavior 155
[1966] Seymour Halleck
12 The Psychology of Wickedness: Psychopathy and Sadism 171
[1997]]. Reid Meloy
(Continued)
vii
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SECTION II. TREATMENT, RISK MANAGEMENT, AND 181
PSYCHODIAGNOSIS
13 Introduction to Section II 183
J. Reid Meloy
14 The Phallic-Narcissistic Character 205
[1933] Wilhelm Reich
15 The Narcissistic Transference of the "Juvenile Impostor" 213
[1935] August Aichhorn
16 Some Characteristics of the Psychopathic Personality 227
[1960] Betty Joseph
17 Some Narcissistic Personality Types 239
[1973] Ben Bursten
18 Outpatient Treatment of Psychopaths 265
[1978] John R. Lion
19 The Response Aroused by the Psychopath 283
[1980] Neville Symington
20 The Treatment of Antisocial Syndromes: 297
The Therapist's Feelings
[1986] Larry H. Strasburger
21 The Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the 315
Differential Diagnosis of Antisocial Behavior
[1989] Otto F. Kernberg
Index 339
viii
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Preface
J. Reid Meloy, Editor
W hen I was a young man, a newly licensed psychologist in the
. State of California, Kathy Wachter-Poynor, the local public
mental health director, offered me a position that was to
change my life and my career. She asked if I would consider developing
an acute psychiatric inpatient program for mentally ill offenders in a
maximum security setting. My excitement, composed equally of a
tremendous naivete and a fierce ambition, both now tempered by years
of experience, carried me into this valley of the shadow of death.
Thankfully, I did come to fear evil.
I fairly quickly arrived at the realization that little was clinically
known about some of the men I began to encounter. In those days of the
ancien regime-DSM III had just been published-the application of
specific criteria to arrive at a reliable, descriptive diagnosis was the coin
of the realm. Little thought was given to the notion of psychopathy; no
contemporary psychoanalytic writers used the term (although a few
still clung to the anachronistic word sociopathy); and the word psychopath
was central only to the empirically rigorous, and nonanalytic, psycho
logical research of Robert Hare and his students at the University of
British Columbia, unheralded at that time.
Unable to shake my undergraduate major in history at the College of
Wooster, I began to peruse the older psychoanalytic literature for hints
of clinical wisdom concerning the psychopath. I began also to search for
contemporary psychoanalytic theorists who were at least obliquely
interested in the internal life of such untreatable persons. I found a vein
of data: gems from the past and a few diamonds from the present.
This book crystallized in my mind about six years ago, when I
realized that my private intellectual labor of love might be of use to
others; it could possibly become a published anthology of psychoana
lysts' approaches to various facets of the psychopath, a book informed
and balanced by what is currently known about psychopathy from a
social, psychological, and biological research perspective.
My search for a publisher was met with several rejections. In addition,
I found a daunting economic problem: reprinting published papers
meant purchaSing the reprint permissions, and no publisher wanted
ix
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