Can a psychopath love?
In the world of couples, psychopathy leads to complications. Can you call that love?
Did he ever love me? is the title of Liane Leedom's paper, in which she analyzes the love relationships between psychopaths and their partners, based mainly on the testimony of the latter. based mainly on the testimony of the latter. Liane Leedom's conclusions establish four phases in this type of relationship: induction, commitment, disconnection and recovery. However, although she explains how an adult can become involved in a relationship with a psychopath, she does not answer the question of whether a psychopath is capable of feeling the emotion we know as love.
On the other hand, the University of Laval establishes a relationship between the type of attachment to a psychopath and the type of love. a relationship between the type of attachment and psychopathy.. Psychopaths tend to have an avoidant attachment style, which manifests itself in the difficulty to establish interpersonal relationships with high intimacy. The basic question we are asking here stems from just that: can a psychopath feel true love, or just a surrogate? Let's take a look at it.
Are psychopaths capable of love?
A psychopath is able to establish a romantic relationship and, in it, manipulate the victim. But this does not contradict the possibility that the psychopath can be in love with his partner or love his family. To understand this it is necessary to define what psychopathy is and to define what love is.
Psychopathy
Primary psychopaths, those who make our hair stand on end and become superstars in crime or in the stock market and business world, are characterized by two fundamental traits: low fear and pleasure in the Pain of others.. These characteristics show a dysfunction in the brain structures that deal with emotions and, moreover, are the origin of the lack of empathy: fear is the precursor of guilt and pain is the precursor of compassion.
If a person is incapable of feeling fear, it is logical that he or she does not fear the consequences of his or her actions and, therefore, does not feel guilt for them, he is simply immunized against them. When the pleasure center is activated in the same individual when visualizing scenes of other people's pain, it means that his compassion system is turned off. And thus the primal psychopath was born.
Love
Love, on the other hand, could be defined as an emotional state that combines at the psychological level a motivation of affiliation (related to the need for attachment), socially learned attitudes and expectations, and overt behavior. All of this is based on a neurobiological foundation. which involves different areas of activation in the brain and the secretion of certain neurotransmitters such as oxytocin and dopamine.
Dopamine is related to pleasure and reinforcement.. Its response in psychopaths not only corresponds to that of non-psychopaths when we speak of neutral and appeasing situations, but its secretion can be a greater reward, much greater, in the presence of reinforcement (in secondary psychopaths), especially when there is pain involved (in primary psychopaths).
It seems that the affective flattening of the psychopath clashes with characteristics and behaviors that are socioculturally attributed to love. But the two major traits we have mentioned have nothing to do with love. The psychopath's emotional problems have to do with the suffering of others, fear and pain, not with all emotions.
This means that a psychopath can love in principle, but with his own rules.. He may show no concern or upset if his teenage daughter does not come home on time, but still want her to show up and love her. You can lie and be unfaithful to your partner, but still feel that you want to be there for them. Of course, these "rules" of the psychopath need not be accepted by his family or society (and, in fact, often should not be), but they do exist and there is a certain moral code behind them.
A different emotionality
The point is that a psychopath's love does not include the sociocultural extras associated with this emotion (fidelity, compassion, sincerity...), nor those accessories that come from the emotions of pain or fear. The psychopath is not going to feel love in the same way you and I do: in his mind it is a limited emotion, because the structures involved in emotions, such as the amygdala and the hippocampus, function in an abnormal way.
Moreover, it will be a type of love with its own facets of antisocial branding (as dopamine is activated in its own way). But love, in a peculiar and crude way, is also a reality in the mind of the psychopath.
This particular way of loving leads to toxic relationships, where the psychopath's partner suffers constantly. However, it is possible that for the psychopath these are also unsatisfactory relationships in which he never gets exactly what he wants (as in the crimes he commits) because of his own limitations.
The debate remains open
It has been shown that psychopaths are capable of feeling compassion for themselves and empathy when and empathize when instructed to do so. For his part, Joe Newman proposes with an empirical basis that psychopaths have a tunnel attentional capacity, where although they feel this emotional range, for them it is a secondary condition that they can easily ignore to focus on their goals, a theory that fits well with secondary psychopathy. All this proves that in psychopaths emotionality is not a simple void, perhaps it is a very dark hole, but it certainly contains something.
Taking these issues into account, the debate remains to discern whether it is possible to call love to this psychopathic emotion which seems to imitate it only partially, or whether love, as the romantic idealists argue, goes much further.
In my view, the term "love" is contaminated by many sociocultural constructs that correspond to myths of romantic love and that also do not correspond to the reality of the emotion. For this reason it is necessary to delimit at the psychological and neurobiological level the definition of love to answer this question, and for this reason we may never know. In any case, there is empirical evidence that psychopaths are capable of feeling something that, at the very least, resembles love.
(Updated at Apr 12 / 2024)