New Yorker-----Suffering Souls

[go2]

The November 10, 2008 issue of The New Yorker magazine has an article on psychopathy. The title is “Suffering Souls” by John Seabrook, a reporter at large. The author interviews Dr. Kent Kiehl, a student of Dr. Robert Hare. Dr. Kiehl is
using fMRI equipment installed in the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility to obtain brain scan data which he hopes will confirm psychopathy is caused by a defect in the “paralimbic system.” John Seabrook could have chosen a more accurate title, but perhaps that wasn't his intention.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_seabrook

Hare has published two books that translate some of the concepts of psychopathy for a general audience and attempt to teach people how to identify the “successful psychopaths” in their midst. In the introduction to “Without Conscience,” he writes, “It is very likely that at some point in your life you will come into painful contact with a psychopath. For your own physical, psychological, and financial well-being it is crucial that you know how to identify the psychopath.” Among the professions likely to attract psychopaths, he writes, are law enforcement, the military, politics, and medicine, although he notes that these have norms and are self-policing. The most agreeable vocation for psychopaths, according to Hare, is business. In his second book, “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” written with Paul Babiack, Hare flirts with pop psychology when he points out that many traits that may be desirable in a corporate context, such as ruthlessness, lack of social conscience, and single-minded devotion to success, would be considered psychopathic outside of it.

John Seabrook labels psychopathic research on individuals beyond the confines of the criminal justice system pop psychology. More knowledgeable readers may find other subtle manipulation in John Seabrook’s article. The New Yorker is widely read by intellectuals in the USA, some of whom, might have a vested interest in this subject, and be in position to influence public awareness on psychopathy.

The quote suggests an area of research in the public interest, would be the brain scans of individuals in positions of vast power. Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Hank Paulson, Rahm Emmanuel, Alan Greenspan and many others who make life and death decisions on this planet come to mind. The fMRI data for families would be another interesting path of research. Clearly the current research and information is focused on failed psychopaths in the criminal justice system.

“If you could target the brain region involved, then maybe you could find a drug that treats that region,” he told me. “If you could treat just five per cent of them, that would be a Nobel Prize right there.”

Still, for Kiehl the portable fMRI is like a sports fantasy come true. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I just can’t believe that it’s all come together,” he said. “The scanner, the lab, and the data we are amassing. It feels like winning the Super Bowl.” ♦

It’s not hard to imagine a day when everyone’s personal psychopathy risk will be assigned early in life—a kind of criminal-potential index. Kiehl was recently appointed as a scientific member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Law and Neuroscience Project, which will study some of the legal implications of neuroimaging.

http://www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org/mission.php

We do need to remain calm in the often giddy excitement of probing the human brain. Although methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electrophysiology are widely available to study the human nervous system, modern neuroscience is in reality more akin to physics in 1900, before Planck, Einstein, and the field's other revolutionaries. New tools are powerful, but we lack the theoretical formulations needed to make the most of these new technologies. Indeed, the key questions about how a 1300-gram organ guides human behavior are not even properly articulated. We need a fusion of novel theories and questions with rigorous experimentation if the spectacular progress in physics is to occur in the biology of the mind.

The few quotes above provide a glimpse into the mind and motivations of a man who is now the science advisor for a project examining the future uses of the MRI neuroimaging in a pathocratic system. Planck and Einstein’s research in physics brought humanity the atomic bomb in the last century, lets hope the new neuroscience doesn’t bring an equal horror to humanity.

 

[Mountain Crown]

Thanks go2. Very interesting.

Lobaczewski pointed to a need for adequately identifying psychopaths to prevent them from acquiring vital positions in society. We need to be on our guard; they would find it in their best interest to manipulate such testing.

 

[webglider]

We need to be on our guard; they would find it in their best interest to manipulate such testing. ]

I read the New Yorker article after I read Go 2's post, and the concern you raise, Mountain Crown immediately came to mind. In fact I have no doubt that psychopaths will manipulate the technology to provide the readings to suit their purposes.

This whole scenario reminds me of the movie Minority Report where advances in technology allow law enforcement to arrest a person for a potential crime not yet committed.

The following raised a red flag for me:

... molecular biologists have been analyzing DNA, in an attempt to identify a genetic marker. In a recently published study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, guillermo Ponce and Janet Hoenicka report that two genes that have already been associated with severe alcoholism may also be linked to psychopathy.

Many indigenous people have been destroyed by alcoholism which was introduced by Europeans. I can just see how studies like the DNA study above could be used to stigmatize indigenous people as psychopaths. It's creepy.

Below is a short history and explanation of how addictions were induced in Native and Asian populations.
The Stanton Peele Addiction Website http://www.peele.net/faq/indians.html

Why are so many indians alcoholics?
Stanton,

One of the most interesting topics (for me), at your web site, is represented by the articles and papers on cross cultural studies that show the difference that the underlying culture has in how substances are used/abused, and even in the resulting physical effects. About a year ago I was doing some reading on the history of prohibition and came across an account of the dealings between the Hudson Bay Co. and the Pacific Coast Indians. This was in the lower Columbia River Basin, at the beginning of the 19th century. What struck me particularly was how resistant the Indians were to the inducements of alcohol in the beginning, refusing to drink to intoxication, loosing respect for white men who did, and becoming angry when a chief's son (an adolescent) was encouraged to get drunk and make a fool himself. A mere 20 years later, with 9 out of every 10 of these people dead from war or starvation or (mostly) disease, and their culture and native economy in total ruin, the survivors were well on the way to becoming the people that we think we know today. That is, as a people, completely unable to handle alcohol.

I've never thought of myself as a racist, but I'd never before questioned the assumption that Native Americans differed from the rest of us in some basic way that explained this behavior. Do you know anything about the early contact between Europeans and various Native American Nations? Does this pattern appear elsewhere? I'd appreciate any information or direction you might be able to suggest.

thanks,

Russ


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Dear Russ:

Thank you for this fascinating question.

There is a history of the introduction of foreign intoxicants by dominant or conquering cultures, and the results are uniformly bad ones. Perhaps the most often noted example in addition to the Native American one you discussed is the impact of opium on the Chinese when imported by the British from India, where it had been used ceremoniously for centuries without harmful effects. In China, however, this foreign substance quickly became a pernicious and addictive habit, a symbol of subjugation and escape, as represented best by the sordid opium den. (Notice, however, that the Indians had their revenge by introducing tobacco smoking-to which they were not traditionally addicted---to white people.)
Your analysis of the context of the introduction of alcohol to Pacific Coast Indians is an excellent one, and leads you in the right direction. I was particularly struck by your description of the use of social disapproval by Indian leaders to repress drunkenness; a direct and successful modern equivalent for this is found among American Cantonese Chinese in New York's Chinatown Obviously, these social strictures were destroyed with the decimation of the Pacific tribes. Ironically, I debated Jim Milam before the NIAAA in San Diego in 1989, and he gave an impassioned description of Indian drinking, from which he concluded exactly the wrong and useless message that Native Americans are genetically predisposed to alcoholism. In fact, those working with Indians note that they quickly acknowledge the disease concept, then continue drinking outrageously.
Observers and scientists note a greater tendency to flushing (based probably on acetaldehyde build-up) in Asiatic peoples. Some have therefore uncritically (along with Milam, social psychologist Stanley Schachter) attributed drinking problems among Native Americans to this biological phenomenon. This holds not a thimble-full of water: To wit:
The lowest alcoholism group in the U.S. and in an international survey by Helzer et al. was the Chinese. Just as the highest alcoholism groups in the U.S. are Native Americans and Inupiat, who also flush, Helzer and Canino (1992) were stunned to discover that the alcoholism rate among the neighboring (to the Chinese) Koreans was fifty times the Chinese rate.
Joseph Westermeyer and Dwight Heath have examined Native American drinking and point out wide variations in problem drinking, not by racial group, but by cultural situation.
Ron Johnson and Sylvia Schwitters conducted a number of studies in the mid-1980s with flushing among Asians and found that flushing among individual Asians and Asian ethnic groups interacted with cultural and personal variables in leading to drinking outcomes. The idea that Asian Americans form a single group that shares flushing and drinking characteristics is a myth, and Chinese Americans drink more moderately than Japanese and Korean Americans. The latter group in particular has high rates both of heavy drinking and of abstinence in the U.S. Drinking behavior among Asian groups is related both to ethnic group and to drinking subgroups.
Native Americans are a group to whom genetic and disease theories have been applied promiscuously without resulting good to the peoples themselves. There is a strong counter movement today to among these Native peoples to explore nondisease theories that build on individual, community, and cultural strengths.

Let me know how your research goes,

Stanton


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References
I discuss this on my web site in "Love and Addiction" with reference to Clausen (1961) and Blum et al. (1969). In The Meaning of Addiction, I present a model of Native American theology vis-a vis alcoholism in Chapter 5, "Culture and Ethnicity," with special reference to Mohatt (1972).
I discuss the Chinese and other cultural recipes for eliminating alcohol abuse in "A moral vision of addiction" and also Diseasing of America, with special reference to Barnett (1955).
See my analysis of Schachter and his academic school of social psychologists on this and related questions in "Behavior in a vacuum: Social-psychological theories of addiction that deny the social and psychological meanings of behavior," Journal of Mind and Behavior, 11, 513-530, 1990. See "The implications and limitation of genetic models of alcoholism and other addictions."
Archie Brodsky and I review this and other cross-cultural data in Alcohol and Society. How Culture Influences the Way People Drink
J.J. Westermeyer, "The drunken Indian": Myths and realities, Psychiatric Archives, 4: 29, 1974; D.B. Heath, Alcohol use among North American Indians, in Research Advances in Alcohol and Drug Problems (Vol. 7), New York: Plenum, 1983.
Chi, Lubben, and Kitano, Differences in drinking behavior among three Asian-American groups, Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 50, 15-23, 1989.

 

[Laura]

I don't think that genetic markers is the way to go and this whole article gives me the creeps. Alcoholism can be caused by a LOT of things, including candida. And for all we know, some people may be more susceptible to candida due to genetic weaknesses. Some of them, of course, could be psychopaths, and others not.

I think we need to watch this very closely, follow some of the loose threads, find what kind of research they are relying on, and analyze what they are doing here.

 

[Cyre2067]

Interesting article. Couple of things I noticed:

-psychopath as 'suffering soul' first of all the etymology they describe isn't accurate. From the article: "The word “psychopath” (literally, “suffering soul”) was coined in Germany in the eighteen-eighties. By the nineteen-twenties, “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” had become the catchall phrase psychiatrists used for a general mixture of violent and antisocial characteristics found in irredeemable criminals, who appeared to lack a conscience."

From here: _http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=psychopathic

psychopathic: 1847, from Ger. psychopatisch, from Gk. psykhe- "mind" (see psyche) + pathos "suffering" (see pathos). Psychopath (n.) is an 1885 back-formation. psyche: 1647, "animating spirit," from L. psyche, from Gk. psykhe "the soul, mind, spirit, breath, life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body" (personified as Psykhe, the lover of Eros), akin to psykhein "to blow, cool," from PIE base *bhes- "to blow" (cf. Skt. bhas-). The word had extensive sense development in Platonic philosophy and Jewish-infl. theological writing of St. Paul. In Eng., psychological sense is from 1910. and pathos: "quality that arouses pity or sorrow," 1668, from Gk. pathos "suffering, feeling, emotion," lit. "what befalls one," related to paskhein "to suffer," and penthos "grief, sorrow;" from PIE base *kwenth- "to suffer, endure" (cf. O.Ir. cessaim, Lith. kenciu "suffer").

From what we know, psychopaths have no soul nor suffer for their condition, other then their 'hunger', so perhaps psychopath is a misnomer indeed. Hollow might be a better description.

Then there was this bit:

Some scientists think that psychopaths suffer from an extreme and far-reaching attention deficit, which causes them temporarily to forget the moral and social consequences of certain antisocial actions. Joseph Newman, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is the leading advocate of this theory. His model is based on traditional research methods, such as lab work using rats with brain lesions, and studies of humans using a well-known card-playing task, in which players gradually start to lose money; the players in the control group stopped as their earnings diminished, but the psychopaths could focus only on the outcome of the next card choice.

Another hypothesis is that psychopaths lack fear of personal injury and, more important, moral fear—fear of punishment. David Lykken pioneered this theory in the nineteen-fifties, and it has been taken up by James Blair, Christopher Patrick, and others. The updated version of this model posits that psychopathy is a result of a dysfunction of the amygdala, the almond-shaped bundle of gray matter situated in the midbrain, which is another area instrumental in emotional processing.

Nothing about how they might just be an intraspecies predator. I think this goes to the heart of the lack of knowledge about psychopathy. We have reporters talking to the big wigs in the research field and they think it's a disorder, a disease, a mistake - when in point of fact, it's just a part of the human experience. There's also the reference to Snakes in Suits as 'pop-psychology' instead of a serious warning....

In his second book, “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” written with Paul Babiack, Hare flirts with pop psychology when he points out that many traits that may be desirable in a corporate context, such as ruthlessness, lack of social conscience, and single-minded devotion to success, would be considered psychopathic outside of it.

Almost deliberate blurring of the lines between normal narcissism and psychopathy:

But the problem is that “psychopathic behavior”—egocentricity, for example, or lack of realistic long-term goals—is present in far more than one per cent of the adult male population. This blurriness in the psychopathic profile can make it possible to see psychopaths everywhere or nowhere. In the mid-fifties, Robert Lindner, the author of “Rebel Without a Cause: A Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath,” explained juvenile delinquency as an outbreak of mass psychopathy. Norman Mailer inverted this notion in “The White Negro,” admiring the hipster as a “philosophical psychopath” for having the courage of nonconformity. In the sixties, sociopathy replaced psychopathy as the dominant construct. Now, in our age of genetic determinism, society is once again seeing psychopaths everywhere, and this will no doubt provoke others to say they are nowhere, and the cycle of overexposure and underfunding will continue.

There's some other things I noticed, but I've ran outta time, try to come back to it later tonight.

 

[Hildegarda]

From the purely scientific point of view, what Kiehl so far sees in his fMRI is a correlation with psychopathy diagnosis, not the cause-and-effect relationship. Moreover, since he only studies male prison population, whatever he is observing could be a testosteron thing linked to environmental influence of the prison. It is entirely too early to call for the "paralimbic disfunction" to be a CAUSE of psychopathy. If he shows a graded relationship (higher PCL score corresponds to more paralimbic defects) in both men and women, that's more robust. But still, there is a possibility that brains differences he observes are a factor that can develop overtime in more extreme cases of psychopathy.

From a practical point of view, the thing can go into either of the two directions. One is to help blur the difference between normal and psychopathic. "Everyone has some psychopath in him", "your corpus callosum is too thin? hmmm. you are in trouble", etc. The other is to let psychopaths off the hook easily by making it a bona fide "mental disorder", which would make those people considered incompetent by the court. The second path is more likely. The medical establishment very much likes to see "brain changes" as an underlying basis of a disorder; this kind of evidence "legitimizes" it.

I see the only practical application of this in criminal justice system -- you really can't force a corporate psychopath to undergo a self-incriminating fMRI scan as part of the job application process. AS for criminal justice, one could argue that it is better to funnel psychopathic criminals into a subsystem within the prison where they could receive more appropriate help and not "infect" other inmates with sociopathic tendencies. I am pessimistic about it though. Most likely they will come up with some kind of chemical, like Ritalin, to keep the symptoms down. High potential to abuse and low emphasis on prevention, especially in kids and young adults.

Overall this is a very interesting research and an expected development, but the focus is a bit off, IMO.

 

[Mountain Crown]

Thank you for this post, Hildegarda. Clear thinking.

From a practical point of view, the thing can go into either of the two directions. One is to help blur the difference between normal and psychopathic.

Hiding the difference between normal people and psychopaths has been their main tactic all along. There has been much more exposure of the existence and nature of psychopathy of late, we should expect to see damage control - especially from the medical/psychiatric communities.