Savage Spawn by Jonathan Kellerman Read Free Book Online Page A

or three years of childhood. Studying the infant-toddler period makes intuitive good sense because much emotional conditioning occurs during this period and one of the most striking aspects of psychopathy is gross abnormality of the emotional system.
    During early childhood, the foundations of interpersonal relationships are laid as the baby bonds with parents or caretakers by experiencing satiation of bodily needs, receiving physical and emotional nurturance, and learning to associate physical satisfaction with affection. Toddlers also develop specific strategies of coping with anger, fear, and frustration, and they begin to identify with other people at a rudimentary level and to reciprocate affection. The first signs of altruism and sympathy for others usually appear during toddlerhood, supplanting the infant’s inborn narcissism.
    Psychopaths make it to adulthood without ever developing the capacity for empathy and sympathy, though they learn to be quite good at imitating both. They view people as objects, which allows them to exploit, manipulate, and inflict high levels of pain on others without regret—what’s wrong with cheating or stabbing a
thing
? It’s not that they lack an understanding of morality and the rules of conduct—many psychopaths subscribe to some kind of moral code. In fact, imprisoned criminals often spout a strong law-and-order line. It’s just that they believe the rules apply to others, not them.
    Psychopaths are also quite enthusiastic about defending themselves physically—whether or not defense is necessary—and they display a heightened sense of interpersonal threat, perceiving aggression and hostility in the behavior of others when it doesn’t exist (30). Like cornered animals, they are likely to lash out violently when they feel trapped.
    Though calm, cool, and excellent sleepers, psychopaths are by no means devoid of emotion. They experience anger and pleasure and boredom at high levels—indeed, they crave and often chase pleasure with a staggering single-mindedness. But anxiety, worry, and ambivalence are muted or absent, though the psychopath can mimic them—role playing of the most malignant variety.
    Skillful, intelligent psychopaths can learn kindness, sensitivity, and morality as abstractions and weaknesses to be exploited, but they don’t integrate these qualities into their personalities.
    Psychopathy, like any other personality dimension, takes time to develop, and young killers such as Johnson and Golden can be thought of as incompletely fashioned criminals: impulsive, unsophisticated, lacking even the flawed judgment of adult psychopaths. Despite clear evidence of premeditation, as master felons the boys were pathetic duds—boasting about their intentions to anyone who’d listen, leaving behind mountains of evidence. No Sherlock was necessary to figure out whodunit. Lacking access to guns, their misdeeds would likely have expressed themselves as some variant of schoolyard bullying, perhaps a knifing. Equipped with a firearms arsenal, their faulty reasoning, low impulse control, and lack of smarts had just the opposite result: mindless carnage.
    It seems logical that disruption of the parent-child bonding process has something to do with this emotional warp. The problem is, the kind of data it would take to pinpoint how specific processes of emotional scrambling occur are hard to obtain, for we are generally unable to study and observe large numbers of children and family from the moment of birth through adulthood with the kind of detail necessary to establish causation. Some of the more thought-provoking studies about the biology of psychopathy have been produced in countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where national registries are maintained, but large-scale American data are conspicuously lacking.
    One alternative to multigenerational longitudinal research involves studying kids who already exhibit high degrees of