I’m not a world-class expert on psychopaths, but I’ve thought about them and read about them a lot. I believe that understanding psychopaths can help us to understand ourselves and to dispell an illusion of some mysterious “evil.” What follows is what I think is usually going on with them. This is how, according to me, psychopaths work.
Most people seem to have an unhealthy relationship with their inner-child, the part of the psyche that is sweet, innocent, playful, and curious. Many of us tend to shame, belittle, ignore, or generally devalue that part of ourselves, at least to some degree. This non-adaptive relationship with our inner-child is usually due to an internalization of some aspect of caregiving that we received in childhood.
People treat children, or anyone else, non-optimally because they’re acting-out what happened to them as children. If you grew up in an environment where children were beaten for “talking back” (for questioning authority) then not only will you tend to internally beat your own inner-child for questioning the authority of what you think of as your self, but you may also tend to (at least want to) beat real-life children who appear to talk back to you. This is the way that intergenerational trauma gets transmitted and sustained.
With the psychopath, it seems that the extent of the childhood trauma was often so great…
