Can a psychopath love?

Did he ever love me? is the title of Liane Leedom's work in which she analyzes love relationships between psychopaths and their partners based primarily on their testimony. Liane Leedom's conclusions establish four phases in this type of relationship: induction, commitment, disconnection and recovery. However, although it explains how an adult can become involved in a relationship with a psychopath, it does not answer the question of whether a psychopath is capable of feeling the emotion that we know as love.

On the other hand, the University of Laval establishes a relationship between attachment type and psychopathy. Psychopaths tend to have a style of avoidant attachment, which is manifested in the difficulty to establish interpersonal relationships with high intimacy. The underlying question that we ask ourselves here derives precisely from that: can a psychopath feel true love, or only a substitute? Let's see.

• You may be interested: "Differences between psychopathy and sociopathy"

Are psychopaths capable of loving?

A psychopath is capable of establishing a romantic relationship and, in it, manipulating the victim. But this does not contradict the possibility that the psychopath may be in love with his partner or love his family. To understand this, it is necessary to define what psychopathy is and define what love is.

Psychopathy

Primary psychopaths, those who make our hair stand on end and become Superstars of crime or the world of the stock market and business, are characterized by two traits fundamental: low fear and pleasure in the face of other people's pain. These characteristics show a dysfunction in the brain structures that deal with emotions and, in addition, are the ones that cause the lack of empathy: fear is the precursor of guilt and pain is the precursor of compassion.

If a person is unable to feel fear, it is logical that you do not fear the consequences of your actions and therefore do not feel guilty about them, you are 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 off. And thus the primary psychopath was born.

Love

For its part, love could be defined as an emotional state that combines on a psychological level a motivation of affiliation (related to the need for attachment), socially learned attitudes and expectations, and behavior manifests. All of this is sustained on a neurobiological basis that includes different activation zones in the brain and the secretion of certain neurotransmitters such as oxytocin and the dopamine.

Dopamine is related to pleasure and reinforcement. His response in psychopaths not only corresponds to that of non-psychopaths when we talk about neutral and appeasing situations, but his secretion It can be a bigger prize, much bigger, before a reinforcement (in secondary psychopaths), especially when there is pain involved (in psychopaths primary).

It seems that the affective flattening The psychopath collides with characteristics and behaviors that socioculturally are attributed to love. But the two main features that we have mentioned have nothing to do with love. The emotional problems of the psychopath have to do with the suffering of others, fear and pain, not with all emotions.

This translates to a psychopath in principle can love, but with his own rules. He may show no concern or upset if his teenage daughter doesn't come home on her time, but still want her to show up and love her. He may lie and be unfaithful to his partner, but still feel that he wants to be by her side. Of course, these "rules" of the psychopath do not have to be accepted by his family or by the society (and, in fact, in many cases they should not be), but they exist and there is a certain moral code after them.

A different emotionality

The point is that the love of a psychopath does not include the sociocultural extras associated with this emotion (the fidelity, compassion, sincerity ...), nor those accessories that come from the emotions of pain or afraid. The psychopath will not feel love in the same way that you and I do: in his mind it is a limited emotion, since the structures involved in emotions, such as the amygdala and the hippocampus, they work in an abnormal way.

What's more, it will be a kind of love with its own antisocial brand facets (because dopamine is activated in its own way). But love, in a peculiar and crude way, is also a reality in the psychopath's mind.

This particular way of loving leads to toxic relationships, where the psychopath's partner suffers constantly. However, it is possible that for the psychopath they are also unsatisfactory relationships in which they never gets exactly what he wants (just as in the crimes he commits) because of his own limitations.

The debate is open

It has been shown that psychopaths are capable of feeling compassion for themselves and to feel empathy when instructed to do so. For his part, Joe Newman proposes with an empirical basis that psychopaths have an attentional capacity of tunnel, where although they feel this range emotional, for them they are a secondary condition that they can easily ignore to focus on their goals, a theory that fits well with psychopathy high school. All this proves that in psychopaths emotionality is not a simple void, perhaps it is a very dark hole, but of course it contains something.

Taking these issues into account, the debate remains to discern whether it is possible to call this psychopathic emotion love that it seems to mimic it only partially, or if love, as romantic idealists argue, goes much further.

From my point of view, the term "love" is contaminated by many sociocultural constructions that correspond to myths of romantic love and that they also do not correspond to the reality of the emotion. For this reason, it is necessary to define the definition of love at a psychological and neurobiological level to answer this question, and that is why 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.