Did he ever love me? is the title of Liane Leedom’s work in which she analyzes romantic relationships between psychopaths and their partners based fundamentally on their testimony. 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 and psychopathy Psychopaths tend to have an avoidant attachment style, which manifests itself in difficulty establishing interpersonal relationships with high intimacy. The underlying question that we pose here derives precisely from that: can a psychopath feel true love, or just a substitute? Let’s see it.
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 who become superstars of crime or the world of the stock market and business, are characterized by two fundamental traits: the 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, furthermore, are what cause a lack of empathy: fear is the precursor to guilt and pain is the precursor to compassion.
If a person is incapable of feeling fear, It is logical that he does not fear the consequences of his 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 viewing scenes of other people’s pain, it means that his compassion system is turned off. And thus the primary psychopath was born.
Love
For its part, love could be defined as an emotional state that combines, at a psychological level, an affiliation motivation (related to the need for attachment), socially learned attitudes and expectations, and overt behavior. All of this is based on a neurobiological basis which includes different activation zones in the brain and the segregation 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 talk about neutral and calming situations, but its secretion can be a greater, much greater, reward for reinforcement (in secondary psychopaths), especially when there is pain involved. (in primary psychopaths).
It seems that the psychopath’s emotional flattening collides with characteristics and behaviors that are socioculturally attributed to love. But the two great traits that 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 translates to a psychopath can love in principle, but with his own rules She may not show any concern or concern if her 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 he or she wants to be by your side. Of course, these “rules” of the psychopath do not have to be accepted by his family or by society (and, in fact, in many cases they should not be), but they exist and there is a certain moral code behind them.
The point is that the love of a psychopath 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 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, function in an abnormal way.
Besides, It will be a type of love with its own antisocial brand facets (since 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 there are also unsatisfactory relationships in which he never gets exactly what he wants (just as in the crimes he commits) due to his own limitations.
The debate remains open
It has been shown that Psychopaths are capable of feeling compassion for themselves and to feel empathy when they are 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 objectives, 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 this psychopathic emotion love that it seems to imitate it only partially, or whether love, as romantic idealists maintain, 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 also do not correspond to the reality of the emotion. For this reason, it is necessary to delimit the definition of love at a psychological and neurobiological level to answer this question, and that is why perhaps we will never know. In any case, there is empirical evidence that psychopaths are capable of feeling something that, at least, resembles love.
