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 How to Succeed in the Business of Creating Psychopaths Without Even Trying
Paul D. Steinhauer M.D. FRCP(C)
"Here is an excerpt from Paul Steinhauer, a well known child psychiatrist, from a talk he gave to Children’s Aid Society workers to alert them to the hazards of moving a kid through a dozen or so foster homes in the first three years. I like the way he puts it, and he puts it even more technically and accurately if you look up the book where he later wrote about the same thing.*
If you want to make a psychopath, and you want a really fool-proof formula, just move a kid through 12 foster homes in the first three years.
What scares me is that paid group institutional daycare under age three is taking the same fool-proof psychopathy producing formula and making modifications. Why? Why are we messing around with variations of such a dangerous formula. To me it’s analogous to a brain surgeon cutting progressively closer slices off the centre of your brain, without knowing more than the fact that if you cut close enough you’ll produce an emotional vegetable.
Moving through 12 different foster homes in the first three years will make a psychopath for sure. But will 10 moves or will 8 -- let's try 6. Let's try daycare centres 10 hours a day, or 8, or 6 hours a day. Let's try with 2 year olds, 1 year, 6 month 2 month, 2 week olds. If 100 separations and 50 changing caregivers will produce a psychopath, will 80 and 30 do it, maybe we're safe with 50 and 20. We act like we don't see even the remotest connection to the known danger.
We have been delivered up so completely into the values of consumption as the most important thing in our lives that we seem quite content to be deliberately creating childcare arrangements that risk producing psychopaths and we rationalize that risk as either necessary or non-existent, putting our hope and faith in social science studies to ease our guilt."
* A more comprehensive description of these long-term effects of incomplete or aborted mourning can be found on pages 73 - 75 of the book Psychological Problems of the Child in the Family by Steinhauer P.D. and Rae-Grant, Q. New York, 1983, Basic Books.
...when there is no single, adequate, continually available person to whom the child can relate, or [that in which] the child is passed through a series of placements where he makes only brief attachments. In either case, the end result is a child who is afraid to put down roots, a child left unable to relate in depth or to form stable, long-term attachments. Such children either do not relate at all, or are shallow, superficial, totally narcissistic and manipulative in their dealings with others. Others are valued only when they satisfy the child’s needs of the moment, to be discarded or turned upon violently as soon as they fail to do so. Alternately, such children combine exaggerated demands for closeness with an inability to tolerate intimacy and a need to keep others at a distance.
Other associated long-term deficits include:
1. Persistent, Diffuse Rage
As Bowlby has stated, “There is no experience to which the young child can be subjected more prone to elicit intense, violent and persistent hatred of the mother figure than that of separation.” Unless worked through, this rage, along with the defences called into play against it may be dammed up, generalized, displaced and diffused, distorting the developing personality, undermining and destroying potential relationships and dominating both mood and behaviour.
2. Chronic Depression
This is related to the degree to which basic needs for love and security remain unmet. While presenting at times as frank depression in the adult sense - overwhelming sadness; loneliness; hopelessness; self-destructive behaviour (including the use of drugs); suicidal thoughts or attempts - at other times it takes the form of a continuing apathy marked by pervasive lethargy; failure to develop or loss of interests; lack of drive or available energy; deteriorating school performance; inability to get started or to follow through; global persistent pessimism which may alternate with bouts of acting-out and frequently antisocial behaviour which can be dynamically understood as depressive equivalents.
3. Asocial and Antisocial Behaviour
Two sets of factors, usually in combination, account for the frequency that asocial and antisocial behaviour are displayed by these children. Many children show super-ego defects. These result from discontinuity of relationships which keeps them from forming the stable identifications which are the basis of effective superego. As a result, they frequently show diffuse feelings of shame and worthlessness, and lack the appropriate capacity for guilt characteristic of the mature conscience. At the same time, these children almost invariably show severe ego defects. They might well be termed “short-fused” children. They lack the ability to bind tension, leaving them prone to immediate and explosive discharges of behaviour in response to the sweeps of rage to which they are so vulnerable partly because of the greatly intensified anger resulting from repeated deprivations and partly because the lack of continuity and consistency in their upbringing has failed to help them develop the necessary control over their affects. As a result they remain impulse ridden and prone to acting-out.
4. Low Self-Concept
This is derived originally from the child’s never having felt loved or cared about sufficiently to incorporate an inner picture of himself as a valued and worthwhile person. This original lack is aggravated by his compulsive though unrecognized need to set himself up for repeated rejections (i.e. repetition compulsion), thus proving again and again that there is nothing worthwhile or loveable about him.
5. Chronic Dependency
Many such children never reach the stage of achieving emotional self-sufficiency and independence. As if needing to obtain in their adult life what they were deprived of in their childhood, they may turn their exaggerated demands for nurture and support from one person or agency to another. When they eventually succeed in draining and alienating one source of supply they then turn to another, thus remaining emotionally, socially and often economically dependent.
A stage of permanent detachment occurs if and when the energy and love withdrawn from the original mother fail to find an adequate substitute within the critical period of time. As a result, this energy remains unavailable to form relationships with others, and is instead withdrawn and turned back onto the child himself.
a)Love and energy withdrawn from others may be re-invested in the child’s own body. Initially, this may result in excessive autoeroticism (thumbsucking, rocking, masturbation). Such children remain vulnerable to hypochondriasis and psychosomatic complaints later in life.
b) The love and energy may become invested in the child’s self-image causing him to become increasingly narcissistic. The narcissistic child is concerned only with himself and his own needs. Shallow, superficial and self-centred, he will use others for what he can get, giving as little of himself as he can get by with. He may be totally plastic, relating in an “as if” manner by feeding others what he thinks they expect rather than expressing what he really thinks, feels or wants. His love and energy may become overinvested in his own inner world of fantasy, which then assumes more importance for him than external reality. This will lead to a progressive withdrawal and an increasing turning for gratification to fantasy rather than to real experiences or other people.
These alternatives are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Together they represent the end result of the process set into motion when a child is forced to submit to the trauma of repeated separations. Let me repeat again: the longer the interval between loss of contact with the child’s own mother and the time of permanent attachment to a substitute mother, the greater the hazard of severe and permanent damage leading ultimately to a child who is asocial and/or antisocial, incapable of trust, warmth or true intimacy with others... |
