There has been some debate in the media recently about whether or not Joran van der Sloot–the young man suspected of killing Nataee Holloway in 2005 and charged with the murder of Stephany Tatiana Flores Ramirez five years later–is a serial killer, similar to Ted Bundy. What is becoming obviously clear, however, is that he is a textbook case psychopath.
Not everyone is willing to believe that Joran is capable of murder. Some evidence has emerged lately, from one of his girlfriends, Melody Granadillo, that Joran had a charming, romantic and gentle side. The Associated Press reports that during an interview with ABC’s “20/20,” Granadillo stated they would spend hours talking together and gazing into each other’s eyes. She described Joran as “romantic… playful [and] very honest.” Honest, that is, until she repeatedly discovered him cheating and lying to her. “He would lie for no apparent reason at all… and if you caught him in it… he would double down and be even more serious about the story,” she recounts. The romantic and the vicious, the seemingly honest and the actually deceitful, the good and the evil sides of Joran van der Sloot all fit perfectly into the psychological profile of a psychopath. But only one side of a psychopath is real: the monstrous side. The other side is only a mask, used to lure and manipulate potential victims.
So what is a psychopath then? Psychopaths aren’t necessarily serial killers. But they are, like Joran van der Sloot, dangerous and predatory. The experts on psychopathy, Hervey Cleckley, Robert Hare and Martha Stout provide, essentially, the same list of personality traits to describe psychopaths. They state that such individuals exhibit superficial charm and intelligence. They use these qualities to attract people and to control them. Contrary to other kinds of pathological individuals, psychopaths don’t experience delusions or manifest any “other signs of irrational thinking.” For that reason, they appear to be, and actually are, “sane.” When they commit crimes, psychopaths know exactly what they’re doing. They realize that it’s wrong and know why society considers it wrong. They just happen to make exceptions for themselves and for their outrageous behavior, which, in their estimation, lies above the rules that govern the rest of humanity.
Similarly, psychopaths lack nervousness or any “psychoneurotic manifestations.” Not only are they unlike Woody Allen’s comical antiheroes, but also they stay cool and collected even when a normal response would be to experience distress. Although they sometimes engage in histrionic displays of emotion to gain sympathy, inside, psychopaths remain unflappable during a crisis, such as a break-up or divorce from their significant other (because no other is significant to them), a death in the family, when they’re caught for committing a crime or even when they’re being punished for their illegal activities. A psychopath’s motto in life is: “Bad men do what good men dream.” Psychopaths can’t grasp the idea of conscience and feelings for others except as a form of weakness. They don’t understand that their dreams are normal people’s nightmares.
Such individuals are very impulsive and can fly off the handle with little or no provocation, but nothing rattles them for long. Analogously, they can fulfill their obligations for a short period of time to win their targets’ trust, but are unreliable over the longhaul. No matter what promises they make and how important their commitment to fulfill them may be to others, they’ll eventually let people down. In fact, they go out of their way to hurt and betray those who trust them. Psychopaths pursue short-term goals. They say whatever they need to say in order to get what they want at the moment. Their minds function like a GPS system where they’re constantly punching in a new destination. Whatever direction they take changes upon a whim, as soon as they spot anything or anyone they momentarily perceive as a better or more exciting opportunity.
That’s not just because psychopaths are shallow, but also because they’re envious, greedy and power-hungry. They want whatever other people have that they find desirable. That may be a new partner, a good job, prestige, wealth or a family. They want successful relationships without offering love, honesty or fidelity. To bolster their sense of superiority, without having much to show in terms of personal qualities, talents or accomplishments, they put their partners (and others) down and cultivate their weaknesses. To succeed in their jobs, without doing much work, they charm, intimidate, manipulate and bully their coworkers and staff. To acquire wealth, they commit fraud or engage in scams. But, generally speaking, psychopaths can’t hold on to anything and anyone because their interests and needs change constantly. Sooner or later, they become dissatisfied with everything they have in life and want something more, or something different.
Psychopaths are unpredictable even in their unpredictability. Nobody can tell in advance when they’re going to sabotage your life and happiness, or even their own, for that matter. Psychopaths can be highly believable pathological liars. Most people may lie sometimes. Psychopaths, however, tell harmful lies for the sport of it and with malice. To them, lying functions as a means of controlling others by manipulating their perception of reality. It’s also a form of free entertainment. Because of their shallow emotions, psychopaths get easily bored. Their psychological hollowness propels them into a perpetual quest for new people to use, new sexual encounters, the newest business ventures as well as new and exciting ways to transgress social rules.
Psychopaths manifest poor judgment and fail to learn from experience. Epicurus defined pleasure as the absence of pain. By that standard, psychopaths aren’t Epicurean. They seek positive pleasures: highs, thrills and the sensation of constant euphoria. But they aren’t particularly bothered by pain or by negative consequences in general. They sabotage their own futures and harm others in momentary flashes of anger or for the sake of short-lived fun. A lot of their problems stem from their fundamental narcissism, or what Cleckley calls their “pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love.” To psychopaths, people are objects whose needs and even lives don’t matter except in so far as they can use them. After using people, they toss them away.
Psychopaths can’t feel anything, not even joy or happiness, very deeply. They exhibit, Cleckley indicates, a “general poverty in all major affective reactions.” Hare states that psychopaths experience “proto-emotions” rather than the full range of human feelings. They feel momentary pleasure, glee or delight when they do or get what they want. By way of contrast, they feel fleeting frustration or anger when their desires are thwarted. But they can’t experience the deeper emotions, such as other-regarding love, empathy, remorse, sadness, regret or even anxiety and depression. Their main emotion is contempt for other human beings, which they often mask underneath a thin layer of sociability and charm. Upon meeting new people, psychopaths perform an intuitive cost-benefit analysis, to classify them as targets, accomplices or obstacles in the pursuit of whatever they want at the moment. Targets are used as accomplices, then discarded as obstacles once their usefulness has expired. Since psychopaths eventually alienate all those around them with their unscrupulous and callous behavior, the only people who continue to find their mask of sanity plausible over time are those who don’t know them well, those who suffer from a similar personality disorder, or those who have an unhealthy emotional investment in them. Those who refuse to face the truth about the psychopath in their lives often become his alibis, sticking by him despite all rational evidence of his personality disorder and his wrongdoings.
Due to their shallowness, psychopaths suffer from what psychologists call “specific loss of insight.” Not only are they incapable of understanding how others function on a deeper emotional level, but also they lack an understanding of their own motivations and behavior. They intuitively know how to deceive and manipulate others. But they can’t grasp why they feel compelled to do it. Because they don’t see anything wrong with themselves and their actions, they also fail in therapy. Improving one’s behavior requires having the insight to see your flaws and the desire to change for the better, especially for the sake of those you care about. Psychopaths lack such incentives. They live only for their own pleasure. To entertain themselves, they engage in what Cleckley calls “fantastic and uninviting behavior.” This is made worse by various addictions—to sex, drugs and/or alcohol—that are quite common for them, largely because of their low impulse control and need for constant excitement.
Psychopaths thrive on depravity and transgression. After behaving more or less normally for a period of time, they can all of a sudden become boisterous and unruly, pull their pants down in public, hit their spouse or start a brawl without provocation. Cleckley also notes that for psychopaths, “suicide is rarely carried out.” Just as they’re incapable of experiencing a deeper form of happiness which for most people results from leading an orderly life and loving one’s family and friends, they’re also incapable of experiencing a deeper form of unhappiness, which drives some individuals to suicide.
Cleckley and Hare both observe that for psychopaths “sex life is impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated.” Psychopaths can, however, sometimes experience intense attachments without emotional bonding. Some of them have such obsessive infatuations that they may even stalk their targets for an extended period of time. This behavior, however, is not tied to any genuine feelings of love or even to “being in love.” Rather, it stems from a sense of entitlement and ownership. Psychopaths believe that it’s their right to possess the women they momentarily desire and to discard them as soon as they no longer want them. Generally speaking, for psychopaths sexual relationships function as a release and as a form of exerting control over others. They’re not a means of connecting, which, over time, implies shared emotional ties and mutual moral obligations.
Finally, psychopaths are noted for their “failure to follow any life plan.” A few psychopaths may be very ambitious. Yet fewer become powerful or famous. However, most lack the patience to pursue far-reaching goals that require dedication and hard work. Instead, they move from one temporary–and usually destructive–diversion to another, in search of something to alleviate their pervasive sense of boredom.
Claudia Moscovici, psychopathyawareness
Dangerous Liaisons: How to Identify and Escape from Psychopathic Seduction
September 20, 2010
Categories: Claudia Moscovici, Dangerous Liaisons, Joran van der Sloot, psychopath, psychopathic seduction, psychopathy, psychopathy awareness, psychopathyawareness, serial killers, social predators, sociopath, sociopathy, what is a psychopath . Tags: Claudia Moscovici, Dangerous Liaisons, Hervey Cleckley, Joran van der Sloot, psychoapthyawareness, psychopath, psychopathy, psychopathy awareness, serial killers, social predator, sociopath, sociopathy, The Mask of Sanity, what is a psychopath . Author: Holocaust Memories . Comments: 8 Comments
Confronting the problem of psychopathy isn’t reserved just for criminologists, psychotherapists or journalists who cover crime stories on the news. Because it often occurs in our daily lives, it also appears on popular reality shows. In one of the recent episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Khloe wonders out loud if Scott, her sister’s boyfriend, is a psychopath. She laughingly dismisses the idea, as the whole Kardashian family struggles to accept Scott. After all, he’s the father of Kourtney’s baby, Mason Dash, and Kourtney herself seems to really love him. And yet, much of the tension in the Kardashian family revolves around Scott’s bad behavior, usually followed by repeated apologies and reconciliations. He lies without any apparent compunction to Kourtney and others, cheats on her, picks fights with family members but magically smooths things over whenever it suits him (which is usually when he’s about to be thrown out for good). One of the most memorable scenes of the show is when Scott gets very drunk, attacks a waiter and aggressively shoves money into his mouth. True, people do strange things when intoxicated. But in my eyes, Scott’s behavior seemed more about asserting dominance than about being inebriated. 
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