I was the one who made the comments about the autistic author. When I was talking about a character being relatable, I actually had James Fallon's book 'The Psychopath Inside' in mind. I haven't read the book yet but I have read a few reviews. Most of the reviews are positive, but of the ones that are negative they consistently hate it because Fallon comes off as a self-aggrandizing asshole. If this is the reaction to a psychopath's autobiography, what hope does a non-psychopath have at making a relatable fictional psychopath.
I would definitely be interested in reading you analyzing and / or debunking the Bernardo tapes. I’m m Canadian and my mom was in Toronto when he was committing his crimes so it’s come up a few times.
Honestly, there are so many not-great writers out there putting out shoddily researched stuff about they have no lived experience off. It might be alright if the bad research is on really trivial things, like the type of electrical wiring on the spacecraft, or if it’s common to bend the truth with that specific thing, like if there’s a certain restaurant on this certain street in this certain city. But to take the experiences of real people and mess them up completely in a pathetic, even if good-natured attempt at representation or diversity, is… agh. It’s frustrating. I once read a book about a trans boy, written by a trans boy’s cisgender mother, and it was the single worst book I’ve ever read (well, second worst, but it’s BAD). I kept thinking, why not just write a book about being a trans kid’s mom? Why attempt a book about experiences so intimate and wildly beyond her understanding?
I’m by no means saying writers can’t write characters they themselves aren’t, but 1, they NEED to be able to do it well by having some kind of understanding of how it is. If they can’t? Don’t do it. No rep always beats bed rep. And 2, they NEED to leave stories about actually being X to people who are X. Like the cis mom writing a coming-of-age book about a trans boy. Let’s just collectively stop making messes of people’s experiences because we feel superior, like we can write about them better than they themselves.
I'm not sure that it's that they feel superior, but rather that they truly don't understand how differently thought processes are. I understand this because I am constantly trying to figure out why people do the things that they do, or think how they think, or why they feel what they do. If I don't wonder and seek these answers, my life gets exponentially harder because all of those things make up how the world functions.
Most people don't have that need and never develop the skills, so they are drawing from what they think that they know, but instead it is largely based on their own perception of the world that is projected onto the motivations and experiences of others.
that’s all very true. It’s also just bad to assume the worst. Mostly I added the bit about superiority because I’m a writer too, and in a lot of online writing spaces (when the discussion turns to be about who can write what), there’s always people coming at it from a very entitled point of view that oozes assumed correctness. To me, they’re similar to the, ”I am allowed to write whatever I please and if someone gets butt-hurt over it, that’s their problem, not mine” attitude some people (usually middle-aged men) have. But those people don’t write any diversity in the first place, neither positive nor negative, so they’re just fuming out of principle and doing little harm besides being annoying online. And the people I mostly meant are similar in the sense they’re equally firm in their belief they have the ultimate truth, and when they write inaccurate portrayals of groups they don’t belong to, they can’t even take criticism on it because of how convinced they are of their truth. ”Superiority” might be the wrong word for it still, but in a way, they do put their assumptions over the real truths given to them by people with lived experience. For an easy example, men writing women badly. All jingling breasts and thinking about the state of our ovaries. Tell a man writing that stuff that’s not how women act, and he’ll go on a tangent about how He Knows Women. Doesn’t matter if you’re a woman personally. He knows better than you.
They are the minority, though, not the majority. Thankfully so. Majority are just what you described.
It reminded me of an interview with a very famous author. The main hero of her book(not necessarily main , but the book is largely driven by happenings caused by him or around)-I'm not completely sure who is he but your desciption seems to fit, to a big degree.
She said , when asked in that interview, that it was immensely hard to write him-and she consulted with her friends who were diagnosed in this or that way, and still couldn't write. Couldn't relate in a way that would allow to. Couldn't understand how his mind m i g h t have worked.
In the end, in my understanding, she went for writing about the lenses through which others saw and perceived him.
Thus, the reader sees him also strictly through eyes and experiences of other people, their descriptions, their feelings, known historical facts, letters, etc(it helps that it happens in 18 th century. He was an insanely charismatic man).
I'm yet to comprehend how one writes fictional character well, whoever the character is-I'd be awfully scared to make a mistake. I write fiction only when I am asleep))
Years ago I would write short stories and post them to an anime fan forum for entertainment. My core concept that developed were pairs of fraternal siblings, brother and sister, who had been genetically engineered for reasons that they were attempting to discover in the plot of the stories. There were seven different pairs if I am recalling correctly.
I found those characters to all be fun and relatable to me but they absolutely horrified the readers which considering it was an anime forum was a pretty good trick
Now I can look back and see that I was writing completely ruthless psychopaths who would have all been happy to wander off to different corners of the globe if it weren't for their government and corporate antagonists who were determined to regain control of their experiment.
I had fun doing that and unfortunately those old forums are long gone so I can't find those tales. My favorite episode was when the lead brother/sister pair discussed whether or not members of "The Twins" should breed amongst themselves as they were free of any genetic defects so therefore it shouldn't cause any problems. That really lit the readers up and the fact was that it wasn't my intention to upset people but it was a sort of thought experiment
Tragic. Well, I hope you will write something in the future. I would love to see how I would react to it.
As for breeding among themselves - isn't there this problem with increasing chance of random dysfunctonal mutations with each next generation? Cause sure, they have no recessive and other defects now, but what about twenty conceptions down the line? Also the fact that pathogens tend to adapt and to outrun them diversification via natural attraction-based breeding among unrelated individuals does the best. They tested it on some simpler organisms too - those that they left to multiply on their own were more resilient than those, where they intervened. So I have some doubts about this being a long-term strategy. But could work at start - increasing amount of individuals with high quality genes that would later seek out some new genetic material.
The conversation on inbreeding was in fact something like that. I have a biology degree and was having fun with it. It really bothered the readers that a brother and sister were having such a conversation though
I enjoyed your article. I am still a bit puzzled why people seem to care so much about psychopathy. Maybe the internet has changed things. But my Dad and my cousin and other people I knew who I believe to be psychopaths are all old or dead now. In their day, they never spoke about psychopathy. I cannot picture them wanting to explain themselves to people —unless there was something in it for them. They did tell lots of funny stories (funny to me at least).
I think because the word is so commonly used for so many reasons. It has a life of it's own and with that comes the mythos that has been constructed around it. People want to be a part of that mythos and end up doing far more harm than good when it comes to understanding psychopathy in a purely objective light. Because there is no objective understanding of what it is it cannot be written without being weighed down by the extremes that surround it unnaturally.
I think it is a way to explain what they don't want to look at in themselves. The evil nutters in the world are NT. But because their own behaviours of falling in with the heirarchy and believing their company is "family" and whatever else, could never be the source of the problem. (This behaviour is only good you see!) They need to find someone that does not have that all good thing "emotional empathy" to explain all the dark things in the world.
For me it boils down to curiosity. I'm fascinated by any type of difference in neurological functioning. For example, aphantasia (a condition where one lacks a "mind's eye"). It's kind of a contradiction to try to imagine what that's like, given that it's a fundamental difference in imagination itself. But I try anyway (in vain I know). Same with psychopathy. (Well, I was fascinated once I learned it was a specific condition, and not just a synonym for "crazy.")
For my sins as a mathematician and a software writer, I became something of a writer, making most of my documents the presentation of plans that people would like to see implemented; to wit, fund raising.
But I am pretty certain any psychopath I wrote about would probably rival a certain purple pegasus unicorn named Happy simply because the challenge of portraying a neurodivergent in terms likable to neurotypicals is an upstream swim in a waterfall. I think it would be less challenging to construct and describe a dream that some folk put together an enclave which promoted the survival of homo sapiens, neurotypical and neurodivergent alike, where the two(many?) worked together in complementary harmony to survive the probable thousands of years of the Sixth Extinction and preserve enough technology that mankind doesn't have to climb that tech tree again without waiting for the millions of years required to regenerate the resources we have used in the past 300 years.
So, maybe I will take the advice of Athena and not waste my time trying to make any neurodivergent appear interesting and acceptable to neurotypicals in the written word. I think the closest I have seen to describing cognitive functioning of an advanced state requiring a stretch to comprehend but nevertheless interesting came from Samuel R. Delany in "Babel-17" and "Empire Star".
I suppose another approach would be to give our universe more dimensions, say a countable infinity of them, and then write of ideations as projections from this infinite-dimensional space into the few that we as humans seem capable of perceiving, where NTs get projections from the emotion-laden subspaces and NDs get them from less emotion-laden subspaces. It should be at least as interesting as the discussions in days of old on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I enjoy so much reading your funny interactions with some users on Quora. My favorite one so far is the one you brought up in your "psychopath manifesto" post, the psychologist student that interviewed you if I'm not mistaken.
*************************************
That's why I agree with something you say which is removing the psychopathy from under the ASPD umbrella. Since there's this situation, people who get diagnosed with ASPD think they're psychopaths simply because the professionals consider psychopathy under the ASPD Spectrum, when in reality it's not.
Well, I can see why an NT would think that the inability to feel the things that NTs feel is by nature antisocial. Not that I necessarily agree with them, but psychopathy certainly would make negotiating the NT world more complicated than it would otherwise be. And NTs have this tendency to think that anyone who isn't like them is antisocial, evil, what have you.
Hey Athena, I've got a question about psychopath behavior that's vitally important to a story I'm wri--just kidding. No, really, the subject I'm thinking of would make at best a boring (but more likely irritating) story no matter what kind of character.
You're on a highway in the left lane, but you see a sign that the left lane is closed ahead for construction. Do you merge (1) early, while the cars in the right lane are still going relatively fast and it's less hassle, (2) at the last minute where all traffic is at a crawl and you have to stop and wait for someone to let you in -- which many don't want to do, or (3) somewhere in between?
Yeah, all choices are emotionally tinged for a NT in all kinds of ways, e.g. in terms of how other people see you, anxiety about the act of merging, desire to not be held up more than necessary, general annoyance about the whole thing, etc. (See? Who would want a story about that?)
It's so interesting that the merging thing would be emotional in nature, but certainly know that it is for many people.
I merge when I see things are starting to slow slightly. I do not understand the people that rush up and expect everyone else to let them in, and I don't understand the people that merge super early and then get angry that there are a bunch of people that want to be let in when they did the responsible thing and merged early. I figure that merging around the time that things are slowing means that I am going with the flow of traffic and removing myself from being a hazard. It also means that I am not going to have to deal with someone's road rage from either one of the extremes.
Interesting. I would have guessed that without fear/anxiety, a psychopath might favor driving (normally, not rush) to the front, because it's likely fastest (not everyone lets you in but someone will). But that doesn't take into account a cognitive recognition of road rage or a principle of going with the flow.
There is an actual most efficient way, which is for EVERYBODY to merge late (ie. where the lane ends), and take turns merging (zipper method). But because most people* merge earlier, that makes it so the lane that's ending is relatively empty, so going to the end violates turn-taking.
As it stands, I aim for something similar to what you described, though I end up erring on the side of too early if I'm tired.
(*This is my US-centric experience; I have no idea how it is in other countries.)
I wasn't planning on reading your article this week because I could not think of anything more boring than the title; but when you said 'No, no I won't help you'... You brought it back for me big time!
Yeah, I think a lot about fiction. Partly it is I have a lot of free time and I am prevented from being productive often. But it is also, I think, partly a fascination with how neurotypicals think; also a mild frustration that I am absolutely not able to write fiction. Writing said characters is a black hole for me I can only do plot. There have been a few characters in various entertainment that have shown very classic mental states to me. But then, another writer comes in or something else happens and they have to "humanise" the character in some way that throws off them getting so close to something accurate.
For instance, Rick, from Rick and Morty showed a lot of narcissistic traits. In season 5 of Rick and Morty, the entire theme was in some way about narcissism and abuse including a very accurate episode I think where the family set up a kind of heirarchy with Rick at the top and viciously bullied each other based on this. There were also so many times, notably in Season 6, where you were "fooled" into thinking he had changed and you got that "feel good" moment in the show where there was some kindness from Rick; then shortly after it would be revealed as some sort of deception and he would crack down with a venom filled rant about how great he was and someone had offended him with some minute behaviour or something. It was really good how you could feel that the NT emotional religion wasn't being fed.
So the character that did a lot of the writing with the voice acting was fired and now they have a new guy. So they have got Rick into a point of defeating his nemesis that has "potentially" opened the way for him to open up and be more NT. Crisis averted!
I will agree, Rick is an entertaining character to watch, but I eventually got sick and tired of all the fake out redemptions. I don't want to experience the emotions of narcissistic abuse via the media I consume. Props to the writers for eliciting those feelings in the audience though, now it's obvious why abuse victims stay.
It is... not obvious to me. I had a friend very similar to Rick. My best friend actually for more than two decades. He was every bit as entertaining and sharp witted as Rick. A lot of his jokes were insulting like Rick almost precisely. Hugely entertaining and joyful person tended to have three girls on the go at any individual time.
Anyway, for some weird reason, perhaps so he could continue to get laid, he went extremely left wing. It was like he was trying to improve himself and doing it wrong. He became an insufferable evangelical gossip. When it was time for us to part ways the only emotion I felt was relief. I literally, with every one of the people that has gone crappy in my life. Have never even one time had the instinct to continue to communicate with them once they got too weird.
I read Meredith Miller who has a deep understanding of abuse and such. There was a time where I imagined these emotions applied to me but I realise that was my medical situation putting me into physiological stress and thus, I would make up emotions I did not have. Now I read these articles wondering if the knowledge applies to me at all.
You might find after Season 7 episode 5. Where Rick captures and kills his ultimate nemesis that is explained in his backstory to be the reason he is the way he is. That his character changes and you can enjoy the show again. Also the new voice actor started at the beginning of Season 7. Rick Prime (the nemesis) is even more narcissistic, he is convinced that he is actually a god. It is like Rick is killing that part of himself: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xM3IQMgM8zE
I think I’m good. Look, the reason I said the show recreates the feelings of abuse is because of the whole cycle of “oh, I’m sorry. I’ll change!” only to go back to their old behaviour and act as if nothing happened.
My biological father was, and most likely still is, like this. If he changes good for him, but it’s not my responsibility to facilitate that nor will I reward him for changing by entering his life again; too much damage has been done.
When it comes to Rick, sure he symbolically killed that part of himself, but like before, the writers can just decide to backtrack on that development and we’re back to the status quo again.
I appreciate you trying to get me back into the show, but I think I’ll just watch something else.
OK, firstly, I don't care if you watch the show. I think that needs to be stated explicitly. 'Maybe you'll enjoy it again' is just a thing to say.
But, since we are talking in this area, and it is an area I think about/ talk about/ think is interesting. I just want to do that a little here.
Where you say that the writers "backtracked" on Ricks character development I don't think that is accurate. Because the "false redemptions" were written in from the beginning of their plots. Think of the vat of acid episode that was all in one episode. We see kindness from Rick but it is just a cruel trick. Then in Season 6 where he creates a literal Rick robot for a few episodes because he is so pissed off with Morty being a normal kid. Like I said. The redemption wasn't backtracked on. It was never present.
I think with the new voice actor they are trying to change the character. But I have no emotional preference as to whether that is the case and again I say I don't care if you watch it - I'm not even watching it. With the season 7 episode 5 breakthrough, which brought back the Mazzy Star song from the first episode. A lot of people asked why that had happened so early in the season and not saved for the finale. What I think is that they needed the episode to change Ricks character because they have got sick of the lack of character change and perhaps other pressures. So they needed those events to change Rick.
OK, the thing about your biological father. I'm sure that does hurt a great deal and I can see how Ricks characterisation would bring up associated feelings and create unpleasant sensations for you. Of course, when I read that I thought about people and family in my own life and such but I think that conversation is too personal for substack message board. So you have shared something personal. But I will not respond to that.
How about a documentary? I, for one would love to see a psychopath typically functioning daily, mask on, mask off and get some insight into how you view the world and the nts in it. A common theme in your posts seems to be that NTs will never understand us. Why not add to the body of knowledge? Make your own film, produce, direct and star in it. Seriously. Have you ever been approached with this idea?
There are people on YouTube with a psychopathy diagnosis who have participated in such films. Maybe not directly with the mask off, but they do explain what's going on behind the mask and what can happen if they do take it off.
Haha I think the problem here may be that your mask is just too good! I would have read the exact same things into your response to the snarky commenter - offended, angry, hurt. And I 100% believe you're a psychopath, and think I have a fairly good cognitive understanding of what psychopathy is, but I still would've read that as an emotional reaction. We NTs are just so hard wired to be constantly assessing other people's emotional states all the time, and since 99% of the people around us are NT too, our assessments are usually fairly reliable. So if you're that good at mimicking an emotional response, then it's pretty much guaranteed most people are going to take it at face value and believe you.
The reason that 'emotional' comments like that from you don't make me question whether you're really a psychopath, is because they're so few and far between. I must have read about 80-100 of your posts across here and Quora and I've only seen max 2 or 3 comments from you with any kind of emotional slant to them like that, and even then it's usually very muted. On the other hand I've lost count of the number of times I've seen VERY provocative / antagonistic / downright rude / offensive comments from other people directed at you, and you either ignore the comment completely, or (even more effectively) you pick out the one actual rational point that the person made and just respond to that, completely ignoring the provocative/emotional bits. That level of indifference is something that I don't think any NT could fake that consistently. Most people can feign indifference up to a point, but not for long - it's an effort for us, because we're having to manufacture an artificial response which doesn't match with how we really feel, which gets tiring pretty quick (a bit like you with the mask I guess). If you were NT I'm sure you could fake indifference to the odd comment, but not to 100's of them. Everyone has a breaking point (every NT anyway).
Completely agree with what you say about NT's not realising how much emotion drives our thought processes, decisions etc. I think that's one reason your writing is so popular - it helps us to understand psychopathy, but it also helps us to understand ourselves, because learning how a person thinks and relates to the world when that emotional element is missing, really exposes how much emotion affects and drives us in ways we're not even aware of. There are many scenarios in life where I would have sworn I was being entirely logical, but now after reading your writing I realise I emphatically was not!
That makes sense. I cannot say I know what was going on inside my father and my cousin. I spent a lot of time with my father especially. I can describe his behavior and attitude from my perspective, which makes for interesting stories—but that does not mean I understood what it was like inside them. However, I could predict their external reactions and desires pretty accurately.
I have exactly this limitation when it comes to understanding neurotypicals. I have an advantage in that I live in the world constructed for and by them, so I have plenty of examples to find consistencies and irregularities, but it really took my Significant Other being able to explain how things are processing through the brain and why people think the way that they do. He was also able to explain emotions in ways that I could track the feelings and link them to the actions, which then gave me insight to why a person might do what they do. That does not, however, mean that I understand it. I often say I am like a little kid with the, "why", question locked and loaded at all times.
There would still be the inability to remove those emotional lenses that they read them through. So often people cannot separate their own emotions from the words because they do not see that their emotions have slanted how they are perceiving things.
If they're NT, even carefully reading Athena's posts isn't going to be enough. There's just going to be too much "Does not compute" in the picture for it to work.
Exactly right. They still don't know how their perception is altered by their hardwiring. I have trouble with this from the other side of things. I forget that my lack of emotions in how I see things will change a situation drastically for the other person experiencing it.
I myself can function either with or without emotions, depending on the situation. The switch does sometimes flip in either direction, either on or off, without a conscious decision my part, but sometimes I have been able to flip it consciously. I'm not sure if there is a specific "default setting" that applies to all situations.
Not all writers start with the plot first. Most of the best authors first craft a compelling character and then let that character drive the story. It’s absolutely doable to write a story centering around an authentically portrayed psychopath, because all good story is boiled down to the formula of [person wants something + obstacle to getting what they want + tries to overcome obstacle and fails + learns what they actually needed which wasn’t what they wanted + accepts or rejects this life lesson]. Seems to me emotion doesn’t need to factor in. Even psychopaths struggle and must overcome obstacles, and of course they’re capable of learning and growth. Simply your description of a lifetime spent assimilating into mainstream life shows this.
So, what if an author wrote a story with an accurately depicted psychopathic character that was not explicitly named to be a psychopath?
According to your list of traits, a psychopath could make an excellent detective. I imagine solving puzzles would be a pleasure for a psychopath. Think Sherlock Holmes, for instance. Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him is certainly not neurotypical, and I believe was well-received. I think a female psychopath as a main character sounds interesting, and as a detective, the themes of love and revenge don’t need to be about her, but rather the neurotypicals that she interacts with.
Also, what interests me immensely is that you, Athena, have a Significant Other. As you emphatically stated, psychopaths do not love. But they do appear to find it beneficial to engage in long-term relationships with a dedicated partner. So, while love doesn’t drive a psychopath to couple monogamously (or at least, cohabitate with a dedicated person), the act of attaining and keeping a significant other is still a story that neurotypicals are interested in and something that you prove in your own writing is something a psychopath would do.
I certainly would find it an invigorating challenge to craft an engaging story starring an authentically psychopathic character, that would be recognizable to psychopaths but not readily to a neurotypical. But the challenge would be writing that character’s journey to intimacy with a life partner. As a female writer, like so many before me, I am thoroughly fascinated with the intimate day-to-day relational decisions that people make, and in that aspect, psychopaths are no different from other humans. They interact with other people and they have driving forces within them.
I think it would be superb to write a story that pulls back the curtain on the domestic life of a psychopath who has perfected her public mask and still must, to a certain extent, maintain even a mask in her own home- what powerful motivator would lead her to sacrifice the freedom of solitude in order to share her space and daily life with another person? Is it simply the multitude of small but ultimately meaningful advantages of cohabitation with a life partner, all tallied up to tip the scales to its favor?
Sounds like a story worth reading if written skillfully enough. The crime solving adventure is the A story and the relationship with the potential significant other is the B story that reveals what the psychopath needs rather than wants. She wants to be entertained, to be diverted from the tedium of mere survival, perhaps; what she needs, though, is a partner in life, and a meaning driven personal life. You’d be best qualified to tell me how far off base this characterization might be…
As a neurodivergent person myself, I often have to coldly and rationally tally up the advantages of remaining in a committed marriage and caring for my children when their behaviors wear on me. My emotions certainly muddy things up but can also lengthen my “stay” column when I include “love” as a reason to stick around when the going gets tough. A psychopath doesn’t have love on the “stay” list, but their other column “leave,” is considerably shorter as well, I imagine. Is irritation a reason to quit a relationship, for a psychopath, for instance? What pros might outweigh the financial and physical costs of child-rearing, as well as sacrifices of space and time?
Do psychopaths ever choose to procreate, and what reasons might lead them to do so? Do they ever keep and raise their children, or other people’s children? What motivations may exist for them to do that?
But in your case, you don’t have children, but you do have a significant other. Why do you stay? I think I can guess reasons to leave, but why stay?
These are the questions I would explore in crafting an authentic psychopathic character.
I think that a psychopathic character is best left to a psychopath to write as a psychopath is the only one that understands how and why we think how we do. Anyone else would just be guessing and that guesswork is exactly what created the problem to begin with.
Do you intend to write any stories starring a psychopath, Athena? Do you know any psychopaths willing and able to do so? I, for one, would very much like to read them.
I don't know, maybe. Right now I am discussing writing a Snow White story from a different take with my Significant Other. We talked about it recently and sort of crafted a narrative that I am interested in pursuing.
Would you be up to sharing what you came up with? Either just broad strokes or, once the story is finished, the story itself. If it is private it is private.
The thing I found myself asking as I read Nicole's comment was "Is need or motivation even a thing for a psychopath?" Those were the two notions that brought my eyes out on stalks.
Well, I need to eat, and want to survive, so there is that. As for all the rest of it, it tends to be interest that captures me in the moment as in the moment living tends to be how I relate to the world. I think that is more indicative of psychopathic motivation in general which is to live and enjoy it.
We certainly have the need for food, water, shelter, and clothing, so in that regard we have needs. Motivation tends to be, "Ooo, that's interesting. Let's try that."
Okay, I think I get it… perhaps the problem, then, is all the mystique surrounding psychopaths makes them seem more interesting than they actually are (to neurotypicals). Writing a story starring a psychopath is like faithfully documenting a day in the life of a wild animal. NT fiction writers attribute characteristics to animals (personification) to make them more interesting and relatable to other NTs, but what the NT world considers “human” traits don’t exactly align with psychopaths… and giving them these traits in a story essentially removes the thing that makes them psychopaths. Based on the above comments about living in the moment and no motivations outside chasing creature comforts and stimulation, psychopaths sound really boring to a neurotypical. It sounds like animals that look like humans and are intelligent enough to fake being people, but they are only concerned with survival and pleasure.
I see now why a NT can’t write about a psychopath. Either they would try to make the character more interesting by adding NT traits, or they would make the psychopath seem like a painfully boring and base creature. Neither are attractive options.
But I don’t think that can actually be true, because Athena, your blog is interesting and you seem to have a motivation in writing it beyond mere amusement… but maybe that’s my block, I consider amusement an insufficient reason to do something? I’m confused but I guess that’s also the point made earlier… psychopaths are nearly impossible for NTs to adequately understand.
Life is an interesting thing to live, so interest and amusement are high motivators for us. However, we are still people and individuals, and that is what humanizes a character regardless of how their brain functions.
I think their observations and solutions to problems could be interesting even if they themselves would seem painfully base. The search for working understanding of surrounding world holds a spark of drama. But yeah, difficult thing to tackle.
Cases just bellow the cut-off seem more writer-friendly, because there is potential for small presence of NT elements and for those elements to clash with the rest of structure, but data is scarce.
I am not a psychopath, so I don't have a definitive answer to this question. So, I await commentary from Athena. But I just remember various things she's said that suggest that if these things existed at all for a psychopath, they would take a very different form than for an NT.
A character I thought had pro social psychopathic traits who was in that 'Sherlock Holmes' category was Patrick Jane from the Mentalist. Except of course the love he had for his wife and daughter that is a pretty big one since it was his only motivation.
But the way he talked and manipulated people constantly I thought was psychopathic. It is the kind of thought process that is easier to arrive at if you don't have emotions getting in the way so you can think of people in a more strategic way. He had no fear either. He was able to not follow rules and didn't get anxious from this.
He was purely driven by that loss which would make him objectively not psychopathic. I also think that if you forget to read the emotional drive into his actions you aren't fully grasping the character. It means that he will make decisions that are very poor or rash because he isn't logically thinking about things, he is emotionally pursuing an outcome that is of the highest priority to him. He is more than happy to hang the costs for himself and those around him.
That said, I enjoyed that show and forgot about it until you mentioned it.
True, but his character and the show itself was incoherent which means that parts can be picked out of a character.
For instance, the botched Red John operation. If they had killed him off at the end of Season 3 in that fantastic finale then it might have worked but the show made no sense with the addition of the magical Red John for those extra seasons.
While the character was strongly motivated by loss to the extent that he entered a mental institution after his wife was killed. I would say that the kind of tricks he played that had no sensitivity to others were outside general NT functioning. I would also say that to be able to look at others like that would likely include processing them in such a way as to not be dealing with a whole lot of your own emotion. Perhaps there is another explanation but I thought psychopathy could fit.
In the same vein as Red John though the character himself does not make sense imo. Looking at real fake psychics (Examples covered recently with full background by Steven Cambian of Truthseekers), they are generally people without two braincells to rub together.
Also, it seems to me what they did was create a character with motivations that were somewhat psychopathic. The fact, for instance, that he goes to sleep on shift, denotes a lack of anxiety to be sure. Then pasted onto him the longer term motivation. But on closer examination the second part of his motivations does not make sense because if you are living as a fake psychic, then I would think the toxicity of that would effect your homelife and having a perfect family life in those circumstances does not fit with reality.
I would say probably he’s a better candidate for sociopath than psychopath, but frankly, being manipulative and not having anxiety are hardly a case for being either. And the higher a person’s IQ, the less sympathetic they tend to be. A correlation I have noticed just anecdotally, and probably the writers noticed this as well. I’d say he’s just a neurotypical genius. Wired the same as most people, but so intelligent as to instinctively regard others as lesser and forget to treat them with compassion. My own husband is that way, and I erroneously believed at first that he might be a psychopath lol. But Athena works very hard to show how essentially incomprehensible to NTs true psychopaths are.
Ultimately I don't think we can know because the character isn't written well enough. In my view. But the idea that a neurotypical person with a high IQ shows enough unusualness to be considered divergent in a serious manner is an interesting one I think.
I mentioned before a guy who wrote a book on neurotypicals because he was very high IQ and got a lot of problems with them.
We are also using terms that aren't that well defined potentially as well. Like, I know a few neurotypicals that I think are really super cool. Really have it down. But if you put them in the same room with a stupid neurotypical it seems like a different species. But even with this there is definitely a set of troublesome behaviours that keep the term "neurotypical" alive. It doesn't seem like there is a better term to solve the innaccuracies with that one.
Agreed, and yes, the term neurotypical isn’t as useful as we’d like it to be… without scanning everyone’s brains once they enter biological adulthood, our only way to identify NTs is self identification and observation, both flawed and limited.
Fair enough. I don’t suppose my husband is a genius but he’s pretty squarely neurotypical… but he is extremely intelligent and extremely capable, and has little patience for people with average or below-average intelligence. So we can use a different word than genius if that’s more acceptable.
Check out any of the currently streaming documentaries about the Twin Flames Universe, and look at Jeff Ayan. Definitely not a psychopath, but narcissist for sure. He’s a real world example of a neurotypical very comfortable with manipulating people, tricking them, and saying and doing whatever it takes to get what he wants. There’s a difference between being amoral and being neurodivergent. Certainly there can be crossover but morality can exist and be absent in NTs and NDs alike.
I plan on addressing that situation in a post. I did a post previously on Twin Flames, but that was before I had ever heard of the Twin Flames Universe. I watched both the documentaries on it and follow a creator that infiltrated the online group. I don't know how deep of a dive I will do on the actual cult/MLM but I will be addressing an overview of the whole concept.
Addendum: I just read reviews of James Fallon’s book, the Psychopath Within, after it was mentioned by other commenters here, and now I have to ask Athena- are psychopaths capable of being moral? I assumed the answer to be yes, based on Athena’s writings, but admit I haven’t read everything Athena’s written, and perhaps I was incorrect. In any case, being amoral isn’t a guarantee of being psychopathic.
Have you ever read any of the Crystal Society books? I read the first book in the series. It's not technically about psychopathy. It's about an AI with some psychopathic traits that had a conscience-subroutine imposed on its other subroutines before it escaped. The story is written from the perspective of conflicting subroutines which are essentially 'people.' The series was interesting in terms of putting forward fundamentally alien psychologies which were nonetheless engaging.
I wonder if sociopathic characters would be more relatable than psychopathic ones, and if prospective authors might be steered in that direction. The notion of some trait being created through suffering would be one technique to foster reader empathy.
Did you have any thoughts on Killmonger from Black Panther as a sociopathic anti-hero / anti-villian?
I was the one who made the comments about the autistic author. When I was talking about a character being relatable, I actually had James Fallon's book 'The Psychopath Inside' in mind. I haven't read the book yet but I have read a few reviews. Most of the reviews are positive, but of the ones that are negative they consistently hate it because Fallon comes off as a self-aggrandizing asshole. If this is the reaction to a psychopath's autobiography, what hope does a non-psychopath have at making a relatable fictional psychopath.
A very good point indeed
I would definitely be interested in reading you analyzing and / or debunking the Bernardo tapes. I’m m Canadian and my mom was in Toronto when he was committing his crimes so it’s come up a few times.
All right, I will do so
Honestly, there are so many not-great writers out there putting out shoddily researched stuff about they have no lived experience off. It might be alright if the bad research is on really trivial things, like the type of electrical wiring on the spacecraft, or if it’s common to bend the truth with that specific thing, like if there’s a certain restaurant on this certain street in this certain city. But to take the experiences of real people and mess them up completely in a pathetic, even if good-natured attempt at representation or diversity, is… agh. It’s frustrating. I once read a book about a trans boy, written by a trans boy’s cisgender mother, and it was the single worst book I’ve ever read (well, second worst, but it’s BAD). I kept thinking, why not just write a book about being a trans kid’s mom? Why attempt a book about experiences so intimate and wildly beyond her understanding?
I’m by no means saying writers can’t write characters they themselves aren’t, but 1, they NEED to be able to do it well by having some kind of understanding of how it is. If they can’t? Don’t do it. No rep always beats bed rep. And 2, they NEED to leave stories about actually being X to people who are X. Like the cis mom writing a coming-of-age book about a trans boy. Let’s just collectively stop making messes of people’s experiences because we feel superior, like we can write about them better than they themselves.
I'm not sure that it's that they feel superior, but rather that they truly don't understand how differently thought processes are. I understand this because I am constantly trying to figure out why people do the things that they do, or think how they think, or why they feel what they do. If I don't wonder and seek these answers, my life gets exponentially harder because all of those things make up how the world functions.
Most people don't have that need and never develop the skills, so they are drawing from what they think that they know, but instead it is largely based on their own perception of the world that is projected onto the motivations and experiences of others.
that’s all very true. It’s also just bad to assume the worst. Mostly I added the bit about superiority because I’m a writer too, and in a lot of online writing spaces (when the discussion turns to be about who can write what), there’s always people coming at it from a very entitled point of view that oozes assumed correctness. To me, they’re similar to the, ”I am allowed to write whatever I please and if someone gets butt-hurt over it, that’s their problem, not mine” attitude some people (usually middle-aged men) have. But those people don’t write any diversity in the first place, neither positive nor negative, so they’re just fuming out of principle and doing little harm besides being annoying online. And the people I mostly meant are similar in the sense they’re equally firm in their belief they have the ultimate truth, and when they write inaccurate portrayals of groups they don’t belong to, they can’t even take criticism on it because of how convinced they are of their truth. ”Superiority” might be the wrong word for it still, but in a way, they do put their assumptions over the real truths given to them by people with lived experience. For an easy example, men writing women badly. All jingling breasts and thinking about the state of our ovaries. Tell a man writing that stuff that’s not how women act, and he’ll go on a tangent about how He Knows Women. Doesn’t matter if you’re a woman personally. He knows better than you.
They are the minority, though, not the majority. Thankfully so. Majority are just what you described.
It reminded me of an interview with a very famous author. The main hero of her book(not necessarily main , but the book is largely driven by happenings caused by him or around)-I'm not completely sure who is he but your desciption seems to fit, to a big degree.
She said , when asked in that interview, that it was immensely hard to write him-and she consulted with her friends who were diagnosed in this or that way, and still couldn't write. Couldn't relate in a way that would allow to. Couldn't understand how his mind m i g h t have worked.
In the end, in my understanding, she went for writing about the lenses through which others saw and perceived him.
Thus, the reader sees him also strictly through eyes and experiences of other people, their descriptions, their feelings, known historical facts, letters, etc(it helps that it happens in 18 th century. He was an insanely charismatic man).
I'm yet to comprehend how one writes fictional character well, whoever the character is-I'd be awfully scared to make a mistake. I write fiction only when I am asleep))
Thank you for the great post, Athena.
It sounds to me like that author figured out one of the only ways that character would have been successful.
Years ago I would write short stories and post them to an anime fan forum for entertainment. My core concept that developed were pairs of fraternal siblings, brother and sister, who had been genetically engineered for reasons that they were attempting to discover in the plot of the stories. There were seven different pairs if I am recalling correctly.
I found those characters to all be fun and relatable to me but they absolutely horrified the readers which considering it was an anime forum was a pretty good trick
Now I can look back and see that I was writing completely ruthless psychopaths who would have all been happy to wander off to different corners of the globe if it weren't for their government and corporate antagonists who were determined to regain control of their experiment.
I had fun doing that and unfortunately those old forums are long gone so I can't find those tales. My favorite episode was when the lead brother/sister pair discussed whether or not members of "The Twins" should breed amongst themselves as they were free of any genetic defects so therefore it shouldn't cause any problems. That really lit the readers up and the fact was that it wasn't my intention to upset people but it was a sort of thought experiment
People are awfully sensitive
As an aside it’s disappointing how big tech strip mined and destroyed those forum sites over the last decade and a half
Tragic. Well, I hope you will write something in the future. I would love to see how I would react to it.
As for breeding among themselves - isn't there this problem with increasing chance of random dysfunctonal mutations with each next generation? Cause sure, they have no recessive and other defects now, but what about twenty conceptions down the line? Also the fact that pathogens tend to adapt and to outrun them diversification via natural attraction-based breeding among unrelated individuals does the best. They tested it on some simpler organisms too - those that they left to multiply on their own were more resilient than those, where they intervened. So I have some doubts about this being a long-term strategy. But could work at start - increasing amount of individuals with high quality genes that would later seek out some new genetic material.
The conversation on inbreeding was in fact something like that. I have a biology degree and was having fun with it. It really bothered the readers that a brother and sister were having such a conversation though
I enjoyed your article. I am still a bit puzzled why people seem to care so much about psychopathy. Maybe the internet has changed things. But my Dad and my cousin and other people I knew who I believe to be psychopaths are all old or dead now. In their day, they never spoke about psychopathy. I cannot picture them wanting to explain themselves to people —unless there was something in it for them. They did tell lots of funny stories (funny to me at least).
I think because the word is so commonly used for so many reasons. It has a life of it's own and with that comes the mythos that has been constructed around it. People want to be a part of that mythos and end up doing far more harm than good when it comes to understanding psychopathy in a purely objective light. Because there is no objective understanding of what it is it cannot be written without being weighed down by the extremes that surround it unnaturally.
I think it is a way to explain what they don't want to look at in themselves. The evil nutters in the world are NT. But because their own behaviours of falling in with the heirarchy and believing their company is "family" and whatever else, could never be the source of the problem. (This behaviour is only good you see!) They need to find someone that does not have that all good thing "emotional empathy" to explain all the dark things in the world.
For me it boils down to curiosity. I'm fascinated by any type of difference in neurological functioning. For example, aphantasia (a condition where one lacks a "mind's eye"). It's kind of a contradiction to try to imagine what that's like, given that it's a fundamental difference in imagination itself. But I try anyway (in vain I know). Same with psychopathy. (Well, I was fascinated once I learned it was a specific condition, and not just a synonym for "crazy.")
For my sins as a mathematician and a software writer, I became something of a writer, making most of my documents the presentation of plans that people would like to see implemented; to wit, fund raising.
But I am pretty certain any psychopath I wrote about would probably rival a certain purple pegasus unicorn named Happy simply because the challenge of portraying a neurodivergent in terms likable to neurotypicals is an upstream swim in a waterfall. I think it would be less challenging to construct and describe a dream that some folk put together an enclave which promoted the survival of homo sapiens, neurotypical and neurodivergent alike, where the two(many?) worked together in complementary harmony to survive the probable thousands of years of the Sixth Extinction and preserve enough technology that mankind doesn't have to climb that tech tree again without waiting for the millions of years required to regenerate the resources we have used in the past 300 years.
So, maybe I will take the advice of Athena and not waste my time trying to make any neurodivergent appear interesting and acceptable to neurotypicals in the written word. I think the closest I have seen to describing cognitive functioning of an advanced state requiring a stretch to comprehend but nevertheless interesting came from Samuel R. Delany in "Babel-17" and "Empire Star".
I suppose another approach would be to give our universe more dimensions, say a countable infinity of them, and then write of ideations as projections from this infinite-dimensional space into the few that we as humans seem capable of perceiving, where NTs get projections from the emotion-laden subspaces and NDs get them from less emotion-laden subspaces. It should be at least as interesting as the discussions in days of old on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I enjoy so much reading your funny interactions with some users on Quora. My favorite one so far is the one you brought up in your "psychopath manifesto" post, the psychologist student that interviewed you if I'm not mistaken.
*************************************
That's why I agree with something you say which is removing the psychopathy from under the ASPD umbrella. Since there's this situation, people who get diagnosed with ASPD think they're psychopaths simply because the professionals consider psychopathy under the ASPD Spectrum, when in reality it's not.
Indeed, and that creates an enormous number of misunderstandings and misinformation.
Well, I can see why an NT would think that the inability to feel the things that NTs feel is by nature antisocial. Not that I necessarily agree with them, but psychopathy certainly would make negotiating the NT world more complicated than it would otherwise be. And NTs have this tendency to think that anyone who isn't like them is antisocial, evil, what have you.
Hey Athena, I've got a question about psychopath behavior that's vitally important to a story I'm wri--just kidding. No, really, the subject I'm thinking of would make at best a boring (but more likely irritating) story no matter what kind of character.
You're on a highway in the left lane, but you see a sign that the left lane is closed ahead for construction. Do you merge (1) early, while the cars in the right lane are still going relatively fast and it's less hassle, (2) at the last minute where all traffic is at a crawl and you have to stop and wait for someone to let you in -- which many don't want to do, or (3) somewhere in between?
Yeah, all choices are emotionally tinged for a NT in all kinds of ways, e.g. in terms of how other people see you, anxiety about the act of merging, desire to not be held up more than necessary, general annoyance about the whole thing, etc. (See? Who would want a story about that?)
It's so interesting that the merging thing would be emotional in nature, but certainly know that it is for many people.
I merge when I see things are starting to slow slightly. I do not understand the people that rush up and expect everyone else to let them in, and I don't understand the people that merge super early and then get angry that there are a bunch of people that want to be let in when they did the responsible thing and merged early. I figure that merging around the time that things are slowing means that I am going with the flow of traffic and removing myself from being a hazard. It also means that I am not going to have to deal with someone's road rage from either one of the extremes.
Interesting. I would have guessed that without fear/anxiety, a psychopath might favor driving (normally, not rush) to the front, because it's likely fastest (not everyone lets you in but someone will). But that doesn't take into account a cognitive recognition of road rage or a principle of going with the flow.
There is an actual most efficient way, which is for EVERYBODY to merge late (ie. where the lane ends), and take turns merging (zipper method). But because most people* merge earlier, that makes it so the lane that's ending is relatively empty, so going to the end violates turn-taking.
As it stands, I aim for something similar to what you described, though I end up erring on the side of too early if I'm tired.
(*This is my US-centric experience; I have no idea how it is in other countries.)
I wasn't planning on reading your article this week because I could not think of anything more boring than the title; but when you said 'No, no I won't help you'... You brought it back for me big time!
Yeah, I think a lot about fiction. Partly it is I have a lot of free time and I am prevented from being productive often. But it is also, I think, partly a fascination with how neurotypicals think; also a mild frustration that I am absolutely not able to write fiction. Writing said characters is a black hole for me I can only do plot. There have been a few characters in various entertainment that have shown very classic mental states to me. But then, another writer comes in or something else happens and they have to "humanise" the character in some way that throws off them getting so close to something accurate.
For instance, Rick, from Rick and Morty showed a lot of narcissistic traits. In season 5 of Rick and Morty, the entire theme was in some way about narcissism and abuse including a very accurate episode I think where the family set up a kind of heirarchy with Rick at the top and viciously bullied each other based on this. There were also so many times, notably in Season 6, where you were "fooled" into thinking he had changed and you got that "feel good" moment in the show where there was some kindness from Rick; then shortly after it would be revealed as some sort of deception and he would crack down with a venom filled rant about how great he was and someone had offended him with some minute behaviour or something. It was really good how you could feel that the NT emotional religion wasn't being fed.
So the character that did a lot of the writing with the voice acting was fired and now they have a new guy. So they have got Rick into a point of defeating his nemesis that has "potentially" opened the way for him to open up and be more NT. Crisis averted!
Great article Athena! Appreciated.
Rick sounds exhausting
He is. He's as exhausting as a narcissist. But he is also very funny.
I will agree, Rick is an entertaining character to watch, but I eventually got sick and tired of all the fake out redemptions. I don't want to experience the emotions of narcissistic abuse via the media I consume. Props to the writers for eliciting those feelings in the audience though, now it's obvious why abuse victims stay.
It is... not obvious to me. I had a friend very similar to Rick. My best friend actually for more than two decades. He was every bit as entertaining and sharp witted as Rick. A lot of his jokes were insulting like Rick almost precisely. Hugely entertaining and joyful person tended to have three girls on the go at any individual time.
Anyway, for some weird reason, perhaps so he could continue to get laid, he went extremely left wing. It was like he was trying to improve himself and doing it wrong. He became an insufferable evangelical gossip. When it was time for us to part ways the only emotion I felt was relief. I literally, with every one of the people that has gone crappy in my life. Have never even one time had the instinct to continue to communicate with them once they got too weird.
I read Meredith Miller who has a deep understanding of abuse and such. There was a time where I imagined these emotions applied to me but I realise that was my medical situation putting me into physiological stress and thus, I would make up emotions I did not have. Now I read these articles wondering if the knowledge applies to me at all.
You might find after Season 7 episode 5. Where Rick captures and kills his ultimate nemesis that is explained in his backstory to be the reason he is the way he is. That his character changes and you can enjoy the show again. Also the new voice actor started at the beginning of Season 7. Rick Prime (the nemesis) is even more narcissistic, he is convinced that he is actually a god. It is like Rick is killing that part of himself: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xM3IQMgM8zE
I think I’m good. Look, the reason I said the show recreates the feelings of abuse is because of the whole cycle of “oh, I’m sorry. I’ll change!” only to go back to their old behaviour and act as if nothing happened.
My biological father was, and most likely still is, like this. If he changes good for him, but it’s not my responsibility to facilitate that nor will I reward him for changing by entering his life again; too much damage has been done.
When it comes to Rick, sure he symbolically killed that part of himself, but like before, the writers can just decide to backtrack on that development and we’re back to the status quo again.
I appreciate you trying to get me back into the show, but I think I’ll just watch something else.
OK, firstly, I don't care if you watch the show. I think that needs to be stated explicitly. 'Maybe you'll enjoy it again' is just a thing to say.
But, since we are talking in this area, and it is an area I think about/ talk about/ think is interesting. I just want to do that a little here.
Where you say that the writers "backtracked" on Ricks character development I don't think that is accurate. Because the "false redemptions" were written in from the beginning of their plots. Think of the vat of acid episode that was all in one episode. We see kindness from Rick but it is just a cruel trick. Then in Season 6 where he creates a literal Rick robot for a few episodes because he is so pissed off with Morty being a normal kid. Like I said. The redemption wasn't backtracked on. It was never present.
I think with the new voice actor they are trying to change the character. But I have no emotional preference as to whether that is the case and again I say I don't care if you watch it - I'm not even watching it. With the season 7 episode 5 breakthrough, which brought back the Mazzy Star song from the first episode. A lot of people asked why that had happened so early in the season and not saved for the finale. What I think is that they needed the episode to change Ricks character because they have got sick of the lack of character change and perhaps other pressures. So they needed those events to change Rick.
OK, the thing about your biological father. I'm sure that does hurt a great deal and I can see how Ricks characterisation would bring up associated feelings and create unpleasant sensations for you. Of course, when I read that I thought about people and family in my own life and such but I think that conversation is too personal for substack message board. So you have shared something personal. But I will not respond to that.
Best Wishes.
How about a documentary? I, for one would love to see a psychopath typically functioning daily, mask on, mask off and get some insight into how you view the world and the nts in it. A common theme in your posts seems to be that NTs will never understand us. Why not add to the body of knowledge? Make your own film, produce, direct and star in it. Seriously. Have you ever been approached with this idea?
I am not particularly interested in people knowing who I am
Hire an actor to play Athena but make it your own story. Debunk the myths surrounding being a psychopath.
They would still have to meet me, and I am not interested in that
There are people on YouTube with a psychopathy diagnosis who have participated in such films. Maybe not directly with the mask off, but they do explain what's going on behind the mask and what can happen if they do take it off.
Haha I think the problem here may be that your mask is just too good! I would have read the exact same things into your response to the snarky commenter - offended, angry, hurt. And I 100% believe you're a psychopath, and think I have a fairly good cognitive understanding of what psychopathy is, but I still would've read that as an emotional reaction. We NTs are just so hard wired to be constantly assessing other people's emotional states all the time, and since 99% of the people around us are NT too, our assessments are usually fairly reliable. So if you're that good at mimicking an emotional response, then it's pretty much guaranteed most people are going to take it at face value and believe you.
The reason that 'emotional' comments like that from you don't make me question whether you're really a psychopath, is because they're so few and far between. I must have read about 80-100 of your posts across here and Quora and I've only seen max 2 or 3 comments from you with any kind of emotional slant to them like that, and even then it's usually very muted. On the other hand I've lost count of the number of times I've seen VERY provocative / antagonistic / downright rude / offensive comments from other people directed at you, and you either ignore the comment completely, or (even more effectively) you pick out the one actual rational point that the person made and just respond to that, completely ignoring the provocative/emotional bits. That level of indifference is something that I don't think any NT could fake that consistently. Most people can feign indifference up to a point, but not for long - it's an effort for us, because we're having to manufacture an artificial response which doesn't match with how we really feel, which gets tiring pretty quick (a bit like you with the mask I guess). If you were NT I'm sure you could fake indifference to the odd comment, but not to 100's of them. Everyone has a breaking point (every NT anyway).
Completely agree with what you say about NT's not realising how much emotion drives our thought processes, decisions etc. I think that's one reason your writing is so popular - it helps us to understand psychopathy, but it also helps us to understand ourselves, because learning how a person thinks and relates to the world when that emotional element is missing, really exposes how much emotion affects and drives us in ways we're not even aware of. There are many scenarios in life where I would have sworn I was being entirely logical, but now after reading your writing I realise I emphatically was not!
I am glad that you find it useful for that purpose. Thank you, Jen
That makes sense. I cannot say I know what was going on inside my father and my cousin. I spent a lot of time with my father especially. I can describe his behavior and attitude from my perspective, which makes for interesting stories—but that does not mean I understood what it was like inside them. However, I could predict their external reactions and desires pretty accurately.
I have exactly this limitation when it comes to understanding neurotypicals. I have an advantage in that I live in the world constructed for and by them, so I have plenty of examples to find consistencies and irregularities, but it really took my Significant Other being able to explain how things are processing through the brain and why people think the way that they do. He was also able to explain emotions in ways that I could track the feelings and link them to the actions, which then gave me insight to why a person might do what they do. That does not, however, mean that I understand it. I often say I am like a little kid with the, "why", question locked and loaded at all times.
They should just make their character based on your posts.
There would still be the inability to remove those emotional lenses that they read them through. So often people cannot separate their own emotions from the words because they do not see that their emotions have slanted how they are perceiving things.
If they're NT, even carefully reading Athena's posts isn't going to be enough. There's just going to be too much "Does not compute" in the picture for it to work.
Exactly right. They still don't know how their perception is altered by their hardwiring. I have trouble with this from the other side of things. I forget that my lack of emotions in how I see things will change a situation drastically for the other person experiencing it.
I myself can function either with or without emotions, depending on the situation. The switch does sometimes flip in either direction, either on or off, without a conscious decision my part, but sometimes I have been able to flip it consciously. I'm not sure if there is a specific "default setting" that applies to all situations.
Not all writers start with the plot first. Most of the best authors first craft a compelling character and then let that character drive the story. It’s absolutely doable to write a story centering around an authentically portrayed psychopath, because all good story is boiled down to the formula of [person wants something + obstacle to getting what they want + tries to overcome obstacle and fails + learns what they actually needed which wasn’t what they wanted + accepts or rejects this life lesson]. Seems to me emotion doesn’t need to factor in. Even psychopaths struggle and must overcome obstacles, and of course they’re capable of learning and growth. Simply your description of a lifetime spent assimilating into mainstream life shows this.
So, what if an author wrote a story with an accurately depicted psychopathic character that was not explicitly named to be a psychopath?
According to your list of traits, a psychopath could make an excellent detective. I imagine solving puzzles would be a pleasure for a psychopath. Think Sherlock Holmes, for instance. Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him is certainly not neurotypical, and I believe was well-received. I think a female psychopath as a main character sounds interesting, and as a detective, the themes of love and revenge don’t need to be about her, but rather the neurotypicals that she interacts with.
Also, what interests me immensely is that you, Athena, have a Significant Other. As you emphatically stated, psychopaths do not love. But they do appear to find it beneficial to engage in long-term relationships with a dedicated partner. So, while love doesn’t drive a psychopath to couple monogamously (or at least, cohabitate with a dedicated person), the act of attaining and keeping a significant other is still a story that neurotypicals are interested in and something that you prove in your own writing is something a psychopath would do.
I certainly would find it an invigorating challenge to craft an engaging story starring an authentically psychopathic character, that would be recognizable to psychopaths but not readily to a neurotypical. But the challenge would be writing that character’s journey to intimacy with a life partner. As a female writer, like so many before me, I am thoroughly fascinated with the intimate day-to-day relational decisions that people make, and in that aspect, psychopaths are no different from other humans. They interact with other people and they have driving forces within them.
I think it would be superb to write a story that pulls back the curtain on the domestic life of a psychopath who has perfected her public mask and still must, to a certain extent, maintain even a mask in her own home- what powerful motivator would lead her to sacrifice the freedom of solitude in order to share her space and daily life with another person? Is it simply the multitude of small but ultimately meaningful advantages of cohabitation with a life partner, all tallied up to tip the scales to its favor?
Sounds like a story worth reading if written skillfully enough. The crime solving adventure is the A story and the relationship with the potential significant other is the B story that reveals what the psychopath needs rather than wants. She wants to be entertained, to be diverted from the tedium of mere survival, perhaps; what she needs, though, is a partner in life, and a meaning driven personal life. You’d be best qualified to tell me how far off base this characterization might be…
As a neurodivergent person myself, I often have to coldly and rationally tally up the advantages of remaining in a committed marriage and caring for my children when their behaviors wear on me. My emotions certainly muddy things up but can also lengthen my “stay” column when I include “love” as a reason to stick around when the going gets tough. A psychopath doesn’t have love on the “stay” list, but their other column “leave,” is considerably shorter as well, I imagine. Is irritation a reason to quit a relationship, for a psychopath, for instance? What pros might outweigh the financial and physical costs of child-rearing, as well as sacrifices of space and time?
Do psychopaths ever choose to procreate, and what reasons might lead them to do so? Do they ever keep and raise their children, or other people’s children? What motivations may exist for them to do that?
But in your case, you don’t have children, but you do have a significant other. Why do you stay? I think I can guess reasons to leave, but why stay?
These are the questions I would explore in crafting an authentic psychopathic character.
What are your thoughts on this, Athena?
I think that a psychopathic character is best left to a psychopath to write as a psychopath is the only one that understands how and why we think how we do. Anyone else would just be guessing and that guesswork is exactly what created the problem to begin with.
Do you intend to write any stories starring a psychopath, Athena? Do you know any psychopaths willing and able to do so? I, for one, would very much like to read them.
I don't know, maybe. Right now I am discussing writing a Snow White story from a different take with my Significant Other. We talked about it recently and sort of crafted a narrative that I am interested in pursuing.
Would you be up to sharing what you came up with? Either just broad strokes or, once the story is finished, the story itself. If it is private it is private.
Perhaps. I will consider it once I get around to writing it.
The thing I found myself asking as I read Nicole's comment was "Is need or motivation even a thing for a psychopath?" Those were the two notions that brought my eyes out on stalks.
Well, I need to eat, and want to survive, so there is that. As for all the rest of it, it tends to be interest that captures me in the moment as in the moment living tends to be how I relate to the world. I think that is more indicative of psychopathic motivation in general which is to live and enjoy it.
I’d be interested to hear the answer to your question, Karol. Are need or motivation things psychopaths experience?
We certainly have the need for food, water, shelter, and clothing, so in that regard we have needs. Motivation tends to be, "Ooo, that's interesting. Let's try that."
Okay, I think I get it… perhaps the problem, then, is all the mystique surrounding psychopaths makes them seem more interesting than they actually are (to neurotypicals). Writing a story starring a psychopath is like faithfully documenting a day in the life of a wild animal. NT fiction writers attribute characteristics to animals (personification) to make them more interesting and relatable to other NTs, but what the NT world considers “human” traits don’t exactly align with psychopaths… and giving them these traits in a story essentially removes the thing that makes them psychopaths. Based on the above comments about living in the moment and no motivations outside chasing creature comforts and stimulation, psychopaths sound really boring to a neurotypical. It sounds like animals that look like humans and are intelligent enough to fake being people, but they are only concerned with survival and pleasure.
I see now why a NT can’t write about a psychopath. Either they would try to make the character more interesting by adding NT traits, or they would make the psychopath seem like a painfully boring and base creature. Neither are attractive options.
But I don’t think that can actually be true, because Athena, your blog is interesting and you seem to have a motivation in writing it beyond mere amusement… but maybe that’s my block, I consider amusement an insufficient reason to do something? I’m confused but I guess that’s also the point made earlier… psychopaths are nearly impossible for NTs to adequately understand.
Life is an interesting thing to live, so interest and amusement are high motivators for us. However, we are still people and individuals, and that is what humanizes a character regardless of how their brain functions.
I think their observations and solutions to problems could be interesting even if they themselves would seem painfully base. The search for working understanding of surrounding world holds a spark of drama. But yeah, difficult thing to tackle.
Cases just bellow the cut-off seem more writer-friendly, because there is potential for small presence of NT elements and for those elements to clash with the rest of structure, but data is scarce.
I am not a psychopath, so I don't have a definitive answer to this question. So, I await commentary from Athena. But I just remember various things she's said that suggest that if these things existed at all for a psychopath, they would take a very different form than for an NT.
A character I thought had pro social psychopathic traits who was in that 'Sherlock Holmes' category was Patrick Jane from the Mentalist. Except of course the love he had for his wife and daughter that is a pretty big one since it was his only motivation.
But the way he talked and manipulated people constantly I thought was psychopathic. It is the kind of thought process that is easier to arrive at if you don't have emotions getting in the way so you can think of people in a more strategic way. He had no fear either. He was able to not follow rules and didn't get anxious from this.
He was purely driven by that loss which would make him objectively not psychopathic. I also think that if you forget to read the emotional drive into his actions you aren't fully grasping the character. It means that he will make decisions that are very poor or rash because he isn't logically thinking about things, he is emotionally pursuing an outcome that is of the highest priority to him. He is more than happy to hang the costs for himself and those around him.
That said, I enjoyed that show and forgot about it until you mentioned it.
True, but his character and the show itself was incoherent which means that parts can be picked out of a character.
For instance, the botched Red John operation. If they had killed him off at the end of Season 3 in that fantastic finale then it might have worked but the show made no sense with the addition of the magical Red John for those extra seasons.
While the character was strongly motivated by loss to the extent that he entered a mental institution after his wife was killed. I would say that the kind of tricks he played that had no sensitivity to others were outside general NT functioning. I would also say that to be able to look at others like that would likely include processing them in such a way as to not be dealing with a whole lot of your own emotion. Perhaps there is another explanation but I thought psychopathy could fit.
In the same vein as Red John though the character himself does not make sense imo. Looking at real fake psychics (Examples covered recently with full background by Steven Cambian of Truthseekers), they are generally people without two braincells to rub together.
Also, it seems to me what they did was create a character with motivations that were somewhat psychopathic. The fact, for instance, that he goes to sleep on shift, denotes a lack of anxiety to be sure. Then pasted onto him the longer term motivation. But on closer examination the second part of his motivations does not make sense because if you are living as a fake psychic, then I would think the toxicity of that would effect your homelife and having a perfect family life in those circumstances does not fit with reality.
I would say probably he’s a better candidate for sociopath than psychopath, but frankly, being manipulative and not having anxiety are hardly a case for being either. And the higher a person’s IQ, the less sympathetic they tend to be. A correlation I have noticed just anecdotally, and probably the writers noticed this as well. I’d say he’s just a neurotypical genius. Wired the same as most people, but so intelligent as to instinctively regard others as lesser and forget to treat them with compassion. My own husband is that way, and I erroneously believed at first that he might be a psychopath lol. But Athena works very hard to show how essentially incomprehensible to NTs true psychopaths are.
That's a good insight.
Ultimately I don't think we can know because the character isn't written well enough. In my view. But the idea that a neurotypical person with a high IQ shows enough unusualness to be considered divergent in a serious manner is an interesting one I think.
I mentioned before a guy who wrote a book on neurotypicals because he was very high IQ and got a lot of problems with them.
We are also using terms that aren't that well defined potentially as well. Like, I know a few neurotypicals that I think are really super cool. Really have it down. But if you put them in the same room with a stupid neurotypical it seems like a different species. But even with this there is definitely a set of troublesome behaviours that keep the term "neurotypical" alive. It doesn't seem like there is a better term to solve the innaccuracies with that one.
Agreed, and yes, the term neurotypical isn’t as useful as we’d like it to be… without scanning everyone’s brains once they enter biological adulthood, our only way to identify NTs is self identification and observation, both flawed and limited.
Geniuses are by definition not neurotypical. That is what distinguishes merely gifted people from geniuses.
Fair enough. I don’t suppose my husband is a genius but he’s pretty squarely neurotypical… but he is extremely intelligent and extremely capable, and has little patience for people with average or below-average intelligence. So we can use a different word than genius if that’s more acceptable.
Check out any of the currently streaming documentaries about the Twin Flames Universe, and look at Jeff Ayan. Definitely not a psychopath, but narcissist for sure. He’s a real world example of a neurotypical very comfortable with manipulating people, tricking them, and saying and doing whatever it takes to get what he wants. There’s a difference between being amoral and being neurodivergent. Certainly there can be crossover but morality can exist and be absent in NTs and NDs alike.
I plan on addressing that situation in a post. I did a post previously on Twin Flames, but that was before I had ever heard of the Twin Flames Universe. I watched both the documentaries on it and follow a creator that infiltrated the online group. I don't know how deep of a dive I will do on the actual cult/MLM but I will be addressing an overview of the whole concept.
I look forward to reading your thoughts
Addendum: I just read reviews of James Fallon’s book, the Psychopath Within, after it was mentioned by other commenters here, and now I have to ask Athena- are psychopaths capable of being moral? I assumed the answer to be yes, based on Athena’s writings, but admit I haven’t read everything Athena’s written, and perhaps I was incorrect. In any case, being amoral isn’t a guarantee of being psychopathic.
Yes, I have several posts on morality if you would like the links.
Have you ever read any of the Crystal Society books? I read the first book in the series. It's not technically about psychopathy. It's about an AI with some psychopathic traits that had a conscience-subroutine imposed on its other subroutines before it escaped. The story is written from the perspective of conflicting subroutines which are essentially 'people.' The series was interesting in terms of putting forward fundamentally alien psychologies which were nonetheless engaging.
I wonder if sociopathic characters would be more relatable than psychopathic ones, and if prospective authors might be steered in that direction. The notion of some trait being created through suffering would be one technique to foster reader empathy.
Did you have any thoughts on Killmonger from Black Panther as a sociopathic anti-hero / anti-villian?
No thoughts on either as I am not familiar with the first and found nothing interesting in the second so I don't recall almost any of it.