The Psychology of Serial and Mass Killers - Information About Pathological Narcissism

Written by Sam Vaknin

"Constructs" or "Structures" are permanent psychological patterns. This is not to say that they do not change - but they are capable only of slow change. Kohut and his Self-psychology disciples believed that the only viable constructs are comprised of self-selfobject experiences and that these structures are lifelong ones.

Melanie Klein harked back to archaic drives, splitting defences and archaic internal objects and part objects. Winnicott (and Balint and other, mainly British researchers) as well as other ego-psychologists thought that only infantile drive wishes and hallucinated oneness with archaic objects qualify as structures.

Horney is one of the precursors of the "Object Relations" school of psychodynamics. She said that personality was shaped mostly by environmental constraints, social or cultural. She believed that relationships with other humans in one's childhood determine both the shape and functioning of one's personality. She expanded the psychoanalytic repertoire. She added needs to Freud's drives.

Where Freud initially believed in the exclusivity of the sex drive as an agent of transformation (he later added other drives) - Horney believed that people (children) needed to feel secure, to be loved, protected, emotionally nourished and so on. She believed that the satisfaction of these needs or their frustration early in childhood are as important a determinant as any drive. Society is introduced through the parental door. Biology converges with social injunction to yield human values such the nurturance of children.

Horney's great contribution was the concept of anxiety. Freudian anxiety was a rather primitive mechanism, a reaction to imaginary threats arising from early childhood sexual conflicts. Horney argued convincingly that anxiety is a primary reaction to the very dependence of the child on adults for his survival. Children are uncertain (of love, protection, nourishment, nurturance) - so they become anxious.

Defences are developed to compensate for the intolerable and gradual realization that adults are only human: capricious, arbitrary, unpredictable, non-dependable. Defences provide both satisfaction and a sense of security. The problem still exists, even as the anxiety does, but they are "one step removed". When the defences are attacked or perceived to be attacked (such as in therapy) - anxiety is reawakened.

Karen B. Wallant in "Treating Addictions and the Alienated Self":

"The capacity to be alone develops out of the baby's ability to hold onto the internalization of his mother, even during her absences. It is not just an image of mother that he retains but also her loving devotion to him.

Thus, when alone, he can feel confident and secure as he continues to infuse himself with her love. The addict has had so few loving attachments in his life that when alone he is returned to his detached, alienated self.

This feeling-state can be compared to a young child's fear of monsters

So, the child learns to sacrifice a part of his autonomy, of who is in order to feel secure. Horney identified three neurotic strategies: submission, aggression, and detachment. The choice of strategy determines the type of personality, or rather of neurotic personality.

The submissive (or compliant) type is fake. He hides aggression beneath a facade of friendliness. The aggressive type is fake as well - at heart he is submissive. The detached neurotic withdraws from people. This cannot be considered an adaptive strategy.

It is by no means universally accepted that children go through a phase of separation from their parents and through the consequent individuation. Most psychodynamic theories (especially Klein, Mahler) are founded on this assumption. The child is considered to be merged with his parents until it differentiates itself (through object-relations).

But researchers like Daniel Stern dispute this hypothesis. Based on many studies it appears that what seems intuitively right is not necessarily right. In "The Interpersonal World of the Infant" (1985) Stern seems to, inadvertently, support Kohut by concluding that children possess selves and are separated from their caregivers from the very start. In effect, he says that the picture of the child, as depicted by psychodynamic theories, is influenced by the way adults see children and childhood in retrospect. Adult disorders (for instance, the pathological need to merge) are attributed to children and to childhood.

This view is in stark contrast to the belief that children accept any kind of parents (even abusive) because they depend on them for their self-definition. Attachment to and dependence on significant others is the result of the non-separateness of the child, go the classical psychodynamic/object-relations theories. The Self is a construct (within a social context, some add), an assimilation of the oft-imitated and idealized parents plus the internalization of the way others perceive the child in various social interactions. The self is, therefore, an internalized reflection, a simile, a series of introjected idealizations.

In some an intricate and multi-phased process, traumas are inevitable. In early childhood - especially in the formative years of infancy (ages 0 to 4 years) - traumas acquire an ominous aura, an evil, irreversible meaning. No matter how innocuous the event and the surrounding circumstances, the child's vivid imagination is likely to interpret it within the framework of a highly idiosyncratic horror story.