Posted by boB on April 19, 2000, at 19:32:33
In reply to Re: Sociopathy - a mental illness?, posted by Cindy W on April 19, 2000, at 9:31:53
Criminologists are reaching a concensus that there is clearly a cycle of abuse. Police exectutives and attorney's general are keenly awarr of the cycle. In a book "Why they kill" a renegade criminologist, now teaching at some east coast catholic school,(it is sort of a biographical account of the sources studies, written by a pulitzer prize winning writer) the source guy posits that ALL violent, sociopathic behavior results from the following:
• Victimization (being beat up)
• Personal horification (seeing others beat up when you are powerless to help)
• Violent training (being taught that if your come home with a black eye but did't throw a punch you will get it again at home)
• violent performances (trying violence for yourself - if it works, and one wins social approval for their performance, and especially if one stands up to their abuser, they are well on their way to your prison nightmare, which is:)
• Virulance (uncontrolable violence)The writer said the source (sorry I don't recall the name, and my efforts on this site are fast and free) had interviewed hundreds of prisoners about their history of violence and found the pattern to be very consistent. He said it is important to stop bullying and abuse at an early age before it escalates into irreperable violent training. But the scholar in question says the process (he calls it "violentization") can occur at anytime, such as in a gang intitiation, in a prison environment, or in military training.
There likely are physiological signs of a sociopathic mind, but this gets to the heart of that nature/nurture, biology/pscyhology argument. For many people, "weird hangups" such as guilt and penis envy, that were the stock and trade of psychoanalysis in its 20th century heydey are now nothing but superstition. Scholars and amature fans of psychology are having a hard time grasping that life experiences leave a biological, physiological imprint, and that the imprinting mechanisms are suspended in social conditions. There are drugs to treat sociaopathy - cyanide comes to mind. Just a joke. There are diseases, if you want to call them that, that we will best treat socially and systematically.
The war on drugs is serving to insure that otherwise non-violent people are housed with the most sociopathic elements of our society, so that otherwise non-violent people are being trained in the Prison University of Sociopathy. This will insure that they continue to teach their contagious illness to their children, along with such wonderful skills as promiscuous homosexuality. The war is counterproductive because it creates injuries that will inspire well-meaning pdocs to try to prescribe legal drugs that can never repair the damage done by the process of violent training. The only lasting cure for socoiopathy is a systematic effort to counter the training processes that create sociopathy. In my thinking, it is either a sickness or a criminal act for a scholar to take a position that society cannot address the root causes of sociopathy.
(see also the national association of attorney's general report on youth violence, Bruised Inside)
poster:boB
thread:30106
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000411/msgs/30612.html