Is the Mind of the Psychopath so Distinctive? Is Violence Related to Derogation? Evidence from Adult Attachment Interviews in a Prison Setting

Obscurity surrounds the developmental psychopathology of psychopathy and violence. How far might psychoanalytic and attachment perspectives be critical for understanding the basis for such pathology? And how can we complement clinical case reports about affected individuals with controlled studies that capture psychoanalytically relevant evidence derived from grouped data? In this study, we adopted the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) as our measure of psychodynamic functioning. We interviewed men who were housed in a secure hospital for criminal offenders, and employed the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) to select 11 psychopathic individuals, whom we compared with 8 criminals who had relatively low scores on this measure. Results were that the majority of each group were categorized as Cannot Classify (CC). Across groups, a substantial proportion of individuals were Unresolved with respect to trauma and loss (U), and there was a significantly higher prevalence of derogation among offenders who showed violence. In several respects, therefore, both criminals with psychopathy and those with antisocial personality disorder exhibited atypical forms of emotionally configured thinking, and across groups, derogation was related to violence. In certain important respects, the psychodynamic functioning of individuals with psychopathy was not different in kind to that of a comparison group of non-psychopaths.