In many respects, the role of a shrink is ticking boxes.
Psychiatrists and psychologists, as their respective functions require, employ the diagnostic criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders towards reductive classification of a specific condition. To wit, Antisocial Personality Disorder, unofficially sociopathy or even psychopathy, requires a minimum of three identified of seven diagnostic criteria, manifesting as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others…”
Editor’s Note: Enjoy Part I HERE
Writers, on the other hand… writers who want to invest their story with all the suspense that derives from an intriguingly, appallingly, expectation-confoundingly complex villain or an upping-the-ante anti-hero – they needn’t be so constrained. For them, the DSM provides not a tool for narrowing options, but rather one for creating layer upon layer of intricate entanglement and convoluted entrapment in the detestable and irresistible psyche of evil.
That’s the appeal, to writers, of exploring the psychological underpinnings of psychopathy – genre thriller writers obviously, but no less relevant to writers of literary fiction, and re-fashioners of the criminal outrage de jour into the now-ubiquitous genre of True Crime (so ubiquitous, in fact, that getting the requisite psychological richness should be an imperative to these writers, to differentiate their work from the morass of crap out there)… anyway, the appeal to writers of developing multifaceted and substantiable malevolence is in the anything goes license that psychodynamics allow their “show don’t tell” intentions. This is a freedom that comes with caveats, though – the most important of which is to never do it formulaically. After all, every cack-handed second-to-fifth rate police procedural has had at least one episode in which the suspect is apprehended by the doughty officers, after digging into a past to reveal the so-called serial killer triad… “Ah, bed wetting too, as we just heard from his old nanny… on top of the juvenile arson and the disinterred corpses of seventeen pets in the backyard of his childhood home… yes, we’ve got him now…”
So, let’s look at those seven criteria, as the American Psychiatric Association ordains them, to explore their potential for mosaic-like construction of character history, motives, aspirations and definingly malign peccadilloes:
- Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors… while, from the writer’s perspective, never ceasing to be mindful of how the deliberately provocative or provocatively deliberate violation of social manners, mores, customs and taboos can be even more shocking, more compelling and repelling to a reader’s sensibilities than transgressions of the law…
- Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure… while the profit motive unquestionably fuels many a plotline, it’s the “pleasure” aspect in which complex character-drawing comes into its own – to bring that pleasure to life in the reader’s mind… through an ambiguous sneer/smile, a gesture of unsuspected and patronizing consolation to the poor oblivious conned mark, a signature phrase of aberrant philosophising or uniquely bizarre sophistry, an idiosyncratic taste to be satisfied before, during or after the successful con, verbal or behavioral quirks that connote inadvertent prickings of conscience, or else the all-encompassing arousal to do it again, better, bigger… any, all and many more are the ways to make the reader infer that pleasure, even feel it themselves, in a visceral way that makes them abhor and perversely admire those manipulative skills as that character has implemented them, with understated subtlety and gracefulness, or overtly romantic dash and a splash of sprezzatura…
- Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead… this is not merely indicative of brutish impatience, but is more enlarging of a sociopathic nature in respect of the malignant narcissism that derives from absolute entitlement, the contempt for the world at large with its plodding predictability, a contempt that the virtuoso-rendered villain will project onto the reader as an intimately embracing and constraining folie a deux…
- Irritability and aggressiveness… it’s true that the formularized thug has their place in genre thrillers, but the compelling narrative exponents of evil eschew cheap ruffianism – it’s beneath them, beneath their literary or cinematic composers, as much as it is beneath the rapt attention of the reader… even unthinking aggression does not need to be represented unthinkingly… the escalating array of triggers, the slow build to explosive release, the physiological markers of emergent unreasonable aggression, how the visual frame of reference narrows, the smell and taste of the uncontrollable urge to cause pain, the particular piquancy of revenge served cold or piping, piping hot…
- Reckless disregard for safety of self and others… criminal masterminds think big in terms of carnage… but the axes of misanthropic unconcern and obliviousness to personal preservation can be algebraically plotted to a myriad of moral complications…
- Consistent irresponsibility… failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations… perhaps the most singular aspect of immersively enthralling villainy is the nature and make-up of their personal moral system… even the irredeemably immoral or amoral possess their own compelling conception of individual morality… in the sociopath, this is frequently tied to their simultaneous persecution complex and delusions of grandeur that make them reject the moral responsibilities that the rest of us observe, the intrinsic grasp of the social contract understood by even the most unversed in moral philosophy, the mutual obligation of one to all and all to one (the sewer of social media notwithstanding)… villainy is the essential rejection of contractarian ethics… character richness deriving from malevolence must exemplify a personal moral code that is cohesive on its possessor’s terms, even if it is loathsome on our own – even the most unreasoning villain must act within the bounds of their own reasons… the extent to which the reader can become inclined to suspend personal moral qualms, or even become stickily enmeshed in the self-vindicating moral casuistry of a character’s malignancy, is testament to the richness of their reading experience.
- Lack of remorse… related to the above, to the distinctly sui generis nature of a private moral framework which does not feel subject to compunctions of regret because its conception of right and wrong, and the right to do wrong, is mis-wired… and more psychologically intriguing, more embracing of human complexity than DSM’s “lack of remorse,” is the exploration of misplaced or misdirected remorse… the villain is not one-dimensionally unfeeling, at least not if they are to sustain the reader’s attachment – the villain is all too feeling, in ways that make us feel exposed, vulnerable, violated and even, perhaps, unsettlingly, culpably involved.
Some of these diagnostic criteria seem, prima facie, antithetical to others. Only, though, through the seductive interpretive lens of attribution theory, whereby we tend to characterize what happens to others as deriving from their innate character flaws, while we conceive of our own circumstances as created by the multifariously complicated dynamics between the external world and our richly intricate inner life. We need to be reminded that we, all of us, contain multitudes. To writers, these diagnostic criteria are not for character diagnosis. They are for character enlargement, narrative enlargement, enlargement of the whole damned imagined world. It’s not a matter to cross each symptom off a list, chapter by chapter, as they’re each sequentially given a guernsey. Rather, it’s to explore what any of them can do, in isolation or jigsaw-like in combination, to intensify characterisation, motivation, and opportunities for facilitating, tightening, or expanding plot resolution and denouement… To be continued
