Did he ever love me? is the title of Liane Leedom’s work in which she analyses the love relationships between psychopaths and their partners based mainly on their testimony. Liane Leedom’s conclusions establish four phases in this type of relationship: induction, commitment, disconnection and recovery. However, although she explains how an adult can get involved in a relationship with a psychopath, she doesn’t answer the question of whether a psychopath is capable of feeling the emotion we know as love.

On the other hand, Laval University establishes a relationship between the type of attachment and psychopathy . Psychopaths tend to have an avoidant style of attachment, which manifests itself in the difficulty of establishing interpersonal relationships with a high degree of intimacy. The basic question we are asking here derives from just that: can a psychopath feel true love, or just a substitute? Let’s see.

Are psychopaths capable of love?

A psychopath is capable of establishing a romantic relationship and, in it, manipulating the victim. But this does not contradict the possibility that the psychopath may be in love with his partner or love his family. To understand this it is necessary to define what psychopathy is and to define what love is.

Psychopathy

Primary psychopaths, those who make our hair stand on end and become superstars of crime or of the stock market and business world, are characterized by two fundamental features: low fear and pleasure in the face of others’ pain . These characteristics show a dysfunction in the brain structures that deal with emotions and, moreover, are the ones that cause the lack of empathy: fear is the precursor of guilt and pain is the precursor of compassion.

If a person is unable to feel fear, it is logical that he or she is not afraid of the consequences of his or her actions and therefore does not feel guilty about them, he or she is simply immune to them. When the pleasure center is activated in the same individual by visualizing scenes of others’ pain, it means that his system of compassion is shut down. And so the primary psychopath was born.

Love

On the other hand, love could be defined as an emotional state that combines at the psychological level a motivation for affiliation (related to the need for attachment), socially learned attitudes and expectations, and manifest behavior. All this is sustained on a neurobiological basis that includes different activation zones in the brain and the segregation of certain neurotransmitters such as oxytocin and dopamine.

Dopamine is related to pleasure and reinforcement . Its response in psychopaths not only corresponds to that of non-psychopaths when we talk about neutral and appeasing situations, but its secretion can be a greater, much greater prize in the face of reinforcement (in secondary psychopaths), especially when pain is involved (in primary psychopaths).

It seems that the emotional flattening of the psychopath clashes with characteristics and behaviors that are socio-culturally attributed to love. But the two main features we have mentioned have nothing to do with love. The psychopath’s emotional problems have to do with the suffering of others, fear and pain, not with all emotions.

This means that a psychopath can in principle love, but with his own rules . He may not show any concern or upset if his teenager doesn’t come home on time, but still wish he would show up and love her. She may lie and be unfaithful to her partner, but still feel that she wants to be by his side. Of course, these psychopathic “rules” don’t have to be accepted by your family or society (and, in fact, many times they shouldn’t be), but they do exist, and there’s a certain moral code behind them.

A different emotionality

The point is that the love of a psychopath does not include the socio-cultural extras associated with this emotion (fidelity, compassion, sincerity…), nor does it include those accessories that come from the emotions of pain or fear. The psychopath will not feel love in the same way that you and I do: in his or her mind it’s a limited emotion, since the structures involved in emotions, such as the amygdala and the hippocampus, function in an abnormal way.

Furthermore, will be a type of love with its own facets of antisocial branding (as dopamine is activated in its own way). But love, in a peculiar and crude way, is also a reality in the psychopath’s mind.

This particular way of loving leads to toxic relationships, where the psychopath’s partner suffers constantly. However, it is possible that for the psychopath these are also unsatisfactory relationships in which he never gets exactly what he wants (as in the crimes he commits) due to his own limitations.

The debate is open

It has been shown that psychopaths are capable of feeling compassion for themselves and of feeling empathy when they are instructed to do so. For his part, Joe Newman proposes with an empirical basis that psychopaths have a tunnel attention span, where although they feel this emotional range, for them they are a secondary condition that they can easily ignore in order to focus on their goals, a theory that fits well with secondary psychopathy. All this proves that in psychopaths emotionality is not just a void, maybe it’s a very dark hole, but it certainly contains something.

Taking into account these questions, the debate remains to discern whether it is possible to call this psychopathic emotion which seems to imitate it only partially, or whether love, as romantic idealists claim, goes much further.

From my point of view, the term “love” is contaminated by many socio-cultural constructions that correspond to myths of romantic love and that also do not correspond to the reality of emotion. For this reason it is necessary to delimit at a psychological and neurobiological level the definition of love in order to answer this question, and that is why we may never know. In any case, there is empirical evidence that psychopaths are capable of feeling something that, at the very least, resembles love.