Personality is a construct that refers to the pattern of thoughts, beliefs, worldviews and behaviors largely acquired throughout the life cycle that are maintained through situations and time.

Some of these patterns are dysfunctional and do not allow the subject to adapt correctly to the environment, making him suffer severe difficulties or causing damage to others. This last one is the case with disorders such as antisocial or the one we are going to talk about in this article: the sadistic personality disorder , a phenomenon that produces a lot of interest, to the point that there are countless films that talk about this type of person.

Sadistic personality disorder

Sadistic personality disorder is a pathological pattern of cruel, abusive and aggressive behavior that manifests itself consistently throughout life and across situations. As with sexual sadism, the subject feels enjoyment and satisfaction from the observation of the suffering and humiliation of others. To do so, they can use everything from physical violence to humiliation, lies and rumours to cause harm, with no concrete objective beyond the pleasure of doing so.

Violence and humiliation are often used with the aim of dominating others for mere pleasure, without the cruelty employed being a means of achieving other objectives. It is also common for them to succeed in imposing their will through fear and coercion. They tend to be controlling people and tend to limit the freedom of those around them, especially with their closest friends, as well as to show a fascination with death and violence in general.

It should be noted that this disorder is not limited to a specific person or situation, nor does it refer to the mere use of the pain of others as an object of sexual satisfaction (that is: people who manifest sexual sadism do not have to have a sadistic personality), but rather we are talking about a generalized pattern of behavior .

Link to criminality

It may be easy to attribute criminality to mental and personality disorders, but as a rule most subjects who commit crimes (including blood crimes) are people without any kind of psychopathological disorder. It is necessary to take into account that although we are talking about people who enjoy the humiliation and pain of others, this does not imply that they will incur in any type of crime .

However, there is a higher prevalence of this disorder and of psychopathy in certain types of crimes: this is what happens with a large part of serial killers. In other cases the prevalence is much lower, but sometimes in some studies carried out with prison populations it can be found that some of the subjects who commit sexual abuse/ aggression or mistreatment have typical features of this disorder.

Despite this, it must be stressed that suffering from this disorder does not necessarily lead to criminality, in fact most criminals are individuals without a mental or personality pathology, contrary to what is usually believed.

Causes

Although the possible causes of this disorder are not yet known, as a personality disorder the origin of sadistic personality disorder is found in the interaction of biological temperament with experience and environment.

In this sense, it is proposed that in many cases biochemical and brain elements may partly arise (brain areas such as the limbic and brain reward systems may be involved) and learning, such as in situations of domestic violence or sexual or physical abuse continued throughout the subject’s life that he has learned by modeling and associated with power and/or pleasure.

Lack of information and current situation

However, there are doubts about its existence as a personality disorder: although it is clear that there are people with sadistic attitudes as some psychopaths do, there is not enough evidence to fully characterize this type of disorder and even to determine whether we are really dealing with a personality disorder that is different and separable from others that already exist.

The diagnostic classifications focus especially on the behavioural without going into detail on the emotional and cognitive aspects. Further research is required in this regard in order to obtain more data. Although collected by the DSM-III and by Millon as a personality disorder, sadistic personality disorder is currently listed as a diagnostic category proposed for research and collected in the appendices of the largest diagnostic manual for the classification of American mental disorders, the DSM.

Link to psychopathy and antisocial disorder

Although at first glance it can be seen that antisocial disorder and sadistic personality disorder are closely related (in fact, in many cases they concur in the same subject), these classifications are not synonymous.

In all three cases, there is a shared dominant attitude and a tendency to mislead and violate rights in order to achieve their goals, often with an absence or difficulty for empathy and remorse.

However, the obtaining of pleasure and gratification from suffering and domination, which are the core of this disorder, are not absolutely definitive of either the psychopath (not all psychopaths are sadists) or the subject with antisocial disorder. Likewise, a subject can be sadistic without thereby mocking or violating social norms and laws, which is strange in antisocial personality disorder.

Bibliographic references:

  • American Psychiatric Association (2002). DSM-IV-TR. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Spanish edition. Barcelona: Masson. (Original in English, 2000).
  • American Psychiatric Association (1987). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 3rd revised edition (DSM-III-R). Washington, D.C..
  • Caballo, V. (2001). An introduction to personality disorders in the 21st century. Behavioral psychology, 9(3);455-469.