Free Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior by Robert I. Simon

Because of his intense selfcenteredness and grandiose image of himself, he could not tolerate any insights without feeling the threat of psychological disintegration. His antisocial acts were driven by the need to exploit and depreciate others to maintain a grandiose, powerful view of himself.
    The master spy Jack Walker’s exploitation of others is described by author Pete Earley:
    John A. Walker, Jr., had an uncanny skill to see the fragilities of those around him. He was able to identify flaws in their personalities and, like a chameleon, he became whatever he needed to become, whatever they wanted him to be, in order to take advantage of them, manipulate them, and profit from their weaknesses. This was not done by chance. It was calculated, precise.
    Although psychopaths can detect the foibles of others readily and exploit them, they lack psychological insight into their own vulnerabilities. For instance, their devaluation of everyone else as a defense against the enormous envy that they feel toward others creates a blind spot in their interaction with the world. It often happens that while the psychopath is busy conning his or her victims, he or she is easily gulled by another predator.
    Psychopaths experience chronic feelings of emptiness and of personal isolation. They have stimulus hunger , a need for constant stimulation, perhaps to dispel their diffuse sense of the meaninglessness of life. Some find this state unbearable and kill themselves. But what keeps the vast majority of them from doing so? Dr. Kernberg describes the motivation of the most common type of psychopath, the passiveparasitic type:
    [He or she finds] gratification of receptive-dependent needs —food, objects, money, sex, privileges—and the symbolic power exerted over others, by extracting such gratifications from them. To get the needed supplies while ignoring others as persons and protecting oneself from revengeful punishment is the meaning of life. To eat, to defecate, to sleep, to have sex, to feel secure, to take revenge, to feel powerful, to be excited, all without being discovered by the surrounding dangerous though anonymous world—this constitutes a sort of adaptation to life, even if it is the adaptation of a wolf disguised to live among the sheep, with the real danger coming from other wolves, similarly disguised, against whom the protective “sheepishness” has been erected.
    The conflict that psychopaths experience is not that of the normal person, between the push of internal impulses and the pull of conscience, but the conflict between their own impulses and the rest of society. Unable to self-reflect, unable to feel sadness about lost opportunities or relationships, stuck in a pattern of deep mood swings, psychopaths exhibit a value system that is more like that of a child than that of an adult. What they admire are outward things—beauty, wealth, power, adoration by others—and what they discount (and despise) are hard-won abilities, achievements, acceptance of responsibility, and loyalty to ideals. The psychopath is a study of the triumph of style over substance. As Jack Walker stated, “Everyone is corrupt… everyone has a scam.” Therefore, psychopaths have no conscience to trouble them and prevent them from such usual psychopathic activities as lying, cheating, stealing, forging, swindling, and prostitution (among the crimes of the passive-exploitation, parasitic type of psychopath), or from assault, armed robbery, and murder (among the crimes of the aggressive psychopath). Earley summed up his impressions of Walker in this way:
    Most of the criminals whom I have met as a journalist seem to have had some moral code of conduct, however twisted and slim, beyond which they could not trespass without traces of guilt and occasional remorse. John didn’t. He was totally without principle. There was no right or wrong, no morality or immorality, in his eyes. There were only his wants, his own needs, whatever those might be at