The Organic Red Herring
E.T. Barker

Let me say right off the top that I believe that psychopathy can be, if not genetically predisposed to, at least biochemically caused by some toxic process or organic damage that is not easily detectable. I’ve examined the parents of psychopaths, taking a detailed history starting six months before conception, and I couldn’t find what I thought was failure of attachment or difficulties in the first three years. I am sure there are some psychopaths whose pathology is caused by something organically wrong.

But to believe that psychopathy is always or mostly genetically or biologically determined is not just a misconception, but a very dangerous misconception. It's dangerous because it is so attractive. It's attractive because it eases any guilt we may have individually as parents or collectively as a society and it is attractive because if the cause is organic there is the possibility of finding a cure that doesn't necessitate changing the way we think about and do things. So we leap at any shred of evidence that psychopathy is organically caused.

It gives us hope that it is not us personally that has caused the damage. For the defence of rationalization, as we all know, no evidence at all is sufficient! The fact that there is indeed some good evidence that some psychopaths probably are organically caused is a guilty persons dream come true. And a researchers dream come true, because the money for further research will be more readily available.

But all of this flies in the face of the uncomfortable fact that we know that any child can be made into a psychopath through failure of attachment. We know that. We have known it for a long time. There is no doubt about it. But we want to deny that because it means that we as parents may have caused irreparable damage to our child, and that knowledge doesn't feel very good. And as a society we don't like it because it means we have to change a lot of established patterns or ways we do things -- our priorities -- in order to arrange things so that nothing gets in the way of attachment in the earliest years.

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