I find it interesting to study psychopathy to get into the meat of, "why is this character the way he or she is?" Most villainous characters as well as a few heroes in fiction are regarded as psychopaths. Ex. Despite Deadpool being an anti-hero, or sometimes being a superhero, he is regarded in my opinion a psychopath in some cases but a sociopath in most cases.
Why do I say that? Well the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is that a psychopath does not know or is familiar about the difference between right and wrong, however a sociopath does, but they just do not care. As in the case of Wade Wilson as Deadpool, he does know right from wrong, he just doesn't care. The Joker on the other hand is a classical psychopath.
Now, I'm not saying all psychopaths are evil or are messed up, there are some who can be "nice" and well-mannered like sociopaths.
As in the case of my character, Richard Love, he is in fact a borderline psychopath. Why? He is bold and cares less of the ramifications of his actions.
Another difference is that the making of a psychopath is generally genetic while sociopaths are made due to their environment.
What do you guys think?
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
Writing Psychopathic and Sociopathic characters
Ha, I do like exploring messed up characters (I had a major one in the Godstrain) but I tend to shy away from terms like psychopaths and sociopaths.
Firstly, I dislike attempts to pigeon hole the vast gamut of human behavior into neat little boxes. It could be argued that lots of us have psychopathic tendencies here and there (in that we don't often see the right or wrong of a particular matter), so what, are we saying a 'true' psychopath just has 'LOTS' of these moments. And sociopaths… Do they always NOT care, or just some times? How often, what percentage of life, do you have to not care to cross over into sociopath territory? I know I sometimes don't care… :/
Second, modern psychology, with its material reductionist tendencies, is inherently deterministic, meaning that, at its root, it must declare that we don't have freewill. None of us! And I get that (freewill, when thought deeply about, seems to have metaphysical qualities, which are abhorrent to psychology, and the sciences in general). Nevertheless I believe we do have freewill in some form, but that's a whole 'nuther debate, but that also means I have to cast a sideways glance at many modern psychological 'truths'!
That said, I really do like exploring messed up characters! I just think differently on how the 'messed up-ness' comes to be!
I have sociopathic, psychopathic, narcissistic, OCD, bipolar, etc. characters. Not necessarily bad guys (in fact, most of my characters run in the gray area), and I mostly avoid labels. I do a lot of reading about psychology and I use real people as inspiration. First person accounts from people with various personality quirks/conditions are especially helpful (but can be disturbing to read at times).
The completely non-empathetic character(s) serve as a good contrast for overly-empathetic ones, so it is an interesting range to explore. Technically, doctors call it antisocial personality disorder – not sociopath/psychopath. It's basically a lack of empathy, but it can also include having no moral compass. Any character that has no regard for others while pursuing goals falls into this. "Good businessmen" easily fall into the sociopath category. The climb to the top means putting yourself first (or only). The most interesting empathy-less characters in fiction are the charismatic ones that put on a good show to get their way. It's fun to write, too, for a character who delights in manipulating people. (That is in the realm of the psychopath.)
I have a more recent character, Jack Talbott, who is pretty classically sociopathic. He's fun to be with, throws parties, and is pretty likeable. But he makes no deep connections to anyone. He takes nothing seriously. If someone stands in his way, he has no qualms with leaving them behind or destroying them outright. He appears rebellious and shallow and makes no pretense that he's not. He can run hot-blooded if crossed.
I also had/have characters in my story with psychopathic traits. Manipulative and calculating, playing the whole world like a game. Good at "blending in" and more cold-blooded.
(Btw, the character I think of as a textbook classic sociopath is Daffy Duck. Lol )
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is not deterministic. At its core it holds that the individual is the complete master of herself despite any illness. And realistically in a world with freewill all you can control or change is yourself because all else is beyond your control and that has to be acknowledged and acceptec for therapy to be successful.
Despite having certain behavior or thoughts that are "psychppathic" most are no more a psychopath than anyone who drinks beer id an alcoholic. It's the pattern of behavior, not the specific behavior. It's the whole personality not just a few activities. It's not a pigeonhole so much as defining the parts of the spectrum manifest in a human mind.
At $125 for 45 minutes I've tried to get the most for my money.
A good way to approach a sociopathic or psychopathic character is determining when the behavior becomes a disorder. Look at the character Monk from the TV series. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and over time it receded into just the behavior. There is also how an individual rationalizes her behavior that determines behavior versus disorder.
Or not. Your choice. In the end you could look at it all as a toolbox for defining and working on things as opposed to a rigid system. You can throw around the terms but there's a lot of little things across a broad spectrum that make up that disorder and personality type. And thats the meat of characterization in fiction ain't it?
bravo1102 wrote:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is not deterministic…
*Ahem* In a totally material universe (no deities, no souls, no minds beyond the physical brain…) EVERYTHING is deterministic, including how your mind works. So says Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and a few other materialists. To deny this is to implicitly admit there is more to reality that the purely physical (and that's a whole 'nuther can o' worms)…
I should know - I'm an obsessive/compulsive psycho-sociopath about this stuff!! :D
I do not like to have psychopathic villains because they're not very relatable or understandable, by definition they are not based on normal people, they're freaks.
You can't sympathise with the motivations of a psychopath, they're simply an idiot who should be put down :)
They're good villains to have if you don't want to put much effort into them I think, which is why most bully-level characters in TV shows and villains in bad movies are psychopaths- like say any post apocalyptic movie, Mad Max for example.
———————-
That is not to say that if you stick a psychopath in your story you're being lazy or that all psychopaths are cardboard villains it's just that they're very often used that way.
Fiction has a much greater proportion of psychopaths than there are in reality. :D
Sociopathic/narcissistic behavior does seem pretty prevalent in real life "villains" though.
Writing villains is tricky. I usually look to history/reality for inspiration. Just reading comments on any FaceBook article or YouTube video is eye opening if you need to get into the mentality of asshats and unfeeling crazies.
(I dunno if anyone would talk that way in real life, but there is some great fictional-level evil to online personas.)
usedbooks wrote:I think that's how we often characterise "villainous" behaviour because we are appalled by it and don't really want to understand the reasons behind it or the motivations of the perpetrator.
Sociopathic/narcissistic behavior does seem pretty prevalent in real life "villains" though.
But from everything I've heard, actual psychopaths/sociopaths are not nearly as common and we'd think.
The problem is that pretty much any violent or criminal act is "antisocial" by definition, but there could be a whole number of reasons for why those acts are committed. Saying it's psychopathic means we don't have to explore them.
If it WAS done by a psychopath though, then we can't.
From a writing standpoint, I don't see the purpose of trying to figure out what category of wacko a given character falls into. I remember when I was taking a creative writing course in college, I had a classmate who would actually take notes from a psychology textbook to flesh out her characters, which struck me as equal parts lazy and robotic.
I've dealt with a lot of bizarre characters in my work: cannibal hookers, pretentious snuff film makers, serial killer cops… I've never once tried to psychoanalyze any of them. They're all monsters, some lovable and some not so much. Trying to determine what species of derangement they're ailing from is a bit pedantic in my opinion… like when people obsess over whether Star Wars is science fiction or fantasy. Does it really matter?!
(Star Wars is fantasy, btw)
KimLuster wrote:Ahem, they're not psychologists. You don't learn coping skills from a physicist or evolutionary biologist. There is room for the numinous in CBT. What determines you is you. The universe is what it is and you can't control it but you can control you. There can be a whole other universe inside you, one formed of your experiences and biology but the mind is so much more than that. That kind of belief system can be part of coping skills because seeing everything as determined can defeat the object of therapy before it's even begun.bravo1102 wrote:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is not deterministic…
*Ahem* In a totally material universe (no deities, no souls, no minds beyond the physical brain…) EVERYTHING is deterministic, including how your mind works. So says Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and a few other materialists. To deny this is to implicitly admit there is more to reality that the purely physical (and that's a whole 'nuther can o' worms)…
I should know - I'm an obsessive/compulsive psycho-sociopath about this stuff!! :D
—
Back to fictional characters. The writer is creating a person so you could use a psych book to get ideas about human behavior. Or you could make them up. I'll give the characters the behaviors and aspects of the mental illness or I could just let them grow as the story gets told. Sometimes the definitions help you to be able to get into a characters head and other times it can stifle creativity. If you're writing a psychological character study, fine, but an epic fantasy or a superhero comic? Creating a sociopath or psychopath can be the beginning of character creation but not the end.
bravo1102 wrote:KimLuster wrote:Ahem, they're not psychologists. You don't learn coping skills from a physicist or evolutionary biologist. There is room for the numinous in CBT. What determines you is you. The universe is what it is and you can't control it but you can control you. There can be a whole other universe inside you, one formed of your experiences and biology but the mind is so much more than that. That kind of belief system can be part of coping skills because seeing everything as determined can defeat the object of therapy before it's even begun…bravo1102 wrote:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is not deterministic…
*Ahem* In a totally material universe (no deities, no souls, no minds beyond the physical brain…) EVERYTHING is deterministic, including how your mind works. So says Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and a few other materialists. To deny this is to implicitly admit there is more to reality that the purely physical (and that's a whole 'nuther can o' worms)…
I should know - I'm an obsessive/compulsive psycho-sociopath about this stuff!! :D
I agree with you about the above, and that's kinda my point. To me, it seems that if I saw everything as being determined, then certain coping skills (including CBT) would lose their power, as I wouldn't believe I truly had the freewill to use them. The universe (which includes me and everything I've ever done and will do) would have a fatalistic meant-to-be feel. But since I don't believe the universe is completely determined, and that we do have freewill to some extent, I know certain therapies that urge us to believe we have the power and will to change ourselves do indeed work!! Those that try to excuse us by passing the blame to our genes, rearing, or environment, I tend to find abhorrent (I do acknowledge those things can have tremendous influence, I just don't believe they're the 'unbeatable' forces some modern psychologists and scientists suggest they are…)
Anyway, doesn't seem to me we're in any real disagreement, and we've derailed the topic enough - back to the characters!!
I think, if you're writing about someone who has a disease, and the progression of said disease is a plot point, then it definitely makes sense to know as much as you can about that disease. So if you're writing a character like 'Monk,' then yeah you probably need to know everything there is to know about OCD (and whatever else he had). But if you're just writing a character who's a jerk, and you're going through a psych textbook writing down bullet points for Type A personality and antisocial disorders… congratulations, you just outsourced your creative process to a textbook!
Kinda reminds me of that anecdote about Laurence Olivier's comments to Dustin Hoffman on the set of 'Marathon Man' (1976). Hoffman put himself through all sorts of physical torture to convincingly play his role, and Olivier finally quipped to him, "My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?" Just try writing. Don't pretend you're a doctor. Readability trumps strict medical adherence every time.
ozoneocean wrote:Depending on who you talk to, it's not so much as NO free will as opposed to LESS free will. Genes determine certain traits of behavior but one still has to be able to control something of themselves or therapy is futile. And that's one of the points of that school of thought. Therapy is useless because genes and environments have us trapped.
As to the "no free will" deterministic thing, some psychologists DO believe that. There's still a school of thinking that supports it.
They don't take it as far as physics, it's more about genes and stuff like that.
Try using that to talk someone out of suicide. It might look good on paper and in the laboratory but not so good in practice.
But it might be a good angle for a story. Tell a tale about no free will to prove we have free will.
ozoneocean wrote:
As to the "no free will" deterministic thing, some psychologists DO believe that. There's still a school of thinking that supports it.
They don't take it as far as physics, it's more about genes and stuff like that.
But unless you believe in some sort of mind dualism (that the mind and the brain ain't the same thing), like a soul, spirit, anything but the mind being only an emergent property of the mushy gray stuff in our heads, then 'genes and stuff' ARE, ultimately, still physics!
According to most parapsychologists a soul or spirit is also physics, just physics we don't understand yet. But any psychologist worth listening to will tell you are more than just your genes and environment. I've had these discussions with mental health professionals.
bravo1102 wrote:
According to most parapsychologists a soul or spirit is also physics, just physics we don't understand yet. But any psychologist worth listening to will tell you are more than just your genes and environment. I've had these discussions with mental health professionals.
Certainly! It won't work otherwise! If you only believe you are just your genes and environment, how can you overcome your genes and environment?! Also, most people in the world that believe reality is comprised only of physics we currently understand (even educated people like psychologists) don't follow that through to its logical conclusion. If reality is only nothing more than the physics we know, then causal determinism, by necessity, must be true, and we don't have freewill (thinking we do is but an illusion…)
For the record, I don't believe reality is only the physics we currently know (and that's a whole 'nuther can o' worms!). And we DO have freewill! But we've beat this horse before a few times already…
The conclusion may be logical but it is inconvenient and humans do not like inconvenient.
Besides humans do not perceive physics but they do see and experience their own choices. Which is more real to them? An idea expressed by a collection of words or their own life experience?
All your logical syllogisms are in the end nothing more than expulsions of rarified gases signifying nothing.
That is why the sage laughs because one bellylaugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.
Your quest may be ultimately futile because you already have your answer and seek evidence to prove it as opposed to truly considering all options and knowing that any answer is probably wrong because you weren't asking the right question.
The universe is what you make of it. You have as much or as little free will as you feel you can get away with. ;)
And the sage laughs.
usedbooks wrote:
Except fictional characters' existences are deterministic. They have no choices or control. Mwahahaha.
(Or DNA.)
I used to think that and then a character insisted she wouldn't do what the plot outline insisted she do. As I go on my writing has become a more organic process. No DNA but not completely deterministic.
Damn them. Just do what I say you have no choice or will of your own. No–
Well, as someone who's main antagonist is a sociopath in the most underhanded way (he facades that he is a gentleman who just wants to do what it best), exploring the nature of such people is interesting. That and it makes you see how sociopaths get away with their misdeeds. More often than not, they are people of high stature who have the monetary and social power to get away with everything and all they need is one person to start blatantly challenging them.
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