It’s only when the teenage Gagne begins her undergraduate studies at UCLA that the penny drops. A psychology lecturer speaks of the general emotional “apathy” of people characterised as sociopaths, who do norm-breaking things in order to feel something. “The sociopath’s subconscious desire to feel,” Dr Slack says, “is what forces him to act out.” That’s me, Gagne thinks.
But as Gagne researches further what she now has identified as her own condition, she discovers a medical, historical and cultural mess. These days, the word “sociopath” in popular usage describes a cunning manipulator with no conscience: sociopaths are supposedly highly intelligent but lacking in empathy. Yet when the term was first used a century ago in American medicine and jurisprudence, it was identified as a “higher grade of feeblemindedness”; the criminal or antisocial bent was thought to derive from an intellectual deficit.
Nowadays, by contrast, the deficit is thought to be emotional, but gradations of the problem are not well established. The current diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders (DSM-V) speaks of “antisocial personality disorder”, which lumps sociopathy in with psychopathy. The latter is widely understood to imply genuine malignity or at least utter imperviousness to the feelings of others, as popularised in Jon Ronson’s bestseller The Psychopath Test. But this is a problem for those who score more highly on the antisocial personality disorder test than the general population but less than true psychopaths, such as Gagne herself. “Why isn’t sociopathy in the manual?” she wonders. She decides to do the missing science herself by reading for a doctorate in sociopathy, and then, at the end of the extraordinary journey recounted in this book, becoming a therapist for other sociopaths.
Suddenly, I no longer felt like the only sociopath in the world.
In the meantime, there has been a hilarious detour into the music industry, where Gagne worked as an artist’s manager. “From the moment I started working as a talent manager, my psychological horizons began to expand,” Gagne writes, deadpan. “Suddenly, I no longer felt like the only sociopath in the world.” But the pop ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll cesspit is also, it turns out, infested with creatures much more annoying to her: those she terms “fauxciopaths”, who appropriate the clinical label in an attempt to justify their own appalling, greedy, and selfish behaviour. They’re not sociopaths, she thinks angrily; they’re just “full of s***”.
The thing about sociopaths, Gagne argues, is that while they can feel a set of basic emotions – fear, anger, joy, surprise, even (in her case, at least) love – they do not innately feel what are called the “social emotions” of empathy, guilt and shame. “Sociopaths were not, in fact, monsters hell-bent on destruction,” Gagne discovers in the research racks; “rather, they were people whose default temperament made the learned social emotions – like empathy and remorse – more difficult, but not impossible, to internalise.” And whatever the cause of this difficulty, it can hardly be said to be their fault. So Gagne’s mantra becomes a line from Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” As she complains to her boyfriend: “People hate sociopaths for not having empathy and compassion… But who has empathy and compassion for them?”
Much of Sociopath’s humour draws on the fact that not feeling social emotions can be a kind of superpower, enabling a person to see through the ridiculousness of many social norms. Gagne describes herself as a better pragmatic decision-maker than her boyfriend, because he is too prone to “people-pleasing”. And what, after all, is so terrifying about being locked in a school bathroom?
Throughout this addictively page-turning book, there are brilliant flashes of poetic, slightly alien feeling. “The silence of a structure that has just been broken into is unlike any other,” Gagne writes happily of her house-invasion addiction. “It’s almost like the house can’t believe what just happened and has gasped, taking all the air with it.” And Gagne, with wry courage, reframes her own condition as a bonus: “People go to yoga and spend thousands of dollars on meditation classes to learn how to let go and feel nothing. But I get to do it every day. For free.”
Whatever else you may have erroneously thought about sociopaths, after this book you won’t say they can’t write.
- Sociopath: A Memoir is published by Macmillan
- Steven Poole’s rating: 5/5 stars
