The trouble started for Patric Gagne around the age of seven, when she stabbed a child in the head with a pencil. “It splintered, part of it lodging in the kid’s neck.” Nothing much had happened to motivate the attack, other than a sense of “unrelenting pressure that would permeate my entire self”. She knew that the only thing to relieve the pressure would be something bad — really bad. And it worked. She walked away feeling a “deep sense of peace”.
It was not the first hint that something was a bit off. Since she could remember, Gagne, who grew up in San Francisco, had been compelled to steal: as a toddler she had swiped the sunglasses from Ringo Starr’s face (her dad worked in the music industry). She kept them, along with a hairgrip stolen from her schoolmate’s head, in a box of illicit treasures in her bedroom. When she introduced an imaginary murder into a game of mummies and daddies and a classmate observed, “You’re weird,” Gagne knew she was right.
But what could she do? She just didn’t have the same feelings as other people did. She experienced the “primary” emotions, such as anger and happiness, but a whole range of learnt, “social” emotions — guilt, empathy, remorse, love — weren’t there. When her treasured pet ferret died her sister was beside herself, but Gagne couldn’t squeeze out a tear no matter how much she tried. “I’ve likened it to standing next to a rollercoaster. I can hear the people on the ride … I get it. I’m just not experiencing it for myself.”
You might think that a life without these complicated feelings would be simpler. But that’s not the way it works. Humans have evolved as social animals. An absence of feeling is, Gagne tells us, stressful and profoundly isolating. Her mother, understandably, would have liked a child with normal emotions, a daughter who would make friends and would not abscond from sleepovers to break into empty houses. After the stabbing incident Gagne realised that being honest with her was not going to elicit understanding. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted.”
While the lack of feeling created a deep anxiety, a violent or morally reprehensible act gave her an “emotional pop of colour”. Hence the compulsion: better to feel something than nothing at all.
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Gagne, who is 48, describes herself as having an “emotional learning difficulty”. Only later, once she had entered therapy as an adult, was she diagnosed as a sociopath. The term is contentious, having gone out of fashion since it was popularised in 1930 by the psychologist GE Partridge, who defined the disorder as a pathology involving the inability to conform behaviourally to prosocial standards. These days it has been largely jettisoned in favour of “antisocial personality disorder”, which encompasses sociopathy and the more extreme psychopathy.
Gagne argues that we need to bring the term back. The disorder is not just about behaviour, she says, but about thought processes. There are probably many sociopaths out there who haven’t been identified. “I’m a criminal without a record … and I’ve written this book because I know I’m not alone.”
The list of things that Gagne has got away with is fairly jaw-dropping. After the pencil attack she decided to steer clear of violence — not because she felt bad but because it attracted too much attention. She resolved to find ways of dealing with her anxiety that would allow her to fly beneath the radar. Thus she alleviated the boredom of a family holiday by tormenting a cat (she throttled it for a while before letting it go — it wasn’t seriously injured, as far as we know). At college her favourite method was to take joyrides in cars she had stolen from drunken men at frat parties. She stalked people, on one occasion breaking into a house to watch her target sleep. She went to strangers’ funerals to feed off the emotional energy (“I bring flowers!” she reassured her horrified father). As long as she stuck to her policy of non-violence — the cat was an aberration — she congratulated herself on keeping her darker urges under control. “I scheduled my mischief like a doctor’s prescription.”
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Gagne acknowledges that she was insulated from consequences for her misbehaviour largely because she was rich, white and female. The lifestyle she describes features chandeliers, housekeepers and parties in the Playboy mansion (she sneaks into Hugh Hefner’s office and steals a notebook). After graduating she went into the music business and found that her personality type fitted in perfectly. “Oh, I’m totally a sociopath,” one successful producer responded on hearing of her diagnosis. “I don’t give a f*** about anything.” Having spent a lifetime thinking she was the only sociopath, she found herself surrounded.
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She is perhaps atypical in that she found a supportive partner, in the shape of David, a man who accepted her dark side. She is also the mother of two children, aged 8 and 13. “When our son was born, I was not overcome with emotion. I didn’t get the profound surge of ‘perfect’ love I’d been promised. And I was angry,” she writes. Motherhood didn’t come easily but she discovered over time that “those fundamental feelings for my son weren’t nonexistent. They were simply non-intrinsic. I had to work to experience them.”
Having all this support in place has allowed her to explore her condition — she trained in clinical psychology specialising in sociopathy, and while working as a counsellor encountered many people less privileged than herself struggling with feelings of “emotional emptiness” and “a drive to do bad things”.
The heartwarming twist is that this woman with no empathy wants to help her fellow sociopaths. Gagne believes that they do have the capacity to learn social emotions — this is what distinguishes them from psychopaths, who are physically incapable of doing so. “These are people who desperately needed treatment.” It’s a serious point. The news is filled with criminals who destroy lives and feel no remorse; on a jail visit Gagne is told by a guard that 80 per cent of the prisoners are sociopaths. Some studies have indicated that as much as 5 per cent of the population — that would be more than three million people in Britain — have the disorder. If it were not stigmatised could they be helped, and this suffering avoided?
Sociopath tries to answer this with an entertaining, occasionally frustrating cocktail of psychology and personal anecdote.I would have liked a wider view of the role sociopaths play in society. There are odd moral judgments too. While promoting better understanding of sociopaths Gagne is happy to dish it out to people she suspects of being “fauxiopaths” (those who justify their bad behaviour with a false self-diagnosis). “You’re not a sociopath,” she thunders to one woman. “You’re a f***ing moron.” But why draw the line at morons? Do they not deserve empathy too?
Of course, we shouldn’t expect Gagne to have all the answers. As she says: “I’m a sociopath. Who the f*** is going to believe anything I say?”
Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne (Bluebird, 347pp; £18.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
