“You’re not looking for a friend.”
About halfway through Patric Gagne’s book Sociopath: A Memoir, her therapist poses this possibility, and Gagne is initially inclined to disagree. She asks, “Then what am I looking for?” Dr. Carlin, her therapist, offers her a one-word answer: “Empathy.” This exchange encapsulates the central thesis of this book: people who struggle to feel empathy still desire and deserve it.
Sociopath chronicles Gagne’s experiences living with sociopathy, from her childhood to her decision to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology. While many mental health conditions have become less stigmatized than they once were over the course of the last few decades, Gagne makes the case that sociopathy continues to be misunderstood. She attributes this state of affairs to the slippery definition of conditions like sociopathy and psychopathy.
On the one hand, much psychological literature lacks a clear definition of sociopathy, which makes it difficult for people with that condition to find treatment. On the other hand, people who Gagne colorfully refers to as “fauxciopaths” often use sociopathy as a justification for simply selfish or careless – but not fundamentally disordered – behavior. By inviting the reader to understand her life and choices, Gagne seeks both to advocate for a clearer diagnostic definition of sociopathy and to draw the reader’s attention to the unexplored challenges that come with the condition. Gagne acknowledges that it may be more difficult to have compassion for sociopaths than for people living with other disorders, but she argues that sociopaths are neither beyond treatment nor deficient in their desire for meaningful lives and relationships.
Gagne’s road to helpful treatment is long and full of setbacks. She knows that people often colloquially use terms like “psychopath” and “sociopath” to refer to someone who is so fundamentally self-centered and frustrating to deal with that they seem to be beyond all help, and she refuses to consider herself beyond treatment, even when treatment is hard to come by. She also readily admits that her life presents many patterns of objectionable behavior: as a child, she locked another kid out of her house and, in a separate incident, stabbed her with a pencil; she amused herself by stealing cars from drunk frat guys in college; throughout her whole life, she has broken into houses and stolen things like it’s a hobby.
She tells the story of the time she left a locket, which she thinks she probably stole from a house that her family left, so she broke back into that house and stole it a second time. She did not do this because she feared the new owners might be upset about finding stolen goods in their home. She stopped and chatted with the girl living in her old room. She did this because, as she says, “That locket was mine. I wasn’t just going to leave it behind.”
Gagne does not attempt to justify her sociopathic behavior. She simply poses the following problem: any person who said that they regularly did these kinds of things because they had the uncontrollable urge to do so would be told that they should get help—but where? Where can you go if you realize that you exhibit symptoms of sociopathy and you want to get them under control? Everybody in her life wants Gagne to be different, but nobody seems to have a good roadmap for how to get there. So, Gagne decides to chart the course herself. She decides to get a Ph.D. and write a book.
By drawing from her own experience, Gagne shows that sociopaths are not irredeemable monsters but people who are living with a disorder that currently lacks an effective treatment strategy. Her recounting of her childhood experiences is harrowing, as her honesty with her parents about her harmful actions continues to produce more and more deeply distressed reactions that she does not understand. She may not experience emotions in the same way as everyone else, but that doesn’t keep her from wanting to love and be loved.
Also, she does not actively desire that the people around her feel pain; what she mostly feels would be best characterized as apathy, not sadism. But she experiences an urge – an overwhelming anxiety that she calls “stuck stress” – that can only be quelled by doing something that deviates from the moral norm. When, after the pencil incident, she commits to never physically harm anyone again, she spends her teenage and college years performing a careful balancing act between her urges and the people in her life that she does not want to alienate.
David, her boyfriend, whom she meets in high school at sleepaway camp, is arguably the most significant of these figures. David is not a sociopath, but he is one of the first people she meets who is willing to accept her as she is without judgment. When they have an opportunity to reconnect later in life, David’s willingness and ability to maintain this position become Sociopath‘s primary source of narrative tension.
As she begins to meet with a therapist regularly, Gagne tries to reconcile the fact that she does not feel shame, empathy, or remorse in a typical way with her desire to love a person who regularly feels all of these things. Her relationship with a man who encourages her darker side–a famous musician with the cartoonish pseudonym “Max Magus”–competes with her dreams of developing what she calls a “normal family” with David.
Although Sociopath is largely a self-assessment exercise, Gagne is not particularly reflective about the socioeconomic status that makes her search for a therapeutic cure possible. Her father is a successful Hollywood music executive, and one of Gagne’s earliest memories of stealing something is captured in a photograph of her as a baby pulling the glasses off of Ringo Starr’s face.
After moving to Los Angeles to attend UCLA, she lives in her father’s Coldwater Canyon home, which he leaves at her permanent disposal once he moves to another house in Beverly Hills. She attends a party at the Playboy Mansion and leaves David a voicemail from Hugh Hefner’s personal office phone. Basically, Gagne isn’t just the beneficiary of wealth; she’s the beneficiary of Hollywood levels of wealth. The fact that she can access anything she needs whenever she needs it – a state that relatively few people with serious mental disorders experience in the United States – is acknowledged in a single paragraph in the introduction and then taken largely as a matter of course.
However, the fact that Gagne fearlessly presents herself as a difficult person to feel empathy for is the beating heart of Sociopath, which is, after all, an attempt to get the reader to rethink long-held presuppositions and biases. Her matter-of-fact prose leaves nothing off the table regarding the things she has done or wanted to do, and there is real artistic bravery in making her darkest inner thoughts public without sensationalizing them.
People still sometimes carelessly toss off the term “sociopath” to pejoratively describe a person who fails to hold others in the same regard as they hold themselves; readers are likely to come away from Gagne’s memoir with the sense that this usage of the word ought to go the same way as other outdated “ableist” language. You, the reader, are ultimately going to have to choose for yourself whether or not to include sociopaths in your circle of empathy. Sociopath: A Memoir will lead you to reflect on what it means to be able to make such a choice in the first place.