Psychological Insights

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Psychological Insights: "From Schadenfreude to Serial Killers: The Sadistic Personality"

Host Pat Kazakoff and Dr. Robert J Hamm delve into the Sadistic ...

Host Pat Kazakoff and Dr. Robert J Hamm delve into the Sadistic Personality types.

A person who might be defined as having a sadistic personality would exhibit a host of ...behaviors that might include poor frustration tolerance, a harsh, demeaning manner, and a fascination with weapons or heinous criminals. Such persons might also be attracted to careers that allow them to control or punish others such as in law enforcement, the military, or the government. Roughly 90% of people diagnosed with sadistic personality disorder are men. According to the psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm (The Authoritarian Personality, 1957), the sadistic personality is ultimately motivated by the need to humiliate others. While this behavior is used to exhibit power and dominance it belies weakness inasmuch as it depends on an “other” to dominant in order to feel strong. In real life, humiliation is more likely to be exhibited by social, or verbal, rather than physical means, but in either case, this behavior serves as a defense against feeling or exhibiting vulnerability.

In fundamental ways the sadistic personality looks a lot like narcissists and sociopaths, or what is technically known as the antisocial personality. Whilst it is from this essential cruelty that the sadist derives pleasure from the suffering his behavior inflicts on others, his presumed “attunement to” the emotions he endeavors to elicit from his victim, however predatory in its quality, suggests that the sadist has the greater degree of empathy.

Criteria for Diagnosis

Uses physical cruelty and violence to establish dominance.
Humiliates people in the presence of others.
Exhibits unusually harsh treatment toward others under their control.
Expresses amusement in witnessing pain in others, including animals.
Lies in order to inflict pain.
Uses intimidation or terror to elicit compliance.
Restricts autonomy of people they are close to.
Exhibits fascination with violence and torture.

SPD was not, finally, adopted in the DSM’s fourth edition because it was not supported by statistical evidence to sufficiently differentiate it from antisocial personality disorder. Moreover, there was concern that establishing a clinical diagnosis for behavior that is categorically destructive to others might, by assigning it to a “medically” diagnosed condition, diminish its social and legal culpability. While some, such as Theodore Millon (The Assertive to Sadistic Personality Spectrum, 2009) believe there remains sufficient evidence to recognize its clinical distinctiveness, it was proposed instead to consider SPD as, at best, representing a possible subset of antisocial personality disorder.

While there is evidence as with most clinical phenomena of hereditary contributions to SPD, such as impulsiveness and dominance, for example, the pathological dimensions such as cruelty and taking pleasure from someone else’s pain likely originate from social learning and early life trauma. There is some evidence that exposure to role models, whether from one’s family, community, or social media, can contribute to sadistic behavior. However, even in such instances, it remains compelling that what differentiates sadistic from antisocial personality, viz., taking pleasure, originates from the painful experience of victimization and the vain attempt, either in fantasy or cruel behavior itself, to overcome these helpless feelings through the role reversal necessary to transform traumatic experience. It is a tragedy that beyond the suffering such behavior inevitably inflicts on its victims the repetition of sadistic behavior fails to diminish the force with which it continually influences the emotions that drive it in compulsive fashion. In fact, empirical research has suggested that, paradoxically, rather than assuage the need to cause suffering in others, for the sadistic personality, cruel actions are more likely to result in an exacerbation of dysphoric feelings. Psychological treatment for SPD, as for all personality disorders, normally requires intensive and prolonged psychotherapy. These persons are not likely to enter therapy for reasons that are most likely obvious to others. Instead, they either are referred because of the consequences of their behaviors, such as from law enforcement or from family members. Intervention often focuses on helping the patient better understand how the consequences of their behavior originate from their behavior while at the same time establishing a sufficiently trusting relationship with the patient to allow such insights to be accepted. Working with a patient’s trauma history and probing insights that may be derived from the psychodynamics of trauma often constitute an essential part of therapy for this particular disorder as well.[+] Show More