By Steve Taylor, Image: Prachatai/from Flickr and Wikipedia, Psychology Today, July 26, 2023
After studying children brought up in orphanages and other institutions in the 1930s and 1940s, the British psychologist John Bowlby developed his maternal deprivation hypothesis. He suggested that if a young child’s attachment to a mother figure is broken, this is likely to severely damage their social, emotional, and intellectual development. A lack of attachment could result in what he called affectionless psychopathy, the inability to empathise with other people or to form meaningful relationships.
Certainly, as Bowlby’s theory predicts, a common theme of people with psychopathic traits is traumatic and emotionally deprived childhoods. In DisConnected, I refer to such people as hyper-disconnected. They are completely self-absorbed and detached from others, treating their fellow human beings as objects. I examined the childhood experiences of serial killers and fascist dictators and found a pattern of severe childhood trauma and neglect.
Serial killers such as David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, and Joel Rifkin were rejected or abandoned by their mothers. The female serial killer Aileen Wuornos (portrayed by Charlize Theron in the film Monster) was abandoned by her mother at the age of 4 and raised by her grandfather, who abused her physically and sexually. A recent study found that 50 percent of serial killers experienced psychological abuse during childhood, while 36 percent experienced physical abuse, and 26 percent experienced sexual abuse.
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