Discussion on the conflicts that arise when working with a likeable psychopath

Abstract

This article describes a man who beat another to death in a kebab shop for tapping him on the shoulder and asking him to stop insulting the proprietor. In his head, he corrected a boundary violation, earned back lost respect, and delivered justice with one, accidentally fatal, punch. He imagined he then exited the shop to conduct his business elsewhere. CCTV showed that he had lost control and beaten the man repeatedly until he was dead and spoiled. In court, he recognised the parents of his victim and that the man he had killed was a sparring partner and friend from his childhood boxing days. In prison, he helped others to give up violence and drugs, sobbed with remorse in his assessment session with me, but corrected infringements of his students on the prison landings with beatings. In forensic psychotherapy over the course of a year, he began to question his idealisation of his father who had taken him as a young child to witness dad deliver punishment beatings to others who had "stepped out of line". He made use of a link between what he saw and what he revisited upon his own children who he took to punishment beatings that he subjected others to.