Podcast Rough Draft

In this episode, the hosts discuss the narcissistic characteristics and antisocial behaviors of four psychopaths. They focus on Eric Harris and Ted Bundy, highlighting their manipulation and narcissistic behaviors. Harris altered his image to manipulate others, while Bundy created a separate persona to protect his image. Both used manipulation to control how others perceived them. The hosts also discuss the antisocial behaviors of Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson, linking their childhood trauma to their actions. Dahmer had a troubled home life and developed trust issues, while Manson experienced abuse and developed a self-defense mechanism. Both psychopaths displayed control and manipulation in their actions, likely stemming from their lack of control in their earlier years. In today's episode, we will be discussing the narcissistic characteristics and antisocial behaviors displayed within the four psychopaths that we have been discussing throughout the series. This is a continued discussion, so if you are new to the show, we advise you to start from episode one to ensure a full grasp of our discussion. Welcome back to Psychology Behind the Psychopath, with your hosts Delaney, Kat, Sarah, and Isabella. This is episode 16, Narcissism and Antisocial Behavior. To begin our discussion, Kat and I will be discussing the narcissistic behaviors between Eric Harris and Ted Bundy. The first thing one can see is the predominance of manipulation and narcissistic behavior. Both men display this strongly, in different and similar ways. Eric was big on showing an altered version of himself to his parents, especially his dad, and teachers. Anytime he got in trouble, he was able to smooth talk his way out, careful not to taint their view of him. While Ted protected and maintained his image to the public and his family by almost creating a completely altered version of himself, which in a way created two separate areas of his life, in his last interview, he attempts to maintain a soft spot in the public eye by pretending to show remorse and guilt when speaking of his actions. In his last interview, when asked if he deserves the punishment the state has inflicted upon him, he laughed and said, Honestly, I don't want to die. I'm not going to kid you. I deserve the most extreme punishment society has, and society deserves to be protected from me, and from others like me, that's for sure. I think what I hope will come of our discussion is I think society needs to be protected of itself. So from quotes like that and others similar, throughout the entire interview, we can experience firsthand his manipulation. As he twists what he wants the public to see of himself, makes them feel remorseful when you know he's not, as if he wasn't caught, he would keep continuing the way he was. Whereas Eric, we have a different side where we see his personal thoughts and where he wasn't trying to alter his actions or words towards anyone to cater their view. He had his own personal diary that was for himself and himself only. So when that was released, it was a huge difference between what one wanted to see and what actually was happening. So Eric wanted a world where he was completely by himself, whereas Ted's trying to make this whole big picture of himself. Ted Bundy made an act of idolizing his actions by referring to people who may follow him in his footsteps and commit similar crimes as the other Ted Bundys. He created a label out of his name and deemed his actions as respectable enough to mimic. Eric had the mindset that he was better than everyone else, fully believed he could get any girl he wanted, receive any grade he tried for, and so on. Ted Bundy calculated his answers very well in his interview, and if he didn't feel like he could give a good answer in the public eye, he would either not answer the question directly or he would say something like, I can't answer that right now, it's too hard, what I did is too awful, I can't handle it myself. So he would avoid asking or answering questions that made him look bad, and he would also calculate how he was going to answer, and that's why he got so many non-direct answers in his interview. Eric, on the other hand, when he was younger, dreamed of bad things happening, but he was always the hero that fixed it all. He'd play games involving fake war with his friends, always ensuring that he was the good guy that fixed it all for everyone in the end, emphasizing his journey of growing narcissism. Ted Bundy, on the other hand, kept his good image by placing the blame on outside things. So you'll notice in his interview answer before, he blames society, and society needs to fix this, and society needs to keep itself from getting hurt, and on and on. And earlier, when he's talking about how he started this, and anyway, he blames it on having easy access to pornographic magazines and pornography, and as he got more and more addicted to it. So he supposedly is taking the blame, but in actuality, you can see in all his answers that he's saying, society made me this way, getting pornography early made me this way, like, it was never directly his fault. Eric, similarly, had wanted things, per se, to be portrayed and acted the way he wanted. He describes multiple times in this fantasy world where everyone is gone, dead, except him. It is just him alone in the quiet. In this fantasy world, he would go online and hide behind his screen and talk to girls that would allow, like, whoever would listen, girls that would listen, Dylan who would listen, anyone who would listen, and he would just kind of describe in depth, and he did so in his diary as well. So he had this glimpse of, you know, his ideal world where basically, not only was he completely alone and quiet, but he ruled everything that happened. So he would tell his people his thoughts and opinions on this and, you know, get a timid response, and it would only fuel him more to feel and say and act those ways. These are just a few examples of both men's lives that kind of portray the narcissism that they both had, the quality that they both experienced. And we also wanted to say that narcissistic tendencies, like, if you experience them, doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to end up doing something awful or they're going to be the reason why you turn into a murderer or anything like that. It's just a, it just happens to be present amongst several psychopaths. In this next section of this podcast, we will discuss the antisocial behaviors that are evident in these two famous serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer, me, I'm going to review his, and then Charles Manson, and Isabelle is going to go over that one. To start, we need to first understand what antisocial behavior looks like. According to Crafton Hills College, antisocial behavior can be both overt and covert, some indicators being aggressive actions against siblings, peers, parents, and teachers, and some actions involving aggressive behavior towards property. Dahmer, in his high school years, presented this behavior in an academic standpoint. Antisocially, he was described as a loner with a lack of close friends and was often bullied. Manson, on the other hand, displayed lots of aggressive actions towards property. As early as age nine, he was sending fires to buildings. He would also vandalize property and rob grocery stores in his teen years. They seemed to have very different indicators of having antisocial behavior. Maybe some home life could have affected them? Sarah, what was Dahmer's home life like when he was younger? Dahmer had a rather traumatic childhood with a mother that had a long history of mental illness. While his father was very absent in his life and visited himself with his work. His mother described him as a very energetic and happy child until he was four years old. Around that time, he underwent a double hernia surgery, but later his parents would put the blame on for his misdeeds. His father actually taught him how to remove the flesh from roadkill seeing Dahmer show what he thought was interest in science. In school, Dahmer was a very shy kid and had pretty bad trust issues, which worsened after classmates pulled a prank on him. While in high school, he developed a drinking problem and at 14, he realized he was gay. This added further displeasure in his home life as his family was unsupportive of this change. That's very interesting. Dahmer seemed to have a very rough social life. Something I noticed is that Manson's father was also absent during his childhood. His mother was a struggling alcoholic who was in and out of jail, although Manson did not seem to have a bad relationship with her at that time. In fact, Manson says that when his mother returned to her jail in 1942, that was the happiest time of his life. Unfortunately, that changed and he ran away from home a few times and eventually ended up in the Indiana Boys School. There, Manson was treated horribly, allegedly being raped and beaten. He finally escaped in 1951, but left with a trauma and self-defense mechanism called the Insane Game. And later that year, he experienced his first imprisonment. I think both Dahmer and Manson had difficult and traumatic childhoods that definitely played a part in their development of antisocial behaviors. What do you think? Well, there definitely seems to be some similarities between them. Definitely, and I think they both developed a negative societal view because of what they went through, which definitely, in Manson's case, affected his actions. Oh, absolutely, which furthered their antisocial behavior. Manson had a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that drove a lot of what he did in his later years. It definitely stemmed from these antisocial behaviors and tendencies of isolation and self-defense. Did Dahmer have some kind of agenda or prophecy that he worked towards? Dahmer doesn't seem to have a specific agenda with any of his actions, but it seems that his psychological issues and his obsessions with death and dismemberment seem to drive his murderous actions. He claimed that he believed that he could create obedient zombie companions, but these statements are regarded as attempts to rationalize his crime. Manipulation is another indicator of antisocial behavior. It would seem that Dahmer wanted to control and manipulate his victims. This is similar to Manson and what he did in his cult. The way he taught and treated his disciples, he really only had one goal, to control them. But to me, it makes sense that Dahmer and Manson would want that control because it's something they lacked in their younger years. What do you think of that thought process? I can definitely see that for the both of them, as they had some interesting backgrounds. It would make sense that that would be the case for both of them. Now we're going to bring together both of what we were discussing in our groups, antisocial and narcissism, and then we're going to relate them back to psychopathy. Both Dahmer and Bundy wanted to have reasons behind their killing, and they wanted to portray that to society and kind of create a picture of this empathy that they both lacked. They wanted to humanize themselves just a little bit more in the public eye. Which goes back to the checklist that Dr. Fuslier had created, which has the list of charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, egocentric, and an appalling failure of empathy. I actually want to touch on the egocentric part and go back into how it connects with narcissism. Eric basically, in specifics, had said that him and Zeus are so alike. Eric had enjoyed the act of creation, so he made a whole paper about the similarities between Zeus and I. He hailed both of them as great leaders, finding no faults in their pettiness or malice, but identified common inclinations. So basically that's just touching on, back to the whole egocentric, narcissistic aspect. To add on to what you just said about being egocentric, Manson, in his cult, he called it this helter-skelter, this race war that he predicted was going to happen. And he formed his cult because he believed he was the only person who would not be affected by this race war, the only person who would not be killed by another person. And he got his followers to believe that if they followed him and did as he said, and as he gave out responsibilities and jobs, that they would also be safe and protected from being killed. Both Donner and Bundy were very charming to their victims. They did a very good job at pulling them in and making them think that they cared about them and wanted to interact with them. And definitely were able to lure them into their homes and into a safe place for them, and to where they can do what they want with this person. And it's the fact that they were able to do this to so many different people in different settings that is pretty crazy to me, honestly. Yeah, they pulled them in from the public a lot, and you would think somebody with such malice intent wouldn't be able to just pull somebody randomly off the street and nobody would notice, but they were just so personable to their audience and who they were trying to attack that nobody really thought anything of it until it was too late. And definitely with Donner, he's very antisocial, definitely wouldn't want to be in a conversation, very awkward, and so it's very surprising to see that he's able to lure these people in and take them into his own home and stuff. And while we saw that they are very charming, they made people think that they cared about them, when in reality they were both very callous and had very much malice intents. None of this was them caring about these people. They didn't care about these people at all. They just wanted to follow their own agenda and murder these people and do with them what they wanted, and it didn't matter who these people are or what they were doing, but using their charm to manipulate their victims, they were able to pull them in and do as they pleased. Yeah. We can see through Eric Harris and Ted Bundy's narcissistic tendencies to Jeffrey Donner and Charles Manson antisocial behavior tendencies that there are many different behavioral aspects that all fall underneath the umbrella of psychopathy, and it's very vast and very wide. We will continue exploring that wide area in our next podcast. Thank you so much for listening. That's it for today. Bye.