We know psychopaths don’t feel empathy for others, but it turns out they also can’t feel empathy for themselves. Philosopher Michael Cholbi argues that psychopaths’ inability to grieve teaches important lessons about empathy and grief for all of us. It shows us that it’s possible to empathise with past and future versions of ourselves (a form of mental time travel) and that a key part of grief is this self-empathy. Albert Camus’ The Stranger demonstrates this well, with the protagonist’s inability to grieve the death of his own mother. 

Psychopaths have a number of attributes that explain their reputation for antisocial behavior. Psychopaths are deceitful and grandiose, with inflated senses of self-worth. They do not experience normal levels of emotional response, and are prone to impulsive or reckless behavior.

There is one specific characteristic of psychopaths that appears difficult to explain, though: psychopaths experience little if any grief in response to the deaths of others. 

Consider Meursault, the seemingly psychopathic protagonist of Albert Camus’ novella The Stranger. Meursault lies routinely, indulges in casual cruelty, single-mindedly pursues the pleasures of the moment—and feels no guilt or remorse about any of this. Upon hearing about the death of his maman, the event barely registers with him. He goes through the motions of grieving—attending his mother’s funeral, etc.—but her death is of no emotional consequence to him.

___

For psychologically typical subjects, the ability to grieve reflects and is entangled with our ability to care for ourselves and for others.

___

It is tempting to explain psychopaths’ diminished capacity for grief in terms of their lacking empathy. Psychopaths are systematically deficient in caring about others and in being able to take on their points of view. But that fact won’t explain their lack of grief. No doubt one common aspect of grief is that we are sorrowful on behalf of the deceased person. We feel a sense of loss because death was in some way bad for them. The process of dying may have been painful or undignified, or they may have died with a lot of good life still to live. Presumably, Meursault could not have felt such sorrow for maman, since sorrow at how her death may have been harmful to her would require him to possess the ability to empathize with her. 

Yet there is another dimension of grief, one that psychopaths should be able to experience. We grieve the deaths of those who matter to us in some way—those who have become central to our lives. And an inability to empathize with others does not preclude their being central to our lives. Perhaps for a psychopath, that another person’s death could be a loss to that person won’t provide the psychopath a reason to grieve. After all, to grieve what others have lost to death seems to require the very empathy psychopaths don’t have. Meursault’s lack of empathy means that whatever may have been bad about his mother’s death for her does not resonate with him. But that same lack of empathy allows that her death could have been bad for him, an event worthy of grief. On its face, even a psychopath should be able to experience the death of someone who cared about them as a loss. Psychopaths’ empathic deficiencies therefore should not stand in the way of their being able to grieve.