I'm an avid sci fi fan, asexual (sex repulsed/anti-sexual), and a mental health professional. I've recently, after a health scare, re-evaluated my beliefs and have come to the conclusion that I no longer hold religious beliefs. I have therefore been re-evaluating my opinions on issues of morality, logical absolutes, what we can and cannot say we know, and the like.
I set up this blog because of my interest in conducting a case study on the feasibility of using Kolinahr (Star Trek's Vulcan mental discipline to cause living by logic and total control of emotions) in the treatment of psychopaths. If you're a psychopath, or just someone interested in Kolinahr, leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you and possibly collaborate. If this treatment is successful in reducing psychopathic ideations/behaviors, it would be the first cognitive behavioral therapy ever to do so, so this really is important research. However, I cannot offer financial compensation for the research and it does require long-term commitment. Traditional Kolinahr, according to canonical sources, takes two to six years. Without a Vulcan master and the ability to spend a long time in a monastery, it may take even longer.
The reason I posit that this may be successful has to do with my hypothesis on the difference between male and female psychopathy. I believe that male psychopaths are violent at a higher rate than female psychopaths because female psychopaths maintain an older, more primitive instinct originally used to make early female mammals care for and protect their young. In most mammal species, fathers do not share an active role in the care of the young, but the female must feed them and protect them to some extent to have their genes passed on to the next generation. Thus it would logically follow that the female brain would need to develop something the male brain would not, in order to make the female mammal care for the young.
Since this instinct would be much older than our living in social groups and needing to develop empathy for others in our group, there is no reason why these two processes, although they appear to do similar things, should be connected biologically or in the brain. Therefore there is no reason to assume that, if one of these processes is broken or disrupted in an individual, the other should be effected. So, while male psychopaths would not have this instinct, female psychopaths would, and this would reduce their tendency to commit violent crimes, and the females who do commit violent crimes (especially towards their own children) would not necessarily be psychopaths.
I wonder, therefore, if a similar sense could be awakened within the male psychopath's brain through training. The intent is not to teach them empathy; I do not believe this is possible without altering the structure or neurochemical balance of the brain; but to teach them to value the logic of acting in a way that would support the survival of the species and the reduction of human suffering. This may or may not be possible, but to my knowledge it has not yet been attempted.
