(bold mine) This is contrary to everything we've learned in 50 years re personality development and learned behavior which concludes sociopaths are made, not born. This "Bad Seed" mentality--the fatalistic notion of demon seeds and psycho genes suggesting that even the most skilled, child-centered, responsible parents who discipline consistently using appropriate boundaries are nevertheless helpless to train up empathic, moral and well-adjusted children--subtly blameshifts, scapegoats, excuses away, and undermines those very well established links. For those who believe KC eg is a true, coldblooded sociopath, most mental health experts have long reached a widely shared conclusion that sociopaths are NOT in fact born this way--rather to the contrary they've amassed a wealth of research and clinical evidence proving this is instead largely determined by parenting extremes during childhood..
No one is excusing KC or buying into her victimhood. I've said repeatedly that she must pay for her crimes, and that nothing w/in her past should allow her to escape the consequences of her behavior. And while I have compassion for anyone now living this nightmare, neither am I willing to blindly cast CA in the role as a sheer hapless victim of fate who suddenly found herself "trapped" by random forces over which she never had any influence. Narcissistic parents produce narcissistic children. And I've merely expressed the hope that by recognizing and understand this pattern we might as a society be better equipped to prevent the same tragedy from replaying itself over and over. If you have no interest in doing so, that's fine by me!
JMO
Yes we do know. Despite every gritty detail which has emerged about this family there has been not one indication, so much as one person who has ever reported, nor any account given of any attempt by these parents to discipline, hold accountable much less seek outside counsel or intervention for their daughter nor to acknowledge she was out of control which would have done the unthinkable--exposed the family's "dirty laundry." We know KC would stop at nothing because nothing was done ("I should have been stopped a long time ago...") ie when KC had robbed them, LA, JG and others yet we know it isn't until she'd finally stooped so low as to drain her aging GP's retirement fund that CA in fact ever "reached out." We have instead a well established history of rescuing, enablement, failure to impose consequences coupled with turning a blind eye (to obvious lies, signs of unemployment, whereabouts, ad infinitum ad nauseum). Caylee's disappearance and death were hardly the beginning of CA's problems, nor did the causes appear overnight. It was the tragic yet inevitable consequence of no boundaries, in the making for years. JMO
Excuse me for interjecting here, but I can't help myself. The posts on this thread are thoughtfully quite dense so I haven't read everything.
I'd like to point out that the nature-nurture issue is nowhere near resolved. We largely have theories, and little proof.
I believe the perp to be a psychopath. She exhibits psychopathic traits, attitude and anti-social behaviours. If this is true about her, from all the literature I've studied there is a likelihood that psychopathy is hard-wired.
Robert Hare, a leading expert on psychopathy, has conducted EEG studies on adult ASPDs comparing their brain waves to that of non-conduct- disordered adolescents and found a similarity in brain patterns. This indicates to Hare that it is possible that an ASPD brain simply never fully matured.
There have also been twin studies that show that there can be a genetic predisposition to psychopathy.
The point I'm making is that the nature-nurture debate is by no means over.
But your point about the effects of narcissism is well-taken, though I am not sure that it's an inevitability that narcissists produce narcissists. I've puzzled over CA since the beginning. At first I thought she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome, a kind of weird take on loving your captor (the perp), or exhibiting behaviours of a cult member. Over time it became clear to me that CA was exhibiting narcissistic traits. Two behaviours come to mind: the way she blames everyone, and the way she brings the focus on herself, her feelings, how it's all affecting her.
There's this great British TV drama called "Wire in the Blood". In one episode the murderer of a child turned out to the mother who had Munchausen's. The psychologist figured out she was the killer because when she was pleading for her child's safe return, she kept talking about how it affected
her, how
she was suffering, etc.
I think that the perp is a hard-wired psychopath (nature). And I'm also thinking that CA's narcissism affected the perp's development in influencing and enabling and encouraging her narcissistic tendencies until they were massively full blown (nurture) to the point of murder. Mere pampering is not enough to create a murderer, IMO. I'm thinking that perhaps the motive for murder was the injury to the perp's narcissistic self. Without her mother's enabling, perhaps the perp would have been a different kind of psychopath. With it, it was a recipe for murder somewhere down the line, especially if it involved their enmeshment.
As an aside, their relationship is so enmeshed and so glaringly sick, I can't find words for it. It's like they're a single dynamic entity and no one else exists for them. I keep thinking
folies a deux even though it can't be.