Following the psychopath: Between epistemological errors and cultural patterns

Experience and theory form a textual symbiosis in this thesis, which traces patterns of a cultural pathology enveloping individual and social existence. The experiential narrative follows one year in the author's life as he comes to share an apartment with a charming stranger who turns out to be a psychopath with a criminal past, resulting in dramatic changes in the author's environment. The theoretical narrative provides a critical analysis of those events through Sigmund Freud's account of the narcissistic wounds of our civilization and Gregory Bateson's theory of mental systems in order to connect the author's experience to larger psychopathic patterns of our culture. The thesis argues that in a period of imminent disaster, we need to recognize and understand ourselves as organisms within a larger cultural ecology and demystify the deeply political relations by which we are connected to, and embedded in, our social world.