Kevin's Psychopathy

In class, everyone seemed to be in agreement that Kevin was born a psychopath, and that his mother was not to blame for his behavior, but I do not completely agree with this. One of the many theories about psychopathy that are currently circulating is that some people are born predisposed to psychopathy, but they do not actually become psychopaths unless something in their environment triggers it. I believe that this might have been the case for Kevin; he was born predisposed to psychopathy, and his mother’s hatred and mistreatment of him made him become a psychopath.

Even before Kevin was born, Eva hated him. She hated children in general. She felt that they were “loud, messy, constraining…ungrateful,” a hassle, and time consuming, and that they ruined their mothers’ bodies and lives and forced a mother “to pay a debt she can escape” (17, 26). She even wondered why “anyone chooses to reproduce at all,” referring to babies as “nine-month freeloader[s]” (27, 58). And her feelings about children did not change when after she gave birth, liked she expected they would. When Franklin took Kevin from Eva to hold him for the first time, she was more than willing to hand him over, feeling gratitude for “being relieved of him” (83).

I believed that Kevin could sense his mother’s hatred of him, and that is why he acted out when she was around. Sacrificing her career and travels to take care of a child she hated, Eva was miserable, even referring to Kevin as “hell in a handbasket” (91). Kevin shrieked all day around his mother, because he could sense her negative emotions towards him, and then stopped when his dad came home, because he could sense that his dad loved him. It was his mother’s negative, degrading remarks, like “What’s your problem, you little shit? Proud of yourself, for ruining Mummy’s life?” and her neglectful behaviors, like the one she described by saying, “I was not going to pick him up. No one was there to make me and I didn’t want to. I would not…check his diaper, nor would I warm a bottle of milk. I would let him cry and cry,” that created an unhealthy environment for him to grow up in, and eventually turned him into a psychopath (105).