Last December 2023, The TFP community lost a dear friend with the passing of Dr. Michael Stone. While I never met Dr. Stone, I had heard his name, of course, and I knew he worked at Columbia as an expert in personality pathology. I knew he had written a book on sociopathy. But I had never spoken with him. I began to sense the personal importance of Dr. Stone to the TFP community on a Zoom call about a year ago when Otto Kernberg looked at me with clear sadness and told me that our colleague and friend Michael Stone had had a stroke. Dr. Kernberg’s concern and caring for Dr. Stone were apparent. He went on to share that Michael was an extraordinary person, that he had worked in a forensic hospital, and had been able to accumulate a unique perspective on psychopathy. Otto was letting me know that I had missed out on getting to know someone who had tremendous knowledge and wit, and someone he cared for profoundly.
The Anatomy of Evil
Based on this conversation, I spent August 2023 reading The Anatomy of Evil. Dr. Stone published it in 2009, a book in which he develops a taxonomy to define and classify evil. Anatomy is the right word: the book is a massive effort of research and classification, detailed, methodically and meticulously descriptive, clinical – an almost perfectly objective showcase of heinous crimes. The book is an encyclopedic attempt to describe with the hope to help prevent, not treat; there was only a vague attempt to provide a logic, with the full and final recognition that to truly understand the mind of a psychopath is ultimately not a possible endeavor.
I enjoyed the reading and the freedom of developing my own opinion over such an extensive and all-consuming collection of details and facts. How could Dr. Stone have collected so much information in one lifetime? And why did I find that book mostly comforting; why did I not feel repulsed? The writer seemed to have had a set of emotional responses like mine; acquiring knowledge seemed to have been a comforting process; only certain details were clearly fear-inducing. From there I started to wonder why Dr. Stone would be so interested in evil and, indeed, who was Michael Stone?
His writing manifested some of his cognitive style – a style that is down-to-earth, methodical, and extremely vast. He was approaching one of the most controversial topics in life without any quick judgment, without the pretense of a theory or a hypothesis to demonstrate. Rather than talking about moral values, a term we use so often without enough of a definition, the book would describe how and why any human value is inadmissible in a psychopathic killer’s mind. And, indeed, how can anyone genuinely wonder about psychopathy without letting go temporarily of our own moral anchors? Rather than talking about lack of empathy, he thought lack of compassion was more accurate to describe the most significant internal aspect of evil.
“Strictly speaking, empathy refers to the ability to read correctly the emotions another person is experiencing, as telegraphed to us by the person’s facial expression and gestures….compassion relates to the ability most people have: to feel distress at the distress or suffering of another person and to move to do something to alleviate that person’s suffering.”
Dr. Michael Stone
Larger than life
Referring to another encyclopedic contribution of Dr. Stone, his long-term naturalistic study of the evolution of the lives of patients with borderline personality disorder, Frank Yeomans said, “I profoundly respected and admired Michael’s dedication. He pursued the patients he saw longitudinally with so much persistence that he told me he would go find them at home if they didn’t return his phone calls… 15, 25 years after he had met them,” (The Fate of Borderline Patients: Successful Outcome and Psychiatric Practice). Along with the vast nature of his work, I was struck by his acuity and attention to details
He was an anatomist. No matter what intellectual challenge he was tackling, Michael approached it with immense latitude and depth, while always adding his original point of view, which happened to always be very thoughtful. He was a diagnostician, a prognostician; he was interested in describing, differentiating, and classifying clinical phenomena – that interest he shared with Otto.
Dr. Sergio Dazzi
In my opinion, the objectivity of Anatomy of Evil reveals Dr. Stone’s interest in phenomenology well beyond the boundaries of medical literature. In fact, Dr. Stone’s domain was so much more than his role as a psychiatrist. He spoke 16 languages. Sergio says, “Michael had an interest in evil that went beyond psychopathy. He was interested in evil in history, art, music, literature, theater. He was really interested in all human passions – the most extreme the most enticing. You would find him talking to the bookstore owner in a corner in Paris; his love for humanity and life would bring him to speak with anyone.” Or again, “Treatment for Michael was not just about getting the patient’s problems to dissipate; he would talk about improving their life even if full cure was not achievable.”
One of his sons, John Stone, added more on Dr. Stone’s Renaissance polymath nature: “My father seemed to live 20 lives in one: a Classics major at Cornell (which he entered at age 15), he made a Sanskrit dictionary, collected languages the way others might collect stamps (and in fact, he was a passionate collector of stamps, currency, rare books, and artifacts from around the world). He was a passionate theatergoer, seeing everything on- and off- and off-off-Broadway, and an even more passionate balletomane and opera and classical music enthusiast. He taught himself piano and was capable enough to get through Chopin Nocturnes and Schubert Impromptus. He was utterly steeped in every aspect of literature and history, especially poetry (reading in the original, including Russian, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, etc), a one-man refutation of the Tower of Babel.
My father was a passionate oenophile and gourmand, traveling across the city and planet for the ideal meal. He had a more than lay-person’s grasp on all things scientific, and never tired of studies on topics as far-ranging as black hole and string theory to the cutting edge of neuroscience. He had a lifelong flirtation with the history of philosophy from pre-Socratics to the present, a love that stayed with him till the end, and he was a sentimental fool for all things feline, finding in cats the supreme fulfillment of beauty and perfection. And for all his interest in the dark side of humanity, he was a celebrator and creator of the humorous in picture and word, and was a consummate artist of the double entendre, witticism (often in multiple languages at a time) and side-splitting pun.”
John Stone
Dr. Stone thought that to help severe personality disorders, it was necessary to adopt multiple styles at the same time and creatively adjust to the patient. He defined himself as an eclectic, but Sergio tells me the term is reductive: He would treat his patients eclectically, but his knowledge of each single approach was as profound as one of the best specialists.
Both Frank and Sergio tell me that Dr. Stone would attempt to treat most people; he had turned down only three people from his practice. When I asked our colleagues who knew Dr. Stone about his interest in psychopathy, Frank said, “He had a firm commitment to helping others and he would be willing to take on serious risks to fulfill what he saw as his mission.” There is an anecdote about how he agreed to take on the treatment of an antisocial patient, but made his agreement contingent on the patient’s parents purchasing an insurance policy of two million dollars on his life.
He was a man willing to put his life on the line for his ideas and beliefs, I respect that deeply. We don’t usually think of our job as therapists and psychiatrists as one in which we risk our lives for beliefs, but Dr. Stone did.”
Dr. Frank Yeomans
When interviewed for the book Personalities (ed. Gerben Hellinga et al.), Dr. Stone admits his special interest in the most severe pathologies was due to a “rescue complex” he developed in childhood. “The greater the pathology, the greater the rescuing.” And with regards to psychopathy, in the same book, Dr. Stone offered:
“You may not be able to teach a psychopath to feel empathy, but you may succeed in making them choose to act for the benefit of society.”
Dr. Michael Stone
Hearing about a man of strong passion and even stronger intellectual persistence in Frank and Sergio’s description of their friend, I begin to remember having seen Dr. Stone sitting at faculty meetings at Columbia. I begin to connect the picture I see on his books with the man I saw in vivo who appeared always so elegant, unapproachable for me as such the youngster I was, and lost in thoughts that must have always been larger than life.
Except they probably weren’t. Stone was also a comedian, and he had an obsession: he would draw cartoons, making irreverent jokes about himself, therapy, psychoanalysis, and any other serious topic (see an example reproduced with permission from editor of The Funny Bone, I chose this specific cartoon because looking at it reminds me I am not alone every time I have an after-effect from containing a devaluing transferences). The Funny Bone was edited by Dr. Stone’s son, John. As I got to know John, I begin to intuit some of Dr. Stone’s features as they were being described to me. John is pure creativity and energy, contained in a tremendously gentle and humble personality. John is a composer, but he is also a medical/scientific editor (yes, he proofread this piece – except this last part on him – and this is why all my “modifiers” are in the right place!). He is the Executive Director and Musical Director of The Paper Bag Players, America’s longest running children’s theater company. I went to see their show with my five years old son, and in this era of digital and abstract reality, I have never seen him more engaged than when watching the absolutely hilarious musical skits of the Paper Bag Players. They didn’t just win my son over, but my heart as well.
Anatomy of Evil concludes: “It is our ardent hope that […] our culture will eventually learn that true power and control come only after a lifelong process of mastering and inhibiting the self. […] Perhaps, as a first step, we should admit that the water in our collective pot is growing disquietingly warmer, day by day.”
Dr. Stone was, in a certain sense, speaking more loudly and more clearly than all of us about one of the core values of the TFP community: the absolute need to fight denial, to become acquainted and make peace with our own aggressive impulses, only then to systematically choose to act according to moral feelings under the overarching goal of integrating the two.
Silvia Bernardi
Bibliography
- Stone, M. H., & Stone, M. H. (2017, January 1). The Anatomy of Evil. Prometheus Books.
- The Funny Bone. MIchael Stone 2023
- Stone, M. H. (1990, May 4). The Fate of Borderline Patients. Guilford Press.
- Hellinga, G., Van Luyn, J. B., & Dalewijk, H. J. (2001, January 1). Personalities. Jason Aronson.
Silvia Bernardi
Silvia Bernardi, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. After graduating from medical school in Florence Italy in 2006, Silvia emigrated to the USA to work intensively in neuroscience research, studying the bases of the interaction between emotions and cognition. Silvia completed her residency in Psychiatry at Columbia and has since practiced privately in New York. She trained in Transference Focused Psychotherapy and continues to see patients for medication management and psychotherapy while conducting her research to unlock further knowledge to support the biological underpinnings of TFP and borderline personality disorder.
