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?
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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.