[The abusive personality: violence & control in intimate relationships]

Canadian Psychology, Aug 1999 by Dutton, Donald G, Rice, Marnie E

DONALD G. DUTTON

The Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships

New York: Guilford Publications, Inc., 1998, 214 pages (ISBN 1-57230- 370-0, US$26.95, Hardcover)

Reviewed by MARNIE E. RICE

Having devoted much of his career to the study of men who abuse their wives, Donald Dutton is unquestionably well qualified to write this book. Through his extensive research on the topic and his hands-on experience with men who batter, he has gained valuable insights into these and other men. In the late 1970s, when my colleagues and I were planning a study on applying social learning theory to the reduction of violence, Don Dutton was one of the few people who had already made headway in that area, and his ideas about how to apply psychological knowledge were formative in our early efforts. Since that early work, Dutton's ideas have evolved based on where his research results led him, and that journey is the story told in this book.

In the first chapter, Dutton describes three subtypes of batterers: psychopathic, over-controlled, and "cyclical." Although he acknowledges the three subtypes, this book is about only the third, the cyclical or borderline batterers. Dutton gives very cursory reviews of psychiatric, sociobiological, and feminist theories of wife assault before discussing in depth social learning explanations which formed the basis of his early thinking about the topic. Although he finds much of value in social learning explanations, he finds them lacking sufficient complexity to account for cyclical batterers.

The borderline wife assaulter is chronically and intermittently abusive, but only within the family. His violence is private, directed only within the family. He is very emotional, experiencing high levels of depression, anxiety, and anger that occur as he repeatedly builds up tension and explodes. Dutton presents data on wife assaulters referred for treatment showing high correlations between measures of borderline personality and victims' reports of psychological and physical abuse.

Dutton's next insight into the abusive personality came when he hypothesized that the source of the rage in cyclical batterers came from their faulty attachment styles. He proposed that the abusers had, in infancy, developed "fearful" attachment styles in which they exhibit an ambivalence toward intimacy and toward those persons emotionally connected to them. Most particularly, the fearful attachment toward the mother during infancy and early childhood is experienced later in life towards the spouse: undue preoccupation with her whereabouts, lack of trust in her, and chronic anger and resentment towards her. Dutton presents data showing that men's self-reported attachment styles were related to females' reports of their partners' abusiveness. Men with high "fearful" attachment scores were also high in measures of borderline personality and chronic anger. These three together, Dutton hypothesized, formed the core of the abusive personality.

The next step in Dutton's elaboration of the abusive personality was his observation that abusers were in what the therapists facetiously called "emotional kindergarten": they exhibited an extreme poverty of emotion regarding their own parents and upbringing. He found that, when corrected for socially desirable responding, wife assaulters reported feeling rejected by their fathers (and, to a lesser extent, by their mothers), as well as physically and psychologically abused by their fathers. Thus, Dutton hypothesized, the men had learned to be abusive by three different processes. Parental psychological abuse resulted in a vulnerable borderline personality prone to going on the defensive to shore itself up. Physical abuse directed at them or their mothers modelled the abusive behaviour for them. And both the physical and emotional abuse left them with fearful attachment styles. Together, these generated the abusive personality.

The final step in Dutton's formulation of the abusive personality was the discovery that wife assaulters scored high on measures of trauma symptoms. Dutton's research showed that borderline personality, fearful attachment, and trauma symptoms were all highly correlated. Thus, his final "trauma model" of intimate abusiveness posits that witnessing and experiencing physical abuse as a child results in adult cognitive problem-solving deficits and a violent behavioural repertoire. Experiencing parental rejection and shaming in the form of criticism and public and random punishment result in adulthood in externalizing (blaming) attributional style combined with high chronic anger. And insecure attachment as a child results in adulthood in insecure attachment, sensitivity to rejection, and a disturbed self-schema that is prone to anxiety and depression and an inability to calm oneself down.

At the end of the book, Dutton outlines a 16-week treatment program for batterers. The program is cognitive-behavioural in orientation and can be offered to all subtypes of batterers. Dutton admits that for many men more intensive therapy having to do with borderline personality, attachment issues, and trauma will need to be undertaken in addition to the standard program. Is treatment effective? Dutton realistically makes no strong claims here, but rather refers to outcome literature showing a small to moderate effect size for treatment of court-mandated batterers. For his own program, he reports lower rates of recidivism (defined as new crimes of any kind, new violent crimes, or new wife assault offenses) for men who completed treatment than for men who dropped out. But, as he points out, he could not say whether these differences were due to treatment per se or to motivational or psychological differences in the men. It is entirely plausible, based on the data regarding treatment for at least some groups of offenders, that treatment serves as a "filter" to screen out high-risk men, so that those who complete the treatment are lower risk than those who refuse or drop out, but that it is not the particular treatment per se that accounts for the lower recidivism of completers.