HEALTH PLUS:LITERATURE HAS accounts of many cads and bounders as they were rather quaintly termed in a bygone era.
The cads were the charming, debonair, devastatingly attractive, cultured, articulate, polished, aristocratic, grandiose, financially impoverished men who inveigled their way into the hearts of vulnerable and wealthy single or widowed women for nefarious purposes.
They won their hearts, appropriated their money and callously abandoned them to extreme public humiliation and private heartache. They were identifiable within certain societal circles and were often warned against by insightful mothers, wise aunts and protective papas usually to the deaf ears of those smitten by their charms.
Bounders were of a more ill-bred nature but were nonetheless seductive, unscrupulous and successful in their conquests while “rakes” tended to waste their inheritance on wine, women, gambling and the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of family, friends and all who capitulated to their charms.
William Hogarth's depiction of A Rake's Progressoutlines the fate for those in this behavioural genre in past times.
Cads and bounders formed the essence of many a romantic tragedy in which the heroine tried to reform their immorality while often succumbing to it, losing her virtue, her reputation and her fortune.
Take Madam Bovary's principal lover, for example, now he was a cad of the first order, as was Alec d'Urberville in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Picture poor Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectationslanguishing in her wedding dress after her abandonment by Compeyson.
Few cads can compare with Don Juan who personified the libertine, licentious extravagance of this personality type. Look at the trouble caused by George Wickham to the Bennet family in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
And most of us must be mesmerised by the concept of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Graywho personifies the outward perfection and inner degeneration of the aristocratic cad who believes that he has every entitlement in life, even to challenge age itself.
Cads and bounders populate history. The cruelty of the Marquis de Sade, the seductions of Lord Byron and the excesses of Casanova encapsulate their ilk.
But are these imaginative or exaggerated characterisations of a former time or do they exist in modern form and, if so, how are they identifiable?
It is believed that cads still exist, that they still prey on the naive as they deceive and bankrupt them. Psychiatric nomenclature would associate this behaviour with “narcissistic personality disorder” distinguished by irresponsibility, disregard for obligations, insincerity, pathological egocentricity with a self-centredness that includes incapacity for empathy and love. Poverty of feeling while expressing false feelings in grandiose form, ingratitude for love bestowed upon them and an overriding sense of entitlement are features of narcissism.
The excessive need for novel, thrilling and exciting risky stimulation, the capacity to be deceptive, deceitful, unscrupulous and dishonest, to cheat, to con, to defraud, allied to a lack of remorse or guilt, distinguish those who are psychologically unable to empathise with others.
There is a ruthlessness and exploitation in business dealings and in personal relationships.
Romantic relationships are of their nature numerous, superficial and exploitative and the poverty of emotional capacity means that no remorse appears to be experienced nor to be expressed at the distress of those who love, are loyal to them and are ultimately betrayed by them.
What makes the cad? What loneliness lies in the heart of those who cannot feel? What detachment from life, from reality, from insight, from self resides in the person who shows no capacity to connect emotionally with other people, to care about them, to return their concern and to commit to them in a caring way?
How does this come about? What life experiences shape the condition and how can people be protected from those who suffer from it, while seeking to understand the circumstances that generate it.
The problems caused by cads and con men for themselves and others are not just the stuff of dramatic fictitious tales of the past. They exist today and intervention is required for them and for those who encounter them, trust them and are hurt by them.
Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in University College Dublin