I have an adoptive son. We adopted him as an infant from El Salvador. He is nearly 30 years old now. I also have a natural born daughter from a previous marriage, When my son was little there seemed to be something odd about his personality. At the time I just accepted it as being a different personality type from me or my wife. He was loved and I still think his adojptive mother and I did the best we could in raising him and trying to impart our values to him as he grew up. He was an extraordinarily difficult teen, and in truth the stress of living with him contributed to the eventual divorce of my wife at the time and I - though I did my best not to express this or show it to my son.

Fast forward many years later and I am working in a company where I came to realize some of the management there were probably clinically sociopaths. I read the book "Snakes in Suits" about sociopaths in the workplace and I recognized those traits in the managers who had caused me and most of the people who dealt with them such grief.

I also came to recognize that my son is also likely a sociopath. He has all the characteristics:
A talented liar who manipulates the people around him for his benefit; strong sense of "entitlement" and seems to think he's special; inability to learn from experience that he needs to put in the time and effort on the job to become proficient and reap the rewards; and appears to lack empathy for those people closest to him - like his girlfriend who seems to gave been supporting him.

It's comparatively easy to learn to avoid and put distance between you and the sociopaths you are not related to. It's another thing to recognize your son is a sociopath and only contacts you when he wants something from you of a material nature. I have often turned over in my mind the questions of "Can he be helped?" and "Why is he like this?" The only thing I have learned is that I cannot change him and my life is far better the less contact I have with him. We now live a couple of thousand miles apart which seems to work well for me.

I read a posting about soulless people or spiritless people on RMN's main page. While I'm not buying into all the details of that posting - The concept that there are hunan beings around us who lack the something that makes us a whole person is one way of expressing what I have seen in some people around us. I find it hard to believe that anything like 50% of the people on this planet are like that based on my own experiences, but I do believe that there might be about 1/10 of that or about 1 in 20 based on my own life experiences and on the number of sociopaths n this world.

At the link there is yet another but similar variation on the concept that some people lack that "spark" that makes the rest of us empathetic and caring. Again, I don't buy the whole theory posted there - but parts of it resonate with my own experiences.