Psychological Appropriation: When Empathy Becomes Violence
Most explanations of violence begin with absence. Absence of empathy, absence of conscience, absence of restraint. Conventional forensic models divide offenders into familiar categories: instrumental, affective, psychotic, ideological. Each assumes that harm emerges from deficit. Something is missing. Something failed.
This paper began with a different question: what if some forms of violence arise not from absence, but from excess?
The work introduces the concept of Psychological Appropriation, a framework for understanding a specific class of moralized violence in which the offender does not see themselves as destructive, hateful, or even aggressive. Instead, they experience themselves as protective, redemptive, or necessary. The act of harm becomes framed as care. The offender does not believe they are violating morality. They believe they are fulfilling it.
Psychological Appropriation describes a surrogate-driven structure in which empathy fuses with identity. The offender does not simply feel for another. They begin to experience the suffering, purity, or vulnerability of a symbolic other as their own. This process produces a moral logic that reframes violence as obligation rather than choice. Within this structure, inaction becomes complicity, and action becomes restoration.
The model identifies three core mechanisms at the center of this transformation.
First is surrogate fusion. The boundary between self and other begins to collapse. The offender internalizes the suffering or symbolic value of a person, group, or ideal, and begins to act as if responsible for protecting or repairing it. This is not delusion in the traditional sense. Thought remains coherent. Reasoning remains structured. But identity becomes partially shared.
Second is moral mandate illusion. Violence is experienced as ethically necessary. It is not perceived as cruelty, revenge, or impulse. It is interpreted as repair. The internal logic becomes stabilizing. The individual believes that they are restoring balance, purifying harm, or relieving suffering.
Third is symbolic consent. The act of harm is justified through imagined moral authorization. The offender does not experience themselves as imposing violence, but as carrying out a duty on behalf of the surrogate. This transforms aggression into service. Harm becomes framed as mercy, protection, or release.
Together, these mechanisms produce a structure in which empathy does not restrain violence. It enables it.
This framework situates Psychological Appropriation along a dimensional spectrum of personality organization. It overlaps with psychotic structure, particularly in identity diffusion and moral absolutism, yet differs in that cognitive reasoning remains intact. The individual knows the act violates social norms or law, but experiences it as morally required. The distortion is not in logic. It is in moral orientation.
The paper explores this structure through comparative case analysis, examining both expressive and covert forms of surrogate-moral violence. In expressive cases, violence appears catastrophic and symbolic, driven by purification or rescue narratives. In covert cases, it emerges within caregiving or institutional settings, framed as compassion or relief. Despite differences in form, the underlying architecture remains the same: empathy fused with identity, moral logic transformed into compulsion, and violence reframed as care.
This perspective shifts the focus of forensic inquiry. Instead of asking why empathy failed, it asks how empathy became unbounded. Instead of interpreting moral language as rationalization, it examines it as structural evidence of internal obligation. The danger in such cases lies in the sincerity of the belief. The offender often feels remorse, but the remorse itself reinforces the moral logic that justified the act.
The broader implication is that violence cannot always be understood through the psychology of hatred. In some cases, it must be understood through the psychology of care that has lost its boundary. When empathy merges with identity and morality becomes absolute, compassion can transform into compulsion.
Psychological Appropriation reframes moralized violence as a pathology of excess rather than absence. It suggests that the same mechanisms that produce altruism, protection, and ethical action can, under certain conditions, produce destruction. The difference lies not in the presence of feeling, but in its structure.
In this sense, the study of violence becomes inseparable from the study of empathy itself.
