The below Excerpt by Frank Mosca from his Joy Building Workbook addresses this question.
Now some will object that there are categories of people, called psychopaths, who are living proof of what happens when you care only for your own happiness. These people are dreaded precisely because they seem to fit a caricature of the totally amoral, totally unfettered individual who out of that alleged freedom and happiness decides to perpetrate “evil” on his fellows. The character Hannibal Lecter in the movie “Silence of the Lambs,” and later “Hannibal” played with such panache by Anthony Hopkins, epitomizes this fear we have of our happiness. That is why movies about serial killers are so popular of late, precisely because they capture the public’s image of happiness gone amok and reinforce the necessity for “healthy misery” to preserve us and others from the disastrous effects of such insane felicity.
But are such people as described in fiction really compatible with the way people act in real life? I would assert they are not. The case histories of so called psychopaths are replete with descriptions of how enraged they were and how those intense feelings of unhappiness manifested in their savagery towards their victims. No, it is not happiness that so called psychopaths achieve with their violent, destructive acts, but rather a release of the enormous internal tensions of unhappiness that they carry as a belief package with them into their daily lives. The acts give them some temporary remission from that pain and some temporary permission to feel a glimmer of contentment.
Let me illustrate by some items that are newsworthy at the time I am writing this paragraph. First, a manhunt that gripped the country for weeks came to an abrupt end with the discovery of the suicide of Andrew Cunanan, the murderer of the designer Versace, along with lesser known individual In an interview done with one of Cunanan’s roommates of some years, it was disclosed that he (Cunanan) was obsessed with self-image and power and never felt comfortable except when he actually held or was under the illusion that he held, power over others. His tastes in sex ran more and more radically to sadistic practices of inflicting pain on others. His roommate theorized that he killed Versace out of a pique of jealousy that while he (Cunanan) was becoming a “nobody” going “nowhere” in his life, Versace was the epitome of the gay man with enormous power and prestige; a vision of everything Cunanan wanted (in order to feel happy, of course) but felt he could never achieve. Thus he killed the icon of his ideal person, but actually was trying to kill the “unbearable wrongness of being” in himself that flooded him with feelings of being so “bad” and unworthy that only a steady diet of permission giving devices based on power would allow some relief. However, the behavioral rituals that would provide the relief grew in intensity from merely whipping to actually torturing and murdering others. It culminated in Versace, after which [his inability to control the world to prevent himself from feeling bad] led Cunanan to put a bullet in his own brain to kill the pain.
