Love and Hot Empathy
Affective empathy (aka emotional empathy aka hot empathy) is necessary for bonding with another person qua person. Bonding with another person qua person is necessary for loving that person. To the extent that psychopaths are neurophysiologically incapable of affective empathy, they’re also neurophysiologically incapable of bonding with another person qua person, and hence neurophysiologically incapable of love. In contrast, non-malignant narcissists and other Cluster B personalities are probably neurophysiologically capable of affective empathy, on some level. Moreover, they are probably capable of bonding with another person at least to some extent. However, their pathologies tend to severely interrupt the normal influence of affective empathy on behaviour, and, relatedly, render their interpersonal bonds highly unstable, and prone to being abruptly (and traumatically) severed. In other words, with respect to bonding with another person qua person, even non-psychopathic Cluster B personalities suffer from what is called ‘insecure attachment’. Insecure attachment makes it impossible to love another person in a stable way, because it prevents one from forming a genuine, profound attachment to another person qua person. It prevents one from loving another person in the manner that is typically described as ‘unconditional’. (‘Unconditional’, in this context, means something like ‘in a relatively selfless, stable, tenacious way’.) Even if one is neurophysiologically capable of affective empathy, one must also be capable of secure attachment to another person, qua person, in order to be capable of loving another person in a stable way.