Maggie's Farm

let me give this a try:

1) The fact of the treatment indicates the families have material resources, so boy's father was in the house, but entirely distracted. Authoritarian and arbitrary, son seen as object. Physical punishment regular --thus the son's foundational anger --actually a deeply buried but highly pressured post-traumatic stress disorder.

2) Mother, having been marriage-attracted to an efficient but cold and distant man to begin with, is unaware that she has a problem herself --whatever it is, it expresses as a substituting of appearances for a distastful, or worse, or just lost, reality --and has thus been both primary and over-interested in appearances in raising her son.

3) Ergo, son's method of gaining approval was very early on to suppress self and assume a role --"the charmer".

4) "The charmer" becomes a full but false identity, thus splitting the son's core self, leaving the conscience in the hidden but actual self. He doesn't have any idea of who he is, and therefore has no way of understanding his condition. The rest is history.

5) He IS evil, evil is as does, and evil has been done to him so early and so completely that to him evil is normal, as ordinary as the weather, or a tree.

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Howdidoo, Doc?

LOL --good idea --