The hollow man

Recent actions perpetrated by the present administration brought this biblical quotation to mind: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). Trump’s taking over Venezuela. Enabling and justifying the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Threatening Denmark and Greenland. Removing leaders from ethics, oversight and accountability offices. Strong-arming universities to do his bidding. Attempting to subvert an election. Personalizing the justice system. Living and breathing for personal revenge. Pardoning sixteen-hundred criminals. Emasculating Congress. Planning to punish Iran for doing what he is doing to U.S. citizens but on a smaller scale.

The quotation came to mind because of its falsity regarding the president and his henchmen, and possibly its falsity universally. This person who is striving to “gain the whole world” is not losing his soul. He died by soul murder (Shengold; Schatzman) or something intimately close to it in his childhood. It was already lost. That was the vacuum that filled with hate and enabled the switch to a material ego. I picture this president on his deathbed counting his buildings and his millions, counting the people he has made his subjects, counting the countries and allies he has commandeered, threatened, cowed and alienated. Hate will remain but he'll be tired and there will be no more fake smiles for family and henchmen and the gimps that bend over to him. On his deathbed can he, could anyone, feel good and at peace to be made only of objects and poison? That’s all his world is, he has shrunk it by trashing everyone’s heart so there’s only room on his planet for buildings, skeletons, dollars not yet spent and a suffocated inner child.

Do these last days or minutes count? Could they be the most important days and minutes in his life?

Kennedy's loaded diaper

Autism is spreading, becoming pandemic. It used to be children who flapped their hands and spun around, obsessed over the thread inside a button, who treated adults as objects: A child approached his father not to greet him affectionately but to lift his arm to reach a toy on a high shelf. Then Asperger’s – bright, cerebral and awkward children without emotional intelligence, laughing at others’ serious remarks, failing to understand another kid’s sadness, an 18-year-old worrying about his 401K when he turns 65 – joined autism. And now Kennedy Jr. has thrown his loaded diaper in the ring.

The pandemic comes from a virus: Not an autism virus but a virus metastasizing the name: “It exists on a spectrum.”

Can people stop being stupid for two minutes? All mental and emotional divergence from abstract perfection exists on a spectrum, an infinite continuum defined by the individual. Dysthymic depression is the grey “blahs” not suicidal blackness (though a “meh” soul can feel suicidal). The previous DSM hypothesized “minor depressive disorder,” presumably somewhere in between. There's "unspecified depressive disorder." There’s existential malaise, confusion about self, feeling lost. There's the ambitious, driven person with abysmal self-esteem. Should they all be funneled into Major Depressive Disorder? There’s panic, high anxiety, generalized anxiety, baseline insecurity, timidity, shyness. There’s Intermittent Explosive Disorder, road rage, crash-and-burn moments, angry frustration and angry-hurt frustration, a general upset defeatedness, sourness and irritability. Are they all part of a nameable disorder, a single disorder? There are out-of-the world schizophrenics and there are individuals who function well and think clearly but hear their father’s voice: “You’re dumb,” or see shadows. There are teens who drink when it's offered, many who live to party, and others who have found a substance that makes them, for the first time, feel human, decent. Are they all addicts? There are paranoid personalities who see malign intent in everyone, and people who are broadly cynical about humanity. There are Borderline personalities who are angry children in adult bodies, holding their breath ‘til they turn blue, and mature others who wisely and wistfully say “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” There are psychopaths and there are people who have no empathy because they are frozen, needing to be melted with love. Should the DSM committee geniuses posit a "Generalized Anger Disorder"? A "Major Immaturity Disorder"? Is everyone without feeling a psychopath?

There are countless children who seem fine up through age 12, but come 13 and seventh grade, still have the emotional maturity of an 8-year-old. They feel wrong, out-of-sync among other kids, think they’re the only one in their classes who is “different.” They are the boys who can’t picture talking to a girl, the child too infant-like to even comprehend caring about current events. They are inner-dwelling because their distracted or incompetent parents estranged them from early on. Eighth or ninth grade, they will be introspective; tenth grade, the “intellectual” or the rebel without a clue. No one sees a problem. They will grow up to not have an interest or passion in the real world, a goal after high school, because they are self-soothing. They will join the military, work with their father, go to trade school, go to college without ambition. A ship without a rudder. They will lack emotional intelligence, proven in their problematic relationships. They are out-of-sync within themselves.

They are possibly the bulk of humanity. Are they autistic?

What the hell is wrong with you people?!

"The calendar is lyin' when it reads the present time."

(Phil Ochs song, "Here's to the State of Mississippi")

“The tradition has roots in patriarchal societies, where women were considered part of the father’s household until given to a husband. Marriage was often an economic or strategic alliance between families, not just a personal romantic decision.”

“This tradition became a gentlemanly custom by the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, where it was . . . more about honoring the family. By the late 20^th century, particularly after the feminist movements of the 1960s – ’70s, it began to fade as a necessity, and today it’s seen by many as optional or symbolic rather than imperative.”

“Current Status in the U.S. and the West: Not a cultural imperative anymore. Some couples still practice it as a gesture of respect or family bonding, but many skip it altogether.”

What insane, odious, absurd, atavistic, humiliating, psychologically self-effacing, hidebound-to-our-ugly-and-pestilential-history custom is ChatGPT referring to?

“Overall Prevalence: A 2015 survey by The Knot found that 77% of grooms asked permission from the bride’s father or parents before proposing, up from 74% in 2013 and 71% in 2011. Millennial Trends: A survey conducted by JamesAllen.com in 2017 revealed that 63% of millennials asked a partner’s parent for permission before proposing, compared to only 20% of people over 45. Regional Variations: A 2024 survey by DatingNews.com found that nearly half (48%) of respondents in California would not ask for parental permission to wed, while in more conservative states like North Carolina and Utah, only 14% and 16% respectively would forgo this tradition.”

The statistics are much worse for Asia, much better for Europe. 

Curse the MF Ball-less Lord of Freaks, what the hell is wrong with you people? Next to the self-rape that millions of MAGA folks perpetrate daily in their love of Prime Sociopath, this act may be what most boggles TPS’s mind. A client’s fiancée said that her mother was and is imperiously offended that the man didn’t seek her permission to marry her daughter. Struck stupid, I did my Chat research. There are 20% to 77% of men and the women ‘neath them, in present-day U.S., who ceremoniously or anxiously seek a parent’s approval to marry? There are this many (as opposed to not a goddamned one) men who first prostrate themselves upon the “Whalecum” redneck doormat of their fiancée’s fifteen-word-vocabulary father before sealing the deal with her? What kind of people am I looking at on my couch? The toxic umbilical cord that continues to bind most adult-children to their parents is one of the most powerful impediments to therapy. It prevents even the façade of autonomy and separateness that is necessary to be an adult and necessary to enable the deep, healing expression of childhood pain: Without the opted-for adult as guardian over the psyche, these inner-wilted clients will never dare to assert their anger, their grief, their equality. They crumple at the sight of their parent in their mind. They can never understand justice.

Let them never appeal to their partner’s or their own parent for any permissions. Let them lose their false, unthinking definition of “respect.” Let therapy rip the delusion of parental hegemony from their brains.

Military life is a second abusive childhood

For many soldiers and veterans, the military years are a second abusive childhood. There is the recapitulated flawed separation-individuation phase, the first few years when recruits are the vassals of superiors who establish arbitrary rules, exercise sole power and require absolute obeisance. They are essentially tabula rasa again, with a few genetic predispositions. They sacrifice and subsume themselves or don't survive. Immature parents create sick bonds during the first three years which are the starting gate of personality disorders such as Borderline Personality. Will the infant gain the potential for healthy autonomy, or will the psychic umbilical cord remain attached in engulfment and rejection, in abject dependency, in schizoid alienation, in psychopathy or narcissism? Will the infant soldier somehow become an individual, or will his fundamental inchoateness be schooled by a new troubled master?

Following this second separation-individuation is their second latency stage and adolescence (the remainder of their original four- or six- or eight-year contract) where this time they must ditch whatever sense of a complex and caring world they may have had. Their friendships are forged in the landscape of subjection, humiliation, near-seamless surveillance and a life whose theme song is “we live to kill people.” Friendships that form in combat are a unique blood bond, or rather a bleeding bond where love is trauma. In an ambiance of two-dimensional humanity – right/wrong, good/evil, strong/weak, masculine/feminine, categorical/indecisive, calloused/emotional, superior/inferior – the formatively-injured psyche is recaptured and re-tortured right at the moment (late teens, early twenties) when it might have meaningfully escaped the family hypnosis.*

A veteran, twenty years post-service, said during a session: “They try to break you then rebuild you into the kind of person they want you to be. They put a way of thinking into your brain, different from normal people. You’re told to end people’s lives.” “They take empathy away from you. They definitely strip you of that.” “They want you to be submissive to them. They want to break your mindset. It’s definitely a cult.”

A Psych textbook, many years ago, cited research indicating that soldiers who came from a troubled childhood were, in similar combat or combat-adjacent circumstances, more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than those who came from a healthier childhood. They are also the ones who, in high school, are more likely to choose the military, a peculiar choice – and occupation – when one’s country's survival is not at stake. Few if any other professions feature a prisoner re-education camp format or require the calcifying of one’s heart and the re-infantilizing and concretizing of one’s psyche.

More than a few of the veterans I’ve seen suffered deliberate, ongoing mental torture by one particular psychopathic superior officer, someone who should have been cowering in a dungeon, not cavalier in the upper ranks. These veterans were changed forever, raped to a new philosophy by the evil they endured in lonely, masculine indifference within a Kafka-esque FUBAR bureaucracy conceived by sociopaths over many illustrious generations.

It's one of the amazing ignorances of the world that recruits don’t know they are entering their second childhood when they join the military. They believe they are starting their adult life, maybe a life of great meaning and idealism. Instead, they have fallen backwards into the formative tragedy of their lives – child's helplessness and confusion and powerlessness, bullying, loneliness, unfair punishments, tedious chores, that awful second- or seventh-grade teacher – a nightmare of psychological regression. And permanent regression, because they leave the military as they left their childhood, having never formed their own center. The “false self” – a seminal principle in psychology – is the consequence of most lives that adapted, from infancy, to the needs and neuroses of powerful others. The military man and woman have redoubled that falseness, present upon past. They don’t know their self, twice co-opted.

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* A term conceived by psychotherapist David Calof in Multiple Personality and Dissociation: Understanding Incest, Abuse and MPD.

The most eye-rolling of defenses

My client, a retired physician, has always gone astray in her search for a good man. She is attracted to confident, masterful (and well-dressed) men, feeling implicitly just right to want to be taken care of and protected. I, on the other hand, a hard-working male therapist, feel manly and good to be the earner, providing a sense of security for my wife.

Here we are, two of the billions of adequately intelligent people who marched brainwashed into the right belief system bequeathed to us by history and television, the stalwart man and the limp starry-eyed woman.

This may be a stretch (I don’t think so), but I suspect that even the sweetest guys and the toughest women harbor, beneath their Freudian preconscious, these same ego-syntonic* and delicious urges: protectee and protector. Ayn Rand, most adamantine of women with her “virtue of selfishness,” her casting deviators from her Objectivist philosophy into the fire, her apotheosis of atheism and capitalism and her deification of rationality, believed that the essence of femininity is male hero-worship and therefore that a woman should never be, for example, president of the United States.

I think it’s valid to ask if these stereotypes (or archetypes**) are fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong. Can there actually be something instinctively “looking up” (at a man) in the female genome, something “looking down” in boys’ and men’s? What if world history has simply perpetuated certain self-medicating defense mechanisms as prosthetic egos when real self-esteem is lacking? “Boys better than girls” no different than "men superior to women" no different than “Whites superior to Blacks,” no different than Jews more “chosen” than you,*** no different than parents better than their children?

If we look to depth psychology – the terrible place where we are all still three years old, the inner child crawling wounded from infancy to grave – we’ll find that my client's and women's need to need is half right and that men's script of superiority is all wrong. How? The women have allowed themselves, maybe unconsciously, to feel dependency, the unfinished child’s rightness to have someone to lean on, to collapse to, to look to for wisdom, the eternal bond to the perfect(-seeming) Mother or Father. Where women have erred is in accepting that it is the opposite sex, rather than the Platonic parent, who stands on a pedestal in their DNA.

The emotionally ingenious men who can feel this dependency in themselves will be holistically cleared of a poisonous obstruction in their lives, the conceit of macho godliness. They will be rid of a delusion that slowly breaks their backs, warps their spirit, and cuts short their lives. Ayn Rand was right about this: These false Atlases need to shrug. She didn’t know that they need to fall into their mother’s arms, in fact or memory or loss.

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* “Ego-syntonic” – basically meaning “in harmony with one's dysfunction.” For example, someone with Major Depressive Disorder doesn't like being depressed. But a Depressive Personality-disordered person is ego-syntonically fine to be miserable, morose, pessimistic, sure that the future will be as bleak as the past and present.

** Carl Jung conceived a few archetypes embodying traditional male and female roles, such as the hero, the great mother, the wise old man, the maiden, the anima and animus.

*** TPS is of Jewish lineage and therefore feels that he has standing to make objective comments about the tradition.

Anger or dissolution

A middle-aged woman said that her father was absent in her childhood. “I didn’t like him.” Growing up, she felt that she always had to be “big, strong and brave” because “there was no one to take care of me.” Her stepmother beat her severely. “That’s why I’m angry at women.” Despite “good” therapy a few years ago, her inner child still feels alone and afraid.

“I don’t give mercy and grace to women.” “I don’t like weak women.”

When she got cancer, her husband failed to be her caretaker. “He was concerned for himself.” However, she was “independent.” She joked about having to “kill him.”

Once she was a “pathetic people-pleaser,” a codependent enabler. No longer.

I confronted one of her statements: “I don’t like weak women.” What did she mean by “weak”? Sensitive, feelings easily hurt. I told her that she had been a child whose feelings mattered to no one, she had had to be “big,” and still feels she must be brave and strong and independent. She doesn’t dislike “weak” women: She sees sensitive, feeling women and her aged child feels envious, down to the soles of her feet, of their normal humanity. She was made to be a hard shell and they could be filled with hurt, love, need, life.

She saw that this was true. What could help her? Grieve her stolen childhood, the greatest tragedy that can happen to a person. Dismantle the barbed barricade around her heart. But that unraveling would demolish her powerful anger, her identity attitude, her bigness, her “independence,” her strength. She gave me a saucy stare.

We should all be able to predict, correctly, that she is a Trump admirer and voter.

I probably should have written "here-and-then"

Third in a likely sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits

There are doubtless some do-gooders who do prosocial acts for sick reasons. They may, for example, hate the rich or be “people-pleasers” whose self-value is to exist for others. (Which is not real self-esteem.) One can bet, though, that most liberals are average people with a good heart. “Populists,” on the other hand, can be globally categorized as neurotic, a term describing persons who unconsciously seek redress for childhood needs and pain through present means. Psychologically, their present is their revenge for their past. The main reason Democrats are feeling helpless to reach their Trumpian nemeses is that they are trying to reason with people who seem to be in the here-and-now, but are in the there-and-then. (Comment to David French's 2/9/25 New York Times article "The Populist Cure Is Worse than the Elite Disease," https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/455qtk?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

Therapy is a nonjudgmental process. But can we help a bad person?

Here is an indigestible paradox: Therapy is the most “successful” when it’s the shallowest and least effective. This is to say that Cognitive Therapy can work for anybody, as it’s based on the assumptions that (a) dysfunction is a matter of wrong thinking, and (b) irrational or pessimistic thoughts can be changed by logic and optimism. These assumptions could apply to anyone regardless of their moral system or political ideology. As it goes, the Cognitive approach can only help people who are heavily invested in their severed head, who live in their head and prefer to banish their historical body of emotion, felt sense, pain and developmental abort.

Depth therapy, that changes emotional chemistry by reaching to the origin causes of dysfunction, cannot help individuals who are married to blaming the world, to their love of a sociopathic president, to their antisocial ideologies and attitudes. These cognitive-conceptual stances are based in deep, early-onset pain that they will critically resist feeling else they will collapse into inchoate helplessness.

A woman whose childhood anger is redeemed in hateful leaders and governmental policies. A married couple who prefer the military life – seventy percent of the year – to raising their children, leaving them with friends and relatives. People with a vengeance sense of good and evil, who are deeply and complacently repressed, living on the surface of themselves and not wanting to reach or know their truth. Therapy will not help them.

But Cognitive Therapy can.

Maybe who we really are

Another in a possible sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits.

I’ve seen a few thousand people in therapy over the past 26 years. Regardless of what they may initially say – “I had a great childhood”; “My parents never hit me” – the fact is that none of them received respectful empathy and unconditional love in their childhood. This doesn’t necessarily mean they had terrible caregivers They may have had distracted, or weak, or immature parents who “meant well.” (Note my challenge: “Parents don’t do their ’best.’ They do their feeling.”) When you consider that the therapy population is only a fraction of the people who are hurt and damaged in their formative years, it is theoretically plausible that a majority of our citizens harbor buried anger, feeble and selective empathy, and a fundamental lack of prosocial feeling. It would take a powerfully inspirational personage – like Obama – to pull them out of their primary self-regard and into a prosocial spirit (“We are all brothers and sisters”; “I care about the poor, the homeless, etc.”). Trump may represent the default id that is angry, self-focused and nihilistic. He may have to fail spectacularly before people’s better angels again find room in their psyche. (Comment to a Washington Post article.)