A www.theatlantic.com commenter added his two cents’ worth to a mostly anti-Trump thread. The president’s narcissism, he wrote, is a “trait,” just a quality or quirk in the complexity of the man. Reading that statement, that word, one can grasp to a depressing depth the blindness so many people have to psychology, the psychology within them and around them.
To believe “traits”
are the difference between people is to assume we are all essentially the same. More fundamentally,
it is to judge oneself to be a generally normal, viable person, though with some “unique-ifying” brand. The brand might mar you
somewhat (such as a public speaking phobia) or give you a super-power (obsessive-compulsive
persistence), but it would not be you.
Who wouldn’t want to believe he or she is essentially healthy and right in the
world?
But psychology
shows us this is not true. A look at the literature – five generations of it ’til
the present feel-good era – shows that a person’s errors are forged in the
furnace of his history. We read about all the exotic problems but few cures.
Freud didn’t heal with his “interminable” psychoanalysis. Laing believed that the
schizophrenic young adult was the “sanest” member of his family, a “mystified”
person. Presently there are many trauma therapies du jour that are making no inroads into veterans’ suicides.
It is when we
sink inside ourselves, though, that we discover truths that aren’t in a hundred
books. We glimpse very undermining things. We see that we are a built or contrived
persona. We conclude that despite some “hope,” we may have no ability to dream of
anything better for ourselves. We find that we live in a world within our skull, not
in the earth’s wonders that excite and motivate a child.
I believe it’s
safe to say that people would prefer – given these options – to think that they
have been injured, rather than to think they are intrinsically defective. They
would prefer to think they have a problem, not that they are a problem. They would prefer to think they have an “inner child,” not that they are their inner child and that
the adult is an accretion with much less weight. Call this a health mechanism,
or some less clunky term like “wishful thinking.” We don’t want to see beneath
our safe-making perspective on ourselves, to see from a different angle an
alien. To do so would be to cancel our life out significantly, and replace it
with another life already condemned, and of course outside of our control.
Most of us, I
believe, could understand difficult principles in math and science,
deconstructionist literary criticism, esoteric philosophy, given enough
patience and time. I believe our brains are that good. But we may never allow ourselves
to know that a person is his history, that a Narcissist is his child-self gone
wrong and lurching in the real world. Isn’t it interesting, though, that there
are so many of us who assess the new
president to be thoroughly – literally every atom of his being – twisted, while
his followers perceive a real man, a competent actor, possessed of certain “traits”?
The many months
straddling the recent election have revealed a psychological landscape
different from and more bleak than any other in my lifetime. We have learned
that much of our country lives on generalized anger, an empathy deficit, and with no capacity to see
their psychological selves or the nature of another person. This has, of
course, always been true but is brought out in scab relief in the face of the
burgeoning autocracy in Washington, D.C. I believe we are at the beginning of a
new civil war, a psychological civil war, where we must win and the sympathizers
of a narcissistic-sociopathic menace must lose – lose power, prestige, the benefit of the doubt, the banner of legitimacy.
