Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Rocket science is easy, psychology is hard


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 arent 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.

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Silence 2


Real, effective therapy requires the client to shut up, pretty early on in therapy and frequently. Silence, to go inward. Words and conversation are too often buoys, both yanking the person out of her depth and keeping her afloat, false-stabilized by bright talk, rationalizations, the sheer quantity of running away on word or idea energy.

For some clients, words and feeling and deep feeling and deep revelatory feeling are all in friendly or warm touch with each other. But for most of the people who come for help, talk and deep feeling are different worlds, almost matter and anti-matter: You may as well ask a computer program to turn into a bowl of ice cream. That different.

If we want clients to change, we have to point them to silence, and to the purposes of it. It’s so everything can stop. When everything stops, you start sinking back to your foundation. When everything stops – and in a room with a clear and deep-seated observer – you are present with your life in a unique and one true way. This is presumably what you wanted: To get to reality.

Just stopping everything is in itself epiphanic. Your brain is in a different place, no longer a whirlwind. If you go beneath the anxiety, you immediately see yourself and your world in a different way: It’s yours. Time doesn’t rush by to be lost, gone. You are the central actor, seeing everything.

I have rarely if ever done a good enough job promoting silence as the essence of process. We therapists want to talk, to show the person new things about the world his psyche lives in, and his psyche itself. I’m suggesting, though, that we soon abruptly come to a fork in the road, one branch leading to a different dimension: the place of aloneness and silence. Though Bettelheim said: “I speak here of the child’s private world . . . Each of us is implying in his way that one cannot help another in his ascent from hell unless one has first joined him there. . . .”*, this is untrue for adults, who ultimately can’t be hand-held in their hell. They have to face the truth that when they most needed the parent, they were alone.

We are not abandoning the client when we do this. We are, though, destroying the fake relationship between stranger and help-seeker. It is replaced by the person first being in the silent cave of himself, looking out stunned or answered or in desperation, and seeing a hero.

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* Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress, 1967, p. 10.

Monday, January 23, 2017

Avoiding paralipsis . . .


. . . I won’t call anyone a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but will insist that in Trump and his coterie, we are watching the strange tidal wave of a personality-disordered White House overcome us. Two of the most toxic character botches – NPD and psychopathy (the blackest end of Antisocial Personality) – feature radical lying, a phenomenon that I believe is included in Freud’s concept of “primary process,” signifying primitive. This is the species of mendacity where the person can never be caught because his world of truth is insular and determined solely by feeling and need and heartless contempt for other people. The “callous and unemotional”* child who tells his father “I didn’t take” the wad of bills sticking out of his pocket. The psychopath who fabricates an entire dazzling résumé.** Trump, Conway and Spicer lying about the Inaugural crowd and offering the insanely contemptuous – or contemptuously insane – artifact of “alternate facts.”

One wonders how these people found each other – solider than most Narcissistic / Borderline marriages.*** One wonders, even more, how people who would always seem estimable and professional-grade good are actually lizard-brains and amoral and immoral children who can express the ugliest lies and brainwashes with indignation or with a smile on their face.

Though people tend to a visceral dislike for psychological attribution (“ad hominem”; “psychobabble”; “pop-psych”; “pseudo-science”; “not a real doctor”), I am asking our country to turn its eyes to the formidable, oceanic entity of the personality disorder. Among us are individuals – many, actually – who see and live in the world at an entirely different tilt from the earthbound norm. For them, odd music has always been playing from childhood on, and it is the theme-symphony of their life. They can never be a full person, can never really bond with another. They live a cornered-rat crimped agenda in a wide world: to be dependent, to be destructive, to be perfect and envied, to be detached, to be the center of attention, to be rageful bleedy and hysterical.**** Their emotional repertoire is old, stale and moribund like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake,***** built from the failed mother-child bond but twisted by all the out-of-sync years in the interim. Like Cleckley’s “mask of sanity,”****** they look here-and-now but never passed the starting gate of their life, the crib, the playpen.

They are our new Heads and counsels and spokespersons of government. I can only speculate that they were magnetized to Trump’s administration in, broadly, the same way women fall for abusive men and domestically violent men find victimizable women.******* There are forces of infantile need – though they wear rich suits and a strutting rooster’s bearing – that underlie everything.

My point here is a simple one: Try, please, to break through the psych phobia and see personality disorder as a key secret – “hiding in plain sight” – in the world. It is, in a way, a terraforming alien among us. Wouldn’t you want to know if your husband ran over that cat by accident – or on purpose? Wouldn’t it be enlightening to know that your friend wants to kowtow to her nasty elderly mother, doing her bidding, taking her advice, lurching to her phone calls? Wouldn’t you, the new boyfriend or fiancé, want to know that your girlfriend’s saucy personality isn’t “women’s lib,” but rather the rabbit-boiling bitch-rage of a Borderline Personality? Wouldn’t you want to know that your husband or wife’s confidence, and ability to make you feel crazy, evil and stupid by words and looks alone, is the disease of Narcissism? I believe that knowing our new government oligarchy is disordered – with lies, untruths, ad hominem smears that you’d never expect from a small child – will enable us to keep them in a box, on the hot seat where we can face their words and actions with the deepest sobriety, and horror, and justice-giving. Otherwise, we’ll be dupes, victims.

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* “Callous and unemotional” – relatively new conceptualization of the psychopathic child. See some horrifying youtube videos on the subject.

** “His philosophy? ‘If you throw enough shit, some of it will stick.’ It seems to work, because he leaves even sophisticated observers convinced of his sincerity. For example, one interviewer’s notes contained statements such as: ‘very impressive’; ‘sincere and forthright’; ‘possesses good interpersonal skills’; ‘intelligent and articulate.’ What the interviewer learned after reading his files, however, was that virtually none of what the inmate had told him was true. Needless to say, this man’s score on the Psychopathy Checklist was very high.” Without Conscience – The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Robert D. Hare, Ph.D., p. 49.


**** Respectively, Dependent Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder.

***** Dickens’s Great Expectations.

****** The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, 1941.

******* The Illusion of Love – Why the Battered Woman Returns to Her Abuser, David P. Celani, Columbia University Press, 1994.