Trump: Taking a dump in the kitchen (or – "Obsequious Pride Syndrome")

I don’t know why the line has stuck in my head after forty-five or fifty years. An interview in Playboy or Esquire, a seamy piece about some seamy criminal or fifteen-minutes-of-fame artiste, some cheap renegade – the article with faux pretension of intellect because of the magazine. The runty guy was talking about the droves of indiscriminate sex he’d had from early teens on. His smiling maxim was: “You’ve gotta draw the line somewhere.” He had just said he wouldn’t or hadn’t slept with his sister.

The insults “tacky,” “slimy,” “sleazy,” “lying,” “two-faced,” “corrupt,” “gross,” “disgusting,” “crude,” “boorish,” “trashy,” “low-life,” “indecent,” “vulgar” seem, when uttered by any given person, to be terms of subjectivity. Who can say what “should” be offensive or condemnable to people, considering their different makeups and backgrounds? One person’s or group’s snobbery about, say, a velvet Elvis painting, those maudlin images of sad, wide-eyed children, or some crude graffiti on a church door, seems to judge the snob as much as it does the creation’s admirers.

And in part this is so: We do internalize prejudices of judgment or hate from our parents. We do have seeds of deep, child-based injustice and shaming that morph into derision, in our later life, of others who secretly trigger our pain. Alice Miller, in The Drama*, writes of a parent’s stuckness in the “vicious circle of contempt,” where his early mistreatment is projected, decades later, into callous disregard of his child’s personhood and needs. In these instances, our condemnation of the other person is but a mirror to our own soul.

But there is, I believe and would evidence, an area where all those insulting terms do land on an objective, solid target beyond ourselves; where clear understanding, not a bent and angry heart, assesses the person and his behaviors. We, from a healthier vantage point, see someone condemnable and unfit, and we are right. We are right because there is a stronger or psychologically healthier set of eyes; there is a sicker or dysfunctional misperception of facts and individuals. When I “evaluate” a serial killer or swindler to prison and punishment, I am more right than is he or his sympathetic relatives. This doesn’t mean that I can’t, through the psychotherapist’s lens, appreciate the deeper validity of all behaviors: Every action does have a meaningful reason, from murder to self-mutilation, pedophilia to self-sacrifice. But as we must live among others in the alter theme, the different plane of adult not id-primitive values, we are sanctioned to divide acceptable from unacceptable, life-promoting from life-devaluing.

Donald Trump, the person and president, is tacky, slimy, sleazy, lying, two-faced, corrupt, gross, disgusting, crude, boorish, trashy, low-life, indecent, vulgar. That many of us can see this and many of us can’t is a litmus test of psychological clarity rather than of political prejudice. We see the man’s anti-human values expressed through an abortive and malicious character, and we know this is sickness, no different from a doctor’s assessment of cancer or a victim’s damnation of a rapist who disfigures her.

There are truths that people will not like and must deny because they need a delusion to give them a prosthetic sense of balance. Schizophrenics, “who have undergone terrifying, heartbreaking, and damaging experiences, usually over a long period of time, and as a consequence are emotionally disturbed – often to the point of incapacitation”**, must believe they are Jesus or Napoleon or a famous person to delude themselves from the factual collapse of their identity. Many men, beaten and soul-murdered with shame by their father, must believe they are superior to women, are ascendant by birth. Without that belief, they would collapse into the disintegrated boyhood that never left its prison. Large numbers of people grew up to have to filter out the damage that authoritarian bluster, narcissism, crudeness, sarcasm, non-objective rule and violence did to their child selves. They became self-protectively blind to a father-figure’s callousness, primitiveness, ugliness – his failure to be an adult. Like children who “identify with the aggressor” and believe they admire the neurotic strength of their alcoholic or belittling father, they see and hear the crudity of this president and their hearts swell with obsequious pride. Like children who, ‘returning to the bad object,’*** cannot quit an abusive parent as their starved core still hopes for love and nurturing, they follow this effigy of arbitrary power who doles out false promises (as their father did), and who helps them project their pain into the “other.”

Little can be tacky or indecent to the followers of Trump. His foul breath, in the form of their caregiver and their childhood, became the oxygen that sustains them.

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* Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child – https://www.amazon.com/Drama-Gifted-Child-Search-Revised/dp/0465016901.

** John Modrow’s How To Become a Schizophrenic – https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Schizophrenic-Biological-Psychiatry/dp/0595242995.

*** Ronald Fairbairn’s theory of “return to the bad object.” See David Celani’s exposition of it in The Illusion of Love: Why the Battered Woman Returns to Her Abuser – https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Love-David-Celani/dp/023110037X.

My hippie moment #3: Deeper in the ocean

Does anyone today – anyone over, say, age ten – ever just pause deeply, quietly, and say to him- or herself: How do I feel about this? I mean at the body bowel-gut-chest level, where our deep ocean currents of emotional sensations are. Here’s how to test whether you do this: Image a tree along your evening walk, a cup of coffee in hand, a politician intoning about this or that, the night sky, an African-American man walking down the street with his head bowed, a picture on the wall of your living room, your life as a whole. If you are able to simply sense or feel, in many of these scenes you would find that your feeling is very different from what your common thought would be. That is, the body’s knowledge would say a “felt idea” or more likely a blurred rainbow of feeling-truths that would be different from the attitudes and ideas you had come to accept and identify as yourself. If we will agree that our organismic Self is our authenticity and our history and meaning, more so than the variety of propagandas that sit in our heads, we will fear that we have become lost to our personal truth, our real core.

Three examples. Attitudinal thought: “These gun lovers are closet cowards who don’t have the dignity or strength to be a man simple, naked before the world with his hands open, his mind capable.” Deeper feeling: He – I – would want people to keep out of my life. I like my rifle. Don’t break into my mind anymore than you would break into my house.

Attitudinal thought: “Starbucks coffee concoction. Assembly line made. Eighteen-year-old employee with no interest in the esthetics, the quality, ensuring the recipe is just right, the history, the science of it.” Deeper feeling: Why am I relying on a cup of coffee to give me some peace and contemplative feeling? It’s too powerless to do that. I am a derelict little boat in a big sea.

Consensus thought: “We must sacrifice for our children: They are our future.” Deeper feeling: Children are not more important to me than I am. My future is my future.

I’m troubled by all the ideas, the brand-name thoughts that have pretty much replaced the atmosphere of our modern days. Ideas that must be erroneous because they are eternally in conflict, big box attitudes insane to reality: all Democrats are – ; immigration good or bad; conservative ideology is right; abortion is wrong. We've become garbage heads, our thoughts the pond scum on a deep pool. At the very least, if we were to fall back into our gut, our body known, we’d be falling away from our rage-inducing enmeshment in all these fights. We’d stop being disembodied heads. And we’d be finding ourselves.

Unanswered questions #2: The self-made man*

I will likely have to rest content in not understanding this man. He is, to me, an absurd mystery. He is melodiously narcissistic but spends his days being altruistic and meaning it; do-gooding from tedious to noble, day and night. He has full certainty that he is the sole cause of his life – everything that has happened to him is by his agency and as he desires – and that “to want” is the meaning of his life. And that he only does what he wants – nothing else. His moral code is incomprehensible to me. He spent years stealing from his family and from businesses. But “my family always supported me” and he has never judged himself negatively. He so adeptly gamed the system by feigning a dangerous psychosis that he now lives on disability benefits. Yet he proudly sees himself as a self-made man who by cleverness and hard work has made himself what he is. In his late forties, he has the exuberant and grandiose ambition of a twenty-one-year-old. He talked himself into a job helping the down-and-out and works without pay. He appears to be quite good at the job, partly because of his erstwhile membership in that population, partly because in his narcissism he sees himself as a simply sublime personage, a self-view that felicitates his energies. People – he is certain – are drawn to him, listen to his pearls of wisdom, are changed for the better by his presence, pretty much instantly. He believes he knows everything about psychology, such as one’s complete creation of one’s nature: No such thing as determinism by abuse or childhood influences!

Though he is perversely likable, I find that not only have I given up doing real therapy with him, a mix of intimidation and humor leads me to polish his narcissism with semi-faux-admiring statements, facial expressions and god-struck tone. Sometimes I pretty much say: “You are indeed the template of tremendousness!”

There are some knowns. In a moment of weakness months earlier, he revealed that in his late teens he had consciously forged his optimal personality from the fire of the shaming he had suffered for years. Family laughed at his looks, devised funny names for him. School kids ridiculed him. So he created purposely, like a scientist at the drawing board, a gallant and vindictive persona. And only lately have I understood, better, how seriously he meant it.

We had somehow got on the subject of “manipulation” as both strategy and virtue (I cited, to show off, my old professor’s definition of manipulation as ‘the client’s effort to get her legitimate needs met, but in a way that I don’t approve’). My client acknowledged with bright insouciance that he is widely manipulative.

Therapist (paraphrasing): That’s putting on an act.

Client: My whole life is an act.

Therapist: ?? (interested facial expression)

Client: I’m an actor in my own story. Adapting, learning how to survive in any environment I’m in.

Therapist: ??! (redoubled facial expression and evocative hand gestures)

Client: . . . as long as you’re in control . . .

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This is, I believe, the first person I’ve ever known who consciously hand-tooled himself into an actor performing himself. It frankly sounds to me as terrible as anything can be. People talk about “living consciously” or “deliberately” as if this made sense, as if it made sense to live in ideas, plans and anticipation. But this example shows the hideousness of creating a self-like instead of being a self, of never just feeling your own life and enjoying the world. There were, of course, real parts beneath his mental surface – a sad and twisted child with a child’s need for approval, the pain of being the black sheep, an elixir of felt love and hidden rage for the parent who died, depression, anxiety. These facets couldn’t be reached for help, though: He was exactly what he wanted to be.

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* Unanswered questions #1, though not given that title, would be Passion of the Gums – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_24.html.

Pessimistic therapy laws #4: Thrice-changed adolescents

1. Children of neurotic parents (abusive, sociopathic, solipsistic or other-dissociated; simply put: immature) are, without an “enlightened witness,”* wounded and can’t ascend through right development in terms of ownership of their true feelings, independent thinking, organic self-esteem, autonomy and maturity. They become suspended, falsely re-balancing entities: attitude-heavy and attitude-bent, based on pain and self-medication and the emotionalized attitudes of their parents and others.

2. These young people become immersed in a technological and commercial culture formed by the neurotic adultosphere – childish and false-self adults (parents, media, teachers, advertisers, gurus like Jenna Marbles, Logan Paul, Mark Zuckerberg, rap musicians, etc.) who did not achieve right development and therefore did not ascend beyond their children, cannot conceive of children as children. This culture is exactly like the Borderline mothers who cultivate their twelve-year-old daughters to be snarling and contemptuous intellectuals, pseudo-savvy, equals of their parent in the slough of id. These youngsters, fed synthetic sophistication by adults who do not know what children need, are bent again. We have a race of teenagers with virus-like, pompous ideas and beliefs they do not really own, infantile sex, a mirage of wisdom, kids in pundits’ garb. Don Lemon, ask the fourteen-year-old what Congress should do about DACA.

3. And now: our new, contemporary theme of school shootings. These doubly-impaired youth are now forced into the worst faux-adult mentality, stripping them of the last shred of the child's spirit and innocence, forging their minds with the final failure of adult nurturant protection. No longer children, they are unmoored. Our culture has created life forms, in twelve- to nineteen-year-olds, that are far removed from what normal, healthy development would have created. Falsified selves from early on, they’ve swallowed and become a false culture, and now must absorb a quotidian trauma, a universal meaning that will taint their minds from morning awakening to bedtime. The last cultural hypnosis I remember was the ’60s hippie-and-anti-war movement. But that faded, and the young people had to be disenchanted to the (more or less) adult realm. Today’s commonplace murder of children in schools may be a stage that does not pass. What kinds of life forms will we see, when these thrice-annulled children are in their twenties and thirties?

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* Alice Miller's concept of an empathic witness for the child. In her discussion of Dostoyevsky, she writes: “Dostoyevsky, for example, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn’t strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have been unimaginable. Many have also been lucky enough to find later both enlightened and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them. People who found such witnesses never became criminals.” (Alice Miller’s website.)

Demon in the basement

This was a woman and problem unlike any I’d ever seen. Forty-four years old, with a long résumé of normalcy, she woke up one morning insane and knowing it. Full insight: “Suddenly I am crazy.” Visions of cities growing out of the colors of objects. All printed words with second and third meanings always more dreadful than the first, so frightening she could not even hold a book or magazine in her hands. Feeling followed, she would jump back and tail the person – desperate detective work and revenge. Wondering countless times through the day: Am I dead? Am I in a coma? “I am afraid of all languages. I am afraid of colors. I am afraid of clocks.”

As said, the day before, the whole life before, she was fine.

She had a known or strongly suspected precipitant. The previous afternoon, she had read a poem à clef, a very amateur one, on the Internet.

Like poets ourselves, we can cast our mind wide and imagine an underlying cause. Was it a brain tumor? An over-the-border psychotic species of Borderline? There were two occasions in her twenties when she’d been in crisis (pet death, relationship ended), took a psychiatric pill and crashed into overdose, run-headfirst-into-a-wall crazy. Then back to normal. As she had never used any drugs but coffee, I was reminded of a story in one of Bradford Angier’s wilderness books about a mountain man, allergic to civilization, who became ill in his old age and had to transport to the hospital in the city. He was so filthy in a natural way that staff gave him a bath – his first ever. He died in the tub from shock. So was one Paxil enough to tripwire Rube Goldberg my client’s psyche?

Actually, I preferred my sudden theory. We had spent so much time in serious telling and speculating that I failed to learn her childhood history, but for two facts. Her parents divorced when she was ten years old. Her father moved out but bought a house very close – walking close – “so I would be OK with the divorce.”

Can you see my Eureka moment?

I told her this was crazymaking. She had been fed the impossible – “You will be OK with the ending of your parents’ marriage because I have moved close by” – had “believed” it, and had continued her whole life to “believe” the insanity.

It would be insane-making to be told “pain is pleasure, being shamed is funny, Christmas is the holiday when we hate each other, we are raping you for your own good.” Wouldn’t it be insane-making to be told that sadness and loss are happiness?

When parents give a little girl tragedy with a smile and a children’s song, they are injecting cannibals beneath her surface that are the gradually explosive undermining of her psyche. In a few words, these parents ripped part of the earth’s core from under her and said “have a lovely day.”

We should understand that trauma to a child consists of the moments of horror and overwhelm plus all the moments after when nothing is done to help, when there are only days and months of silence, other people moving on, blue skies and rainy days. What goes on in her mind in that peculiar prison? The incredible dully mixed with the necessary; monsters mixed with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Parental loss that’s been blessed is poisonous, and must infect the child’s interior with tragedy and twisted logic, make her hands unknowing how to touch. We cannot see it, but she will come to sense sabotage in the sweetest situations, disaster and disembowelment in dreams and in awakenings. She is alone and invisible and unsafe with this gift of a world that is nonsense. Without help – a real person to talk and scream to – she will be losing her birthright of reality.

Thirty-four years later, my client, like the struggling, long-delayed overnight success, went insane.

What-if exercise #1: The last two men, one-thousand-billion years in the future, sitting on a rock (for Cat L.)

“Two men, at the end of history as we can know it, on an island in an ocean named . . . sunset. We own all of the human race’s psyche and none of its hopes, or our own. Long ago, the cosmos fled to oblivion but for two dim lights. All meaning is gone but for those fading question marks, and the meaning contained in our fear, wonder, sadness, and residual love. It is fortunate we are not children. For they would have the eyes of hope disappointed in this measureless coffin.”

“All of the people’s stories, billions of years of them, are in the reservoir of our brains, but my attitude is a sorry one: What else could they have done but build their homes and their systems of togetherness, succumb to romance, imagine truths that could never be found, and explore their lives? In all of it, each carried a germ of pain, whose source they were always afraid to know, and it made the wars and other products of frustration: murder and cruelty and black comedy and suicide. They were crazy and driven and they stumbled and fell as they ran, always.”

“It is terrible to see the end of everything. . . .”

            “I still imagine there are civilizations out there, though we never found them –”

“. . . and this makes me not fully accept it. What if the eons of eons have been only a split-second rounding of the bend before some awakening to a different life, a different plane with a different play? Or awakening to the first morning? What if I die then wake in a blink, a newborn, because in another thousand-billion years all the atoms of my life, all our lives, will have found their way home again?”

“These are good things to imagine. I could say I can accept the magical, because our lovely universe has never given us evidence it is not magic. There is no answer to all that.”

“No answer. So must there be something wrong with us that we’ve asked a question? The questioning – what is everything? – undermines everything. It steps back from beauty and life, from just being, but we can’t not ask it. What if it has prevented us from being one with all, and thereby knowing?”

            “What do you mean?”

“We knew love by feeling, not thinking. We knew water by swimming, not peering from the boat. Maybe the thinking and the looking have made us blind.”

“So dying is closer to living. Once we’re simply the magical energies, we’ll be one.”

“Yes, I think so.”

A silence. They looked out at nothing, which was everything.

“I think I’ll sleep.”

“Ha!”

They had another conversation later.

“I was a psychotherapist.”

“I was an explorer. Five thousand years asleep, then awake and another look here and there. The best were places of deep forests and waters and undulating hills to the horizon, blue skies with redolent breezes, where all was safe like music, dangerous like stormy symphonies. I always contained opposite feelings about finding another person. They would be company, but also another unknowing mind, with its own perspective. I didn’t want the hope and airy thinking that come with a fellow traveler.”

“You wanted a home. You wanted home.”

“Yes. I confess for the first time that I’ve always just wanted a blanketed bed, a fireplace and a warm kitchen, the moon out the window and – ”.

“I know. . . .”

“Mother. Calm, snuggling, feeding, knowing everything. That may be all I’ve ever wanted.”

“Maybe all of us never leave home, in one lifetime, in the history of humankind. Maybe we are always connected by an umbilical cord, however far we go, whatever the timepiece says.”

“That would make sense: like the circle of the universe, like the unity of pre-birth and death. How can there really be travel, evolution, progress to some end, some goal? What are all the stars racing to, all of time summarizing to? All of us, forever, have lived bedtime stories. Until now.”

“But doesn’t it feel that way to you, that the story is ending?”

“I don’t think it can, not without mother to tell it to me.”

They looked out, nothing to see but two estranged stars and nothing but a change in the chemistry of their fear, wonder, sadness and residual love.

“Let’s hold hands, and maybe fall asleep again.”

“Yes. Until someone wakes us up.”

As they slept for a long time, the two stars disappeared, leaving only blackness. Silence was the only truth. But beneath them, whatever that could mean, there was an ember, red and gray, cold and burning. It may have been in a stove. It may have been a heart. It may have been the perfect unknown, even to itself.

He found himself in an amazing scene which was the only joy he had ever known, as if it were a dream from his fresh infancy. Around him all the royalty and creatures and objects of the zodiac were alive and busy in a roistering parade, musical, uproarious. They were happiness, which somehow was the meaning of existence. He was complete. At that moment there was no need for achievement, for creativity. Being there was all. He drank it in and it became him.

The other man was in a kitchen, possibly in a house. He sat at a table, and there was a woman with her back turned – a blindingly benign back – as she was preparing bowls of food. It was obvious to him this place, this woman, was the origin, the source of time and the world. Yet it was sedate, quiet, as if it had always existed. She turned, to carry a bowl to him.

“Father.”

“Mother.”

Trump, radical

“New York Times: Trump lawyers worried Mueller could catch him lying” (CNN headline). They know him, as we all do. Narcissism, Trump’s fundamental disorder, is a global delusion of perfection. It’s not a leaf on his tree, that could fall off and the tree remains. It is his baseline, the bedrock of himself. Where are you if that cracks? (Comment at The Atlantic)

How is it possible, what does it mean, that a person’s entire sense of existence – the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness, breathing and suffocation, life and death, reality and disintegration – is dependent on the possession of one specific emotional attitude? An attitude that must be constantly repeated (if silently) to oneself day and night. An attitude that requires you to assume your character and accomplishments are perfect or beyond anyone else’s capability, that must be fed by “supplies” of admiration and deference, and requires you to assess others’ view of you as either admiring and jealous or malicious and wrong?

How can one’s psyche – not merely his sense of worth, but his feeling of being alive as a person and having an identity – be constructed from some warped fusion of body feeling and thought that is obviously a second-tier growth, not his “psychological birth of the human infant”* or his childhood organism of feeling and thinking? This fusion has come later, to replace whatever he was and become his new ground.

This is Narcissistic Personality. It is as obdurate and as fragile as it seems. The person replaces himself with this secondary growth because his first self could not be sustained: His origin was a botch. This is not something that most people, including psychologists, typically observe as it is hidden and harrowing. Childhood can have such deficits – of love primarily, and its various manifestations such as empathy and visibility and care and physical affection – that it fails to become viable and to move into the next developmental phases. The anchor weight of early starvation and failure increases with time, until some point where the child’s chronological age is so out-of-sync with his time and his actual development that he must either decompensate or form an instant replacement self. Perfection instead of cataclysm; confidence instead of disintegration panic; diamond-smooth persona instead of identity vacuum.

This is the Narcissist’s vision and energy: to constantly refuel, re-polish, reiterate his false self. He can never see beyond or escape from his perfumed prison.

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* The title of Margaret Mahler’s seminal book on separation-individuation.

Violence

I suspect that some sort of physical violence is part of seventy-five percent of all television and movies and novels, and I think that violence is ridiculous. Just think about it: Grownups conversing, having different points of view, then smack! He punches the guy, she slaps the man’s face, he shoots a room full of people. War movies. Fargo. Rape and justice movies. Gone with the Wind, Blade Runner, Pan’s Labyrinth. Rowdy bar scenes. Horror-torture shows. Even the intellectuals are on board. Norman Mailer promotes Gary Gilmore, killer. Christopher Hitchens ups the Iraq War. Sartre’s “curiously ambivalent” views on violence. Ayn Rand’s heroine, Dominique Francon, is raped in a philosophically inevitable way. Religious lore is saturated with murder and prostration. We cheer boxing, wrestling, hockey. We don’t blink at Guantánamo tortures and humiliations. We nod aesthetically at Mel Gibson’s bloody Jesus and decapitated Mayans.
 

Do we really think this is common, implicit, the human way? What made average and non-average violence possible, and our normalization of it?

My life did. My parents were without violence. My father came home from World War II a passive-aggressive lamb. Our home life was quiet, dissociative, suppressed, fake. Put a little boy in a home where feelings are not had except for the atmosphere of assumed happy. He is bullied and troubled at school, but comes home and all is quiet, mundane. His tension builds but it is internalized. He is anxious and does not feel good, and is all alone. He says nothing real but the real happens: holes bitten in shirts, fingers gnawed, hair pulled out, tics erupted, ants burned on a light bulb. A quiet mind. Life goes by and time produces fake surfaces, fake presents. There’s the young man who talks, grows a persona, writes some poems, imagines – or would imagine – that he is growing up.

There’s a whole philosophy of death that has been growing inside us. Because somehow we sense our potential but also sense it is too late. Beneath today’s mild or pretty colors there is brown and black. Beneath the woman’s mobility and earning power is the girl’s imprisonment in silence and unfairness. Beneath the adult’s ability to “choose” was the child’s inability to have his way and maybe eventually to feel what that means. Within them are muscular and chemical and emotional constrictions that eventually have to berserk, which only means to expand like a spring to their long-suppressed normal, except that there is no normal knowable anymore, as it existed only in the past.

We cannot reach our normal, our self. There is no greater frustration. We slam our fist on the table, or we think of destroying a race. It is violence of our molecules, of our soul.