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.