Narcissism and the pain of reality

The president lies continually because reality is painful to him. Narcissism, as he embodies the personality disorder, is a kind of universe, a global perfection and invulnerability system that begins, like the Big Bang, in a volatile monad. That singularity is an unarticulated sense of failure in the child, a sense of false existence that is most likely to explode into its narcissistic defense when adolescence requires some maturity. Prior to that, the child will still lean on a parent for ego solidity.

We can all be personal psychologists by feeling within ourselves pain that never healed and which we’ve covered with repression, denial, explanations. Even now with our strength, we may find it impossible to admit core flaws seated in our early childhood which would manifest if we didn’t replace them with untruth. A fundamental cowardice. An abyssal disconnect from everyone which actually means the deepest hopeless need for connection. A sense of never leaving childhood. A feeling of not having an identity. Even if we can, wisely and candidly, name our insight into such a flaw, we can only do it by bouncing off it, glancing at a fact then returning immediately to our tower of functionality and ideas. To dwell in that error would be to become it again.

Donald Trump’s brain formed, by “nature and nurture,” the greatest drug to escape from existence pain: the false feeling-belief of perfection. But even he might on rare occasion sense the deepest hollow inside. This is an intrapsychic place where one feels without knowing, and the feeling is that one was never a genuine human being.* Drugs and other self-medications cover, for many people, that abyss. People kill and die for their drug. Remove an alcoholic’s or meth addict’s supply and he will begin to die inside, because he is feeling his early failure. Cause Donald Trump to question his narcissism, which must be a seamless coat of paint over everything in the world, and the plain world would kill him.

We revile Trump for his narcissism. But he is just covering, with gold paint and lies, the pain of reality.

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* “Painful memories once repressed rise and come flooding into awareness with a gruesome, hallucinatory awareness. As if in a trance, he suddenly ‘realizes’ that at no time in his life had he ever been a person who was fully human.” John Modrow, How To Become a Schizophrenic, p. 23. Publisher: Writers Club Press, 1992, 1996, 2003.