Delusion is personality, personality is delusion

Let’s dissect a delusion. I’ve written a number of articles about the invalidity of much of our thinking – how our ideas and beliefs can have the primary origin of comfort not truth. Rationalizing, minimizing, “spinning” and reframing are understandable examples. Less conspicuous a flaw would be intellectualization itself, a “defense mechanism of great power” according to Alice Miller. Here, living in idea clouds within clouds on top of clouds; abstract unprovable notions; global-inclusive judgments (“all Jews are –”, literary deconstruction, “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” religious doctrine and moral systems, etc.) is to be an escapist severed head, separated from what we, in our roots, really feel and know.

First consideration: The delusional person doesn’t just believe the untrue fact. He or she must believe it. A Narcissist must believe he is perfect in some way, uniquely special. He must believe, for example, that “only he can fix” the country’s messes. A schizophrenic must believe his apartment is bugged by the FBI, or that she is surveilled wherever she goes. Let’s skip for the moment the matter of why a psychotic would believe something so apparently uncomfortable. The key issue here is the “must.”

Let’s eliminate one distractor. That is the feeling or emotion the person will feel as part of the delusion. Put yourself in the shoes of a President Trump who is obviously smug and proud about his uniqueness and competence. But it’s not consistently true: A Narcissist can feel lousy and angry a good bit of the time, or have glimpses of shame or pretension. A paranoid may feel sickly-warmly bathed in all the attention, feel a strange comfort and membership from it. What remains, beneath the different moods, is the necessary belief: I am perfect, I am watched, Jennifer Lopez is once again driving in the car behind, following me.

Must must be a matter of personal survival in some way. Let’s say there are two psychological kinds of personal survival: our heart’s, and our identity’s. If a man discovered after many happy years that his loving family – wife and children – hated him and had made plans to kill him, his heart would be ripped. What would he do? He might be in shock, or he might be devastated, or some deep id in him might trigger a cosmic nihilism where he moves out, leaving them penniless. In any of these scenes, he remains an intact self.

What if, though, he is a person with a weak or no sense of himself. He might have said at some point: “I don’t know who I am,” a ubiquitous and profound problem that New Age sensibilities and mainstream psychotherapy incompetently touch. He is fundamentally disconnected from the world: Nothing in it is his raison d’être, and he joins some occupation or activity or person only because it gives him something to do and because it makes him feel special or pleasure or release or worthy or good about himself. Existence, then, is he, not a wide field that he is born to love or be jazzed by.

In this land of mirrors he is a kaleidoscope of cloudy reflections, and will need to have – pardon the clunky phrase – an identifiable identity that he can tell himself he is. He has no feeling ground to live in in his essential disconnection from his roots and the world’s. So he makes a self. And without feeling roots, it has to be a thought.

A Narcissist or other delusional person will find it very difficult to understand that most (I hope) people feel a bond with their fellow men and women, with humankind. They feel meaningful and, we could say, complete because they have been cared about – loved – at the literal and figurative cradle of their existence. They are filled, and now – even as children – can live beyond themselves. The delusional person is someone whose self was never filled, his cradle needs were never met, and he is in pain, the pain of being sent into the world invisible without healing. Do not expect him, then, to reach out to humanity for completion. It is too late.

What will make him a person, a self, will be a belief that fills an empty identity, an identity alone. Since he is only, ungrown, chaotic, he comes to realize he is seamless perfection and superior – a Narcissist. Since she’s been kept an infant by a ruthless mother, she endorses symbiosis – a Dependent Personality. Since she has always felt invisible in every cell of her body, people are seeing her, watching her everywhere. Since he was born on fire in crack cocaine withdrawal and could never bond, there is no love in the world, life is losing or winning: He is Antisocial.

In a way, we can see a unity of delusional disorder and personality disorder. A belief, or a belief system, that carries you safely above the fire or emptiness of your reality is both your personality and a necessary untruth. Both afflictions are “ego-syntonic”: Their pathological idea is in harmony with one’s view of oneself, whether the idea is that “humanity is worthless” or that every one of your female high school teachers sexually abused you. Most of us, I suspect, need some comforting convictions. The difference between “us” and “them” is: Are our convictions just comforting, or are we again the unformed vessel without them?