SAM VAKNIN IS A GOOD SPRINGBOARD

I finally re-found the url for Sam Vaknin’s interview of his sweetheart of a wife.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dETUK_u4R1o

In another vid, Sam talks about “Cluster B” personality disorders, so I had to go looking for what they were.  The term is from the diabolical DSM-5, which struggles all the time to understand how to name things better than the labels they use for insurance forms.  This time around they tried to avoid defining the boxes of psychoses or neuroticisms, which always attract a nasty cloud of social accusations, like Sam’s diagnosis of narcissism.  Such labels are short of criminalization, but can still justify chemical restraint or even confinement — for your own good.  

Even psychoanalysts, who intend to use empathy is a benign and insightful way, make their entry through the complaints of the client because that’s the only way the analysts know them, the only reason the clients come with their checkbooks.  This leads to the grotesque cop-out of docs who say that Trump is not crazy because he isn’t in pain enough to come to their office asking for help.  Crazy people suffer, they say, and Trump is not suffering.

I see it differently.  I think he is delusional because he cannot bear to leave his fantasy — he wouldn’t just suffer, he would die.  That might happen yet.

But okay, what’s the latest thinking that leads to these “clustered” personality disorders.  I’m relying on a website called MentalHelp.net.  https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/defining-features-of-personality-disorders-distorted-thinking-patterns/   Lots to read there.  These are the four arbitrary factors of personality disorders.  (Assuming you think you know what a personality is.)

1) Distorted thinking patterns,

2) Problematic emotional responses,

3) Over- or under-regulated impulse control, and

4) Interpersonal difficulties.

To translate, these are characteristics of assholes, clingers, the childish, the energy-drainers, the bullies, the individuals that bug everyone else.  And once in a while, a misunderstood genius, like Vaknin. Otherwise, most people and their dysfunctions just chug along with the rest of society finding workarounds and tolerating the friction.  But sometimes the situation or aging or economics demand that something be done — then what to do is a puzzle.  The idea of the DSM is that if you’ve got a diagnosis of some kind, it suggests treatment strategy or at least justification for eliminating the pain-in-the-ass.

Each of these have links on the website above.  There are roughly ten “personality disorders” which overlap each other, seem connected some way, and so are “clustered.”  

Cluster A is called the odd, eccentric cluster. It includes Paranoid Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, and Schizotypal Personality Disorders. The common features of the personality disorders in this cluster are social awkwardness and social withdrawal. These disorders are dominated by distorted thinking.

Cluster B is called the dramatic, emotional, and erratic cluster. It includes:

• Borderline Personality Disorder.

• Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

• Histrionic Personality Disorder.

• Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Cluster C is called the anxious, fearful cluster.  It includes the Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorders.  These three personality disorders share a high level of anxiety.

This cluster system is not that much more helpful than Freud’s imaginary system of “ego, superego, and libido” or his anatomical categories of stages of development: anal, oral, and genital.  Everyone has a little of most of these clusters in them.  In one counselling group (part of preparation for ministry) I was labeled “borderline.”  It was confusing that both of the group leaders (one male, one female) had also been diagnosed as “borderline.”  None of us fits into the description of “borderline” according to the DSM-5.  (Five means this is the fifth version.)  

The definition and description over the years has shifted around so much that it isn’t helpful anymore.  (I may have moved from Cluster B to Cluster A.  Is this progress?)  I’m NOT erratic, overemotional, polarizing, or inconsistent.  I don’t compensate with substance abuse, risky sexual liaisons, self-injury, overspending, or binge eating.  But I’m an investigative and reflective writer which means I try to find the truth, which can seem like borderline — detectives search borderlines on both sides.

Using a word derived from politics, nations, and territories, means assuming that it has to do with drawing a line, socially acknowledged, and then enforcing it — Foucault would say defining failure to observe a border line as “insane” is a control mechanism, a surveillance and contamination label.  It means “you stay on your own side or there will be consequences.”  Lately this has been vividly contested by people violating the Victorian (Freudian) lines about sex and gender roles.  People are forcing binary thinking over into continuums and asking “why not?” instead of “don’t you dare!”  What that means is that the line dividing the binary is erased.

Much more unfortunately, borderline morality in regard to wealth has redrawn the line of what is honourable far over into the gray area that always separates business from crime.  Eliminating regulation in these areas is an attempt to erase the “line” so there is no more chance of criminalization.

The Rachel Maddow show interviews over the past few days has illuminated how the “line” about interfering in other nations through cyberspying and rigging elections has been erased, partly because we’ve become calloused and habituated by the steady practice of those previously taboo acts on both sides.  But also because our video fictions like “House of Cards” and video strategy  games have made people we would see as villains in the past into attractive role models because they are powerful and wealthy.  Our ability to see through charlatans is badly damaged.  Anyway, time has wiped out those whose senses were sharpened by major war, whether atomic or cold.  Reporters now tend to look pretty, be young, and want personal followings on the basis of their personalities.  At every level — not just nightly news.  And they are controlled by editors and owners who want drama that sells.

So my idea is that borderlines become ecologies.  When Trump slams the borders shut, he doesn’t realize that the nurses along the High LIne are often “travel nurses” who come down from Canada, because in Canada the major cities are as “south” as they can get, along the border.  But on the US side the space along the border tends to be “empty,” just ranches and small towns, because it is daringly “north”.  Over time one side weaves into the other.  For instance, the St. Mary’s valley along the east edge of Glacier Park empties into geology on the Canadian side.  If you are there and need a hospital in a hurry, you go north, and if necessary you smash through the barrier.  Many of the kids up there are born in Cardston, Alberta, which confuses citizenship issues.

Coming out of the St. Mary’s hydrology complex is Milk River which long ago was redirected away from Canada into the USA because they had the money and will to do it and Canada did not have the will to prevent it.  Over the years, one of the flumes necessary for diversion began to deteriorate and leak, so that there was a kind of water oasis in dry terrain.  A cluster of plants and animals and birds formed there.  Now repairing the flume would destroy that little ecology.  Eliminating lines is eliminating the standing order, the status quo.  

“Healing” a human and his/her little community can have the same effect.  People who realize this will resist.  Some communities SHOULD be scattered, because their borderlines don’t do anything good and only create pain.  And assholes.  But others are shelters for atypical people with high value, even for the typicals.

More tomorrow if nothing disruptive happens.

MODELLING NARCISSISM

Bannon and Trump

In the 1950’s when as a child I first began to wonder about mental health, being crazy was roughly equivalent to being criminal, a failure to conform that had moral weight.  Thus, being hospitalized in a mental institution was equivalent to being incarcerated.  And yet the times were sympathetic to drunkenness or family violence, and for women there was no escape from child-bearing nor way of reliably making enough money to support them. We drafted young men.  Life was double-binds and punishments.  I got the idea that one should not have defenses, that one should stand alone and take the punishment.  It doesn’t work.

The upshot of that WWII aftermath was child-rearing practices that centered on force, deprivation, and secrecy.  They were control-based.  They created narcissists.  I suggest that narcissism is at core a pattern of self-defense against attack, a sort of castle/fortress.  Freud and others defined it while responding to their times by attaching “selfishness” to a Greek myth that doesn’t fit.  Trying to survive in a world where everyone wants to control the pretty boy is not the same as the pretty boy admiring himself beyond limits.  Nor does it claim the pretty boy wants control.

Below, the first of three, is a relatively light-hearted video exploration of pretty boy (website marketing) narcissism which leads to two vids by hard-core narcissism expert, Sam Vaknin.  The last time I ran across Sam Vaknin (maybe 2001) there was no YouTube.  I was interested to see him, so as to pick up a visual impression.  So far, I’ve watched these three vids and find that I pretty much agree with Vaknin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGO2U1thFAk  

“How Narcissists Took Over the World”  Is funny and not Trump friendly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpzNLVLXHt0

“Trump, Clinton - Narcissists? "Experts" Spew NONSENSE!” is useful in sorting the political evidence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-6OhpcPHbo

“How to Manipulate the Narcissist”  How to be co-dependent by feeding the needs of a narcissist.

When Vaknin was only in print rather than vids, he was much more confessional and reported the damage he had done as a narcissist.  (He served jail time.)  He was not a nice guy, but I’m not sure how he gave up his viciousness -- maybe it was by accepting the diagnosis.  In these vids he seems like the usual Viennese shrink full of pronouncements.  Nevertheless, he makes good points.

I like the distinction he makes between “cold” narcissists and “warm” narcissists, which is mainly a separation from someone who can figure out your inner dynamics and use them (which I identify as Theory of Mind) and someone who really can “feel” another person, sharing their interior worldview to some extent.  One can pass moral judgement, saying that cold is bad and manipulative, but warm is nurturing and reassuring.  I would bypass all that morality.

Theory of Mind is a category that is a little mechanistic, but useful.  Empathy isn’t always that embracing, endorsing thing.  It can be terrifying to be shared too thoroughly by someone else.  What might they do with the information?  Some people become determined to squeeze themselves into your private world.  Isn’t that what reading is about?  Still, attempts at empathy are less dangerous than Theory of Mind when the latter is wrong and one’s motivation is misinterpreted.  Both empathies become Procrustean when they are categories with labels.

Beyond that, empathy appears to be organically based, maybe housed in the entorhinal part of the brain.  Mirror cells are only the beginning of the discoveries as well as the understanding of how they work.  Vaknin doesn’t leave the psychoanalytic world, though he splits his attention between behaviorism and analytical systems.  The actual empathic comprehension of others may be simply missing from some people’s brains for one reason or another — maybe hereditary, maybe environmental, maybe a matter of the epigenome, and finally perhaps because the empath can’t bear the realities of other persons.  And some people simply don’t believe that anyone is not just like themselves.

If you google for the neurology of narcissism, there is evidence — but not very comprehensive — about actual brain tissue differences.  No doubt they exist, but they are probably on a continuum and maybe very subtle, cell by cell.

My original education, once when I got to high school and then intensively at undergrad college, was theatre-based, notoriously narcissistic but also intensely empathetic.  It’s a double-dimensioned approach to humans, one from inside and one from outside.  “Warm” inhabitance of a character was taking on the role in one’s own being (the Method); but just over the boundary it co-existed with “cold” analysis of the effectiveness of one’s performance.  Both were necessary to create the pattern of the production, the artistic design.  

In seminary I found the same thing expressed as “inside the believer’s circle” and “outside the believer’s circle.”  Inside is the commitment to the reality of the faith system; outside is the analysis (usually logical but including empathic knowledge) of the same system.  One learns to step from inside to outside, though some feel that doing that will break the value of the illusion, make you “lose faith” and therefore confidence.  This is a concept in both religious studies and anthropological work, esp. that which is about small protected societies in remote places.  It may require the scholar to develop a larger understanding than his own culture.

More painfully, stepping away from intense (hot) emotional sharing with a narcissist to cooler reflective adding-up of objective events and dynamics, can evoke both grief and rage on both sides.  Or not.  I appreciate Vaknin’s measured judgement that not all narcissism is some kind of malignant attack.  As I said in the beginning, it might just be a defense mechanism that should not be taken away without providing some compensating safety.  Who can provide that in a culture where safety is a purchased commodity?  Those who know how to sell it will get rich.

The relationship of all this to actual brain function — which can break apart into hallucinations, rage, paralysis, sleeplessness, violence, and addiction (the symptoms of PTSD)— is only now beginning to develop for understanding individuals.  But I think there is a parallel in social life, politics, and art.  A suggestion grows that there is no reality out there, merely a consensus that lets the world turn, but — we fear — a consensus that could be broken by invasion from “outer space” until the world is so dystopian that survival is not possible.  Not even for Trump or Bannon.

The real truth of survival is always in the ecosystem, the pattern of relationships governed by resources and fittingness, finding a niche that fits.  Since the world is dynamic and everything is always changing, the individual must adapt — that’s the definition of living, the capacity to adapt in some ingenious way or other.  

Vaknin, diagnosed as narcissistic by early court-ordered evaluations, has made a living from the category. "In 2009, he was the subject of an Australian documentary film, 'I, Psychopath,' directed by Ian Walker. In the film, Vaknin underwent a psychological evaluation in which he met the criteria for psychopathy according to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, but did not meet the criteria for narcissism."  I guess he didn't need the defense mechanism anymore.  So now he's just a psychopath.

WIKIPEDIA NOTES ON VAKNIN.  (No way to know who wrote them.)

Vaknin has a prolific online presence, writing on narcissism and psychopathy.^[14] His views have been solicited by the media.^[3][15]

In his view, narcissists have lost their "true self", the core of their personality, which has been replaced by delusions of grandeur, a "false self". Therefore, he believes, they cannot be healed, because they do not exist as real persons, only as reflections: "The False Self replaces the narcissist's True Self and is intended to shield him from hurt and narcissistic injury by self-imputing omnipotence ... The narcissist pretends that his False Self is real and demands that others affirm this confabulation,"^[16] meanwhile keeping his real-life imperfect true self under wraps.^[17] 

Vaknin extends the concept of narcissistic supply, and introduces concepts such as primary and secondary narcissistic supply.^[18] He distinguishes between cerebral and somatic narcissists; the former generate their narcissistic supply by applying their minds, the latter their bodies. He considers himself a cerebral narcissist.^[19] He calls narcissistic co-dependents "inverted narcissists."^[20] "[They] provide the narcissist with an obsequious, unthreatening audience...the perfect backdrop."^[21] He believes that disproportionate numbers of pathological narcissists are at work in the most influential reaches of society, such as medicine, finance and politics.^[5]