IS TRUMP A NUT CASE?

TRUMP, undisguised.

Dealing with Trump is at least giving us a lot to work with while considering mental health, a subject desperately in need of review for a number of reasons:  the rising tide of Alzheimer’s, recreational use of deranging drugs, interference of cultural concepts with more formal scientific concepts, competing claims about cures, and the enormous new knowledge about neurology.  Then there is the persisting phenomenon of people who protect those who think they are chickens because the protectors need the eggs.  This is sometimes called enabling, or co-dependence.

Lately the new term has been “reverse narcissism” which is feeding the narcissist a steady stream of praise and reassurance.  Characteristically, the narcissist is the one with the power, prestige, and charisma, and then the “tender” tries to appear humble or even secret, traditionally “the power behind the throne.”  In our culture they are gender-role assigned, women meant to be the co-dependent because in the past only men could earn a living — a gender assignment going back to hunting mastodons — or provide protection likewise prehistoric.  In modern times we sometimes see “folie å deux” where symbiotic, interdependent relationships share a delusion that is hard to assign to one or the other.  Which is the primary narcissist between the Duke and Duchess of Windsor?

I’ll come back to this.  First it has become clear that Trump has Alzheimers at a fairly advanced stage.  The average length of time from first diagnosis to death by brain dysfunction is about eight years.  One of the most obvious signs is disconnection and fabulizing to cover up failure to comprehend or remember.  Watching vids of Trump, even edited, shows these signs.  If you are interested in this aspect, use Google, but probably if you are interested it’s because you know someone with it or worry about yourself.  Both scientific and narrative material abounds.  Alzheimers is the 8th most prevalent cause of death in the US.

Second, what Alzheimer’s does by its destruction of the ability to reflect is remove what’s called “executive function.”  Wikipedia is handy.  “Executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes – including attentional control, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, as well as reasoning, problem solving, and planning – that are necessary for the cognitive control.”  In short, the stuff the Executive Branch of the US government (the President) is supposed to do.  By now it’s clear that Trump is simply unable to do these things.  It’s not a matter of temperament or strategy:  he can NOT be presidential, he can NOT perform presidential duties.  He is being stage-managed into an illusion.

In addition, his baseline personality is released from restraint by the Alzheimers.  Persons with benign and friendly personalities remain that way.  This is where the narcissism diagnosis comes in.  Narcissism is a personality syndrome badly named, since it is NOT about being in love with oneself because one is beautiful.  It is rather being totally absorbed in oneself but needing constant reassurance from outside oneself, completely unaware of the reality of others.  The result is lashing out, vindictive revenge, rewards and punishments meant to control, and other refusals to face reality.  This is not cruelty, enjoying the pain of others, but rather amorality, inability to realize that others can be in pain and mocking them when they are.  (Sorry, Sen. Schumer.  If you can’t cry for the debasement of America at this point, what CAN a person cry for?)

So, psychotic, amoral, sociopathic — who approves?  Bannon.  Does he have Alzheimer’s?  No sign that he does except that he’s a slob.  He declares himself to be Leninist, a revolutionary who wants to smash government, which is conceived as like the dictatorship of the Russian Tsar.  Lenin (which is an alias) was from a gifted, privileged, educated family that became revolutionary because of resisting Tsarist control.  This has to do with the struggle of an emerging middle class or proletariat.  I don’t know what Bannon’s personal story is.  In this relationship with Trump he stands somewhere between co-dependent and manipulator.  There’s enough evidence to describe him as a sociopath (one who doesn’t care for society) but also a psychopath (one who injures himself or others without regard for the consequences because of delusion).

We have assigned roles to deal with such people: psychiatrists, who are medical doctors authorized to prescribe meds, and psychologists, who use the research in the field of psychology.  There are also psychoanalysts, who try to understand a person’s thinking in order to find mistaken ideas, unhelpful beliefs, and the like.  (They might be either psychiatrists or psychologists.  The first would treat Alzheimer’s patients.  The second might more likely support and comfort the families of the patients.)  Over the years these functions have become rather gender-assigned in the same way that doctors and nurses are.  MD psychiatrists tend to be men and clinical psychologists are often women.

A curious criteria for psychosis that I ran across was that the client must be in distress himself.  Trump doesn’t seem to be suffering overtly, though many feel he is insecure and grasping at straws.

Because there was an attempt to impeach or otherwise remove Goldwater from the presidential race an ethical rule was devised.  (From ever-useful Wikipedia.) “The Goldwater rule is the informal name given to of Section 7.3 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) code of ethics^[1] which states it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined in person and obtained consent from to discuss their mental health in public statements.^[2] It is named after presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.^[3]

“The issue arose in 1964 when Fact published the article "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater."^[3][4] The magazine polled psychiatrists about American Senator Barry Goldwater and whether he was fit to be president.^[5][6] In Goldwater v. Ginzburg Goldwater filed a libel suit in response to the article, and he won $75,000 in damages.”

This is what is putting the brakes on the 25th Amendment, which was also a 1964 response to a problem, specifically the death, resignation, impeachment, or otherwise removal of a president.  In a society of laws, it’s ambiguous but useful.  In a sub-society of lawyers (the US Congress) it is a recipe for paralysis.  I don’t know what $75,000 would be in equivalent 2017 dollars.

When one googles these issues, it gradually becomes clear that the medical doctors are more willing to say that Trump is demented and unable to perform his duties.  Partly they are helped by video evidence which demonstrates his behavior.  Partly they are helped by our consciousness of genetics, and the fact that his father had Alzheimers.  But they have to consider their code, though many doctors these days brush codes aside; for instance, when they help torture.

But the clinical psychologists, who tend to be women whose practices are consoling, supporting, and guiding people in distress, trying to understand how they see the world, seem to want to believe that Trump is “crazy like a fox,” merely pretending to be Mortimer Snerd in order to cover his real motives and abilities.  Of course, if one is conscious of his close relationship with Bannon, this is not reassuring because those motives might not be benign.  Bannon has said he is out to destroy the standing order (he seems to ee the small percentage of rich folks controlling the world at the expense of the middle class as a modern version of the Tsar) and it appears that Trump is his instrument, lacking both conscience and awareness.

One suspects that the American subconscious so involved in “Game of Thrones” is particularly susceptible to all this melodrama, especially if they think it is aimed out outsiders.  It may be approaching spring, but winter is coming in the minds of many.

EROSION OF EMPATHY

I was thinking about this before I saw this video, which means that the subject is “out there” in the collective mind.  How much can we stand to “feel” each other?  We talk about "compassion fatigue."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXcU8x_xK18&feature=share

The erosion of empathy: Simon Baron Cohen at TEDxHousesofParliament

Part of what I try to do with these blogs is to return to things I thought I “knew” and rethink them, given new research and my own inner changes.  The TED Talk above begins with a still photo of Nazi researchers trying to find out how long a human being can live in very cold water.  I’ve known about this kind of "research" all my life, thanks to my father’s “Police Gazette,” but I never visualized it being like this.  I thought they put their human “white rat” in a separate cell with a door in the window and watched them die from outside that door -- or maybe went back later to see if they were dead yet.  But this photo is intimate, hands-on, carefully monitoring vital signs as though they were trying to save him, but then they didn’t.   And he had not volunteered.

I didn’t know that lack of empathy could be so intimate.  It makes me think of early accounts of Indians torturing missionary priests -- all the while studying their faces closely to see how they reacted, these strange non-people.  And yet not long ago I drowned a mouse with the same impassive interest.  It had been skittering around the house for weeks and both cats had been still-hunting, but they tend to nod off.  Finally Squibbie nailed the little beast and mauled it until I found it, barely alive.  It would have died by itself fairly soon, but I thought it would be more humane to finish it off sooner.  Rather than step on it or hit it, I drowned it in the bathroom sink, warm water, holding it down with the nail brush because otherwise it tended to float.  There was air in its fur and a surprising amount of air in its lungs, but it died in seconds without even moving much.

At the same time the smallest of the feral kittens growing up in my backyard appeared with a bad limp, barely able to put weight on that leg.  Probably he fell off the ladder to the loft in the back garage.  There’s no way I could do anything for him since he’s too spooky to catch.  So I put out food.  As usual.  At the same time I decided it was time to remove access to that loft, but the ladder is behind a pile of windfall I’ve been saving to saw into stovewood.  I just bought an electric chainsaw since it became clear that I no longer have the arm-power to saw it all up.  Yesterday was one of those golden fall days and I spent it removing the cardboard I’ve been saving for ten years, esp. the boxes that appliances (file cabinets, mostly) came in.  They were on top of the wood.  Now I’m where I can saw up the wood, but the cats are so freaked by my activity that they’re gone.  So am I helping the kitten or not?  Even if I could catch him, I have no money for a vet and, anyway, cats heal by themselves.  But it’s a long painful time for one small gray cat.

Two people could live through the same events and not experience it in anything like the same way.  I’m very intolerant on this subject.  I’m proud -- too proud -- of my capacity to “feel with” others.  It was the stock in trade of the kind of minister I wanted to be.  (Some of them are cold fish who use the pulpit as a shell.)  I’m good enough at it to sometimes be buckled over with shared pain, but that can seem like a form of hubris.  What’s harder is to share numb despair, empty unfeeling un-humanness.  But shouldn’t we be trying to feel what the Nazi experimenters felt?  How else can we figure out what the hell was going on in their minds?

No one wants to know.  We don’t care.  They are outside the pale.  Inhuman.  We distance them through that cell door window.  Evil.  The main defense against our feelings against them, which are not the same as our feelings about what they did (and someone somewhere must be doing today, maybe to a cat), Not Knowing.  It’s not just that we don’t want to be offended, but also that the glass window might become a mirror where we might see ourselves. 

Now I’ll go in the other direction.  I am also proud of my ability to be tough when it is justified.  It was the stock-in-trade of being an animal control officer to be tough, not so much in terms of killing animals but in terms of seeing clearly when they were suffering and nailing the cause.  The worst cases overwhelmed me; for instance, the puppy that tripped a Vietnam-style napalm bomb when it raided a garbage can.  Could easily have been a human child. 

Empathy and denial are intertwined: knowing, denying that we know (and from the inside, not just as an abstract concept), and the terror of the abyss of unknowability.  It shouldn’t be surprising that ministers and teachers can drink a little too much.  Empathy means opening up to pain and joy.  When it is done intensely on a stage or professionally when facing students, there’s a loneliness in it.  Oh, yes.  Writing, too.  A little numbness, a little denial, makes enough room to create art, which expresses what is known -- maybe too well -- in a form accessible to others -- maybe.

Bit-by-bit empathy is investigated by scientific experiment with startling and worrying results.  Evil (which I believe is real but human), cognitive empathy versus affective empathy (responding with an appropriate emotion: like compassion), inborn capacity for either kind of empathy; social forces that diminish empathy, like, obedience to authority; ideology; resentful deprivation; in-group/out-group dehumanizing stereotypes.  All these are part of the complex.  Overwhelmingly, the big force is childhood neglect and abuse.  We’ve known this for a long time.  We do nothing about it.  They’re all feral kittens to us.

OVER empathy does not serve us all that well.  Writhing in agony when other people writhe in agony does not address the cause.  One does not want one’s surgeon weeping into the incision.  Sentimentality that extends emotional empathy to beings other than humans is a major dilemma:  some animals must be killed.  We don’t want meat-packing plants full of sociopaths.  We can’t all be vegans.  But we can make sure that imposed death is clean and dignified.  We can prevent much casual cruelty and probably encourage less stony indifference.  Many today value the lives of animals more than the lives of other people.

How much should children be shielded from being over-empathic? When I was little, we went on my mother’s college biology field trip to the coast.  My brothers, ten and eight, became absorbed in prying starfish off the rocks.  The creatures have a thousand feet and they cling so tightly that prying them off means tearing off those attachments.  As a superior twelve-year-old, I challenged them about how those starfish must be suffering.  I think I marked them for life, which is what I intended.  I’m a cruel bitch in streaks.  The result on their part was a kind of paralysis, right on into enlistment in the Marines.  I don’t know what would have happened if they had gone into combat.

I don’t know what would happen if I went into combat. Maybe boys are just naturally more soft-hearted than girls.  Some people refuse to ever believe anyone can feel what they feel:  partly a matter of preserving their special uniqueness (which they might feel would be diluted if someone else shared it) and partly a need to be unknown as a self-protection.  They do not want it known how soft-hearted they are.  Like kittens, they puff up and walk stiff-legged.