thelastpsychiatrist.com - A Generational Pathology: Narcissism Is Not Grandiosity. Adnotated.

Sunday, 21 July, Year 11 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

something's not right

I like your writings about narcissism, but your description seems to differ from the one in the DSM and everywhere else I look.

Why does that matter if indeed it was true?ⁱ

I just want to know where you came up with it.

You mean, "I just want to make sure you didn't make it up."ⁱⁱ Because if I made it up, then it stands entirely on my back. Like an American, the shortcut you use for difficultissues is to judge their proponent as a proxy. If you don't like some ideas, look for hypocrisy, discredit the speaker. Which will be easy to do with me, I assure you. Heavy drinking, womanizingⁱⁱⁱ, misanthropic... maybe not even a psychiatrist.^iv There. Do you win?

That's not what I meant.

It is what you meant, even if it isn't what you meant. There's plenty of writing on narcissism, you can start with Kohut, even Jung and Freud. But you're resistant: no, psychoanalysis is bunk. And impossible to understand. That stuff can't be right.^v

You want science, you want something with bullet points and a standard deviation.

Here are the DSM criteria for NPD, of which you must score at least five:

grandiose sense of self-importance
preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
belief that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
need for excessive admiration
sense of entitlement
takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
lack of empathy
envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

Much easier. Is that the narcissism you heard about? Selfish and grandiose. Looking at that definition, do you even come close to narcissism?

Of course not, because your mind is shielding you from the truth. The belief that narcissism is synonymous with grandiosity is, itself, a narcissistic defense.^vi You are being lied to, by yourself.

What happened to the diagnosis? Why did it favor grandiosity?^vii

How do you quantify something that your mind is working to hide from you? How do you treat it? When psychiatry wanted to stop being a Jewish/Marxist/elitist worldview and become a real science^viii, it needed to pretend it had medicines and statistics, and a whole new DSM (III).

How do you measure the unmeasurable? Divide the unmeasurable into pieces, and measure the pieces. Too many pieces, too fine? Start with the obvious.

We found a foot, an eyeball, and a liver. This must be a man. Or a triceratops.^ix Or a... And now we come to consider that a man is something possessing of three attributes: footness, eyeballness, and liverness, with exclusion criteria of dinosaurization. Thanks, Aristotle, this helps a lot.^x

So, too, the scales for narcissism, e.g. the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. While these scales are supposed to measure something that already exists, in postmodern fashion they [instead] alter your concept of what exists.

You looked up narcissism, saw there were criteria, scales, and read them. And, like decimate, it was reinforced by hearing it in a sentence. Oh, it's an egotistical jerk who only cares about himself. Got it.^xi

I've used this example before: The Hamilton scale for depression contains no questions about sleeping excessively or eating too much^xii:

On a 17 question scale in which a reduction of 10 points is outstanding, a sedating side effect can be the difference between $4B/yr in sales or wasted millions in R&D. Add two points for drugs that make you hungry, and that's the whole game.

Psychiatricians will counter that the Hamilton isn't meant to be a screening tool, but in fact it's used as a screening tool all the time: in clinical trials. You have to meet a certain threshold to be enrolled in a trial, so you can see that a person who is very depressed but hypersomnic and eating too much will be excluded.^xiii

I just told you something that is obvious; so why isn't Abilify (not sedating) testing their drug on other kinds of depressed people? Because they can't. The FDA wants the HAM-D, or the MADRS (which is skewed the same.) Abilify would have to convince the FDA that their drug worked AND change the entire infrastructure of psychiatric drug approval. Furthermore, psychiatrists themselves would be suspicious, "why are you doing it differently?"

If it's not grandiosity, then what is narcissism?^xiv

Shame over guilt; rage over anger; masturbation over sex; envy over greed; your future over your past but her past over her future...^xv

Imagine what you look like to another person. Now recall what you looked like in the mirror this morning -- that's really what they see. They are making instantaneous judgments about your personality based on that mirror image. They are hearing your voice like it comes form a recording, not as you hear from your mouth. You're the only person who experiences yourself as you do.

The narcissist feels unhappy because he thinks his life isn't as it should be, or things are going wrong; but all of those feelings find origin in frustration, a specific frustration:the inability to love the other person.^xvi

He's a man in a glass box, unable to connect. He thinks the problem is people don't like him, or not enough, so he exerts massive energy into the creation and maintenance of an identity: if they think of me as X...^xvii

But that attempt is always futile, not because you can't trick the other person -- you can, for an entire lifetime, it's quite easy. But even then, the man in the box is still unsatisfied, still frustrated, because no amount of identity maintenance will break that glass box.^xviii

If the other person is also in a glass box, then you have a serious problem. If everyone is in their own glass box, well, then you have America.

I guess Facebook is a kind of glass box?

Facebook is a neutral tool^xix, it's what you do with it that matters. You think the "I'm better than everybody!" status updates are evidence of narcissism, and maybe they are, but the deeper pathology exists in those who derive their identities from that online presence while simultaneously retreating from the real world. Show me a man or woman who posts pictures of themselves in bathing suits and I shrug my shoulders. Show me a person who spends more than an hour a day on Facebook and it isn't their job and I'll show you a future divorce even if they're not married yet. Show me a middle aged person who spends >1 hr a day on facebook, and I'll show you someone who has been to a psychiatrist. It's not an insult, it is a statement of fact. Each person tries to find ways of affirming themselves; but when it is done through identity and not behavior, it always leads to misery.^xx

Sure, you can convince 5000 people you're anything. Then what?^xxi

It is self-reinforcing. The type of person who withdraws into facebook is already stunted in their potential for happiness; and if you're spending all your energy on facebook then you're not spending it in ways that might actually work. The problem isn't facebook, the problem is you.^xxii

But that's how I met my last girlfriend...

Your last girlfriend.^xxiii Narcissism has a fail-safe: since you know you tricked them to get them, you can't believe them when they say they love you. The fact that she loves you means she's not smart enough to know what love is. That's why you default to measurable quantities of love: how fast did she get into bed with the past guys?^xxiv

Just because she thinks you're awesome, doesn't mean you can really feel her.

I know I can love, because I love my son and daughter, totally and unconditionally.^xxv

And so now I know your kids are young. No matter what you do to them: abuse them, yell at them, neglect them, abandon them, withdraw from them, they will love you unconditionally.^xxvi But after puberty, when they start to love other people in different ways than you, or more than you (do you remember when you were 17?), even the best parent's status drops. How will your ego defend against that?^xxvii Sports car and drinking? Cybersex? "I've started smoking pot again, it really helps me unwind."

What can psychiatry do about this?

Do about what? According to it there's nothing wrong with you, don't you see? You're not grandiose. Maybe you get diagnosed with "depression" or a touchy-feely therapist tells you you have "self-esteem issues" but that's like being told you have a hairy back, you make some cosmetic adjustments or you just don't go to the pool, life goes on. Psychiatry has nothing to say about why you get so enraged when you hear about welfare cheats, or how your wife's giggle at that one joke on TV hit you the wrong way, how everyone seems like shallow, phony jerks and no one is worth getting to know -- how adamant you are that the government do X or Y, neither of which are feasible or even matter but to you it's the most obvious thing in the world to do and the fact that they're not doing it must mean they are either idiots or corrupt -- and while you're yelling at the TV or the monitor or in your own head your wife is mauling a vibrator or you don't have a wife at all.

But I never yell.^xxviii

Your rage may not score on the decibels but it is triple digits on the wattage. Psychiatry can't measure that. And while this rage makes you miserable there's also a societal effect: hating black people, hating white people, blaming Goldman Sachs, blaming your parents, declaring war.^xxix

And deserving things: shouldn't you be in a nice car? Nautica/Zegna/Underarmor/Polo shirts?^xxx Restaurants? The fact that you can't get them is someone else's fault; but if you get them, why aren't you happier? Meanwhile there are bills to pay.

And you can't make the connection between these things at all. Even as I say it, you resist: it's not that simple, you don't know her, you don't know them......................................... it can't be all me.

It is you, it is all you, it is always you. Isn't it odd how narcissism turns everything inward, except blame?

It's not odd, it is by psychic design, and psychiatry has failed you all in this. If individual narcissism is self-defensive, one might presume that societal narcissism will find [its] own way to hide in plain sight. Narcissism became synonymous with grandiosity because that facilitated its measurement. But in so doing, the most significant social pathology in two generations was rendered undetectable.

———

It matters because the principal role of self-aware cognition is to produce and maintain the list of explanations as to perceptible discrepancies in phenomenology. [↩]
Not in the slightest. He means, "I want to make sure you didn't leave anything interesting behind, in that evidently impotant place you found where you stole this from." It's a perfectly reasonable behaviour, and much more than that besides : it's absolutely necessary as the predicated base of human knowledge. [↩]
For what it's worth, I do not believe this "womanizing" bullshit for one single second. I have spent by now so much time with women working the streets for other women, and before that with girls and their girl-friends, that I can very much tell the puppyboy from the "womanizer" etcetera. You ever seen "Terms of Endearment" ?

It's not that "he is / isn't a womanizer". It's that in the world he lives, no such thing as womanizers exist. It's not that he isn't, it's that he can't be, anymore than he could be an early medieval itinerant knight. I'm sure he's read about them, of course, of course. I've also read about Martians, you know ? [↩]
No, actually it's not so hard to verify a Christos Ballas worked and taught.

Christos Ballas is a practicing Psychiatry doctor in Philadelphia, PA. Overview. Dr. Ballas graduated from the Jefferson Medical College. Dr. Ballas works in Philadelphia, PA and 1 other location and specializes in Psychiatry.

[↩]
Must suck being stuck with first layer readership. I know I'd have gone mental if continued with Romanians much longer -- either time. [↩]
This is actually very much so, and why the UStarded puritans came up with their, rather specific, brand of "modesticity" narcissism. [↩]
Shoots, I just answered that. I didn't know the next question on the test was gonna be about the side-point to the previous point! [↩]
This is bunk. When psychiatry quit the republic and joined the empire, it got a whole lot of lumpenclothes to better fit in. What "real science", get over yourselves, there's been 0 progress in psychiatry since the days of Vienna, and in fact more "real science" was conducted by the Moscow school than by the DSM school. At least their politically motivated pseudoscience was funny, this shit's just tedium. [↩]
Actually, if you find the liver you win -- it's so centrally important in the metabolic exchanges of the animal, you'll pretty much get the precise species even if not permitted to sequence any DNA, heck, even merely by shape, size and color. There's a reason the previous set of "real science" folk stuck at the shape-size-and-color classification stage (the Egyptians) thought the liver's where it's at. And the eye's not at all far behind, at that, have you ever considered this ? Looky!

Now pick among iguana, crocodile, gecko, chameleon, turtle, boa and viper, which is which ? [↩]
A lot or not a lot, it's all the help you're ever going to get -- and all is always larger than any lot. [↩]
This "private summarization" habit they teach their kids in the colonies, together with the "you already contain all things, guess what the word means by which we mean, see what portion of your inconsequential and in any case undeveloped inside do you feel like labeling with this string", constitute the cornerstone of being an utter fucking moron, to that superlative degree only ESLtards ever really manage. Diploma mills aka "get a degree on the basis of your current life experience" aren't an epiphenomenon of ESLtarded pseudo-scholarship, but precisely its crowning realisation. [↩]
That'd be the scale for laziness. [↩]
It is perhaps not even worth mentioning by now that the laziness "manifestations" of "depression" are very much geared towards... the female experience and worldview. Dudes don't overeat and keep indoors when "depressed", because nobody's gonna come and impregnate them if they get lusciously fat and are readily trapped already. Instead they do something else.

Seriously, the "depression" behaviour entirely consisting of reproductive grooming in females is not self-fucking obvious ? She's not "depressed", yo. Her body just lost all possible respect for her supposed "mind" -- which, uselessly absent as it finds itself utterly fucking can't convince even blind biological processes that it's Mandated by Heaven to sit at the helm of them all -- so it decided it's gonna give her a baby instead. Less time outdoors so there's nowhere to run (historically, the human sexual selection paradigm, inter alia) and more weight so there's less chances to successfuly outrun anyone and more chances someone might be found willing to stick it in. Oh, a certain "outlook" along with certain "feelings" are driven by these bodily factors into the "mind" ? What fucking mind! "Depressed" women are fucking objects, they don't have a mind to begin with! If they did, they wouldn't be "depressed" in this sense, holy hell how hard is it ?

More importantly : why is your first reaction to "depressed" males to pretend "mental issues" even if that's not, credibly, the case, but it is absolutely never, ever, ever, no matter fucking what, going to cross your mind at all when dealing with exactly-equally-and-perfectly-identically "depressed" females ? Hm ? Oh, let me guess, "they express it differently", fat retards indoors "don't hurt anybody".

"Hurting" is not the fucking criterion. [↩]
Narcissism is a class of derealization, present when the individual's coping mechanism principally involves ideation of the self.

Those are the two prongs, the genus and the specific difference. First, the individual has to lose contact with reality, the outside world has to cease being meaningful, interpretable, predictable and actionable. Then, once this happened, there's a lot of anxiety, of course, and a lot of other uncontrolled and mostly chaotic processes going into the mind, because derealization is trauma, the first and foremost. That's why theatre's called Traum in German, or maybe it was something else.

This trauma has to be somehow resolved, even if merely by temporary nigger-rigging. All those nigger rigs are diseased states, by the definition of what a nigger is, but not all are narcissism. Narcissism is just the one when the individual copes with the derealisation trauma by looking at himself. This isn't a conscious sort of looking, but rather subconscious, and unaware. "Depression" is organic, narcissism is subconscious, and murder sprees are rational (if unintelligent). That's your scale : women are dumber than men in the general because when confronted with the trauma of derealisation, they try to have babies instead of spending all their time jacking off, which comes higher up on the scale. The even higher thing is randomly killing a bunch of other tards in the proximate environment (and this is actually an altrusitic act). The pinnacle would be joining the Republic, though likely the Republic won't have you, so get to fueling that Cessna today. [↩]
It's kinda funny how this works, isn't it ? [↩]
The inability of the putative other person to be loved!

When I say to a girl, "strip" or "come" or whatever else and she doesn't, it isn't "my inability to order a slut" that's ruining her life for her ; much like when some dork tries and fails to read Trilema, it's not "my inability to write" that's burning his future. And no, it's very much not a problem of "her not being a slut". Of fucking course she is, pretend as she may, she is what she is not what she claims to be. [↩]
No, generally men manage to figure out sooner or later that the whole system of Inca-driven cling foil wrapping of everything has to burn down. Women generally don't, but then again their stupidity is not, generally, their own fault. [↩]
This is precisely it -- the narcissist is a man who imagines he can "resistance through culture", he'll just maintain his ever-precious self pristine, like a body in suspended animation. He'll safely and politely wait until the Republic comes, and kills the Inca, and tears all the cling foil and breaches all the separators ; then he'll join into the choir, like all the dead on the second coming, and all will be well.

Except it fucking won't, of course. The only thing that can happen inside the Inca-made compartments is decay, and the more decayful the more one tries, actively, insistently, to "maintain himself pristine for the day". After all -- the whole Inca's engineered on that premise, if it didn't work that way it also wouldn't exist that way. So no, when we're finally breaking the walls from outside, we're burying the foul smelling shit found inside, and irrespective of whether it wants to run and hug us or whatever other insanity.

It ain't gonna fucking work, this strategy. Try something else. [↩]
There is no such thing as the ideologically-neutral tool. All tools drive the ideology of their makers, which is why it's so important to use the right set of tools. It's not important to use them "the right way", but it is overwhelmingly important to use the right set. [↩]
The "is" being, of course, the female way to go about it. [↩]
Actually... then teh lulz, at least as a general rule. [↩]
The problem is to a large enough degree actually facebook. [↩]
I met both Hannah and Nicole online. And Chet. One's dead, the other's been my slave for thirteen years, and the last's going back to Chicago.

Just kidding. She ain't going anywhere. She's been a slave for a year and she ain't going anywhere, what the fuck now ? Because I constantly ask the girlies how long did their longest relationship last, and they always break out the month as a unit of measure, like true pedos.

How long are you gonna keep pretending ? [↩]
How the fuck is this a measurable quantity in the first place, let alone "of" anything ?!

And no, this isn't "how the pathology works". This is how the other pathology works, this is how the pathology of the "understander" works to "understand" the pathology of the "understood". Even if they're different (and no, of course they aren't), they're still equally pathological. [↩]
This, incidentally, is false ; and its falsity a major driver of (usually deeply buried) parental anxiety.

Nobody loves their children in the sense here implied, and I know this is a fact exactly like you do : if they did, then biological mothers wouldn't have to self-secrete & feed themselves a bespoke cocktail of psychoactives the likes of which even Burroughs envied his life entire, just to get through the first year-and-a-half of joy bundling.

PS. There's absolutely nothing wrong with not loving your children in this way. It's not even a real way, existent in fact, it's just the tar of psychogenic process, nevermind, forget about it and relax already.

PPS. All this weird wank is blinding you from (and will later probably morph into an excuse for) your own fundamental failure as a parent. [↩]
That's not the important part.

The important part is that their capacity -- not "their needs", this isn't marxism, nature's always and will always stay the most "capitalistic" thing possible -- for eating you is yet tiny, their bites into your flesh are slowly verging into "mosquito" territory.

By the time they bite like a lion... watch out. [↩]
And why should your ego have to defend ?

Pro tip : who was Ὀλυμπιάς Α' Ηπείρου ? How about... well, can you name any of the والده سلطان ? They had to do a lot of work in this vein also. In fact, their entire lives were predicated on doing a good job of this. "Never heard of it" ? [↩]
You also never belt her, which is way worse. [↩]
Some of these are actually good things, select which. [↩]
You can't be fucking serious. [↩]