There's been a lot of talk these days about narcissism, but exactly what is it? I wanted to find out, so naturally the first place I looked was Google. While Google certainly couldn't be considered the world's repository for all of mankind's knowledge and absolute truth, I thought it might be a good place to start. I already knew that narcissism is considered by some experts to be a mental disorder and I thought that it might explain some of Donald Trump's bizarre behavior. Maybe he does some of these things because he just can't help it. That's when I came across something called malignant narcissism.
There is a reference source called DSM that mental health professionals use to categorize symptoms of mental disorders and describe the conditions related to them. DSM stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. It's pretty dry reading, so rather than spend a lot of time trying to understand its contents, I decided to steal someone else's explanations of narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, and malignant narcissism and then share them with you and let you figure it out by yourselves.
While I was searching for information, I kept encountering references to a web site called psychologia.co, so I went to it and searched around for some useful information. I found that narcissism itself is not considered a disorder, but narcissistic personality is. There is yet another flavor of narcissism called malignant narcissism, which is basically a combination of narcissism, anitisocial personality disorder, aggression, and sadism The paragraphs below were cut and pasted from what I found there. The actual link is right here in case you want to check it out for yourself. It's a pretty good article.
"According to PsychCentral, the term “narcissism” is simply a layman’s term for someone with narcissistic personality disorder. However, Dr. Allan Schwartz (MentalHelp.net) argues that there is a distinct difference between simple narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder. According to him, narcissistic personality disorder is a mental illness, whereas narcissism — although characterized by somewhat similar behaviors — is not classified as a mental illness."
"Narcissistic personality disorder is a destructive preoccupation with one’s own personal adequacy, power and prestige. People with this disorder crave for admiration, have an unreasonably strong sense of entitlement and are often preoccupied with unrealistic fantasies of success, beauty and ideal love. Unlike malignant narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder is defined as a mental illness in DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Fifth Edition)."
"Campbells’ Psychiatric Dictionary defines malignant narcissism as a mix of narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, aggression and sadism. It is important to mention that malignant narcissism was not included in the latest edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) and is not considered to be a diagnostic term."
Armed with these definitions, I decided that the best way to look for these characteristics in Trump would be in his Twitter posts since that seems to be his preferred channel of communication. Indeed, Twitter seems to be the place where he just says whatever is on his mind at that moment without giving much consideration to the accuracy of his posts or their consequences.
What I found was shocking. I went through about a hundred of his recent posts and almost all of them contained some level of either shameless self-promotion or aggression toward others. At first I looked only at posts he made after he won the election since I thought pre-election posts would probably contain more narcissistic characteristics due to the nature of his campaign. When I realized how many of the post-election posts contained narcissistic characteristics, I went back and looked at the pre-election posts too. There was no difference. The man won the election, yet he still uses Twitter daily to rip people apart with all the intensity of a rabid hyena. At that point I realized that Trump is not just a narcissist. He's a malignant narcissist.
You can form your own opinion, but I really don't want someone like that to represent the Unites States to the rest of the world. I think it's a dangerous situation and will escalate to something much worse than just a war of words to be waged 140 characters at a time. There's just too much at stake for all of us to silently watch this unfold. It's time to resist and get this under control before it's too late and he does something we'll all regret for many years to come.
The form of activism you may choose to exercise is up to you. My choice is using words and images. I would encourage you to embrace whatever type of activism works for you and start taking action. Today.
And even more relevant is the scientific correlation between malignant narcissism and low IQ. It's a misnomer that such individuals are often brighter than average; they're not. I've worked with several of them (one was later clinically diagnosed and is wanted by numerous law enforcement agencies now) and concur that while they were certain they were geniuses, they were actually intellectually limited.
ReplyDelete"Among the general population, it is commonly thought that both psychopaths and sociopaths are typically highly intelligent persons (we probably have Hollywood to thank for that). However, this isn't the case. On statistical analysis of the gathered data, Heinzen et al (2012) found that psychopaths had a significantly lower IQ than healthy controls, and sociopaths had slightly lower IQ than the control group – the latter difference, by the way, was too small to be deemed significant. The researchers went on to conclude that both interpersonal and behavioral psychopathy are associated with lower IQ, however, this association is stronger in behavioral psychopathy than in the interpersonal type. Next to that, they also found that if a significant level of behavioral psychopathy is present, the IQ of the person tends to be lower regardless of the level of interpersonal psychopathy."
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-correlation-between-narcissism-psychopathy-and-intelligence
I thought learning about malignant narcissism would be a new experience for me, but it didn't take long for me to realize that I've known at least two people over the course of my life who fit the profile. One was the worst boss I've ever had and I can't say anything about the other one for legal reasons. I don't have real data to back it up, but I think both had a higher than average IQ, which made any interaction with them even more unpleasant. They have both done well in their professional lives, but their narcissistic tendencies have taken a great toll in personal relationships, mostly on others.
ReplyDelete