by Cynthia Bourgeault…insightful!…Narcissistic personality disorder
Naming It for What It Is
Moving Beyond the Madman Archetype
I readily admit that I am not a professional psychologist, but in my role as a spiritual teacher I have seen my fair share of psychological abnormalities and have sometimes had to make tough judgment calls to preserve my own safety or the wellbeing of the Wisdom community I serve. The trickiest by far to navigate have been my periodic encounters with the so-called “Cluster B” personality disorders, particularly those still undiagnosed, which is most of them. It was through one particularly destructive such encounter several years ago that I cut my teeth on what the world looks like when viewed— insidiously, insistently, coercively—through a fractured looking glass.
Part of the covert toxicity of these Cluster B relationships, as I have subsequently come to learn, lies in the ongoing cognitive dissonance incurred through prolonged exposure to the profoundly torturous and twisted logic that is a hallmark of this particular sector of pathology. Conventional word meanings are turned upside down, logical causality is stood end for end, and one wanders in a hall of mirrors in which all efforts to communicate, to understand, to defer, are dismissed as pitiable weakness and only serve to further inflame the already engorged ego of the afflicted person. The bottom line is that you cannot apply reason, empathy, or negotiation to an untreated “Cluster B.” It is like pouring gasoline on a raging fire.
If there is any remediating value to my difficult initiation, it’s that I learned some very hard lessons about psychopathology that most of us neurotypical types are simply too incredulous to face. As we enter now upon an eerily similar difficult initiation for our country and our world, my daily newsfeed reading like a déjà vu “writ large,” I can see that these lessons, painful though they were, have in certain respects prepared me well to look straight into the eyes of the beast and name it as I see it.
While Donald Trump’s erratic trajectory may be morally inconceivable, it is, I suggest, clinically predictable. “Narcissistic personality disorder” is not a literary metaphor; it is a clinical pathology with predictable behavior patterns, all of which our President models like a poster child. While the Cluster B disorders (narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder) all sit uneasily on the line between neurosis and psychosis, I would offer as a layman’s rule of thumb that neurosis is a psychologically dysfunctional response to an actual reality; psychosis is a logically appropriate response to a distorted reality—i.e., to a phantasmagoria of the disordered person’s mind or emotions. The distinction is essential. When Donald Trump says that he personally prevented eight-plus wars or insists he was cheated out of the 2020 election, he is not lying; that is how he actually perceives the situation. And his responses—rage, retribution, scorched earth vengeance—while emotionally primitive, are still logically consistent with his sense of being slighted and cheated. Once you stop feigning shock and horror and start looking at the world through his own Trumpian logic, his next moves become tragically predictable.
The other thing that needs to be taken into account when dealing with a narcissistic personality disorder (and which unfortunately, the original myth of Narcissus does not make sufficiently clear) is that the disorder does not really arise out of vainglory—an exaggerated sense of self-worth—but rather, out of a bottomless well of self-hatred and shame. The hole at the center of selfhood can never be filled, and the grotesque exhibitions of personal power and dominance are merely the frantic efforts to shore up the eroding inner castle, to extort something from the outside that can only truly be conferred from within. It’s a doomed pattern, and when it’s appeased rather than confronted, it tends to escalate manically, creating what’s known among the social sciences as a “positive feedback loop”—meaning not that it is beneficial, but that it is intensifying, spiraling rapidly out of control.
I have more than had my fill of liberal politicians and commentators wringing their hands and lamenting, “When will we be rid of this madman?” “Madman” is way too romantic a term, way too imprecise; it conjures up the whole case lot from Captain Ahab and Othello to Machiavelli to The Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh who dreamed bigger dreams and dared to imagine a larger reality. There is a huge difference between the visionary dreamer, the coldly calculating but neurotypical (i.e., sane) villain, and a mentally impaired person with an untreated Cluster B personality disorder. And the fate of our world may now hang on knowing this difference and being prepared to act on it.
No, our country is NOT being governed by a “madman.” It is being governed by a person whose behavior patterns are overwhelmingly congruent with a volatile and dangerous mental illness now in full manic overdrive. And if this is so, his likely future trajectory, however logically erratic and morally inconceivable, is still clinically predictable: the pathology will continue to intensify as he grasps more and more frantically for outward praise and power on his inward journey toward implosion.
It is beyond contest that this is a situation in which the 25th amendment could be rightfully invoked—and should have been already. Had the man suffered a heart attack or a stroke, had he been emergency air-lifted on life support, the decision would have been effortless; physical incapacitation is clear and obvious. But mental incapacitation is still a murky path, particularly when it gets tangled up with that other well-documented consequence of prolonged exposure to a Cluster B personality toxicity: trauma bonding. In a reversal of all known logic, the victimized person, rather than running for dear life, becomes traumatically fixated on the victimizer, compulsively cycling back in the vain hope of clawing out of him that mutual understanding or mutual closure that the Cluster B person is psychologically incapable of delivering.
With the President’s cabinet, the Republican party, and now, lamentably, the Supreme Court largely traumatically bonded to their toxically maniacal leader, it is hard to say where help will come from. Which among these duly vested bodies will finally summon the moral gumption to exercise the agency duly entrusted to it and pull the plug on this escalating horror show? I am not holding my breath. Trauma bonding does not work that way.
Meanwhile, as we all collectively wait for Godot, we can at least stop romanticizing our plight, stop wringing our hands in theatrical lament. We can begin by naming the situation clearly for what it is: not some latter-day Shakespearean tragedy, but a tragic case of an entire nation held captive in a collective trauma bonding orbiting around a toxically disordered person. The paralysis that has overtaken our theoretically unassailable structures of governance is not a freakish moral aberration; it is the usual and even normative psychological outcome in such situations, extraordinary only in its scale, not its basic configuration. A realistic psychological assessment of what we’re up against, clinical though it may sound, at least establishes some quantifiable markers and points a way forward toward appropriate remediative strategies and longer range healing pathways. If we are serious about addressing our national plight, perhaps we should be looking less toward Shakespeare and Sophocles and more toward the DSM.