A much too long rant ... mea maxima culpa.
After these three years of struggling first against the outrageousness of a 70+ year old huckster seeking to be President and then the absurdity of him being elected and now the attacks on both decency and the attempts to forge an ethical republic, I find it difficult to find the path ... call it Dao, The Way, Halachah, Sh'riyah, ... to find a path at the forks in the road and a sense that convinces me that my footfalls are moving in a virtuous direction.
It seemed pretty clear to me (most often a dangerous sign) that DJT was presenting to us all the image of an ill man. His apparent Narcissism was not of the type we see in clinical practice where folk come in who are hypersensitive to wounds against their self-esteem and who split in response to such wounds ... The Good becomes Bad ... and folk who are in their orbit are seen as either Gooder than they are or Worser that Dog-shit. This man presented ('who knows what actually lurks in the heart of man) as needing to thoroughly destroy anyone who was not willing to be an adoring subordinate to his powers and will. Even the sickest of Borderlines and Narcissists that I had treated for the previous 40 years didn't split so completely and didn't need everything before them to be vitiated and everything after them destroyed. Senat Prezident Schreber had fantasies such as these but he didn't act them out (Freud's discussion of his autobiography); Trump did. He didn't present as a "counterpuncher," as he claimed, unless one considers the outlandish attacks on the Khans, on Women, on opponents, on beauty pageant contestants, on workers and on the man who publicly chided and humiliated him in public in front of the Press Corps.
A brief pause: the comment he made in an interview just after the Khans asked him if he had known sacrifice ... repeated by the interviewer: 'Yes, I've sacrificed. I gave thousands of people jobs.' I had rarely if ever heard such a wild claim running counter to the notion that employers and employees live under the terms of a mutually beneficial contract -- either an implicit or explicit one. It is as if he was suggesting that the implied sharing of benefit was, in itself, an offense to his sense of the right.
John Gartner began using the diagnostic category employed by Fromm to describe despots ... Malignant Narcissism ... in short, the worst parts of Narcissistic and Borderline and Sociopathic Personality Disorders. It certainly seemed to fit the manifest behaviors openly shared by this candidate.
Bandy Lee and her group (my group) took a different tack and emphasized Trump's dangerousness, skirting the original Goldwater Rule's prohibition against Diagnosis and focusing on what was "the issue" ... This guy, whether he fit this or that category, by virtue of the fact that he was now, as President, armed to the teeth was a danger to the Republic and to the World, at large. Jim Gilligan (one of my heroes) and Bob Lifton and Judith Herman and two dozen others very thoughtful therapists joined Bandy in the Dangerous Case group and many local organizations put together meetings and rallies in dozens of cities -- those organized by John. The book appeared early October 2017 and the rallies were held mid-October. My brief contribution was about what I'd been talking about for two years, then ... the tension between the Right of Public Figures to maintain Privacy (Goldwater) and the Duty to Warn and to Protect (Tarasoff), so clearly set out in Leviticus 19: 'Don't go loose-lipped gossiping among your people but don't stand idly by as your neighbor bleeds.' (Another co-author of the Dangerous Case book, indeed, had removed me from a discussion group for not agreeing to stop talking about this tension on that discussion board.)
In the meantime, there were a number of psychotherapists accusing these two groups of practicing armchair psychiatry, an attack homologous to those brought against the authors who wrote about Barry Goldwater in 1964.A number of these dissenters were not speaking in support of Trump but rather arguing that he was evil or "a putz" and that diagnosis was besides-the-point. By the way, many of the attacks against (may I call us) the Resistance were, at best, misguided and sometimes misrepresented the Resistance. The vast majority of the Bandy Lee group never offered a diagnosis, nor did they indulge what Freud called "Wild Analysis" ... discussions of a Mommy Complex or developmental lacunae of this or that type. And the Gartner group, too, was using Fromm's descriptor carefully examining Trump's manifest behavior.
In any case, I began to fascinate about the Lower Level Personality Disorders. My own belief was (again with der alte hexenmeister fum Wien) that these people -- those as disturbed as the Persona that Trump presented -- lived behind a "Stone Wall of Narcissism" and were untreatable. That was not to say that folk with limited problems in the Narcissistic and Ego Integration sectors (NPD and BPD and maybe even some Sociopathic tendencies) were untreatable ... Kernberg, Kohut, Masterson, Meissner and a slew of us demonstrated treatment viability with certain of these people but there are some who, to my way of thinking, are untreatable. I went so far as to wonder whether the inclusion of these broad PD diagnostic categories might not be there in DSM/ICD to allow us clinicians to bill 3rd parties for their treatment. A bridge too far? Maybe. But these folk who have no apparent capacity to view others as Subjects in Their Own Right but as objects to be used ... maybe they are evil ... not practitioners of dark arts as in the Maleus Maleficarum but people who seek to harm others and are not ever gonna get better.
What struck me as interesting was that the Bandy Group and the John Group and those naysayers I mentioned above, all seem to agree that Trump is dangerous ... Oh! And the media and maybe even the legislatures seem to have come around. So let me end with the media ... Middle and Progressive and maybe the Rightists, as well. I don't know where I stand on the Terribly Dangerous or Malignant Narcissistic or Evil questions. Frankly, I see no real difference. But I do get supremely pissed off day-after-crazy-day when the media conflates what Trump says with what he believes. It pisses me off when my supervisees do that, too.
Frankly, when MSNBC or CNN talks about what "Trump believes" ... my kishkas turn upside down ... a psychic gastric torsion. Did Trump believe that his inauguration was bigger than Obamas? Who knows but I bet not ... the pictures are too obvious. Does he believe that the Democrats are obstructionist in Republican controlled Legislatures? I think not. Does he believe that abortion is bad? C'mon. This poor sick or evil bastard who would use racism to his advantage, hangs little kids and Dreamers out to dry for his own purposes, seeks to destroy anyone who stands in his way and risks devastating consequences in his destruction of an alliance that equilibrated the World for two thirds of a Century and align himself with tyrants and plays with wars ... he shows no belief beyond self-aggrandizement ... no value in anything outside of himself.
Enough ranting: How do I/We get the media to stop playing with words. Freud once described something as eine harmlose Nachlassigkeit des Ausdrucks ... a harmless figure of speech. Frankly, the Old Guy shoulda known better ... there are few, if any, harmless figures of speech ... and this game of attributing a belief system to this fellow is not harmless, either. ... Oy! I've lost confidence in my path.