By Hal Brown, MSW, Bio.
My blog with other stories that piqued my interest from numerous sources, updated all day, other Daily Kos diaries posted almost daily on a wide variety of topics.
I use the term psychotherapists to include all mental health professionals including psychiatrists like Bandy Lee and Lance Dodes, psychoanlysists like Justin Frank, clinical psychologists like John Gartner, Mary Trump of course, as well as Alan D. Blotcky and Seth D. Norrholm who write as a team and have just been published in the New York Daily News, and and counselors and clinical social workers like Rosemary Sword and yours truly. These links are all to web searches for articles by these psychotherapists.
There were many photos to choose from for my illustration (above) when I searched Google Images for Trump “pointing at his head” including this rare double pointer:
These frequently published psychotherapists agree on just about everything about Donald Trump’s psychological makeup and can and do cite numerous examples which demonstrate how, to use the example of someone who bent and some would say broke the system with clever lawyers including Alan Dershowitz who also defended Trump in the Senate trial, to get away with murder. If Trump’s behavior were a pair of gloves they would fit into an assessment of the president’s psychological unfitness like a custom made $275 FitzGerald Morrell Broughton glove.
Adding all we know making the case that Trump’s psychopathology renders him both unfit and dangerous to be president if he were O.J. Simpson the glove would fit and he’d have gone to prison. Simpson murdered two people and was found innocent. Trump caused the death of tens of thousands and is murdering democracy and so far is getting away with it.
There two things thing we don't know about his psychology.
One involves his lies. We know that he lies so many times there’s a been a new job presumably for Internet adept interns at various news organizations in determining which of his statements are outright lies and which are “mere” bending or distorting of the truth.
I searched online for articles by psychotherapists trying to explain why Trump lies and came up short finding only this one: A psychologist explains why Trump lies so much in Salon from two years ago: A psychologist explains why Trump lies so much.
The MSNBC host then turned to Tali Sharot, an associate professor of cognitive neurosciences at University College London, and posed the question: “Why an uptick in the president’s lies?”
“We don’t know specifically about why there’s an escalation in the president’s lies,” Sharot began. “It could be many reasons — maybe certain lies covered up with more and more lies, maybe falsehoods repeated so many times they are considered to be true, which makes them repeated more.”
“Our research suggests that there might be another explanation — an explanation which is quite intriguing,” she continued. “Research done in our lab, not on the president, suggests that the emotional response that people have to their own lies is reduced every time they lie. Now they don’t have that negative arousal that comes with lying so there is nothing carving their dishonesty, and so dishonesty just escalates over time.”
Describing clinical trials she conducted, Sharot used an analogy to describe Trump’s explosion of lying.
“I think the way to think about it is, it’s a bit like perfume,” she elaborated. “You buy a new perfume, you put it on and it smells quite strongly. Over time you put it again and again and after a while, you can’t smell it anymore because you have adapted — you really need to apply it more liberally in order to smell.”
“So your own dishonesty, repeated dishonesty, is a bit like perfume that you just adjust to over time and you can’t adjust to it anymore,” she concluded.
In June in The NY Times Michael Tomasky who is not a psychologist wrote “Why Does Trump Lie? — He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that exist to keep presidents in check.”
He concludes:
It often befuddles emphasis added observers that Mr. Trump has no urge to hide his lies. Of course he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t care if he’s caught, because he has no regard for the democratic limits named above. His only real purposes are holding on to power by any means necessary and relentlessly reinventing himself to keep his reality show on the air for as long as possible.
So, far from respecting the institutions enough to sneak around them or appear to conform with their rules, he is perfectly happy to destroy those institutions that might expose him (the press, Congress, the courts, the inspectors general). He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that check him, so he has no urge to hide anything. And of course — maybe the most frightening part of all — he has not a moment’s concern for what endures after he’s gone.
So this is what makes his lies worse. They threaten the foundations of the republic in a way that even Mr. Nixon’s did not. And they will only get worse. If we’ve learned one thing about the president, it’s certainly this: It will always get worse. It’s mortifying enough to imagine the damage he can do in the next five months, let alone the following four years if he’s re-elected.
The key word above to me is befuddles. I don’t like to be befuddled about Trump’s behavior. I want to understand it as fully as possible. I have repeatedly written about how strongly I believe in Sun Tzu’s dictum from The Art of War: “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”
As psychotherapists, just adding the ones listed about, with a modest estimate of having had more than 200 years of clinical experience, we endeavor to help non-therapists understand the enemy, Donald J. Trump. This knowledge isn't the only way to defeat him but it is important. Hopefully Joe Biden will use this known in the debates. The Lincoln Project and other anti-Trump PAC’s has effectively used this understanding to provoke him into making mistakes.
Understanding Trump’s psychological make-up, especially his narcissism, has been one of the most effective ways that world leaders, especially Vladimir Putin and Kim Jung Un, have been successfully manipulating him.
The only way I can understand Trump’s lies, so many of them easily exposed, is that there are are probably vacillating and overlappng determining factors sometimes existing simulanteously. I think he has a tendency to delusional thinking mixed with wishful thinking and confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories).
Because he is both a malignant narcissist he has no morals whatsoever, and is also a high functioning sociopath (note that unlike Trump many sociopaths have a moral code) I think some of his lies are absolutely conscious manipulations. The most recent deliberate lie is his claim about mail in ballots. I am 99% sure he knows this is a lie. If he believes it he is well into the having a delusional disorder where his ability to engage in reality testing has been shot to hell, to put it in colloquial terms.
The second thing about Trump’s psychological state which we can’t know and can’t predict is how close Trump may be to having a psychotic episode.
From a clinical standpoint it is important to know how close to becoming unmoored from reality Trump is because there is a line of demarcation between being borderline psychotic and fully psychotic, and one’s ability to determine what is real and what isn’t own a consistent basis is that line. In my experience as one approaches that lines they may lapse briefly into psychosis and return to a more stable state for awhile, but once they cross the line completely there is no coming back aside receiving psychiatric treatment, generally with short term hospitalization and anti-psychotic medication.
If Trump does become truly psychotic it should be very difficult to hide. The primary symptoms of a psychotic episode which I think we could see developing in Trump are:
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Some readers think they already know all they need to about Trump and that article like the are superfluous at best. I wonder why those people bother reading these articles if as they write in comments that they don't want to learn more about Trump psychology. I strongly believe that the more we know about Trump and his machinations the better equipped we are to fight him. You can bet Putin, Kim Jung Un, and President Xi, and probably other world leaders have psychologists who are studying him.
As they say on MSNBCwhich is set to a few recognizable notes of music:
I don't think it is possible to know and understand too much about Donald Trump because to do this is to be able to formulate and refine strategies and tactics to exploit his vulnerabilities.
