![]() ![]() If you can understand what you are up against, you can be freed from the unnecessary emotional baggage they wish to impose upon you. Some individuals, however, have an extra measure of pathology making their narcissistic traits especially problematic. Their penchant for control and manipulation makes relationships quite toxic. Each person has moments when these traits show up, and when they are persistent, we refer to it as narcissism. Narcissism is a pattern on a spectrum. It includes tendencies toward controlling attitudes and behaviors, low empathy, self-centeredness, sense of entitlement, need for superiority, need to feel important, excessive defensiveness, and exploitive behaviors. Frances was chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, widely considered to be psychiatry’s “bible,” so his credentials are unassailable.If you are connected with a very pathological narcissist, there is a high probability that you have experienced ongoing stress, and are blamed for any strain that is present. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Allen Frances, said this in a letter to the editor two years ago: “Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. The psychiatrist who wrote the defining clinical characteristics for narcissistic personality disorder, Dr. There’s only one problem with her assertion. Jennifer Senior seeks to malign Donald Trump by claiming that the president suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. He would not be covered when he is simply trying to get attention. Perhaps a simple rule is needed: The president would be covered only when he is announcing what the government is doing. ![]() Trump’s statements during a rally in Minnesota on the ground that the remarks were so ugly that they should not be amplified by being reported. Todd announced that he would refuse to repeat, much less to replay, one of Mr. Indeed we should, and we have a courageous example in the person of Chuck Todd, of the program “MTP Daily” on MSNBC. Jennifer Senior’s column on President Trump’s narcissism has much to teach about coping with his madness, particularly the last part of her column concerning the need for the press to reconsider the notion that “almost anything that comes out of the president’s mouth is considered news.” Let’s bridge this empathy chasm and heal our nation. Trump’s run-amok style and policies, only serves to further alienate his supporters. Trump, they believe, understands how obliterated, erased and forgotten they feel.Ī smug, superior stance, aided by fancy psychiatric diagnosing by people understandably horrified and appalled by Mr. Trump’s base adore him for reasons that are deeply meaningful to them. No, he’s a steak-and-eggs malignant narcissist, king of the character disorders.īut what do we do with this diagnosis? Our country has never been more divided. Trump is not just an ordinary cornflakes-and-milk basic narcissist. Now what? While I applaud Jennifer Senior’s confirmation that President Trump is, indeed, a malignant narcissist, what do we do with this diagnosis? So Mr. The writer is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. That puts him far beyond the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder into a much more dangerous zone for our nation. Trump, like Hitler and Stalin, has the personality of a grandiose-paranoid dictator who would destroy all he saw as his enemies while endangering the nation that he supposedly was advancing through his leadership. The proper category would be “destructive dictator,” because Mr. President Trump’s grandiosity and paranoid retaliatory behaviors are so far beyond those shown by what in contrast could be called “ordinary narcissists” that he requires a category beyond narcissism. 12):Īs a psychiatrist who contributed a chapter to the “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” I have often been asked whether he meets the definition of a narcissist, to which I have answered, half in jest, “No, rather he gives narcissism a bad name.” ![]() Re “ We Are All at the Mercy of the Narcissist in Chief,” by Jennifer Senior (column, Oct. ![]()
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