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Narcissism and Politics in America
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by Susan Marie Kovalinsky | September 12, 2009 at 03:53 pm
Since the publication of "The Politics of Narcissism: America's Grandiose Persona under Bush" by Peter Wolson in 2004 - a scathing indictment of the war in Iraq - much thought has been given to narcissim in relation to the political domain. If, as the feminists said, "the personal is the political", the reverse is likely to hold true as well.
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America, having co-opted the noble ideal of self-reliance espoused by Emerson, and twisted it to its own ends, is a culture which advocates narcissism to a degree. This was stated plainly by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissim (Norton Publishing, 1979). Moreover, Justin A. Frank, in his expository text, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (Harper Collins, 2004) gives the reader to understand how it is that narcissistic injuries ( and the whole secret animus and mechanism of the narcissistic syndrome) can conjure up a host of political delusions, which are of necessity actualized in ways inherently dangerous to - and diametrically opposed to the health of - the nation and the populace. A politician who views the public as a venue by which to gain narcissistic supply is unlikely to be cohesive and constructive in his thinking.
Sam Vaknin, PhD, well known self-professed narcissist and scholar/author on narcissim , labeled Barack Obama a narcissist during the campaign days. While the clinical traits set forth in the American Psychological Association's Diagnostician's Manual proport to be describing a medical syndrome, this in itself may be due to the narcissim of the clinical psychologists, who feel a rivalry with actual medical doctors. Less a clinical syndrome and more a psychological profile, the description would appear to detail a continuim which we may all progress along , and which the narcissist, through arrested development of the normal infantile narcissistic phase - through neglect or over-indulgence, or a combination of both - has landed at the extreme end.
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Vaknin's critique and analysis of Barack Obama's "presenting symptoms" is interesting to anyone who watched Obama closely during the campaign, and who suspected narcissim in him themselves. ( It is easiest to spot in others when one is oneself a narcissist). This is not to say that Obama necessarily has a malignant narcissim. But the mysterious aura, the flirtatiousness of the facial expressions, the "haughty" body language, and the preference for soaring rhetoric over detailed substance does indicate some narcissim. To a degree, any "great" man must be somewhat narcissistic. It could be the factor which catapults him to the public spotlight , and the impetus to action which is lacking in the non-narcissitic person. Vaknin has this to say of the etiology of Obama's syndrome:
Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations. Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then, his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia: a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995.
Source: globalpolitician.com
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Timothy Birdnow has pointed out the narcissim ( I am not using the term perjoratively, by the way) of Obama thusly:
Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him with a fellowship and an office to work on his book. The book took him a lot longer than expected and at the end it devolved into, guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which, he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book 'Dreams From My Father.'
Source: timothybirdnow.com
On page 89 of Lasch's text (c. 1979, Norton Books) Lasch points out what may lie in the political process in America in general, bolstering Vaknin's assessment of Obama: "The merging of actors and audience does not make the spectator into a communicant; it merely provides him -- if it does not drive him out of the theater altogether -- with a chance to admire himself in the new role of pseud-performer". And in a chapter critiquing Capitalism, Lasch points out that a quasi-Socialism may be needed to repair the damage of a great deal of narcissistic evil inherent in the corporate system itself. Ergo, Barack Obama may be seen as apex and reversal; villian and victim; child and hero, to an extent not visible on the political surface.
The political narcissist makes his appearance also in the followers of politicans who are acting out the effects of narcissist injury. Whether in the case of quasi-socialistic liberals or gun-toting Tea Partiers, ideology runs the risk of being fuled not by true identification with political aspirations, but rather with complexes and skewed perceptions: These, the necessary byproducts of a naricissitic fixation. The "Birthers" might well be said to be engaging in the primitive and infantile act of "splitting" and "projection", in which Obama becomes a suspisious character, moving like a foreign figure accross their homespun landscape; with skin color, features, and affectations which are all dubious and make it appear, within the projection, as if he is the Other, the dreaded outsider who desires to infringe on their liberties. His motives suspect, lurid in his aspirations, he becomes through projection of narcissistic injury a truly hated and hideous character. So much so, that to an extent it is believed that there must be some piece of evidence - such as a Kenyan birth certificate - which will prove once and for all that his election was a mistake, and his presence a menace. Such ideas swallowed wholesale are divisive to say the least, making resonable debate well nigh impossible, and further muddying the public discourse. Obama may have sensed some of this suspicion of him through his biraciality all of his life, and adopted his own narcissism as a defense. Thus, one would have a narcissistic politician in a defensive role, with narcissitic opposers in the offensive stance, complicating matters to an extreme degree. In this sense Obama's narcissism would be viewed by the discerning as posturing which masks a noble soul; while the other's may ba actual base aggression projected onto a person of a very high order, and unworthy of such.
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