Painting on a Mask

Corners of the Internet: The Last Psychiatrist [2/3]

Edit: first part can be found here; third part can be found here.

This was supposed to be a two-post series, one interpreting and a second commenting. It was also supposed to be a series of off-schedule posts, not taking up space on the monthly docket. Both of those decisions occurred before a large change in my schedule diminished my free time substantially. Here is the new plan.

The last post was the bird’s eye view. In this post, I’m going to give applications — both TLP’s own and my attempts to stretch the concept outside of the data points I have already been given. This will serve two purposes. First, to give substance to the theory which otherwise may be difficult to fully grasp. Second, to deal with the worry of overfitting that plagues psychoanalytic theories and its fellow-travelers. I have attempted to extract the principles, but the point of such an exercise is in disciplining their use, so let’s use them.

I have also gone back and edited the first post to include a few posts by TLP which are the most important, in my mind, to understanding the overall principles of his theory of narcissism. This post will necessarily include links to the examples which I find most illuminating as to its application.

In the next post, I expect to make connections between TLP’s theory of narcissism and other theories and concepts which it either contradicts, coheres with, or in some way bumps up against. After that, I will attempt to evaluate the theory and discuss not only its applications to particular cases, but TLP’s attempts to make it a wider social theory and how I understand and evaluate that portion of the theory as well.

The first post can be found here. I highly recommend reading it in full before this one, but here are some orienting excerpts for the impatient and of-little-time:

Everything the narcissist does — wearing the clothes they do, ruminating on the wrongs they have endured, beating their girlfriend, even feeling miserable about themselves — is a defense against change. They do not ruminate and obsess over how they could be better in order to change; they feel miserable in order to not change — the misery allows them to live with their selves. The alcoholic does not drink alcohol, which drives away his wife: he drinks alcohol so he does not have to repair his relationship with his wife. So that he does not have to change.

…

Pathological narcissism occurs when the primary objective of our lives is to be desired/high status. However, at the same time, we do not care about anyone else. At once, everyone else is competing with us for status (status is entirely rivalrous — one status point for you means one less status point for me) yet also the arbiters of status.

…

[A] narcissist can’t love anyone. All [TLP’s] gnashing of teeth is because narcissists don’t know how to love a single person in their life. They only know how to love what having them in their life says about them.

In the second person (as TLP favors): get out of your own head. Your problems are not your problems — they are the problems of the people who rely on you. Your preening self-identification is screwing over the people you pretend to try to give the impression of caring about. No, it’s further than that: not only is your self-identification screwing everyone over, you don't get to self-identify. Identities are what people construct to explain your actions. You are the one that acts. Narcissists believe that if everyone would just agree upon their identity, the right things will happen because they will be desired; the story of life is that you act, and then an identity is created as a heuristic for the things that you do. Who you are is determined by what you choose to do, not the other way around. And it is always a choice. Always. You’re in the hole now. Any moment you choose just a bit differently, for that moment, you are not a narcissist. Start there. Or maybe you are still a narcissist — that’s not the point. The point is you just did something good. For someone else. Congratulations. Now keep choosing differently. No plans that are set up to fail, just to give you one more reason to allow yourself to believe you can’t change — just choosing differently. At any moment. Whenever you can. You say you’re miserable.7 Prove it. Anything else is a defense against change, a defense against being the person doing the thing that the person in front of you needs you to be do, a defense against loving someone instead of a whisper of a dream of a picture of someone else’s impression of you. For God’s sake, love someone. “Oh, I’m not the kind of person who can-” Love someone. “First, I have to figure out-” Love someone. “But what if I’m not me when-” Love someone.

Let’s get in the weeds.

An Example from The Last Psychiatrist

Before my own attempts to apply the theory, I’ll give one full summary of a TLP-approved application: Shame. Shame is a 2011 movie about sex addiction. First, TLP gives a note on hermeneutics: “I'm going to offer an interpretation. It won't matter whether this interpretation is correct— none of this actually happened, after all. The point is to ask why no one else thought of this interpretation that, once you read it, will seem to you an obvious one.” He ends with another note on the same subject: “That's one interpretation, anyway, but I am telling you now, it is the only one that will save you.” So, how’s an extended Michael Fassbender sex scene going to save us?

The first important thing to note is that sex addiction is a habit, and like any habit, it is a skill and a worldview. “Everything [the sex addict] sees is sex.” “In the staggered brick pattern of the wall he sees a 69; the rounded elevator button reminds him of a clitoris; a footstep behind him is a woman sneaking out of her husband's bed. These are instantaneous and millisecond association flashes that happen all the time.” His whole life is oriented around his addiction, both in using it to stave off the pressure which would force him to change and in creating excuses for his addiction which allow him not to change. And even as the addiction becomes less able to stave off the pressure, the difficulty in changing increases as well. With all the time invested in it, “if the sex addict gets a watch, hell, gets a calendar, what he will discover is that he has practiced no other skill more diligently than pursuing empty sex that he knows is unsatisfying to him. That's what he's spent the most time on, that's what he knows how to do the best.” It’s not an addiction when you want to do it; it’s an addiction when you don’t want to do it, but you won’t choose any other way of getting through the day.

So, what to do? “The solution to your problem … is not to refrain— you can't resist your desires forever. You must practice a new skill, you must become the kind of person who wouldn't turn to porn when they are: lonely; horny; boredy.  If you practice a new skill enough times, it will become second first nature, and you will be a different person.” In a word: change.

Next issue: one of the problems with talking about addiction generally, and sex addiction especially,¹ is that it is framed as harm to the addict. “The real problem with sex addiction isn’t that it destroys your life but that it destroys everyone else’s life. … The risk of sex addiction isn’t that you contract a disease, the risk is that you spread the disease. How can you stand there and pretend that any of your hundreds of partners are more likely to be infected than you?”

As long as the concern is for the addict, there is no sense of guilt, only shame (hence the title). However, something does break our hero out of this self-concern: the attempted suicide of his sister. “[H]e feels guilty, and guilt is omniscient. You know it's guilt because no one else would blame him for what she did, and yet he knows with total certainty that it was his fault, even though it wasn't. Yet he knows it was.” It’s guilt that “his commitment to his own life made him not be there for his sister.” The guilt never goes away, so either it destroys you or you reach an agreement (TLP says “stalemate”) with it.² “That stalemate is sublimation. In Brandon's case it is that guilt which motivates him to try and change his life, so when he sees the married woman from Act I again on the subway he doesn't get up to flirt with her.  He lets her go, he has decided to be the kind of person who sublimates his sex drive to devote more attention to his whacky sister,. [sic]  To being a better person.”

Final note: “In order to get sexual satisfaction from anything, that thing has to be unattainable, or at the very least it must come with rules.  You can get release and pleasure from the attainable, but not satisfaction.  There has to be a limit, a line, which defines a transgression which then allows you to bump up against it-- and be satisfied. … Brandon knows he can get any kind of sex any time he wants, so it always fails.  Not sometimes.  Always.  Watch the movie.  But he keeps trying, in the same ways, over and over.”

I won’t be applying the theory in such depth — TLP was trying to explain himself and build on his theory as he applied it. But here is a case where we see:

• Addiction, especially understood in terms of harms to yourself, as a way of defending against change.

• What you do creates who you are; changing what you do is how you change who you are.

• In the bottomless pit of self-concern, only shame reaches all the way down. Guilt requires you to look outside of yourself, but once you do, it does not leave you.

  • Drives can be destructive or constructive — the point is how you use them.

Before I start on my own applications, TLP also has a very helpful annotated Atlantic article which can be found here and gives a bit more insight into his process. At the end of this post, I’ll give a longer list of TLP applications. Let’s do some ourselves first.

My Applications

Exhibit A: The Counter-Elite

Article here and memoir here. The story Walter Kirn wants you to believe is that he was a plucky middle-class kid pulled into the hollowed-out world of elites that he has finally separated himself from and found truth in championing the cause of the left-behind. How does he champion them? With a small-run literary newspaper and a Substack largely read by, well, the type of people who read Substacks.

The memoir is almost an instruction manual on the narcissism of the elite education system — the obsession with proxies and points and percentiles. He’s from outside the meritocratic core, but he has learned that the system reserves a few spaces for oddballs like him — he just has to play the role right. “Learning was secondary; promotion was primary.” “No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient.” He wades through educational life scoring victories, learning to play the game — ‘post-structuralism’ is a move in the all-important game of ‘English paper,’ not a theory with implications for how one ought to live. Almost ripping a line from TLP, he notes that no one actually read the classics — they would just heard enough of someone else talking about the classics to fake their way through a well-placed reference at a cocktail party. The trick was “mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas disguised as conclusions that I'd reached myself.” Here is the building of a narcissist: “if my schooling had taught me anything, it was how to mold myself—my words, my range of references, my body language—into whatever shape the day required.”

Probably, TLP would have the obvious problem that this is a scapegoat to let you say “that is a narcissist, not me.” You do this, he would say, and this is your enemy. Feeling better than someone else is a great way to remain bad. But that’s too easy.

Soon, the humiliations come. His roommates force him out of his own common room because he doesn’t ‘pay his share’ (in a refurbishing he did not have a say in). The social clubs of the ones who really belong remain out of reach. A sadistic child of wealth kidnaps him and leaves him stranded by the kidnapper’s family’s castle. The girls don’t have time for him, and the boys are cruel to him. The act begins to fall apart. Not going to classes, doing drugs, losing senses, trying to find some way to something real.

And he finds something like that, for a time. He actually works, he actually learns, but then, when he is about to graduate and be thrust into a world without the sorts of tests and ladders at which he is so used to excelling, he falters: he applies to Oxford. As close as he gets to changing, in a moment of weakness, he falls back: his ego knows what works, what keeps him alive, and so he applies for a scholarship to Oxford not out of any desire to learn, but to make sure he does not have to change.

This rising bubble was punctured by a conversation with an old friend, an old friend actually interested in literature, not in where appearing to know literature can get you. A little later, Kirn actually reads a book. And another. How nice.

This is the story Kirn wants to tell. Should we trust him?

As this strangely-verbose meme I found on Instagram notes, your nemesis can give a sort of meaning to your life.

TLP says that you understand your life according to the five-act structure. So why does Kirn end his memoir at the climax (also known as the turning point)? He wants the climax to be his breakdown, but the central tension is not whether he’ll be able to get his act together, but whether he will stop having an act. All of that is rising action: the climax is when he might finally change. So what is he missing? What are we missing? This is where the article comes in.

Kirn is a “counter-elite.” He writes bromides against the lying, condescending establishment and paeans to the streetwise, complicated folks they don’t care about. He has thrown in his bag with the conspiracy theorists and Trump, seemingly out of spite for the snotty elites who kicked him out of his own apartment and wouldn’t go on dates with him. When asked why his distaste for elites required a downplaying of COVID or January 6th, the problem wasn’t so much that Kirn thought that was wrong, but, well: “he didn’t dispute it. It just wasn’t an argument that excited him.” He is “less concerned with the strict facticity of the claims he makes than with the sins of the people he’s attacking.” Exactly.

The point is not whether Kirn is right or wrong — the point is that he doesn’t care if he’s right or wrong. “The fact of this defiant posture, Kirn suggests, is the real and lasting message.” The message is a posture. The point is to be against something — as long as you can push at something, you don’t have to choose an actual direction. You don’t have to actually believe anything, be for anything.

Here’s what I’ll bet Kirn is thinking when he reads his Classics and Romantics: not ‘what favor will this curry,’ but ‘how contrarian am I for reading this, for actually understanding it.’ People aren’t people for Kirn, they are “résumé[s] representing a field.” The elite is an excuse for him, an excuse for him not to love someone.

This article as well is not your friend. It poses Kirn as the dissent. “He’s a free thinker [conspiratorial, uncaring about truth, impolite, low class] and if you don’t want the line we’re giving you, this is what you’ve got.”

Exhibit B: Stabbing Your Wife

Article here about a documentary on Norman Mailer. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. A horrible thing. Something that should consume your conscience, something you should atone for every year, something that should surround you with guilt, something that should give you a burning drive that requires some kind of justice, some way of making your life justifiable. This is how Mailer describes it:

“What I’ve come to realize is that when I stabbed my wife with a penknife, it changed everything in my life,” he said in an interview decades later. “It is the one act I can look back on and regret for the rest of my life.” He faced his own guilt: “I can’t pretend that hadn’t cost nothing. It caused huge damage.” He had let down his children, he said, and he had let down God.

You might notice that none of the words are about his wife, but about him. The closest she gets to the picture is in the passive voice “it caused huge damage.” To whom? Oh, you mean you. Gosh, I almost thought you cared.

Also notice the words “let down.” We don’t have the actual words, but I would bet that they were not directly about harming the children, but about harming his appearance in the eyes of the children. This is not a man who “faced his own guilt” — this is a man who saw his status in other people’s eyes take a hit.

The whole documentary centers on him, on how he thinks one can “come alive.” How alive is one who decides which front of WWII to fight on based on how it will look on the page, on what fodder for a novel it will provide? Is that living? Living for the image? Mailer’s drive centered on his “animalistic urges.” Is this the destiny of man: uncontrollable lightning, striking whatever is in proximity when the tension happens to need release? Mailer wrote screeds and jeremiads and macho books which professed to be about life — all of this, we are supposed to believe, is brave and lonely in the era of Baldwin and Hemingway and the Beatniks. Stupid.

Again, there is the belief that confrontation will allow us to come alive, as if mere friction could give a direction.

The author claims, “the film spares Mailer nothing.” Surely, surely the most damning thing to Mailer would be a deep, concerned look at how his stabbing affected his wife. Surely the film considered deeply how she understood it, how it had affected her, how he had or had not reached out to her and how she might understand this.

As for Adele Morales, the film reveals little about what happened to her after the incident in which she nearly lost her life, besides that she became an alcoholic; one of her daughters said the stabbing was a “trauma” her mother “never got over.”

Don’t worry: he didn’t either.

Now, a couple notes: the article also aligns narcissism with grandiosity (which, for our purposes, it most certainly is not). Also, the diagnosis is complicated on one count: his seeming contrition in his meeting with feminists. I’m sure there’s a way to make this work, but I don’t really want to right now.

Exhibit C: Anxiety

Adam Mastroianni’s telling of his experience with anxiety. Try this one on your own. I’ll give you a hint: its a question even a child can answer: why was #6 afraid of #7?

Related: do I think that there’s a connection from this experience (and his eventual progress) to Mastroianni’s distaste for academia and professed love of ‘seriousness?’ Yes, yes I do.

Exhibit D: Girls (2012-2017)

TLP may have generally characterized narcissism as masculine, but gosh are these young women not going to stand for that. You can just watch the show and take a shot every time a character does something in order to maintain an identity, if you’re willing to give up your liver. Fine, something more specific: s2e5, 20:10-25:20. You can find it on Max. I’m not even going to analyze this one. It doesn’t need it.

Exhibit E: Validation

This one is from my personal life. It has become common practice in some circles of people my age to talk constantly about how valid each other’s feelings are, as a crossover from therapeutic language. This always irked me. Here is my TLP-informed perspective: if you are validating my feelings, you are presuming that you are in a position to validate them, i.e. I need your approval/empowerment for something as basic as wanting to go to bed instead of watching RuPaul’s Drag Race until 1am. Converse: if someone can validate your feelings, then someone can also invalidate them. Reverse: if you need someone to validate your feelings, you are making yourself dependent on them, giving them power over you. Inverse: If someone is empowering you, you don’t have the power. Obverse: if you need someone to validate (desire) not just your identity but each and every one of your feelings, that is narcissistic.

Exhibit F: Mid-life Paralysis

Okay this one is a bit spicy, but I didn’t write under a pseudonym so that I could be an intellectual coward: is Clayton Atreus a narcissist? Because I didn’t read all that: book review. Please just assume that all the reasonable throat-clearing I would otherwise have to write is up here. I obviously don’t like the vibe of dunking on a dead paraplegic. However, if I don’t respect him as a person with person-value thoughts, if I give him a pass just because something terrible happened to him, then I’m treating him like something less than human.

Two Arms and a Head is a book written by a paraplegic philosophy student about his condition and his decision to commit suicide two years later. He lost function of his body from the nipples down when he was 30 years old in a motorcycle crash. Before that, he lived a very active life. After that, well:

Everything below my nipples is no longer me. Hence the title of this work, “Two Arms and a Head”. [...] I am two arms and a head, attached to two-thirds of a corpse. The only difference is that it’s a living, shitting, pissing, jerking, twitching corpse. [...] What was once my beloved body is now a thing. [...]

Two arms and a head. Period. Additionally, I will be using a sort of shorthand in this book when I refer to parts of “my” body. So when I say “my penis”, for instance, what I really mean is “the unfeeling, alien piece of flesh that used to be my penis, but is now just part of the living corpse I will push or drag around forever until I am dead.” [...]

As far as I feel about my body, who do you love more than anyone else in the world? Think of that person. Now picture being chained to their bloated corpse—forever.

The pain is insistent, nagging, and so sharp it seems to crackle. [...] It’s just as sharp and intense every time, over and over, like it’s mocking you. Sometimes it happens when I’m lying in bed and it’s like trying to fall asleep with someone sticking a needle between my ribs or the bones of my big toe.

He can't put both arms out in front of him, lest he fall over. He has to continuously prop himself up with one arm while doing anything at arm's length. After only 1.5 years of being paralyzed, this has already caused significant repetitive strain injuries in his elbows, shoulders, and ulnar nerves.

Clayton still has to deal with all the logistics of life, despite two-thirds of his body being a hunk of corpse-flesh. He dedicates huge swaths of the text to all the little time-wasting tasks he now has to do. How much of his life is ticking away with every delay, every piece of effort, every task that is trivial for an able-bodied person but monstrously difficult for him. Something as simple as getting out of a car is an entire production—let alone running errands, cleaning, doing laundry, cooking. 

Since the lower two-thirds of his body no longer sends pain signals to his brain, he must proactively tend to all of its physical needs. Complications include pressure sores, infections, and a high chance of blood clots. Aside from suicide, the leading causes of death among paraplegics are all related to poor circulation. 

In addition to the loss of conscious sensation and muscle control, problems with the autonomic nervous system—heart rate, orthostatic blood pressure, temperature regulation—are common. This is even more pronounced in cervical spine (neck) injuries. Some quadriplegics black out or the blood rushes to their head when being moved from lying down into reclining in a wheelchair. A spinal cord injury wreaks havoc on the body's functioning.

It is terrible. I would not wish it upon anyone. And yet:

Two Arms and a Head opens with one such quote from Stephen Hawking:

“I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many.” —Stephen Hawking

This is patently absurd. Why do they say these things? Do they actually mean it, or are they just being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect? Surely they all know, secretly, that they’re lying to themselves?

Clayton argues that no, they mean it, and they’re not lying to themselves.

Here is how Clayton experiences it:

What kind of mental and emotional toll does all of this take on Clayton?

The feeling I experience is a frantic, frenzied, desperate distress. [...] I need to move. I need to move. [...]

Not only is two-thirds of my body paralyzed, but so is a huge part of my innermost self. It wants more than anything to feel and experience life. To exist. But it exists now only in a place between reality and nothingness with no hope of ever coming back. [...] All it can do is degenerate in the solitary place it has been forever exiled to.

A popular heuristic in neuroscience is "use it or lose it." This is usually in the context of memorization, but it also applies to sensory organs and limbs. When Clayton is injured, his brain's connection to everything below his nipples is severed. Lacking any more sensory input from down there, the brain simply overwrites and repurposes the unused neurons. 

His injury is not limited to his present and future, but also reaches back into his past:

Certain of my memories seem to be disappearing. For example, when I try to remember doing things that involved running, jumping, and sex, the memories seem less real or vivid than they used to. [...]

If I imagine taking another person’s hand in mine, or kissing someone’s face, or someone touching my face, I feel something similar to sensation in those parts of my body when I imagine it. [...] But my lower body is now just a void, and its death started the creation of a void in my brain. Not only can I not feel it, but my ability to imagine feeling it is disappearing, as is my capacity to remember feeling it, and doing things with it.

…

His mind is doomed to slowly decay as its neurons do what neurons do: rewrite themselves until none of the person he used to be is left.

So what does Clayton do in such a situation? Murder the person he was going to be before they could be born.

Clayton has an identity — he is an active, vigorous young man who enjoys honest physical labor, social spontaneity, and sex. The review worries that some will find this list shallow. It’s not shallow — it’s a reasonable, even admirable list of desires. But when you say that other paraplegics have accustomed themselves to such a life, but you won’t, even as you feel your mind becoming accustomed to this life, I have to wonder who you care about more: your future life, or your past identity?

What I disagree with is the framing of change as brainwashing. The disabled do not come across, in this book review, as being particularly perspicacious:

They [lifelong paraplegics] tend to only see life in terms of the possibilities that exist for them [...] Their view becomes somewhat tautological. “What I can do is all that is possible, therefore I can do all that is possible.”

When disability activists argue that our society should reject ableism, what they are saying is that we should reject the notion that “being able to walk, have sex, and control one’s bowel movements are good and desirable traits.”

Given what Clayton has told us of his life, that argument is cosmically, outlandishly insane. 

So... why do they make it? What’s going on? They can’t really believe this, can they?

The knee jerk response is to dismiss them as just being in denial, but Clayton offers a much more horrifying explanation: they do mean it. 

I have no desire to begrudge other paraplegics their happiness, though many of them evidently have every desire to begrudge me my feelings. I find them monstrous and inhuman the moment they want to insist that my feelings indicate from some kind of defect within me. [...] A clam is comfortable in its shell and thinks all of the other animals should envy it. A clam does not see why an eagle would rather die than be a clam.

Yes, yes, all those people who were mad about Mr. Beast curing 1,000 people of their blindness are weird and bad and probably narcissists (see: Dove commercial in TLP applications section). The first line in the Two Arms and a Head: “Is anything in man so deep-rooted and prevalent as the drive to see things as they are not?” And yet. You see the speck in your neighbors eye, but do not notice the log in your own?

I’m not mad because you killed yourself, I’m mad because you killed who you could have been. Someone who could have loved another person, could have helped them. Someone who could have been loved, and been helped. You felt your self dying and thought “I’m going to take the future down with me.”

I don’t know what courage I would have had in this situation. I don’t know how I could possibly have dealt with the pain. I may not have even lasted two years. I may not have even produced such an eloquent and important expression of my situation as this. I may not have been nearly so brave as Clayton Atreus. It doesn’t matter who I am: it matters what you do.³

Exhibit G: Winning

Nike wants you to know: winning isn’t for everyone. Wrong. Watch the ad. It’s not about winning. Everyone who can read a scoreboard can tell you not everyone wins, i.e. “winning isn’t for everyone.” No, that’s obviously not the point because that’s about what winners do (score more points, run faster, jump higher), and this ad isn’t about that. The ad doesn’t care about what winners do (they train, they work hard, they sacrifice, they take risks, they win); it cares about who the winners are. And who are the winners? Don’t get too caught up with that question though: this ad isn’t about them. It’s about you. Remember: if you’re reading watching it, it’s for you.

The ad tells you who you are by telling you who the winners are. The winners are deceptive, selfish, unempathetic — frankly, mean. They’re threatening, unfriendly, disrespectful. They certainly aren’t you, sitting in your bed with your laptop watching Nike ads (the couch was pretty inconvenient). But that’s not why they aren’t you. This is the ad’s message: you aren’t a winner not because you haven’t done anything but because you have decided to be nice and empathetic and forthright and unthreatening and respectful and… all the things that make you a quiet, not-going-to-cause-a-fuss consumer. You’re not a winner because you’re better than the winners.

Nicole Graham, Chief Marketing Officer at Nike, says, “‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’ shows that anyone can be a winner, if they are willing to do what it takes.” If the ad meant anything other than what I have told you it meant, this would be nonsense. Narcissism needs a reason why you haven’t succeeded, haven’t won, haven’t achieved anything. Nike is here to help: it’s because you’re too darn respectful.

Exhibit H: The Narcissist/Borderline Pair

I haven’t talked so much about borderline, largely because TLP did not talk about it so much either. TLP takes it as the flip side of narcissism: where narcissists have an overpowering and artificial sense of identity that they feel the need to force everyone to play along to, borderlines have no sense of identity and search for someone who can give them a role to fill. Where narcissists are disproportionately male, borderlines are disproportionately female.

Annie Hall is a movie about a narcissist finding a borderline who eventually develops an identity of her own and leaves him. Alvy (Woody Allen) has three marriages depicted in the course of the movie. Each of them is completely dominated by his inability to love someone else. I don’t really want to do the full analysis, so I won’t, but here’s the gist: Annie Hall begins as a unsophisticated borderline; Alvy Singer can’t handle her lack of intellectual snobbery, so he gets her to read books about death and go to psychoanalysis; she forms a separate identity of her own and is so successfully turned into a narcissist that she begins acting and singing professionally. Also, this is in the context of his second wife, who was more of an intellectual than him, and to whom he felt inferior. There’s a lot more there, I think, but this is a long post already.

Incidentally, if you’d like to see a defense against change, watch the clip:

Exhibit I: Wellness Culture

Wellness and therapy practices are important medical interventions for serious issues. Freddie de Boer is a great commentator on how these important medical interventions get turned around into incantations for pathological self-protection and egoism. See: Selfishness & Therapy Culture. The subject of his post narrowly is an article which is operating entirely on the narcissistic level of analysis. It can only conceive of the pros and cons of forgiveness as the pros and cons to the forgiver. The subject of his post broadly is a perversion of the psychiatric mission into a series of excuses to be as grubby a little striver as you want and for no one imply that you have any sort of natural obligations towards others. Just read Freddie de Boer and be thinking “why would this help someone whose only concern is social permission rather than loving other people.” He’s a better writer than I am anyway.

Exhibit J: Dialogue Politics

Megalopolis is a stupefying movie — I definitely walked out of it more stupid than when I walked in. It brims with ideas in the sense that a schizophrenic brims with voices. But there is one idea in it which I see elsewhere and which it gives such a ludicrous, concentrated rendition of that I have to use it here: its great hero describes his vision of a perfect world as “and when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” I want to punch you with the force of every hungry scream from every child’s mouth in the whole world.

There is a strain of politics that asks one question and one question only: “why aren’t more people talking about this?” As if talking, as if someone paying attention to very special you and your very special problems and ideas was the point of politics. As if awareness was what we asked of our politicians. Narcissism. Of course, what this allows you to do is believe that when you pay attention, you are doing politics. You are not. You are doing what politics wants you to do so it can get on with running the country.

TLP Applications

I have a document with various things I read throughout the year. These are links to TLP posts with my lightly edited initial thoughts about them.

• Dove ads. My favorite nugget is the desire to bend an objective standard to accommodate you because you neither want to hold yourself to a standard nor do you want to deal with the existential burden of not living up to an existential standard. Then the overall argument against psychiatry and therapy elevating some mystical ‘self’ is great. Finally, this: “You can't see it, but since this is America, the problem here is debt.  Not credit card debt, though I suspect that's substantial too, but self-esteem debt.  They're borrowing against their future accomplishments to feel good about themselves today, hoping they'll be able to pay it back.”

• Amy Schumer, narrativizing your mistakes, and the palliative of absolution that allows you to stay the same. You are always protecting the Self, and a great way to resist change is to pretend that a consequence of that Self is not actually that but an error that can be split off without implicating the rest in the slightest. Also see in the same post: addiction replacing connection/works because it allows you to not change, not adapt. To find a new way to love is difficult — deciding you actually had fallen out of love is much easier. But that just belies how narrow and poverted your idea of love is. “‘Why’ is masturbation, ‘why’ is the enemy, the only question that matters is, now what?”

• How a guy got over a girl he thought he loved. Close up the wound to the self, let it heal, take everything that comes as information — including the fantasies you try to repress. Then, grow up: you decided to be obsessed with her, decided she was perfect, but you were not devoted to her. You just liked having her. You liked what having her said about you.

• Guinness and men and the guilty faux-kindness of playing down to someone else's perceived level. Makes it about gender, of course, but the core of it — useless guilt that is necessarily condescending — is about right. Men want women who can manipulate men, because when that woman chooses them, it is a massive status high. They get to own something that other people would want, but can't have. “Why didn't one of these ‘men’  just walk her to her car?   Three guys, not one thought of this?  She's under your umbrella and your natural instinct was not to protect, to help?  So wrapped up in what it all means and power imbalances that you couldn't just... behave? … Or so flustered because a woman that you have stripped of her ordinary humanity and forced her to be a symbol of value chose to be near you, your brain couldn't  figure out what to do next?  In which case her decision to leave you for another umbrella was astutely correct, odd how she and the commercial knew that.  All men are good for is an umbrella because she cannot rely on men to act like... men.” Double standard: ‘acting like a man’ = not society's expectations, but a good ideal; ‘acting like a woman’ = society's expectations, a bad thing. Perhaps it's because women never had a good/healthy social script, while TLP thinks men did? Either way, this sort of thing, though perhaps good, is so easily misunderstood (see: Zero HP Lovecraft) that it seems downright negligent. The case is: men get resentful of women even though they are not good people and don't even want the women (just the status that comes from them).

• TLP’s review of The Descendents. A telling allusion to “19th century Russian literature” about depictions of mature love (by which I assume he means Dostoevsky, probably principally The Brothers Karamazov). Another example of his deep, deep well of frustration in the fact that people just can’t seem to love another person. Also some gender stuff in there as well, with the terribly flat and uninteresting depictions of women. Then the old parenting saws of lacking responsibility, not being able to be a role model, and teaching your kids to be obsessed with appearance over substance. For narcissism: note that narcissistic injury isn’t just for narcissists, it’s just an injury related to the narcissistic drive. You feel unimportant to or a separation from others. The reactions to the narcissistic injury are all telling: they are all ways to make yourself impactful. What does it mean that the ego wants status quo? It is invested in identity. But what is it that the ego is invested in identity? Like, psychoanalytically speaking. Meanders its way into a disgusting Louis CK video and commodification.

• An Education is a movie about a grifter and an audience who should know better. TLP realizes that the 35 year old sophisticate picking up teenagers is no good: why didn’t you? And why doesn’t the movie understand the import of the true story’s ending? I.e., that the teenager, after her ill-advised fling, was cured of her desire for sophistication and after that wanted merely decency, kindness, and respect: in other words, normal goodness. Also, a nice bit about the Hollywood disgust with the bourgeois (read: American) strivings. You think you’re enlightened for not judging people as individuals, but that just means that all you think of them is how they relate to you.

• Very compelling TLP post on the old locker room question: if you could rape someone and then make her (always a her) forget, would you? And of course, the asking of the question assumes one thing (that others are as narcissistic and inhumane as you are) and reveals another (you spend all your time fantasizing of having power instead of acting or connecting with others: just because it was a fantasy doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. What you think about is a habit too). By not caring about others, by breaking the rules, you have singled yourself out, and that is lonely. The next step that TLP doesn't quite say out loud: as long as you still believe there are rules, you can be brought back into the fold by punishment/atonement, but if you don't believe there are any rules at all, then you are no longer human. You're purely an individual.

• TLP on people who envy sociopaths: don’t worry, you’re a sociopath too! You just can’t execute. You already don’t care about others, you’re just scared of them. I.e., you are a narcissist, but you’re jealous of another narcissist’s identity. More than that, you envy that they have a story/identity, that they don’t have to prove themselves, or already have, or whatever — the important part is that everyone has already agreed to treat them a certain way. A strong, solid identity is not more freedom, but less — duh — but it is perceived as more freedom because it is a freedom from having to act. And for someone who has no concept of what they should do (they just want to be desired), that’s freedom. “Cynicism, irony has failed you, but you know no other way to be.” Important line. Cynicism/irony as a way to distance yourself from your actions. Fascinating. The tantalizing straightforward identities of TV characters are then juxtaposed with the aspirational objects in ads which we hope to use to define ourselves.

• Irony allows you to participate in the system (good for the system) while maintaining an identity that you are better than your actions (good for you). Projection is when a feeling or action of yours does not line up with your self-conception, so you place the feeling/action outside of yourself, as not coming from you — the homophobic guy who is sexually attracted to men assumes that the homosexuality must be coming from the other guy, not himself; the jihadist who enjoys a good strip club assumes that the profanity must be coming from America, not him. If you figured out you were projecting, congratulations, but that’s not the last step: you are projecting in order to defend what identity? The problem is you want rewards for success, not success — you want treats and punishments, not to get better at something, not accomplishment. “What finally gets those dummies fired up is First Prize or Third Prize, left to themselves they meander in mediocrity while deluding themselves that they are more than what they do.” Have an iota of ambition — no, not that ambition, the serious one. Stand up for yourself and the value of your work.

• Now a critique of Lori Gottlieb's article on parenting. Actually some quite good points, especially on accomplishment, giving/receiving meaningless choices, and narcissism as lack of knowing what to define yourself by. Things can be ‘nice’ and not worthy of complaint, but still immiserating if they do not allow for risk and real consequences and actions — things, results that you can be proud of. Anxious, narcissistic parents will want to manage their children by giving them meaningless choices and ‘allowing’ them fake freedoms.

• Relationships are not tools. People are not actors. Love someone, for God's sake. Don't focus on what you need or want or whatever, or about ‘the relationship’ (as unreal as that is). Focus on the person in front of you who is not made for you and is something beyond your grasp and who you should love and want to be happy. Okay, I'm starting to see the beast of psychiatry: its devil is the narcissist, who thinks the actual state of the world and what they have done and all these outmoded notions like sacrifice and achievement could not possibly be why they are sad. No, no it must be some intellectual realization that will make them happy. Ha! Ideas are not nearly that strong. They can (at most) point you in the right direction. Therapeutic solutions are painkillers —  The Last Psychiatrist wants a cure. Perhaps the beast is the focus on the symbol — the aesthetic — over the actual thing. This sort of deep, narcissistic unseriousness that is palliative but not curative, which confuses a momentary feeling of the thing with the actual thing. It's a sort of childishness. If that is it (and I hope I’m not simply contorting it into something I can get behind), then yeah I'm totally down.

1. TLP asserts that sex addiction’s framing as a harm specifically to the addict is unlike other addictions. I am not so sure. Certainly, there are degrees, and people are much more willing to talk about how an alcoholic is tearing apart their family, but the stereotypical contemporary intervention is always about the interveners being concerned for the addict. “It’s terrible to see you like this.” They care about the addict ruining his own life, not theirs. They’re far too well-adjusted to castigate him for messing with their lives that are far more put-together than his. However, I say this with much reservation due to my lack of experience with the matter.

2. An interesting note on this subject by TLP that doesn’t quite fit into the argument in a big way, but is indicative of TLP’s general mode of argument and, I think, quite interesting:

The only thing I've ever found that works, in the absence of a God who can forgive you, is to understand your guilt as not coming from the failing but generated by you as self-punishment, so that you can go on with the rest of your life.  Have you suffered enough today?  Then go have a Reuben, they're tasty. You've earned it.

3. That, by the way, is one of TLP’s stated reasons for his pseudonymity. As soon as you know who the advice is coming from, as soon as the words are coming from a discernible someone, then whether or not to follow the advice becomes about that person as much as it becomes about you. The more layers of obfuscation between your decision and another individual who may think higher or lower of you due to your decision the better, when it comes to narcissism.