[Off-Schedule] With Friends like These, Who Needs Enemies? With Identities like These, Who Needs Friends?
Corners of the Internet: The Last Psychiatrist [1/3]
Corners of the Internet is a new type of post I am trying out. It will be posted off-schedule, in addition to rather than replacing the usual monthly posts, and each installment will be focused on a different curious or enlightening or otherwise interesting internet community or creator that I find interesting. Each subject will have two parts. The first will deal give background and interpretation, while the second will provide considerations, evaluations, and reflections on the subject. This is the first part. Let’s get our hermeneutics hat on.
This is not going to be an essay proper, though it may eventually become related to one that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while. Rather, I want to take you on a trip to a very curious corner of the internet inhabited by an enigmatic and abrasive blog called The Last Psychiatrist (TLP), active largely between 2007 to 2014 and written pseudonymously by “Alone” (I will be referring to the blog/author interchangeably as TLP and Alone throughout). TLP is largely devoted to the critiquing of popular media and culture through largely psychoanalytic framing, but sometimes rather seems to me to use popular media as a canvas (or perhaps more charitably — and more du mode — an inkblot) on which to express a psychoanalytic theory.
The language of psychoanalysis is a strange one for me, in the way it forms its arguments and what it sees itself as being up against — all very alien to my formal learning, which never really came very close to the subject. I’d like to try to understand it, or at least the off-brand stuff I can get in an internet back alley for a search and a click. But hey, if you’ve ever been to a proper city, you know that the real stuff — the stuff you couldn’t find somewhere else — is always to be found in side streets and by word of mouth.
The volume of his (and, yes, Alone is a he) writings is such that I cannot faithfully dissect any reasonable breadth of them without this piece blooming to absurd proportions. Rather, this tour will proceed through discussing a representative example and evoking the message of a few more before synthesizing what I see as the main thrust of his work. TLP has also written a book under the pseudonym “Edward Teach, MD” that came out somewhat recently called Sadly, Porn. If I read it, then I might get around to posting my thoughts on that book and the various reviews of it I have seen (which just from secondhand knowledge I believe have ranged from largely unperceptive and racist1 to not getting it because, on a deeper level, they get the actual point to just generally pretty good and helpful). For now, we’ll be focusing on the blog proper.
The Last Psychiatrist: An Introduction
The Last Psychiatrist is a condescending, berating, sewer-mouthed alcoholic who is tired of you not understanding just how infantile and narcissistic you are and in just how many ways you have been beaten into a gooey, symbol-driven pulp — intentionally. Whose intention? The system’s. Who’s the system? It’s the power. Who’s the power? I don’t know, read Foucault, or at least Lasch. Never mind, that won’t help. Just read The Last Psychiatrist and get confused and frustrated and paranoid enough to actually figure out who you are beyond the images burned into your synapses and the words you have learned to parrot. Maybe enough that you’ll change. Actually, scratch that: you are still focusing on yourself. That’s already the wrong direction, already the narcissism in charge. The Last Psychiatrist will tell you your problem, tell you you’re a bad person for having it, and show you how stupid you and your problem are by mocking a piece of popular media in the opposite direction from where the dulled, smoothed-over grooves of your mind took you.
If my description seems harsh or over-didactic, just know that I am attempting to speak his language. And, actually, attempting to soften it — or at least make it clearer. I’ll analyze the rhetoric later — for now, I just want you to feel what it is, give you a taste for the blog itself.
Let’s start with a representative piece, one that really just checks a few boxes efficiently and without too much difficulty: The Hunger Games is not feminist.
The Last Psychologist loves to pull the old PC switcheroo. He says something which blares to all your offensiveness receptors “this is offensive,”
Rue is a little girl in The Hunger Games, and in the movie she's played by a black girl. According to Jezebel, Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Disappointed.
…
So there are some racist fans, so what? In itself, why would this be surprising? There are racists everywhere. I once asked a black guy where I could find some racists and he punched me in the mouth, turns out I'm a racist. Who knew? Actually, I did, because every time I see a black guy do anything odd I say to myself for no reason at all, "oh, hell no, oh no you didn't." This is going on in my head, silently, no audience. Apparently not only do I see race, I hear it. And god forbid it's a black woman, my neck and skull actually start moving from side to side as I think, "mmmm hhhmmmmm!" Why do I do this? I don't talk like that. So much for individuality, so much for free thought, I am so polluted by the world that my reflex thoughts are someone else's. You don't even want to know whose thoughts I think when I see boobs.2
and then pulls you in close and shows you how the nice, decent, non-offensive media you thought was on your side “is more sexist than a rap video.” Why?
We can start with the obvious. The book is about 24 kids thrown into an arena to fight to the death, only the toughest, the most resourceful, the strongest will survive, and it better be you because your whole village depends on it. It is such a scary premise that there was some concern it was too violent for kids to watch. Well, big surprise: Katniss wins.
Hmmm, here is a surprise: Katniss never kills anyone. That's weird, what does she do to win? Take as much time as you want on this, it's an open book test. The answer is nothing.
This is not a criticism about the entertainment value of the story, but about its popularity and the pretense that it has a strong female character. I like the story of Cinderella, but I doubt that anyone would consider Cinderella a strong female character, yet Katniss and Cinderella are identical.
The traditional progressive complaint about fairy tales like Cinderella is that they supposedly teach girls to want to be princesses and want to live happily ever after. But is that so bad? The real problem with fairy tales is that the protagonist never actually does anything to become a princess. …The Hunger Games has this same feminist problem. Other than the initial volunteering to replace her younger sister, Katniss never makes any decisions of her own, never acts with consequence-- but her life is constructed to appear that she makes important decisions. She has free will, of course, like any five year old with terrible parents, but at every turn is prevented from acting on the world. She is protected by men-- enemies and allies alike; directed by others, blessed with lucky accidents and when things get impossible there are packages from the sky. In philosophical terms, she is continuously robbed of agency. She is deus ex machinaed all the way to the end.
…
"But she chooses to commit suicide at the end!" That would have been a choice, but the book robs her of that as well, this is the point. The book does not allow her to make irreversible choices, it lets her believe she is making free choices and then negates them, again, just like a five year old girl with terrible parents.
…
She does commit one consciously deliberate act, and it's quite revealing. At the end of the book, she's ambivalent about whether she loves contestant Peeta. But the Games allowed two winners only because they appeared to be in love; so all she has to do, for the cameras, is pretend to be in love with a boy she already likes a lot. But after all she's been through in the arena, this-- what is coincidentally called ACTING-- is what is described, in the shocking last sentence of the chapter, as "the most dangerous part of The Hunger Games."
This is not hyperbole. This is literally correct: for someone who has not ever done it, acting with agency would indeed be dangerous. But those stories aren't fairy tales, those stories are legends. [Emphases in original]
Young impressionable girls, you thought The Hunger Games was your friend? No, actually, your friend is this cantankerous boozer who thinks such dirty thoughts when he sees boobs that he won’t share them after he already gave a transliteration of his own racial stereotype imitation.
Let’s keep with the gender theme. It won’t be hard. The Last Psychiatrist is deeply, deeply concerned with gender. You can append “not all women” or “not all men” to each of his sentences if it makes you feel better. It won’t matter. He’s talking about social roles, prescribed norms, psychoanalytical types.
So, next: Don't Hate Her Because She's Successful. Oh, you think the powerful woman is on your side because she’s a successful woman? Oh, you thought that the branding of occupation-centricity as aspirational — as, in fact, socially valuable political protest — was meant to help you and not the system?
The younger and more online will laugh at this takedown of the “girlboss” as one more way for [capitalism/modernity/corporations/The Man/patriarchy] to take political dissidence, repackage it, and sell it for a profit (also known as a premium, which is, of course, another word for something that is high status). That analysis has already become chic, somewhere in the 11 years since TLP wrote it.
(Hold on a moment: now I’m doing rhetorical word association? Is this still me writing? I don’t believe in word association, so what am I doing using it? Who am I? I don’t know, a narcissist play-acting as a psychoanalyst? Or is that The Last Psychiatrist? Hm.3 Well, back to the issue at hand.)
You may scoff and laugh along to the “girlboss” takedown, and even to the takedown of your(?) very well-meaning but narcissistic parents: Is The Cult Of Self-Esteem Ruining Our Kids? (explanation in footnote).4
Or maybe you were laughing because you wouldn’t fall for that girly stuff. Can I interest you in “Don Draper Voted ‘Most Influential Man’”? And the sequel, “You Want To Be Don Draper? You Already Are”. In short, you don’t want traditional masculinity, or even to be able to cheat on your wife: you want to be the main character. You want someone to give you permission to be traditionally masculine and cheat on your wife. You know, like a child would.
The Last Psychiatrist was reacting to his own time — put him in our own, and I am sure he would mock the contemporary niceties and pieties just as harshly.
The Last Psychiatrist: A Thesis
These are interesting as one-off pieces of cultural criticism themselves, and I do not mean to overstate the single-mindedness of TLP’s project in this analysis. Small series and semi-extraneous analysis abounds: some interesting ones include his critiques of psychiatry as a practice and science, social science generally, political messaging, and the True Detective Season 1 Finale. However, it is striking the general focus Alone maintains in his work on and about a single psychoanalytic construction: narcissism.
Narcissism is the desire to be desired. I don’t believe TLP ever defines it in this way specifically, but it is the definition that has best covered for me the ways in which he uses the term. This is a completely natural and normal desire, with which I (and I don’t think Alone does either?) don’t have any inherent problem with. Is it wrong to want to be loved? To want someone to care for you? And specifically you? To want to feel special? To want to distinguish yourself? Narcissism is a piece of our nature and will not be excised from it by any ideology or regimen. A narcissist is a mask wearing a face.
In TLP’s telling, the narcissist’s story begins with (or is best understood by) child-parent relationships, with the narcissistic drive kicking in around 2-3 years old and reigning supreme for at least a short while. In normal people, it is then reigned in and plays a supporting role in one’s psyche. The parent, though, by being in turns unpredictable, irresponsible, and self-centered, teaches the child that the strategy of life is to contort oneself into an identity which can please the individual in front of you. The parent teaches no serious principle, only the fact that if you can find what someone wants you to be, act like that person, and then convince them that you are that person, you will be safe. Now, the child begins to learn the lesson of narcissism: if you could just curate the right identity, if you could just get everyone (and thereby maybe yourself) to believe that you are that identity, then you would be desired happy.
The child searches for what is good, and finds that the good is whatever is determined by the one with power (for their parent gives them no other explanation), and that the way to get the good is to become what the power wants, to become something that is desired. One might say an object, perhaps.
The narcissist thus becomes someone whose life’s work, whose very existence, is predicated on the maintenance of an identity, a particular sense of self. This identity, in its source, is about retaining the favor of power, and requires not the narcissist’s participation, but, importantly, that of everyone else (n.b.: anyone can self-identify as anything at any time, no one can stop anyone from doing that. That fact alone should tell you how useless self-identification is. What the narcissist actually needs is for others to identify them as they wish to be identified. Actions exist; identities are agreed upon. Narcissists care about the latter. Remember: the desire to be desired). The narcissist does not want to do what a soccer player does (i.e. play soccer); they want everyone to agree with them that they are a soccer player. So, they will chase visible proxies for being a soccer player, such as being a member of a known soccer team. The worst thing that can happen to the former person is losing the ability to play soccer; the worst thing that can happen to the latter person is other people not believing they are a soccer player. Because identity, of course, is about what happens to you — the movie you are in — not what you can do. Narcissists are not grandiose, they are just defined by the desperate attempt to choreograph, direct, and star in the right movie.5
The analogy to a movie is not idle — TLP often makes just such an analogy. The point is, to the narcissist, they are the main character, and if someone does not play their assigned supporting part, that is a threat to the integrity of the show: the narcissist, TLP notes, is not injured in their identity by their significant other cheating on them, as long as it is to get back at them. They might be mad, or sad, but it also confirms their desire to be the center of things. If their significant other cheats on them just because they aren’t thinking about the narcissist, or don’t care about them, then that threatens the whole endeavor: expect rage, not mere anger.
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; rather, 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. Going to the bar and feeling miserable about yourself every day is better than stopping going to the bar. The alcohol is fulfilling the need that his wife used to, it’s just also ruining the lives of everyone around him as it does that. And he can’t go back to his wife because that bridge would need to be rebuilt. The subcontractor in his head ran the numbers, and labor alone would cost more than that pint of Guinness. Sorry, missus, you didn’t pencil out in the cost-benefit calculation.
Narcissists will feel lonely, empty, and even bad about what they have done. But they will search for insights, ideas, further facts about themselves in some pre-foiled quest to figure out what is wrong. This is all a defense against change. No insight can give anyone permission to be someone else (and even if it did, the narcissist would not take it) or turn anyone into someone new. In fact, insights or understandings (especially mechanistic ‘scientific’ understandings which take you out of the picture) can themselves be a defense against change. Rather, you start doing different things and that is what makes you a different person. But more importantly, and this is what the narcissist will always forget, you start doing different things and the people around you have better lives.
And this is exactly what makes this problem so devilishly difficult: any insight into a narcissist’s condition brings the narcissist’s attention back on themselves. The problem with narcissism is never what it does to the narcissist, but what it does to everyone else. Let’s repeat that: narcissism is not a problem for the narcissist, it is everyone else’s problem, for which the narcissist is responsible. Framing the narcissist’s problem as an issue for them is already playing into the problem itself because it allows everything to remain about them.
Here, I think it might be useful to make a distinction between action and acting.6 Action requires a principle behind it, a straightforward motivation that you can take responsibility for and ownership of. “I did this because I believe that x is good.” Acting is what happens on TV: you’re following a script. You do something not because you think it is right, but because it is what is done (by people (like you(r identity (that you are pretending (for other's approval))))). The first is scary: you have identified with your action, and if the principle is wrong or the action doesn’t work out, you could fail. You could lose. In the latter, you are outsourcing your action to others, following a script you think will make you desirable to them. Furthermore, this is a script you are writing, and can rewrite to require minimal effort or possibility of embarrassment if you so choose. Since your success is not “getting the thing you want/believe is right” but instead “following the script you wrote,” you can modify the script so that you always win. You don’t tend to do anything — you pretend that you have already done it (by defining “it” after the fact). Everything the narcissist does is done to allow the narcissist to imagine that they are high status. The problem is not straightforwardly too strong of an identity, but the focus on identity and how it is perceived.
The narcissist does not feel guilt, only shame — they do not feel as though they have transgressed some internal principle, but rather see their status become lower in the eyes of others. The reason they never feel guilt is that they are more concerned with the success of their identity than the success of their principles, so they rewrite the principles to fit the identity. But the narcissist also needs others to reassure them that they are meeting certain standards (i.e. principles) because remember: anyone can self-identify however they want, but what a narcissist really needs is for others to approve of their identity. It’s grade inflation, but for the ego. It’s also grade inflation.
The life of a narcissist is miserable. 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. Remember the parents: we are taught not that others are important, but that power is important and the individual who holds the power gets to decide what is good. When you want nothing more than to be desired, everyone else has a knife to your throat and your only chance at happiness behind their back.
Furthermore, we cannot earn adoration, because we have no internal sense of what is required of us/what is good — and even if the narcissist did, they could not believe in those rules anyway (narcissism does not care about rules). So, we must deceive the adorers into believing us to be praiseworthy. How? Maintaining an appearance identity. N.b.: when you don’t believe the rules are fair/worthy, it always feels like deception. This does not mean that there is some ‘true’ you that you are covering up. That is narcissistic. You are your actions.
Furthermore furthermore, you do not forget that you cheated — whether by deception or by rewriting your own rules. As soon as you reach a marker of success, it is worthless, because it must be if you were able to cheat your way to it. This, to me, sounds like hell: obsequious lying for the sake of a capricious God you hate.
TLP rarely explains narcissism in a straightforward manner, instead usually opting for more evocative language, and always in the second person. There is a reason for this. Give a narcissist an account of why they are what they are they do what they do and it becomes one more lock on their cage: the story I gave at the start will allow a narcissist to blame their parents; the description of the narcissistic desire as human and natural will allow the narcissist to blame their own nature; the description of the misery of the narcissist allows the narcissist to blame their misery or pity themselves rather than change — change, of course, being the only thing that might just help. Quick, reread that last clause: who did you assume was the object of that help? If you said the narcissist, then buddy, you’re not keeping up.
If the narcissist discovers they have narcissistic tendencies, they will wonder what it says about them, and wonder how they can be not a narcissist without it not just becoming one more identity they playact as. Wrong. You're thinking on the wrong level of analysis. Your whole conceptual framework is out of wack. The correct question, upon discovering you have narcissistic tendencies, is to ask how it is hurting other people, at which point you change yourself not because it is more or less authentic (authentic to what? Whatever happened to be on TBS when your parents were arguing?), but because you care about how your actions are affecting other people.
And here is the single important conclusion that TLP comes to again and again yet so many people seem to miss, the single thing that he says over and over is the only thing that will save you, the rub of all this theory and why he is Alone in the first place: a narcissist can’t love anyone. All his 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.
There are other important aspects of TLP’s mission. None that I think are as important as that single pained exhortation, but there are. Let’s run through them. He demands that you “focus on the words themselves,” a demand for careful hermeneutics in people’s descriptions. What references are they making? How are they framing the problem at hand? Whose perspective is taken/considered? What values are implicit in the facts which are chosen as representative? He also says that “if you’re reading it, it’s for you.” On the one hand, this is the point that if you are reading it, you are thereby making yourself the kind of person who reads that thing (i.e., it’s for you). What you have done/read/thought about in the last 24 hours is you. There is nothing to you other than the things you do, including your obsessive ruminations.
On the other hand, this is connected to another piece of this mission: “the system.” I am not generally one for not-clearly-defined conspiratorial thinking, so this is a tough one for me to parse. Here is my best shot: is someone giving you permission? Did you ask for permission because you care about that person? If you answered “yes” and then “no,” that’s the system. The system can at times mean things like courtrooms or schools, but TLP’s favorite focal point of the system is various bits of media. I’m not even sure the system has to be real as a coherent object or group for it to be an important concept. At times, it seems like like Heidegger’s “the they,” a self-made construct of the sort of unnamed Other that will approve or disapprove of your actions, and to whom you can farm out the difficult work of deciding what is right. At other times, it seems like the system of incentives that demands the media give people what they want: an enemy to identify against, an outgroup to have contempt for, a side to take. At other other times, the system just seems like a stand-in for culture or ideology — not in the sense of a conscious worldview, but the more classical definition of the unconsidered assumptions that a worldview is built on top of.
The system has many lessons for you, but the one that TLP comes back to again and again is roughly this: do not act, certainly not for your own reasons. Instead, be. Specifically, be what the system wants, and you will be approved.8 Not unrelated to narcissism, you can see. The system gets to define your thinking by providing the terms of your thought: are you this or that? The other thing goes unmentioned, you forget about it. A common move TLP makes is to take a political choice of the day and explain how the framing of the choice destroys its significance. The system gets to decide what you pay attention to, it gets to set the terms of your thinking, and therefore of your action, and therefore of you. TLP usually suggests engaging with media from outside the system in order to regain some psychological balance — the classics, religious works, anything written/filmed/created before around 1945 or so.9
Relatedly, TLP will often note something along the lines of “if someone is empowering you, you don’t have the power.” Or he will criticize people for chasing the appearance of power rather than power itself. Power is the ability to do something; empowerment is someone who is able to do something saying nice things to you, giving you permission to do things. If someone gives you permission, you didn’t have the power. Narcissists want to identify with power (or, more rightly, they want to be identified with power, and so they identify with power), because all the narcissist knows is that the person with power determines the good (there are no higher principles) and that identity is the way to be aligned with the good (action is futile). Narcissists like being empowered. Similarly, narcissists mistake the incorporation of another person into their identity for love — they possess, they own the person (or, to use our previous analogy, that person is part of the cooperating cast of their movie). But back to power.
Alone’s style itself also seems to be an evolving part of his blog and theory. His earlier work is less aggressive, and in many of his less narcissism-focused posts, TLP retains a level of restraint and matter-of-factness that is astronomical when compared to the others. I may discuss this further if I ever get around to doing a post on Sadly, Porn, but my first run at dissecting this is that may be a sort of Xanatos Gambit. The insight itself might just provide you with one more way to defend against change, but when an absolute chode of a guy is berating you with that point, he takes on the character of an authority figure (important for a narcissist) at once both hyper-reasonable and unreasonable. You don’t want to prove this asshole right, do you? And even if you did, he is demanding enough that you could never do it to earn his (impossible) approval (read: desire). Of course, this is all inkblots and I’m really not sure. It could be that he was genuinely fed up with people using his writings as further defense mechanisms and felt this was the best shot he had at cutting through.
These other pieces are all important, but I still maintain that the central thrust of TLP, as a project, must be something like this: you care more about your[]self than you do other people, and that is why you and everyone who needs you is miserable. And it’s your responsibility. Not because you did it, but because you’re the only one able to respond.
Confused? Maybe you don’t want to understand. Or you don’t need to (less likely). Next time we'll look at TLP's influences, apply the theory, connect it to other thinkers, and evaluate it.
Here are the primary high-level posts where TLP gives an overview of his theory of narcissism, approximately in order of most general/fundamental to least:
The next off-schedule post will include my considerations and notes on TLP.
Edit: here is the second part.
Edit 2: here is the third part.
Also sexist, which is one more reason I think he misses the point.
But note: where is the actual offensive assertion? The Last Psychiatrist makes a joke about nonchalant racism (“I once asked… turns out I’m a racist”), then confesses to the sort of foible that wokeness was built on revealing and emphasizing (“every time… hhhmmmmm!”), and then actively distancing himself from that foible, evidently believing it to indeed be bad (“Why do I… boobs.”).
Gosh, these games are fun. It’s a wonderful canvas to act out your cleverness on. I can see why The Last Psychiatrist enjoys it. Rather than just saying the theses (as I will later), I can just talk around them, eventually making it clear what I mean, but on the way make so much wordplay as to both show off my own intelligence and also to barrage the reader into rhetorical submission. Read these sentences as “The Last Psychiatrist, roughly, thinks that the increasing social pressure for women to work and value themselves by their occupation is not a rebellion to the existing social order, but in fact is condoned (indeed, insisted upon) by that order as a way to decrease labor costs” and “The Last Psychiatrist, rather than pretending to a character who has solved the personal problems he berates his readers for, seems to act out many of those very criticisms to show his readers their universality.”
A childhood can be ‘nice’ and harmless and (thereby?) not worthy of complaint, but still immiserating if the parents do not allow for real risk and actual (not invented) consequences; anxious, narcisstic parents will want to manage their children by giving them meaningless choices and ‘allowing’ them fake freedoms and then be confused as to why their adult children feel like their choices are meaningless and their freedoms are fake. A parent thinks they are so much more enlightened and tolerant than their own because they don’t mind their child drinking. But, of course, this isn’t an act of tolerance, since the parents like the fact that their child is drinking. Or, more correctly, they like that it allows them to distinguish themselves from their parents — and there is little more important to a middle-aged American than not seeming old. Really, they are not more enlightened or tolerant — they are just acting out what they believe a more enlightened/tolerant parent looks like. And if they’re child doesn’t play along with that identity, well… that’s what we’ll get to next.
TLP makes a paired construction of the borderline, where the initial lesson is the same, but the reaction is rather to look for someone else who can provide you the script. Generally, he genders narcissism as masculine and borderline as feminine.
This is the part of my synthesis for which I am most shaky, and have the least direct evidence for in TLP. However, it helps me understand the narcissist, so here we go.
TLP notes that he would not be doing this if narcissists did not constantly profess to being miserable. If they were not miserable, there would be no reason for the psychiatric approach. But since they are miserable, they must want to change. They just usually want to stay the same more.
The Existence of such a system and its ability to permeate our desires is another reason why TLP is skeptical of appeals to authenticity or a sense of true individual identity: we are all shot through with the voices of others, especially those of the chattering class.