Spanish life is not
always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A
Pilgrim in Spain.
Life in Spain:
- Click here for another example of how Spain is slowing ceasing to be 'different', as more and more rules are enforced. Sometimes merely for revenue purposes, of course. Austerity and all that.
- Fabulous news . . . Terry Gilliam has finally made his version of Don Quijote. As an owner of his DVD Lost in La Mancha, I can't wait to see it. I say 'owner' but someone has clearly borrowed it . . .
- Reverting to one of yesterday's issues . . . Economists - and the EU technocrats - have a nice label for the fall in salaries and the massive unemployment suffered in Spain and other European countries over the last 8 years. It's internal devaluation. Doesn't sound too bad, does it? And, true enough, it doesn't much affect the rich and those in secure, state-protected jobs. Quite the opposite in fact. Things get cheaper. Including people.
I recently bought 2 new tyres and asked the mechanic not to exceed the recommended pressure."We always put more in", he replied. I know that full well, I replied. But why? His answer was, effectively, that they knew better than the manufacturers of the car.
There's a nice brochure for Galicia's Tourist Trains. It's in very-nearly-English. For example: The [lighthouse] lights that guide the boaters will lead you to unique locations. I might be wrong but I thought boaters were only a type of hat. Maybe not in the USA.
Yet another non-surprise . . . An investigation has been started around the possibility(!) that bribes have been paid around the as-yet-unfinished construction of the AVE high-speed train tracks up near Ourense. My guess is that things would have been even slower if they hadn't been.
Nutters' Corner: More of the you-couldn't-make-it-up stuff:-
- The execrable Jim Bakker:- What was the name of that concert? ‘Dangerous Woman concert.’ They literally invited these kinds of things to happen. They almost cursed themselves with this concert. I tell you what, God’s not going to put up with mockery. ‘Be not deceived, God is not mocked.’
- A Republican Congressman. And a Christian:-
Bakker, by the way, was imprisoned years ago for various bits of skullduggery and now makes a fortune selling buckets of food to gullible Evangelists who think The End Times are here. Click here for a video about this crap.
Today's cartoon:-
TRUMP ARTICLES
In the mind of Donald Trump, you’re either a strong winner whom others respect and fear, or you’re a weak loser whom others exploit and laugh at. There is no other alternative.
This choice underlies
Trump’s approach to other people as well as his view of America in
the world. "At what point does America get demeaned? At what
point do they start laughing at us, as a country?" he asked
Thursday during his major announcement from the White House Rose
Garden that the US would be withdrawing from the Paris climate
agreement. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries
laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be. They won’t be."
For Trump, there is no
such thing as collaboration for mutual gain. Cooperation is a sham.
Social insurance is a con. Billionaires can be trusted because
they’ve already made their money -- presumably by out-exploiting
others. Dictators are admirable because they’re respected and
feared.
But
democratically-elected prime ministers and presidents need to be
shown who’s boss – their hands grabbed in white-knuckled contests
of dominance, their bodies shoved aside if they get out in front. And
treaties and compacts need to be renegotiated so America wins.
It’s the same at
home: Political opponents must be humiliated, White House staffers
demeaned (even the Vice President shown his place), the press
degraded, recalcitrant judges debased, others intimidated. Everything
is a giant zero-sum game in which either you win and they lose, or
they win and you lose. And if they dare put up a fight, you get even.
This is the personality
of a sociopath. He is now the single most powerful person on the
planet, with the ability to order the destruction of the world in
just over four minutes. It is our responsibility to get him out of
the White House, peacefully and legally, as quickly as possible.
2. Psychoanalyzing
Donald Trump: Michael Bader
I’m going to
psychoanalyze Donald Trump. In doing so, I may seem to be violating
the “Goldwater Rule,” that enjoins psychotherapists from
diagnosing public figures based on secondhand information. However, I
happen to agree with the consensus of a recent conference of mental
health professionals at Yale University that argued mental health
professionals have a “duty to warn” people about the danger posed
by Trump’s mental illness.
I’m going to analyze
Trump because I think that media analyses have been too superficial
and that understanding Trump more deeply can help us decipher actions
and attitudes that might otherwise seem bewildering. In my view,
there isn’t anything quirky or confusing about Trump’s
psychopathology. It makes perfect sense if seen through the right
lens.
Most approaches to
psychotherapy assume that people naturally avoid painful emotions.
One person can’t tolerate feeling dependent; for another, it’s
anger; and for still another it might be guilt. People do all sorts
of things to avoid painful emotional states. They might simply deny
them (“I never feel sad”). They might exaggerate the opposite
("I’m happy, not sad"). Or they might project these
feelings outward, making an internal problem into an external one (“I
don’t hate the world, the world hates me”). These are examples of
psychological defenses. More often than not, the difficulties people
experience in their lives—or create for others—come from their
attempts to defend themselves against emotional pain. Their
solutions, in other words, become a problem.
So, for example, if
someone fears feeling angry, she might assume an exaggerated position
of meek compliance which might then lead to situations in which she
is inauthentic or self-sabotaging. Or such a person might externalize
feelings of anger and become paranoid about imagined aggression in
others, believing she is the target of others’ anger. Such a person
is chronically defensive and mistrustful of others. A paranoid
person is very hard to get along with.
Our psyches are wired
to seek to eliminate or escape painful feelings. Sometimes,
however, emotional states feel so dangerous that a person’s efforts
to safely avoid them have to be similarly extreme and involve
distorting reality. And if that person has a lot of power—the
president, for example—such extreme defenses pose a serious threat
to others. Donald Trump’s psychopathology is expressed primarily by
his defenses against certain painful feelings. I would argue
that the emotions he dreads the most are inferiority, helplessness
and shame. This triad lies at the heart of what makes Trump
crazy.
Trump can easily be
diagnosed, as many have done, as a “malignant narcissist”—someone
who has, according to the DSM-V, a narcissistic personality disorder,
but who shows prominent symptoms of paranoia and an inability to feel
guilt or remorse. Such a diagnosis, while accurate, is simply
descriptive and doesn’t go deep enough into the real sources of his
pathology. It’s not enough to diagnose him. Instead, we have to
understand how a man with such a diagnosis is likely to feel, the
fears and desires that motivate him and the strategies he uses to
escape painful emotions. Understanding how Trump is constantly
defending himself against feelings of inferiority, helplessness and
shame brings us closer to the truth. Viewed this way, malignant
narcissism is merely the shape that Trump’s defenses—he defenses
of any malignant narcissist—take as he struggles against the
threats of this triad of feelings.
Take Trump’s extreme
grandiosity. He is always the biggest, the best and the
greatest. This self-aggrandizement makes sense if it is seen as a
defense against feeling small and insignificant—in other words,
inferior. The exaggerated degree of his grandiosity is a measure
of the depth of his dread of being inadequate. Similarly, Trump
surrounds himself with a type of garish luxury (gold fixtures in the
bathroom, and golden trophy wives) to counteract feelings of lack of
worth. In other words, this surface is absurdly glorified in
order to counteract feelings of internal damage. Further, his
incipient dread of feeling small (for example, his obsession with
proving his hands are not small) is also defended against by
projecting “smallness” onto others. So he called Marco Rubio
“little Marco,” and he calls people he doesn’t like “losers,”
thereby reducing the pressure of feeling that way about himself. Over
and over again, he paints his critics as losers, petty powerless
people, momentarily escaping a dreaded belief that he is the real
loser.
Trump is constantly
battling feelings of shame and humiliation. We know that because
he is frequently expressing “disgust.” Disgust is a way to
keep shame at a distance. It’s a way of saying that something
bad isn’t inside, it’s outside, and disgust warns us to keep away
from it. Trump can barely contain expressions of disgust and
contempt. During the campaign we saw this defense emerge in regard to
women; he was disgusted by Hillary’s use of the bathroom during
their debate at Saint Anselm College, and he fulminated about Megyn
Kelly’s bloody secretions after she was tough on him in their first
debate. Trump is obviously extremely vulnerable to feeling shamed and
humiliated. I would argue that in general, he finds women to be
essentially disgusting and he avoids getting too close to this
dangerous feeling by using women as things. Relationships with
things are safer than actual intimacy and exposure.
Shame, helplessness and
inferiority are mutually reinforcing. Helplessness and
inferiority are shameful and being exposed as pathetic or inferior
increases feelings of vulnerability and helplessness. The threat
of experiencing all three of these emotions can be seen in Trump’s
now famous inability to pay attention in meetings and his lack of
interest in reading. When he has to pay attention for too long, he
may begin to feel anxious, as if he is being helplessly cornered and
made to feel one down, and he can’t stand it. Further, if he has to
consider a difficult problem or focus on material about which he is
ignorant, Trump has to face feelings of being flawed, helpless and
embarrassed. In other words, he begins to feel like a stupid
loser, which he can’t tolerate. So he has to interrupt and
quickly change the subject to one with which he’s comfortable or
one that features his greatness. In this way, he relieves
himself of dreadful feelings of being defective. Such feelings
trigger his private fear that he is, indeed, insignificant and weak.
For someone plagued
with feelings of helplessness, shame and inferiority, the danger of
exposure is ever-present. Such a danger is captured by the
colloquial expression “being caught with one’s pants down.” It
shows up in our dread of incontinence, of an involuntary disclosure
of one’s private secrets, of being found out. But found out as
what? In Trump’s case, it’s found out to be dirty and bad,
unworthy and defective, instead of deserving and greatly valued. This
is why he is a conspicuous spender—also a defense. Trump is
consumed by this conflict. His paranoia reflects his constant worry
about the critical judgment of others, a worry that in his heart,
Trump secretly fears is justified. As a result, he is angrily fixated
on being “found out” by investigative reporters or exposed from
within by “leakers.”
In the context of such
a formulation, it makes sense that more than anything, Trump dreads
revelations that make his electoral victory last November seem
illegitimate. He simply cannot tolerate the fact that he lost
the popular vote, nor even a hint that the Comey letter and/or the
Russians helped him defeat Hillary Clinton. In Trump’s disturbed
mind, this makes sense because he is horrified by feelings of being a
loser, horrified by evidence of the dirty fraudulent underbelly that
might lie at the foundation of his personality and his life. He
has to stamp out this accusation—which is really a
self-accusation—at all costs.
In his years as a real
estate tycoon, Trump could exercise enormous control over his
environment, sanitizing it of any evidence that contradicted his
idealized version of himself. He could surround himself with
flatterers and the trappings of wealth and power—the external cues
that he is special. As president, however, he finds himself
under constant hostile scrutiny, and this scrutiny threatens his
defenses. He is constantly compelled to preemptively reassert his
invulnerability, his power and greatness, which come across as what
they are: boorishness, a braggart desperately trying to save face.
If reports are true,
Trump frequently loses his temper, striking out and blaming others
for chinks in his narcissistic armor. These outbursts are a belated
attempt to master and control an environment that is relentlessly
whispering—at times, shouting—that he’s a bad, inferior,
defective man. He can’t stand being the helpless victim of
these whispers and shouts. He’ll do anything to shut them
up—fire press secretaries, obstruct justice, bribe allies, anything
to restore the moat defending him against criticism.
Real losses—say,
votes in Congress—are psychically equated with being a
loser. Revelations that his campaign colluded with Russia are
psychically equivalent to admitting his victories weren’t
real. Impeachment would be the ultimate realization of Trump’s
nightmare—proof that he is helpless, damaged goods, a public
failure who deserves contempt. Such a trauma could produce extreme
and radical reactions, from a frank psychotic break to a reckless
military attack to resignation and a panicked flight back to his
private castle in Trump Tower.
Knowing what makes
Trump tick doesn’t allow us to make specific predictions about his
likely political positions, but it should make his chaotic and
sociopathic maneuvering around the Russia investigation seem quite
understandable. I’m sure that intelligence agencies around the
world already have a book on how to deal with Trump that is based on
analyses of his personality similar to this one. As part of his
domestic opposition, we ought to understand at least this much;
namely, that Trump will always be propelled by his defensive need to
prove he’s good, not bad; powerful, not weak; a winner, not a
loser. This need will be behind everything he does.
Michael Bader is a
psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco. He is the author of
"More Than Bread and Butter: A Psychologist Speaks to
Progressives About What People Really Need in Order to Win and Change
the World" (Blurb, 2015).
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