Who knew that the name of a two-bit spray-tanned Fox News hack would be destined to be mentioned alongside the David Frost interview of Richard Nixon as a classic of the genre, but it appears that is where yesterday’s Bret Baier “Special Report” interview with Donald Trump is headed. Well known celebrity interviewer Frost asked Nixon whether the president could do something illegal, such as taking action against certain anti-war groups “if he decides it’s in the best interest of the country or something,” to which Nixon infamously responded, “Well, when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Forty-five million television viewers watched that night, a record for the largest audience for a political interview in history.
I'll say it again - DJT is mentally ill. His narcissism is so acute, he can't stop himself from trying to get over anyone he interacts with (with the possible exception of Putin...). In his mind, he can't be wrong.
The old joke goes, "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one - but the lightbulb has to want to change." Narcissism is almost impossible to treat. The man would deserve pity, if only he wasn't so destructive to our society.
He is clearly mentally ill - and it ain't just his narcissism. He has several screws loose, and that was obvious long before he got his hands on the country.
Who gives a flying f**k if he's mentally ill! The same can be said of any of history's tyrants and monsters. Was Hitler mentally ill? Stalin? Idi Amin? Pol Pot? Going back to Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun? Evil should NEVER be reduced to pathology!
Yes, everyone you mention was mentally ill. Murderous cruelty is not present in an integrated personality. I was not saying Trump's evil deeds were *excusable* because he's unbalanced and disturbed, just that he is barking mad.
The non integrated personality is neurotic. Neurotics have a tough time knowing what they are about and figuring themselves and their underlying motivations out. Psychopaths know exactly what they are doing. They are integrated to quite an alarming degree.
I do not believe Trump is neurotic. (I am neurotic. Most people are.) I believe him to be psychotic - among other things. The reason he can't be *merely* psychotic, by your definition, is that he clearly does not know "exactly what <he's> doing," else he would not have confessed and incriminated himself all over television.
I don't give a flying f**k either. Diagnosing Trump, or any of these others, as "mentally ill" puts the focus on the individual's psyche instead of on their criminal or otherwise appalling actions in the world.
It also deflects attention from the fact that none of these individuals could have done what they did by themselves. Were all the people who aided and abetted them mentally ill too? The social, political, and economic context is crucial, and it can't be explained away by diagnosing the guy (and it usually is a guy) at the top as mentally ill. We need to be addressing the multiple factors that allowed an individual like Trump to amass such power. Attributing his actions to "mental illness" lets us all off the hook.
And finally, where do we draw the line between mentally healthy and mentally ill? I look at, e.g., the corporate CEOs who are handsomely rewarded for treating their employees like interchangeable widgets. I look at those who stormed the Capitol on 1/6, the rank-and-file as well as the leaders, and the mostly privileged and well-educated individuals in the so-called "War Room" directing the action. Are their gullibility and (often) callousness and malevolence consistent with mental health?
You may be on to something, the social, political, and economic systems may be really sick: destructive of humanistic values like caring and compassion for the most vulnerable among us, for example, undermining respect for personal autonomy for women, to pick a timely example already provoking a massive electoral backlash against the justice system that failed us there, but I am not sure how focusing on a prime example such as Trump, as someone instantiating those hypothetical sicknesses, and others, leads to the conclusion that "Attributing his actions to `mental illness' lets us all off the hook."
Possibly both things are true: there is a seriously dysfunctional, abusive set of behaviors characterizing the larger systems you mention, and Trump's assaults on democratic norms, the rule of law, and all kinds of ethnic, religious, and other groups, etc., is part and parcel of the predictable effects of that systemic dysfunction.
If that's so, we can admit both have a place in any serious discussion, being ipso facto serious problems, since Trump managed to harness the most dysfunctional of the dysfunctions into an especially toxic political message.
We can agree Hitler, Stalin, other modern authoritarians, and Trump, did not spring into existence ex nihilo, out of a cultural vacuum, or as some completely incomprehensible aberrant human beings, not at all.
Wait, now I see your premise from the git go is that this "puts the focus on the individual's psyche," as if the individual's intrapsychic ideation can be "walled off" from "their criminal or otherwise appalling actions in the world." But if we are using a different "map of the mind," the individual's psyche is always going to be understood via their acts, including their speech acts, of course!
Ergo this inescapably leads to Trump's criminal acts and criminal incitements, appalling acts and appalling insults, invective, slurs, hate speech, lies, declarations of revenge, misogynistic rants, tweets that include all of the above in a spectacularly weird word salad of quasi-demonic nihilism.
If this is on the right track, starting off with your premise but just reworking it a bit, we have some damn scary conclusions, and I think that pleases Donald, as well as his most devoted cult followers. Probably even the less fanatical ones, who might be prone to deny enjoying the act of vicariously striking fear into Trump's targets, but in fact, also get satisfaction from it.
It occurs to me I probably need to read more of his niece Mary Trump's analysis of all of this, as well.
Mary Trump is well worth reading and listening to -- talk about being the right person in the right place at the right time with the right background!
My main problem with the "mental illness" diagnosis is -- well, if a particular mental illness is as widespread as this one seems to be, albeit to different degrees, it isn't something that can be treated one by one. It's become systemic. The same thing goes for racism: the right wing insists that it's an individual failing, or pathology if you will, but if you've been around the block a few times, it's almost impossible not to realize that it's bigger than that.
I totally agree with you, Susanna, because narcissism doesn’t lead to rape which Fake 45 is guilty of also. Nope, he’s not just a narcissist and a psychotic. He is pure evil.
One last explanation, that may clarify why I linked to that book: "Normally," these "37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals" would feel bound by the professional rule that privileges client privacy, but as everyone on THIS site and millions of others realize, Trump is abnormal in ways far beyond "the usual neuroses of civilized life," psychological issues springing from existence in a complex culture with many contradictory roles and messages flying around, etc.
So they do not focus on Trump's psyche in a standard psychiatric or therapeutic sense, but on their "professional duty to warn, " and there we have the (in Trump's case, completely hypothetical) merger of a professional attempt to cure the client/patient via a diagnosis (which they explicitly point out is not what's going on in the text, as they have no therapist-client relationship to undergird that) with a larger responsibility.
Sorry to jumble this all together, you raised points I take very seriously and it spurred me to try to think more clearly about those issues, thanks!
The problem too is limiting criticism of an immoral system to the right and giving the left a free pass. Biden is profoundly narcissistic and has voted along with the right on numerous human rights issues. And of course, is a total toady to corporate America.
Of course, no sooner did I post the longer reply when I realize I have been linking to a book for over FIVE YEARS, including maybe 6-7 times on this very blog that straddles the "divide," and explores every single aspect of that reply in far more detail, and naturally with far greater professional expertise!
^^^^ This is for the edition I have, here are some reviews of the updated edition:
About This Book
As this bestseller predicted, Trump has only grown more erratic and dangerous as the pressures on him mount. This new edition includes new essays bringing the book up to date—because this is still not normal.
Originally released in fall 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was a runaway bestseller. Alarmed Americans and international onlookers wanted to know: What is wrong with him?
That question still plagues us. The Trump administration has proven as chaotic and destructive as its opponents feared, and the man at the center of it all remains a cipher.
Constrained by the APA’s “Goldwater rule,” which inhibits mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures they have not personally examined, many of those qualified to weigh in on the issue have shied away from discussing it at all. The public has thus been left to wonder whether he is mad, bad, or both.
The prestigious mental health experts who have contributed to the revised and updated version of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump argue that their moral and civic "duty to warn" supersedes professional neutrality. Whatever affects him, affects the nation: From the trauma people have experienced under the Trump administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond. With eight new essays (about one hundred pages of new material), this edition will cover the dangerous ramifications of Trump's unnatural state.
"This is an historic work in the history of American psychiatry. We have never been in this place before." —Lawrence O'Donnell
"There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump...profound, illuminating and discomforting" —Bill Moyers
"The stand these psychiatrists are taking takes courage, and their conclusions are compelling." —The Washington Post
“When I first heard about the conference that gave rise to this book at Yale, I was worried that a manifesto would come out with a diagnosis…. That is not what happened: what happened is a very thoughtful assessment based on lots of public data, which gives us a very clear way of thinking about the terrific vulnerabilities of our current president that elicits a duty to warn.” - Samuel Barondes, Professor Emeritus and Former Chair of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco
“This insightful collection … is a valuable primary source documenting the critical turning point when American psychiatry reassessed the ethics of restraining commentary on the mental health of public officials in light of the ‘duty to warn’ of imminent danger.” - Estelle Freedman, the Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University
Immoral, highly aggressive and cruel. None of these are mental illnesses. In the modern era, people prefer to think this rather than confronting the raw reality of evil. So, yeah, totally agree.
Absolutely not! He deserves to be thrown in with the gen pop of the strongest federal prison and kept there for the rest of his life, with no communication with the outside world! That will NEVER happen of course-- just a fantasy of mine.
I want him to suffer. I want mental anguish to take over while he is in prison. I am praying the DOJ will not make a sweetheart deal with his attorneys, like let him stay only at Mar-a-Lago under surveillance. No no NO! The man upended our country and because of his influence, 1000 (and counting) have been indicted, lives lost, over 1 million died of his inaction of vaccines re: Covid. Let him rot in jail!
Hell no, our prisons are full of people who are “mentally ill”, nobody in their right mind would do the things that people did to end up in prison. He deserves to be put into a prison cell if he’s found guilty, no special treatment, especially none because of his wealth. Maybe then the country can begin to heal from the terrible scourge that he has inflicted upon it, he has to be gone for that to happen, IMHO. His “base” will find something else to occupy their fevered minds before long, if he’s sitting in a cell without his microphone. Intelligently focused doesn’t apply to his “base”, which I suppose is why they are and remain his “base”, it’s sad really.
No, that's not how either the court system or the mental health system (such as it is) works. Courts are not diagnostic conferences. (I would love to see the expression on DJT's face if his lawyer launched into an insanity defense!) But courts usually won't go there; if you're pretty much tracking in court, you're gonna go thru the process. You can offer all the evidence you want to prove that you were blind drunk when you caused the accident; you can't claim "temporary insanity" to get you off.
The legal consequences of criminal acts are the prescribed penalties imposed upon convictions. DJT should go to prison at the end of that process.
fortunately, in most states (if not the whole country), you can't just throw somebody in a psychiatric facility for an unlimited period. I also think that in most states, at least the civilized ones, you can only confine a convicted criminal for the period he's still actively "insane" in legal terms. Axis II Personality Disorders seldom provide sufficient cause to legally send someone to the bughouse. and what most of us think TFF's "problems" fall into that Axis II category.
I would again cite the views of Allen Frances, whose work I know from an internship I did at Payne Whitney, summer of '85. this is one the guys who actually WROTE the definitions of Axis II disorders (ESPECIALLY Narcissistic Personality) for the DSM-III and its subsequent iterations. his view of "diagnosing" TFF is pretty much "we don't NEED to diagnose him; just saying he's an asshole is enough for us to deal with him on THAT level." I'm paraphrasing.
with some friends bunch of years ago, I used to enjoy talking about "leakage," in which people act or talk in such a way as to reveal what's really bugging them.
in a rare concession to TFF's extraordinary qualities, let's just all agree that he's a Past and Future Master of Leakage. and all that leakage is on tape and is admissible.
let's hope he keeps talking...it makes it so much easier for the prosecution.
He is narcissistic, evil, greedy, selfish, and unwilling to work. It may be described as mental illness, but there is no way the traitor can weasel his way out of accountability by using his "mental illness" as any kind of defense. The creep has been breaking the law his whole life and knows he was. He belongs in prison for the rest of it.
As every criminal defense lawyer tells his client in their very first conversation: “Shut the fuck up!“
It is fitting that The Vile One’s narcissism and his entire lifetime of avoiding accountability, legal or otherwise, would lead to this juncture, and his arrogance would lead him to make globally-broadcast admissions of guilt about a few of his countless felonies.
Now we shall see if our oh-so- flawed justice system will finally hold him to account.
It is so satisfying to see him continue to dig a deeper and deeper hole while he thinks he is exonerating himself. He truly must be a defense attorney's worst nightmare.
I am wondering how many more teams of attorneys will represent him before a trial even begins. He will truly be scraping the bottom of the barrel for new blood when all the expected indictments are handed down. Few reputable lawyers should want to see their careers damaged and their reputations tainted by defending his lies, fantasies and hubris.
It's fun reading articles around after the arraignment of all the good firms and attorneys in particular there who thought for a second maybe they would but the blowback from the firms was pretty much instant. No! They can get him to pay them because they get their money up front and quit working if it isn't there on time. But he never follows their advice and he wants to run his own case.
Which looks like will be his downfall. Trump is so stuck to being in guard mode and revenge mode, he can't pull back far enough to see the big picture. He has spent way more money defending himself than he's made. He's still cashing in things from his father's estate to live on. He's like a filter for good money. It flows through anywhere near him and he finds a way to turn it into money for bad.
Tightly written. Thanks for covering that which I have no stomach for. Though watching the clown prince of queens stab himself like Clytemnestra giving Agamemnon the what for sounds like something I might have been persuaded to catch.
Until a future playwright will distill this nightmare into a performance we will be able to laugh at, I’ll depend upon you.
I’m paying attention and probably won’t have the coy-ach (Yiddish for “stomach”), to write this up as a script.
The last time l wrote a political parody was in graduate school. The play was about Nixon’s decline and fall and it proved my own personal defeat. My tenured, faculty advisor in the Department of Drama and Theater was appalled by my dramatic decision have the disgraced president burned at the stake. I was following Arthur Miller’s formula, and it cost me my Master’s degree. My playwright instructor was taken out to lunch by a tenured professor and advised to drop me as a student.
Stuff like this did and does happen. Today’s political climate is just so toxic. Guys, what it your advice?
Trump's self-incriminating interviews, apart from also being cringe-worthy, are the stuff of political satire that you see on shows like Veep. Except here, real life is far surpassing fiction. That it is happening in prime time is almost unbelievable - but not when it comes to Trump. Because, as we have seen, there is no bottom with him.
It didn't just happen. It was a deliberate and successful attempt to shoot down an my thesis. When I told my writing professor what had happened, he was shocked!
I literally when from being an "A" student to receiving a "Z"
Fortunately it only encouraged me to continue my studies independently. And I taught high school English and Speech for about ten years, but on a lower pay scale.
There are some things that money just cannot buy. My personal independence was a costly proposition!
Please. Queens has produced far far better than him (me for example, LOL). Seriously, he may have spent his formative years in Queens, but that personality is because he was in a toxic family environment, not because of the borough he was in. And then he went to Manhattan and never looked back.
Understood that. Others out there in the country may know nothing of Queens and the vibrant diversity, hard working nature, and success stories of its residents.
It only makes the previous journalism of Bret Baier all the more embarrassing, to realize he and other hacks like him are quite capable of simply "doing their damn job," even if it isn't scintillating and original interviewing.
Not quite Sonnet 94 territory by any means, but even so...
Sonnet 94: They that have power to hurt and will do none
Oy, Trump again. If anyone should be in touch with Dante, please tell him there is a tenth circle: It is the near constant coverage of Trump. It is now indisputable that everything that comes out of his mouth, and I mean everything, is equal parts lie, alibi, and mental disturbance. Why this man isn't in a locked ward somewhere instead of having "rallies" with a retinue of Secret Service agents protecting him is a serious question.
“Before I send boxes over, I have to take all of my things out. These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things…uh…golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes…there were many things. This response to a key question is just more argle-bargle. (In what universe do top secret classified docs mingle with golf shirts?)
Anyway, props to Professor Wolff. When all is said and done I would not be surprised if someone mounts a production of "Inside the Criminal Mind, The Musical." I'll not be in the audience.
I will say the screenshots Mr. T. chose spoke volumes. He is frantic, and he is nuts.
In the words of Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of "The Art of the Deal," “Lying is second nature to him...More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”
"When Schwartz began writing “The Art of the Deal,” he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” Schwartz now disavows the passage. “Deceit,” he told me, is never “innocent.” He added, “ ‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ ” Trump, he said, loved the phrase."
"Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of course he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.”'
The wonder is that this interview was done on Fox. I don't watch Fox, so I am largely unfamiliar with Bret Baier - but kudos to him for his hard-hitting questions and follow ups. Apparently, he is a real reporter who knows how to go for the jugular. I wonder, though, if Trump thought he was safe because it was Fox, and so walked into an ambush.
No, he is precisely as Lucian described him, a hack, but even hacks can sometimes muster the requisite minimal competence when the opportunity is right in front of them, and given a self-destructive, narcissistic buffoon like Trump, the interview subject is guaranteed to blunder, brag,
bluster and bungle his way into completely obvious traps.
No need to get overexcited when basic journalistic standards are followed.
“In 2016, the psychologist Dan McAdams wrote a psychological portrait of Trump for The Atlantic, which he later expanded into a book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. McAdams describes Trump as “psychologically singular,” a man who “lacks an inner story to provide his life with temporal continuity, purpose, and meaning. He is the episodic man, living (and fighting) in the moment.” And that moment is free of ethical considerations and ethical constraints.
“Trump is like the alpha chimp who is always playing the short game, a brute-force game, to win at all costs,” McAdams claims. Trump himself said years ago, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
Whatever the precise nature of Trump’s psychological pathologies—McAdams says Trump is “way more strange than any mental illness category that one can apply or create”—we can see for ourselves how they manifest: extreme narcissism, lack of empathy, feelings of persecution, grandiosity, and deceitfulness; impulsivity, shamelessness, remorselessness, and rage; a compulsive desire for attention, an obsessive need to dominate others, an eagerness to shatter social norms, and the belief that rules that apply to others don’t apply to him.”
As some have already said, Trump is / has gone nuts in a whole bunch of ways. He was always a lab animal for psychiatrists, but now his totally off the rails. I think at some point this will end out of court. The attorneys certainly know there is little or no defense and will try to strike some kind of deal. I imagine something along the lines of guilty, retire from the race, and house arrest maybe for the rest of his life at Mara logo where he can have secret service protection and a really big fine. He will die miserable. His kids will take all his money saying he is incompetent / unable to manage things anymore. And except for his rants on social media he will be gone from daily life. Just a thought of course.
Trump gives off a vibe that he intends to solve his legal problems by campaigning, then winning the presidency, and finally pardoning himself. You will recall that he launched a violent insurrection after he didn't win the last time he ran. Trump's reality is not the same as ours.
Upvoted because you are able to find a glimmer of sunshine in this - that Trump would experience just enough lucidity, momentarily, to sign off on a "guilty" plea.
What he needs, what everyone at some point needs, is some form of metanoia - hopefully not having to suffer through a complete breakdown as part of that, mind you!
Metanoia (from the Greek μετάνοια, metanoia, "changing one's mind") has been used in psychology since at least the time of American philosopher/psychologist William James to describe a process of fundamental change in the human personality.[1]
The term derives from the Ancient Greek words μετά (metá) (meaning "beyond" or "after") and νόος (noeō) (meaning "perception" or "understanding" or "mind"), and takes on different meanings in different contexts.
Developments
William James used the term metanoia to refer to a fundamental and stable change in an individual's life-orientation.[1] Carl Gustav Jung developed the usage to indicate a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form – a form of self healing often associated with the mid-life crisis and psychotic breakdown, which can be viewed as a potentially productive process.[2] Jung considered that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as an existential crisis which might be an attempt at self-reparation: in such instances metanoia could represent a shift in the balance of the personality away from the persona towards the shadow and the self.[3]
Jung's concept of metanoia was an influence on R.D. Laing and his emphasis on the dissolution and replacement of everyday ego consciousness.[4] Laing's colleague, David Cooper, considered that "metanoia means change from the depths of oneself upwards into the superficies of one's social appearance" – a process that in the second of its three stages "generates the 'signs' of depression and mourning".[5] Similarly influenced was the therapeutic community movement. Ideally, it aimed to support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening a person's existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict.
The Dutch psychiatrist Jan Foudraine wrote extensively about it, tracing its history through the work of Jung and Laing, and eventually considering it “a permanent change in gestalt.” He cites an example where one sees a black vase, then one blinks, and instead one sees two white faces in profile opposite each other (the Rubin vase).[6]
In transactional analysis, metanoia is used to describe the experience of abandoning an old scripted self or false self for a more open one: a process which may be marked by a mixture of intensity, despair, self-surrender, and an encounter with the inner void.[7]
Metanoia which is not familiar to most people is one of my favorite words and James is one of my favorite philosophers. Many years ago, I finally quit smoking after and evening read of one of his essays. Metanoia is also defined in terms of a religious transformation in biblical texts. I am pretty sure that doesn't apply to Trump. Thanks for taking the time to respond. I found it interesting.
I listen to podcasts given by the Well Red Comedians -- one of whom used to be a defense attorney. His comment was "I have defended 13-year-olds who were better at crime than Trump."
I have written about this before so skip if you wish.
Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee recognized the extreme danger Donald Trump posed, even before we elected him, so she went public with her concerns. The American Psychiatric Association attacked and punished her for doing so. She did violate the Association's rule that a member cannot comment on a subject's mental state without having first personally examined the subject. This is the "Goldwater Rule" going back to a controversy during Goldwater's unsuccessful campaign for president. So, exit Dr. Lee, enter the triumphant Donald Trump. (Lee has a nice website. Please visit her.)
What so concerns Dr.Lee is Trump's evident malignant narcissism. Malignant narcissists are extremely dangerous to others. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck mused that, if it were possible to diagnose evil, evil would be malignant narcissism.
We elected a president with an untreated dangerous personality disorder, and we gave him the nuclear launch codes. It is amazing we are all still here. Are we really stupid enough to elect him again?
NOT "we"---THEM !!!! The millions of stupid, willfully ignorant, cruel, bigoted pieces of worthless human garbage who still adore him, voted for him twice and will vote for him again!
Only in the world one Donald J. Trump inhabits would one Bret Baier be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. In this interview he simply gave Trump the shovel, over and over, to bury himself and let the once and now it would seem forever ex President not just convict himself but do it over and over. And, over again. This broadcast will be evidence in the case along with a lot of other B roll which Trump has produced over the past year.
Here is what we all now know. In the world of one Donald J. Trump there is no such thing as a gag order. He simply cannot help himself because he does believe he can talk his way out of anything. And, to be fair and objective, it has worked for him for seventy years. Now, however, the jig is up and he is simply having trouble coming to the realization the game is almost over. Whenever this trial occurs he is going to see the evidence of his consciousness of guilt over and over. So , too , will the jury. Is it possible a MAGite could work their way onto the jury and hang it? Sure, but then one Donald J. Trump will have to face the real trial of the century. The one for his conspiracy and actions to steal an election. And, it is for than one I am hoping the jury will find him and some of his co-conspirators guilty.
I'll say it again - DJT is mentally ill. His narcissism is so acute, he can't stop himself from trying to get over anyone he interacts with (with the possible exception of Putin...). In his mind, he can't be wrong.
The old joke goes, "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one - but the lightbulb has to want to change." Narcissism is almost impossible to treat. The man would deserve pity, if only he wasn't so destructive to our society.
He is clearly mentally ill - and it ain't just his narcissism. He has several screws loose, and that was obvious long before he got his hands on the country.
Who gives a flying f**k if he's mentally ill! The same can be said of any of history's tyrants and monsters. Was Hitler mentally ill? Stalin? Idi Amin? Pol Pot? Going back to Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun? Evil should NEVER be reduced to pathology!
Yes, everyone you mention was mentally ill. Murderous cruelty is not present in an integrated personality. I was not saying Trump's evil deeds were *excusable* because he's unbalanced and disturbed, just that he is barking mad.
The non integrated personality is neurotic. Neurotics have a tough time knowing what they are about and figuring themselves and their underlying motivations out. Psychopaths know exactly what they are doing. They are integrated to quite an alarming degree.
I do not believe Trump is neurotic. (I am neurotic. Most people are.) I believe him to be psychotic - among other things. The reason he can't be *merely* psychotic, by your definition, is that he clearly does not know "exactly what <he's> doing," else he would not have confessed and incriminated himself all over television.
I don't give a flying f**k either. Diagnosing Trump, or any of these others, as "mentally ill" puts the focus on the individual's psyche instead of on their criminal or otherwise appalling actions in the world.
It also deflects attention from the fact that none of these individuals could have done what they did by themselves. Were all the people who aided and abetted them mentally ill too? The social, political, and economic context is crucial, and it can't be explained away by diagnosing the guy (and it usually is a guy) at the top as mentally ill. We need to be addressing the multiple factors that allowed an individual like Trump to amass such power. Attributing his actions to "mental illness" lets us all off the hook.
And finally, where do we draw the line between mentally healthy and mentally ill? I look at, e.g., the corporate CEOs who are handsomely rewarded for treating their employees like interchangeable widgets. I look at those who stormed the Capitol on 1/6, the rank-and-file as well as the leaders, and the mostly privileged and well-educated individuals in the so-called "War Room" directing the action. Are their gullibility and (often) callousness and malevolence consistent with mental health?
All excellent points!
You may be on to something, the social, political, and economic systems may be really sick: destructive of humanistic values like caring and compassion for the most vulnerable among us, for example, undermining respect for personal autonomy for women, to pick a timely example already provoking a massive electoral backlash against the justice system that failed us there, but I am not sure how focusing on a prime example such as Trump, as someone instantiating those hypothetical sicknesses, and others, leads to the conclusion that "Attributing his actions to `mental illness' lets us all off the hook."
Possibly both things are true: there is a seriously dysfunctional, abusive set of behaviors characterizing the larger systems you mention, and Trump's assaults on democratic norms, the rule of law, and all kinds of ethnic, religious, and other groups, etc., is part and parcel of the predictable effects of that systemic dysfunction.
If that's so, we can admit both have a place in any serious discussion, being ipso facto serious problems, since Trump managed to harness the most dysfunctional of the dysfunctions into an especially toxic political message.
We can agree Hitler, Stalin, other modern authoritarians, and Trump, did not spring into existence ex nihilo, out of a cultural vacuum, or as some completely incomprehensible aberrant human beings, not at all.
Wait, now I see your premise from the git go is that this "puts the focus on the individual's psyche," as if the individual's intrapsychic ideation can be "walled off" from "their criminal or otherwise appalling actions in the world." But if we are using a different "map of the mind," the individual's psyche is always going to be understood via their acts, including their speech acts, of course!
Ergo this inescapably leads to Trump's criminal acts and criminal incitements, appalling acts and appalling insults, invective, slurs, hate speech, lies, declarations of revenge, misogynistic rants, tweets that include all of the above in a spectacularly weird word salad of quasi-demonic nihilism.
If this is on the right track, starting off with your premise but just reworking it a bit, we have some damn scary conclusions, and I think that pleases Donald, as well as his most devoted cult followers. Probably even the less fanatical ones, who might be prone to deny enjoying the act of vicariously striking fear into Trump's targets, but in fact, also get satisfaction from it.
It occurs to me I probably need to read more of his niece Mary Trump's analysis of all of this, as well.
Mary Trump is well worth reading and listening to -- talk about being the right person in the right place at the right time with the right background!
My main problem with the "mental illness" diagnosis is -- well, if a particular mental illness is as widespread as this one seems to be, albeit to different degrees, it isn't something that can be treated one by one. It's become systemic. The same thing goes for racism: the right wing insists that it's an individual failing, or pathology if you will, but if you've been around the block a few times, it's almost impossible not to realize that it's bigger than that.
I totally agree with you, Susanna, because narcissism doesn’t lead to rape which Fake 45 is guilty of also. Nope, he’s not just a narcissist and a psychotic. He is pure evil.
One last explanation, that may clarify why I linked to that book: "Normally," these "37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals" would feel bound by the professional rule that privileges client privacy, but as everyone on THIS site and millions of others realize, Trump is abnormal in ways far beyond "the usual neuroses of civilized life," psychological issues springing from existence in a complex culture with many contradictory roles and messages flying around, etc.
So they do not focus on Trump's psyche in a standard psychiatric or therapeutic sense, but on their "professional duty to warn, " and there we have the (in Trump's case, completely hypothetical) merger of a professional attempt to cure the client/patient via a diagnosis (which they explicitly point out is not what's going on in the text, as they have no therapist-client relationship to undergird that) with a larger responsibility.
Sorry to jumble this all together, you raised points I take very seriously and it spurred me to try to think more clearly about those issues, thanks!
The problem too is limiting criticism of an immoral system to the right and giving the left a free pass. Biden is profoundly narcissistic and has voted along with the right on numerous human rights issues. And of course, is a total toady to corporate America.
Of course, no sooner did I post the longer reply when I realize I have been linking to a book for over FIVE YEARS, including maybe 6-7 times on this very blog that straddles the "divide," and explores every single aspect of that reply in far more detail, and naturally with far greater professional expertise!
Here it is again:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dangerous_Case_of_Donald_Trump
^^^^ This is for the edition I have, here are some reviews of the updated edition:
About This Book
As this bestseller predicted, Trump has only grown more erratic and dangerous as the pressures on him mount. This new edition includes new essays bringing the book up to date—because this is still not normal.
Originally released in fall 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was a runaway bestseller. Alarmed Americans and international onlookers wanted to know: What is wrong with him?
That question still plagues us. The Trump administration has proven as chaotic and destructive as its opponents feared, and the man at the center of it all remains a cipher.
Constrained by the APA’s “Goldwater rule,” which inhibits mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures they have not personally examined, many of those qualified to weigh in on the issue have shied away from discussing it at all. The public has thus been left to wonder whether he is mad, bad, or both.
The prestigious mental health experts who have contributed to the revised and updated version of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump argue that their moral and civic "duty to warn" supersedes professional neutrality. Whatever affects him, affects the nation: From the trauma people have experienced under the Trump administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond. With eight new essays (about one hundred pages of new material), this edition will cover the dangerous ramifications of Trump's unnatural state.
It’s not all in our heads. It’s in his.
us.macmillan.com/books/9781250212863/thedangerouscaseofdonaldtrump
In The News
"This is an historic work in the history of American psychiatry. We have never been in this place before." —Lawrence O'Donnell
"There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump...profound, illuminating and discomforting" —Bill Moyers
"The stand these psychiatrists are taking takes courage, and their conclusions are compelling." —The Washington Post
“When I first heard about the conference that gave rise to this book at Yale, I was worried that a manifesto would come out with a diagnosis…. That is not what happened: what happened is a very thoughtful assessment based on lots of public data, which gives us a very clear way of thinking about the terrific vulnerabilities of our current president that elicits a duty to warn.” - Samuel Barondes, Professor Emeritus and Former Chair of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco
“This insightful collection … is a valuable primary source documenting the critical turning point when American psychiatry reassessed the ethics of restraining commentary on the mental health of public officials in light of the ‘duty to warn’ of imminent danger.” - Estelle Freedman, the Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University
Immoral, highly aggressive and cruel. None of these are mental illnesses. In the modern era, people prefer to think this rather than confronting the raw reality of evil. So, yeah, totally agree.
H by
So, you think he could be (or should be) condemned to a mental hospital instead of prison?
I’ll be grateful if it’s before any of us.
Absolutely not! He deserves to be thrown in with the gen pop of the strongest federal prison and kept there for the rest of his life, with no communication with the outside world! That will NEVER happen of course-- just a fantasy of mine.
He can be incarcerated, but never in the general population. Instant death penalty.
Yup—just what I had in mind!
I want him to suffer. I want mental anguish to take over while he is in prison. I am praying the DOJ will not make a sweetheart deal with his attorneys, like let him stay only at Mar-a-Lago under surveillance. No no NO! The man upended our country and because of his influence, 1000 (and counting) have been indicted, lives lost, over 1 million died of his inaction of vaccines re: Covid. Let him rot in jail!
Hell no, our prisons are full of people who are “mentally ill”, nobody in their right mind would do the things that people did to end up in prison. He deserves to be put into a prison cell if he’s found guilty, no special treatment, especially none because of his wealth. Maybe then the country can begin to heal from the terrible scourge that he has inflicted upon it, he has to be gone for that to happen, IMHO. His “base” will find something else to occupy their fevered minds before long, if he’s sitting in a cell without his microphone. Intelligently focused doesn’t apply to his “base”, which I suppose is why they are and remain his “base”, it’s sad really.
exactly.
Prison. I taught in a max security prison for men in Pgh. If and when he gets to I’ll for prison, he can be moved. Happens every day.
No, that's not how either the court system or the mental health system (such as it is) works. Courts are not diagnostic conferences. (I would love to see the expression on DJT's face if his lawyer launched into an insanity defense!) But courts usually won't go there; if you're pretty much tracking in court, you're gonna go thru the process. You can offer all the evidence you want to prove that you were blind drunk when you caused the accident; you can't claim "temporary insanity" to get you off.
The legal consequences of criminal acts are the prescribed penalties imposed upon convictions. DJT should go to prison at the end of that process.
fortunately, in most states (if not the whole country), you can't just throw somebody in a psychiatric facility for an unlimited period. I also think that in most states, at least the civilized ones, you can only confine a convicted criminal for the period he's still actively "insane" in legal terms. Axis II Personality Disorders seldom provide sufficient cause to legally send someone to the bughouse. and what most of us think TFF's "problems" fall into that Axis II category.
I would again cite the views of Allen Frances, whose work I know from an internship I did at Payne Whitney, summer of '85. this is one the guys who actually WROTE the definitions of Axis II disorders (ESPECIALLY Narcissistic Personality) for the DSM-III and its subsequent iterations. his view of "diagnosing" TFF is pretty much "we don't NEED to diagnose him; just saying he's an asshole is enough for us to deal with him on THAT level." I'm paraphrasing.
with some friends bunch of years ago, I used to enjoy talking about "leakage," in which people act or talk in such a way as to reveal what's really bugging them.
in a rare concession to TFF's extraordinary qualities, let's just all agree that he's a Past and Future Master of Leakage. and all that leakage is on tape and is admissible.
let's hope he keeps talking...it makes it so much easier for the prosecution.
No, he should be 'dispersed' into a prison population, 'per se'!
I frankly don't care. Hospitals for the criminally insane are not exactly holiday houses.
He is narcissistic, evil, greedy, selfish, and unwilling to work. It may be described as mental illness, but there is no way the traitor can weasel his way out of accountability by using his "mental illness" as any kind of defense. The creep has been breaking the law his whole life and knows he was. He belongs in prison for the rest of it.
As every criminal defense lawyer tells his client in their very first conversation: “Shut the fuck up!“
It is fitting that The Vile One’s narcissism and his entire lifetime of avoiding accountability, legal or otherwise, would lead to this juncture, and his arrogance would lead him to make globally-broadcast admissions of guilt about a few of his countless felonies.
Now we shall see if our oh-so- flawed justice system will finally hold him to account.
It is so satisfying to see him continue to dig a deeper and deeper hole while he thinks he is exonerating himself. He truly must be a defense attorney's worst nightmare.
I am wondering how many more teams of attorneys will represent him before a trial even begins. He will truly be scraping the bottom of the barrel for new blood when all the expected indictments are handed down. Few reputable lawyers should want to see their careers damaged and their reputations tainted by defending his lies, fantasies and hubris.
It's fun reading articles around after the arraignment of all the good firms and attorneys in particular there who thought for a second maybe they would but the blowback from the firms was pretty much instant. No! They can get him to pay them because they get their money up front and quit working if it isn't there on time. But he never follows their advice and he wants to run his own case.
“I alone can fix it” Same reason he would never listen to any advice!
Which looks like will be his downfall. Trump is so stuck to being in guard mode and revenge mode, he can't pull back far enough to see the big picture. He has spent way more money defending himself than he's made. He's still cashing in things from his father's estate to live on. He's like a filter for good money. It flows through anywhere near him and he finds a way to turn it into money for bad.
And then get stiffed on the fee
Tightly written. Thanks for covering that which I have no stomach for. Though watching the clown prince of queens stab himself like Clytemnestra giving Agamemnon the what for sounds like something I might have been persuaded to catch.
Until a future playwright will distill this nightmare into a performance we will be able to laugh at, I’ll depend upon you.
I’m paying attention and probably won’t have the coy-ach (Yiddish for “stomach”), to write this up as a script.
The last time l wrote a political parody was in graduate school. The play was about Nixon’s decline and fall and it proved my own personal defeat. My tenured, faculty advisor in the Department of Drama and Theater was appalled by my dramatic decision have the disgraced president burned at the stake. I was following Arthur Miller’s formula, and it cost me my Master’s degree. My playwright instructor was taken out to lunch by a tenured professor and advised to drop me as a student.
Stuff like this did and does happen. Today’s political climate is just so toxic. Guys, what it your advice?
Remember that comedian, Kathy Griffin? She did a 'skit' of Trump using a prop severed head and got banned from most venues for it.
She admitted later that she was not smart to do it, and that she should have thought twice about the stunt. It cost her a lot of money.
Trump's self-incriminating interviews, apart from also being cringe-worthy, are the stuff of political satire that you see on shows like Veep. Except here, real life is far surpassing fiction. That it is happening in prime time is almost unbelievable - but not when it comes to Trump. Because, as we have seen, there is no bottom with him.
Go for it
Your supervising professor was supposed to give you feedback and guidance. Sorry that happened...
It didn't just happen. It was a deliberate and successful attempt to shoot down an my thesis. When I told my writing professor what had happened, he was shocked!
I literally when from being an "A" student to receiving a "Z"
Fortunately it only encouraged me to continue my studies independently. And I taught high school English and Speech for about ten years, but on a lower pay scale.
There are some things that money just cannot buy. My personal independence was a costly proposition!
I can't bear watching him but this is a long interview and it's been broken up and played everywhere since last night. I could not stop watching.
That’s courage
No, I've learned I can do certain things if they're in small bites. My curiosity got me.
still lmrao and the play ain't yet written. Hint: write it
Please. Queens has produced far far better than him (me for example, LOL). Seriously, he may have spent his formative years in Queens, but that personality is because he was in a toxic family environment, not because of the borough he was in. And then he went to Manhattan and never looked back.
Queens has more to answer for than trump. There's also the matter of Andrew Cuomo.
Lived in Jackson heights and Astoria for years in 70s, no disrespect to such a multicultural place. Just him. Massively.
Understood that. Others out there in the country may know nothing of Queens and the vibrant diversity, hard working nature, and success stories of its residents.
It only makes the previous journalism of Bret Baier all the more embarrassing, to realize he and other hacks like him are quite capable of simply "doing their damn job," even if it isn't scintillating and original interviewing.
Not quite Sonnet 94 territory by any means, but even so...
Sonnet 94: They that have power to hurt and will do none
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
The couplet is the best part of that sonnet.
Here's another seasonal old English verse, to shift your attention from politics for a moment. https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/periods-genres/early-music/oldest-english-song-sumer-is-icumen-in/
The sand flows down in the hourglass. Hopefully soon enough we will get to see his pinstripes in a shade of orange.
Orange Foolius is self destructing!
Oy, Trump again. If anyone should be in touch with Dante, please tell him there is a tenth circle: It is the near constant coverage of Trump. It is now indisputable that everything that comes out of his mouth, and I mean everything, is equal parts lie, alibi, and mental disturbance. Why this man isn't in a locked ward somewhere instead of having "rallies" with a retinue of Secret Service agents protecting him is a serious question.
“Before I send boxes over, I have to take all of my things out. These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things…uh…golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes…there were many things. This response to a key question is just more argle-bargle. (In what universe do top secret classified docs mingle with golf shirts?)
Anyway, props to Professor Wolff. When all is said and done I would not be surprised if someone mounts a production of "Inside the Criminal Mind, The Musical." I'll not be in the audience.
I will say the screenshots Mr. T. chose spoke volumes. He is frantic, and he is nuts.
The interspersed with pants line was where I looked up from reading this and stared into space, just taking it in.
Oy is right Margo If it weren’t so scary it would be downright funny
In the words of Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of "The Art of the Deal," “Lying is second nature to him...More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”
"When Schwartz began writing “The Art of the Deal,” he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” Schwartz now disavows the passage. “Deceit,” he told me, is never “innocent.” He added, “ ‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ ” Trump, he said, loved the phrase."
"Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of course he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.”'
The wonder is that this interview was done on Fox. I don't watch Fox, so I am largely unfamiliar with Bret Baier - but kudos to him for his hard-hitting questions and follow ups. Apparently, he is a real reporter who knows how to go for the jugular. I wonder, though, if Trump thought he was safe because it was Fox, and so walked into an ambush.
No, he is precisely as Lucian described him, a hack, but even hacks can sometimes muster the requisite minimal competence when the opportunity is right in front of them, and given a self-destructive, narcissistic buffoon like Trump, the interview subject is guaranteed to blunder, brag,
bluster and bungle his way into completely obvious traps.
No need to get overexcited when basic journalistic standards are followed.
I think Rupert Murdoch knew about, and possibly directed, Baier's assault on Trump. Trump will be toast without Fox et al behind him.
I know, it seemed strange. I guess Fox is just signaling that they are moving on from the Orange One.
According to Andy Borowitz (New Yorker satirist) today, an apology had to be issued by Murdoch as Baier nearly made FOX seem legit.
“In 2016, the psychologist Dan McAdams wrote a psychological portrait of Trump for The Atlantic, which he later expanded into a book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. McAdams describes Trump as “psychologically singular,” a man who “lacks an inner story to provide his life with temporal continuity, purpose, and meaning. He is the episodic man, living (and fighting) in the moment.” And that moment is free of ethical considerations and ethical constraints.
“Trump is like the alpha chimp who is always playing the short game, a brute-force game, to win at all costs,” McAdams claims. Trump himself said years ago, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
Whatever the precise nature of Trump’s psychological pathologies—McAdams says Trump is “way more strange than any mental illness category that one can apply or create”—we can see for ourselves how they manifest: extreme narcissism, lack of empathy, feelings of persecution, grandiosity, and deceitfulness; impulsivity, shamelessness, remorselessness, and rage; a compulsive desire for attention, an obsessive need to dominate others, an eagerness to shatter social norms, and the belief that rules that apply to others don’t apply to him.”
Whener .... Atlantic 6/2023
Morality Is for Trump What Colors Are to the Color-Blind
The majority of his enablers, though, still know right from wrong.
By Peter Wehner
And with all of this in plain sight, millions of people worship him! They are all as sick and as evil as he is!
As some have already said, Trump is / has gone nuts in a whole bunch of ways. He was always a lab animal for psychiatrists, but now his totally off the rails. I think at some point this will end out of court. The attorneys certainly know there is little or no defense and will try to strike some kind of deal. I imagine something along the lines of guilty, retire from the race, and house arrest maybe for the rest of his life at Mara logo where he can have secret service protection and a really big fine. He will die miserable. His kids will take all his money saying he is incompetent / unable to manage things anymore. And except for his rants on social media he will be gone from daily life. Just a thought of course.
Trump gives off a vibe that he intends to solve his legal problems by campaigning, then winning the presidency, and finally pardoning himself. You will recall that he launched a violent insurrection after he didn't win the last time he ran. Trump's reality is not the same as ours.
Not only a pardon for past crimes, but "presidential" immunity from new crimes. This new notion about the Divine Right of Presidents is noxious.
Upvoted because you are able to find a glimmer of sunshine in this - that Trump would experience just enough lucidity, momentarily, to sign off on a "guilty" plea.
What he needs, what everyone at some point needs, is some form of metanoia - hopefully not having to suffer through a complete breakdown as part of that, mind you!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(psychology)
Metanoia (from the Greek μετάνοια, metanoia, "changing one's mind") has been used in psychology since at least the time of American philosopher/psychologist William James to describe a process of fundamental change in the human personality.[1]
The term derives from the Ancient Greek words μετά (metá) (meaning "beyond" or "after") and νόος (noeō) (meaning "perception" or "understanding" or "mind"), and takes on different meanings in different contexts.
Developments
William James used the term metanoia to refer to a fundamental and stable change in an individual's life-orientation.[1] Carl Gustav Jung developed the usage to indicate a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form – a form of self healing often associated with the mid-life crisis and psychotic breakdown, which can be viewed as a potentially productive process.[2] Jung considered that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as an existential crisis which might be an attempt at self-reparation: in such instances metanoia could represent a shift in the balance of the personality away from the persona towards the shadow and the self.[3]
Jung's concept of metanoia was an influence on R.D. Laing and his emphasis on the dissolution and replacement of everyday ego consciousness.[4] Laing's colleague, David Cooper, considered that "metanoia means change from the depths of oneself upwards into the superficies of one's social appearance" – a process that in the second of its three stages "generates the 'signs' of depression and mourning".[5] Similarly influenced was the therapeutic community movement. Ideally, it aimed to support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening a person's existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict.
The Dutch psychiatrist Jan Foudraine wrote extensively about it, tracing its history through the work of Jung and Laing, and eventually considering it “a permanent change in gestalt.” He cites an example where one sees a black vase, then one blinks, and instead one sees two white faces in profile opposite each other (the Rubin vase).[6]
In transactional analysis, metanoia is used to describe the experience of abandoning an old scripted self or false self for a more open one: a process which may be marked by a mixture of intensity, despair, self-surrender, and an encounter with the inner void.[7]
Metanoia which is not familiar to most people is one of my favorite words and James is one of my favorite philosophers. Many years ago, I finally quit smoking after and evening read of one of his essays. Metanoia is also defined in terms of a religious transformation in biblical texts. I am pretty sure that doesn't apply to Trump. Thanks for taking the time to respond. I found it interesting.
Remember we are dealing with Republicans here, there is no bottom.
Trump is engaged in a political campaign in response to a legal indictment. That only works in banana republics.
I listen to podcasts given by the Well Red Comedians -- one of whom used to be a defense attorney. His comment was "I have defended 13-year-olds who were better at crime than Trump."
Which says plenty about NYC/NJ law enforcement. Their looking the other way decade after decade made him what he is today.
The lawyer I referred to -- worked in Miami, FL. NYC/NJ South, I suppose...
I have written about this before so skip if you wish.
Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee recognized the extreme danger Donald Trump posed, even before we elected him, so she went public with her concerns. The American Psychiatric Association attacked and punished her for doing so. She did violate the Association's rule that a member cannot comment on a subject's mental state without having first personally examined the subject. This is the "Goldwater Rule" going back to a controversy during Goldwater's unsuccessful campaign for president. So, exit Dr. Lee, enter the triumphant Donald Trump. (Lee has a nice website. Please visit her.)
What so concerns Dr.Lee is Trump's evident malignant narcissism. Malignant narcissists are extremely dangerous to others. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck mused that, if it were possible to diagnose evil, evil would be malignant narcissism.
We elected a president with an untreated dangerous personality disorder, and we gave him the nuclear launch codes. It is amazing we are all still here. Are we really stupid enough to elect him again?
NOT "we"---THEM !!!! The millions of stupid, willfully ignorant, cruel, bigoted pieces of worthless human garbage who still adore him, voted for him twice and will vote for him again!
Some of us are very, very stupid and gullible. They will vote for him.
The rest, though, are possibly getting over their mass insanity.
Only in the world one Donald J. Trump inhabits would one Bret Baier be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. In this interview he simply gave Trump the shovel, over and over, to bury himself and let the once and now it would seem forever ex President not just convict himself but do it over and over. And, over again. This broadcast will be evidence in the case along with a lot of other B roll which Trump has produced over the past year.
Here is what we all now know. In the world of one Donald J. Trump there is no such thing as a gag order. He simply cannot help himself because he does believe he can talk his way out of anything. And, to be fair and objective, it has worked for him for seventy years. Now, however, the jig is up and he is simply having trouble coming to the realization the game is almost over. Whenever this trial occurs he is going to see the evidence of his consciousness of guilt over and over. So , too , will the jury. Is it possible a MAGite could work their way onto the jury and hang it? Sure, but then one Donald J. Trump will have to face the real trial of the century. The one for his conspiracy and actions to steal an election. And, it is for than one I am hoping the jury will find him and some of his co-conspirators guilty.