With what Graham Richardson used to call “the free personality analysis” — by his account, he and Paul Keating performed one on each other at the end of their long political association — Brendan Nelson left politics, describing his successor as suffering from “narcissistic personality disorder”, which had the press, and almost certainly Turnbull’s gormless advisers, reaching for the Google.
The line gained a whole news cycle of coverage. It didn’t deserve it, and the parting shot discredits Nelson not only as a failed politician, but also as a medical professional. It does nothing but add to the junk of our political culture.
What is this strange concept of “personality disorder”? It is a fairly recent category in psychiatry, used to replace a series of alleged mental conditions — hysteria, neurosis — which had developed from the birth of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the late 19th century. The various set of PDs — borderline, narcissistic, passive aggressive, oppositional defiant, anti-social, etc — overlap to some degree.
But they have two things in common: first, the sufferer is what we would call in common parlance, well fucked up. They all have some basic set of misunderstandings — so deep as to be relatively impervious to reflection and change — about the boundaries of self, cause and effect, their relationship to other people. Secondly, the condition is so bad that it is disabling, making it difficult to pursue careers, hold relationships, friendships, etc.
The latter qualification is important, because it only really qualifies as a PD condition if someone’s life is lying in pieces on the floor. The idea of PDs has gained a lot of criticism of late — especially the way in which new ones are budded off at the drop of a hat by the editors of the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for US psychiatrists. The original purpose of the DSM was to try and develop standard classifications so that psychiatrists from different schools of thought could talk to each other.
In the huge hospital of America, it now has another purpose — to make the treatment of mental health quantifiable for insurance companies. But like ADD and bipolar disorder (manic depression) it has spread from the small number of people genuinely suffering something major, to the cause of social control of youth (in the case of ADD), and avoiding dealing with one’s deep internal conflicts by self-diagnosing (bipolar disorder).
Now whatever else Turnbull is, he is not ineffective in his life. He has a long-standing marriage, a successful legal and business career and appears to have more friendships than your average pollie. By definition he is an ordered and integrated subject.
Quite possibly he is also an a-sehole — rude, arrogant, individualistic, backstabbing without compunction. But, of course, Nelson couldn’t say that as the door hit him on the way out, because that would be a pure cry of pain, an admission of howling defeat. So, to try and gain a last bit of power, he resorts to professional power to try and portray Malcolm in a muddle. Good, hah? I got lots of those. Where was I?
Ah yes. There are two possibilities — either Nelson doesn’t have a clue about what a NPD description really involves, or he does, but is willing to misuse the discourse to make a cheap point. It’s pathetic and professionally disreputable.
It does, however, serve one function — to make clear how much psychiatry is about power, that of one subject, the doctor, to turn another subject, the patient, into an object by the application of a jargon. In some cases that is necessary and therapeutic as a stage in treatment of people in a severe bind. But its remorseless spread is simply an attack on the idea of the free, or potentially free, human being, shaping their own lives.
Some people sometimes lose that freedom or never gain it (most serious personality disorders result from violent childhoods or disturbed families — the personality “sets” like a permanently broken bone, another reason not to be flippant about it).
And the psychological interpretation of politicians and public figures is quite legitimate, and necessary — and if Turnbull’s colleagues had done a bit of thinking about the wellsprings of his impetuousness and short attention span, some might have had valuable second thoughts about his elevation.
But the pathologisation of the varieties of human behaviour is something else. Illiberal in the extreme, the fact that liberals seem most interested in engaging with it — Jeff Kennett, on the basis of a pamphlet someone read to him, saw fit to diagnose Mark Latham with bipolar disorder — is a measure of how degraded the tradition is within the party that bears its name.
Clinical Narcissism was often previously described as borderline personality disorder. The term only came into being in the 1980’s as best I can adduce but it represents a life of hell for all those in contact with such a being. It is evidently incurable but is manageable with drugs. It is believed that most of the great and feared dictators in world history possessed such a profile. In a book by Dr. Sam Vaknin entitled Malignant Self Love : Narcissism Revisited, the writer, a card carrying narcissist, claims to have written it to assist all those in the narcissist’s socio-emotional circle before they also descend into madness. Vaknin points out that the narcissist (N type personality) does not love themself because they are incapable of love. They are without genuine affect and merely reflect the emotions of others they have observed as a means of communicating.
Dr Vaknin describes in some detail how the “N” type thinks, feels and acts on a daily basis, as an automaton, a speedboat out of control, a loose cannon on deck, with an exaggerated sense of grandiosity – almost of divine right. Although not a sadist per se, the N type according to Vaknin is certainly coercive and capable of extremely hurtful behaviour that can rival that of maladjusted and highly aggressive sociopath.
In their claim to unlimited glory they can exhibit both a generalised free floating paranoia, as well as overtly paranoid behaviour based on specific situations where their claim to grandiosity is challenged. Although not aggressive at the personality core, their capacity for aggressive display is almost unlimited. Not all narcissists are the same but a sense of divine right and open displays of hostility to those who would attempt to stultify these pretentions are common among most. Some writers postulate that this condition is the result of early abuse but I haven’t cited any evidence for this although if you have been watching the United States of Clare (DID as a result of trauma) you may have an inkling of why they think this.
Whether that fits the bill for the current leader of the Opposition, I guess those close to him would be best qualified to judge; although in Vaknin’s own words, “if a narcissist marries a submissive type, the partner may become tolerant of the abuse to the point of masochism”, or what Karen Horney would describe as “morbid dependency”.
So make of it what you will!
Here’s the thing that I wonder about – why have we had to read so much about what Nelson said? OK, he left with a smack at his successor, common enough. But let’s face it, name calling is not diagnosis, nor does it need to be dissected for days.
Instead of ‘reaching for Google’ and writing about what was there – how about some other forms of research and engagement with political issues ? I know the pollies themselves make it hard sometimes, but surely the self-proclaimed purveyor of ‘independent news and commentary’ can reach beyond this level of gossip style commentary.
R.
Fair comment, Guy, but without going into psychiatry and anti-psychiatry too much, large organisations and middle management generally are riddled with ‘narcissistic powerpaths’, people who often don’t reason well but use and abuse the power they garner to set themselves up comfortably to the cost of the organisation and to the careers of the people they manipulate around them. I’ve encountered an extreme case of one such person, I would say functioning much worse than Malcolm Turnbull, but such people are given oxygen by dysfunctional management structures around authority that say you can never question managers and must close ranks around poor-performing managers for the sake of face to the lower echelons. Remember, some huge number, more than half I think it is, of people leave their jobs because of problems with the people they work with. There are many more cases of this highlighted at a huge number of websites that have spring up: just google’ bullying’ and see how many of these sites come up. And it’s a lifespan ‘disease’ generally, i.e. the playground bully may well become the office bully.
Even Peter Cundall in a recent interview suggested that the greatest threat to civilisation today was the existence of such people in organisations, (especially) including the ABC.
See Beware the psycho in a suit – smh.com.au for a good description of the syndrome.
As the article points out, NPs aren often glib, but generally do things that are counter-productive for the organisation, and ride roughshod over people around them, ignoring workers rights, with the aim of cementing security, power and status for themselves. (I suppose a lot of pollies might fall into this category also.) Often the Western industrial understandings of what a manager should be feed the NP as well — authoritative, domineering, opinionated, and so on — so they are really fed and nourished by today’s large hierarchical organisations. Most people can think of plenty of managers who are narcissistic, domineering, petty, vengeful, and lacking good judgement who simply hang on to their jobs by stroking an ego higher up.
The ‘narcissistic powerpath’ is a coinage and not in DSM-IV, but demonstrate some pretty extreme narcissistic tendencies on a continuum of normal (or even self-effacing) to NPD. The other side of the NP syndrome is ‘antisocial personality’, i.e. not caring about effects on others at any level:
“A corporate powerpath is a cunning schemer who works out clearly how any situation can be worked to their advantage. The reason they wouldn’t kill a work rival would be because they know that ending up in prison would be bad for them. The morality of the act wouldn’t occur to them.”
Unfortunately, we’re surrounded by such people in society, although honest and decent people don’t like to think it is a commonplace, and think the ‘rules of the game’ of civilised society – work hard, be conscientious, receive a reasonable wage and have a quiet life not bothering others and lending assistance where necessary – are shared by everyone. In fact, for altruistic people, the very thought patterns of an NP are unthinkable and hence unbelievable.
However, natural selection is all about survival, and the spectrum of behaviours up to NPD are there because they have, or had, natural survival value in some environment or another. Deception and egoism are techniques that ensure your survival and return more benefits to you, across all species. That it can become deranged and that many people still have these traits should then not be a surprise. Under this perspective, think of the lovers often reported in the papers who calmly plan the murder of an inconvenient spouse, or for money, etc and, while shocked, we should not really be surprised. The very history of civilisation has been around nobles grasping, fighting and kiilling for personal benefit after all, almost ubiquitously. We seem to have forgotten this lesson hardwired into our genes. Well, somebody else’s genes, then.
I’m just surprised that Brendan Nelson, being in politics and the AMA for so long, should have just realised the existence of this trait in others.
Further, as Richard Wilson points out, NPDs or NPs or just plain sub-clinical narcissistic people demonstrate other ‘psychopathological’ (by common definition) traits like paranoia, or dysfunctional relationships with other due to constant accusations or undermining. There are a cluster of other traits that are common to PDs when you read DSM-IV and Kaplan and Sadock, etc.
My revised theory of everything sees paranoia as another adaptive survival trait and kind of essentially ‘healthy’ — if you are suspicious of everything and everyone , no matter what their true motives, you are less likely to be surprised on the one time in ten something or someone is actually malevolent. You have sacrificed happiness for survival. One persons’s paranoia is another’s sound judgement, especially in the cutthroat world of competitive business, or avoiding internet scams, or saber-tooth tiger attacks. Being deeply suspicious has survival value for an individual (or a business), although it does not lead to harmonious relationships or personal happiness. Hey, nature’s not perfect, it never claimed to be — it just comes up with heuristics and neural patterns that in a roughshod way have ensured the survival of individuals and the species, no matter how dysfunctional they might appear or become.
Nelson by his calculated timing indicated passive aggressive streak I thought.
If I were Nelson I’d be reflecting on the WMD that never were. The wonder is he didn’t resign on the election morning.