Obama's Malignant Narcissism

From American Thinker
By James Lewis

The hardest thing in psychiatry is to keep an open mind while sitting with a patient, who might be trying to provoke and manipulate the doctor, day after day, month after month. We want to understand troubled people, but people are complex. Psychiatric diagnoses are just reasonable guesses. Most human beings are much too mixed, much too complicated, and much too interesting to reduce to just a checklist.

Obama is the exception. Lots of people talk like narcissists -- when teenagers get grandiose, or when they start to lie to and manipulate their parents, it might be just a phase they're going through. Lots of people preen and strut on life's stage without losing their sense of proportion. But I think Obama just turned all his grandiose talk into irrevocable action. I don't think we've had this extreme and radical a president ever before in American history. Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR took radical actions, but only at a time of huge national crises. We don't have a national crisis today. Obama is our national crisis.

Obama is going for the "nuclear option" to force very bad and very toxic medicine down our throats. He is willing to sacrifice his congressional majorities to get the biggest, most budget-busting entitlement ever imagined into the permanent fabric of American national life. The main beneficiaries of Obamacare will be Obama's ego and the Permanent Left. This is his chance to be FDR, and he can't control his need for that glorified image. He is therefore crossing the Rubicon -- making an irreversible decision that will define his presidency forever, win or lose. This is not just another grandiose gesture. Obama now stands revealed for what he is.

Sure, we've had lots of evidence of his oddities over the last two years -- Obama giving the finger to Hillary during the campaign; Obama thrilling to the sound of his own voice echoing at the Berlin Victory Monument, using Karl Marx's own words in Marx's old haunting grounds; Obama speaking to the whole Muslim world from Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo; Obama rushing to Copenhagen to rescue a scientifically phony climate treaty; Obama suddenly looking enraged last week when Rep. Paul Ryan demonstrated with impeccable logic that ObamaCare just doesn't add up. It's simple arithmetic. That C-SPAN shot of Obama's sudden expression of rage when he couldn't answer
Paul Ryan is now being analyzed frame-by-frame by the intelligence agencies of the world. Their psychological teams are trained to look for momentary facial expressions, to study this man in every conceivable way, to see out how his mind works. If he can change the destiny of nations, you can be sure that lots of nations have whole KGB Directorates trying to read him. It's hardly a perfect science, but they would be fools not to try.

They are not fools.

Here's a partial checklist. You decide.

1. "Common to malignant narcissism is narcissistic rage. Narcissistic rage is a reaction to narcissistic injury (when the narcissist feels degraded by another person, typically in the form of criticism)."

2. "When the narcissist's grandiose sense of self-worth is perceived as being attacked by another person, the narcissist's natural reaction is to rage and pull down the self-worth of others (to make the narcissist feel superior to others). It is an attempt by the narcissist to soothe their internal pain and hostility, while at the same time rebuilding their self worth."

3. "Narcissistic rage also occurs when the narcissist perceives that he/she is being prevented from accomplishing their grandiose fantasies."

4. "Because the narcissist derives pleasure from the fulfillment of their grandiose dreams (akin to an addiction), anyone standing between the narcissist and their (wish) fulfillment ... may be subject to narcissistic rage. Narcissistic rage will frequently include yelling and berating of the person that has slighted the narcissist, but if strong enough could provoke more hostile feelings."

5. "Individuals with malignant narcissism will display a two faced personality. Creation of a 'false self' is linked to the narcissist's fear of being inadequate or inferior to others and this mask becomes ingrained into their personality so as to project a sense of superiority to others at all times."

6. "The narcissist gains a sense of esteem from the feedback of other people as it is common for the malignant narcissist to suffer from extremely low levels of self-esteem."

7. "The ... false self of the malignant narcissist is created because the real self doesn't meet his or her own expectations. Instead, the narcissist tends to mimic emotional displays of other people and creates a grandiose self to harbor their internalized fantasies of greatness."

8. "The [false self] is used by the narcissist to present to the outside world what appears to be a normal, functioning human being and to help maintain his or her own fantasies of an idealized self. The narcissist constantly builds upon this false self, creating a fictional character that is used to show off to the world and to help them feed off the emotions of other people."

There's ongoing debate about "malignant narcissism" as a diagnosis, and some people prefer to use the standard DSM-IV version. It doesn't make much difference in this case.

The biggest question is what happens next. If Obama is stopped, will he react irrationally? Or, for that matter, if he succeeds, will he become even more grandiose? Some possibilities are worrisome.

It's possible that Obama may be a "fanatic type" of narcissist. That could mean a world of trouble for the Democrats, for the nation, and given his position in the world, for other countries as well.

Here is Theodore Millon's definition of the fanatic type:

fanatic type - including paranoid features. A severely narcissistically wounded individual, usually with major paranoid tendencies who holds onto an illusion of omnipotence. These people are fighting the reality of their insignificance and lost value and are trying to re-establish their self-esteem through grandiose fantasies and self-reinforcement. When unable to gain recognition of support from others, they take on the role of a heroic or worshipped person with a grandiose mission.

By choosing the "nuclear option," Obama is demonstrating do-or-die fanaticism. This makes for great TV football, but it's very dangerous for the man in the biggest power seat in the world. We are seeing Obama the Radical taking over from Obama the Pragmatist -- if that one ever really existed. From what we know about his fanatical associates like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, sacrificing the Democratic Party majority in Congress would be only a small price to pay.

The question is what real damage Obama may do to the country. This man has been entrusted with the greatest power in the world. He will have that power for the next three years at least.

But he may not be able to emotionally tolerate any real limits on his need for self-aggrandizement and power. And still he can't be allowed to beat the country into submission.

Good luck to all of us.

Obama's Revenge Against GM

From American Thinker
By James Lewis

Watching Obama is a psychiatrist's delight. Here we have a middle-aged man with no real-world accomplishments, but with truly astonishing grandiosity and a rock-star following that confirms his Jesus Christ Complex at every opportunity. Obama must have real, ingrained grandiosity, the kind that is anchored deep in the soul. He goes ‘way beyond the usual high-fallutin' rhetoric from presidential speech writers -- because he has just fired the President and CEO of General Motors, something no previous president, including FDR or JFK, would ever have imagined doing.

That's not rhetoric, and it isn't just show. It's an political gamble unprecedented in American history, a throw of the dice so breath-taking that the press, the pundits and the voters haven't yet been able to take it in. It is a sort of political Blitzkrieg, a lightning stroke so sudden that it's hard to even understand, but which will trigger wave upon wave of thunderous echoes in the years to come.

If this were a Hitchcock movie I'd be settling back for a rollicking good time. Unfortunately, it is reality -- and that means we have another four years of this psychodrama to live through. Good luck to us all.

The liberal cliché -- a false one -- is that capitalism follows the slogan, "What's good for General Motors is good for the United States." For the moment it is not relevant that the President of GM never said that during the Eisenhower years. What's important is that Google shows 389,000,000 citations for the phrase "good for General Motors." It's a mental meme gone viral on the Left, and all the liberals think it means that to rich capitalists, GM comes first and everybody else comes later -- or maybe never. It is the leftist accusation that has stuck in the minds of the liberals.

We know that Obama has a very conventional mind. I have not heard a single novel or even interesting idea from the man over all the months that I've listened to him. He clearly has no understanding of classical economics. He doesn't understand, as Bill Clinton did, the real harm and suffering that welfare dependency has inflicted on black people after LBJ's War on Poverty. He does not understand the elementary difference between productive and non-productive investment of scarce resources. He has no conception of the damage inflicted by inflation on the poor, more than even on the rest of the country. He has no real understanding of the dizzying complexities of foreign policy -- nor does his Secretary of State, who was hardly picked for her competence in foreign affairs.

These are not just rank amateurs, they are willfully ignorant amateurs, who also happen to be grandiose narcissists, and who now have free reign over the levers of power in the United States. We are all watching the Titanic steaming full speed ahead right before that diamond-hard iceberg tears off all the steel rivets from her skin. If you're not aghast, you're just not paying attention.

So why did he decide to fire Rick Wagoner, the President and CEO of General Motors?

Was it sound policy? Not likely. But if you think it was, watch the Dow and the economy in the coming months, and then decide.

Was it sound politics? Not likely. The Democrats who are up for election next year are already dancing away from this one just as fast as they can move. That's why they say it was all the White House's doing. Don't look at me! I didn't do it!

(It's up to the GOP and the New Media to hang this one around their necks come election time.)

So why did he do it?

Read the rest of this entry >>

Obama is a Pathological Narcissist Declares Psychological Authority

By Ali Sina

I must confess, I was not impressed by Sen. Barack Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident, a wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words.

Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such a quasi "religious" impact on so many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with zero accomplishment makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming.

Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact, he is quite ignorant on most important subjects. Barack Obama is a narcissist.

Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of "Malignant Self Love," also believes, "Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist."

Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands it and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens.

Vaknin says that Obama's language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, nearest and dearest suggest that the Senator is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Joe Stalin, Saddam, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong IL, and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers and followers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirer's souls, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life. Those men gave their followers hope! They promised them the moon, but alas, they invariably brought them to their doom.

When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don't know it until it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse. "Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations," says Vaknin.

"Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. His mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia, a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a stepfather. He was raised as an only child, full of himself and no others. He never had to share the spotlight with any siblings. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995."

One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them.

Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around him and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality; his admirers become his co-dependents.

Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objectives. They are focused on one thing alone, and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention.

If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The "Present" vote is a safe vote; he used the "Present" all the time as a member of the Illinois legislature. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Why should he implicate himself in issues that may become controversial when they don't help him personally?

Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and an advance to write a book about race relations.

The University of Chicago Law School provided him with a fellowship and an office to work on his book.

The book took him a lot longer than expected, and at the end it devolved into guess what? His own autobiography!

Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book "Dreams from My Father." Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself?

Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama's lack of interest in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month. A man who lives in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who has raised nearly a half billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? His brother cannot be used for his ascent to power.

A narcissist cares for no one but himself. This election is like no other election in the history of America. The issues are insignificant compared to what is at stake.

What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of a conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world?

I hate to sound alarmist, but one must be a fool if one is not alarmed.

Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They are simply self-serving and selfish. [Witness Al Gore's Income Tax; it reveals that he gave away NO MONEY to charities, not even to a church!]

Obama evinces symptoms of pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined.

This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw.

Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous. [Look up the word 'treachery.']

Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their party [and to this great nation]. The great majority of blacks have also decided to vote for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple. The truth is that, while everyone carries a misconceived collective guilt towards blacks for wrongs done centuries ago by a bygone people to a bygone people, the blacks carry a collective rancor, enmity or vendetta towards non-blacks, and to this day want to "stand up" to the white man. They seem to be stuck in 19th century [encouraged by race baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and others]. The downside of this is, that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads deeper in the sand and blame Obama's detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash among the whites.

The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support. I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will increase to levels not seen since the turbulent 1960s. Obama will set the clock back decades. America is the bastion of freedom.

The peace of the world depends on the strength of America, and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Maoist Castroists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so thrilled by the prospect of "their man" in the White House.

America is on the verge of destruction. There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.