injunjane

I was saying he's a classic narcissist long before his second term.

But here's the conclusions of John Hopkins professor Dr. John Gartner who expressed concerns about Trump's mental health already in 2017.

Dr. John Gartner on Trump's dementia and narcissism

It seems that the podcast hostess was constantly attacking the guest (because this persistent mentioning of "so many medical terms that I do not understand" is clearly a way to attack and put the blame for her lack of understanding on the speaker). In the same time, I really enjoyed how the professor was responding and explaining.

"...We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another
to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into."

Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent.

The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience."

A. Huxley "The Doors of Perception"

Aldous Huxley - The doors of perception

One of the greatest and the most influential books I've ever read.

"The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions.

The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious."

Here he speaks about mental illness and it's similarity to his drug use experience. Also, Huxley interpreted his psychedelic experience according to the concept that our mind is a regulator (a valve) between an individual consciousness and so-called Mind in Large (if I understood it right, that should be something similar to the conscious universe of Buddhists).

The problem is, Huxley would probably have the same or similar experience if he would suddenly acquire the vision of an insect or sense of smell of a hunting dog. Or just went into a state when all neural filters between his 5(?) senses and his brain would suddenly stop working.

The world around us (not only inside us) contains immense amount of information, but if we could perceive it all at once, we'd gone mad.

Watch on YouTube

Stupid title, but a very interesting interview worthy of watching.

There is something which was not directly discussed in there but I think it's very important. In the middle of the talk Dr Kanojia says that social media and modern isolation do make people more narcissistic. I notice not only that, but the increasing tendency of failing to see 'big picture' out of enormous amount of facts nowadays available to people due to the internet.

This is IMHO similar to the 'differential diagnosis' mentioned by him a bit earlier in the same interview - people find opposite information about the same thing and assume that either one is 100% correct and another 100% wrong, or worse they are both equally true. Despite that usually there is general tendency and some outliers.

For example, for war in Ukraine there is a general truth - we are an independent state which was attacked unprovoked by the much larger and stronger neo-empire, and our people are fighting for 3 years for their survival as a nation. And there are (numerous but still) outliers like false volunteers selling humanitarian aid, deserters, and corrupted officials profiting from war. That doesn't mean all Ukrainians are corrupt or war crimes and deserting the battlefield are normal in Ukraine.

Learn to see differential diagnosis, not only separate facts.

By the way, there are tons of other useful info in this interview, too :)

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Entries tagged with psychology

Trump has dementia, along with malignant narcissism?

A. Huxley "The Doors of Perception"

The Doors of Perception

The importance of differential diagnosis

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