"Something's Wrong with the President"

A Congreeman from Michigan just, now, told Thomas Roberts (~10 am Sunday) that "There is something wrong with this President."

Just some thoughts about this ... I'm still unclear -- after some surgery end-last-week -- but coherent enough to try to clarify my position, again. 

Some Say He's Healthier than Any President, Before

(1) I have repeatedly made clear my idiosyncratic sense since last Summer that the then-nominee, Trump, was either playing games by presenting himself as a personality-disturbed individual to the possible detriment of billions or, else, he was suffering from such a personality disorder. 

(2) Again, I have been suggesting that he presented the triad of characteristics that I find ubiquitous in folks with NPD and BPD ... namely, 

• a. the incapacity to see others as subjects in their own right (ie, empathy); 
• b. the splitting (Freud's spaltung) of others into a binary category of with-me or agin-me ...               essentially the instinct driven "prey or predator ... or accepted kin"; and 
• c. an impulse disorder. 

(3) I have added, since then, two other implied (by the first 3) charachteristics, namely: 

• a. the tendency towards one-horse, ie, monomaniacal models of thought and 
• b. the failure to develop a sense of interest in and concern for the future ... 

(4) I think it best to be careful in not presenting Personality Disorders or Character Pathology as simply unstable; it's more complicated than that. Since the beginning of such discussions about states that are neither conflict-based (then, called neuroses) nor quasi-brain-based (psychoses) ... since the time that is of the classic papers by Reich, Deutsch and RP Knight ... these have been thought of as more or less stable conditions that typically have "a bottom" that is well above the schizophrenic disorders. These are, that is and paradoxically, stable states of instability. They are (all this to my way of thinking, need I add) more or less unchangeable and not amenable to treatment in the vast majority of cases (Freud's "stone wall of Narcissism), nevermind in people mine and Trump's age.

(5) The NRA group has long held that it is not guns that kill but people and their mental illnesses that kill. The 1% of the population that pretty consistently and homogeneously-across-population groups are schizophrenic don't seem to be the typical suspects, but rather this group that continues-on for years without the various trappings that go along with a lack of empathy. Some may be schizophrenic, as well ... but that is a subtype. Lots of schizophrenics are quite capable of a reasonable or more level of empathy ... again, in my experience. The PD group, though and when armed, may pose a clear and present danger to public safety ... even in their relative state of stable-instability. 

(6) I continue to believe that it is not only Kosher but obligatory under the spirit of Tarasoff to openly speak about the dangers of arming anyone with serious PD with even a "38," nevermind Nuclear ICBM's. Not only do I think the Goldwater Ruling of the Amer Psychiatric Assoc is trumped by Tarasoff, but I believe the Goldwater Ruling to be in error. Indeed, the Tarasoff Ruling in most states, as I understand, is taken as including protection against legal reprisal for reporting. On a number of occasions in the past 40 years, I have given PD visitors to my office a choice: Leave your weapon here or I must remove it from you and, if I cannot, I will call the police. 

(7) As Mordechai says to Esther, in the Book of Esther: "Don't silently fascinate in your heart that you can be silent at a time like this." Or, as Leviticus so neatly opines: "Yes, don't go looselipped among your people but don't stand by idly as your neighbor is about to bleed; this is Godliness." (I have taken only the minor liberties of the translator in rendering this passage from Lev 19.) 

(8) I'm going back to bed, now, gladdened by those who are speaking out on Squares and onLine, in their blogs and in airports. I am terrified by the notion, too, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been removed from the National Security Meetings, except when beckoned by the Boy who would be King.