Susan Matthews over at Slate writes about attempts to diagnose Donald Trump, by mental health professionals and laypeople:
There have been cautiously speculative stories in the New York Times, here on Slate, in Vanity Fair and the Washington Post and the Atlantic, all of them seeming to grow from the same unspoken wish: to explain away the crazy by labeling it as a real disorder. We like to put a name to our monsters. Diagnosing Trump, whether doing so without examining him is proper or not, helps.
Her extensive analysis of how best to understand Trump’s pathology includes delving deeply into the work and thinking of Theodor Millon, to whom she rightly assigns the title ‘godfather of personality disorder analysis’. She notes that Millon
was drawn to the field in part by Nazis and fascists. Born in Manhattan in 1928 to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Millon addressed his doctoral dissertation to “a theme of great concern at that time, which had to do with post-Second World War concerns regarding the Nazi Fascistic kind of mentality,” as he told fellow psychologist Michael Shaughnessy. “I did a research study on assessing the characteristics of authoritarian or fascistic personalities.”
Matthews offers lengthy, and truly frightening, excerpts from Millon’s description of Narcissists. Please read them in full, but to give an sense of how Millon (an expert among experts) views the psychological functioning of Narcissists:
Narcissists are neither disposed to stick to objective facts nor to restrict their actions within the boundaries of social custom or cooperative living. … Free to wander in their private world of fiction, narcissists may lose touch with reality, lose their sense of proportion, and begin to think along peculiar and deviant lines.
Were narcissists able to respect others, allow themselves to value others’ opinions, or see the world through others’ eyes, their tendency toward illusion and unreality might be checked or curtailed. Unfortunately, narcissists have learned to devalue others, not to trust their judgments, and to think of them as naïve and simpleminded. Thus, rather than question the correctness of their own beliefs they assume that the views of others are at fault.
As a psychologist in clinical practice, I think we do a disservice if we don’t state plainly what we are all observing, and what professionals know to be true— Trump is Narcissistic in the formal sense, not just the colloquial ‘this guy is full of himself’ sense. One need not have met Trump face to face to see that every observation Millon made of Narcissists applies to Trump, so obviously and clearly that to suggest otherwise is nonsensical.
But a full understanding of Trump’s evident psychopathology is not the most important aspect of Matthew’s analysis. Rather, what is most significant is her assessment of why his Narcissism has been facilitated, allowed to run rampant, causing horrific damage to so many unfortunate enough to have any contact with him, because of class, social and cultural norms, and the politico-economic apparatus designed by and for men like him:
I think the privilege into which Trump was born has exempted him from the operating rules of civilized society. Whether he’s bragging about sexual assault, denying reality during the debates, or promising to reject the democratic process itself if it does not happen to favor him, the thread that connects them all is privilege. The impunity he has enjoyed is chilling, and so is his blithe certainty that it will always be there for him. The privilege he derives from his gender and his fame and his father and his class and his race seems to have granted him a lifetime pass. The result of such a life is a man whom we cannot help but pathologize. (emphahis added)
The same might be said of Roger Ailes, Sheldon Adelson, and countless others.