On 2023-08-18, I read 15 posts by the now-extinct blog The Last Psychiatrist (TLP). I documented this in a Twitter thread, which reviewed the posts. I now believe that I have found an inconsistency between two of the posts that I read, from which I will quote now.
The first post is The Wrong Lessons Of Iraq, from 2007-05-24, describing the self-deception of some soldiers who were taken hostage by Iran:
Here’s an example I fear no one will understand. The Iranians took 15 British soldiers hostage. I don’t know what constitutes an act of war, but I figure this is pretty much it. The soldiers surrendered without a fight (ironically, so as not to start an international incident), and then pretended to go along with the Iranians. They did the song and dance “we are bad, we are imperialists, Ahmadinejad is good, we’re sorry, thanks for being so nice to us” and were eventually released.
So I’m sure those soldiers were thinking, “look, I know who I am, I know I’m not a coward, I’m not helping the Iranians, but I have to do whatever is necessary to get out of this mess.” What they are saying is that they can declare who they are, and what they do has no impact on it. “I am a hero, regardless of how I act.” That’s the narcissist fallacy. Whatever they may think about themselves, the fact is that they did help the Iranians, and they are not heroes. But I can see that it is ego protective, I can see why they might take this perspective. There are few things in life worse than being taken hostage by the Iranians, so I understand why they would choose this type of self-deception, why they would turn to narcissism for defense. Bottom line is, I guess you can’t fault them for playing along.
But here’s the thing: when they returned home to Britain, they were heralded as heroes by other people. Including the British government. Based on what? They didn’t actually do anything; heroism isn’t simply living through a bad experience. Well, of course: based on the fact that they are heroes who had to pretend to be something else.
That’s the narcissist’s tautology: you are what you say you are because you said you are. What makes it an example of our collective narcissism is that we agree-- we want it to be true that they, and we, can declare an identity. [...]
Enough quoting. As you can see, according to TLP’s idea of narcissism, the narcissist delusion is to think you are something other than what you act like. Given a specific action that you did, you can’t decide that it isn’t who you really are, and that your identity is really defined by other factors. It doesn’t matter that these soldiers bravely volunteered to fight, and it doesn’t matter that their actions in Iran were done under duress. They don’t get to disavow their actions: they did what they did, and if they did it, that’s who they are. OK.
Now onto the second quote, which is actually earlier, from the first post in the blog. If This Is One of The Sexiest Things You’ve Ever Seen, You May Be a Narcissist, from 2006-12-29:
Consider the narcissist who wants his wife to wear only white, high heeled pumps. The narcissist wants this not because he himself likes white high heel pumps-- which he might-- but because the type of person he thinks he is would only be with the type of woman who wears white high heeled pumps. Or, in other terms, other people would expect someone like himself to be with a woman who wears those shoes. What he likes isn’t the relevant factor, and certainly what she likes is irrelevant. What matters is that she (and her shoes) are accessories to him.
Never mind that the woman is obese, or 65, or the shoes out of style, or impractical-- the shoes represent something to him, and he is trying to reinforce his identity through that object.
Narcissists typically focus on specific things as proxies for their identity. As in the example above, that the woman might be obese or a paraplegic could be ignored if the footwear was the proxy for identity. These proxies are also easy to describe but loaded with implication: “I’m married to a blonde.” Saying “blonde” implies something-- e.g. she’s hot-- that might not be true. But the narcissist has so fetishized “blondeness” that it is disconnected from reality. The connotations, not the reality, are what matters (especially if other people can’t check.)
Here we have the same notion of the narcissist being overly attached to an identity, but the message is the opposite: the narcissist delusion is to think you are not something other than what you act like. Given a specific action that you did, you can’t decide that it is who you really are, and that your identity is defined by it instead of other factors. It doesn’t matter that this guy actually did get his wife to wear white high-heeled pumps: if you take the broader view, you can see that this fact isn’t representative of who he really is. He doesn’t get to stake his identity on that fact: even though he did get his wife to wear the shoes, the fact that he got this fact to be the case doesn’t change who, behind it all, he really is.
If you apply the standard of the first quote to the second, the narcissist is right: after all, if he did get his wife to wear white high-heeled pumps, then he can’t be anything other than the type of guy whose wife wears white high-heeled pumps. If you apply the standard of the second quote to the first, the narcissist is right: after all, the soldiers shouldn’t take this one set of cowardly actions in Iran to define who they are, when the rest of the context of their lives, as well as the praise of their countrymen, all agrees that they really are heroes.
It seems that, if you got TLP to be your analyst, then he would simply decide who you “really” are, and if you pointed to your actions to the contrary, then he would call it a narcissistic fixation. After all, you are privileging your self-image over “the reality” that he has oh-so-objectively determined.
But of course, if you decide to believe him entirely about who you are, then you’re taking your identity wholly from your external environment, and he thinks that that is bad too, since this is what he calls Borderline. You just can’t win with this guy.
