ANATOMY OF A DIVIDER: PART 1A. WHY OBAMA CANNOT UNIFY

This excellent post was written October 22nd, and has been updated to reflect the current reality. It was cross-posted at www.lynettelong.com.

Imagine yourself at the podium talking to a huge crowd, and the words on the teleprompter say things like: "This is the moment that the world is waiting for. . ." or, "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." How do you pull it off? Maybe you flash to Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, running across the top of a train shouting, "Acaba! Acaba!" with stirring music underwriting your every move. Even so, something in you hesitates at throwing your full self into such grandiosity. Something healthy in you that feels it’s just too way over the top. Besides, isn’t it up to other people to say whether you are a transformative figure?

That something in you that hesitates is not present in some people, such as Barack Obama. When he proclaims that, "we are the change we’ve been waiting for," he goes full tilt with a straight face and no embarrassment. Those caught up in his rhetoric feel like they are part of the "we," and that they are going to be part of something big and wonderful together. Others of us get an unsettling sense that even when he says "we," it’s all about him, quite singular. We don’t sense individuals in a crowd relating to him (as we do, for example, when Hillary Clinton speaks), but a fused entity lost in him. He is not offering to  serve them or fight on their behalf. He is proclaiming that they can become part of him. Many of us get an eerie chill because this is the kind of messianic promise made by cult leaders, not politicians.

And that’s just the beginning of the diametrically opposed reactions to Obama that have deeply divided feminists, progressives, and Democrats, and pitted friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors, networks, interest group members and officials, former political allies, as well as demographic groups against one another. One of the things that keeps us so divided is that his devotees and even many of his converts seem to know so little about him yet consistently reject information that does not fit with their trusting view of him. Many pour out unprecedented—for "progressives"—nastiness, misinformation, and hatred to demean Hillary Clinton and then Sarah Palin, and to intimidate and even threaten those who don’t agree with them. Their bullying has dominated campuses, caucuses, and the convention as well as the blogosphere and media. "Truth squads" aim to silence anything but unqualified admiration.

This is not politics as usual. How can we explain the depth and ferocity of opposing views about a man who portrays himself as a uniter? What is unleashing such widespread animosity and bullying? Is there something about the candidate himself that is inherently divisive?

When a situation has lots of pieces that don’t seem to fit, I look for a lens that can make comprehensive sense of them. In this case, we can get part of the way there via Alinsky-style "community organizing" which Obama says is the best education he ever had. This explanation dovetails perfectly with another that takes us deeper and makes sense of diametrically opposed perceptions and reactions: the anatomy of the candidate’s "self-system." The hypothesis advanced here is that his self-system appears to be organized by "narcissistic personality disorder" (NPD). The NPD lens can illuminate the structure and dynamics not only of the candidate but also of his campaign and the roles of the key sets of players. That is the focus of this article which has grown into two parts: why Obama cannot unify, and how he has divided us.

Having first engaged seriously with NPD 30 years ago and integrated it into my interdisciplinary work, I find the term "narcissist" can be a valuable tool when it is not tossed out casually or without a clue that the self-centered-ness to which it typically refers is merely the tip of an iceberg. We need to dive beneath the surface.

When we do, we discover that NPD is a defective way of organizing the self. Rather than growing around a core, it is cut in half and has no center. The ensuing hollowness and fragmentation explains why "NPDs" lack empathy and authenticity, and have difficulty standing by a principle. It’s also why the psychiatrists who first began recognizing this pattern referred to it as the "as-if" personality. Non-professionals who try to figure out NPDs invariably find themselves
encountering masks and personae, and puzzle over what lies beneath them. Where is the "real" person? Where is the "real" Barack Obama?

They will never succeed in finding him. The devastating truth about NPDs is that there is no "there" there. Nothing substantial and real lies under the masks. There are only masks.

But there is an invisible anatomy beneath the masks. It makes sense of what otherwise doesn’t. It shows us how the pieces fit together and why NPDs are inherently divisive. NPD is not uncommon, and it comes in variable degrees and with different overlays. We’ve all paid an enormous price for not recognizing NPD the last time around. Bush, too, claimed to be a uniter. Despite the disaster he has perpetrated, the Democratic establishment and most of the media have learned absolutely nothing. They can’t wait to do it all over again.

I, on the other hand, being a sociologist, tend to look beneath the surface to social and behavioral processes and the meanings they enact. I have been appalled by what it reveals about this campaign. I am perhaps even more disturbed by the feeble degree of interest and outrage among so many Democrats about these processes and what that bodes for our future. My allegiance is to neither wing of the corporate party nor their candidates, but to getting at the truth—the only basis for any of the
things we say we value.

The issue of divisiveness initially came into focus during the spring because, despite his rhetoric, Obama’s campaign and captive media kept hammering Clinton as "polarizing," and, along with the DNC, as "dividing the Party." How could a candidate who kept getting stronger and winning all the swing states be seen that way—unless, as we now know, the playing field had been rigged before a single vote was cast? This claim had legs, however, because it built on the old shibboleth that Hillary is polarizing. Really? What has seemed obvious to me for the past sixteen years is that Hillary is just the Rorschach onto whom has been projected our culture’s polarizing ambivalence about women, especially powerful women, a deep ambivalence that is carried by many women as well as many men. Not only was Hillary getting a phoney bad rap, but, equally troubling, why were so many voters unable to see through the media narratives to discern that the Obama campaign, their bloggers, and their captive media were the ones generating extraordinarily hateful vitriol and divisiveness?

When I began this piece in early August, we could still hold out the hope that the pledged and automatic delegates could resist the monumental pressure and intimidation to choose the eminently qualified woman over the unqualified man—and of course, as most people don’t know, they nearly did on Convention Wednesday until they were quashed. Although the short-term electoral context has changed, nothing changes the absolute necessity of untangling the modus operandi of this campaign. Liberal ideologues will consider my critique heretical while I consider their singularity and suppression of other narratives dangerous. I’m in the business of deconstructing false narratives and exposing what goes on beneath them—the job our defunct Fourth Estate failed to do.

Forming a Self: the Right Way and a Wrong Way. To understand NPD, we need to see the invisible structure beneath the masks. The kind of structure in focus here is mental: how we represent images, feelings, and experiences and organize them into a pattern or structure. Because we filter new experience through that structure, it becomes a self-reproducing system. The most basic of these structures is how we configure the self.

Gaining a sense of self while also learning about relationships and boundaries with others is the big task of an infant/toddler. When this goes well, "I" develop a sense of "me" and "you" in relationship with a realistic internal boundary separating us.

• Someone organized by NPD never got that right. Instead, the young narcissist-to-be lays down a different primary pattern: good/bad.

• The profoundly disturbing implication is that his self has no core or center from which to grow himself. Instead, he has two halves split off from each other. They don’t "talk" to each other. His self-boundary is in the wrong place. It divides him in two rather than drawing a line between himself and the other.

• What gets really crazy-making is that both halves of "me" get mixed up with "you" (i.e., my mental representations of you). Both halves cut right across self and other. "Good me" conflates parts of you and of me, and "bad you" conflates different parts of you and of me.

• The mixups enabled by his mislocated boundary lead to unending projections and reversals that are inevitably destructive, and make our heads spin when we try to untangle them. That’s why it is so important to slow them down and have some guidance for how to see their strange anatomy.

To add to our difficulty in seeing through the spaghetti maze, NPD is a deep structure which can be overlaid by later developments and adaptations that obscure its operation to many observers. The bright NPD can use his charm to "pass" with people who aren’t used to looking deeper, and in situations that do not threaten his faulty structure. Things get very nasty very quickly, however, whenever his "stuff" kicks in. That, not his surface adaptations, is my focus here. I begin with half of his faulty self, what the literature refers to as the "Grandiose Self."

Grandiose Self. The surface presentation of the Grandiose Self may be extremely charming, polished, even charismatic. He has a sense of entitlement and an appearance of great independence. Beneath his
grandiosity, however, lies a sense of emptiness and hollowness. How can he not feel hollow when he has no center?

Rather than learning how to "feed" and take care of himself, the NPD’s sense of entitlement leads him to expect to be filled up emotionally and supplied by his admirers. His Grandiose Self requires a steady diet of admiration, applause, and other supplies to feel alive, real, and good; anything less than wholehearted approval may be experienced as criticism. When the applause stops, the narcissist deflates like a balloon.

Beneath his grandiosity and entitlement lies the hidden structure of the NPD’s Grandiose Self. It conflates three streams into the "good" self who the narcissist considers himself to be:

 
(a) realaspects of himself that he "owns" as being "who I am";

 
(b) qualities he idealizes and claims for himself but does not in fact embody; and

 
(c) mirroring aspects of other(s) which feed his fantasy of himself by reflecting the only image of himself he identifies with and will accept and which he appropriates as part of himself.

What’s wrong with this structure? First of all, the narcissist lacks the normal tension between who he is and his ideal or fantasy of himself. That tension is essential to realistic self-perception. Presidential candidates do not normally claim that the other party’s administration is handling Gustav better than Katrina because they are following "my recommendations."

Once we know about that conflation, we are not quite so surprised by the Obama mantras about the world waiting for His Coming. That conflation also explains why the speaker of such words shows no embarrassment in speaking them, or in demanding a Greek temple stadium or the Brandenburg Gate, or usurping a presidential seal for his podium. He feels entitled to these venues, symbols, and much more. When called on it, he does not feel shamed. No acknowledgment of his gross inappropriateness will be forthcoming, only a denial of his intent when turned down ("The Brandenburg gate was only one venue we were considering") or denial of our interpretation ("We never intended to use the seal for more than one occasion"). It’s like a cat who has misjudged a leap: "I intended to change my position in precisely that manner." Yet a cat knows she is pretending; the narcissist doesn’t.

Given the absence of a center and the fragility of the Grandiose Self, narcissists are defensive, thin-skinned, and lack a sense of humor about themselves. This may not at first appear obvious because they conceal their lack of humor and humility with preemptive, inoculating statements about themselves. ("They’ll try to scare you and tell you that I’m ….." the stump speech intones.) But underneath: how dare anyone criticize! Or worse, poke fun.

Nothing hurts a narcissist more than ridicule. Mockery and even simple questions can trigger "narcissistic wounds" that lead to retaliatory behavior—especially if they churn up some truth he is trying to hide. No surprise then that following an acerbic cartoon cover of the presidential pretender and his wife, there was, according to Dana Milbank, no room for the New Yorker on the Europlane.

Obama’s conflation of fantasy and reality is readily observable in his representations of his polygynous father and his union with his mother. Barack, Jr. has created a mythic birth for himself that rearranges facts, events, and time, including the Selma march (four years after he was born!). His inability to represent his parents’ relationship realistically is merely the beginning of fabrications, distortions, denials, and coverups about his birth, childhood, schooling, family, and chunks of his adult life. Like many others, I am concerned about not only what he is hiding about himself, but also his still being a prisoner of his internal family drama.