The phenomenology of narcissism

Edgar Allan Poe, who played well enough to know, dismissed its "elaborate frivolity,"

calling it a game in which "what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is

profound." But upon the death of on January 17, 2008 at the age of 64, the one-

time world champion was celebrated as the most extraordinary of men, because in his prime he

had towered over his competitors and single-handedly created a worldwide boom in chess.

Most obituaries became tongue-tied, however, in reconciling his of genius at playing a board game with his incapacity for adapting to reality elsewhere. Leonard Cassuto, writing "In Praise of Bobby Fischer" for The Chronicle Review, February 1, 2008, put the matter this way:

His chess was not only uniquely creative, but also relentlessly clear and truth seeking. Bobby Fischer at the board was everything he wasn't when he was away from it: honest, deep, respectful, and even philosophical.

Poe would certainly have hooted at the idea of chess as an arena of truth and philosophy. Edward

Rothstein, writing in The New York Times, January 19, 2008, showed himself more aware of the insularity of chess from life in contrasting the game with other human endeavors that seem to reward powers of purely abstract thinking. Music and mathematics, seemingly remote from our everyday activities, are tested or transformed by the experience of life, whereas chess is not:

So when it comes time to look at the wider world, it might seem a vast extension The phenomenology of narcissism - 2

of the game, only ever so much more frightening because its conspiratorial strategies cannot be discovered in rule books, and its confrontations cannot be controlled by formal tournaments. That was the world that Bobby Fischer saw around him as he morphed from world champion chess player into world-class crank, never realizing that he had unwittingly blundered into .

So we have Fischer depicted by Cassuto as dishonest, shallow, disrespectful, and unphilosophical away from the chess board, scattering terms that are wildly malapropos for capturing Fischer's dysfunction; and as merely a crank, albeit one of "world-class" proportions, by Rothstein, who drastically understates the severity of Fischer's condition. It is sobering that not one of the articles I have read about Fischer since his death has suggested that he was and always had been mentally ill. The writers assume only that after he won the , he sabotaged his own life by cultivating eccentricity and willfulness. Certainly many of them ascribe "paranoia" to him, and they tell anecdotes consistent with this ascription stretching back into his teenaged years; yet they clearly cannot wrap their minds around the idea that he was both sick mentally and the greatest chess player in the world. In their telling, he became world champion and then descended into crankiness. And that crankiness must not have been real mental illness, because he never spent a day of his life in a psychiatric hospital. He managed to meet the minimal societal definition of a functioning adult for the rest of his life.

Well, Hitler and Stalin were never committed to a psychiatric ward either, although the one believed in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that had suborned both the Kremlin and Wall

Street to its interests, engineered the defeat of Germany in the First World War, and corrupted modern art and music, while the other detected plots against him among myriad imaginary enemies and especially among his old associates in the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, the patients in hospitals sporting the diagnosis of paranoia are merely the outliers who hear loud The phenomenology of narcissism - 3

voices and repeat what the voices say. You have to be a paranoid schizophrenic to find yourself committed – to be merely paranoid is close enough to normal to pass for normal.

The person who left this message in the comments section of an Internet blog is also presumably going to work every day and leading an outwardly ordinary life:

Check out the videos that expose how the Masons and the Mormons are in bed with each other to spin both conservative and liberal media in order to get a Mason (or in Hillary Clinton's case an Eastern Star) into the White House. There is a reason why just about every American president has been a Mason. Whether we voted for Bush or Kerry, both just happened to be from the same Masonic secret society called Skull and Bones. Obama, Clinton, Romney are likewise all Masons with a globalist Masonic agenda.

What Fischer's sad trajectory illustrates is that narcissism underlies paranoia, and perhaps all other mental illnesses, and serves by itself to explain many of the maddening features of madness. Take, for instance, this textbook exemplum of "projection" when Fischer compares himself to another world champion, Garry Kasparov:

I object to being called a chess genius, because I consider myself to be an all- around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he is like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.

A psychodynamic therapist, adept at the language of Freudianism, would say that Fischer has adopted the "defense mechanism" of disowning his own behavior and attributing it to someone else – for it is surely Fischer who was a failed human being away from the chess board, and

Kasparov who proved, by his principled to the autocratic government of Russia, to be one of the few chess champions in history to function well and admirably in the outside world.

In fact, however, there is no need to route Fischer's remark through this interesting, colorful, and The phenomenology of narcissism - 4

convoluted "complex" of denial and projection. Like all narcissists, Fischer looks with his two

eyes and sees the plain truth – the truth that is, in Stalin's inimitable phrase, "obvious to anyone,"

and which is, in this case, that the Jewish world conspiracy is behind the sorry state of affairs

generally as well as the series of specific persecutions that he has endured all his life. In the

course of one of his public rants, he said that this truth is widely published – that those who care

to know what is going on have only to look at the Internet. (This is too true – the Anti-Semitic

Theory of Everything is readily available on the worldwide web, where the entire archives of the

Dearborn Independent can be read.) Why does Fischer say that Kasparov knows nothing outside of chess? Because he does not know, or pretends he does not know, that the Jewish world conspiracy exists. So he might as well be a complete baby. Why does Fischer anoint himself an all-around genius? Because he knows the answer to what the world needs to do to right itself politically and economically as clearly as he knows the answer to a . But even though his statement sounds megalomaniacal, he is not really attributing supreme intelligence to himself: he is stating facts that he believes are within reach of all ordinary uncorrupted minds.

What makes him special, he thinks, is not his own preternaturally keen eyesight, but the mystifying blindness of almost everyone else.

Every narcissist thinks like Fischer: the truth is apparent; anyone can see the truth; yet others say, with a show of earnestness, that they don't see it. It was a simple process of deduction for Fischer to arrive at his self-assessment and his assessment of Kasparov. The process is conscious, and it is merely logical.

We are tempted to think that Fischer must have known, in some part of himself, that he was a failed act. We cannot credit the blazing sincerity of the narcissist, and the extent to which The phenomenology of narcissism - 5

he is fused with his perceptions: we suspect that he has some consciousness of his manipulativeness, some awareness of the special pleadings and the double standards that he employs in argumentation. When his statements are so over the top, we suspect that the narcissist, just from listening to himself, has to know it. But what the narcissist knows is only that, for reasons that are unfathomable or, more likely, profoundly sinister, other people persist in denying plain facts and in calling black white. This is why Fischer could never agree to defend his title – he could never keep his mouth shut about the perfidy of the forces aligned against him and pretend that he didn't see what was really happening. Cassuto's imputation of dishonesty is a rank calumny: a man like Fischer is the very embodiment of truth-seeking and almost incapable of intentionally telling a consequential lie. Cassuto has mixed into his assessment of Fischer's character his own conclusion that Fischer's beliefs are false. But Fischer arrived at his beliefs in much the same way that Cassuto and the rest of us arrive at ours – by evaluating public documents as interpreted by individuals whom he trusted. And as incredible as it may seem to

Cassuto, Fischer did not have the least clue that his beliefs were paranoid. In a witty Ted Talk, journalist Kathryn Schulz asks her audience what it feels like to be wrong. She elicits answers of

"dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassment." Schulz then points out that these are feelings that we have when we realize we are wrong. "But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything." A little later, Schulz corrects herself: "It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right."

It is also a mistake to believe that Fischer, and other similarly damaged people like the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., must have been sane when they stood atop their chosen professions – that no person suffering from paranoia could do first-rate intellectual work or win the world chess championship. In fact, both men gave early warning signs of serious mental and The phenomenology of narcissism - 6

emotional incapacitation while still in their teens. It is undoubtedly true that, in their thirties,

they deteriorated markedly from a sociological perspective. But what commentators need to

acknowledge is that, as Rothstein comes near to saying, mental illness may not impede a person's

mastery over a field of thought as abstract and circumscribed as mathematics or chess.

It is difficult to disabuse ourselves of the romantic fallacy that the sheer waste of Fischer's life must have been felt by him. Yet we have the contrary evidence of his radio rants and uproarious press conferences, where he exhibits precisely the savage self-assurance that made him the most aggressive player in the history of tournament chess. Over and over, he becomes angry about the same imaginary persecutions, the same betrayals, the same outrages. Often, as he fulminates, it is as if a switch has been thrown, and he is back in the incident experiencing all its infamy for the first time. (This trait has been mentioned by David Kaczynski, the brother of the

"Unabomber," as one of the characteristics that should have led him to suspect a serious mental issue underlying his brother's behavior.) All his life, Fischer made (and discarded) friends who urged him repeatedly to accept the rules of tournaments and just play chess. We saw and felt that

Fischer had only to sit down and play, and by doing so he would have reaped every reward that conduces to a materially good life. But he never saw and felt this. What he saw and felt was that the deck had been stacked against him by evil people in chess federations who had sold themselves lock, stock, and barrel to even more evil people – the Jews – who were part of a vast conspiracy to destroy every last vestige of decency in the world. We are besotted by hero-

worship if we think that Fischer's mastery of chess somehow meant that he could not really have

been this far gone; and we veer toward his own brand of narcissism if we suspect him of having

put on an act. That was his diagnosis of us – that we were pretending (because we had been The phenomenology of narcissism - 7

bought off) not to see the evil machinations of the Judaeo-Communist conspiracy.

Thus do we continually make the mistake of contaminating the pure record of the narcissist's phenomenology with our own phenomenology. We mix up the experience of dealing with someone like Fischer with Fischer's experience. It is almost impossible for us not to think that "on some level" Fischer must have known that he was a pain in the neck to everyone he met, and that "deep down" he was playing some sort of complicated game. But I believe the opposite: he had no depths and he was on the level. Over and over, he "saw clearly" that he was persecuted, and it was wondrous and disturbing to him that others did not see it or, worse still, feigned not seeing it. His subjective reality was exactly like that of the genuine victim of real persecution who knows that he is such a victim. Fischer's sense of himself was similar to Victor

Frankl's sense of himself during the six years that Frankl was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp, and we must not allow ourselves to be thrown off the track by how preposterous and even offensive that comparison is . . . to us. Frankl knew himself to be a victim

– to be a person who had done no harm to others but was targeted by the minions of a malignant regime on specious grounds. That is exactly how Fischer felt. Where the analogy breaks down is in the self-doubt experienced, never by Fischer, but by Frankl – not in relation to the evil of

Nazism, needless to say, but in relation to his fellow inmates and about whether his conduct among them would stand up to a moral examination in accordance with the highest ethical ideals.

After his release, Frankl said, with heartbreaking candor, that those who survived the camps knew that the best among them had not. I hope it need not be pointed out that such a thought could never have found its way into Bobby Fischer's consciousness. The two men differed markedly in how they regarded their tormentors (real in Frankl's case, imaginary in Fischer's The phenomenology of narcissism - 8

case), and in the attitude that they adopted toward their predicaments, and in what sort of self-

examination they were able to undertake. But in feeling that evil forces had been arrayed against

them and that it was a piece of bad luck that they had fallen under the power of these forces, they

were identical. Except for this – imagine Frankl's state of mind if the other prisoners in the camp

had said to him repeatedly, "Come now, Victor, stop making difficulties, things are fine, relax

and quit finding fault everywhere." That's how Fischer felt.

Similarly, we know that General George B. McClellan was wrong. But he neither knew

that he was wrong at the time, nor that subsequent events had proved him wrong. After the war,

when Lincoln and Grant were celebrated as the saviors of the Union, McClellan calmly copied

out extracts from his letters to his wife – passages that refer to Lincoln as "the gorilla" and

malign all the high-ranking and honorable members of the administration as "men whom I know

to be my inferior." No one need ever have learned how catastrophically he had misjudged both

himself and others had he not maintained a record that he was convinced would vindicate him. It

is his own extracts that have forever damned him as vain and deluded. But he never imagined

that he had erred on any single point of either military judgment or psychological acumen, and

clearly he was incapable of imagining this. In order to understand McClellan's personal

psychology, then, we must abandon our cherished conception that "deep down" he was afraid that

he was a failure. So rock-ribbed was his self-confidence that, after he was ignominiously

cashiered as commanding general for the second time in 1862 and forced to return to civilian life,

he was not in the least abashed: in fact, he ran for President of the United States two years later.

His phenomenology cannot be captured by any account that shadows it with self-doubt. Instead, his sense of himself is identical to that of a genuine military hero of real perspicacity and ability The phenomenology of narcissism - 9

who did in fact twice save his country and knows that he had indeed been underrated, misjudged, and unfairly obstructed in his career by men who are his inferiors.

But is it not true, both as a common-sense deduction and as an inevitable inference from the historical record, that McClellan was unconsciously afraid of losing the battles that he found so many excuses not to fight? I would say yes, but that fear was truly unconscious, entirely so, and it was not present to McClellan's awareness in any way that was damaging to his confidence and self-esteem; and we need no Freudian depth psychology to factor it in. Fear of losing is humanly ordinary, understandable, and universal, unless it be truly the case that a handful of sociopaths are immunized against it. A normal person, engaged in a consequential undertaking, knows that success may be likely but cannot be certain. We say of the mediocrities in any sport that they are "afraid to lose" while the greatest athletes relish the opportunity to win. The former are scared of making a mistake; the latter play with joyful abandon and with apparent fearlessness. But everyone in the contest is aware that he may come up short: the slogan "Failure is not an option" is merely a pep talk. Perhaps the figures whom we most revere in history are merely those monomaniacs whose appetite for renown is so consuming that, with lunatic bravado, they are always willing to risk everything on one throw of the dice. The voracity of their neediness overcomes their fear. They are only afraid of not going all-out for the brass ring.

This quality is so extraordinary that we continue to idolize it even where the record shows that it did not prove out in the end. Napoleon is still touted as a military genius, in spite of having led, with his customary confidence at the outset, one of the most disastrous campaigns in all of history – a misbegotten invasion characterized by blunders that an intelligent monkey would not have made. McClellan had the full complement of Napoleon's grandiosity but lacked the daring The phenomenology of narcissism - 10

to take such chances: he was "normal." So without ever experiencing any deficiency in himself,

he found pretext after pretext for avoiding an engagement with the enemy. The mistake of

mixing up our phenomenology with his, however, is to assume that in any conscious corner of

his mind, he knew that his excuses were pretexts. He believed in the truth of his pretexts as

strongly as he believed in his sapience and intrepidity as a military commander. That's the gift of

narcissism; and of McClellan we may say these words of Henry James taken from his

masterpiece The Beast in the Jungle – "Your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the

strangeness. It's the wonder of the wonder."

Fischer too, beyond question, was afraid to defend the championship, because he could

not be absolutely sure that he had stayed at the top of his game; and certainly he could not have

admitted this fear to himself. Therefore all the reasons he gave for refusing to agree to the match

were rationalizations, but it is a mistake to assume that they were therefore conscious

prevarications. Fischer truly believed that malign forces were at work to rig the outcome of a

rematch against him.

The mistake of all the deep psychological theories about such narcissists is the assertion that, "at bottom," they are neurotic and defensive, unsure of themselves and therefore over- compensating, and ultimately self-loathing. Again, we mix up our sense of them with their sense of themselves, and we cannot believe that they are not "insecure." This error, I believe, originates in Freud's conception of the unconscious, which is literally half baked: his theory assumes an id that is completely inaccessible to the ego and superego, and therefore truly unconscious; but his therapeutic is based upon the notion that the psychoanalyst can bring the contents of the id into conscious awareness – "Where id was, there let ego be." He believes that The phenomenology of narcissism - 11

the id will give up its secrets at the merest touch of a symptom, a dream, or a free association,

whereas in fact what is truly and deeply buried in the unconscious remains – I am sorry to have to

put the matter so baldly – un-conscious. Therefore no therapeutic can demonstrate to the

narcissist the fear and insecurity alleged to reside below his conscious awareness. In fact, one

symptom of narcissism is the subject's belief that he has unimpeded access to all the contents of

his own mind, whether those contents are labeled conscious or unconscious. Fischer would have

smiled disdainfully at a therapist who presumed to tell him something about himself that he did

not already know.

Freud not only imputes too much importance to the unconscious mind, he also denies too much to the conscious mind. He mistakenly locates the cause of all our troubles in the ravening id. But many of our most pressing conflicts play out in the superego, which is often paralyzed, not by the grip of the unseen id, but by a contradiction between two warring axioms, both of which are fully present to awareness. What is no longer available to the conscious mind may be, not so much our nasty impulses of murder and rapine, as the original parental injunctions that became a part of our definition of the world – interpretations of reality that stand for reality itself

– so that we can no more see them operating in our lives than we can notice the blind spot in our field of vision. To take an obvious example: my conscious effort to achieve a goal, egged on by my superego's incorporation of cultural imperatives like the Protestant work ethic, may be sabotaged by another message implanted in my superego by a destructive parent and now barely remembered, that I am too weak and lazy to succeed.

The therapist can have no success delivering a diagnosis of narcissism to the client. The nature of narcissism is that it cannot be suspected by the sufferer because it cannot be The phenomenology of narcissism - 12

experienced. Asked to consider the possibility that he is wrong, asked to go back over the evidence, the narcissist makes a good-faith effort and finds, after an exhaustive review, that he has been right after all.

Are men like McClellan and Fischer, then, in some perverse sense, psychologically healthy? Having rejected a facile analysis in terms of "defense mechanisms" and insisted that their defenses not only worked, but were absolutely impregnable, am I arguing that they were fully realized Buddhas? No. A person who knows neither himself nor others cannot be deemed healthy; and someone who is inside a fortress than can never be penetrated is a prisoner of himself. Furthermore, narcissists are, down deep, anxious and fearful, not entirely because they are afraid of failure, but because they crave the approbation of others and those others are, it seems to them, infernally fickle. In spite of their seeming arrogance, narcissists poignantly need others to validate them. The arena of their rightness has to be, in some degree, public. Without exception, the most famous narcissists known to history have gathered about them some disciples, who fed their ravenous appetites for vindication.

There is a valid question of how men like Nash and Fischer manage to hold themselves together until their 30s, and why their paranoia metastasizes thereafter. The answer is simple. During the tumultuous years of adolescence, we are all granted, and grant in turn, great latitude for self- absorption and idiosyncrasy. The decade from ages 13 to 23 is characterized by a culturally encouraged pseudo-narcissism, where due allowance is made for the consuming nature of the individual's search for "an identity." The crazy gifted person can go a long way on his gift in an The phenomenology of narcissism - 13

environment where most of his associates are themselves hormonally driven and given to fits of

emotional disequilibrium. Furthermore, the incipient bouts of paranoia engendered by the gifted

person's extreme narcissism are still haphazard – they are not yet tethered to a single persecutory

obsession. The narcissistic impairment is noticeable to his friends merely as an extreme

confidence in the rightness of his perceptions and a sometime brittleness when he is contradicted

or criticized; but in a rambunctious high school or college milieu, it does not yet place him at the

far end of the bell curve of human personality. Most of us grow out of this pseudo-narcissistic

condition; but we see that the psychologically immobile narcissists do not, with the passage of

time, modify or mitigate their belief systems, but ineluctably harden them through repeated

"confirmations." With each passing year, the body of "evidence" in support of their paranoia

grows. And the longer they live, the more likely it is that they will eventually encounter a Theory

of Everything – a conspiracy theory worked out in satisfying detail that gathers up all the loose

threads of random persecutions into a single mosaic. Hitler was not anti-Semitic in his youth;

but in Vienna, he encountered the suave "racial biologists" who gave anti-Semitism a scientific

veneer. Now he understood everything: how both communism and capitalism, Moscow and

Washington, were suborned to the Jewish world conspiracy; and why atonal music was being

composed by the Jewish Schoenberg and abstract art was being painted by the Slavic Kandinsky.

George Lincoln Rockwell similarly discovered Hitler. Bobby Fischer was a grown man when

Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion fell into his hands and unlocked all the secrets of the earth. Now he had the over-arching explanation for why culture and society were utterly corrupt and why he was forever being betrayed. When a paranoid person finally comes across a classically anti-Semitic website, suddenly all the gears in his mind mesh perfectly and The phenomenology of narcissism - 14

his hitherto scattered impressions of a malignant world coalesce into a single grand explanation –

furthermore one that has, over its long history, been fine-tuned by innumerable contributors so that it has no loose ends. Fischer found this venerable Theory of Everything that had been around for centuries and in every era has claimed adherents from the respectable classes. He found why things have been going wrong in history for as long as history has been written; and why things had been going wrong in his life for as long as he could remember.

Nash fabricated his own Theory of Everything, but it too grew out of the Zeitgeist: he was to be a major player in a cosmic showdown that was a kind of parody of the superpower impasse between the United States and the Soviet Union. When the future paranoid is a teenager, he is still learning the Zeitgeist: only as a full-fledged adult does he get hold of all the pieces of the puzzle, at about the same time that other people are beginning to lose patience with his

"adolescent" antics. From that point on, one bad decision begets another, and the individual spirals downward – out of a nurturing collegial environment into an increasingly isolated existence where he can chew over all the perfidious incidents of betrayal that have laid him low, and devote himself full-time to studying, in all their elaborate guises, the persecutory mechanisms that are oppressing him. If he has made an early success of himself, he may now have the money and the time to devote long hours to his obsession without the distraction of having to do productive, remunerative work. This is a recipe for lifelong fecklessness. Nash eventually fell victim to full-blown manias and hallucinations, and wound up in hospitals from time to time. There are anti-psychotic drugs that have some efficacy in interrupting such episodes. But as nearly as we can make out from his biography, he was cured by the passing of time and the efforts made by others, at considerable , to enable him a live an The phenomenology of narcissism - 15

uncomplicated stress-free life. Fischer's illness never took him over the edge, and was

experienced by others merely as lower-case paranoia and epochal obstreperousness. No

therapeutic can ameliorate the condition of the semi-functioning tax-paying citizen whose paranoia is not a side effect of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder but merely narcissism cubed.

Fischer could not be helped because his malady did not issue in florid manifestations of mental illness; and there are no medications for what psychologists call the "character disorders."

There are many such carriers among us, but like Typhoid Mary, they come to our attention, and to the attention of therapists, primarily as a result of the havoc that they wreak among others. They are often known to counselors as the "crazy-makers" who have driven their closest relatives to seek help. Sometimes they themselves do consult therapists, when they are downcast over the many "betrayals" that they have suffered; but they are, needless to say, almost impossible to treat, since they adamantly maintain that there is nothing wrong with them, but only a great deal wrong with the world and especially with the people closest to them who do not know the meaning of loyalty and trust. They can defeat the strongest psychiatrist: Scott Peck, in

People of the Lie, describes a narcissistic woman, whom he misdiagnoses as autistic and evil, who came to over 400 unavailing sessions before abruptly terminating the therapeutic relationship. He is admirably frank about the confusion that she raised in him. There is no way to deal with such people other than to try to maintain our own moorings, but it is always well to remind ourselves, over and over again, that they are not consciously tormenting us. They cannot see what they cannot see; and they cannot understand why we cannot see what they do see.