The Phenomenology of Narcissism.Docx

The phenomenology of narcissism Edgar Allan Poe, who played chess 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 Bobby Fischer 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 combination 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 checkmate. 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 world chess championship, 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 opposition 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 chess problem. 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.

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