On The Creep of Psychopathology
Narcissism is a common human trait. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is an extremely uncommon pathology but you wouldn't think so if you talk to your average therapist.
As I’ve re-entered the dating scene, I’ve developed a perverse taste for seeking women’s stories about their past relationships. When searching for a true partner, doing so as overtly as I do is not an advisable habit—you must do so with tact and subtlety in those cases. But I’m not seeking the real thing at this moment in my life and am just looking to have fun for now. I’m “still figuring it out,” as they say on the algorithms of sex, although in my case, this is a bit of a misnomer because I’ve figured out that “still figuring it out” is exactly what I want to do in the present moment.
In doing so, I have collected a fair bit of anecdotal relationship reports from women at this point. It’s shocking, but almost every single one of these women has dated a pathological narcissist (“Wow, so true!” as
would say). When these women say narcissist, they always mean someone with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Taken at face value, this is quite troubling because it means that there are a ton of men out there with full-blown NPD. However, in listening to these women’s stories, I rarely come to the same conclusion as them.Voyeurism In Service of Truth
When these women regale me with horrifying examples of narcissistic behaviors and actions, they are indeed quite bad. To a T, the longer I let them expound, every single woman eventually drops a story that, I believe, thoroughly dissolves their central thesis.
You see, the bad anecdotes are often quite gruesome. But capacity for narcissism alone does not, in and of itself, make Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Let’s wield the holy bible of therapy, the DSM, against the profession least occupied by intellectuals. (Insults like this are classic NPD; I detect numbers 1, 3, and 9 at least in the statement above.)
Standard Checklist Methodology
The Textbook definition of narcissistic personality disorder is as follows:
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. This pattern is indicated by the presence of at least five of nine specific criteria.
A grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerating achievements, expecting to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
Belief that they are "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.
Requires excessive admiration.
A sense of entitlement (e.g., unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations).
Interpersonally exploitative (e.g., takes advantage of others to achieve their own ends).
Lacks empathy: unwilling or unable to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
Often envious of others or believes others are envious of them.
Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
Ooh, checklists and circular caveats—the favorite of the academic-but-not-intellectual. Let’s tease this out and put it into the language of the thinking person. (I’m exhibiting numbers 2 and 3 at least.)
Synthesized into a pithy sentence, by grok no less, we arrive at something like:
Pathological Narcissism is the soul’s enslavement to its own image, where the pursuit of self-glorification blinds one to the beauty of others and the truth of one’s own flaws.
Well, its use of metaphor is, ironically, soulless, and it’s not perfect; I am left with minimal fear that the robot will soon replace me as a hobbyist writer. But this topic, I feel, is somewhat beneath me, and I cannot be bothered to come up with my own synthesis. (“Dear god, he’s doing it again?! Does he even know?” Yes, I detect numbers 5 and 9, at a minimum.) So we’ll use the robot derivation—it’s good enough.
A Better Methodology
The checklist approach is an inclusive, threshold approach. Check five or more boxes, and you get NPD—very cool. It’s kinda crude but repeatable and teachable too. However, complexity is often the enemy of truth. When possible, simplicity is always a better route to truth. So, in this case, we can take our robot-derived simple definition, discard the checklist, and invert its methodology to use one of exclusion. Then, we add (gasp) an element of human judgment to it, and we have our new framework.
If we want to truly stunt on the normies, we can confine ourselves to examining one single counter-example and derive our diagnosis from a deep understanding of just one example. Let’s try—here we go:
If a person has exhibited moments in which they do not exhibit enslavement to their self and see the beauty and humanity in another, we must examine this and determine if it is genuine or not. If we use our human judgment and determine that the exhibited moment was genuine for the other person, not the self, then pathology might be able to be ruled out.
“Nuance” As Dangerous Justification
Here, the checklisters enlist what they think of as “nuance” to riposte and dispatch my foolish argument. En Garde, my dear!
They will say, “But my checklist and surrounding caveats note that the pathology may sometimes present as a person ‘breaking the pattern,’ but deep down, they are doing so in service of their own condition.” This is a neat trick because it allows the therapist to discard evidence to the contrary by ascribing malicious motivation to a surface-level action that, on its face, is a good thing. The therapist is exercising their human judgment.
So, an earnest apology, in and of itself, could easily be done for the purposes of the narcissist himself. While this is no doubt true sometimes, this flings the door open to human judgment in a way that, I’m not entirely sure, these people realize. In this way, their method, though it has more complexity and sophistication to it, still relies on human judgment—much more than mine, actually, because they must make a judgment about inclusions and exclusions. However, the checklist methodology itself serves to obfuscate this out of view from the therapist and convince them they are applying scientific rigor.
A hundred years ago, therapists were discerning intellectuals with a keenness for the aesthetic practice of judgment; they applied this to their subjects in hopes of helping them overcome themselves. Today, this does not describe the capacities of your average therapist—let’s leave it at that. Judgment is, fundamentally, an aesthetic application of taste, and it’s not really something that can be taught, in my experience.
This is why the DSM prefers the checklist approach—it’s a way of standardizing. But standardization inevitably flattens and reduces that which is art to a “science.”
When people use the word ‘science,’ it’s often a tell, like in poker, that you’re bluffing.
— Peter Thiel
The very name of the therapist’s handbook is a form of this. DSM stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (of Mental Disorders). If you left off the last part and asked an intelligent alien to guess what field this may relate to, his first answer would not be psychology—I feel quite certain of this. So, while they don’t call it “psychological science,” these wily therapists have figured out more clever ways of achieving the same effect.
Observations From An Unlicensed Therapist
As a clandestine and unlicensed therapist to several women who go to strange men’s houses for sex (an admittedly skewed, though rapidly growing, and perhaps representative sample of women in America today), I have observed that these women’s NPD exes are quite probably nothing of the sort. When they inevitably tell me of a moment in which the man displayed empathy, remorse, etc., that’s when I pounce.
As any therapist with 200k in student debt will tell you, the key to maintaining the therapeutic frame is to remain silent for the most part, interjecting only at critical moments. I believe four semesters of writing “I shall be taken more seriously the less I opine” on the chalkboard, like Bart Simpson, is part of the curriculum—but I can’t be certain.
Nevertheless, this is when I strike. I inquire more and more about the situation in which the man displayed deep empathy, regret, or some such trait. I attempt to tease out of their reports whether this moment was in service of his assumed psychopathology or genuine.
And most of the time, it seems pretty clear that this was a genuine moment. And remember, I’m getting this from the woman’s perspective, so, on balance, it’s gonna be skewed against the man, not in his favor. But, as they say, the truth will out, and indeed it does for those with eyes to see it. It’s usually not even a close call, to be honest.
I hear about men writing long apologies in which they chastise themselves and convey a deep sense of remorse. I hear about other men who write brief interludes and then excuse themselves from her life, deeply embarrassed and possessing enough nobility to bow out gracefully. I hear about men who are racked with guilt for their childish and nasty behavior.
I almost never come to hear about men who are doing this in service of their own ego. I almost never encounter stories of men devoid of empathy. But I can see how the mistake can be made. Because I do hear about men who are a bit arrogant, envious, and have tried to showcase themselves as exceptional to the women they loved, only to act frantically and shamefully when it starts to come apart.
These read to me like… men. Who, though they are not perfectly formed, usually show enormous amounts of empathy, levelheadedness, and generosity of spirit.
Human Judgement
Now, in my exclusionary framework, this single example of empathy, etc., insofar as we feel high confidence that it is genuine and not in service of his ego, rules out pathology. But that scares people—it’s too easy, or that’s how it appears, at least. Our thirst for data is primary in our world today. There is no room for human judgment; this is unreliable, and, what’s more, it can’t be taught, which means it cannot be sold for non-dischargeable student debt by non-profit institutions.
Nevertheless, I feel that the exclusionary methodology is superior in the hands of a proficient practitioner (read: “special people.” Great example of Number 3—always remember, no one is allowed to be special today; this is the civic virtue of America after all, it is what the founders believed! Recall our famous creed, “All men are created equal… and remain equal forever.”).
But, in our data-obsessed world of checklisters, you may want to repeat this process on a few more examples. If you’re just too wed to R and p-values and just can’t bear to go full rawdog human, you can tease out more and more examples to build your sample size and increase your confidence interval. That’s fine, I guess. But, for me, I deeply prefer to make grand extrapolations from one single, well-turned-over example (Is this NPD? Seems pretty Numbers 1, 3, and 4 to me).
Structure At Every Level
I think we are pathologizing a lot of normal human behavior that just isn’t pathological at all. And I think this is a shame. Why is this happening? I have some theories.
Part of the reason this is happening is because of the structure of the therapy-industrial complex. Prepare yourself—observations about actual, immutable differences between men and women incoming.
First, the practice of therapy is utterly female-dominated now: 75% actual female, probably 95% when we include the spiritually female (gay, liberal, etc.). Second, its pool of patients is also majority female.
Women are trust-the-sciencers. This is just a fact; the exceptions only serve to prove the rule. Indeed, if anything of George Orwell’s is to survive at all in a thousand years, it will be this line, which, in less than a hundred years, has achieved nuclear, platonic levels of truth. Evidenced in East Germany, COVID, trans ideology, and the invincibility of the Democrat Party, even when it becomes an outright suicide cult.
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
— George Orwell, 1984
In this context, it cascades in a glorious but terrifying fashion. Aspiring female therapists go to get their credentialing; there, they uncritically consume the theory of therapy (which, though it was initially designed by men, has begun, over time, to be replaced by modern, affirmative-actioned female academics).
These newly turned-out therapist soldiers then go out, hang a shingle, and onboard hordes of young women as patients who cannot help but feel a horniness for their new friend’s master’s degree. Some of the therapists are sexy as fuck and charge enormous sums of money, transforming themselves into giga-Staceys of wisdom in the eyes of their patients.
Even worse, this whole process escapes containment and becomes a viral social phenomenon. Did you know that you can turn an entire elementary school of girls trans really easily? Well, you can; the affirmative-actioned psychologist academics have observed this, measured it, and turned it into scientific reports that you, the taxpayer, have funded. They’ve also then tried to suppress these findings, and, if you didn’t know this, they’ve been partially successful. We live in truly incredible times. But forget, for a moment, that being trans is alarmingly contagious in young girls.
You can also go on YouTube and watch videos by NPD influencers—yes, there are NPD influencers. No, these are not supposed to be people with NPD, although they usually are. On its face, these are just (usually female) therapists who make a living teaching people to see NPD everywhere in their lives. Yes, it’s true, you cannot help but notice that these people frequently appear to have actual psychopathologies of their own. And, yes, it’s also true that this content is extremely popular with women during breakups.
All of this results in the over-pathologizing of normal but shitty human behavior. But what’s worse is what it causes to be missed: that a lot of men are just unindividuated and need help with that process. But we tell their girlfriends, wives, and mothers that they have a personality disorder that is permanently fixed and cannot be rectified. I don’t think this serves the patients or the men. Although, I cannot help but notice that this does serve the therapy-industrial complex.
We live in a world where more and more young women are being encouraged to attend therapy. There, these impressionable young ladies will land on the couch of a box-checking half-academic. But, in the eyes of the patient, this therapist carries the same magical title as that of Freud and Jung. But they are nothing like those men, in the same way that your average criminal defense attorney is nothing like John Adams. The majority of therapists are just pleasant-looking human LLM interfaces to the DSM.
So, when they then find psychopathology where it’s much more likely they are dealing with an unindividuated young lady who is dating an unindividuated young man, the patient (the young lady) eats it up uncritically—the last stop in the chain of dangerous “respect for authority” I have just described.
Drafting off Old Perceptions
This is sad and appears to have very real negative consequences for our society. The production of therapists appears to correlate with decreasing levels of happiness in our society—make of that what you will. I’m sure they taught you that “correlation is not causation” in your undergrad, but did you consider that sometimes it is?
Now, there are people with psychopathologies out there. There are people with NPD, etc. I’m not saying that there aren’t. But I find it extremely unlikely that nine out of ten women are encountering men with this particular psycho-personality trait, even when we account for women’s world-historic body counts and their clustering around certain types of men in order to acquire these numbers.
What I think is more likely to be the cause of this perception is both therapist and patient believing that what they are doing in their fifty-minute sessions is anything remotely similar to the work of therapists of old. In reality, the problem is that the practice of either my methodology or the DSM’s methodology actually requires a certain level of taste, judgment, and discernment that, I’m not so sure, can be taught very easily, if at all. (How NPD of me!)
NPD vs. BPD
There is a reverse of this phenomenon, by the way. Men often use the slang, “She’s BPD,” by which they usually mean that the woman in question is batshit crazy and a great lay. It stands for Borderline Personality Disorder, by the way. But this is more meme than heartfelt belief for most men. Whereas many women are deadly serious in their convictions about NPD. This is caused by many factors, but one is that women come to this belief through their academically credentialed friends that they call therapists.
Whereas most healthy men use this slang to say something more general about women and are not caught up in true belief of BPD as such. Although you can find neurotic, spiritually female men on Reddit who are. The differences in these memes—the seriousness with which they are intended and meant—tell us a great deal about the differences between men and women.
Women Hurting Women
Yes, therapists aren’t supposed to diagnose non-patients and theoretically don’t. But we all know that this phenomenon of every woman’s ex having NPD didn’t start on YouTube or TikTok; it started on the couches and escaped containment to YouTube and TikTok.
If this piece enrages you and you would like to diagnose me, then you probably have a physical copy of the DSM—maybe even an old one—a comforting symbol of your prestige that reminds you of your expertise when you look at it.
I have problems, that’s for sure, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have NPD. If you have a copy of the DSM-5, you will be more likely to find my condition (if it’s a condition at all) in the section titled mood disorders. And I would suggest spending more time reflecting on the conditions in that section of your totem.
Because I think those kinds of conditions are much more relevant to our times today, even though the personality-disorder section is admittedly much more titillating. I get it, ladies, but let’s be professional. You are a professional, right?
There’s a lot of suffering going on out there, and, though most therapists are not actual doctors, I think they should still comport themselves in alignment with the Hippocratic oath. I worry that the therapy-industrial complex is doing quite a lot of harm.
And, in this particular context, it’s mainly women doing harm to other women, which makes it even more sad.