My dreams have been unusually evocative, which is saying something, since I have long had a very active dream life.
Last night I was dreaming about being a part of a coven of vampires as a child. I did not know they were vampires: they revealed it. The holy symbol on the wall morphed into something bloody and skeletal. It was a bit like the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney, where one picture turns into another as you sink down. They lived in a locked room, but I knew how to get into it. There was a child, who I understood to be me, who started drinking beer and watching TV at age 6. No one said no. Everyone was asleep.
Psychodynamically, I think this is pretty clear. If you can’t read it, I won’t read it for you, but I wanted to focus on one point I thought of general interest: the image of the vampire is best seen as the narcissist.
I recently spoke with my father on the phone and based on some things he said, I realized that it has never occurred to him until recently that he is going to die. He understands it theoretically–he in fact HAS nearly died several times–and of course he knows he is human. But I think in important respects he has emotionally considered death to be something that happens to other people, and which does not apply to him.
This was a remarkable realization for me. Emotionally, he thinks he is immortal, and has lived accordingly.
Vampires are neither living nor dead. They are animated, in that they move, but emotionally something is frozen inside. There is no movement in and out. The breezes of life do not flow through them, in the still graves they carry in the darkness even when alert and on the prowl. They exist, but they do not live. They certainly do not love.
And it is hard to convey to someone who has not experienced it how emotionally draining it can be to interact with someone who is emotionally unable to recognize that you are there. Emotionally, they are looking at themselves in a mirror while talking to you. They speak to you, but they are speaking to themselves, and using you as a mirror. This is terribly damaging to your sense of reality, of individuality, and of sanity outright. You know and sense something is wrong, but there is nothing in the words which conveys it. The problem is in the context, the relationship, such that it is.
[I will add parenthetically that Donald Trump, as someone who loves life, work, and people, is not even remotely a narcissist. He is perhaps a bit greedy for experience–he has too much YOLO in him, hence his serial infidelities, which is his only real character flaw–but he is obviously quite empathetic, quite attuned to the emotions and needs of others, and quite genuinely warm and generous in temperament.]
And this morning I got to thinking about Werewolves, creatures of intermittent rage. And it hit me that this is a key feature of Borderline Personality Disorder.:
People with borderline personality disorder may experience mood
swings and display uncertainty about how they see themselves and their
role in the world. As a result, their interests and values can change
quickly.
People with borderline personality disorder also tend to
view things in extremes, such as all good or all bad. Their opinions of
other people can also change quickly. An individual who is seen as a
friend one day may be considered an enemy or traitor the next. These
shifting feelings can lead to intense and unstable relationships.
You know who else this describes? Antifa, and the REEEE’s. And does not transexuality also fit into this, where you might be a boy one day, a girl the next, and we need 367 classifications for evanescent sexual moods fundamentally unstable people might feel?
But most of all the RAGE, the all or nothing, the you are with us or we hate you.
Here is another link: https://www.health.com/depression/borderline-personality-disorder-symptoms
We all have an internal critic, but people with BPD struggle constantly
with overwhelming self-doubt. These individuals have an incredibly
unstable self-esteem, so they rely heavily on external praise and
approval to help define their identity, Dr. Oldham says. “Underneath
that, there’s a sense of inferiority and incompleteness,” he says.
People with BPD may even copy others’ actions and behaviors, because
“their ability to be independent and autonomous is very impaired.”
Note that last sentence: “their ability to be independent and autonomous is very impaired”.
Or this, manifestly true with regard to today’s Left:
“Interpersonally, there’s a real impairment in being able to see
yourself from the outside and see others from the inside,” says Dr.
Oldham. In other words, people with BPD struggle with both
self-awareness and empathy. “There’s a lack of understanding about how
your own behavior impacts people, so when your emotions are out of
control, it doesn’t register that this causes stress for others,” he
says. This lack of awareness is one reason people with borderline tend
to have trouble maintaining healthy long-term relationships.
There are a number of other symptoms in that link worth reading. What I would submit, though, is that most of them are implied in the term “snowflake”. Most of them–the mental illness symptoms–are implied by the way these people are trying to live their lives. They panic when they don’t get their way. They lack adult coping skills. They fly into rages easily. They want to destroy all traditional social roles so they can occupy serially all of them.
What you have with BPD–which has long seemed to me to be kind of a catchall for seriously fucked up people who can’t be shoveled into any other classification–is a complete lack of a sense of stable self, of self worth, and of belonging. Such people are clay which can be easily molded into a highly coherent, Borg-like, political force.
Now, my own opinion is that the American Psychiatric Association, in rejected the proposed category of “Developmental Trauma Disorder”, not only betrayed science, not only betrayed basic standards of intellectual integrity, but made the actual remediation of mental illness–supposedly their main charter and purpose–much more difficult.
All these things: Bipolar, monopolar, OCD, chronic anxiety, BPD, Narcissism: they all flow from poor attachment, in my view, as children, where actual brain damage is not present. Large things nearly always begin from and flow from, small things.
Now, our world is confusing and scary. We have no idea what changes the psychopaths in Silicon Valley (or China, or Russia) will bring about in the next ten years, but it is not unreasonable to suppose some of them will not be good. We live in a world filled with Nuclear Weapons and weaponized viruses. There is a lot to be anxious about.
But over and above all of this, I think many parents are failing in basic ways. It may well be that the single best contribution to the future mental health of our nation we could make would be to figure out how to guarantee mothers can stay home full time with their children for their first three years or so. My rework of our financial system, I might suggest, would certainly do this.
And I think the hyperinflation of the 1970’s–which caused many women to enter the work force–along with the feminist assault on motherhood, is largely responsible for the mass hysteria and mental illness we see today. It did not spring from the forehead of Zeus.
And much of this seems to have been planned. Our media fills our heads with fear, and fear breeds rigidity and following stupidity. Fear makes it easy to manipulate people.
Again, I don’t know how we survive all this, but we have to try. I will do my little part, in my little corner of the world.