Trump, Kohut, and the Pathology of Grandiosity
Every morning Lynda and I take our three Whippets for a walk around the block. The older two, Paddy (age 9) and Izzy (age 4) stroll alongside us, taking in the morning sunshine, a sniff here, a poop and a pee before arriving back at our front door. Our newest addition, Seamus Heaney, a nod to both my family name and the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet (age 9 months) is a bundle full of impulsivity living in a world that exists to please him. Therefore, there are no constraints on what he does. Seamus is now our largest and strongest Whippet and consequently most challenging. He sees the earthworm on the sidewalk before I do and strains on the leash to snatch it up and eat it. Underneath the Oak tree, it’s the acorns. As we pass by the beautiful Spring flowers lining the walk of one of our neighbors he snatches and swallows a colorful blossom from a collection of Coneflowers out front. When Paddy and Izzy stop to sniff, he pushes in from behind shoving his muzzle into the center of what seems to have captured their interest. They are sanguine about the many such intrusions perhaps forgiving what I saw as Seamus’ grandiosity as a mark of youthful curiosity. Clearly, it annoys me more than it does them. It was my framing his barging into Paddy and Izzy’s sniff sessions as grandiosity that brought to mind two things: Donald Trump and Heinz Kohut.
You know the first and the association of grandiosity with Donald Trump is self-evident. The second name, Heinz Kohut, is less likely to be known. He is considered the founder of Self Psychology, a school of psychology that has its roots in Psychoanalytic (think Freudian) Psychology. Fans and practitioners of Psychoanalytic Psychology have become increasingly sparse for a number of reasons. True psychoanalysis takes many hours per week on the couch and potentially years to complete making it cost prohibitive for most. Moreover, its efficacy as a treatment modality is questionable by most measures. Heinz Kohut’s writings gained momentum in the ’70s, and he published a set of theories focused on early development. More about why his thinking came to be known as Self Psychology in a moment. Kohut and Don Winnicott, who many more are likely to know, shared many of the same beliefs. What was especially interesting about Kohut’s work was his interest in Narcissism and the roots of its development. Back in the ’50s–70s much of psychology’s emphasis was focused on developmental issues. Poor mothering was blamed for everything from personality disorders to schizophrenia and so one has to pick through the various schools of thought to discover what both makes sense and can withstand scrutiny. Contemporary clinical psychological treatment, mostly for economic reasons, focuses on presenting symptoms often bypassing any regressive analysis of underlying causes and attending to symptom management. With this caveat, I’ll share those elements I have found useful from Kohut.
Heinz Kohut postulated that the normal course of relational development between an infant and mother (I will substitute parent here) began with an infant getting everything it needs — he cries and is fed, he cries and is changed. As they are comforted after expressing distress the parent coos, and smiles, and snuggles. The infant learns very quickly they are the center of this universe — actually since their awareness excludes other possible universes, they are the center of THE universe. They scream and cry and help arrives, reinforcing this belief and accompanying the met need is a round of expressive warmth and affection. Kohut labeled the key providers of care who wrap the infant in met needs and affection “self-objects.” The infant, he suggests, is forming their sense of self based on these persons and their behaviors. The infant perceives that his needs and those of the self-object are one and the same. The self that is developing is grandiose and narcissistic which Kohut took as a sign of healthy development. He believed that such grandiosity and narcissism were the basis for developing self-confidence, motivation, and drive.
The next major developmental challenge for both the infant and the so-called “self-objects” is to undertake a process of separation during which an infant learns that they indeed are not the center of the universe. This is where self-objects may not be immediately responsive to the infant’s needs but express (and therefore teach) empathy and understanding; that while what the infant feels is understood and the parent (self-object) is sympathetic to those needs or wants, they have other responsibilities as well. The infant’s task now is to learn that her needs are not one with her parent. This process of separating the infant from the self-objects is variously described as differentiating or individuating and which both Kohut and Winnicott felt was the likely locus of pathological narcissism’s roots. During this transitional period where an infant is gradually coming to terms with not being the center of the universe, the term “transitional objects” was introduced. Mothers, who as stated earlier often bore the blame for their child’s dysfunctions, learned that “good enough mothering” (Winnicott’s phrase) was precisely what the infant needed to individuate. Not only did the infant’s caregivers become transitional objects, so too did things like pacifiers that helped manage the space between a felt need and gratification of that need.
As I watched Seamus this morning unconsciously disregarding the limits learned to successfully live among others, I could not help but recollect the nineteen-minute speech President Donald Trump made the previous night regarding the war in Iran. As I reviewed some of Kohut’s thinking on narcissism, I came across a list of seven phrases frequently employed by narcissists. The alignment of phrases with the content of his speech was striking but not surprising.
| Common Narcissistic Phrases | Donald Trump’s April 1 TV Address |
| “You’re lucky I even care…” | I don’t need to be in the Middle East. The Middle East offers me nothing. |
| “You’re so pathetic…” | The Iranians. The previous Administration over the past 47 years. |
| “You need me…” | NATO needs me. I don’t need NATO. |
| “You are wrong to feel that way…” | The reason I’m doing this speech is because you wrongly feel the economy is suffering. |
| “Everyone else is an idiot…” | The military leadership I trusted in my first administration. The Iranians. Joe Biden. Democrats. |
| “My feelings are your fault…” | If I sound annoyed it’s only because I have to explain the wisdom of my actions to idiots. |
| “I don’t have time for this…” | I am building a ballroom the likes of which has never been seen before, and this war is getting in my way. I had to take this excursion into Iran to deal with a problem neglected by previous administrations. |
I am not proposing we need to trace the etiology of Donald Trump’s behavior back to his infancy. I’m not even proposing that a hard-and-fast diagnosis be assigned. But we have been living with this man and his dysfunctional behavior now for ten years. That’s on us. What I am suggesting is that the public has an obligation to understand something about a person they are electing to a position where they can influence their day to day lives. Maybe someone who had such a stormy first administration would be worth more careful study. In this case, it would be useful to know the difference between a braggart and a pathological narcissist. Maybe it’s worth understanding that he never learned empathy. It would be pitiable if he were not our President. Remember, he is very clear that he certainly doesn’t need you. But some eight million people flooded the streets of our cities and towns nationwide to express how much we need a healthy adult for our President. When someone who possesses such vast influence over your life seems determined to sow chaos in our collective lives, it is worth the effort to do your homework before you vote.
Finally, what is genuinely alarming in light of the above discussion is how Donald Trump has never really individuated and how we have become his self-objects. He acts as if his wants and needs are one with our own; that we are here to run to his side when he cries, determine what he wants and give it to him. Our job, like that of one parenting an infant, is to mirror back to him his grandiosity. Equally alarming is that so many elected officials are content to live with Trump stuck in the earliest stage of infant development. If we want him to grow up, parenting him means learning how to say NO with empathy for the narcissistic wound it is likely to inflict. But this is how healthy adults mature. Which leaves us with one unavoidable question: what exactly is the developmental difference between an infant and our President?