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Narcissism, 5
The time has come to talk about what I said in the second instalment of this series: Marco’s offer of his second house and the funds from the phantom bank account he allegedly wanted to give me. What shocked me the first time I heard such a thing, during a phone call the day after our mall failed meeting, was that I hadn’t dealt with Marco for four decades and suddenly he came out with it!
Yesterday his cousin revealed to me the names of one of his brothers (i.e. another first cousin of Marco’s), a daughter of the cousin and a niece who had also been suggested by Marco to move into his second house. Yesterday the cousin also revealed to me something I was unaware of: that the house is at such an early stage of construction that the second floor doesn’t even have a roof! (Before, I was under the impression that it was just a hole in the ceiling.) I don’t want to mention the names of these other relatives of Marco because, as I said yesterday, I don’t want that family to know that I am writing about them. But the whole thing reminds me of what Harold Covington called GUBU freak: Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, Unprecedented. Last year I was shocked when I realised that the old friend of the park where we played chess had suffered a GUBU psychosis, and since I talk about mental disorders in my books, I couldn’t resist the temptation to psychoanalyse him in my diaries.
Cases of severe psychosis are all GUBUs to the layman. In a previous entry, I mentioned Silvano Arieti’s treatise on schizophrenia. The cases Arieti mentions, and especially the depth psychology he uses to unravel them, are fascinating even if the reader is unprepared to enter that conceptual world. What I do with Marco is also similar, in a way, to what Martin Gardner (1914-2010) did in his Skeptical Inquirer column: what I liked best about that journal. Gardner analysed cases of very crazy people in the paranormal world, and in such a jocular way that his column was a real treat. Thanks to him and other writers in the magazine, I realised that parapsychology was a pseudo-science, and I remember a line of Gardner’s that is worth picking up on: ‘Cranks are fascinating creatures’ in need of being analysed a bit!
What Marco does with these house offers is nothing more than what gurus do: they bombard you with love to lure you into their cult. This has been observed by those who study destructive cults. But what gave me the GUBU shock, to the extent that it motivated me to write so much in my diaries, is that Marco wasn’t like this in the past. It is a psychosis that the former friend has fallen into in recent years, although I can’t pinpoint an exact date as I stopped seeing him for a long time. Even his first cousin has limited information about his biography (yesterday I advised him to contact a woman I knew decades ago, Marco’s ex-partner, so that through her anecdotes he has more pieces of the puzzle we want to put together).
The GUBU character in Marco’s current psychosis, who I repeat wasn’t crazy when I met him, is seen with extreme clarity in his demand that we come and live in his second house when it still lacks a roof above the stairs. Unlike the gurus, who aren’t psychotic, such narcissists become increasingly isolated because those close to them begin to perceive that their demands are not only irrational and grotesque, but blatantly injurious to those close to the narcissist. Only a son of a street sweeper, and we can imagine the social stratum of that Mexican, consented to go to Marco’s second home for a while.
I spent hours talking to the cousin yesterday, but those who haven’t had a misadventure with a narcissist won’t understand why it becomes almost an obsession to psychoanalyse an acquaintance, friend, partner or relative who suffers from this condition. True, the already psychotic forms of narcissism are no more bizarre than the schizophrenias. But the difference is that, unlike schizophrenics, narcissists want to drag others into their maelstrom (‘If I live in a spider-webbed house, come on and live in a roofless one!’).
In giving my Hojas susurrantes to Marco, I had the faint hope that he would settle the score with his late mother, in the form of writing his memoirs, especially the painful ones. While it is true that Marco was full of praise when he read the voluminous book, it is very significant that he didn’t mention my mother at all when he phoned to eulogise my writing, even though the first of the book’s five chapters is almost exclusively about her. Nor did he say anything to me when he got my second book, in which I inscribed a few words on the first page on the day my mother died: a book whose central chapter is, once again, about my mother.
It doesn’t take much science to see that Marco is shying away from the subject not only of his mother but of mine and other similar mothers. The skeletons I have unburied through my autobiography, Marco has buried in his mind, so it should come as no surprise that he is as mad as he is. Marco’s repression is such that he couldn’t even say half a word to me about my mother after he had devoured the 700 pages of my Hojas susurrantes last year. What kind of reading was that?
I believe that severe cases of mental illness are directly proportional to the repression of what happened to us with our parents. In ¿Me ayudarás? for example, the second book I sent to Marco, I mention that, although she had delusions from time to time, my late sister didn’t become schizophrenic because, even when she had delusions, the image of the mother was faintly present. Once, for example, my sister told me that the manager of the building where she lived, a certain Sylvia (our mother’s name!), was plotting to make her life miserable. I knew this Sylvia, and I got to talk to her in her flat. She told me that at one point my sister’s paranoia had been such that she had called the police because of her conspiracy theories. But despite these occasional crises my sister didn’t deteriorate (true schizophrenics hear voices, speak in ‘words salad’ and, in the most severe cases, even suffer from catatonia). And if she didn’t deteriorate it was because, at least metaphorically, ‘Sylvia’, our mother, was faintly present even during her crises.
In cases of true schizophrenia, Arieti reports, the conspiring agents are no longer obvious symbols of the abusive parents. For example, the patient speaks of the FBI or CIA persecuting him or her. 
In a case of psychosis that happened to a white nationalist, Jonathan Bowden (1962-2012), he saw the Mossad as his persecutors. This, according to Arieti, is even more serious than cases of simple delusions where the parent is faintly present as the parental figure is, now, totally absent.
In other words, for those of us who had mothers with fluid ego contours, those immature women who treated us as egoic objects, incapable of a healthy ‘psychological childbirth’ with their offspring, the more the memories of their mistreatment are present in our minds, the greater our mental health will be. On the other hand, the more repressed they are, the more prone you are to neuroses and even psychoses. My sister talked a lot about our mother, even complaining to our relatives about what she did to her. So her disorder was comparatively mild and occasional. This wasn’t the case with Marco who represses, en bloc, every negative aspect related to his mother to the extent of never saying half a word to me about mine (my second book, which as I said he also owns, is more than 600 pages long and even contains photos of my mother)!
I spent hours talking to Marco’s cousin yesterday about him. But I think that what I have said on this blog is enough. If anyone would like to know the details of my interaction with Marco, whom I don’t think I will ever deal with again (his cousin will still see him), I will be happy to do so in the comments section.
Sometimes it is necessary to analyse a GUBU freak to understand a mad West…
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Narcissism, 4
Yesterday I ended my post by mentioning the word introject. Like all other cultures, the West is in a very primitive state as far as self-knowledge is concerned. If we take ancient Delphi as a paragon of Aryan wisdom, even the most prominent western thinkers and philosophers of the Christian Era have been but slaves to what I have metaphorically called ‘Semitic malware’ (Judeo-Christianity): the introjects of their parents and educators. I only discovered this in my own mind when, well into my sixties, writing a passage in my third autobiographical book, I was astonished to discover that my mind had, literally, been programmed with Christian introjects since childhood. The details I explain there but suffice it to say here that, before that passage in my last book, I was under the impression that I had been a relatively free and moral agent—precisely the Christian belief in free will—, and that my father’s influence wasn’t as absolute as, now, I am astonished to acknowledge.
But in this entry, I don’t want to talk about autobiography but about biographies. In my 2021 post, ‘On Shelob’s Lair’, I had said that Francis Bacon regarded metaphysical philosophers as weavers of cobwebs. Now I would like to delve a little deeper into Immanuel Kant’s biography.
This German was born in 1724 in Königsberg, which was East Prussia: territories Germany lost after WW2. If the so-called philosophers were lovers of wisdom, as the etymology of the word philosophy says, Prussia would still be part of a German Reich. We can already imagine a world where, instead of metaphysical cobwebs, the great philosophers of classical German idealism, starting with Kant, would have devoted themselves to what Gobineau (1816-1882) would eventually devote himself to: the study of the races. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Kant was educated in the stern spirit of Protestant pietism: first by his mother, a pious woman, and then at the Collegium Fridericianum, famous as a pietistic school. During 1740-1746 the lad Kant continued to be brainwashed with theology at the University of Königsberg, where he was greatly influenced by Christian Wolff. If we keep in mind what was said about the role played by the mother in the previous entry, it becomes clear that from an early age the introjects are a kind of building blocks that form a psychic edifice: the structure of a mind in the making. There is no point in giving the details of Kant’s life as a young man because it is clear that his mind was already Christianly structured from an earlier age.
In his late thirties, it is important to mention that Kant wrote Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God). Since the young philosopher lived during the Age of Enlightenment, although he never wanted to destroy metaphysics, he did want to put it on new critical foundations. This reminds me that a well-known proponent of the American racial right once called himself a ‘neo-normie’. Kant’s metaphysics was actually a ‘neo-theology’, as we are about to see.
Kant worked for many years on his major work, Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781 (he died in his hometown in 1804). But what is ‘metaphysics’ according to Kant? Kant simply starts from the conceptions of his time, when philosophy had been trying to become independent of theology as an infant tries to individuate himself before a schizogenic mother. This is so true that Kant himself declares that the contents of metaphysics are no more and no less than the contents of Christian theology. He writes that the ‘inevitable tasks of pure reason are God, freedom and immortality’ (B7). And later he reiterates: ‘Metaphysics has as the specific aim of its investigation only three ideas: God, freedom and immortality’ (B 395).
It couldn’t be clearer: due to the introjects of his early age, the mature philosopher remains the servant of the Christian theologian. (A philosopher of a true age of enlightenment would use the plural to refer to providence, as he would be a man who has already transvalued the monotheistic values of Judeo-Christianity to the Gods of the Delphic inscription.) It doesn’t matter that in his first Critique Kant concludes that metaphysics, as a science, is not possible. The fact that he even returns to the same triad—God, the immortality of the human soul and freedom—when he already writes about ‘practical reason’ speaks for itself. Kant even states: ‘I had therefore to do away with knowledge to make room for faith’ (B XXX).
As I said in ‘Shelob’s Liar’, Kant’s prose is abominable. This major spider was a creature who never successfully rebelled against maternal and scholastic introjects. Even his so-called pure, a priori knowledge was a conception of metaphysics that was rooted in the Cartesian approach and Leibniz’s analytical judgements: a type of metaphysics already removed from the Aristotelian tradition. Let us not forget that, among Christian Wolff’s disciples, there were several 18th-century philosophers, including Kant.
Quite apart from the fact that the obscurantist prose of the exponents of classical German idealism is intolerable to any sane reader, my point is obvious. The human mind is a structure. Our parents and guardians lay the bricks of the structure that will become our egos, against which it’s very difficult to rebel successfully. Recall the quote from Margaret Mahler in the previous entry, who in analysing the psychology of toddlers discovered that interpersonal relationships are internalised within the ego or what we call the Self. Once internalised, we are slaves to what we have been calling ‘parental introjects’, even the so-called great philosophers.
The first cousin
If Kant, the greatest German philosopher of the so-called Age of Reason, was a creature of mom’s introjects, what could a little Mexican do in the face of the introjects of an even more engulfing mother than a pietistic one raising her child with Prussian ethics?
I invited Marco’s cousin again, who came to my house this very day that I’m writing, whom I won’t mention by name and surname because, given that the name ‘Marco’ I have used is real, and that the only person who visits him in his cobwebbed house is his cousin, I don’t want some Spanish-speaking person in the curious country where I live to find out, through Google, that I’ve been writing about them.
Anyway, I hope tomorrow to continue unravelling this bizarre psychodrama with another entry.
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Narcissism, 3
I would not have fully understood Marco without noticing that there were a considerable number of YouTube channels talking about narcissism. But there is a fundamental flaw in all of them. Unlike Silvano Arieti’s treatise which helped me so much to understand serious mental disorders (my summary here), these youtubers don’t illustrate their knowledge with specific cases. Perhaps they do so out of cowardice, as there are quite a few people like Marco in the world. They don’t even have to use real names but pseudonyms, so why they don’t use real-life cases to illustrate their theories is a mystery.
Quite independently of such an obvious flaw, I was impressed that these youtubers say that the malignant narcissist can be distinguished by his or her lack of empathy. As we saw in the previous post, Marco showed me off his cobwebbed house that reminded me of vampire castles without noticing that I watched in horror as the thick layer of dust also covered the armchairs in his living room. In fact, I had to turn over one of the cushions of one of his armchairs so that I could sit in his living room and not get dust on my trousers. To show off his house to me without realising that I was horrified, is to lack the most basic empathy.
Youtubers also talk a lot about the gratuitous rage of narcissists, who explode at the drop of a hat. As we also saw, Marco exploded in anger when the taxi driver and I couldn’t easily find his house without a street number. These youtubers also talk about paranoia, which I witnessed in that September call last year with his claim that his relatives craved to steal his house. Another thing the youtubers say that portrays Marco is that those who suffer from malignant narcissism have fluid contours in their ego, so they treat people as egoic objects. This is so surreal that I must illustrate it with an anecdote.
In the previous entry I had promised to explain why we didn’t meet in a mall last year. The answer is that Marco had told me he would meet me outside a restaurant. However, given the unpunctuality of Mexicans, I have been in the habit of meeting them inside a restaurant on my appointments. This allows me to bring a book and entertain myself if the Mexican in question is unpunctual. I told Mexican Marco a couple of times that I would wait for him inside the restaurant. In a Sam Vaknin video I saw yesterday, he said that the narcissist only registers what you say if it goes along with the narcissist’s narrative. It seems incredible, but even in something as prosaic as the location during an appointment Marco didn’t hear what I said more than once: he heard his original voice that he would look for me outside the restaurant.
The result was that we didn’t meet. It was very frustrating in that, although Mexico City is as large as Houston, with fifteen million more people and far fewer freeways it is very difficult to get around. I chose a Sunday for the appointment at the mall far north of the city because there is not much traffic on Sundays and the taxi driver only made an hour’s drive along a freeway from my house to the mall. Marco had arrived by public transport, so it took him an hour and a half to get to the mall. Counting the return trip for both of us, it was five hours of wasted transport, plus the hour and a half wasted in the mall thinking we had both been stood up. All because Marco didn’t want to register in his mind what I told him: that I would wait for him sitting down, inside the restaurant.
A trivial case you might say, but perfect to explain what it means to treat others as egoic objects: the will of the other guy becomes invisible, and one only deals internally with one’s own will, despite the calamity that Marco had to suffer (Perinorte, the mall referred to, is very notorious because the cell phone signal there is very poor, so we couldn’t communicate when we were in and out of the restaurant). But what causes a ‘narcissism’ that it is not even possible to convey such a simple idea as that we will wait for a friend inside a restaurant?
Thanks to the visit of Marco’s first cousin at my house, who had known him since he was a small child, I tied up some loose ends. I already knew that Marco had been raised by a slightly mentally retarded mother, who apparently had been raped: Marco’s absent father. What I didn’t know, and only learned from what the cousin told me, was that Marco had been raised exclusively by his mother. (Before his visit, I had been left with the idea that an aunt and grandmother, in addition to his mother, had been Marco’s guardian figures; I didn’t know that, from an early age, the mother had migrated from some villages to the capital, where Marco grew up.)
Now that single mothers are in vogue in the West, it is becoming clear what havoc some of them wreak on their offspring, especially boys, who have never had a father figure to attach themselves to. Marco, according to his cousin, suffered an absolute mental breakdown the day his mother died, to the extent that his cousin had to make all the arrangements for her funeral and burial while Marco was mentally blocked. I conjecture that this is when Marco’s depression began, as there was no longer the real source where the mother’s only child could settle accounts.
The schizophrenogenic mother
The word schizophrenogenic, which I abbreviate to schizogenic, never appears in the videos of the youtubers who talk about malignant narcissism. It doesn’t even appear in Vaknin’s videos when he openly blames those mothers who undermine the individuation process of their children. I sometimes use the term because it inverts the values of biological psychiatry to the trauma model of mental disorders. (Anyone who has not read what I have written about psychiatry in Daybreak, and still believes that psychiatry is a science, might now read ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’ on pages 105-127 of my book.)
Once we reject biological psychiatry and see it for what it is, a pseudo-science, it is easier to see that Vaknin fails by using so many diagnostic categories. I reject not only biological psychiatry, but the hundreds of diagnostic categories of psychiatrists and even clinical psychologists. The reason for this is simple. Even in the videos of Vaknin, who uses a plethora of diagnostic categories, it is clear that sometimes a subject deteriorates from a basically neurotic narcissism into a psychotic one where Vaknin already uses terms like ‘mood disorder’ and even ‘schizoid’. In other words, unlike somatic diseases where a heart condition doesn’t degenerate into a condition of, say, the thighs, in mental disorders everything is very fluid. Contrary to psychiatric claims, neuroses, which even normal people generally suffer from, can degenerate into psychosis (what happened to poor Marco).
What Vaknin does get right in his videos is that the infant internalises the gaze of his mother. When the infant is mistreated by a mother, he cannot say that the mother is bad but blames himself because of a sort of Stockholm syndrome (cf. these pages of my book Day of Wrath). The schizogenic mother, from the fluid contours of her ego, sends her infant an unconscious message: I cannot love you as you are; only when you suppress your individuality, your desires, your will that doesn’t agree with mine and your independence and separation from me. I love you not as a separate entity but as part of me forever, symbiosis, womb: mother and child forever united.
With this engulfing behaviour, the child’s internalised morality begins to turn towards self-denial. The infant seems to internalise a message: To function not only in the family, but in society at large, I mustn’t be myself. Thus the future narcissist begins to be engendered, someone with fluid contours of his ego with the environment. If mother rejects me, it is because I am a bad, spoiled, stupid, ugly child. Some psychologists call this a ‘bad object’ and this object, because it is so bad, has to be expelled. Thus the child projects this bad object, externalises it and turns himself into its antithesis, what some call ‘split’. By projecting it outwards the child purges the bad object from himself, cleanses himself; but at the cost of projecting it onto others.
Marco’s cousin cried when, suffering from paranoia that he and his son wanted to steal his second house, enraged, Marco ran him out of his main house. What the cousin ignores is that Marco has internalised the bad object instilled in him by his mother and now wants to expel it symbolically, by projecting it onto others. What many youtubers call ‘narcissistic abuse’ is nothing more than the unravelling of this long-standing, unresolved dynamic with the real mother.
When a narcissist is confronted with a relative who really loves him or her, like Marco’s first cousin, the narcissist doesn’t know how to cope. It was very stressful for him. Paradoxically, he perceives this love, now really brotherly love (not like the manipulative love of his mother) as manipulation and mistreatment. This sibling love is perceived as dangerous, and the narcissist falls apart and resorts to so-called narcissistic abuse: treating the cousin precisely as he couldn’t treat his biological mother because, as an infant, he was one hundred per cent at her mercy.
But why such a twisted dynamic, in which the grown-up narcissist then tries to act out theatrically with other adults? Because the infant had been conditioned to associate love with betrayal. When the infant, who will become a narcissist, is confronted day by day with this mixture of love and all the negative emotions of the devouring mother—shame, fear, guilt, anger, frustration—he learns to associate love with these negative affects. The abused infant seems to internalise the following: Love is bad, it means that I will be betrayed. Even an eighteen-month-old infant who is treated with this sort of behaviour already feels anger about it. But given the absolute power the mother has over him, he internalises that it is illegitimate to be angry with her. It’s even dangerous. So getting angry with mom must be buried in the mind. But what happens to the infant who buries his emotions?
The anger is internalised as long as it can’t be directed towards mom. The child redirects it to himself. But anger redirected to the internal self, rather than to the original source, transmutes into depression: which is what has happened to Marco since his mother died, with his house so spider-webbed that it reminded me of Nosferatu’s. Just compare what Marco did with his mind with my Hojas susurrantes, the first chapter of which is entitled ‘Letter to mom Medusa’ where I direct the anger outwards, towards the original perpetrators. That’s why I never suffer from depression! In contrast to the vindictive autobiographer, depression is a form of self-directed aggression (see ‘On Depression’, pages 27-41 of my book Daybreak).
And compare also what I do literarily with what Marco advised me: to stop writing my autobiographical books and forget about the past! The very Christian Marco is simply following the accepted wisdom: forgive and forget. But since the unconscious can’t be fooled, look at how my old buddy ended up: mad as a hatter! In other words, not only Christian values must be transvalued as far as Hitler and National Socialism are concerned, but also the Christian ethics of forgiveness, and the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parent whatever she or he does. Marco, who offended me in his last phone call by subtly advising me to join a Christian church went the opposite way and, as Vaknin says in one of his videos, that can lead to schizoid depression: which is exactly what happened to him.
See for example the five minutes from this point in another of his videos, and especially what he says after minute seventeen when he talks about the work with children of Margaret Mahler, who said: ‘Interpersonal relationships become internalised within the ego, or the self’. Mahler also said that what we call the ego or the self is simply a reflection of our relationships with others, and that all mental illnesses are related to interpersonal problems. It is an important video that Vaknin uploaded twice with different titles. And here Vaknin uses a word I’ve used a lot on this site, introject, about which I’ll say a few things in my next post.
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1945
I’m not the esoteric type, but if I had to give my two cents, I’d say this: Wotan / Odin / Zeus went away after we killed his Austrian avatar. The lack of proper fatherhood is indicative of this. As Berlin burned, the All-father packed his things and left. Then he saw Kalki approaching, and said “Your turn”.
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Narcissism, 2
In this article I would only like to talk about the bare facts. The psychological interpretation will come in the next entry.
Almost half a century ago, in 1975, I met Marco on the chess benches in Mexico City’s Parque de las Arboledas, in Colonia Del Valle (cf. my little book on my chess misadventures). Those were times when the teenager I was didn’t want to be in an abusive home and school, but undisturbed by them in a park. The first game we played, by the way, was won by Marco with the black pieces, and I seem to remember that, against my chess habits, I opened the game with the queen pawn and if I remember correctly he replied 1…f5. Apart from the fact that I lost that first game (in subsequent days I would beat him), the only thing I remember is his rather surly face, and we hardly exchanged words before or after playing. In fact, in the 1970s I didn’t get on with him much more than I interacted with other players in the park, although I eventually discovered that Marco was a good reader of literature, especially the great Russian writers.
It was in the first half of the 1980s that I began to get along more with Marco; when, after playing chess or watching some of the other parkgoers play, he and I would walk around the perimeter of the park talking about philosophical issues. Sometimes, taking into account that he worked and I didn’t, he would invite me to lunchtime meals in the proletarian restaurants of Colonia Del Valle or Narvarte (Marco belonged to a different social class), and we would continue our conversations. Eventually I even asked my grandmother to rent him the maid room on the roof of her house, which was near the park.
In short, that was basically my dealings with Marco, whom I stopped seeing when I went to work for a few years in California in 1985. That image, of a friend with whom I could talk to about interesting topics, was the image I had kept of him from those years.
By the time I returned from the United States in 1988, I had lost track of Marco. Since I grew up in Colonia Narvarte, in 2003 I went to live in a guesthouse very close to my beloved childhood and early teenage home. I used to pass by Concepción Béistegui Street, when Marco no longer lived on that street. In late 2004 I saw his aunt coming out of the house where Marco had lived and I asked her about him. She gave me his mobile phone, and I spoke to him. Those were times when Marco worked in the neighbouring Mixcoac and we met only once in that zone on one of his lunch breaks. Since I kept many documents, diaries, and have classified some of my emails to write an autobiography over the decades, I am able to report that from his work office, Marco answered my email on January 7, 2005, and we didn’t see each other again for many years, although I already had his mobile phone in my phone book.
Remembering the old friend from the park, it wasn’t until 2019 that it occurred to me to talk to him again and we arranged to meet outside the Palace of Bellas Artes. We met there on the 27th of May and then went to one of those proletarian restaurants in the centre of the metropolis that Marco likes to eat at. Then we said goodbye. So far, nothing extraordinary had happened, and you can see that my diary entries about Marco were very laconic, in that there was nothing relevant to report. What began to obsess me about Marco’s mind was due to what happened next.
Two years after our relatively brief encounter in the city centre, I phoned him. I was interested in recovering two books of mine that I had given him decades before, including a splendid edition of poems of the Castilian language that my uncle Julio had given me, and a book of the chess champion Alekhine that my father had given me before the tragedy that struck my family.
So, without telling him that my real interest was in the books I wanted to get back, I told him on the phone that I wanted to see his house. With the help of a taxi driver we arrived on 30 May 2021 (remember I have diaries). On entering his house I was astonished at the level of Marco’s neglect by the dusty cobwebs and thick layers of dust throughout his house. I had only seen old cobwebs dusting the door frames in vampire castle movies!
I deduced that the old friend had been suffering from depression for years, if not decades. That had been the same day that Marco had given the taxi driver and me, as a reference point to locate his house, the electricity pylon without realising that there was a row of pylons; and that the real reference point to locate his house was a dumpster. The very rude manner in which he greeted us because we struggled to find his house without a street number was such that I promised myself that this would be the first, and last, time I visited him. Nevertheless, I repressed my anger and handed him the two illustrated books on the Aztecs and the Mayas that I had planned to give him before the trip.
That was the last time I saw Marco. I must say that, when I was dealing with him in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Marco had never been so rude to me, but what happened afterwards was key to understanding him.
Although we didn’t quarrel (I repressed my anger), since I wasn’t going to visit him a second time at his house, Marco, who surely remembered our philosophical conversations of yesteryear, kept calling me on the phone to visit him again (he didn’t have my mobile number, that I almost never used anyway). My diary records phone calls to my mother’s house on 7 and 28 July, 11 August and 18 December 2021; although he may have spoken at other times. These were times when she would answer the phone and then pass the message on to me. By 2022 Marco gave up phoning to my mom’s place.
In 2023, on 22 May to be exact, remembering his love of literature, I thought of calling Marco to give him, outside his house to which I had promised not to return, a copy of my book Hojas susurrantes (Whispering Leaves). We made an appointment and Marco chose the large mall called Perinorte as the meeting point. It was a disappointment because we didn’t see each other at the Sanborn’s restaurant for reasons of his mental illness, which I will explain in the next entry. But the important thing was what happened next.
Until then I hadn’t had any real problems with Marco. The problems started the next day after our failed meeting. I phoned him to ask him to give me a postal address so that I could send him Whispering Leaves by post, since I was unable to deliver the book to him personally at the mall. With that seemingly innocent phone call on 29 May last year began my morbid curiosity to try to decipher a new Marco I hadn’t known before.
In the phone call to get his postal address, Marco suddenly told me something that stunned me: he wanted to give me his second house, and added that he had an account in the BBV Bank whose funds he wanted to give me as soon as he unfroze them! I was flabbergasted by this, as my friendship with Marco had been relatively superficial; we had never been really close friends. A few months later I learned that he had made the same offer to his first cousin, Marco’s only close human contact with the outside world since he secluded himself in his vampiric castle, so to speak. To offer me money when I knew that Marco, though he has two properties, didn’t have a penny was so grotesque that I wrote in my diary that it was pure blackmail to get his cousin, or me, to visit him. Those were times when I hadn’t yet met his cousin, although I had heard of him.
Then, in that same phone call on 29 May, after those bizarre offers to give me his second house and the funds in his bank, Marco spoke wonders of a train arriving near his house ‘with a broken voice, almost in tears’ says my diary, as if begging me to visit him. I told him that I didn’t want to suffer the hours-long bus odyssey to visit him (Marco and I live at opposite poles of the great metropolis), as I didn’t want to take my car to such a distant zone, and wasn’t going to pay taxis. So, during the same phone call whose only intention on my part was to get his mailing address, Marco had transformed the casual call into a discussion in which he had offered me his house and the phantom money in a bank account. Seeing that I would still not go to visit him by public transport, he scolded me that I was suffering from snobbishness, and that I should open up to a more proletarian lifestyle. Needless to say, I didn’t acquiesce to his demand to visit him despite his fantastic gambit.
The following month, on 9 June, the book I had written reached Marco through the mailman. By 18 July he had read it. He spoke to me and showered me with praise. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever praised what I wrote in Hojas susurrantes so highly. Two days later, my mother died. On August 2, my second book analysing my family, ¿Me ayudarás?, which I had also mailed to him, reached Marco and he sent me his condolences, since I had inscribed a few words on the first page: that I was sending him the book on the very day of my mother’s passing. Then Marco’s cousin contacted me for the first time and we talked on the phone for a while.
By September, the surreal situation with Marco was back. Those were the days when I had arranged with his cousin that I would invite Marco to clear up the bizarre offer that no less than I, whom Marco hadn’t dealt with for four decades, would inherit his second house; and we wanted the three of us to be here. On the 3rd of that month I decided to speak to Marco on the phone to arrange the invitation but he was in a state of extreme paranoia against his cousin. He believed that he and his son, Marco’s nephew, wanted to steal his second house. He forbade me outright to speak to his cousin again, and started saying very nasty things about my siblings. But Marco doesn’t know a single one of them. In fact, he never entered my family’s house. My diary says that Marco spoke badly about my siblings in the context of his demand that I leave the house where I live to go to his second house which, according to his cousin, is unfinished (there’s even a big hole on the roof)!
That is to say, in that September call Marco was angrily demanding that I move out of my late mother’s mansion and into his uninhabited second property, in disrepair. (Just to give you an idea of my mother’s mansion, during yesterday’s move they took out a grand piano and an upright piano that were here as my siblings plan to sell the house, and there is still another piano in the other house, after the garden on the same family property.) Why did Marco surmise that I was getting on so badly with my siblings? To give me fatherly advice; to get me out of this mansion and to invite me to move to his second property in a poor neighbourhood. Marco’s tone was like he was advising me wisely…
I was so alarmed by that crazy phone call that I kept insisting to his cousin that he come to my house to meet me and in October, finally, his cousin and I met at my late mother’s mansion. Since the day Marco had exploded in paranoia that he and his nephew wanted to steal the house he wanted to give me as a gift, Marco and I hadn’t spoken on the phone. But on 8 December last year he phoned me. Unlike the furious paranoid of the September phone call, he began his remarks in a very cordial manner, albeit in an omniscient tone. Yours truly was the object of his ‘wisdom’ in the form of unsolicited advice. The paternal advice was so grotesque, so damaging to my self-esteem and self-image, that it explains why I became obsessed in my diaries with psychoanalysing him. Without arguing with him, because by then I saw him as a disturbed man, I wrote down his words as Marco said over the phone: ‘I want to advise you to stop writing. The house you are going to occupy…’
Marco still didn’t register the fact that I had told him several times that I wasn’t going there, and to boot I had to stop being a writer! He just continued to treat me as an extension of his mind. During that phone call, when I wanted to rebel against the change Marco was proposing (leaving my mother’s comfortable mansion for a house in a poor neighbourhood), at one point in the discussion he said emphatically ‘You’re giving me a lot of crap…!’ (my Spanish-English translation). It was so insulting that I was going to live in his second property, still in structural work, abandoning the mansion where I live, that I let him speak during that last phone call just to record verbatim what he said.
I won’t phone him again. When I met Marco so long ago, he had the same angry character, but he didn’t get out of touch with reality. Now, at his age of seventy-three, I see that he has stepped out of reality. Marco has also wanted his nephews, i.e. his cousin’s children, to live in his second house and set up the restaurant there that Marco couldn’t set up because he squandered all his pension money. But even when his cousin or nephews tell him that they don’t want to move to such a remote neighbourhood, Marco doesn’t come back to his senses. He is under the impression that, sooner or later, someone—for example me—will follow his wise advice.
It’s impossible to convey how perplexed I was when, decades after dealing with him, I came across a new person: a deluded Marco. It was only from the videos I saw on YouTube that I realised that it is fashionable to analyse his symptoms under the curious tag of ‘narcissism’. In this entry I can only add that, unlike those youtubers, who in most cases treated people with this condition because they were romantically involved with them, I cut Marco off from the beginning of his delusions. (Only to loved ones, such as my late sister, have I tolerated her delusions, sometimes directed against me, to the extent that I never broke up with her until she died.)
In the next entry I would like to talk about Sam Vaknin’s interpretation of this kind of psychopathology: not being able to conceive that a close friend, a relative or a partner has a will of his or her own.
Significantly, the first mission of his new paramilitary formation, undertaken even before it was christened the SA, was an attack not on the Jews, communists or Social Democrats, but on a meeting of [particularist —Ed.] Ballerstedt’s Bayernbund in the Löwenbräukeller in the summer of 1921 under the banner ‘we will not betray Bavaria’. Hitler led an assault in which Ballerstedt was manhandled and the police were eventually called to break up the fight. His violent behaviour earned him a short jail sentence. By contrast, it is not documented that Hitler ever personally laid hands on an individual Jew, either then or subsequently. Hitler’s campaign against Bavarian federalism in general and his vendetta against Ballerstedt in particular continued throughout the 1920s and remained a preoccupation until he had him killed during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.
Hitler’s view of foreign policy was, as we have seen, strongly ideological. That said, he was also beginning to develop a keen sense of geopolitics. In part, this followed the prevailing discourse of Germany’s central location in Europe and her consequent vulnerability to ‘encirclement’. He spoke of ‘the position of our fatherland, which was geographically one of the most unfortunate in Europe’. Hitler inveighed repeatedly against the ‘encirclement attempts of the Entente against Germany’. Where Hitler went much further than the nationalist mainstream was over the growing question of space, the Raumfrage, references to which increased exponentially during the early 1920s. In mid April 1920, Hitler lamented that ‘the world was so unjustly distributed’. Four months later, he noted that Germany suffered from a crippling lack of space by comparison with Britain, which controlled about one-quarter of the entire globe. By March 1921, Hitler decried the injustice that Britain, with a smaller population, controlled ‘three-quarters of the entire world’, while more populous Germany had to make do with considerably less space. This sense of connection between Germany’s ‘disadvantageous military location’ and the ‘impossibility of securing the food supply in Europe’ stayed with Hitler to the end.
The cause of this unequal distribution, he believed, was global capitalism and its associated system of world governance. ‘The international exploitation of capitalism must be combated’, Hitler demanded, as well as that of ‘international loan capital’. ‘We want to turn world slaves into world citizens,’ he announced. This required ‘the liberation of our German people from the fetters of its international world enslavement’. This in turn meant that Germany would have to regain its military freedom of action. ‘The German is either a free soldier,’ Hitler argued, ‘or a white slave.’ He therefore called upon the German people to relearn the old adage that ‘whoever does not want to be a hammer must be an anvil’, adding that ‘we are an anvil today, and were being beaten until the anvil became a hammer’, that is a ‘German sword’. The idea that Germany must become a ‘hammer’ to avoid remaining an ‘anvil’ was a common trope at the time and one to which Hitler returned on a number of occasions.
In short, Hitler saw the root of Germany’s evils in her external subjection… Any prospect of a vigorous German foreign policy, Hitler claimed, ‘is predicated on a radical domestic political change’. In this context, the defeat of 1918 could be put to good use. Just as the catastrophe of 1806 had led to the Wars of Liberation in 1813, Hitler hoped that defeat in 1918 and the humiliation of Versailles would be followed by a national revival; ‘fall’, ‘purification’ and ‘rebirth’ were common tropes in Weimar Germany. Hitler’s rhetoric consciously mimicked that of the great patriotic martyr Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller who was executed by Napoleon in Hitler’s hometown of Braunau for penning the rousing tract ‘Germany in its deepest humiliation’…
Categories
Narcissism, 1
A diabolical idea occurred to me today.
You may recall that last month I discussed Sam Vaknin in my short posts ‘Mr Darcy’ and ‘Five Minutes’ in the context of what is now fashionable to label ‘narcissism’ on various YouTube channels. I would prefer the term ‘malignant egomania’ or something along those lines, but there are so many videos on various YouTube channels that if I want any traffic to flow to my opinion on the subject, I have no choice but to use the popular expression.
As I have already said, the fundamental flaw of all these channels is that they expose the subject academically, without concrete examples; and they rarely talk about ‘narcissistic’ parents, those suffering from malignant egomania: a condition that compels them to destroy the minds of their children.
The correct way to expose this pathology would be, in the ancient world, as it was done in Greek tragedy: where tragedies were events of a family, even if they used fictitious characters. It is also possible to use real-life people. Those who have read Stefan Zweig’s The Struggle with the Daimon about the Germans Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche will know that it was a tragedy that Kleist burned his History of My Mind before committing suicide. That missing work would, it seems, have marked the beginning of an authentic depth psychology—unlike the epistemological error that reigns in the universities (for example, the Jew Vaknin pays obeisance to the Jew Freud, whom we have roundly exposed on this site).
True depth psychology, which I conjecture would have begun with Kleist, would begin with those who devised the trauma model of mental disorders. Before that, all we had about tormented souls was Zweig’s approach, illustrating it with 19th-century biographical cases. More evolved is to enter the world whose door Alice Miller opened in the second half of the 20th century.
Since, unlike the YouTubers, I have entered the world whose door Miller opened for us (cf. my trilogy), the diabolical idea I came up with means analysing the former friend I talk about in ‘Mr Darcy’ to illustrate what malignant egomania is. In this way I circumvent, one hundred per cent, the fundamental flaw of every vlogger who talks about it: none of them dares to give concrete examples through life cases of real people!
It could be objected that this has nothing to do with the darkest hour of the West. I differ because biography and history are two sides of the same psychological coin. The ethnosuicidal psychosis from which virtually all Western Aryans currently suffer must be analysed. And to solve inexact problems (not mathematical, computational or chess problems), it is important to limit the scale of the problem to avoid confusing ourselves: what has happened to the mental health professions, especially psychiatry (my original contribution to the unmasking of this pseudo-science can be read here). Only then can we hope to solve our inexact problem, or at least come closer to a theoretical solution.
Instead of a pretentious (and failed) metahistorical work like Oswald Spengler’s, limiting the scale means simply understanding ourselves and our neighbours to, from this limited scale, jump into trying to solve the white man’s ethnosuicidal passion. Youtubers cannot do this because they aren’t even able to use the real names of their parents and close ones, as I do in my books.
Whoever criticises his father with his real name will be able to criticise anyone. However, as the person I have analysed is still alive, I will only use his first name, omitting his surnames. (I use the plural because in the Spanish-speaking world not only the father’s surname is used, but also the mother’s. For example, the current president of Mexico is known by his surnames ‘López Obrador’.)
As soon as I can start the series, I will do so, and I will show how understanding a particular case of narcissism can help us to understand the crazy West that, after 1945, only thinks of ethnosuicide.