Search: are narcissists attracted to sociopaths?

Absolutely.

All narcissists are delusional.  They have a delusional view of themselves and a pathological self involvement.  Sociopaths will mirror this delusion (manipulating the emotionally mentally ill is one of their highest skills) and they will make the narcissist feel the self involvement is normal.

Narcissism is actually a confusing term, there are at least three pathological types that I know of:  garden variety, malignant and rigid.  Rigid is the one I am most familiar with — the narcissism of Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, aka, the perfect, the mentally ill evil.  They have zero consideration for anyone else, their whole psychic universe is organized around protecting their perfectness.  This is why they give up the lived life, they gain total perfection.

The rest of us go through life with daggers of defeats, failures and regrets attached to our backs that tweak us now and then, because we have consciences.  Narcissists know none of this, never having made a mistake in their lives, leading a life absolutely without error (as long as they can maintain the fiction).  But the maintenance of this false world is exhausting, turning to sociopaths for enabling must be such a relief.

They are so lacking in empathy that they are often mistaken for sociopaths themselves, I term them one of the faux sociopathic states.  Joining with a sociopath mirrors their vast selfishness and disregard of others.  They often pair off with sociopaths to form an evil couple.

Furthermore, there is a phenomenon known as narcissistic catastrophe (at least for the malignant and rigid types).  The catastrophe occurs when the edifice of the false self is overwhelmed by reality, when the betrayal of their own soul is overwhelmed by their own soul needs.  At that point they are lost at sea, unable to recognize friend from foe, in personality meltdown, they probably feel they don’t even know themselves — permanent psychotic dissociation is an extreme danger.

At this point they need protection both from themselves and from sociopaths (for whom they are now like an artist’s palette).  I actually knew a rigidly narcissistic therapist to throw such a client to sociopathic manipulators.  Narcissism is that evil, almost like a personality virus that won’t allow anyone under their influence (even their own child or client) to escape narcissism to live a lived life, a soul life.

Search: pseudologia fantastica treatment

There isn’t any.  Pseudologues (i.e., sociopaths who are also pathological liars) are the way they are born to be.  Neither freewill or individual psychology plays any role.  Their brains are even different (www.futurepundit.com/archives/001998.html, www.futurepundit.com/archives/003035.html.

However, there are other types of psychological liars so each individual should obviously be evaluated.  A problem with this, though, is that those individuals we would assume to be experts, therapists, probably have less experience with pseudologues and sociopaths than we do in daily life.  Pseudologues and sociopaths, being perfect in every way, simply do not often present themselves for treatment.  Further, if they do, their purpose is not to change but to learn how to pass for normal more easily — in effect they seek to use talk therapy to become more adept as sociopathic predators.

I agree with those that believe pseudologues and sociopaths should never, ever be accepted into talk therapy.  I would go even further to state that any therapists who do in fact do this should lose their licenses — since it is only by their being out of touch with their own soul that they could fail to recognize the soulless, could fail to recognize that they couldn’t reach the sociopathic client.  Any therapist out of touch with their own soul can not be of any use to anybody, is by definition not even a therapist in the first place.

The worst situation I have ever known of in this regard involved a therapy group that allowed sociopathic members along with the depressives, neurotics, incest victims, etc.  I’m sure the therapist would never have thrown piranhas into a goldfish bowl, but this she found acceptable.  I’m not a fan of group therapy in the first place (I believe it is a grotesque lowering of boundaries before strangers one can not know) but accepting sociopaths into group therapy should be grounds for automatic malpractice suits against a therapist.

A universal among sociopaths (including pseudologues) is delight at manipulating the non-sociopathic into behavior betraying their souls.

In the instance above the therapist was a rigid or malignant narcissist herself (one of Scott Peck’s mentally ill evil described in his book, People of the Lie).  Many people object to the concepts of evil and mental illness being joined, I can only assume they have never dealt with any malignant narcissists.   Group therapy with such a flawed therapist would become a celebration of her defect.  Sociopaths would effortlessly join that effort.  In addition narcissists are very attracted to sociopaths, narcissists themselves have to spend eternity fighting their souls, their consciences, their dreams and do in fact wake up to their true humanity occasionally.  Sociopaths have none of these problems.

A small grotesquery in an extremely grotesque story is that this therapist was called Mother by her clients.  It is hard to imagine a greater perversion of reality or semantics.

What’s wrong with the Democrats?

I posted this in response to Benjamin Barber’s post at HuffPost, “It’s the ‘Public’ not the ‘Option’ in ‘Public Option’ that Counts,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benjamin-r-barber/its-the-public-not-the-op_b_389441.html.  His argument was that the Democrats are losing the war of words in defense of the value of the public sphere or public good by dropping the phrase public option from the healthcare reform (sic) bill.

The fact that the Dems are losing the war of words is symptomatic of a very deep flaw in the Democratic Party, imo. The mental illness at the extreme end of the Democratic Party is narcissism (as opposed to the mental illness of extreme Republicanism, sociopathy, that of the ‘whatever’s for me, is the good” of the Randeroids).

By narcissism I mean the overvaluing of the mind over the emotions, or the mind over the soul. Narcissism runs the gamut from a lightly worn modality of thought to the rigid malignant narcissism of Peck’s People of the Lie. Narcissists lose the ability to communicate to non-narcissists because they are totally alienated from the “motivations of the soul.” Thus the Democratic Party, by and large, has lost the ability to connect with the working class and vast swaths of middle America.

“What’s wrong with Kansas” is not merely a question of what’s wrong with Kansans but also a question of what’s wrong with the Democratic Party that can’t reach Kansans. People will simply not vote for individuals they can’t relate to or who are unable to speak to them in ways that make sense, both intellectually and emotionally. So the conartists of the Republican Party step in.

The war-of-words is lost on too many Democrats (it’s all “bloodless” negotiating to them) as great opera is lost on the tone deaf.