Therapist’s Grandiosity

A critical psychology's view of the concept of grandiosity

Among the most common forms of mental pathology are depression and grandiosity, whose components form the backbone of almost all personality disorders, as defined by Western psychology and psychiatry.

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In this essay, I will try to do a bit of critical psychology, that is psychology of psychology, internal affairs - mostly for the benefit of my clients who have been called either, openly and by implication, by people who claim to know these things. What does the reification of the concept of grandiosity accomplishes for the psychologist and the therapist? — as carriers of a sociological, cultural, and Machiavellian script.

I will not even entertain the discussion about these pathologies from their status-quo context of hyper-realism and the medicalisation of mental life. If it is really as they say, as they teach in psychology textbooks and in therapy classrooms - that the emergence of both of these, and of everything else under the sun, is an illusion, somehow magically collapsible to a biochemistry we don’t yet know but which is surely out there - then this discussion is pointless. But that perspective is so vulgar, so reeking of scientism, let’s leave that to the psychiatrist and his lap dog the mainstream psychologist.

Same Infection

That rant out of the way, let’s look at both grandiosity and its flip-side cousin, depression, from the less idiotic perspective of identity disturbance. To risk a massive oversimplification: depression, a neurosis, is a deflation of the ego, while grandiosity is the reverse, its shadow aspect - an inflation. Both are then really the same, in the way that both a burning-hot fever and the coldness of death are possible outcomes of the same infection. In both, the ego is over-invested in. In grandiosity, the resource is fetched directly from outside; in depression, it is kept and spawned within.

This is the classic definition of, pretty much, all personality disorders. The borderline personality structure, as, for example, described by Otto Kernberg is the freezing of those two strategies in one, while object relations theory suggests an immaturity of the reality principle that causes all of this. In reality, at least one claimed as the real reality by western folks, ego should be treated as a part of a triad, something bigger. Classically for example with the Id and Superego, or of a larger family, as in Internal Family Systems. In cognitive approaches, which seek to crush every nuance under the boot of European rationality, ego should be a function of reason, and mental health is seen as that state of balance, almost as if the phenomenological self has to be broken and subjugated by Descartes’ cogito.

While I won’t address the obvious intellectual colonialism that happens in cognitive and behavioural psychology, I brought it up to show that really, the more humanistic approaches of psychoanalysis, ego therapy, and existentialism described above do the very same thing, they seek, as all things in mainstream psychology, to put the blame back onto the individual.

Much in the way that an “irrational” patient of a cognitive therapist suffers from not being like the therapist - rational, the patient of a psychoanalyst suffers from not being like the analyst - liquid in its psychological makeup.

Objective Narcissism

Let’s analyse one important aspect of clinical grandiosity - it can only offend when it’s “objective”. By that I mean the European, and Cartesian, delusion that the world is divided in half - that of the world, and that of the internal state. For example, if one thinks of themselves as the best author in the world, despite not being one - that is a delusion, a clear indicator of a narcissistic personality disorder or some aspect of psychotic problems. Conversely, when one thinks the creator of the universe holds a place for him in paradise - that is just a religious belief.

Equally as delusional, by the same token. But almost no one does take it to the border of objectivity, in the West at least. It’s private, and by virtue of being so it’s impotent as a belief. Even in deeply religious contexts, people do not really believe that, like: really, really, really, really - proof? because their lives have been lived as if that wasn’t objective reality - why would they fear death otherwise?

The religions and worldviews that do muster courage to claim it’s an “objective” reality, often do not believe it truly either, and the force of that conviction is a mind-shattering doubt. that has to be stitched up by fanaticism and often fascism.

In other words, whatever is subjective and doesn’t make a claim on objectivity, is non-offending. And yet it exists, right? That a child dreams of becoming that writer, that this belief through its liquidity pours over into a whole trajectory of its yearning, efforts and ultimately…. disillusionment - pretty real things if you ask me - is seen as good. The child will never become one, by the odds of statistical analysis - it’s a certainty it won’t. And that certainty transforms into a personal suffering. This internalisation of being swindled in a rigged game, as if one’s dreams didn’t catch up to ability, economic ability - if courageous, is praised as the virtue of ambition.

So if a child says they want to be a famous writer, it’s at an endless risk of being called either a narcissist or a failure- the child now is made to not even to prove that it’s capable, but to actually attain it. If he gets there, which he won’t, that’s a statistical certainty, he gets to say it and is not delusional, but still! it has to protect the subjectivity of others by being humble, attributing having arrived there not to himself but to an external effort; if he doesn’t get there and claims that status prematurely, he is delusional, a narcissist, and grandiose. All of that would be just brutal mediocracy, except for one small detail - the child is actively encouraged all his life, to preserve that subjective claim as an internal ambition.

If a child just drops out from that rigged circus, he is said to be, at the very best, unambitious, at the very worst, autistic or schizoid, or they get a diagnosis of a suboptimal brain - through ADD.

The Engine and Its Containment

Here lies the hypocrisy of colonial psychology: on one hand, subjectivity, which shouldn’t be a source of objective extraction of psychic resources, is the engine of all striving in a cultural, economic and technological sense. In other words, we are encouraged to have grandiose, narcissistic dreams - even in developmental psychology it’s called healthy narcissism. But on the other hand, that libidinal investment is prohibited from being capitalised outside of the external gaze of people. It can be, if it’s purely subjective, like a religious belief, if it’s castrated, temporary, and liquid. It’s a good engine for your capitalist behaviour, but watch out if that petrol spills out - clean that up, with therapy, pills, humbleness, more liquidity. For, should you feel shameless in expanding like that into the objective reality of capitalistic pursuits and economic powers, then you wouldn’t engage in the mirroring process of the Machiavellian mind - in other words, the threat is that you might become ungovernable by the appeals to “reason”, which is just a judgement of other people, often the therapist or the philosopher and the culture-maker. And nothing is more scary to a Western person than someone outside of it.

That is to say, of course grandiosity and the reverse of depression aren’t ideal psychic states, they are sources of immeasurable suffering.

My point is only that the reason for those pathologies isn’t in one’s “personality”, identity disturbance, or brain chemistry, it’s in the soul-murdering abuse of Western culture which feeds objective, scientific, and economic life, exploitative life, with castrated claims to internal states. A division it itself invented! Which doesn’t exist in non-western worldviews. It keeps subjectivity muzzled, castrated, and utterly private, like y’alls religion. But still, if those misbehave - they can be judged, as broken, faulty, or guilty. That arrangement is the only containment of the vitality of organic life which kinda works for the benefit of those technocratic states- up to a point, make no mistake. And there is no better enforcer of that abusive split than the mainstream psychiatrist and the therapist.