40 World News
EIR
November 26, 2010
Sam Vaknin (http://samvak.tripod.com) is the author o
Malignant Self Love—Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain—How the West Lost the East
, as well as manyother books about psychology, relationships, philoso- phy, economics, and international aairs. He has served as a columnist or
Central Europe Review, Global Politician
, PopMatters, eBookWeb, and Bellaonline, as well as being aUPI Senior Business Corre-spondent. He was the editor or the Mental Health and Central East Europe categories in TheOpen Directory and Suite101.This interview was con-ducted or LaRouchePAC-TV during the frst week o Novem-ber, by Brent Bedord and Mat-thew Ogden, and can be viewed at http://tiny.cc/l3tq3
Brent Bedford:
I’m a pro-ducer at the LaRouchePAC.com website. I’ve read a lot o your writings—not all o them,because you’ve written somuch, and you have a lot o YouTube videos too.I responded to the question o Obama’s narcissism,in response to my frst encounter with it, which was at awebcast presented by Lyndon LaRouche, on April 11,2009. And he was very straightorward, that Obama hasa narcissist personality type, which he compared toHitler and Nero. And he urther said that, as President,Obama was susceptible to inuence by a cabal who wasaround him, and that under the current conditions o economic breakdown, you had a dangerous mixture,with Obama’s personality, and his being President.So, when I took this diagnosis o Obama, one thingthat I ound was that in just discussing this casuallywith people, a lot o people had difculty conrontingthis.
Vaknin:
They’re in denial.
Bedford:
Yes. Without a critical analysis, theywould try to see Obama as a projection o, say, awsthey saw in themselves. Oh yeah, he has a big ego, orhe’s vain, or arrogant. But when I was orwarded yourwritings on it, I realized that this goes much deeper be-neath the surace than most people had conronted.
Vaknin:
That’s very true.
What Is Narcissism?
Bedford:
Could you just describe, to start the dis-cussion, what the basis is or the narcissistic personalitydisorder?
Vaknin:
Well, it’s very difcult—people fnd it di-fcult to make the distinction between
their
traits, andshortcomings, and railties, and the narcissist, becausewe all have a modicum o narcissism. We all have whatis called healthy narcissism. Without healthy narcis-sism, we would not look out or ourselves, we would
LPAC-TV Interview with Sam Vaknin:Obama Is a Malignant Narcissist
LPAC-TV
LPAC-TV editor Brent Bedord (let) interviewed Sam Vaknin (right), a well-known specialist inmalignant narcissism, on thesubject o President Obama’snarcissism. LPAC and Vakninconcur on the extremedanger o having such anarcissist as President o theUnited States.
November 26, 2010
EIR
World News 41
not have personal boundaries, we would not be ambi-tious, we would not pursue goals, etc., etc. So, healthynarcissism is, as the name implies, healthy.So, we are all acquainted with narcissism, and that’swhere people fnd it very difcult to distinguish
the
ma-lignant psychopathic narcissist, rom your garden-vari-ety narcissist, someone with narcissistic traits, or with anarcissistic style, or with a bloated ego, or something.But as you justly said, the dierence is proound.The malignant, or psychopathic, narcissist lacksempathy. In other words, he lacks the crucial aculty o eeling human, o experiencing what it means to behuman. The narcissist is, to a very large extent, a ormo artifcial intelligence, sort o an alien in the truestsense o the word, because he has never experiencedhumanity, or humaneness, and he cannot empathizewith other people; he cannot put himsel in other peo-ple’s shoes. He cannot eel or them, because he alsolacks the emotional apparatus; he lacks emotions, or atleast, access to his emotions.So, this is the frst critical dierence. Then, as de-rivatives o this existential condition o lacking empa-thy, the narcissist is exploitative, anti-social, destruc-tive, and sel-destructive, arrogant, eels superior,eels that he’s superman, and so on and so orth. Allthese are derivatives rom the inability to know whatit means to be human. And so this is where the narcis-sist diers rom someone with an inated ego, orsomeone who believes himsel to be a genius, or what-ever. It’s like a dierence between a normal cell, anda malignant cell.That’s why I called my book
Malignant Sel-Love.
Sel-love is okay. It’s great. It’s needed. But there’s aorm o malignant sel-love. That’s why narcissists arevery dangerous, and narcissism is a pernicious phe-nomenon which impacts all o the narcissist’s nearestand dearest.Now, i the narcissist is a local butcher, or neighbor-hood barber, then the damage is limited. But i he hap-pens to be the president o the United States, it’s a ca-lamity. It’s an apocalypse.
Obama’s Narcissism
Bedford:
That’s what’s interesting. In reviewingObama’s background, or what’s available about hisbackground, he appears to have presented himsel as anarcissistic personality early on, although it wasn’t thesame thing as when he presented himsel as a presiden-tial candidate. This is when you said—you were one o the frst to identiy him back in 2008,
1
and so I was curi-ous as to what did you respond to, or how did you seethis?
Vaknin:
As ar as I know, I was the frst. At least Isuered as though I was the frst. I was vilifed andslandered, and I paid a very, very hety and dear priceor daring to say that he might be,
might
be, mind you,a narcissist.The signs were all there. First o all, a very chaoticchildhood, in a series o dysunctional households. Andwithin a dysunctional amily—that is the typical, tradi-tional, and orthodox background which leads to theemergence o personality disorders in general, and mostparticularly, the narcissistic and anti-social personalitydisorders.So, check one.Then, there was the issue o conabulations. Obamalies pathologically, incessantly. He has a hazy biogra-phy, which is a major sign o narcissism. Narcissistshave this sort o diuse biography. There’s nothingthere, it’s all in the air, you can’t pinpoint dates, names,places, nothing. It’s very og-like, oggy history. So,that was there too.Then, there was the body language. In total, in thelast three years, I’ve watched, very closely and repeat-edly, well over 1,200 hours o Barack Obama. I’vescrutinized his body language, I’ve listened to hisspeeches, o teleprompter and on teleprompter. I haveseen his unscripted reactions to a variety o surprisesituations. I notice his attitude toward his colleaguesand coworkers, and, or instance, towards his superi-ors, when he was in the Senate, and so on, and soorth.So, I’ve studied this man very, very thoroughly. Andhis body language was very typical o a narcissist:haughty. Haughty body language. A superior posture.The distance, the invisible wall, the glass wall, betweenhim and others. The pretensions and so on.Then, there was the issue o pronoun density, one o the major signs o narcissism, which is, by the way, aclinical measure. It’s used in testing narcissism. Pro-noun density means how many times you say “me,”“my,” “I,” and “mysel,” in a single sentence, unneces-sarily. In places where you could have substituted other,more appropriate pronouns. So, when I wrote the articlein July 2008, Obama’s pronoun density was
three times
1. “Barack Obama—Narcissist or Merely Narcissistic?”
Global Politi-cian
, August 13, 2008.
42 World News
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November 26, 2010
the average pronoun density o a psychopathic narcis-sist. I mean, that’s how bad it was. And it declinedsomewhat in 2009, and in the last ew months, it wentup again, especially during the British Petroleum crisis.That is a major clinical sign.Then we have another clinical sign, which is calledadversity tolerance threshold. That is, to translate it intoproper civilized English, how many times you snap atyour underlings. What kind o interactions you main-tain with people who are at your mercy, in some re-spects; employed by you, your amily members, and soon. His adversity threshold went down and down—inother words, he snapped more oten. He became irrita-ble, irascible, and cantankerous more oten, and veryoten, on camera. He couldn’t control it anymore. It wasout o control.And that’s also a clinical test, by the way.So, we had an adversity threshold that was declin-ing. So, having put all these things together, in a verylengthy essay, in July 2008, I reached the conclusionthat Obama
might
be—and I was very careul in thatessay; I said that he might be. He must be subjected toproper personality testing, and so on and so orth. Ididn’t say, oh, the guy’s a narcissist, and that’s it. I said,he
might
be a narcissist. That was two and a hal yearsago.By now, I am convinced that he’s a narcissist. I haveno doubt in my mind that, should he be subjected topsychological testing, or instance, to the NarcissisticPersonality Inventory, which is a classical tool or diag-nosing narcissism, or to the MMPI (Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory), I have no doubt in mymind that he will be diagnosed as a classical, malignant,psychopathic narcissist.Ater he became President, I had a lot more materialto work with, o course. It’s mainstream now, absolutelymainstream. You’ll fnd people like George F. Will, andCharles Krauthammer, and even
Time
magazine, not tomention the
Financial Times
, and so on—now it’smainstream. It’s in ashion to say that Obama might bea narcissist.But, even so, people don’t realize what they’resaying. Lyndon LaRouche is among the very ew whorealize the severity, and the cataclysmic nature o sayingabout someone that he’s a narcissist. Other people say,well, he’s a narcissist, so what? They don’t grasp, theydon’t understand. They don’t understand that the nar-cissist is a time bomb, a walking time-bomb.It doesn’t have to be a Hitler, it doesn’t have to be aNero. I think the institutional character o the UnitedStates is such that it would be very difcult or Obamato commit genocide, or to open concentration camps, orto legislate race laws. So, I don’t think his narcissismwill be expressed exactly the same way Hitler’s was, orStalin’s was, or Nero’s was. But it would be as destruc-tive. In this sense, LaRouche is right. It would be asdestructive.One way or the other, the devastation, the waste-land, in the wake o the narcissist, is as big wherever thenarcissist acquires power. So, a Hitler let behind a dev-astated continent. Obama might leave behind a devas-tated economy. But the devastation would be equallyproound, equally deep.
Bedford:
I wanted to ollow up your initial summa-tion o narcissistic personality disorder with a more o-cussed question, which I drew rom your latest article,but beore that, would you be willing to share the natureo the vilifcation and slander? Do you think that thatmay have come rom Obama, or that there’s any sig-nifcant—
Vaknin:
No, I doubt very much i Obama is evenaware o my existence. But his ans—and I don’t think it was a coordinated sort o thing. I don’t think it was aconspiracy, o the Secret Service, or the CIA, or the cor-ridors o power in the West Wing, to viliy and slanderSam Vaknin, the unknown Sam Vaknin, as ar as Obamagoes. I think simply that Obama has his acolytes, thesesycophants, these robots, robotic ans, unthinking, to-tally, and they think that they’re doing their idol, anddivinity, in a way, a avor by taking down anyone whodares to question his credentials, his biography, letalone his character. . . .
Bedford:
Would you say or that reason, that Obamahas this kind o ollowing, that a distinction exists be-tween him, and the average, common narcissist?
Vaknin:
No, all narcissists create a cult. The cultaround the narcissist could consist and subsist o hisamily, or even his wie. I the cult is a two-membercult, we call it shared psychosis in psychology—a
olieà deux
, in French. The cult could consist o the narcis-sist as a husband and his long-suering wie, as his aco-lyte, sycophant, ollower—he acts as the guru, as thepsychiatrist. So it’s a two-person cult. But, o course,when the narcissist is President o the United States, hehas a 20-million-member cult.But the narcissist operates through cults. The orga-
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Obama: One Narcissist's Reaction to Failure and Defeat
In July 2008, I was the first to suggest that Obama may be suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). How is a prominent narcissist likely to react to defeat and failure? Will Obama disintegrate, decompensate, act out? Is this a dangerous situation?
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