[FRIAM] narcissism

Wed Apr 29 18:47:49 EDT 2020

I know you're really asking and I'm really trying to answer but it's
complicated.  I will give you some background which may seem irrelevant.
Bear with me.

I was going to ask you what kind of evidence you would accept:  assertion
by authorities or empirical clinical evidence i.e. data.  1975 isn't very
long ago in the development of psychoanalytic thought.  It moves slowly if
it is to be taken seriously.

In about 1974 or so I was considering research training in psychoanalysis
which was offered by the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute which was, at
that time, housed within the Psychiatry Department of the University of
Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

I had had years of experience doing data analysis of social scientific and
even psychiatric data.  Generally articles written by psychoanalysts
consist of clinical case material but there was interest in methods more
acceptable to academics.  Therefore there was a possibility that people
familiar with data analysis and scientific methodology in general would be
admitted to a research training program.

Here is some context.  A man named Tomas Detre was hired by the University
to become, eventually, Chancellor of the Health Professions, and Executive
VP.  But he started as chair of the Psychiatry Department.  The Department
had been dominated for decades by psychoanalysts but Detre was not
psychoanalitically trained.  He made it clear that he would support the
Institute if he were made director.  This was impossible given the precepts
of psychoanalysis.  The eventual result was that the Institute left the
University and became free-standing.  There was for some time skepticism or
hostility toward the Institute by high level Univesity administrators.

Also, there was a professor of philosophy named Adolph Grunbaum who had
written papers and perhaps a book arguing that psychoanalysis was not
science. He is correct in that most psychoanalysts don't collect data an do
analysis on it and then publish it.  The reasons for this are that the
methods of psychoanalysis focus on the dynamics within the patient and are
highly sensitive in the sense of privacy.  They also deal with the
interactions at a deep psychological level between the minds of the doctor
and patient (transference and counter-transference).  Hence psychoanalytic
research is problematic for multiple reasons in terms of the methods of
educational research, experimental psychology, etc.

Because of my interest in research training I was able to read a thesis
written by a recent graduate of the program, who already had a PhD in
classical experimental psychology.  It had to do with an information
theoretic understanding of recurring dreams reported by a handful of
patients that she treated during her training.

Anyway, to answer your question in the way I think you want it answered
would require gathering data on a set of patients already diagnosed with
NPD and then gathering objective data via questionnaires or some other
instrument (MMPI-like for instance, Meyers-Briggs-like) and seeing if
discriminant function analysis or some clustering algorithm indicates that
there are two groups which correspond to grandiose and vulnerable.  This is
not likely to happen given the methodological constraints of
psychoanalysis. Another psychoanalyst named Karen Horney wrote a book or at
least a chapter called "the expansive versus the self-effacing solution"
which sounds related but look there only you are willing to accept a
non-statistical analysis.

Here are a couple of facts which may be of interest in the early 1970s when
I was thinking of research training there were maybe 25,000 psychiatrists
in the US and 2,000 psychoanalysts.  To become a psychoanalyst usually you
first become an MD psychiatrist, complete a residency in psychiatry and
then undertake psychoanalytic training which takes another 5+ years and
includes a personal analysis, the sine qua non of the training.  There are
"lay analysts" but not many.

I'm past the TL;DR threshold so I'll stop without proofreading.  I hope
this helps a little.  Watch out for transference and
counter-transference (joke).

Sincerely,

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 3:25 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, to be clear, the journal articles I've seen *indicate* that the
> grandiose one's don't suffer much. I wouldn't know one way or another. I'm
> just going off what I read in the articles.
>
> And I apologize in advance, but without *some* evidence in support of what
> you're saying, it's impossible for me to incorporate. The question I'm
> asking is: Are they the same people just presenting differently? Or are
> they really 2 different types of person? I'm seriously asking that. And as
> I (and Steve) have mentioned, it's reasonable to HYPOTHESIZE that there are
> 2 modes, or some kind of self-presentation mechanism menu from which the
> narcissist chooses. So I really am asking the question.
>
> You're not asking that question. You're *answering* that question without
> providing any evidence to justify your answer. I appreciate the
> conversation a lot. But it's the evidence (and the structure/type of that
> evidence) that I care about. If you don't provide any evidence to back up
> your opinions, I'm at a loss. And, also to be clear, a book from 1975 won't
> be very good evidence for or against a distinction that seems to have been
> made in the literature in 1991. I'd love to find a critical "debunking" of
> the type distinction. That's what I'm looking for. But all I see are
> confirmations of the 2 types.
>
>
> On 4/29/20 2:09 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> > By the way, you say
> >
> > ...that grandiose narcissists *don't* suffer much, but the vulnerable
> narcissists *do*...
> >
> > Grandiosity is a defense against vulnerability in these people.  They're
> the same people.
> >
> > I find Kernberg to be more masterful and credible that Yeomans.  Of
> course, the former is the teacher of the latter.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 2:59 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com
> <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >         Here, Yeomans refers to what I started this thread with, he
> thinks narcissists suffer a lot, enslaved in an isolation. But the research
> I've seen in journals indicate that grandiose narcissists *don't* suffer
> much, but the vulnerable narcissists *do*. This is directly inferrable from
> the *alternative* model of NPD in the DSM 5. And it's reflected to some
> extent in pretty much any paper you get from a google scholar search.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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