Like a number of the blogs appearing on this website, this post explores a particular nuance of the psychopathology underreported by the national media, and that has contributed to the dysfunctionality of American politics: What to do when a federal official exhibits all the diagnostic traits of a psychopath?

Two months after he’d lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump continuously tried to coerce Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find” the 11,780 votes needed to overturn his state’s election results. This coercion was also exhibited by Lindsey Graham (R, South Carolina) who, Raffensperger later revealed, had also tried to coerce him to find the needed votes.

Though it seemed to take Capitol Police by surprise, the insurrection that led Trump-supporting rioters to invade the Capitol was entirely predictable.

In this video, Gary Rosenthal, author of Re-Visioning Narcissism, reflects two commonly suffered forms of “developmental arrest” that have been with us for a very long time—an egocentric narcissism and an ethnocentric tribalism. What’s distinctive about our current epoch is that these two forms of stunted development now threaten not only the world’s democracies, but the fate of our species. Never before has there been such an urgent imperative to evolve further, to become wiser, less polarized, more objective—and fast. For our planet’s ecological clock ticks ever closer to a deadly midnight. And already, the dying has begun…

In the wake of the polarized, political turmoil of the Iraqi war, James Hillman published an article in Parabola entitled “The Gods, Disease, and Politics.” In it Hillman writes: “The recognition of the intimate and subtly differentiated connection between myth and pain, between the gods and diseases and politics, is the greatest of all achievements of the Greek mind: the perfection of tragedy…”

Wearing a mask and social distancing aren’t radically liberal, expensive, or complicatedly high-tech. You don’t need a privileged status to employ them. You don’t need your own helicopter and a dozen doctors monitoring your every breath, nor a cocktail of experimental drugs that are not widely available to anyone else, in order to protect against the ravages of COVID.

Membership has its privileges, as well as its downside. For example, what do Donald and Melania Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Thom Tillis (R-NC), former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), and Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins all have in common?

Though psychopaths and narcissists share central traits in common — egocentricity, lack of empathy, being interpersonally exploitive — I’m quite used to encountering narcissism, and much more frequently than the estimates provided by the American Psychiatric Association. But psychopaths are a different, more rarely encountered breed…

In response to the New York Times article from August 31, 2020, “Trump Books Keep Coming, and Readers Can’t Stop Buying,” I agree with the quote from historian Jon Meacham: “It’s an inherently dramatic moment, it’s tribally fierce, it’s urgent, so there is this amazing appetite for all things political.”

As narcissism continues to show up in American psychotherapeutic consulting rooms, mental health professionals are confused as to what the term truly means…

Akin to the tragic figures of ancient Greek drama, Captain Ahab is a figure who seems at first larger than life, a man who has been struck by lightning and lived, yet who is brought down by his own hubris.

In a global world, the rising tide of the sea change of Trump’s election was shockingly noted — not only in the hallways of the world’s governments, but in the consulting rooms of American psychotherapists.