PRESS RELEASE
Leading Narcissism Expert
Warns about Obama
Sept. 22, 2011 (EIRNS)—As Lyndon LaRouche has emphatically pointed out, Obama's mental impairment has potentially fatal consequences for the United States—requiring that he be removed from office immediately for the sake of the nation. Only cowardice actually prevents many prominent political leaders from echoing him. Thus they put their country at peril.
Narcissism expert Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love and the first to raise the possibility that Barack Obama was a narcissist (Summer of 2008), is one of the few who have no qualms about exposing the dangerous illness suffered by the President. Vaknin's interview with Lyndon LaRouche PAC-TV's Brent Bedford in early September updates the picture he painted in an interview given in November 2010, and raises the alarm that Obama's reaction to being denied what Vaknin calls his "narcissistic supply" (adulation), puts our republic in danger.
Vaknin and Bedford devote the better part of an hour to discussing "What happens when the narcissist can't get his fix anymore?" Vaknin reminds the audience that the narcissistic personality is a rigid one, whereby the person creates a fake persona in order to cover up his inner sense of worthlessness, and insists on constant positive reinforcement for that fake personality. If that positive reinforcement is lacking, the narcissist uses various mechanisms to try to prevent being exposed for what he is.
The three mechanisms that Obama has chosen, in order to cope with the undeniable reduction in support from the population and political colleagues, in Vaknin's view, are
- passive-aggressive behavior,
- paranoid/schizoid behavior, and
- compensatory self-pity.
These can be expected to be superceded very soon by a process Vaknin calls "decompensation," in which a narcissistic personality begins to disintegrate, and reacts in a manner commonly referred to as "acting out"—i.e., aggressive behavior.
Vaknin usefully compares Obama's case with that of President Richard Nixon, who, he says, certainly shared some of Obama's malignant qualities. However, Vaknin emphasized, the fact that Nixon was not a malignant narcissist is underscored by the fact that he was able to differentiate between himself, and the government. He even continued to permit useful government activity to go on, while he was carrying out his paranoid, even criminal behavior. To the contrary, Vaknin said, Obama believes he is the government, something equivalent to the second coming of Jesus Christ!
It is for this reason, Vaknin concludes, that he fears the consequences of Obama's personality collapse. I think he will try to bring the nation, even the world, down in flames, if he sees himself being rejected and destroyed, Vaknin said. This is why I have trouble sleeping at night, because people just don't want to face the danger of having a malignant narcissistic personality in the Presidency of the United States.
