Maggie's Farm

Our Editor asked me to comment on McArdle's post of the above title. Happiness is, as I have discussed here in the past, undefineable.

Joy is defineable, peace of mind is, contentment is, delight is. Pursuit of happiness is a fool's errand. (Is it true that Jefferson's first draft was "pursuit of property", but that was edited out?)

Key quote from her post:

Instead of asking parents and non-parents whether they are happy right now, we might ask whether they are becoming more like the people they want to be. And then we might see children not as factors that may or may not be contributing to our happiness, but as opportunities to practice what most of us -- perhaps me most of all -- need to do more often, which is to put someone else before ourselves.

Shrinkwrapped's post on sociopathy is a good update, and raises intriguing, age-old questions about free will and responsibility which go far beyond the topic of sociopathy. The Greeks understood these things better than we do. Fate, personality temperaments, and all that.

Everybody's brain seeks excuses for their body's wrong or irresponsible behavior: My Brain Made Me Do it.

I might revise the title to "My brain made me blame my brain." That's the one I use when I screw up.

I have no answers to these conundrums (conundra?).

Erik Erikson said "Psychotherapy begins where common sense ends."

Well, common sense isn't all that common. In fact, it is as rare and precious a thing as honesty.

The shrink proprietor of F*ck Feelings is darn good with common sense. As they say in The Program, "Feelings aren't Facts." I always like to apply common sense first, then other things if that doesn't help.

Sociopathy seems to be, to some extent, bred in the bone. As I have discussed here in the past, it's about a cool indifference to others, often while presenting a mask of warm caring and self-sacrifice (the so-called Mask of Sanity). It's about an easy ability to lie to your face, and it's usually not about violence and murder.

High IQ sociopaths fool shrinks all the time and we kick ourselves every time we finally realize it. Often, they confess things as red herrings for us. They tend to have ulterior motives, but do not mention them to us at all. People who repeatedly lie to shrinks generally have sociopathic traits, at the least. They tend to have an assortment of other symptoms and problem behaviors also, such as substance abuse, shame, narcissism, blaming, exploitative relationships, and anxiety. They always have an excuse at the ready, tend to be impulsive, and always have their self-interest in mind.

At Gene Expression's Bad to the Bone:

Could a psychopath mount a legal defense by saying “my brain made me do it”? Or my “genes made me do it”? Is this any different from saying my rotten childhood made me do it? Psychopaths know right from wrong – they just don’t care. That is what society calls “bad”, not “mad”. But if they are constitutionally incapable of caring, can they really be blamed for it? On the other hand, if violent psychopaths are a continuing danger to society and completely refractory to rehabilitation, what is to be done with them?

Don't ask me. Just keep them out of my office. They are Very Bad News for soft-hearted gullible trusting folks like me.

I have been mulling over the notion of doing a post on ineffectiveness in people, but every time I thought about it, the subject just got too big to tackle. There are so many ways to be ineffective in life, ways of not addressing reality - and oneself - firmly.

Schneiderman is keeping it simple: "The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People"

It always amuses me when expensive and time-consuming studies are done to demonstrate something that everybody and his grandmother knew already.

Great example: Personalities Accurately Judged by Physical Appearance Alone

Without that subliminal processing, neither actors nor con men could exist because there would be nothing to imitate.

I do not know how material poverty can be defined. I have an easier time defining poverty of spirit. Man can not live on bread alone, and material appurtenances are no measure of quality of life.

(I have mentioned before two "poor" people I have come to know well: a Maine Guide who lives with his family in an unelectrified log cabin built by his own hands and who home-schools, and a New Hampshire farmer who attends my church whose life is as spartan and spare as that of the Guide, but whose life is full of joy, accomplishment, friends, pride, and serenity - except when his equipment breaks.)

Few people get this as well as my fellow shrink Dr. Ted Dalrymple, a man who has seen it all both in the jails and government housing of England and around the world. Sympathy Deformed: Misguided compassion hurts the poor.

The examples from Africa are heartbreaking.

Given all that, I am grateful to be what I am, an American professional woman married to a Boston finance guy with money to spare. He still plays Rugby and hockey, and I never lacked for life spirit either. We lack neither the Holy sort nor the secular sort of spirit, I think, and Shame On You if you do not jump into the thick of life and grab it by the balls the ball. Our family motto is a Nike ad. I do not need much in material comforts, but I do like and desire other things, including a closer walk with Christ. There is something about having spare money that causes one to want less material stuff, at least for me.

As our Editor says, a new car is a used car after 24 hours. Thoreau would have said the same thing, but it was all hypothetical for him. He had a family business (always a good thing to have).

Dr. Arie Friedman on A Dying Profession

I think it is still appealing (as a second income) for those who find the work interesting and challenging. It will be mostly women in the US, I think, in the future, and on government pay.

No More Identity Politics; Palin Proves Old School Feminism is Dead. A quote from Lori Ziganto's piece (h/t, Linkiest):

The reason I’m happy that Palin and the “mama grizzlies” are in the forefront isn’t because they have girl parts. It is because of what they believe. It is because of the kind of people they are. It is that they are coming forward now, as freedom fighters. It is because, like it or not, it just so happens to be the women of the GOP who have the will and the fighting spirit at this time. That is what we need: leaders with spines, regardless of having breasts or not.

You see, while “Feminists/Femisogynists” were busily pant suiting themselves and trying to become men, other women were out there annihilating the glass ceiling, by raising their families and learning through actual living and perseverance. We didn’t learn by trying to be something we are not, but rather we learned by living. Most often in our wonderful small towns, none of which, in my experience are bitter.

We don’t rely on a victim mentality; we rely on ourselves and the love of our families.

Regular people living in the real world never bought the Leftist narrative that criminals are victims. Neither did shrinks, who know how much character matters. Criminality knows no socio-economic or ethnic boundaries.

This is right on the money: Were Liberals Wrong on Crime? It's a sad day when honest, hard-working people who are willing to work two tough jobs to pay their bills and support their families are made to feel like chumps, or worse.

Such good folks are the salt of the earth and the backbone of America, whatever the Manhattan radical chic set thinks of them.

Do DSM psychiatric diagnoses have any validity? Or are they superficial descriptors on the order of "Patient has a fever" or "Patient is dehydrated," but with pseudo-scientific-sounding specificity?

What’s in a name? Genetic overlap between major psychiatric disorders

Readers know that I view a DSM diagnosis as just a little bit more than an insurance form entry item, most of the time. As a highly experienced colleague says, "I've read the DSM, and I have never found a patient of mine in there."

I plan to bore our readers by reposting my series on Psychiatric Diagnosis during vacation this summer.

Broken Heart Syndrome. It's a real thing, believed to be caused by a massive adrenaline surge.

A few basic books on psychotherapy and analytic psychiatry at Dr. X. He can keep the Kohut, because I cannot understand him, or any of the "Self Psychology" stuff.

What I read this weekend (and recommend): Gyorgy Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain.

It is about the self-generating powers and activities of the brain. While presented as a popular science book for the layman, some familiarity with modern neuroscience would help.

I have been working on ways of talking about personality traits and relationships which avoid all psychobabble, fancy convoluted theorizing, and obscure terminology and latinate or greekified jargon. That means trying to invent better, more intuitive, metaphors. This is just a first draft to help get me thinking about what it is I really want to say -

For 40 or 50 years, Psychiatry and especially Psychoanalysis has tended to view the formation of a person - their pathology and their normality - as being founded in their relationships during development. I do not agree with that premise.

However, as a shrink I am naturally interested in peoples' relationships. It's one of the main topics I listen to, and it is one of the main arenas in which people live out their personality tendencies, for better or worse.

A patient of mine, 59 years old, was married at 21 to his high school sweetheart on their college graduation. He comes to me because he has let himself fall in love with a younger co-worker in his office, and feels torn up with the conflicts. So torn up that he cannot work or concentrate. He is an entrepreneur and has built a series of multi-million dollar businesses during his life, some successful, some not.

Naturally, I inquire about his marriage. A picture gradually forms in my mind of a relationship which is frozen in the past. Two young folks, mad about each other, created a romantic relationship template - their manner of relating and interacting at the time - which has neither changed or grown much since then except, of course, a marked cooling of the passion. Meanwhile, everything else in life has changed: raising kids, financial ups and downs, deaths of parents, new activities and new friends and relationships, etc.

The relationship model that worked at 20 didn't do much at 59, but they unwittingly clung to the original template they had formed early on.

Everybody has had the experience of seeing an old friend after many years, and thinking "Gee, we picked up just where we left off ten years ago." Or, even more commonly, "I feel a bit like a 14 year-old or a 16 year-old when I spend time with my parents."

It's neither a good nor a bad thing; it's just a fact that we have a limited number of relationship templates on hand to apply to our different sorts of relationships, and we tend to keep using the same ones.

Often, in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, this is termed "transference." I just call it recycling of old templates. Mental efficiency, however imperfect.

Sometimes we are forced to form new ones, regardless of our age. Getting a new sibling requires a new one (an evil and unwelcome interloper), becoming a parent requires new ones, as does becoming a grandparent or an in-law. New love relationships sometimes do, but more often tend to draw on past templates, modified a bit, and superimposed on a new relationship. Even a new house dog demands a new template (unless one imposes one of one's human templates on the relationship - as I do. I seem to use my "toddler" template for dogs.).

Sometimes we do things on purpose to create new, more mature or more satisfying templates for our arsenal, or to adjust old ones (relationship templates have wiggle room on the edges). That's one of the purposes of marriage encounter, marital therapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, etc. Much of what can feel sterile in relationships is our clinging to old templates - clinging for comfort and familiarity.

People usually form new relationships on their pre-existing templates, and the lack of perfect "fit" of mental template to reality is what makes for all the fun and challenge and mess. (You can generalize that metaphor to lots of things in life...most of what we do and how we do it is from an existing pattern.)

Humans stick to their patterns most of the time - creatures of habit - and usually prefer venturing outside of them (adventure) to a limited extent - just enough to keep it interesting, depending on where one falls on the timidity-recklessness spectrum.

More later about what our templates are made of...

I was asked two questions at dinner last night, both on the "Feelings aren't facts" theme.

1. "Do people with strong insecurities and feelings of inadequacy tend to be people with plenty of inadequacies - or not?" A good question.

My reply: "Some people who feel inadequate are quite "sufficient," and some are wise to doubt themselves and their life skills. Bear in mind, though, that every human has his share of inadequacies and shortcomings. Some people magnify their own for neurotic reasons and some deny their own for neurotic reasons. The best thing is to be realistic about our strengths and weaknesses, and to get to work on the weaknesses - if we want to."

2. "Do people with strong self confidence tend to be people for whom it is justified, or not?"

My reply: "Could be either. However, I tend to be a little wary of those who project noticeably strong general self-confidence. But plenty of people learn how to give the appearance of strong self confidence when they need to, to fake it; a game face is a good thing, when needed. Also, strong confidence in a specific area in which it is merited is one of the finer things in life."

Then I finally said, "So tell me, what are you and your kids up to this summer?"

From a genetic standpoint, why is mental illness so common?

- The wiring is very tricky. Lots of teensy tiny wires, all tangled up.

From Robin of Berkeley's The Left's Unbearable Darkness of Being:

My clients are astonished when I tell them that life is not supposed to be easy, and that we carve out our characters and our souls from the hard times.  Further, suffering is the great uniter: It has the potential to connect us to people all over the world. Pain reminds us that everyone is, at times, pierced by grief, loneliness, and sorrow.

- If you are over 18 and haven't learned that life is tragic, you may have a learning problem.

From Had Enough Therapy, Victims No More. 

- Most of our problems are of our own creation - often unwittingly. That was just one of Freud's insights - borrowed from the ancient Greeks, of course.

Also interesting, The F*ck Feelings Manifesto. The home of that site is here. 

- The attitude is similar to what is summed up by the AA aphorism "Feelings aren't facts."

Nature/nurture is always a fun topic. Why aren't identical twins identical mentally and emotionally? It's only around 50%. Or, does parenting make any difference at all in who the adult turns out to be? Probably not too much, barring massive trauma.

Well, it is all complicated, and getting more complicated as we learn more about how the brain develops. The noise matters. A degree of messiness is built-in.

In the end, however, I do not think will-power is built-in. It is a choice, a daily choice.

This is a basic update, not very well presented, but interesting nonetheless. Skip the introduction.

The psychoanalyst Alice Miller has died. She was not an MD. I blame her popular writings - all on the one theme of the evil of parents - for fueling the "victimization" and "trauma" crazes in pop psychology of the late 20th Century.

You can term people who take one idea to explain everything as monomaniacs but, to try to be charitable to the recently dead, I would term it hopelessly if not crazily reductionistic.

In the human soul, easy answers and simple explanations of things never do any good. Her sorts of explanations got their traction by absolving people of their own decisions and choices by blaming others, thus further denigrating the powers and potentials of the human soul.

A patient recently told me that she had been invited to join a neighborhood wife-swapping club about six months after she and her husband moved into a middle-class Boston suburb. The invitation came quietly, at a lady's coffee.

She replied that she was flattered, but thought it probably wasn't a good idea for her marriage. In fact, it made her so uncomfortable that she decided to move away.

I thought it sounded quite retro, 1970s, like Ice Storm. Key Parties and all that. I had not been aware that these things were still happening. I restrained myself from asking her whether the neighborhood husbands were hot, and from asking whether it might better be described as husband-swapping.

Or is it like "Take my wife... please." ?

Gagdad Bob's Great God Almighty, I'm Free at Last! Now, Who Stole My Chains?! connected with a topic on which I have been reflecting lately, namely, how avidly people sometimes cling to symptoms and pathologies and, indeed, can feel lost without them.

In my field of work, we have to be careful with such things, following the lines of "If you break it, you own it," and "Primum non nocere."

Also, "Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Or, as I usually phrase it, "the good-enough."

I was much affected by Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom when I was in college.

People vary in how much freedom they can handle, whether from internal or external chains. I prefer the chains I deliberately select for myself.

How much of what shapes our lives is luck and serendipity? Most of us have met our spouse by chance, and many even have their jobs or even their careers by stumbling onto something.

On Maggie's Farm, we like to view life optimistically as an endless conveyor belt of opportunities, but with few of them passing by more than once. Thus do we necessarily accumulate regrets over time.

But what is luck made of? What is Fate made of?  In part (and only in part), it is made of these ingredients:

"Character is destiny." - Sigmund Freud

"Chance favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur

"You make your own luck." - Ernest Hemingway

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."  -Thomas Jefferson

"I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often."  - Brian Tracy

"Suit up, show up, and shut up." - AA aphorism, and the closely related Woody Allen quote: "Eighty percent of success is showing up."

This topic came to mind as I reflected on our corny but deeply true QQQs on persistence.  Persistence tends to work because it works on a statistical basis. If a fellow hits on enough gals in the pub, he'll eventually get lucky.

Of course, knowing when to fold 'em is part of wisdom too. Sometimes sunny optimism is plain stupid.

In the wake of Obamacare, the MSM has been busy this week reinventing a partisan myth - the myth that Conservatives and "regular Americans" are violent, white, chronically angry, racist, homophobic, greedy, selfish, mouth-breathing troglodytes.

Shrinks know all about myth creation, because most peoples' life stories are personal myths. These political myths, however, are deliberately constructed, mass ad hominen smears on millions - including me. I do not mind non-violent political anger at all, but I do mind smears.

Just a few posts on the recent propaganda I noticed today:

- The Washington Post Reminds You, All Criticism of the President Is Racist

- Powerline: More Thoughts On Liberal Political Violence

- "Dozens" show up at Nevada Tea Party

 - Jammie: Frank Rich Loses Me at Kristallnacht

- Why we dream

- From a piece on psychiatric diagnosis, a quote from Carl Jung:

It is generally assumed in medical circles that the examination of a patient should lead to the diagnosis of his illness, so far as this is possible at all, and that with the establishment of the diagnosis an important decision has been arrived at as regards prognosis and therapy. Psychotherapy forms a startling exception to this rule: the diagnosis is a highly irrelevant affair since, apart from affixing a more or less lucky label to a neurotic condition, nothing is gained by it, least of all as regards prognosis and therapy. - C.G. Jung

- More Mind and Brain links at Dr. X

The magical biological and psychological chemical attractions to which we humans are heir is one of the more complicating, exciting, bewildering, and painful parts of life. Desire.

Sexual and romantic tension between two people is powerful stuff indeed. Without it, there would be very little music.

The French, like the cave-men did, routinely give in and just get the thing over and done with. Magic gives way to reality fast, in relationships that last longer than a few hours or weeks.

I wonder how our readers deal with this part of life, but I am not trying to collect Lenten confessions...

I see that George Will wrote a piece, The Basement Boys -The making of modern immaturity, which echoes the themes I mentioned in my post this week, Are men "naturally" monogamous?

Will wearily concludes:

Last November, when Tiger Woods's misadventures became public, his agent said: "Let's please give the kid a break." The kid was then 33. He is now 34 but, no doubt, still a kid. The puerile anthem of a current Pepsi commercial is drearily prophetic: "Forever young."

Alas, Will makes the common error of associating years with psychological maturity and strength of character. I have known plenty of mature 18 year-olds - even 16 year-olds, and plenty of infantile 75 year-olds.

A charming female figure affects men like a drug.

A dinner partner asked me "Are men naturally monogamous?" on Saturday. What a silly question. "Of course they aren't."

Men are obviously programmed to want to have a good time spreading their DNA around willy nilly, as it were, but, at the same time, normal men are capable of forming these strange things we call "relationships," of forming sturdy and deep attachments, of developing strong character restraints, and of living by moral codes and committments to others.

We often refer to those latter things as core aspects of "manliness" in our culture: loyalty, honor, dependability, reliability, responsibility, self-control, providing support and family defence and all that. Otherwise, a guy is just a teenager. The combination of the former and the latter is part of the male challenge. (Females have their own set of life dilemmas.)

Still, these "naturally" questions I get always raise the basic problem: How does one discuss "natural" for a naturally culture-building and society-building animal like man? The discussion always becomes circular.

Freud was not the first person to address the topic, but he did his best.

This fascinating "virtual back lot" video saddened our friend The Anchoress.

It didn't sadden me, but rather impressed me with the use of graphics software. How do they perform this theatrical magic?

When I consider it, our lives are packed with incoming lies and virtual realities: the news, stories and fiction writing, advertising, photoshopped photos, politicians' statements, theater, legal "theories," activist's anecdotes, fantasies and imagination, memories, dreams (and the tales our patients tell us about their lives).

Mr. Plato had plenty of thoughts on the subject of human perception of reality, and he was darn well aware of the human distorting component too.

Some good blogger (I forget who) recently commented that she (I think a she) was sick of the term "narrative." I sympathise, but I am not sick of it yet. I find it useful. The overused term "authentic" is the one I am sick of.

I have not yet entered a pomo solipsistic world in which reality is a pure mental construction or, worse yet, a pure social construction (see the wonderful Berger and Luckmann). Reality does exist: Just hit your thumb with a hammer or stub your toe on something in the dark to be reminded of that. Many of us, fortunately, do not distort things very much to ourselves, or to others.

However, I do live in a world in which meaning is indeed a human construction, both personally and socially.

A "narrative" is an effort, conscious or unconscious, to ascribe meaning: designed to deceive, to manipulate, to entertain, to seduce, to support one's wishes or self respect, to indulge, to self-justify or to rationalize or serve some other defensive purpose, etc. - or just to try to make sense out of the stuff that seems to happen - more or less regardless of its objective validity. Every song, picture, poem, film, and book is a "narrative" too. Like any blog post. "I" am a narrative, I guess, and right now, presenting a narrative about narratives.

One of the many interesting things about being a shrink is to contemplate a person's "narrative," whether it is just a report of something that happened, or a life story. When somebody is engaged in an exploratory, depth treatment, these narratives change over time - which is why we never take them at face value. We assume a narrative meets some present want, or need, or fantasy. Our always-challenging and endlessly-interesting job is to probe the meaning of the narratives we see or hear in the work of untangling what ails a person's heart and soul.

One of our luxuries as people in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy field is the reliable consistency of the human personality "structure" (another term I hate - shrinks often use fancy latinate terms and complex conceptualizations for ordinary things): like a jigsaw puzzle, there is always a picture of something in there somewhere. Another is the luxury of not worrying too much about the literal truthfulness of things (unless dealing with undiagnosed sociopaths).

I could go on and on about this, but that's enough for now.

WSJ: The proposed new edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders could place large swaths of the population under the umbrella of pathology.  One quote:

...good psychiatrists do not rely too heavily on the DSM when they care for patients. There is simply no substitute for observing the patient, listening to his story, and fine-tuning his treatments—psychological and pharmacological—as needed.

The framers of the DSM III knew this well. They cautioned against manual users taking too literally the sharp boundaries drawn between disorders and between disorder and mental health. "This version," they wrote in the preface, "is only one still frame in the ongoing process of attempting to better understand mental disorders." Thirty years later, despite undeniable progress in brain science, we are saying much the same thing.

Well said, Dr. Satel.

Ed. Addendum:  Louis Menand, with wonderful clarity, looks at the tendency to pathologize everything into a "disorder" in The New Yorker. Every human has his own difficulties, weaknesses, pains, sorrows, limitations, fears, heartaches, struggles. No one can catalogue and categorize them all. Simply trying to understand one person is a heck of a challenge.

A quote from Dr. Laura (my bolds):

People don’t actually “grow apart” in relationships. They simply stop taking care of each other. They stop waking up and looking at their spouse with gratitude and awe. They stop finding ways to make that person happy that they are married to each other. They stop behaving as though they love that person with their last breath. They basically stop being the kind of person they themselves would want to come home to.

And then I find myself thinking "Who the heck would want to come home to face themselves?"

From Bowman at New Criterion's Ain't Gonna Study War No More:

In the media’s view, everything must be over-determined by circumstance — or the mistakes of the Bush administration — so that acts of terror become like acts of God, both in their causes and in the limited and ad hoc way they demand to be dealt with. Insofar as questions of war and peace arise, it is only by way of demonstrating that war must be thought of as a struggle to understand the other side — the unspoken assumption being that there is always a way to get the enemy to stop fighting by understanding and sympathizing with him and without having to defeat him in battle — as the old, unmentionable honor culture would once have insisted. Got that?

PC makes some hatreds privileged and deserving of "understanding," and others not so.

There are people who hate me purely because they have learned of my conservative/libertarian political views. Real, venomous hatred, despite the fact that I believe myself to be a friendly, kind, thoughtful, reasonably attractive, socially appropriate, and relatively warm person with a respectable pedigree and well-bred manners.

Truly, and trite as it sounds, some or even most of my best friends are Liberal-ish, and I have never hated anyone for their political views. In social situations, it doesn't even register with me. 

I do not understand this hatred, but I admittedly have never spent much time trying to understand it either. It does hurt my feelings, though.

Yes, I am voting for Scott Brown today, and not just because he is a hunk.

A book: The Importance of Fathers: A Psychoanalytic Re-evaluation

About the documentary: “In Search of Memory: The Neuroscientist Eric Kandel”  A wonderful fellow.

Alcohol myopia. I recently learned that alcohol doesn't just induce disinhibition (duh)and one-track preoccupations, but it also exaggerates inhibitions: scared drunks are more fearful of danger than the sober - when they are reminded of it. Who knew?

Scott at Powerline asks "Where have all the grown-ups gone?" Diana West has a new book, coming out soon: The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization.

It's a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while - the phenomenon of perpetual psychological adolescence in us decadent and pampered Americans - so I will look forward to seeing what she has to say about it.

I hope she will mention that the post-war worship of youth, which culminated in the late 60s and 70s, provided social permission, if not incentive, for adults to continue behaving like kids. Even college, once the domain of the serious, has become an extension of high-school. Given the human temptation for regression, and the joys of youth when compared with the rigors, duties, sacrifices, and responsibilities of adulthood, it's no wonder that people welcome the socio-cultural invitation. Every psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in America, and probably in Europe, is well-aware of this. And so are our politicians, who feed into it - and feed on it: Take care of me, Mommy and Daddy Government.

Powerline has a blurb from Ms. West about the book.

Photo: These mill workers in Georgia around the turn of the century were probably more mature than some of the 40 year-olds I see these days. Yes, I am in favor of children working. All of mine did. I did, too - and it was not "fun." However, I had time to work on my tennis too.

I have been thinking quite a bit about Sociopathy (aka Antisocial Personality, aka Psychopathy, aka in the young "Conduct Disorder") lately. People without a conscience who view others as objects of gratification or as tools to be used. I have missed the diagnosis several times over the past few years, to my regret. Many experts are known to miss it until something happens to wave the red flag in front of your face.

It's not just an important diagnosis for us shrinks to make: it's important for everybody out in the world. 2-3% of humans probably have enough sociopathic traits to be of concern in life. It's a strange partially genetic adaptation. Some end up as leaders and moguls, many end up addicts, dead, or in jail. Sociopathy knows no economic, cultural, or ethnic boundaries.

What is this "condition"?

It's a tricky thing, sociopathy. It has been well-described from many points of view. We analysts often think of it as being based in an absence of empathy - an inability to experience others as other than as objects to be exploited, used, predated upon, etc. An inner coldness and calculatingness towards others, but not to be confused with obsessional personalities who simply protect their emotions, and not be confused with those with immoral or amoral impulses - everybody has those.

However, successful sociopaths learn to create a warm, caring, engaged, and often charming presentation of themselves to the world. Very successful and smart sociopaths learn how to live honest lives and to channel their talents, guile and wiles into honest paths.

Full-blown sociopathy is generally considered an untreatable and incurable condition. I am not convinced that that is true - but I think it requires special methods which are outisde of regular Psychiatry. Sociopathic traits are far more common than the supposed 2% of the population that are said to be full sociopaths. I am not going to write an essay on this complicated topic, but will just offer some links for those who are interested:

Wiki has a simple introduction to the topic

A classic book by Cleckley: The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic Personality

An interesting paper: THE SOCIOBIOLOGY OF SOCIOPATHY: AN INTEGRATED EVOLUTIONARY MODEL

I have more links on the topic, but no more time right now.

I believe that we all have an immature side which wishes - or sometimes pretends - that our unwise and ill-considered actions might not have negative consequences. Some people have more of that wish, some less. Also, some people learn from bad experience better than others.

(I am not talking about neurotics who unconsciously or semi-consciously invite trouble upon themselves.)

As parents, we often have to invent consequences, eg a spanking if they run into the street, or grounding if they defy a curfew. However, the best teacher of consequences isn't parental discipline: it's Mr. Reality, aka The School of Hard Knocks.

Dr. Dobson has a brief simple discussion of the topic: Behavior and Consequences - The effective use of a powerful parenting tool

At the wonderful Hall of the Fishes at New York's American Museum of Natural History there is a preserved female Anglerfish. Attached to her is a bump with a tiny tail on it, which looks like a parasite.

It isn't. It's the shrunken remnant of a male Anglerfish. The males attach themselves to a female, and their bodies shrink away into nothing but male gonads permanently attached to the females. (You can read about Anglerfish here.)

I was reminded of Anglerfish by Kay Hymowitz's piece at City Journal, "The Incredible Shrinking Father," which takes a look at voluntary single motherhood in America and the role of artificial insemination. It is remarkable that, in one generation, something that had been considered a family tragedy is now considered, by some anyway, a "lifestyle choice."

A quote from her essay:

You’d think that we had enough problems keeping fathers around in this country, what with out-of-wedlock births (over a third of all children are born to unmarried women, and, in most cases, the fathers will fade from the picture) and divorce (the average divorced dad sees his kids less often than he takes his car in for an oil change). But these days, American fatherhood has yet another hostile force to contend with: artificial insemination. This may sound a tad overheated. After all, AI has been around, by some accounts, for over a century. And the number of kids born through the procedure each year, though steadily growing, remains quite small relative to the millions of babies conceived, as we can now say completely without irony, the old-fashioned way.

But aided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family. There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men promotes the very male carelessness that leads a lot of women to become single mothers in the first place. And fatherless families are a delicate proposition, as AI families are discovering, since all the scientists’ technology and all the lawyerly contracts can’t take human nature out of human reproduction.

Leaving aside the fact that single motherhood accounts for a large percentage of America's poverty stats (that's another article in itself), I consider voluntary single motherhood to be the height of selfishness, immoral, irresponsible, and no favor to a kid. I do not believe that "it takes a village" to raise a family, but I do think that, for a number of practical and psychological reasons which I will not go into now, it takes two parents to do it - one of each type. A couple of sets of grandparents, and some aunts and uncles, are good too, if you can get 'em. Paid help is no substitute because blood is thicker than money.

Fortunately, we live in a free country, and freedom implies the freedom to make stupid and irresponsible choices. That is why freedom requires maturity, education, intelligence, and restraint for things to work. Being a free citizen in a free republic demands a lot from a person, and all of us have to dig deep to find the strength.

You can read Hymowitz's entire piece here.

Image: A lovely female Anglerfish

Our Editor emailed this article from the NIMH, The Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress, for my comment. It begins:

New imaging studies are revealing—for the first time—patterns of brain development that extend into the teenage years. Although scientists don't know yet what accounts for the observed changes, they may parallel a pruning process that occurs early in life that appears to follow the principle of "use-it-or-lose-it:" neural connections, or synapses, that get exercised are retained, while those that don't are lost. At least, this is what studies of animals' developing visual systems suggest. While it's known that both genes and environment play major roles in shaping early brain development, science still has much to learn about the relative influence of experience versus genes on the later maturation of the brain. Animal studies support a role for experience in late development, but no animal species undergoes anything comparable to humans' protracted childhood and adolescence. Nor is it yet clear whether experience actually creates new neurons and synapses, or merely establishes transitory functional changes. Nonetheless, it's tempting to interpret the new findings as empowering teens to protect and nurture their brain as a work in progress.

I don't think the human brain ever stops "developing" - or at least changing, as long as we are well-engaged in life and do not turn stagnant.

What I notice most in myself, as I accumulate years, is an increase in what I call mental "clarity." Who knows, maybe it comes from all that synaptical "pruning." Like when you cut back an overgrown, leggy hydrangea or lilac. My tennis court clarity has improved, too. Perhaps my ADD is getting better - or maybe I am a very slow frontal myelinator:

(a) series of MRI studies is shedding light on how teens may process emotions differently than adults. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a team led by Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at Harvard's McLean Hospital scanned subjects' brain activity while they identified emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task, activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other "gut" reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance. Similarly, the researchers saw a shift in activation from the temporal lobe to the frontal lobe during a language skills task, as teens got older. These functional changes paralleled structural changes in temporal lobe white matter.

That might be the developmental physiology of what is often referred to as "growing up."

Why don't colleges just collect all of the grievance study groups and put them in one department. Fat Studies, Anorexia Studies, Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Hispanic Studies, Black Studies, Indian Studies, Transexual Studies, Lesbian Studies, Klutz Studies, Oppressed Studies, Ugly Studies, Not-Too-Smart Studies, Too-Short Studies, etc.

You could call it Boo Hoo Studies, and in it you could sequester everyone who expects college to cater to their narcissism instead of teaching them about bigger, better, and more important things than themselves. Baby bottles in the coke machine, over in that department.

Eventually, they will need to include one more increasingly marginalized and disenfranchised  minority in Boo Hoo Studies - Regular People Living Without Grievance. RPLWG just can't get a break these days, can they?

Editor's note: Or, to borrow the phrase from The Anchoress, could it be called the "It's All About Me" Studies Department?

A Dr. B. re-post from our long-ago archives -

"Why do I do all these things for Jim, Dr Bliss, when for the past six months I can't stand his presence and I can't even stand the way he eats? Is it because I feel guilty, or have no self-esteem?"

Guilty? Self-esteem? It's of interest to me how the morality-free zone of psycho-babble in our popular culture can obscure the persistence of the old virtues, even among those who live them.

The language of duty, loyalty, honor, self-sacrifice, endurance, perseverance, reliability, courage, self-reliance - the things Bill Bennet wrote about - has been replaced by a language of "feeling" and "guilt" in some strange and ill-informed distortion of psychoanalytic understandings.

Indeed, "my feelings" appear to have replaced the virtues to the point that "not being true to your feelings" is like a modern-day sin. And yes, I guess it is a sin - if you regard yourself as a god.

But back to my patient. I know her well enough to know that she was raised with the sturdy Mid-Western Presbyterian virtues, internalized them, and lives them. Her kindness and thoughfulness with her husband are driven by character (in the old sense of the word) - not guilt, and surely not, at the moment anyway, by "loving feelings." For her, it would not be so much "guilt" in betraying her character - it would be "failure." And not life failure, but a failure to be who she was built to be.

The point I want to make is not about my patient's psychology, or how she ought to deal with her situation. That's another subject. It's about the pop-psych assumptions that are in the air that would cause a person who "does the right thing" despite her emotions of the moment is somehow afflicted by "guilt" or some other pathology (although guilt is not a pathology), rather than being a mature person whose habits of character are stronger than her emotions.

I sometimes joke that if we were all true to our feelings, we'd all be in jail.

A few take-home points:

• Distrust the elevation of "feeling" over character. It is immature. That is not to say that we should ignore our emotions - it's just that they are not sacred, they are seldom what they seem, and they can be very poor guides to life. Contrary to popular misunderstanding, psychoanalytic thinking does not make emotions sacred: they are just surface data points.
  
• Guilt is neither a pathology nor a sin. In my experience, guilt is usually well-earned. So-called "neurotic guilt" is a psychological issue for some, but those with plenty of it never know they have it, without therapy.
  
• "Character" - meaning virtuousness, not personality type - is culturally-defined, and transmitted mainly via family with, one would hope, the support of genetics and of the surrounding culture.
  
• The only definition of "failure" I have is failure of character. We should feel like a failure when we fail in the virtues that we have been raised on - assuming that they are a worthy set of virtues. When we fail, we should repent, seek forgiveness, beat ourselves up a bit, contemplate our shortcomings, learn, and move forward.
  
• Despite the prevalence of amoral, pop-psychological language,  decent people still live, or struggle to live, according to the time-honored virtues. If they do not - keep your distance and beware, because they are "coming from a different place" and are playing by a different rule-book.

New Years Eve. Time to party hearty? Been there, done that in youth. No more. There's no point to it.

We ask our readers to please drink responsibly. Each reader is precious to us, and we cannot afford to lose one to a traffic accident.

Speaking of alcohol abuse and alcoholism, here's an interesting report on The Three Types of Alcoholism. I am not sure whether it corresponds well to my clinical experience or not. Probably not. However, this does:

The authors note that this finding supports two pathways to alcoholism: one where drinking represents a tendency to behave impulsively and seek excitement, and a second where drinking is used to relieve negative mood states and reduce behavioral inhibition.

In other words, substance addiction often - but not always - has underpinnings of either neuroticism or sociopathy. In the end, every human - drunk or sober - is a unique individual with his own basket of issues.

Probably yes.

While I am quite pleased and content with my own (first) marriage, when I talk with unhappy people, which I do all day, I am often reminded that the nuclear family is a very recent invention, that the notion of romantic love is also recent, that arranged marriages and marriages of convenience or necessity were the norms of the past, and that humans are not "naturally" monogamous - whatever I might mean by "naturally".

When you put the nuclear family together with dreams of enduring romantic love, it's a set-up for disappointment. The nuclear family, unlike the extended family (or the tribe), is isolating and does not provide a broad base of support in life. Intense romantic love, unlike plain old-fashioned strong attraction and desire, is a regressed state of mind - some shrinks half-jokingly call it a form of insanity. Not that it isn't great fun, but it gives way to reality in time, although the best marriages can rekindle the old feeling from time to time.

One thing that is probably not talked about enough is how many marriages are not founded in "true love," but instead are founded on loneliness, desire for companionship, desire for babies, desire for security, fear of becoming an old maid, friendship, desire for a social foundation, etc. This is not a bad thing, but I sometimes wonder whether the contrived and ridiculously costly fairy-tale trappings of the typical American wedding is designed to obscure those facts. Young folks these days often talk about having "friends with benefits" while they await true love, without realizing that "friends with benefits" can be one description of one kind of satisfying marriage.

But to get back on track here, yes, I believe that we tend to wish that a marriage could meet all of our emotional and physical needs. Shrinks term that a regressive, ie childish, wish - not just because it is unrealistic, but also because if emphasizes the "meeting my needs"  aspect of a relationship rather than emphasizing "how can I try to give these people (wife, kids)  a good life".

It's a truism that people thrive when they have multiple sources for emotional care, and many outlets for love and caring. Friends, colleagues, neighbors, members of clubs or churches, etc, Making and keeping good friends is not really an easy thing to do, and I don't know anyone who doesn't want one, or doesn't want another one. In fact, I suspect that one reason moms want jobs these days is because they feel isolated with their kids.

Althouse noted a NYT op-ed piece by History Prof Stephanie Coontz about the limits of marriage. Althouse comments:

The problem, in Coontz's view, is not only that we deny ourselves the happiness to be found in friendships, but also that by expecting so much from one romantic relationship, we can put so much pressure on it that it breaks. What's worse, if the marriage was our source of happiness, we have nothing.

Quotes from the Coontz piece:

A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.

In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.

The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.

Read the whole thing here.

On Friday morning a patient told me that he liked to hire people who are in AA because he knows that they struggle with honesty, and take the subject seriously - and often know more first-hand about dishonesty than most.

So thanks to Assistant Village Idiot for noting a relevant piece by the always interesting Kling at TCS on the anthropological subject of "trust cues" in human relationships and especially in affiliative groups (tribes), That's Your Cue.

Are humans tribal? You bet they are. And it often makes good sense to be.

Trust cues are our ways of indicating that we are members of a group, or tribe, and that it is important for us to be a member in good standing. In a sense, my patient took AA "membership" as a trust cue, because he knows they talk about honesty all the time in AA.

My favorite example of a trust cue which is ceremonially acknowledged is the "made man" in the Mafia: the guys know they can fear and trust him because he has blood on his hands. A similar example might be admission to any exclusive club.

But trust cues aren't always rational or reliable. For example, I have a bias towards trusting the intentions of serious Christians but, as far as I know, serious Christians are as morally flawed as everyone else. I suppose I'd like to believe that we, like the AA "members," worry more about how we treat others.

Thus trust cues do not necessarily mean "trust" in a moral sense, but more "trust that we're on the same page;" that we view the world somewhat similarly, and/or that we share enough similar life experience to constitute some sort of group membership.

When I attend a psychoanalytic meeting, I know it's my "club:"  mere attendance indicates some fundamental interest in unconscious processes. When I go to my church, I know I'm with my "tribe:" we are all interested enough in Christ to show up. And, come to think about it - if you really want to see a trust cue festival, attend a Dartmouth alumni Christmastime cocktail party: you have never seen so much green conviviality since St. Patrick's Day in NYC.

What Kling does, in his discussion of Wade's book Before the Dawn, is to note the ways in which dogma (as opposed to truth) is used or abused to indicate group membership.

Wade says that the evolutionary value of trust cues is that they facilitate peaceful interactions among strangers. When I offer a trust cue, I am saying that even though we do not know one another, I am a member of a trustworthy group. I value my membership in that group, and I know that lying to or cheating another member of that group could cause me to be excommunicated from the group. Since you are also a member of the group, you can trust me not to lie to you or to cheat you.

However,

...political beliefs serve primarily as trust cues. For example, those who favor an increase in the minimum wage are sending trust cues to people on the Left, and those who oppose an increase in the minimum wage are sending trust cues to people on the Right.

The actual consequences of raising the minimum wage are rarely discussed. In other words, political debates often ignore what I call Type C arguments (from empiricism) and turn instead to type M arguments, which accuse one's opponent of belonging to an outcast group. The reason for this is that people are not trying to persuade each other rationally. Instead, they are using trust cues to indicate that failure to agree implies excommunication from the group.

It has been my view that the current fad of getting upset about global warming is a trust cue, and little more. What it actually proclaims is "I am virtuous and I care a lot, and I don't mind more government control over things." The science, and the real empirical debate, lies outside the cue structure. Assertion of tribal membership is what such political postures are all about.

Read Kling's piece here, and Asst. Village Idiot's comments here. Interesting stuff.

I discover, sometimes, that things about others which I detest are qualities of my own which I detest, reject, and attempt to disown by pinning them on others.

Although I am not a Borderline Personality, there is an element of projective identification in this. Whether in fantasy or in reality, we can mentally construct another person so as to contain, embody (or, if the person is in our personal lives, to even get them to enact) our own rejected demons. Then we can detest them or look down on them while preserving an illusionary and undeserved self-esteem.

I have learned to reflect on the qualities I seem to be most irritated by or contemptuous of in others and to do a little reality check to see whether it's more about my stuff than about theirs.

Do you find yourself doing this sometimes, as I do?

With half the world either on vacation, spaced out, "enjoying" family, skiing, lounging in the Caribbean over Mohitos and Rum Punches, or too busy digesting cookies to spare time for the intertubes, it seems like a good time to mix in some daily Dr. B. re-runs from our archives. 

This one, "A Good Spanking," is from 2007.

The proposed anti-spanking law in California has been much discussed, as here at Education Wonks. Also, Raven.The story has also been much mocked: Blame Bush notes that spanking can lead to things which are considered "disorders" in California, such as respect for authority, consideration of rules, self-discipline, and awareness of consequences.

There may be some shrinks who are opposed to corporal punishment, but I do not think that I know any. There are many situations for which I would recommend corporal punishment (eg ignoring a rule about playing in the street, or accidentally pointing a BB gun at somebody, or being sadistic with a sibling or a pet - for a few examples) and, in general, I think it is preferable to withdrawal of love or attention (ie, "time-outs," which I think are usually applied when the adult needs the break from the kid. That is, a "time-out" is a cop-out.).

In fact, I think schools ought to be able to administer corporal punishment too. I received my share, and not only did it not harm me - I think it helped me (in retrospect!). It "concentrates the mind," assists the memory, sets a firm limit, and demonstrates "tough love." A reasonable degree of anger is an essential accompaniment.

What I observe more than anything else is that defiant, obnoxious, or even "conduct disordered" kids - and sometimes just naughty kids, get sent to psychiatrists and social workers before anyone tries forceful discipline - as if growing up respectful and obedient were automatic. For many it is, but for many it is not.

Never forget that when a young adult messes with a drill sargent, watch out. When an adult messes with a cop, that adult will be taught a very firm physical lesson. When an adult breaks a serious rule, men without smiles with loaded guns will come and point them at your chest, throw you to the floor, cuff you, and lock you away in a small room with Bubba-With-No-Teeth who is big and strong and feeling lonely.

So a good whuppin', when needed, isn't really so bad. It beats humiliation by a long shot. When the rules of life are not internalized, they need to be enforced externally until they are - which for some people means never. Some fear is very useful in life to keep us out of trouble. We can be their friends later, after they grow up a bit.

Spare the rod and spoil the child. Do not listen to those who deliberately and sneakily try to conflate punishment with child abuse, and never let the government tell you how to raise your kids. In case you haven't noticed yet, the government is an idiot.

Related: Dr. Helen on kids who kill

Image: Boy being birched by teacher, no doubt deservedly, while other students observe. 1375.

A piece via Memorandum launched my brief rant about the noisy, Leftist segment of the women's movement.

Regardless of the moral issues around abortion, I have no interest in paying for your abortion. None. Nor for your IVF, your tummy tuck, your massages, aromatherapy, chiropractic adjustments, your birth control pills, or your nose jobs. If an insurance plan doesn't cover such things, too bad. The claim that insurance which does not pay for non-therapeutic abortions "harms women" is insane.

Grow up and pay for your own damn abortions, ladies - and for anything else medically-related that you elect to do which is therefore "elective."

Equating "liberation from oppression" with "wanting free stuff" is pathetic and retrogressive, replacing the good husband ideal of the past with a new sort of husband in government. Next thing you know, these women will be demanding that we buy them cars so they can drive to work.

That's not pride and confidence. That is infantile, and consistent with the worst stereotype of the weak, ditzy, incompetent female.

I believe that a man needs his good woman just as a woman needs her good man.

The moral of the story is that "movements," like non-profits - having acomplished their major goals, need to keep finding new things to do to maintain and justify their existence - and their paychecks. It is not grown-up for women - or anyone of any of the 5 or 10 or whatever "genders" - to want things on my nickel.

My apologies for bothering our readers with this on a cheery and snowy Christmas weekend. Now that I have that off my chest, we are getting ready to dress up fancy to head off to make the rounds of some Christmas parties and open houses.

Bring on the mountains of snow and the gallons of eggnog and the groaning boards! Modern women enjoy trying to meet life's challenges of all sorts, including those of excess snow and excess eggnog and excess calorie-filled goodies, as did the women of my Mom's generation. Strong women, never victimized, oppressed, or asking for pity.

And God bless our lonely military wives and Moms during Christmas. A tough job, but they can do it and need no pity and ask for none. Same thing goes for the guys whose wives are in the service.