I think it was Jung who said the most pointless thing to do with information about the personality is to berate an introvert for being introverted, which is like trying to tune a piano with a sledgehammer.
Major companies are also rejected the annual performance review, which is often used characterize normal personality traits as crippling characterological problems or personality disorders. This only happened since the dot com crash when employees became expendable and the post 9-11 rise of institutional paranoia. It only takes a couple cycles of the annual witch hunt to make the workers unhappy, but management is now realizing that annual reviews are huge hit to their bottom line. And who sold us this turd sandwich? It wasnât introverts, and now the anti-extrovert backlash is coming from the top down and bottom up.
Add to that the narcissistic clusterfuck of the âthe old rules donât apply any more!â which led to the dot com bust, the 2008 crash, and will almost certainly spark the next crisis as well.
I think one of the main values of the personality test is to remind people that they have to share the world with other personality types, and that it is not the individualâs duty to hunt down and exterminate the other personality types. Perhaps this needs to be spelled out a little more explicitly, because for many people this would be a revelation.
I agree, itâs like the value is less in whether the personality tests are actually accurate and more in just giving people a reminder that they shouldnât expect that everyone thinks the way they do (even if it leaves them with a bullshit impression of how other people might think.
People generate a constant stream of fantasy in their heads about what other people are thinking, and reality is a shadow of the highly dramatic movie that plays in their heads. Most people assume that everyone knows what everyone else is thinking, and failure to respond according to the other personâs fantasy can be quite dangerous because people take the whole role playing game very seriously. Kernberg says that the reciprocal role is a demand that other people have a specific reaction that fulfills a âconcrete wish or fantasy,â This clearly echoes Fenichel in 1945 who describes peopleâs âhighly concrete emotional needs directed toward the person that happens to be present.â I like the âhappens to be presentâ part, because we often cross paths with someone who just assumes that weâve all received copies of their script and that even strangers will deliver their lines on cue.
Really depends on whether youâre encountering them socially, through your work or other business.
Iâd like to imagine that most people who drown in personal narrative give the cues for others to pander to theirs, but I imagine that itâs not always the case.
Yeah, thatâs what I was getting at. Merely saying to people, âHey, instead of thinking the way you think they think, other people might think like A, B, or Câ seems to have some use even if A, B and C are kind of pop psychology nonsense. The point is to provide any alternative to constantly projecting onto other people, since nearly any alternative is better.
I think whatâs really neat is that while we obviously see examples of people who seem totally disconnected from reality, a lot of people are actually extremely good at sending these signals and getting other people to pander to them. Part of learning to do psychotherapy is learning how to avoid getting caught up in other peopleâs scripts because it is a very common problem in emotional conversations. Recently Iâve been reading a lot about Borderline Personality Disorder and the materials aimed at people offering treatment are full of cautions about this, and about how without knowing it it is very easy to fall into the scripts that a person with BPD writes for you because they just push those buttons.
Borderlines are a strange combination of grandiosity and low self esteem. They have a lot of the omnipotence and omniscient fantasies as the narcissist. The BPD feels guilt while the NPD leans towards a sociopathic lack of guilt, the BPD shows their intense dependency by clinging while the NPD denies their intense dependency with exaggerated counterdependent behavior like casually dumping their family.
Off the cuff, I think BPDs are the ones with most intense fantasy dialogues running in their head outside of bipolars, schizophrenics, etc.
It also depends on the hierarchical structure of the relationship and the specific tendency of people with dependency issues to become drunk with power because power relieves them of all their guilt.
Employees become painfully aware of this in the annual reviews. Probably one of the reasons people are rebelling is that they find themselves thinking âCan I get some intelligent criticism from someone that doesnât brag about spending their childhood locked in a tool shed?â and, in many organizations, the answer is âNo, no you canât,â because a mature person simply doesnât have those urgent personal opinions about other people.
Sit you down and explain that this is why you will never be management. Really. It has nothing to do with your current manager and I being at the same frat.
An important feature of BPD seems to be extreme attributions of good vs. bad. So while most people exist in a sort of hazy shifting balance between attributing agency to themselves vs. others, and between seeking autonomy vs. dependency, with BPD you get four discreet states with one or the other. Really, I just love the chart because of the term âDemigod Perpetratorâ. But he really nailed it, thatâs actually what it feels like.
[quote=âRatel, post:92, topic:67373â]
Sit you down and explain that this is why you will never be management.
[/quote]I canât be in management because of my severe mental problem, which mysteriously materialized when I turned 30. Nobody can quite put their finger on what it is, but it is only visible to people from severely alcoholic families. Keep in mind that there is a national support group for people from alcoholic families, Al-Anon (AA is for drunks). Besides helping them get over their irrational devotion to sociopaths and addicts, Al-Anon is helping people from alcoholic families get over their delusional belief that they can detect mental illness in people who arenât from alcoholic families. After the umpteenth time of being told that I donât have what it takes by someone whose dad drank themselves to death, I realized that my âproblemâ is alcoholism - not enough of it. I told my father it was his fault for not drinking enough when I was a child. He said âWould it help if I started drinking heavily now?â and I said âWell Dad, youâre 70, and I think the moment has passed. But thanks for the offer!â
If you want your kid to succeed, start slugging down the booze so theyâll fit into the organizational lifestyle.
Thatâs âsplittingâ of different parts of the ego and the ego and a primitive precursor of the superego. This leads to rapid changes in affect, and affects that exist in isolation from each other. In âGirl Interruptedâ when Winonna Ryder tells the shrink sheâs all better and calmly says she feels ânothingâ about her recent suicide attempt, thatâs the tip off that she needs to be hospitalized. On top of that is a âcharacterologicalâ disorder where reflexive reaction occur without any conscious thought, like Pavlovâs dog. Itâs possible to waste a lot of time trying to change a BPDâs characterological problem when, practically speaking, thereâs almost nothing psychological behind it.
Although the BPD has relatively intact âreality testingâ by the ego, this can vanish when they regress, which is why they are borderline psychotic. Notice how often people who have greatly exaggerated pride in what great people they are keep shifting to nearly homicidal rage? Yep, the moment the BPD notices nobody is giving them a rim job, all hell breaks loose.
In groups, relatively normal people show these behaviors because a group operates several levels lower than the individual.
If you want to see someone acting in a borderline manner, catch someone indulging in moral indignation online then ask them a rational question (She turned you into a newt?) to watch their circuit breakers blow.
As I was saying the other day âŚ
⌠(A)ggression ⌠becomes rather crude and potentially inappropriate ⌠because the ego has partly abdicated the function of reality testing in social situations ⌠and may also reflect a faulty superego expressed as pathological aggressive behavior directed towards others and justified with moral indignation. Reality testing in the more general sense of testing social reality ⌠and the capacity for introspection are both reduced under these circumstancesâŚ
Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions And Pathological Narcissism
When someone is having their most excellent moment of moral indignation and basking in the unconscious group processes, interrupting them with any sort of rational thought is experienced as violent abuse.
Also, Kernberg says in a couple books that having empathy for a true borderline maybe be experienced by them as literally equivalent to violent rape. Hmmmm ⌠wait, I think the penny just dropped right there.
Well thatâs true in situations where someone says to the other personâs face âYou mad Bro?â to make them mad and thatâs âprojective identification.â See Elizabeth Taylor in âWhoâs Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?â Projective identification is huge for BPDs and because they have these split off ego states the rules change with their mood minute by minute, so yes, you really got it right that they are the masters of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-donât scenarios. They are so good at it youâd think they had a supercomputer running through all the possible scenarios, but itâs not calculated, itâs chaos, but they have learned to externalize the chaos as a means of projecting aggression onto others. Wheee!
Google for that page of the book and read back a page to what he says about simultaneous âarrogance and stupidity,â compare that to how quickly self righteous people curl up and start saying âI donât understand âŚI donât understand âŚI donât understand âŚâ or they just resort to âHurr-Durr!!! Hurr-Durr!!! Derrrrrrrp!â And meanwhile they are doing so many role reversals with the person they suposedly hate that onlookers say âHey you two, get a room!â
