Narcissism, 5

The time has come to talk about what I said in the second instalment of this series: Marco’s offer of his second house and the funds from the phantom bank account he allegedly wanted to give me. As I’ve already explained, what shocked me the first time I heard such a thing, during a phone call the day after our mall failed meeting, was that I hadn’t dealt with Marco for four decades and suddenly he came out with it.

Yesterday Mr F. revealed to me the names of one of his brothers (i.e. another first cousin of Marco’s), a daughter of Mr F. and a niece who had also been suggested by Marco to move into his second house. Mr F. also revealed to me something I was unaware of: that the house is at such an early stage of construction that the second floor doesn’t even have a roof! (Before, I was under the impression that it was just a hole in the ceiling.) I don’t want to mention the names of these other relatives of Marco because, as I said yesterday, I don’t want that family to know that I am writing about them. But the whole thing reminds me of what Harold Covington called GUBU freak: Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, Unprecedented. Last year I was shocked when I realised that the old friend of the park where we played chess had suffered a GUBU psychosis, and since I talk about mental disorders in my books, I couldn’t resist the temptation to psychoanalyse him in my diaries.

Cases of severe psychosis are all GUBUs to the layman. In a previous entry, I mentioned Silvano Arieti’s treatise on schizophrenia. The cases Arieti mentions, and especially the depth psychology he uses to unravel them, are fascinating even if the reader is unprepared to enter that conceptual world. What I do with Marco is also similar, in a way, to what Martin Gardner (1914-2010) did in his Skeptical Inquirer column: what I liked best about that journal. Gardner analysed cases of very crazy people in the paranormal world, and in such a jocular way that his column was a real treat. Thanks to him and other Skeptical Inquirer writers, I realised that parapsychology was a pseudo-science, and I remember a line of Gardner’s that is worth picking up on: ‘Cranks are fascinating creatures’ in need of being analysed!

What Marco does with these house offers is nothing more than what gurus do: they bombard you with love to lure you into their cult. This has been observed by those who study destructive cults. But what gave me the GUBU shock, to the extent that it motivated me to write so much in my diaries, is that Marco wasn’t like this in the past. It is a psychosis that the former friend has fallen into in recent years, although I can’t pinpoint an exact date as I stopped seeing him for a long time. Even Mr F. has limited information about his biography (yesterday I advised him to contact Mrs N., a woman I knew decades ago—Marco’s former girlfriend—so that through her anecdotes he gathers more pieces of the puzzle we want to put together).

The GUBU character in Marco’s current psychosis, who I repeat wasn’t crazy when I met him, is seen with extreme clarity in his demand that we come and live in his second house when it still lacks a roof. Unlike the gurus, who aren’t psychotic, such narcissists become increasingly isolated because those close to them begin to perceive that their demands are not only irrational and grotesque, but blatantly injurious to those close to the narcissist. Only a son of a street sweeper, and we can imagine the social stratum of that Mexican, consented to go to Marco’s second home for a while.

I spent hours talking to Mr F. yesterday, but those who haven’t had a misadventure with a narcissist won’t understand why it becomes almost an obsession to psychoanalyse an acquaintance, friend, partner or relative who suffers from this condition. True, the already psychotic forms of narcissism are no more bizarre than the schizophrenias. But the difference is that, unlike schizophrenics, narcissists want to drag others into their maelstrom (‘If I live in a spider-webbed house, come on and live in a roofless one!’).

In giving my Hojas susurrantes to Marco, I had the faint hope that he would settle the score with his late mother, in the form of writing his memoirs, especially the painful ones. While it is true that Marco was full of praise when he read the voluminous book, it is very significant that he didn’t mention my mother at all when he phoned to eulogise my writing, even though the first of the book’s five chapters is almost exclusively about her. Nor did he say anything to me when he got my second book, in which I inscribed a few words on the first page on the day my mother died: a book whose central chapter is, once again, about my mother.

It doesn’t take much science to see that Marco is shying away from the subject, not only of his mother, but of mine and other similar mothers.

I believe that severe cases of mental illness are directly proportional to the repression of what happened to us with our parents. In ¿Me ayudarás? for example, the second book I sent to Marco, I mention that, although she had delusions from time to time, my late sister didn’t become schizophrenic because, even when she had delusions, the image of the mother was faintly present. Once, for example, my sister told me that the manager of the building where she lived, a certain Sylvia (our mother’s name!), was plotting to make her life miserable. I knew this Sylvia, and I got to talk to her in her flat. She told me that at one point my sister’s paranoia had been such that she had called the police because of her conspiracy theories. But despite these occasional crises my sister didn’t deteriorate (true schizophrenics hear voices, speak in ‘words salad’ and, in the most severe cases, even suffer from catatonia). And if she didn’t deteriorate it was because, at least metaphorically, ‘Sylvia’, our mother, was faintly present even during her crises.

In cases of true schizophrenia, Arieti reports, the conspiring agents are no longer obvious symbols of the abusive parents. For example, the patient speaks of the FBI or CIA persecuting him or her. In a case of psychosis that happened to a white nationalist, Jonathan Bowden (1962-2012), he saw the Mossad as his persecutors. This, according to Arieti, is even more serious than cases of simple delusions where the parent is faintly present as the parental figure is, now, totally absent.

In other words, for those of us who had mothers with fluid ego contours, those immature women who treated us as egoic objects, incapable of a healthy ‘psychological childbirth’ with their offspring, the more the memories of their mistreatment are present in our minds, the greater our mental health will be. On the other hand, the more repressed they are, the more prone you are to neuroses and even psychoses. My sister talked a lot about our mother, even complaining to our relatives about what she did to her. So her disorder was comparatively mild and occasional.

This is not the case for Marco because, having been mistreated as a toddler (my sister and I were abused as teenagers), the poor devil doesn’t even have any memories of what his mother, Mrs. Ch., did to him!

Yesterday I spent hours talking to Mr F. about his dear cousin. Sometimes it is necessary to analyse a poor devil to understand a mad West…