if I was Trump's daughter he's you know
he's probably doing me some good you
know and he might
I might weirdly you know I might love
him what would you be your prescription
for how to begin to sort of pull you
know extract yourself Deanne mess
yourself from that yeah
well that's a difficult hypothetical
question because we don't know about the
psychological makeup of in this case the
daughter you're referring to right but
if the person if the narcissistic
individual isn't suffering in some way
there's no way to successfully intervene
because any intervention you would offer
would create suffering if they accepted
it an uninvited interpretation is an
aggression one of the things we observe
as clinicians is that somebody with a
very severe narcissistic personality
disorder is just on the edge of
psychosis what they believe seems so far
removed from reality that it's almost a
breakdown in reality testing but not
quite because they managed to maintain
enough of a coherent system to function
in the world now if that individual is
causing us harm I think we're better off
not interpreting to them but just trying
to change the reality around them this
is actually analogous to what we do
sometimes in clinical situations when we
have I'm thinking of a case of a young
adult who had this kind of malignant
narcissism seem to get pleasure in
causing pain to others was totally
refractory to any therapy efforts after
one has exhausted one's efforts to do
individual therapy our advice to our
students is give up on the individual
therapy work with the system help in
this case the family understand that
they can't for whatever reason and we
can't seem to make a dent in the
individual psychological function but if
you change the conditions of their life
if you stop
supporting them so generously so that it
just seems to facilitate their bad
behavior if you put up a structure to
contain them so in the example you're
giving I don't think there's any
interventions that could change the
individual psychology I think the
structure and that's what we're all
working toward to try and create a
government that contains instead of sort
of cooperates with pathology
you