Malignant Narcissism and Power: A Psychodynamic Exploration of Madness and Leadership

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Zeiders, Charles

Devlin, Peter

Mental Health

Routledge

Using psychodynamic theory and riveting case material, this book dissects the figure of the malignant narcissist leader (MNL). Across the world today, individuals and societies are impacted by unprecedented disruptive influences, from globalization and climate change to economic uncertainty and mass migration. The rise of populists and would-be saviours have promised certainty for anxious populations, but how far are such leaders suffering from the MNL pathology? Through the psychoanalytic lens of Otto Kernberg, the authors explain the etiology of the charismatic MNL's clinical features: charisma, grandiosity, criminality, sadism, and paranoia. The book outlines the limitations and complexity of diagnosis, contextualizing the MNL within the transcendental and millenarian movements, and discusses the patho-dynamics of high-pressure groups and totalitarian regimes, including: types of groups, methods of mind control, categories of constituents, the corporate totalitarian state, and the authoritarian demagogue. The book looks at a wide range of leaders including Donald Trump, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Roger Ailes, Keith Raniere, Jan of Leiden, and Credonia Mwerinde. Distinguishing the disordered personality of the MNL from other personality disorders, and presenting a new model of overlapping descriptors to categorize high-pressure group types and identifying types of followers as well, this book represents essential reading for psychodynamically-minded psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, sociologists, political scientists, and those working in organizational development.

Charles Zeiders has given us a great gift; a poet, healer, and lover, he shares with fearless eloquence his heart, his mordant wit, and his empathic depth. Most of all, however, he inspires hope, hope in the human soul. I am captivated by his words and reading him I can feel my soul's enthusiastic approbation. You must give your soul the same pleasure. -Dr. Stephen Martin, Jungian Analyst and President Emeritus of the Philemon Foundation Love Poems and Other Terrible Problems teems with psychic and spiritual energy. It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting that includes the Marx Brothers and splotches of transcendent gold. - Peter Devlin, from the Introduction Zeiders’ love poems depict the paradoxes of a Christ-redeemed eros . . . But the volume explores the insane side of love…Like Dante’s Virgil, Zeiders navigates us through an earthly Inferno of malignant narcissists, charlatans, and pedophiles…Thankfully, the poet brings us safely to the other side . . . Just as the Christian vision of the universe begins and ends with Love, so Love Poems and Other Terrible Problems provides hope. -Joseph Walls, from Kiss Epiphany: A Spiritual Critique of Love Poems and Other Terrible ProblemsFrom the exploration of the transfigured state found in the “Love Poems” we turn to the “Other Terrible Problems” . . . Nietzschean nihilism presses upon us. So does war and gore…Psychopaths head our institutions . . . we cannot find a way to offer our eros in the mad contexts they create . . . yet, the lesson is that within the container of love . . . one’s en

Love Poems and Other Terrible Problems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

il piccolo editions

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