If you have been watching Obama speak and give interviews you may have noticed that he seems to reveal spot light more than even the most egotistical of political candidates. He spends a half hour going through the crowd after he is introduced, shaking hands like a Messiah. He has this condescending look down his nose at your sneer when he talks to interviewers and looks especially perturbed and angry when berating someone who he perceives is attacking him. He morphs his voice and body language to suit each audience in a manner that goes beyond customization to easily acting a part. I believe he is narcissistic. Here are other narcissistic nonverbal and behavioral cues that one of my blog readers wrote about Obama.One of my readers is getting his doctorate on evolution and ecology and wrote me:
“I’ve spent years trying to recognize the most accurate indicators of NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder). There are a handful that I’ve come to trust, though they’re a bit difficult to convey.
1. An amorphous expression that looks like a child, about three years old, needing approval. I’ve almost never seen this expression in someone who isn’t NPD (occasionally in Borderline Personality Disorder, a closely related type II personality disorder). To me, it’s an exceptionally good indicator. It’s often a fleeting micro-expression (hard to catch without practice). It’s an expression of yearning and need, directed toward the person they’re interacting with. In males, it makes the face look like that of a little boy. Some psychologists argue that a developmental stage goes awry in NPD, roughly around the age of three.
2. The eyes of NPDs usually have an unusual look. My face-reading friend describes them as “dead eyes”. I perceive NPD eyes as “no boundary between inside and outside”. Some people perceive them as magnetic. There’s reduced activity in some of the musculature around the eyes. This includes a reduced response to emotion-laden scenes or speech (e.g. less of a startle response to disturbing visuals). At times, it can produce a “detached” appearance - or a languid, even slightly sleepy look. The startle response of pupils (e.g. to disturbing scenes) is often diminished relative to normal people (both less of a change in pupil diameter, and a longer lag before pupil size changes). I think people with NPD also spend less time playing through internal imagery (visible in eye tracking and facial expressions).
3. There’s also something I call “frozen cheeks”. Muscles in the cheek region aren’t as mobile as in normal people. This is partly due to a subtle expression of contempt and partly due to increased control over appearance.
The contempt can often be an open clear-cut expression, but much of the time it’s just a subtle tensing of the musculature, underlying the “apparent” expression.
Obama displays all of these (the first as micro expressions). There’s also his entitlement body language, his glares, his cocked head and “looking down the nose”, etc.. He occupies quite a bit of space and also frequently initiates physical contact - e.g. putting his hand on someone’s back or arm.
An assured smooth gesture - in a way that’s slightly unusual given our culture’s definition of personal boundaries. The anger in his face is kind of interesting. Sometimes it’s blatant, but more often it’s a subtle expression. When Hillary scores a solid point in a debate, or when a journalist challenges him in a question, you can see a sustained increase in the subtle expression of anger. People with NPD often have a high level of latent anger that can be triggered by any injury to self-image (narcissistic injury).
In case you haven’t seen these, here are a links to a couple of YouTube videos that people have put together capturing some of Obama’s more blatant anger/contempt expressions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9coNTKQi544
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvFSECcANZE&feature=related
People with NPD are typically hypercompetitive and hate losing. One woman I know of would throw the checkerboard across the room if she lost a game of checkers with her eight year old son. Obama is clearly hypercompetitive and is known as a bad loser - people that he has played poker with comment on him being a poor loser, and he’s said to be a bad loser in politics as well (e.g. when he lost to Bobby Rush).
Narcissists that I’ve known are generally charming and very well-liked (except by those they’ve injured). They often set up a cult of personality, though on a much smaller scale than Obama - a circle of admiring people.
There’s a need for a high level of admiration.
Paul Street, a progressive columnist, had the following observations after attending an Obama rally in Iowa:
“So why wasn’t I dancing and singing along? Why did I have a terrible taste in my mouth two hours after Obama’s speech even as the sun shone and the warm spring breeze passed through my den just a mile east of the Pentacrest?
Part of it was the narcissism of the self-presentation. Obama does this creepy thing after being introduced. He approaches the stage only after a good 5 minutes of passing through a parting sea of applauding audience members.
Please. Candidates should stand humbly by the side of the stage and walk up right after being introduced. I do not attend political rallies to see a pretend savior savoring popular adulation as he dances through the cool stream of the multitude.”
Though people with NPD often cultivate a circle of admirers, they tend to have few true friends. There’s often an odd hint of “aloneness” to them.
You mentioned that you found Obama “chameleon”-like.
This is common in NPD.For someone with NPD, it’s predominantly about the surface - the image in the mirror. There’s less of a solid core. One perspective that many psychologists subscribe to is that in NPD, the “true self” is greatly diminished or largely absent, having largely been replaced by a “false self”. Another interesting characteristic, in my experience, is that people with NPD often take on a stance of amused indifference. Floating slightly above it all, sometimes with a slight bit of contempt. You can often see Obama doing this in interviews.The entitlement aspect comes through not only in his body language, but also in things he does and says.For example, he was interviewed about the tactics he used to first win elected office, as an Illinois State Senator. It was a very liberal Chicago district, so the only real opposition was in the Democratic primary. He had four opponents, including the incumbent (a woman named Alice Palmer - long time popular activist). Obama hired the best lawyers in Chicago and used aggressive legal tactics to challenge the nominating petitions of each of his opponents; knocking them all off the ballot so that he could run unopposed (it would have been very difficult for him to win the election if the incumbent remained on the ballot). In 2007 a reporter asked him about this:“Asked whether the district’s primary voters were well-served by having only one candidate, Obama smiled and said: ‘I think they ended up with a very good state senator.’And he defended his use of ballot maneuvers: ‘If you can win, you should win and get to work doing the people’s business.’
In my experience, people with NPD use language in a very distinctive way. I have found the following description by Sam Vaknin to be pretty accurate (though the description is too flowery for my taste):
“Narcissists …don’t talk, or communicate. They fend off. They hide and evade and avoid and disguise. In their planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes - they perfect the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches.
It is the fact that language is put by Narcissists to a different use - not to communicate but to obscure, not to share but to abstain, not to learn but to defend and resist, not to teach but to preserve ever less tenable monopolies, to disagree without incurring wrath, to criticize without commitment, to agree without appearing to do so. Thus, an “agreement” with a narcissist is a vague expression of intent at a given moment - rather than the clear listing of long term, iron-cast and mutual commitments. Communication through unequivocal, unambiguous, information-rich symbol systems is such an integral and crucial part of our world - that its absence is not postulated even in the remotest galaxies which grace the skies of science fiction. In this sense, narcissists are nothing short of aliens.
With cerebral narcissists, language is a lover. The infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrotechnic type of speech which sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay more attention to the composition than to the content. They are swept by it, intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the spiraling complexity of its forms.”
Another interesting aspect of NPD is a desire and tendency to “merge” with others. With Obama this manifests, for example, in the nature of the personality cult he is encouraging. You can also see a bit of it in statements like “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for; we are the change that we seek.”
One of the core deficits in NPD - perhaps the core deficit - is a deficiency in empathy. They can talk about empathy (e.g. one NPD woman I know likes to lecture others about empathy), and their cognitive empathy is intact (they can correctly interpret what others are feeling - often better than average), but there’s a deficiency in affective empathy. That Obama can be empathy-challenged has been noted by the occasional reporter. e.g. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1207/7486.html
Several genetic studies have been done to separate environmental from genetic effects in NPD (mostly studies using twins). These studies have consistently shown NPD to be highly heritable. Across the studies that I’ve seen, the median estimate of heritability is somewhere roughly around 0.7 (on a linear scale of 0 to 1, with 1 being perfectly heritable). This doesn’t mean that someone with an NPD parent will necessarily be NPD, but it does mean that they’re at substantially increased risk. There are also environmental risk factors (e.g. abuse or excessive adulation during childhood). Along these lines, the history of Obama’s father is really interesting (ignore the headline - the person composing the headline appears not to have read the article). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=431908&in_page_id=1770
Obama’s sister had an interesting comment:
Sen. Barack Obama with sister Auma Obama, left, and grandmother Sarah Obama at his late father’s Kenyan village (Courtesy Mshale)
“Barack was a lot like my father - his hand movements, his gestures, how he talks, how he sits. He’s got certain quietness about him and he sits and he concentrates like my father. He can be in a room full of people and he withdraws on his own. And we’ve all got the Obama hands - the fingers and everything. So it was amazing to watch that, because I was meeting him for the first time but it felt like I knew him.” Another almost-universal feature of NPD is a strong sense of restlessness. Many psychologists attribute this to an internal feeling of emptiness. The feeling of emptiness leads to a desire/need for new experiences, as well as a desire for adulation, and a tendency toward drug and alcohol abuse.
Obama writes about his own restlessness, and it’s been commented on by others. e.g. from a Vanity Fair article:
“A chronic restlessness, an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me.” He has tried to turn this to his advantage. “I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington,” he said in announcing that he would run for president. “But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.” Obama’s restlessness is a quality that would lead him to conclude, again and again, that the time had come to make a move—to take a chance, to aim higher - when others told him to wait his turn.”
Anyway, those are some of the reasons I think Obama has NPD.
Though NPD is rare in the general population (1-2%), for a very complicated set of reasons I’ve ended up having contact with a pretty large sample size.
So I’ve developed good recognition skills.
I’ll include the DSM IV criteria for NPD.
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance
2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brillance, beauty, or ideal love
3. believes that he or she is “special” and unique
4. requires excessive admiration
5. has a sense of entitlement
6. is interpersonally exploitative
7. lacks empathy
8. is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her
9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
Though such abstract criteria don’t capture it in its entirety (and could be misapplied). If you have extended personal contact with people diagnosed with NPD, you’ll find that it’s a really distinctive entity (unmistakable for garden-variety narcissism or other personality quirks).”
~Greg Gelembiuk
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How does John McCain use his voice and how does it contrast with Obama’s? When a speaker like McCain reads his speeches or gives lists of things, the voice often lowers in volume and becomes a monotone. He still has some variation but without the high highs and low lows of pitch and volume that give Obama such dramatic variability.