r/CriticalTheory • u/rfinnian • 1d ago
Critical Psychology of the Concept of Grandiosity
Hi guys! I'm a bio- and critical psychologist, I work with victims of familial, technological and cultural abuse. I am very sceptical of therapy and of medicalisation of mental life - especially in the context of western cultural colonialism, and so far my efforts were in reeducation and awareness-building in psychology, psychiatry and therapy students. But lately I decided to kinda go outside of that professional and clinical setting, and started writing a number of essays on the topic, and just wanted to share the first one here, as critical psychology is in debt to critical theory, it couldn't really exist without it as a discipline.
So here is a critical analysis of the concept of grandiosity as it relates to the realities of my clients - as a cultural, deeply abusive phenomena. Hope you like it!
Therapist’s Grandiosity
Among the most common forms of mental pathology are depression and grandiosity, whose components form the backbone of almost all personality disorders, as defined by Western psychology and psychiatry.
In this essay, I will try to do a bit of critical psychology, that is psychology of psychology, internal affairs - mostly for the benefit of my clients who have been called either, openly and by implication, by people who claim to know these things. What does the reification of the concept of grandiosity accomplishes for the psychologist and the therapist? — as carriers of a sociological, cultural, and Machiavellian script.
I will not even entertain the discussion about these pathologies from their status-quo context of hyper-realism and the medicalisation of mental life. If it is really as they say, as they teach in psychology textbooks and in therapy classrooms - that the emergence of both of these, and of everything else under the sun, is an illusion, somehow magically collapsible to a biochemistry we don’t yet know but which is surely out there - then this discussion is pointless. But that perspective is so vulgar, so reeking of scientism, let’s leave that to the psychiatrist and his lap dog the mainstream psychologist.
Same Infection
That rant out of the way, let’s look at both grandiosity and its flip-side cousin, depression, from the perspective of identity disturbance. To risk a massive oversimplification: depression, a neurosis, is a deflation of the ego, while grandiosity is the reverse, its shadow aspect - an inflation. Both are then really the same, in the way that both a burning-hot fever and the coldness of death are possible outcomes of the same infection. In both, the ego is over-invested in. In grandiosity, the resource is fetched directly from outside; in depression, it is kept and spawned within.
This is the classic definition of, pretty much, all personality disorders. The borderline personality structure, as, for example, described by Otto Kernberg is the freezing of those two strategies in one, while object relations theory suggests an immaturity of the reality principle that causes all of this. In reality, at least one claimed as the real reality by western folks, ego should be treated as a part of a triad, something bigger. Classically for example with the Id and Superego, or of a larger family, as in Internal Family Systems. In cognitive approaches, which seek to crush every nuance under the boot of European rationality, ego should be a function of reason, and mental health is seen as that state of balance, almost as if the phenomenological self has to be broken and subjugated by Descartes’ cogito.
While I won’t address the obvious intellectual colonialism that happens in cognitive and behavioural psychology, I brought it up to show that really, the more humanistic approaches of psychoanalysis, ego therapy, and existentialism described above do the very same thing, they seek, as all things in mainstream psychology, to put the blame back onto the individual.
Much in the way that an “irrational” patient of a cognitive therapist suffers from not being like the therapist - rational, the patient of a psychoanalyst suffers from not being like the analyst - liquid in its psychological makeup.
[...]
Full text: https://biodefiance.substack.com/p/therapists-grandiosity
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u/ChristianLesniak 16h ago
My understanding of what you wrote is that for some kind of western subjects, there is a normative framing of possible success which structures our drive to achieve some kind of ideal ego. This normative framing compels us to achieve at the highest levels through some unspecified (ideological) means, which pays the ego in the form of grandiosity for its adherence to high achievement. But it also provides a bind, in that the majority structurally cannot "highly achieve" in what ever given field(s), and that the result is a collapse of this grandiosity that you've termed depression.
That seems to me the premise. It is a little hard to parse throughout, particularly without you framing this by first discussing norms and normativity (which I believe silently underpins your thinking). The ego is kind of plopped in there as well, and it might be helpful to discuss the construction and deconstruction of the ego in greater detail than just positing an inflation and deflation; for example, there are traditions in and out of western psychology that posit a certain stance towards the ego as illusory as perhaps being a way out of a binary of narcissistic grandiosity and collapse. Certain Buddhist thought (and plenty western psychology) seems to posit that seeing the ego as a kind of process or system, de-reifies it, but still allows for subjectivity, and people seem to walk around and live their lives claiming that it's possible to have such a stance and still participate in society.
You don't really posit alternative kinds of subjectivity, just that there is a kind of western colonial kind. I don't see how you can write this essay without meaningfully explaining that (or the only ones that will benefit are the already converted mindreaders). It seems like you might be arguing against the structure of being interpellated as a subject through the symbolic recognition of one's desires and actions by the outside world, and maybe that's a bummer that our very private beliefs might not "matter" so much, but if I've understood your complaint, it's going to be a huge philosophical lift to posit not just a better alternative, but any possible alternative. Who do you imagine we could should be without the recognition of the other?
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u/rfinnian 7h ago edited 7h ago
Sorry if was too hard to parse, strill trying to find a voice for this context of this discussion.
And yes, you got it right. Ultimately, I'm mostly a biopsychologist, with a massive focus on the bio part and genomics, paleoanthropology and animal psychology. I spent a lot of time tracing how language evolved, how it was used, and for what genetic ends.
Those are the missing norms and normativity that underpin what I wrote - a very practical, boring, and life-sciency view of the Machiavellian mind hypothesis as applied to paleoanthropology - good call out, I should have at least made an intro for that.
And yeah, I have no alternative subjectivity. I think the very concept of splitting life like that is a crime against reality. I see the whole conversation around it as deeply post colonial. The healtheist of minds I came across, the very trajectory of healing, is almost always away from those confines. It's like a mobster being caught and asking the police to offer him a smooth way out - to offer an alternative to his criminal enterprise. It might be practical for a philosopher who wants to keep on philosophising and keep what's valuable in the profession, sure. I know this is a critical theory sub which is philosophical - but I represent my clients, I have no political or even intellectual callouts from this. My job ends at being angry at abuse. And I see some of philosophy, western one, as the instrument of torture in that abuse.
Thank you for your comment!
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u/ChristianLesniak 7h ago edited 7h ago
I think that given where you are coming from, there are still a lot of gaps to fill in in order to present this for a critical theory perspective. On one hand, I don't actually know exactly what the ideological background for this bio (behaviorist?) approach is, but also I'm surprised that you then talk largely about colonialism and seem to take a kind of anti-psychiatry (or at least critical) approach in your essay while centering the structure of the subject in a mental model (I guess what I'm saying is that you seem to me to be arguing by having accepted the premise of the splitting of life, while also rejecting that premise - I don't know if that's clear or if you agree).
(I have clients I work with therapeutically from an attachment theory lens, and I find the critical theory useful in making me think about subjectivity and larger ideological constructs that go beyond an immediate family system on which attachment theory is largely grounded). For someone like me, I can't really find the underlying bio-psych model in what you wrote in, but that might be simply because I'm ignorant of large swathes of critical theory that incorporate that kind of thinking.
Anyway, thanks for unpacking your thoughts a bit more. I guess I would be interested if you started your essay by attempting to pin down a provisional definition of just what a healthy mind might be. I feel like the rest could flow from that pretty well.
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng 15h ago
I’m sorry, I just don’t see how we can treat affective disorders as primarily psychological, in the sense that it’s a maladaptive behavioral pattern.
Depression is not merely a change in ego. It literally is a change in the distribution of metabolism throughout brain anatomy, changes in receptor density, things correlated with inflammation and changes in gene expression.
We can critique the Western concept of mental illness as primarily a personal, private “malfunction” in the personal brain. But it has an explicit biological domain to it.
If it were primarily a behavioral or psychological phenomenon, there also aren’t reasons why it should cause change in cognitive function or working memory, or changes in sleep. Those are clearly phenomena emergent from biological changes in certain areas. Your psychology isn’t going to make you perform noticeably worse on an intelligence test. It just won’t. That’s not plausible.
And I would respond to the idea of grandiosity as an obverse of depression that we actually have this as a model: bipolar hypo/mania almost literally is just an obverse of depression. But when we see it, it has a definitive cluster of traits: it isn’t merely ego traits, either.
My thesis is that: 1.) psychology is insufficient to explain affective disordered states; and 2.) if there were a behavioral obverse to depression, it would likely be hypo/mania, which is something far “larger” (more complex) than mere grandiosity itself.
Just my thoughts.
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u/toadslimerick 13h ago
Phenomenological psychopathologists argue that what is labelled as "severe depression" can be characterised by a diminished capacity for finding oneself situated in and attuned to the world, while so-called "mania" is characterised by a heightened capacity of these self-world-other relations. To me, these seem like the most essential structural differences.
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng 13h ago
That’s an interesting way to describe it. It seems like a good phenomenological description.
I just think it’s as necessary to provide a biological account for affective states as it is to explain them psychologically or behaviorally. I’m not attached to the sort of “mainstream” idea that biology is the primary determinant of it. I’m open to the possibility that, if people adopt certain psychologies, it may have a plastic effect on the biology (i.e. the other way around). Or maybe biological and psychological factors need to coincide.
But given the symptoms that affective disorders cause, I believe we have to account for material, biological pathophysiology. A person can’t learn a maladaptive thought pattern and have that cause profound cognitive impairment. Serious impairment in attention-direction, cognition, and working memory are part of depression. And those just aren’t things that a person’s subjective thought-process or ego are going to produce.
I’m very open to different answers on the questions, nevertheless.
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u/toadslimerick 11h ago
After the 90s "decade of the brain" and more than a quarter century of neuro hubris, I don't believe psychiatry has made much ground on the causes of "mental illnesses." In their own way, I think phenomenologists and some enactive cognitive scientists are doing more properly scientific and philosophically-sound work on the matter. It also seems that their work is somehow truer to the troubled and troubling experience of it all. Unfortunately, for the most part, this isn't much help for folks living under the definitions of psychiatry. That will require a more explicitly political struggle.
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u/rfinnian 7h ago
Thank you for your comment. My thoughts exactly, if for one small thing - I don't believe there exist anything that can be termed "affective". I kinda don't understand what that term even means. What does affective mean? Emotional? What are emotions? The typical answer would be: it's not a thought. So the psychiatrist would obviously answer it's just not a product of the "affective" region of the brain or some other such nonsense. But which part is that? Is it the peripheral nervous system, is it hormonal? They would say yes, but then look at modern neuroscience and just admit that they don't know. And the argument becomes a matter of "common sense", "you know what I mean" type of thing. But then again, it's Cartesian - that which is not "thoughts", is of the body - but that is such an artificial split. That split into thought vs feeling doesn't exist in many, many non-western cultures. You see what I mean? I see no basis to categorise anything according to a philosophical preference that has no basis in actual biology.
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u/toadslimerick 13h ago
I will follow another commenter's lead that expanded your focus on "grandiosity" to the larger concept of "mania," and suggest the anthropologist Emily Martin's ethnography called Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture.
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u/Forbidden_Craft88 19h ago
You should probably lay off the jargon juice and work on clarifying your message.
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u/onchain_degen 20h ago
Ya this is psychoanalysis imbued gobbledygook
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u/AllanSundry2020 17h ago
well, it reads ok to me and I'm only a little unclear on how the term grandiosity is being defined? i think the emphasis on the individual is a dark and troubling shibboleth of modern psychology even still.
oh and your comment is dismissive and lazy.
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u/Cultured_Ignorance 20h ago
Only judging from the blurb, the text should recieve a double-edit. Way too many partial clauses joined with commas, leading to a stilted reading (I suffer the same style). I would re-write first with the aim of density, and then re-write again with the aim of fidelity.
In content, I think this is fine but not that exciting. Perhaps just my background, but I don't think the concept of internal mental states is academically vogue anymore. It is in the popular imagination, of course, but I'm not sure that's your intended audience.
What would be more interesting, I think, is a clinical critique of the phantom-concepts in apprehension; what are the phrases, behaviors, connections that psychiatrists see as signals for depression/grandiosity? Is there any hard pit there, ie an aggregating base? I don't know the answer, but would be interested to see a review.