SECRET MAGA SUBTWEET:

One of the strangest examples of this more pathological type of con artist is Tania Head, the woman who claimed to have been in the Sky Lobby on the 76th floor of the South World Trade Center Tower when the second plane struck. Together with an actual 9/11 survivor named Gerry Bogacz, Tania Head formed the WTC Survivors Network, a sort of trauma-support system. Eventually, she squeezed Bogacz from the board and maneuvered herself to the position of president. She gave guided tours at ground zero, telling groups and even the media of her harrowing experience: how she was thrown across the room from the explosive impact; how she emerged from unconsciousness to find Welles Crowther, the famous man in the red bandana, patting out the fire scorching her arm; how she was carried to safety just before the second tower collapsed; how a fireman guided her under a truck to avoid the falling rubble; and how she slipped into a coma only to awaken five days later in a hospital bed. She also told of how her husband, Dave, had been killed when the first tower collapsed, making her a double-victim.

The documentary The Woman Who Wasn't There chronicles Head's rise to prominence in the world of 9/11 survivors and her fall from fraudulent grace. In many of the film's interviews, we see her former friends and companions discussing how integral she had been in comforting them and helping them through the trauma, how compassionate she was, how strong and supportive and admirable. Over time, however, as Head grew more ruthless in her victimhood, her façade began to crack. Bogacz and others grew increasingly suspicious, and a series of articles and inquiries led to the discovery of the truth that Tania Head was unmarried and living in Barcelona on September 11th, 2001. When the planes struck, she was some 4,000 miles from ground zero. She never profited financially from her manipulations, nor did she appear to harbor any resentment towards victims of the terrorist attack--to the contrary, she seemed to long for the community her duplicity provided, and, clearly, she wished to be a leader of that community.

What if con artists of her inclination, who operate neither from umbrage nor for financial gain, fail to remember that their elaborate construction is untrue? What if the sham itself is an act of forgetting, one that, to put it another way, requires memory but interferes with accurate recollection? In constructing falsehoods of such magnitude, the imagination and the memory coalesce, and in order to avoid betraying the lie, the con artist is required to work up a wealth of detail both subtle and intricate, one that is founded on seized minutiae from a life not her own.

Counterintuitively, in fact, this work of forgetting may be the originating purpose of the deception: not a mere by-product of the urge to swindle, but an unconscious strategy to avoid enduring one's own problematic inner depths. The perspective of such massive dishonesty impedes proper self-knowledge because it neglects the true contents of personality--which is to say that it remembers from a false starting point, and in so doing, occludes recollection of one's substantial reality as an individual in pain. The mental energy required to hold the fabricated structure in place allows the fraud to escape the often distressing ordeal of self-awareness.

A 2020 television series entitled The Undoing plays with these issues. Based on the novel You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, the series stars Hugh Grant as Jonathan Fraser, a pediatric oncologist accused of murdering his mistress with a sculpting hammer. Nicole Kidman plays his wife, Grace, a clinical psychologist. Throughout, Grace struggles with the question of whether her husband is capable of such violence. One of the issues concerns the idea of her husband's potentially pathological narcissism: a self-infatuation and lack of empathy so absolute that, essentially, he has no conscience, no qualms about ending the life of another human with maximum brutality. Is it possible that this man whom Grace has loved and trusted for so long has successfully concealed his sociopathy from her, when after all she is trained in diagnosing such disorders? If her husband is guilty--and all the evidence suggests as much--how is it that she never penetrated beyond his superficiality in order to see the moral vacuum within?

The suspense the series generates hinges around this question, since it reveals the contradiction that, in her own sub-clinical narcissism, Grace Fraser is perhaps more likely to be duped than a woman untrained in clinical psychology. Her strong belief that she is a good psychologist interferes with her willingness to admit that she might have mistakenly married and remained devoted to a man who for all these years has managed to conceal his extreme self-absorption, hollowness, and indifference to the feelings and emotions of other human beings.

But The Undoing raises an even deeper psychological contradiction embedded within the concept of narcissistic personality disorder. The contradiction is best described by Otto Kernberg in his book Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. In what would amount to an almost picture-perfect description of Hugh Grant's character, Kernberg writes:

I describe patients with narcissistic personalities as presenting excessive self-absorption usually coinciding with superficially smooth and effective social adaptation, but with serious distortions in their internal relationships with other people. They present various combinations of intense ambitiousness, grandiose fantasies, feelings of inferiority, and overdependence on external admiration and acclaim. Along with feelings of boredom and emptiness, and continuous search for gratification of strivings for brilliance, wealth, power, and beauty, there are serious deficiencies in their capacity to love and to be concerned about others. This lack of capacity for empathic understanding of others often comes as a surprise considering their superficially appropriate social adjustment.

That final sentence in Kernberg's description highlights a compelling question. If the pathological narcissist lacks empathy, how is he is able to adjust so well socially, to gain the confidence of others by fooling them into the belief that he is loving and compassionate, and even to seduce others into a devoted reciprocal relationship? If long-term social adjustment requires sensitivity to the emotions of others, if an enduring erotic relationship requires mutual understanding and a nuanced responsiveness to the physical and emotional needs of a partner, then how is a pathological narcissist able to pull off such relations? How does the narcissist dupe his spouse, children, colleagues, and friends into the belief that he is caring and compassionate, perhaps even selfless, when in fact the opposite is true?

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