Wow so much here to unpack.
When the patient’s thinking is disorganized, both tangential (goes off on a tangent and never answers the question) or circumstantial (gives a lot of unnecessary detail eventually circling around to answer the question), the interview can take forever.
When the patient’s thinking is disorganized, both tangential (goes off on a tangent and never answers the question) or circumstantial (gives a lot of unnecessary detail eventually circling around to answer the question), the interview can take forever.
It’s not uncommon to have to interrupt and re-state the question but letting them ramble is revelatory, as with this entire interview. This degree of disorganization is seen in other disorders but qualitatively different. The narcissist is constantly chasing his grandiosity.
Trump gets lost in narcissistic storytelling. He goes completely off the rails because some more shiny reflection of his idealized self becomes the more immediate need for him to riff on rather than any realized commitment to continuity or necessity to answer the question posed.
After his first tangential spew about the military, his Mother’s Day message not surprisingly devolves into all about the narcissist & his relationship with his own mother. It’s safe to say his description of that relationship was much more complicated than his grandiose gushing.
First he starts to say his mother loving him “was not hard...” (to do) but realizes his grandiosity must be reigned in. He quickly recovers with “probably not easy to do” a Freudian slip of the truth, more plausible given his history of behaviors consistent with conduct disorder.
IMO besides the severity of his disorder, cognitive impairment is preventing Trump from filtering and worsens his disorganization. Narcissists learn what gives them away and alter behavior. The last thing they want to be seen as is pathetic or small. Trump can no longer do this.
