Activism, Character, Disorder

P-HOLE Lecture #4

In which I attempt to sharpen the double-edged sword. (Photo credit: The Swedish History Museum).

This lecture—which isn’t really a lecture, as it won’t every be delivered as such—is rather overdue. I had to cancel the final meeting of my class, Social Character and Its Disorders, at the Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education. This is what I would have said, now with the benefit of several months of reflection.

We have covered considerable ground in this course. We have learned all about what personality disorders—AKA character disorders—are, from a (neuro)psychoanalytic perspective. We have explored Fromm’s idea of social character and Fanon’s idea of sociogeny, the ways in which our individual characters are shaped by our social contexts and the demands they place on us. And we’ve begun to connect the dots between neuropsychoanalysis, traditional psychoanalytic theories of personality, and social psychoanalysis, understanding how what we call character disorders are very much the imprint of a harmful social environment on our psyches, and how becoming well-adjusted to a harmful social environment should be seen as rather disordered in its own right.

Here at P-HOLE, we tend to be a critical bunch; a great many of us are actively involved in grassroots and movement activist efforts. Whether or not we practice as therapists, we are interested in the ways in which social forces and movements can shape psychological experiences. Why do we want radical social change? Because it would make us feel an awful lot better if people, ourselves included, weren’t being oppressed so goddamn much.

My goal for today is actually to flip things around and consider the role of individual psychology in social movements. I want us to reflect on a particularly vexing subject—the roles of social character and character disorder in animating and, sometimes, undermining social movement work.

. . .

This subject is vexatious for a host of reasons, chief among them being that fascist activists have spent the last several years arguing that their opponents—me, us—have personality disorders. Chris Rufo’s entire theory of his fascist case is summed up in his writings on what he calls The Cluster B Society. The raw material for this argument was provided to Rufo by useful idiot psychoanalysts like Joseph Burgo, who argued in Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller that trans activists—like me—are narcissistically character disordered bullies. Burgo’s proposition is, in pop psychoanalytic terms, that trans people are not really trans; that we think we are trans because of our underlying personality disorders; that these personality disorders lead us to want to control everyone, particularly authority figures; and that claiming a trans identity in a neoliberal social context is a highly effective strategy for being able to bully people and get away with it.

Rufo extends this line of argument to conclude that every fascist bogeythem, from campus activists to antifa to BLM to trans people, has been infected by socially contagious personality disorders via the leftist internet. This argument also originates with psychoanalysts—the idea of the internet as a vector of socially contagious transness was developed by psychoanalysts like Lisa Marchiano and others who became essential useful idiots for international fascist organizing efforts. Marchiano’s original academic article on this topic is entitled “Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics.” Fantasies of social contagion—illness, pollution, impurity—have been essential to fascist thought for some 100 years, and they tap into far more elemental psychosocial anxieties. Psychoanalysts are uniquely positioned to understand and capitalize upon such anxieties, since they are our stock in trade, and they were devastatingly effective at helping fascists to (re)build the case that all of their enemies are mentally ill and need to be subjected to coercive re-educational treatment by the fascist state. (They also, according to Project 2025, want to control the internet Chinese-style, supposedly in order to prevent people like me from “grooming” kids to become trans, which they call “transing” them).

It is not controversial, in the year of our lord 2026, to recognize that every fascist accusation is a confession. Fascism’s rise to power in the US in particular was driven by the expansion of a reactionary internet that became a fertile environment for the flowering of fascist ideas and influence. That wing of the internet was primarily animated by a desire to influence the way people experience and express their gender, from incel-derived looksmaxxing to the figure of the tradwife. Fascists recognized that, because all gender is “socially contagious,” one could use propaganda to effectively try to promote the forms of gender identity and expression that suited their political project. This was transmogrified, via projective identification, into a fantasy of a cabal of Marxist influencers transing the youth, a minor variation on earlier fantasies of Jewish cabals promoting immigration and Black rights in order to undermine the volkish whites. (Indeed, it’s not even a variation; the same people ultimately believe these are all fruit of the same tree).

As I have argued elsewhere, this wing of the fascist internet can be understood as catalyzing character disorder by promoting profoundly narcissistic ways of being oneself, and of imagining and relating to others. This claim—that White supremacy is a narcissistic ideology that grows by grafting itself onto the basic narcissistic tendencies that exist within all of us—is so close to home for fascists that, whenever psychoanalysts make it, they are fed into an online fascist hate machine that’s meant to destroy their lives. (They are fed into it by other psychoanalysts, by the way, who drop a dime on them to fascist journalists). This has been done to Aruna Khilanani, Donald Moss, Derek Hook, and Lara Sheehi; I keep waiting for the shoe to drop on me, and being mildly offended that it has not!

Psychoanalytic thinkers like Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Christopher Bollas have all argued that fascist states of mind are fruitfully understood as socially contagious mental disorders. Adorno in particular said that fascism is psychoanalysis in reverse; we should not be surprised, then, to see fascists taking the line of argument leftist psychoanalysts advanced against them and flipping it back on us and our fellow travelers (the trans people, the antifascists, the Black liberation activists). I am rubber and you are glue . . .

. . .

So the fascist idea that all their enemies have personality disorders is 100% bullshit, right?

Well . . .

Yes, it is bullshit, in the sense that it is a substantively untrue claim that is being made without real evidence or regard for how (un)true it is, in order to advance the standing of the people making the claim. It is beyond ludicrous to argue that all your leftist enemies are mentally ill, just as much as it would be beyond ludicrous to argue that all Trump supporters are ipso facto mentally ill.

And yet . . .

I have been involved in many forms of movement work and activism over the last 20 years. I have been a union organizer and activist on a very active basis since 2022; through the beginning of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings, I was president of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, the social activism interest section of the American Psychological Association’s psychoanalysis division. I would describe myself as a semi-professional activist.

Anyone who has spent any real time in movement-world is aware that what organizers tend to call “difficult people” are a major feature of the landscape. Brian Martin, the anarchist theorist and activist, has written so trenchantly about this as to make my own argument almost redundant. What I’d like to do here is summarize his argument on this issue, but with my own psychoanalytic spin.

Martin observes that all organizations can be destabilized and run aground by difficult people in various ways. Bad behavior compromises the organization’s ability to function effectively; it alienates other participants to such an extent that they abandon ship; and, particularly in organizations dedicated to utopian visions of social change, difficult people can challenge or discredit the ideals and practices the organization is trying to promote. Not all difficult people have personality disorders, but—at least in the way Martin is using the term—I contend that a great many, perhaps most, do.

Martin also rightly notes that difficult people become difficult by virtue of damaging or traumatizing interactions with the social world, that their distinctive way of being difficult is a finely-honed coping strategy based on their formative experiences, and that they can’t but return to this coping strategy. This observation is entirely consistent with psychoanalytic understandings of character generally, and character disorder in particular; we learned, via Fonagy and associates, that borderline personality and related disorders are defined by excessive rigidity and a particularly limited behavioral “menu” from which one can only make basically bad choices.

The tragic fact of life in leftist social spaces is that we attract wounded people (ourselves included) to our causes, and then we act wounded together in ways that wound our causes. Crucially, though, there are degrees of woundedness, as Martin also notes. Per the DSM-5TR, about 10% of the general population meets their (admittedly very problematic) criteria for a personality disorder, and that figure shoots up to roughly 1/3 of patients in clinic settings and over half of people in forensic settings like psychiatric hospitals and jails. Even accounting for a lot of biased and bigoted misdiagnosis in those settings, my own extensive experience in such settings makes clear that people who wind up in them are routinely very traumatized, including and especially by the state that is forcing them into such settings. I am not just talking about the patients in these settings, either—I’m also talking about the professionals.

When we base our movements around the critique or even abolition of such institutions—prisons, the psychiatric industrial complex, the settler-colonial state and its institutional apparatus—surely we should not be surprised that the people who make up our movements are massively traumatized. Surely we should not be surprised that a sizable percentage of them (us) will have personality disorders. And surely we should not be surprised that these personality disorders, wrought as they were by the very oppressive forces we are trying to oppose together and indeed reflecting a psychic internalization of those forces, can have a very deleterious effect on people’s ability to act cooperatively, rationally, flexibly, and with a tolerance for conflict, difference, and disappointment.

We become our own worst enemies.

. . .

Now might be an opportune moment to mention that I have a personality disorder.

I am not, as the Chris Rufos and Joseph Burgos of the fascist world would have you believe, a trans-trender crypto-narcissist. I do, however, have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

For the uninitiated: in typical obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the person suffering from it generally recognizes that their obsessional thoughts and compulsive behaviors are crazy. Partly, that’s because their obsessional thoughts and compulsive behaviors often look quite outlandish and unreasonable; partly, it’s because they experience their obsessive-compulsive spirals as states that are fairly distinct from their baseline personality. Obsessive-compulsiveness is a spectrum; some people can be diagnosed with OCD with poor or absent insight, which means they truly do not know that their outlandish and unreasonable obsessions and compulsions are outlandish and unreasonable.

In obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, a baseline (and partly biological and heritable) tendency to think in an obsessional manner becomes yoked to traumatic realities. This is associated in particular with an ambivalent style of attachment¹. In ambivalent attachment, the child responds to inconsistencies in their caregivers and environments by feeling highly responsible for making sure their own needs are met. Typically, this involves becoming a highly emotionally expressive and clingy squeaky wheel, a way of being that is widely despised and which is strongly discouraged by most schools and peer groups, particularly when the squeaky wheel is (rightly or wrongly) seen as a boy. In such situations, in which they face major punishment for the way of being that their insecure attachment has encouraged, it is common for the child to shift to an obsessive-compulsive orientation to their environment as an alternative strategy for seeking safety through control.

In OCPD, you tend to become fixated on not doing things wrong, because you often have a core belief that doing things wrong is why your needs were not met. This takes many forms, including debilitating perfectionism; what the DSM describes as being “overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values”; a tendency towards hyper-mentalizing others (i.e. working way too hard to figure out if they are okay, if you have upset them, what they might need, all in order to make yourself feel safe again); a profound stubbornness that serves to ward off losses of control. One’s personality becomes organized around constant hyper-vigilant efforts to avoid any sort of mistake (broadly defined) on one’s own part, and to scan the environment for hazards that can be identified and neutralized.

Being something of an expert on the assessment and treatment of personality disorders, the failure to recognize this in myself until relatively recently is rather embarrassing. (It should, I suppose, be far more embarrassing to the various clinicians I saw over the years who never noticed it or attempted to treat it). Still, my own failure to see it is diagnostic—in OCPD, your obsessions and compulsions do not feel like obsessions or compulsions, they feel like squarely rational worries and like reasonable courses of action in response to those worries. You tend to think other people are weird for not worrying the way you worry, or taking the actions you take.

OCPD becomes stabilized beyond what you see in OCD because you tend to latch onto fairly plausible things to worry about. Your anxieties are not usually outlandish or bizarre. I think the best way to explain it is that your thought content is usually solidly reality-based, but your thought process—the way in which you are thinking about things, i.e. obsessionally—is not reasonable.

One of the defining features of all personality disorders is that they are an ongoing effort to manage how others relate to you. In Cluster A disorders—paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal—one is trying to keep scary others at bay; in Cluster B disorders—narcissism, borderline, histrionic, antisocial—one is trying to frantically titrate the distance all the time, as in the famous “come here/go away” dynamic in BPD; in Cluster C disorders—avoidant, dependent, and OCPD—you are trying to keep others close enough to keep you safe, but in a manner that can be quite controlling.

Something that it has been painful for me to fully appreciate is that, in OCPD, you tend to draft other people into your compulsions. You relate in ways that seek (indeed, demand) reassurance; you try to induce other people to act according to your own rigid systems; you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get other people to make you feel better, but in a way that only reifies your underlying anxieties.

All of this has been highly relevant to my activist work, and sometimes in positive ways—for the cause, anyway. One of the signature features of OCPD is workaholism. My ability to work like crazy—or, rather, my inability not to work like crazy—proved very advantageous for various activist projects. Refugee resettlement, union bargaining, protecting your friends from fascist propaganda campaigns, being an unrelenting feminist killjoy within institutions; these are all colossally exhausting and time-consuming exercises. I ran those marathons like a fucking champ, and I am very proud of the work that got done.

The cost of this work to me was profound. I got very ill on a regular basis, taking steroids and other medicines in order to keep performing. My overwork weathered and aged me beyond my years. Relatedly, I think all kinds of people—both within movements and in my personal life—took advantage of my energy and capacity for self-sacrifice for their own purposes. I was not nurtured by movements; I was, frankly, exploited for my use value.

In a similar vein—if moral scrupulosity is yoked to philosophically sound principles, it makes it much easier to be an effective feminist killjoy, though this presumes a person’s rigid moralism can be influenced by philosophical argumentation. I think part of my willingness to be as ruthless with the psychoanalytic profession as I have been, to take the risks I have taken and to sacrifice the things I have sacrificed in order to be as critical as I have been, is because this is a central feature of my psychology. Our colleague Lara Sheehi has written about the essential value of repetition in psychic militancy, and nobody knows about repetition like someone with an obsessive-compulsive personality . . .

And—I am aware that my effectiveness as an organizer, in particular, has also been hampered by OCPD. Like many people with this personality style, I can tend to get consumed by side quests that feel psychically satisfying but don’t move the ball down the field. I find it hugely difficult to delegate, which also makes it hard to cooperate. I have been told that I am rigid, and that is true. (And—the people who most object to my rigidity are often the people whose principles or actions are being found wanting). Some of my personality traits are in tension with what organizing according to my principles actually requires, even as others help me to hold fast to those principles against intense external pressures to conform and shut up.

. . .

I am, in other words, a difficult person in meaningful ways, a person whose personality disorder is a real double-edged sword in my activist work. When I observe that leftist activist spaces are often hamstrung by problems created by character disorder, I am aware that the call is coming from inside the house.

What I want to argue here is that developing the capacity to deal effectively with interpersonal and organizational issues that arise in large part because of personality disorder needs to be a core competency of leftist organizing, and right now it is not. We know that personality disorder is a predictable outcome of the kinds of mistreatment, especially adverse childhood experiences and their social determinants, that lead people to movement work. Part of being universally accessible and committed to disability justice involves being welcoming to those of us whose mental health issues can show up—positively and negatively—in organizing contexts.

And—I increasingly think that personality disorders constitute an edge case that challenges some normative principles of disability justice theory and praxis². In particular, we need to recognize that personality disorders are extremely unusual in that the symptoms of the disorder often involve treating other people poorly and acting in a generally destructive way. In OCPD, this takes the form of being needy and people-pleasing and reassurance-seeking and sometimes quite rigid, all of which is annoying and disruptive. In other personality disorders, particularly the narcissistic and borderline disorders I have dedicated my career to addressing, the level of interpersonally violating unethical behavior and destructiveness stemming from the disorder can be quite profound. In such cases, it is neither ableist or eugenicist to believe, even insist, that it is necessary for the person to change, provided that one is also committed to playing an appropriate role in helping to get them the resources to change³.

On the one hand, those of us with personality disorders are uniquely essential to our movements, because the movements exist for our benefit and because we have particular attributes that can, under certain conditions, be powerful force multipliers in organizing efforts. On the other hand, we are uniquely likely to play a crucial role in catalyzing dynamics that can hamstring and blow up movements because of the ways we are liable be—counterproductive, alienating, destructive, hoist on our own petard—and because of how our characteristic ways of being are liable to bring out the worst in other people, and in organizations especially.

From my perspective, we all have a moral obligation to try to grow our capacities to act decently towards ourselves and others. (Hot take, right?). We do not all have the same resources to do so, and that is one of the key issues that the movements I am involved with for better access to (mental) healthcare are trying to address, and why myself and many movement clinicians I know provide low- or no-fee treatment to activists in order to help make sure they can keep doing the work they are doing. Being an ethical activist involves recognizing the vulnerabilities within yourself that can compromise your ability to advance the causes you care about; this is part and parcel of Sheehi’s idea of psychic militancy. But our organizations and institutions also have special obligations to all of us, especially people who have these vulnerabilities; they owe it to us to not be so rocked by us that they collapse on our heads and then lay all the blame for their collapse at our feet.

. . .

There is a body of work at the edges of psychoanalysis that I have found very useful in thinking about how to contend with these issues interpersonally and organizationally; at face value, this work is not radical, but it can be put towards radical ends.

I asked you to read the work of Hanna Pickard and Cathleen Morey for today. Pickard is a philosopher and clinician whose work for the last many years has developed a concept she calls responsibility without blame, particularly with respect to personality disorders, as in the paper you read. Pickard is extending the line of logic we have already seen via Fonagy and associates—that a defining feature of personality disorders is that they biopsychosocially limit your range of behavioral choices, constraining them to such an extent that you often only have shitty options available to you, particularly in the most adverse and challenging situations. You are the agent of your actions, and therefore responsible for them; but because your constrained behavioral options are not in a larger sense your fault, blaming you for them—that is, acting as if you should have been able to do otherwise—is irrational and can often provide an alibi for other people to treat you badly in response, often due to their own hurt and weaknesses.

From my perspective, responsibility without blame is an abolitionist ethic. It asks us to put blame where it belongs, i.e. on the systems and circumstances that so reduced the harmful person’s choices, while recognizing that the harmful person has some irreducible human freedom and agency that can build towards better ways of being if they are appropriately supported by the community. This is the basic premise that underlies transformative justice work.

Importantly, Pickard asks her readers to give each side of this dialectic equal weight, and I want to encourage us to heed her call on this. In some instances I have seen, people with personality disorders have been subject to disproportionate and frankly retaliatory scapegoating treatment in movement-land when problems arose; in others, their comrades failed to respect the person with a personality disorder’s actual agency, limitations, and needs, allowing them to continue to harm others and the movement’s work by not setting or enforcing rational interpersonal or organizational limits.

This is where I think Pickard’s work lines up with Morey’s. Morey was a colleague of mine in graduate school, and I respect her thinking very much; we come to similar questions from very different political and institutional positions. Morey is the chief social worker at Austen Riggs, the storied (and quite conservative) psychoanalytic residential treatment center focusing mainly on patients with severe personality disorders. In that context, she consistently observed patterns of what she came to call systems enactments.

Those of you familiar with relational psychoanalysis will know that relational analysts understand enactments as, basically, complex interpersonal weather systems that emerge when the unconscious materials and tendencies of patient and analyst converge. Cold air meets warm and you get a tornado, seemingly out of the blue. The concept emerges out of experiences in individual psychoanalysis, with only two people involved. Morey’s innovation is to fractally expand the concept out. She recognizes that individuals and clinical dyads are nested within treatment teams, institutions, and larger communities and systems of power, and that difficult clinical situations that superficially look related to a patient’s psychopathology are actually, on closer inspection, enactments that involve the confluence of all these various micro-, mezzo-, and macro-level forces, most of which are being actively disavowed by the individuals and institutions involved and blamed on the patient, who nonetheless has usually made an important contribution to the situation by doing personality disordered stuff.

Morey synthesizes the results of her empirical research on this topic (which is fascinating) to offer a list of seven characteristics that define a systems enactment⁴:

• Affective dysregulation. People, especially institutional staff, having big feelings, losing their cool, and numbing out.

• Cognitive disequilibrium. As she puts it, “disturbances in cognitive function such as rumination, self-critical thoughts, disorganized thinking, fragmentation, and a collapse of mentalizing capacity.”

• Uncharacteristic verbal or non-verbal interactions. Basically, staff being weird and acting out.

• Somatic manifestations. Bodily, things don’t feel right.

• Deviations from the therapeutic frame. More acting out, often in a way that blames the patient for dysregulation in the clinicians or larger systems.

• Polarization dynamics. To paraphrase what I was told in my first year training in the psych hospital: you know the patient is borderline when the staff is fighting about them. This also involves a tendency of staff to blame each other for what is putatively going on with the patient. (See also: Davies and Frawley on victim/victimizer/bystander/rescuer dynamics).

• Emergence of treatment ruptures. The work breaks down, people get fired, people leave, people get sicker, people cross boundaries, people blow up or blow out.

I imagine that these dynamics are very familiar to any of you who have worked in clinical institutions; but I also expect that they sound equally familiar to people who have spent lots of time in movement-world. I have been hired to consult with numerous clinical and activist organizations around the country in the last several years, and without exception the impetus for calling me is a systems enactment that unfolded exactly as Morey describes. These moments show the institutions their own limitations, so they seek outside help; almost without exception, though, the institutions are reluctant to actually recognize that they, as much or more than the patient, were a major catalyst of the events that unfolded. When the focus turns from how to support patients with personality disorders to how they can learn to deal with each other differently, particularly by critically interrogating the power dynamics that operate within their institutions and professional relationships, the appetite for my services tends to wane.

This is, to my mind, an example of what another favorite thinker in this area, Laura S. Brown, calls institutional cowardice. Brown is a research associate of Jennifer Freyd, who coined the concepts of institutional betrayal and betrayal trauma; the idea of institutional cowardice seeks to explain how and why institutions, particularly notionally altruistic ones with a formal duty of care, so routinely betray the very people for whom they are supposed to care. Her argument is, broadly, that institutions become self-protective in ways that produce both negligent and abusive outcomes.

Many of us have been betrayed by cowardly institutions; these betrayals have become a regular feature of my professional life, so much so that I devoted most of my career to studying them, research being me-search and all that. Those of us who are trans, who are advocates for Palestinian rights and the rights of other oppressed peoples disfavored by our states, who have fought for unions and workers, have all routinely been subject to frankly disgusting institutional betrayals by notionally benevolent institutions like governments and universities and hospitals of late, and this is hardly a new phenomenon. I suspect most of us here at P-HOLE are not so naïve as to believe these institutions’ hype that they are the good guys.

But institutional betrayals happen in “our” organizations, too—the labor union, the activist collective, the mutual aid group, the kink scene—and they often orbit around people with personality disorders. Sometimes, we are the victim; sometimes, we are the perpetrator; sometimes the whole thing is such a goddamn mess, the DARVO so major, that it feels very difficult to establish, and by the time the dust settles enough to figure it out people have been harmed and banished and made to escape.

A series of question I wish to raise is: to what extent is this tendency towards implosion a feature of the social character of leftist social movements? And perhaps of psychoanalytic ones especially? And, if social character is defined by what it takes to be successful in one’s environment, what does this characteristic have to tell us about what success may mean for many of us?

. . .

I originally conceived of this course as a kind of provocation. I hoped it would invite us P-HOLE people to be self-critical about some of the dilemmas we face, as individuals and as a growing intellectual movement with increasing political influence and institutional strength within our field.

I hold a lot of hope for this intellectual and political movement, but I also hold a lot of fear. The dynamics I have explored today are quite clearly on display in our world; we are not short on difficult people, present company very much included. We all deserve a place, some sense of intellectual home and community—and we so desperately hope that this will be it that we’re liable to become disappointed, envious, retaliatory, embittered. We’ll be humiliated by how badly we wanted and needed something from this—from the faculty, from the community—and that humiliation is liable to curdle when our wants and needs are thwarted and thus become conscious. I have seen it happen again and again in situations like this.

Psychoanalytically, I like to think that having an awareness of this can do some work to head the most unnecessarily painful outcomes off at the pass. And, psychoanalytically, I know that hoping transferences and enactments won’t happen is kind of a fool’s errand. The question is, can we keep our heads enough to recognize when we are in the thick of something inevitable? Can we keep our heads enough to treat each other decently?

Here, I think Morey is helpful again. She offers an extensive consideration of how organizations can become more aware of systems enactments, planning for them as an inevitable part of doing a particular kind of psychosocial work. What would it look like for this ascendent social psychoanalytic movement to build this awareness into our communities and institutions, into our modes of relating with each other? How might it help us check ourselves before we wreck ourselves?

1. I love Arlene Montgomery’s work so much I want you to check out this free link to it, but I also value it so much that I want you to buy her book if you can afford it! If you’ve found these P-HOLE lectures interesting, you will find this text invaluable.

2. This line of argument is one that Ava Hoffman and I have been developing together, with Hoffman’s thinking on personality pathology-based internet subcultures playing a vital role; watch for publications in the future!

3. Another Ava Hoffman line of argument.

4. This list is an extensive paraphrase of the article linked above.