The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

very much like this formulation by Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology and biology at Stanford University:[*] “The nature of our nature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature.” If we’re constrained by anything, maybe it’s that very open-endedness; strange as it may sound, our miraculous talent for adaptation could also be a liability. Because our nature is so influenceable, different conditions evoke different versions of us, from benign to disastrous. When we reify—set in stone, mentally speaking—the particular way human behavior shows up in a certain place and time, we commit the fallacy of conflating how we’re being with who we are. This error can keep us from considering other possibilities, even if our current way of operating isn’t good for us. We then replicate conditions that are unfit for our well-being, and the sad saga continues. This is why, in seeking a vision of a healthier world, we had best disabuse ourselves of any fixed, limiting beliefs about what we’re all about, and instead ask, What circumstances evoke which sorts of outcomes?

Why? According to the neuroscientist and seminal researcher Stephen Porges, one of our inherent needs is reciprocity, to be attuned with—“well met,” as the archaic greeting goes. It is what he calls a neural expectancy. Our brain may process the lack of welcoming response as an assault, a threat to safety.

Thus do materialistic cultures generate notions—myths, in effect—of selfish, aggressive striving and dominance as behavioral baselines, encouraging characteristics that place a lesser value on connectedness to others and to Nature itself. In our present capitalist society, Darcia Narvaez suggested to me, we have become “species-atypical,” a sobering idea when you think about it: no other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be.

Raffi Cavoukian woke suddenly at six o’clock one morning in 1997. “I bolted upright in bed,” he tells me, “jaw dropped, eyes wide open, and the words ‘Child Honoring’ were playing right in front of my eyes, as a phrase and as the name of a philosophy.” For the next decade, the internationally cherished children’s troubadour took time away from the concert stage and recording studio to dedicate himself to envisioning, networking, and advocating for a world that honors children. He has maintained that commitment.[1] As he speaks of it, he sparkles with the playful enthusiasm and deep respect for young people that infuse his music—the same qualities that inspired my son Aaron as a toddler to dress up as his musical hero for Halloween, complete with ukulele and face-painted beard. “At its core, Child Honoring is respect for personhood,” Raffi says. “Children are here to learn their own song.”

The question of children’s developmental needs is neither abstract nor sentimental; it is of urgent practical importance. Although we often refer to childhood as “the formative years,” our societal norms speak dismally to our appreciation of how formative these years really are, of just how much is being “formed.” The individual and collective stakes are far higher than we tend to imagine.

“We discover who we are from the inside,” Raffi says. “What’s forming is no less than how it feels to be human. And I’m using my words carefully here: how it feels to be human.” Our culture too often subordinates felt knowledge to the intellect. This inverted ranking system upends how we raise our children—which, in turn, serves to rei...

These areas of the nervous system form the unconscious scaffolding for our thoughts and conscious feelings and, therefore, for our actions. “The earliest established components of an infant’s psychobiological makeup are those most formative of his lifelong outlook,” notes Jean Liedloff. “What he feels before he can think is a powerful determinant of what kind of things he thinks when thought becomes possible.”[3] In fact, the impacts go well beyond the content of thoughts: research has shown beyond any doubt that early experience molds behaviors, emotional patterns, unconscious beliefs, learning styles, relational dynamics, and the ability to handle stress and regulate ourselves.

Neufeld sums up eloquently what all young ones, whatever their temperament, need first and foremost: “Children must feel an invitation to exist in our presence, exactly the way they are.” With that need in mind, the parents’ primary task, beyond providing for the child’s survival requirements, is to emanate a simple message to the child in word, deed, and (most of all) energetic presence, that he or she is precisely the person they love, welcome, and want. The child doesn’t have to do anything, or be any different, to win that love—in fact, cannot do anything, because this abiding embrace cannot be earned, nor can it be revoked. It doesn’t depend on the child’s behavior or personality; it is just there, whether the child is showing up as “good” or “bad,” “naughty” or “nice.”

Do we then ignore dangerous or unacceptable behavior? No, that wouldn’t be the loving thing to do either, since children’s needs also include guidance and orientation, which include setting boundaries. Rather, we do our best to monitor and curtail undesirable actions from an unconditionally loving place: a way of being wherein children understand that nothing they might do can threaten the relationship, even if it elicits momentary anger or requires correction. Operating from this attitude may even allow us to see the child’s “misbehavior” in a broader, more forgiving frame—perhaps it expresses a need frustrated, a communication unheard, an emotion unprocessed. We understand and respond to the needs and emotions the child is “acting out,” rather than simply punishing the behavior and banishing the feeling.

And what of the infant in these now yellowed pages? What does he experience? Some three decades later, in 1975, Jean Liedloff warned her readers in The Continuum Concept about “the current fashion to let the baby cry until its heart is broken and it gives up, goes numb, and becomes a ‘good baby.’” And indeed, I became a very good baby. Even as a four- or five-year-old I would lie in my bed before dawn, stoically enduring the stabbing pain of a middle-ear infection, whimpering quietly to myself so as not to disturb my sleeping parents.

Though it no doubt runs diametrically counter to most parents’ intentions, a child whose cries are not responded to, who is not fed, not held close to a parent’s warm body when in distress, learns a clear if wordless lesson: that his needs will not be met, that he must constantly strive to find rest and peace, that he is not lovable as he is. By taxing my brain’s PANIC/GRIEF system, my poor mother’s non-responsiveness also helped wire my brain for those chronic tendencies of mine that express the overactivation of that system: anxiety and depression. “When our brains are undercared for,” writes Darcia Narvaez, “they become more stress-reactive and subject to dominance by our survival systems—fear, panic, rage.” Don’t I know it.

We need not abandon the great achievements of medical work to honor traditional wisdom, rooted in age-old experience. We can embrace both.

It turns out that our innate parenting instinct is perfectly calibrated to ensure the provision of the thing many “experts” would have us ignore: the child’s developmental needs. And here’s a plot twist: we are not talking only about children’s needs. In a real sense, we cannot even speak about the infant’s needs without considering those of the mother. “There is no such thing as a baby,” the British pediatrician D. W. Winnicott once said, explaining, “If you show me a baby, you certainly show me someone else who is caring for the baby . . . One sees a ‘nursing couple’ . . . The unit is not the individual, the unit is the individual-environment set-up.”[5] Or, in Ashley Montagu’s words, “When a baby is born, a mother is born. There is considerable evidence that at this time, and for months thereafter, her needs for contact exceed those of the infant.”[6] Good thing, too: Were there not built-in physiological and emotional incentives for the ones doing the caregiving, parenthood would be even more of a slog than it already is. Fewer babies would have their survival needs met if fulfilling those needs were not rewarding for parents. With its usual brilliance, our interpersonal-biological makeup dictates that our requirements be mutual. (One of the unfortunate impacts of our culture’s way of doing things is that stress tends to whittle down these innate rewards, making parenting more frustrating and daunting than it rightly ought

Especially in infancy, but throughout childhood, the young human uses the emotional and nervous systems of the caring adults to regulate her own internal states. The interpersonal-biological math is elementary: the more stressed the adult, the more stressed the child.

A wiser view requires a wider lens. Yes, parents are responsible for their children; no, they did not create the world in which they must parent them. Our cultural ecology does not support attuned, present, responsive, connected parenting. As we have seen, the destabilization begins with stress transmitted to infants still in the womb, with the mechanization of birth, the attenuation of the parenting instinct, and the denial of the child’s developmental needs. It continues with the increasingly intolerable economic and social pressures on parents these days and the erosion of community ties, and magnifies with the disinformation parents receive on how to rear their young. Reinforced by educational systems that too often stress students with pressures to compete, the process culminates in the exploitation of children and youth for the glory of the consumer market.

As we’ve discussed, emotional safety, formed in secure connections with a baseline of unconditional worth, is a prerequisite condition for maturation. Generally, once kids are absorbed into the peer world, they lose the safety of the primary connection with adults.[*]

“There are indications that children today are losing their tender feelings,” Gordon Neufeld said in his penetrating European Parliament address.[7] “Many children have lost their sadness and disappointment . . . their feelings of alarm . . . their feelings of shame and embarrassment. Interestingly enough, research reveals when children lose their blush, they also lose their empathy. It turns out that caring too is a vulnerable feeling as it sets us up for disappointment. We know that the most wounding of all experiences is facing separation . . . Unfortunately, today’s children are subjected to more [parental] separation and more peer interaction than ever before.” The result, he concludes, is “a significant loss of feeling,” as the young brain’s defensive apparatus becomes stuck in an effort to “defend . . . against a sense of vulnerability that is too overwhelming.” Again, we see the child’s emotional apparatus being weakened, their felt sense of being human impoverished.

If we do not hold our children close to us, the ultimate cost is the loss of their ability to hold on to their own truest selves.

Apart from impeding maturation, the shutdown of vulnerable feeling reinforces the sense of emptiness. It fosters boredom, impairs genuine intimacy, undermines curiosity and learning, fuels the demand for distraction from the present moment, and drives a compulsion for overstimulation through competitive games, unrelenting background noise, hazardous social situations and behaviors, the hunger for products, and the pursuit of escape through substances.

Even as parental stress and peer orientation weaken children’s connections with nurturing adults, the corporate siege of immature minds has exploited and exacerbated the void created by the loss of connection. They act symbiotically to drain childhood of the emotional richness our development thrives on. A decade ago Bakan warned, “The average child in the United States watches 30,000 television advertisements a year—most of which pitch products directly to them . . . and all conveying a series of subtle, and corrosive, messages: that they will find happiness through their relationships with products—with things, not people; that to be cool and accepted by peers, they need to buy certain products; that fast food and toy companies, not parents and teachers, know what is best for them; that corporate brands are the true bases of their social worth and identities.”[9] These trends have only accelerated since then with the further spread of social media and digital advertising.

When Dr. Kang asserts that digital apps and gadgets are “engineered” to hit children’s brains with bursts of dopamine, she is being very precise. “The phone,” she told me, “has been designed by the world’s top neuroscientists and psychologists, who have taken all of our most sophisticated brain research and understanding of human motivation and reward cycles and have embedded it into devices.” She cited as an example a company with a name and mission so on the nose that one would think it came out of a satirical film or novel: Dopamine Labs. “It was started,” she said, “by a neuroscientist and software developers whose entire business platform is to consult companies to help them engage and release dopamine . . . It’s called persuasive design.” Addiction, of course, is the whole point. Viewed from a corporation’s bottom line, one could not imagine a more desirable consumer profile than those who can’t get enough of what they don’t need but feel they must have.

in marketing, the people who invent and propagate these technologies are conscious of the problematic nature of their wares, and even take it to heart—when it comes to their own children, that is. A 2019 Business Insider article details how many major Silicon Valley executives—including founders and CEOs of Apple, Google, and even the explicitly kid-targeted Snapchat app (!)—go to concerted lengths to limit their own kids’ screen time at home.[*][14] Tellingly, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs forbade his young children to play with the then newly launched iPad.

As Thomas Merton noted dolefully in 1948, “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”[7] Constantly living at that “highest pitch of artificial tension” leaves many people dissatisfied, on edge, anxious—utterly captured by an addictive process that alienates them from real needs, real emotions, real concerns, real life.

Over my decades of medical practice and thousands of conversations, I have learned that the first question to ask is not what is wrong with an addiction, but what is “right” about it. What benefit is the person deriving from their habit? What does it do for them? What are they getting that they otherwise can’t access? This inquiry is key to understanding any addiction, whether to substances like alcohol, opiates, cocaine, crystal meth, sniffed glue, or junk food, or to behaviors such as gambling, compulsive sexual roving, pornography, or binge eating and purging. Or to power and profit, for that matter—here, of course, we begin to shade toward addictions that go well beyond individual habits into the realm of collective fixations.

Second, this definition is not restricted to drugs. The same drive that often devotes itself to substances can activate any number of behaviors, from compulsive sexual roving to pornography; from inveterate shopping to the internet (both of which habits I know well); from gaming to gambling; from any sort of binge eating or drinking to purging; from work to extreme sports; from relentless exercising to compulsive relationship-seeking; from psychedelics to meditation. The issue is never the external target but one’s internal relationship to it. Are you craving and partaking of something that affords you temporary relief or pleasure, inviting or incurring negative consequences but not giving it up? Welcome to the meeting. Free coffee in the back.

Whatever the degree of injury, all addiction is a kind of refugee story: from intolerable feelings incurred through adversity and never processed, and into a state of temporary freedom, even if illusory. Again, try saying no to that.

Felitti’s childhood adversity findings lay further waste to the myth of genetic determinism that I began debunking in the chapter on epigenetics. No single addiction gene has ever been found—nor ever will be. There may exist some collection of genes that predisposes people to susceptibility, but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination. What’s true of physical illness is just as true of addiction: genes are turned on and off by the environment, and we now know that early adversity affects genetic activity in ways that create a template for future dysfunction. Human and animal studies have both

A hungry laboratory mouse whose brain is artificially denuded of its dopamine apparatus will starve himself while standing in front of a plate of food.

Many doctors are intensely uncomfortable facing their own hidden sorrows and wounds—what Carl Jung called our shadow side. And not only doctors: as a well-known colleague told me, “Patients play into this as well. They don’t want to look at their lives, either. It would involve getting into recovery, changing something. It’s enormous work to recover from our childhoods. It’s incredibly worthwhile, but it’s a lot of work.” The

Like all concepts, mental illness is a construct—a particular frame we have developed to understand a phenomenon and explain what we observe. It may be valid in some respects and erroneous in others; it most definitely isn’t objective. Unchecked, it becomes an all-encompassing

Contrary to what I, too, used to believe, a diagnosis like ADHD or depression or bipolar illness explains nothing. No diagnosis ever does. Diagnoses are abstractions, or summaries: sometimes helpful, always incomplete.

A University of British Columbia study looked at the prescription records of almost one million B.C. schoolchildren over an eleven-year period and found that kids born in December were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than classmates born the previous January. The reason? December kids entered the same grade nearly a year younger than their January counterparts—they were eleven months behind in brain development. They were being medicated not for a “genetic brain disorder” but for naturally delayed maturation of the brain circuits of attention and self-regulation.[7]

If we are today seeing more youngsters in automatic resistance mode, the question we must return to is, How does this culture disrupt healthy adult-child relationships? Why are we diagnosing children with a disorder, instead of “diagnosing”—and treating—their families, communities, schools, and society?

Leslie’s healing journey—she, too, is no longer on any medications—has centered on finding the meaning in her multifaceted sufferings. Her crushing belief in her unworthiness revealed itself to be a self-protective strategy gone awry. Odd as it may sound, it was the best worst option. A suffering child, as Leslie was—again, the details matter less than the contours—has two possible options when it comes to processing her experience. She can conclude either that the people she relies on for love are incompetent, malicious, or otherwise ill-suited to the task, and she is all alone in this scary world; or that she herself is to blame for, well, everything. As painful as the latter explanation is, it is far preferable to the other one, which paints a life-threatening picture for a young being with zero power or recourse. The first option is not an option at all. Better to believe “It’s my fault; I’m bad,” which lets you believe there’s the chance that “if I work hard and be good, I will be lovable.” Thus, even the debilitating belief in one’s unworthiness, nearly universal among people with mental health diagnoses and addictions, begins as a coping mechanism, a topic we will revisit in chapter 30.

Thus, many actions and beliefs that look like pure insanity from one perspective make sense from another—and always made sense at the start. It is our task, if healing is the goal, to make sense of them newly, now, with the benefit of adult discernment and compassion.

Tuning out is dissociation’s less extreme cousin, part of the same family of escapist adaptations. It is invoked by the organism when the circumstances are stressful and there is no other recourse for relief, when one can neither change the situation nor escape it.

The time has come to address the swiftly changing and ever more stressful environments our children are growing up in, before we interfere chemically with children’s brain physiology. When I saw children who met the criteria for this condition, my approach was to consider the family milieu and to help parents understand the stresses they were unwittingly transmitting to their offspring. These children were in every case the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Sensitive to the nth degree, their “symptoms” expressed the unresolved travails of the entire family system, itself often overwhelmed by the pressures exerted by a culture increasingly unfriendly to development. If we saw the condition and its associated traits as manifestations of biopsychosocial underdevelopment rather than as symptoms of a disease, we would ask ourselves how to provide the right conditions for healthy brain plasticity and psychological growth.

This desperate drive to seize some command at least of their own body amid turmoil is almost universal among people with anorexia or bulimia that I have interviewed. The psychologist Julie T. Anné, who specializes in treating eating disorders, nails it: with her clients, she says, “three lacks” are typical—lack of control, identity, and self-worth—along with a need to numb pain. “In a relational world . . . the human psyche devises a brilliant means to emotionally survive,” she told me. “In our culture, this becomes the pursuit of perfection vis-à-vis the body and self. Also known as anorexia.” And yet these deeply wounded individuals, like the bearers of every mental-emotional burden we have touched on, are all too rarely asked the key questions: Where did this come from? and What valid problem

If I could distill my message and insert it into that beautiful cinematic moment, I would have Robin Williams look all of us in the eye—including himself—and say with assurance: “It’s not your fault . . . and it’s not personal.” It’s about our hurting world, manifesting the illusions and myths of a culture alienated from our essence. We turn to that bigger picture next.

What, in our society, are the most widespread emotional triggers for stress? My own observations of self and others have led me to endorse fully what a review of the stress literature concluded, namely that “psychological factors such as uncertainty, conflict, lack of control, and lack of information are considered the most stressful stimuli and strongly activate the HPA axis.”[3] A society that breeds these conditions, as capitalism inevitably does, is a superpowered generator of stressors that tax human health.

Capitalism is “far more than just an economic doctrine,” Yuval Noah Harari observes in his influential bestseller Sapiens. “It now encompasses an ethic—a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children, and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom, and even happiness all depend on economic growth.”[4] Capitalism’s influence today runs so deep and wide that its values, assumptions, and expectations potently infuse not only culture, politics, and law but also such subsystems as academia, education, science, news, sports, medicine, child-rearing, and popular entertainment. The hegemony of materialist culture is now total, its discontents universal. We explore how it affects our very health in this and the following chapters.

It is now de rigueur for observers of all political hues and philosophical persuasions to bewail the glaring, growing absence of social feeling. “That basic sense of peoplehood, of belonging to a common enterprise with a shared destiny, is exactly what’s lacking today,” the oft-insightful conservative columnist David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times.[1] Lacking, we might say, by design: qualities like love, trust, caring, social conscience, and engagement are inevitable casualties—“sunk costs,” in capitalist argot—of a culture that prizes acquisition above all else.

A society that fails to value communality—our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us—is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment. “When people start to lose a sense of meaning and get disconnected, that’s where disease comes from, that’s where breakdown in our health—mental, physical, social health—occurs,” the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry told me. If a gene or virus were found that caused the same impacts on the population’s well-being as disconnection does, news of it would bellow from front-page headlines. Because it transpires on so many levels and so pervasively, we almost take it for granted; it is the water we swim in. We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy.

Among psychologists there is wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of, some of which we have already explored. These have been variously listed as: belonging, relatedness, or connectedness; autonomy: a sense of control in one’s life; mastery or competence; genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others; trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life; and purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature. “The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.” So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx in 1844.[2] None of this tells you anything you don’t already know or intuit. You can check your own experience: What’s it like when each of the above needs is met? What happens in your mind and body when it’s lacking, denied, or withdrawn?

Just as I have named authenticity and attachment as two basic needs, so Bruce has identified people’s “vital need for social belonging with their equally vital needs for individual autonomy and achievement” and calls the marriage of the two psychosocial integration.[3] A sane culture, Bruce and I agree, would have psychosocial integration as both an aim and a norm. Authenticity and attachment would cease to be in conflict: there would be no fundamental tension between belonging and being oneself.

He points to four central principles of what he calls ACC—American corporate capitalism: it “fosters and encourages a set of values based on self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition.”[13] There is a seesaw oscillation, Tim found, between materialistic concerns on the one hand and prosocial values like empathy, generosity, and cooperation on the other: the more the former are elevated, the lower the latter descend. For example, when people strongly endorse money, image, and status as prime concerns, they are less likely to engage in ecologically beneficial activities and the emptier and more insecure they will experience themselves to be. They will have also lower-quality interpersonal relationships. In turn, the more insecure people feel, the more they focus on material things. As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates.

What the system sells as happiness is actually pleasure, a philosophical and economic distinction that makes all the difference between profit or loss. Pleasure, Rob Lustig pointed out, is “This feels good. I want more.” Happiness, on the other hand, is “This feels good. I am contented. I am complete.” This tracks perfectly with my understanding of addictions and brain chemistry. While similar in some ways, pleasure and happiness run on different neurochemical fuels: pleasure employs dopamine and opiates, both of which operate in short-term bursts, while contentment is based on the more steady, slow-release serotonin apparatus. It is very hard to get addicted to serotoninergic substances or behaviors. All addictions, however, commandeer the dopamine (incentive/motivation) and/or opiate (pleasure/reward) systems of the brain. Pleasure in the absence of contentment, and especially when sought in instant gratification, may be addictive, hence profitable. Contentment sells no products—except when evanescent, in which case it is no contentment at all, rather the bogus kind of “happiness” meant by Mad Men’s[*] fictional ad whiz Don Draper when he muses, “What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” True happiness, being a non-commodity, does not make itself obsolete.

According to another study presented to the American Heart Association, sugary drinks alone may be responsible for up to 180,000 deaths around the world.[4] Coca-colonization, this has been called.

The worldwide obesity epidemic is a marker of the international stress epidemic discussed in our previous chapters, and of the attendant lifestyle challenges endemic to our modern era: lack of time, lack of exercise, growing insecurity, lack of family connection, loss of community, and erosion of the social network. There are many aspects of life that drive people to follow unhealthy diets and engage in self-harming habits, the main culprits being emotional pain, stress, and social dislocation. And as we have seen, compulsive overeating—like all addictions—is itself a response to stress and a way of soothing the impacts of trauma. “It’s not what you are eating,” someone cleverly said, “it’s what’s eating you.” Stress induces people to “choose” unhealthy foods and to put on weight in the wrong places, promoting disease. It also depletes the serotonin/contentment circuits, shifting the brain’s functioning toward the short-term, dopamine-fueled pleasure

What kind of people would knowingly cause the illness and deaths of countless millions? Law professor Joel Bakan,[*] whose book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power became the basis of the award-winning documentary of the same name, set out to assess corporations in the light of standard mental health measures we would apply to people. The appraisal is entirely fair, given that U.S. law has, since the late 1800s, regarded corporations as “persons.” “Viewed from such a vantage,” he told me, “many corporations meet the criteria of ‘sociopaths,’ acting without a conscience: not caring about what happens to other people as a consequence of their actions, having no compulsion to comply with social or legal norms, not feeling guilt or remorse.” It’s an airtight case—from a mental health perspective, how else to regard nonaccountable “persons” with limitless power, quite willing to obscure truths and broadcast lies, sowing illness and death? If anyone requires a second opinion, the New York psychoanalyst Steven Reisner is ready with one.[*] “Narcissism and sociopathy describe corporate America,” he told me. “But it’s flat-out wrong to think in twenty-first-century America that narcissism and sociopathy are illnesses. In today’s America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies. And they’re very successful strategies, especially in business and politics and entertainment.” Call it the myth of abnormal, this notion that somehow these antisocial traits go ag...