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Monday, March 11, 2013

Narcissists in the news: Paul Frampton

In the NY Times Magazine, headlined "The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble," a hilarious profile of a raging narcissist getting "catfished" into being a drug mule and stuck in an Argentinian prison. It is one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in the past year or two, maybe. Great pacing! Worth reading in its entirety! But just in case you're lazy, here are the selections that scream narcissist to me:

  • Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.
  • Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.
  • “I’m a bit of a celebrity in here,” Frampton said.
  • Frampton closed our interview half-seriously, half-impishly, with another kind of calculation: “I’ve co-authored with three Nobel laureates. Only 11 theoretical physicists have done that. Six out of those 11 have won Nobel Prizes themselves. Following this logic, I have a 55 percent chance of getting the Nobel.”
  • Shortly after his divorce, Frampton, then 64, expressed concern about finding a wife between the ages of 18 and 35, which Frampton understood to be the period when women are most fertile. . . . “He told me to look her up on the Internet,” Dixon recalled. “I thought he was out of his mind, and I told him that. ‘You’re not talking to the real girl. Why would a young woman like that be interested in an old guy like you?’ But he really believed that he had a pretty young woman who wanted to marry him.” When I later asked Frampton what made him think that Milani was interested, he replied, “Well, I have been accused of having a huge ego.”
  • “There could be retribution. I could be assassinated.”
  • Frampton is prone to seeing himself as the center of the action whatever the milieu. When he was growing up in Worcestershire, England, in what he describes as a “lower-middle-class family,” his mother encouraged him to report his stellar grades to all the neighbors, a practice that may have led the young Frampton to confuse worldly laurels with love. 
  • In what a fellow physicist described as a “very vain, very inappropriate” talk delivered on the 80th birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, Frampton veered into autobiography, recounting how his ability to multiply numbers in his head at 4 led him to see himself as “cleverer than Newton.” This line became a refrain throughout the talk. Interspersed with the calculations and hypotheses were his Oxford grades, which, he said, showed that he, like Newton, was in the top 1 percentile for intelligence. Frampton insists that he was merely joking and that his sense of humor was misinterpreted as self-regard. Yet in many of my conversations with him, he seemed to cling to the idea of his own exceptionalism. During our first meeting, when I asked him what attracted him to Milani, he said, “Not to offend present company,” referring to me and the representative from the penitentiary service, “but, to start with, she’s in the top 1 percentile of how women look.”
  • When I asked Frampton if he had slept in, he said he spent half the night on the Internet, reading through all the latest discoveries in his field, checking to see what his “competitors” had been working on, and beginning to answer the thousands of e-mails he received. He reported that he had more citations than ever.
  • "This sounds a bit egomaniacal, but to understand dark energy, I think we have to be open-minded about Einstein’s general relativity."







37 comments:

  1. You have to be a narcissist to think you can diagnose someone based on a few things

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    Replies
    1. Or a genius. Btw, in some situations it's possible.

      PS: Your phrasing has a few logical flaws, regarding what we're talking about and considering what point you're trying to make.

      First of all, "a few things" is way too relative to use it for this kind of topic. If you'd go through the criteria of "a few" PDs you would notice, that there are mostly just "a few" criteria for every single PD.
      Also, in medicine and psychology, (and most other things you do) "a few things" can make a big difference.

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  2. Narcissists are so fucking useless.

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  3. He looks like he smells like too much cologne.
    I don't think narcissists are useless at all, M Brig.

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    Replies
    1. Sure they are. They're too delusional to be useful in any way. They don't have a firm grip on reality, which makes them quite useless in my opinion.

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    2. Delusions of grandeur! Precisely M.Brig. Useless! The disconnect. How can it ever be reconnected? I'm a useful tool, smart & discerning, but never capable of being a Master of the Universe. Beam me up Scotty!

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    3. i dont think anyone is useless, no matter what their grip on reality is. My narc friend is a terrific office worker. she does outstanding work and is a perfectionist. So what, she does it with the hope she will have approval? Who fucking cares? She is damned useful.

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    4. Everyone is narcissistic. If you don't have enough narcissism, it is as bad as having too much. Malignant Narcissism is one thing and that is a PD, but I want more health narcissism, myself.

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    5. No not everyone is narcissistic.

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    6. Frickin' Fruitloop!

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    7. Along with being obtuse............they HAVE to win!

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    8. I view narcs as useless, too.
      In my opinion the distortion of their view has the same impact on their usefulness, as being blind and deaf. With the difference, that their perception problems are way more annoying than the ones of a blind and deaf guy.

      I read somewhere, that narcs are not capeable of having a single original thought. Is that actually true, and if yes, in which way and/or to which extent?

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    9. Yeah because narcs are so reliant on others to determine their worth

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    10. Wow. Just...wow, Mymind.

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    11. Thx, i know that i am just mind blowing.

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    12. I guess MyMind blew your mind too, Medusa? Just probably not in the same way... ;)

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    13. i have a narc collegue i always very calmly explain him why he can't win and demonstrate him
      you can see him slip into a depression

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    14. Anon 10:11
      Ah, indeed!

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  4. Narcissists are obtuse. They make poor decisions and careless mistakes.

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    1. Utter BS. Many are perfectionists.

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    2. And you think perfectionism is an asset? Lol. Like I said obtuse.

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    3. magical thinking.

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    4. i think if you are the CEO of a company, and you hire a perfectionist narcissist to do the proofreading of it's mission statement, you will not be displeased.

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    5. CEO SociopathworldMarch 11, 2013 at 3:14 PM

      Heyo, point for 1:22.

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    6. @Anon 1:22

      Yeah, most likely.

      But why should i hire an annoying perfectionistic narcissist, if i can hire a narcissistic perfectionist who doesn't annoy me, and does the job just as well or most likely even better.

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    7. True. Good point. No employee, narc or non narc should be annoying. I did not say perfectionism comes along with being annoying.

      I overlook annoying people too well. I think it is good that way. I think i will stick with some dissociation as a gift.

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    8. *SOMETIMES it is good that way.

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    9. Sounds like the CEO needs a secretary.

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    10. ..Hello, Gawgiss ?

      :)

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    11. CEOs secretary may be in for some fun times ~

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  5. narcism is the lesser form of psychopathy (from mask of sanity)

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  6. I'm intrigued by the aspect of a narc not having the capability to generate an original thought or idea. Brilliant insight! Thanks for the brain food.

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    Replies
    1. 10:15 ~ Good point.

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    2. Intriguing insight. I'm breathless.

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  7. Nasty spiteful uncaring comments.
    Assume this is written BY a sociopath and not about them?

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