Absolutely. Being persuadable and being accurate are not necessarily hinged to each other. To maintain that they are, plays into the hands of those who would "dialogue" until the sun sinks in the West, and the West with it. And let this from Meyer be enshrined. It is a comprehensive diagnosis, the summary answerable to the "i feel yr. pain"-ers, the whole un-Wrapped "conservatives don't care the way we care," Alka-Seltzers in the ocean, bunch: "altruism based on narcisssism and false empathy."

>>>Wonderful post. In relationship lifecoaching, I often find that distressed women who are paired with men who have these passionate sidelines that "reserve" a significant portion of themselves offline the relationship, have an Aha! moment when discovering Marie Louise von Franz' work on the Puer Aeternus, the Peter Pannish, initially endearing but ultimately sad, eternal would-be time-defying boy. >>>Until then, the women feel like nags & churls, this hip toy collection or video-game expertise or full-time mountain-climbing vacation seeming like a part of the glorious romantic kaleidoscope of Him. >>>Not for nothing is the traditional demand to leave father and mother, and put away childish things, and accomplish a dangerous hero's journey, in return for greater, and different, rewards. Robert Avrech's saga is heartening, for just that reason. He speaks of Karen as an early beneficent obsession (to a point that morphs into selfless love) that prevailed over the delicious soft-shackles of extended adolescence. That has always been one role of the call of the pair bond, and thus it's essential that the beloved put some price tag on her acquiescence, and the child's parents deny a few luxuries and pleasures as unsuitable to the immature so the youth must go out and earn them, as he tests and establishes his mettle. >>>We are beginning to see what happens when a society disregards these principles. >>>And, as a kind of PS, the culture and their women need to grant real grown men a reasonable little space allocated to relief and retreat in outdoorsiness, sports, and other active fellowship and repose, to revisit and refresh the free and adventuresome boy. In proportion. Otherwise the prospect of the role of Available Productive Man must seem formidably airless. IMO

Does the Freudian paradigm still have enough influence that we might regard this behavior as regression to infantile polymorphous perversity?

Perhaps this narcissistic ultimately self-destructive perfectionism may be creating a resonance between a certain kind of leftist and islamismists. That is, due to the increasing importance of the smaller difference, the world will never be pure-or-perfect enough to satisfy or halt jihad or progressivism. There will always be an enemy to tilt at, as I believe Dr. Sanity points out elsewhere, in order to juice the endocrine system. In my experience recovering from flaming narcissism, narcissists recognize and like each other at a distance; it fell apart of course when we approached near enough to shake the projection, and the content of our strategies and goals conflicted.

It's always a dance along a continuum, IMO. For instance, the discussion by Thomas Hobbes of brutish "all-against-all" versus some kind of reluctant political soverignty for peace and concerted action. Of course extremists (or those positioned further toward either end than, e.g., moi) are always at work piling stones on the teeter-totter. Some Christian discussions of the Trinity suggest that this Undivided-yet-Distinct Three doctrine models a psychological function: containing and navigating the internal conflict between Me and Us, between the fear of expulsion from the tribe, and of suffocating captivity. Suffocating captivity/enclosure in the collective is developmental "Mother stuff;" and thus the hypotheses of several of the psych-bloggers that the Left's rosy-toned communal tilt exhibits certain developmental issues. A participation mystique toward the old tribal days when we passed talking sticks and cherished Gaia. Or when we weren't expected to have suffered the Adulthood Initiation into intractable problems and unpredictable, frightening challenges with no one to rush to our aid. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life expresses the persistent intuition that either extreme is in the end lifeless. Fierce retreat to the severe Father (mercilessness) or limp collapse into the all-nourishing Mother ("idiot compassion") proves harmful to the point of evil. The ongoing balance is subject to ongoing adjustment.

An archetypal perspective suggests that there is always a Power/Force category. If Power is divorced from the idea of the Father (a meme particularly prominent in the Judaeo-Christian context, connoting authority + love and identification) it doesn't just disappear. It arises as "Master" (paired with slave), or "Force" (to be resisted by adversary force). Dissolving "Father" disrupts a fertile complexity of role, leaving simpler, more toxic and ruthless, human contexts.

The undertow of Thanatos on Eros has been underestimated, erupting in Romanticism's preference for the sublime over beauty, increasingly "fleshed out" via much of what John Paul II called The Culture of Death -- including various Dionysian tastes, inclinations, practices and dark related memes in which modern life swims. My own suspicion is that the ultimate expressions of Eros need to be culturally contained & channeled so as to keep it amusing, lest, especially, the intellectual, begin to find it boring and inadequately complex, and peer with interest toward the more-novel & fraught foothills of death, beginning with various hate-filled Dysfunction Syndromes hyped as good.