The Self Seekers

Richard, M.D. Restak

ISBN-10: 0385159765
ISBN-13: 978-0385159760

"Here is a compelling report that unmasks one of the most prevalent - and treacherous - personality disorders occurring in America today. Based on profiles drawn from the practices of prominent psychologists and psychoanalysts, Richard Restak provides a provocative psychological portrait of a personality fast becoming widespread in our culture - the individual who can only function by manipulating and exploiting others.

Who are the self-seekers? How can you recognize them? What techniques of behavior do they use to control you? What underlies their need to dominate others? Why are their numbers increasing? The answers to these questions may surprise and shock you, but they cannot be ignored. THE SELF SEEKERS is filled with insights into the complex personalities who perceive with alarming accuracy the dynamics of everyone’s behavior but their own."

Extract from the Introduction by Richard Restak:

"Contemporary American society is currently overrun with a personality that I call the manipulator. He exists at all levels of society, from the boardrooms of our nation's industries to the maximum-security wards of our prisons. Manipulators are numbered among our employers and spouses; many of our heroes are manipulators. So widespread is the manipulator, in fact, that manipulation has become a life-style which threatens to change the very fabric of American society.

Basically, the manipulator suffers from a deficiency in the sense of self: what we usually refer to as a sense of identity. This disturbance exists along a continuum beginning with innocent and commonly encountered difficulties in the regulation of self-esteem which we all experience from time to time and extending, at the other extreme of the continuum, toward dangerous psychopathic murderers. Along this continuum are encountered different kinds of manipulators: narcissists, borderline personality disorders, impostors and finally, psychopaths. This book explores each of these different personalities and illustrates how they all share a basic disturbance in the self. To this extent, the book is about the importance of self in modem life."