How do manipulators behave? And what types of manipulators exist?
E. Shostrom identifies eight main types of manipulators, which can be easily divided into logical pairs: what one offers is what the other lacks. The first in the pair is an active position, the second is a passive position. Moreover, depending on the situation, he can play different roles.
1. Dictator . His position is to dominate, indicate, control. A dictator needs victims.
2. Wimp (or weakling). This is the opposite of the Dictator, that is, his victim. The rag plays a passive role: it is silent, gives in, does not argue.
3. The computer tries to calculate everything in advance. His main tools are cunning and lies. This is the type of swindler, gambler, blackmailer.
4. Stuck . Slave, his position: “Do everything for me.” The following types of clingy people are usually found: whiner, hypochondriac, dependent, parasite.
5. Hooligan , in the female version - a bitch, a grumpy woman. The bully is exaggeratedly aggressive and cruel. He insults, threatens, scares.
6. The Nice Guy is overprotective. He suffocates with his love. Such people are obsequious, overly friendly, obsessive in their kindness.
7. Judge . This is the type of accuser, critic. He always knows everything better than anyone else, considers himself to have the right to evaluate and expose others, and to shame the guilty. A very vindictive guy.
8. The defender takes on the role of a lawyer. With his excessive help, he interferes with the independence of his clients and deprives them of the opportunity to correct their mistakes. The Defender’s selflessness does not allow him to pay attention to his own affairs; he forces himself to take care of the problems of others.
Manipulator according to E. Shostrom
Film "School of Life"
The girl at this consultation demonstrates the behavior of a manipulator. Game, image, work to impress - and lack of trust. It’s hard to say how the girl behaves in other situations.
Film "Adventures of Electronics"
Each person has buttons to control them!
Manipulator according to Everett Shostrom - a negative type of neurotic manipulator, described by E. Shostrom. E. Shostrom’s popular book “The Manipulator” attached a persistently negative meaning to the concept of “manipulator”, which has become traditional.
For other types of manipulators, see the general article Manipulator
A manipulator according to Shostrom is a type of person characterized by manipulation, who strives to own and control people in the style of a mechanical manipulator. That is, for whom all other people are not his own, not people, but alien, indifferent and inanimate objects, and treats them as without openness, without trust, as mechanical objects. A person of this type pursues only his own interests; it is strange for him to talk about the interests of a mechanical object, therefore this is a negative characteristic of a person.
Such manipulative people control others through various means, including demonstrating their difficult states. For example, these are “Whiners,” that is, people for whom everything is fine, but when we meet, they can spend hours talking about how bad everything is for them and how tired they are of everything.
A manipulator may not understand or realize that he is a manipulator or an object of manipulation.
How to determine whether this is everyday manipulation or the lifestyle of a manipulator? If the manipulation is situational and cannot be reproduced in other situations, it is an everyday manipulation. If a person constantly behaves like a manipulator, without leaving this role, this is already a lifestyle.
Let's look at this using a child as an example. The child wants to watch another program or cartoon. I asked - okay. I cried - I tried to influence, but they distracted me - I got distracted, this is manipulation within the framework of age norms. And if he immediately, regularly and persistently roars until they show him a cartoon, insists on having his way by crying - this is already a manipulator.
Manipulative and neurotic person
A predisposition to manipulation is characteristic of a neurotic person. One of the needs of a neurotic is the need for dominance, to have power. Karen Horney believes that the obsessive desire to dominate gives rise to “a person’s inability to establish equal relationships. If he does not become a leader, he feels completely lost, dependent and helpless. He is so powerful that everything that goes beyond the limits of his power is perceived by him as his own subordination.”
Criticism of inaccuracies in the views of E. Shostrom
Following E. Shostrom, other types of people who do not deserve such a negative qualification are very often called manipulators.
“A person who uses other people to achieve his goals is a manipulator.” Untruth and stupidity. The student uses the teachers for his goal of becoming an educated person - he is a good student, not a nasty manipulator.
“Anyone who uses manipulation is a manipulator.” Confusion and stupidity. A manipulator is someone who is characterized by manipulation, not someone who uses manipulation. For example, positive manipulations are constantly used in communication between loved ones, family and loving people. Positive manipulation is a natural part of their beautiful close relationship, in which no one is or feels like a stranger or a mechanical object. Positive manipulations are a manifestation of care for the person to whom they are directed, and cannot be the basis for a negative characterization of their author. Look
Causes. Why do they do this?
One of the main reasons is the desire to receive the love of others through power over them. In this case, the manipulator hides his true feelings and thoughts. He's trying to make you love him.
The second reason is a person’s internal conflict, his distrust of himself and others. To gain trust, the manipulator tries to control people and bring them closer to him.
The next reason is fear of deep relationships. Therefore, manipulators prefer superficial control rather than close interaction. Hence their hypertrophied self-control: they do not allow themselves to express strong feelings (fear, joy, anger).
Read online “The Manipulative Man”
Everett Shostrom
Man is a manipulator
The inner journey from manipulation to actualization
Preface
Several years ago I read a book called "A Cow Can't Live in Los Angeles" that made a huge impression on me. It was about a Mexican man who smuggles his relatives to America. He taught them: “The Americans are wonderful people, but there is one thing that really offends them. You shouldn’t even hint to them that they are corpses.” I believe that this is a completely accurate description of the “disease” of modern man. He is dead; man today has become a doll, and this “corpse-like” behavior is an integral part of his life. He is leisurely and emotionless, like a puppet. He is reliable, but lacks life aspirations, needs and desires. His life is extremely boring, empty and meaningless. He controls and manipulates those around him and at the same time is securely caught in the network of his own manipulations.
The purpose of this book is to describe how we lose all signs of life, playing manipulators - often falsely - without any soul, without the desire to be and live. It is extremely difficult for modern man to understand and accept the fact that he is dead, false and has lost his vitality and human appearance. Nevertheless, he can feel his humanity again if he only wants to take a risk, open up and come alive; in this way he will move from the lifelessness and slowness of the manipulator to the complete spontaneity of the actualizer.
I believe that the lifelessness-aliveness (or manipulation-actualization) continuum presented in this book should replace the illness-health continuum accepted in psychiatric and psychological circles.
After all, it is the first that is characterized by the most important concept of hope. Becoming aware of your own manipulation is only the first step, but truly believing that actualizing capabilities can develop without manipulation is hope. As Erik Erikson wrote: “We recognize... the intrinsic similarities between... deep-seated mental disorders and the complete absence of basic hope.” Today it is clear that modern psychiatry and psychology do not take such hope into account.
And yet the “medical model” of a person - whether sick or healthy - is causing increasing frustration. Most therapists no longer call their patients psychotic or even classical neurotic. Patients are people who have problems in life and develop manipulative patterns of behavior to their detriment.
It is important to recognize that the term “mental illness” is not appropriate to describe such people. The work of Thomas Schasz and others is entirely focused on the fact that using the medical model with problem people is unacceptable because it implies that the problem is some altered physical condition rather than a maladaptive behavior. In addition, it allows the patient to maintain his problematic condition. Such comments from patients are well known: “I’m sick, I can’t cope with it”; “Don’t blame me, I’m neurotic”; “It’s all my compulsion that’s to blame.”
Translator's Preface
For the first time, “The Manipulator” by E. Shostrom was translated interlinearly “for official use” by the All-Union Center for Translation of Scientific and Technical Literature and Documentation (VTsP NTLD) in the late 70s of the last century. The translation received serial number A-34423 and soon ended up in Samizdat. As a matter of fact, it could only be called “interlinear translation” conditionally. The nameless translator had no command of the subject, neither the English nor the Russian language, so the reader was forced for the most part to guess for himself what was being said.
After perestroika, Shostrom’s book was published in good Russian under the title “Anti-Carnegie, or manipulator” (Minsk: TPC “Polifact”, 1992). The translator was A. Malysheva. She changed not only the title of the book, but also the titles of the chapters, changed the division into chapters, removed examples, illustrations and most of the author's text. retelling made in the traditions of Soviet popular science literature
what Malysheva managed to understand from translation No. A-34423. Despite the smoothness of the speech, the retelling was inferior to the “original”: something that could previously have been at least guessed completely disappeared from it.
Finally, last year, as it was stated, the “first complete translation” of Shostrom appeared (M.: “April Press, EKSMO-Press”, 2002; translators N. Shevchuk and R. Kuchkarova). Upon closer examination, however, it turned out that this was still the same No. A-34423, which the literary editor had lightly gone over; The editing had virtually no effect on the intelligibility of the text. Since this hack was immediately digitized and began to spread online, I realized that it was time to let people know what Sjostrom actually wrote about.
* * *
The proposed text is the result of a conceptual decoding of the translation of the VCP NTLD No. A-34423 through a preliminary reverse translation into English. I launched my first imperfect attempt to bring some clarity to this “set of words” in Samizdat about twenty years ago (by the way, not so long ago it partially surfaced on the Internet). The current attempt is undoubtedly more successful, now I am much more familiar with the ideas of the “Movement for the Realization of Human Potential”, which Sjostrom refers to, and with the features of translating these ideas into Russian. But since I did not have access to the English original, I was unable to understand the content of several paragraphs, mainly with descriptions of “life examples.” In order not to confuse the reader with nonsense, they are omitted (the bills are marked with ellipses in square brackets). In addition, in five places I was unable to correct the unsuccessful translation of some terms and expressions (they are marked with question marks in square brackets). I hope that over time I will get to the original, and these shortcomings will be eliminated. But now the text is quite suitable for use, for which I congratulate us all.
Vladimir Danchenko,
Kyiv, September 2003
