1. Mirror, mirror on the wall

2. Who is the fairest of them all?

Who can forget the look of murderous rage distorting the face of the Wicked Queen in Walt Disney’s remarkable animation of the classic fairy tale “Snow White” when she looks in the mirror after asking this question in her daily ritual of reassurance and, instead of her own face, sees reflected the image of the even more beautiful Snow White? The popularity of this fairy tale reflects the universality of a theme central to political psychology: the narcissistic ruler clinging to power who is threatened by pretenders to the throne. Reflecting the ruler’s underlying insecurity, Arthur Feiner, in an especially insightful contribution to the volume Narcissism and the Interpersonal Self, mischievously notes and archly asks in his parenthetical to the epigraph that introduces both his and this chapter, “Maybe, it’s you, oh beautiful queen, but Madam, why do you think you need to ask?”

A fatal example of this dynamic is reflected in the life of serial bomber Theodore Kaczynski. The target of one of the FBI’s most costly investigations, Kaczynski became known to that agency as UNABOM (UNiversity and Airline BOMber), and, until his identity was eventually discovered, he was popularly known as the Unabomber. Intellectually precocious and mathematically gifted but a social isolate because of his obvious intellectual gifts and peculiar interpersonal style, Kaczynski skipped several grades in school, which served to isolate him further from his peers. His passage through school was characterized by a major imbalance between prodigious intellectual gifts and a major deficit in interpersonal skills. He has been described as a mathematical genius and an emotional cripple. At age 10, he took with him on a family camping vacation a book entitled Romping through Mathematics from Addition to Calculus.