Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite You Face Syndrome (DSM)

“Cutting off your nose to spite your face syndrome” should be listed amongst the conditions in the DSM. It’s when you proudly refuse to go along with something that might have been a help to you. Diderot’s Rameau’s nephew spites the very people he wants to get the attention of. Freud termed it “faulty achievement.” Clausewitz looked at war as a form of diplomacy. Wasn’t Philoctetes refusal to employ his powers a Pyrrhic Victory! Maladaptive behavior is less an Insult to someone else as it is to oneself.  Here is AI on Charles Brenner's psychoanalytic theory of "compromise formation," It is the outcome of an internal conflict where the ego must find a way to allow a forbidden instinctual drive to be partially expressed while still maintaining defense against the anxiety it would otherwise produce.Still despite all the intellectualizing it boils down not to the classic kid but rather adult running away from home.

read "_RT" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and here's ChatGPT on "_RT"