Narcissism is, oddly, a Janus faced term that emerges from Greek mythology, via psychoanalytic theory and has become a barb that is used as the worst sort of insult to men in general and our current president in particular. The Janus faced quality is that it is both essential to our development as human beings (meaning as we grow from infants through childhood towards adulthood and maturity) – and, when that development gets off track, it labels the problematic characteristics that emerge and impact how we interact with others. The rub is that we are all in this boat together – we are all narcissistically vulnerable – meaning that good quality narcissistic development creates armor for all of us – better armor for those who are more mature – but all of our armor has chinks in it.
Narcissus was, of course, the beautiful Greek boy who became
so enamored of his own reflection that he could not tear himself away from the
pond in which he saw it and died of starvation.
Freud turned this story into a central tenet of our psychological
functioning – suggesting that we need to take ourselves as an object – to love
ourselves – in order to survive. This
primary narcissism is the attachment that we feel towards ourselves,
ironically, as biological critters who need food and drink and, though Freud
had a hard time admitting it, love from others.
More precisely, Freud posited that those who never got
beyond primary narcissism – those who never realized that caring for others was
at least as important as being cared for – were the psychotic among us. There is something elegant about this – those
who are psychotic – those who are diagnosed with schizophrenia and severe
depression or mania, are not only hallucinatory, but largely unaware of
others. Or the awareness of others, when
in this state, is constricted – so that others sort of float around the
periphery of the psychotic person’s experience – and frequently can feel very
threatening when they become too close.
Ironically, Freud, who was a neurologist and wanted to
describe psychiatric illnesses from the perspective of biology, missed a bit on
this one. There is good evidence of a
strong genetic/biological basis to most chronic psychotic conditions. And while descriptively these individuals
live in bubbles that they are at the center of, their condition is influenced
by profound disruptions in multiple brain and psychological arenas and they are
not easily understood solely through the lens of narcissism.
Narcissism has been psychoanalytically studied in great
depth in the second half of the twentieth century. Heinz Kohut postulated
that narcissism – which he described as a kind of need for what he called
mirroring – a need for someone to continually reassure us that we are OK – was related
to a lack of early mirroring. This would
have been a lack of responsivity on the part of early caregivers. Otto
Kernberg, on the other hand, suggested that narcissism is a defense against
an intrusive, demeaning, or destructive caregiving style. Glen Gabbard, a student
of Kernberg’s, suggested that Kernberg and Kohut were using the same term to
describe two very different populations.
Kohut was working with graduate students who couldn’t bring themselves
to finish their dissertations. Kernberg
was working with severely ill individuals who were hospitalized because of how
toxic they were to the people around them.
People like Daniel
Stern, who have observed the infants of middle class mothers in the United
States, have observed the incredible attunement that occurs between parents and
their children and have noticed how this helps the infants become attuned to
the world in general. When we play with
kids and follow their lead, they begin to build a sense of themselves as
involved in the world at large and feel a growing sense of competency.
When the reluctant son was young, his mother and I worked
hard to help him experience himself as being at the center of his world. Others (including my reluctant parents) were
critical of this approach. They feared
that when, for instance, we would tell him a bedtime story about a boy with his
name that he would grow up to think that what happened to him was all that
mattered. It was very gratifying, then,
when he was playing with his cousin and he started to tell his cousin a story
about a little boy – and here he paused – before telling the story about a boy
with his cousin’s name. He had learned
from us not that he was the center of the world, but how to connect with
others.
The irony of problematic narcissism, then, is that inflated self-esteem,
which is at the center of it, is compensatory.
When we feel confident enough about who we are we are much more able to
experience others as they are – to be open to them. We are narcissistically healthy (as the
reluctant son was, at least in the moment when he was telling the story to his
cousin).
When we don’t feel certain of who we are, we need evidence
that we are wonderful and we don’t connect with others so much as show off to
them hoping that they will appreciate just how wonderful we are so that we will
have a sense of our value and worth. It
feels, when we are in the presence of someone who is narcissistic, as if no
amount of soothing will lead them to feel OK – will lead them to internalize a
sense of their value. We sense that they
have not internalized a sense of self-worth, despite the fact that they are
telling us how wonderful they are.
While ordinary, everyday narcissism – we might call it lack
of self-esteem – is a problem, so called toxic narcissism, which is seen by
psychoanalysts as being on a spectrum with psychopathy or anti-social personality
disorder, is indicative of so little sense of self that the person doesn’t care
for others or is actively malicious towards them – as if the only way to feel
better about oneself is to point out to someone else how much they are lacking
or to actively damage them as an (imaginary) means of elevating oneself. So some people question (myself included) where
on this spectrum Donald
Trump lies.
There are many, many examples of narcissism in film and
television. We are drawn to narcissists –
and some people do become narcissistic who are quite gifted – and repeatedly
told that they are. They overvalue
themselves – as if the praise they’ve received is just too much but they don’t
really feel like they live up to their press clippings. Superhero films and books are filled with these types (The
Avengers, Birdman,
and Eragon),
though they can also demonstrate healthy narcissism (The
Black Panther) and the mourning process that is part of realizing that we
aren’t all that we would like to be (The
Avengers: End Game).
Narcissists from history have been displayed on the little
screen (Edward
the VII on The Crown) and the Crown also features Elizabeth
as a leader who leads with humility.
I think that
Antonio Damasio nicely demonstrates how healthy narcissism is a biological
necessity. If you are interested, I
battle with my own narcissistic issues while describing the trials of Florence
Foster Jenkins. And then there’s
Woody Allen, about whose narcissism I speculate when describing his film Blue
Jasmine.
You may also be interested in a post: What
is Psychoanalysis.
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