Narcissism: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst's Take on a Complicated Concept

 

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.

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.