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Narcissism
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Narcissism
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What is Narcissism? Perhaps it was a chance that I never bothered too much about the term itself, as it is confusing and misleads many people. There is about no other subject where the clash between professional knowledge and the half-knowledge of lay persons is so large as with narcissism. Everybody seems to know what narcissism means, but when you inquire further, you see that people maintain the strangest misconceptions about it.
Most people have heard about the ancient myth of
Narcissus
that is at the origin of the term narcissism. But what does this myth
tell us? Here is where the misconceptions start. Most people somehow got
a scarce idea and extrapolate from the little knowledge they got, and
the result is a standard answer like:
And then they go concluding narcissism was a hang-up of people who love
themselves too much, who are fixated upon their own self-image, who are
fallen in love with themselves. Needless to say that all of this is sheer nonsense. The very contrary is true. Narcissism is a pathology where the person, through a deep hurt suffered early in life, is unable to love himself or herself, and thus lacks even a basic level of self-love. And what is worse with this affliction is that the true self of the person, their self identity, their feeling ego, their Me idea, and also their body image, have been buried deep down in the unconscious. The result is that narcissistic people do not know who they are or, as it is expressed in psychiatry, they deny their true self. This denial of their own intrinsic being, their character, their values and oddities, their depth and dignity is what lets them appear like shadow dancers. They are generally fluent talkers and take up new ideas quickly, but they don't integrate novelty, because there is nothing they could integrate it into, as they are out of touch with their true identity, the fertile soil of their human nature, their grounding. I use to call them for this reason narcissistic comedians, as they actually behave as if being on stage, as if life was a huge stage where everybody performs a role - but where nobody plays the role of himself or herself, but always another. A plays B, B plays C, C plays A. But life normally is that A plays A, B plays B and C plays C. People who suffer from narcissism tend to appear aloof, they appear to float, as if their feet never touched the ground beneath. There is often also something Peter-Pan like about them, something fragile and strangely youthful, often accompanied by a sunshine smile that seems to suggest that they know no sadness. While in truth, they are the saddest people on earth, only that they can't even feel their sadness, alienated as they are from their feelings. In exchanges with narcissists I also found that they often deny the reality of emotions, trying to grasp all of reality with their pure intellect - that usually works brilliantly well. But that makes that they are truly alienated from humanity because they more or less consciously discard the irrational out of the world. For them, all must be rational, clear and straight, and they tend to condemn irrationality in people, out of touch as they are with their own irrationality. We humans are at times rational and at times irrational. We are as good as never only rational or only irrational; we are a mix of many qualities and oddities, and it's our vivid emotions that bring the necessary kaleidoscopic change in our lives so that we are not for too long rational and not for too long irrational. But for the narcissist there has to be only rationality, and all the rest is as it were human weakness... You can identify rather quickly if you suffer from a narcissistic fixation or not. Simply check if you play yourself in your life, or if you play a role that fakes it is you. Then, when you ask this question and it rings like 'But who is myself?', you are getting on the right track. When that question feels odd and strange because somehow you have never asked who you are, and if in the game of life you as good as never play the Me-card, then you know you have a problem with narcissism. Another reality check would be the obsessional idea to be altruistic and 'always good' to others, to a point of self-forgetfulness. Rings true? Why the hell should you forget about yourself? You feel it's a moral duty to be always concerned about others and put yourself behind? No, it's not. But you probably have a hang-up with narcissism, as you are constantly denying your own self, replacing the vacuum at need with person A, friend B or relative C that you have to help out, to save from bad luck, rape or incest, to heal, to comfort, to look after, to console, to protect, and so on. Narcissism is really not a complicated thing and it's not difficult to grasp. It has been made difficult to understand through popular psychology that loves to use strange terms and abhors to express simple things in a simple way. For example, it's much more difficult to explain what neurosis is or psychosis than to say what narcissism means and what makes persons afflicted with narcissism suffer so much in life. They really suffer! Narcissism is not a party affliction, not a gentleman disease, and not an outflow of vanity, while it is often belittled as such. Narcissism is an affliction serious enough to be put on priority by most of today's psychiatric services. For when you're out of touch with yourself and your deepest emotions, you live a life that is not yours, you live as it were an empty life. This inner vacuum, this emptiness when it's constant is something that can trigger other serious afflictions such as substance abuse, chain smoking, depression, chronic fatigue, alcoholism, anxiety, phobias, and sexual obsessions, aggression and perversion. It also can trigger somatizations, which means that the body gets ill for reasons that are not physiological, but psychological. Another corner of the literature on narcissism is what spiritual-minded people say about it. Their terminology is different, and that unfortunately also contributes to the general confusion about narcissism. I have in mind a particularly successful and brilliant author, Thomas Moore, whose most famous bestselling book, Care of the Soul, is basically a manual for healing narcissism. But the problem is one of terminology. Moore speaks of soul and of lacking soul when he describes narcissism. His ideas are brilliant, and he has pointed the finger on the wound when he says that narcissism cannot be healed through pushing the person into a growth cycle or by otherwise suggesting the person to grow up. I am going to cut and paste here the part of my review of his book that is concerned with narcissism.
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, pp. 58-59. I have coached narcissistic and highly problematic individuals over the Internet, free of charge, for a period of almost ten years, considering this as the 'social' part of my mission as a coach, and I found invariably that they wait for society to accept them, instead of doing the first step and accept themselves. Moore explains:
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, pp. 60-61. And I made an astonishing discovery. I had myself a narcissism problem over many years, since my childhood actually, and it was not cured in a two-year hypnotherapy, but I could cure it subsequently, virtually by 'talking to the trees'. It was only a few years ago when, living in the Provence, I took the habit to go for a night walk every day, when I would address speech to some of the trees in a huge alley with sycamores. There were three huge sycamores I felt spontaneously attracted to, and what I would do, late enough so that no cars would pass by, was to put my right hand firmly against the trunk of the tree, and talk to the tree, either by thinking or by whispering my ideas. Now, what happened to my surprise was that not only was I greatly energized through this unique kind of conversation, to a point to not being tired any more when coming home, but also to have dreams where the tree was talking back to me. And I learnt amazing depths of wisdom from these dreams. Now, I was of course very surprised when I found the following passage in Care of the Soul:
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 61. And indeed, through my talking to the trees, I felt a sudden interest in shamanism and went on a spiritual quest that took me several years. I engaged in a tedious research about shamanism and went to Ecuador, in 2004, to drink the traditional sacred Ayahuasca brew. I left this initiation completely transformed. I have regained the whole range of magical beliefs I once fostered as a child, and this really has completely healed the narcissistic condition. Now, Thomas Moore, has put a particular stress in this book on the danger of collective narcissism and he investigates deeply in the culture of the United States of America, to identify it as a narcissistic culture par excellence. Moore writes:
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 62. When we look at how present-day America, with its strongly narcissistic government, faces this 'loving dialogue', we indeed see that the puer spirit is indeed very strong. Not only is it strong but Americans somehow like to choose their presidents among puer personalities, and that may one day result in a fatal outcome! Mature cultures choose mature leaders, senior personalities, people who have grown out from the cradle or from an adolescence where Peter Pan is the dominating archetype. And it is very interesting that Moore also notes that curing narcissism involves an expansion of boundaries:
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 63. And here again, when we look at present-day reality in the United States, boundary-dissolving substances, from DMT, over LSD to Marijuana have all been declared illegal, which thus shows the degree of narcissism at the top government level in the enlightened nation. Only that the light seems to come from the wrong source. And the enlightened nation is an action nation. All is action. The major coach-actor of the nation performs in shorts, jumping around like a school boy. When all is action, everybody is an actor. Not himself. And everybody acts out his or her life, instead of living. This timelessness of the nation, which is embodied in its business values, business standing for busy-ness, is one of the symptoms of its cultural narcissism that is not a present-day phenomenon. The action-nation was born in New England. When there is no more time, there is no more soul. Moore explains: Thomas Moore Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 67. Peter Pan resisted to grow up. And astonishingly enough, Thomas Moore writes that growing-up is not a cure for narcissism, in the contrary:
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 71. When we apply this truth to the Peter Pan nation, we learn that we have to let them run where they run and let them break even more glass everywhere in the world, right? I am not sure if Thomas Moore wanted to say that because once of a sudden, after having expanded into collective narcissism, he again speaks of the individual. But our daily news about the hero culture really seem to suggest that Moore's analysis of collective narcissism, that is shared by number of depth psychologists, would lead to an abysmal accumulation of Peter-Pan like acts, performed as a nation-narcissist on the world at large, in order to gain depth. I am not so sure if this psychological solution will work out politically, because even the most optimistic of Peter Pans around in the great nation may get a hint of stretching the bow too much ... and the international repercussions may not permit Peter Pan to continue his puer game infinitely ... Anyway, from the soul perspective, and leaving political realities untouched, Thomas Moore writes:
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 73. This is in accordance with a general soul-based healing approach that was the prevalent approach to healing during the Middle-Ages and the Renaissance. Moore writes:
Source: Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p. 81. In order to realize our personal identity and become whole human beings, we have to be able, still in childhood, to form an original personal identity. This is however impossible if we are reared by narcissistic parents, those namely that are indifferent to the unique person of the child they have brought to life. This is primarily done through indoctrination and,
secondly, through The next step is to force the child to play roles
in order to please their parents. The main role in this drama which is
the Drama of the Gifted Child, This education that I like to call rearing narcissistic comedians, is very common in what I came to call, for this very reason, Oedipal Culture. This is why narcissism is rampant in Western nations, especially in the United States. However, there are few researchers who see that the main etiology for narcissism is to be found in our child rearing paradigm. Those who do, such as Alice Miller or Alexander Lowen are not representing mainstream psychology, despite the brilliance of their work. They have, inter alia, found that education that typically leads to narcissism is rich in inventing and executing magic formulas that are given to the child for so-called 'good education' but that are in reality hypnotic injunctions. Some of these are: Hypnotic Injunctions Recognized by TA
(Transactional Analysis) - Be adaptable and flexible until
self-alienation; I see another etiology of narcissism in lacking symbiosis between mother and infant during the first 18 months after birth. Regularly, with mothers who themselves suffer from narcissism, clinical research found a reduction or total absence of eye contact between mother and child, absence of breast-feeding or when the breast is given, the mother feels revulsion, disgust or aggression toward the child; in addition, such mothers tend to be hostile to the child's first steps into autonomy, thereby creating in the child a pathological clinging-behavior that has very nasty consequences later on in the development of the child and young adult. Often what happens in such relationships is that the mother manipulates the child into a real co-dependence where she projects her longings for love, that remain unfulfilled in the partner relation, upon the child. This then in many cases leads to emotional abuse. Narcissism thus is often the inevitable result of emotional abuse suffered in early childhood, and that fact may help to understand the gravity of the affliction of narcissism. What this results in is that the person unconsciously later tries to heal the lacking primary fusion by repeated pseudo-symbiotic relationships, which are relationships where love is replaced by dependency or confused with dependency. However, since those persons that are invested with that role of ersatz mothers and fathers can never give the lacking primary fusion, disappointment and depression will invariably ensue in those relations. Narcissism is an inevitable by-product of patriarchy, and its etiology is wrong relating. Wrong relating to self. Wrong relating to others. It is built on what Joseph Campbell called the solar worldview and ignores the many shadows of the soul – and thereby ignores its own shadow. Narcissists, therefore, are tragic figures. They are tragic in the sense that they run into the abyss without the slightest idea of what they are doing because they are not grounded and have their feet in the air, like the Fool of the Tarot. They are lunatics, because they have not integrated their own Luna, their Moon energy. They are the eternal Peter Pan’s of sunshine movies, and present themselves to the public smiling, broadly smiling, most of the time, but in haphazard moments you see their true face – while they themselves ignore it. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure
that the details contained herein are correct and up-to-date, it does
not constitute legal, psychological, psychiatric or other professional
advice. I do not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for any
error or omission. |
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Narcissism
