Tag: Narcissism

What is a Narcissistic Parent?

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Introduction

A narcissistic parent is a parent affected by narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder.

Typically, narcissistic parents are exclusively and possessively close to their children and are threatened by their children’s growing independence. This results in a pattern of narcissistic attachment, with the parent considering that the child exists solely to fulfil the parent’s needs and wishes. A narcissistic parent will often try to control their children with threats and emotional abuse. Narcissistic parenting adversely affects the psychological development of children, affecting their reasoning and their emotional, ethical, and societal behaviours and attitudes. Personal boundaries are often disregarded with the goal of moulding and manipulating the child to satisfy the parent’s expectations.

Narcissistic people have low self-esteem and feel the need to control how others regard them, fearing that otherwise they will be blamed or rejected and their personal inadequacies will be exposed. Narcissistic parents are self-absorbed, often to the point of grandiosity. They also tend to be inflexible, and lack the empathy necessary for child raising.

Characteristics

The term narcissism, as used in Sigmund Freud’s clinical study, includes behaviours such as self-aggrandisement, self-esteem, vulnerability, fear of losing the affection of people and of failure, reliance on defence mechanisms, perfectionism, and interpersonal conflict.

To maintain their self-esteem and protect their vulnerable true selves, narcissists seek to control the behaviour of others, particularly that of their children whom they view as extensions of themselves. Thus, narcissistic parents may speak of “carrying the torch”, maintaining the family image, or making the mother or father proud. They may reproach their children for exhibiting weakness, being too dramatic, being selfish, or not meeting expectations. Children of narcissists learn to play their part and to show off their special skill(s), especially in public or for others. They typically do not have many memories of having felt loved or appreciated for being themselves. Instead, they associate their experience of love and appreciation with conforming to the demands of the narcissistic parent.

Destructive narcissistic parents have a pattern of consistently needing to be the focus of attention, exaggerating, seeking compliments, and putting their children down. Punishment in the form of blame, criticism or emotional blackmail, and attempts to induce guilt may be used to ensure compliance with the parent’s wishes and their need for narcissistic supply.

Children of Narcissists

Narcissism tends to play out intergenerationally, with narcissistic parents producing either narcissistic or co-dependent children in turn. While a self-confident parent, or good-enough parent, can allow a child his or her autonomous development, the narcissistic parent may instead use the child to promote his or her own image. A parent concerned with self-enhancement, or with being mirrored and admired by their child, may leave the child feeling like a puppet to the parent’s emotional/intellectual demands.

Children of a narcissistic parent may not be supportive of others in the home. Observing the behaviour of the parent, the child learns that manipulation and guilt are effective strategies for getting what he or she wants. The child may also develop a false self and use aggression and intimidation to get their way. Instead, they may invest in the opposite behaviours if they have observed them among friends and other families. When the child of a narcissistic parent experiences safe, real love or sees the example played out in other families, they may identify and act on the differences between their life and that of a child in a healthy family. For example, the lack of empathy and volatility at home may increase the child’s own empathy and desire to be respectful. Similarly, intense emotional control and disrespect for boundaries at home may increase the child’s value for emotional expression and their desire to extend respect to others. Although the child observes the parent’s behaviour, they are often on the receiving end of the same behaviour. When an alternative to the pain and distress caused at home presents itself, the child may choose to focus on more comforting, safety-inducing behaviours.

Some common issues in narcissistic parenting result from a lack of appropriate, responsible nurturing. This may lead to a child feeling empty, insecure in loving relationships, developing imagined fears, mistrusting others, experiencing identity conflict, and suffering an inability to develop a distinct existence from that of the parent.

Sensitive, guilt-ridden children in the family may learn to meet the parent’s needs for gratification and seek love by accommodating the wishes of the parent. The child’s normal feelings are ignored, denied and eventually repressed in attempts to gain the parent’s “love”. Guilt and shame keep the child locked in a developmental arrest. Aggressive impulses and rage may become split off and not integrated with normal development. Some children develop a false self as a defence mechanism and become co-dependent in relationships. The child’s unconscious denial of their true self may perpetuate a cycle of self-hatred, fearing any reminder of their authentic self.

Narcissistic parenting may also lead to children being either victimised or bullies, having a poor or overly inflated body image, tendency to use and/or abuse drugs or alcohol, and acting out (in a potentially harmful manner) for attention.

Short-Term and Long-Term Effects

Due to their vulnerability, children are extremely affected by the behaviour of a narcissistic parent. A narcissistic parent will often abuse the normal parental role of guiding their children and being the primary decision maker in the child’s life, becoming overly possessive and controlling. This possessiveness and excessive control disempowers the child; the parent sees the child simply as an extension of themselves. This may affect the child’s imagination and level of curiosity, and they often develop an extrinsic style of motivation. This heightened level of control may be due to the need of the narcissistic parent to maintain the child’s dependence on them.

Narcissistic parents are quick to anger, putting their children at risk for physical and emotional abuse. To avoid anger and punishment, children of abusive parents often resort to complying with their parent’s every demand. This affects both the child’s well-being and their ability to make logical decisions on their own, and as adults they often lack self-confidence and the ability to gain control over their life. Identity crisis, loneliness, and struggle with self expression are also commonly seen in children raised by a narcissistic parent. The struggle to discover one’s self as an adult stems from the substantial amount of projective identification that the now adult experienced as a child. Because of excessive identification with the parent, the child may never get the opportunity to experience their own identity.

Mental Health Effects

Studies have found that children of narcissistic parents have significantly higher rates of depression and lower self-esteem during adulthood than those who did not perceive their caregivers as narcissistic. The parent’s lack of empathy towards their child contributes to this, as the child’s desires are often denied, their feelings restrained, and their overall emotional well-being ignored.

Children of narcissistic parents are taught to submit and conform, causing them to lose touch of themselves as individuals. This can lead to the child possessing very few memories of feeling appreciated or loved by their parents for being themselves, as they instead associate the love and appreciation with conformity. Children may benefit with distance from the narcissistic parent. Some children of narcissistic parents resort to leaving home during adolescence if they grow to view the relationship with their parent(s) as toxic.

What is Narcissistic Withdrawal?

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Introduction

In children, narcissistic withdrawal may be described as ‘a form of omnipotent narcissism characterised by the turning away from parental figures and by the fantasy that essential needs can be satisfied by the individual alone’.

For adults, ‘in the contemporary literature the term narcissistic withdrawal is instead reserved for an ego defence in pathological personalities’. Such narcissists may feel obliged to withdraw from any relationship that threatens to be more than short-term.

Psychoanalysis

Freud used the term ‘to describe the turning back of the individual’s libido from the object onto themselves….as the equivalent of narcissistic regression’. On Narcissism saw him explore the idea through an examination of such everyday events as illness or sleep: ‘the condition of sleep, too, resembles illness in implying a narcissistic withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject’s own self’. A few years later, in ‘”Mourning and Melancholia”…Freud’s most profound contribution to object relations theory’, he examined how ‘a withdrawal of the libido…on a narcissistic basis’ in depression could allow both a freezing and a preservation of affection: ‘by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction’.

Otto Fenichel would extend his analysis to borderline conditions, demonstrating how ‘in a reactive withdrawal of libido…a regression to narcissism is also a regression to the primal narcissistic omnipotence which makes its reappearance in the form of megalomania’.

For Melanie Klein, however, a more positive element came to the fore: ‘frustration, which stimulates narcissistic withdrawal, is also…a fundamental factor in adaptation to reality’. Similarly, ‘Winnicott points out that there is an aspect of withdrawal that is healthy’, considering that it might be ‘”helpful to think of withdrawal as a condition in which the person concerned (child or adult) holds a regressed part of the self and nurses it, at the expense of external relationships”‘.

However, from the mid-20th century onwards, attention has increasingly focused on

‘the case in which the subject appeals to narcissistic withdrawal as a defensive solution…a precarious refuge that comes into being as a defense against a disappointing or untrustworthy object. This is found in studies of narcissistic personalities or borderline pathologies by authors such as Heinz Kohut or Otto Kernberg’.

Kohut considered that ‘the narcissistically vulnerable individual responds to actual (or anticipated) narcissistic injury either with shamefaced withdrawal or with narcissistic rage’. Kernberg saw the difference between normal narcissism and ‘ pathological narcissism…[as] withdrawal into “splendid isolation”‘ in the latter instance; while Herbert Rosenfeld was concerned with ‘states of withdrawal commonly seen in narcissistic patients in which death is idealised as superior to life’, as well as with ‘the alternation of states of narcissistic withdrawal and ego disintegration’.

Schizoid Withdrawal

Closely related to narcissistic withdrawal is ‘schizoid withdrawal: the escape from too great pressure by abolishing emotional relationships altogether’. All such ‘fantastic refuges from need are forms of emotional starvation, megalomanias and distortions of reality born of fear’.

Sociology

‘Narcissists will isolate themselves, leave their families, ignore others, do anything to preserve a special…sense of self’ Arguably, however, all such ‘narcissistic withdrawal is haunted by its alter ego: the ghost of a full social presence’ – with people living their lives ‘along a continuum which ranges from the maximal degree of social commitment…to a maximal degree of social withdrawal’.

If ‘of all modes of narcissistic withdrawal, depression is the most crippling’, a contributing factor may be that ‘depressed persons come to appreciate consciously how much social effort is in fact required in the normal course of keeping one’s usual place in undertakings’.

Therapy

Object relations theory would see the process of therapy as one whereby the therapist enabled his or her patient to have ‘resituated the object from the purely schizoid usage to the shared schizoid usage (initially) until eventually…the object relation – discussing, arguing, idealizing, hating, etc. – emerged’.

Fenichel considered that in patients where ‘their narcissistic regression is a reaction to narcissistic injuries; if they are shown this fact and given time to face the real injuries and to develop other types of reaction, they may be helped enormously’ Neville Symington however estimated that ‘often a kind of war develops between analyst and patient, with the analyst trying to haul the patient out of the cocoon…his narcissistic envelope…and the patient pulling for all his worth in the other direction’.

Cultural Analogues

  • In I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the therapist of the protagonist wonders ‘”if there is a pattern….You give up a secret to our view and then you get so scared that you run for cover into your panic or into your secret world. To live there.”‘.
  • More generally, the 1920s have been described as a time of ‘changes in which women were channelled toward narcissistic withdrawal rather than developing strong egos’.

What is Narcissistic Mortification?

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Introduction

Narcissistic mortification is “the primitive terror of self dissolution, triggered by the sudden exposure of one’s sense of a defective self … it is death by embarrassment”.

Narcissistic mortification is a term first used by Sigmund Freud in his last book, Moses and Monotheism, with respect to early injuries to the ego/self. The concept has been widely employed in ego psychology and also contributed to the roots of self psychology.

When narcissistic mortification is experienced for the first time, it may be defined as a sudden loss of control over external or internal reality, or both. This produces strong emotions of terror while at the same time narcissistic libido (also known as ego-libido) or destrudo is built up. Narcissistic libido or ego-libido is the concentration of libido on the self. Destrudo is the opposite of libido and is the impulse to destroy oneself and everything associated with oneself.

Early Developments: Bergler, Anna Freud, and Eidelberg

Edmund Bergler developed the concept of narcissistic mortification in connection with early fantasies of omnipotence in the developing child, and with the fury provoked by the confrontations with reality that undermine his or her illusions. For Bergler, “the narcissistic mortification suffered in this very early period continues to act as a stimulus throughout his life”.

Anna Freud used the term in connection with her exploration of the defence mechanism of altruistic surrender, whereby an individual lives only through the lives of others – seeing at the root of such an abrogation of one’s own life an early experience of narcissistic mortification at a disappointment with one’s self.

Psychoanalyst and author Ludwig Eidelberg subsequently expanded on the concept in the fifties and sixties. Eidelberg defined narcissistic mortification as occurring when “a sudden loss of control over external or internal reality…produces the painful emotional experience of terror”. He also stressed that for many patients simply to have to accept themselves as having neurotic symptoms was itself a source of narcissistic mortification.

Kohut and Self Psychology

For Heinz Kohut, narcissistic injury – the root cause of what he termed narcissistic personality disorder – was broadly equivalent to the humiliation of mortification. Kohut considered that “if the grandiosity of the narcissistic self has been insufficiently modified…then the adult ego will tend to vacillate between an irrational overestimation of the self and feelings of inferiority and will react with narcissistic mortification to the thwarting of its ambitions”.

Object Relations Theory

Unlike ego psychologists, object relations theorists have traditionally used a rather different, post-Kleinian vocabulary to describe the early woundings of narcissistic mortification. Recently however such theorists have found analogies between Freud’s emphasis on the sensitivity of the ego to narcissistic humiliation and mortification, and the views of Bion on ‘nameless dread’ or Winnicott’s on the original agonies of the breakdown of childhood consciousness. At the same time ego psychologists have been increasingly prepared to see narcissistic mortification as occurring in the context of early relations to objects.

Physical Sensations and Psychological Perceptions

An individual’s experience of mortification may be accompanied by both physical and psychological sensations. Physical sensations such as: burning, painful tingling over the body, pain in the chest that slowly expands and spreads throughout the torso, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, sweating, blanching, coldness and numbness can be experienced by the individual suffering from mortification. The psychological sensations described are feeling shocked, exposed, and humiliated. Descriptions of this experience can be, for example: “It feels like I won’t survive” and “I have the absolute conviction that he or she hates me and it’s my fault”. These sensations are always followed by shock, although they may have happened on various occasions, they also prompt the need for the individual suffering to do something both internally and externally, to effect a positive self-image in the eyes of their narcissistic object. Narcissistic mortification is extreme in its intensity, global nature, and its lack of perspective, causing the anxiety associated with it to become traumatic.

Normal versus Pathological

In Eidelberg’s view, a normal individual would usually be able to avoid being overwhelmed by internal needs because they recognise these urges in time to bring about their partial discharge. However, Eidelberg does not view occasional outbursts of temper as a sign of disorder. An individual experiencing pathological narcissistic mortification is prone to become fixated on infantile objects, resulting in an infantile form of discharge. He or she cannot be satisfied by the partial discharge of this energy, which takes place on an unconscious level, and this in turn interferes with their well-being. According to Eidelberg, the denial of an infantile narcissistic mortification can be responsible for many defensive mechanisms.

Internal versus External

Narcissistic mortification can be:

InternalOccurs when an individual is overstimulated by their emotions. For example, while debating with classmates on the importance of stem cell research an outspoken student loses his temper causing an uproar. The student has just exhibited an overstimulation of his emotions and used this outburst to relieve internal tension.
ExternalOccurs when something out of one’s control influences a situation, for example, an individual who is held at gunpoint while having their wallet stolen. This individual does not hold any control over the scenario nor the actions of the gunman, but their reaction to being held at gunpoint influences the next scenario and what the gunman does next.

In Cult Leadership

To escape the narcissistic mortification of accepting their own dependency needs, cult leaders may resort to delusions of omnipotence. Their continuing shame and underlying guilt, and their repudiation of dependency, obliges such leaders to use seduction and manic defences to externalise and locate dependency needs in others, thus making their followers controllable through a displaced sense of shame.

Death, Anxiety, and Suicide

Because in Western culture death is sometimes seen as the ultimate loss of control, fear of it may produce death anxiety in the form of a sense of extreme shame or narcissistic mortification. The shame in this context is produced by the loss of stoicism, productivity, and control, aspects that are highly valued by society and aspects that are taken away as one ages. Death according to Darcy Harris:

‘is the ultimate narcissistic wound, bringing about not just the annihilation of self, but the annihilation of one’s entire existence, resulting in a form of existential shame for human beings, who possess the ability to ponder this dilemma with their higher functioning cognitive abilities.’

Individuals who hold this anxiety are ashamed of mortality and the frailty that comes along with it; and may attempt to overcome this reality through diversions and accomplishments, deflecting feelings of inferiority and shame through strategies like grandiosity in similar fashion to those with narcissistic personality traits.

Narcissistic mortification may also be produced by death of someone close. Such a loss of an essential object may even lead through narcissistic mortification to suicide.

Among the many motives behind suicidal activities in general are shame, loss of honour, and narcissistic mortification. Those who suffer from narcissistic mortification are more likely to participate in suicidal behaviours and those who do not receive the proper help more often than not succeed. Suicide related to narcissistic mortification is different from normal sorrow in that it is associated with deep rooted self-contempt and self-hatred.

Treatment

According to a paper presented by Mary Libbey, “On Narcissistic Mortification”, presented at the 2006 Shame Symposium, long-term goal of psychoanalytic treatment for those who suffer from narcissistic mortification is to transform the mortification into shame. She says by transforming it into shame it enables the sufferer to tolerate and use it as a signal; the process of transforming mortification into shame entails working through both the early mortifying traumas as well as the defences, often unstable, related to them. If an individual sufferer does not go through this transformation, he or she is left with two unstable narcissistic defences. Libbey says these defences are: self-damning, deflated states designed to appease and hold on to self-objects, and narcissistic conceit, which is designed to project the defective self experiences onto self-objects. Both of these defensive styles require a continuation of dependence on the self-object. Transforming the mortification into shame makes it possible for self-appraisal and self-tolerance, this ultimately leads to psychic separation and self-reliance without the need to sustain one’s mortification, according to Libbey’s paper.

In the 21st Century

Postmodern Freudians link narcissistic mortification to Winnicott’s theory of primitive mental states which lack the capacity for symbolisation, and their need for re-integration. Returning in the transference to the intolerable mortification underpinning such narcissistic defences can however also produce positive analytic change, by way of the (albeit mortifying) re-experience of overwhelming object loss within an intersubjective holding environment.

21st century American analysts are particularly concerned with the potential production of narcissistic mortification as a by-product of analytic interpretation, especially with regard to masochistic personality disorder.

Literary Uses

  • Narcissistic mortification at injuries to self-esteem has been seen as pervading Captain Ahab’s motivations in his confrontation with Moby-Dick.
  • Mortification at one’s self is seen in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when the Creature stares at his reflection in a pool of water. This is where he becomes convinced that he is in fact the Creature and becomes filled with despondence and mortification.

What are Narcissistic Defences?

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Introduction

Narcissistic defences are those processes whereby the idealised aspects of the self are preserved, and its limitations denied.

They tend to be rigid and totallistic. They are often driven by feelings of shame and guilt, conscious or unconscious.

Origins

Narcissistic defences are among the earliest defence mechanisms to emerge, and include denial, distortion, and projection. Splitting is another defence mechanism prevalent among individuals with narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder – seeing people and situations in black and white terms, either as all bad or all good.

A narcissistic defence, with the disorder’s typical over-valuation of the self, can appear at any stage of development.

Defence Sequences

The narcissist typically runs through a sequence of defences to discharge painful feelings until he or she finds one that works:

  • Unconscious repression.
  • Conscious denial.
  • Distortion (including exaggeration and minimisation), rationalisation and lies.
  • Psychological projection (blaming somebody else).
  • Enlisting the help of one or more of their co-dependent friends who will support their distorted view.

Freudians

Sigmund Freud did not focus specifically on narcissistic defences, but did note in On Narcissism how “even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it”. Freud saw narcissistic regression as a defensive answer to object loss – denying the loss of an important object by way of a substitutive identification with it.

Freud also considered social narcissism as a defence mechanism, apparent when communal identifications produce irrational panics at perceived threats to ‘Throne and Altar’ or ‘Free Markets’, or in English over-reaction to any questioning of the status and identity of William Shakespeare.

Fenichel

Otto Fenichel considered that “identification, performed by means of introjection, is the most primitive form of relationship to objects” a primitive mechanism only used “if the ego’s function of reality testing is severely damaged by a narcissistic regression.”

Fenichel also highlighted “eccentrics who have more or less succeeded in regaining the security of primary narcissism and who feel ‘Nothing can happen to me’….[failing] to give up the archaic stages of repudiating displeasure and to turn toward reality”.

Lacan

Jacques Lacan, following out Freud’s view of the ego as the result of identifications, came to consider the ego itself as a narcissistic defence, driven by what he called “the ‘narcissistic passion’ …in the coming-into-being (devenir) of the subject”.

Kleinians

Melanie Klein, emphasised projective identification in narcissism, and the manic defence against becoming aware of the damage done to objects in this way. For Kleinians, at the core of manic defences in narcissism stood what Hanna Segal called “a triad of feelings—control, triumph and contempt”.

Rosenfeld

Herbert Rosenfeld looked at the role of omnipotence, combined with projective identification, as a narcissistic means of defending against awareness of separation between ego and object.

Object Relations Theory

In the wake of Klein, object relations theory, including particularly the American schools of Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut has explored narcissistic defences through analysis of such mechanisms as denial, projective identification, and extreme idealisation.

Kernberg emphasised the role of the splitting apart introjections, and identifications of opposing qualities, as a cause of ego weakness. Kohut too stressed the fact in narcissism “vertical splits are between self-structures (among others)—’I am grand’ and ‘I am wretched’—with very little communication between them”.

Neville Symington however placed greater weight on the way “a person dominated by narcissistic currents…survives through being able to sense the emotional tone of the other…wearing the cloaks of others”; while for Spotnitz the key element is that the narcissist turns feelings in upon the self in narcissistic defence.

Positive Defences

Kernberg emphasised the positive side to narcissistic defences, while Kohut also stressed the necessity in early life for narcissistic positions to succeed each other in orderly maturational sequences.

Others like Symington would maintain that “it is a mistake to split narcissism into positive and negative…we do not get positive narcissism without self-hatred”.

Stigmatising Attitude to Psychiatric Illness

Arikan found that a stigmatising attitude to psychiatric patients is associated with narcissistic defences.

21st century

The twenty-first century has seen a distinction drawn between cerebral and somatic narcissists – the former building up their self-sense through intellectualism, the latter through an obsession with their bodies, as with the woman who, in bad faith, invests her sense of freedom only in being an object of beauty for others.

Literary Parallels

  • Sir Philip Sidney is said to have seen poetry in itself as a narcissistic defence.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre’s aloof, detached protagonists have been seen as crude narcissists who preserve their sense of self only by petrifying it into solid form.

What is Narcissistic Supply?

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Introduction

In psychoanalytic theory, narcissistic supply is a pathological or excessive need for attention or admiration from co-dependents, or such a need in the orally fixated, that does not take into account the feelings, opinions or preferences of other people.

The concept was introduced by Otto Fenichel in 1938, to describe a type of admiration, interpersonal support or sustenance drawn by an individual from his or her environment and essential to their self-esteem.

Brief History

Building on Freud’s concept of narcissistic satisfaction and on the work of his colleague the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham, Fenichel highlighted the narcissistic need in early development for supplies to enable young children to maintain a sense of mental equilibrium. He identified two main strategies for obtaining such narcissistic supplies – aggression and ingratiation – contrasting styles of approach which could later develop into the sadistic and the submissive respectively.

A childhood loss of essential supplies was for Fenichel key to a depressive disposition, as well as to a tendency to seek compensatory narcissistic supplies thereafter. Impulse neuroses, addictions including love addiction and gambling were all seen by him as products of the struggle for supplies in later life. Psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel (1920) had earlier considered neurotic gambling as an attempt to regain primitive love and attention in an adult context.

Personality Disorders

Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg considered the malignant narcissistic criminal to be coldly characterised by a disregard of others unless they could be idealised as sources of narcissistic supply. Self psychologist Heinz Kohut saw those with narcissistic personality disorder as disintegrating mentally when cut off from a regular source of narcissistic supply. Those providing supply to such figures may be treated as if they are a part of the narcissist, in an eclipse of all personal boundaries.

Functions in Narcissistic Pathology

In their adolescence, the narcissist internalises a “bad” recipient (usually their parent). They regard feelings that are socially discouraged towards this recipient, including types of aggression such as hatred and envy, among others. These perceptions reinforce the self-image of the narcissist as immoral and corrupt. They eventually create a feeling of self-worth that is dysfunctional. Their self-confidence and self-image become unrealistically low and distorted. In an attempt to repress these “bad” feelings, the narcissist also suppresses all emotions. Their aggression is channelled into fantasies or outlets that are socially lawful like extreme sports, gambling, reckless driving, and shopping. The narcissist sees the environment as a place that is hostile, unstable, unfulfilling, morally wrong, and unpredictable.

Narcissists generally have no inherent sense of self-worth, so they rely on other people, via attention or narcissistic supply, to re-affirm their importance in order to feel good about themselves and maintain their self-esteem. They then turn other people into operations or objects in such a way that others do not pose any emotional threat. This reactive pattern is pathological narcissism.

The narcissist projects a false self to elicit a constant stream of attention or narcissistic supply from others. The false self is an unreal façade or cover they show to the world that involves what the narcissist intends to be seen as – powerful, elegant, smart, wealthy, or well-connected. The narcissist then ‘collects’ reactions to this projected false self from their environment, which may consist of their spouse, family, friends, colleagues, business partners, and peers. If the expected narcissistic supply (adulation, admiration, attention, fear, respect, applause, or affirmation) is not forthcoming – they are demanded or extorted by the narcissist. Money, compliments, a media appearance, a sexual conquest are all merely different forms of the same thing to a narcissist – narcissistic supply.

Sources

The attention they receive from the “supply source” is essential to the narcissist’s survival, without it they would die (physically or metaphorically) because it depends on their fragile ego to handle their unstable self-esteem. There are distinctive forms of narcissistic supply to attain them with two separate sources. Scholars and researchers generally recognise two main kinds of narcissistic supply:

  • Primary, acquired through more publicly directed forms of attention; and
  • Secondary, generally acquired through attention attained through interpersonal relationships.

Primary

The primary narcissistic supply is based on attention in both its public forms such as recognition, fame, infamy, stardom, and its private, more interpersonal, types of praise, admiration, applause, fear, and repulsion. It is crucial to realise that the primary narcissistic supply represents attention of any kind–positive or negative. Their “realisations” may be imaginary, fictional, or only evident to the narcissist, as long as others believe in them. Appearances qualify more than the content; it is not the truth that matters, but their perception of it. Therefore, as long as they receive the expected reaction or attention that they had projected through their false self, the connotation attached to it is inconsequential.

Triggers

A main narcissistic supply trigger is an individual or object that causes the source to provide narcissistic supply by confronting the source with information about the false self of the narcissist. Narcissistic supply is the source’s response to the trigger. If the false self is projecting admiration and the narcissist finds an environment that feeds into their need, then it becomes a trigger of primary narcissistic supply.

Publicity (celebrity or notoriety, being renowned or being notorious) is a narcissistic supply trigger because it causes individuals to pay attention to the narcissist, thus moving sources to provide narcissistic supply to the narcissist. Publicity can be acquired through exposure, creation of something, or by provoking attention. The narcissist continually resorts to all three, much like what drug addicts are doing to guarantee their regular dose. One such cause of narcissistic supply is a partner or a companion.

Secondary

Secondary narcissistic supply involves projecting the image that they live a good life (a worthy cause of pride for the narcissist), maintaining a safe existence (financial security, personal acceptability, upward growth), and acquiring companionship. Thus, having a partner, possessing significant property, being creative, operating a company (converted into a pathological narcissistic space), having a feeling of anarchic liberty, being a part of a community or society, having a skilled or other reputation, being prosperous, owning land and displaying one’s status signs-all represent secondary narcissistic supply as well. Whatever would be a status symbol in the community of friends of the narcissist and would be considered a secondary source as achievement in that community. Secondary supply is about the overall image that the lives of the narcissist brings to their friends and relatives. However, if it is to endure, this type of supply requires to be positive, any display of negativity would end up hurting the person, no matter who they may be. It is this type of supply that is also the reserve source for short primary narcissistic supply. However, the narcissist uses both in much the same manner.

What is Malignant Narcissism?

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Introduction

Malignant narcissism is a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behaviour, aggression, and sadism.

Grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families and organisations in which they are involved, and dehumanises the people with whom they associate.

Malignant narcissism is a hypothetical, experimental diagnostic category. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), while malignant narcissism is not. As a hypothetical syndrome, malignant narcissism could include aspects of NPD alongside a mix of antisocial, paranoid and sadistic personality disorder traits. The importance of malignant narcissism and of projection as a defence mechanism has been confirmed in paranoia, as well as “the patient’s vulnerability to malignant narcissistic regression”.

Brief History

The social psychologist Erich Fromm first coined the term “malignant narcissism” in 1964, describing it as a “severe mental sickness” representing “the quintessence of evil”. He characterised the condition as “the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity”. Edith Weigert (1967) saw malignant narcissism as a “regressive escape from frustration by distortion and denial of reality”, while Herbert Rosenfeld (1971) described it as “a disturbing form of narcissistic personality where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized.”

On 11 May 1968, psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg presented his paper Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities, from the work of the Psychotherapy Research Project of The Menninger Foundation, at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Boston. Kernberg’s paper was first published in hard copy on 01 January 1970. In Kernberg’s 1968 paper, first published in 1970 in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), the word ‘malignant’ does not appear once, while ‘pathological’ or ‘pathologically’ appears 25 times.

Developing these ideas further, Kernberg pointed out that the antisocial personality was fundamentally narcissistic and without morality. Malignant narcissism includes a sadistic element creating, in essence, a sadistic psychopath. In his article, “malignant narcissism” and psychopathy are employed interchangeably. Kernberg first proposed malignant narcissism as a psychiatric diagnosis in 1984. So far it has not been accepted in any of the medical manuals, such as the ICD-10 or the DSM-5.

Kernberg described malignant narcissism as a syndrome characterised by a NPD, antisocial features, paranoid traits, and egosyntonic aggression. Other symptoms may include an absence of conscience, a psychological need for power, and a sense of importance (grandiosity). Psychoanalyst George H. Pollock wrote in 1978: “The malignant narcissist is presented as pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioral regulation with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism”. Of note, M. Scott Peck uses malignant narcissism as a way to explain evil.

Kernberg believed that malignant narcissism should be considered part of a spectrum of pathological narcissism, which he saw as ranging from Hervey M. Cleckley’s antisocial character (what is now referred to as psychopathy or antisocial personality) at the high end of severity, through malignant narcissism, and then to narcissistic personality disorder at the low end. So according to Kernberg’s hierarchy, psychopathy trumps malignant narcissism as a more extreme form of pathological narcissism. Malignant narcissism can be distinguished from psychopathy, according to Kernberg, because of the malignant narcissist’s capacity to internalise “both aggressive and idealized superego precursors, leading to the idealization of the aggressive, sadistic features of the pathological grandiose self of these patients”.

According to Kernberg, the psychopath’s paranoid stance against external influences makes him or her unwilling to internalise even the values of the “aggressor”, while malignant narcissists “have the capacity to admire powerful people, and can depend on sadistic and powerful but reliable parental images”. Malignant narcissists, in contrast to psychopaths, are also said to be capable of developing:

“some identification with other powerful idealized figures as part of a cohesive ‘gang’…which permits at least some loyalty and good object relations to be internalized… Some of them may present rationalized antisocial behavior – for example, as leaders of sadistic gangs or terrorist groups…with the capacity for loyalty to their own comrades.”

Psychopathy

The terms malignant narcissist and psychopath are sometimes used interchangeably because there is little to clinically separate the two. Individuals with narcissistic personality disorder, malignant narcissism, and psychopathy all display similar traits which are outlined in the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. The test has 20 items scored on a three-point scale, with a rating of:

  • 0 if it does not apply at all;
  • 1 if there is a partial match or mixed information; and
  • 2 if there is a reasonably good match.

With a maximum score of 40, the cut-off for the label of psychopathy is 30 in the US and 25 in the UK. High scores are positively associated with measures of impulsivity and aggression, Machiavellianism, persistent criminal behaviour, and negatively associated with measures of empathy and affiliation.

Malignant narcissism is highlighted as a key area in the study of mass murder, sexual, and serial murder.

Contrast with Narcissism

The primary difference between narcissism and malignant narcissism is that malignant narcissism includes comorbid features of other personality disorders and thus consists of a broader range of symptoms than pathological narcissism (NPD). In the term “malignant narcissism”, the word “malignant” is used in the sense of the word described by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “passionately and relentlessly malevolent: aggressively malicious”. In malignant narcissism, NPD is accompanied by additional symptoms of antisocial, paranoid and sadistic personality disorders. While a person with NPD will deliberately damage other people in pursuit of their own selfish desires, they may regret and will in some circumstances show remorse for doing so. Because traits of antisocial personality disorder are present in malignant narcissism, the “malignant narcissist” suffers from a more pervasive lack of empathy than someone with NPD alone and will lack feelings of guilt or remorse for the damage they cause. Since sadism is often considered a feature of malignant narcissism, an individual with the syndrome may not only lack feelings of guilt or remorse for hurting others but may even derive pleasure from the gratuitous infliction of mental or physical pain on others. These traits were formerly codified in the DSM-III under sadistic personality disorder (SPD).

Therapy

Typically in the analysis of the malignant narcissist, “the patient attempts to triumph over the analyst by destroying the analysis and himself or herself” – an extreme version of what Jacques Lacan described as “that resistance of the amour-propre… which is often expressed thus: ‘I can’t bear the thought of being freed by anyone other than myself'”.