All About Me: Loving a narcissist. Simon Crompton

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СКАЧАТЬ said that narcissism was a natural part of the human makeup, but also a characteristic that if taken to extremes can prevent us from having meaningful relationships. In 1914, Freud distinguished between primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism, he said, is the love of self in our infancy which precedes our ability to love others. It is a natural and essential stage of the child’s development, when a child asserts a sense of identity – learning how to love themselves before they can love anyone else.⁵ This idea of the formation of the ‘self’ in childhood has been built on by many of Freud’s followers in psychoanalysis. The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan, for example, put a new twist on primary narcissism by developing a theory of the ‘mirror phase’, where babies develop a sense of self and others only once they have recognised their own reflection in a mirror.

      Secondary narcissism is something very different – a form of self-love that people can develop in adulthood when they should be well beyond primary narcissism and should have learned to find external objects for their love. Secondary narcissism is a form of regression back to childish self-absorption, as a result of having tried to reach out to objects of desire, but failing to gain their love or attention. It is, in effect, a means of protecting yourself against further rejection.

      These ideas are still relevant to modern and emerging ideas of narcissism. When we talk about narcissists today, we are referring to secondary narcissists – people who are stuck in, or reverting to, childish self-centredness. Freud’s work demonstrates that ‘narcissist’ isn’t just an abusive term – it’s something inherent in all of us, and something that we are all liable to fall back on as a result of emotional trauma.

      Freud’s definitions are important because they set the groundwork for our increasing understanding that people become narcissistic and self-regarding not because they are simply ‘bad’ or ‘difficult’ but because they are vulnerable. There’s now a widely-held belief that real narcissism in adulthood usually has its roots in emotional rejection or deprivation from one’s parents in childhood. It’s a pattern born of a lack of empathy and love, and results in people being in turn unable to empathise or love. Narcissists breed narcissists, because their behaviour forces their children to create an artificial idea of grandiosity and self-esteem around themselves. It’s self-defence.

      Many psychoanalysts have pointed out that it’s not just our relationships with our parents that can encourage narcissistic tendencies – it’s our relationship with other people and society too. Freud’s followers have picked up on the term ‘narcissism’, because it seems increasingly relevant to our modern times.

      As psychoanalyst Marion F Solomon says, many people today suffer from ‘a narcissistic vulnerability that permeates all their relationships’. This is the result, she says, of a number of converging factors, including ‘the messages that society sends us, the emotional failure between parents and children, and the history of failed relationships that has today become part of the life of many.’ Narcissistically vulnerable people desperately wish to be involved in a relationship, but have unreasonable expectations of what they should give to the relationship, and what they should get from it. This inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration for both themselves and their partners.⁶

      Because of our experiences, some of us have strong narcissistic traits in adulthood, and others have milder ones. All of us will have narcissistic traits as children. And all of us are likely to revert to narcissistic, self-centred patterns of behaviour at times of stress. We all become needy and demanding when we feel we can’t cope. This has a name: it’s called reactive narcissistic regression. Even if you’re the most empathetic, selfless person around, you’ll have some understanding of narcissism if you try to imagine how it feels when you’ve been really upset and are demanding attention. Say you’ve just had an argument with someone you love. You’ll cry and make a scene and make demands on people – probably your friends – that you would never do normally. You might even exaggerate your own achievements a bit to boost your own sense of power, and compensate for the vulnerability you are feeling inside. ‘I told him like it was … I’m too good for him, and he knows it.’ That’s you, essentially, reverting to a primary narcissistic state. The thing about people with strong narcissistic traits is that they are like that most of the time.

      WHY NARCISSISM IS GETTING SERIOUS

      In the 1970s, two psychoanalysts from America – Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg – played a major part in defining modern ideas of narcissism. Though they disagreed on the causes, they put forward ideas of narcissism as a ‘disorder of the personality’ that has been widely taken up in popular American culture. Kohut was the man who first coined the phrase ‘narcissistic personality disorder’, saying that some of the traits that Freud and other psychoanalysts had classified as narcissistic could be so problematic in some people that they constituted a personality disorder.⁷

      This had a real impact, particularly after 1980, when narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD, was recognised as a distinct mental health disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Examples of personality disorders in the same category as narcissistic personality disorder include antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder.

      Suddenly, narcissism had distinct ‘diagnostic criteria’, and NPD was a clinical term that could be legitimately used of people who have ‘an excessive sense of how important they are’, and who ‘demand and expect to be admired and praised by others and are limited in their capacity to appreciate others’ perspectives’.⁸

      This is a controversial area. Not everyone, including some psychiatric authorities in the UK, is convinced that moving psychoanalytical theories about personality types and the evolution of a sense of self into the arena of diagnosable mental-health problems is helpful – particularly when the treatment for that particular illness is unknown. Their fears are perhaps supported by what has happened in the United States since word about NPD hit the agony aunts, the chat shows and the pages of dozens of books.

      Therapy-literate Americans are now rushing to diagnose others, and themselves, as narcissistic personalities – not in a ‘It’s natural for us all to have narcissistic tendencies but some are more narcissistic than others’ kind of way, but in a ‘narcissism is bad’ kind of way, involving much pointing of accusatory fingers. The word ‘toxic’ is now regularly attached to the word ‘narcissism’, and millions of American men and women are taking the diagnostic criteria for NPD, overlaying them onto their foundering relationships, and condemning their partners as narcissistic personalities.

      There’s much breast-beating too. Bestselling relationship authors Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, who wrote the book Help! I’m in Love with a Narcissist!, confess that when they started to research their book, they began to see aspects of themselves in many of the case histories and behaviour patterns they were writing about. ‘It is a terrible thing to be writing a book about “awful behaviors” and “awful people” only to realise that you share some of their characteristics’ they wrote.

      Perhaps they should take stock of their own wise advice later in their book, where they point out that most of us have some narcissistic or selfish characteristics. ‘That doesn’t make us awful or completely unpleasant to know. It does make us human, with room for improvement.’⁹

      Because the truth is that narcissistic personality disorder and narcissism are closely related, but not the same thing. They are different points on a continuum of human characteristics – just as obsessive attention to detail and genuine autism are points at different ends of a spectrum of human characteristics. So narcissism may be difficult, ‘toxic’ and even dangerous in some people, but it’s important to see it in a wider perspective. If only because, if it’s in all of us to some extent, we cannot use it too readily as a weapon to hurl at others. The СКАЧАТЬ