Narcissism

A New Theory

Neville Symington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367325640
• eBook ISBN: 9780429916472
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Neville Symington approaches the well-trodden subject of narcissism, offers us fresh insights from his long clinical experience with patients suffering from this disorder, and sketches some highlights in the history of the concept of narcissism.

CHAPTER ONE

Setting the stage

Our task is to try to understand what narcissism is; I am still thinking about the subject and feel dissatisfied with certain things I have to say. Part of the reason for this is, I think, the model of the mind with which we are working. Certainly for most of us who are psychoanalysts, or who have been influenced by psychoanalytic theory, the model we have of the mind is inadequate to explain the phenomenon of narcissism, so much groundwork is needed to establish a model of the mind that makes the phenomenon comprehensible.

According to James Strachey, the word “narcissism” was introduced by the sexologists Havelock Ellis and Paul Näcke. The term “narcissus-like” was used by Havelock Ellis in 1898, and in the following year the term “narcismus” was introduced by Paul Näcke. In the intervening 90 years narcissism has become a household word; in analytic literature, given the great preoccupation with the subject, the term is used more than almost any other.

The myth of Narcissus

The story of the myth of Narcissus is told by Robert Graves (1960) in his book, The Greek Myths:

Narcissus was a Thespian, the son of the blue Nymph Leiriope, whom the River-god Cephisus had once encircled with the windings of his streams, and ravished. The seer Teiresias told Leiriope, the first person ever to consult him_ “Narcissus will live to a ripe old age, provided that he never knows himself”.

(You may remember that the old blind seer Teiresias came into the story of Oedipus.) That prophecy, “live to a ripe old age, provided that he never knows himself”, is crucial in the understanding of narcissism.

Anyone might excusably have fallen in love with Narcissus, even as a child, and when he reached the age of sixteen, his path was strewn with heartlessly rejected lovers of both sexes; for he had a stubborn pride in his own beauty.

Among these lovers was the nymph Echo, who could no longer use her voice, except in foolish repetition of another’s shout. One day when Narcissus went out to net stags, Echo stealthily followed him through the pathless forest, longing to address him, but unable to speak first. At last Narcissus, finding that he had strayed from his companions, shouted: “Is anyone here?”

“Here!” Echo answered.

“Come!”

“Come!”

“Why do you avoid me?”

“Why do you avoid me?”

“Let us come together here!”

“Let us come together here!” repeated Echo. [pp. 286–287]

It is significant in the myth that Narcissus is with Echo. A feature of the person dominated by narcissistic currents is to be just an echo of the other, and that echo can be quite sophisticated. One has a fair task, as a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist, recognizing when the patient is just carrying on a dialogue within a narcissistic structure.

“Let us come together here!” repeated Echo and joyfully rushed from her hiding place to embrace Narcissus. Yet he shook her off roughly and ran away. “I will die before you ever lie with me!” he cried.

“Lie with me!” Echo pleaded.

But Narcissus had gone, and she spent the rest of her life in lonely glens, pining away for love and mortification, until only her voice remained.

One day, Narcissus sent a sword to Ameinius, his most insistent suitor, after whom the river Ameinius is named; it is a tributary of the river Helisson, which flows into the Alpheius. Ameinius killed himself on Narcissus’s threshold, calling on the gods to avenge his death.

Artemis heard the plea and made Narcissus fall in love, though denying him love’s consummation. At Donacon in Thespia, he came upon a spring, clear as silver, and never yet disturbed by cattle, birds, wild beasts, or even by branches dropping off the trees that shaded it; and as he cast himself down, exhausted, on the grassy verges to slake his thirst, he fell in love with his own reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful boy who confronted him, but he presently recognized himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened.

Echo, although she had not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed “Alas! Alas!” as he plunged a dagger into his breast, and also the final “Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!” as he expired. His blood soaked the earth, and there sprang up the white narcissus flower with its red corolla. [pp. 287–288]

Positive and negative narcissism

I now want to say a few words about positive and negative narcissism. A habit has grown up of talking about narcissism in this way, and of describing these two aspects as different entities. I believe this to be a mistake, in that the positive and the negative always go together—one does not exist without the other. It may be just a semantic issue, in that someone talking of positive narcissism, for instance, may be talking about self-esteem or self-confidence. I prefer not to call that positive narcissism, however, because I think it leads to confusion. C. S. Lewis (1988), in his book, Surprised by Joy, makes a distinction between what he calls self-centredness and selfishness, which is relevant here:

Such is my ideal, and such then (almost) was the reality, of “settled, calm, Epicurean life”. It is no doubt for my own good that I have been so generally prevented from leading it, for it is a life almost entirely selfish. Selfish, not self-centred; for in such a life my mind would be directed towards a thousand things, not one of which is myself. The distinction is not unimportant. One of the happiest men and most pleasing companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On the other hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose lives were nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, because self-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either condition will destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man who takes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks of other things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself, and whose very kindnesses are a continual reproach, a continual demand for pity, gratitude and admiration. [pp. 116–117]

While self-centredness does not express fully what narcissism is, if it is taken as a provisional definition, it makes some sort of sense to talk about “healthy selfishness”. On the other hand, it is meaningless to talk about healthy self-centredness. If, by positive narcissism, confidence in oneself is meant, then fair enough—but that is not narcissism. In the analytic world there is a tremendous confusion of tongues, and the result is that people are often talking at cross-purposes.

The failure of psychotherapists to treat narcissism

I believe that we psychotherapists have largely failed when it comes to narcissism. There are various criteria that signal the presence of narcissism, one of which is the capacity to receive criticism. One might think that someone who has been through a course of intensive psychotherapy would be able to receive criticism, but this is frequently not the case. Many of us come out of psychotherapy—even extended psychotherapy or psychoanalysis—still suffering from severe narcissistic disorders. Sometimes such disorders are crippling. This is a serious situation: further on, I argue that most mental disorders flow from narcissism.

A number of times I have treated patients who had had previous analyses or therapies, and in several cases I have been struck by the fact that narcissism had not even been addressed, as far as I could see. A couple of years ago an analyst from London, Sydney Klein, gave a private talk to analysts on autism. In that talk he said that over the years he had conducted about 16 analyses that had been either second or third analyses, and he had discovered in all of them what he referred to as an autistic area that had been left untouched, or certainly unresolved. I think that narcissism and autism are a unitary clinical entity, and I will explore this later.

Karl Abraham said that the aim of psychoanalysis was to put things right at the foundation of the personality, to insure the individual against future mental illness. Obviously this is an ideal and we are bound to fall short of it in our work, but my observation is that we are falling very far short of it. I think that we might even have lost sight of the ideal and have become satisfied with symptomatic relief. It is quite possible for someone to feel a great deal better after therapy, even without narcissistic issues having been addressed, but in the event of a crisis the individual will experience the need for therapy once more.

The importance of recognizing narcissistic currents

It is extremely important to be able to recognize people dominated by a narcissistic character structure. For one thing, such people, however gifted, cause considerable damage to the social structures to which they belong—to their families, their work organizations, clubs, societies.

Narcissism is not only present in individuals but it also contaminates organizations. One of the ways of differentiating a good-enough organization from one that is pathological is through its ability to exclude narcissistic characters from key posts. I have worked in organizations so riven with narcissistic currents that they seemed to have been present since the organization’s foundation, and under such circumstances little creative work was done. I have also worked in organizations where, despite there being much narcissism and envy, creative development was fostered. In these places highly narcissistic people were usually prevented from obtaining senior positions. It is important to be able to make some sort of diagnosis of organizations with regard to narcissistic currents.

Of greatest importance, however, is the ability to recognize narcissistic currents in our own characters. None of us is free from narcissism, and one of the fundamental aspects of the condition is that it blinds us to self-knowledge. You will often hear people say, “Oh, I’m very narcissistic”, or “It was a wound to my narcissism”. Such comments are not a true recognition of the condition; they are throw-away lines. Really to recognize narcissism in oneself is profoundly distressing.

Bettelheim, in his book, Freud and Man’s Soul (1983), writes lucidly about the degree to which many people in the psychoanalytic and therapeutic professions are blinded from knowledge of themselves:

For nearly forty years, I have taught courses in psychoanalysis to American graduate students and residents in psychiatry. Again and again, I have been made to see how seriously [he is talking about the English translations here] the English translations impede students’ efforts to gain a true understanding of Freud and of psycho-analysis. Although most of the bright and dedicated students whom it has been my pleasure to teach were eager to learn what psycho-analysis is all about, they were largely unable to do so. Almost invariably, I have found the psycho-analytic concepts had become for these students a way of looking only at others from a safe distance—nothing that had any bearing on them. They observed other people through the spectacles of abstraction, tried to comprehend them by means of intellectual concepts, never turning their gaze inward to the soul or their own unconscious. This was true even of the students who were in analysis themselves—it made no appreciable difference. Psycho-analysis had helped some of them to be more at peace with themselves and to cope with life, had helped others to free themselves of troublesome neurotic symptoms, but their misconceptions about psycho-analysis remained. Psycho-analysis as these students perceived it was a purely intellectual system—a clever, exciting game—rather than the acquisition of insights into oneself and one’s own behaviour which were potentially deeply upsetting. It was always someone else’s unconscious they analysed, hardly ever their own. They did not give enough thought to the fact that Freud, in order to create psycho-analysis and understand the workings of the unconscious, had had to analyse his own dreams, to understand his own slips of the tongue and the reasons he forgot things or made various other mistakes. [pp. 6–7]

What Bettelheim is referring to here is narcissism, which is deeply antagonistic to self-knowledge.

One of the ways a person powerfully dominated by narcissistic currents destroys self-knowledge, as I think most of us know, is by projecting the unwanted aspects of their character—jealousy, envy, sadism, or whatever—and the perfect person into whom the psychotherapist can make that sort of projection is, of course, the patient. For analysts and therapists there is an enormous difference between making an interpretation based on a denial of self-knowledge and making one that arises from a recognition of what is in oneself. It is of no therapeutic value if, when pointing out to patients that they are being cruel, or seem to be behaving in a possessive or jealous way, analysts disown those aspects of themselves. When this is happening either an accusing tone develops between the therapist and the patient or the therapist attempts to reassure the patient, and neither approach is of value.

Someone once told me that Erich Fromm was able to say to a patient, “You are living this self-centred life, you are just feathering your own nest, and most of your problems result from this”, without sounding accusatory. He said these things in such a way that they seemed to be statements of fact, not unbearable traits of which he was ridding himself. It is enormously important, for those of us who see patients, to try to grasp the narcissistic currents in ourselves.

Conceptual tools

Now I want to go through some of the conceptual tools that we need in order to try to grasp narcissism.

First, we need a concept of knowledge. When we talk about knowing something, we generally mean that we have knowledge of something that is real, although, as you probably know, there have been philosophers like Berkeley who believed that reality is an illusion and we cannot know that anything exists outside ourselves. There is a huge difference between something that is known and something that is surmised or felt.

We also need to be able to conceive of psychic realities—realities that cannot be smelled, touched, seen, or heard. Examples of such realities are friendship, an hallucination, a dream, a thought, a feeling, an intuition, an intention, a judgement, truth, goodness, courage, confidence, inhibition, omnipotence, humbleness, cruelty, revenge, self-loathing, hatred, love, guilt, shame, deception. These are realities, in that we are capable of knowing them. They are psychic objects of knowledge. In trying to conceptualize narcissism, I make use of a particular psychic object, which I refer to as the “lifegiver”. I expand on this later.

We attribute qualities, such as goodness and badness, to psychic objects. We judge cruelty to be bad, love to be good, truthfulness to be good, deceit bad, confidence good, inhibition bad, and so on. The notion of there being analytic or therapeutic neutrality regarding qualities of psychic objects is a complete illusion. Every psychotherapist makes judgements, and every patient makes judgements. The patient comes complaining of depression and judges it to be bad, for instance. The therapist may judge the patient’s depression differently, but a judgement is made nevertheless.

We also need some concept of the self and a concept of projection and introjection, the mechanisms through which we have mutual contact with other human beings. Two inanimate objects, two stones on a beach, do not interpenetrate each other, but once we cross that great boundary between the inanimate and the animate world, the capacity for interpenetration of one living thing by another arises.

The F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Setting the stage
• 2. The composite self
• 3. The narcissistic option
• 4. The intentionality of the self
• 5. The erotization of the self
• 6. The phenomenology of narcissism
• 7. The relation between trauma and the narcissistic option
• 8. The reversal of narcissism
• 9. The relation of this theory to other psychoanalytic theories
• 10. The effects of narcissism on character
• Bibliography
• Index