In an examination of developmental considerations, Bednar, Wells, and Peterson (1989) suggest that feelings of competence and the self-esteem associated with them are enhanced in children when their parents provide an optimum mixture of acceptance, affection, rational limits and controls, and high expectations. In a similar way, teachers are likely to engender positive feelings when they provide such a combination of acceptance, limits, and meaningful and realistic expectations concerning behavior and effort (Lamborn et al., 1991). Similarly, teachers can provide contexts for such an optimum mixture of acceptance, limits, and meaningful effort in the course of project work as described by Katz and Chard (1989).”
(Distinctions between Self-Esteem and Narcissism: Implications for Practice ? ERIC database)
Kohut, as we said, regarded Narcissism as the final product of the failing efforts of parents to cope with the needs of the child to idealize and to be grandiose (for instance, to be omnipotent).
Idealization is an important developmental path leading to Narcissism. The child merges the idealized aspects of the images of the parent (Imago in his terminology) with those wide sectors of the image of the parent which are cathected (infused) with object libido (=in which the child invests the energy that he reserves to Objects). This exerts an enormous and all-important influence on the re-internalization processes (=the processes in which the child re-introduced the Objects and their images into his mind) which are right for each of the successive phases. Through these processes, two permanent nuclei of the personality are constructed:
a. The basic, neutralizing texture of the psyche and
b. The ideal Superego
Both of them are characterized by an invested instinctual Narcissistic cathexis (=invested energy of self-love which is instinctual in its nature).
At first, the child idealizes his parents. As he grows, he begins to notice their shortcomings and vices. He withdraws part of the idealizing libido from the images of the parents, which is conducive to the natural development of the Superego. The Narcissistic sector in the child’s psyche remains vulnerable throughout its development. This is largely true until the Child re-internalizes the ideal parent image. Also, the very construction of the mental apparatus can be tampered with by traumatic deficiencies and by object losses right through the Oedipal period (and even in latency and in adolescence).
The same effect can be attributed to traumatic disappointment by objects.
Disturbances leading to the formation of NPD can be thus grouped:
1. Very early disturbances in the relationship with an ideal object. These lead to structural weakness of the personality which develops a deficient and/or dysfunctional stimuli filtering mechanism. The ability of the individual to maintain a basic Narcissistic homeostasis of the personality is damaged.
Such a person will suffer from diffusive Narcissistic vulnerability.
2. A disturbance occurring later in life – but still pre-Oedipally – will effect the pre-Oedipal formation of the basic fabric of the control, channeling and neutralizing of drives and urges. The nature of the disturbance has to be a traumatic encounter with the ideal object (such as a major disappointment). The symptomatic manifestation of this structural defect is the propensity to re – sexualize drive derivatives and internal and external conflicts either in the form of fantasies or in the form of deviant acts.
3. A disturbance formed in the Oedipal or even in the early latent phases – inhibits the completion of the Superego idealization. This is especially true of a disappointment related to an ideal object of the late Pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal stages, where the partly idealized external parallel of the newly internalized object is traumatically destroyed.
Such a person will possess a set of values and standards – but he will forever look for ideal external figures from whom he will aspire to derive the affirmation and the leadership that his insufficiently idealized Superego cannot supply.
Everyone agrees that a loss (real or perceived) at a critical junction in the psychological development of the Child – forces him to refer to himself for nurturing and for gratification. The Child ceases to trust others and his ability to develop object love or to idealize is hampered. He is constantly shadowed by the feeling that only he can satisfy his emotional needs and he regards.
The Narcissist is born into a dysfunctional family. It is characterized by massive denials, both internal (”you do not have a real problem, you are only pretending”) and external (”you must never tell the secrets of the family to anyone”). The whole family unit suffers from an affective dysfunction. It leads to affective and other personality disorders displayed by all the members of the family and ranging from obsessive – compulsive disorders to hypochondriasis and depression.
Such families are reclusive and autarkic. They actively reject and encourage the rejection of social contacts.
This inevitably leads to defective or partial socialization and differentiation and to problems with sexual identity.
This attitude is sometimes applied even to other members of the extended family. The nuclear family feels emotionally or financially deprived or threatened by them. It reacts with envy, rejection, self-isolation and rage.
Constant aggression and violence are permanent features of such families. The violence can be verbal (degradation, humiliation) and up to severe cases of psychological, physical and sexual abuse.
Trying to rationalize and intellectualize its unique position and to justify it, the family resorts to emphasizing logic, cost effectiveness, and calculations of feasibility. It is a transactional approach to life and it regards knowledge as an expression of superiority and as an advantage. These families encourage excellence – mainly cerebral and academic – but only as means to an end. The end is usually highly Narcissistic (”to be famous/rich/to live well, etc.”).
Some Narcissists react by creatively escaping into rich, imagined worlds in which they exercise total physical and emotional control over their environment. But all of them react by diverting libido, which should have been object-oriented to their own Self.
The source of all the Narcissist’s problems is the foreboding sensation that human relationships invariably end in humiliation, betrayal and abandonment. This belief is embedded in them during their very early childhood by their parents.
But the Narcissist always generalizes. To him, any emotional interaction and any interaction with an emotional component is bound to end this way. Getting attached to a place, a job, an asset, an idea, an initiative, a business, or a pleasure is bound to end as badly as getting attached to a human being. This is why the Narcissist avoids intimacy, real friendships, love, other emotions, commitment, attachment, dedication, perseverance, planning, emotional or other investment, morale or conscience (which are only meaningful if there is a tomorrow to consider and to believe in), developing a sense of security, or pleasure.
The Narcissist emotionally invests only in things which he feels that he is in full, unmitigated control of: himself and, at times, not even that.
I. The Narcissist’s Mother – A Suggestion for an Integrative Framework The whole structure of the Narcissistic Disorder is a derivative of the prototypical relationship with a Mother.
This Mother usually was inconsistent and frustrating in her behaviour. By being so, she thwarted the Narcissist’s ability to trust others and to feel secure with them. By emotionally deserting – she fostered fears of being abandoned and the nagging sensation that the world is a dangerous, unpredictable place. She became a negative, devaluating voice, which was duly incorporated in the Superego.
Our natural state is anxiety, the readiness – physiological and mental – to “fight or flight”. Research indicates that the Primary Object (PO) is really the child, rather than its mother. The child identifies itself as an object almost at its birth. It explores itself, reacts and interacts, it monitors its bodily reactions to internal and external inputs and stmuli. The flow of blood, the peristaltic movement, the swallowing reflex, the texture of saliva, the experience of excretion, being wet, thirsty, hungry or content – all these cannot but alienate the sefless child from its self. It assumes the position of observer and integrator early on. As Kohut said, it has both a Self and the ability to relate to objects. This intimacy with a familiar and predictable object (oneself) is a primary source of security and the precursor to emerging narcissism. The mother is only a Secondary Object (SO). It is the second object that the child learns to relate to and it has the indispensable developmental advantage of being transcendental, external to the child. All meaningful others are Auxilliary Objects (AO).
A “good enough” SO serves to extend the lessons of of the PO and apply them to the world at large. The child learns that the external environment can be as predictable and safe as the internal one. This titillating discovery leads to a modification of the naive or primitive narcissism. It recedes to the background allowing more prominent and adaptive strategies to the fore. In due time – and subject to an accumulation of the right positively reinforcing experiences, a higher form of narcissism develops: self-love and self-esteem.
If, however, SO fails, the child reverts back to the PO and to its correlated narcissism. This is a regression in the chronological sense. But it is an adaptive strategy. The emotional consequences of rejection and abuse are too difficult to contemplate. Narcissism ameliorates them by providing a substitute object. This is an adaptive, survival-oriented act. It provides the child with time to “organize and come to grips with its thoughts and feelngs” and perhaps to come back with a different strategy more suited to the new – unpleasant and threatening – data. So the interpretation of this regression as a failure of object love is wrong. The SO, the object chosen as the target of object love, was the wrong object. Object love continues with a different, familiar, object. The child changes objects, not his capacity for object-love or its implementation.
If this failure to establish a proper object-relation persists and is not alleviated, all future objects will be perceived as extensions of the Primary Object (the Self), or the objects of a merger with one’s self, because they will be perceived narcissistically.
There are, therefore, two modes of object perception:
The narcissistic (all objects are perceived as variations of the perceiving Self) and the social (all objects are perceived as others or selfobjects).
As we said earlier, the Core (narcissistic) Self – precedes language or ineraction with others. As the Core Self matures it can develop either into a True Self OR into a False self. The two are mutually exclusive (a person with False Self has no True Self). The distinction of the False Self is that it perceives others narcissistically. As opposed to it, the True Self perceives others socially.
The child constantly compares his first experience with an object (his internalized PO) to his experience with his SO. The internalizations of both the PO and the SO are modified as a result of this process of comparison. The SO is idealized and internalized to form what I call the SEGO (loosely, the equivalent of Freud’s Superego plus the internalized outcomes of social interactions throughout life). The internalized PO is constantly modified to be compatible with input by the SO (for example: ?you are loved?, if the child is lucky). This is the process by which the Ideal Ego is created.
The internalizations of the PO, of the SO and of the outcomes of their interactions (for instance, of the results of the aforementioned constant comparison between them) form what Bowlby calls “working models”. These are constantly updated reprsentations of both the Self and of Meaningful Others (what I call Auxilliary Others). The narcissist’s working models are defective. They pertain to his Self and to ALL others. To the narcissist, ALL others are meaningful because NO ONE has BEEN meaningful hitherto. This forces him to resort to crude abstractions (imagine the sheer number of working models needed). He is forced to dehumanize, objectify, generalize, idealize, devalue, or stereotypize in order to cope with the sheer volume of potential interactions with meaningful objects. In his defense against being overwhelmed, he feels so superior, so inflated – because he is the only REAL three-dimensional character in the whole cast of his personal movie!
Moreover, the narcissist’s working models are rigid and never updated because he does not feel that he is in interaction with real objects. How can one feel empathic, for instance, towards a representation or an abstraction or an object of gratification?
A matrix of possible axes of interaction between Child and Mother can be easily constructed.
The first term in each of these equations of interaction describes the Child, the second the Mother.
The Mother can be:
Accepting (?good enough?)
Domineering
Doting
Indifferent
Rejecting
Abusive
The Child can be:
Attracted
Repelled (due to unjust mistreatment, for instance)
The possible axes are:
Child / Mother
1. Attraction-Attraction / Accepting
(Healthy axis, leads to self love)
2. Attraction?Attraction / Domineering
(Could lead to personality disorders such as Avoidant, Schizoid, to Social Phobia, etc.)
3. Attraction?Attraction / Doting
(Could lead to Cluster B personality disorders)
4. Attraction-Repulsion / Indifferent (passive-aggressive, frustrating)
(Could lead to narcissism, Cluster B disorders)
5. Attraction-Repulsion / Rejecting
(Could lead to personality disorders such as Paranoid, Borderline, etc.)
6. Attraction-Repulsion / Abusive
(Could lead to DID, ADHD, NPD, BPD, AHD, AsPD, PPD, etc.)
7. Repulsion-Repulsion / Indifferent
(Could lead to Avoidant, Schizoid, Paranoid, etc. PDs)
8. Repulsion-Repulsion / Rejecting
(Could lead to personality, mood, anxiety disorders and to impulsive behaviors, such as eating
disorders)
9. Repulsion-Attraction/Accepting
(Could lead to unresolved Oedipal conflicts and to neuroses)
10. Repulsion-Attraction/Domineering
(Could have the same results as axis 6)
11. Repulsion-Attraction/Doting
(Could have the same results as axis 9)
This, of course, is a very rough draft-matrix. Many of the axes can be combined to yield more complex clinical pictures.
But to my mind, it provides an initial, coarse, map of the possible interactions between the PO and the SO in early childhood and the unsavory results of bad objects internalized.
The results of this POSO matrix continue to interact with AO to form a global self evaluation (=self esteem or sense of self worth). This process – the formation of a coherent sense of self-esteem – starts with POSO interactions within the matrix and continues roughly till the age of 8, all the time gathering and assimilating interactions with AO (=meaningful others). First, a model of attachment relationship is formed (approximately the matrix above). This model is based on the internalization of the Primary Object (later, the Self). The attachment interaction with SO follows and following a threshhold quantity of interactions with AO, the more global self is formed.
This process of the formation of a global self rests on the operation of a few critical principles:
(1) The child, as we said earlier, develops a sense of “mother-constancy”. This is crucial. If the child cannot predict and be sure of the behavior (let alone the presence) of his mother from one moment to another – it would find it hard to believe in anything, predict anything and expect anything. Because the self, to some extent (some say: to a large extent), is comprised of the adopted and internalized outcomes of the interactions with others – negative outcomes get to be incorporated in the budding self as well as positive ones. In other words, a child feels lovable and desirable if it is indeed loved and wanted. If it is rejected, it is bound to feel worthless and worthy only of rejection. In due time, the child develops behaviors which ensure its rejection and the outcomes of which thus conform with its self-perception.
(2) The adoption and assimilation of the judgement of others and its incorporation into a coherent sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
(3) The discounting or filtering-out of contrarian information. Once Bowlby’s “working models” are at work, they act as selective membranes. No amount of external information to the contrary will alter these models significantly. Granted, shifts in RELATIVE positions may and do occur in later stages of life. A person can feel more or less accepted, more or less competent, more or less integrated into a given social setting. But these are changes in the values of parameters WITHIN a set equation (=the working model). The equation itself is rearely altered and only by very serious life crises.