A Study of Malignant Narcissism

A Study of Malignant Narcissism offers a unique insight into malignant narcissism,

exploring both its personal and professional aspects and constructing a theoretical
framework that renders its origins and manifestations more accessible.
With reference to his own family dynamic and to 45 years of professional
experience, Richard Wood explores the psychology of malignant narcissism,
positing it as a defence against love. The book first offers an overview of existing
literature before examining relevant clinical material, including an analysis of
Wood’s relationships with his own parents. Wood presents vignettes illustrating
the core dynamics that drive narcissism, illustrated with sections of his father’s
unpublished autobiography and with his patient work. The book makes the case
for malignant narcissism to be considered a subtype of psychopathy and puts
forth a framework setting out the key dynamics that typify these individuals,
including consideration of the ways in which malignant narcissism replicates
itself in varied forms. Finally, Wood examines the impact of narcissistic leader-
ship and compares his theoretical position with those of other clinicians.
This book will be of interest to clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, and
psychotherapists, as well as all professionals working with narcissistic patients.

Richard Wood, PhD, is a psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychologist

based in Ontario, Canada, with over 45 years of experience. He was educated
at Cornell University and Wayne State University.
‘A Study of Malignant Narcissism is an essential contribution to the growing lit-
erature on dangerous personalities and the destruction they cause. Courageous,
searingly honest, and deeply moving … A rare combination of compelling bio-
graphy and crucial work of science, this is essential reading for our disordered
times. An invaluable work of wisdom and experience.’
Ian Hughes, Senior Research Fellow, MaREI Centre at University
College Cork, Ireland

‘This fine book offers a marvellous combination of often hair-raising raw

experience with thoughtful, illuminating reflection and insightful commentary.
Dr Wood throws much needed light on character formation and function,
defensive deformation of personality, … and resilience. This is a courageous,
timely, well written, important book.’
Dr Brent Willock, Founding President of the Toronto Institute
for Contemporary Analysis, Canada

‘With superb prose, Dr. Wood provides a scholarly and informative description of
the characteristics and behaviors of individuals with narcissistic personalities …
For anyone wanting to learn about psychopathy and malignant narcissism, and
how this knowledge might apply to autocratic leaders, this is the book to read.’
Graeme J. Taylor, MD, FRCPC, Psychoanalytic Fellow of the American
Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry and Professor
Emeritus, University of Toronto, Canada
A Study of Malignant Narcissism

Personal and Professional Insights

Richard Wood
Cover image: Colin Anderson Productions pty ltd / Getty Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Richard Wood
The right of Richard Wood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wood, Richard (Psychologist), author.
Title: A study of malignant narcissism : personal and professional insights / by Richard Wood, Ph.D.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and
index. |
Summary: “A Study of Malignant Narcissism offers a unique insight into malignant narcissism,
exploring both its personal and professional aspects and constructing a theoretical framework
which renders its origins and manifestations more accessible. With reference to his own family
dynamic and to 45 years of professional experience, Richard Wood explores the psychology of
malignant narcissism, positing it as a defence against love. The book first offers an overview of
existing literature before examining relevant clinical material, including an analysis of Wood’s
relationships with his own parents. Wood presents vignettes illustrating the core dynamics that
drive narcissism, illustrated with sections of his father's unpublished autobiography and with his
patient work. The book makes the case for malignant narcissism to be considered a subtype of
psychopathy and puts forth a framework setting out the key dynamics that typify these individuals,
including consideration of the ways in which malignant narcissism replicates itself in varied forms.
Finally, Wood examines the impact of narcissistic leadership and compares his theoretical position
with those of other clinicians. This book will be of interest to clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts,
and psychotherapists, as well as all professionals working with narcissistic patients”-- Provided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022004625 (print) | LCCN 2022004626 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032160597 (paperback) | ISBN 9781032160580 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003246923 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Narcissism. | Psychology, Pathological.
Classification: LCC BF575.N35 W66 2022 (print) | LCC BF575.N35 (ebook) | DDC 616.85/854--
dc23/eng/20220511
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004625
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004626

ISBN: 978-1-032-16058-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-16059-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24692-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
To my spouse, Mary Walton, whose inspired love made this book
possible and to my mentors, Dr. Kenneth Davidson, Dr. Paul Lerner,
and Dr. Ray Freebury whose warmth, gentleness, and wisdom helped
me become human.
Contents

Preface viii
Acknowledgements xv

1 Establishing an Attitude of Skepticism 1

2 Literature Review of Malignant Narcissism and Related Constructs 7
3 Mother 42
4 The Face of Narcissism – Father: Foundational Ideas 52
5 The Face of Narcissism – Father: The Nature of Relationships 71
6 The Face of Narcissism – Father: There Can Only be One God 82
7 The Dark Side – Father: Cruelty 89
8 The Cost of Narcissism: Clinical Depression and Complex Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder 100
9 Origins of Narcissism – My Father’s Autobiographies 114
10 The Case for Narcissism as Psychopathy 139
11 Formulation of Narcissism 146
12 Legacies of Narcissism – Impact on the Psyche 169
13 Legacies of Narcissism – Malignant Narcissistic Leadership and
the State as a Narcissistic Entity 182
14 Reflections 196

Index 204
Preface

This is a book that I have known I would have to write eventually. While
most of the ideas that inform this book declared themselves to me in my 40s
as I struggled to make sense of my own experience with my family and, of
course with my patients, it was always a book I planned to dedicate myself to
once I had substantially retired. This is a piece of work that I have both
looked forward to and dreaded. I knew that if the book was to be understood
it would require me to share my inner life with frightening candor. While I
am very open with my friends and my loved ones, finding deep sharing very
meaningful and sustaining, my circle of intimates is relatively small and very
familiar to me, allowing me to navigate my way through my world in a way
that feels mostly manageable.
A work of the kind that I am embarking upon, however, requires me to
open doors to any who would choose to read what I have written. Doing so
feels like an enormously uncomfortable venture and a very unsafe one. Off-
setting what I can only describe as an imposing sense of trepidation is my
hope and – compellingly – my conviction that what I have come to under-
stand will better enable others to more deeply appreciate the human condition
that defines us.
After some deliberation, I have had to admit to myself that I cannot ade-
quately disguise case file material in a way that would ensure, to my satisfac-
tion, that not only would patient identity be protected, but that patients could
not recognize themselves when they read this book. I appreciate that many
other authors have quite usefully and instructively included case or clinical
material in their discussion of clinical entities. Much of this material has been
helpful to me personally in my learning journey. Now that I am faced with
the task, however, of incorporating my own work with patients into my text, I
cannot conceive of doing so in a way that would not cause potential harm to
a patient who comes to realize that I am talking about him or her. Even given
prior permission/approval and a chance for a previous patient to review
material I have written; I am well aware that with the unfolding of any
attention this book receives there may be unintended consequences for such
people that neither I nor they can foresee. As a consequence, I will only talk
 Preface ix

about broad patterns or generalities that seemed to typify the two major
groups of patients that I worked with – narcissistic personality disorders and
the people that they impacted.
Finally, I have deep concern about the impact such an intimate look at a
psychologist’s personal struggle and his inner world might have upon those
many people with whom I have worked over 40 years of practice. Inevitably,
alarming and disconcerting for some, possibly shattering idealizations that
people relied upon to help them heal and, perhaps simultaneously, affirming
of their own humanity and the many variegated forms through which
humanity expresses itself. Equally prominent for me is my awareness of those
people who might choose to seek help for themselves in the future who might
be dissuaded by a frightening view of a therapist’s pain.
So, all in all, not such an easy work to consummate.
Psychotherapy itself, in my view, is an immensely personal undertaking,
requiring a therapist to repeatedly draw upon their own experience and their
own trauma to better understand a patient. Doing so demands endless – and
probably always flawed – self-examination side-by-side companion personal
therapy that punctuates the life of a therapist. The process is necessarily
messy, ambiguous, and imperfect. Even with the support of intermittent psy-
chotherapy of one’s own and peer collaboration, a therapist can expect that he
or she will inevitably lose their way many, many times during the course of
their work. Sometimes patients evoke counter responses in a therapist that the
therapist finds too deeply disconcerting to contain. Sometimes patient trauma
activates the therapist’s own traumatic experiences, immersing the therapist in
a process called vicarious re-traumatization. Or sometimes the therapist’s diffi-
culty with their own lives at a particular point in time means that doing their
job – listening, empathizing, understanding – becomes exceptionally challen-
ging. Potential sources of compromise for a therapist are endless. Not all of
them, even with extensive training, can be anticipated. Unless a therapist is
possessed of exhaustive self-knowledge and exhaustive knowledge of the human
condition – which none of us can be – a continuing commitment to try to know
ourselves as well as we can is the best that any of us can do. This is the work of a
lifetime and it is always incomplete, but without it there is little chance that we
can recover ourselves and help the people we are meant to help when we get in
over our heads. Getting in over one’s head with greater frequency than one
would like, I would maintain, is a constant of therapeutic work.
Even with a reasonable (but certainly always imperfect) understanding of
who we are, where we come from, and what we have come to be, any of us,
whether we are therapists or not, must still face a profoundly challenging
struggle as we attempt to alter patterns and defenses that define us. Absent
such an imperfect understanding – and for many people all but the most
superficial look at the self is too painful to bear – relative blindness renders
the possibility of becoming more caring, more generative, and more loving
human beings that much more remote.
x Preface

I believe that because the imperfect and messy process of looking at the self
can be so disruptive, much of modern mental health initiative has become
variably programmable, relieving therapists of at least some of the uncertainty
and discomfort more extensive investigation of the self can create. Within the
context of programmable work, therapists enjoy the benefit of more or less
knowing what they are to do during each session. Therapist focus is on
objectively reproducible technique. Programmable interventions also seem to
be particularly amenable to numeric evaluation of therapy success. Both
therapist and patient, then, have the reassurance of being able to confirm
progress, session by session, towards realization of certain identified goals.
Because programmable therapy tends to be short-term in nature, there is
often not time to get stuck in the intricacies of either the patient’s or the
therapist’s psyches. Therapeutic intervention is highly replicable and is
ordained by clearly elucidated steps that define process. It is a good compa-
nion to an age that demands declarative answers and numeric verification.
It is argued by many in our contemporary surround that which cannot be
quantified cannot be science; that that which cannot realize objective ver-
ification through vigorous research paradigm cannot produce real scientific
data. But unless we look at what is happening inside us, we ignore who we
are. Numbers can only capture some of these realities; words, it seems to me,
do far better. Words, then, become the core tools and the essential means that
we have to rely upon to make sense out of the self. Words can capture nuance,
variegation, and complexity of thought and feeling in a way that still eludes
algorithms and quantification. Imagine trying to construct even a relatively
brief interaction with a friend that encompasses ambiguities of intent, feeling,
and thought that play themselves out through gestures, facial expressions, and
spoken words with a series of numbers or formulas. How does one assign a
number to insouciance? Or to irony? And how would one convey the poten-
tially complex mix of emotions implicit in eye rolling? To my mind, words
represent the best means that we have – and the most precise – to approx-
imate, to share, and to explore phenomenology. And even with the wonderful
precision and explanatory power of words, we can never fully describe or
define our internal realities – not until even more effective tools than words
present themselves to us. Using words, we construct models and suppositions
of what we think takes place in people, displacing them with better models
and better suppositions as we seem to deepen our awareness of ourselves. The
study of phenomenology progresses, much like any other science, through a
series of insights, reappraisals, missteps and new clarifications. It may feel
more ungovernable, more chaotic, and more elusive than other branches of
science, particularly the physical sciences, but I’m not sure that it is. In the
end, as Mark Twain famously suggested, what we know may ultimately be
limited by our inherently flawed capacity to be honest with ourselves.
Our best but inevitably continuously changing grasp of phenomenology will
have to marry itself to wonderfully, spellbindingly complex interactions with
 Preface xi

epigenetics, genetics, brain function, biochemistry, and the dynamics of dis-

ease and healing.
As an aside, I should emphasize that I do feel programmable and evidence-
based psychotherapeutic interventions, like cognitive behavioral therapy
(CBT), make a significant contribution to mental health remediation, though
perhaps not to the extent that we once believed that they did. Importantly,
they offer an alternative to the risks of intense self-exploration that render
intensive, extended self-awareness work unsuitable for many people; they
create a therapeutic milieu that is more tolerable for many therapists; they
facilitate training of greater numbers and greater varieties of therapists; and,
not inconsequentially, they make a more affordable form of psychotherapy
(because it is generally shorter-term in nature) available to greater numbers of
people than extended self-awareness work can. Programmable work also
affords people the opportunity to engage in limited self-exploration within the
context of a relatively safe paradigm. Its major drawbacks are its capacity to
address mental health problems characterized by severity, chronicity, and
long-term risk. I would also say that it is less well equipped to provide us with
the full range of tools and conceptualizations that we need to more mean-
ingfully extend our understanding of who we are. Intensive self-awareness
work is better equipped to do the latter, but it can produce painful, dis-
organizing confrontations with the self that may be catastrophic for an indi-
vidual to bear. Great care has to be taken in its application. Because it is
often (though not exclusively) long-term in nature, it also tends to be much
more costly than various forms of programable symptom relief intervention.
Both approaches are valuable, then, and both are possessed of limitation.
And both approaches, of course, represent legitimate approaches to science. It
also has to be said that, at present, there are many forms of mental health
challenge which neither approach can adequately address, even with the help
of psychotropic medication.
The microcosm of the two therapeutic worlds I have just referenced offers
us a portrait of what I think we see in the larger world around us. I would say
that we appear to live in an age in which problems – particularly human
problems – demand simplistic conceptions consisting of soundbites that belie
the extraordinary complexity of the issues we are trying to make sense of.
Binary thinking and binary choices seem to reassure us. Truth can only be
true if it is simple and, one might add, visceral and therefore easily accessible.
Problems must be actionable and solutions realizable through a series of
declarative steps imbued with moral imperative. We must have the one right
or true way to do a thing rather than admit the bewildering array of alter-
natives and ambiguities which real-life complexity creates for us. Complexities
and ambiguities confuse us and frighten us. We’d much prefer the comfort
and reassurance which “simple truths” seem to afford us – even if, in adher-
ing to them, we cause damage to ourselves, to others (including other spe-
cies), and to our planet. Voices which cry for change and for a more accurate
xii Preface

representation of reality are often met with outrage, indignation, denuncia-

tion, and even attempts to obliterate.
We cling to the truths we create for ourselves with ferocity and tenacity.
Those who favor ceaseless exploration and curiosity about the self and about
the world around them (and much of humanity does) are felt to create jeo-
pardy for those who don’t. The inherent tension between these opposing
forces within human nature has the potential to be constructive, enhancing
either growth or stability in orderly turns. When appreciation of nuance and
complexity becomes too prominent or moves ahead too rapidly or in a see-
mingly ungovernable fashion, human nature finds itself locked in combat with
its fractious parts. Combat is real – moral, psychological, economic, and
physical. Old forms of thought and being which define old identities face
compromise. Safety is forfeit. Means of distinguishing friend versus foe and
good versus bad are rendered more tentative. And the self loses the under-
pinnings and moorings that it relies upon to insulate itself against the inher-
ently chaotic and disordered inner world we must all somehow find a way to
live with. It seems that more of our inner lives we wall off to make ourselves
safe, the more dangerous it becomes to tolerate knowing the self. The struggle
to find ways to feel safe with our inner world appears to be a core human
conflict.
I would suggest the war we wage within ourselves has escalated in modern
times. I would also say that we risk annihilation if we do not find the means
to know ourselves better – however imperfectly, but better. Every age prob-
ably perceives its struggles in epic proportions and every age might wish to
say of itself that it is the best and the worst of times. Never, it seems to me,
has humanity shown such promise and never has it been so close to its own
end. It is my hope that in sharing some of the darkness in my own soul and
the souls of those close to me in my family of origin I can help – even if only
in a very limited, incremental way – to extend our willingness to examine who
and what we are. I can make no claim that the models of the human psyche I
piece together here are necessarily accurate representations of the phenomena
I have attempted to capture. At most - assuming they are possessed of any
value at all - they can only be approximations that, hopefully, will give rise to
further discussion which refines and elaborates them in a more useful manner.
This is a book about phenomenology – the study of our inner worlds - that
treats me and four members of my family of origin as the objects of its study.
The subject of this book is narcissism or, more accurately put, narcissistic
personality disorder (NPD). NPD may express itself in a variety of ways and
with varying degrees of severity; my exclusive focus in this work is on one
particularly virulent or extreme form of NPD, which has sometimes been
referred to as “malignant” narcissism. My clinical experience tells me that
NPD is a continuum; it is my view that less virulent forms of NPD can be
seen to share many of the characteristics and psychodynamics of malignant
narcissism, differing largely in the degree to which they manifest themselves. I
 Preface xiii

recognize that many clinicians might disagree with my perspective. I’m also
very cognizant that my clinical experience, while extensive in terms of years,
necessarily represents only a small clinical sample of the ways in which nar-
cissism expresses itself and the causes that lead to its development.
For ease of reference, I will use the terms malignant narcissism, narcissism,
and NPD interchangeably, though I am very much aware that not all narcis-
sism and NPD, though destructive to self and others, is imbued with the
measure of malevolence l am attempting to investigate. It must be emphasized
that some people who qualify for a diagnosis of NPD appear to be capable of
leading relatively successful and productive lives, depending upon the metric
that one applies. I also very much recognize that healthy narcissistic experi-
ence has its own constructive contribution to make to the human develop-
mental process. In entitling my book “A Study in Malignant Naarcissism,”
I hope to remind the reader that I am looking at an extreme variant of NPD.
Malignant, unfortunately, carries with it connotations of pejorative judge-
ment, but it is so compelling as a descriptive term I have decided to use it.
I am not the first clinician to employ the diagnostic construct malignant
narcissism (see, most prominently, Eric Fromm and Otto Kernberg, among
others). Like other writers, I have constructed my own understanding of what
malignant narcissism means based on both personal and clinical experience.
The reader will see for him or herself whether my grasp of this particular
facet of the human condition is possessed of any value.
As I noted earlier, this is a book I have always known I would have to write
and that I had planned to write some time in my early-ish 70s. From my point
of view, the center stage that Narcissistic Personality Disorder has occupied in
recent years did surprise me, though perhaps, in retrospect, it should not have.
It was never my intention to write about a particular individual or series of
individuals, but rather to try to more deeply investigate what narcissistic per-
sonality disorder is. My preference was that I could have written a book about
narcissism without it finding itself center stage in the midst of a maelstrom of
controversy. But Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a profoundly important
human phenomenon that has both served humanity well in some respects
during the course of its evolution and, much more latterly, created potentially
devastating future outcome for virtually our whole planet. Whether I would
wish it so or not, it is timely that we intensify our efforts to understand such a
pivotal variation of the human character.
From one perspective, malignant narcissistic personality disorder must
surely be seen as a core form of human evil. It would appear to play a very
important and at times central role in the various forms of suffering that we
cause one another. In addition to as yet poorly defined biological and genetic
factors, I would maintain that it can be a consequence of devastating early
suffering that gives rise to terrible distortions of the human character. From
this vantage point, it is neither good nor bad, but, rather, a variation of the
human character, like any other, that demands respect, compassion, and
xiv Preface

perception. Indeed, the devitalization of the human spirit it occasions imposes

a lifelong agony and spiritual deadness upon those who must live with it.
While an individual enduring NPD would rarely describe themselves as
damaged, preferring instead to portray their destructiveness as strength, the
torment that endlessly invades their day-by-day life must eventually become
acutely transparent to any who would look.
I will not personally reference contemporary figures in this book. There are
many contemporary figures, I believe, to whom the term Narcissistic Person-
ality Disorder could be applied. To make the book about one or a select few
individuals would defeat its purpose. The reader will see, however, that
aspects of the literature on malignant narcissism and related concepts does
engage clinicians’ assessment of Donald Trump. My focus when I review this
portion of literature will direct itself towards a description of the formulations
that clinicians propose rather than on commentary they make about Trump.
Side-by-side the rest of the literature review, the review chapter will help set
the stage for the reader to critically evaluate my ideas. It also permits me, in
the final chapter of the book, to compare and contrast my ideas with those of
other clinicians.
And so, I begin, for me, a perilous journey.
Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I owe a great debt of thanks to my wife for her extra-
ordinary patience in reviewing endless drafts of this book and for her see-
mingly limitless forbearance as she gently nudged me to structure content in a
way that would make the book more accessible to my readers. She, more than
anyone, knows my story intimately. While I’m aware that it was difficult for
her to read about many aspects of my experience with my father, she per-
sisted, allowing herself to be drawn into some of the darkest corners that I
explore, emerging from them to offer insight and demand clarification where
it was needed. Thank you, Mary, for your companionship during what might
otherwise have been an overwhelming journey had it been undertaken without
your presence.
I must also express a debt of gratitude to the numbers of people who took
the time to review the manuscript, often providing me with painstaking edit-
ing that must have required hours and hours of effort on their part. My old
friend Dr. Timothy Gilmor, with whom I shared the mentorship of Dr. Paul
Lerner and who has remained a dear friend throughout much of the entirety
of my professional life, was one such person. Another long- standing friend,
Dr. Brent Willock, also invested an enormous amount of time and energy in
reviewing the manuscript and in helping me work with it. His contributions,
like Tim’s, were deeply valued. So, too, were the contributions of relatively
new friends, Dr. Donald Edwards and Dr. Susan Andresen, whose acquain-
tance I made subsequent to my relatively recent move to Stratford, Ontario.
Like Tim and Brent, without hesitation they shouldered the task and moved
through a somewhat imposing manuscript that I know Don, at least, found
troubling to confront at times. It is my hope that my friendship with both of
them and their partners will continue throughout my remaining years. Two
other long-established friends, Don Duprey and Gia Levin, also indulged me
by reading my manuscript, offering their own appraisals and thoughts. I also
have to extend special thanks to my dear friend Ron Barzso, who read
through the book several times and passed it out to numbers of friends.
Old friends whom I had the pleasure of reconnecting with, Dr. Ray Freebury
and Dr. Graeme Taylor, not only took the time to read this book, but commented
xvi Acknowledgements

on it extensively and wrote reviews. And, finally, I owe a considerable debt of

thanks to my colleague and long-standing friend, Joel Kumove, for his thoughtful
appraisal of the work.
I also reached out to total strangers – other mental health professionals
whom I knew shared my deep concern about the terrible risks that dangerous
personalities, like malignant narcissists, create for us when they assume posi-
tions of power and leadership. Dr. Ian Hughes was one such like-minded
person. Having read his book, Disordered Minds, I could guess that we would
hold important common ground with one another. I was right. Ian was not
only receptive to my request to read a manuscript from someone he had never
heard of, but demonstrated himself to be extraordinarily generous, proving to
be not only a careful editor, but a source of support, affirmation, and
encouragement. I would wish that our work will continue to lead us in similar
directions in the future so that we might work together again. His presence in my
life has been an unexpected gift. Other mental health professionals – Elizabeth
Mika and Harper West took the time to read parts of the book and offer their
comments. I express my gratitude to them as well.
I also want to extend special thanks to the editors at Routledge – Susannah
Frearson, Kate Hawes, Jana Craddock, and Ellie Duncan – who took an
immediate interest in my book, saw some promise in it, and undertook to
publish it. With your encouragement, the book became more than it was. It’s
very much been a pleasure to work with all of you.
And lastly, I want to express my deep appreciation for my “new” family
member, Melanie Ryan, for her extraordinary support. Without her willingness
to rescue her mother and me from the terrors of working with a Word document
converted from PDF format, I’m not sure this book would have ever made its
way to the publisher. Thank you for your patience and encouragement.
Chapter 1

Establishing an Attitude of
Skepticism

Relying on memory to accurately capture one’s early, formative experiences

may be a fool’s errand predicated, as it has to be, upon unappreciated mis-
conception, misapprehension, and reality bending distortions as one attempts
to protect the self from early insults. Acuity of remembered perception must
always be co-mingled with formidable limitations. While it can plausibly be
argued that the subjective realities that define contemporary inner narratives
and experiences are the only “realities” that a therapist can legitimately deal
with, there is recognition that the subjective realities that define us now may
not correspond in the ways that we think they do with our early experience.
At the moment, differentiating what actually happened to us from what we
think happened is, essentially, an insoluble problem. The more we know
about memory – and the impact that trauma has upon memory – the more
uncertain we must be about what we think we recall. We are left to grope in
the dark with a bewildering array of memories, images, feelings, and variously
successfully articulated experiences that we believe, with varying levels of
conviction, tells us who we are.
As with any scientific endeavor, we begin by cataloguing what we think we
see, establishing points of reference and putting the remembered past and the
actualities that seem to define the present together as best we can, always
reminding ourselves that both past and present (for the present is subject to
the distorting impact of defenses as well) must be viewed with skepticism. At
times, we have the advantage of watching a childhood as it unfolds and seeing
somewhat more directly (but always imperfectly) the effect that a given set of
circumstances has upon varieties of individuals. At other times, we may even
have the benefit of longitudinal study that spans years, if not decades, of a
given individual’s life. Gradually, from a morass of gloriously imperfect
“data” (some psychologists, at least, are said to love ambiguity), patterns
begin to emerge that seem to enjoy various forms of validity confirmation –
some from number science and some from carefully articulated accounts of
the human endeavor. And gradually, cautiously, we began to invest incre-
mental confidence in the science that emerges, always remembering we must
be prepared to replace old ideas with better ones.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-1
2 Establishing an Attitude of Skepticism

When meaningful patterns begin to define themselves, we cling to them

much as a drowning man might cling to a life raft. We need them to be true
in order for our world to feel safer. As the scales fall from our eyes and we
begin to recognize their inadequacy, or feel it, we are cast adrift again to re-
forge other, hopefully better, explanations that will confirm for us there is
order in the world after all. The desolation one feels as patterns, laboriously
constructed, begin to fail us is, to say the least, extraordinarily disconcerting.
Will we ever be capable of finding meaningful answers? Are the answers that
we have found for ourselves the best that we will ever be able to devise – and
if that’s true, how will we survive our ignorance? The wait for new answers –
models that better approximate the human experience – can take years or
even decades. Drifting around in the wilderness of one’s own thoughts and
feelings seems interminable, and interminable engenders potentially suffocat-
ing despair. When new ideas finally do begin to present themselves, particu-
larly when they are integrated into seemingly elegant patterns that appear to
possess enhanced explanatory power, we are besotted by them, desperate, as
we are, for means that allow us to pull ourselves away from the darkness.
Elegance and coherence co-mingled with terrible need make such ideas hard
to resist. Scientific skepticism ought to compel us to stand back from our
creation and question it, but in so doing we evoke jeopardy for a self that is
loath to give up the bits and pieces of order it has discovered. We must be
ever mindful of this vulnerability if we are to test our ideas adequately and if
we are to spur ourselves further into uncharted territory. For me, the answers
that I pieced together and the models that I laboriously assembled into
pleasing patterns felt like lifelines without which my psychic survival would
not be possible. The tension between the desire to invest in them and the need
to divest oneself of them when appropriate was ever present. One had to
willfully remind oneself to resurrect skepticism. The struggle to do so was
certainly not always successful.
I remember all too well the mixture of intense trepidation and anticipation
when I entered graduate school. I would be talking to people and taught by
people who knew about and understood the human condition; they could
help support me in my heretofore hapless efforts to know more about myself
and others. But such “knowing” would come at a cost. It meant that I would
have to allow myself to be known. Very dangerous territory. Like so many
other graduate students in clinical psychology (although I was convinced my
own position was far more precarious than theirs), I imagined the immensity
of my pain and my disordered interior would be both so transparent and so
repellent I could expect to be quickly turned away. The pain I carried also
meant that I was only capable of limited work effort and of episodic successes,
sometimes confirming talent and sometimes deconstructing it. The etiology of
the up and down course typifying my work ethic was beyond my means of
apprehension at the time. I secretly and shamefully concluded this particular
pattern represented moral failing. The frustration of my mentors seemed to
 Establishing an Attitude of Skepticism 3

confirm episodic disappointment and disapproval, apparently reiterating my

self-appraisal. I was unable to recognize that my teachers were truly as per-
plexed as I was, probably because they lacked conceptual frameworks that
have become commonplace in psychology today. It did not occur to me, in
other words, that the state of their knowledge was imperfect. There were
glorious moments when I saw that was so, but, reflexively, I always turned
any misgivings against myself.
As my graduate experience elaborated itself into years, I continued to feel
confused – or probably, more accurately, astonished – that I had not been
rejected. The sense of precariousness that had characterized the early part of
graduate school persisted in succeeding years, in part because I did not see
myself becoming a “knowing” being in the way that my teachers were and, in
no small part, because I still failed to recognize that any of the answers I
acquired through reading or through clinical experience and supervision were,
essentially, only approximations, each of which was possessed of limitations
and flaws that I mistakenly attributed to my own stupidity or backwardness.
It was only with the passage of time that I recognized that I, like everybody
else, was required to endure the painful solitude that I think we experience
when we finally acknowledge there are no absolute answers – only imperfect
ones. I wanted someone else to simply tell me how everything worked in the
human psyche. I had to face the contentious and painful reality that if I
wanted to know, I would have to make my own journey, admitting each step
of the way the best I could do was a better idea.
I implore the reader again to remember that the ideas contained in this
book are only approximations of reality, approximations that may be exten-
ded if they prove worthy, but will most certainly be changed or dismissed as
we come to know more about ourselves.
I also want the reader to be aware that the ideas that I present in this book
about narcissism represent the culmination of many, many other people’s
work. I am building on their shoulders and am deeply indebted to them, not
only for the literature that they produced, but for the personal endeavor that
so many of my clinician colleagues undertook, either directly or indirectly, to
help me grow and learn.
Many of these contributions are described in the literature review chapter
which follows this one. In that chapter, I have tried to capture clinicians’ efforts
to understand the dangerous form of personality organization that this book
concerns itself with. Following completion of the literature review, the reader
will see that I do not incorporate references to literature, with few exceptions, in
the chapters that follow. I very much wanted to create a narrative that is
uncluttered by repetitive literature citation; my intention is to draw my readers’
attention to the ideas and the extensive clinical material in the text, which,
hopefully, I have managed to present in clear and accessible language.
I am inviting my readers to take a very visceral journey with me, one that I
know may render the book hard to read for some people. As the book
4 Establishing an Attitude of Skepticism

unfolds, I will be exposing people to disturbing experiences that I endured

which are meant to elucidate what it felt like to grow up in a narcissistic sur-
round. I not only want the reader to see and hear about what happened; I
want them to feel it. Only by being visceral can this book capture the dis-
torting impact narcissists have upon the people close to them. In each chapter
I have presented a series of experiences and vignettes that, although they may
seem disconnected, are intended to incrementally provide insight into the
nature of narcissism. If at various points along the way people find themselves
confused and lost, their confusion, perplexity, and perhaps distress will serve
to help them better appreciate what my own experience was like. The “voice”
that the reader will find me using to represent my younger self is often an
intellectualized one, very much reflective of my desperation to make sense out
of all the chaos around me and inside me. At various other points, my despair,
my horror, my helplessness, and my repugnance with the changes that were
unfolding inside me will obviously eclipse the intellectualized or clinical tone that
I attempted to establish for myself as a younger person and that I relied upon to
protect me. If people can endure the companionship that I offer them – a
kind of emotional partnership with me and with my childhood and young adult
self – my hope is that the reader who persists will be rewarded with a depth of
understanding of narcissism that would otherwise elude them. I believe that
what I endured is not only indicative of what happens to family members
exposed to a narcissistic other, but to much larger groups of people that may fall
under the narcissist’s sway, including nations that they lead.
Chapter 2 provides an extensive literature review of salient commentary
clinicians have offered with respect to our evolving grasp of what I am refer-
ring to as malignant narcissism. It will not attempt to describe conceptual
work clinicians have undertaken in their efforts to understand forms of nar-
cissism that fall outside the dangerous personality I’m attempting to
investigate.
Chapter 3 will focus on my relationship with my mother, whose own for-
midable and ultimately lethal psychological liabilities rendered her exquisitely
vulnerable to my father’s depredations. Her struggles for cohesion, for iden-
tity, and, ultimately, for survival were a deeply poignant part of my growing
up experience.
Chapters 4 through 6 direct their attention towards a series of vignettes that
are meant to capture some of the core dynamics that I believe drive narcis-
sism. Each chapter builds upon the ideas that the previous chapter explored,
though not always in an obvious way. Because the dynamic forces that char-
acterize narcissism are entwined with one another, it was not possible to dis-
cuss each dynamic as a separate, discrete entity. Invariably, describing one set
of dynamic themes implicates others. I have done my best to avoid repetition
as I look at various facets of narcissism, but I have to beg the reader’s indul-
gence because, in order to explicate new constructs, I have to reference older
ones I have already examined.
 Establishing an Attitude of Skepticism 5

Chapter 4 is a foundational chapter in the discussion of narcissism. As I

review a number of searing experiences with my father, I begin to explore
what they mean. Towards the end of the chapter, I consolidate my reflections
on both my father’s behavior and my own internal responses to it into a
number of important questions.
Chapter 5 investigates the nature of my father’s “friendships.” I identify
various facets of his narcissism that shape the way that he relates to people.
Chapter 6 returns to a theme, via further vignettes, introduced in Chapters
3 and 4: my father’s need to obliterate other personalities and other voices,
replacing them with a version of his own. Chapter 5 also returns to another
theme identified in the first two chapters: the apparent inclination of some of
the people in my father’s sphere of influence to incorporate his voice and his
perspectives as their own with an almost celebratory zeal.
Chapter 7 calls attention to growing similarities between my father’s mani-
festations of cruelty and those I recognize in myself. The parallels between his
inner life and mine are felt to provide damning evidence of my own compro-
mise. I document my growing fear that my humanity, like his, will eventually
be displaced by the ugliness I see accruing inside myself
Chapter 8 reviews two different kinds of psychological damage that were
prominent in my response to my father’s narcissism. The first was clinical
depression and the second complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I discuss
the dynamics of both extensively, closely examining the ways in which each
manifested themselves in my father’s life and in mine.
Chapter 9 looks back at my father’s growing up years and young adulthood
through the lens of the two extensive autobiographical statements he provided
me. The autobiographies themselves have not been included in the body of my
work because they are so lengthy. I have excerpted significant parts of them in
the narrative that Chapter 9 provides. I was deeply appreciative of my father’s
willingness to construct these portraits of his life; they allowed me to pene-
trate narcissism and to piece together a far more deeply compassionate view
of him, which was very much welcome, allowing me to reframe some of the
anguish he had caused. I think there was a part of him that wanted me to
know who he was, where he came from, and how he had come to be the man
that he was. The autobiographies, in their original form, however, are also
obviously self-serving; entirely absent in them is any indication of his aware-
ness of the injury that he imposed on the people around him.
Chapter 10 makes the case that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is
best understood as a subtype of psychopathy. I take strenuous issue with the
DSM-V conception of psychopathy and of NPD, elaborating upon my rea-
sons for doing so. In this chapter I acknowledge the ambiguities and chal-
lenges of the diagnostic process.
Chapter 11 provides a synthesis and an elaboration of all of the ideas about
malignant narcissism in the book into a single framework that attempts to
formally conceive the compelling and most often destructive dynamics that
6 Establishing an Attitude of Skepticism

typify individuals manifesting this extreme form of narcissism. It is intended

to capture the general case, rather than being a reference to my father’s
experience. It is meant to set the stage for the two chapters that follow, which
also broadly reference the issues they are attempting to address rather than
focusing on my father’s dynamics specifically.
Chapter 12 considers the ways in which malignant narcissism replicates
itself, sometimes by manifesting itself in other forms of psychopathy. I remind
the reader of the important similarities that emerged between my psyche and
my father’s as I was progressively exposed to his narcissism. I spend the
greatest portion of the chapter, however, describing my patients’ responses to
the influence of a narcissistic other. Various mechanisms of transmission of
psychopathic traits are outlined in some depth. I also extensively describe
various patterns of psychological injury people living in a narcissistic sur-
round sustain. Characterization of injury and of injurious dynamics unfolds
against the backdrop of what healthy human psychic development can look
and feel like.
Chapter 13, moves from consideration of injuriousness narcissism occasions
for family members and friends to investigation of the impact that narcissistic
leadership has upon the governed. Extending what one sees in the family
context to the context of a larger entity, like a state, produces a model of
narcissistic leadership marked by brutality, toxicity, incitement to violence
and hatred, inflammation of bigotries, generation of conspiracy theories,
blunting of citizens’ humanity, and movement towards an increasingly psy-
chopathic national culture in which bullying and endemic fear progressively
overwhelm decency. Quality of thought faces compromise; intellectual endea-
vor and truth both endure murderous erosion.
Chapter 13 also attempts to make sense of our susceptibility to narcissistic
leadership, identifying numbers of potential factors that seem to contribute to
our willingness to be led by this damaged and very damaging group of
people.
Finally, Chapter 14 attempts to compare and contrast my conceptions with
those of other clinicians. In the process, my intention is to delineate my for-
mulation of malignant narcissism with greater clarity.
Chapter 2

Literature Review of Malignant

Narcissism and Related Constructs

A literature review of the sort that I am about to embark on now, like many
another literature review, offers a microcosmic view of how we acquire
knowledge and of what scientific process looks like. The reader will feel each
of the practitioners I reference in this chapter struggling with challenging
realities that they’re attempting to capture. Each new theory, each new con-
ceptualization potentially moves one closer to a more accurate appreciation
of the complex phenomena one is attempting to understand. Some ideas will
eventually prove themselves to be detours that turn one away from a closer
approximation of truth; some may strike one as deeply insightful, even epi-
phanous, only to disappoint as more knowledge accumulates; and some that
may impress one as inelegant or as perplexing will show themselves possessed
of great merit upon better acquaintance. The reader will probably find him or
herself feeling that many of the formulations and perspectives of the clinician
writers I review seem contradictory or even impossibly at odds with one
another. With the passage of a great deal of time and as ideas are repeatedly
tested, real knowledge begins to build. Even though many, many very quali-
fied people have attempted to understand what I refer to as malignant nar-
cissism, this is still very nascent science. We have a very long way to go. If the
various contributors to the subject matter, including myself, help us better
appreciate important facets of the material we have been studying, our work
can be said to be successful. Each of us builds on the efforts of others,
sometimes in ways that are quite apparent to us and sometimes without full
awareness of the impact that other scientists and other ideas have had upon
us. It’s a slow process, often a very confusing one marked by lots of blind
alleys and misdirection, but, in the end, after a great deal of extensive work, a
very rewarding undertaking.
This literature review will confine itself to consideration of psychological
constructs relied upon to understand a particularly destructive and dangerous
form of personality organization that has a profoundly pathological impact
upon the affected individual and those people that he interacts with, whether
it be on a personal, familial, societal, or governmental level. You will see that
some practitioners are reluctant to tie the pathological form being described
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-2
8 Literature Review

to a particular diagnostic entity, preferring instead to try to identify markers

that help us appreciate when a given individual has become dangerous; others
clearly do see the damaging personalities they’re describing as extending from
recognizable diagnostic categories. Some of the practitioners I reference will
largely direct their attention towards catastrophically damaging pathological
leadership; others will focus upon the broader implications (not just in a lea-
dership context) of the processes that they’re trying to understand.
Psychoanalyst and psychologist Eric Fromm began a serious conversation
about malignant narcissism in his 1964 book, The Heart of Man, that has
extended from that point in time up to the present. It is a conversation that
has waxed and waned since Fromm presented his original ideas, becoming
somewhat more focused and garnering more intense interest over the last five
or six years. Some, like myself, would argue that this is such an important
subject and, in many ways, such a neglected one, that we must now of neces-
sity turn more energy and attention towards it.
For Fromm, as was true of Freud, narcissism was an inherent part of the
human condition and one that mankind could never hope to entirely eclipse,
in spite of man’s efforts to humanize himself and grow. Fromm conceived of
growth as a progression from narcissistic preoccupation with the self to a state
in which, increasingly, humankind was ever more mindful of the needs of
others and evermore capable of generativity and love. The process, as he
imagined it, was an imperfect one that never allowed one to fully escape one’s
preoccupation with one’s own importance.
Simultaneously, Fromm considered that each individual’s absorption with
their own significance was biologically necessary for survival in a competitive
world; without a compelling investment in oneself one could not find the will
to struggle and to assert his right to exist against the pressing needs others
could be expected to express. Saintliness, Fromm pointed out, might represent
an idealized conception of the human spirit, but saints could not be expected
to last very long.
Narcissism, Fromm believed, was felt to grow out of the infant’s symbiotic
attachment with the mother figure in the very earliest or pre-Oedipal phase of
development. In the very first part of its life, it could only know its own wants
and needs, the fluctuations of its own biological realities, the gratification/
satiation that life provided, and the frustrations that it imposed. Within this
framework, the infant was said not to have awareness of the outside world
and, in particular, of the existence of other people, or, in analytic language, of
other objects. It was only as the child came to painfully recognize its sepa-
rateness and the existence of the world outside itself that the child could be
said to step away from its narcissistic engagement with itself (what Fromm
and others have referred to as primary narcissism). Differentiating self from
the rest of the world meant that the child was free to divert the energy it
invested in itself towards building attachments with others. As this process of
differentiation unfolded, the child learned to attend to others’ needs and to
 Literature Review 9

identify with them as an effective means of managing in a world he or she

could not entirely control. The child might remain narcissistically involved
with his own needs, but now an awareness of others and the importance of
addressing their needs had evolved as well. The stage was set for the child to
begin to transcend his primary narcissism as he became more prosocial and
collaborative. Parenthetically, Fromm recognized that humans were equipped
with a multiplicity of drives and different forms of energy rather than two
primary drives; these views led him to re-conceptualize the meaning of the
various critical developmental phases Freud described (narcissistic, oral-
receptive, oral-aggressive, anal-sadistic, phallic, and genital).
Within Fromm’s conception, narcissism appeared to refer to broad dynamic
forces: man’s inclination to over-estimate his own value and, simultaneously, his
propensity to exist within a closed world that fed upon itself, one defined by his
own perspectives, thoughts, feeling states, and needs to the exclusion of others’
realities and the realities of the world that existed around one. Life, then, was a
balancing act, pitting mankind against the seductive urge to over-invest in the
self and in the self’s subjective realities, on the one hand, and humanity’s will-
ingness, on the other, to embrace the world of people and events outside one-
self. Fromm emphasized that “whatever the different manifestations of
narcissism are, a lack of genuine interest in the outside world is common to all
forms of narcissism” (1964, p. 67).
Fromm distinguished two forms of narcissism: benign and malignant.
Benign narcissism, as its name implies, was seen to be a potentially con-
structive, creative narcissistic force. Fromm believed that as man made a
narcissistic investment in the importance of his work and his achievements,
the scope and extent of such narcissistic attachment was naturally self-limited
by the work that one had to do to realize a desired accomplishment. Work
mitigated narcissistic investment, in other words, reminding a creator that
output was only possible through disciplined, sustained effort. It could not
occur simply because one wished it to. The frustration inherent in such effort
served to remind one of one’s own constraints, tempering burgeoning hubris
in the process. Fromm recognized that there was at least one important
exception to his view that benign narcissism was curtailed by the effort of
achievement; he cautioned that narcissism occasioned by conquest could not
be considered benign. One had the sense that he was not entirely satisfied with
his formulation of benign narcissism, but felt that it was nonetheless suffi-
ciently important as a construct to try to articulate.
Malignant narcissism, in contrast, was defined by output that was highly –
and one could say exclusively – valued because the creator saw himself as
inordinately special. Valuation of one’s productions was not mitigated by the
demands that achievement requiring hard work could impose. For the malig-
nant narcissist, something was good simply because it came from him or was
of him. In such a context, reality was inconsequential. All that mattered was
that one’s view of oneself as ascendant or superior could be maintained.
10 Literature Review

Fromm described malignant narcissism as “not self-limiting, and in con-

sequence is crudely solipsistic as well as xenophobic” (p. 74). The malignant
narcissist could be expected “to isolate himself increasingly in narcissistic
splendor” (p. 74). Being malignantly narcissistic meant that one was pro-
foundly alone, in an echo chamber of one’s own making.
In other sections of his chapter on narcissism in which he did not appear to
be explicitly referring to malignant narcissism, Fromm suggested that grossly
inflated estimates of one’s talents and one’s achievements was an inherently
self-defeating undertaking. The bearer must continuously fend off contra-
dictory voices and perceptions lest their appraisal of self face jeopardy – the
caveat being that narcissistic self appraisal was unrealistic and therefore all
too vulnerable to criticism. Criticism, in turn, was expected to produce rage
fed by fear that diminishment of the self ’s special status would feel cata-
strophic. Overvaluation of the self could only be supported by an expanding
sense of grandiosity and omnipotence that had to be continuously augmented
to hold countervailing voices and forces at bay. Other voices and other reali-
ties had to be discredited to protect the self from the devastating realization
that its own acts of imagination were essentially barren.
If burgeoning grandiosity and omnipotence unfolded in a personality pos-
sessed of unusual assets, such a personality might eventually consolidate
inordinate power. Inordinate power meant that opposition could be annihi-
lated and that the narcissist could bend reality to suit his own distorted
interpretations. Delusional beliefs could become realities that the narcissist
compelled those around him to enact, providing him, in the process, with
confirmation that his power was limitless and that what he thought must be
real simply because he thought it. Fromm referenced personalities like “the
Egyptian pharaohs, the Roman Caesars, the Borgias, Hitler, Stalin, Trujillo”
who had become “gods, limited only by illness, age and death” (p. 63).
Fromm reflected that such a human contingency was “madness, even though
it is an attempt to solve the problem of existence by pretending that one is not
human” (p. 63).
Presuming that Fromm regarded personalities like Hitler’s and Stalin’s as a
form of malignant narcissism, one further understood that, from his perspec-
tive, such personalities contained the seeds of their own destruction because
they are at war with the dictates of reason and love. Reason offended
grandiosity and love was precluded by narcissistic failure to experience others
as separate beings deserving of respect. Escalating overvaluation of the self
and escalating omnipotence must inevitably create failures for such personal-
ities that would jeopardize the omnipotence they require to feel safe. Should
mounting evidence contradict the realities they tried to impose on others,
Fromm thought that compromised omnipotence was likely to produce
potentially lethal depression. It was as a result of often poorly articulated, but
nonetheless formidable depressive potential that the narcissist was driven to
safeguard omnipotence at all costs. In this formulation one hears echoes of
 Literature Review 11

other authors (see, for example, Mika, to be discussed shortly) who regard
malignant narcissistic adjustment as precarious and, ultimately, as fatally
flawed, destined to end itself in personal disintegration.
Fromm did not attempt to articulate clinical causalities or life experiences
that could set the stage for the development of malignant narcissism beyond
identifying pre-Oedipal attachment as creating a pan-human narcissistic sub-
strate that everyone could be expected to be exposed to as part of the devel-
opmental process. He did, however, in one interesting passage identify mother
fixated men whose mothers directed contempt towards the father, demon-
strating a clear preference for the son. Consequently, such men developed the
conviction they were better than father and better than any other man.
Fromm concluded that “This narcissistic conviction makes it unnecessary for
them to do much, or anything, to prove their greatness” (p. 98). He added
that these men’s entire self-esteem was embedded in their relationship with a
woman, from whom they required unconditional, limitless admiration. While
not specifically a formulation of etiology for malignant narcissism, his com-
ments are worthy of mention here because they mirror, to a degree, Kern-
berg’s conception of causative factors contributing to the development of
malignant narcissistic personality organization (see the discussion about
Kernberg that follows below).
Fromm believed that pathological narcissism could manifest itself in large
groups of people just as it could in individuals. Fromm referred to such nar-
cissism as “social narcissism,” believing that “it plays as a source of violence
and war” (p. 75). He pondered the seeming contradictions between personal
and social forms of narcissism. How could individuals sacrifice personal nar-
cissism to become part of something larger? Fromm concluded that:

the survival of the group depends to some extent on the fact that its
members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their
own lives, and furthermore that they believed in the righteousness, or
superiority, of their group as compared with others.
(p. 75)

Investment in group narcissistic identity offered people the energy to serve the
group and to make severe sacrifices in its behalf.
In Fromm’s conception of social narcissism, identification with the group
that allowed its members to see themselves as superior or special in some
form might represent “the only – often very effective – source of satisfaction”
(p. 76) for those members of society deemed to be economically and/or culturally
impoverished. Consensus about group values was often confounded with reason,
the former imparting a sense of rationality to group choice. Reason was seen to
be a casualty of group narcissism as was scientific attitude (critical thinking,
robust skepticism, and attunement to reality), which Fromm thought imperiled
the group’s narcissistic belief system. “Lack of objectivity and rational
12 Literature Review

judgement” were the “most obvious and frequent symptoms” (p. 81) of the
pathology of group narcissism.
Fromm cautioned that “The highly narcissistic group is eager to have a
leader with whom it can identify itself” (p. 83). Such a group could be
expected to project its narcissism onto the leader. Fromm tells his readers that
“in the very act of submission to the powerful leader, which is in depth an act
of symbiosis and identification, the narcissism of the individual is transferred
onto the leader” (p. 83). Dynamics that applied to individual narcissism also
applied to group narcissism. Narcissistic injury that the group sustained or
criticism directed towards it could be expected to evoke rage, the desire to
annihilate, and revenge.
Malignant narcissism is only one of three processes in a triad of processes
that Fromm identifies which eventuates in human evil or what he calls the
“syndrome of decay” (p. 33). The first leg of this triad is orientation towards
death (necrophilous) rather than life (biophilia). Fromm’s grasp of death
orientation implies not just a preoccupation with various manifestations of
death itself, but also an inclination to turn away from activities or pursuits
that foster healthy growth and expansion of the self and growth in others. He
sometimes refers to these dimensions as love of death and love of life. From
the perspective of death orientation, “force” (p. 36) is the power to transform
a man from a living thing into a corpse. What Fromm characterizes as a
“necrophilous” person is a person “who loves all that does not grow, all that
is mechanical” (p. 37). Having is more important than being and emphasis is
placed upon control as a means of compromising aliveness. Such a person “is
in love with the killers and despises those who were killed” (p. 36). Necro-
philous people “deal with murder, blood, corpses, skulls, feces; sometimes
also with men transformed into machines or acting like machines” (p. 38).
They are also people who strangle the joy out of life. At one point, Fromm
reflects that “good is reverence for life” while evil “is all that stifles life, nar-
rows it down, cuts it into pieces” (p. 43).
It is clear from reading Fromm that he accords love of life – love of death as a
separate dimension and separate force within the human psyche even though
many of the characteristics of love of death can be seen to overlap those of
malignant narcissism. Fromm related his conception of love of life – love of
death to some of Freud’s original conceptions of a life instinct and a death
instinct. Unlike Freud, Fromm considered that “the death instinct represents
psychopathology and not … a part of normal biology” (p. 46). Life instinct or
what he would refer to as love of life represented “the primary potentiality in
man…” (p. 46). Fromm admitted that he was at a loss to provide a “full answer”
to the question, what induces a man to adopt one orientation in preference to the
other? As he thought about modern life, however, he observed that:

In giant centers of production, giant cities, giant countries, men are

administered as if they were things; men and their administrators are
 Literature Review 13

transformed into things, and they obey the law of things. But man is not
meant to be a thing; he is destroyed if he becomes a thing; before that is
accomplished, he becomes desperate and wants to kill all life.
(p. 53)

The third process or dimension that Fromm identified as making its con-
tribution to the syndrome of decay was a variable he referred to as “inces-
tuous symbiosis” (p. 91). It, too, very much represented a separate third force
that was possessed of the potentiality to render human nature evil.
Fromm also related incestuous symbiosis to the pre-Oedipal phase of
attachment that both sexes must experience, though in this instance emphasis
was placed upon the seductive allure of unification with an all-powerful other
as opposed to the desire to over-invest in one’s importance and shut out the
rest of the world. He believed “that the boy’s or girl’s pre-Oedipus attachment
to mother is one of the central phenomena in the evolutionary process and
one of the main causes of neurosis or psychosis” (p. 93). He explained that

this incestuous striving, in the pre-genital sense, is one of the most fun-
damental passions in men and women, comprising the human being’s
desire for protection, the satisfaction of his narcissism; his craving to be
freed from the risks of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness; his long-
ing for unconditional love, which is offered without any expectation of his
loving response.
(p. 93)

Such craving, Fromm thought, also infected mature men and women who,
although in a different fashion than an infant might be, were also subject to
terrible life uncertainties and to forces that they could not control. Awareness
of the profound vulnerabilities attending the human condition produced deep
yearning for protection, for safety, and for an enveloping symbiosis that man
could rely on to weather the many storms that beset him, Fromm thought.
Such cravings, however, rendered mankind susceptible to symbiotic yearning
that affiliation with clan, nation, race, religion, or God could offer. And, one
could add, to the enticement to surrender to malignant narcissistic leadership.
Fromm was also careful to point out that the desire for symbiotic unifica-
tion was a fraught process, one imbued with promise of ecstasy and with
threat of annihilation to the self. Symbiosis could mean that one was larger,
possessed of a sense of power and authority that far exceeded normal human
prerogative, or it could expose one to an annihilation of sorts, a death of self
that unfolded as one gave up the self to the symbiotic other.
As he had when he conceptualized narcissism and love of life – love of
death, he framed incestuous symbiosis as a spectrum that extended from
more benign forms to more malignant ones. In its most malignant form,
incestuous symbiosis could be expected to subvert reason and rationality;
14 Literature Review

symbiotic embrace demanded that one surrender independent judgement and

thought to the realities that the symbiotic entity clove to. Turning towards
reason meant exposing oneself to the painful aloneness that one was
attempting to avoid through unification with a powerful other. Malignant
forms of incestuous symbiosis also prevented one from experiencing other
human beings as fully human. Fromm reflected that “only those who share
the same blood or soil are thought and felt to be human; the ‘stranger’ is a
barbarian” (p. 104). The final manifestation of malignant symbiosis was the
compromise of independence and integrity. The symbiotically bound person
was not free to have a conviction of his own.
Fromm believed that the more malignant one’s orientation on any one of
the three major dimensions of human experience that he described (love of
life – love of death, narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis), the more likely one
was to demonstrate malignancy on the remaining two. As he would put it,
malignancy on one meant that malignancy on all three began to converge,
producing a syndrome of decay that was deeply toxic and that fatally com-
promised human potentiality to move towards independence, growth of self-
hood, and respect for other identities. Man’s ability to exercise freedom of
choice diminished the more malignant he became; the more he moved
towards life, towards separateness, towards engagement with others, the more
he maximized the possibility of choice and of free will. He also imagined,
somewhat paradoxically, that as humankind became deeply life-affirming, it
would be increasingly difficult for mankind to make self-destructive choices.
His discussion of free will in the latter part of his book is, for me, one of the
most thoughtful and nuanced reflections on this very complex and challen-
ging theme that I’ve had the pleasure to read.
Fromm’s formulation of evil and of malignant narcissism, in particular, will
strike one, as the reader moves through this literature review, as more intri-
cate, more elaborate, and in some ways more nuanced than the work of many
other authors. In my estimate, it is an extraordinary piece of work that attests
not only to his humanity, but to the passion that informed his efforts to grasp
who we really are, including our best parts and our darkest and most lethal
parts.
Although he did not specifically name malignant narcissism in his 1971
article focusing on the psychoanalytic concept of the life-and-death instinct,
Herbert Rosenfeld appeared to be referring to a similar concept when he allu-
ded to a form of narcissism typified by a “psychotic structure organization”
(p. 175). He explained that this psychotic structure was “like a delusional world
or object” that “appears to be dominated by an omnipotent or omniscient
extremely ruthless part of the self” free to indulge itself in sadistic behavior
(p. 175). This psychotic organization, Rosenfeld believed, was utterly com-
mitted to “narcissistic self-sufficiency” (p. 175) and, as such, could be expected to
resist healthy dependency and recognition of another’s value. The destructive
impulses embodied in this psychotic structure could be “overwhelmingly cruel”
 Literature Review 15

(p. 175). Such a patient, however, might experience his harrowing (to others)
omnipotence as promising “quick, ideal solutions to all his problems” (p. 175). In
such a manner, the patient was seduced into surrendering that part of him which
yearned for connection and the sustenance that benevolent others could provide,
replacing it with ever-growing commitment to unfettered narcissistic grandiosity
and cruelty. As Rosenfeld said, it was as if the sanest part of the individual’s per-
sonality was “persuaded to turn away from the external world and give itself up
entirely to the dominion of the psychotic delusional structure” (p. 175). Losing
the “sane, dependent” parts of himself meant that the patient also compromised
his “capacity for thinking” (p. 175).
In his reflections on the life-and-death instinct, he also somewhat famously
alluded to destructive narcissism as being highly organized, as if one were
dealing with “a powerful gang dominated by a leader who controls all the
members of the gang to see that they support one another in making the
criminal destructive work more effective and powerful” (p. 174). It was less
clear, however, when he made this statement whether he was referring to the
psychotic narcissistic structure he delineated towards the end of his paper.
In a 1964 paper, which served as a precursor to his 1971 paper on life-and-
death instinct, Rosenfeld focused on the crucial role that omnipotence plays
in narcissistic structures as well as identifying core defensive operations of
narcissistic personality, including introjection, projection, and projective
identification. His discussion of narcissistic dynamics made it clear that split-
ting was among the signature defenses manifest in narcissism. He also com-
mented that

in severe narcissistic disturbances we can invariably see maintenance of a

rigid defense against any awareness of psychic reality, since any anxiety
which is aroused by conflicts between parts of the self or between self and
reality is immediately evacuated.
(p. 333)

He added that “the anxiety which is … defended against is mainly of a

paranoid nature …” Later in this article, he reflected that “the ideal self-
image of the narcissistic patient may be thought of as a highly pathological
structure based on the patient’s omnipotence and denial of reality” (p. 336).
One did not know whether these comments might have reflected a pre-
monitory allusion to the psychotic narcissistic structure he was to describe in
his 1971 paper.
Edith Weigert (1970, pp. 119–136) appeared to conceive of malignant nar-
cissism within the framework of an ego psychology orientation. Benign nar-
cissism unfolded in response to adequate synthesis and integration of the ego’s
abilities and skill sets, producing an individual who had trust and confidence
in their ability to manage the challenges that life presented them. Malignant
narcissism, in contrast, was a consequence of a “weak” ego, one in which
16 Literature Review

consolidation of successfully sublimated ego strengths was relatively impaired,

leaving the individual beset by emotions like “anxiety, doubt, anger, rage,
hatred, shame, and guilt…” (p. 123). In response, the ego’s diminished means
of dealing with reality meant that it was subject to “disorganized fight and
flight reactions” (p. 123) in the face of a perceived emergency. She elaborated,
while reflecting upon psychotic states, that:

Instead of realistic appraisal of the ego, the emotional self-assessment

escapes into hypochondriac or self condemning orgies of frustration rage,
or this rage is compensatorily denied in fantasies of grandiosity and
omnipotence that set up the false self of a more or less malignant nar-
cissism that denies the defeat of the ego….
(p. 130)

Her conception of malignant narcissism is obviously much more limited in its

scope then other formulations contained in this review; it does not attempt to
address the breadth of destructiveness to the human community other clinicians
found to be a prominent part of their versions of malignant narcissism, instead
largely restricting itself to the implications of a developmentally weak ego structure.
She did go on to comment, however, that this “negative narcissism is at the core of
neurotic and psychotic maladjustments” (p. 127), thereby establishing the founda-
tional role her construct of malignant narcissism could play in human suffering.
Psychiatrist Otto Kernberg conceptualized malignant narcissism as the
intersection of what he variously referred to as pathological narcissism and
Narcissistic Personality Disorder with severe antisocial behavior, significant
paranoid trends, and ego syntonic aggression that could be directed towards
either self or others (1984). His conception of pathological narcissism was first
articulated at length in his 1970 paper, “Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treat-
ment of Narcissistic Personalities.” He said of this group of people that their
main characteristics are “grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a
remarkable absence of interest in and empathy for others in spite of the fact
that they are still very eager to obtain admiration and approval from other
people” (p. 52). Contempt, exploitation of others, intense pervasive envy,
boredom side-by-side diminished capacity to eke lasting psychic sustenance
from their lives, and an impoverished inner life devoid of “good objects”
(internal representations of rewarding, fulfilling relationships) all typified the
malignant narcissist’s enduring state of being. Kernberg believed that their
inability to experience sadness, mournful longing, and depression were “a
basic feature of their personalities” (p. 53). Such people had endured a
“fusion of ideal self, ideal object, and actual self-image as a defense against
an intolerable reality in the interpersonal realm…” (p. 55). They were com-
plete and flawless unto themselves. Having thus assured themselves of their
own grandiosity and perfection, they could protect themselves against ever
having to acknowledge their need for other people.
 Literature Review 17

Kernberg described pathological narcissists as “orally fixated,” by which he

meant that they were voraciously, unsustainably hungry for the psychic and
material supplies that they craved; frustration of such needs could be expected
to produce rage. In his original paper, he also conceptualized antisocial per-
sonality as a subgroup of narcissistic personality because both groups were
typified by similar characteristics. In his article, “Malignant Narcissism:
Concealed Side of Psychopathy” (2019). Saeed Shafti argued that the simi-
larity between the “core structure of primary sociopathy and morbid narcis-
sism is more than a minor overlap.” He felt that commonality between the
two diagnostic categories was “based on an identical deficit, which may be
indicated as a lack or shortfall of superego” (p. 16314).
In his remarkable 1970 paper, Kernberg pointed out structural similarities
between pathological narcissism and borderline personality organization.
Each was felt to demonstrate reliance on primitive defenses, including split-
ting, denial, projective identification, omnipotence, and primitive idealization.
Both groups were also seen to instigate conflict fueled by oral rage.
He further elaborated his appreciation of what the inner life of people pre-
senting pathological narcissism was like in this seminal work. The interior of
the pathological narcissist was largely devoid of good objects – representa-
tions of sustaining and rewarding relationships – instead filled with idealized
representations of the self, “shadows” of the people the narcissist exploited
whose only value lay in their ability to feed him, and dreaded enemies.
Underpinning the pathological narcissist’s blighted interior was the “image of
a hungry, enraged, empty self, full of impotent anger at being frustrated, and
fearful of the world which seems as hateful and revengeful as the patient
himself” (p. 57). He elaborated that psychotherapeutic endeavor revealed “a
picture of a worthless, poverty-stricken, empty person who feels always left
‘outside,’ devoured by envy of those who have food, happiness, and fame”
(p. 58). Narcissistic defenses primarily served the function of protecting this
emaciated core.
Finally, I shall mention one other important facet of Kernberg’s founda-
tional work. He focused attention upon the potential etiology of pathological
narcissism. He speculated that

it is hard to evaluate to what extent (the development of pathological

narcissism) represents a constitutionally determined strong aggressive
drive, a constitutionally determined lack of anxiety tolerance in regard to
aggressive impulses, or severe frustration in their first years of life.
(p. 58)

With respect to the latter possibility, it struck him that chronically cold par-
ental figures possessed of intense covert aggression could often be identified in
the history of the pathological narcissist. Usually, the pivotal parental figure
was a mother who appeared to function well, but who was possessed of “a
18 Literature Review

degree of callousness, indifference, and nonverbalized spiteful aggression”

(p. 59) that produced intense oral frustration, resentment, and aggression in
the affected child. The child’s deprivation set the stage, Kernberg thought, for
a need to “defend against extreme envy and hatred” (p. 59). Kernberg added
that in his experience such children often demonstrated unusual character-
istics that earmarked them as especially attractive or talented. The mother’s
narcissistic exploitation of such qualities invited the child to feel “special,”
thereby setting the stage for the child to pursue “compensatory admiration
and greatness…” (p. 59). The presence of such recognizable, exploitable talent
helped divert the child towards pathological narcissism rather than borderline
personality organization.
Most of Kernberg’s ideas in his 1970 paper were replicated in Chapter 8 in his
1975 book, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. In Chapter 9 of
this same book, he elaborated upon the differences between narcissistic person-
ality structure and borderline personality organization. The former, he felt, was
typified by “an integrated, although highly pathological grandiose self” (p. 265).
The inherently fragmented, emaciated self representations that characterized
pathological narcissism, in other words, were bound together by the grandiose
self; in this way the pathological narcissist could protect himself against the mea-
sure of identity diffusion and compromised function reflected in a borderline state.
In his paper on the almost untreatable narcissistic patient (2007), Kernberg
cautioned that pathological narcissism which assumed the form of malignant
narcissism was “at the very limit of what we can reach (psychother-
apeutically)” (p. 527). He also warned about the inherent risks therapists can
find themselves exposed to with such patients – risks that included litigious-
ness, potentiality of harm to the therapist, the relative ease with which thera-
pists could be drawn into sadomasochistic exchanges with patients, and the
therapist’s fear of and discomfort with sadistic imagery, which work with such
patients could readily evoke. The presence of these risks could significantly
compromise the sense of safety a therapist required in order to do his or her
work with this group of people.
In his 1989 paper on “The Temptation of Conventionality,” Kernberg
called attention to the danger of malignant narcissistic leadership, stating that

under conditions of social upheaval, turmoil or stress and in the presence

of a powerful paranoid leadership, the group (can shift) into the opposite
extreme of endorsing a primitive, powerful, sadistic leader who will
assure the group that, by identifying collectively with the threatening
primitive aggression he incorporates, they will be safe from persecution
by becoming persecutors themselves.
(p. 202)

Kernberg further elaborated many of these ideas in his 2003 papers on sanc-
tioned social violence: part 1 and part 2. In part 1, he warned about the
 Literature Review 19

inherent narcissistic and paranoid, regressive pull in group process that could
lead to the expression of both tyranny and violence. Surrender of self to group
identity entailed movement back towards latency age functioning character-
ized by concrete distinctions between good and bad, diminished tolerance for
ambivalence and ambiguity, reduction of relationships to idealized and per-
secutory figures, assumption of a “primitive morality in which the bad are
punished and the good always triumph” (p. 689), profound repression of the
linkage between eroticism and tenderness in sexuality, analization of sexuality
linking sex with excretory functions, an inability to tolerate emotional depth,
and a desire to consolidate autonomy and, by implication, identity by
embracing the mores and values that group membership offers.
Kernberg believed that the nature and extent of the group’s regressive pull
dictated its choice of leader; when a group was significantly distressed by a
chaotic or confused social context, a narcissistic leader could be expected to
be sought out, and when a group felt itself beset by significant threat, a
paranoid leader was likely to be chosen. The existence of a paranoid ideology
that “explains to a mass its origin and sense, its purpose and future, may
contribute to the severe paranoid regression of an entire community or an
entire nation” (p. 690). Leaders who demonstrated a “pathological con-
densation of narcissistic and paranoid features in the syndrome of malignant
narcissism” (p. 693) represented the worst case but often typical scenario of
autocratic leadership. Hitler and Stalin were two such examples. Post (2008)
offered a similar diagnostic impression of Kim Jong il.
From Kernberg’s perspective,

the leader characterized by malignant narcissism experiences and expresses

an inordinate grandiosity, needs to be loved, admired, feared, and submitted
to at the same time, cannot accept submission from others except when it is
accompanied by intense idealizing loyalty and abandonment of all inde-
pendent judgement, and experiences any manifestation contrary to his
wishes as a sadistic, wilful, grave attack against himself.
(p. 693 of part 1)

Terror was the inevitable byproduct of such leadership. A community led by the
malignant narcissist combined “totally subservient, idolizing subjects, with
totally corrupt and ruthless antisocial characters whose pretense of loving and
submitting to the leader permits their parasitic enjoyment of his power” (p. 693).
Kernberg identified several factors that might create vulnerability to pathologi-
cal leadership, including defeat in war, persecution of a religious minority, brutal
suppression by an alternative racial group, historical trauma associated with
transgenerational effects, and breakdown or disorganization of a “traditional,
powerfully structured and socially stable system of government…” (p. 695). As
various targeted groups of people suffer grievous injury, the stage is set for them
to identify themselves as aggressors in the future, turning the tables on those who
20 Literature Review

have persecuted them, in the process extending conflict and brutality in endless
cycles. Kernberg reiterated many of the ideas contained in part 1 in his later 2020
article, “Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression.”
In part 2 of his paper on sanctioned social violence, Kernberg attempts to
further delineate the internal world of the torturer and the terrorist. He cau-
tioned that immersion in a social structure defined by totalitarian ideology
that promises opportunities for the exercise of absolute power provides indi-
viduals who can be described as malignant narcissists with unfettered means
to express their sadism. At first possibly taking pleasure in sadistic acts, their
aggression may no longer yield sadistic gratification, instead becoming
“mechanized and totally devoid of relationship to an object” (2003, p. 954).
Kernberg posited that “eventually the extent of power exerted may compen-
sate for the meaninglessness of murder with the intoxicating conviction of
total dominance over the world, and freedom from essential fears of pain or
death” (p. 954). The world that he was describing, he felt, was consistent with
the intrapsychic world that Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984) had attributed to per-
sonalities Kernberg recognized as being malignant narcissists. It was a world
that was characterized by an inability to appreciate boundaries or differ-
entiation between objects and that was heavily infiltrated with anal sadistic
imagery. None of the “objects” in this world were imbued with humanity or
value; all of them were reducible to feces and could be treated accordingly.
Poignantly and somewhat chillingly Kernberg commented that in this psy-
chological space “human beings may be treated as inanimate objects, with a
thoughtless, even bored dispensation of death” (p. 953).
Interestingly, Kernberg referenced Dicks’ 1972 study of concentration camp
prison guards, noting that Dicks discovered that guards presented severe per-
sonality disorders Kernberg found to be consistent with his appreciation of
malignant narcissism. Dicks also reported that guards had emerged from
traumatic backgrounds marked by extremely sadistic and controlling fathers
and unloving or unavailable mothers. Dicks observed that once prison guards
were not operating within the universe of unconstrained power the camp
represented, they no longer seemed violent or dangerous.
Turning to Sofsky’s 1997 sociological analysis, Kernberg reiterated Sofsky’s
assertion that absolute power effectively deconstructs virtually all “ordinary”
human values. Later in his paper, Kernberg emphasized that “democracy as an
ideology cannot aspire to the dynamic force of totalitarian fundamentalism”
(2003, p. 959). Totalitarian fundamentalism, in turn, is most dangerously impel-
led by paranoid vision with its mistrust of otherness. It was his appreciation that

the problem of alien cultures has become an urgently pressing one, as

major migrations of population from one country to another and, parti-
cularly, from different ethnic, religious, linguistic, racial, and cultural
groups, have been taking place all over the world.
(p. 962)
 Literature Review 21

I think these comments are profoundly important and profoundly prophetic.

Kernberg cautioned that his appreciation of the kind of personalities he
referenced in his paper that were drawn to engagement with terrorism and vio-
lence, not all of which I have articulated, represented only a limited vista of
possibilities that was most reflective of the psychoanalytic viewpoint. Emerging
understanding deriving from a number of different social science disciplines
would eventually flesh out the important questions he was attempting to address.
Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, like Kernberg, devoted a substantial part of
his professional life to developing an understanding of narcissism.
In contrast to Kernberg’s structural approach (id, ego, superego) and invest-
ment in drive theory, Kohut (1975d) posited the possibility of a “rudimentary
self” (p. 756) at the very beginning of life and a complementary drive to take
pleasure in aloneness and separateness. He added that “The self… does not seek
pleasure through stimulation and tension discharge; it strives for fulfilment
through the realization of its nuclear ambitions and ideals” (p. 757). The self that
Kohut envisioned was informed by two fundamental fears: fear of annihilation/
disintegration and fear of the despair that failure to consummate the potential-
ities of the authentic self could generate (his so-called “Tragic Man”). His con-
cept of self was at the very heart of his understanding of narcissism.
Kohut’s conception of the analytic process required to treat NPD success-
fully was at odds with Kernberg’s model of treatment; in a lengthy section in
his book, Severe Personality Disorders, Kernberg outlined his objections to
the Kohutian approach, detailing, from his perception, its various shortfalls.
In an act of what can fairly be perceived as frustration, Kohut expressed his
exasperation with the misperceptions and misattributions others had relegated
to his treatment process. His comments (1981, 2010) were made only several
days before his death:

‘These idiots, they don’t read what I write!’ But again I should have lis-
tened… They will claim that empathy cures. They will claim that one has
to be just ‘empathic’ with one’s patients and they’ll be doing fine. I don’t
believe that at all! What do I believe?… I submit that the most important
point that I made was that analysis cures by giving explanations – inter-
ventions on the level of interpretation; not only by ‘understanding,’ not
by repeating and confirming what the patient feels and says, that’s only
the first step; but then (the analyst has) to move (on) and give inter-
pretation. In analysis an interpretation means an explanation of what is
going on in genetic, dynamic and psycho economic terms… A good
analyst reconstructs the childhood past in the dynamics of the current
transference with warmth, with understanding for the intensity of the
feelings, and with the fine understanding of the various secondary con-
flicts that intervene as far as the expression of these (childhood wishes
and needs) are concerned.
(1969–1970, p. 124 and 128)
22 Literature Review

How surprising, then, to discover, through the agency of two articles Kohut
wrote that Daniel Shaw had identified in the bibliography of his book, Trau-
matic Narcissism, that not only had Kohut written about a form of malignant
narcissism (I erroneously didn’t think that he had), but that his formulation of
the same was in many respects very similar to Kernberg’s (and in some
regards, to Fromm’s as well). As Kohut talked about his appreciation of his
version of this variant of narcissism, one very much had the sense that he
meant to distinguish it from other forms of NPD that he attempted to work
with and conceptualize.
Kohut (1976) made reference to “certain types of narcissistically fixated
persons (even bordering on the paranoid) …” (p. 825). He identified his group
of narcissists as charismatic and messianic narcissists, writing that neither was
“likely to become willing subjects of the psychoanalyst’s clinical scrutiny” (p.
830). Feeling that his clinical experience at least allowed him to draw tenta-
tive conclusions about these types of personalities, he went on to suggest that:

These persons appear to have no dynamically effective guilt feelings and

never suffer any pangs of conscience about what they are doing. They are
sensitive to injustices done to them, quick to accuse others – and very
persuasive in the expression of their accusations – and thus are able to
evoke guilt feelings in others, who tend to respond by becoming sub-
missive to them and by allowing themselves to be treated tyrannically by
them.
(p. 830)

In the same paragraph he made reference to the “evilness” that such people
enacted.
He added that:

The dynamic essence of their current behaviour appears to me to lie in a

stunting of their empathic capacity: they understand neither the wishes
nor the frustrations and disappointments of other people. At the same
time, their sense of legitimacy of their own wishes and their sensitivity to
their own frustrations are intense.
(p. 830)

It struck him that such people “assert their own perfection, and they demand
full control over the other person… without regard for his rights as an inde-
pendent person” (p. 831). Such messianic and charismatic narcissists were felt
to “fully identify themselves with either their grandiose self (here Kohut
seemed to be referring to the charismatic narcissist) or their idealized super-
ego (Kohut’s reference to messianic narcissism).” Reliance on the grandiose
self or the idealized superego as a means of protecting self-esteem, however,
deprived such personalities of elasticity.
 Literature Review 23

He characterized charismatic and messianic narcissists as living in an

“archaic world” (p. 831), one that had inflicted devastating narcissistic injury
on them by having withdrawn empathic response after teasing them with a
modicum of security and delight very early in their lives. Narcissistic injury
could take the form of withdrawal or absence of mirroring responses
(mother’s warm smile confirming value and competence) or through failure
on the adult caretaker’s part to offer merger experiences (hugging or holding,
for example) necessary for a sense of security. The abrupt, damaging with-
drawal of narcissistic sustenance “and what the world judges to be their pre-
sent misdeeds is to them the expression of justified narcissistic demands”
(p. 832). They become “super empathic with themselves and with their own
needs and they have remained enraged about a world that has tried to take
from them something they consider to be rightfully their own…” (p. 832).
Kohut felt that the child with unusual congenital gifts would be in a position
to assume “prematurely and in toto the function that the archaic self objects
should still have performed for him” (p. 832).
Kohut was clearly deeply concerned about the damage that such people
could inflict on broader society should they occupy positions of leadership.
He drew his reader’s attention to what he felt were two critical questions:
“How do the characteristic psychological features of the messianic and char-
ismatic person dovetail with widespread yearning for archaic omnipotent fig-
ures? And what are the specific historical circumstances that tend to increase
this yearning?”
He proposed a concept of a “group self” (p. 837) whose dynamics would
unfold in much the same way that was analogous to the self of the individual. He
also suggested that group pressure diminishes individuality; “it leads to a primi-
tivization of the mental processes” (p. 839) that could potentiate “cathartic
expression of archaic… impulses, emotions, and ideation…” (p. 839). Awareness
of all the dynamics that govern an individual self meant that one could “observe
the group self as it is formed, as it is held together, as it oscillates between frag-
mentation and reintegration, as it shows regressive behaviour when it moves
toward fragmentation…” (p. 838). He believed that in applying psychoanalytic
knowledge it might be possible to make “a contribution to the explanation of
historical events, of the course… of history” (p. 836). His aim was no less than
“man’s mastery over his historical destiny” (p. 836). It is significant, I believe,
that his expressed need for a psycho-historian emerged in the context of his dis-
cussion of charismatic and messianic narcissism. He clearly understood the
dangers that each posed to our survival.
Kohut’s essay “On Leadership,” written in the late 1960s but not first
published until after his death in 1985, extends and elaborates his concerns
about pathological forms of narcissistic leadership. He warned that:

Narcissistic leader figures of this type experience the social surroundings

as part of themselves. The mere fact that other groups, nationalities, or
24 Literature Review

races are different from themselves, do not react as they expect them to
react is a deep personal affront, the frightening, inimical disturbance of
their solipsistic universe. The situation can only be remedied by wiping
out those who dare to be different.
(p. 107)

The narcissistic leader imbued with paranoia was particularly dangerous

because “They are principally united by their sharing of an archaic narcissis-
tic conception of the world that must destroy those who are different and by
the identity of their grandiose fantasies embodied in their leader” (p. 107).
He foresaw that the individual who had endured narcissistic injury them-
selves might “seek to melt into the body of a powerful nation (as symbolized
by a grandiose leader) to cure their shame and provide them with the feeling
of enormous strength, to which they react with relief and triumph” (p. 110).
He later contended that “The most malignant human propensities are mobi-
lized in support of nationalistic narcissistic rage” (p. 117). Ideals that a
pathologically narcissistic leader proposed were nothing more than a “delin-
quent ego’s attempts to justify its misdeeds” (page 122).
As he considered his formulation of pathological leadership in the context
of what he understood about the way in which healthy change unfolds in
individual therapy, he seemed at times to despair about humankind’s ability
to successfully reflect upon its potentiality for destructiveness. One can feel
him struggling to find answers that might offer hope for a better future.
Frederick Burkle (2015) conceived of the destructive personalities that
typified tyrannical leaders as an intersection between Antisocial Personality
Disorder (ASPD) and pathological narcissism. Initially presenting themselves
as “saviors,” such personalities inevitably proved themselves to be despots.
Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were cited as examples. He reflected that

while my experience and that of others would suggest that in practice the
degree of narcissistic behaviour in Narcissistic Personality Disorder
remains somewhat stable over time, the potential for an abrupt worsening
of narcissistically driven behaviour is always present and may shift along
the spectrum to Antisocial Personality Disorder.
(p. 9)

He added that the terms “ASPD, sociopathy, and psychopathy are often used
interchangeably in the peer-reviewed literature” (p. 9). He also noted that
there was considerable overlap between the characteristics of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder and psychopathy. He argued that among the array of
personal deficits presented, “Those with ASPD have no personal or social
conscience” (p. 11). Indeed, as one read Burkle, the distinctions he was
drawing between NPD and psychopathy/ASPD remained somewhat unclear
for me. As his article developed itself, he made more references to ASPD and
 Literature Review 25

tyrannical leadership than he did to the narcissistic elements of such person-

alities. 21st-century examples of tyrants included Kim Jong-il, Milosevic,
Saddam Hussain, and Putin, among others. He warned that “ASPD leader-
ship needs to be managed as both a global security and strategic priority”
(p. 30). He considered various steps that could be taken to identify, deal with,
and mitigate ASPD leadership.
Psychoanalyst Daniel Shaw expressed his preference for the use of the term
traumatizing narcissism to either malignant or pathological narcissism, feel-
ing that the former clearly differentiated the narcissistic form he wanted to
explore from other conceptions of narcissism, such as Bach’s deflated narcis-
sist, Kohut’s shame-prone narcissist, and Rosenfeld’s thin-skinned narcissist.
He explained:

The term ‘pathological narcissist,’ often used to describe this set of char-
acter structures, is also used, problematically, to label and describe the
people he typically exploits and victimizes, whose sense of self-esteem he
has traumatically destabilized.
(Shaw, 2014, p. 11)

He also expressed another reservation about using the terms pathological

narcissism and malignant narcissism, commenting that he was “frustrated
with the pejorative description of these patients as pathological, destructive
narcissists,” feeling that these terms belied “the gravity and the extent of
developmental trauma they have suffered” (p. 17).
As he mentioned at various points in his book, traumatizing narcissists
were unlikely to present themselves for treatment and, even when they did,
were unlikely to transcend their pain or their mode of relating to others.
Usually, they presented themselves in treatment because they hoped to estab-
lish an alliance with the therapist to further support their self-justification,
their presentation as victim, or to establish the legitimacy of their position,
not to change and grow.
Shaw went on to describe the traumatizing narcissist as the “predominantly
overinflated, entitled, grandiose narcissist” (p. 12) who attacks, shatters, and
suppresses others’ subjectivity, displacing the legitimacy and authority of the
other person’s inner experience with the feelings and perceptions that the
traumatizing narcissist imposes through acts of domination, typically to
satisfy needs to control and exploit. Traumatizing narcissists demonstrated
intractable investment in their own grandiosity, delusional infallibility and
entitlement, and in externalization of shame. Shame was so poorly tolerated,
Shaw argued, that unless the traumatizing narcissist could protect himself
from self-loathing by diminishing others, “literally, mortification, or (psychic)
death by shame” could occur (p. 35). The other in a relationship with the
traumatizing narcissist could “either kneel at the throne or be banished, dis-
inherited” (p. 104). Shaw distinguished the traumatizing narcissist from the
26 Literature Review

psychopath by suggesting that the former creates harm through a “delusional

conviction of righteousness” while the latter’s efforts to inflict harm are
“thoroughly deliberate” (p. 149).
While discussing Fromm, Shaw referred to the trauma that the traumatiz-
ing narcissist inflicts as a “rape” of personhood and subjectivity (p. 58). To
further emphasize the devastation that compromised subjectivity created, later
in his book Shaw referenced Shengold’s (1989) characterization of such
“interior violence as ‘soul murder’,” reiterating the poignancy and the devas-
tating nature of the injury that is inflicted (p. 71).
Shaw explained that:

Narcissism that is traumatic describes a kind of relationship, in which the

traumatizing narcissist relates in particular ways towards others for par-
ticular purposes.
(p. 12)

Shaw identified what he felt the potential precursors of traumatizing narcissism

might be, citing “cumulative relational trauma throughout the developmental
years in the form of chronic shaming at the hands of parents and/or other sig-
nificant caregivers who are severely narcissistically disturbed,” thereby identify-
ing narcissistic disorder as potentially self-perpetuating. He added that

the traumatizing narcissistic parent envies and resents the child’s right to
dependency, and demands, covertly or overtly, that the child recognizes
the exclusive validity of the parent’s needs and wishes – which means of
course that the child is to be ashamed of her own needs and desires and
view them as the parent does – as irrelevant, or as contemptible; i.e.,
greedy, selfish, weak, morally abhorrent.
(p. 34)

Such a child learns that dependency is worthy of contempt and shame, in

response possibly adopting “rigid, manic defenses” that disavow susceptibility
to dependence. Shaw deemed that an individual who chose such a course was
now primed to become a traumatizing narcissist him or herself.
Unlike other psychoanalytic theorists who focused on distortions unfolding
at critical developmental phases in the child’s early experience, Shaw empha-
sized destructive systems of relatedness as setting the stage for human pain.
At the core of people’s vulnerability and their potentiality was their need both
to feel loved and to feel that their love mattered to the person that they cared
about. Moreover, these twin needs were felt to be an inherent part of the
human condition, manifesting themselves in the very earliest part of life
experience in the child’s relationship with his or her caretakers. In his view,
appreciation of the foundational part love plays in human development and
in psychotherapy as a healing endeavor had frequently been an awkward
 Literature Review 27

topic that could evoke discomfort and censure amongst many psychoanalytic
thinkers, some of whom placed greater emphasis on libidinal and aggressive
drives as determinants of both human suffering and creativity. Only by
according the desire to both give and receive love the importance that it
deserved, Shaw believed, could one hope to appreciate the complex relational
patterns that characterized the human experience. Love, in turn, represented a
willingness to respect and enhance the other’s uniqueness and subjectivity.
This “relational turn” in psychoanalytic thinking most closely approximates
my orientation to the work that I undertake as a clinician and as a theorist.
Numerous clinician authors who contributed to The Dangerous Case of
Donald Trump attempted to make diagnostic sense of the dangerous person-
ality they believed Trump possessed. Their efforts are instructive, reflecting
diversities of viewpoint that continue to characterize our grasp of how a
dangerous personality like Trump’s is organized. Keep in mind that all of
them are focusing their diagnostic acumen on a single individual whose
behavior is now well documented and has become a part of the public
domain for all of us to consider. Each practitioner makes cogent arguments,
but no clear consensus emerges about what diagnosis is most appropriate or
even whether diagnosis, as opposed to dangerousness, is relevant. The lack of
consensus that emerges is generally reflective of the state of our knowledge
about pathological leadership; there is a great deal that we can agree upon
and a great deal that we cannot, largely because we haven’t satisfied ourselves
that we fully understand what we’re seeing. Malignant narcissism is certainly
one – but only one – of the constructs practitioners rely upon to try to
understand who Trump is and why he operates as he does.
Craig Malkin (2017), a clinical psychologist who wrote a chapter in Dan-
gerous Case, references malignant narcissism, which he sees as the intersection
between psychopathy and pathological narcissism. Pathological narcissism
manifests itself as a variant on the extreme end of the narcissism spectrum
that he believed would earn a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder
(NPD). Briefly, he typified NPD patients as manifesting three prominent
characteristics: entitlement, exploitation, and empathy impairment. Paranoia
was considered to be an inherent or native feature of pathological narcissism.
In contrast to NPD, he saw psychopathy as marked “not by impaired or
blocked empathy but a complete absence of it” (2017, p. 53). He considered
that absence of empathy may be a consequence of brain dysfunction evident
on neuroimaging that suggests “psychopaths don’t experience emotions the
same way non-psychopaths do” (p. 53). Malkin cautioned that malignant
narcissism was not a formal diagnosis, but a “term coined by psychoanalyst
Eric Fromm and elaborated on by personality disorder expert, Otto Kern-
berg, to describe people so driven by feeling special that they essentially see
other people as pawns in the game of kill or be killed …” (p. 53). In his view,
people like Hitler, Kim Jong un, and Vladimir Putin all presented personality
organizations consistent with the construct malignant narcissism.
28 Literature Review

Malkin took care to emphasize that mental illness in and of itself is not
enough to establish incapacity to do an important job; what matters instead is
our appreciation of the danger that a given personality represents to self and/
or to others.
In his description of malignant narcissism, Malkin implicates both sadistic
and paranoid components. He also anticipated that should a personality that
might be characterized as malignantly narcissistic face significant challenge in
its drive to establish and protect its status as inordinately special, a “psychotic
spiral” (p. 56) could ensue marked by intensifying paranoia, projection,
increasing lapses of judgement, escalating need to impress others, volatile
decision-making, and gas lighting.
Psychotherapist Harper West (2017) reiterated the broad range of diag-
noses/constructs various mental health professionals had assigned to Trump,
including “Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder,
Paranoid Personality Disorder, Delusional Disorder, malignant narcissism,
and some form of dementia” (p. 238). She argued that the most parsimonious
way to understand Trump’s behavior was to focus on the character flaw that is
at the core of such personalities: other blaming.
Within her formulation, low self-worth is the cornerstone experience that
sets the stage for poor shame tolerance and an associated consequence, an
inability to tolerate blame or accountability. She maintained that “poor
shame tolerance causes … vindictive anger, lack of insight and accountability,
dishonesty, impulsivity, entitlement, paranoia, lack of remorse and empathy,
self-importance, and attention seeking” (p. 239). Moreover, other blamers
“may adopt an aggressive dominating persona to protect themselves” (p. 239).
Vulnerability in such personalities was poorly tolerated and self-awareness
was experienced as shaming. Intolerance of self-awareness meant that such
personalities avoided therapy.
She went on to speculate that people she called other-blamers were “likely
exposed to developmental or attachment trauma, such as abusive, shaming,
rejecting, or neglectful parenting” (p. 240). She felt that children exposed to
trauma endured chronic fight or flight reactions and chronic exposure to fear
response, leading to anxiety-based behaviors such as impulsivity, hyper-
activity, irrationality, volatility, impetuousness, poor frustration tolerance, and
poor concentration.
She believed that other blaming compromises compassion and empathy,
leading to objectification and depersonalization of others. She cited Bancroft’s
(2002) comment that while objectification of others could protect the other
blamer against guilt and empathy, it was the “critical reason” an abuser tends
to get worse over time (p. 246).
Depersonalization and avoidance of accountability was thought to enhance
entitlement. She suggested that other blamers could be expected to place a pre-
mium on loyalty, on isolating their partners, on a commitment to power and the
right to misuse it, and on efforts to promote an image of success. She warned
 Literature Review 29

that other blamers who occupy positions of leadership could be expected to

produce a loss of stability and empathy in the societies that they lead.
Psychoanalyst and psychologist Howard Covitz (2017) distanced himself
from discussion of specific diagnoses, choosing instead to focus on Trump as
suffering from an unspecified personality disorder.
In their prologue to the first edition of Dangerous Case, psychiatrists Judith
Herman and Bandy Lee also sidestepped diagnosis of Trump, preferring
instead to reference mental instability and evil:

A man can be both evil and mentally compromised – which is a more

frightening proposition. Power not only corrupts but also magnifies existing
psychopathologies, even as it creates new ones… a political leader’s grandi-
osity may morph into grotesque delusions of grandeur. Sociopathic traits
may be amplified as a leader discovers that he can violate the norms of civil
society and even commit crimes with impunity. And the leader who rules
through fear, lies, and betrayal may become increasingly isolated and para-
noid, as the loyalty of even his closest confidants must forever be suspect.
(2017, p. lix)

Both Herman and Lee argued that assessment of dangerousness could be

undertaken through appraisal of mental state and of actions. They concluded
that “delusional levels of grandiosity, impulsivity, and the compulsions of
mental impairment, when combined with an authoritative cult of personality
and contempt for the rule of law, are a toxic mix,” warning that “anyone as
mentally unstable as Mr. Trump simply should not be entrusted with the life-
and-death powers of the presidency” (p. lx).
My sense was that they avoided directing attention to a specific diagnosis
both because they had not had direct opportunity to assess the president and
perhaps because they felt it was more appropriate and more telling to focus
on observable behaviors connoting risk than to tie risk to diagnosis.
Psychoanalyst Lance Dodes focused upon sociopathy as the construct that
best captured Trump’s clinical realities. He felt that the primary deficit in
sociopathy was impairment in empathy. He noted that sociopathy was also
marked by an absence of guilt, intentional manipulation, and controlling or
even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. He saw
sociopaths as lacking in those qualities that essentially render people human.
He emphasized that successful sociopaths are able to generate an appearance
of success because of their ability to cheat, to simulate caring, and to disguise
their intentions, making it harder for others to recognize their craziness.
He brushed up against the term malignant narcissism, suggesting that
sociopathy is a “major aspect” of that construct without providing further
clarification. He appeared to imply, without saying so explicitly, that malig-
nant narcissism could be construed as an intersection between narcissism and
sociopathy.
30 Literature Review

Dodes linked the development of sociopathy to early, primitive emotional

problems manifest in rage reactions in response to disappointments and an
adherence to alternate realities as a means of protecting the self from actual-
ities that the child did not like. He also cited research connecting sociopathy
with disorders of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
Dodes identified prominent defenses manifest in sociopathic personality,
including projective identification and splitting. Projective identification, in
contrast to projection, was seen to be a process in which the impulses or
attributes one projected into another person were experienced as so dangerous
and so threatening that they had the potential to incite the sociopath to
attack others. Splitting that the sociopath relied upon was conceived as being
an unstable process that divided the world into a shifting landscape of good
and bad people who were variably experienced as presenting threat of attack,
depending upon how they were perceived at any given point in time. The
sociopath was viewed as feeling justified in rage reactions he or she developed
towards scapegoated groups. Sociopaths could also be expected to demon-
strate rage reactions to imagined slights, producing reckless, destructive
behavior that compromised impulse control. Efforts to protect the self against
challenges to the sociopath’s interpretation of reality occasioned rationaliza-
tion and outright lying. In Dode’s view, the inability to accurately appraise
the world and maintain genuine, reciprocal emotional relationships led to
more paranoia.
One important defensive attribute of the sociopath was his or her ability to
employ a predatory form of empathy, allowing the sociopath to identify vul-
nerabilities in a target personality. Sociopaths were said to engage in an end-
less quest for power and admiration, unmitigated by basic empathy or guilt.
Clinical Psychologist Dr. John Gartner (2017) directed his attention to
malignant narcissism in his appraisal of Trump’s personality. He began his
chapter by drawing attention to Eric Fromm’s depiction of malignant narcis-
sism as the quintessence of evil. He noted that Otto Kernberg considered
malignant narcissism as possessing four salient propensities: Narcissistic Per-
sonality Disorder; antisocial behavior; paranoid traits; and sadism. He refer-
enced Kernberg’s comment (Goode 2003) that malignantly narcissistic leaders
like Hitler and Stalin had been “able to take control because their inordinate
narcissism is expressed in grandiosity, a confidence in themselves, and the
assurance that they know what the world needs.” Both leaders expressed “their
aggression in cruel and sadistic behaviour against their enemies: whoever does
not submit to them or love them” (pp. 89–90). He also cited Pollock’s (1978)
observation that “the malignant narcissist is pathologically grandiose, lacking
in conscience and behavioral regulation, with characteristic demonstrations of
joyful cruelty and sadism” (Gartner, 2017, p. 90).
Gartner went on to systematically review each of the four components of
malignant narcissism that Kernberg had included in his formulation. The
combination of disorders that Gartner described as falling under the rubric of
 Literature Review 31

malignant narcissism could be expected to produce a leader who feels

“omnipotent, omniscient, and entitled to total power; and who rages at being
persecuted by imaginary enemies, including vulnerable minority groups…”
(p. 92). Malignant narcissists could “harm others and enjoy doing so, showing
little empathy or regret for the damage they have caused” (p. 93).
The confluence of psychological realities contributing to malignant narcis-
sism meant, for Gartner, that narcissism and malignant narcissism “have
about as much in common as a benign and malignant tumor” (p. 90). He
reminded his readers that Fromm (1964) had asserted that malignant narcis-
sism is “a psychiatric disorder that makes you evil” (p. 93). He warned that
success emboldens the malignant narcissist to become even more grandiose,
reckless, and aggressive. He also seemed to share Fromm’s view that the
malignant narcissist lives on the border of psychosis. Gardner suggested that
it would be challenging to differentiate between lies the malignant narcissist
told for political advantage versus lies that grew out of a genuine delusional
disorder.
Whether as a component part of malignant narcissism or as a quality that
had emerged in Trump as a genetically based predilection, Gardner observed
that Trump appeared to be possessed of a hypomanic temperament compa-
tible with dispositions early psychiatrists like Bleuler, Kraepelin, and Kretch-
mer had described (Bleuler, 1924; Kraepelin, 1908, 1921; Kretchmer 1925).
He expressed concern that Trump’s hypomanic bursts of activity often culmi-
nated in recklessness and poor judgement.
Gardner appears to agree with Fromm that malignant narcissism is a
madness that tends to grow in the life of the affected person.
Clinical psychologist Michael J. Tansey took the position that Donald
Trump’s behavior could best be described by the “exceedingly rare diagnosis
of delusional disorder…” (p. 104) Delusional disorder, he underscored, is “far
more severe than what has widely been proposed as merely Narcissistic Per-
sonality Disorder, merely Antisocial Personality Disorder, or merely patholo-
gical lying” (p. 104). Besides being shrewd, calculating, and convinced that
the truth is spoken only when it happens to coincide with his purposes – what
Tansey referred to as being “crazy like a fox” – he also believed that Trump
possessed a well-hidden, core grandiose and paranoid set of delusions that are
disconnected from factual reality – or what he referred to as “crazy like a
crazy” (p. 115).
Delusional disorder, he noted, was a psychotic disorder that compromised a
given individual’s appreciation of reality. He explained that delusions are
beliefs “that exist despite indisputable, factual evidence to the contrary”
(p. 105); that they are held with absolute certainty; that they can be built
around a variety of themes, “including grandeur and persecution” (p. 105);
that they are not manifestly bizarre; that deluded people tend to be extremely
thin-skinned and humorless, particularly when others questioned the validity
of their delusions; that delusional beliefs are central to the person’s existence;
32 Literature Review

and, finally, that delusional disorder is “chronic, even lifelong, and tends to
worsen in adulthood, middle-age, and beyond” (p. 106). People burdened with
a delusional disorder elaborated delusional beliefs in a consistent and logical
way. Tansey thought that the general logical reasoning and behavior of such
people was unaffected “unless they are very specifically related to the delusion”
(p. 106). He also explained that people with delusional disorders typically pos-
sessed a heightened sense of self reference, over investing trivial events with
undeserved importance and meaning, especially if they contravened delusional
premises. He warned that unlike schizophrenia, “delusional disorder is neither
bizarre nor is it readily apparent to the outside observer” (p. 105).
For Tansey, delusional disorder captured an essential truth about Trump:
that he was at times psychotic and incapable, in spite of the great responsi-
bility he carried, of differentiating what was real from what was not.
Like Tansey, psychiatrist Henry J. Friedman (2017) focused upon the
paranoid elements in Trump’s presentation, suggesting that Trump appeared
to demonstrate paranoid character structure. Individuals possessed of para-
noid character structure could be expected to consistently produce ideas and
responses that find exaggerated danger of malevolent intent in others and in
the situations they encounter. He warned that the major totalitarian leaders
of the 20th century manifested paranoid thinking and, moreover, that their
destructive acts represented an enactment of their disturbed ideation. Fried-
man attributed the deaths of millions of people to such a dynamic, arguing
that “pure paranoid based ruthlessness” rendered targeted groups of people
enemies of the state (p. 156). Paranoid ideation effectively mobilizes both fear
and hate, particularly in less well-educated segments of a given population; he
expected that paranoid characters need to be able to identify an enemy
against whom the paranoid character’s hatred can be directed.
Somewhat like Tansey, Friedman felt that the focus on Trump’s “so-called
narcissism” (p. 157) minimized the significance of his paranoid beliefs, indu-
cing others to overestimate the level of functioning of which he was truly
capable. Friedman also echoed Tansey’s caution that it would be easy for
people to see Trump’s behavior as an extension of political maneuvering as
opposed to a reflection of the severe pathology inherent in his paranoid
character structure. He considered that the interplay of forces inherent in
leadership a paranoid character offered meant that there was likely an overlap
of the paranoid leader’s personal hatreds and those of his followers.
In his experience, treating people possessed of paranoid character was
“always arduous and rarely effective” (p. 160). He added, significantly, that
“any attempt to ‘understand’ Trump from the perspective of his childhood or
of what he is re-enacting from his past is, in all probability, a hopeless and
unnecessary task” (p. 161). He added that “character formation of the para-
noid typology becomes so autonomous that, once it is solidified, it is practi-
cally meaningless to try to find an explanation for its existence in a particular
individual” (p. 161).
 Literature Review 33

Reflecting the wide diversity of opinion about legitimacy of diagnosis/for-

mulation, psychiatrist James Gilligan (2017) redirected his reader’s attention
towards dangerousness. Feeling, in part, that diagnosis potentially carried
with it the implication that insanity and violence are somehow inevitably
confounded with one another, he asked his audience to consider that danger-
ousness was a more useful construct because, at least in Trump’s case, incite-
ment to violence and threats of violence were manifestly apparent,
particularly towards perceived enemies. In this respect, he saw Trump’s beha-
vior as consistent with the dangerous behavior that dictators and autocrats
manifested towards the people subjected to their power. He believed that
judgements about unprecedented and abnormal dangerousness are necessary
if societies are to protect themselves.
Psychotherapist Diane Jhueck re-framed Gilligan’s emphasis on danger-
ousness. Noting that nearly half of all US presidents could be seen to have
been struggling with mental illness (a percentage that would have been higher,
she said, if mental illness diagnosis included personality disorders), she con-
cluded that the important question to ask was whether the specific form of
mental illness a given president manifested was a cause for concern about
dangerousness. She wished to underscore that mental illness was not synon-
ymous with either an inability to fulfil duties as a president or with destructive
behavior.
Citing personal characteristics that she felt were consistent with narcissism
and psychopathy (or possibly psychopathic tendencies), Jhueck identified a
variety of behaviors she saw as manifestations of these forms of mental illness
that constituted clear danger, not just to the citizens of the United States, but
to the world at large. Mental health symptoms that implied dangerousness
included, as a partial list, impulsive blame shifting, claims of unearned
superiority, delusional levels of grandiosity, inability to tolerate criticism and
perceived threats to his ego, an obsessive need to be admired, and a lack of
insight and confirmation seeking that make certain mental disorders particu-
larly dangerous in a position of power. Early in her chapter in Dangerous
Case she referenced a study by Monahan in 2001 that potentially established
high scores on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist as “more strongly associated
with violence than any other risk factor we studied” (p. 176)
Psychotherapist Elizabeth Mika began her chapter by noting that “tyr-
annies are three-legged beasts (consisting of) three wobbly legs… the tyrant,
his supporters (the people), and the society at large that provides a ripe
ground for the collusion between them” (p. 289). Referencing Dr. Ian Hughes’
work, she conveyed that political scientists call this three-legged beast “the
toxic triangle” (p. 289). In her conception, the force binding all three legs of
the toxic triangle was narcissism. Narcissism was also the force that rendered
the insidious encroachment of tyranny so difficult to recognize. In such a
fashion, she felt, tyrannical forces could reassert themselves successfully
throughout the long course of human history.
34 Literature Review

Mika maintained that all tyrants “are predominantly men with a specific
character defect, narcissistic psychopathy (a.k.a. malignant narcissism)”
(p. 290). Included among the characteristics of malignant narcissism were
severely impaired or absent conscience; an insatiable drive for power and
adulation; the ability to use manipulative charm and a pretense of human
ideals to pursue distinctly primitive goals; and a compulsion to treat other
people as objects of need fulfilment and wish fulfilment. Malignant narcissism
served the tyrant well in his quest for power, for adulation, and the right to
exploit as well as containing the seeds of its own destruction. Unimpeded as
they are by inhibition or scruples, tyrants were free to lie, cheat, manipulate,
destroy and kill, but, notwithstanding the extraordinary power they accrued,
they were fated to deconstruct themselves precisely because of the way they
were organized as personalities.
Unlike many authors, Mika speculated about early precursors of malignant
narcissism. Citing biographies of tyrants (Fromm 1973; Miller 1990; Newell
2016), she identified early manifestations of vanity, sensation seeking and
impulsivity often accompanied by poor self-control, aggression, callousness, a
strong competitive drive and a desire to dominate as prominent develop-
mental characteristics of such people. She emphasized that

it is impossible to rule out narcissistic upbringing as being involved in

raising a future tyrant – creating a narcissistic injury that shaped the
child’s life and set him on a path of ‘repairing’ it through a ruthless and
often sadistic pursuit of power and adulation – even when there is no
evidence of overt abuse and/or neglect in his biographical data.
(pp. 291–292, italics mine)

The point that she makes is reminiscent of Daniel Shaw’s contention that
traumatizing narcissism may be self-perpetuating primarily because it
destroys the subjectivity of the other – a catastrophic yet perhaps largely
invisible injury that would escape the biographer’s eyes. She further speculated
that narcissistic psychopaths/malignant narcissists might possibly arise from
an impairment in the development of object constancy in affected children.
Her comments were intriguing and hopefully will be the focus of further
consideration she directs towards this subject in the future. Lastly, she won-
dered whether lack of empathy could emerge from an inborn cause or a nar-
cissistic/authoritarian upbringing.
Somewhat like Hannah Arendt (1963) whose purveyors of evil could not
think and feel, Mika was reminded of Burkle’s (2015) appraisal that people
possessed of impairments characteristic of malignant narcissism could be
“smart but not bright” (p. 292). Referencing a passage in a paper that Dab-
rowski wrote in 1986 and that Mika translated for her chapter in Dangerous
Case, she noted that intelligence is “subsumed under the primitive drives (for
power, sex, and adulation)” (p. 292).
 Literature Review 35

Mika considered different levels at which a malignant narcissist might

function, varying from serial killers to tyrants. Tyrants possessed the right
combination of manipulativeness, self-control and intelligence that allowed
them to seduce others long enough to put their grandiose ideas to work on a
large scale. The charisma that characterized tyrants was, simply, “the ability
to tell others what they want to hear” (p. 292). Once in power, tyrants could
fully unleash their sadism “under the cloak of perverted ideals, which they
peddle as a cover for their primitive drives” (p. 292). Strong sadistic drives
compelled the malignant narcissist to ruthlessly pit people against one
another as a means of dominating and consolidating power.
The tyrant’s followers could be expected to project their hopes and dreams
onto him, finding that the more grandiose his sense of his own self and his
promises are, the greater their attraction and the stronger their support. The
tyrant’s self-aggrandizement “heals the followers’ narcissistic wounds, but also
tends to shut down” rational process (pp. 295–296).
Mika asserted that the tyrant consolidated his bond with his followers by
promising to address aggrieved entitlement deriving from either real or ima-
gined injury. She thought that the tyrant had little interest in the well-being of
his followers, essentially holding them in contempt. Narcissistic rage was felt
to grow out of the narcissist compulsion “to purge, psychically and physically,
all that is weak and undesirable from the narcissist’s inner and external
world” (p. 299).
Mika paid particular attention to societal conditions creating receptivity to
malignant narcissistic leadership. Among the vulnerabilities identified were a
growing and unbearably oppressive economic and social inequality that pri-
vileged members of society ignored, a breakdown of social norms, and “a
growing disregard for the humanity of a large part of the population and for
higher values” (pp. 300–301). Such societies demonstrate “an inevitable split
in their grandiose and their devalued parts and denial of the shadow, which is
projected outward on Others” (p. 301). She underscored that “the narcissism
of the elites make them blind to the encroaching tyranny” (p. 302).
Like numbers of other clinicians, Dr. Ian Hughes believed that pronounced
dangerousness in a personality was a result of a coalescence of three crucial
dimensions of disordered personalities: psychopathy, narcissism, and paranoia.
People who possessed all three simultaneously were people who were more likely
to behave destructively towards the rest of humanity, particularly if they came to
occupy significant positions of leadership. Personalities like Stalin’s, Mao’s, and
Pol Pot’s provided disturbing examples of the terrifying cruelty and callousness
that such people were capable of enacting, resulting in the deaths of millions that
they governed or attempted to dominate. Hughes articulated his position in his
book Disordered Minds – How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democ-
racy (2018) as well as in Dangerous Case (2019).
People whose personalities were organized in a way that maximized their dan-
gerousness were also people who were likely to assume positions of oppressive
36 Literature Review

authority at those points in history when the governed had absorbed unendurable
narcissistic wounds, often in the form of wealth inequality, profound humiliation,
or the social degradation of being dispossessed of dignity, security, and respect.
The sense of certainty that the dangerous personality possessed side-by-side his
ability to act decisively in an unfettered way offered an oft-times irresistible invi-
tation to identify with tyrannical power that followers believed they could harness
to redress their own wounds. Hughes warned that the tyrannical leaders he was
describing were ultimately always self-interested; their appeal was to others’ alie-
nation, but it was never infiltrated by concern for their followers’ well-being.
Hughes’ appreciation of the process that eventuated in tyranny was captured by
the construct ‘toxic triangle’ that Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser conceived in 2007.
The toxic triangle encompassed destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and
conducive environments.
Hughes argued persuasively that democracy was probably unconsciously
conceived as a way of protecting society from the devastating effects of
pathological leadership long before anyone could articulate some of the psy-
chological realities/dynamics that attend potentially lethal personality dis-
orders. He observed that after making only intermittent appearances in
human history, democracy began to assert itself with increasing insistence at
the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Seven of the core
principles that defined democracy appeared to serve the function, Hughes
thought, of ensuring that tyranny was unlikely to become the dominant form
of government. These seven “pillars” of defense against pathological leader-
ship included the rule of law; electoral democracy; separation of church and
state; social democracy; protection for human rights; pooled sovereignty; and
cultures of tolerance.
Hughes did not specify particular etiologies that led to triangulation of the
dangerous personality disorders he was describing, but he did feel that early
life experience likely had a profound impact on unfolding brain development
and on the shape (including the neural networking) that defined one’s internal
representation of relationships and of life experience. Broadly speaking, early
environments that fostered love and fun enhanced humanity; those marked by
hate, fear, and abuse broadly undercut potential for humanity and decency.
He asserted that his emphasis on the quality of early life experience as an
important determinant of adjustment was a core psychoanalytic principle.
Finally, I would like to briefly mention Michael Stone’s (2018) paper that
considers where psychopathy falls along a spectrum of negative personality
types, including destructive personalities that embody paranoia, narcissism,
and sadism. Drawing on extraordinary clinical experience extending across
the lifetime of his career, Stone makes the case that at the end of the spectrum
he proposes are “persons who embody the attributes of narcissistic, psycho-
pathic, and sadistic (traits)” (p. 178). He concludes that evil, like Shengold
(1989), represents an act of “soul murder,” which could be described as the
“nullification of another human being” (p. 178) through the destruction of
 Literature Review 37

their subjectivity, whether through acts of violence and physical torture or

psychological control and degradation.
In considering the literature just reviewed, one sees that there is only lim-
ited appreciation of the etiological factors arising from nurture experiences
that can be seen to contribute to malignant narcissism and to related con-
ceptions, like paranoid disorder and psychopathy. Heinz Kohut provides a
blueprint of the kinds of early narcissistic injuries that may help prepare the
ground for the formation of what he calls charismatic and messianic narcis-
sism. These injuries were said to take the form of specific kinds of empathic
failures. He also took note of constitutional factors that may contribute to the
establishment of a grandiose self. Otto Kernberg offers us a relatively exten-
ded description of possible psychodynamic causalities underlying malignant
narcissism, but his appreciation appears to be a somewhat limited one com-
pared to the particularity he realizes in his characterization of malignant
narcissistic realities. Both West and Shaw focused on the formative impact
that shaming experiences had upon a developing psyche. West also called
attention to abusive, rejecting, or neglectful parenting while Shaw highlighted
damaging patterns of relating that undercut subjectivity and people’s need to
both love and be loved. From his perspective, exposure to parental narcissism
could potentiate traumatizing narcissism in children. In his attempts to grasp
the origins of sociopathy, Dodes queried whether disproportionate early rage
reactions to disappointments and evidence of adherence to alternate realities
that a child relied upon to protect the self represented important precursors of
a sociopathic personality organization. Like Hughes, explanations also
potentially implicated brain function. In his conception, disorders of the pre-
frontal cortex and amygdala assumed potential prominence; for Hughes, the
impact of environmental experience on the development of healthy neural
networking was compelling. Hughes was also mindful that nurturance
experiences that failed to expose the child to enough love and fun or to too
much hate and fear during important developmental phases represented a
potential source of compromise, but he spent limited time identifying the
formative part disrupted nurturance might play in the development of
pathological narcissism. Relying on biographical literature describing tyrants’
early life experience, Mika identified a number of markers that seemed to
typify their psychological profiles. She also raised questions about dis-
turbances in object constancy, about the impact of an authoritarian upbring-
ing, and about unspecified brain impairment limiting empathic response. And
Friedman was adamant that the foundational forces contributing to paranoid
character structure were unlikely to ever be found.
The literature review also makes it apparent that many practitioners iden-
tified the same elements of disturbed personality organization making their
contribution to a toxically destructive personality, but they differed – some-
times significantly – about which of these elements played the most important
role. For Tansey, it was delusional disorder; for Friedman, it was paranoid
38 Literature Review

character structure; for Dodes, it was sociopathy; for West, it was other
blaming; for Kohut, it was the interface between what he referred to as
charismatic and/or messianic narcissism, on the one hand, and paranoia, on
the other; and for others, like Hughes, Malkin, Gartner, Stone, and Kernberg,
it was a combination or an intersection of pathological narcissism, psycho-
pathy, predilection to cruelty, and paranoid personality disorder. Burkle
thought the destructive personalities he was describing represented a regression
from pathological narcissism to ASPD. Even Fromm, who first introduced the
identifier malignant narcissism, conceived of malignant narcissism as a triad
consisting of pathological narcissism, death instinct, and catastrophic symbiotic
yearning. Only Mika and Shaw appeared to view malignant narcissism as a
unitary construct.
In what I consider to be an important paper, Colleen Covington, using
Hannah Arendt’s concept of banality of evil (1963), comprehensively
reviewed psychoanalytic literature that bears on susceptibility to malignant
leadership. A lengthy 2012 paper called “Dabrowski: The Dynamics of Con-
cepts” (author unspecified) appeared to suggest that Dabrowski, much like
Arendt, believed that for many people, if not the majority in any given
society, it was easier to be bound by social context, relying on dictates of
conventionality that defined normative thinking, modes of feeling, and mor-
ality rather than drawing on a well-articulated sense of self and individuality
to direct their choices.
For those interested in doing so, two wonderful articles about the nature of
evil are worth reading in the context of any consideration of malignant nar-
cissism. The first is Anna Aragno’s 2014 paper called “The Roots of Evil: A
Psychoanalytic Inquiry.” The second is Gavin Ivey’s 2005 paper entitled
“‘And What Rough Beast…?’ Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Evil States of
Mind.”
On a personal note, I want to express appreciation to Otto Kernberg for his
enduring courage in confronting the most daunting parts of the human heart
and attempting to make sense of what he saw. His work has extended over
decades and has surely exposed him to punishing, disconcerting experiences
in therapy and to a view of his own soul that might well have been too
frightening for many another practitioner to endure. While very different than
the work of Daniel Shaw, who understood what he called traumatizing nar-
cissism through its relational implications and whose work also strikes me as
remarkably brave, Kernberg’s decades-long effort was anchored in drive
theory and object relations. It is his belief that the dynamic interrelationship
of one’s internal objects mirrors itself in the way that one deals with external
reality.
I also want to pay homage to Heinz Kohut for his conception of self. The
construct of a self, as the reader will soon see, is very much a cornerstone in
my conception of malignant narcissism as well as offering me the means
through which I could better articulate my own phenomenology.
 Literature Review 39

Now I must ask the reader to indulge my conception of malignant narcis-

sism. I do so in a context, as the reader can see, that is characterized both by
a multiplicity of competing diagnostic constructs and, simultaneously, by sig-
nificant commonalities between different groups of practitioners in the way
that they view what I have called malignant narcissism. As Daniel Shaw
(2014) has pointed out, ferreting out science is a bit akin to blind men
exploring an elephant. I can only hope that the piece of elephant I think I
have laid my hands on will enhance our understanding of what is perhaps the
most destructive form of human personality.
I think it can fairly be said that the literature review the reader has now
moved through offers nothing less than an appreciation, albeit a still pre-
liminary one, of our attempts to better understand potentiality for a particu-
larly virulent form of human evil.

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Malkin, C. (2017). Pathological narcissism and politics: A lethal mix. In B., Lee (Ed.).
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Chapter 3

Mother

As far back as my subjective memory extends, I recall feeling frightened and

utterly perplexed by the two people charged with my care. Fright was the
predominant emotion up to the point that I was able to stand back and –
privately, for to do it in my parents’ presence would have been dangerous –
ask questions about what was taking place in my world. Fright now had two
new companions, the ability to question and the ability to observe and
remember, however inadequately, what was taking place around me and
inside me. No longer was I just overwhelmed by bewildering and suffocating
fear; I began to be able to think about what was happening to me, starting a
lifelong journey defined by a search for patterns that I hoped could help me
make sense of my world. This shift probably took place earlier than I can
appreciate that it did, but my recollection is that I was around eight or nine
when I began to make a very earnest and consuming commitment to investi-
gation. Asking myself lots of impossible questions I couldn’t answer was
scary, but at the same time it was somehow comforting to have these solitary
conversations with myself. They provided me with a private refuge where I
could retreat from a world that mostly felt threatening and dangerous, bereft
of much support or warmth from other people.
Of course, very little did make sense to me at that point in time. There was
so much of me that was incomplete and so much of me, as I was all too
aware, that was badly compromised, it was probably harder for me to stand
back and successfully observe self and others than it might have been for
someone who was healthier. I suppose, however, that in the long run it was
the conviction that everything that was happening within me and around me
could make sense that sustained me and allowed me to endure the terrifying
inner world endemic fear helped create.
I think my parents must have intuitively recognized what was going on in
my head, though only in a very rudimentary way. Paradoxically denying me a
voice or an opinion of my own, they now simultaneously sought me out as
someone who must know something about the human condition, expecting,
hoping that, somehow, I could save them from the storms and addictions
which beset them that they were unable to deal with themselves. I was, at one
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-3
 Mother 43

and the same time, seemingly both larger than they were and smaller, a con-
duit for their thoughts and feelings that was to have little mind of its own. It
was now my task to say what each needed to hear in the conflict they
experienced with one another, but to do so in a way that didn’t offend their
antagonist.
Perhaps an example would be helpful. Each night before my mother went
to bed, she spent approximately an hour to an hour and a half in the bath-
room preparing herself while my father waited. The transformation at the end
of this process was both tragic and hilarious. What had at the outset been a
stunningly beautiful woman whose appearance approximated Ava Gardner’s
now had become something that looked like a Gila monster with small gar-
bage cans strapped on its scalp. Topping it off, she slathered on blue grey
facial cream thick enough for one to be able to write one’s name on the side
of her cheek. Very much like something out of a B grade 1950s sci-fi horror
flick. Zontar the Thing from Venus, but adorned in a transparent baby doll
nighty. She capped off her preparations with 6 ExLax and two Carter’s little
liver pills (also laxatives) which produced predictable and sometimes devas-
tating results in the morning as she struggled to get to the toilet in time.
Inevitably, shortly after reintroducing herself to my father, she would call me
into her bedroom complaining he was uninterested in her sexually. She would
want my advice. I think I was 10 or maybe 11 at the time that these scenarios
unfolded (and they could do so several times weekly, at the worst of times).
Tragically and hilariously, I didn’t have a very clear idea what sex was (this was
the mid-1950s, after all), but I could feel that the stakes were high. What was I to
say to her? Of course, he was uninterested in her. She had gone to great lengths
to render herself not only unattractive, but bizarre and strange looking for rea-
sons that I could not begin to understand in that frame of my life.
And what did I say to him when he complained that my mother had done
the very thing I couldn’t talk to her about? That of course she was terribly
messed about because he brutalized her verbally much of the time they spent
together? I was tasked with forging a reply that would somehow convey a
measure of support to each without generating offence in a context in which
each was already hurt and in a context in which I largely possessed gross
misinformation about the subject matter.
The reader has probably already perceived my objectification of my mother
in this context. Objectification undoubtedly reflected disassociation (emo-
tional numbing) born of considerable fear. I had to transform my mother into
a “thing” that I could stand back from and privately treat as an absurdity. A
taste for the outrageous and the grotesque in my humour has remained with
me throughout much of my life. It has undoubtedly served self-protective
functions. How gratifying and how relieving to discover later in my life that
others (like the Monty Python troop) occupied my sensibility. I somehow
found the means to share my own black humour with others. Their laughter
was confirming.
44 Mother

I do appreciate that the example just given of my parents’ sexual interac-

tion is raw and probably disturbing to read. I offer it because it captures the
improbable, otherworldly quality that infected much of my early experience.
To survive the impossible conundrum which my inadvertent “wisdom” had
created for me, I began to construct models, however crudely and intuitively,
of what each parent was like and how each operated. I relied on such models
to help me anticipate what I could say to soothe one parent without inciting
the other. The whole project was born of fear. Fear infected every word I said
in this peculiar, surreal context. The disturbing and very dangerous sense of
the power I was enacting also frightened me. Hovering above all of this was a
private self, one that weighed, watched, appraised – seeking to protect “me”
from the actualization of threat. And as I watched that self-operate, I had
confirmation that an “I” existed, tethered, as it was, to find a way to survive
another moment, another encounter, more impossible paradoxes.
Because so much of parental behavior was seemingly arbitrary, unpredict-
able, and, to me, irrational, vigilance was my constant companion, though I
could not have named it. It weighed on me and exhausted me, teaching me to
contrive much of what I showed the outside world. There were moments
when I seemed to be able to free myself from vigilance and contrivance,
experiencing transient or sometimes modestly extended occasions when joy,
playfulness, and spontaneity defined me. I can remember embracing such
moments, desperate to hang onto them and to find a way to expand them.
Perhaps there was more to me than the unrelenting contrivance and vigilance
I knew all too well. Perhaps there was a real self, unfettered by pain and fear
that might find the means to express itself, one that was genuinely me. Tan-
talizing, fleeting glimpses, but enough to suggest there might be more beyond
the starvation of spirit that I knew. I also gradually became aware that at
times I seemed to be capable of a kind of creativity that my friends appeared
not to possess, at least not to a similar degree; it, too, seemed to promise
substance, but its presence, like my other gifts, was maddeningly ephemeral,
very much resistant to my attempts to replicate it. Increasingly, vigilance and
contrivance appeared to be winning with the passage of years, displacing the
glimmers of aliveness that I sometimes experienced. I felt increasingly hol-
lowed out, confronted by an interior that looked to be barren.
As obviously crazy and chaotic as my mother was (like my father, she, too,
was addicted to alcohol), and in spite of the cruelty she episodically enacted,
she could also access emotion in a way that he could not, responding to a
broad array of feelings that informed her actions and her presence. One could
feel an aliveness in her she was struggling to sustain, perhaps much as I was.
Though I could not have articulated it at the time, I realize in retrospect that
what I saw in my mother represented fragments of a self trying to come
together to form a cohesive whole. This struggle was quite palpable, which
rendered it both very poignant and rather disturbing to watch. I think I can
remember reflecting at the time that none of the pieces seemed to fit together.
 Mother 45

I couldn’t figure out where my mother’s centre was. It felt like she was trying
to paste together disparate and oft times fundamentally incompatible parts
into a single picture that was mostly at odds with itself, perhaps like one of
Picasso’s portraits of his mistresses. I could feel her desperation as she tried to
make it work, casting about for unity and coherence she never seemed to be
able to manage.
She drifted into reveries and dreaminess she invited one to share with her,
perhaps as a means of establishing connectedness. Heaven knows I wanted
connection, but as much as I wanted to participate in what looked like a
gratifying experience for her (and, potentially, I imagined for me), I never
found any substance to her dreaminess I could latch onto. The content she
provided was vague, woolly, sometimes conspiratorial, and relatively inarti-
culate or, alternatively, it embraced idealizations of me that struck me as
utterly implausible, as if she had no sense of who I really was or what my
pain was like. I simply didn’t know what to do with the terrible fictions that
infused and defined her at these times, but I also didn’t want to offend her by
turning away from her when it appeared she so badly needed to come toge-
ther with me.
At still other times my mother could be wickedly funny and irreverent,
often as a means of neutering my father, which I secretly applauded. Some-
times her pushback in the face of his contempt was articulate and appropriate
(mockingly deriding his ideas either publicly or privately with withering,
irresistible intelligence). At other times her efforts to oppose him could be
disjointed, shocking, or frankly bizarre (conspiring to trap my father with her
homosexual friends on a boat trip and watching him squirm; jumping up on
my father during a gathering of his executives and their wives, wrapping her
legs around his middle, and declaring herself a Cherokee Jew). Her acts of
defiance, which I suppose were meant to affirm selfhood, seldom remained
triumphant in the face of the inevitable counterattack which ensued, but, in
spite of promised obliteration, she continued to fight back in whatever
manner she could in a given situation. These acts struck me as very coura-
geous at the time and I had admired her for them, but I also recognized she
was gradually losing her battle and losing herself. That recognition was pro-
foundly unsettling. Not only would I lose the ineffective and sometime pro-
tector I had; I had growing evidence that the self could be destroyed, which
was one of the two things I feared most.
Other parts of my mother were devastatingly self-critical and perfectionistic
which, dangerously, I knew could infect her assessment of anything I did. At
other times she could be utterly compelled by her need for order and by a
measure of cleanliness punishing for anyone around her. These strictures
helped contribute to an impression of craziness because they were so out-
landishly drawn. The vastly inappropriate seductiveness that she directed
towards me, sometimes couched in the frame of humour, but just as often not,
further contributed to a sense of an unstable, out-of-control dangerous
46 Mother

personality seemingly unaware of the damage she was inflicting. Sometimes

my mother’s seductiveness was laced with a conspiratorial tone that invited
me to join with her in our mutual fear/loathing of my father. On still other
occasions she could engage in either deliberate or, possibly, unintentional acts
of cruelty quite devastating to endure, typically inciting my father to direct his
rage towards me. And (this is not meant to be an inclusive list) there was also
a mother who episodically showed herself to be warm, who could appraise
reality accurately, and who could be empathic.
While we all move back and forth between different facets of our person-
alities, sometimes wearing one face and then another, my mother’s transitions
between her different faces struck me (and still do) as abrupt and arbitrary,
one reality utterly and completely displacing the other within the passage of a
moment. Sudden, incongruous transitions I could not understand most of the
time. Undoubtedly these experiences further contributed to my sense of a
fragmented person.
Because I so desperately needed an ally in order to be able to survive the
devastation which my father visited upon me, I had to turn aside the many
forms of threat that she manifested, instead idealizing the better parts of her
so that I could feel safer. It was of course an impossible undertaking and one
that was fated to fail. The shared world we sometimes tenuously established
always fell apart as other pieces of her dominated our interaction. When she
left my father the first time, I understood. I saw her desperation to survive as
being much like my own. When she separated from him the second time (after
remarriage), I went with her, only – perhaps one should say inevitably – to
discover she was barely able to parent, too skeletal and too devastated spiri-
tually to effectively look after someone else. Her ongoing anorexia, promi-
nently and noisily displayed after each meal, served as a reminder of what
could happen in the face of my father’s relentless assaults. The visage she
presented was frightening: at 5 foot 7 inches, she was well under 100 pounds
and at her worst, in the very last years of her life, she was barely 85.
As I got older, I began to rely on my increasingly irreverent sense of
humour to convey to others (and possibly myself) what I had experienced
with her. So much of her behavior had been so outrageous and so bizarre it
was easy to get other people to laugh as I caricatured her. It felt like a relief
to be able to do so. It was an acceptable way both to disguise my rage
(sometimes from myself) and to express it.
In spite of the perceptiveness that my humor implied I possessed, there
remained much that I did not acknowledge about the experience I had with
her, particularly the sexual abuse she had introduced into our relationship.
Once my mother left my father for the second time and I became part of her
household, I found myself sharing a bed with her (I was 15–16 at the time).
Night-time preparation included the transparent baby doll nighty. I was only
half aware that what she was doing felt wrong. Next to the profound uneasi-
ness I was unable to fully define for myself was also a feeling that somehow
 Mother 47

what she was doing must be okay. To have fully acknowledged the sense of
threat her behavior provoked would have meant admitting to myself that I
couldn’t be safe with her either, that I was living in an out of control, dama-
ging world dominated by other people’s toxic impulses.
My own sexuality, of course, was pushing me very hard while all of these
events were unfolding with my mother. I was being invited to respond to my
mother’s seductiveness, but never to admit or confirm that I found her body
arousing. I was not capable of recognizing she was feeding off the confirma-
tion which my emerging (and certainly distorted) sexuality was providing her.
In an adult context I can see that in toying with me sexually she transformed
the fear which sexuality engendered in her (and which she had so prominently
played out in her night-time rituals with my father) into a sense of power. No
longer was it necessary for her to feel compelled by insatiable need to move
herself towards sexual exchange she was afraid could murder her spirit.
Instead, she could identify herself as an aggressor who possessed prerogatives
of choice not accessible to her in a relationship with an adult male. “Toying”
is a good word to describe what I felt at the time. She could play with me and
with the effect her sexuality had upon me. Her sexual instigation, however,
was as often as not chaotic, demonstrating itself in front of my friends and
hers in a manner that was certainly uncomfortable for everyone involved
(checking to see if I was erect when I came in from a date, playfully placing
her foot in my crotch when I walked into a room). People responded to these
surreal encounters with her by attempting to reconstruct them, often with
humour, attributing benign or acceptable motives to her troubled behavior.
The effect was disconcerting for me, making it harder for me to appreciate
what was happening to me in my relationship with her. I imagined, in
response, that my discomfort and my embarrassment must be overblown or
overstated, that my mother’s behavior, was, in some way, a variant of normal
parenting. As already alluded to, I very much needed to believe that, because
without her, there was only the abyss that I faced with my father. Even harder
to put into words for myself was the sadistic triumph her sexual provocation
sometimes seemed to create for her. It required decades for me to see that
cruelty further consolidated power and authority for her as well as imbuing
her sexuality with a measure of aliveness.
In what ended up, on balance, being a half unintended act of compassion,
my mother sought to extend her intrusion into my sexuality by arranging for
me to sleep with a prostitute so that I might discover what sex was (I was still
16 at the time). It had been her plan that this act would take place in the bed
that she and I shared. She would oblige me by leaving the apartment for the
afternoon. I somehow had enough self-preservation to resist her, insisting that
I see the prostitute, who occupied a different apartment in the complex where
we lived, on my own. This woman proved to be gentle and kind and generous,
taking a great deal of time with me and seeming to demonstrate what
appeared to be genuine concern for my emotional well-being. My mother
48 Mother

naturally wanted a blow-by-blow description of my experience. I pleased her

and myself by sharing only some of it. Shortly thereafter I began a relation-
ship with my first serious girlfriend which, although stormy, was immensely
important to me.
As damaging as my mother was, she still offered me fleeting anchors of
perception and empathy I could rely on to support an illusion that she was
caring. As previously referenced, it was an illusion in constant need of repair.
It constantly fell apart and I continuously tried to fix it. In spite of the ram-
shackle, frighteningly inadequate security umbrella she offered, I did see she
could also sometimes tolerate my anger, which was confirming for me. I can
remember thinking that I was often unfair to her, knowingly directing anger
towards her that I couldn’t take to my father. While she sometimes joined
with me in my appraisal of my father, both allowing me to give voice to my
pain and sharing common cause with me, I was very much aware that our
alliance was an uneasy one – and one that could fall apart all too quickly if
she became offended, often for reasons I could not begin to anticipate. As
noted, I could also see and certainly feel that there was a part of her that took
delight in the cruelty she intermittently inflicted on me. Whether she was set-
ting me up as fodder for my father (dressing me up in clothes she knew he
would attack me for wearing, for instance) or turning on me abruptly with
scathing appraisals, I could see the look of apparent satisfaction that her
sadistic acts had generated for her. It is hard to capture with words the mixture
of desolation, outrage, and betrayal that such moments created for me. Cer-
tainly a sense, as was true of our “shared” sexuality, that she delighted in
“playing” with me. I struggled to discern why, probably partly because I so
badly needed to find human reasons – and therefore redeeming ones – that
could mitigate her toxicity. I told myself that her cruelty was a reflection of my
father’s, an echo of all the pain and helplessness he had caused her that was
now being directed towards me. As I look back, I think I can also recall feeling
that something else, something bigger, possibly something more malignant, was
lurking inside her, something that escaped my understanding but not my visc-
eral response to her. I think I also tried to turn aside this appraisal of her,
finding it too dangerous and too impenetrable to deal with at the time.
Improbably, notwithstanding these contradictions and insoluble paradoxes,
I could feel relatively safer with her than I did with my father. As risky and as
uncertain the business of soliciting support from her was, she did inter-
mittently offer what looked and felt like a safe harbor, however imperfect and
impermanent. At times, then, I could hide myself in her, however brutish and
punishing her personal dynamics were. Of course, my desperation for safety
and for confirmation drove me towards her in spite of the terrible damage her
unpredictable behavior could inflict. It was sometimes at least something,
somewhere I could pretend there was comfort.
My mother did eventually lose her battle with herself. The shards of self
that remained to her were not enough to sustain her. Her presence was
 Mother 49

increasingly infected with conspiracy theories and paranoia (through which

she meant to confirm her intelligence and her identity) and by out-of-control
drinking she needed to sustain herself hour by hour. Multiple marriages to a
number of narcissistic men made their contribution to the terminal erosion of
her spirit. By the time she was 63, her liver no longer worked. Throughout my
adult life, she continued to turn to me to help heal her. I could not. My own
wounds and my own confusion about what had happened to me limited my
efforts as did the increasingly toxic nature of her behavior. She could not bear
to let anyone get too close to her and I was not sufficiently self-possessed at
the time to endure the various forms of verbal assault she directed towards
me. I simply did not know enough about myself or about her to provide her
with the comforting presence she needed. I do have to acknowledge that, even
had I been able to offer her something better, she might not have been able to
accept it, save only for brief periods of time. It took some considerable time
for me to accept that someone can be too broken to fix. To save myself, I had
to leave her behind. Her aloneness still haunts me and saddens me.
Throughout all of my experience with my mother, my observing self kept
me company, prodding me, asking questions, trying (usually without success)
to synthesize, to construct order where so little seemed to exist and attempt-
ing, also often without success, to find ways I could reassure myself and
soothe myself with meaningful insights. My efforts so often felt futile, birthing
desolation I thought must bury me. But as I have already implied, my obser-
ving self was not just friend and companion, but assassin as well, sometimes
unceasingly echoing the disdainful, accusatory voices of my parents, particu-
larly my father’s. One of my patients described this part of his own process as
being like having a murder squad in his head.
So, observing self was both friend and foe, companion and unwelcome
intruder. It did affirm identity, but it was hard to feel after its incessant
attacks that I wanted to be the “me” it kept reminding me I was. I also
noticed, where my mother was concerned, that my ability to observe and to
integrate ideas was far more compromised than it was when I made effort to
understand my father. Although I was acutely aware of her craziness, seeing
my mother with any clarity up through my middle adulthood was probably
too threatening for me to bear, whereas seeing my father as he was, was
necessary for survival.
My relationship with my mother was certainly profoundly disturbing,
reverberating throughout my life in a variety of expected and unanticipated
ways I was left to disentangle, as best I could, through my own work and
through the help of various therapists, mentors, and friends who enabled me
to at least partially find my way through a bewildering landscape. To say that
the journey was variably an unnerving and disconcerting experience that
evoked cacophonies of painful emotion as well as episodic triumphs and
insights probably doesn’t do it justice. And this work remains imperfect and
incomplete, as it must, though it is fair to say that after a lifetime of effort I
50 Mother

have been able, increasingly, to realize a kind of peace – one in which a

measure of understanding and compassion begin to displace some, maybe
much, of the pain this relationship occasioned.
I am very much aware that had I had the opportunity to learn more about
my mother’s early life, I might plausibly have understood even more about
her, but she never allowed herself to tell us a great deal about what had
actually transpired. Her portrait of her parents and of one of her siblings, in
particular, struck me as rigidly idealized, inaccessible on a meaningful human
level beyond the caricatures which were proffered. Given her choice of men
over the course of six marriages (two to my father) and the fragmentation
that was such a prominent part of her, I could at least guess what might have
transpired in her relationship with her parents. Her sister also seemed to have
made a similar choice in a partner. I speculated that her sense of self had been
subjected to shattering blows long before she met my father and that she
chose him because he reiterated lethal combat she had faced in her own
family. The walls she built around her early experience, I assumed, were
necessary for her, protecting her from unbearable truths her disconnected self
could not effectively process. Increasingly, I saw her as someone who needed
to hide herself from the world, afraid that her own devastation and craziness
was all too easy for others to see. On only a handful of occasions during the
course of my entire relationship with her did she ever allude to profound early
pain. When she did, her characterizations of events that she referenced struck
one as outlandish, improbable, and bizarrely hyperbolized. Moreover, her
description of important parts of her life varied wildly from one retelling to
the next, leading me to wonder whether my memory must repeatedly have
failed me. My relationship with her throughout much of my life was defined
by elusive, shifting realities that seemed to defy rationality. It became part of
my life’s work to piece together narratives that allowed me glimpses of the
human being shrouded by all the chaos that had obscured my view of her.
It is important to mention, albeit seemingly in the form of a footnote, that
among my mother’s causalities was a benign pituitary tumor requiring
radio-surgery around the time I was in grade school. I can’t recall now
whether my mother’s anorexia had preceded it or unfolded as a dreadful
side effect of the radiation itself. I remember researching her condition and
her surgery, discovering that some authors, at least, believed that an anor-
exia like syndrome could sometimes ensue following radiological interven-
tion. It was somewhat comforting to me. It argued that my mother’s
physical withering might not be a consequence of my father’s depredations,
but, possibly the result of a dispassionate physical illness. The deeply dis-
turbing and deeply compelling image her anorexia created, however,
remained riveting for me nonetheless, echoing, again and again, virtually
every time I saw her, my dread about what was happening to me. Almost as
if some part of her understood, she obsessively saved some portion of her
meagre allotment of food for me, insisting that I take it. And as much as I
 Mother 51

was frightened that in doing so I was contributing to her inevitable starvation,

I was too frightened of my own spiritual withering to refuse her. No doubt she
fed me at the time, at least in part, because doing so allowed her to participate
vicariously in my satiation. I think as a consequence of this part of my experi-
ence with her, I came to view food, without realizing that I had done so, as the
means to offset the psychic depletion that so terrified me.
Chapter 4

The Face of Narcissism – Father

Foundational Ideas

Where my father was concerned, there was rarely anyplace to hide. If my

mother’s walls were fragmented, his were monolithic and imposing. Formid-
able, relentless and implacable are the three words which come to mind. One
could feel the immensity of his force. It was voracious and unstoppable. The
menace he projected through rage that always felt dangerously close to the
surface was paired with abruptly abusive verbal outbursts that might suddenly
and arbitrarily punctuate an exchange with him. These aspects of him made
him feel much more threatening than my mother ever had. His rage could
bury you, suffocating you with debilitating fear and shame.
I think I was in grade 1 when he asked me to spell my name. I made an
error. And then another. The screaming commenced. It feels challenging to
capture the intensity of his rage with words. He was beside himself with fury. I
was asked again and again to spell my name. I had no idea what mistake I
was making. But with each mistake, I could feel his rage escalating. I can
recall feeling afraid that he wanted to murder me. At the very least, it was
proof that I was utterly despicable in his eyes. My mother tried to intervene.
She became tearful and desperate, unable to dissuade him to back away. She
began to scream at him and she physically interjected herself between him
and me. I was confined to my bed for the entire weekend, periodically sub-
jected to the kind of interrogation I have just described. Just as I thought the
storm might subside, it fell upon me again. My mother remained unable to
stop him, in spite of repeated intercessions attended by more crying and
screaming of her own. Incensing him further, I proved able to spell my name
correctly when my mother asked, but not when he did. Somehow, after two-
and-a-half days, his rage abated. I never knew why. There was no attempt to
apologize or to repair, so I can remember assuming that he continued to feel
extraordinary distaste for me.
I was in grade 9 and had just won my letter in varsity wrestling. We were at
his country club, in a crowded room. He began to attack my mother, as he
often did. I tried to protect her verbally. This infuriated him. His verbal
assault became even more ferocious and demeaning. I told him to stop, trying
to reciprocate some of the courage she had demonstrated towards me when I
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-4
 Foundational Ideas 53

found myself in similar circumstances. To little avail. I threatened to throw a

glass of water in his face if he didn’t stop. Now rage was turned towards me.
Using an even louder voice than that which supported his assault on my
mother, he conveyed to the entirety of the dining hall that I was despicable,
that he had never liked me, and that I was a source of great shame to him. He
was screaming. He moved closer to me to press home his attack. His fury
seemed to feed itself. I eventually broke down, sobbing uncontrollably, further
intensifying my sense of diminishment. I tried to escape to the washroom. He
followed me, continuing to scream, continuing to express his outrage that I
was his son. Somehow, thankfully, his outrage with me retreated into a kind
of heavy silence that accompanied the drive home. The next morning, in
response to my mother’s insistence, he made a subdued apology. It was one of
only two apologies he ever made to me in my lifetime.
His rages were quite terrifying. They transfixed and overwhelmed. Rage
could sweep him and fill him seemingly with little warning, though with the
advantage of adult perspective I can make more sense of them now. In the
midst of his rage, you could feel his hatred. I came to believe that must be the
real measure of his feeling for me. Kindnesses were relatively short-lived and
struck me as condescension or forbearance concealing deep revulsion.
In my late 30s, I came to understand that my father was struggling with
Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Other than a list of symptoms, it felt very
poorly defined as a psychiatric construct. I couldn’t find explanations for the
origins of his pain or for the dynamics that repeatedly played themselves out
in his relationships with himself and others – at least not explanations that
made enough sense to me. Sorting through who he was and what drove him
was, in various parts, an act of self-preservation, of desperation, and, I sup-
pose, of love. His pain was so manifestly, crushingly present, it felt inescap-
able. My journey gradually evolved from a position in which I appraised him
as an essentially malignant being to one in which I felt I was better able to
appreciate the terrible costs which his affliction created for him. Recognizing
what he had become and why produced a mixture of compassion for his
agony side-by-side outrage for my own losses. My struggle with him felt like
the focal point of my life. Unless I could begin to see who and what he was
and how he had come to be, it felt like I would never be able to free myself,
even partially, from the destructive impact that he had upon me. Towards the
end of my life, I have felt grateful for the kind of experience that I had with
him, believing that it allowed me glimpses of the human experience I might
never otherwise have been afforded. But it was a harrowing journey and one I
am very much aware I very nearly did not survive. I would not willingly
repeat it, but, with distance, I can say it created an opportunity for me to
learn a great deal.
If my mother was able to evince some aliveness from amongst the frag-
mentation, from the collection of pieces that she seemed to be, my father
appeared to be largely incapable of spontaneity, playfulness, and genuine
54 Foundational Ideas

warmth and engagement, though he could feign those qualities. To my eye,

when he did so, it never felt real. Rather, it appeared to be an intentioned or
constructed act meant to serve some end, but often an end that eluded my
powers of apprehension. Dancing meant counting and it meant placing your
feet exactly where they were meant to be as determined by the dancing les-
sons he’d taken. Acts of affection mostly appeared to be stilted, though
sometimes one could feel, momentarily, a measure of connection. Humor as
an act of generosity and an affirmation of humanity seemed out of his reach.
Humor didn’t extend affability for him; on the contrary, he appeared not to
know how to touch other people or move them by appealing to the defining
aspects of the human condition which characterized him and them. Instead,
his humor tended to focus on the “funny” aspects of a sadistic or cruel
interchange between people that caught his eye. Other forms of humor did
not appear to engage him. The awkward, absurd, or preposterous nature of
either human or animal suffering was the common currency he relied upon to
build his bridges to others.
As I watched him socially, much of the time he appeared to be playacting,
going through the motions and feigning human responses so that he could
pass. When people told jokes, particularly ones that played upon their short-
falls or their foibles, he appeared to be genuinely confused, as if the joke
made no sense to him, but he would pretend that it did. Jokes that were
obviously self-effacing seemed to horrify him, often provoking scathing verbal
attacks, usually in the form of obvious, crude sarcasm or attempts to
humiliate.
It gradually dawned on me that he was unable to use humor to touch other
people and deepen his bonds with them. Indeed, he appeared to be repelled
by that prospect. Watching him, actually, was a bit chilling. A marionette on
his own strings. For me, unconvincing form in the absence of much substance.
It was painful and confusing to watch his artifice. His smiles were tight lipped
and forced. So was his laugh. His manner rarely seemed to convey what felt
like genuine kindness or regard. I eventually noticed that the orchestration of
self I found so disconcerting was especially prominent when social interaction
focused upon communion meant to convey affection, generosity, or warmth.
He simply didn’t know what to do in such circumstances – as if he was facing
a language and a series of transactions that not only baffled him, but wrong-
footed him, evoking guardedness, awkwardness, and, oddly it seemed to me,
detachment. I could not imagine that he was struggling with the same kind of
evisceration of spirit that I was. He felt so big inside me and like such a
powerful presence, it was bewildering to watch him act as if the simple lan-
guage of affiliation and of genuine, mutually satisfying acts of caring required
him to back away from people and to curate himself in the peculiar way that
he did. What was he protecting himself against, I wondered? What did all of
this mean? I remember thinking, “am I supposed to be like this?” That
thought filled me with despair. If I acted as he did, I could never free myself
 Foundational Ideas 55

from my own contrivance. I would only be escalating my own playacting. I

imagined that there must be some underlying music that informed his beha-
vior. I kept trying to hear it, believing that if I did, I might find points of
resonance between the two of us that could offer us a means of moving
towards one another. Perhaps then I could become more acceptable to him.
But I never found anything that sounded like music. Or much that appealed
to me as attractive and human. Instead, I heard an endless succession of jar-
ring, discordant notes in the absence of any discernible melody. How I wished
that my father could sing, but he never did.
It confused and frightened me I couldn’t find the human parts of him, just
as I couldn’t with my mother. How could I construct an identity with his
discordancy and her fragments? Was I fundamentally too defective to experi-
ence whatever it was that moved the two people at the very center of my life?
It all felt very surreal – as if I was an outsider looking in at a series of jagged,
disconnected exchanges that made no sense to me. As was true of my rela-
tionship with my mother, only occasionally did I allow myself to see that
something was terribly wrong with him. That was both a frightening thought
and a comforting one. For the most part, however, I was much more deeply
absorbed by all of the deficiencies and absences that seemed to define me.
The question that I’d begun to formulate for myself – what made him feel
so uneasy about warmth, connection, and the kind of openness necessary for
spontaneity and play – proved, for me, to be one of the cornerstone pieces in
my understanding of narcissism. If I make it sound like I was able to distill
this question early in life, I should take care to emphasize that I didn’t. My
response to the quality of contrivance that I experienced in him comprised a
series of disjointed impressions and uncomfortable feelings that gradually,
with the passage of two to three decades, began to consolidate into more
sharply focused perception.
Coexisting with his contrivance was enormously draining. I could feel
myself tighten up when I was around him, as if his guardedness was somehow
infectious, invading me with reciprocal response. The tighter I felt, the more I
found myself trying to replicate his rigidities, as if in doing so I might have
imagined I was making myself safer. I could feel my inner life contract in
response, probably mimicking what he was enduring without recognizing that
might have been so. The invidious comparisons that more or less continuously
unfolded in his presence compelled me to believe that his artifice was some-
how possessed of more substance than my own and that my deficits of per-
sonhood were therefore grotesquely greater than his. He was, after all, as he
kept reminding me, a person of extraordinary parts, someone who had
transcended crushing poverty through acts of will and bravery to become, as
he had me believe, a mythically successful retail executive and visionary.
There was, in fact, compelling reason for me to respond to his contrivance
with contrivance of my own. One was acutely aware of the appraising eye he
cast over everyone around him, very much attuned to any slight or injury that
56 Foundational Ideas

might be directed towards him. I particularly had the sense when I was with
him, both publicly and privately, that I was regarded as a potential source of
embarrassment who could cause him compromise.
When I did so, my action was mostly inadvertent. Much of my conscious
effort around him was directed towards avoiding the corrosive, seemingly
ruthless ascriptions he imposed on me. Open defiance, like my mother’s, was
almost impossible for me. The emaciation of self that I lived with meant that
a risk like that was too great; it felt possible to me that he could utterly
annihilate my secretly decimated spirit. This was very much a conscious fear
that declared itself evermore emphatically as the years with my father unfol-
ded. It manifested itself as a sense that I could be crushed or obliterated, not
only by my father, but by anyone who struck me as resembling him or,
indeed, by anyone who was at all forceful or aggressive.
The wariness that one felt around him was suffocating, but his needs dictated
that one present oneself as personable and competent, not as afraid. Doing this
also demanded a measure of contrivance and orchestration of self that further
contributed to the feeling that one was dying inside. Acutely felt vulnerability
was so exquisitely experienced it eventually became impossible to hide, resulting
in a prolonged period in primary school of devastating bullying. In retrospect, I
came to understand as a psychologist that my relative inability to effectively
defend myself was all too apparent, readily targeting me for the bullying which
took place. At the time, I was convinced that my inability to protect myself
confirmed the deep and abiding inadequacy my incompleteness created for me,
further exacerbating shame. My father, acutely aware of the bullying and feeling
very much diminished by what was happening to his son, escalated his distaste
for me. Bullying played itself out over the course of two–three years in early
primary school. It meant being terrified to go to school, being terrified at recess,
and being terrified at the bus stop both before and after school. It was as
relentless as my father’s disgust with me. I still live with its effects.
A change of school offered the possibility of resurrection which, mir-
aculously, I was able to effect, becoming, for a period of years, all that I
thought my father would have wanted (president of my class, president of the
student council, captain of most of the major sports teams, academic honors)
only to discover I was still regarded with disdain and contempt. “Stupe” was
a favored moniker for me. I could only conclude that my father’s judgement
must be accurate, that I was fundamentally distasteful and weak, which was
unforgivable. There seemed to be nothing I could do to turn away the repug-
nance that my father felt for me. I concluded that my defect was my endemic
fear, which I thought, horrifyingly, was becoming all too transparent again
and was certainly repellent to him. I further believed that because I contrived
so much of myself, anybody who attempted to get close to me would soon
discover that, like my mother, I was skeletal and incomplete. This latter con-
cern was very sharply felt, prompting me to retreat further and further from
the people around me. Absence of substance was a mortal sin.
 Foundational Ideas 57

Long after I had finished graduate school, it finally began to occur to me

that my father’s contempt was ubiquitous and, in a perverse way, democratic.
It was his dominant interface with the world. At one point I had concluded
that he was misogynistic. Then I recognized that he had contempt for vir-
tually everyone. No relationship was immune to it. The spics, wops, mics,
kikes, chinks, and niggers he derided were not exceptions to an otherwise
genial humanity. His contempt for them was the measure of him. Very much
a relief for me to recognize that it was so, but bonds of shame about my own
incompleteness and my fearfulness, though loosened, still held me unbearably
tight. It remained for me to puzzle out why contempt was so important to
him. As I matured as a psychologist, I could ask myself what function it
served and what it reflected about his own internal realities. The more I
looked and the more I experienced him, the more I could recognize that he
was truly misanthropic. Finally understanding this facet of him played a key
role in helping me conceptualize what I came to believe were core dynamics
of narcissism. I will return to this theme as different threads in the unfolding
narrative wind their way together in this and in subsequent chapters.
Comments made thus far about contrivance and my father’s extraordinary
sensitivity to injury or slight might seem to imply that he carefully and assi-
duously impression-managed his own behavior so that particular effects, each
of which was painstakingly arranged, could be realized. To be on the receiv-
ing end of the vigilance which he imposed, particularly in the company of his
self-aggrandizement, certainly made it feel as if such must be the case: a
grand master manipulating his every move all knowingly and flawlessly. But
as one kept close acquaintance with him over the years and then decades, his
mask of infallibility fell away, tentatively at first and then very decisively. Two
realizations presented themselves.
First, I began to recognize that the vigilance he so prominently exhibited,
while undoubtedly reflective of his own consuming guardedness, also helped
him incite vigilance in others around him, which appeared to be quite
important for him. Why, I wondered, was it so compelling for him to provoke
fear in the people that he dealt with? Or, put another way, what did that tell
me about him? Then I began to notice that fear incitement, like contempt,
was nearly ubiquitous, or, perhaps expressed more accurately, eventually sur-
faced in a very prominent and a very tenacious way in virtually every rela-
tionship that he had. Sometimes it took the form of an explicit attack or acts
of bullying carried out in the company of other people, causing either muted
or tangible discomfort in everyone in attendance.
I watched people’s responses, hopeful that their reactions could help me
better understand my own. Some attendees seemed to convey tacit acceptance
or even approval of his acts; others even joined in the bullying themselves.
Some few might object, framing their objection with humor, while some small
number might take him on, letting him know that his behavior was not
acceptable and that they would not participate in it. This latter group of
58 Foundational Ideas

people, as already implied, were exceptions, but they were important excep-
tions for me to watch. Some of them were clearly furious with my father while
others couched their distaste for his behavior in a very elegant, self-possessed,
and articulate fashion. How wonderful, I thought, to be able to do either. His
attacks and bullying certainly caused me to be afraid. Could I be next? And if
this possibility frightened me, were other people in the room, or at least some
of them, feeling the same way? If my feelings somehow served as a measure of
what other people might be feeling, was it then also possible that others
shared what I regarded as base and shameful reactions on my part – palpable
relief that if he was attacking others I was safe for a while?
It took some time for me to appreciate that people I thought of as powerful
adults might withhold confrontation because they were afraid of being
attacked themselves. As I looked back from a perspective of adult conviction,
I finally established for myself, I also remembered that in many of these
gatherings (certainly not all) my father was surrounded by people who
worked for him. It was easy to assume as a youngster, particularly the kind of
youngster I was, that they and he were both of one mind – that is, his mind,
the boss’s mind. At the same time part of my reality as a youngster in these
situations also included profound feelings of discomfort infused with my own
guilt, by concern for the suffering of the targeted party, and by outrage that I
was helpless, compelled to watch yet another humiliation drama unfold.
One summer evening my father was entertaining a number of his sub-
ordinates at a barbecue he was holding. He was the chef. I was his assistant.
He had a barbecue with a bellows one could operate with a crank. Men and
women together were assembled at the barbecue listening to my father
expound in hyperbolized fashion on the meat that he was cooking. Con-
spiratorially, he whispered to me, in an aside, that I was to get two large four-
inch firecrackers and surreptitiously slip them into his hand. I did so. Loudly
proclaiming and pointing, “Look at that bear over there!” (This was an ele-
gant suburban enclave not far from downtown Minneapolis), he tossed the
two firecrackers into the grill with his free hand. It would be a great under-
statement to say that the ensuing explosions, which occurred almost instan-
taneously, were loud. Women screamed. Some men did too, though they
immediately tried to suppress it. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres were spilled on
clothing. But nobody said anything. Nervous laughter. Some strange looks.
Finally, some appreciative remarks reflecting the boss’s great sense of humor.
Another summer evening and probably another barbecue. I was invited to
demonstrate my marksmanship in front of guests (subordinates again). The
direction given was to shoot at a large gourd hanging from a tree that served as
a birdhouse. I did as I was told. The ricocheted BB shattered the cocktail glass
of the woman standing next to me. I remember feeling appalled, ashamed,
detached (maybe surreal is a better word), and somehow blameworthy. The
assembled guests provided the anxious laughter I had come to expect in such
circumstances, but no remonstrations.
 Foundational Ideas 59

With the maturity that my profession provided me, I was able to recognize,
in retrospect, that the dynamics and the feelings that I was starting to disen-
tangle had provided me with an intimate look at a very formidable and pow-
erful phenomenon which has played, to my mind, such an important part in
human history: identification with the aggressor. As I read Eric Larson’s
wonderful book, Garden of Beasts, I had only to look at my own childhood to
understand why the physical and psychological coercion of that particular
chapter of human history (Germany 1933) could be so irresistible for so many
people. One particularly disturbing memory from childhood assailed me
during that reading experience: my chief bully during my childhood years
laughingly hanging my pet dachshund by the leash from an elevated porch
attached to our house some 15 feet off the ground. I laughed with him. I was
sick with fear and loss, but too frightened to oppose him. That impression is
indelible. To an outsider, I would have looked like a collaborator. Inside, the
sense of personal betrayal that I demonstrated towards my dog, Ginger, still
unsettles me.
Another thought occurred to me about the function of my father’s vigilance
as I reflected, at various points in my life, upon countless examples like the
ones provided above. It was a thought that was very hard for me to acquire
because I assumed that I was fundamentally different than the “normal”
other and certainly different from the adults who attended the events I have
described. Could it be possible that the fear my father instigated in others had
the same impact on them that it had on me: to shut down spontaneity and
creativity and freeze inner life? Did it serve him in some way, in other words,
to do that to all of us?
The second realization that presented itself to me also helped open vistas of
insight. I started to recognize how imperfect my father’s attempts to curate
himself and others were. Simply and perhaps somewhat misleadingly put, I
began to acknowledge both how out of control he was and how unaware he
was of why he was behaving as he did. I didn’t have any answers I could give
myself at the time and, if I had, it really would have been too dangerous to
share them with him, particularly if they were perceptive. Even remotely
insightful thinking was not welcome. But there it was. His behavior was
enormously impulse ridden, or seemed to be so. I continued to guess that
there must be order and coherence somewhere under the surface informing
his impulsivity, but I would have to wait a long time for those explanations to
occur to me. Recognizing his need to generate fear and vigilance in others,
though, eventually proved to be one part of the puzzle.
Impulsivity and addictive behavior constantly derailed the staged presence
he appeared to work so hard to construct for himself. The bullying, shaming,
and intimidation which I have just referred to abruptly punctuated much of
his behavior in an erratic, uneven, out-of-control way. While I had come to
see that “nice” didn’t typically last very long and that the urge to invoke
vigilance and fright would eventually prove itself to be irresistible, I became
60 Foundational Ideas

less and less certain that he was capable of choosing the time and place of his
aggressivity. Rather than creating the impression of a master manipulator
who planned and directed such behavior, one was left with a sense that he was
oftentimes a passenger on a runaway train he was not in any position to
restrain. It was a curious thing to notice about him and an important para-
digm shift for me. I could anticipate his sadism, but I often couldn’t predict
when it would visit itself on me or someone else in the circle – and I don’t
think he could much of the time either. For the most part, it looked like
something that was happening to him, though, when it did, he whole-
heartedly participated in the urge to hurt and to diminish.
Interestingly, he never seemed to ask himself what was happening to him
during these moments. He simply appeared to consummate them without
reflection. He didn’t consider, at least so far as I could see, how he might be
harming himself or others. I puzzled and puzzled over this question. How
could he not see? And how could he not feel? My guts were churning with the
unfolding of each of these episodes. He looked to be blind to the effect he was
having on himself and the people around him. For a while I wondered if this
is what he expected me to become. That this was what he believed a man was
supposed to be – swaggering, dominating, indifferent to the people around
him. While this prospect horrified me, I was deeply confused. If it was good
to be a man and if this was what a man was, how was I to find my way?
Should I try to be like him? Or should I pull away from him and try to find
some other path to manhood? These were very overwhelming and very
unsettling questions to have to consider and they permeated a significant part
of my life. He unselfconsciously portrayed his behavior as an attractive asset
to be prized. His aggression and impulsivity were couched as a strength.
There was never an admission that he had gotten himself in over his head in a
given instance. His behavior was so tenaciously pursued that at times I
remember thinking he was casting himself in a ridiculous light, an outlandish
caricature of toughness that was transparently absurd. He didn’t seem to be
able to possess the discretion to stop himself. The train just seemed to careen
onwards, escalating wreckage, on its way to the inevitable washed-out railway
culvert.
His addictive drinking and his out-of-control sexual appetites were treated
in much the same way. Assets to be prized. Testaments to his masculinity and
his prowess. Aspects of character to be admired. “Adult” cocktails begin as
soon as he arrived home. The drinking essentially never stopped until he went
to bed. Restraint, it seemed to me, was only ever tentatively expressed, all too
readily displaced by the desire for another drink. Pride accompanied a belief
that he could hold his liquor well. That, too, was manly and grown-up. His
perception of his drinking suggested that he felt it set him apart, establishing
a kind of ascendancy over others who couldn’t drink as successfully or as
much as he could. And drinking, like his bullying, was supported by entitle-
ment, an unquestioned right he could act upon, seemingly without conscience
 Foundational Ideas 61

or consideration for others. If pushed by some unseen internal accuser, he

might offer that drinking was the just desserts of someone who worked as
hard as he did (he was unquestionably an extremely focused professional who
demanded a great deal of himself). There was no acknowledgement, however,
of the pain or misgivings about self that informed his drinking. Virtually no
self-examination. No attempt to investigate the internal realities that drove
the addiction. Never an admission of vulnerability, of error, or of misstep.
Sexual exchange was framed similarly. Hyperbolized masculinity. Desirable
prowess. Confirmation of attractiveness. And cause for conspiratorial
exchange with other men that, to my young eye, seemed to consolidate
admission to a very special fraternity, one that any fellow must want to be a
part of if they were solidly male. There were largely whispers of my father’s
sexual adventures when I was younger and he was variably still married to my
mother, but the whispers were loud enough and frequent enough that I soon
began to understand that he, like my mother, was not remotely faithful. In my
later teens he openly bragged about the various women he knew. Sometimes
the language used – probably characteristically – was crude and visceral and
it made me feel uncomfortable, though I was loath to show it. Because it was
obvious that I was, after all, supposed to view sexuality in the way that he
did, I could not tell him that I was uneasy with his manner and his words. I
imagined something must be wrong with me. Part of me very much wanted to
share in this collaboration, to find some means of coming together with him
and consolidating sexuality in a way that he might approve of. I could push
myself to try to replicate his version of sexuality, but I always came back to
the same place of discomfort. Worse, I had no words of my own to articulate
my reticence. That, too, would take some time.
As I was older still, my father’s relationships with his girlfriends became
even more transparent, largely because he not only told me about them but
sought my advice. I even found myself, on one occasion, counselling a woman
who had become suicidal after he broke up with her. I can recall being
astonished by his indifference to her pain. And in what struck me as a sur-
prisingly casual and glib way, he handed the phone to me to deal with her
distress. In the same way that I had not understood sexuality at age 10 when
my counselling was solicited, I certainly was at a loss to make sense of the
intricacies of relationships at age 19. Shortly after my phone call with this
woman began, my father cheerfully absented himself to go out for the evening
on another date.
Certainly, in part what made it difficult for me to discern the obviously
impulsive character of much of his behavior when I was younger was the air
of self-righteousness and seemingly deep conviction appearing to inform his
attacks on the people around him. I assumed that he was responding to great
wrongs others had committed that had incited moral outrage in him I wasn’t
in a position to appreciate. Perhaps also contributing to my confusion was the
deliberate, methodical way he acted out much of his cruelty. He seized upon
62 Foundational Ideas

people’s vulnerability and used it, systematically, to deconstruct them, in the

process filling some need of his I could not discern.
My uncle was visiting our family over one of the holidays. He had lost his
job some months before and was quite desperate, having been unable to find
anything new for himself. My father raised the subject of my uncle’s jobless-
ness at a gathering of family and friends, including, I think, some of his work
colleagues. He talked extensively about some of the big projects that he was
working on and did so in a way that struck me as an attempt to impress the
people around him. He then began to hint that there might be a place in his
organization for my uncle. He implied opportunity and then withdrew it,
doing so repeatedly. My uncle’s attempts to maintain a professional façade
that might support his attractiveness as a potential new executive started to
break down, exposing the desperation that his joblessness was causing for him.
My father played with him. Soliciting interest and hope, talking about possible
functions my uncle might fulfil, and then disqualifying him. This whole process
seemed to me to extend interminably, possibly over an hour or more. All played
out very publicly. By the end of it, my uncle was nearly in tears. Probably con-
fused, probably aware that he was being played with, but simultaneously despe-
rately trying to hang onto his composure to keep a job opportunity alive. My
father strung him out for months after this conversation, periodically soliciting
letters and phone calls that predictably led nowhere. My mother, very much
aware of what he was doing – having seen him operate in this fashion countless
times before – confronted him repeatedly with his cruelty. In the face of her
objection and her pressure, he would seem to back off a bit, only to reinitiate the
ugliness. He utterly tyrannized my uncle, exploiting vulnerability, helplessness,
and fear until he finally tired of the game.
There is one final aspect of my father’s difficulty exerting control over
himself which now becomes important to mention: the seemingly irresistible
urge to counterpunch whenever others were perceived to have attacked him.
His sense of being attacked might reflect an intuitive feeling that others meant
to undercut, wound, or embarrass or it might represent reaction to a clear,
intentioned attack that someone else directed towards him. In the case of the
former, intuition might be based upon an accurate appraisal of the potential
threat another person was likely to mount or, alternatively, it might also grow
out of what struck one as exquisite sensitivity to injury that facilitated elabo-
rate paranoid constructions, or conspiracies, that identified other people as
risks. His many bigotries illustrated this vividly. Each group targeted with
hatred seemed to be perceived as wanting to use, exploit, or manipulate him;
each was also regarded as morally inferior and therefore as worthy of pun-
ishment. He always seemed to find justification, in other words, for his con-
tempt and his mistrust of the other guy. In so doing he cleared a path for rage
that seemed to continuously press him to express itself. Rage that took the
form of counter punching was no less resistible and no more containable than
other forms of rage that also seemed to dominate him.
 Foundational Ideas 63

So I observed, again and again as a child, that any perceived or actual

slight could produce – did produce – storms of retribution he seemed unable
to contain. Once the ugliness of a counterattack began, he was caught in its
grip. A single counter stroke could endure throughout an evening’s social
proceedings and sometimes long afterwards, culminating in a vendetta against
a given individual he might never surrender. Any mention of that person or
any indirect reminder of them could re-incite his fury and his condemnation.
Sometimes he might be momentarily dissuaded from his invective, but, once
started, it eventually seemed to reinstate itself, involuntarily bringing everyone
back to his sense of injury and to his unquenchable indignation.
It was really quite difficult to make any sense of these intimidating displays
throughout most of my growing up years. The conceptualization I provided
above only emerged after years of personal work. What stood out for me as a
youngster was the terrible risk that you faced if you identified yourself as an
adversary. Doing so meant having to bear unending and probably escalating
excoriation that promised to deny any reinstatement into his good books. At
first I concluded that he behaved as he did when he directed his vendettas
towards me because I was essentially bad – as must be those other people he
spoke of in such condemnatory terms. The quality of personal righteousness
that attended his rage flooded me, obscuring any capacity for perception or
for thought. Only gradually was I capable of recognizing that his out-of-con-
trol counter punching bespoke some kind of struggle that he was having with
himself. His incitement to join him in his rages and to support his bigotries
somehow always felt wrong to me – perhaps because, somewhere inside, I
quietly wondered whether his poisonous assessment of others might be flawed
in the way that I hoped his assessment of me was. As much as I took his
behavior to heart, I also felt its injustice. Besides hating myself, I also hated
him for despising me. Was I really as awful and as compromising as he con-
veyed that I was? And if I wasn’t, did it mean that he might be wrong about
others?
These are very difficult and challenging issues for a child to resolve. I
deliberately tried to support the idea that his endemic hatreds, including his
hatred of me, might not be well grounded, but most of the time, for a very
long time, I failed to convince myself. I was caught in a terrible dilemma.
Hate myself or hate him. Share his pervasive derision and suspicion of others
or open myself to the possibility of others’ decency.
Hating him gave way to insight. Finding a way to trust and respect others,
where he couldn’t, granted me the chance to hear other voices. Insight
allowed me to eventually recognize how deeply and profoundly wounded he
had been – deeply and profoundly enough that he was unable to trust anyone,
erecting walls of cynicism, contempt, and vigilance that kept everyone else
out, locking himself up in a world that must have been profoundly lonely and
that could and did become paranoid and delusional. To a degree, he could
hide in the prejudices and culture wide misconceptions of his times. The effect
64 Foundational Ideas

of living life as he did, nonetheless, must have created a kind of slow, devas-
tating erosion of the soul. If contempt and loneliness are your close compa-
nions and rage your defining interface with the world, how could you sustain
yourself, I wondered.
Exposure to the kind, gentle, mentoring personalities of numerous teachers
who took me under their wings (some coaches) helped me start to translate
the alternate path I was looking for. I found I wanted to be someone who
could make others feel the way that my teachers made me feel. I felt utterly
undeserving of their warmth and acceptance, imagining that they, like my
father, must respond to me with disgust and alienation. Somehow, I allowed
myself to remain close to them in spite of what felt like suffocating fear that I
must disappoint them. I never realized a strong subjective conviction of
belonging in these relationships, but I could allow them to unfold. The
warmth and respect that these people bestowed was partially transformative,
coexisting side-by-side all of the worst things that I saw in myself. Father-
surrogate relationships continued throughout my schooling, including gradu-
ate school, and extended themselves into the first eight years of my profes-
sional career. Initially feeling that I couldn’t begin to take in the wonderful
resources they afforded me in a way that would allow me to mitigate my pain
to a meaningful degree, I discovered, as my life unfolded, just how much of
an impact they had. I also had, as a result, clear evidence of how tenacious
early pain is and of how long might be required to offset it. And, at that, at
the end of a lifetime, I can still see and feel the residual effects of my father’s
version of masculinity in the private discourse that unfolds within me.
Through the example that these men provided, I was increasingly able to
articulate some of the discomfort that my father’s brand of identity and
sexuality had evoked in me. I could decide that I didn’t want to hurt other
people and make them afraid of me because, through others’ mentorships, I
now knew how powerful and how sustaining kindness was. This, too, was not
an easy journey. As one will see in succeeding chapters, I struggled with pro-
found darkness and a deadness of the soul for quite some time that deeply
frightened me. My insides largely felt like a wasteland, populated with
devastating imagery and with rage born of cruelty, exquisite vulnerability, and
helplessness. It was hard for me to see that I carried anything redeeming
within me. But these lovely men helped me see that there was more to me,
that I was capable of feeling other things beyond the devastation which my
mother and, prominently, my father evoked in me. So now I was in the posi-
tion to understand that what had made me feel uncomfortable in the way that
my father approached women was his need to “thingify” them, to strip them
of their humanity and complexity, rendering them objects he could use and
then – importantly – discard without feeling anything himself. It occurred to
me that maybe that was the point. Beyond the obvious distastefulness of
exploiting somebody else or, worse, subjecting them to deliberate acts of
cruelty, I could see another intention: the need to sidestep bonds of warmth
 Foundational Ideas 65

and mutuality of affection that create belonging and render relationships, as

well as life itself, meaningful and fulfilling. This proved to be an essential
insight, one that allowed me to penetrate narcissism.
This foundational realization, however, led to more questions. I wanted to
understand what had happened to him, what it was about his life experience
that made loving and being loved so toxic. These were answers that presented
me with the next series of challenges I would have to move through to unravel
the puzzle – not only of his life, but of my own. My training and my work
experience enabled me to elaborate my questions further. Love, after all, so
much as I came to understand it, necessitated safety, trust, mutuality of
respect, tolerance of vulnerability, and interdependence. It also seemed to
require restraint, judgement, and a well-articulated appreciation of another’s
feelings as well as of one’s own realities.
In iterating a list of qualities as I have just done, I make it sound like it has
been easy for the collective us, including members of the mental healthcare
professions, to figure all this out. It wasn’t. Our conceptions of what was
required to establish a successful love relationship have changed dramatically
over time. When I was in graduate school, for example, one school of thought
maintained that if a relationship was truly intimate, it meant that partners
could share unvarnished truth however bluntly they wished to. That didn’t
work out so well. Another school of thought believed that people could move
in and out of fidelity, engaging with multiple partners without generating
harm to trust. Some professionals still hold this view (polyamory), but my
sense is they would not attempt to impose it on others save for those who
wished to make such a choice for themselves. During my early professional
years, in contrast, advocates of polyamory would have enthusiastically
encouraged couples to experiment with multiple relationships. The con-
sequences of inciting multiple infidelities, in retrospect, now seem predictable
and understandable, but they weren’t at the time.
As helping professions, we have spent many years groping through choices
that seemed appropriate enough or beguiling enough to integrate into psy-
chotherapy practice, only to discover our conceptions were unworkable. The
list of “necessities” for love to flourish that I have provided represents, of
course, my own distillation of the knowledge that we have painstakingly
acquired over literally decades.
All of which is to suggest that we didn’t come by our current understanding
of love easily. No doubt our conceptions will continue to change, hopefully in
increasingly helpful ways, as they have in the past. The qualities that I just
identified above, however, would prove to be enormously generative in better
enabling me to grasp what my father’s life journey had meant to him.
In the context of what I had come to understand about love, I could see
that various aspects of my father’s behavior – most prominently, within the
purview of what has been discussed in this chapter, his punishing vigilance,
his explosive rages, his cruelty, and his endemic contempt – subverted the very
66 Foundational Ideas

conditions required to establish a loving relationship. I found myself asking,

again, whether these aspects of character represented a kind of byproduct of
narcissism or, possibly simultaneously, whether one of narcissism’s core func-
tions was to protect the narcissist against love – as if love were an unbearable
threat. Love as threat was not a new idea for me. I watched most of the
people I worked with struggle with the risks that it posed and intense fear that
it could arouse, creating myriad layers of defense to protect themselves in
response. Most of these people, however, acted like they wanted to be able to
love and were compelled to pursue it, even though imperfectly, showing
themselves capable, to greater or lesser degrees, of tolerating it. If the ability
to tolerate love represented a kind of continuum, I thought, maybe people
with Narcissistic Personality Disorder experienced love, connection, and
community as far more aversive than possibly much of the rest of humanity
did. My understanding of what love entailed, then, brought me back to the
hypothesis that I shared earlier in this chapter – that giving love and being
loved was unbearable for the narcissist.
Let me return for the moment to the subject of my father’s impulsivity – his
ability to act with alacrity, without apparent hesitation or misgiving. Later in
life my clinical experience permitted me to see that which would have been
inaccessible to me when I was younger. Not looking at the self served my
father’s unconscious interests well, allowing him to engage and reengage with
the damage that he inflicted on others without exposing himself to the
empathy that insight would have imposed. If the function of his behavior was
to refute loving feelings in himself and others, the absence of insight and of
empathy could be seen to be self-protective, enabling him to turn others away
in the various ways that he did without being constrained by concern for their
feelings or for the pain that he was causing them.
I observed in my practice, over and over and over again, that when the self
was threatened in some important manner, people’s need for safety often
trumped empathy. It was all about protecting the self. Perhaps a couple of
simple examples would be helpful. If someone else’s accurate assessment of
you felt too jeopardizing, you could turn them away with scathing counter
criticism. Some people felt remorse in the moment, but couldn’t constrain
themselves; many others were only able to experience remorse, if at all, once
the moment had passed. The subgroup of people who seemed unable to
experience remorse appeared to believe the negative attributes (scathing criti-
cism) they attributed to the other party. Deconstructing the other guy and
rendering him or her unattractive facilitated use of the defense. Now you
could feel justified for treating someone else badly and get to protect yourself
at the same time. You could even demand reparations.
The second example I’m about to give reiterates and deepens many of the
dynamics of my first example. Suppose you experience giving an apology as
diminishing and threatening, perhaps because it occasions unbearable vul-
nerability for you. You feel terribly small and unprotected when you face
 Foundational Ideas 67

accountability, possibly because others in the past have treated you harshly
and punitively. You find ways to sidestep the apology required of you by
wrong footing the other party (“you’re much worse than I am,” “I’m tired of
you getting hurt all the time,” “if you’re not happy, maybe you should leave”
etc.). Once again, numbers of people would be aware that their defense was
hurtful, but couldn’t stop themselves from acting as they did; many others, in
contrast, only experienced remorse after the event or, if the self was threa-
tened sufficiently, not at all. Once again, believing in the negative attributes
you assigned the other guy facilitated this process. In the moment, you lit-
erally experience them as being like the punitive other(s) who had so badly
hurt you earlier in your life. You could feel justified in presenting a threat of
abandonment, for instance, because the other party was “bad” and you had
the right to protect yourself.
But sometimes you might not even be aware of the experiences that make
giving an apology so painful for you. You act as you do as a means of estab-
lishing your authority and your power in a relationship without experiencing
the vulnerability that an apology occasions for you. Your “defense” is automatic
and reflexive rather than being informed by a measure of self-awareness.
Defense short-circuits the vulnerability you find so painful, ensuring that you
don’t experience it. It is the work of psychotherapy to help people appreciate
the automaticity of their defenses and the impact that their defenses have
upon others. Even with extensive psychotherapy effort, some patients cannot
tolerate insight or the empathy for the other which insight facilitates. Their
resistance is formidable, tenacious, and obdurate. Considering the implications
of their behavior feels too catastrophic for the self to bear and, importantly,
doing so would compromise defenses they experience as essential to their psychic
survival.
The examples I have given of abrogated empathy are simple ones. In actu-
ality, many of the defenses that people employ are complex and nuanced, very
much embedded in habits of being that have evolved over their lifetime.
Habits of arrogance, condescension, impatience, mistrust, irritability, rest-
lessness, feelings of being hard done by, hyper responsibility (“once again I
have to do it all myself”), chronic hostility, sense of victimization, habitually
talking over others – the list is potentially endless – capture, again in a
somewhat simpleminded way, manifestations of defense. Less obviously,
positive or seemingly innocuous human qualities can also serve defensive
functions: humor, generosity, empathy, acquiescence, diffidence, charm, crea-
tivity, self-sacrifice, etc.
Now imagine that many of these postures intertwine with one another to
form systems of defense (what I have called complex defenses) that also serve
to protect us. Consider, as well, that these systems of defense unfold auto-
matically and largely unconsciously, insinuating themselves into who and
what we are on a day-by-day basis. Some of us are variably aware of the
complex defenses we employ; many others of us are not. But how could we
68 Foundational Ideas

be? Unless we do a good deal of work with ourselves and are passionate
about knowing ourselves, we probably won’t understand why we have come to
rely on the complex systems of defense that are such an integral part of our
lives. Even when people make assiduous efforts to be self-aware, they can still
expect to be possessed of blind spots that remain with them throughout their
lives. We may remain unaware, in other words, of the complex defenses that can
be such a pervasive part of us as well as the painful life experiences that instigate
the use of defense. Moreover – and very importantly – many of us would be
largely unaware what it would be like for other people to be targeted by the
complex defenses we employ. We don’t recognize the injury that we are causing
them by relying on our defenses. We need our defenses. We need to be able to
enact them without the obstructions that oppressive empathy might create.
To be fair, of course there are people who are all too painfully aware that their
personalities batter and wound others, without being able to stop themselves
from doing so. Empathy and guilt are very prominent parts of their experience,
but, poignantly, they lack the means to step away from what they have become.
Many people experience addiction in the manner that I have just described.
Getting people to understand that complex, interrelated patterns of beha-
vior and feeling states serve defensive functions is a core and frequently
challenging part of psychotherapy work. It is understandably hard for people
to initially grasp the importance of defenses because it feels threatening to
take a deep look at ourselves (e.g., “what you’re telling me about myself
makes me feel like a terrible person”). Helping people feel safe enough to
look deeply represents a big part of what one does in psychotherapy.
Even after people are able to stand back and observe themselves, the function
of defense often didn’t declare itself. What makes this next phase of the work
especially challenging is the efficiency of defense. Defenses curtailed the threat
that people were trying to avoid before they could experience it. I would so often
hear, “but I don’t feel afraid – so why do I act this way?” It was only as people
meaningfully disrupted defense that they began to experience the sense of threat
that drove it. Disrupting defense is hard to do. Softening the reflexive arrogance
or condescension or impatience that characterizes you is unsettling and dis-
concerting. It places people in the position of experiencing aversive affects their
defenses allow them to sidestep. Feelings like, variously, remorse, shame, guilt,
acutely felt vulnerability (for some people, “weakness”), helplessness, rage they
would find unacceptable in themselves, personal diminishment, etc. Moreover,
disrupting defense sometimes exposed people to a reexperiencing of the original
trauma(s) that instigated defense. Reexperiencing aspects of original trauma can
be particularly painful and disorganizing. People work very hard to avoid reex-
periencing. If it can be tolerated, however, people are in a much better position
to see why they feel compelled to handle themselves in the way that they do. Pain
associated with reexperiencing is potentially formidable.
My own sense has been that people who have been able repress original
trauma experiences may be effectively protecting themselves against Post
 Foundational Ideas 69

Traumatic Stress Disorder, which produces potentially lethal levels of psychic

pain. Quite a benefit, actually. Repression is kind of a spooky, otherworldly
defense. We literally forget traumatic experience. It remains inaccessible to us.
Some clinicians maintain that repressed memory can reliably be recovered
through treatment. Most clinicians now would probably agree that the
“recovery” process is likely to produce inaccurate, distorted accounts of
trauma. The cost of repression is relative personal blindness. People who have
used this defense extensively probably have a harder time coming to under-
stand the origins of their behavior.
I believe that our reliance on systems of complex defense is a pervasive and
defining part of each of us, the well-adjusted as well as the troubled among us.
Everybody. Good people. Really quite decent people. It appears to be something
that everybody does (myself included) either in the face of immediate threat to
the self or habitually. Sometimes the complex defenses we employ are subtle,
nuanced, and highly elaborated and sometimes they are crudely transparent.
People’s awareness of the defenses they rely upon to protect themselves can vary
considerably as does their ability to acknowledge what they are doing once the
defense is identified for them, but employment of defenses often seems to require
at least some measure of disabled empathy and disabled empathy, in turn, always
seemed to amplify the robustness of defense. Disabled empathy, of course,
represents another kind of blindness.
Blindness, in my father’s case, was complicated. It was clear to me that he
knew he was bullying others, that he could taste the harm and the shaming
that he was causing them, and that it was obviously gratifying to him to act
as he did. He wasn’t unaware of his impact on others; on the contrary, he
seemed to thrive on others’ pain and impotence. Now I had a new question to
ask myself about the interaction between empathy, self-awareness, and
defense. One puzzle leading to another and then another.
Even defenses that impose significant costs on us and the people around us
typically offer us compromises with our pain that allow us to do the best that
we can with what we’ve got. My father’s reliance on a tortured, complex
system of defense, possibly to protect himself against love, can be seen to
represent a particularly damaging compromise that would tragically limit his
capacity to lead a fulfilling life. The in-depth investigation of his life that this
book provides should serve to offer the reader an example of what a complex
system of defense looks like and how it operates.
As a fitting end to this chapter, let me provide a very dramatic and perhaps
disturbing example of the easy facility large groups of people – an entire
society – can employ to shut down empathy. In his book, Empire of the Summer
Moon, S. C. Gynne describes Comanche efforts in the southwestern United
States to offset settlers’ incursions onto land that the Comanches considered
theirs. Comanche counter response to settlers’ attempts to appropriate their
lands was strikingly ruthless: captives were tortured in front of their families and
babies were hoisted on Comanche spears before horrified parents. Once a raid on
70 Foundational Ideas

settlements finished, Comanche warriors returned home to their tribe, where

they were said to show themselves to be very committed, caring parents devoted
to child-rearing.
How could two such shockingly different realities coexist so casually in the
same people? Can we satisfy ourselves by concluding that Comanches were, from
our perspective, a primitive tribal entity that lacked the moral structures so
carefully constructed by more humane versions of civilization? But if we give
ourselves an answer like that, how do we account for the casual juxtaposition of
so-called good and evil that seems to have characterized humanity from its
recorded inceptions? Isn’t this what we do in warfare? Love the people close to us
at the same time – at the very same time – that we devastate our enemies,
employing instruments of war that are meant to so terrify and cow our oppo-
nents they submit to our will? Even if one allows that the Allied position in
World War II was, relatively speaking, possessed of greater moral justification
and rectitude than the axis nations, does one not have to acknowledge that the
war was brutal for all participants and that it brutalized everybody, inciting
participants to engage, on a very large scale, in acts of extraordinary cruelty (e.g.,
carpet bombing) that the imperatives of war justified? And as people on both
sides of the war engaged in such cruelty, were they not also, with varying degrees
of success, simultaneously conducting personal lives with friends and loved ones
defined by expectations of respect, caring, and empathy?
As a footnote to the Comanche story, the seemingly fearless, ruthless
Comanche warrior bereft of empathy and humanity rapidly acquiesced to
white pressure for a negotiated treaty when their own wives and children
became captives as a result of white military action. Their concern for their
families’ vulnerability quickly induced them to capitulate.
For me, our capacity to embrace both brutality and love at one and the same
time is who we are. We mustn’t pretend otherwise. In the past, it has been
adaptive for us to unleash our ruthlessness on our enemies at the same time we
try very hard to love the people most important to us. In this fashion generally
more sophisticated forms of civilization marshaled the resolve and the sense of
entitlement required to dominate less sophisticated ones, thereby advancing the
broader interests of civilization itself – without rupturing a combatant civiliza-
tion’s own cohesiveness. In this way, people could love the state and each other
at the same time that they devastated an enemy. Being able to traverse brutality
and love in the easy way we do has therefore been adaptive for our species. The
potentialities to love and to brutalize coexist in all of us.
Empathy is a precious human commodity. It is readily compromised. We
are designed, it seems, so that we can turn it off. If we mean to safeguard it –
as I believe we must if we are to survive in a now remarkably interconnected,
interdependent world – we must make assiduous, disciplined effort to protect
it and enhance it. One of the intentions of this book is to help elucidate some
of the means and the causalities that occasion loss of empathy.
Chapter 5

The Face of Narcissism – Father

The Nature of Relationships

The questions I have just raised about my father’s blindness and his cruelty
naturally led me into consideration of my father’s relationships outside the
purview of his relationship with me and with my mother.
By childhood, I was aware that my father characterized his friendships and
his collegial relationships in exaggerated, larger-than-life terms, just as he did
himself. So and so was the greatest or the best or the most extraordinarily
talented at what he did. Or impossibly brilliant. Or inconceivably tenacious in
overcoming Herculean obstacles. Even identified enemies were similarly formid-
able, testament to his own heroic status. When I was very young, I unhesitatingly
accepted such portrayals. It was exciting to think of my father in mythic terms,
though it did make him that much more intimidating as well – someone whose
achievements I could never emulate. Indeed, he made it quite clear that I could
not hope to do so, that his successes and his gifts of character were so formidable
it would be doubtful I could ever approximate his talent. By the same token, I
was given to understand that I was expected to replicate the immensities he saw
in himself and that failure to do so carried with it disqualifications of shame and
disgrace.
His greatness, then, was a mixed bag for me but, increasingly, I found
myself feeling that it was too self-congratulatory, too exaggerated, and too
self-indulgent for me to comfortably be able to share in the celebration he
assigned himself. It just didn’t feel real. And believing it carried with it the
implication of my own terrible inadequacy. By the time that I was around
eight or nine years old, I found myself dreading these soliloquies. I was
implicitly expected to join in his self-congratulation, echoing his aggrandized
appraisals of himself. Mercifully, sometimes I was only required to listen
appreciatively. At their most awkward, his soliloquies could be mawkish or
even maudlin in tone (especially if he was drinking). I recollect having the
sense that these moments felt very insular, as if I was standing on the outside
of his world watching him feast on his own praise. Even if I did all that he
wished, or that I imagined he wished, I had no means of touching him nor
did I feel I could enhance his celebration by participating in it. Mine was a
scripted part and an inauthentic one at that. His celebration was not generous
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-5
72 The Nature of Relationships

in the way that human celebration can be; it made no room for me to aug-
ment celebratory mood with reciprocal feelings of my own. Layered on top of
all of this was acute awareness that failure to provide him what he wanted, in
the form and to the degree that he wanted it, would result in injury for him
and subsequent wounding for me.
Just as I was held captive – a virtual prop with no dimensions or person-
hood of his own – so too were his “friends.” Indeed, many of them were very
successful themselves. For some, the opportunity to trade testaments to
shared greatness was probably gratifying, but I wonder now if they recognized
how little else there was in their relationship with him to support meaningful
human connection. Listening to some of these sometimes seemingly endless
conversations was disconcerting: giants from Odin patting each other on the
back who never somehow seemed to get around to talking about themselves
in human dimensions. The feeling that most closely approximated my reac-
tion to these conversations was a mixture of intimidation, envy, and lone-
liness. Much of the interaction felt like caricature.
Sometimes when my father waxed prolific about his own greatness and the
greatness of those in his listening circle, he encountered resistance. People
trying to move past the walls he was erecting so that they could engage their
own humanity and his in a more comfortable, genuine format became impa-
tient with him. Some gently poked fun at the outlandish proportions he
assigned himself and them. Others openly resisted his hyperbole in a frank,
outspoken way. They wanted more from him and they wanted more for
themselves. In such moments he appeared to be utterly defeated, very much at
a loss to understand what was being required of him. I thought his perplexity
in these contexts was painfully evident.
My father was probably most at ease with himself talking to others he
could regard as less accomplished than he was. In the company of such
people, he dialed back his self-importance (though it still appeared to be
present), often adopting what struck me as a deliberately folksy, “I’ve got
working-class roots, too” kind of delivery. To my eye, he was able to make it
work better sometimes than others. The more performative the presentation
was, the less successful it was; the more he could allow himself to connect
with the realities of their lives, the more tangible and satisfying the connection
appeared to be. The performative elements of his interactions with people,
whether colleagues or the average Joes, were always prominent, at the best of
times fading into the background only to make their presence felt again
before too much time had elapsed.
I can speculate that my father might have felt more comfortable talking to
what he would characterize as average people because they were not felt to
challenge his ascendancy. In the presence of people whose accomplishments
approximated his own, his inflated appraisals of himself and of them became
more dominant parts of the social exchange. His behaviour and sometimes
theirs brought to mind elaborate threat displays that competitors might direct
 The Nature of Relationships 73

towards one another. Elaborate and sometimes grotesque pissing contests.

These exchanges came to feel dangerous to watch, sometimes eventuating, as
they did, in open belligerence as one participant tried to one up and outdo
the other. On some few occasions that I witnessed, it had been necessary for
onlookers to provide physical restraint to prevent a literal battle from taking
place. I can remember my mother commenting to me that any time my father
was in the presence of someone whose achievements he felt significantly
eclipsed his own, he became obviously ill at ease. It had been her experience
that when this happened he was likely to find an excuse to leave whatever
event he was attending.
Only in retrospect have I been able to recognize that my father’s relation-
ships were largely transactional, often built upon some shared rapacity he and
the other party were intent upon pursuing. At various points in his life my
father established informal business partnerships. These “partners” enjoyed
larger-than-life attributions, much like his corporate colleagues. He was on
the lookout for vulnerabilities in the marketplace – people, for example, who
might be desperate to sell some land, a business, house etc. He and his part-
ner might follow the property over time, instigating phone calls to take the
temperature of the seller and to tease them with the prospect of an offer that
never materialized. When the seller’s desperation overtook them and an
extraordinarily good purchase price could be realized, a purchase was made.
The process was typically an elaborate one, extending over months. As I lis-
tened to my father tell these stories, his pleasure in dominating these people
and winning his deal was unmistakably prominent. There was a pleasure to be
had not just in getting a fire sale price, but in humiliating the other. I suppose
as I heard him talk about his retailing and merchandising work at large cor-
porations he helped direct, he demonstrated similar pleasure in being able to
disguise, lure, and confound store clients. Of course, business is business. But
the pleasure he took from manipulation and exploitation of others seemed to
be defining for him. It was very much the sum of his parts rather than a part
of the whole he could bring to bear on his profession.
Once shared rapacity no longer existed, relationships seemed to dissipate.
Or worse, should he sense vulnerability in a partner or a colleague he could
profitably exploit, he readily did so – with alacrity. As much as he might
express deep injury about perceived disloyalty others demonstrated towards
him, he was unapologetically and unhesitatingly ruthless towards them. It was
an odd juxtaposition for me to witness as a youngster. Expectations of
unswerving and unfaltering loyalty he regularly betrayed in his relationships
with others. Relationships were not sustained by depth of understanding of
the other’s human circumstance, by compassion, or by bonds of attachment
and respect: value only existed if others partnered themselves with his vor-
acious, exploitative appetites.
Relationships also appeared to be infused with parsimony. Carefully calcu-
lated transactions meant to ensure that my father was the dollar winner. Even
74 The Nature of Relationships

something that he was passionate about, his fishing, was informed by parsi-
mony. To all appearances, he looked to be generous in offering to take his
friends out on his boat for fishing expeditions. The deal was that they could
keep only one fish that they caught. The rest were his to sell. In this way he
not only had enough money to pay for his gas, but regular maintenance and
dockage for the boat as well. He often bragged about this small act of finan-
cial prowess. He had created an impression of generosity and even sociability,
but had insured, in the process, that it would cost him nothing. He certainly
hadn’t needed the money at the time. I came to recognize that the microcosm
of fishing reflected the way he approached relationships in the larger context
of his life. Meticulous attention to what he was getting versus what he was
giving. Rarely letting go and giving more than he got. Calculating to ensure
the other party either paid for what they received or vastly overpaid.
I cannot overstate my father’s commitment to parsimony. It seemed to
invade every aspect of my and my mother’s relationship with him as well as
his relationship with others. He was mindful of every dollar that he spent.
Generosity was only rarely apparent and when it was, he soon retreated from
it, recalculating what generous acts had cost him or reminding everyone what
was owed to him for gifts or favors given. Gift giving could make him angry,
as if the impulse to give was nearly inescapably paired with cynicism and
contempt. If cynicism and contempt were defenses, what was it about the urge
to give and to be generous that made him feel like he needed to protect him-
self ? What was the threat that he perceived, I kept asking myself ? Could it be
discomfort and a measure of jeopardy he experienced when his behavior
evoked affection from others? Were other’s feelings of affection aversive for
him because they threatened to engender bonds of obligation in him that
reciprocal affection of his own might create? More than any other, this ques-
tion proved to be pivotal in allowing me to unlock narcissism.
Parsimony was also a metaphor, I came to see, for emotional exchange and
for relationships. Building his formidable walls around himself meant that
other people could never get close enough to hurt him or, more to the point,
to use him. Vulnerability was intolerable. He could affirm his power to protect
himself by using others and by exploiting their loyalties. He was constantly on
the lookout – literally hypervigilant, as I can see now – for any intimation of
disloyalty or rapacity in the people in his sphere, continuously anticipating it
and continuously girding himself against it. I could also see that his fear of
exploitation was so acutely felt that he experienced the rest of the world as
being as ruthless and as self-interested as he was. He was living in a projected
world, one replete with the demons populating his inner life he unceasingly
imputed to other people. How awful for him, I thought. As I was able to put
these ideas together, I felt I had a better measure of what his vigilance meant.
He could never feel safe. His existence was defined by unrelenting solitude.
Desperate to keep everybody out, he had engaged in continuous and com-
pulsive combat with the rest of the world.
 The Nature of Relationships 75

Like many people who had lived through the depression, his preoccupation
with parsimony most certainly bespoke his response to the harrowing poverty
he had endured during most of his childhood and young adult life. Later I
will argue that poverty had a devastating impact on him, playing a significant
role in the creation of his narcissism.
More should be said about the projected world my father occupied. It
dominated his relationships with others and his relationship with himself. He
unceasingly accused others of being possessed of the constellation of
destructive impulses that defined him. Others wanted to screw him, or
manipulate him, or deceive him. Or they were perceived as intending to inflict
harm or humiliation. The world around him was felt to be constantly on the
make. People, he would always say, were always out for themselves, in one
way or another. There were no acts of authentic generosity; everybody had an
angle. But I saw that genuine kindness – kindness that he couldn’t unmask or
discredit – quite unseated him. He was obviously uncomfortable around
people whose decency and genuine concern for others could not be compro-
mised by his cynicism. He retreated visibly into a smaller self, using a tiny,
high-pitched voice: “oh, aren’t you just so nice” or “aren’t you wonderful,”
vaguely sounding like he was full of incredulity. I noticed that he often
retreated from such people altogether, usually fairly quickly. These were not
the people he seemed to want to associate with.
But if he succeeded in deconstructing someone’s decency, exposing ugly
intent of one kind or another under the surface, he stayed and bored in,
expanding his advantage and leveraging as much discomfort as he might. His
sense of relish and celebration in such situations was terribly transparent. At
one point later in my life I came to understand that people’s failed humanity
offered him some vindication for his own. “You see,” he seemed to be saying,
“none of you are any better than I am – you deserve my contempt.” Con-
tempt was gateway entitlement for him. It justified his rapacity. It sub-
stantiated his mistrust. And it allowed him to transform his fear of
vulnerability into qualities that confirmed power: the capacity to celebrate
others’ humiliation and the capacity to negate empathy with a virulently
misanthropic perspective. Restated in terms I relied on a couple of paragraphs
ago, it allowed him to hold the world at arm’s-length, sidestepping the possi-
bilities of harm and “weakness” that meaningful intimacy would have
entailed.
Living with someone who more or less constantly attributes the worst of
himself to others often made me feel like I was living in an upside-down
world. My father generated such stature for himself, particularly when I was
younger, it was hard to disbelieve him. I was simultaneously repelled by his
dark vision of the world and the people in it. It just felt wrong. Like all the
other forms of insight that I eventually acquired, appropriate and propor-
tionate disbelief took some time to present itself to me. The world I shared
with him was all odd angles and jagged contradictions. I knew the pieces
76 The Nature of Relationships

didn’t fit, but I couldn’t figure out why. Only gradually did it dawn on me that
the attributions he directed towards others were mostly not about them, but
about him.
His cynicism did equip him to ferret out moral failings in others with
astonishing efficiency. As often as not, however, his appreciation of others’
tarnished humanity was simplistic, overblown, and improbably overstated. He
tried to support his perceptions with invective and outrage. Evidence was
supplied in the form of convoluted undercurrents of malignant intent that
only he, with the advantage of his wisdom and his unique life experience,
could disentangle. His characterizations of the “badness” he saw in others
lacked internal coherence, which didn’t seem to bother him (but certainly did
me). As I have noted previously, I dared not oppose him – at least not too
defiantly when I was very young – but privately I found myself concluding
that his constructions didn’t seem to make much sense. I suppose, again, I
make it sound easier than it was for me. Who was I to question a giant? He
must be right. Thankfully, my dear mother kept pulling apart some of his
more outrageous assertions, helpfully pointing out that he was being pre-
posterous, that he was assassinating others for the very things that he did
himself. As always, being the mixed blessing that she was, she might also,
confusingly, endorse some of his outrageous conspiratorial arguments, further
elaborating them with oddball embellishments of her own.
World War II with the Japanese was prearranged. Roosevelt and the Japa-
nese were in on it together, agreeing on a timetable and a scenario to start the
conflict. Thousands of Japanese workers in the pineapple fields had cut huge
arrows out of the cultivation to guide the Japanese bombers. Sinister forces
operating in the background had set the carnage in motion to manipulate
large-scale forces of manufacturing and productivity for their own gain.
Always unnamed sinister forces. Unnamed is significant. That left you no
recourse to explore the issue further to determine whether the argument had
been possessed of any substance. This particular conspiracy theory, in a vari-
ety of similar forms, was quite popular during the 40s and 50s, so it had the
glow of popular wisdom, a tradable social commodity one could use to
enhance others’ perceptions of one’s acuity. I suppose I cite this particular
example because it demonstrates the easy juxtaposition of personal psychol-
ogy onto national events and the interpretation of history. An inclination to
find the darkest parts of himself in others made it relatively easy for him to
accept conspiracy theories; correspondingly, her fragility, paranoid outlook,
and fragmentation allowed my mother to uncritically absorb improbable
ideas.
Similar principles applied to my father’s attitude towards race. My father
presented axiomatic racial truths. Blacks were lazy. They were shiftless (shift-
less was always used with lazy, though I don’t know why). They were childlike
and guileless. They were unintelligent compared to the white man, so they
quite naturally needed his direction. He knew how to look after their needs
 The Nature of Relationships 77

and harness their limitations in a way that would work best for society. Blacks
couldn’t self direct (I should say that the word my father used was nigger, or,
in a more benevolent mood, darkie). They had no initiative. They always
looked for the easy way out. They were dishonest. But, in contrast to the
inertia that typified them in the rest of their lives, they were powerfully,
uncontrollably sexually voracious and had to be carefully watched to ensure
that the white women around them were safe. And then I heard that blacks
were a dangerous and volatile force in the broader sense; give them an inch
and they would take the proverbial mile, subverting white rule and hard
earned, much-deserved white privileges. Give them guns and these inert
childlike other beings would organize themselves, rise up as one, and annihilate
their white adversaries.
No room for compassion in this perspective or for an appreciation of the
other as a well-defined human being possessed of uniqueness and an interplay
of complex feelings and motivations much like any other people. No recog-
nition of dignity or of suffering in the cardboard cutouts he erected for him-
self as stand ins for an entire culturally diverse race. Perception driven by his
own compulsion to exploit, to use, and to objectify.
Of course, it must be recognized that numerous forces, in addition to per-
sonal dynamics, support prejudice. I won’t attempt to review them here; my
primary interest and focus in the narrow confines of this discussion is on the
internal dispositions and realities that shape perception, feeling, and behavior.
Later in the book there will be opportunity to broaden context and consider
other factors that contribute to prejudicial beliefs.
On a personal level, living with my father’s unceasing projection of his own
dark impulses onto the people around him meant, as I said, living in a topsy-
turvy world. I’m being told that such and such a person is selfish or greedy or
devious or ruthless, but that’s not what I’m feeling at the time. What I’m
feeling is my father’s powerful, invasive voice. It’s too big and it feels malig-
nant, but my attention is being directed towards someone else’s malevolence.
I’m being asked to feel that they represent threat, but my father’s presence
feels ever so much more threatening than the threat he attributes to them. To
accommodate him, I try to believe what he’s telling me about the other, but
the most tangible malevolence that I experience mostly seems to come from
him – even when I can see that his appraisal of the other is objectively accu-
rate. Mind bending. And then there are the occasions when my view of the
maligned other is very much at odds with his. I can’t see the danger that he’s
spotlighting with his emotion-laden indictments. They just don’t make sense.
They don’t fit my grasp of the person. And, heaven knows, I needed to find
somebody in whom I could believe in his blighted world (I suppose, half
tongue-in-cheek, that’s why Santa Claus became so important to me), so I’m
aware, from a fairly young age, that my desperation to find redeeming quali-
ties in others might have distorted my capacity to see them accurately. Finally,
there are the occasions when my father directs accusatory intent towards
78 The Nature of Relationships

others when I can clearly see that it is my father who is being rapacious, dis-
respectful, self-interested etc. “Wait a minute, you are doing that to him, he’s
not doing that to you,” I might say to myself.
My portrayal of my 8–10-year-old self must sound unlikely to the reader,
but remember that my conversations with myself are unfolding in a paternal
environment that more or less continuously demanded that I not trust my
own perceptions and which more or less continuously foisted upon me either
impossibly inflated or impossibly cynical assessments of others.
As a psychologist, I could see that the projected world that so dominated
my father’s perception, compelling and re-compelling him to assign his own
damaged humanity to others, imprisoned him in an unrelenting solitude, one
in which he witlessly found himself relating to the aggrandized and mis-
anthropic parts of himself that he imposed on everyone around him. His
world, as a consequence, seemed to be populated with cartoonish two-
dimensional stereotypes reflecting his own crude appraisal of humanity. Alone
in an existence devoid of connection to the real, complex human beings
around him. A relentlessly punishing starvation diet.
During the latter two decades of his life, it finally became apparent to me
that my father’s exaggerated characterizations of his friendships grossly mis-
represented his reality. Prior to that, though I wondered what passed between
him and other people that rendered his relationships meaningful, part of me
still thought that there must be more to his exchange with other people than I
could see. I imagined that my appraisals must be wrong or were poorly
informed, that maybe the “great” friendships he kept referencing really exis-
ted on terms I could not appreciate. His friendships were typified, perhaps not
surprisingly, in the same aggrandized terms as other facets of his life. He was
so emphatic about the descriptors he used and brought such imposing con-
viction to the subject matter of his friendships that I ended up – wrongly –
questioning my own perceptions rather than his. Eventually I came to recog-
nize that he had probably not enjoyed many enduring friendships and, at that,
I wasn’t sure how close he had allowed himself to become to the best of the
friends he had.
I very much wanted to believe he had more for himself than I think he did.
I was aware of people that he had mentored – as improbable as that sounds,
in the context of this discussion – and I was also aware of one friend he
appeared to have stayed in touch with throughout a substantial part of his
adult life. Maybe, I thought, he had allowed himself to be more open and
human with them, but other voices inside me reminded me that was improb-
able. Now, in hindsight, I can see that my father’s relationships, or the best of
them, generally followed the same pattern: aggrandized idealization which
paralleled (and fed) his own exaggerated view of himself followed by a cata-
strophic sense of betrayal that might either end the relationship or produce a
never-ending vendetta. My stepmother (my father’s second wife) reflected on
the subject of my father’s capacity for friendship shortly after his death: “you
 The Nature of Relationships 79

know, I don’t think your father ever had any friends – not real ones – I think
he was alone.” Her words have stayed with me, echoing indelible confirmation
of his antipathy and his mistrust towards humankind. At that time she also
made it clear how painful and how punishing her marriage had been, but as
the years separated her from my father’s death and she was facing her own
end, she began to idealize him. To my mind, her altered portrayals of him
bore no relationship to the person I knew. Her idealization appeared to be
comforting to her.
Once again, I confronted that haunting question: what had happened to
him? I knew that understanding this question would help me understand
myself. As this narrative unfolds, I will eventually find my way back to this
pivotal question. I think I did find some answers, but I have to set more of the
stage before I can credibly consider them.
There are other aspects of my father’s relationships with others and with
himself that need to be discussed.
One aspect or piece was his aggrieved self. A part of the self that openly
cried out about the injustice or the insensitivity or the betrayal that others
were felt to direct towards him. This piece of him was unselfconscious: no
hesitation, no misgiving, and no mitigation in its expression. Deep offence,
deep injury, and of course angry indignation. Howls of it. No capacity to
observe or to mediate his emotions. Profound injury accompanied by furious
righteousness, fearsome in its display. And these were times, as I noted in the
second chapter, when my mother was likely to gore the bull. Some of his
other girlfriends did, too. Interestingly, as he was challenged, his outcry might
become more plaintive and childlike. Sometimes it even began that way. He
did sound like a small and defenseless child in great pain, a child who
expected, no, demanded that others heed his cry. The effect was both comical
and preposterous, particularly for one who had couched himself in such
heroic terms. I didn’t know what to make of it as a child myself or even as a
teenager. It made me enormously uncomfortable and it also made me feel like
I wanted to laugh. I had no way to process this. It felt like it was at odds with
everything that I had been taught about him. Like so much else, it also felt
like a dangerous moment, one in which one misstep could cause real jeo-
pardy. Now as I consider this behavior, I find myself thinking that what I was
seeing was his real core, an irreparably injured child seeking solace for
damage that no one could fix. The exaggerated, dramatic, and even absurd
presentation of this pain belied its immensity.
My father did turn to the women in his life intermittently, as he did me, to
talk about the privations of his childhood – and objectively I think they were
many and formidable. This was another facet of his aggrieved self. Exposing
such pain seemed, simultaneously, to evoke hostility, as if the act of stepping
into a dependent or a needy position was unbearable for him. His hostility
rendered his pain exclusive and forbidding, a private domain that in the end
only he could occupy. Outsiders were only momentarily welcome, if that’s the
80 The Nature of Relationships

right word, pushed away by angry reflection that conveyed they could not
hope to understand the magnitude of such suffering. Talking about his pain
also evoked unmistakable envy of the other, which made it risky to share in
his lamentation: why had he alone been subjected to so many burdens when
the rest of humanity (including, particularly, his listener) had been spared?
I’m not sure my father ever felt like others were able to soothe him to the
degree that he might have needed them to when he was in the midst of such
pain, nor did it ever seem to me he was able to soothe himself. Alcohol was
his best source of succorance at such times.
As companion to this part of him, my father’s relationship with his own
mother stands out. I observed that every time he talked to her, he sounded
quite literally like a five or six-year-old trying to appease a parent. His lan-
guage became primitive and infantile; so, too, did the tone of his voice. She
responded to him in a somewhat similar fashion, though she did not sound as
childlike as he. This happened virtually every time they spoke.
Like his outcries of pain, these exchanges felt preposterous and odd. I had
to suppress the impulse to laugh. My mother, on the other hand, never missed
these opportunities, mocking him and belittling him, which made me feel like
I needed to get out of that version of Dodge as fast as I could. I do remember
thinking, “what on earth can this mean?” I had no idea, but I intuitively
knew that it was important and meaningful behavior. I was aware that my
mother saw my grandmother as a competitor, as someone who endlessly
solicited attention from my father, whether through a phone relationship from
her apartment in Philadelphia (we lived in New York) or through the face-to-
face relationship she had when she visited my father. My grandmother was
unrelentingly hypochondriacal. If thwarted – my mother certainly did her best
to see that she was – my grandmother’s kindly, suffering, plaintive presence
very quickly became suffused with what looked like unadulterated hatred. I
don’t think I can ever forget the rage I saw in her eyes. They were so much
like the darkness I recognized in my father’s eyes when he was filled with fury.
I knew only that my grandmother’s life had been marked by extreme pov-
erty and deprivation that was especially pronounced during my father’s
growing up and young adult years. I could also see that she unquestioningly
idealized him while he still seemed to experience her as his mom who needed
protecting. The infantile voice that he employed, however, suggests to me now
that he also yearned for protection himself, perhaps protection that their
shared circumstances or her own limitations might have prevented her from
providing. They felt like they were joined together in their perpetuities, held
fast by suffering and trauma I was not privy to, much like storied World War
II orphans who forged bonds of care with one another that the adult others
around them found difficult to penetrate even after the rigors of the war had
passed.
As I think about my father’s relationship with his mother, I can perhaps
better understand his pointed antipathy towards women. The childlike
 The Nature of Relationships 81

yearning that was so evident in his voice and so prominent in his relationship
with his mother rendered women a potential source of compromise for him.
Facing a woman and facing the need she could elicit in him – particularly the
immensity of childhood need long unrequited – likely created threat for the
tough guy, bullying persona he so relied on to keep himself safe. Far easier to
denigrate the woman and transform her into a two-dimensional sexual object
without much of an intellect. That way he could afford himself protection
from the frighteningly intense dependent yearning he carried within himself.
A woman became a thing he could use and discard without feeling much.
The best of my father was his storytelling. He was a consummate story-
teller. His stories were imaginative and creative. And they were filled with a
sense of adventure and excitement that made them magical. He clearly loved
stories. On reflection, storytelling was the one time I could hear his music, the
one time I could hear him sing. And when he told stories, I think it was
probably the only time I could let my guard down with him. I knew that so
long as he was telling his story, he was immersed in it and immersed in
sharing it with me. The depredations that could otherwise expose me to
attack were not likely to unfold. I could let go and lose myself in the story
and in the marvelous twists and turns of plot that he invented. A very little
oasis, but one that meant a great deal to me. It would prove to be my father’s
storytelling that elaborated itself into some of the answers that I was looking
for. I think his love of storytelling led to my love of literature and helped to
set the stage for my lifelong fascination with other people’s stories.
My father could create momentary magic in his relationships with other
people, casting a kind of spell about himself that rendered him charismatic.
His wonderful storytelling was certainly part of that. I sometimes think that
those bits of him might have reflected what he could have become, but they all
too quickly became harnessed by his feral, ruthless instincts on the lookout
for advantage and for opportunities to exploit. As much as he was able to
sustain it, charisma usually ended up being used to fill some darker motive. It
confused people. They kept looking for the lovely guy they thought they had
caught a glimpse of. He might tease them by reappearing in a transitory way,
but he never stayed. He never could. Nice didn’t last. But it did last long
enough to tantalize people to keep them coming back to find that other
fellow.
Chapter 6

The Face of Narcissism – Father

There Can Only be One God

My father’s intransigently angry, aggrieved self was particularly likely to

make an appearance when others contradicted or disagreed with him. This
facet of his anger, at least, was somewhat predictable, though it might be
hard, in any given situation, to understand why he experienced a particular
voice as contrary. There was no evidence of softness or vulnerability when
such anger overtook him. His mode of attack was invariably intensely perso-
nal. He targeted – or invented – personal characteristics in the other that he
slandered his opponent with. Humiliation and shame were his weapons of
choice. Short, startlingly blunt assaults on the other person’s dignity, often
taking the form of a single word or three-to-four-word label meant to devas-
tate. He was surprisingly good at it, though sometimes – rarely – his attack
was so obviously misplaced that it evoked corrosive laughter from his audi-
ence. Attacks were often carried out publicly, which made them that much
more likely to feel more intensely shameful, but they could also be under-
taken in the privacy of a person-to-person exchange where his revulsion for
his target and his anger felt even bigger.
“Little” was a popular adjective, delivered in a mocking tone. So, also,
were racial slurs. Attacks on competence or on character were common. If a
woman was involved, her appearance was often the target as was her intellect
(one neighborhood woman deserved the sobriquet “pig face” when she dis-
agreed with him). These executions seemed to be both remorseless and enti-
tled, carried out with no discernible hesitation. So far as I knew, they were
not followed by apology or by any obvious attempt to repair nor did they
seem to occasion painful self-reflection. One saw him act this way again and
again when others disagreed with him or challenged him, never mind criti-
cized him. He didn’t appear to have any choice in the way that he reacted.
Divergent opinions were most often experienced as assaults that evoked
indignation, righteous injury, and unhesitating effort to obliterate and intimi-
date the other. A one trick pony. Very little means to mediate differences, to
learn from them, or to use them to instigate self-evaluation. If the other
pressed their point home successfully, my father’s sense of victimhood became
very pronounced, sometimes eventuating in the childlike presentation
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-6
 There Can Only be One God 83

described in the previous chapter. This transition could be particularly mad-

dening to live with, especially when he alternated rapidly between verbal
assault and victimization. Being on the receiving end, for me, meant having to
contend with somebody who never pulled his punches, but who expressed
outrageously disproportionate injury when even a whiff of criticism was
implied. I had two childhood nicknames for my father. The first was the
hoary wrath holder (I didn’t know what hoary meant at the time, but I think
an author had used it to characterize a frightening troll-like creature I found
described in something like a Grimm’s fairytale). The second was fragile
tyrant. These names helped.
As an adult, I could put into words what eluded me as a child: my father
was largely unable to make room for other personalities or other voices. His
voice had to occupy the biggest space. It had to dominate. As I watched him,
I begin to realize that he expected others to “twin” themselves to him, treat-
ing themselves as an extension of his wishes, his feelings, his perspectives, and
his impulses. Praise ensued if they did so. Shaming followed if they did not.
But even when people accommodated him, they could still be rebuked or
contradicted, especially (and seemingly paradoxically) when they replicated
his voice emphatically. His reaction in these contexts was certainly puzzling.
Had they not given him what he wanted, and, at that, in spades? They had,
after all, seemingly cloned a version of him in themselves and provided a
passionate imitation. But then, I thought, maybe that was the problem. Their
passion and their ideological purity were perhaps too much for him. Did he
now feel that the depth of conviction they used when they employed his voice
threatened to compromise his prerogative of initiative? His need to position
himself as a unique visionary? I’m the prophet. I get the boomy voice. Your
voice, your presence, your passion has to remain more muted than mine. If it
gets too big, you become too dynamic. I’m the shaker and the mover. Don’t
attempt to appropriate my power. Perhaps an obvious answer, but a tough
one for me to sort through. So, acolytes had to color between lines: worship-
ful, unswervingly loyal imitations of the master but never the master himself.
Convincing echoes of him, but NEVER more.
In the discussion that’s about to unfold, I will review material I have
already explored, but I do so with the intention of focusing more directly on
the theme that I am now trying to highlight – my father’s efforts to invade
and assimilate other people, transforming them into vessels he could fill with
himself. I watched my father attempt to do this to the people around him.
Some openly resisted him, as I noted in an earlier chapter. In the context of
his workplace or even his personal life, they were often other senior executives
on approximately the same level as he was. Their accomplishment and their
“greatness” enhanced his own sense of aggrandizement, but he often found
himself facing intense conflict with them. They got to keep their sense of self,
but in the presence of frequent and often intense boundary wars that sometimes
took the form of the rutting displays previously described. Subordinates, to
84 There Can Only be One God

varying degrees, were not so lucky. Open disagreement rarely seemed to emerge
in his business interactions with them (I was witness to interchanges in the
workplace on many occasions over the years when I spent time in my father’s
office) or in his social interface with them. Because my father was so engaged in
storytelling, he provided nearly daily accounts of his encounters with the people
around him. What he told me seemed to confirm what I saw: his colleagues
either allowed themselves to be subsumed within his personality, accepting rea-
lity as he defined it or they faced assassination and expulsion. On some few
occasions, however, I can remember my father demonstrating compassion
towards people he had discovered lacked the talent to do the job. I kept hoping I
would see more of this side of him, but it never became more prominent.
On one occasion my father came home from the office, he was very much
pleased with himself. He had installed a full-size traffic light on his desk. If he
liked what his people were talking about, the green light was on display. If
they wandered into territory he began to disapprove of, up came amber. Red,
he said, meant stop talking immediately. He so instructed people working for
him when he was conferencing with them. So far as I could see, the ambiance
he created around him was straight jacketing; it involved policing people,
placing pressure on them to focus on what they thought he wanted rather
than giving them the freedom to explore ideas in a more freewheeling,
person-centered way. Step away from yourself. Think about me. Think about
what I want you to be. Any boss subordinate relationship is possessed of such
pressures, of course, but some bosses, by virtue of who they are as people, are
keenly aware and very much desirous of the need to enhance and expand a
given employee’s unique gifts; my father, on the other hand, appeared to want
to erase people and replace them with a version of himself.
Most disturbing for me were the people who sounded like my father, as if
they had swallowed substantial parts of him holus-bolus, either utterly aban-
doning their own personhood and replacing it with their imitation of him or
disguising it with a facsimile of him so that he might never discern what was
really going on inside them. My younger self preferred that they were doing
the latter, but I was afraid that many of them were doing the former. Quite a
chilling drama to observe. Were they deeply, but privately anguished, as I was,
about diminishment of the self and about survival of the self ? Oddly, unlike
me, some of them seemed to be pleased with their new selves, almost exu-
berant in the way that they channeled my father. I was quite horrified. These
people seemed to have lost themselves, but felt transcendent and even embel-
lished in response. That idea also frightened me. Could people lose themselves
and not know it happened? Could you become a ghost or a wraith and be the
happier for it? Very, very pressing questions for me to answer.
I felt myself quite consciously struggling against the identity he seemed to
want to impose on me, but I had to do so in the context of constant accom-
modation, constant anticipation of what was safe and what wasn’t. I con-
sciously resisted becoming a version of him. He could feel it and he hated me
 There Can Only be One God 85

for it. I could feel that. None of this was ever spoken, but it was a very pow-
erful subtext. Head in my own direction and follow my own promptings and
face humiliation and shaming that could terminally damage the self. Fail to
do so and endure catastrophic and perhaps permanent loss of self, allowing
someone who felt like a stranger to replace me. I didn’t want the monstrous
realities that seemed to occupy my father to become me. That prospect quite
terrified me, all the more so because I had compelling reasons to believe I was
becoming a monster myself, as will be seen in the next chapter.
As a youngster in grades three and four I used to watch a wonderful art
show on television, the John Nagy show. TV wasn’t much in those days, but
this show was really quite endearing. Nagy was a gentle, lovely guy. It’s a
shame the show hasn’t been replicated for contemporary kids. John Nagy
taught kids how to draw. Each week showcased new techniques and interest-
ing new subject matter to try to capture on paper. He put together an art kit
replete with instruction manual, chalk and water color, and sundry other
interesting things. For a small fee you could send away for it and get one,
which I did. When it arrived, I was pretty excited. My parents naturally
wanted to know what it was. I could sense apprehension in their initial reac-
tions, particularly my father’s. What followed were hushed conversations car-
ried on loudly enough that I could overhear bits and pieces of them. They
were uncomfortable I was interested in art. Their whispering suggested this
was not something they expected a young boy would want to do. I was
confused. My mother was an artist and, for a period of time, my father had
even attempted oil painting. The whisperings became explicit parental con-
cern that expressed itself after perhaps a month or so. Real boys didn’t want
to draw. Real boys were more preoccupied with sports and rough-and-
tumble play (I did those things too). I noticed that they seemed to screw up
their faces into expressions of concern, in the peculiar way that parents can,
whenever they looked at me. Very soon their concern reached unbearable
proportions for me.
About this time, they decided to tell me more about what was really wrong.
The phrase “real boys,” it turned out, meant that they thought something was
wrong with my sexuality (I had already discerned that, but hearing them say
it, actually say it, was so much more awful). My interests meant that I was
different, aberrant in their eyes, clearly not a good difference. My passion for
classical music also had a similar effect on them. I didn’t know why I liked
classical music, but I just did. I didn’t seem to be able to enjoy the music that
was popular at the time or that became immensely popular once rock ‘n’ roll
got its start, but I could fake it. Pretend to be part of my generation’s cul-
ture – culture that was supposed to be captivating and immersive, but just
wasn’t for me. I remember feeling that I wished I got the music that every-
body else did. It would mean that I was part of something that I was sup-
posed to be part of rather than being set apart in a bad way. It would also
mean that I didn’t have to keep secrets about my differences.
86 There Can Only be One God

From time to time, when I was able to afford them, I would buy classical
albums – full-length 33s – rather than the 45 rpm pop songs my friends were
purchasing. I hoped they wouldn’t notice I didn’t have any of the latter. I tried
to sneak my classical purchases home unobtrusively under my jacket, but
given my size and the size of a classical album, that was a very iffy proposi-
tion. Soon after my parents confronted me about the intersection of interest
in drawing and sexuality, I gave up John Nagy. I quietly hung on to classical
music. I could do so because my mother left my father around this point in
my life for months at a time as she attempted, haltingly but with a kind of
success, to forge a life apart from him in the US Virgin Islands. That meant
she was not around much of the time, nor was my father because of his late
work hours, leaving me free to listen to my music without intrusion when I
got home from school.
Identity, then, was something that had to be forged with great care and with
no small measure of secrecy in the presence of my father’s invasiveness. I think
it was much the same for his colleagues and friends. Unless you were a giant
yourself, you probably had to carefully construct an understated version of
yourself or, worse, surrender identity and incorporate him if you were to exist in
his world – the caveat being that if you were in his presence, he expected to be
able to subject you to his terms. Those terms demanded that there was really
only one fully formed voice in the room: his. Others were expected to shut
themselves – no, cram themselves – into a small space so that he could claim
grotesquely disproportionate space for his own personality.
When I could set the maelstrom of my own emotions aside, I found myself
asking why? Why does he need to do this? And later as a psychologist, what
function does it serve? How does it protect the self ?
I tried to imagine what he was feeling and project myself into the context of
his world, as I had come to know it. He was someone who needed to elicit
vigilance and threat in other people. That implied that he didn’t feel safe
himself. Could his need to obliterate others reflect the same concern? To out-
ward appearance, he looked reckless and fearless, but then why go to such
trouble to intimidate and negate other people if your own position was
already well protected? Perhaps that was the point. Invasion and negation
were his protection, a kind of armor. But then, what was he protecting him-
self from? It looked like he felt jeopardized by people with a well-defined
sense of self, people who were equipped to head in their own direction and
express divergent points of view. People possessed of independence of
thought, initiative, and personhood. From his perspective, voices clambering
to be heard, voices who might potentially overpower his own. He desperately
wanted to either be the only voice or the biggest voice in any given room, but
that meant, quite literally, listening to yourself talk all the time. That brought
me back to the word solitude again. And the word starvation. I could not
imagine how he fed himself and kept himself company if he could not allow
other people in. Quite an extraordinary cost to pay. So, what was the offset?
 There Can Only be One God 87

I played with numbers of ideas. Indulgence of vanity? In and of itself it

didn’t appear to me to be compelling enough to employ such costly defenses.
I concluded it had to be bigger than that or more complex. Perhaps he was
afraid that if others had a voice they could bury him. After all, he did live in a
projected world, again as I understood him. Did his own abiding rapacity
elicit perpetual fear that others would try to dominate him as he did them?
This felt like a better answer, but it wasn’t entirely satisfying either. It didn’t
help me understand why he was so rapacious in the first place. Still, I could
imagine that his own towering rapacity projected onto the world would make
the world a pretty scary place.
Later in this process – perhaps sometime during the third decade of my
life – it struck me that accommodating lots of unique voices meant inter-
polating one’s own needs with the needs of others. I need to speak, now they
want to speak, I must make room for them (and possibly validate their ideas
or change my own), now I get to speak again. A simple yet multifaceted
social interaction that affords intellectual stimulation, opportunity for gen-
erativity, connectivity, confirmation of community, intimacy, and a willingness
to allow others to enter the self and have an impact on it. I already had
reason to believe that some of these things were aversive experiences for my
father. Given that he experienced other people as wanting to take a mile if he
gave them an inch, maybe he was afraid that others could disrupt his sense of
self. Get inside and start wrecking the interior. That made a little more sense.
Given his own runaway needs, in the form of out-of-control addictions and
out-of-control emotions and impulses pressing for expression, I could see he
might feel any endorsement of someone else’s needs or their personhood
might be dangerous for him. They could swamp him and bury him with their
own rampant hungers and with their own malevolence. This seemed a more
convincing interpretation than fear of domination, but it still begged the
question, “what drove his rapacity?”
That question made me wonder if somehow during my father’s formative
years he experienced others as having relentlessly exploited him. That might
mean that such an early threat was still very vivid and very manifest for him,
a threat that he could displace by confirming for himself, again and again,
that he was the biggest, baddest bear in the woods, compulsively asserting
ascendancy with each conquest, but never, ever feeling safe enough to relin-
quish combat. As I considered this dynamic and its compulsive nature (allu-
ded to in Chapter 4), it felt like a variation of trauma response. Punishing
preoccupation with threat (re-traumatization), arousal that supports hypervi-
gilance, hypervigilance that potentiates hair trigger stress (fear) response,
repeat. As much as my father tried to hide it, I could feel and hear the fear
that resided very close to the surface underneath his posturing. I think his fear
and certainly his sense of injury were manifest to me fairly early on in my life,
though I didn’t know what to do with them save to treat them as warning
signs directing me to try and stay away from him.
88 There Can Only be One God

As I reconsidered a trauma formulation, it struck me that my father’s ver-

sion of trauma response seemed not to include an endlessly preoccupying and
debilitating focus on mental rehearsal of counter responses to the inevitable
intrusion he expected from other people. This is a core part of trauma
experience. It’s what renders trauma disorder – what is known as PTSD – so
painful and so compromising. People can’t stop thinking about all the things
that can go wrong and they can’t stop thinking about all the things they need
to do to protect themselves. The rehearsals are torturous and compulsive. To
escape them, people cut themselves, abuse drugs, and take their own lives.
This prominent piece of the trauma experience seemed somehow to be short-
circuited in him. Did his impulsivity help insulate him from the full effect of
PTSD suffering? He was largely a “don’t think – just act kind of guy.” He
appeared to be free to do just that without the burdens of deliberation, hesi-
tation, or conscience. The more that I came to see narcissistic experience as
being infiltrated by a significant trauma component, the more I wondered
how he had escaped the unbearable agony that compulsive rehearsal (also a
form of re-traumatization, in my estimate) typically produced. Impulsivity
and compromised empathy appeared to provide me with part answers.
I still felt unsettled. I was sure there were other answers to be found that
would help me make better sense of his interminable need to overpower,
subjugate, and either materially or spiritually rape the other.
I also remained fascinated (and horrified) by some people’s jubilant will-
ingness to refashion themselves in my father’s image, happily discarding their
own identities as they did so. Identification with the aggressor never fully
satisfied me as an explanatory dynamic. A niggling feeling at the back of my
head said that maybe there was more. “More” only seemed to declare itself to
me with any real conviction during the latter stages of my professional life.
Again, because of the necessity of building ideas one upon the another, I will
explore these adjunctive ideas later in the book.
Chapter 7

The Dark Side – Father

Cruelty

A taste for cruelty, as will already be apparent to the reader, was a very pro-
minent and disturbing part of my father’s character. Cruelty was endemic. He
appeared to rely on it to divert himself from the peculiar burdens that his
inner life generated for him. Some of his acts of cruelty were relatively benign
and others quite frightening. I have already provided some illustrative exam-
ples. As a child, I could see that he delighted in hurting and humiliating
others; what I couldn’t figure out in any given situation was the risk that a
particular set of behaviors posed for me. Admitting to myself just how big his
cruelty was probably evoked intolerable threat. At times, his urge to wound
was so unmistakable that, even had I tried to look away, I couldn’t miss it. So,
too, was the delight he experienced when he saw he had disrupted or, more
satisfyingly, annihilated his target. I can see now in retrospect that I mini-
mized and disguised the meanness of spirit he wove into our daily lives.
Sometimes I did so with humor, laughing with him at some of the things that
he did. These were just guy activities, I told myself, something that all boys
and fathers do. Without realizing it, I also think I laughed to appease him,
hopeful that if I did so he would experience me as a pleasing compatriot
rather than attuning himself to my vulnerability.
My father would situate himself in an open window on the second floor of
our house in Minneapolis. He armed himself variously with a BB gun, a
pellet gun, and a 22 capable of shooting shrapnel shells. His choice of prey
determined choice of gun. He could sit in the window for hours waiting for
his opportunity and often did. Literal hours. His favorite target was male
dogs. When they entered the rose garden, his attention quickened. He might
call me over in hushed whispers, full of subdued excitement. “Hey, Rich,
come over here – now wait, wait – yeah, that son of a bitch is lifting his leg –
watch this!” This dialogue might play itself out over a couple of minutes. It
was conspiratorial in tone, as if he and I were sharing a special moment. His
dénouement fulfilled itself when he had a chance to shoot the dog’s exposed
balls. Hitting the target – which I thought was improbable, given the distance
and reliance on a BB gun – produced a satisfying yelp from the dog, who
invariably left the scene with a remarkable burst of speed. “Look at that dawg
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-7
90 The Dark Side – Father

skedaddle – I got that som bitch! Did you see that? He’s never coming back to
my rose garden!” …. as if the rose garden was the point of the exercise rather
than the chance to terrify and injure the animal. At such moments my father
typically lapsed into good old boy talk, the tough language he ascribed to the
hard times in his childhood.
Shrapnel shells and pellets were for squirrels and chipmunks. Victory pro-
duced similar exclamations of gratification and excitement. Victory in this
case, though, usually resulted in death of the animal, which sometimes could
take some time. I don’t recall there being a second shot to end suffering. An
injured animal’s gyrations could also produce an excited running dialogue.
“Did you see that little bastard jump when I hit him?” etc. etc.
One weekend afternoon my father found a wasp nest in the attic on the
other side of the screened opening venting attic air. I was invited to watch the
fun. I think in those days people used DDT or a pesticide like that to deal
with insects (this would have been the first half of the 50s). He had me
approach the screen with him, insisting that we both stop only inches from it.
I dared not flinch or pull away or show hesitation. I understood what was
required of me, so I found a way to suppress my panic and create the
appearance of composure. The activity on the other side of that screen looked
to me like a miniature version of hell: numbers of what looked like the biggest
wasps I had ever seen, moving about the outside of the paper nest and the
screen itself. No doubt proximity inflated my estimate of their size. The reader
may have also already understood that I was acutely aware there may have
been wasps on our side of the screen as well. If there was a tiny opening in the
framing around the vented space we would be in trouble. We were in a small
enclosed attic space with an awkward avenue of escape through a narrow
opening that could only accommodate one of us at a time. I was distracted by
my father’s excited tones, “Watch this – wait till you see what happens to
these little bastards now!” I cringed. I had seen the effects of this poison
before. I knew that almost instantly the insects would find themselves in
frenzies of agony – convulsed bodies, stinging themselves, flying jaggedly in
all directions. My panic became suffocating. We were unleashing a firestorm
of insect rage and terror. My father was fascinated and obviously gratified.
“Look at them little bastards… That’ll fix ’em.” Their death was both sick-
ening and fascinating. I could not look away. I also wanted to be sure that all
of them were dead.
My father had placed me in numerous other situations like this during the
course of my childhood, situations fraught with threat. As I think about these
experiences, I imagined that at some level he had to be aware of my fear and
of the potential harm he was exposing me to. The paradigm was always much
the same: a situation possessed of significant manifest threat that unleashed
crushing anxiety that I needed to suppress if I was to protect myself from the
disgust he would have directed towards me had I not done so. On some of
these “play dates,” panic could have created substantial injury. During one
 The Dark Side – Father 91

snorkeling expedition he guided my raft over a particular section of reef,

telling me to slide off carefully, only to discover that there were sea urchins –
dozens of them – positioned inches from the underside of my body. On
another he instructed me to swim off the end of our fishing boat after he had
been warned by the captain we were in shark infested waters. I was expected
to swim to a buoy about a quarter-mile away and back again. I did as I was
instructed. I could feel the depth of his antipathy and his murderous intent
even through the heavy veil of my own dissociation.
Frighteningly, sometimes I found myself feeding off his acts of cruelty in
the way that I suspected he was. I felt so dead inside, so shrunken, that I
welcomed the aliveness and the engagement that a moment of cruelty could
create for me. The agony my emptiness caused neutered my feelings. Fear and
numbness were two of my three most prominent feelings. As it was, there was
very little I could find in myself that didn’t feel scripted or embarrassingly
deficient. Watching my father engage in sadistic acts seemed to allow me to
feel something and I was quite desperate, I can see looking back as an adult,
to feel anything at all. A scrap of bread in a devastated landscape. I took the
poisoned chalice. Cruelty twinned itself with the other growing reality inside:
rage. Each time I drank from this cup, I could sense, sometimes only sub-
liminally, that the gratification cruelty provided felt disturbingly wrong,
another awful reality I was compelled to hide from others. But I was riveted
by some of the cruelty. I didn’t seem to be able to look away from parts of it.
It did seductively awaken something in me.
From a very early age the cruelty around me began to seep into me. I
remember night times being particularly terrifying because I had to face sleep. I
think I can actually recall having terrifying nightmares in kindergarten and
grade 1, but it may have been a bit later (I also have to acknowledge that
nightmares may have begun earlier than that simply because they exceeded the
grasp of my memory). I can still remember some of the multicolored mon-
sters – Caterpillar like things – that pursued me. I think I can also remember
trying to escape, but being frozen in slow-motion running that doomed me to
whatever annihilation awaited me at the hands of these villainous phantasms.
The dreams included repeated outcries to my parents for help; it seemed to me
in the dreams that my parents heard me, but remained benevolently indifferent
to my pleas.
I do recognize, of course, that dreams recalled 70 years after their occur-
rence, particularly dreams informed by trauma, are likely to be subject to very
considerable distortion. The fact that I still remember these dreams very
vividly does not substantiate their accuracy. The terror that they impressed
upon me and that seemed to pervade my childhood at bedtime over a course
of some years, however, may be more reasonably believed by the reader.
My bedroom was on the third floor of the house and was well isolated from
my parents, who remained downstairs until their much later bedtime. I do
remember feeling a sense of doom as I climbed those stairs with the parent
92 The Dark Side – Father

who was designated to put me to bed. I knew once my parent left my room
and it was time for sleep, I didn’t dare call out for help. Doing so would only
solicit fearsome anger. I was on my own. I had to deal with my own demons
somehow. I had to find some way to suppress my fear and contain it. I
couldn’t tell my parents about it. That would have been dangerous. I would
look around the room at various articles of clothing, books, toys, carefully
scrutinizing each pile, reminding myself that they were just common objects,
not the living, threatening things they seemed to become in a darkened room.
No matter how much I tried to reassure myself, the things in my room would
always seem to move about before sleep came to me and I always felt that I
was in danger, frozen in place, unable to speak or move. Without under-
standing it then, I was probably in that place between consciousness and sleep
that today we would describe as a hypnagogic state. I certainly didn’t know
that then. I thought I was going crazy.
I was fascinated by the book Alice in Wonderland that my mother read me
at some points during my childhood. Subsequently, as an adult, I wondered
why it had been so important to me. Now I think that it offered me reassur-
ance I could survive my unconscious mind and the nightmares it produced.
Falling down that rabbit hole into a surreal world was a lot like falling asleep.
I don’t know when my mother began to read this story; it may have been
around the time that my Caterpillar dreams began. So it may be that the
genial world of Alice introduced a monster into my dreams at the same time
that it reassured me. One of my favorite adult movies, Pan’s Labyrinth, struck
me as being about the same kind of theme, though with a different twist: a
young girl who tries to construct a benevolent imaginary world intended to
protect her, only to find it invaded and deformed by the horrors around her.
I remember much later – perhaps around grade 4 and 5 – listening to my
parents talk about me in the more proximate bedroom they now occupied in
the new house we then lived in. It was again a case of talking behind my back
in front of me, in whispers manifestly intended to hide their voices, but con-
ducted loudly enough that I could hear them. I never knew whether that was
an effect they meant to achieve or whether this was simply an act of mis-
calculation. Believing it was a deliberate act made it feel that much more
awful. Even as a miscalculation, which I suspected it was, it was still trans-
fixing. I had to just lie there and endure it. I couldn’t get up and challenge
them or confront them. That would have precipitated an Armageddon I
didn’t want. So, I pretended to be asleep, but took in every word with the very
few exceptions of words I couldn’t hear. Lengthy iterations of all the worst
that I knew they thought about me. This went on night after night. The act of
listening engendered morbid retaliatory fantasies. Elaborate, bloody, vindic-
tive ones that I sated myself on. It was both gratifying and destructive – more
evidence that I was bad and that I was disturbed. You weren’t supposed to
hate your parents, particularly in the 1950s, but I certainly did. So there I was,
lying in bed, thinking of the various ways that I could murder them, devising
 The Dark Side – Father 93

intricate plans to end their lives. I couldn’t tell anybody about any of this stuff
either. I just carried it. And judged myself.
Eventually, I graduated to committing acts of cruelty myself. I was
encouraged to hunt and shoot things, as my father did. Hunting created a
broad context of social appropriateness that helped make it easier to cross
lines outside a hunting venue. I began to look for things to shoot in the
backyard, much like my father did. With my father’s full knowledge and
implicit sanction, I undertook other acts of cruelty towards animals, often
with friends. Surgery on living frogs as preparation for the surgeon I was to
become (dropping out of medical school at the beginning of year two, my
father wanted me to fulfil the dream denied him). Living animals inserted in
model rocket ships as part of an exploration of “science.” Before long, I had
established a small graveyard in an unused part of our backyard (12 to 13
graves) warehousing the different animals I had killed, some with friends and
some on my own.
Doing what I did, particularly when I did it on my own, always felt sub-
liminally dirty, but, most prominently, it was hard for me to feel anything at
all for the animals. The moment of death, watching the light go out of the
animal’s eyes, was both powerful and disturbing. Now as I try to recapture
those moments, I can remember wanting to understand what made things
alive. I felt so dead in contrast, it was as if I was trying grasp what separated
me from other living things. The moment was powerful because I could deny
life even though I couldn’t feel alive myself. A terrible, brutal kind of envy
and a soul-destroying way to try to express my own pain. Each “murder” felt
like it was dragging me further into the darkness. I began to become very
frightened about what was happening to me, but I had no one to talk to.
I may have had occasion to read about psychopathy around grade 4–6, or
perhaps I overheard an adult conversation about this subject. I can’t remem-
ber which. A holy Trinity of signs indicating psychopathy had been described.
I certainly ticked the cruelty to animals box. I was relieved that I wasn’t a bed
wetter. I wasn’t sure I hadn’t been a fire setter (I had a hazy memory of being
accused along with two friends of setting a fire in a field adjacent to my
school, but had/have no recollection of having done so). So, I had to accept
that this third sign was a maybe. I felt quite sick to my stomach. Was this
who I was? Someone utterly unredeemable, incapable of any genuine feeling
for others’ suffering, possessed of an indelible and, as I understood it, irresis-
tible urge to visit pain on others that would only escalate as I aged? Someone
who could “pass” as normal who would always know that he didn’t belong in
normal society? Now I was not just empty, but monstrous. I was very much
afraid that sooner rather than later, much like the defectiveness my parents
had identified in me, the people around me would soon discern that I was
fundamentally evil.
I can imagine that reading some of this material must be unsettling. I do
appreciate that. I share it because I think it is an essential part of living in a
94 The Dark Side – Father

narcissistic surround. It’s also my belief that my internal realities help provide
clues to what was going on inside my father. My deadness, my inability to
feel, my starvation, my reliance on sadism to engender aliveness, and even the
mask of normalcy that I wore all captured important aspects of his experi-
ence. I did not know that as a child. I only saw the ugliness piling up in my
own insides. And with the passage of time, instead of being just dead and
empty, my interior was replete with rage, with vindictive impulse, and with
frightening, cruel imagery. Increasingly, that’s how I managed to fill myself to
offset my emptiness. I eventually concluded that this reality, too, was reflective
of what my father’s interior must be like. I had certainly come to know his
rage and his need to obliterate the other as a signature part of his
presentation.
I remember seeing Patty McCormick in a movie called “The Bad Seed.” It
was very disquieting. While I wasn’t as manifestly evil as she was, it felt like
there was a very thin and insubstantial line separating me from her. I was
afraid that with much more of a push, my own cruelty would overtake me
and the people around me. Being around a narcissistic personality made it
feel as though that push was just around the next corner. There was very little
opportunity to experience salutary feelings and impulses; most exchanges
evoked brutish reactions inside, further consolidating my growing conviction
that I was fundamentally incapable of ever being able to eclipse my own
darkness.
When I was around 12, a very important experience unfolded in my back-
yard. I had stabbed a chipmunk with a lawn implement, nearly cutting it in
two. The agony I saw in its face flooded me. I was intensely, acutely aware of
its suffering. I couldn’t look away. Inside, privately, I made a sobbing apology.
I don’t think I said anything out loud. And then I felt relief. I realized that I
was capable of compassion. The measure of compassion that I felt alongside
the horror at what I’d done was so big that it felt suffocating. It’s bigness and
its intensity reassured me. I wasn’t just blackness. There was a human part of
me.
As I look back now, I can see that there were numbers of other experiences
that offered tendentious confirmation of humanity throughout my childhood
and adolescent years, but the noise of my own immense deadness and the
cruelty that I carried inside obscured my possibilities. The reader may have
already discerned them, but I certainly couldn’t see them in the midst of my
struggle with my father and myself. I needed an “epiphany” big enough and
dramatic enough, like my experience with the chipmunk, to turn my head and
show me that I could be more than I thought I was. Even with this new evi-
dence, however, I was still subject to several decades of variably intense mis-
giving about my capacity to love and to give.
Losing my humanity has remained my biggest fear in life. The darkness of
my childhood never feels as far away as I would like it to be. Part of my own
vigilance – a very substantial part – has directed itself towards trying to
 The Dark Side – Father 95

anticipate situations that would lead to compromised humanity and re-

immersion in the darkness that I knew all too intimately in the early years of
my life. In truth, I can see that this fear had been so deeply impressed upon
me it could be naught else but a lifetime companion. Will this person or the
next unseat me in some unexpected way, being too brutish, too devious, too
provoking for me to manage, unleashing ugliness and cruelty within me I’ve
worked so hard to understand and contain? Will I repudiate my hard-earned
humanity with a single retaliatory act? These questions have been the stuff of
my nightmares.
On a few occasions my father talked about the sadistic paradoxes he cre-
ated for people, watching them twist helplessly in his grasp. He revealed that
he was aware others backed away from street fighting, as he referred to his
own brand of interaction, because they couldn’t bear to see and feel the dark
things in themselves that he knew he could evoke. That, he said, gave him
quite an advantage, because he could act without hesitation, as I well knew.
He was admitting that he prized his ruthlessness, that it set him apart from
others, granting him powerful means to overpower personalities whose nice-
ness and decency prevented them from pushing back. In his upside-down
world, ruthlessness and freedom from empathy represented strength and a
source of pride. They allowed him to stand back from and above the rest of
humanity, affirming a sense that he was both better and more powerful than
those he perceived to be “weaker” than he was. I could hear in his words
intimations of his own omnipotence and his entitlement. In his upside-down
world, inability to feel enhanced rather than diminished him. How, I won-
dered, could he tolerate numbness that I found so agonizingly painful, cele-
brating it as a prized asset rather than feeling the desolation that it was
causing me? What could cause him to make such terrible sacrifices and then
not only tolerate them, but embrace them? I didn’t know how he had reached
a place like this inside himself, but I was certainly afraid I would eventually
find myself occupying the same space he did. I at least knew that I didn’t
want that for myself, but part of me felt, guiltily, that if I loved him, I ought
to try to emulate him. This struggle also confronted me with old questions
about masculinity I have referred to previously: was this not who I was sup-
posed to be if I were truly manly?
My father did not often make admissions of the kind I have just described.
Such moments were extraordinarily important for me. Another doorway or
window offering me a glimpse of his soul. He knew he was ruthless. He used
it. It made him feel bigger. He was taking the measure of everyone who
moved into his world, assessing their capacity to resist him or to disrupt his
domination. He tested people brutally. And compulsively. Compulsively, I
realized, was telling. Maybe it meant that he was not free to do otherwise, not
free to let down his guard, not free to be gentle, not safe enough to love or to
be vulnerable in other people’s presence. That was certainly my experience of
him. These are, of course, concerns I have already raised; I reiterate them here
96 The Dark Side – Father

as a reminder that my exploration of myself and of my father seemed to keep

bringing me back to the same points of reference.
If these questions that kept introducing themselves were possessed of any
value, I had further indication that my father experienced love as toxic and as
compromising. But then how does one move comfortably through life making
a virtue of that absence? It was certainly an absence, as I perceived it in
myself, that caused me terrible distress and shame, an unspeakable secret I
had to hide. As I came to understand with greater conviction that the capa-
city to love, to give, to feel empathy and compassion, to make sacrifice for
others, to tolerate obligation, and to participate in constructive, fulfilling
dependencies appeared to be the essence of humanity, the very best that we
have to give each other and the very best that we could aspire to, I could
appreciate how precarious my father’s position must have felt for him. But he
gave no evidence of distress. He was seemingly proud of his damaged
humanity. Weakness and compromise were prominently paraded as strengths.
Most of the time – incredibly – he seemed to be able to pull it off. Look at
my status. Look at my wealth. Look at my beautiful wife. Feel my power.
Remember how effectively I can threaten you and diminish you. Remember
my brilliance. My uniqueness as a visionary. You need me. Only I can solve
the big problems. Diffuse. Distract. Deflect. Look where I tell you to. Don’t
look at the hole in my soul. A consummate magician endlessly performing
sleight-of-hand tricks meant to turn people away from his terrible deficits
while he engaged them with an array of assets and weapons meant to inspire
envy and/or wrong foot them. Back up the Batmobile and blow smoke. Again
and again and again. It almost looked effortless when he did it, but I can
recognize now what extraordinary energy such relentless effort required. It
would exhaust and deplete most people, but he seemed to feed off it. Look at
my greatness. Look again. Look again. Don’t you wish you were me? Don’t
you wish you had what I have? Think of how small you are in comparison.
What I eventually came to refer to as my father’s compensatory self was the
aggrandized self I’ve just described. He relentlessly pushed it into others’
view, calling their attention to it. He appeared to be very much enamored
with it himself. I suppose the construct of compensatory self captures the
familiar narcissistic motif of Narcissus staring lovingly at his own image. The
self-congratulation that attended celebration of my father’s compensatory self,
however, struck me as obviously overinflated, almost to the point of being
grotesque at times or, alternatively, absurd. The more I looked – the more I
understood what I was seeing – the more tawdry it all felt and the more
tragic. My father trotting out the same tasteless configuration of himself, over
and over, betraying his infatuation with his own broken humanity. What
ought to have been a transparently nightmarish creation seemed instead to
mesmerize, transfixing his audience with admiration or, depending upon the
effect he wished to achieve, with fear. Were people too afraid of their own
darkness to look at his and see it as it was? Did they somehow wish to
 The Dark Side – Father 97

identify with the “strength” and power he attributed to himself so that they
might imbue themselves with similar attributes? A sense, in other words, that
we can all be supermen? Or, more subtly, was I seeing evidence that a sig-
nificant portion of humanity is hungry for structure and direction from malig-
nant leadership that sanctions and authenticates dark, tribal impulses that the
tribe needs to call forth to feel safe? A kind of reflexive, innate accommodation
creating receptivity to an exploitative leader prepared to decimate perceived
competitors.
On still another level, I found myself thinking about how inherently terri-
fying our inner lives are – replete with monsters and nightmares we project
onto the external world and onto each other, rendering our outsides as dan-
gerous as our insides. In the face of such chaos and threat, do we turn to
decisive others to tell us how to blend malevolence and generativity in ways
that serve our group or our community, making us feel safer with ourselves
and with those we have been told to perceive as enemies? My experience with
my own nightmares and fantasies underscored very dramatically for me just
how disruptive and terrifying the intrapsychic world is. My long experience
with patients, with my dearest friends, and with the arts that have so sustained
me confirmed that we are, all of us, frightened by what we carry inside. The
greater people’s fear of their inner world, the more likely they seem to be to
build rigid, inflexible structures, including unyielding moral schemas meant to
protect them, to define what they can and can’t feel, to limit and constrain
their thought, and to deny the presence of impulses deemed to be unac-
ceptable. As I look around me, I see those strictures imbued in punitive law,
in fascistic governmental structure, and in straight jacketing religious ideolo-
gies. If my conception is possessed of any validity, it would seem to imply that
humanity carries a terrible vulnerability within it, vulnerability to be led by
others we willingly allow to harness (perhaps harvest is a better word?) the
best and the worst in us so that our group can survive and so that we can live
more comfortably with ourselves. We seem to be willing to give such leaders
the power, in other words, to use us as they will, ready to believe that their
interest must be synonymous with ours so long as they can create an impri-
matur of strength, fear, and feral instinct. We let them tell us when it’s
acceptable to unleash our own versions of hell that we carry inside us and
when we are expected to constrain ourselves, even if only to serve their ends.
In the process, we may remain blind to other, more humane possibilities that
might serve us, or the collective us, better. Because I think these ideas are so
important, I will return to them later in the book.
These conceptualizations helped me better understand the disturbing phe-
nomenon I’d mentioned briefly earlier in this book: people’s willingness to
swallow my father and reconfigure themselves in his image without feeling a
sense of decimation but, instead, demonstrating a sense of completion and
celebration with the new self they acquired. This thought led to still another,
perhaps more frightening thought: are we inherently set up to move through a
98 The Dark Side – Father

series of identities proffered by “stronger,” more threatening personalities as

the context of our life changes for us?
Many of the ideas that I have just discussed pertinent to the dynamics of an
authoritarian personality are not new. In tying them to my personal experi-
ence in an intimate way, however, I hope to bring them alive in a fashion that
a discursive, academic text could not.
As I watched my father’s compulsive, repellent dog and pony show restage
itself again and again, I became increasingly aware of just how frantic the
entire endeavor was. He was almost never at peace with himself. He was
always hustling, sometimes obviously and, to a non-practiced eye, sometimes
subtly. Trying to hide a core secret, the inability to love, and transform it
somehow into an admirable asset required extraordinary work and intermin-
able shucking and jiving. His only choice, as I have mentioned earlier, when
he was around decent people who insisted on their decency and appeared
immune to his subversion, was to run away.
By the third or fourth decade of my life I began to recognize that there
were cracks in the wall, times when even he felt momentary horror at what he
had become. I can remember him turning to me at such times and half telling
me, half asking me, “I’m a monster, aren’t I?” Sometimes this kind of sear-
ingly painful insight arose in the context of a poignant discussion, but most
often it seemed to come unbidden, surprising both of us, I think. My appre-
ciation was that his own death was quite terrifying for him, representing, as I
think it might have, anticipated confrontation with ugliness and cruelty he
kept trying to turn away from in himself. I then understood that the dog and
pony show wasn’t just for others – it was a means by which he could distract
himself from his own terrible realities. Like a Dorian Gray who can convince
himself that his outsides looked good but who knows that the portrait await-
ing him in the attic will horrify him when he finally has to look at it.
As I put these additional pieces together, I thought I now better understood
my father’s rage and his incessant attempts to evoke envy in other people. As
much as he called attention to his wealth, the reality was that he was devas-
tatingly impoverished. Unable to love and to give, he couldn’t get. The was-
teland that I felt within me also existed in him, though his landscape must
have been far more bereft of hope than mine had ever been. I can see now
that his unceasing efforts to evoke envy in others were a reflection of his envy
of them. Envy that they were genuinely and deeply connected to the people
around them. That they could love and give and therefore sustain themselves.
That they were possessed of an internal richness – assets like spontaneity,
playfulness, generosity – that he could never possess himself. Though largely
unconscious most of the time, the envy he experienced had to enrage him.
And the perpetual starvation he endured meant that he was fearsomely vor-
acious, stuffing as much power, money, status, and sadistic pleasure down his
gullet as he could endure, only to always end up in the same place, starved
and empty. The goodies that he so hungrily pursued could never fill him, but
 The Dark Side – Father 99

they did distract him from what would have been a disastrous confrontation
with the self. The caveat was that he could never stop. He was perpetually on
the lookout for more, always more, always pushing himself, always shoving
other people out of the way so that he could have a bigger share, and always
frantically shoring up the whole rickety structure with relentless predatory
energy. It still surprises me that it all worked as well as it did for as long as it
did. The costs for him were tragic. As was true of my response to my mother’s
life, my heart breaks when I think about the kind of life he lived. Compassion
is of course co-mingled with a complex brew of the pain and damage that he
inflicted, which I still contend with. I feel vaguely guilty, too, about the array
of people he hurt, as if somehow being with him implicated collusion.
Chapter 8

The Cost of Narcissism

Clinical Depression and Complex
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

I would like now to talk more about two particular forms of damage my
relationship with my father occasioned: depression and complex post-trau-
matic stress disorder. I have described at some length the profound and terri-
fying sense of starvation that defined my experience in a narcissistic surround.
I would reiterate a nearly omnipresent fear that my own resources, my sub-
stance, was so ethereal and so limited that the self could easily be crushed.
Lest the reader think that I am offering an adult perspective, I can very much
confirm that as a child of eight or nine years I experienced dread of a psy-
chological – not just physical – but psychological annihilation. I felt as if I
would cease to exist if there are any less of me, but in order to survive my
father’s rage and depredation, I was required to erase myself to a very con-
siderable degree in order to be safe. It was quite a challenging juggling act, as
I have already said. At best, a half-life. One in which I felt half alive and half
dead. An apparition rather than a person. Being around my father sub-
jectively felt like having one’s life force drained away. As an adult, it struck
me that vampire mythology may have grown out of an appreciation, however
vaguely articulated, of narcissistic predation.
I remember reading one opinion in grad school suggesting that children
don’t experience full-blown clinical depression. At the time I read it, I was
incredulous. I knew very well at that point, looking back, that I had endured
significant and often compromising depression during my childhood years. I
wasn’t aware of what the diagnostic criteria for depression were when I was a
child, but I certainly knew that I felt suffocatingly depressed, as if I were at
the bottom of a very deep and rather dark hole with very slippery sides from
which I could never hope to escape. Importantly, I didn’t understand the
broad impact that depression has on people and that it was having on me. I
used food to offset pain, typically sweet fats like baked goods. Fortunately, I
was heavily involved in athletics so I could eat as much as I wanted without
worrying about weight gain. Weight did, not surprisingly, become a problem
later in life. My sleep was certainly disrupted, often by nightmares, or, alter-
natively, I overslept, still struggling to get up in the mornings in spite of the
excess rest I had enjoyed. I have no doubt that my sleep cycle was badly
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-8
 The Cost of Narcissism 101

compromised. It was extraordinarily difficult for me to enjoy myself, though I

was capable of doing so over short bursts of time in my family environment
and over substantially longer periods of time in a benevolent context, like
summer-long overnight camp. Guilt and self-hatred either assailed me or else
felt like they were uncomfortably close to my surface much of the time. Peri-
odically I felt quite suicidal, though I never somehow came to the point of
either formulating a plan or attempting to act on it. Now I wonder why I
didn’t. Where did all that resilience come from? I also faced very significant
challenges sustaining concentration and effort which I mistakenly attributed
to laziness or to some kind of undefined character flaw.
In the preceding paragraph, I have endorsed a symptom array that would
have earned me a diagnosis of clinical depression or, more formally, Major
Depressive Disorder (MDD). I qualified for MDD rather than Major
Depressive Episode (MDE) because my life was punctuated with multiple
episodes of depression. Intensity of clinical depression would have been char-
acterized, variably, as mild to moderate depending on its expression at a given
point in time.
I want to take a little bit more time now to direct attention towards a par-
ticularly prominent aspect of depressive experience that I have just referred to,
disrupted concentration. I would attempt to read a page of text and find that
my focus was unseated by intrusive thoughts and preoccupations. Sometimes
they reminded me I was too limited to understand the material I was
attempting to take in (the “you’re probably too stupid” voice). At other times
they engaged me with broader worries and concerns I had about myself or my
environment. Disruptions could present themselves seven or eight times
during the course of trying to get through a single page. They could (and
often did) trigger either disturbing or escapist fantasies that elaborated my
fears or offered me some surcease, however momentary. Escapist fantasies
invariably led to more guilt and self-recrimination as I recognized that I
wasn’t being productive. At the end of a single page, I would usually feel quite
exhausted, but I would demand that I push on. Homework was interminable.
It dragged on for me longer by far than it did for my friends, seemingly con-
firming the intellectual inadequacy I’d always suspected. This process went on
literally year after year. With each year’s renewal, I felt less and less confident
that I could continue to extend myself and win the kind of grades that earned
me some protection from my father’s caustic censure and disappointment.
At private school, I had the advantage of Masters – many of whom were
quite lovely people – who closely supervised everything I did, as they did
other students. Once I moved into public school during my last two years of
high school, I kind of fell apart. My grades were still more or less acceptable,
but my ability to work and to sustain effort really began to deteriorate. I was
utterly perplexed and panic stricken. Though I was acutely aware of the ter-
rible struggle I had faced trying to get myself through academic material,
finding it harder and harder each year, I still didn’t understand what was
102 The Cost of Narcissism

happening to me. I had expected when I changed schools to be able to

maintain the same work ethic, but I couldn’t. I knew my work didn’t begin to
honor whatever ability I had. I remember thinking, is this where I’m going to
find myself heading – dissolute, self- indulgent, and too corrupt with pro-
blems to ever hope to make a life for myself ? I was acutely embarrassed. I
already felt like I was faking brightness and now my realities had caught up
to me. Soon everyone would be able to see that I lacked the substance to be
able to pursue a life, that I was a deeply flawed echo of what I was supposed
to be.
I began to notice a pattern. At times I could be productive, but then I
would back away, almost involuntarily, retreating from work and effort as I
allowed myself to be caught up in escapist fantasies or distracting adventures
with my friends. Then scathing self-recrimination began. One substrate that
appeared to be driving this pattern, I eventually realized, was depression
itself. Through my work with patients, I could see how frightening depression
was for people. Severe depressive pain set the stage for people to be afraid of
another depressive experience. Sometimes this fear was explicit and some-
times it wasn’t, but I learned that I could infer its presence with some con-
fidence even though people weren’t aware that fear of depression was
compelling for them. They acted out their fear in ways that affirmed its pre-
sence. Fear of depression, I discovered, was related to subjective depletion.
The more that life or circumstance demanded from people with depressive
histories, the more depleted they felt, and the more depleted they felt, the
more frightened they became of getting depressed again. They could allow
themselves limited periods of productivity, but productivity seemed to be fol-
lowed by significant compromise and inertia after only relatively short-lived
effort. As they started to feel depleted, or, alternatively, as life escalated its
demands, they compulsively engaged in escapist tactics that I guessed were
meant to give them the opportunity to replenish themselves, but which,
inevitably, unleashed self repudiating attacks that further intensified both
depletion and depression.
All of us, including those of us who have not been subjected to intense
depression, need to replenish ourselves and need to recover from the depletion
that substantial, sustained effort brings about. I am describing a process,
however, that is marked by very uneven productivity and work capability, a
kind of discontinuous, jerky sort of progress marked by fairly sharp contrasts
between relative successes and obvious lapses. The overall impression created
as such a process unfolds is one of unreliability and irresponsibility.
As an aside, as I worked with people with depression, I came to understand
that their primary challenge involved learning to trust their resilience in the
face of the threat (sometimes poorly understood) that depletion created for
them. I found that people who had been severely depressed did best when
they were exposed to escalating responsibility in a graduated way, much like
some of the paradigms we rely on to help people mitigate fear. Rushing back
 The Cost of Narcissism 103

into responsibility and the demands of productivity all at once seemed to

occasion disastrous outcomes. People angry with themselves for letting
themselves or others down who attempted full re-immersion in their life’s
demands sometimes were able to demonstrate persistent effort over fairly
prolonged periods of time (months or even for a couple of years), but they
always seemed to crash and burn, facing yet another devastating encounter
with depression. Graduated exposure appeared to be effective, but I saw that
it took far longer than anyone might imagine it would (in my work with
patients, not uncommonly a couple of years, and that was whether or not
psychotropic medication was included in their treatment regimen). Clearly,
such a prolonged process works best with the support and understanding of
educated family members.
I watched my own depression follow a similar course, intimately tied, as it
appeared to be, to my own subjective sense of depletion. The bewildering up
and down course of my work in the last two years of high school and all of
university and graduate school that neither I nor my profs could make sense
of, punctuated alternately by acts of brilliance and lapse, now begin to make
sense to me. I eventually established a very strong work ethic, but only after
years and years of effort and struggle. Depletion and the depression it impli-
cates have always nipped at my heels and still do.
Up to this point in my narrative my internal realities seemed, in many sig-
nificant ways, to capture important aspects of my father’s experience. Not a one-
to-one correspondence, by any means, but close enough to be very informative.
Where, then, was my father’s depression? While depression was oppressive for
me, it appeared not to exist for him. I don’t think I ever heard him say that he
was depressed nor did he ever appear to be, even towards the end of his life when
he faced a decade long physical deterioration. I saw outrage, a childlike presence,
howls of indignation, grievous betrayal, debilitating and intractable mistrust,
hypervigilance, and an engaged raconteur and salesman, but never depression
and never self-recrimination. Only once did I see him cry, at least that I can
remember. There were occasions when he appeared to be relatively at peace with
himself, almost quiescent – usually when he was fishing or working on a project
by himself – but for the most part what struck one was his energy and his pas-
sion. His passion might often be married to destructive feelings and impulses,
but it was there to be felt by anybody who spent any time around him. Not at all
a depressive presence. He was certainly anguished, manifest in the many ways
that he found the world objectionable. He cried out about various perceived
injustices nearly unceasingly. But he never looked or acted like he was depressed.
I thought, as I came to understand him better during my adult years, that he
certainly had cause to be. Indeed, I could not imagine someone living as he did,
becoming the kind of person that he was, without experiencing significant
depression. As I knew, his solitude, the absence of stable community in his life,
and his formidable, enduring psychic pain all represented very imposing risk
factors for depression. How, then, did he manage to sidestep it?
104 The Cost of Narcissism

It may be helpful for me to comment now that I never regarded the energy
I saw in my father as a manifestation of hypomania. There are several reasons
why I believe this was so. Its character never changed; it followed a relentless
course; in its own perverse way, it was stable; it was not punctuated by peri-
ods when he was obviously depressed nor by periods when he appeared to be
inert and listless; and it more or less consistently served predatory ends. As a
point of information, hypomania is marked by transitory periods during
which people experience a heightened and unreasonable sense of personal
well-being and competence side-by-side indications of compromised judge-
ment and impulsivity. It is also associated with elevated levels of energy and
irritability. It is felt to be a component of Bipolar Disorder and Cyclothymic
Disorder, both of which, like depression, are classified as mood disorders. Of
particular importance, its presence is thought to offset depressive experience.
I did entertain the idea that my father’s remarkable levels of energy, grandi-
osity, impulsivity, and hostility might represent an aberrant and particularly
toxic version of hypomania more or less unrelenting in nature that served as a
defense against depression, but it certainly wasn’t the classical and therefore
more pedestrian version of hypomania I was used to seeing in my practice.
My father’s version of hypomania seemed to be more consistent with very early
psychiatric formulations embracing the concept of a hypomanic personality – a
more or less stable personality structure prominently characterized by hypo-
manic activity.
As I considered my father’s relative imperviousness to depression, I wondered
if his impulsivity – that is, the readiness and willingness to act without being
constrained by concern about consequence – might have helped inoculate my
father against depressive experience. Impulsivity, or what is sometimes referred
to as disinhibition in psychological literature, is believed to arise from a variety of
different causes and, as such, carries different implications in different clinical
contexts. Broadly speaking, however, difficulty controlling impulses does not
appear to protect people from anxiety and depression; on the contrary, it appears
to be associated with a multiplicity of symptoms consistent with both of these
broad categories of disorder, including suicidality.
Our discussion now leads us into consideration of the literature on psy-
chopathy. I will restrict myself to outlining major trends and prominent
themes that are relevant to the issues I am addressing. Accordingly, many of
my comments will reflect generalities I have abstracted from this literature
rather than citing individual research findings. My intent is to provide a meta-
view of this body of work so that my reader has an overview of its findings. I
will return to this literature in Chapter 10 and expand the perspectives I am
providing in this chapter. For an exhaustive look at this literature, I would
recommend the Handbook of Psychopathy (2019) edited by Christopher
Patrick published by Guilford Press.
The psychopathy literature seems to suggest that if reckless impulsivity (or
marked disinhibition) is paired with a trait identified with the label “boldness,”
 The Cost of Narcissism 105

then a significant measure of protection against both anxiety and depression is

conferred. Boldness is characterized in different ways by different authors, but,
again, broadly speaking, it appears to refer to low fear reactivity (fearlessness),
venturesomeness (a predilection to take risks), and a need to dominate. I found
this conception quite helpful; it suggested where I might look to find some of
the answers I was seeking. Understanding how and why traits comprising the
construct boldness could enable a narcissistic personality like my father’s to
largely avoid depression held promise. How was the trait boldness, which was
certainly a part of him, interacting with the other parts of him in a manner that
mitigated the effects of depression?
I initially discovered myself thinking about my father’s sense of omnipo-
tence. Other people could challenge him successfully, but as I think of it,
when they did, he would avoid them if he couldn’t annihilate or assimilate
them first. I guess, in this way, he fiercely defended his dominance and his
entitlement to it, refusing to allow people to undercut it for long. The battles
were bloody oftentimes, but he held onto his dominance even if it meant
ejecting the other party from his life. Being dominant, establishing his right to
bully, and affirming his “I’m the only guy who can do it” posture was a
matter he was willing to go to war over again and again – whatever it took to
confirm ascendancy. To my mind this whole endeavor looked like a very iffy
proposition, because you had to win every battle that you fought and either
push the other guy off the field or overpower him. Every battle. Oh my gosh.
Wouldn’t you be afraid you could lose? Wouldn’t the whole proposition seem
terribly daunting and wouldn’t it be very depleting? Within his framework,
though, this kind of dominance was something he had to do. As I understood
him, in order to feel safe, he had to be the biggest voice, if not the only voice
in the room.
Did self-aggrandizement and dominance feed him enough to deflect
depression? I couldn’t imagine that they would. It did strike me, however, that
his intolerance of vulnerability and his poorly understood but nonetheless
profoundly imposing fear that others could tear into him or exploit him
should he appear to be weak rendered depressive experience intolerable for
him. He couldn’t ever let go and admit fallibility, not just to others but to
himself (that was just as dangerous); he dare not express misgiving or uncer-
tainty; and he rigidly avoided self-reflection, particularly if it called upon him
to make room for other people or to empathize with the injury that he
caused. The plaintive, childlike and very vocal cries of injury that he issued in
the face of someone else who was pressing home a point that they had to
make, moreover, didn’t appear to bespeak accessible vulnerability so much as
they served to leverage an attack and lay groundwork for entitlement.
So was this what was happening? Was his fear of weakness and the ima-
gined consequences it could impose so big and so utterly compelling that
depressive experience became impossible for him? His greater need was to feel
safe and to feel safe he had to forsake his humanity. Was this terrible sacrifice
106 The Cost of Narcissism

what rendered him impervious to depression? A kind of massive fear can

trump mood sort of explanation? If the defenses that one employs neuter
capacity for empathy, compassion, conscience, and self-reflection, does one
somehow also inoculate oneself against depression? Are these qualities neces-
sary for depression to occur?
This explanation feels like a part answer to the question I have raised. I
can’t say that it strikes me as entirely satisfactory. For one thing, it feels
almost too poetic and lyrical. Additionally, my own experience with depres-
sion in the patients that I have worked with confirmed for me that in many
life contexts depression is such an irresistible force it will have its way. Move
over. Here it comes. Now you have to deal with it.
Having expressed these caveats, however, I do acknowledge a continued
affinity for this idea. If we have to neuter our human parts to render ourselves
unassailable and untouchable, maybe our capacity for depression does face
compromise. I should note that what I saw in my father – that is, his imper-
viousness to depression – I felt I saw in all but two of the six narcissistic
patients that I treated over a relatively long course of time (nine months or
more). I would describe four of the six people who persisted in long-term
work as deeply anguished individuals, very much tormented by the kinds of lives
they were living. Anguish was either expressed as depression (again, two
patients) or as a sense of chronic alienation and anger. All but two of the six
construed their problems as arising entirely outside themselves, not from within.
Five of them were there (one willingly) because employers or partners or both
presented them with ultimatums. Two (including the one who had been promp-
ted to come by an employer and did so willingly) came in response to their own
pain, but one of them could not consider his own contribution to it. Only the
patient who agreed with his employer that he needed help fully embraced intro-
spection; the remainder were either implacably or variably determined to avoid
it. With the exception of the patient who could allow himself to experience
depression and who could tolerate extensive self-examination, the rest of this
long-term group of six people were markedly impaired in their ability to experi-
ence empathy, compassion, and generosity towards others. The course of treat-
ment with these five people was predictably uneven, marked by interruptions as
they withdrew from treatment for various periods of time, only to reappear in
response to pressure others brought to bear on them or, in one case, because of
intractable depression. The work with all of them was hard and bruising.
Had I had opportunity to work with some of the other narcissistic patients
I saw on a longer-term basis, I might well have decided that depression was,
after all, a prominent part of their clinical presentation. In the long-term
patient I saw who was depressed, but intolerant of introspection, little pro-
gress could be made. In the second narcissistic patient in whom depression
was prominent, accountability was embraced. This person very much wanted
to recognize – more than that, feel – how much he had hurt others. Treatment
proved to be a successful endeavor.
 The Cost of Narcissism 107

The greatest number of narcissistic patients that I worked with I only saw
over a relatively brief course (several sessions), denying me the opportunity to
carefully assess levels of depression. Most typically, narcissistic patients
showed up on my doorstep in response to the disruption my work with their
family members was perceived as causing them; it felt like I was being
checked out, much the way an opponent might check out an adversary, so
that my vulnerabilities could be exploited to their advantage. What usually
followed was a campaign to discredit my work based on the personal flaws
they felt they had identified or, more generically, on flaws that they felt could
be attributed to my profession (“he’s not really interested in you, he just wants
you to keep coming so he has an income”). Should these tactics fail and the
family member (sometimes a spouse) persist in their treatment work, my
narcissistic opponent typically disappeared, usually not to be heard from
again. Occasionally they came back and some few even struggled with self-
awareness, attempting to pursue greater self-knowledge, but, in the end, it
always seemed to me that it felt too dangerous for them to surrender the
rapacity and bullying that essentially defined their relationships.
In my exploration of imperviousness to depression, I am setting aside, of
course, complex questions about the biological underpinnings of depression
that may arise from intricate interactions between psychological stress and
biochemistry. We are, after all, becoming increasingly aware that psychologi-
cal events impact and change physiological/biochemical realities and vice
versa. I should add that in making the comments I have about the relation-
ship between depletion and depression, I do recognize depression may arise
from a variety of sources; I see sensitivity to depletion as a particularly pro-
minent way that depression manifests itself, but my clinical experience tells
me it can wear other guises. Some of the people with whom I have worked,
for instance, seemed to be able to protect themselves from depression by
utterly exhausting themselves through over-commitment to work. Slowing
down would soon get them into trouble.
My thoughts about this question also led me to genetics. Was there a
unique pattern of specific, interacting genes (a so-called emergenic pattern)
that helped confer heartiness against depression in my father or in some of
my narcissistic patients? Speculation about an emergenic pattern, however,
only seems viable when applied to a specific individual, not to a group of
unrelated people (save for their diagnosis) whose genetic patterns could be
expected to be broadly variable. Typically emergenic patterns only reliably
reproduce themselves in monozygotic twins. There is recognition, however,
that emergenic patterns do repeat themselves in larger populations. Could
they somehow be tied to genetics underlying narcissism? Or could an additive
and/or interactive genetic model comprising multiple genes somehow generate
heartiness to depression – a pattern that also demonstrates itself to be part of
a narcissistic genetic substrate? These ideas feel worthy of exploration to me,
but I do not begin to know enough about genetics to make any real sense of
108 The Cost of Narcissism

them. If one allows that narcissism is a largely genetic disorder, then I suppose
one could consider that as part of overall genetic makeup some protection
against depression is conferred. To date, there does seem to be growing evidence
that various traits comprising psychopathy are shaped, to a degree, by genetic
contribution, supported largely by additive genetic effects, but there does not as
yet appear to be strong substantiation that the overarching construct we refer to
as psychopathy is mediated by an identifiable genetic pattern.
So far as I know, however, there does not seem to be substantive evidence
that narcissism is largely a consequence of genetics. The literature on psy-
chopathy notes that one of the three traits composing a triarchic model of
psychopathy (disinhibition) does appear to enjoy some heritability, but it is
not clear that the other two traits (boldness and meanness, respectively) do.
Meanness, however, appears to be closely related to the dimension of coldness
and unemotionality (CU); CU, in turn, may be subject to genetic influence,
particularly in individuals manifesting a markedly cold and unemotional
presentation. I must, again, leave this matter in the hands of geneticists far
more knowledgeable than I am. I simply wanted to raise questions about
genetics so that the reader might understand, in a very limited way, how
challenging and complex they are. As a footnote, I would mention that there
may be emerging evidence emergenic patterns and environmental influence
(epigenetics) interact with one another. Patience and extended scientific effort
will help us figure some of this stuff out. As the reader will see in Chapter 8, I
do feel environmental influence played a formidable role in contributing to
my father’s narcissism. Indeed, some of the genetic research on psychopathic
traits simultaneously substantiates, at least to a modest agree, the contribu-
tion environment potentially makes to the realization of psychopathic traits in
a particular individual.
It is my sense that narcissism represents a subtype of psychopathy, but I am
very much aware that some people might disagree with me. I think an argument
can also be made that narcissistic personality disorder should be conceived of as
a severe anxiety disorder. My reasons for making this comment, if not already
apparent, will become even more obvious in later sections of this book.
At the beginning of the chapter, I had said that I wanted to explore two
different forms of damage that I can see I sustained in my relationship with
my father – damage that appeared to depart from the kind of pain he was
struggling with. The second source of injury I am referring to is Post-Trau-
matic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or what is now informally identified as complex
post-traumatic stress disorder. While not yet recognized in DSM-5, the diag-
nostic and statistical manual mental health professionals rely upon when
making diagnoses, complex PTSD represents a very important and useful
construct that I hope will eventually enjoy formal recognition.
Complex PTSD refers to PTSD experience arising from early abuse that dis-
rupts and distorts normal developmental processes essential for the construction
of a healthy and reasonably well-functioning self. Because essential developmental
 The Cost of Narcissism 109

processes face compromise, the potential damage complex PTSD inflicts is

thought to be broader and more encompassing than damage typifying many
adult-based trauma experiences.
From the time that I was very young, I can remember rehearsing for antici-
pated trauma. What would my father say next? What would he do? What crazy
thing could I expect from my mother? How would I react? I would obsess end-
lessly about possible responses. Most of the time there weren’t any, prompting
me to look harder, to look further, to try to find some option for myself that
could insulate or partially insulate me from the sense of intense violation their
incursions generated in me. Every time they wounded me, it felt like I had failed
myself, that I had betrayed myself by failing to be able to defend myself effec-
tively. Betrayal of self, for me, was and is a powerful phrase. It very much cap-
tures what I felt. I both blamed and shamed myself for my inadequacy. I should
have been able to fight back, but of course I was also learning that if I fought
back, I would incite devastating retaliation. I struck a balance, as best I could,
between what I could say and get away with, and what I had to suppress (not
unlike a normal parent–child struggle, but, as the reader may appreciate, con-
siderably elevated in its intensity).
It was almost unbearable tolerating the helpless rage piling up inside. I was
desperate to create some kind of affirmation of self, some demonstration that
confirmed I had the means to push back. Instead, I found myself trapped in a
private space dominated by improbable retaliatory fantasies or by endless,
tortuous rehearsals of solutions I could never consummate. In spite of all of
the rehearsals that seemed to unfold endlessly over interminable periods,
when the moment of truth arose and I anticipated I would be able to defend
myself, I nearly always failed because I was too terrified to act. I dreaded
these inevitable failures because I knew they would give rise to more painful
hours of rehearsal that might only abate after a period of two to three days.
I discovered something else that I have alluded to earlier in this book: my
terror disorganized me. In the face of it, I literally couldn’t think. I was so
flooded with terror I couldn’t find words. And it disorganized my emotions as
well. In that moment of truth when I might have acted to mount resistance to
an assailant, I was likely to shake or to cry. Boys were not supposed to cry.
My parents seized upon that part of my vulnerability and attacked, variously
labeling me “crybaby” or – very typical of the 50s – “you better stop that
crying or we’ll really give you something to cry about.” Following such
experiences there were renewed rounds of rehearsal, the search to find the
perfect response that would shield me and restore some measure of dignity,
rehearsals that always ended badly when the time to act presented itself.
Disturbingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, I found myself unable to act and
unable to protect myself when I was faced with either a forceful personality or
a bullying personality in the world outside my home. The sense of not being
able to defend oneself without incurring fateful risk only amplified pre-
occupation with my own vulnerability.
110 The Cost of Narcissism

There is one other salient aspect of the trauma dynamic that I lived with
worthy of mention. I had learned that it was not safe to be too articulate, to
fill myself out too much as a personality, or to be successful. Throughout
much of my life I did not recognize that I sabotaged potential successes not
only because of depression, but because I was afraid that doing well would
expose me to attack from malignant, envious others. I could allow myself
momentary successes, but then withdrew from them. Doing so made me feel
safer, but inflamed depression as I failed to meet my own standards and
expectations. During the latter third of my life my fear of being attacked in
response to success became painfully prominent; I could literally feel how
afraid I was of others’ repudiation if I did well. Imagined successes produced
punitive, retaliatory fantasies that resulted in my diminishment at the hands
of competitors; actual successes yielded significant discomfort and acts of
undoing on my part. Maddeningly, I saw that the cognitive style, which I
developed in response to the threat my father generated, limited me to think
in vague, approximate, impressionistic terms rather than with the precision I
wanted to achieve for myself. Say name A when you mean to say name B.
Mix up facts that you ought to know well. Find yourself providing a woolly
or even inaccurate account of events that you have a good grasp of to ensure
that you don’t imbue your voice with too much authority. Watching and
measuring the people around you, trying to assess whether they can tolerate a
strong voice, but mostly expecting that they can’t. Consciously sabotaging
one’s own voice to appease a perceived enemy. And frustratingly, exasperat-
ingly, all of these things would unfold with implacable automaticity very hard
to resist. No doubt the disruptive impact of both depression and anxiety on
cognitive process, which is well documented in the psychological literature,
made their own contribution to some of the difficulties I was having with
myself.
My father’s cognitive processes, in contrast, seemed to be utterly unfettered,
to my envious eye. How wonderful, I thought, to be so free to act. But he
wasn’t, actually. His cognition had been hijacked as well – by his compulsion
to maintain dominance and rapacity. In order to be the guy who knew more
than everybody else and who had the biggest voice, he had to be equipped to
bludgeon his opponents through argument by affect (overwhelming and sub-
duing the other party with one’s own toxic emotional displays) rather than by
reason. Argument by affect seemed to be surprisingly effective much of the
time. People mostly did back away. Because domination was so important,
facts and realities could be swept aside in the service of establishing his
ascendancy. And because vulnerability was intolerable, he could never admit
fallibilities, even though it might have served him and his relationships well to
do so. His interpretations of reality ebbed and flowed, shifting in accordance
with his need to suppress other personalities. Although his relationships with
others could be defined for a time by a measure of amiability, amiability was
always eventually displaced by the compulsion to neuter and subjugate the
 The Cost of Narcissism 111

other. Under these terms, reason was treated as a disposable commodity,

readily sacrificed if it stood in the way of that which was most important to
him: confirmation that he was the guy who could obliterate the opposition.
We’re covering some old ground here. The intent is not to further highlight
my own suffering, but rather to elucidate the dynamics of incipient trauma.
Trauma yielding pain yielding obsessive rehearsal that occasions endless,
compulsive re-traumatization. The voices in your head that you can’t stop,
that keep going, that keep pushing you, popping up at various points in the
day, assaulting you, insisting on hypervigilance, insisting on preparedness,
insisting that every possible avenue of insult is anticipated and readied with
counter response.
The best depiction of PTSD I have ever seen I encountered in a murder
mystery series called “River.” The main character finds himself assailed
repeatedly by illusory figures hurling insults at him that he desperately and
angrily tries to fend off. He knows the figures aren’t real (I don’t think it was
the intention of the series to convey that he was struggling with a hallucina-
tory experience), but his engagement in these conversations is irresistible and
is so vivid affectively (fear, rage, desperation) that he momentarily forgets his
surroundings, embarrassing or compromising himself as he finds himself more
absorbed by his dialogue with them then he is by real-world events taking
place around him. He betrays his engagement with his trauma world with
gesticulation and speech directed towards the relentless attackers in his head
he can’t seem to escape for very long – gesticulation and speech that others
can see and hear. He talks out loud to himself when he speaks to his ima-
gined assailants and he sometimes waves his arms at them in exasperation.
Immediately recognizing what he has done, because he does appreciate the
boundary between the real and the trauma world, he hastily tries to recom-
pose himself, but maddeningly finds himself subject to the same breaches of
control over and over as the trauma world becomes too prominent for him to
manage. People who know me very well, like my wife, can pick up shifts like
this in me, but, hopefully, the cues I expose are less transparent than they
were for the main character in River. My wife, however, might say otherwise.
I probably do permit myself more unguarded moments with her than I do
with others.
Living with PTSD means facing seemingly interminable re-immersion in re-
traumatization and hypervigilance. Relax too much, feel too composed, start
to feel too safe, and PTSD prompts you to be afraid again, to keep looking
over your shoulder, to be ready for the next encounter. Peace and safety are
not enduring commodities to be had, but relatively transitory ones to be
enjoyed as best they can in those moments when they arise. In my clinical
experience, people struggling with complex PTSD arising from severe abuse
find it hard to feel safe in the world. A core task of the therapeutic endeavor is
to help them feel safe with the therapist. Safety is unquestionably founda-
tional in any therapy, but it assumes critical importance in the treatment of
112 The Cost of Narcissism

complex PTSD, demanding particularly close and assiduous attention to the

patient’s experience in the therapeutic relationship.
I have often thought that our brains are organized in such a way that they
insist we remember that which has frightened us very deeply. Remember that
waterhole, where you nearly got eaten? Don’t ever forget. Remain very
watchful. Stay wired. Here, I’ll remind you what that experience felt like.
You’ll relive it. And I’ll make you relive it if you start to relax in the face of
cues that might be construed to imply danger. In fact, if you relax too much,
even if you’re not in a dangerous situation, I’ll remind you that it’s not safe to
do so.
Profound, repetitively experienced fear has the potentiality of becoming
indelible – a kind of fixed presence or unwelcome guest that one carries
around inside perpetually trying to compel one to do its bidding. Such is
often the case when one grows up in the context that a narcissistic other cre-
ates. The consequence is enduring fear, a sense that one is never fully safe in
the world. Irresistible re-traumatizing thoughts that are part of the fear or
trauma dynamic help ensure that one can never feel adequately insulated
against threat. So, too, does the internal representation of the narcissistic
other that one carries inside. The specter of narcissistic invasion and decon-
struction never feels too far from the surface, even in surroundings that might
be expected to induce a measure of security. Even though there are interludes
when one can relax – sometimes relatively extended ones that may persist
over hours or even a couple of days – fear of violation by an envious, depre-
ciatory other inevitably reasserts itself. That has certainly been the case for me
as it has been for many of my patients who evolved in a narcissistic surround.
I look forward to a time when we can understand brain substrate and
dynamics better than we do now so that we might do a better job helping
people mitigate a condition like complex PTSD. Right now, at least in my
experience, complex PTSD occasioned by significant, prolonged early trauma
requires prolonged work. There is no single trauma experience, as there may
be in an adult trauma event, but multiple points of trauma extending over a
course of years, aspects of which can be readily appreciated and others that
prove to be subtle and nuanced. Moreover, because complex PTSD sig-
nificantly distorts or inhibits healthy developmental process, people living
with it have to find the means to acquire those parts of themselves they need
to live the successful adult lives which trauma has denied them. An appro-
priate and proportionate sense of personal value, the ability to constructively
assert oneself, a capacity to build a sustaining community, a willingness to
share internal realities and experiment with one’s personality to enhance per-
sonal richness and uniqueness, and the capacity to sustain effort and maintain
concentration are a very short list of the developmental tasks that have to be
addressed. As can be seen from my own experience living with a narcissistic
personality, I faced the challenge of piecing together a sense of self from the
distorted bits and pieces that my early experience produced. All this has to be
 The Cost of Narcissism 113

done in the face of continuing anxiety and depression. It takes time for people
and it is profoundly hard and often discouraging work.
I have struggled with complex PTSD all my life. My mother certainly made
her own contribution to it, but the greatest part of it, I would maintain,
derived from my experience with my father. I certainly recognized what I have
called trauma dynamic in my father and have referred to it in text. I could
see, in other words, that his narcissistic behavior looked to be compelled by
fear that he could be subjected to the same kind of encroachment and viola-
tion he visited on the people around him. I thought I could also see his
hypervigilance. He was always ready for battle, sometimes inciting it when it
was clearly not necessary to do so. I never saw evidence, as I noted in Chapter
5, that he obsessively replayed trauma in his head as a means of preparing
himself to deal with an intrusion. He didn’t become distracted by his immer-
sion in his trauma thoughts in the way that I did. He seemed to be spared
that component – that agonizing component – of PTSD. I asked myself
again, “How was he able to do that?”
When I returned to this question a second time, I found myself re-embra-
cing some of the same answers that I provided in Chapter 5, but this time
when I considered the question at hand, it felt like I could do a better job
elaborating and articulating my original ideas, possibly because the act of
writing offered me more time to play with the material.
My father’s greatly diminished capacity for empathy and compassion, his
fear of weakness, his vast acquisitive hunger, and his ruthless need to push
others aside all facilitated an unrestrained, action oriented, pull no punches
style of functioning. He didn’t leave himself time to deliberate or to hesitate
or to consider other’s feelings; he just acted. He didn’t have to rehearse
responses. They just happened. Usually with alacrity and the appearance of
intimidating conviction. He wasn’t generally subject to rumination and he
certainly couldn’t tolerate helplessness for long. Given such a powerful, com-
pulsive drive to act, I could see why he wasn’t subjected to the endless rounds
re-traumatizing thought that I was. Feel threatened and act. Skip the painful
re-traumatization step. It was both attractive and repellent for me to witness.
More latterly in my life I could recognize with painful clarity the terrible costs
that he had incurred. Broken relationships. Solitude. Failed collaborations.
Perpetual fear and restiveness. Add to these a fractured intellect constrained
by short brutish sentences lacking nuance and appreciation of complexity that
worked well as a means of intimidation in verbal combat, but that sig-
nificantly undermined his ability to better appreciate the multilayered actual-
ities he was often dealing with.
Chapter 9

Origins of Narcissism – My Father’s

Autobiographies

In this chapter I will focus on the autobiographical portraits that my father pro-
vided me late in his life at my request. I was facing another trip to California to
visit him that I anticipated would, in all likelihood, turn out, as other visits had,
to be painful experiences for both of us. Even within the format of a very short,
two-day trip, I was very much aware how badly and how quickly things might
deteriorate between us. I wondered what I could do to render the visit more
manageable and, possibly, even enjoyable. It finally occurred to me that I could
ask him to create a record or a kind of diary of some of the important events in
his life. Throughout my childhood he had repeatedly referenced various parts of
his early and young adult years, often telling the same stories again and again. I
realized that unless I recorded his stories – or got him to do so – they would be
gone forever. He was in his 80s and was struggling with health. It also struck me
that having the stories in one place, written down, would provide me with a more
meaningful picture of what his life had meant to him than the piecemeal accu-
mulation of oral histories he had shared over the course of our relationship.
When I proposed that he make an autobiographical statement, I had no
sense of whether doing so would appeal to him. I did know that he seemed to
be compelled to talk about his life – including the most painful parts of it – so
I could imagine he might be receptive to my request. I was not at all sure
whether doing so might get us into real trouble as he found himself focusing
on the formidable sense of injury I knew engagement with his early life could
occasion, but, given the risks inherent in any visit with him, I decided it was
worth taking a chance. We would either have another terrible get together or
his life story might offer both of us an interesting and rewarding focus for the
two days we would have with each other. I made my proposal over the phone
and he seemed to be modestly interested. When I arrived in California, how-
ever, I discovered that he had filled 3 or 4 90-minute tapes and was getting
started on still another tape. He had pulled together various pictures and
family documents as well. While he certainly talked about numbers of pro-
foundly disturbing experiences, as the reader will soon see, he was obviously
gratified to have been given the opportunity I presented him. We actually
spent a reasonably enjoyable visit.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-9
 Origins of Narcissism 115

Once I got back home, I had my secretary type out all of the tapes. As I
reviewed his 64-page autobiographical statement, I could see that the mean-
dering chronology that characterized his narrative made it difficult for one to
be sure when some of the important events he was describing had taken place.
He made attempts to chronologize, but I think chronology was often hijacked
by emotion. Talking about one set of experiences triggered poignant mem-
ories of other experiences that sidetracked an ordered narrative, but these
diversions also served to help one better appreciate the salient emotional
themes that had punctuated his life. I could see that the document he had
provided was immensely meaningful. It was, as I had hoped, a collection of
many of the different stories he had told me about himself, but all in one
place. The totality of this narrative was certainly greater than the sum of its
parts. I was also in a position to be able to read between the lines. I had, as
additional source material, comments he had made to me throughout the
years – often during anomalously unguarded moments – about various
important relationships he described in his autobiographical statement. Plus, I
had the advantage of actually knowing at least some of the players, which
offered me the opportunity to draw upon my own perceptions (however
accurate they might be) as a resource.
I decided I would ask him to return to the statement he had given me to see
if, together, we could create a more coherent sequence to the storyline. He
agreed and enthusiastically provided me with, essentially, another complete
autobiography, this time of 40+ pages, double spaced. Chronology was still
problematic, but by comparing the two autobiographies, I did feel I had a
better sense of when, approximately, some of the most significant experiences
had unfolded. Not a perfect understanding (I wouldn’t have expected one),
but one that I thought was good enough to paint an adequate picture of the
ways in which his life had impacted him. I was immensely grateful for what
he had done. His autobiographies allowed me to render human that which I
had experienced as monstrous. I could now view him with a depth of com-
passion and understanding that offered me meaningful consolation. I still had
formidable damage to contend with in myself and I still found it enormously
unpleasant to be around him, but I now also had compassion and depth of
insight as a more prominent part of my interface with him and my interface
with myself.
The most salient emotion that I experienced when my father died at 94 was
relief. I was almost giddy with it. I was no longer required to talk to him, to
endure the conspiracy theories and the outrageous bigotries that could punc-
tuate his conversation with me, nor would I any longer be subject to his sub-
versive attempts to undercut and deconstruct me. His funeral assumed a
surreal aspect as I was required to hear from various attendees about
aggrandized versions of his life he had offered them which they, in turn,
thought I would be gratified to be introduced to or to hear confirmed. I had
already heard the stories and knew all too well that they were not true (he
116 Origins of Narcissism

had worked on the Manhattan Project and would have to shoot me if he told
me what he did; he was a member of the first U.S. navy underwater demoli-
tion team and had, along with other team members, been responsible for
blowing up a battleship at the end of the war in Tokyo Bay). Having always
been prone to make up outrageous exploits that attested to his prowess, as he
moved further from the centers of power and “greatness” that he had once
occupied, he filled in the empty spaces with his wonderful – but apocryphal –
self-congratulatory stories. This was particularly true of his recounting of
World War II adventures. The summary of his service record in the Navy,
which I had seen prior to his burial in the US armed forces cemetery in San
Diego, made the limits of his naval service shockingly clear. Under a heading
something like “positions occupied” was the entry, “procurement officer,”
followed, oddly, by a period, as if to place special emphasis on the reality that
this was all he did. This odd style of entries in his service record extended
itself into the categories of (approximately) “special qualifications and train-
ing” and “rewards and citations.” Each was demarcated by the word “none”
and each “none,” as I remember it, possibly imperfectly, had its own period.
With the passage of time, my sadness about the kind of life that he had
lived and about the terrible losses that he had endured became more promi-
nent. Would that I, as a child, had been capable of the understanding that I
enjoy now I might have been able to offer him more support or, at least, more
forbearance rather than the largely secret war that I waged with him. Such
insights are, however, not possible for children. I have to accept that his life
irretrievably damaged him. He had to endure the pain that it occasioned
without any real recourse to set a different direction for himself. What I can
do, however, is to try to elucidate his pain and penetrate it as best I can so
that I can better grasp my own realities and so that others may better
appreciate how narcissism – at least some forms of it – can potentially grow
out of the human experience. It is my belief that my father’s autobiographies
render his narcissism – perhaps I should say salient parts of it – accessible.
That is to say, accessible in human terms rather than simply as a manifesta-
tion of what we have come to think of as evil. To my mind, it is essential that
we make sense of this very fundamental and potentially very disruptive,
destructive human condition that has helped set the stage for cataclysmic
human suffering in the form of war, economic privation, psychological
trauma, and suffocating oppression.
Perhaps one of the first things that one will notice looking at the auto-
biographies is the reappearance of many of the same stories framed by almost
identical words and phrases. Initially striking me as somewhat odd, I quickly
remembered that my father had told his stories over and over again, dozens
and dozens of times during the course of my acquaintance with him. Stories
retold, possibly, in search of resolution or understanding that always eluded
him, hence the need to endlessly revisit them. Many of the stories were also
trauma stories, capturing pain that seemed to serve a number of functions –
 Origins of Narcissism 117

consolidation of entitlement, confirmation of his endemic cynicism, inves-

titure in an embattled solitude that admitted little help from others, and
invigoration of vigilance, contempt, and rage. There was also, unmistakably, a
deeply plaintive cry for help that he would say never came and that he cer-
tainly could not have accepted, had it presented itself. His obsessive oral his-
tory giving found the words to express itself and, once found, ossified itself in
fixed forms – in the words and phrases that he used over and over again to
express himself. A man caught in a maze, increasingly, of his own making,
moving down the same blind alleys with the insistence that this time he could
find new answers.
Many of his stories were presented as accusations: “Why did this happen to
me and not to you? Why were you favored while I lived with such punishing
deprivation?” The tone of accusation that attended his storytelling, as I have
said, always filled me with dread. Because dread dominated my experience
with him in these moments, it was harder for me to appreciate that at these
times he became the desperately wounded child he had once been. Not that I
was unaware of his suffering or untouched by it – I was – but my fear of him
soon displaced any compassion I was capable of feeling. I suppose I dwell on
these feelings because I think it is important for the reader to be reminded of
the ambience that surrounded his storytelling, both in him and in me. What I
see on paper as I read the autobiographies doesn’t begin to capture the
immensity of injustice and suffering he conveyed as he told his stories.
From the vantage point that I occupy towards the end of my own life, I can
now better set the dread I experienced in association with his storytelling
aside and hear the anguish that they represent. Endless, tortured appeals for
someone to free him from what was undoubtedly a tormented existence.
Before I begin my commentary on his autobiographies, I wish to emphasize
that of course I am very mindful that his retellings of his experiences are
likely distorted by the vagaries of brain function and memory and by the
emotions that help compel and shape memories over time. I don’t doubt that
in some respects his sense of injustice, for instance, had become increasingly
hyperbolized as years passed, lending his stories the sometimes frantically
indignant quality that they assumed, but I also have little doubt that the pain
he displayed was very real. I could see and feel and taste the damage that he
had endured (much of it described in the first seven chapters) through his
impact on me. I also recognized in the coherent patterns of suffering my
father presented patterns that I was seeing in many of my patients. It further
struck me that the dissociation (emotional numbing) his trauma experiences
created for him could conceivably mean that in some respects he was not well-
equipped to appreciate (to feel) how fully devastating they had been.
What was also apparent in his appraisal of his life was his inability (his
reluctance?) to acknowledge the damaging impact he had upon many of the
people close to him. My mother and I had certainly cried out in pain and in
protest often enough – for me, particularly during my adult years when I was
118 Origins of Narcissism

more capable of confronting him – so I knew he had to be cognizant of our

respective agonies, but he seemed not to be able to incorporate them into his
narrative, as if he had no means to address this part of his experience. He
attempted to resolve this omission by casting an idealizing glow over the
latter part of his life that was meant to create an impression of resolution and
growth the actualities of his life could not support.
With respect to memory, I would note that there are inconsistencies in the
autobiographies. Virtually any history I have acquired from my patients is
marked by inconsistency. In extended therapy work I have the advantage of
investigating incongruities and, if I’m lucky, eventually coming to understand
them. It was not possible to do that with my father’s stories, though, as pre-
viously mentioned, some attempt was made to do so. This surely represents a
limitation of the autobiographies. Nevertheless, I’m reasonably content that in
spite of occasional contradictions and disrupted chronologies the auto-
biographies tell a poignant and evocative story about my father’s life journey.
I am, after all, primarily interested in tracing major themes that seem to
inform his movement towards a narcissistic posture. I think that the auto-
biographies so prominently display these themes and allow them to stand out
in such relief that matters of inconsistency or contradiction in the storyline
recede in importance. I admit that I am departing, to a degree, from the
position that I have always taken in my work – that the devil lies in the
details. The reader will have to decide for themselves whether I am justified in
doing so.
Finally, before actually delving into the autobiographies, it is important
to note that at the time my father gave them he was in his early 80s and
was beginning to struggle with the effects of the congestive heart failure
that eventually ended his life at 94. When he constructed them, I regarded
him as being intact cognitively. He remained quite lucid up to the end of
his life, but the oral histories that he has given may not be truly reflective
of the intellectual capabilities that typified his functioning at the apex of
his career. What they do offer, I think, is an appreciation of what his
spoken language was like – not a perfect one, of course, because he was
engaged in dictation, but a reasonable facsimile of the kind of language
that he used when he spoke to others, as I remember it. Notwithstanding
his disclaimers in the autobiographies about a lack of skill with English
and grammar, his written business communications struck me as quite
articulate: focused, succinct, and effective. In a business context, his vocabu-
lary and his use of language embraced complex constructs and organized
them, to my eye, very successfully; in contrast, in a personal context – per-
haps as one might expect – quality of language appeared to degrade, subject
both to the impact of his narcissism and to the informality that characterizes
spoken language.
As he surveyed what he had written in his autobiographies, my father
reflected upon what his experience had been like for him:
 Origins of Narcissism 119

In looking back over my younger days, I think it’s very difficult for me to
recall many happy circumstances. My mother and dad did everything in
the world they could for me though we just plain lived in poverty, real
poverty and I was bound to be envious of what the other kids had and
what they were doing and being unable to go along with them, in terms
of having various toys and amusements and going places and that sort of
thing…

My father’s life statements document crushing poverty and hardship. Begin-

nings possibly as early as seven or eight years old marked by soul-sapping
responsibilities that only increased throughout the course of childhood and
early adulthood. Wherever this demarcation began, it seems that at the latest
by the time he was nine or ten, my father was tasked with supplementing a
very meagre family income with inordinate – and he would say (and often
did) – backbreaking physical labor that made the difference between whether
the family had enough to eat and whether it had enough coal to heat the
house in wintertime. As best I can tell, by the time he was ten (and probably
well before that time), he was supplementing his mother’s desperate efforts to
keep the family afloat by holding 4 different jobs that filled his after-school
hours and his weekends (operating the washing machine crank in 3 or 4 half-
hour sessions each night, stringing up the clothesline and hanging out the
washing to dry, beating carpets in the neighborhood, and mowing between 8
and 20 lawns in season). He also seems to have been accountable for shovel-
ing coal into the furnace when it was available and for helping his father plant
a family garden that the Overbrook School for the Blind had made available.
My father’s workload appeared to escalate rather quickly rather than dimin-
ishing with each passing year of childhood. While there seem to have been
brief periods of respite when the family did a little bit better for itself, almost
inevitably, it must have felt, things seemed to get worse again, necessitating
more crushing responsibility.
By the time my father was 11 or 12 years old, by his account, there was
enough concern about shortage of food in the family that he was sent down to
the family farm in Virginia called Nimrod Hall where it was expected that he
would be fed better than he could have been in his own home. Once there,
however, he found that he was responsible for working for his own keep in the
summer months “by milking the cows, bailing the hay, weeding the garden,
and such joys as that.” While at the farm, he was also tasked with driving
1,800-pound loads of ice down an adjacent mountainside to the family farm,
having been taught to drive by one of his uncles at age 10 (this reference and
the associated chronology implies that summers at Nimrod Hall may have
unfolded a little earlier than he suggested they did at one point in his narra-
tive). The end of grammar school (what sounded to me a reference to grades
1 through 8) and the very beginning of high school saw him continue to fill
the hours after school and on weekends with work. He obtained a license at
120 Origins of Narcissism

age 14 after lying about his age so that he could qualify himself to drive a
grocery truck. Work at the grocery store began as he finished school, evi-
dently at two and extended until six when he took another job working at a
local candy store that required his presence until 11pm. Weekend work
included work at a garage that was as much as a 10-mile bike ride or caddy-
ing 2 full rounds at a local golf course, whenever possible, that involved 10
miles of walking with what would have been a heavy bag for a youngster who
had not fully reached physical maturity.
Such work was necessary, my father maintained in his autobiographies, to
pay rent, buy food, and look after other necessities of life. Although the
autobiographies do not say so explicitly, my own conversations with my father
confirmed that after my grandfather left the family to live at Nimrod Hall on
a full-time basis when my father was in his freshman year of high school (I
assume this is an approximate estimate), my father’s earnings also helped
fund a series of psychology lectures that my grandfather presented in different
cities. One of his autobiographies also made it sound as if he began making
contributions to his father to help his father buy a house around the freshman
year time mark, but my own sense, again from conversations of my own with
my father, suggests to me that my father offered help with a house purchase
either much later in high school or at some point in his early 20s. I acknowl-
edge that I may be mistaken and that my father’s account in the auto-
biography may be accurate.
In addition to these burdens, my father also found himself partially sup-
porting the physician, Dr. E. F. Williamson, who was looking after my grand
mother’s now compromised health, by sharing the meagre supplies of food
available to the family. My father implied that it was only as a result of
pressure that he placed on Dr. Williamson that the latter eventually relented
and began to offer the family limited financial support.
At the end of high school my father faced the financial burden of paying
for his own university at the same time that he continued to help support his
mother and, to some degree, possibly his father as well. He seems to have
done so by maintaining multiple jobs and long hours of work. A summer job
at a miniature golf course in what he described as a rough part of town
extended from the morning until well past midnight, but it did offer my father
opportunity to save a meaningful amount of money as a result of his ability
to capitalize upon a betting scheme he organized after hours. In between two
summers at the miniature golf course, he commented that “I worked at gas
stations, delivery trucks, soda fountains, painter, etc. for the rest of the
year…,” further augmenting savings in the process. He did pay for his uni-
versity (it sounded like he attended a pre-med course for one or more years)
as well as his first-year medical school and several weeks of his second year
before another crisis presented itself in the form of a bank failure in the midst
of the Great Depression. This event resulted in loss of all of his savings
(approximately $10,000). Though he resolved to walk away from everyone at
 Origins of Narcissism 121

this time, in actuality his resourcefulness and ingenuity as well as some

unexpected luck insured that he had the means to continue to support his
mother, which he seems to have done up until the time he was nearly 30. At
that point his mother and Dr. Williamson finally married, probably, my father
seemed to suggest, as a result of pressure that he placed on the latter.
After walking away and finding himself on his own, my father gave me to
understand through personal communication that he continued to support his
father and his father’s new wife on a limited basis that was sufficient for them
to sustain themselves and that eventually culminated in shouldering the costs
for nursing home residency for each of them.
During my childhood when my father talked about the extraordinary bur-
dens he felt he had been required to assume from a very early age, his tone
reflected a mixture of bitterness, rage, injustice, and at times, childlike despair.
Underneath the acrimonious outcries and the accusatory tone he directed
towards his listeners, one could hear the helpless, terrified child that he had
once been. I should add that I don’t think he fully occupied the psychological
space of that terrified child; rage and indignation and his sense of injustice
easily eclipsed the profound vulnerability and probably equally profound
despair that his experiences had undoubtedly instilled in him.
His life seems to have been a terribly precarious affair, lurching from one
daily or weekly financial crisis to the next, never offering any real measure of
certainty that now everything was going to be okay. His own father’s singular
devotion to the church meant that family needs could be pushed aside so that
my grandfather’s income could be redirected to the church building fund.
Perhaps not surprisingly, my grandfather’s insistence in doing so was cause for
bitter arguments with my grandmother that infiltrated my father’s home life.
One can imagine a child’s growing bewilderment and hurt in such circum-
stances. Why won’t dad help? Why aren’t we important to him? Does it not
matter that we often don’t have enough to eat, that we often can’t keep warm,
that we don’t have enough money for decent clothes (requisite for both dig-
nity and for warmth in the winter in the absence of coal), that we can’t afford
Christmas, that we rarely have money for pleasure, and that my mother and I
have to work so hard? What must my father have felt about himself and how
much more precarious must existence have felt in the absence of paternal
commitment to the family?
Each time the family seemed to get a leg up, things fell apart again. The
promise that a completed new church and a regular pastoral salary seemed to
offer evaporated with my grandfather’s unexpected blindness. Return of
sightedness in one eye offered hope that my grandfather might work again,
but his attempts to reengage himself with his ministry as well as efforts to
redirect himself as a vacuum cleaner salesman and as a psychological lecturer
all miscarried, leaving my grandmother and my father to somehow fend for
themselves. Tragically, the best that my grandfather could do was absent
himself from the family home and re-situate himself in Virginia so that my
122 Origins of Narcissism

grandmother and father didn’t have to continue to pay for his food. Shortly
after these terrible disappointments, my grandmother’s health began to fail as
she was subject to increasing bouts of asthma. And in spite of the financial
relief that my grandfather’s absence offered, foreclosure on the family home
approximately a year after the occurrence of blindness was followed in suc-
ceeding years by multiple evictions from increasingly meagre dwellings that
my grandmother and father had trouble affording. At least one eviction seems
to have resulted in a sheriff garnishing both my grandmother’s and my
father’s wages for back rent. One gathered that these evictions were also dis-
ruptive to my father’s schooling, occasioning attendance at three different
high schools and, in at least one instance, a commute to school that was
experienced as daunting. For a young man who decided at an early age that
he wanted to be a doctor, school disruption must have felt quite threatening,
intensifying the sense of instability that attended his life.
In the midst of all of this, the Great Depression presented itself. Evidence
of financial disasters were everywhere to be seen, often in the form, in my
father’s world, of people desperately trying to eke out subsistence by selling
apples. The Great Depression, of course, eventually did catch up to my father,
occasioning the bank failure that denied him continuation at medical school.
So much of my father’s early life seems transactional to me: you’re only as
good as the work you contribute and, at best, you could only buy yourself
and your family another day’s food and shelter. There seems to have been
little room and little enough resource for parents to invest in him. His and his
mother’s life were subordinated to his father’s dream of church and ministry.
My grandfather took him on bike rides, but mostly where he wanted to go, as
my own father said, rather than soliciting his son’s wishes. The point of the
bike rides, it seemed, was more work: the vegetable patch that the family
needed for food. The radio that the family treasured was a product of my
father’s labor and his windfall; his parents decided he should have the money,
but for educational purposes. Parents did buy him a train set, but reminded
him continuously about its cost. The most unconditional presents he seems to
have received were a skateboard his father made for him and an aerial that his
father had installed on the roof for the radio (the latter actually served the
family rather than my father alone, but one got a sense that the time my
grandfather spent with him doing this was meaningful). Otherwise, there
seems to have been very little affirmation of either their investment in him or
the pleasure he could give just by being him. There appears not to been much
solicitation of interest in his tastes or his sensibilities or much real apprecia-
tion of his uniqueness.
He was there to serve others. To serve their dreams and their needs. Much
the same appears to be true of his many relations on the Virginia farm. He
regarded “typical” Wood family men as lazy, unproductive, and often unsuc-
cessful people who, like his father, failed to adequately look after their famil-
ies, putting their own needs first instead. Tellingly and sadly, my father
 Origins of Narcissism 123

recalled his grandfather as a guy who spent most of his time relaxing in a
rocking chair eating fried chicken who was disinclined to make much con-
versation with his grandson.
In my clinical experience, families that demonstrate joy in response to the
personal gifts (not monetary ones) that a child can bring consolidate attach-
ment and generate meaning. I can see I’m important to you. I can make you
laugh or you like the way I think or recognize I’m a good artist or you can see
that I’m a kind person or that I love music. My qualities make you happy and
when I make you, my parent, happy I feel like I have a place in the world and
that I have value. In the absence of this kind of feedback – and these are
exchanges, by the way, that more or less unfold on a daily basis – a child feels
rootless, functionally unable to make the parent they belong to feel happy or
experience joy. Similarly, a parent’s investment in a child’s interests (What can
we do that you would like? How can I help you do the things that are
important to you? Or, even better, I know you like X, I’ve arranged for us or
for you to do that) also affirm value. In a context in which there is a sub-
stantial absence of such experiences, I think a child must inevitably endure
doubt about their importance to others, save for the utility they can offer
other parties. Such a connection is certainly not a sustaining one. It also must
exacerbate the sense that one’s place in the world is very tenuous.
Aspects of the reality my father had to contend with must have made him
feel very disposable. Imagine being required, as either a 10-year-old or 13-
year-old (depending on which account of my father’s one reads) to drive
down a roller coaster like mountainside by yourself with breaks smoking and
reverse pedals to the floor carrying six 300-pound blocks of ice in the back of
a broken-down truck. My father’s half comical account in one of his auto-
biographical statements of doing so belies the immensity of risk he faced. In
other conversations about this incident and in the record he provided for the
Wood family tree, however, it becomes apparent risk was very acutely felt. His
retrospective humor in the autobiography likely not only offered him the
opportunity for a colorful story that could augment the larger-than-life per-
sona he was eager to create for himself; it also disguised the terrible reality
that his family was all too willing to lose him to the chores they assigned him.
He never explicitly talked about such feelings of disposability, but I can ima-
gine they were a very prominent part of his psyche.
I wonder if the reason that my father’s memory at seven or eight of a young
boy run over by a truck (and killed) was as indelible as it was, remaining with
him throughout his lifetime, because it captured his sense that life and survi-
val were tentative and that he was discardable.
His comments about this incident are quite poignant:

I saw a little boy cross the street and a truck hit him and he fell down in
front and the truck ran smack over his stomach and the front wheels and
then I saw the back wheels do the same thing and there wasn’t any visible
124 Origins of Narcissism

evidence, outside of the fact that I learned later he was, when they finally
got the ambulance there and all, that I learned he was dead – it had
squashed his insides and broken his back and all kinds of things and it’s
just something that stuck in my memory all my life and it was a sad thing
to watch, but it was another important incident in my growing up days.

I think an eye injury he endured in the schoolyard in primary school must

have had a similar impact as well as the death of his dog Nix and his
encounter with a bear that scared him half to death while he was collecting
blueberries for the family, chasing him all the way down the mountainside. I
believe that, in part, this is one of the reasons that he returned to these
memories so often throughout his lifetime.
I think it’s important at this juncture to continue to reflect upon the parsi-
monious nature of the transactional world my father lived in. It was parsi-
monious, as may be apparent now, both materially and spiritually.
Subjectively, I can imagine my father only ever felt good enough for used
clothes and toys or that he was only ever deserving enough on rare occasions
to have money for movies or spending money (a penny) for candy. It would
have been easy for him to feel that neither he or his mother were important
enough to induce my grandfather to share more of his money with the family
or, alternatively, to develop a supplementary income. My father could work
his heart out, in other words, for the people around him, but they had very
little to give back in the form of either gifts or personal interest. The world
wasn’t receptive to his needs; on the contrary, as I have said previously, he
was there to look after others. He was required to give everything that he
earned to his parents or to the summer family at Nimrod in Virginia, but very
rarely got to keep much, if anything, for himself.
His world was punishingly withholding. When he did manage to save
money as a consequence of heroic effort or attempted an emotional invest-
ment, it must have begun to feel inevitable that the world would take what
little he had away (see, for instance, his one-week old reconditioned car utterly
destroyed by fire, the little dog Nix that he accidentally killed and, most
poignantly, plans for medical school disrupted by both depression related
bank failure and by his mother’s possibly vindictive new partner who denied
him a relatively small loan that would have permitted my father to carry on
with his intended career). Even practical joking that he engaged in on the
farm had its costs (fearsome switching from grandma).
I’ve included descriptions of some of these losses in his own words in the
passages which follow below:

While living in Kirkland, I found a little, lost dog – a puppy. I asked my

dad if we could keep it and he said nix. So, to make a long story short,
after many tears and wheedling I kept the dog and named it ‘Nix.’ Over
the next little while I got very attached to this dog and one day swinging
 Origins of Narcissism 125

a golf club in the yard he jumped, hit the head of the club and it killed
him. I was one sad little kid at the time, boy around 13 years old.1
I finally had enough money, about $300 to buy a car. I bought a little
red Chevrolet roadster and paid $300 for it. I redid the engine and the
brakes and all the things I learned to do with the gas station. After about
a week and it was working pretty well, and there was no place to park it
at our little apartment (it was a very small apartment) so, I got a deal
with a little garage across the street where I worked part time. I was so
proud of that car, I can’t tell you. I went to bed that night, woke up and
saw flames through my window coming out of the garage just down the
street. I jumped out of bed and ran down in my pajamas. Those flames
were coming from that garage and for sure my little car was burnt to a
crisp. The tires were burnt off it, it was melted down. Even the upholstery
had been burnt off. Total loss. As luck would have it, no car insurance
and the car was totaled. I was pretty sad, was without a car, which was
needed to get to one of my jobs. I didn’t know what the hell to do, but
couldn’t do much about it.
I was so damn broken hearted about leaving medical school – I can
never describe the feeling in my stomach; no money, had no job and
didn’t know what the hell to do. I was just about ready to get a job in a
boat and go away…

The vindictiveness I think my father experienced with Dr. Williamson seems

plausible to me. Reading between the lines in the autobiographies and, as
well, having had the benefit of listening to my father tell this story repeatedly,
I had the unmistakable sense that he believed Williamson meant to punish
him because my father had demanded payment for either food or rent in
response to Williamson’s persistent use of these resources. I think my father
was attempting to impose the same rules on the world, in the form of Wil-
liamson, that he felt the world had imposed on him throughout most of his
life. In response to this act of assertion, the world (Williamson) fought back,
withholding my father’s most precious dream (medical school) by refusing
him the loan that he needed to continue with school after his bank’s failure. I
met Williamson at various points during my childhood. He struck me as a
fearsome, forbidding man whom I tried to avoid on my visits to my grand-
mother. As a footnote, when he died my father and I discovered that he was
indeed rich. My memory is that he had accumulated well over a million, if
not $2 million in US stocks – quite a sum at the time (60+ years ago). Wil-
liamson’s will seemed to confirm his emotional and material parsimony, a
kind of implicitly vindictive meanness of spirit. All of his money was to go to
his medical college with the exception of a monthly subsistence allotment for
my grandmother. While I did not think my father recognized the parallel, I
think he must have experienced it: like my paternal grandfather, Williamson
was turning most of his resource back to his profession rather than making
126 Origins of Narcissism

enough of it available to offer his wife even a modestly comfortable lifestyle.

The terms of Williamson’s will clearly placed much of the burden of support
for my grandmother on my father. My father readily reached an agreement
with the medical college to provide my grandmother with adequate income;
the medical college also agreed to pay for my university and to establish a
scholarship for either my sister or I or any of our children to go to medical
school, if we or they so wished. I’m sure in that moment my father must have
felt that he had managed to partially redress a terrible injustice he had suf-
fered, although too belatedly, of course, to give him the career that he had
wanted.
The import of the kind of life experience that my father had, I think, was
to confirm his aloneness, save for his relationship with his mother. She and he
worked side-by-side to ensure that life could go on. What she could not do,
however, given her harsh circumstance, was protect him from the inordinate
hardships that defined his life as well as hers. My grandfather, in turn, seemed
almost entirely unable to afford my father meaningful shelter from the variety
of threats that assailed him. Even an injury like bullying incited a response
from grandfather that pushed my father back into the world on his own to
somehow deal with the two school bullies jeopardizing him. Grandfather
threatened such “drastic” punishment that my father became too afraid not
to fight back. The message that repeated itself over and over in my father’s
life, consistent with this experience, was don’t depend on others – you’re in
this more or less by yourself. You have to figure it out. Others are unlikely to
help you much.
I think my father remembers his experience with Boy Scouts and with the
church basketball team as fondly as he did because in both instances other
people made an effort to help him. While he had to buy his scouts uniform
himself, the church provided him and the other boys with instruments to play
and some lessons. What sounded like a different church community provided
its neighborhood children, including my father, a place to play basketball and
team uniforms. I suspect that in part my father felt as good as he did about
these experiences because he was dressed just like the other boys unlike his
daily garb of second-hand clothes his poverty necessitated. I do think he was
genuinely, deeply appreciative of the clothes and the toys that the DeLong
family gave him, but they came at a cost: charity was diminishing, probably
earmarking him as different than many of the children around him.
As an aside, I was struck by some of the comments my father made about
his encounters with school bullies. After successfully vanquishing them by
fighting back, he considered that maybe he subsequently developed a reputa-
tion as being a tough little kid, saying that he didn’t really think that he was.
Was this the beginning, I wondered, of his reliance on bullying others to
secure his own space? I don’t feel the evidence in the autobiographies is strong
enough to draw that conclusion, but the question nevertheless nagged me,
prompting me to mention it here.
 Origins of Narcissism 127

Notwithstanding what my father said about Christianity in his auto-

biographies, he remained deeply, bitterly opposed to Christianity up to very
nearly the end of his life, feeling that it was self-serving and hypocritical. He
saw Christianity as the origin of much of his family’s suffering. He expressed
deep resentment about the extensive Christian devotionals he was expected to
participate in, probably seeing them as another obligation that his father
imposed on him without having much to give back in return. On a deeper
level, one could speculate that he saw Christianity as a ruthless competitor, an
enticing and irresistible siren that consumed all of his father’s resources, rob-
bing the family of what they needed from him.
My father was exposed to profound and frankly shocking adultification
during his childhood and young adult years. This is to say that he was
expected to shoulder oppressive adult burdens throughout this period of his
life before he had opportunity to form a self or to develop resources appro-
priate to the responsibilities he was carrying. The lion’s share of whatever
personal resilience he possessed was directed towards looking after others.
One can imagine that he felt extraordinarily depleted and all the more so with
each passing year. Little opportunity to be a child. Little chance to explore
the world as a child so that he might discover facets of himself that he wanted
to develop and express. Little reason to feel safe and protected. And little
freedom from the constant fear of survival that dogged his steps throughout
these years. A pretend adult in a child’s body and a child’s half formed psyche
desperately trying to be so much more than he was so that he could get by
and so that he could ensure his one close companion in this journey, his
mother, could continue to stand by his side. He had to find the means to
convince himself that he was bigger than he was, stronger than he was, more
resourceful than he could be. He consolidated such belief with grandiosity –
grandiosity and self-idealization that his mother in all likelihood encouraged.
I could hear her hyperbolized and aggrandizing adorations of him during my
childhood, over the top devotionals that always made me feel awkward, as if
something was terribly skewed in their relationship. I felt a measure of
embarrassment around them that I recognized later in my life reflected my
sense that their relationship felt too close, too affectionate, almost incestuous.
The portrait provided was a confusing one as they seemed to swing back and
forth between two frightened children clinging to one another and two battered
partners beseeching one another for comfort. Accepting her aggrandizement
confirmed their bond, confirmed his worth, and afforded him reassurance that
maybe he could be all that she needed him to be. If he could accommodate his
aggrandized status, they could and he could assuage his loneliness. If he could
accept the position she probably assigned him as surrogate husband, he could
feel special, powerful, and attractive. The sexualized undercurrent passing
between them would have also helped confirm grandiosity.
Whether the reader can accept some of the Oedipal themes that I have just
outlined, it can probably readily be appreciated that aggrandizement and
128 Origins of Narcissism

adultification carry within them impossible contradictions. The more the child
accepts the adult role, the more precarious the entire venture becomes. The
child, after all, is only a child, not the adult he purports to establish in his
own and others’ eyes. The more he pretends to be what he is not, the more
impossible the whole venture must feel. Attempts to reassure the self through
adultification only generate more fright and more aloneness. Fright, however,
is vulnerability badly tolerated in the rickety structure of adultification. It
must somehow be set aside and repressed. Not an undertaking marked by a
sense of much surety or certainty. Many children compelled to adultification
fail. Significant life disruption often ensues. Aggrandizement and idealization
can help hold people together, but, as is obvious, at potentially terrible cost.
My father, I believe, was able to maintain his aggrandized stance because he
was so talented, so improbably resourceful and creative, and so unexpectedly
resilient he could pull it off. One breathtaking high wire act after another
after another. Each one affirming his larger-than-life status. And, for better or
worse, he had the “benefit” of early physical maturation – which is to say, like
me, relatively early on he looked much older than he was for his age. Looking
the part, I’m sure, meant getting his driver’s license at 14 and meant getting
jobs he otherwise might have been disqualified from. It could be said of my
father that he grew up too fast and that he never grew up at all.
All of the above is not to suggest that my father was free from suffocating
despair. Such despair must have repeatedly punctuated his life as he and the
family moved from crisis to crisis. It is perhaps most obviously apparent in
the autobiographies in his description of his feelings following abrupt termi-
nation of medical school and his reaction to loss of his car. One can also
guess that his mother’s escalating bouts of asthma must have portended a
kind of abandonment foretelling even greater burdens for him to carry, not to
mention the potentiality of mother-loss. One would also think that his
mother’s growing dependence on Williamson might have increasingly occa-
sioned powerful jealousy. The one dear heart he had always held close was
being withdrawn from him. In some ways probably a relief, but in others an
unbearable absence. Improbably, he seems to have survived innumerable crises
like those I’ve just referenced, but one does not have to extend oneself very
far as one reads his autobiographies to appreciate that such reversals were
searing experiences for him – ones that he carried with him and struggled
with the rest of his life.
Once established in one’s adult life, self-aggrandizement associated with
adultification requires defense; having been won at such cost, it is not easily
yielded. That which threatens the bearer’s grandiosity must be opposed with
ruthless vigor lest the self is flooded with remnants of crippling panic and
helplessness set aside, more (or less) effectively, during childhood years.
My father’s relationship with his mother bears further exploration. I think
his compulsion to feed her was an attempt to feed himself by participating
vicariously in the nurturance and support he continuously offered her. I’m
 Origins of Narcissism 129

reminded of a poignant incident that I experienced with one of my daughters.

During toilet training she contracted diarrhea. Because she could no longer
fully control elimination, she became afraid, as best we could tell, that she
was losing parts of herself literally down the drain each time diarrhea struck.
Tying a little rope to the toilet paper dispenser helped, but she remained
obviously quite terrified. She very quickly recognized the association between
eating and the urge to go to the bathroom (gastrocolic reflex). In response, she
tried to protect herself by refusing to eat anything at all. She was able to
maintain this strategy for perhaps a day or a day and half before a curious
thing happened: gently at first, but with increasing ferocity, she began to put
food into my mouth. By the end of the second day, she was quite desperate to
feed me. She was participating vicariously in my satiation. Her insistence was
quite striking.
I think my father must have done the same thing with his mother. He
couldn’t lean on others, but he could feed her and, in the process, also help
save her, of course. I think, in part, it became compulsive for him to feed her
because no one could feed him very effectively. As an adult, I think he found
himself caught between his fear of leaning on other people and his need to
offer some form of substance to others as a way of satiating himself. Doing
the latter, however, was a very angry undertaking. How do you demonstrate
generosity towards others when you’re starving yourself ? He certainly mana-
ged to be a far better provider than his own father by several magnitudes of
difference, but his giving was always infected with hostility. As noted earlier in
the book, acts of generosity almost always evoked anger. One heard endlessly
about how much things cost and about what extraordinary effort my father
had made to offer even simple necessities; lavish, exaggerated praise was
demanded in response to even small gestures of generosity. One was even
coached on what to say back. Being called upon to mimic the exaggerated
praise that my father wanted for himself felt awful, like one was being
required to dance like a puppet on his strings. Tragically, he repeatedly poi-
soned his own well, denying himself the heartfelt appreciation which his reci-
pient might have otherwise offered.
There is another theme that I alluded to earlier in the book that I think it
makes sense to return to now. My father’s history offered me confirmation of
the enormity of need that must have piled up inside him as a result of not
having others in his life who could adequately attend to his human wants. In
my clinical experience, as such needs accumulate and as individuals become
increasingly frightened by and mistrustful of others’ abilities or intentions to be
able to appropriately nurture them, it becomes too dangerous to acknowledge
need. Like a child with his or her finger in the dike and a deluge waiting on the
other side, such people are frozen in place, afraid that acknowledgement of
need would unleash a flood of hunger they have no sense how to manage.
Reference to a brief vignette with a patient may be helpful here. Many,
many years ago I was working with a young woman (now deceased) who had
130 Origins of Narcissism

faced similar circumstance in her own childhood to my father’s, but she had
somehow managed to retain more of her humanity than he did. Relatively
early on in therapy when I empathized with her suffering, she quickly and
forcefully cautioned me to stop, explaining that my empathy was moving her
to tears and that once she started to cry, she would not be able to stop.
Thereafter we collaborated closely on the way that she responded to any
empathy that I offered and, having been appropriately cautioned, I took care
in the way that I handled empathy. Throughout a very long course of work
together, she made a number of attempts to enter into a constructive depen-
dence with a man, but could never do so. We both came to recognize that the
risks associated with letting herself consummate intimacy with a male partner
were too great. What she could do, however, was deepen friendships, bor-
rowing some of the tolerance for dependency and intimacy she had acquired
in therapy.
Learning to tolerate dependence is a foundational skill that hopefully one
acquires in childhood. As an aside, it is one of the critical skills that is often
disrupted or denied in a complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder context.
Children begin by expressing their needs in diffuse, unfocused, and inap-
propriate ways (tantrums, for instance), gradually progressing, through par-
ental tolerance, guidance, and support, to increasingly more successful and
constructive ways of asking for that which they need. It’s a long process,
consuming a substantial part of parenting effort and virtually all of childhood
and adolescence. If parenting has been “good enough,” a child will have
learned how to navigate their way through their own wants with relative
confidence, allowing them to extend and deepen any intimacies which they
attempt. Trusting the self to be able to do this is critical to the endeavor. I
would argue that my father never reached the point of being able to do so,
though he certainly could not have put any of this into words. Insight would
have been experienced as a source of jeopardy and a diminishment and, as
such, would have been resisted vigorously.
Now I would like to return to the theme of depletion. I think the specter of
my grandfather’s inability to effectively care for himself or his family and my
grandmother’s eventual decline into a clingy, dependent relationship with her
doctor caretaker must have been quite disconcerting for my father. It meant
that people could run out of gas and that when they did so, they substantially
became unable to tolerate the responsibilities life required of them for survi-
val. They found themselves at the mercy of whatever dependence they could
establish to ensure that they had enough to get by.
It probably would not have been apparent to my father and my grandfather
why my grandfather found it so hard to cope with life. In one of his auto-
biographies my father reported that he and his father had often talked about
my grandfather’s limitations, finally simply accepting the reality. As I look
back, I do wonder what might have happened to my grandfather to set the
stage for his relative inability to sustain work. I do have access to some of his
 Origins of Narcissism 131

diaries and to brief vignettes of his early life he provided for a Wood family
tree document. The sense I got was that he experienced his early life as
demanding and harsh. I wondered whether being the eldest of 15 children
might have placed him in the position of having to assume inordinate
responsibilities himself at an early age. Surprisingly, diary entries that char-
acterized his experiences later in life (late 1940s/early 1950s) were possessed of
a sense that life was enjoyable and meaningful. His stance appeared to be an
optimistic one. I’ve entertained the idea that during my father’s childhood and
adolescence, however, he might have been living with poorly understood and
unrecognized depression. It did occur to me that his unexpected blindness
might possibly have arisen from psychological cause. Having gotten his
church substantially off the ground and having acquired a reasonably good-
sized congregation, was he intimidated by his success and by the demands
that it implied – i.e., having to deal, for instance, with contentious con-
gregants who were split ideologically? Every undertaking thereafter seemed to
defeat him, eventually leading to a kind of retreat from life on the family
farm. It did sound as if he managed to preach again, earning, as my father
said, “a few dollars,” but his success was never big enough to allow him
independence. He remained essentially reliant on my father for the rest of his
life for much of the money he needed to pay for himself and his wife.
My grandmother did evidently demonstrate quite substantial capability to
endure and mount persistent, perhaps even heroic effort in the face of poverty,
but she, too, was eventually defeated by the depleting effects of her burdens.
As I knew her, she was frighteningly clingy and demanding, burying her lis-
tener with unending lists of physical complaints and entreaties for support –
an open mouth that the unfortunate bystander could never fill.
The twined fates of my two grandparents must have dramatically intensified
my father’s own fear of dependence. Let go of self-aggrandizement and
omnipotence and see what happens to you. Never stop. Always keep moving.
Keep the show alive. The choice was binary. You either kept up the frantic
pace or you drowned.
Fear of depletion and of the disorganizing, diminishing dependence it could
impose remained a core fear of my father’s throughout his life. He was utterly
contemptuous of anyone who was unable to take care of themselves, engaging
in lengthy, bitter soliloquies when he felt he encountered such people. Needy
people frightened him. One can recognize, given the context of his early his-
tory, that he must have been frightened – deeply frightened – that others
could drain him with their needs. Drain him and reduce him to the skeletal
reality that eventually defined both parents and that had presumably nearly
overtaken him.
The key to feeling safe was to hold others at arm’s length, to resist the
entitlement and the encroachment that others could realize if they succeeded
in inspiring loving feelings in him. Love, for him, had very understandably
come to represent threat. If you let people love you and if you let yourself feel
132 Origins of Narcissism

love for them in return, they could exploit you and exhaust you with their
demands and their needs. Now I understood with greater confidence. That’s
why “nice” never lasted for long. That’s why he had contempt for everyone.
Nobody gets in. Nobody matters. His words to Williamson were prophetic: “I
don’t need you, I don’t need anybody….” It had required 40+ years for me to
finally make these connections.
Paradoxically, I think my father may have made such extraordinary effort,
year upon year, to help save his family because he had been “blessed” with a
relatively greater capacity for empathy than the average person. His empathy
drew him into caregiving effort again and again. He noticed his father’s
exhaustion and his disappointment. He desperately wanted to protect his
mother. His empathy drew him into very deep waters, creating more jeopardy
for him the more he extended himself for the people he cared about. Empathy
was not his only motive force (survival and the need to protect the people he
relied upon had their say), but I believe it played a significant part in
informing his larger-than-life devotion to his parents. Learning to turn
empathy off, as he eventually did, helped ensure that others could not
encroach with love and associated entitlement. Doing so, like his need to
obliterate loving feelings in himself and others, would have been essential for
safety. In muting empathy, he could protect himself against obligation he
might feel towards others.
Turning back to earlier speculation I offered in this book, I could now
confirm for myself that someone who could not allow himself to love or be
loved in return so that he could feel safe was instead exposing himself to
another kind of starvation. He couldn’t give, or give for long, without feeling
angry, but if he could not take pleasure in giving or loving, if those acts were
too profoundly dangerous for him to undertake, how was he to sustain him-
self ? Connection and generosity are core building blocks of human relation-
ships, rendering our lives meaningful, rewarding, and sustaining. My father
had protected himself against the risk of one form of starvation only to
impose another. Perpetually alone, perpetually and profoundly – one would
say indelibly – mistrustful of virtually everyone around him, voraciously
hungry, and willfully blind to the growing ugliness inside, he tried to feed
himself with stuff (money, power, status) that had been denied him as a
youngster and that had caused such enduring envy. Believing that getting all
the things that he missed and believing that standing apart from people
behind walls of contempt would protect him, he exposed himself to an even
more devastating form of envy, one occasioned by his envy of other people’s
humanity – that is, their still relatively intact capacity to give and to love. As I
have reflected previously, his envy was endemic. It manifested itself in all of
his relationships. Looking back, I can remember him offering prerogatives
and gifts to me or to my mother he had been denied, only to poison them in
very short order with dark resentment. Why was I getting so many of the
things he had never been given, secure in a world where food and shelter were
 Origins of Narcissism 133

certainties? I could see now, from the context of his history, why he so com-
pulsively and sadistically tried to evoke envy in other people. He perceived
them to be complete in a way that he was not and satiated in a way that his
mistrust would never allow him to be. They had each other; he had no one.
As a manifestation of the starvation occasioned by blunting his capacity to
love, one could recognize, again within the context of his history, how terribly
acquisitive and rapacious he must have felt. He could never feed himself
adequately and feel sated. Always ravenous, compelled, as he was, by his own
oral rage, he experienced other people as hungry mouths attempting to
encroach on the meagre, subsistence nourishment he relied upon to feed
himself. He could never authenticate their voices or make room for their
personalities; he needed all the air in the room and, at that, it was never really
enough. Authenticating others and respecting their voices created unbearable
risk. Newly empowered, they could turn upon him with the same ferocity and
hunger that he directed towards them. Projecting his rapacity onto the world
around him and substantiating it with his unyielding cynicism made the world
a very dangerous place.
The parallels between my internal realities while I was growing up (and for
a long time thereafter) and my father’s stood out in greater relief and could be
seen with greater clarity once an appreciation of his history had been devel-
oped. Both of us had faced adultification, he because he had been tasked with
carrying his family financially and me because I had been tasked with carry-
ing my family psychologically. Both of us faced formidable threat of depletion
and endured starvation, though in different forms. Each of us had been
encouraged to develop a sense of grandiosity, me because I acted as my par-
ents’ therapist as a child and him because he was asked to believe he could
shoulder all the physical burdens assigned him. Each of us accommodated
incestuous attachment to our mothers. Each of us struggled with a sense of
inner deadness and each of us also contrived our lives rather than living them.
Both of us spent much of our lives feeling unsafe and scared and both of us
were hypervigilant. And each of us was haunted by the monsters we were
afraid we carried within us. His capacity to love was fundamentally compro-
mised; I worried that I would never be able to. So many secrets for each of us
to carry, so much to try to hide.
It can be seen now how my father’s experience in his formative years set the
stage for the narcissism he acquired that dominated the remainder of his life.
He couldn’t feel love, at least not in a sustained way or to a meaningful
degree. It was too jeopardizing. So, too, was empathy. He shut it down in
order to afford himself protection against others’ need and others’ ungovern-
able hunger. He had powerful reasons to be mistrustful of other people and so
he was. Unrelentingly. Unyieldingly. Mistrust bred vigilance and was sup-
ported by obdurate cynicism. Always on guard, looking for the worst, to
ensure that others could not exploit him. Continuously affirming his strength
and his dominance so that he might reassure himself no one else could
134 Origins of Narcissism

overpower him or deny him that which his feral instincts told him he needed
to survive. Shutting down other voices and other personalities. Making them
feel afraid – too afraid to challenge him. Always the only man standing and
the last man standing. Tragically, using hostility and contempt to obliterate
love, to ensure that others could not touch him, and to affirm his ability to
crush others so that he would not have to worry about being crushed or dis-
placed himself. Voraciously, inconsolably, ruthlessly hungry. Trying to address
all his pain and all of his gaping hunger by pushing others aside, greedily con-
suming that which he imagined would fill him, but never could. Always prepared
to annihilate the other to fight for the last scrap. Relentlessly pursuing the trap-
pings of wealth his early life denied him in lieu of connection, community, and
humanity. Endemic starvation side-by-side endemic, toxic envy. Incapable of
looking at himself because of the horrors he was afraid he might encounter.
Eschewing insight, as a consequence, and replacing it with action.
Formidable, life-sucking poverty, nearly unceasing exploitation by people
that he loved all too ready to sidestep his needs to meet their own, and
interminable threat and interminable depletion wrought by his life circum-
stance all conspired, it would seem, to construct my father’s narcissism.
As I write this, my heart breaks yet again.
As a postscript to this chapter, I want to reflect for a moment on my
father’s feelings towards my grandfather. On the last page of his most exten-
sive autobiography, he made some effort to reassure me and himself that the
life story he had provided was in no way meant to reflect criticism of his dad.
I don’t think his self-appraisal, or at least this aspect of it, is accurate. He
often expressed rage tinged with bitterness towards his father in response to
the latter’s rigid devotion to church at the expense of family. At times he tried
to escape such anger, but it always seemed to reassert itself. He did inter-
mittently make efforts to reassure both of us that his father was a close com-
rade, as he would put it, and that his father had been forgiven for all the
shortfalls that he created, but these reassurances usually presented themselves
in a context in which my own anger towards him had become more manifest.
He was effectively carrying out an invidious comparison – “look at how my
father hurt me, notice that I was never angry with him in the way that you
just were with me even though I had greater cause.”
Unbeknownst to my father, I discovered a number of letters my grandfather
had sent him over a period of many months beseeching my father to send on
desperately needed support checks. These letters made it clear that my father
had not only withheld support, but had refused to respond to my grand-
father’s entreaties or to communicate with him in any way, despite the latter’s
obvious desperation. I could certainly understand, once I enjoyed the benefit
of my father’s autobiographies, why my father might have acted as he did.
Tragic for both of them, but understandable.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, I do think my father tried to sidestep anger
that he felt towards my grandfather. I think it was genuinely disconcerting for
 Origins of Narcissism 135

him, but I also believe that it was so intense that at times it could not be
denied. Part of managing what must have been rage entailed diverting anger
towards Williamson and, however momentarily, idealizing his own father. It
was somehow safer to experience Williamson as the devil incarnate then it
was to consider the implications of my grandfather’s apparent inadequacies.
Upon reviewing my father’s autobiographies, my wife observed that my
father never seemed to have raised questions about why my grandfather had
not taken him and his mother down to Nimrod Hall at the point at which my
grandfather had effectively given up on himself. I realize that she was right.
My father had seemingly always accepted my grandfather’s life transition
back to his home of origin with a kind of sad resignation. My father never
considered in any conversation I had with him that his parents might have
arranged for him to go down to the farm with his dad so that he could enjoy
a more stable life. As I thought about the question my wife had raised, I
could guess – but certainly didn’t know – that my grandmother was probably
already involved with her doctor, hoping that he might provide her and her
son with a better life. That, tragically, was not to be. My grandmother,
instead, seems to have replaced my grandfather’s personal limitations and
daunting ideological fervor with parsimony and ideological fervor of another
kind, occasioned by Williamson’s mean-spiritedness (he, of course, has a life
story of his own that, if it could be understood, would allow one to better
appreciate how he came to be the person that he was). In retrospect, I
wondered whether my father’s attempted, but usually failed idealizations of
his relationship with his father were meant to mitigate the pain that
father’s abandonment was felt to have caused. In my father’s world, people
were experienced as looking after themselves first, much as he might have
felt his father did when he left and his mother did when she invested her-
self more deeply in the relationship with Williamson. I do think my father
was touched by my grandfather’s end-of-life gift to him. I’m referring to a
sum of $10,000 my grandfather had saved from the support money my
father had sent him over the years. While the gift was not significant
monetarily to my father, it did at last confirm that my grandfather under-
stood that he had a debt to pay. He could pay homage to my father by
denying himself comfort so that my father could see he was worth making
a sacrifice for.
Towards the end of his autobiographies my father reflected upon what it
might have been like for him had he accepted another executive position, this
time as a president of another large American retail operation. I think I can
hear in his tone a sense that such an endeavor, while appealing as a possibi-
lity, felt beyond his grasp. He and I often talked about his regret that he had
not carried on. He had hoped that a new experience might redress the sharp
disappointment he had faced during his final years at Wards. He imagined he
might have a successful leadership experience somewhere else that Wards was
felt to have denied him. He also very much wanted to redress Wards poor
136 Origins of Narcissism

stock performance during his years there by creating a retail success elsewhere
that would lead to an immense stock payout. He was frequently preoccupied
by the money which stock options as president of Target might have yielded,
a position he had bypassed for Wards. From my perspective, it struck me that
he remained compelled by the idea that a large payout could make everything
else all right inside. The allure of pursuing this kind of victory, however, was
offset by what I would guess was an immense sense of exhaustion – a feeling
that he could no longer safely expose himself to the rigors of executive
combat. Had he been able to do otherwise, I think he would have. Instead, he
had to content himself with the reflected glory of his earlier and rather
astonishing accomplishments. He could never live comfortably with the per-
sonal reduction that his diminished status created, hence his increasingly
outrageous attempts to aggrandize the self by attributing improbable, apoc-
ryphal achievements to himself.
I don’t think my father ever did find the peace that he was looking for, even
though his new world of retirement was smaller and less demanding. He
continued his wars with everyone around him with much the same intensity,
but on a smaller, less epic scale than his executive battles. He never found the
replenishment that he was seeking, only more struggle. How could it have
been otherwise? Without empathy, human connection, and the ability to feel
love (to both give it and receive it), he was fated to endure everlasting star-
vation in the absence of satiation. Everyone else always looked like they had
so much more; his magic trick was to make other people, including himself,
feel that he was richer than they were. His narcissistic defenses denied him the
very tools necessary for meaningful, fulfilling engagement with others: the
ability to sustain warmth, openness, and vulnerability and the capacity to
celebrate generosity and generativity.
It is important to underscore, as an aside, that my father’s envy of other
people’s humanity was largely unconsciously held. It was not something he
could have articulated or recognized in himself. Had he been able to do so,
one can imagine it would have horrified him to have made such an admission.
Even though he lacked awareness of the core nature of his envy, I would
argue that it still had enormous impact on him, rendering the rest of the
world unbearably more vibrant and attractive than the world he occupied, in
spite of the virulent cynicism he relied upon to taint others’ decency. So many
riches so close at hand, but always out of reach.
His resulting sense of personal deficiency was also largely unconscious, I
believe, but it nevertheless impelled him to take desperate measures to hide
his terrible shortfalls. A powerful motive force behind his endless efforts to
draw people’s attention away from his core deficits with threats and bullying,
with deflections and distractions, and with re-direction towards the shiny
objects he paraded in front of them.
In his autobiographies and in his relationship with me, he made transparent
attempts to idealize the manifest suffering that continued to express itself
 Origins of Narcissism 137

during his retirement. The effect was poignant. I wondered how conscious he
was of this misrepresentation. Sometimes I think he believed it, but at others
it was hard for me to conceive that he was unaware of his immense pain.
What was unconscious, I think, was any substantive awareness of both why
he lived his life the way that he did and why he felt compelled to hurt the
people around him, nor was he fully cognizant of the costs that he was
imposing on himself. Accordingly, his last years looked to be as awful as the
first part of his life had been: fights for dominance and fights for scraps. Disturb-
ingly, I watched the same Oedipal battles I had endured play themselves out in his
new family, as he experienced poisonous outrage whenever my stepmother’s
attention was turned toward parenting rather than him. So far as I could see, his
final years were, in the main, not very happy.
I suppose before I end this chapter, I would like to allude to a part of the
autobiographies that keeps nagging at me and seemingly will not let me alone
until I mention it. As I reviewed my father’s narratives numbers of times, I
kept noticing how often he used the word “little” to describe his possessions
or aspects of his experience. This word called me back over and over to the
injured child I had come to appreciate that my father was. An injured child
who never healed himself and who felt left alone to deal with his own pain,
without real hope of solace or support. As I become older, that child feels
increasingly like the biggest part of who he was.
As beguiling and as coherent as my understanding of my father might
appear to be to some readers, I must caution the reader, as I did at the outset
of this book, that science is a process of successive approximation. My grasp
of my father’s experience and of my own can at best represent only a partial
appreciation of our personal journeys. As others consider what I have said,
ideas may be elaborated, discarded, and amended. Potential causalities that I
have identified can, at best, capture only part of the reality I’m attempting to
investigate. Within the world of mental health, it is generally accepted that
most phenomena are multi-determined. I have only looked at limited forms of
environmental trauma that would appear to make a contribution to the
development of what I have called malignant narcissism. Genetics, epige-
netics, biochemistry and physiology, and complexities of brain function acting
in concert with one another and upon one another side-by-side their interac-
tion with “nurture” will eventually allow us (if, indeed, we are ever capable of
doing so) to truly grasp what malignant narcissism is. And, finally, to more
fully set context, I must take care to add that while malignant narcissism is a
compelling construct for me, I am very cognizant that many clinicians would
argue that malignant narcissism is either a misleading or an inappropriate
descriptor.
Completing this book won’t end my investigation of narcissism nor will it
offer the full measure of consummation I would like to experience; I will
continue to feel restless and dissatisfied with the ideas that I and many others
138 Origins of Narcissism

like me have pieced together to penetrate narcissism’s veil. I would ask my

readers to do the same.

Note
1 In my father’s conversations with me, he identified his father as having swung the
golf club that killed the dog.
Chapter 10

The Case for Narcissism as

Psychopathy

In exploring the theoretical underpinnings that anchor my conception of

narcissism, I’d like to set context by talking, in very broad terms, about
diagnostic formulations pertinent to narcissism and psychopathy.
Psychopathy, at present, is not a distinct diagnostic entity, at least not in
the framework that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Dis-
orders – 5 provides (DSM-5). The DSM-5 is the reference work that mental
health professionals use to confirm diagnosis. With few exceptions, the DSM-
5 sidesteps etiology or causation, focusing instead on clusters of symptoms
that are believed to characterize various clinical entities like mood disorders,
anxiety disorders, sexual disorders, etc. Many diagnostic categories share
marker symptoms, meaning that there is often considerable (and sometimes
confusing) overlap between clinical entities. Classification in a young science
is challenging. Practitioners and research scientists do the best that they can
defining diagnostic categories using very imperfect and very limited knowl-
edge. At times, they are reduced to making decisions about what they think a
particular clinical entity is by relying on consensus rather than being able to
access definitive scientific data. It is assumed that practitioners will not regard
diagnostic categories as hard and fast rules – fixed truths, if one likes – but
rather phenomena subject to the shifts and changes (and ongoing discussions)
that characterize the evolution of a given science. Many divergent opinions
feed the discussion and help refine it. It will be important to keep these
caveats in mind as this chapter unfolds. We will not be talking about
unyielding realities, but rather fluid truths that we hope to approximate with
ever greater success as our efforts play themselves out.
Currently the DSM-5 recognizes a single diagnostic entity, Antisocial Per-
sonality Disorder (ASPD), that can be seen to embrace what has been refer-
red to, variously, as psychopathy, sociopathy, and dissocial personality
disorder. Noting that Narcissistic Personality Disorder shares much the same
symptom cluster that typifies ASPD, the DSM-5 suggests that the two can be
distinguished from one another because NPD is not characterized either by
the presence or, alternatively, by the prominence of impulsivity, aggression,
and deceit.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-10
140 The Case for Narcissism as Psychopathy

To remind my reader, as I extend my consideration of psychopathy litera-

ture in this chapter, I will be referencing broad trends and themes I have dis-
tilled from my reading of it rather than presenting specific research citations. I
would again reference Christopher Patrick’s Handbook of Psychopathy as
essential reading for anyone who wishes to explore this subject in greater
depth.
The current and, one should say, very voluminous research on psycho-
pathy proposes multifactorial models consisting of either two or three
factors, each of which represents a cluster of traits (stable, enduring per-
sonal dispositions that characterize people over substantial periods of
time). Although component traits are organized differently in the two and
three factor models of psychopathy, they are strikingly similar in both
conceptions.
For simplicity’s sake, I will not compare and contrast the two- and three-
factor models of psychopathy. Instead, I will briefly describe the three factor
or triarchic model that Christopher Patrick developed. Providing a descrip-
tion of the triarchic model will, I hope, give the reader a strong sense of
contemporary conceptions of psychopathy. The three factors that Patrick
proposed were called, respectively, boldness, disinhibition, and meanness. As
may be apparent from earlier discussion in this book, boldness refers to a
constellation of traits including venturesomeness, willingness to take risks,
relative imperviousness to fear, the drive to dominate, and confident personal
assertion. As an aggregate, these traits could be subsumed under a heading
like fearless dominance. Disinhibition, in turn, not only encompasses impul-
sivity and compromised personal controls, but also irresponsibility, poor
decision-making, and deceitfulness. Meanness was construed to reflect mark-
edly diminished capacity for empathy, compulsion to exploit others, an
orientation marked by dislike and distrust of others, and an inclination to
take pleasure in others’ pain.
Most authors seem to view psychopathy as expressing itself along a con-
tinuum of severity, depending upon the degree to which a given individual
demonstrates traits along the three axes of boldness, disinhibition, and
meanness. Such a conception denies a unitary model of psychopathy – that is,
one in which psychopathy is conceived of as a unitary entity producing a
relatively consistent emergent clinical picture.
Implicit in the triarchic and two-factor models is anticipation that there are
probably subtypes of psychopathy one could expect to encounter depending
upon which factors in the two or three factor model are more evident than
others.
Two major subtypes of psychopathy have received a great deal of attention
in the literature, primary and secondary psychopathy. Formulations of these
two subtypes have varied, but very generally speaking, it is perhaps fair to say
that some research scientists would regard primary psychopathy as real or
actual psychopathy and secondary psychopathy as a mitigated version of the
 The Case for Narcissism as Psychopathy 141

former that produces a more limited rupture of conscience. Primary psycho-

pathy, at times, has been seen as a core deficit shaped by genetics or biology
that springs into being fully formed; it has also been viewed as being asso-
ciated with, variously, many of the characteristics that typify both boldness
and disinhibition as well as, interestingly, a core of narcissism defined by the
need to exploit others ruthlessly. Secondary psychopathy, in contrast, often
seems to be regarded as a consequence of damaging environmental influence
that occasions the development of psychopathic traits. Perhaps because it arose
as a result of stress inducing adverse nurture as opposed to a primary deficit in
fear arousal mechanisms (boldness), it was seen to be subject to higher levels of
mental health compromise, like depression and suicidality.
The discussion of these entities is often confusing, bespeaking people’s
attempts to come to terms with constructs they increasingly recognize are com-
plex and elusive. Some authors appear to conclude that so-called secondary
psychopathy could potentially produce the same array of deficits and very much
the same clinical picture as primary psychopathy. I think, increasingly, that
investigators are moving away from concepts like primary and secondary psy-
chopathy, redirecting themselves towards consideration of the varied constella-
tions of factors that may manifest themselves in psychopathic disorders.
The foregoing does not begin to do justice to the intricacy and nuance of
discussion that has attended these issues. We also seem to recognize now,
again speaking in very broad terms, that psychopathy is linked causally to a
number of possible etiologies including genetics, brain structure (which can
include response to brain injury), and a very long list of life stressors that
either singly or in combination with one another unfolding at particularly
vulnerable points in the developmental process may help set the stage for
psychopathic personality.
Because the focus of this book has been upon the disruptive impact that a
toxic nurture experience can potentially have upon a given individual, I will
simply name some of these influences. They are thought to include: conviction
and incarceration of one or more close family members; depression in a
mother; age of a mother; paternal uninvolvement; physical abuse; sexual
abuse; lack of parental supervision; harsh punishment; childhood neglect;
parental conflict; an absent parent; multiple father figures; family size; low
socioeconomic status; poverty; housing; quality of schooling; prevalence of
antisocial behavior in one’s neighborhood; and parental substance abuse.
Genetic factors not directly related to the transmission of psychopathic traits
might include low I.Q., difficulties paying attention at school, and low school
attainment. Please keep in mind that I have provided only a partial list and
that confidence in each of these factors or in specific combination with one
another does vary, but the overall picture that emerges clearly underscores the
importance that our experience plays in shaping who we become. Some evi-
dence seems to suggest that a salutary early environment (family, school,
142 The Case for Narcissism as Psychopathy

community) may dilute the impact of presumably genetically acquired psy-

chopathic traits.
There is not full agreement about the importance of all of the environ-
mental factors I have just listed. Some of the research that surrounds parti-
cular factors is contradictory. Some of it is beset by problems because it has
been difficult for research scientists to carry out prospective studies (some few
exist) as opposed to retrospective studies. A prospective study begins with
people that it observes longitudinally, allowing researchers to directly evaluate
causative factors unfolding in real time as opposed to looking back (a retro-
spective study) as one tries to reconstruct, through subject report, what condi-
tions might have been like when trauma was imposed. Research has also been
beset by use of multiple instruments defining psychopathic traits, by varying
definitions of experiences like abuse, by the difficulty of obtaining clinically
diagnosed psychopaths as opposed to high scorers on instruments meant to
measure psychopathy, by conflating psychopathy with other criterion measures
like incarceration and ASPD, and by the problem of “cart horse” (which came
first, bad parenting or psychopathic personality traits that disrupted parent-
ing?). Again, this is only a partial list of research challenges and limitations.
My argument with ASPD as set out in DSM-5 is its failure to embrace the
complexity that psychopathy represents as so wonderfully attested to by the
impressively extensive research literature that surrounds the subject of psy-
chopathy. I think the weight of the research makes sense. I believe psycho-
pathy is multidimensional, comprising a variety of subtypes of which
narcissism is one. So far as I can see, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)
would meet the criteria established for psychopathy in the relevant research
literature as specified by both the triarchic and the two-factor models. More-
over, on a purely prima facie basis, it is hard for me to imagine that someone
can be possessed of salient NPD symptomatology (as defined by the DSM-5),
including, as a partial list, grandiosity, self-aggrandizement, a sense of entitlement,
interpersonal exploitativeness, lack of empathy, endemic envy, and arrogance
without also being likely to be duplicitous, aggressive, and impulsive. My clinical
experience working with limited numbers of NPD confirms my prima facie
impression. The DSM, of course, argues the contrary.
If one is to consider that narcissism is a subtype of psychopathy, I would
think it would also be true, given that psychopathy appears to be inherently
multidimensional, that narcissistic personality could be expected to express
itself differently, depending upon which of its core traits stands out in greatest
relief. Indeed, it is widely recognized that some narcissistic personalities are
able to navigate their way through the world with startling success in spite of
their deficits while others are either ineffectual and obviously troubled (subject
to a variety of other mental health disorders) or have had the means to cause
widespread human suffering. In fact, the DSM does implicitly recognize that
one NPD may not be like another. In allowing clinicians a range of sympto-
matology to choose from (not all NPD symptoms have to be present in order
 The Case for Narcissism as Psychopathy 143

for the diagnosis to be made), the DSM is recognizing that symptom config-
uration may be different in different narcissistic personalities. By implication,
if there are different configurations of narcissistic personality disorder, the
pathways or etiologies that produce each may be different in some important
ways than it is for the others.
For me, this discussion is important because it highlights an important
limitation of diagnosis. Diagnosis, at best, is a label that can only capture very
approximate appreciation of a given individual. It may serve a variety of
important needs (categorization, risk appraisal, formulation of prognosis,
treatment planning), but it can never capture the intricacy of a given indivi-
dual, nor, as a collection of symptoms, can it capture the complex interplay of
forces that lead to the problems that the individual is experiencing. As one of
my colleagues pointed out, it is at this juncture that the distinction between
diagnosis and formulation becomes important. In contrast to diagnosis, for-
mulation attempts to look deeply – or at least more deeply – into an indivi-
dual’s unique circumstances in an attempt to develop an appreciation of just
how that person got to be the person that they are. Doing this places one in a
far better position to start to examine causative factors. It means, inevitably,
constructing a lengthy narrative that, hopefully, judiciously weighs various
hypotheses and informed guesses that one makes about the patterns and the
causalities that begin to declare themselves. It is, at one and the same time,
both more speculative and more precise than identification of a diagnostic
label. It offers one the possibility of spelling out the dynamic interplay of
causalities that produce different kinds of human problems.
Trait-based research attempts to do this by measuring stable dispositional
characteristics across large numbers of people. Its findings are enormously
helpful. I’ve relied heavily on trait data in this discussion and in earlier parts
of my book. The trait approach currently lacks the means, however, as trait-
based researchers point out themselves, to articulate the mechanisms or
dynamics that underlie some of the broad causative agents it has identified,
like parental neglect, parental separation, physical and sexual abuse, etc.
Intensive observation of individuals, couples, and families in psychotherapy
allows one an intimate view of dynamics close at hand, but doing so means
that one is working with very small numbers of people and that the data one
produces are less amenable to quantitative study more readily accessible to
trait research. For a clinician attempting to understand the complexity of
forces, including psychological ones, that inform and direct someone’s life, it
is words, rather than numbers, that become essential. Formulations are words.
My bias as a psychoanalytically oriented psychologist is to believe that an
appreciation of the dynamic interplay of psychological forces is critical to an
understanding of diagnosis. It is, in other words, the mechanisms or dynamics
that drive various human realities which I find most helpful and most infor-
mative when I think about diagnosis. Some of the dynamics that I observe
seem to apply across the human condition and some of them, or groups of
144 The Case for Narcissism as Psychopathy

them, appear to be distinctive, identifying features of particular clinical pro-

blems. Diagnosis based upon etiology and dynamics would, to my mind, be
ideal. The intense idiographic study of each individual's uniquely configured
personality organization, mental functioning, and subjective experience that
the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM–2) (2017) affords certainly
helps us achieve the kind of in-depth formulation of dynamics I find so useful.
It significantly extends the nomothetic formulations that the DSM–5 offers us
and, as such, can be used in conjunction with the DSM or on its own, parti-
cularly when treatment planning and countertransferential issues represent
prominent concerns, as they do in psychodynamic work.
The best that we can do is try and describe some of the interactive forces
we encounter in the people we work with as adequately we can, biding our
time and re-exploring our ideas endlessly until we begin to have the measure
of confirmation we need to have confidence in them. Articulating patterns of
interaction between psychological forces is just the beginning, as I noted at
the outset of this book. We have to integrate that understanding with an
appreciation of brain function and structure, genetics and epigenetics, and
biology in order for diagnosis to be fully meaningful. At that point it is not
inconceivable to me that we will be confronted with multiplicities of patterns/
dynamics that lead to the same behavioral outcomes and personality struc-
tures. And with that knowledge we may discover that diagnosis via etiology is
less desirable than one might imagine it would be. What, then, is the diag-
nosis? It is our best appreciation, however imperfect, of the form that a given
disorder takes (its expression) and/or the unique pathways that give birth to
it. It is a relatively fluid construct, subject, as it is, to frequent reappraisals
that produce ever more helpful models of human psychology.
What I have tried to do in the preceding chapters of the book is provide a
lengthy formulation that attempts to capture both my own and my father’s
salient dynamic patterns. This effort is inevitably flawed. My father’s view of
his life experience was, to a significant degree, a retrospective one, though I
did have the opportunity to view him contemporaneously. My view of myself
could also be characterized as retrospective in some important regards.
Though I was part of my experience as it unfolded, in order to recapture it I
had to rely on both memory and psychological reconstruction to be able to
describe it. I relied on these reconstructions as well as my ongoing experience
with myself to extrapolate patterns. While I was seemingly able to provide a
very intimate and focused portrait of my experience and my father’s, I am
very much aware that I was only describing two people. In some respects, it
must be true that my experience and his are unique, setting us apart from
other people in ways that I cannot anticipate and from that group of people
that I have identified as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The con-
fluence of forces that define each of us are so extraordinarily imposing I
cannot hope to begin to capture their specificity. I must content myself with
moving from the few particularities of our lives I was able to appreciate
 The Case for Narcissism as Psychopathy 145

towards formulations of patterns and generalities that I think could char-

acterize important parts of the dynamics that typify one form of NPD. That
is what I have attempted to do in Chapters 3 through 8.
I am acutely aware that in offering up these patterns and generalizations I
am providing the reader with a description of only two of the many pathways
that may lead to narcissism. I am referring to the pathway that my father
took and the pathway that I nearly took myself.
In the remaining chapters of this book, I hope to restate some of my ideas
in a modestly more formal way that further clarifies and extends the under-
standing of narcissism I have provided.

References
American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental dis-
orders (5th edition). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2013.
Lingiardi, V. and McWilliams, N. (Eds.) (2017). Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual,
(2nd edition). New York, N.Y.: Guilford Press.
Patrick, C. J. (Ed.) (2018). Handbook of psychopathy (2nd edition). New York, N.Y.:
Guilford Press.
Chapter 11

Formulation of Narcissism

My father’s autobiographies conferred a wonderful advantage in my patient

work. They allowed me the means to build a theoretical model of narcissism
that I could test against the realities that narcissistic patients presented me in
a treatment context. I found myself engaging with three different groups of
narcissistic patients: people whom I never met, but could deduce might be
narcissistic given a patient’s ongoing description of them in the context of a
treatment effort; narcissistic relatives or partners of patients I had a chance to
observe directly whose contact with me was, typically, relatively brief (five to
six sessions); and people I worked with over a prolonged period of time (nine
months or more) who appeared to be compatible with my concept of malig-
nant narcissism. The first two groups provided me with the opportunity to
observe, either directly or indirectly, prominent characteristics or patterns of
narcissistic behavior alongside its impact on the people in the narcissist’s life.
There were a relatively great number of putative Narcissistic Personality Dis-
orders (NPDs) in each of these two groups. The latter or third group –
pathologically narcissistic patients who sought out extended treatment for
themselves – only consisted of six individuals. For the most part, malignantly
narcissistic individuals rarely submit to self-exploration, as I commented ear-
lier in the book. It was this last small group of people who afforded me
opportunity to compare some of the salient dynamics of my father’s history
with those of other people I considered to be possessed of malignant narcis-
sism. In such a fashion I could tentatively attribute more or less confidence to
some of the patterns of causality I thought I had identified. My comparisons
of their histories with my father’s were limited by the small number of “sub-
jects” I had to work with, but enriched by the lengthy, in-depth work I was
able to do with such individuals.
All of the malignant narcissists that I undertook long-term work with were
male. While I met numbers of women who were relations of patients who
struck me as narcissistic, I did not have the benefit of having obtained full,
detailed histories from them. As a result, the models of malignant narcissistic
etiology that I am about to articulate reflect my appreciation of male realities.
While I have some sense that at least some of the dynamics and causalities I
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-11
 Formulation of Narcissism 147

identified in men who were malignantly narcissistic could be extended to

female narcissism, I have little data and consequently little justification in
asserting that this would be so. Because my appreciation of female malignant
narcissism is so tenuous, it must remain for other writers who have accrued
experience with a female narcissistic population to attempt to describe it.
I should also emphasize that I worked with many people whose back-
grounds appeared to be as egregious as my father’s who did not adopt a
narcissistic life stance. Understanding this group’s resistance to narcissistic
adjustment represents an important focus of study, but not one that falls
within the purview of this book.
I want the reader to be skeptical about the patterns of causality and of
narcissistic life adjustment that I have described in previous text and that I
am about to reformulate now. I would ask the reader, in other words, to think
critically about what I have had to say and to consider alternative hypotheses
possessed of greater explanatory value. For my own part, each time I worked
briefly with relations of patients who impressed me as narcissistic or heard
about people in patients’ lives who sounded as if they were struggling with
narcissism, I worried about the all too powerful inclination that I think we all
possess to see examples of a precious insight where it may not exist. My
hunger to find examples of malignant narcissism, in other words, could read-
ily lead to errors in clinical judgement.
I will also caution the reader that while the language that I use sometimes
will sound authoritative and declarative, its self-confidence in no way is meant
to assert a claim to “truth,” but, rather, enables me to outline my ideas with
greater clarity and efficiency. To express hesitation about everything that I say
would mire text in tiresome, tedious equivocation. Simply put, the assumption
should be made that I consider everything I say to be hypothetical and
speculative.
Finally, a reminder to readers that I will not talk about patient histories in
any depth nor in a way that might expose patient identity. Instead, I will focus
on broad generalities that seem to typify histories and life adjustments.
In all of the people that I worked with closely, one powerful dynamic
seemed to stand out in great relief: relentless, ruthless early exploitation and
adultification of a target individual by parental figures. As was the case with
my father, parents were experienced as making unceasing, punishing demands
that their needs or their agendas be attended to while providing little suste-
nance for their child and little recognition of the child’s own needs. The level
of expectation and commitment that parents imposed upon their children
gave little quarter, allowing a child no room to be a child or become the child
that they might have been. All was duty. All was work. All was obligation.
Listening to these histories was hard. Children dedicated and re-dedicated
themselves to their parents’ purpose without receiving much reward, save for
either indirect or lavishly indulgent confirmation that their soul-destroying
effort made them special. Either directly or indirectly (but more typically the
148 Formulation of Narcissism

former), aggrandizement and grandiosity were the close companions of

exhaustion.
As a result of such an experience, love comes to connote toxicity, signifying
obligation, exploitation, and terrifying levels of psychic depletion that
increasingly confirm love as a dangerous and jeopardizing experience for the
self. Others’ demands create a measure of psychic and, in my father’s case,
physical starvation that is felt to threaten annihilation, if not of the person,
then of the spirit. Such starvation occurs in a context in which the parental
other is felt to be relatively indifferent or at least insensitive to the child’s lit-
eral struggle for survival. In two of the cases that I saw, parental neglect
appeared to be infiltrated with thinly disguised murderous undercurrents. In
order to survive the profound threat and deprivation that it faces, the devel-
oping self feels increasingly compelled to defend itself against its impulse to
love others and to engage in acts of generosity and empathy. Circumstances
that might evoke love come to be imbued with risk and lethality for the self.
As exploitation continues, extending itself throughout childhood and even
young adulthood, deep and intractable cynicism about the possibility of gen-
erosity and meaningful, sustaining caring from others entrenches itself. It is,
increasingly, supported by vigilance meant to ensure that the self never lets
down its guard, that it never lets others gain traction through love, and that
invocation of mistrust is immediate, pervasive, and unyielding. The self has to
ensure that it cannot be touched by human hand or heart. The self that
emerges is formidably alone and formidably self-interested, determined never
again to expose itself to the exploitation and depredation of others.
The emergent self is also profoundly mistrustful of dependence on others,
having rarely experienced dependence as a constructive and fulfilling enterprise.
The inaccessibility of inter-dependence ensures that solitude becomes more for-
midable. The terrified, lonely child seizes upon the self-aggrandizement and
grandiosity assigned it, clinging to it as a bulwark against all the unrequited need
piling up inside that the child has had little opportunity to gratify. Aggrandize-
ment also seems to offer protection against the suffocating helplessness that the
child’s devastating circumstances have created. “If I can pretend that I’m bigger,
that I am more than the defenseless child that I am, if I can believe in my
aggrandizement, I can feel safer.” Aggrandizement and grandiosity further offer
promise that the child can somehow satisfy its needy parent, consolidating con-
nection and belonging and, perhaps, ensuring parental survival. Most impor-
tantly – and perhaps more poignantly – the aggrandized self is relied upon to
protect the child from too close an acquaintance with the damaged, neglected,
inadequate self that exists underneath his surface – the frightened child who is
beset by unbearable vulnerabilities.
Parenthetically, I should mention that prominent incestuous/oedipal themes
only presented themselves in one patient I worked with. Such themes stood
out with relief, of course, in my father’s relationship with his mother and my
relationship with mine. My sense is that strong oedipal undercurrents or
 Formulation of Narcissism 149

frankly incestuous ones probably eroticize attribution of self-aggrandizement,

rendering it well-nigh irresistible, particularly in an individual who may feel
desperate for nurturance in whatever form it might present itself.
The “mature” aggrandized self that eventually emerges after childhood is
intolerant of vulnerability, intolerant of dependence, and intolerant of others’
wants. It replaces the vulnerability that love and human communion entail
with predation. It repeatedly confirms its authority to take from others and to
dominate them in an effort to create safety for itself in a world that it has
experienced as malignant and invasive. Domination and predation become
compulsive and defining, both because the self would reflexively find it
unbearable to re-experience the agony of childhood and, not insignificantly,
because the self is beset by intolerable, insatiable hunger. Defense against love,
generosity, empathy, and interdependence denies that which is essential for
people to feed themselves: human connection. In the absence of that, the self
becomes hungrier, more voracious, more toxic, extending its rapacity. Turning
away from that which would be truly sustaining, the self instead focuses upon
that which gives the appearance of richness – trappings of power, status,
money, possessions, and acquisition of fame and attention. In my father’s
case, one can imagine how beseechingly desirable these commodities must
have seemed, given their absence while he was growing up.
Contempt is the cornerstone defense. It is really pervasive and relentless.
The mistake is often made that the narcissist dislikes particular groups of
people; sustained acquaintance with a narcissist, however, reveals dislike for
everybody, a truly misanthropic stance. Contempt is the wall that keeps the
narcissist in and others out, ensuring tortured, aggrieved solitude and the
deconstruction of loving, generous impulses both in self and in others. Inevi-
tably, the great charisma of which some narcissistic people are capable is
corrupted by contempt. Nice doesn’t last for very long.
In the process of pursuing that which can never satiate, the narcissist
becomes even less human. His rage, his vigilance, and his rapacity become his
defining preoccupations. His inner landscape becomes blighted by the viola-
tions he must direct towards others in order to feed himself and in order to
ensure that a predatory world cannot overpower him. There is little relief
from the cynicism, mistrust, and cruelty that informs his inner world. Rage
and cynicism are necessary. They justify his exploitation of others and sup-
port a forbidding sense of entitlement. After all, others are just as self-inter-
ested as he is, aren’t they? He tells himself incessantly that everybody’s
looking for an angle, that he has the right to get to them before they can get
to him. His hostility and depreciation ensure that others will react in kind,
further confirming his cynicism.
This process is referred to as projective identification. I feel “X,” now I accuse
you of feeling X, and then I provoke you to act out that which I project onto you,
offering me confirmation that my appraisal of your original intentions was
accurate. In even simpler terms, it’s kind of like telling somebody you’re mad at
150 Formulation of Narcissism

that they’re mad at you, then preemptively kicking them in the shins, after which
you get to experience a sense of satisfaction that your assessment of them was
fitting when they attack you back. This defense may imply that you’re either so
convinced or so frightened that you’re about to be attacked you feel compelled to
act first. It is a particularly toxic and disturbing process to endure if you’re the
target. Someone else has effectively injected you with their toxic emotions and
gotten you to feel and act as if they were your own. Projective identification is
widely recognized as one of the core defenses narcissistic personalities rely on. It
acts in concert with splitting, another cornerstone defense in narcissism. Rather
than seeing the self or others around one as complex human beings defined by
myriads of nuanced and often competing intentions and feelings, the narcissist
divides the world of self and the world of people into simplistic categories of
right and wrong, good and bad. Doing so (splitting) makes it easier to expel or to
disconfirm parts of the self that he doesn’t like, projecting them onto the people
around him, whom he experiences as utterly irredeemable. It also creates
opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of those people he venerates, enhan-
cing, in the process, his own grotesque idealization of himself.
In this fashion, people are experienced in either idealized or denigrated
terms. The resulting lop-sided portrait either vastly overestimates people’s
value or impugns them with reprehensible motives. It is important to
emphasize that these attributions are not stable, but shifting and seemingly
capricious, as can be seen by the manner in which my father responded to the
people in his world. In my experience, splitting and projective identification
never fully protect the narcissist from an awareness of their own destructive
urges; protection is only partial and may vacillate from one moment to the
next. It can be seen through some of the examples I gave earlier in the book
that my father was at times acutely aware of his own ugliness, often using it to
justify his exploitation of others (“See, they’re just as bad as I am, if not
worse, just as I knew”). Tragically, idealization also never manages to con-
solidate stability in the narcissist’s relationships, nor does it provide the means
to incorporate enduring representations of good relationships that the narcis-
sist could rely on to enrich his inner life. The narcissist’s relationship with
himself and with those around him is constantly buffeted by the shifting per-
ceptions that characterize a life dominated by projective identification and
splitting. In part, the offset is that the malignant narcissist ensures for himself
no one can ever get close to him and make the kinds of demands of him
bonds of fealty growing out of a longer-term relationship could impose. By
employing splitting and projective identification, he also benefits by generat-
ing an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty he can harness to meet his needs.
Like any of the defenses that we employ, the solutions that these defenses
offer the malignant narcissist are imperfect compromises, imposing both sig-
nificant costs and desirable advantages.
Bereft of loving impulse, which he would find too dangerous to experience,
his private self becomes a wasteland, populated by grotesque feelings and
 Formulation of Narcissism 151

impulses that further contribute to a sense of inner deadness. There is little

that feels alive and attractive. Engagement and aliveness are simulated
through acts of cruelty and risk taking that confirm power and that enable
him to feel something. In defense against the ugliness accruing inside, he
imbues the aggrandized self with desirable attributions, characterizing its
rapacity as competence and as strength. In this way he tries to conceal his
terrible secret – his inability to love and give – turning tragic weakness into an
admirable asset.
The narcissist is quite literally terrified of any confrontation with his
damaged humanity. His blindness to his terrible deficits is informed by his
need to protect the self from the repellent internal realities that define him.
Such blindness is obdurate, inflexible, and intransigent. Its unyielding nature
means that he could not admit to himself, much less tell others, that he is
terrified of looking deeply into himself; nonetheless, much of his energy is
directed towards avoidance of any meaningful exploration of his interior.
Accordingly, extraordinary effort is made to construct an exterior or a “sur-
face” that the narcissist wishes to call attention to: one meant to inspire envy,
invoke status, convey indomitability, and compel fear. The aggrandized self
previously referred to is a central part of such a surface. These surface facets
of self are, ironically, the compensatory or aggrandized self that has earned
the narcissist the reputation for staring adoringly at his own image.
Remaining on the surface creates great costs for the narcissist. The relative
deadness that characterizes the narcissistic interior, save for defining emotions
like rage, envy, and acquisitiveness, denies the narcissist access to many of the
internal promptings that potentially enrich the self. Spontaneity, playfulness,
tolerance for surprise, openness to vulnerability, capacity for self-depreciating
humor – virtually any act that enhances one’s own and others’ humanity –
largely elude the narcissistic personality. Instead, such “human” markers have
to be contrived. As a result, personality has to be orchestrated, conducted,
curated, and manipulated in order for the narcissist to simulate humanity in
the world of people. For some narcissistic personalities, particularly those
capable of great charisma, fabrication of humanity can unfold with such an
ease and plausibility that a casual observer feels like they are interacting with
an authentic other who is as caught up in the rhythms and music of the
relationship as the observer is themselves. The simulation, in other words,
may feel quite real. In the main, though there are certainly moments of real
connection, it is not. What feels authentic or substantial or meaningful strikes
one, on careful reflection, as empty, vacuous, and insubstantial. Such inter-
action is defined by surfaces and appearances rather than by genuine emo-
tional and intellectual engagement – at best, a transfixing embellishment that
glitters and bewitches but, confusingly, fails to satisfy or fulfil. While other
diagnostic realities in the psychoanalytic world (e.g., hysteria and “as if”
personality), may, respectively, either incessantly seek others’ attention (hys-
teria) or contrive their presentation so that, chameleon like, they might blend
152 Formulation of Narcissism

into their environment (as if personality), neither is dominated by the rage,

envy, and cruelty that is characteristic of narcissism.
Hiding his damaged humanity becomes an unconscious burden the narcis-
sist must carry with him into all of his human interactions. If he can dazzle,
distract, deflect, and threaten, he can turn others away or, even better, seduce
them into believing that his is a rare and enticing world that they must want
to be a part of. Encounters with decency are disconcerting. That which is
decent must be deconstructed and debased or turned away from.
Protection of the aggrandized self is essential. The narcissist assumes the
posture of a fragile tyrant, unable to tolerate any assault on the aggrandized
self, frantically parrying perceived or real sleights out of all proportion to
their objective value. Doing so is critical to survival. Without the aggrandized
self, the narcissist feels exposed to others’ predation. And without the
aggrandized self, the narcissist faces re- exposure to the devastating help-
lessness his childhood occasioned. Others’ attacks have to be met with coun-
terattack. Each and every time. But the whole enterprise increasingly assumes
an improbable cast: incessant domination and hostility breed resistance and
pushback. To be safe, the narcissist has to win every time. Incessant winning
demands ever more single-minded ruthlessness that, while effective in the
moment, generates more injury in those people who occupy space with the
narcissist, occasioning future risk that the narcissist inevitably has to contend
with. Narcissistic predation, hostility, and need for dominance very effectively
protect the narcissist from experiencing loving impulses or from being genu-
inely loved himself, but they set the stage for endless warfare.
Destined to wander in the wilderness of a disturbingly desolate personal
landscape and an interpersonal one pervaded by acrimony, accrual of injury
to others, and frantic attempts to prop up the aggrandized self, the narcissist
endures extraordinary pain that only accumulates with the passage of a life-
time, incrementally consolidating a sense of badness and injuriousness that
becomes increasingly hard to disguise. In an attempt to defend the self from
the catastrophic actualities that define it, the narcissist’s deep revulsion for the
self is projected onto the surrounding world. In consequence, the projected
world that the narcissist occupies assumes the same frightening aspect as the
inner one the narcissist is attempting to evade and conceal. Danger and threat
compound one another; cynicism finds evermore justification for itself.
I would have to say that many of the narcissistic patients that I have worked
with, whether my acquaintance with them unfolded in long-term work or
through relatively brief contact, confirmed how awful they felt about them-
selves, much like my father did. The confession was usually very briefly stated
(though not always), but was always poignantly given. One was impressed by
these people’s genuine, but very disturbing appreciation of what they had
become. Just as quickly as this door opened, it was usually closed, presumably
because keeping it open felt far too jeopardizing. A brief moment of humanity
and vulnerability rarely ever revisited. Two of my narcissistic patients, however,
 Formulation of Narcissism 153

could bear the sight of what they saw inside and could talk openly about the
agony their confrontation with self caused them. They were plainly horrified by
the damage they had sustained to their humanity, re-confirming and expanding
my understanding of what my other narcissistic patients were feeling. One of
them was obviously clinically depressed and the other appeared not to be (I
should clarify that he fell in the short-term treatment group, meaning that I
may not have had adequate opportunity to assess depression).
The patient experiencing depression also proved himself to be able to tol-
erate another facet of his personal experience, one that core narcissistic
defenses seem contrived to protect the narcissistic personality from enduring.
Rather than relentlessly attacking others in an attempt to consolidate dom-
inance, he could recognize and talk about reiteration of childhood pain and
helplessness that surfaced in his adult interchanges. When grandiosity and
need for control were challenged, he could acknowledge the helplessness and
panic such challenge might elicit and, more strikingly, could tell one that
what he was experiencing as an adult reflected facets of unbearable childhood
pain. He could afford to set aside his aggrandizement and grandiosity, in
other words, and feel the early agony that drove him to act as he did. Not
surprisingly, he made more headway in treatment than his compatriots.
A critical part of what I see narcissistic personalities attempting to protect
themselves against is what I refer to as regression to an earlier ego state.
Regressing to an earlier ego state is something that we all endure as a com-
monplace part of our everyday lives. Contemporary events elicit re-invocation
of deeper early pain that has the capacity to flood us, however momentarily,
not only with early feelings, but an early state of being. We feel ourselves to
be the helpless or terrified or relatively resourceless child that we once were
who, depending upon what our early experience was like, may feel over-
whelmed with shame, guilt, utter despair, uncontrollable rage, etc. An
encounter with regression to an earlier ego state is both powerful and dis-
concerting, robbing one, however transiently, of adult competencies and dig-
nity. I remember seeing an old Saturday Night Live episode in which the
adult “kids” go home for Thanksgiving at their parents’ home. Finding
themselves situated in the basement because there is no room at the big table
upstairs, they begin to squabble and fight with one another in the way that
they once did when they were children. I think we’ve all been there. For some
of my patients, however, re-invocation of early pain can be quite catastrophic,
producing, as extreme examples, intense depressive feelings, relationship dis-
ruption, violence, and suicidal behavior. Frequently, people have no sense of
why they have reacted in the way that they do. Helping them establish links
between devastating early pain and contemporary experience can make a
difference. People no longer feel as unsafe with the abrupt, shearing emo-
tional distress that regression to an earlier ego state can occasion. They can
also see and feel that they are no longer the children that they once were,
limited by nascent resources.
154 Formulation of Narcissism

In working with this phenomenon, part of the difficulty that one faces is
dealing with defenses that curtail regression experiences before they can assert
themselves. People develop the means to curtail or short-circuit very aversive
regression states before they can consummate themselves. This is what the
narcissist does by adopting a dominant, rapacious stance: hopelessness, des-
olation, and depletion are replaced with the sense of substance that con-
firmation of power provides. The narcissist never has to go back to the
defenseless, humiliating childhood space. As can be seen from the description
of narcissistic dynamics, extraordinary efforts are made to ensure that never
happens.
Inner deadness I have referenced gives rise to poisonous envy, which infects
and directs much of the narcissist’s experience and behavior. Though unfold-
ing on a largely unconscious basis, the narcissist is aware that others are much
richer than he is. Envy is offset by attempts to inspire envy in others, by
continued affirmations of power and expansiveness, and by compulsion to
diminish and debase those around him. Desperate to acquire more supplies
to fill the terrible, raging empty space inside, envy only intensifies the desire to
exploit and to demean. It directs the self to consume everything outside itself,
greedily demanding that its voice must dominate, that it must occupy center
stage, that accolades are its prerogatives and not others, that its assertions are
infallible, etc.
The narcissist’s pervasive envy and unquenchable appetites help drive the
imperative to dominate space, compelling the narcissist to assert expertise
that is either insubstantial or nonexistent. Qualifications that legitimize
another voice offend; they represent potential encroachment upon proprietary
supplies the narcissist deems rightfully his. Resulting assertions of competence
can assume outlandish proportions. The narcissist all too readily becomes an
instant expert in fields that he knows little about. Extravagant claims are
supported with stridency; objections, however reasonably founded, incite
indignation, elaborate rationalization that may strike one as preposterous,
and a sharp sense of injury in the narcissistic personality. Appropriate back-
tracking, acknowledgement of mistakes, and especially apology, are all
impossible. Because they authenticate others’ voices and are felt to bespeak
personal weakness, they are anathema. Apology is unendurable, experienced
as exposing the damaged self and compromising the compensatory aggran-
dized self. Collaboration also essentially remains out of reach inasmuch as it
necessitates confirmation of the other, invites the other to create and use a
voice, grants space for the other to occupy, and enables the other’s personal
growth. Instead, relationships are zero-sum games in which one party’s win is
inevitably the other party’s loss; the narcissist can only conceive of acting in
his own interest and does not see that generating opportunity for the other
also enriches him.
Envy extends to the very selfhood of others. The other cannot be allowed
to exist as a separate self; rather it must be subsumed as an extension of the
 Formulation of Narcissism 155

narcissist. The other is asked to feel and think and judge as the narcissist does
rather than responding to their own inner promptings. In such a context the
narcissist can reassure themselves that the other no longer represents a sub-
stantial threat to the insatiable supplies that they need or to their own para-
doxically fragile aggrandized self. Others are meant to experience dominance,
power, envy, and threat in the narcissist’s presence; any intimation of personal
weakness on the narcissist’s part is felt to be abhorrent and jeopardizing to him.
In the psychological context of narcissism, the self must protect itself from
empathic experience. Empathy threatens to expose the self to bonds of
attachment, to obligation to look after the other’s well-being, and to breach
of a tenacious focus on self-interest. For the narcissist, empathy implies
exposure to vulnerability and to an exploitation of the self that was an
unbearable and pervasive aspect of early experience. Empathy is generally
tolerated only briefly and fleetingly before the psyche displaces it with cyni-
cism and contempt. Deep, sustained empathy is rare, though the narcissist
may simulate empathy in a transactional context to realize gains.
Horrified by empathy, by intense, rich interdependency, and by the gener-
osity of spirit that supports and extends loving feelings over meaningful peri-
ods of time, the narcissist soon finds himself adrift in a love relationship,
disinterested and repelled by the intimacy so necessary to extend and deepen
it. In all likelihood, the narcissist has probably chosen someone as a partner
who is as transactional as he is. The transactional “bargain” that the narcis-
sist enters into with his transactional partner only confirms the narcissist’s
deeply cynical view of others as essentially calculating and exploitative. After
all, the narcissist can tell himself, my partner’s manipulation and self-interest
confirm for me, day-to-day, what I have always known about people.
Choosing a partner kinder or warmer than the narcissist is may be appeal-
ing, however, because doing so offers the prospect that the other may help the
narcissist heal himself. Relationships based on the promise of transcendence,
though, are often marked by particularly intense, chaotic, and acrimonious
exchanges that pervade and essentially define them. The other’s humanity
threatens to expose the narcissist’s own lack of humanity and must certainly
exacerbate the narcissist’s formidable underlying envy. The other’s relative
richness of spirit torments the narcissistic personality, soon evoking storms of
debasement and disconfirmation intended to obliterate grace and decency
that the other possesses. In such a fashion, the narcissist destroys his own best
hope of re-invoking his capacity to love.
Restless and bored in a transactional love relationship or tormented and
aggrieved by a partner’s relative richness of spirit, the narcissist soon resorts
to multiple infidelities that suit his taste for risk-taking, indulgence of power,
and objectification, moving from one essentially meaningless adventure to
another in an attempt to simulate life. Braggadocio, hyperbolized accounts of
sexual exploits, and attempts to incite envy associated with extended con-
quests are all meant to distract and deflect both others and the self from an
156 Formulation of Narcissism

awareness of the empty, barren nature of such exchanges. Celebrate with me,
the narcissist seems to say, and we can both bask in my shared glory. The
invitation to do so, however, often seems clumsy, marked by exaggerated self-
indulgence and self-congratulation. The aftertaste such an invitation creates
may be offset by the possibility that one can be admitted, at least momenta-
rily, to the narcissist’s special world, one that promises to imbue the individual
with the embellishments of the narcissist’s aggrandized self.
What is interesting is that the narcissist’s appeals to the other to celebrate
reflected glory is often undertaken seemingly without any real awareness of
the caricature that the narcissist renders of himself. The appeal appears to be
indiscriminate, exposing the narcissist, in the process, to expressions of dis-
approval or even revulsion in his audience that, in turn, elicits narcissistic
counterattack.
Endemic lying both arises from and confirms the grandiosity and omnipo-
tence that are central to narcissistic character organization. The narcissist
operates in a world in which his is the only tangible, meaningful presence.
There can only be room for his voice and for his perception. Reality is not
objectifiable and verifiable; it is, instead, an extension of his needs, whims,
and feeling states, confirming what he thinks or wishes simply is. The other
does not matter. Others are experienced – if they are to be acknowledged at
all – as an extension of the aggrandized self, instruments or “things” to be
used and manipulated to achieve narcissistic ends.
Lying serves a particularly critical function. It allows the narcissist to test
and retest his relationships, confirming loyalty as his acolytes parrot the latest
version of truth he has chosen to sell. Because he is eternally wary and mis-
trustful, obeisance and loyalty have to be probed over and over. Demonstra-
tions of fealty are never enough. Those who would partner themselves with
him must show themselves, literally day by day, in an unselfconscious and
enthusiastic fashion, as being willing to replicate the shifting and conflicting
versions of reality he concocts. In this way the narcissist can reassure himself
that he is in command of his world and of the personalities that populate it.
Perpetual testing extends itself in other ways. Should a subordinate too
passionately and too articulately capture the narcissist’s own voice, sharp
retaliation ensues. The other can find themselves facing contradiction and
diminishment for their too successful appropriation of a core narcissistic pre-
rogative: you must always ensure that my presence and the recognition that I
enjoy are more prominent than yours. Confusingly, the target can find them-
selves punished for adhering too closely and too effectively to the narcissist’s
perspective. Even more bewilderingly, they must somehow gracefully accom-
modate their diminishment and, possibly, a contradictory version of reality
the narcissist imposes upon them (“he’s got it wrong – that isn’t my position,”
etc.). Failure to drink this particularly bitter version of Kool-Aid and display
unfaltering accommodation generates concerns about loyalty for the narcissist
and may begin to spell the beginning of the end of the relationship, which can
 Formulation of Narcissism 157

unfold with alarming abruptness. In this way, the narcissist can ensure that no
relationship remains too important to him and that no individual achieves
too much purchase in his life.
The narcissist also expects the other to be willing to sacrifice themselves to
ensure his survival. This is a presumptive and almost casual expectation that
plays itself out with great frequency seemingly in the absence of an obvious
business or political crisis that might demand subordinates take a hit for the
leader. For the narcissist, in spite of his grandiosity, survival is an ever-present
threat occasioned, in no small part, by the unending transgressions which
define his behavior. He must know that others will allow themselves to be
debased and wounded so that he can carry on in spite of the jeopardy his
grandiosity can create for him. For the narcissist, the other is only possessed
of value inasmuch as they can demonstrate utility. Someone who places
greater value on their own survival insults the narcissist. A subordinate who
fails to make the required sacrifice can expect to be characterized as back-
stabbing, as perfidious, or as treasonous. The subordinate who chooses to
take a hit gracefully and without objection possibly reassures themselves that
their act of falling on their sword will earn them eventual rescue through the
agency of the narcissist’s unconstrained power. As a consequence of close
“collaboration” with the narcissist, they may have come to feel that his
omnipotence is defining for them, too, imbuing them with the means to
respond to others’ incursions with indifference or contempt.
Testing and versions of lying also play themselves out in other ways. Sub-
ordinates can be repeatedly asked to cross distasteful moral lines. Their will-
ingness to do so confirms loyalty, of course; it also insidiously and
incrementally tethers those complicit in immoral acts ever more closely to the
narcissist, reassuring the narcissist that individuals who have done so can only
turn against him at great cost to themselves. Having compromised themselves
in an increasingly inexorable stepwise fashion, their corruption comes to all
too closely resemble his. They find themselves fated to cling to his ship. To do
otherwise would be to drown. In such a manner, the narcissist expands the
moral compromise of those who would be part of the influence and power he
wields. It also seems likely that a significant proportion of the people who
would choose to work closely with him have engaged in substantive moral
transgression of their own, perhaps as a habitual part of their being. By
incorporating such individuals into his fold, the narcissist has the reassurance
that he is working with others who can follow him wheresoever he chooses to
go.
Disagreement with a narcissist’s untenable interpretations of reality pro-
duces outrage. It threatens grandiosity and threatens belief that only the nar-
cissistic self has the right to occupy space in the world which surrounds it. If
the challenges which the surrounding world mounts are meaningful, sus-
tained, and effective, narcissistic response comes to be characterized by out-
bursts of rage, by genuine bewilderment (as if it is hard for the narcissist to
158 Formulation of Narcissism

imagine that others are possessed of substance), and, ultimately, by a deep

sense of injury that impresses an observer as childlike indignation. All three
of these states of being can alternate rapidly with one another. The narcissist
variously presents himself as both bully and victim. His presentation is devoid
of empathy and insight. It is, simultaneously, often mawkish or even clownish,
exaggerated in a way and to a degree that lends the entire response an absurd,
arbitrary quality. It is also characterized by ongoing distortions of reality and
impelled by the narcissist’s needs to re-establish entitlement, to disarm the
other, and to portray the self as having endured egregious injury. For those
who have not been enveloped by and identified with the narcissist’s rapacity
and grievance, such behavior feels almost farcical, a surreal drama possessed
of only the thinnest justification for itself. Missing entirely is any sensitivity to
the injury that continued bullying, misappropriation of reality, and deprecia-
tion have had on the narcissist’s neighbors. An outside observer not embroiled
in identification with a narcissist is likely to experience deep indignation that
an individual who persistently and blindly batters others demands that extra-
ordinary sensitivity be accorded to his own feelings. For those people who
have accommodated themselves to the narcissist’s worldview, finding common
cause with the narcissist’s deep sense of injury, there is corresponding offence
and outrage, mirroring the narcissist’s sense that he has been unjustly
attacked.
Vacillation between outbursts of rage, petulance, and disbelief that others
can push back creates a cacophony of emotions and postures that often feels
overwhelming and bruising, a discordant, fractured symphony assaulting all
an adversary’s senses. Bewilderment, shock and awe, and a sense of absurdity
and unreality are its byproducts.
Upon close acquaintance with a narcissistic personality, one realizes that
the alienated, wounded child is never far away. That child is very much com-
pelled by its preoccupation with its own egregious sense of loss and injustice
for which it can receive no meaningful consolation from the surrounding
world. One realizes that this injury is experienced as essentially irreparable,
refractory to any effort that others might make to ameliorate suffering.
Amelioration and healing could grow out of meaningful connection with
others, but the narcissist’s profound mistrust, their conviction that love is a
toxic, dangerous emotion, their fear of being obligated by others’ giving, and
their sense that attachment renders them vulnerable to others’ rapacity together
deny them the possibility of addressing their own agony. With the passage of
time, and in the company of the hyperbolized, often maudlin reiteration of
personal pain a narcissistic personality can endlessly restate, the narcissist’s
genuinely soul-destroying early pain comes to elicit impatience, intolerance, and
incredulity, especially in the absence of any appreciation of the hurt the nar-
cissist regularly causes others. As previously noted, the other eventually comes
to experience a mixture of outrage and disdain co-mingling with a disturbing
but often poorly articulated appreciation of the narcissist’s fragility.
 Formulation of Narcissism 159

The guise of wounded child that the narcissist presents is, at one and the
same time, both authentic, reflecting very formidable, punishing internal rea-
lities, and a contrived posture intended to serve a protective function. In the
case of the former, certainly the rage, indignation, and sense of injustice that
one encounters when the damaged child is introduced are all very real, but
rather than being reflective of early desolation and helplessness, they are
extensions of narcissistic rapacity and entitlement. The narcissist is deeply
incensed that others have opposed him, but he is not in those moments re-
experiencing what I have earlier referred to as regression to an earlier ego
state – an experience in which he is truly flooded and overwhelmed by early
pain. Instead, what one is seeing are the defenses the narcissist employs to
protect himself against the regression experience: faux vulnerability, outrage,
and entitlement. Evocation of the wounded child is meant to disconcert
others and create advantage for the narcissist. Ironically, were he able to truly
re-experience his early pain, rather than disguising it with effrontery, he might
genuinely appeal to the others’ humanity, an act of real power and authority
that the narcissist would experience as repulsive weakness.
Expecting unfaltering loyalty from the other and a willingness on the part
of the other to allow themselves, without evidence of hesitation, to let the
narcissist fill them and define them, the narcissist offers little reciprocity. Any
attempt to use one’s voice or to act on personal need, particularly if those
needs are declaratively expressed or thwart the ends the narcissist means to
pursue, is very likely to produce immediate censure and counterattack. In
response to his own retaliatory rage, the narcissist may expel the other from
his life, treating them as utterly disposable. Such an act further confirms for
the narcissist that no one in his world is possessed of enduring importance,
that no attachment can compel him. He has affirmed for himself again that he
remains untouchable, standing outside any hold that bonds of relatedness
might create for the other. The narcissist may claim friendship, but such
friendship is not bound by the usual terms that typify sustained attachment
between people: patience, compassion, awareness of the other’s reality, will-
ingness to amend the self to help the other, and readiness to make appropriate
sacrifice to ensure the other’s well-being. On the contrary, calling the other
“friend” is meant to serve transactional needs or, more insidiously, to gen-
erate an illusion of humanity that seemingly affirms participation in the
human community not possible for the narcissist. Put differently, friendship is
not intrinsically rewarding, generating deep emotional satisfaction and
meaning that grows out of two personalities who can open themselves to one
another. It is, rather, an empty vessel filled with narcissistic interest.
Bullying is a core part of narcissistic presentation, as is by now manifestly
apparent. It also affirms dominance and entitlement to exploit. It naturally
extends itself from the narcissist’s cornerstone defense, contempt. And it is
readily supported by the rage and envy that drives the narcissist’s rapacity.
Objectification of the other and significantly diminished ability to tolerate
160 Formulation of Narcissism

empathy render endemic bullying an inevitability. Most of the narcissist’s

interactions with others appear to be predicated upon bullying. Respect,
inasmuch as it exists, derives from the other’s ability to meet narcissistic
needs; in the absence of such utility, respect proves to be very transitory, re-
emerging or dispersing itself quickly as utility is perceived to vacillate.
Ubiquitous bullying is intended to confirm a sense of limitless power. The
world can then be experienced as a place the narcissist can exploit without
meaningful constraint. The narcissist is merciless in assault and unselfcon-
scious in his efforts to break the other. Punches are rarely pulled.
Vindictiveness grows out of the narcissist’s sense that literally every affront to
domination, however petty, must be addressed. In order for him to feel safe, the
narcissist must be able to demonstrate to himself as well as to others in his world
that any individual who has stood in the way of narcissistic prerogative, even on
a petty level, must eventually face punishment and must eventually be neutered.
Vindictiveness is also relentless, is ruthlessly pursued, and can be remarkably
heavy-handed, arising from what otherwise would be judged to be a small slight
or injury. Subjectively, of course, such vindictiveness reflects the narcissist’s sense
that any confrontation, however small, challenges the absolute dominion they
require in order to protect the aggrandized self.
Shaming bears a special mention as part of the narcissist’s efforts to bully.
Shaming, more than other forms of retaliation, serves to still the other’s voice,
compelling the other to hide the now depreciated self from public view. The
“shamed” self is meant to be too horrified by the ugly attributions imposed
upon it by its attacker to risk further public exposure. Shaming, too, is
unyielding and merciless. It means to obliterate and wreck.
Sadism is both a facet of bullying and an end in itself that renders the
wounding and humiliation of others intrinsically satisfying. It confirms for the
narcissist, variously, that his depredations are irresistible, that others’ loyalty
remains uncontested, that his own strength is inviolate, and that, once again,
he is an aggressor, not a victim. It also eventually serves the narcissist’s needs
to poison all his relationships. More profoundly, however, it helps support a
sense of aliveness that the narcissist’s ravaged internal landscape and con-
trived humanity denies him. Unable to feel fully alive, the narcissist takes
pleasure in his power to hurt other people and deconstruct them. Being able
to destroy or wound that which he can’t have himself is exhilarating. Like
bullying, sadism is an endemic part of narcissistic experience.
Tragically, to be narcissistic is to be at war. Life is combat. Everyone is
potentially an adversary. Alliances are transitory. To be continuously at war
and to be fundamentally alone, as the narcissist must essentially be, imposes a
state of perpetual arousal. The self supports vigilance by constantly reminding
itself that the world is a malignant, exploitative, self-interested place, a pro-
jected world dominated by the narcissist’s greed and rapacity; the consequent
high levels of arousal that permeate narcissistic existence ensure rage is always
close to the surface, available to redirect itself towards the acts of hostility and
 Formulation of Narcissism 161

contempt that serve core protective functions. Much like the famous Marvel
comic book character, the narcissist is “angry all the time.” Projecting his or
her own malevolence onto the surrounding world helps confirm the malevo-
lence the narcissist imagines that others would all too willingly direct towards
him, save for the hair trigger show of force that his vigilance supports. In a
context of florid fear and threat, conspiracy theories find fertile ground; mis-
trust and fear proliferate. The stage is set for objectification, diminishment of
the other’s humanity, and denial of empathy, all of which enable entitlement
and remorseless obliteration of one’s opponent.
Constantly and habitually accusing others of transgressions you’ve just
inflicted on them is extraordinarily provocative. While this strategy may
effectively disconcert and flummox one’s intended adversary, momentarily
robbing him or her of voice, it inevitably instigates a counter-response marked
by outrage and a profound sense of indignation. In his quest to deconstruct
and disqualify the other by attributing his own dark motivations to them, the
narcissist may win a local battle, but he broadens and intensifies others’ desire
to harm him. Their increasingly transparent antipathy towards him, which in
many ways he has manufactured, provides justification to perpetuate and
expand the warfare that, paradoxically, he requires in order to feel safe.
War requires preparedness to act in an unrestrained fashion. Hesitation,
ambiguity, and concern for the harm which the other endures all constrain
action. Action mitigates subjective vulnerability. It also potentially confers
significant advantage against an opponent hampered by decency. Over-
whelming force can be brought to bear against an opponent whose delibera-
tions about morality and ethics compromise their own readiness to respond.
Willingness to engage the other with “shock and awe” tactics precipitously
compromises the other’s ability to think effectively, flooding them with dis-
ruptive affect, including intense fear, much like a dunning phone call. For an
individual, like a narcissist, who is on a continuous war footing, the capacity
to engage in precipitous action is an imperative that is very difficult to resist
and very difficult to mitigate. Precipitous action taking, furthermore, is often
impelled by deep conviction, readily supported, as it is, by profound rage that
is always close to the surface and by the grandiosity and omnipotence which
represent core defining features of narcissism.
The imperative to act without hesitation produces a chaotic, unpredictable,
impulse ridden style informed by preoccupation with loyalty, rapacity, and
dominance. The predominance of impulse over thought would appear to negate
the importance of contrivance in the narcissist’s life, but it doesn’t; the two
coexist simultaneously. The reckless, erratic course which narcissistic thought
and action-taking follows further contributes to the sense of threat those around
the narcissist experience. The narcissist would have it no other way. His unpre-
dictability protects his prerogatives of voice, of decision-making, and of action.
War readiness and preparedness to act, however, either deny or degrade
the narcissist’s own cognitive assets. Psychological literature tells us that fear
162 Formulation of Narcissism

dramatically distorts cognition and perception. Thought form perpetually

dominated by fear and threat preoccupies itself with that which is perceived
to threaten. Watch the tiger. Don’t look anywhere else. Keep your eyes on it.
Ability to scan one’s environment and see the forest, not just the scary phan-
tom approaching you, is forfeit. Perception and scope of attention becomes
narrowed and sharply, rigidly focused. In a similar way, intellect is also com-
promised. Freewheeling exploration of possibilities becomes very difficult
indeed when one is afraid and vigilant much of the time. There is only room
for simplicity of thought. Making room for appreciation of complex realities
instinctively feels jeopardizing. Solutions must be simple and declarative.
Annihilate the other or run away. Consideration of nuance becomes intoler-
able; so, too, does cognitive flexibility and creativity. Thought compelled by
fear and perpetual combat readiness is defined by the need to simplify choi-
ces. Decisions become binary. Language faces degradation, too, co-opted by
primitive thought forms that demand facile identification of friend or foe.
Choice is often informed by concrete markers like race, group membership,
political alliance, or, perhaps more typically, by stereotypes that align them-
selves with bigotry and objectification of the other. The language of fear and
combat is brutal, guttural, abusive, and abbreviated. Sentences are short and
are often spoken at volume. Their power is visceral rather than intellectual.
Forethought, planning, and restraint are readily sacrificed to the demands of
an eternal present compelled by the urgency of perpetual crisis. Future, too, is
largely abandoned; what matters is the clear and present danger the now
constitutes.
An internal environment pervaded by anxiety (anxiety is another word for
fear), rage, and vigilance eventually neuters other emotional responses in the
narcissist. The self retracts. The world around it may feel surreal and oddly
unfamiliar; the world inside becomes increasingly diminished, evermore
defined by numbness and disengagement. Capacity for emotional richness
and for variegated emotional response married to complex, imaginative
thought constructions recedes. The self feels unreal and detached, both from
the people around it and from itself. Increasingly, it comes to rely on fear,
rage, and self-aggrandizement – the very sources of its pain – to simulate
aliveness and connection. Capacity for emotional restraint is compromised;
primal emotions like fear and rage dominate intellect, further impelling action
and an impulse ridden, chaotic decision-making style.
The foregoing description of narcissistic perception, thought form, and
emotional dysregulation is not to suggest that narcissistic intellect and capa-
city for impulse control is continuously compromised, but rather that, given
the inherent liabilities that the narcissist carries within himself, it can all too
easily be derailed by the narcissist’s other pressing preoccupations. My father
was certainly capable of disciplined, sustained work effort; the innovations he
generated in a retail context were applauded for their sophistication. This
“intelligence,” however, was guided by a cunning mind on the lookout for
 Formulation of Narcissism 163

advantages to exploit – a beneficial perspective to be able to adopt in a retail

marketplace. As I saw on numbers of occasions when I observed him in his
work environment and in the family, it was readily subject to degradation by
the cacophony of emotions, profound mistrust, and endemic fear that char-
acterized him.
I have noted that self-aggrandizement and grandiosity support a habit of
attributing ability, skill, and potentiality to the self that it does not possess.
The almost casual ascription of power and competence to the self that far
eludes its grasp means that a narcissistic individual can all too easily overlook
his own limitations, claiming potencies that would strike an observer as
delusional. Accustomed to believing that he’s the most creative guy in the
room and the only guy, in the end, equipped to solve problems, it becomes all
too easy to unselfconsciously proffer solutions that would strike others as
outlandish, conspiratorial, or crazy. Failure on the part of others to accept
these “gifts” produces outrage, hurt, and a measure of perplexity, further
contributing to the sense one is dealing with a delusional individual who
believes everything he has said. Instead, what one is encountering are the facile
assumptions that extend themselves from his grandiosity. The phrase “magical
thinking” probably better approximates what is unfolding: my thoughts are spe-
cial and precious, like me, so they must be possessed of greater utility and value
than the intellectual endeavor of other people. The magical piece is his assump-
tion that because he feels special his thoughts must be, too, and therefore do not
require careful validation. His self-aggrandizement requires constant confirma-
tion and constant expansion; in my father’s case, it was the one companion that
always stood by his side and kept him safe in the face of life’s terrible depreda-
tions, even though it imposed terrible costs.
Combat language tends to elicit degradation of thought in the other as well as
in the self. In order to protect personal boundaries and integrity of self or, more
basically, in order to protect the self from the potentiality of physical harm, the
other must use similar thought forms to mobilize their own energy, to incite
preparedness for action, and to mount a credible and very visceral threat display
to offset their attacker. Attempts to be thoughtful, to employ reason, and to
problem solve collaboratively very quickly often fail, creating painful and
potentially disastrous exposure to devastating violation. Once a target fully
appreciates the nature of the threat being posed and marshals the means to
mount an effective counterattack, almost invariably they find themselves com-
pelled to use the same tools that their attacker employs. Emotional restraint
deteriorates and so, too, does quality of thought. All is action, fear, and survival.
And if a target is sufficiently self-possessed to be able to hang onto their
humanity in the face of abusive behavior, the likelihood of doing so decreases
with the passage of time.
Dissociation, or emotional numbing, and acquired insensitivity to that which
would have previously horrified, acts incrementally, but probably rapidly, to
render retention of humanity that much more improbable in those targeted by
164 Formulation of Narcissism

the narcissist’s assaults. Dissociation enables one to better tolerate abuse, chaos,
and threat, but it denies one access to compelling emotional responses that
would otherwise inform a more humane decision-making process. Terror is
diminished, but so, too, is emotional intelligence. Dissociation becomes a habit
of being in a threat infested world, having its way years, decades, or even a life-
time after the introduction of trauma. It blinds the sufferer to their own pain and
the pain that they may inadvertently cause others, preparing the way for bru-
tishness to perpetuate itself. As the narcissist traumatizes and desensitizes those
around him, escalating dissociation and desensitization increasingly erode
humane sensibility.
All of the above is not to suggest that retention of humanity is utterly
impossible when we find ourselves in literal verbal or physical combat, but
rather that it becomes increasingly implausible. Warfare, whether social,
political, or actual, degrades our humanity. Occasionally leaders have under-
stood the importance of protecting humanity in the way that they respond to
brutality, as witnessed in the extraordinarily brave efforts of civil rights lea-
ders in the 60s and Gandhi’s determination to sidestep violence during the
Indian independence movement. More often than not, however, degraded
thought, compulsion to act, and readiness to engage in brutishness has
expanded itself, infecting most parties in a conflict, if not wholly, then at least
to a disturbingly significant degree.
Propensity to rely on simple, binary thought structures in concert with
compulsion to retaliate against real or imagined enemies frequently produces
a frenetic, impulse ridden, chaotic cognitive style punctuated by affective
storms in the narcissist that compromises collaborative enterprises. Whatever
potential for collaborative effort might exist when a narcissist is functioning at
his or her best soon collapses once significant threat manifests itself, the
caveat being that subjectively significant levels of threat are virtually endemic.
In an atmosphere of threat, ideas are not judged by their own merit, but
rather by the degree of loyalty they embody. Quality of thought is a second-
ary consideration. Attunement with narcissistic affect and perspectives is pri-
mary, defining a speaker as adversary or ally. From the viewpoint of an
outside observer, narcissistic intellect often appears to be irrational or arbi-
trary, but, in fact, it is nearly always governed by its preoccupation with loy-
alty and by alignment with perceived self-interest. Intellectual endeavors
pervert and degrade themselves to meet these ends.
Others possessed of articulate, thoughtful voices are experienced as deeply
offensive and are venomously pursued as mortal enemies. Being intellectual is
vilified. Science, as a potential competing voice, is discredited. Questions are
not to be asked in any meaningful or persistent way, nor are others’ thoughts
to divert from the narcissist’s acts of will. Intellectualism is viewed as dan-
gerous and as both weak and “unclean,” at odds with the subversion of self,
which the narcissist demands. Adherents are given to understand that accep-
tance of narcissistic rapacity not only enhances the group’s greatness and
 Formulation of Narcissism 165

strength, but that failure to do so jeopardizes the group. Outliers, including

intellectuals, are ruthlessly deconstructed and – where sufficient power has
been consolidated – annihilated. The threat of social or virtual physical
excoriation renders disagreement a very jeopardizing undertaking, to say the
least. Dissent can lead to punitive marginalization or to death.
When narcissistic intellectual assets are directed towards acquisitive ends
(wealth, power, status), they may be harnessed effectively to generate new
ideas or new technical forms that significantly advance the narcissist’s inter-
ests and, almost serendipitously, may advance society’s interest as well. Just as
probably, however, narcissistic creativity may impose terrible social costs
because narcissistic intellect is not informed by concerns about social justice
or others’ well-being; on the contrary, it maintains a terrible and deliberate
indifference to any consideration compelled by humanity or the constraints of
decency. Awareness of decency and humanity can be entertained only fleet-
ingly or sporadically, but certainly not as an enduring and foundational part
of an enterprise that the narcissist embarks upon. Intelligence that is not
directed, shaped, and, importantly, mitigated by compassion and empathy
seems particularly likely to produce destructive progeny.
Intelligence constrained by narcissism renders the narcissist not only blind
to but repelled by others’ ability to initiate and innovate. Considerable intel-
lectual and emotional resources have to be devoted towards negation of the
other. In the process, richness that the other possesses that might otherwise be
harnessed to enhance narcissistic creativity is either diminished or obliterated,
denying a narcissistic personality the opportunity to enhance and expand
their own ideas through the contributions that others can make to them.
Contributions from others are only acceptable inasmuch as they can be
rebranded or reformulated as extensions of the narcissist’s creativity (e.g.,
stolen) or, alternatively, if they can be squeezed and exploited out of others
who participate in a world over which the narcissist can exercise punishing
control. In such a world, punishing narcissistic authority might stimulate
innovation and productivity in the interim, but it must inevitably have the
effect of eventually diminishing any creative or intellectual product the other
is able to construct, wearing down and eroding the selfhood of the other until
output becomes increasingly sterile. When a countervailing voice intercedes to
mitigate narcissistic constraint, human ingenuity seems to be able to restore
itself surprisingly quickly. Some historians would argue that Hitler’s will-
ingness to empower Albert Speer during the last years of the war to grant
German industrial leadership greater latitude in finding their own innovative
ways to increase production helped account for the dramatic increase in
Germany’s industrial output during that timeframe.
The narcissist’s reliance on contempt as a core defense also compromises
judgement; risk-taking accordingly becomes more extravagant, informed by
arrogance and by reliance on danger to simulate engagement. Successes
inflame aggrandizement. The self becomes untouchable, directing scathing
166 Formulation of Narcissism

disdain towards others who stand in its way. With the inevitable escalation of
risk-taking that ensues, inevitable failures accrue. When they begin to jeo-
pardize the aggrandized self, cracks in narcissistic adjustment develop;
renewed triumph confirms and exacerbates grandiosity while persisting fail-
ures associate themselves with invocation of the narcissist’s damaged child
persona, escalating outbursts of rage, hysterical derision of enemies, and
increasingly compromised judgement. As the narcissist faces mounting ques-
tions about the competence of the grandiose self, his ability to sustain abso-
lute dominion over the people in his world feels increasingly precarious,
instigating reinvigorated efforts to dominate and invade. As this destructive
cycle extends itself, so, too, do acts of oppression and brutality that fall within
the narcissist’s grasp.
In the context of the cognitive and affective limitations that have just been
described, narcissistic intellect can be seen to be extraordinarily dangerous in
an individual occupying a position of significant leadership, particularly of a
national entity, not only because they can be expected to visit acts of rapacity
and aggression upon a neighbor or upon internal enemies, but also because a
cognitive style uninformed by wisdom is likely to fracture human and non-
human environments with little regard for consequence. Without empathy,
compassion, generosity, generativity, and a moral sense informed by respect
for others, how could any of us harness intelligence, however formidable it
might be, without causing great harm, particularly if we occupy a position of
imposing authority?
Now imagine that such an intelligence is informed by a personality char-
acterized by rapacity, need to dominate, prevarication, grandiosity, ruthless
self-interest, cruelty, and the capacity to devastate a perceived enemy without
hesitation – all unfolding in a psyche that lacks meaningful awareness of why
it acts as it does. No substantive internal checks and balances and little
responsiveness to the limits others may attempt to impose. Perhaps a formula
for success in a tribal society and a tribal world, where strong homogeneities
define culture and perception of truth and where interests of state and leader
merge so that one is indistinguishable from the other, permitting the state to
act with ruthless alacrity and aggression to further its interests in expansion
and conquest. Indeed, one could argue, as I have earlier in this book, that in a
tribal world narcissistic leadership ensures that the most dominant forms of
technology and governmental organization prevail over weaker neighbors,
thereby advancing and protecting a given civilization’s interests.
But what of the world that we actually live in – one defined by complex,
global interdependencies and by technological, economic, social, and health
care concerns that have potential planetwide impact? In the newly emerging
modern world, the complexity of the issues that we face, I would suggest, can
no longer be addressed by the territorial imperatives of tribalism; they require
collaboration, mutuality of respect, the ability to look beyond our own per-
sonal and national horizons to understand one another’s position, an
 Formulation of Narcissism 167

enhanced measure of compassion for all humankind, and a willingness,

increasingly, to rationalize resources so that they can better serve the entire
human family. In fits and starts we appear to be moving in these directions,
but the journey is understandably a very frightening one as we call upon one
another to leave behind some of the core strategies (like tribalism) that have
reassured us the world could be apprehended in familiar, comforting terms
and that have allowed us to feel we could successfully protect those we love
and the culture we have relied upon to define us. Old truths that we con-
sidered absolute and that beguiled us with their simplicity are being replaced
with new, more intricate, and certainly more bewildering realities we are being
asked contend with. Some of us can embrace this journey, finding it exciting
and full of promise, in spite of its attendant ambiguities. Some of us respond
with deep alarm and panic, afraid that without the clarity that the old forms
provided us, we will never survive.
Of course, the transition I am referencing is an immensely difficult one that
is having a tremendously divisive impact in many if not most parts of the
world. Consider that many nations and many peoples are still engaged in
various forms of tribal combat with one another. Consider also that a sig-
nificant proportion of world leadership is defined by fascism or by exploita-
tive oligarchies. Forces like poverty, disease, and war have produced mass
migrations of people – “others” – that various host cultures are being called
upon to accommodate in numbers (but probably not proportions) that sound
untenable. With diverse groups of migrants come diverse cultural practices.
How, so many of us wonder, can we still retain our identities in the face of so
much change? Will these newcomers push us aside, change our institutions,
adulterate our religions, transform our values, take our jobs, overload our
welfare systems, and generate economic and political instability? How could
there not be fear, particularly amongst those people who already feel mar-
ginalized in their home culture?
Surely, many people think, some of our worst fears must be justified (and
some of them undoubtedly are). But who can tell them? Who can they
believe? A leader who provides simple, declarative answers infused with
unbreachable confidence? Or a leader who acknowledges complexity and
nuance, promising to work flexibly and thoughtfully in response to a shifting,
ambiguous landscape? If you’re really afraid, which style of leadership would
you prefer? If the leader who proffers simple answers also promises salvation,
directing contempt at competing voices who may bring less conviction and
certitude to the challenges that are to be faced, doesn’t he become irresistible
to some of the people who are really scared? Fear dictates choice rather than
discernment and judgement. In response, political competitors may become
equally emphatic, or nearly so, offering assurances of leadership and out-
comes impossible for anyone to realistically promise. In such a context, there
is a risk that everybody’s voice can become more strident and possessed of
greater ideological fervor. Trust in government and leadership, as a result,
168 Formulation of Narcissism

diminishes. How, people wonder, can any of you do all that you say you will?
Look at your track records. None of you contenders can really make this
work, so who can I count on?
The answer, for many people, is, I’ll go with the leader who speaks to my
alienation. He’s the one I can trust, especially when I’m really afraid. In such
a fashion, narcissistic leadership all too readily and all too easily insinuates
itself into our lives. The alienation and mistrust of the governed finds
common cause in the narcissist’s own acute sense of alienation and injustice,
not realizing that what appears to be an empathic exchange is ultimately only
defined by narcissistic self-interest.
The reality, I would maintain, is that we don’t have good answers yet for
many of the formidably complex human challenges we’ve been trying to
address. We simply don’t. It’s going to take us time. Probably a lot of it.
Maybe time, with respect to challenges like climate change, that we no longer
have. Can we get there, however, by pretending that we know a great deal
more than we do? Or do we best get there by acknowledging through civil,
thoughtful discourse that we are going to make mistakes, that none of us has
all of the answers, that – in essence – we’re living in an immensely compli-
cated world that’s profoundly difficult to make sense of ? If we expect a leader
to provide us with all of the answers that we need or want, we’re going to be
in trouble. In the process, we’re going to allow ourselves to be misled or,
worse, badly led. I would say we must beware of the messianic voice. And,
most especially, guard ourselves against our hunger for it. Knowledge seems
to accumulate from many voices and many perspectives, building itself incre-
mentally as it is tested and retested against our grasp of reality. Nobody does
this all by themselves. Climate change is a nice example. Hard work, verified
and checked over and over again, by countless researchers. That’s knowledge.
I want to caution the reader that all of the people that I worked with clo-
sely whom I deemed to be narcissistic were very successful in their profes-
sions. In this sense, they could be superficially described as high-functioning
narcissistic personalities. I emphatically do not wish to suggest that narcissism
and success are somehow intertwined with one another. Many of the qualities
that typify narcissism could be expected to ensure a disrupted, unsuccessful
professional life in individuals not blessed with the resilience, the personal
resourcefulness, and the intelligence that led to the professional triumphs I
saw in my long-term patients and in my father.
Chapter 12

Legacies of Narcissism – Impact on

the Psyche

In this chapter I hope to outline ways in which narcissism appears to perpe-

tuate itself, both in its own form and in forms that can be seen to typify other
variants of psychopathy. I will draw heavily, but not exclusively, upon my own
experience growing up with a narcissistic father, outlining the pathway I
found myself drawn into that I was afraid might have eventuated in my
becoming psychopathic. As an aside, I should say that I was always aware
that the face my psychopathy wore would be different than my father’s. In
addition to my own personal experience, I will also be referencing broad, but
consistent patterns of compromise that I felt I was able to identify in patients
who had been subjected to a narcissistic surround during their growing up
years. I believe it would be fair to say that I have modestly extensive experi-
ence working with such people.
I understand that some of the material I am about to present may be hard
to read – a litany of damage and suffering that the narcissist visits on the
people close to him. I ask the reader to bear with me. In considering how
narcissism and psychopathy may replicate themselves in a personal and a
family context, I will be articulating dynamics that I believe play themselves
out in much larger entities, like nations, that accommodate narcissistic lea-
dership. The next chapter, Chapter 13, will devote itself to the relationship
between narcissistic leaders and the states that they govern.
So that the reader might more closely appreciate the disruptive impact of
the forces I am about to describe, I will begin the chapter by talking about
that which I think benefits us in our early experience, contributing to our
prospects of being able to fully consummate ourselves as human beings. I will
expand some of the constructs that I described earlier in the book, extending
them in a fashion that I hope will render our current discussion more
meaningful.
I very much recognize that people manage to grow and to transcend
themselves in spite of the adversities that they face, sometimes exceeding, by a
wide margin, the potentialities they might have been expected to realize
otherwise. I do not wish to imply that having less than an ideal childhood
utterly and terminally disadvantages people. I very much subscribe to the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-12
170 Impact on the Psyche

notion that adversity and mistakes on the part of both parent and child are
necessary for us to learn and to expand ourselves. I also believe that if par-
enting manages to be good enough, generally meeting children’s core needs in
a more or less consistent fashion, most children will have the opportunity to
enhance themselves, save for children who may carry specific vulnerabilities
into the parent–child relationship. The good enough formulation leaves room
for growth through adversity as well as for individual differences that render
parenting in one parent–child dyad successful and in another compromising.
Attachment plays a foundational role in the formation of identity. Healthy
attachment offers confirmation that the self is valuable and is possessed of
poignancy – the developing self can feel, on a visceral level, that it has the
capacity to generate joy, celebration, and meaning in the lives of those people
with whom it establishes intimate relationships. The other confirms – through
their own unmistakable responses to the gifts that the self offers – that the self
matters and is a source of richness to the people most important to it. In this
way, others mirror what the developing self learns to deeply appreciate about
itself. These elements form the touchstones of emergent identity: such begin-
nings empower the self to take risks in the world and to expand the self
through new forms of thinking, emoting, communicating, and behaving that
allow the self to discover altered forms of being that enhance identity. Crea-
tivity and risk-taking, so necessary to such an endeavor, are possible because
the self feels relatively safe in a world that has affirmed its basic value. Mir-
roring positive attributes, of course, need not unfold with flawless consistency;
it is enough that one’s emotional ambience is in the main caring and affirm-
ing, reassuring the self mistakes are possible and that recovery from them is
manageable without creating catastrophic outcomes. The ability to tolerate
risks helps beget identity. As risk-taking generates rewards for the self, greater
risks can be taken and pursued with more tenacity. In this fashion, a sense of
resilience begins to accrue that imbues identity and the self with an awareness
of its own resourcefulness.
Healthy attachment (what is alternatively referred to as secure attachment)
exists in an environment in which the other is reasonably closely attuned to an
intimate’s internal realities. The other demonstrates the capacity to more or
less accurately read an intimate’s feelings and need states, confirming that the
other can be counted upon to provide protection when it is required in a
fashion that relatively closely conforms to the unique characteristics of the
person they’re attempting to look after. The more accurately uniqueness is
appreciated, the safer the self feels and the more likely it is to risk experi-
mentation. Awareness of uniqueness also conveys a willingness to tolerate the
self ’s hunger to expand and differentiate itself. Demonstrating respect for
uniqueness helps create an increasingly rich internal environment evermore
capable of generating resources like imagination, creativity, intuition, eccen-
tricity, and courage. In this environment there is room for the self to feel safe
enough to challenge its protectors and mentors, testing values, perceptions,
 Impact on the Psyche 171

and ideas it recognizes may antagonize the other. Doing so means the self
must balance its needs for succorance and approval against its desire for
expansion and growth. Inevitable riffs that arise between the parties may
challenge the self to define new ways to think, feel, and communicate that
alleviate conflict so that an important relationship can continue to be sup-
ported. In circumstances where differences feel too imposing to accom-
modate, the self that has been supported by healthy attachment can more
readily affirm perceptions and values that constitute its identity through spir-
ited, respectful debate or by seeking out other intimates or mentors who offer
better opportunities for personal enhancement. Investing in a new attachment
that better serves the self may not mean leaving an old attachment behind; on
the contrary, old attachments may remain immensely important to the self
and may continue to contribute to its growth and differentiation in spite of
differences.
Making its immense contribution to internal richness and to formation of a
well-articulated, variegated sense of identity, healthy attachment helps insu-
late the self against otherwise unbearable, disorganizing pain which permeates
ruptured relationships occasioned by death or by conflict. The self is far better
able to tolerate loss and separation, buoyed by an implicit understanding it
likely possesses the means to survive and to begin life anew. This is not to say
that separation does not cause profound pain, but rather that such pain is not
imbued with a sense that the self is too depleted and too impoverished to be
able to survive without the other. Because of its richness, the self is afforded
choice that a more damaged or more incomplete self feels incapable of
making or only makes in the presence of suffocating terror.
Consider, now, the nature of attachment that unfolds in a relationship with
the narcissistic other. Uniqueness is shuttered. The self is called upon to
orchestrate itself, simulating a presence it vainly attempts to contrive to
appease the other whose moods and perspectives seem to fluctuate arbitrarily.
And the self is given to understand it must negate itself and render itself
invisible so it can be receptive to the narcissistic voice, which expects to still
the voices of those around it. Internal richness is forfeit; so, too, are oppor-
tunities to expand the self and enhance identity. Safety and resilience are, in
the main, compromised; instead, the self is largely defined by its desperate
and often covert attempts to survive its own desolation. The self is denied
value and is denied the opportunity to feel and give love, which the narcissist
would find unbearable. Instead, as the self is subjected to repeated assaults
and acts of cruelty, its capacity to experience a broad range of emotions
becomes blunted; in their place, shame, vindictive rage, and envy flourish.
Shame arises from a sense that the self is defenseless and ineffectual, unable to
protect itself in the face of incessant violation. It asserts itself because the self
feels unworthy of the other’s love (your failure to love me confirms my
defectiveness). And it is experienced because the self increasingly recognizes
that it is skeletal and emaciated. The self ’s inadequacies and distortions feel
172 Impact on the Psyche

agonizingly transparent; transparency further exacerbates the exquisitely

painful levels of vulnerability the self must live with. Perpetual, unrelenting
vigilance ensues. In spite of its best efforts to hide vulnerability, its struggle is
all too readily apparent to the surrounding world, marking it for predation
(bullying).
With the passage of time and the accumulation of disturbing, monstrous, vin-
dictive feelings, shame becomes particularly acute and particularly private. No
one must see the horrific realities inside. An individual so affected looks greedily
at those around him or her who seem to be more complete or more gracious.
Depth of attachment becomes ever more untenable; dissociation, contrivance,
and an indelible sense of one’s own unattractiveness render the possibility of ever
becoming an accepted or even esteemed member of the human community seem
increasingly remote. Depression flourishes, imposing its own attendant con-
sequences that further subvert personal value, that exacerbate depletion and
emaciation, and that erode whatever shards of hope remain that one can con-
struct a life of one’s own. Thinking about suicide offers avenues of escape in an
otherwise impossibly bleak landscape; so, also, does avoidant behavior (including
addictions) that is relied upon to provide momentary relief from unbearable suf-
fering, but which only intensifies personal inadequacy arising from compromised
productivity. And, finally, set upon by a surrounding world and an internal one
that both assume an increasingly malignant aspect, the self endlessly tries to pre-
pare itself for expected new incursions through perpetual rehearsals of responses
to worst-case scenarios that, tragically, it is rarely able to consummate. This form
of anxiety disorder – what is now conceptually being referred to as complex Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – becomes an early friend and oft times life-
long companion for those who endure narcissistic invasion in their childhoods.
In the face of all of its burdens, the self becomes preoccupied with annihi-
lation – both literal and psychological.
I have watched the pattern of dynamics described in the preceding para-
graphs that typified my adjustment to a narcissistic surround unfold countless
times, in its various forms, in great numbers of patients that I have worked
with who had suffered exposure to a narcissistic parent or parent surrogate.
For some patients, it unfolded with a terrible inevitability, producing deva-
stated, chaotic lives marked by addictions, by daunting levels of psychological
pain (including depression and complex PTSD), and by the inability to reli-
ably sustain independence and fulfil the potentialities that the self-possessed.
Some few people were able to transcend the damage that they had endured to
a very meaningful degree, establishing successful lives they found fulfilling,
but even they would say that they were still haunted by many of their early
ghosts in ways that they understood they would probably never escape. The
great majority of people that I worked with managed to forge compromises
with their suffering, moving ahead in some areas of their lives, but having to
accept painful limitations that continued to constrain and hurt them in num-
bers of significant ways.
 Impact on the Psyche 173

Starvation and depletion proved themselves to be the legacy of growing up

in a narcissistic surround. Many patients experienced themselves as skeletal
and emaciated; others would say that they had felt unattractive and unlovable
much of their lives, extending the blight and starvation that characterized
their childhoods up through their adult years. Struggle for voice was a defin-
ing part of their reality. One subgroup of patients appeared to have concluded
that they were too stupid or too uninformed or too insubstantial for anyone
around them to be interested in what they had to say. They experienced
themselves as indelibly defective. Those that were acutely aware of how hard
and how dangerous it had been to use their voice could also tell me that any
assertion of personhood – even in limited ways – met with fierce, if not brutal,
resistance. This group of people were more likely to be able to recognize that
it was the narcissistic parent who was damaged rather than feeling that their
inherent flaws accounted for their parent’s discordant, rejecting response to
them. Both groups, however, would say that the narcissistic voice got inside,
robbing them, in spite of any resistance they might mount, of their sense of
worth. Both groups struggled to regain it with varying degrees of success.
Recognizing that the narcissistic parent had problems rather than utterly dis-
qualifying the self-made recovery of self-esteem somewhat easier, but only
somewhat. One can guess that those individuals who disqualified the self did
so as an unconscious means of appeasing the narcissistic other, trying, in the
process, to protect what few shards of selfhood remained to them.
Whether a given patient blamed themselves or their parent for their par-
ent’s behavior, everyone came to feel that the world was a malignant and
unwelcoming place. They learned that it was dangerous to be a person. They
expected to be attacked and diminished. Many of them were all too acutely
aware that they mistrusted others and many of them felt that others had the
power to utterly devastate them with a disapproving or, worse, cruel voice.
Some could acknowledge that they feared their own annihilation; others acted
as if they did, retreating from the rest of the world in an effort to make
themselves feel safer. In the longer run, retreat never worked. It always exa-
cerbated anxiety and depression. Without recourse to human warmth and
support, people were left to their own thoughts, which increasingly assaulted
them with reminders of their fears, their deficiency, and their hopelessness.
The cruelty of the narcissistic other that infused and defined these patients’
worlds eventually seemed to get inside everybody, poisoning their interiors,
filling them with vengeful, sadistic fantasies. Many patients backed away from
what they saw in themselves with horror, quite terrified to talk to anybody
about what was happening inside them. Some few had managed to entirely
turn away from these parts of themselves, possibly by employing a psycholo-
gical defense called repression (as previously referenced, the ability to wall off
unpleasant memories and feeling states from consciousness). While one could
infer, given all the cruelty they had been subjected to, that emergent sadistic
feelings and fantasies must have represented an important part of their
174 Impact on the Psyche

experience with themselves, they had been able to disguise and hide these
pieces of themselves from their own and others’ view. It was only with great
care and after considerable trust had been established in the psychotherapy
process that one attempted to explore such issues with them, ever mindful
that they might need to shut down exploration of this facet of themselves.
Considering that they carried darkness inside them that mirrored the ugliness
they saw in their assailant was, understandably, a very threatening idea for
people to entertain. Making these connections or at least understanding their
plausibility helped people better appreciate why they felt so unsafe in the
world, if only because they could feel somewhat safer with their own impulses.
For some, less energy had to be devoted towards walling off parts of the self;
as a consequence, they could afford to be less judgmental and brittle with the
people in their environment because they were more accepting of themselves.
For others, the walls could never come down.
Some of my patients who had grown up in a narcissistic surround were able to
tell me that they felt like monsters – or, at least, potential monsters – waiting for
the right triggers and the right circumstances to set off what they feared was
inevitable. They were all too aware that people who reminded them, whether
obliquely or directly, of the narcissistic personality who had assaulted them in
their early lives might set them off, unleashing murderous retaliation. They lived
in fear that the surrounding world would attempt to re-violate them and they
were equally afraid that if they fought back, they would become the monster
inside they had always tried so hard to hold back. They also imagined that the
counter response of an enraged world would expose them to more brutality,
further compromising the humanity they had assiduously tried to safeguard.
Fear of the monster inside – a reposit of all the darkness of their childhoods –
dogged most of this group of patients, sometimes throughout their lives. Their
fear of their own monstrosity and of compromised humanity made them feel
unsafe when they attempted to sustain intimacy with the people that they loved.
Absorbing narcissistic assault and predation seemed to mean, for a sub-
stantial portion of the people that I saw, that the world inside eventually
replicated the searing, lacerating contempt-filled narcissistic voice they had
lived with. Fantasies about success or actual successes produced devastating
counterattacks inside. Attempts to use one’s voice or to render oneself more
visible in the human community elicited a similar internal response. It felt
dangerous to be seen and to be heard. Simple and inconsequential acts of
assertion, or even the thought of them, could produce tortured rumination.
Human interaction became, for many of these people, unbearably threatening,
but isolation meant having to contend with murder squad in one’s head stuff.
It was very, very hard for people to find peace and safety. Vigilance was
nearly an omnipresent part of their lives, sometimes fading into the back-
ground, but all too readily and easily evoked.
Fear of abandonment assumed immense proportions for many of these
patients. Some imagined that their neediness would drive their partners or
 Impact on the Psyche 175

their family away. Others worried that the rage they were struggling to con-
tain would eventually burst free of its bonds and terminally wreck relation-
ships – and at times it did elude people’s self-control, re-inflaming their fears
of inflicting devastating harm on people they loved. Other patients antici-
pated that intimates would eventually understand either how valueless they
were or how damaged they were, fatally compromising their important rela-
tionships. Or people simply didn’t feel safe enough in relationships, yearning
for intimacy but too scared of predation or of the immensity of their own
need to tolerate it.
In the context of so much fear of intimacy, many of my patients presented a
history of destructive relationship choices. The list of possible destructive
partner choice was long and varied. Partners who were narcissistic themselves
who “partnered” a patient’s efforts to diminish themselves. Partners whose
own towering neediness promised protection against abandonment, but whose
reciprocal fears of intimacy eventually sabotaged a relationship. Partners who
could share addictions. Partners who became attractive because their psycho-
logical problems seemed bigger than my patient’s, offering reassurance that
my patient wouldn’t be turned away because his/her own problems seemed so
imposing (“if you’re too healthy, you’ll abandon someone as damaged as
me”). Partners who were too remote and too inaccessible to offer hope that
one’s own frightening, mountainous needs could be met, protecting patients,
in the process, from the disorganizing impact that a caring or empathic
response might have produced (“if I let you touch me, move me with your
love, you’ll see how terribly needy I am and flee”). The foregoing, of course,
represents only a partial accounting of damaging relationship choices people
could make.
Interdependency was inherently frightening for my patients. Besides the
threat of negotiating identity, many of them had not had the opportunity to
engage in a constructive dependence (some few had a parent who was able to
oppose the narcissistic other in a way that at least afforded a patient some
measure of protection and inoculation). Dependencies did not feel like safe
places for them. Setting aside all of the deficiency and sometimes ugliness that
they saw in themselves, how could they count on others not to exploit them if
they rendered themselves vulnerable? And how could they trust themselves to
express their needs in an appropriate way without compromising dignity and
attractiveness? To my surprise, however, many of these people readily mana-
ged to establish very constructive and productive dependencies in therapy. I
was often taken aback by the relative ease with which this happened. Subse-
quently, these patients were able to take intimacy risks in relationships outside
therapy.
Depending upon the receptivity of the people that they chose, risk either
paid off or was, for some individuals, catastrophically damaging. Their fragi-
lity and pain limited their resilience. As a therapist, I was cognizant that the
risk-taking process was, to a degree, ungovernable. I couldn’t always protect
176 Impact on the Psyche

people effectively and I couldn’t always anticipate whether they were exposing
themselves to a good choice or a damaging one. So many unpredictable and
unanticipated variables could intervene in a given instance. Forewarning
patients and attempting to insulate them, ahead of time, against unexpected
and unfavorable consequences was sometimes not enough to ensure that they
would not be badly hurt or, if they had been hurt, that they would find the
courage to take risks again.
Almost all of my patients struggled with depression that was either a con-
stant companion or an intermittent one. It disrupted their lives in myriad
ways. It, too, was immensely frightening, as depression is. Within a psycho-
analytic framework, depression was both anaclitic (reflecting a response to
relational concerns and losses) and introjective (bespeaking preoccupation
with achievement standards and expectations). Suicidal ideation was a fre-
quent companion of such depression. In some of my patients it was obsessive,
frighteningly seductive, and disturbingly intense when it was present. It often
created multiple crises in psychotherapy. Very generally speaking, as people
came to feel more comfortable with the dependence that psychotherapy
offered, only gradually did suicidal ideation seem to lose its potency.
Finally, many of my patients also demonstrated PTSD marked by irresistible,
interminable preparation and rehearsal for catastrophic possibilities. The PTSD
process presented itself unbidden in people’s daily lives, was extremely hard to
short-circuit or mitigate once it had onset, and was a source of agony. It could
also contribute to suicidal risk and to susceptibility to addiction. The myriad
forms of pain that this group of patients lived with rendered susceptibility to
addiction quite high. Addictions offered momentary reprieve in the face of
ongoing suffering patients became quite desperate to escape. It probably also
served the function of helping them sabotage success and undercut their lives,
accommodating an internalized narcissistic dictate to diminish the self.
PTSD reflected people’s sense that they were not safe in the world. Ende-
mic bullying and disconfirmation that the narcissistic other had directed
towards them subverted their sense that they could protect themselves in the
face of expected onslaughts from a predatory and malignant surround. Many
of them struggled lifelong with assertion. I have seen, in my clinical experi-
ence, that early, sustained bullying sometimes has an enduring impact on
people that never fully relents.
I found that the level of “pushback” that my patients were able to direct
towards a narcissistic parent could tell me a great deal about people’s pro-
spects for a successful future life adjustment.
One distinctive group of patients that I described earlier in this chapter
focused on trying to hide the ravaged parts of self left to them, making
themselves small enough to be sufficiently unobtrusive so that they might
escape further narcissistic attack. Recourse to this strategy might mean that
one remained trapped in a small space throughout much of one’s life, too
afraid to engage in acts of self-assertion required to affirm and enlarge
 Impact on the Psyche 177

identity. For others, resistance took the form of explicit acts of defiance and
opposition that brought them into open combat with their narcissistic adver-
sary. People who chose this strategy – or rather, were capable of it – were
conceivably in a better position to protect the self, but they were, simulta-
neously, almost inevitably exposing themselves (singling themselves out?) to
more intense and probably more frequent combat. For some of this group of
people, soliciting combat was, in part, an often unconscious attempt to draw
fire away from other people in the family that they loved whom they per-
ceived to be more fragile. If they could somehow tolerate the escalating
assaults their pushback produced, they could reassure themselves that the self
was capable of surviving. The liability that this particular strategy carried
with it seemed to be directly related to the ferocity of a patient’s defiance. The
more patients depended upon counter-aggression to protect themselves – the
harder they fought, the less restraint they used to modulate their aggression –
the more likely they seemed to be to call on brutish forms of aggression to
make themselves feel safe in the intimacies they attempted in adulthood. In
the face of real or perceived threat, they reflexively adopted an “eviscerate
your opponent before they could hurt you” approach which, of course,
mimicked the way they had protected themselves against the narcissistic
parent. They also seemed to have great difficulty modulating their emotions,
responding to and acting on what they felt rather than being able to think
about it. These people often found themselves in stormy adult relationships
marked by lots of out-of-control conflict they were at a loss to know how to
prevent. While their behavior might deeply trouble them, occasioning suffo-
cating remorse as they confronted the injury they had caused in people they
loved, they were loath to give up the one defense that had safeguarded them
earlier in their life. They seemed to prove less amenable to psychotherapy and
less likely to seek out treatment than people who had not adopted an extreme
aggression strategy.
There did appear to be an optimal level of aggression to use to fend off the
narcissistic other. Not so little that one was constrained to occupy a tiny
space that left the self little room to grow and not so expansive that it had to
be supported by ungoverned aggression. The “just right” range of aggression
seemed to allow people their best chance to preserve enough of the self so
that future intimacy and future growth were possible. These were the people
who seemed to do best with themselves in the long run. The capacity to fight
back at just right levels was probably mediated by a number of factors
including, perhaps, the presence of a supportive or protective parent, access to
a mentoring relationship in the family or the community, a rich native
endowment of social and intellectual potentialities, avenues of escape from the
narcissistic other, etc.
It is striking to me, as I have reflected previously, that the narcissist repli-
cates many of the conditions that define his own inner life – starvation;
enduring, suffocating hunger; envy of all that others appear to have that the
178 Impact on the Psyche

self is missing; fear of dependence; contrivance; a taste for cruelty; a blighted,

rage-filled interior; a profound sense of inner badness; a sense that both one’s
inner and external worlds are infiltrated by threat and malevolence; and high
levels of vigilance.
There do appear to be important manifest differences between narcissistic
personalities and people who mount resistance, in one form or another, to
narcissistic incursion. Unlike a narcissistic personality, shame is a prominent
experience. So, too, is fear of abandonment, depression, subjectively high
levels of self-hatred, inertia, and ruminative equivocation. And, unlike the
narcissist, rather than feeling the need to occupy center stage continuously,
there is a strong drive to disappear and erase oneself that includes a need to
back away from successes and disconfirm them. Sense of inner badness and of
one’s own unattractiveness is exquisitely apparent whereas in the narcissist it
is hidden. The self is also experienced as helpless and powerless as opposed to
being infected with grandiosity and indomitability. Healthy entitlement is
damaged and certainly not inflated in the way that it is in a narcissistic
personality.
All of these differences help set a different course for some of the people
targeted by narcissism than the course which the narcissist follows himself. It
is a course, as I have said, that is fraught with terrible risks. Some people
either don’t survive or barely survive. Many have to contend with lifelong
sequelae. And some few transcend their pain to a significant, but always very
imperfect, degree.
One of the potential outcomes of living in a narcissistic surround that I
want to consider now is the pathway that I saw myself moving down in what
felt like an almost inexorable fashion. Being called upon to accommodate my
father’s shifting interpretations of reality, facing the necessity of disguising my
own counter responses to narcissistic violation, and being able, more or less
consistently, to respond to a threatening environment in a chameleon-like way
contributed to a self that was ravaged by pretense, by a habit of pervasive
dissociation and numbness, and by profound, underlying rage incited by the
devastation that pervaded and defined my sense of self. Chronic exposure to
abuse and bullying evoked murderous retaliatory fantasies and acts of cruelty
I directed towards easy targets, helpless animals. The momentary aliveness
that my cruelty generated in me provided some relief from the numbing effect
of dissociation, giving me the opportunity to at least feel something. Apart
from transient relief, however, my engagement with cruelty horrified me. Why
was I unable to feel untouched by the suffering I was witnessing? Could I not
feel anything beyond the boundaries of my own pain? Was I too dead inside
to be able to engage with life except through sadism?
I had another fear. I felt so devoid of self I could feel the urge to try to
copy someone else, to replicate their personality as closely and as completely
as I could so that not only could I look like a real person, but I might actually
feel like one as well, offsetting, in the process, the skeletal self I had to live
 Impact on the Psyche 179

with. It’s challenging to capture this subjective state in a way that adequately
describes it. I can recall being afraid that my emptiness would prove to be so
unbearable I would be compelled to give up what few shards of identity I
possessed, replacing them with the newer, bigger, more sustaining identity
that somebody else offered me. At the same time, the idea that somebody else
could possess me and define me terrified me. There was so little of me, after
all, maybe I would disappear altogether if I made too much room for some-
body else.
I learned to rely on my ability to simulate socially appropriate responses to
hide my secrets, but my underlying transformation increasingly horrified me.
Could I become – in a different fashion than my father had – someone largely
devoid of humanity whose ravaged insides would lead me to hurt people in
the way that I had animals? In the midst of the intense darkness that had
enveloped me it seemed plausible to me that that’s where I was heading.
Numbness and cruelty were such big parts of me I could not imagine that I
would ever be capable of experiencing loving or communal feelings. It was
dauntingly scary. I suppose the fact that I was scared by what was happening
to me offered some testament that I could be somebody else, but, honestly, as
I look back, I’m not sure my observing self could have saved me.
In actuality, it did not take much (or perhaps it was a lot) to make a dif-
ference: the (to me) improbable mentorships of a few coaches and teachers
who demonstrated obvious affection for me. Had I been possessed of a less
attractive personality to them or had I not been in as supportive a school
environment, I think I might well have found myself trapped in a psycho-
pathic existence. My psychopathy would indeed have looked different than my
father’s narcissism, a parade of obvious weaknesses and vulnerabilities con-
trasting his contrivance of strength. Psychopathy literature makes reference to
so-called secondary psychopathy, which is thought, by some authors, to be
reflective of people with a psychopathic core who are obviously tormented by
their existence rather than appearing to be impervious to various manifest
forms of mental illness, like depression. That, I think, is who I very nearly
became. With just a little of the right help at the right time from my teachers
and coaches, however, the stage was set for me to find a way out of my black
space. The journey was interminable, requiring a lifetime of effort and help.
At many points along the way I found myself utterly bereft of hope. How
could I ever find someone to love me? Or support myself, never mind a
family? Where was the energy and discipline I would need to sustain a career?
What could I possibly have to give to friends that they could value? Every
time I saw someone begging on the street, I palpably cringed. I saw my own
future.
I want to mention another pathway that I think people might follow in
response to threat a narcissistic other creates for them. I have not directly
observed people who have moved down this pathway as part of my clinical
work. I only have the examples that my father’s subordinates provided of
180 Impact on the Psyche

what might possibly unfold in a narcissistic family context. Could children, I

wondered, living in such a frightening and stressful environment try to protect
themselves by identifying with the narcissist’s perspectives and values,
mimicking the aggrieved, entitled, bullying postures so pronounced in the nar-
cissistic other? I have often read about the kiss ass up, kick ass down mentality
attributed to Nazi hierarchical structures. Could children do the same thing?
Could they walk the walk that the narcissist required of them, later playing the
part of the narcissist themselves with someone more vulnerable than they were?
“I’ll give you the obeisance and the pliability that you want from me, but when
I’m dealing with someone I perceive to be weaker than me, I get to be the bully,
just as you have been with me.” A child, I would imagine, might make such a
choice almost intuitively, instinctively. Once they had done so, identity would
begin to consolidate around the posture of alternating obeisance and bullying
that they had adopted for themselves. The whole process would probably unfold
largely outside the child’s conscious awareness.
I think this process would be facilitated if the child came to understand that
the narcissistic other was prepared to reward them for adopting a narcissistic
stance. Identification would not just represent an escape, then, from narcis-
sistic invasion and diminishment, but rather a potentially effective way to win
praise and respect from the depreciatory other as well as a means of con-
solidating one’s own version of grandiosity. For a self that would otherwise
feel beset by emaciation, starvation, and incompletion, the inducement the
narcissistic other offers to identify with them might well feel irresistible.
Taking in the narcissistic other and refashioning oneself in their image, how-
ever, might depend upon whether one is possessed of constitutional givens
and proclivities of personality that would render such a transformation both
bearable and actionable. What may well have saved me from being ensnared
by such a process was my mother’s obvious distaste for my father; had she not
resisted him, I wonder whether I would have been able to protect myself from
a devastating identification with him.
For me, the fulcrum in this process is not threat of humiliation if the child
resists identification, but rather the spiritual withering and identity dissolution
that appears to be an inevitable consequence of narcissistic predation. Part-
nering in a relationship with the narcissist, whether as a spouse, child, or
colleague, progressively exposes one to erosion of identity. This erosion of self,
particularly in family members close to the narcissist, does represent a kind of
soul murder that produces agonies of suffering and often results, as it did with
my mother and with me, in a fragmented self that denies one a sense of per-
sonal cohesion. People who face profound struggle with these issues can
sometimes be described as Borderline Personality Disorders (BPD). The por-
trait I provided of my mother in Chapter 3 offers one an in-depth look at the
ways in which BPD tragically manifests itself.
But what of adults? While I understand that fear could impel adults to
make a choice like this for themselves, I would think that they would have to
 Impact on the Psyche 181

sacrifice self-awareness in order to facilitate movement towards the new self

their fear propelled them to acquire. How could you make such a shift, in
other words, if you were aware of what was happening to you, unless, of
course, you deliberately contrived your new face to make you more acceptable
to the threatening party? If deliberate contrivance was not informing your
behavior, how could you embrace such a shift if you allowed yourself to be at
all thoughtful about what was happening to you? Wouldn’t the cost feel too
high? You would somehow have to shut down your capacity for critical
thought, allowing yourself to swallow holus-bolus that which the other party
required of you. In return, you would get to experience relief from fear and
you would also get to feel strong and perhaps indomitable when opportunities
for you to aggress against others presented themselves. Fear shutting down
selfhood and our ability to think for ourselves. A powerful testament to the
extraordinary effect fear potentially has on the human psyche. Such ideas
took me back, again, to a reconsideration of the events of 1933 Germany
which Eric Larson so powerfully documented in his book, Garden of Beasts.
It is important to remind the reader again at this junction that other clin-
icians/researchers have identified additional pathways that might potentially
lead to psychopathy. Genetics would appear to play some role. Multiple
environmental factors beyond those that were part of my own and my father’s
histories have also been seen to make a contribution. People who might
potentially be described as psychopathic also appear to be possessed of spe-
cific patterns of brain function observable through specialized imaging tech-
niques. With respect to the latter, what I think we don’t know at this point is
whether the psychopathic brain could learn to acquire some of the respon-
sivity that is characteristic of “healthier” brain function. Intriguingly, one
clinician investigating imaging characteristics of functioning psychopathic
brains discovered that his own brain imagery was compatible with that of
psychopaths. In the context of this discussion, one wonders whether patterns
of brain function typifying psychopathy must always express themselves as a
manifest psychopathic personality. If not, what factors might mediate the
difference between underlying functional brain realities and clinical presenta-
tion? We just don’t know yet – or, at least, we don’t yet have the compelling
answers we want.
Chapter 13

Legacies of Narcissism – Malignant

Narcissistic Leadership and the
State as a Narcissistic Entity

We have seen that a narcissistic presence in the family produces terrible dis-
ruptions of selfhood, some or many of which may reverberate throughout a
person’s life. Depression and anxiety are its common offspring. People don’t
feel safe. The ability to trust is ruptured. Both the world around them and
inside them assumes a malignant aspect. Capacity for intimacy is damaged or
forfeited. The acts of cruelty that invade them and the profound dissociation
that they rely upon to protect themselves compromises empathy and facil-
itates brutality. The self is starved and ill formed, primed to take in identities
others might attempt to impose on them. For some, the stage is set for pre-
dilection to psychopathy and narcissism.
I would ask the reader now to project the effects of the narcissist on a
family onto the state he governs.
Because the narcissist is himself at war, as he dominates his culture, he places
it on a war footing. Everyone is potentially suspect and anyone can become a
potential target. Threat is an omnipresent, crushing reality. Like him, members
of his culture learn to become hypervigilant, on guard against predation and
violation. War requires enemies. The narcissist provides them. Enemies are
identified within the host culture and outside it – in either case, unfortunates who
are seen to disrupt or stand in the way of the narcissist’s entitlements. The
“moral” imperative of the narcissist is acquisition of resources of all kinds, save
for decency and love. Just as is true of the narcissist in his personal life, pursuit of
desired supplies that an enemy within the state or a designated enemy outside
possesses can unfold with terrible ruthlessness. The narcissist is driven by his own
subjective starvation. With suppression of freedom, selfhood, and personal
initiative, those he would govern endure erosion of spirit as well. His imperative
to engage in predation becomes theirs. Their reactive, but poorly understood,
starvation helps drive them.
The narcissistic leader promises compensation for the spiritual emaciation he has
helped create. The governed are invited to bask in narcissistic self-aggrandizement,
attributing to themselves aspects of “potency” and “strength” that the master pur-
ports to possess. They, too, can share in his spoils, enjoying the fruits of predation
that he sanctions. If only they would surrender themselves to him, allowing him to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-13
 A Narcissistic Entity 183

define them, he would enhance them. They can become bigger and more powerful
than they have ever felt themselves to be.
In circumstances in which national identities may already have been com-
promised by a sense of acute and unbearable vulnerabilities, by humiliation,
and by unmanageable subjective levels of fear generated by previous priva-
tions and suffering, the narcissistic promise is a seductive one. Conditions of
economic contraction, defeat, war, political chaos, and widespread disease all
help set the stage for receptivity to narcissistic leadership. If a real crisis
doesn’t exist, the narcissist may invent one, or may exaggerate an existing one,
emphasizing their unique capacity to save those being threatened. Visionary
leadership is his prerogative. Only he can solve the problems confronting his
people.
His seeming capacity to appreciate others’ circumstances is illusory. He
always serves his own ends.
The bargain that the governed enters into with him requires utter sub-
ordination of the self to his wishes. People that the narcissist leads are impel-
led to surrender old and possibly more humane versions of the self for the
new self the narcissist offers them, one seemingly more powerful and certainly
more entitled than the old self. This new self must be aligned with the nar-
cissist’s rapacity. Absolute loyalty and subjugation of the self is required.
Because the new self accommodates escalating erosion of humanity, its bearer
must endure increasing starvation and withering of spirit. Hate and fear begin
to replace both love and sustaining communion with others.
Projection of the aggrandized self, or part of it, onto an entire country is a
complicated and inherently unstable undertaking for the narcissistic leader,
characterized, as it must be, by efforts to diminish followers so that they
represent extensions of narcissistic will at the same time that he attempts to
empower them – the latter being an implicitly threatening endeavor for the
narcissist. After all, much of the narcissist’s energy focuses itself upon pre-
venting growth and expansion in adjacent personalities.
Having imbued his followers with his greatness, he must now ensure that
they never exceed him, that their voices never assume more authority than
his. Only he can be the potentate, but he must somehow feed the aggrand-
izement he has encouraged in them without antagonizing them when he sub-
jects them to diminishment. He relies on fear to accomplish this end. Fear is
the deliberate by-product of the chaotic, arbitrary, shifting moods he adopts,
his shearing positional changes, and the bullying and the cruelty he so fre-
quently enacts. Making people afraid serves him well. Anyone, even those
close to him, can become an enemy, as those around him must be acutely
aware.
The narcissistic leader is himself afraid all the time, though he would rarely
acknowledge it as fear. In an attempt to confirm domination which, uncon-
sciously at least, must always feel in jeopardy, the narcissist must continually
test others. They must show themselves willing to accept his version of the
184 A Narcissistic Entity

truth, even though it may change from moment to moment. They must also
show themselves ready to make unconscionable sacrifice should he require
that of them. They must endure his contempt, his ethical lapses, and his
breaches of loyalty, which he requires in order to ensure that no one can
realize enduring purchase in his life. Satisfactory testing produces momentary
reassurance, but exacerbates longer-term fears. At some point, as the narcis-
sist at least subliminally appreciates, drinking from the poisoned chalice must
eventually produce resistance among those he commands to do so.
Having assigned himself visionary powers and having perpetually recon-
firmed his expansive abilities, he must somehow keep afloat an outsized ver-
sion of himself (much like my father and I had to do as adultified children)
that can never admit to fallibility or error. This, too, is an impossible propo-
sition and an inherently unstable one. Errors of judgement must be projected
onto subordinates. Cracks in the aggrandized self that failures occasion are
very badly tolerated, producing hysterical outbursts of rage fueled by a mea-
sure of panic the narcissistic leader can never acknowledge.
All of these sources of instability continually feed a narcissistic leader’s
sense that his war footing must be maintained. No one can be trusted for
long. Cynicism reinvigorates itself. Vigilance never relaxes. The self is always
prepared for combat.
The war footing that the narcissistic leader maintains – supported by per-
vasive rage, unyielding mistrust, and destructive, out-of-control appetites –
requires perpetual combat. So long as the narcissistic leader can fight, he can
create a measure of safety for himself, reassuring himself through combat that
he is the biggest, baddest cat on the playground. Others must be subjugated
before they can hurt him. The rage and pain he so effectively mobilizes in his
followers needs targets. So long as he can draw his people together with the
endless combat he requires for himself, he can turn their attention away from
the depredations he visits on them. He can keep the show going a little while
longer. In part – but only in part – his grandiosity protects him against the
sense of instability that the whole endeavor possesses.
The effect that narcissism appears to have on individuals growing up in a
narcissistic family offers a glimpse of what can happen on a larger, or national
scale, in the context of narcissistic leadership. Narcissistic leadership creates
imposing threat that members of a given culture must find a way to accom-
modate themselves to. The ambience of fear and uncertainty that the narcis-
sistic leader creates pervades people’s lives. The more power the narcissist has,
the more crushing and the more invasive fear becomes. Threat generates dis-
sociation and overall blunting of emotion. It creates erosion of humane sen-
sibility, of capacity for empathy, and of capacity for thoughtful discourse that
appreciates nuance and complexity. It demands an action-oriented, friend or
foe orientation in which delineation of bad guys becomes a primary concern.
Because thought is framed in simpleminded dictums, objectification and
dehumanization of the other is facilitated. It becomes easier to experience
 A Narcissistic Entity 185

revulsion for an adversary because we don’t see them as fully human, but
rather as cardboard cut outs worthy of the aggression and debasement we
direct towards them.
In such an environment the narcissist possesses frightening opportunities to
exploit his rapacity and his taste for cruelty. He finds ready and willing allies.
People enduring endemically high and unsupportable levels of fear become
desperate for safety. For many of them, safety will reside in the tyrannies that
the narcissistic leader allows them to exercise. This is what I referred to in the
previous chapter as a “kiss ass up, kick ass down” mentality. The chance to
bully someone else even as you yourself have been bullied helps many people
feel stronger, better protected. Such bullying can be carefully orchestrated by
the state and can be expected to unfold more or less within prescribed limits.
In effect, a kind of institutionalized bullying. It may be embedded in a
Byzantine, deeply competitive, bureaucratic fabric that pits various bureau-
cratic arms of the government against one another, as seemed to be char-
acteristic of Germany in World War II. Bullying and threat serve the
narcissistic state well, generating a cadre of angry, frightened people who have
learned to mitigate their own fear by beating up their neighbors. A cadre of
angry, frightened people whose own habits of predation can be all too readily
harnessed by the narcissistic leadership. People who become inured, through a
habit of predation, to the harm that they routinely cause others and to the
harm that they routinely endure themselves.
Perhaps counterintuitively, investment of power in an autocratic leader and
the kiss ass up, kick ass down bureaucratic fiefdoms autocracy births, each
headed by their own potentate, exacerbates inefficiencies, obstructing attempts
to rationalize resources rather than facilitating them. Too much energy is
consumed by fear and by fractious rivalries that, while serving the narcissistic
leader’s needs to wrongfoot those he governs, badly compromises productiv-
ity. Democracy, with its relatively greater reliance on collaboration, proves to
be more successful.
Outright persecution of internal enemies sanctioned by a narcissistic state
also ratchets up fear that everybody in the state, whether they have been tar-
geted or not, must live with. The more vicious the persecution of a given
group, the greater the fear that everyone endures. In a setting of such suffo-
cating fear, people can feel relief – perhaps a mixture of exhilaration, pleasure
in others’ suffering, and a sense of power – that they themselves are immune
to the devastation that the other must bear. Schadenfreude becomes a wide-
spread, culturally sanctioned experience. Underlying “relief,” however, there
is unspoken dread that one’s immunity is not indelible. A dread that one can
become a hated outsider. Moral frameworks that the state provides justifying
targeted persecutions help support people’s sense that they, themselves, will
not be touched by the state’s wandering hatreds. In a state where fear fills so
much of the space in people’s lives, the moral justifications the state provides
for its actions reflect the quality of thinking that fear imposes: simplistic, ugly
186 A Narcissistic Entity

generalizations possessed of visceral appeal that offer only the thinnest veneer
of a rationale for prejudicial rage. What is important is identification of ene-
mies through language dominated by contempt. Being able to incite prejudice
through the use of such language allows the state to quickly shift rage and
fear in its populace towards the new targets it finds desirable. People’s identi-
fication with the aggrandizement of the narcissistic leader helps them to con-
tinue to feel out of reach of the prejudices and manufactured bigotries
swirling around them.
Acts of cruelty can unfold with numbing regularity. The unthinkable soon
becomes commonplace. There is so much assault on people’s sensibility and
humanity that it becomes impossible to respond to all of it, much less process
it. The more persecutorial the narcissistic state acts, the more frightened
everyone becomes. Fear begets rage, which is easier to experience than help-
lessness and vulnerability. The pool of people whose fear and rage the state
can marry to its own intentions grows. It befits a narcissistic leader’s pre-
ference that these are people, increasingly, whose humanity has been dimin-
ished. They can be more readily paired with the narcissist’s ruthless intentions.
Survival in a fear drenched environment becomes everybody’s primary
concern. To separate oneself from the narcissistic leader’s voice is to identify
oneself as “other” or enemy. As state and leader become ever more powerful,
acts of resistance become ever more dangerous and ever more improbable.
People’s fear transforms itself into bullying directed at state sanctioned tar-
gets. The state institutionalizes its prejudices and provides rationalizations for
them. Acts of bigotry eventually become second nature for a dissociated,
frightened populace. The acculturation of objectification and depreciation of
others makes it ever easier to swallow justifications for rapacity that state and
culture continue to elaborate. So justified, entitlements extend themselves,
becoming culture wide “givens” or “truths” that are experienced as self-evi-
dent. Lies about others insinuate themselves into consciousness, unfolding
reflexively and casually. Prejudice and brutality barely disconcert, becoming
commonplace acts that express themselves in everyday life quite unselfcon-
sciously. People who act thusly would be shocked and offended if an outsider
questioned their decency; they would point to the respect and everyday acts of
kindness they direct towards their own kind or members of their own tribe,
decrying those they exploited or persecuted as unworthy of humane con-
sideration. In such a fashion, decency and brutality come to coexist comfor-
tably with one another. Dissociation and compromised empathy render this
marriage possible. And in such a context, various inhumane practices, like
slavery, can become institutionalized and flourish. Even as a cultural milieu
becomes less oppressive, bigotries continue to express themselves. Those who
oppress would find it far too hard and far too jeopardizing to acknowledge
the cruelties they enact. Looking at the collective damaged “self” they
embody would feel too dangerous and potentially too compromising to
endure. Only with the passage of time marked by painful and fractious self
 A Narcissistic Entity 187

reflection could such a society effectively transform itself, moving towards a

gentler and more caring version of its former self.
People who support the narcissistic leader, representing the apparatus of
state, also suffer diminishment of humanity as they are called upon inces-
santly to betray themselves, to betray their colleagues, and to betray the truth.
The lapses required of them violate their integrity, which, increasingly, is for-
saken. That which they might previously have found intolerable and objec-
tionable becomes acceptable as they, too, become inured to the ugliness that
surrounds them and fills them. Whatever moral authority or individuality
they might once have possessed becomes suborned to leadership.
The narcissistic leader finds resources in unlikely places in the populace he
governs. People who share his bigotries and prejudices are drawn forward.
They are granted stature and offered political opportunity that allows them to
enact policies consonant with their own natures, but at odds with respect for
diversity. In a tribal environment, “same” connotes friend and safety; “other”
represents enemy and unwelcome adversary. These new leaders further frac-
ture society, inciting old and new hatreds that serve up an ongoing supply of
targets that the narcissistic state requires for itself.
The narcissistic leader also finds himself comfortable with people who have
compromised themselves for personal gain, whether it takes the form of
status, money, power, or thirst for notoriety. Such people can be trusted
because they have shown themselves willing to sell themselves for the price
that they want. Their presence in the apparatus of state ensures that there will
be fewer voices to oppose the narcissistic voice. Their presence also com-
pounds the brutalities that the state enacts and the erosion of sensitivity that
unfolds.
Under narcissistic leadership, everybody endures at least some erosion of
their humanity. If the narcissistic leader extends his rapacity and embroils the
state in a live fire war, damage to humanity is corrosive and extensive, not
only for the inhabitants of the state but for those that they batter and destroy
with their armies. War shatters attachments, creating losses and wounds, both
physical and psychological, that may not heal themselves for generations. It
requires that one shut down one’s sensitivity to suffering. In a narcissistic
context, effective soldiering requires abandonment of conscience. The extra-
ordinary breadth and scope of suffering that war occasions diminishes peo-
ple’s ability to recognize their own pain or the pain in others. Stoicism
becomes a prized and necessary commodity.
Thus, the state and its people join with the narcissistic leader, increasingly
assuming the attributes of psychopathy. Not everyone in the state, of course;
some few individuals show themselves capable of surmounting fear and
engaging in acts of resistance. Sometimes resistance flourishes and a narcis-
sistic leader is deposed, though not always to better effect. Compromised
authoritarian leadership seems to result in an extended period of chaos and
violence before a more respecting form of government can be established.
188 A Narcissistic Entity

Narcissistic leadership may unfortunately follow itself with another author-

itarian presence. Contemporary human affairs continue to struggle with these
themes, though, thankfully, not on the scale that we once did. This is a
struggle that has played itself out throughout recorded history.
I believe that what people do in warfare remains with them, whether
unbidden or not, haunting their conscience. If war was undertaken largely as
an act of exploitation at the behest of a rapacious other, how does one
reconcile the injury that one has caused in war with one’s membership in the
human community? What of the acts of deliberate cruelty that war and a
terror filled existence instigate? How does one explain that to oneself ? If war
has been lost, the tribal narcissistic society must retreat into itself, shuttering
itself away from others’ view lest the indiscretions of a bad war become too
transparent and too personal. Tribalism therefore extends itself, perpetuating
an “us and them” state of being that is all too easily exploited by another
narcissistic leader. Dissociation, erosion of humane sensibilities, and devas-
tating postwar privations all make their own contributions to this tragic
vulnerability.
The film, “Labyrinth of Lies,” provides a thoughtful and disturbing look at
postwar adjustment, in this case, German home front realities following
World War II. Participants in the war struggle with their place in society after
the war is over. For many, what they did in the war becomes unspeakable.
They retreat into silos – small societies, like the remnants of a particular
combat organization – where discourse of some kind is possible. The outside
world, including the larger world of Germany, is shut out. As the title implies,
Germany devolves into fragments, each with its own closely guarded indis-
cretions – a broken mosaic of dissonant tribal interests that coalesce around
secrecy.
Accommodating ourselves to the breadth and the diversity of experience
that the human condition imposes on us is a challenging, if not terrifying
endeavor. We come into this world and this life understanding very little
about it, save for the genetic proclivities we possess that equip us to make
some sense out of what is happening to us. In the main, we need other people
to show us how to interpret that which takes place inside us and around us.
That which unfolds in our private worlds can all too readily assume a frigh-
tening aspect because it is seemingly so ungovernable, so illogical, so reckless,
and so amoral. How do we accept the many faces that present themselves to
us internally, some of which inspire creativity and offer intrinsic satisfaction
and some of which strike us as horrifying, repugnant, and dangerous? Our
parental guides need to help us make our way. If they are themselves repelled
by parts of their inner world, then we, too, are likely to feel the same way.
Those strictures and taboos that they rely upon to wall off parts of self they
find unacceptable we import into our own psyches, probably all too easily,
employing the same tools to keep ourselves safe that they did. I would think
that discomfort with our insides has dogged humanity from its inception. In
 A Narcissistic Entity 189

our primitive tribal iterations, frightening images and impulses that arose
internally were experienced as out-of-control and threatening to us; we miti-
gated the terror they caused us by projecting them onto the world around us,
treating them as gods, and appeasing them by offering them fealty, worship,
or supplicant fear. Institutions of worship and governance legitimized rules
for us to follow so that we could manage that which frightened us most – our
inner life. And we needed the means to manage our insides. Without the
constraints we created, our efforts to incrementally civilize ourselves would
have failed.
It is only by degree that we have come, gradually, to acquire a measure of
comfort and equanimity when we attempt to explore what we live with inside
ourselves. It has taken much of our human history to reach a point at which
we seek out treatment so that we might know ourselves better. Knowledge of
all kinds, including religious “truth” and self-knowledge, was largely a pre-
rogative of an authoritarian other. Someone else told us what to think and
feel and when to think and feel it. Art, science, literature, and commerce
offered the individual increasing opportunity to make their own decisions
about the conduct of their lives and the kind of relationship they would
establish with their own psyches. People enjoyed greater freedom to construct
their own moralities and to decide for themselves what was acceptable and
what was not about their inner lives. This evolution has been stormy and
challenging. It seems likely that individual freedom will continue to expand
and express itself, but it is hard to imagine that we will ever free ourselves
from reliance on authority and the structures that it imposes. We inherently
want and need oversight to feel safe with ourselves and to be safe with other
people.
Though we may think of ourselves as mostly intrepid explorers of our psy-
ches, many of us continue to find a trip through our own interiors to be a very
aversive and dangerous endeavor; even the most experienced of us will
acknowledge they still find aspects of this journey pretty daunting. Many of
us require oppressive strictures enforced by an overriding, implacable
authority to feel safe with big parts of ourselves that would otherwise seem
frighteningly out-of-control. For many people, stability and safety can best be
realized through authoritarian/fascistic hierarchies that appropriate morality
and its compatriots, fear and punishment. Such people want to be provided
with a clear and inviolate sense of what we can and cannot do. Unyielding
consequences and authority define those boundaries. A strong state and a
strong leader tell us who we are, who we ought to be, and under what cir-
cumstances we are to be the things we are told to be. It can be comforting for
us to know that someone else will tell us when it is moral to unleash our most
unacceptable impulses and when it is not, relieving us of a burden many of us
would rather avoid. Authoritarian and fascistic structures continue to seduce
and beguile us, then, offering to absolve us of carrying responsibility for our
own actions. We don’t have to worry about our inner lives anymore – at least
190 A Narcissistic Entity

not to the degree that we might otherwise have to in the absence of a pun-
ishing surround. Leader and state take care of it for us.
Authoritarian structures also solve another important problem. No longer
is the individual confronted with difficult existential questions about how to
create personal meaning; the state tells one what is important and even what
function one is to serve. If a citizen colors between the prescribed lines and
does a good job of it, rewards are to be had as is a strong sense of place in a
cohesive community. We are given purpose and belonging rather than having
to construct them for ourselves. Thus armed – part of something much bigger
and more powerful than ourselves – we can even defer dread about our own
mortality.
Authoritarian and fascistic structures will continue to draw many of us to
these forms of government and leadership. The costs that they can be seen to
impose in an increasingly complex, interrelated global village are formidable.
My sense is that autocratic forms of leadership will continue to seduce us,
creating sometimes unbearable tension between those of us who wish to
expand their prerogatives of freedom and those of us who wish to constrain
them. In delineating the liabilities that narcissistic leadership carries within
itself, it is my hope that we can develop more thoughtful and more extensive
conversations that better inform us about the choices we make and why we
make them. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded by malignant narcis-
sism throughout our history; now we must find the means, at last, to step
away from it and direct ourselves.
American Army psychologist Capt. G. M. Gilbert, tasked with observing
defendants at the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II, developed a
simple, but compelling, appreciation of what he thought evil was:

I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close
to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects
all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.
Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Totalitarian states compromise empathy with terrifying efficiency in a fashion

that is consistent with the interests of both state and leader. I have also sug-
gested, however, that the ability to compromise empathy exists within all of
us, independent of totalitarian influence. We turn empathy off to protect the
self or, I would maintain, to protect the tribe. We do so with a frightening and
casual automaticity. The easy facility with which we can turn off empathy
appears to be built into most or all of us. In many respects, negating empathy
has been an adaptive quality for us in the past, allowing ascendant forms of
civilization to triumph over neighbors and expand themselves, thus furthering
the broader interests of civilization itself. On a personal level, we can all too
readily harm others with either full or partial ignorance of what we have
done; when we act as part of a larger aggregate, neutralized empathy can
 A Narcissistic Entity 191

enable acts of extraordinary cruelty as part of either predation or defence

against others’ predation (or both). In a group context, we can violate others
with extreme prejudice at the same time that we demonstrate kindness and
empathic attunement with the people we care about. The transposition of
these realities captures, for me, an unintended implication of Hannah
Arendt’s phrase “banality of evil”: our capacity to accommodate both bru-
tality and decency in ourselves more or less simultaneously. The discourse
between these two contradictory parts of ourselves, however, sooner or later
proves to be a fractious one. We pay personal and social costs for the harm
we do others.
Given our propensity to turn away empathic feeling, even outside the
damaging impact that totalitarian leadership has on our humanity, we must
be ever mindful, as a species, of our need to support, enhance, and protect
empathic response in ourselves. Empathy rehearsal that the arts compel in
us – theatre, dance, music, literature, visual arts – is more than pleasure: it is
necessary for our continued survival.
The arts serve another crucial function: they help us accommodate our-
selves to the breadth and diversity of our inner life, including our many dark
corners. Much as “Alice in Wonderland” and “the Wizard of Oz” provided
me with a kind of road map to unconscious experience, reassuring me that I
could survive my own nightmares, the arts enable us to explore, in a relatively
safe way, facets of our experience that might otherwise be too frightening for
us to look at. In so doing they extend our appreciation and our acceptance of
human realities, reassuring us we can not only endure what we might discover
inside ourselves, but become, as a result of our arts’ journeys, kinder, more
curious, more fanciful and imaginative, more flexible in our thinking, more
creative and innovative, and more humane. Cultures that support rich diver-
sity of arts expression potentially help us expand ourselves, encouraging us to
take risks with ourselves so that we might evolve and become better, more
thoughtful versions of who we are.
The evolution of self and of culture that unfolds, however, is not without
jeopardy, as I have said; not everyone moves ahead at the same pace and in
the same way and not all change is beneficial. Cultures need time to digest
new forms. And new ideas don’t always work well. Here, too, the arts help us.
Vigorous reconsideration and re-exploration of emergent frameworks through
the arts can be – and invariably is – undertaken. In a very imperfect and often
uneven fashion what unfolds is an even more accurate appraisal of both our
humanity and our possibilities. Gradually – incrementally – we start to move
away from the rigid defensive postures we have felt compelled to protect at all
costs – often through injurious acts towards ourselves and others – that have
so typified our history.
Would that this evolutionary process were easier. With the passage of time,
we do seem to be making more headway with ourselves, but my fear is that
time is a commodity that may soon fail us. Such a large part of humanity
192 A Narcissistic Entity

continues to yearn for some of the “safety” that oppression and autocratic
forms seem to promise.
In addition to protecting the arts, there are other measures we must take on
our journey to move towards and enhance that which is best in ourselves.
My father’s life story offers a passionate argument against the potentially
devastating effects inequality and poverty have on an emerging personality.
The resulting distortions in development lay the groundwork not only for
personal suffering, but for devastating injury for other people whom such an
individual touches with their pain. Remember now that the personality that
emerges from such suffering may be particularly well-suited to exploit
opportunities for leadership of large communities of people. The damage that
can be wrought can multiply itself to an incalculable degree. Over 60 million
people are thought to have died in World War II. This astonishing number, as
intimidating and imponderable as it is, is eclipsed by the numbers of people
enduring starvation, crippling wounds, displacement, shattered attachments,
and psychological injuries. It is for this reason that I think it is important to
append the word “malignant” to “narcissism” in the descriptive phrase
malignant narcissism, which forms part of the title of this book.
The word malignant is not meant to reference a judgement about the per-
sonality organization I and others have described, nor does it excuse us from
responding to such people with compassion and understanding, as hard as
that may be. It is, instead, intended to remind us of the extraordinary cala-
mities such personalities can visit on humankind. As a descriptor, then,
malignant calls our attention to a distortion of the human character that is
extremely dangerous when allowed to govern communities and nations.
Malignant prompts us to be ever mindful of the risks we face when we permit
ourselves to be led by malignant narcissists. Vigilance and an awareness of the
destructive potentiality malignant narcissistic leadership embodies helps us
better protect ourselves against future, and probably unimaginable, cata-
strophes. In this way, we are better equipped to avoid devastation and pain
that might impose itself in the presence of persisting blindness. Malignant,
then, also applies to the horrifying consequences ignorance creates for us and,
as such, implicates everyone; malignancy, after all, is a quality that all of us
possess and that all of us must recognize and understand if we are to be safe
with one another. Not an easy thing to do. I have to acknowledge that I
might have become my father. And the collective “we” need to acknowledge
we can be badly led, seduced into expressing the most blighted corners of our
souls.
Ian Hughes poignantly reminds us that we need to erect enduring, resilient
structures around us to ensure that we don’t get lost in our own darkness. In his
powerful and important book, Dangerous Minds, he identifies democracy as the
governmental form we probably conceived to help us contain our worst impul-
ses, including our willingness to be directed by tyrants. Like all else about the
best parts of the human character, democracy requires attentiveness,
 A Narcissistic Entity 193

commitment, and a full and accurate appraisal of its importance if it is to sur-

vive, never mind flourish. We dare not let ourselves believe that, once it assumes
the appearance of being well established, its self-protective functions will never
fail us. We have only to consider the experience of the past four years in the
United States under the Trump administration to remind us how vulnerable
democratic institutions can be, even in a relatively “old” democracy. Democracy,
as Hughes points out, has only recently proliferated as a popular governing
form; throughout most of human history it has been eclipsed by the autocracies
and tyrannies that have defined the human experience and that, even now, con-
tinue to struggle for ascendancy. We don’t readily or easily leave the destructive
parts of ourselves behind.
There is another terribly important function that democracy serves that I
think is implicit in Hughes’ work: democracy emphasizes the importance for
each of us of assuming responsibility for what we think, what we feel, and
how we parse morality. It implicitly requires us to stand apart from our con-
ventions to construct a point of view reflective of our individuality. It calls
upon us, in other words, to become responsible for our own value systems. It
tells us that if we disagree with government, we not only have the right, but
the responsibility to say so. The imperative for individual members of a
democratic society to express themselves thusly, however, has been a very
uneven and often deeply flawed undertaking. We are still torn between the
desire to encourage people to think for themselves versus our need for mem-
bers of a given society, including democratic ones, to act in concert with one
another and confirm perspectives that serve society’s stated ends. These are,
admittedly, often very hard choices to make.
Complicating the picture is what I see as a profoundly powerful human
yearning for affiliation and belonging that induces us to surrender ourselves
to context driven values, conventions, and “wisdom.” In effect, we give our-
selves permission not to think and feel so that we can confirm our place in
the group that establishes context for us. This is an extraordinarily powerful
human phenomenon, so far as I can see. It may also be reflective of our desire
to be led, often badly, by “strong” personalities who are willing to tell us how
to see ourselves and how to define our place in the world.
Receptivity to leadership and to conformity has in some respects worked
quite well for us, but it often means that we sidestep the discomfort of separ-
ating ourselves from the group, wrestling with our prerogatives, and for-
mulating a position that may identify us as outliers. Very, very hard to do,
even when the group we are part of encourages us to take such chances. The
desire to be led and the desire to belong helped me better understand why
subjects behaved as they did in the famous Milgram (1963) and Haney et al.
(1973) studies and why people could accommodate the destructive value sys-
tems of the Third Reich (as I have said earlier in this book, intolerable levels
of threat and terror also made their contributions to German conformity).
Disturbingly high percentages of Milgram’s subjects were willing to shock
194 A Narcissistic Entity

another person at dangerous levels each time they failed a learning trial
simply because they were told by an authoritative other to do so, unaware
that the shocks were not real; subjects assigned the role of prison guards in
the Zimbardo experiment, in turn, showed themselves all too willing to
accommodate themselves to a punitive guard mentality which they directed
towards subjects who had arbitrarily been assigned the role of prisoners. A
sort of context overwhelms conscience kind of scenario. Both of these studies
have been subject to extensive criticism, but each has nonetheless produced
almost indelible concern about our malleability.
Arendt (1963) has warned about people who avoid thinking and feeling for
themselves and who surrender their personhood to a larger totality; Dab-
rowski et al. (1973) has suggested that education which promotes con-
ventionality interferes with our capacity to be discerning; Fromm (1941) drew
our attention to our need to escape freedom of choice. It does seem that the
burden of assuming responsibility for ourselves as individuals is often intol-
erable. I believe that we have to be taught to do so, taught to be able to take
the kinds of chances that using one’s own voice requires. The caveat – and it’s
an enormous one – is that the less we understand about ourselves, about our
own pain, and about the shared human condition, the more unlikely we’ll be
to make choices that truly reflect our individuality and our capacity for
decency. Which brings us back to the arts, to respect for democratic values,
and to cultivation of individuality, most especially in the way that we educate
our young. Without such assets to draw upon, it will be all too easy for many
of us to become defined by context, whether such context represents a small
group or micro-cultural experience or a larger macro one. The world is, in
fact, cut up into myriad pieces, each characterized by its own attendant per-
ceptions and appraised realities. Somehow we need to render these differences
subjectively smaller than they feel so that our commonalities loom larger. We
have to come to believe that we are all part of the same human family.
Nationalism, elitism, exceptionality, and prejudice will only continue to divide
us and alienate us from one another, offering the most destructive parts of
ourselves more prerogatives to express themselves.
As I am putting these ideas into written form, I find myself wondering –
can we really do it? Can we pull off this piece of magic, effecting a paradigm
shift that moves us away from the fractured mosaic of self-interested silos
currently defining much of our world? If our response to the ongoing Covid-
19 pandemic serves as a metric of our capacity to shift our focus towards the
well-being of all humanity, we can see that our vaccination efforts have often
been compelled by the advantages that wealth and scientific privilege have
offered the world’s most resource-rich nations, many of whom appear to have
elevated the importance of their own political concerns and a “me first”
stance. Of course, there has also been generosity, but it has been very uneven,
very piecemeal, and not reflective of a coordinated, overall global response
that makes a rational, compassionate effort to address worldwide health
 A Narcissistic Entity 195

compromise. We may be able to make our patchwork quilt solutions work this
time, but what of the next? Of the waves of immigrants, the massive economic
and social disruptions, and the upsurgence in populism that we will soon face
as the effects of climate change accelerate?

References
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York,
N.Y.: Penguin.
Dabrowski, K., Kawczak, A., & Sochanska, J. (1973). The dynamics of concepts.
London, U.K.: Gryf Publications.
Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York, N.Y.: Farrar & Rinehart.
Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards. Naval
Research Reviews: 26.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, 67, 371–378.
Chapter 14

Reflections

In describing my father’s personal struggles with himself, I have suggested

that his challenges can be best understood as a unitary personality organiza-
tion (malignant narcissism) rather than an intersection of various personality
disorders (Kernberg, Kohut, Hughes, Malkin, Gartner, Stone) or as an
expression of an altogether different unitary conception of personality (see
Tansey, Dodes, Friedman). Of course, parsimony is beguiling. As I have noted
elsewhere, it is, however, important to acknowledge again that my appraisal
of my father’s personality and of the personalities that I worked with that I
designated as malignant narcissists may only capture a limited set of realities
that attend this most dangerous variant of the human character. We can only
expect real clarity to emerge after many clinicians have added their voices and
tested their ideas alongside mine. What then emerges may be substantially
different than the portrait I have painted.
As I have also pointed out elsewhere in this book, diagnosis is a very chal-
lenging concept. The DSM–5 currently conceives of diagnosis as clusters of
symptoms, behaviors, and traits that are felt to manifest themselves in the
framework of a particular diagnostic category. The resulting patchwork quilt
of diagnostic “realities” we have conceived, many of which include over-
lapping clusters of markers or symptoms, is hard to grasp except as distinct
categories, especially in the absence of psychodynamics and etiologies that
might allow us to better interrelate the “siloed” diagnoses we work with day
by day. If we include as part of the diagnostic process delineation of specific
psychodynamics and/or etiologies associated with a diagnostic entity – an
approach that I prefer – the complaint can be made, with some justification,
that making a diagnosis is less “objective” than our current consensus driven
system. But I would maintain that unless we include psychodynamics and
etiology as part of our appreciation of diagnosis, we sacrifice richness and
depth of understanding in preference for avoiding a bit of mess. Even more
importantly, we deny ourselves opportunities to capitalize upon the impreci-
sion and messiness that a focus on psychodynamics and etiology occasions,
which, while creating ambiguity for us in the short run, begins to open doors
for us in the longer run we must not turn away from. This is the kind of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003246923-14
 Reflections 197

messiness, in other words, that is heuristic and is therefore essential to scien-

tific endeavor. As I noted earlier in this book, use of a diagnostic tool like the
PDM-2 helps us more fully capture the complexities and important realities
that attends each individual’s unique life experience, further extending diag-
nostic appreciation that the DSM offers.
As I have indicated earlier, I don’t find investigation of critical phases of
development (narcissistic, oral receptive, oral aggressive, anal sadistic, phallic,
genital) to be nearly as helpful in understanding personality distortions and
challenges as I do elucidation of overall patterns of being, thinking, feeling,
acting, and experiencing that present themselves in our relationship with
ourselves and that are embedded in our relationship with others. In my book,
I have attempted to articulate some of those patterns and the ways in which
they are informed by defenses we rely on to protect the self. In this respect,
my position is more similar to Shaw’s than to Kernberg’s.
In endorsing a relational perspective, I am very much aware that my
father’s autobiographies do not permit one a glimpse of what my father’s pre-
oedipal life experience might have been like. Accordingly, I don’t have the
means – other than engaging in extraordinary supposition – of weighing the
kind of contribution early trauma of the sort that Kohut, Kernberg, and
others envisioned unfolding at critical phases of development might have
made to my father’s inflexible investment in grandiosity. I would say the
autobiographies do attest, however, very compellingly to relational patterns of
trauma that iterated themselves seemingly endlessly throughout my father’s
later growing up and young adult years.
Like Fromm, I believe that we are possessed of a variety of innate drives we
feel compelled to try and consummate rather than believing that we begin
with two core drives (libidinal and aggressive drives) that eventually differ-
entiate themselves into a multiplicity of felt intentionalities. Among the core
drives that I see expressing themselves in people are the desire to love and to
be loved; the drive to be autonomous; the drive to be competent; a proclivity
to be empathic and consolidate our relationships with others through
empathic attunement; a need for belonging and affiliation; and an abiding
hunger for meaning. I would also say that there are powerful drives for sym-
biosis and for aggression, both of which may express themselves in myriad
forms. In my clinical experience, frustration of any of these drives can pro-
duce what we call pathology, but I would also say that disruption of our need
to both express and receive love makes a disproportionate contribution to
human suffering. In this respect, again, my views are closer to Shaw’s and, in
this case, Hughes and Kohut’s, than to Kernberg’s.
I do find that there are numbers of points of agreement between Kernberg’s
formulation of malignant narcissism and my own. I very much agree with him
that grandiosity in a malignant narcissistic personality protects such a per-
sonality from identity fragmentation. I think the underlying, but probably
poorly articulated threat of such dissolution probably compels the malignant
198 Reflections

narcissist to cling evermore desperately to personal aggrandizement, though

he would be horrified to confront such a reality in himself and/or to make
such an admission. For my father, grandiosity appeared to be the means he
relied upon to survive in a world and in relationships where he was required
to carry everyone else’s burdens on his shoulders. It insulated him against the
helplessness and terror that must have pervaded his early life. Through its
agency, he could assure himself, however improbably, that he could gratify the
mountainous oral rage his background had incited. It also reassured him that
in spite of his repeated violation of others, his grandiosity and self-aggrand-
izement would see him through. So, like Kernberg, Mika, and Kohut – in
contrast to Shaw who emphasized the traumatizing narcissist’s unconscious
fear of shame or Fromm, who identified the malignant narcissist’s vulner-
ability to underlying depression – I see the malignant narcissist as being
inherently and probably unconsciously frightened that his whole being faces
unbearable jeopardy should he fail to protect his outrageous, larger than life
self-attributions. On the other side of such a failure is personal disintegration.
I also see strong similarities between borderline personality organization
and malignant narcissism, as Kernberg does. Both personalities employ many
of the same defenses (splitting, projection, projective identification, idealiza-
tion/denigration), both are impelled by oral rage, and both are preoccupied
with concerns about abandonment, though this concern manifests itself in
very different forms. For people grappling with Borderline Personality Dis-
order (BPD), abandonment is an ever present and all too painful focus, one
that shapes much of their behavior and experience. The malignant narcissist,
in turn, has seemingly neutered vulnerability to abandonment by refusing to
engage in loving exchange, but is nevertheless endlessly beset with obsession
about loyalty, which is tested compulsively and interminably, never yielding
him a secure position. He lives his life on this knife’s edge, always looking for
the next betrayal, ready to react to it with ruthlessness. His world must feel
like a very precarious place indeed as he lurches from one failed relationship
to another, much like the experience people with BPD endure. Both of these
personality organizations are also profoundly engaged in their attempts to
maintain cohesion. In BPD, however, identity diffusion and fragmentation are
painfully apparent and painfully persistent facets of their reality, while in
malignant narcissism, personality structure appears to be strongly cohesive,
but cohesion is established at the price of great rigidity and inflexibility. The
entire structure strikes one as frighteningly brittle, but I have seen that
malignant narcissistic personality organization can endure far longer and
demonstrate far more resilience than one imagines it would, even though it
appears to carry the seeds of its own destruction. Stalin and Mao are two
probable examples.
One readily sees that the malignant narcissist probably carries far fewer
positive representations of self and of relationships than a person struggling
with a borderline state, although the person presenting a borderline state has
 Reflections 199

great difficulty establishing stability for any of the rewarding images he or she
can introject. Notwithstanding such painful limitations, it appears to me that
people struggling with borderline states have a greater capacity, however
fleetingly and in spite of their obvious torment, to express their humanity and
to engage in acts of love and caring than the malignant narcissist does. And,
finally, both “disorders” are marked by a chaotic, impulse ridden presentation
that seemingly lurches from one personal disaster to another; difficulties with
self-regulation in both of these entities contributes to a stormy, sometimes
volatile and often unpleasant therapeutic relationship. In my clinical experi-
ence, people living with BPD would appear to have a far better prognosis
than people with malignant narcissism. I agree with Kernberg that malignant
narcissism is “almost” untreatable and I agree with Kohut and Shaw that
malignant narcissists (or traumatizing narcissists, a term that the latter pre-
fers) are very unlikely to present themselves for treatment.
I am appreciative that Shaw has identified the destruction of one’s sub-
jectivity as perhaps the most devastating wound one human being can inflict
on another. Importantly, these dramatic wounds may not arise from dramatic
and highly visible forms of abuse, but rather from relatively subtle insults
(from the perspective of the outside observer) that belie the extent of damage
being sustained. When we look for etiology that may set the stage for inter-
generational transmission of narcissism, we must be aware that the source of
injury may not be readily graspable, instead being embedded in a matrix of
destructive interactions that progressively compromise selfhood, but do not
do so in an obvious or declarative way. As I have said, I see disruptions of
subjectivity as empathic failures that visit themselves repeatedly during the
course of an entire developmental process as opposed to empathic failures
that occur at very early, vulnerable points in the affected person’s childhood
(Kohut). I think it has probably been our inclination to look for hyperbolized
examples of brutality in the childhoods of tyrants, but that may not be where
we find our most important explanations.
While I have argued that malignant narcissism is a subclass of psychopathy, I
am less certain where it might fall along a spectrum of psychopathic disorders or
even if various forms of psychopathy ought to be characterized as falling along a
spectrum (I don’t think they do). Though it is certainly true, like many clinicians,
that I have had the opportunity to work with psychopaths (almost exclusively in
an assessment format), I don’t feel my grasp of the dynamics that might char-
acterize psychopathy is as solid as my putative grasp of the dynamics of malig-
nant narcissism. Is it most appropriate to define psychopathy by criminality,
injuriousness to others, and profoundly impaired (or utterly compromised)
capacity for empathy or should we, instead, think about severity in terms of a
given psychopathic personality’s propensity to inflict devastation on a great
number of people, like a nation? I’m not even sure how I want to frame this
question. The distinctions that I’m attempting to address in rudimentary form
will begin to emerge with greater clarity once we know more.
200 Reflections

Kernberg (1984) proposes that we consider the malignant narcissist as

being possessed, albeit in a very limited way, of greater capacity for related-
ness than the psychopath, whom he regards as utterly unable to establish a
constructive attachment. My formulation of malignant narcissism suggests to
me that the malignant narcissist rarely “sees” the other, save as a tool to be
used to gratify exploitation. As I reflect on my experience with my father, I
can’t find convincing, substantial evidence of meaningful attachment. What I
think I see instead is his investment in the idealized parts of himself that he
projected onto me rather than substantial recognition and, crucially, appre-
ciation of my individuality. I wonder if I’m being too harsh. I kept looking for
points of genuine connection, but they remained elusively, tantalizingly just
out of reach. Maybe my rapt attention to his storytelling approximated
experiences of connection for me, but I was well aware that I was participat-
ing in his world rather than him attempting to reach into mine. Storytelling
was infiltrated by a kind of empathy on his part, however, which I would
define as his ability to read the pleasure that his stories created and as a
capacity to take pleasure in what he was doing for both of us. I can see that
among the malignant narcissistic patients with whom I worked there were
also points of genuine connection; the longer I worked with them and,
importantly, the more successful my work was, the more the real relationship
between the two of us advanced itself – but, in fairness, with one exception, I
have to admit that actualization of a real relationship was always extremely
limited. I haven’t been afforded the opportunity to undertake long-term work
with people who could otherwise be defined as psychopathic, thus I am not in
the position to say whether a relationship with them would have also afforded
moments of authenticity and shared humanity. Traditional formulations, of
course, maintain that the classically psychopathic personality is entirely bereft
of empathy, save for an ability to read what people want and then contrive a
seductive presentation that serves the psychopath’s unique ends.
Shaw’s framing of the differences between psychopathy and malignant
narcissism is also worthy of further comment. He saw the malignant narcissist
as harming others through a delusional conviction of righteousness while the
psychopath was felt to demonstrate thoroughly deliberate efforts to harm.
Unlike Shaw, I do see the malignant narcissist as predominantly engaging in
deliberately harmful acts. These behaviors serve the function of generating a
sense of aliveness, of confirming ascendancy and therefore safety, and of
reminding people to be afraid of him. Shaw’s wonderful phrase, “delusional
conviction of righteousness,” does, however, describe significant aspects of
malignant narcissistic dynamics.
I’d like now to draw attention again to Shaw’s, Kohut’s, and Kernberg’s
delineation of the psychodynamics potentially contributing to development of
malignant narcissism. As the reader has probably already noticed, their for-
mulations of etiology closely approximates some of the major dynamic forces
that pervaded my father’s early life experience. Shaw’s suggestion that
 Reflections 201

cumulative relational trauma visited upon the child throughout the child’s
developmental years is a foundational part of malignant narcissism can be
seen to be consistent with my father’s growing-up experience, but shaming did
not appear to play the central role in my father’s emerging narcissism that
Shaw’s formulation anticipated that it would (it certainly made a contribu-
tion, however). Shaw’s comments, on the other hand, that the parents of a
child who becomes a traumatizing narcissist either implicitly or explicitly
require the child to recognize the exclusive validity of parental needs and
wishes is very much consonant with the trauma that my father endured. It is
also consistent with the emphasis I placed upon early adultification as a
contributor to malignant narcissistic character formation. So, too, was his
suggestion that such a child develops inflexible, manic defenses as a way of
protecting themselves from susceptibility to dependence. His view that a child
likely to become a traumatizing narcissist would probably be raised by trau-
matizing narcissists was not fully supported by my father’s history (depending
upon how one might characterize my grandfather).
Kernberg’s belief that chronically cold parental figures possessed of intense
covert aggression often typified the history of a malignant narcissistic indivi-
dual appears to be somewhat at odds with my father’s experience, though it
could be said that his mother’s preoccupation with survival and her anger
towards her husband might have rendered her functionally insensitive to her
son’s emotional and material needs while his father’s ideological fervor and
his preoccupation with consummating it might have been reflective of a pro-
foundly narcissistic orientation (bringing us back to Shaw).
Kernberg’s and Kohut’s suggestion that children who become malignant
narcissists often demonstrate unusual characteristics or gifts earmarking them
as particularly attractive or talented does seem to be very much reflective of
my father’s realities as was Kernberg’s sense that a mother’s exploitation of
such qualities invited such a child to feel special, culminating in the child’s
inclination to pursue compensatory admiration and greatness. One might add
that such a dynamic helped the child consolidate identity around an idealized,
grandiose self, which I think was Kernberg’s intention. The only caveat, for
me, in this aspect of Kernberg’s formulation was his expectation that mother
was probably narcissistic herself. I’m not sure that such a characterization
accurately described my grandmother in her younger years, but she certainly
evolved into a terribly self-centered, needy, angry person whose own oral rage
never enjoyed satiation in her later years.
As I reflected earlier in the book, Kohut’s concept of “self” was absolutely
critical in helping me conceptualize the devastation my father experienced
and that he visited on the people around him. Paired with Kohut’s emphasis
on empathy, the construct of self allowed me to visualize malignant narcis-
sism as a nearly unceasing series of empathic failures that left my father
essentially alone in the world of his childhood, bereft, as Kohut might say, of
caring parental presence – a kind of dreadful, extended abandonment denying
202 Reflections

my father essential psychic sustenance necessary for him to evolve into a

loving being.
As I’m writing this last chapter, I also find myself returning to a theme that
I highlighted earlier in the book – my father’s experience, which paralleled my
experience with him, that he was, quite literally, disposable. I wonder if that
translated itself into a sense that he was living in a malignant world he could
only protect himself from by investing in his own grandiosity. I saw him
replaying this theme with me as he episodically acted out lethal intentional-
ities towards me I think he unconsciously felt he had endured himself.
As I explored malignant narcissism and attempted to make sense out of it
over the course of decades, I think the most helpful insight that I enjoyed –
the one that was most effective in unlocking the puzzle – was my appreciation
that malignant narcissism, at least for my father and for some of my patients,
is meant to serve as a defense against love. Almost equally important was my
growing awareness that malignant narcissism appears to represent a re-
enactment not only of early trauma, but of trauma dynamic that I see as
having entrenched itself early on in the lives of these people, compelling them
to forever remain vigilant in a world that they can never feel safe in.
Importantly, as I have noted previously, both perspectives permitted me to
experience compassion for individuals who must live with this condition.
Experiencing informed compassion was a kind of magic, enabling me to dis-
tance myself from some of the black forces that have piled up inside over the
years. Depth of understanding, the detachment it engendered, and the com-
passion it enabled allowed me to diminish the imposing and menacing pro-
portions of the monster inside to a frightened, damaged being riven with
terrible suffering that my father actually was. This is a process very much akin
to the pathway to mitigation of one’s own suffering Daniel Shaw (2014)
movingly describes in Traumatic Narcissism in his chapter entitled “But what
do I do?” In Kernberg’s terms, I have replaced a “bad object” with a repre-
sentation of someone else’s nearly unbearable suffering.
When I was invited to think about images for the cover of this book that
might best reflect its content and its message, I stumbled upon a piece of what
I believe to be tattoo art: a portrait of a skull, head inclined forward, defined
by swirling smoke that renders the skull almost indiscernible. What could be
seen relatively more clearly was a black rose at the top of the skull which it
seemed to want to call the viewer’s attention to, as if it wished to distract one
from its horrifying emaciation by drawing one’s focus towards the dark gift it
meant to offer. How extraordinary and how powerful, I thought. And how
terribly poignant. An unintentional, but certainly visceral, portrait of the
paradox that is narcissism: repellent withering of spirit side-by-side deliberate
inflation of one’s gifts and attempts to draw the eye away from grotesque
deficits – from deadness – towards aggrandizement.
The image that I eventually chose for the book cover – of a man whose
face is largely intact but whose head appears to be disintegrating – captures,
 Reflections 203

for me, the threat the malignant narcissist faces as he tries to maintain personal
coherence while struggling to mediate the forces within him that threaten him
with disintegration. The image captures Kernberg’s and now my own argument
that the rigidity and the grandiosity/omnipotence of malignant narcissistic
personality helps protect such people from the identity fragmentation that
characterizes borderline states.
These two insights – malignant narcissism as a defense against love and as
an enactment of trauma – provided the hinges that allowed me to swing the
door open and realize a better understanding of the complex dynamics that
define this terribly dangerous human reality, exposing one vista after another
for me to try to articulate. As I have said earlier, not a life’s journey any of us
would choose to take, but certainly one that has proven to be very mean-
ingful. Meaning also helps offset injury, making it easier for one to accept
that those aspects of narcissistic wounding that remain unresolved – and there
are many – are worth bearing.
After reading my book, my colleague in Ireland Ian Hughes commented
that he now understood that evil could be abstracted as envy of love. While,
in looking back, I can see that this insight is implicit in much of what I said, I
didn’t see it. His conception was riveting for me, bringing together some of
the core concepts in my work in a very meaningful way. I am grateful to him.
I think he may have captured the essence of evil.

References
Kernberg, O. (1984). Severe personality disorders. New Haven, CT.: Yale University
Press.
Shaw, D. (2014). Traumatic narcissism. New York, N.Y. & London, U.K: Routledge.
Index

abuse 36, 37, 178; less observable, 34, benign narcissism 9, 15; see also attachment
199; psychopathy from, 141, 142; bigotry 20, 162, 186, 187, 194; see also
sexual, 45–48, 133, 141, 143, 148–149; racism; stereotyping
see also bullying; cruelty; malignant biophilia 12, 13–14
narcissists, children of; malignant Bipolar Disorder 104
narcissists, victims of; sadism; shaming blame shifting see other blaming
addictive behavior 44, 59, 60–61, 80 boldness 104–105, 140, 141; see also
adulation, need for 33, 34; see also risk-taking
grandiosity; self-aggrandizement Borderline Conditions and Pathological
adultification 127–128, 133, 147, 201; see Narcissism (Kernberg) 18
also etiologies Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
aggrieved self 57, 79–80, 82–83, 158–159; 180; versus malignant narcissism,
see also defensiveness; self 198–199, 203
alcoholism 44, 60–61, 80; see also borderline personality organization 17,
addictive behavior 18, 198
anger 28, 82–83, 106, 129, 134; see also rage Borgia, House of 10; see also malignant
animals, cruelty toward 89–90, 93 narcissistic leaders
annihilation 12, 24, 35; see also brain function 137, 144; disorders, 27,
domination; malignant narcissistic 30, 37, 141, 181; see also etiologies
leaders; violence bullying 57–59, 159–160; by narcissistic
antisocial personality 16, 17, 19, 30 state, 185, 186; paralleled by
Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) self-victimization, 158–159; as protective
38; symptoms of, 24, 139; Donald mechanism, 81, 107, 126, 136; sadism
Trump and, 28; in tyrannical leaders, and, 69, 160; social reactions to, 57–58;
24–25 trickledown effect of, 180; see also
anxiety 16, 17, 28, 108, 162; see also fear cruelty; intimidation; shaming
Arendt, Hannah, 34, 38, 191, 194 Burkle, Frederick 24, 34, 38
arts, crucial role of 191, 194
attachment 8–9, 123, 170–172; Caesars 10; see also malignant
pre-Oedipal, 8, 11, 13, 133 narcissistic leaders
authoritarianism: enticing sense of safety causes see etiologies
under, 189–190, 191–192; see also charisma 34, 35, 81, 103, 149, 151
malignant narcissistic governments; charismatic narcissists 22–23, 37, 38
malignant narcissistic leaders Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 20
child development see malignant
“The Bad Seed” (1956) 94 narcissists, children of; malignant
belonging, human desire for 190, narcissists, victims of; etiologies;
193–194, 197 parenting
 Index 205

civil rights movement 164 dependence: intolerance to, 26, 131, 148,
cognition, reduced see thought 149, 175, 201; positive relationships
degradation with, 130, 176
competitiveness 8, 34, 97, 161, 185 depletion 173; and depression, 102, 103,
complex defenses 66–69 107; fear of, 51, 130–132, 133, 134, 148
complex post-traumatic stress disorder depression 16; from compromised
see Post Traumatic Stress Disorder omnipotence, 10; lack of, 104–107
concentration camp guards 20 destruction see annihilation; violence; war
conscience, lack of 22, 24, 30, 34, 88, diagnosis: challenges with, 196–197;
187; see also remorse, lack of etiology and psychodynamics in,
contempt 16, 57, 96; bullying as 143–144; see also etiologies;
extension of, 159; to justify rapacity, psychotherapy
75; protective function of, 63, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
131–132, 134, 149, 161, 165; see also Mental Disorders–5 139
bullying; cynicism; entitlement; hatred Dicks, H.V., 20
contrivance 54, 55, 91, 133, 151; see also dishonesty see contrivance; lying;
lying; pretense pretense
controlling others 22, 25, 29, 36–37; disinhibition 108, 140; see also
see also domination; malignant impulsivity
narcissistic leaders; power Disordered Minds: How Dangerous
Covington, Colleen 38 Personalities Are Destroying
Covitz, Howard 29 Democracy (Hughes) 35, 192–193
criticism, low tolerance to 10, 33, 83 dissociation 17, 43, 163–164, 182; under
cruelty 30, 38, 61–62; to animals, 89–90; narcissistic state leadership, 184, 186,
as diversion from inner turmoil, 188; past trauma hidden by, 117; see
89–99; to elicit fear, 183; under also denial; repression; self-awareness,
narcissistic state, 35, 186; in order to lack of
feel, 151; in parallel with loving Dodes, Lance 29–30, 37
relationships, 70, 191; to protect domination 25, 34; boldness and, 105,
against love, 65–66; see also bullying; 140; bullying to affirm, 105, 159;
meanness; sadism desire for global, 20; increasing need
Cyclothymic Disorder 104 for, 166; pleasure in, 73; as protective
cynicism 63, 76, 133, 149, 152 mechanism, 28, 105, 133–134, 149,
152, 154; by subsuming surrounding
Dabrowski, Kazimierz 34, 194 personalities, 28, 34, 36–37, 83–84, 86,
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump 154–155; testing others to confirm,
(Lee) 27, 29, 33, 34, 35 183; truth sacrificed for, 110; see also
dangerousness: need for assessing, 33; controlling others; intimidation;
personality disorders related to, 35–36; malignant narcissistic leaders
Donald Trump and, 29, 33 drive theory 21, 38, 197 economic
death, love of 12, 13 oppression see poverty
death instinct 12, 38; see also
life-and-death instinct elitism, danger of 35, 194
defensiveness see aggrieved self empathy: arts for rehearsal of, 191; brain
Delusional Disorder: danger of, 29; disorders and lack of, 27, 30, 37;
description of, 31–32; Donald Trump contempt used to negate, 75; disabled
and, 28, 31, 32 in a group, 190–191; evil as absence of,
democracy: as safeguard against narcissistic 190; human ability to modulate,
leadership, 36, 185; vulnerable to 69–70, 132, 190; as human necessity,
narcissistic leadership, 20, 35, 193 96, 197; malignant narcissist’s
denial 15, 17, 35; see also dissociation; disabled, 16, 31, 66, 69, 95, 132, 133,
repression; self-awareness, lack of 149, 201; narcissist’s lack of, 22, 27,
206 Index

34, 37, 106, 136, 142, 155, 159–160, fascism 97; see also Germany;
161, 166; narcissist’s self-empathy, 23; totalitarianism
poor shame tolerance and lack of, 28; fear: of abandonment, 174–175, 178; of
psychopath’s absence of, 27, 200; annihilation of grandiose self, 10, 21;
reduced under narcissistic state boldness from low reactivity to,
leadership, 186; sociopath’s lack of, 29; 105; cognition diminished by, 109,
sociopath’s predatory empathy, 30; in 161–162; of dependence, 129, 131,
treatment, 21 178; of depletion, 51, 130–132, 133,
Empire of the Summer Moon (Gynne) 134, 148; of depression, 102, 178;
69–70 diminished self from, 181; early
energy see hypervigilance development diminished by, 36, 37, 44,
entitlement 27, 142; enhanced by 56, 91, 94, 100; elicited in others, 52,
depersonalization, 28, 161; supported 57, 59, 96, 100, 183; of exploitation,
by contempt and cynicism, 75, 149; 74, 105; fight-or-flight reactions, 28; of
supported by victimization, 158, 159; intimacy, 158, 175; mobilized by
traumatizing narcissists and, 25 paranoid leaders, 32; of shadow self,
envy: evoked in others, 98, 133, 154; of 97, 174; of vulnerability, 74, 75, 198;
love, 203; of others, 136, 142, 154, 155 of weakness, 105, 113; see also
epigenetics 108, 137; see also genetics anxiety; hypervigilance; Post
etiologies 16–18, 137; abuse, 34–37, 46–48, Traumatic Stress Disorder; trauma
141–143, 178, 199; adultification, fragmentation see identify fragmentation
127–128, 133, 147, 201; brain function, Friedman, Henry J. 32, 37
27, 30, 37, 137, 144, 181; diversity of, Fromm, Eric 8–14, 27, 30, 31, 38, 194
143; diverting attention from damaged
self, 98–99, 136–137, 151, 202; Gandhi 164
exploitation, 87, 134, 148, 155; fear of Garden of Beasts (Larson) 59, 181
depletion, 51, 130–132, 133, 134, 148; Gartner, John 30–31, 38
genetics 108, 181; importance of gas lighting 28
diagnosis based on, 144, 196; generosity: aversion to, 54, 106, 155;
intergenerational transmission, 26, self-serving 74, 129
199; poverty, 35, 36, 73–75, 134, 192; genetics 107–108, 137, 141, 181
prevention of regression, 153–154, 159; Germany: post-World War II, 188;
of psychopathy, 141; trauma enactment, World War II, 53, 181, 185, 193; see
202, 203; traumatizing narcissism 22, also fascism; Hitler; malignant
25–26, 34, 37, 201; see also diagnosis; narcissistic governments
fear; parenting Gilbert, G.M. 190
evil 12, 30, 31, 34, 38; as absence of Gilligan, James 33
empathy, 190; banality of, 191; as government see malignant narcissistic
envy of love, 203; as nullification of governments
another human, 36–37; Donald grandiosity 133, 163; from adultification,
Trump and, 29 127, 147–148; charismatic narcissists
exceptionalism, danger of 194 and, 22; to counter self-condemnation,
exploitation 73, 77, 200; bullying to 16; group, 24, 35; lying to confirm,
facilitate, 160; as early contributor to 156; of narcissistic leaders, 19, 29, 30,
narcissism, 87, 134, 148, 155; fear of, 31, 33, 35, 184; to prevent identity
74, 105; see also manipulation fragmentation, 197–198, 203; as shield
from criticism, 10; traumatizing
fame-seeking 17, 149 narcissists and, 25; see also
family see malignant narcissists, children omnipotence; self-aggrandizement;
of; malignant narcissist relationships; superiority
malignant narcissists, spouses of; greed 98, 132, 149
malignant narcissist, victims of group narcissism see social narcissism
 Index 207

group self 23; see also society inequality, social 35, 36; see also poverty
guilt 16; lack of, 22, 29, 30; other-blaming infidelity 65, 155
to protect against, 28; see also remorse intelligence, reduced see thought
Gynne, S.C. 69–70 degradation
intimidation 59, 82, 86, 113, 183; see also
Handbook of Psychopathy (Patrick) bullying; domination
104, 140 isolation 10, 29, 79, 132, 148, 168
hatred 16, 18, 32, 37, 53; from fear of
exploitation, 62; see also contempt Jhueck, Diane 33
The Heart of Man (Fromm) 8 Jong-il, Kim 19, 25; see also malignant
Herman, Judith 29 narcissistic leaders
history: narcissist’s projected view of, 76; Jong-un, Kim 27; see also malignant
psychoanalytic knowledge to help narcissistic leaders
explain, 23
Hitler 10, 19, 27, 30, 165; see also Kernberg, Otto 16–21, 30, 37, 38,
Germany; malignant narcissistic 197–198, 200, 201
leaders “kiss ass up, kick ass down” mentality
Hughes, Ian 33–36, 37, 38, 192–193, 203 180, 185
human beings: ability to modulate Kohut, Heinz 21–23, 37, 38, 201
empathy, 69–70, 132, 190; contempt
for, 16, 57, 63, 96 , 131–132, 134, 149, “Labyrinth of Lies” (2014) 188
161, 165; desire for belonging, 190, language, degradation of 61, 80, 118,
193–194, 197; drive for love, 37, 197; 162, 163; see also thought degradation
evil’s nullification of, 36–37; need for Larson, Eric 59, 181
empathy by, 96, 197; receptivity to leaders see malignant narcissistic leaders
leadership, 193–194; susceptibility to Lee, Bandy 29
malignancy, 8, 192; yearning for life, love of 12, 13–14
safety, 189–190, 191–192 life-and-death instinct 14, 15; see also
humiliation 82–83; contempt as justification death instinct
for, 75; sadistic, 160; societal, 36, 183; see life instinct 12
also bullying; sadism; shame loneliness see isolation
humor: lack of self-deprecating, 151; love: in early development, 26–27, 36, 37;
sadistic, 54 evil as envy of, 203; human drive for,
Hussein, Saddam 25; see also malignant 37, 197; narcissistic defenses against,
narcissistic leaders 64–66, 74, 96, 131–133, 136, 148–149,
hypervigilance 74, 87, 103, 113, 133, 149 152, 158, 202, 203; in psychotherapy,
hypomania 104 26–27; as respect of another’s
subjectivity, 27
idealizations 135, 150, 198; see also lying 28; to confirm grandiosity, 156;
grandiosity; self-aggrandizement driven by envy, 154; under narcissistic
idealized superego 22 state leadership, 186; to test acolytes
identification with aggressor 59, 88; see loyalty, 156; see also contrivance;
also malignant narcissistic leaders pretense
identity fragmentation: Bipolar Disorder
and, 198; grandiosity to protect from, machismo see masculinity, hyperbolized
18, 197, 203 Major Depressive Disorder 101; see also
immigration 20–21, 167, 195 depression
impulsivity 28, 29, 30, 59–69, 88, 161; malignancy, human susceptibility to 192
defined, 104; to protect against malignant narcissism: as an enactment of
depression, 104; and psychopathy, 140; trauma, 202, 203; characteristics of,
see also disinhibition 9–10, 15–20, 27–31, 34, 197–201; as
incestuous symbiosis 13–14 defense against love, 202, 203;
208 Index

different levels of, 35; exacerbated by malignant narcissists, children of 42–51,

success, 31; importance of term, 192; 77–78, 100–113, 169–182;
increasing severity of with time, 31; accommodation by, 89, 110, 178; create
lack of consensus over clinical term, alternate realities for protection, 30;
137; narcissism much less severe than, depression in, 100–103; disrupted
31; as subclass of psychopathy, 199; as concentration in, 100; early
a unitary personality organization, development of, 171–173, 179–180;
196; see also etiologies; malignant loss of feeling in, 91, 94; mother’s
narcissistic leaders; Narcissist exploitation of, 18; PTSD in, 108–113,
Personality Disorder; narcissism; 172; rage in, 91, 94; struggle for
narcissists identity by, 85–86, 178; traumatizing
malignant narcissistic governments narcissism and, 22, 25–26, 34, 37, 201;
182–195; authoritarianism, 189–190, value of mentors for, 64, 101, 179;
191–192; common cruelty in, 186; vindictiveness in, 92–93, 94; see also
degradation of thought under, malignant narcissists, victims of;
164–165; diminished humanity under, parenting; malignant narcissist
187; endemic bullying in, 185; fascism, relationships
97; resistance in, 187; totalitarianism, malignant narcissists, spouses of 43–51;
19–20; see also malignant narcissistic see also malignant narcissist
leaders; tyrannies relationships; parenting
malignant narcissistic leaders: dangers of, malignant narcissists, victims of:
18, 23–25, 35–36, 164–168; democracy absurdism used as protection by 43,
as safeguard against, 36, 185; 158; addiction in, 172; annihilation of
democracy’s vulnerability to, 20, 35, self by, 13, 100, 148, 172; anxiety in,
193; escalation of risk-taking under, 15, 90, 110, 113, 182; bigotry toward,
165–166; grandiosity of, 19, 29, 30, 31, 20, 162, 186, 187, 194; susceptibility to
33, 35, 184; historical examples of, 10, bullying by, 56, 109, 172, 176;
19, 24, 25, 27, 30, 35, 198; human contrivance of 44, 56, 151–152, 178;
receptivity to, 193–194; identification cruelty by 44, 47, 93, 178; depression
with, 11–12, 24, 58, 59, 97–98, 186; in 100–103, 107, 172, 176, 178;
projection of confidence by, 30, 167; diminishment of self in 100–101,
scapegoating by, 184; society’s 171–173, 178, 180–181; disassociation
susceptibility to, 13, 19, 24, 35–38, by 91, 178, 179; empowerment of
97–98, 167–168, 186; sociopaths as, 45–47; envy in 171, 177; objectification
29; threatened by intellectualism, by 43; guilt by 101; hatred by 101,
164–165; warlike mentality of, 182, 178; hypervigilance in 44, 133; identity
184; see also malignant narcissistic fragmentation by 44–45, 50, 53, 76,
governments; power; Trump, Donald 171, 180; minorities 31; mistrust by
malignant narcissist relationships 71–81, 182; negative attachment and,
150; in business 58, 73, 83–84, 86, 156, 171–172; pretense of 34, 35; racism
157, 180–181; desire for transactional, against, 76–77; sadism by 47, 48, 178;
155, 157, 159; desire for utilitarian, 157; sexual abuse of 45–48, 133, 148–149;
expectation of acolyte self-sacrifice, 157; stereotyping against, 78, 162; suicidal
grandiosity in, 71–73; inability to behavior in 100, 172, 176; thought
apologize, 154; intolerance to other’s degradation in 163; see also malignant
points of view, 58; obedience rewarded narcissists, children of; malignant
in, 83, 83–84, 180, 190; threatened by narcissists, spouses of; malignant
over-reaching acolyte imitations, 156; narcissist relationships
see also malignant narcissists, children Malkin, Craig 27–28, 38
of; malignant narcissists, spouses; manipulation 34, 35, 73; fear of, 62, 75; lack
malignant narcissists, victims of; of, 57, 60; to simulate humanity, 151; by
parenting sociopaths, 29; see also exploitation
 Index 209

Mao 198, 35, 198; see also malignant narcissistic leaders; narcissism;
narcissistic leaders traumatizing narcissism
masculinity 95; hyperbolized, 60–61, 64 Narcissus 96
meanness 108, 140; see also cruelty nationalism, danger of 194
mentorship, developmental value of 64, necrophilia 12; see also death instinct
101, 179 Nuremberg trials, 190
messianic narcissists 22–23, 24, 37; see
also narcissists object constancy 34, 37
Mika, Elizabeth 33–34, 37, 38 objectification 34, 64–65, 77, 81, 156,
Milgram experiment 193–194 161; under narcissistic leadership,
Milosevic, Slobodan 25 186; as part of bullying, 159–160; as
mistrust 62, 63, 67, 75, 79, 103, 132, 133, protection against narcissists, 43
148, 149, 168; of acolytes, 156; omnipotence 10, 14, 15, 17, 95, 105, 131,
degradation of intelligence from, 163; 203; see also grandiosity; self-
fear and, 161; in narcissistic leaders, aggrandizement; superiority
184; of otherness, 20; self-awareness oral fixation 17
blocked by, 158; see also paranoia other blaming 28–29, 33, 38, 62; see also
money 73–75, 124; see also greed scapegoating
mothers 43–51; and pre-Oedipal
attachment, 8, 11, 13, 23, 133; traits of paranoia 24, 27–32; see also trust,
for pathological narcissists, 17–18 absence of
Mussolini 24; see also malignant Paranoid Personality Disorder: difficulty
narcissistic leaders in treating, 32, 37, 38; parenting:
importance of healthy attachments in,
narcissism: benign, 9, 15; as element of 123, 170–171; with love/fun vs. hatred/
malignant narcissism, 36; elite, 35; fear, 36, 37; Donald Trump and, 28,
milder than malignant narcissism, 31; 31, 32; upbringing under narcissistic,
pathological, 16–19, 23–24, 27, 38; 18, 23, 26, 37, 171–173, 179–180; see
primary, 8–9; traumatizing, 22, 25–26, also malignant narcissists, children of;
34, 37, 201; see also etiologies; malignant narcissists, spouses of
malignant narcissism; Narcissistic parsimony 73–75, 124
Personality Disorder; narcissists pathological narcissism 16–19, 23–24, 27,
narcissistic creativity 165 38; see also malignant narcissism;
narcissistic injury 12, 23, 34, 35–36, narcissism
37; see also etiologies; malignant Patrick, Christopher 140
narcissists, children of; malignant pharaohs 10; see also malignant narcissistic
narcissists, victims of leaders
narcissistic intellect 164–166; see also playfulness, lack of 151
thought degradation Pollock, George H. 30
narcissistic self-sufficiency 14; see also Pol Pot 35; see also malignant narcissistic
dependance, intolerance to leaders
Narcissist Personality Disorder (NPD) polyamory 65
27, 139; ambiguous definition of, 53; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
characteristics of, 27; diagnosis of, 88, 130; from relationships with
143–144; as element of malignant malignant narcissists, 100–113, 172,
narcissism, 30; symptomatology of, 174, 176; treatment for, 111–112; see
142; treatment of, 21, 25; see also also malignant narcissists, children of;
malignant narcissism; narcissism; trauma
narcissists poverty 35, 36, 73–75, 134, 192
narcissists: charismatic, 22–23, 37, 38; power 34, 98, 149; absolute, 20;
messianic, 22–23, 24, 37; see also corrupting nature of, 29; intelligence
malignant narcissism; malignant diminished by drive for, 34; narcissist
210 Index

bullying to confirm, 160; tyrants and, denial; dissociation; self-awareness,

35; see also malignant narcissistic lack of
leaders; status revenge 12; see also vindictiveness
prejudice see bigotry; stereotyping righteousness 11, 25–26, 61, 63, 79, 200
pre-Oedipal attachment 8, 11, 13, 133 rigidity 53–54, 55, 98, 203; see also
Presidents, U.S.: who had mental illness, 33 spontaneity, lack of
pretense 34, 35; see also contrivance; risk-taking: development of self and, 170;
grandiosity; lying in order to feel, 151; see also boldness
primitive idealization 17 “River” (2015) 111
projection 75–78, 160–161 Rosenfeld, Herbert 14–15
projective identification 17, 30, 149–150 rudimentary self 21; see also self
psychodynamics 200–201
psychology, skepticism in 1–2 sadism 14, 18, 20, 28, 30, 31, 36, 73, 160;
psychopathy 6, 17, 24, 26, 27, 35, 36, 38, to feel alive, 91, 94, 98; to feel
104–105, 199; absence of empathy in, empowered, 95; tyrants and, 35; see
27, 200; compared with malignant also bullying; cruelty
narcissism, 200; environmental factors, safety: human’s desire for, 189–190, 191;
141–142; genetic factors, 141, 181; under narcissistic leaders, 13, 35, 36, 183
lack of constructive attachment in, scapegoating: by narcissistic leadership,
200; primary and secondary, 140–141; 184; by sociopaths, 20; see also other
as a subtype of narcissism, 108, blaming
139–144; traits of, 93, 140; Donald schadenfreude 185; see also bullying
Trump and, 33; violence and, 33 self: aggrieved self, 57, 79–80, 82–83,
psychosis 13, 31 158–159; attachments in development
psychotherapy: complex defenses and, of, 170; avoidance of regression to
68; diagnosis in, 143–144; evolving earlier, 153–154, 159; complex
concept of love in, 65; resistance to, defenses to protect, 66–69; fragility of,
18, 28, 146, 199; risks to therapist, 18; 45; group, 23; Kohut’s concept of, 21,
subjective realities and, 1 38, 201; narcissism as diversion from
psychotic spiral 28 damaged, 98–99, 136–137, 151;
psychotic structure organization 14–15 revulsion of, 28, 152
Putin, Vladimir 25, 27; see also self-aggrandizement 96, 163; adultification
malignant narcissistic leaders and 127–128; dependence on 96, 105,
131, 147–149, 151, 197–198; driven by
Racism 76–77; see also bigotry; envy, 154; extended to acquaintances
stereotyping 71–72, 78; protection of 152;
rage 12, 16, 17, 24, 30, 31, 35, 37, 149, 159; speciousness of 57, 60, 136; see also
mobilized by narcissistic leadership, grandiosity; omnipotence; superiority
184, 186; narcissist decision-making self-awareness, lack of 28, 61, 66, 105,
influenced by, 162; as narcissist’s 150–151; see also denial; dissociation;
protective mechanism, 52–53, 62–63, repression
98, 160–161; see also anger self-righteousness see righteousness
reason: as enemy of narcissism, 11–12; self-worth, low 28, 152 see also self
subverted by incestuous symbiosis, serial killers 35
13–14; see also thought degradation Severe Personality Disorders (Kernberg) 21
regression: avoidance of 153–154, 159; sex: intelligence subsumed under drive
group, 19–20 for, 34; promiscuity, 60–61
religion 97 sexual abuse 45–48, 133, 141, 143,
remorse, lack of 28, 66, 67, 82, 161; see 148–149
also conscience, lack of Shafti, Saeed 17
repression: lack of self-awareness from, 69, shame 16, 24, 25, 26, 37; from narcissistic
173; of sexual tenderness, 19; see also other, 171, 178; narcissist shaming, 82,
 Index 211

83, 160; from narcissist’s rage, 52; poor toxic triangle 33, 36
shame tolerance, 28; see also bullying; Tragic Man 21
humiliation trauma: malignant narcissism as
Shaw, Daniel 22, 25–26, 34, 37, 38, 199, enactment of, 202, 203;
200–201, 202 re-experiencing in therapy, 68;
Shengold, Leonard 26 relational patterns of, 197; trauma
skepticism, importance of 1–2, 11–12 response, 87–88; see also fear;
social narcissism 11–12, 13; see also Post Traumatic Stress Disorder;
society traumatizing narcissism
society: group rationality impaired in, 35; Traumatic Narcissism (Shaw) 22, 202
identification with narcissistic leaders traumatizing narcissism 22, 25–26, 34,
by, 11–12, 24, 58, 59, 97–98, 186; 37, 201; see also narcissism; trauma
seeking protection under narcissistic Trujillo, Rafael 10
leaders, 13, 35, 36, 183; tendency Trump, Donald: The Dangerous Case of
toward conventionality by, 38; see also Donald Trump (Lee), 27, 29, 33, 34,
malignant narcissistic leaders, society’s 35; dangerousness of, 33; delusional
susceptibility to disorder and, 31; grandiosity and, 29,
sociopathy 29–30; causes of, 30, 37; 31, 33; highlights vulnerability of
Donald Trump and, 29 democracy, 193; as hypomaniac, 31;
Sofsky, Wolfgang 20 malignant narcissism and, 30–31;
solitude see isolation Narcissist Personality Disorder and,
soul murder 26, 37–38, 180 27, 28, 139; Paranoid Personality
splitting 17, 30, 150 Disorder and, 28, 32; varied mental
spontaneity, lack of 98, 151; see also health opinions on, 27–33
rigidity trust, absence of see mistrust
Stalin 10, 19, 24, 30, 35, 198; see also tyrannies: characteristics of tyrants,
malignant narcissistic leaders 35–36; democracy as safeguard
status 96, 98, 132, 149; see also against, 36; followers of, 35; malignant
power narcissism and, 33–34, 37; three
stereotyping 78, 162; see also bigotry; elements of (toxic triangle), 33, 36;
racism see also malignant narcissistic
Stone, Michael 36–37, 38 governments; malignant narcissistic
subjective reality 1 leaders
subjectivity: love as respect of another’s,
27; narcissist’s destruction of other’s, victimhood see aggrieved self
25, 26, 34, 36–37, 199 vigilance see hypervigilance
suicidal behavior 100, 153, vindictiveness 28, 92–93, 94; see also
172, 176 revenge
superiority 11, 33; see also grandiosity; violence: psychopathy and, 33, 37; social,
self-aggrandizement 18–19, 20, 21; see also abuse; bullying;
syndrome of decay 12–14 cruelty; war
vulnerability: fear of, 74, 75, 198;
Tansey, Michael J. 31 intolerance of, 105, 149, 151; lack of
teachers see mentors empathy to avoid, 155; see also
therapy see psychotherapy defensiveness; love, narcissistic
thought degradation: in group defenses against
narcissism, 11–12, 35; in narcissists,
34, 110–111, 162; see also language, war: narcissistic war-like mentality,
degradation of 160–161; thought degraded in, 164;
totalitarianism 19–20, 32; see also see also competitiveness; violence;
fascism; malignant narcissistic World War II
governments wealth, drive for 149; see also greed; money
212 Index

Weigert, Edith 15–16 Nuremberg trials, 190; see also

West, Harper 28, 37 Germany; war
World War II: brutality of, 70; devastation
of, 192; Germany and, 181, 185, 188; Zimbardo experiment 193–194