{"id":1540,"date":"2017-11-04T03:45:42","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T00:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1540"},"modified":"2020-09-01T13:03:35","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T10:03:35","slug":"lasch-narcissism-in-recent-clinical-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1540\/lasch-narcissism-in-recent-clinical-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Lasch, Narcissism in Recent Clinical Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back to Christopher Lasch, The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

The shifting em\u00adphasis in clinical studies from primary to secondary narcissism reflects both the shift in psychoanalytic theory from study of the id to study of the ego and a change in the type of patients seeking psychiatric treatment. Indeed the shift from a psychology of in\u00adstincts to ego psychology itself grew partly out of a recognition that the patients who began to present themselves for treatment in the 1940s and 1950s “very seldom resembled the classical neuroses Freud described so thoroughly.” <\/p>\n

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In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common. He does not suffer from debilitat\u00ading fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains “of vague, dif\u00adfuse dissatisfactions with life” and feels his “amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless.” He describes “subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression,” “violent os\u00adcillations of self-esteem,” and “a general inability to get along.” He gains “a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported.” Although he carries out his daily responsibilities and even achieves distinction, happi\u00adness eludes him, and life frequently strikes him as not worth liv\u00ading.<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis, a therapy that grew out of experience with severely repressed and morally rigid individuals who needed to come to terms with a rigorous inner “censor,” today finds itself confronted more and more often with a “chaotic and impulse-rid\u00adden character.” It must deal with patients who “act out” their conflicts instead of repressing or sublimating them. These pa\u00adtients, though often ingratiating, tend to cultivate a protective shallowness in emotional relations. They lack the capacity to mourn, because the intensity of their rage against lost love objects, in particular against their parents, prevents their reliving happy experiences or treasuring them in memory. Sexually promiscuous rather than repressed, they nevertheless find it difficult to “elabo\u00adrate the sexual impulse” or to approach sex in the spirit of play. They avoid close involvements, which might release intense feel\u00adings of rage. Their personalities consist largely of defenses against this rage and against feelings of oral deprivation that originate in the pre-Oedipal stage of psychic development.
\nOften these patients suffer from hypochondria and complain of a sense of inner emptiness. At the same time they entertain fan\u00adtasies of omnipotence and a strong belief in their right to exploit others and be gratified. Archaic, punitive, and sadistic elements predominate in the superegos of these patients, and they conform to social rules more out of fear of punishment than from a sense of guilt. They experience their own needs and appetites, suffused with rage, as deeply dangerous, and they throw up defenses that are as primitive as the desires they seek to stifle.<\/p>\n

On the principle that pathology represents a heightened ver\u00adsion of normality, the “pathological narcissism” found in charac\u00adter disorders of this type should tell us something about narcis\u00adsism as a social phenomenon. Studies of personality disorders that occupy the border line between neurosis and psychosis, though written for clinicians and making no claims to shed light on social or cultural issues, depict a type of personality that ought to be immediately recognizable, in a more subdued form, to ob\u00adservers of the contemporary cultural scene: facile at managing the impressions he gives to others, ravenous for admiration but con\u00adtemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it; unappeasably hungry for emotional experiences with which to fill an inner void; terrified of aging and death.<\/p>\n

The most convincing explanations of the psychic origins of this borderline syndrome draw on the theoretical tradition es\u00adtablished by Melanie Klein. In her psychoanalytic investigations of children, Klein discovered that early feelings of overpowering rage, directed especially against the mother and secondarily against the internalized image of the mother as a ravenous mon\u00adster, make it impossible for the child to synthesize “good” and “bad” parental images. In his fear of aggression from the bad parents\u2014projections of his own rage\u2014he idealizes the good parents who will come to the rescue.<\/p>\n

Internalized images of others, buried in the unconscious mind at an early age, become self-images as well. If later experience fails to qualify or to introduce elements of reality into the child’s archaic fantasies about his parents, he finds it difficult to distin\u00adguish between images of the self and of the objects outside the self. These images fuse to form a defense against the bad repre\u00adsentations of the self and of objects, similarly fused in the form of a harsh, punishing superego. Melanie Klein analyzed a ten-year-old boy who unconsciously thought of his mother as a “vampire” or “horrid bird” and internalized this fear as hypochondria. He was afraid that the bad presences inside him would devour the good ones. The rigid separation of good and bad images of the self and of objects, on the one hand, and the fusion of self- and object images on the other, arose from the boy’s inability to tolerate ambivalence or anxiety. Because his anger was so intense, he could not admit that he harbored aggressive feelings toward those he loved. “Fear and guilt relating to his destructive phantasies moulded his whole emotional life.”<\/p>\n

A child who feels so gravely threatened by his own aggressive feelings (projected onto others and then internalized again as inner “monsters”) attempts to compensate himself for his experi\u00adences of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty, and om\u00adnipotence. These fantasies, together with the internalized images of the good parents with which he attempts to defend himself, become the core of a “grandiose conception of the self.” A kind of “blind optimism,” according to Otto Kernberg, protects the nar\u00adcissistic child from the dangers around and within him\u2014par\u00adticularly from dependence on others, who are perceived as with\u00adout exception undependable. “Constant projection of ‘all bad’ self and object images perpetuates a world of dangerous, threatening objects, against which the ‘all good’ self images are used defen\u00adsively, and megalomanic ideal self images are built up.” The splitting of images determined by aggressive feelings from images that derive from libidinal impulses makes it impossible for the child to acknowledge his own aggression, to experience guilt or concern for objects invested simultaneously with aggression and libido, or to mourn for lost objects. Depression in narcissistic pa\u00adtients takes the form not of mourning with its admixture of guilt, described by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” but of impo\u00adtent rage and “feelings of defeat by external forces.”<\/p>\n

Because the intrapsychic world of these patients is so thinly populated\u2014consisting only of the “grandiose self,” in Kernberg’s words, “the devalued, shadowy images of self and others, and po\u00adtential persecutors”\u2014they experience intense feelings of emp\u00adtiness and inauthenticity. Although the narcissist can function in the everyday world and often charms other people (not least with his “pseudo-insight into his personality”), his devaluation of oth\u00aders, together with his lack of curiosity about them, impoverishes his personal life and reinforces the “subjective experience of emp\u00adtiness.” Lacking any real intellectual engagement with the world\u2014notwithstanding a frequently inflated estimate of his own intellectual abilities\u2014he has little capacity for sublimation. He therefore depends on others for constant infusions of approval and admiration. He “must attach [himself] to someone, living an almost parasitic” existence. At the same time, his fear of emo\u00adtional dependence, together with his manipulative, exploitive approach to personal relations, makes these relations bland, su\u00adperficial, and deeply unsatisfying. “The ideal relationship to me would be a two month relationship,” said a borderline patient. “That way there’d be no commitment. At the end of the two months I’d just break it off.”<\/p>\n

Chronically bored, restlessly in search of instantaneous in\u00adtimacy\u2014of emotional titillation without involvement and depen\u00addence\u2014the narcissist is promiscuous and often pansexual as well, since the fusion of pregenital and Oedipal impulses in the service of aggression encourages polymorphous perversity. The bad images he has internalized also make him chronically uneasy about his health, and hypochondria in turn gives him a special af\u00adfinity for therapy and for therapeutic groups and movements.<\/p>\n

As a psychiatric patient, the narcissist is a prime candidate for interminable analysis. He seeks in analysis a religion or way of life and hopes to find in the therapeutic relationship external sup\u00adport for his fantasies of omnipotence and eternal youth. The strength of his defenses, however, makes him resistant to success\u00adful analysis. The shallowness of his emotional life often prevents him from developing a close connection to the analyst, even though he “often uses his intellectual insight to agree verbally with the analyst and recapitulates in his own words what has been analysed in previous sessions.” He uses intellect in the ser\u00advice of evasion rather than self-discovery, resorting to some of the same strategies of obfuscation that appear in the confessional writing of recent decades. “The patient uses the analytic interpre\u00adtations but deprives them quickly of life and meaning, so that only meaningless words are left. The words are then felt to be the patient’s own possession, which he idealizes and which give him a sense of superiority.” Although psychiatrists no longer consider narcissistic disorders inherently unanalyzable, few of them take an optimistic view of the prospects for success.<\/p>\n

According to Kernberg, the great argument for making the at\u00adtempt at all, in the face of the many difficulties presented by nar\u00adcissistic patients, is the devastating effect of narcissism on the sec\u00adond half of their lives\u2014the certainty of the terrible suffering that lies in store. In a society that dreads old age and death, aging holds a special terror for those who fear dependence and whose self-esteem requires the admiration usually reserved for youth, beauty, celebrity, or charm. The usual defenses against the rav\u00adages of age\u2014identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one’s immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past\u2014 can do nothing for the narcissist. Unable to derive whatever com\u00adfort comes from identification with historical continuity, he finds it impossible, on the contrary, “to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished grati\u00adfications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving a growing iden\u00adtification with other people’s happiness and achievements is tragi\u00adcally beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities.”<\/p>\n

Back to Christopher Lasch, The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back to Christopher Lasch, The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time: Table of Contents The shifting em\u00adphasis in clinical studies from primary to secondary narcissism reflects both the shift in psychoanalytic theory from study of the id to study of the ego and a change in the type of patients seeking psychiatric treatment. Indeed the shift […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[46],"tags":[3582,3628,816,3633,493,3625,3634,3638,489,3619,3629,3635,3632],"class_list":["post-1540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-clinical-literature","tag-ego-psychology","tag-emptiness","tag-fixations","tag-freud","tag-neuroses","tag-psychiatric-treatment","tag-psychiatrist","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-psychoanalytic-theory","tag-secondary-narcissism","tag-sexual-energy","tag-shallowness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}