Narcissism is not a bad character or a personality disorder

Narcissism is a character trait that manifests itself in inflated levels of self-esteem, narcissism, and the perception of oneself and one's qualities from an exclusive point of view, which often does not correspond to the real state of affairs. The very name of this psychological feature comes from the Greek legend about Narcissus, who preferred admiring his reflection to the love of a nymph, which is why he was turned into the flower of the same name.

In psychological and psychiatric practice, excessive development of narcissism is considered from the perspective of personality deviations and character accentuations. At the same time, many scientists say that every personality has a narcissistic part; the only question is the level of development of this trait and its impact on the overall quality of a person’s life. Depending on how narcissism manifests itself, it can be divided into destructive and constructive, pathological and normative.

It was previously believed that narcissism was an exclusively male trait, but recent research has shown that it is equally common among both men and women. Narcissistic accentuation is usually not an innate quality, but acquires pathological forms only under certain developmental conditions, however, there may also be hereditary prerequisites at the level of the nervous system, for example, ADHD may be the basis for this type of personality disorder. It practically never occurs in childhood. The first signs may begin to appear in adolescence, and most often in adolescence and adulthood. This is due to psychological trauma, the development of reflection, social environment and upbringing.

Narcissism is

Narcissism is a characteristic of a mental state. A person presents himself as a superior person, his self-esteem is inflated. Such traits are found in ambitious, goal-oriented individuals. The desire to please everyone cannot be called a deviation.

But narcissism syndrome is pathological narcissism, a symbiosis of inflated conceit and inner emptiness. Constant suppression of feelings of envy, shame, guilt.

Deviations arise if an incorrect scenario was laid down in childhood. The desire to appear ideal turns into pathology. Narcissists are often diagnosed with other mental disorders - depression, bipolar disorder.

Narcissism is not a common personality disorder. The total number of daffodils in the world does not exceed 6%.

Causes of narcissism

Most personality disorders have roots in childhood. Narcissism is no exception.

Sigmund Freud believes that all children go through a stage of primary narcissistic syndrome. This is one of the intermediate but important stages in the development of personality. But then he identified other forms of narcissism, which confirmed that the disorder was a mental disorder.

A man reads a book in front of a mirror, admires himself

Karen Hortney believes that narcissistic character is formed in children if they constantly have to build psychological defenses from their parents. This happens if parents try to realize their ambitions through their child. At the same time, the desire and true manifestations of the child are not taken into account. Children develop an inferiority complex, which transforms into narcissism.

According to psychotherapist Otto Kernberg, narcissism is the desire of an adult to receive positive emotions that were not received from parents.

Why narcissistic injuries occur:

disappointment in parental love;
conditional emotional warmth - love needs to be earned, to be good, to be comfortable;
physical punishment, moral violence;
being ignored by parents, communicating only at the level of demands and obligations;
there was no right for weakness or mistakes.

In addition to unhealthy family relationships, narcissistic syndrome occurs under the influence of environmental factors. In the media and social networks I constantly show ideal relationships and things. And advertising imposes services to bring people closer to these ideals. This has a negative impact on mental health.

Signs

It is not difficult to recognize a narcissist; the disorder has characteristic manifestations. The exact assessment criteria for narcissism are described in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

To test narcissistic traits, there is a questionnaire - “Analysis of the main components of the narcissistic personality.” It was developed by Robert Raskin and Howard Terry. The more positive answers, the more pronounced the manifestations of narcissism.

How narcissism manifests itself:

Inflated self-esteem, the habit of exaggerating one’s own talents and achievements. The narcissist expects praise and admiration for even the most insignificant actions.
Constant dreams of worldwide recognition, power, relationships, success. But the person does nothing to make his fantasies come true.
He considers himself right and chooses an environment to suit himself. If you make friends, then only with the right people. The girl should have a model appearance. All items are only from famous brands.
Constant demand for admiration, attention, recognition. He believes that any of his actions is an excellent subject for an article in a newspaper on the front page or a news report.
Everyone owes Narcissus, he is sure of it. Everyone must fulfill his whims on demand; nothing is more important than serving him. After all, he is so irreplaceable.
Using people to achieve their goals is the norm for patients with narcissism. At the same time, thanking people for their help is not at all necessary.
They don't know what empathy is. They are not interested in other people's experiences. A narcissist will hurt you and not even notice it. He is more concerned about how not to lose his own greatness in an uncomfortable situation.
Envy is a constant companion of the narcissist. He envies everyone, he is sure that everyone envies him, that’s why he criticizes.
Arrogance is a core character trait that drives people with narcissistic disorder. Self-affirmation at the expense of the shortcomings and mistakes of other people? It's easy and there's no shame.
The main methods of defense are perfectionism and disappointment. Patients with narcissism syndrome avoid attachments because they are afraid of disappointments. They often create ideal images in their imagination, but the discrepancy between reality and ideal leads to disappointment.

The presence of at least five of the listed symptoms indicates a disorder.

Mrs. L: twin self versus crone

I would like to give a short example from the supervision of the analysis of Mrs. L., a narcissistic patient. Dr. A was particularly eager for this supervision because, although the analysis had just begun, she was already experiencing significant difficulties. Dr. A is a conscientious and skilled analyst with experience in analyzing disturbed and difficult patients; she could not understand her inability to establish and maintain an analytic setting with this patient.

Dr. A described a series of uncharacteristic mistakes that resulted in her confessing to a patient something she had not intended to confess and immediately regretting. Therefore, she felt that the analysis was out of her control. Mrs. L., an attractive young woman, came to the analyst after the upsetting end of a relationship with a man. Her history also included adolescent disorders and episodes of anorexia. She left the city in which she lived with her ex-man and returned to another, where her wealthy father lived with his second wife and where she was to undergo analysis. Everything was agreed upon, but when workers came to arrange the move on the day of her departure, she refused their services and missed her plane.

Having arrived at her new home and having arranged for the analysis to begin, she missed the first session. She called and explained that she had lost the number for the analyst's office. Dr. A, feeling the need to establish her analytic position and method of work from the outset, was “determined” to discuss the issue of payment for a missed session. The alarming signal for the analyst was the inexplicable loss of “firm determination” and some other points. When Mrs. L, who was due to pay for the missed session by check at the end of the month, did not do so, Dr. A, to her chagrin, was unable to bring it to his attention. Following this session, the patient, by any standards very wealthy, called Dr. A. to say that she could not continue the analysis because she could not afford it. Dr. A suggested that the patient come to the next session on time and they could discuss this issue. The patient agreed, and then in the session, Dr. A., to her horror and despair, found herself drawn into further fruitless conversation with the patient. The patient arrived twenty minutes early for the next session, which introduced some confusion into the process.

During this session, Mrs. L. lay restlessly on the couch, constantly fidgeted and got up several times, either for sweets or for napkins. What bothered the analyst most, however, was her own behavior. In this session, she surprised herself by agreeing to reduce the fee for this patient. The feeling that her countertransference was out of control was further intensified when, instead of addressing the issue in self-analysis in preparation for the next session, she inadvertently prolonged the current session—something that rarely happened to her. However, it was in this session that the patient reported a dream that shed some light on these events.

“I had a very strange dream,” said Mrs. L. “I was in a house - this strange house - in each series of dreams I see recurring dreams about a new house. This one was new - but the sensory experience tells me that I was here a hundred years ago. Next to me is another person who was my lover - or sister - or brother, not sure what gender this person was. I was neither a man nor a woman - or I was both a man and a woman. I was protecting this other person - we lived together with the old lady - we conspired to kill her. This somehow involved stairs and something written, something like a letter. Apparently we gave her the letter without her seeing it, which led to her death. For our own sake, we needed to do this. But six or seven years later we were arrested. I know it was me in the dream - I don't usually lie (she lies all the time, the analyst added) - I remember thinking that this was the first time - they won't expose me, they won't find out that we committed murder. If she, the old woman, knew, she would take revenge. She was such an evil old woman - a destructive force. This was not a murder out of malice, but a matter of life and death for me. The reason was this internal struggle. I felt a taste in my mouth like a huge piece of chewing gum - it was cannibalism - like chewing tasteless meat."

“When I woke up this morning, I felt sick,” the patient continued. “Finally I threw up.” The patient herself recognized her mother in the evil old woman.

There is certainly a lot going on in this dream, and it is tempting to explore themes such as cannibalism and oral sadism. But I believe that the best way to use this dream is to explain what was actually happening in the analysis and what light it might throw on the problem of repeated enactments. I suggested that Dr. A is represented in the dream both as a “twin soul/lover” and as an evil old woman - then the recent events make sense. Dr. A's unconscious countertransference identification with the patient is represented in the dream by the patient's “twin soul.” The twin souls' plot to kill the "mean old lady" could then be seen as an unconscious conspiracy between patient and analyst to destroy Dr. A's professional self. Several minor murders had already occurred that seemed justified to the twin souls because they believed they were under threat of being fed poisoned meat through the mysterious practices of psychoanalysis.

The analyst regained her usual analytic position and lost it only from time to time when the patient dramatically introduced some unexpected complication into the analysis. A stereotypical pattern emerged in which progress was followed by negative therapeutic reactions. As the analysis progressed, the full extent of the patient's impairment became more apparent. She had problems with drugs, and episodes of bulimia and vomiting had been recurring for a long time. The patient's unfolding history and transference pointed to her bisexuality. In particular, periods of oscillation were observed between the homosexual erotic transference and the negative, paranoid transference.

I would like to emphasize my point - that the narcissistic object relationship developed by this patient, the "twin soul" relationship, was a conspiracy formed to counter the murderous superego represented by the "old woman." However, the destructiveness turned into a narcissistic relationship. The purpose of the libidinal connection, expressed in the erotic transference, was to create an alliance whose goal was murder. A dream that the patient had a year and a half after the events described shed more light on this complex narcissistic organization.

Mrs. L is spoon-feeding her baby - her mother is in the room - Mrs L is not sure whose baby it is. During feeding, the spoon becomes a fork, which tears pieces of skin from the baby's lips, and he then eats these pieces. The patient turns to her mother for help. The mother says: “Do it this way,” and tears a larger piece from the child’s mouth, saying: “This is what he eats.”

Mrs. L counters that there must be another way to stop the child from eating himself. The child's lips are very red and tightly clenched, looking like genitals. The patient then realizes that it is not her mother, but X, her former lover, and they are not feeding the child, but having sex.

“In real life,” the patient noted, “I had homosexual sexual relations with X.” “X,” she continued, “had the perfect body, I adored him. When I say “ideal,” this is what I mean: this is the body I imagine my father would want a woman to have.”

“We were in college together,” Ms. L added. “It reminded me that at the time I had a recurring masturbatory fantasy: watching a man in steel-toed boots kicking a woman’s genitals, until her clitoris falls off.”

“When I was little, I thought that a woman gets pregnant because she swallows something big and round.”

“The food that comes into us is good, but it comes out as crap. “I saw another dream,” she said, “in which shit covered everything, you couldn’t see anything behind the shit; It was impossible to get anywhere, everything was covered in shit.”

What goes inside may be good, but when it comes out again, it's crap covering everything. I cannot imagine a better description of how the analyst experienced the sessions. Again and again I see a pattern here in which the session begins clearly and clearly, leading to straightforward interpretations and a positive response from the patient. Then it all gets lost in a welter of disconcerting and confusing information from the patient.

This analysis and dream have many aspects. But for now I would like to focus on the patient's sexual relationship with her ego ideal, represented by X, which was constructed from the patient's own ego ideal - that is, a woman with exactly the body that her father would want. Thus X usurps the place of the mother in the primary scene, and the patient takes the place of the father with X. Thus, an idyllic, illusory, narcissistic homosexual primary scene is built and played out. However, this is associated with a sadistic masturbatory fantasy of intercourse that has surfaced in the memory, which is similar to the scene of feeding a child in a dream with the same replacement of satisfaction with mutilation. So in this case, the supposedly protective withdrawal from the frightening relationship with the deadly nursing figure into an autoerotic genital fantasy entails the same destructive elements. The cannibalistic fork-breast that feeds the child itself becomes a steel-clad penis that castrates the female genitals.

What is the difference between female and male narcissism?

In 2015, the University at Buffalo conducted a study on narcissism to identify gender differences. An analysis of 30 years of data from 475 thousand participants showed that men are more likely to be narcissistic than women. The results of the study were published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

There is little difference between female and male narcissism.

When identifying gender differences, researchers studied 3 aspects - leadership, authority, law and exhibitionism.

Results:

Men are more likely than women to exploit others and feel like people with unlimited privileges.
Narcissistic men strive to dominate and are more assertive than women. But the quality of a leader is not considered feminine. Girls are constantly criticized for authoritarian, aggressive behavior, and excessive determination. Under the influence of public opinion, manifestations of narcissistic behavior in girls and women were suppressed.
Both sexes are equally self-centered and vain.

You hate feeling emotions

“The very fact of having feelings in the presence of another person suggests that you can be moved emotionally by friends, family, partners, and even the occasional tragedy or misfortune,” says Harvard Medical School psychologist Craig Malkin. This is why narcissists hate them.

The emotions “challenge their sense of complete autonomy,” he continues. “Admitting feelings of any kind assumes that they can be affected by someone or something from the outside.”

As a result, narcissists tend to change the subject when feelings are brought up, especially their own.

How to communicate with a narcissist

Building a healthy relationship based on equality and trust with a narcissist is difficult. It's easier to cut it off and forget. But this cannot be done.

How to deal with a narcissist - recommendations from a psychologist:

Emotional detachment. You need to learn not to react to provocations, toxic comments and manipulation. Patients with narcissistic syndrome do not admit their own mistakes because they are confident that they are right. Therefore, they do not know how to draw conclusions or correct behavior.
Set boundaries for personal space. You cannot allow yourself to be drawn into unpleasant conversations or carry out intrusive requests or orders. You will not receive gratitude and reciprocal help.
Use only short answers in conversations. This helps to resist manipulation, avoid psychological attacks, and unnecessary conversations.
Stick to the topic of conversation and don’t go off to one side. People with narcissistic syndrome like to get personal and make ridicule and complaints. Therefore, try to keep the discussion on track.
Compliments are the only way to get what they want from narcissists. After flattery and praise, your request will be granted.

You're More Attractive Than Other People - Or At Least You Think So

Narcissists are typically rated as more stylish and physically attractive, according to a study conducted by University of Washington psychologist Seemin Wazir. However, this is not always the case. According to a 2008 study, narcissists rated themselves highly in both appearance and intelligence, but when they took IQ tests, they scored average. When their peers were asked to rate their narcissistic friends based on their appearance, they scored lower than the narcissists themselves.

Treatment

The narcissist does not admit that he is sick, because he is ideal, the feeling of guilt is not inherent in him. Such people turn to a specialist with other problems - depressive, bipolar disorders, alcohol addiction.

There are no medications to treat narcissistic disorders, but psychotherapy helps to get rid of feelings of superiority, irritability, depression, low self-esteem and self-worth. The most effective psychotherapeutic techniques are Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis. Classical psychoanalysis and Jungian depth psychotherapy are used less frequently.

During sessions, the psychotherapist teaches the patient:

treat people better, which will help build close and trusting relationships;
find reasons for mistrust, contempt for people, constantly compete;
accept responsibility;
recognize and accept one’s potential, realistically assess one’s competence, and calmly accept criticism;
empathy, ability to manage feelings;
methods of getting rid of unattainable goals.

Short-term therapy is aimed at eliminating the causes and consequences of stress, smoothing out the manifestations of the crisis. But to completely eliminate the disorder, long-term therapy is required, often with the involvement of family members.

What can you tell us about being in a relationship with a narcissist?

A relationship with a narcissist is not a relationship, but constant stress, a war for personal space. He only seeks in partners confirmation of his own importance, superiority to reinforce vulnerable self-esteem. To avoid mental health problems, such relationships need to be ended.

But breaking up with a narcissist is a difficult process. From a feeling of unbearable insult, he will use all methods to get his partner back. For a while he will become what they want him to be. But all this is just another manipulation. Having achieved his goal, he returns to his behavior.

How to leave a toxic relationship:

make a list with all the reasons for breaking up and keep it handy;
get rid of illusions - people do not change, and especially narcissists;
stop any communication - block everyone, if you have common children, take a friend or relative to meetings.

Let go of your feelings, suffer a little and don't blame yourself for it. The narcissist does not suffer, he restores the ego, using the most unpleasant methods for this - gossip, searching for a new victim.

You enjoy humiliating other people

Narcissistic people intentionally suppress others in order to maintain a high, positive image of themselves. “Admiration seeking is like a drug for narcissists,” says Mithja D. Back, a psychologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. “Eventually, things become very difficult because not everyone is ready to applaud them, so they always have to find new acquaintances from whom they get their next fix.”

This also explains why narcissists usually only maintain weak relationships.

The narcissist has deep dissatisfaction with himself

From the outside it seems that narcissists endlessly love only themselves. But that's not true. Narcissism is one of the ways to hide gaps in self-esteem and feelings of dissatisfaction with oneself and uncertainty.

Patients with narcissistic injury often consider themselves worthless and do not consider themselves worthy of love or respect. But they cope with this condition by demonstrating compensatory behavior. Defense mechanisms are triggered, coldness and arrogance appear.

Narcissism is not a bad character, but a multifaceted personality disorder, manifested by inflated self-esteem and conceit. The treatment is provided by a psychotherapist.