The definition of “narcissism” in Wikipedia can suffice for many purposes: “Narcissism is the personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others.” As such, most if not all of us display narcissistic traits at one time or another, some of us more routinely than others. The concept was first introduced into psychology by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), although Paul Näcke coined the term itself in reference to Ellis’s work on “morbid self love” and his “correlation of the Greek myth of Narcissus with a case of male autoerotic perversion.”[1] In psychoanalysis, the meaning expanded along the lines of our original definition above, thus sexual perversion is now “viewed as only a specific, dramatic illustration of something more general in the human psyche and behavior.”[2]
Narcissism is one of those words subject to distortion through “psychobabble,” that is, misuse and misunderstanding owing to our reliance on
“a form of prose using jargon, buzzwords and highly esoteric language to give an impression of plausibility through mystification, misdirection, and obfuscation. The term implies that the speaker of psychobabble lacks the experience and understanding necessary for proper use of a given psychological term. Frequent usage can associate a clinical word with less meaningful buzzword definitions. Some psychological buzzwords have come into widespread use in business management training, motivational seminars, self-help, folk psychology, and popular psychology. Laypersons may overuse such words in describing life problems as clinical maladies when such nomenclature is not valuable, meaningful or appropriate. [….] Psychobabble terms consist of selected words and phrases with roots in psychotherapy practice. Psychobabblers commonly overuse such terms as if they possess some special esoteric value or meaning when they might not.”[3]
As a layperson and thus not a psychologist or psychiatrist, I’ll assume the risk of psychobabble in what follows, for I want to suggest that the numerous high-profile incidents recently chronicled in the mass media of men behaving badly in public life, particularly those unable to keep their pants on, is fairly convincing evidence (should we needed convincing) that politicians and men in power generally, are conspicuous in their display of many if not all of the symptoms of what clinicians would diagnose as “narcissistic personality disorder.” We should leave aside the case of the former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominque Strauss-Kahn, the French economist, lawyer, and member of the French Socialist Party recently charged with sexual assault in New York City. Why? Well, I think it’s best to cleave to the presumption of innocence, and withhold comment or speculation until the outcome of the legal system’s process of adversarial adjudication. I hope to mitigate the dangers of psychobabble by deferring to psychological and psychiatric expertise in what follows, keeping in mind, with the “lay scientist” Martin Robbins of The Guardian, that psychologists and psychiatrists themselves should refrain from commenting in public about the mental health of public figures for at least two reasons: “Either they have treated the subject in a professional capacity, in which case the details should be confidential, or they haven’t, in which case they aren’t qualified to comment.” Not being a mental health professional, and for better and worse, I’m free from such strictures.
The controversial but no less important and widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-IV (2000) published by the American Psychiatric Association, lists the following diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder:”
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five or more of the following:
(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
(2) is preoccupied with fanatasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
(3) believes that he or she is ‘special’ and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other specific or high-status people (or institutions)
(4) requires excessive admiration
(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of expecially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
(7) lacks empathy
(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
(9) shows arrogant, haughty behavior or attitudes [4]
It’s not hard not to detect from a distance, as it were, any number (five or more?) of these pathological symptoms in high-profile politicians and public figures/celebrities like John Edwards, Tiger Woods, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (among many others). I’m inclined to believe these well-known cases of powerful men behaving badly are merely egregious public representations of a cultural epidemic of narcissism generally in American society, a possibility that should preclude our indulgence in schadenfreude. Indeed, this may be yet another illustration of what Erich Fromm called the “pathology of normalcy.” In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm made an important and comparatively neglected observation: “the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” a point well-appreciated among our philosophical predecessors of Platonic, Hellenistic, Hindu and Buddhist provenance in which it was (and still is) argued that there exists a “widespread prevalence of mass delusion, which only a rigorous apprenticeship of the mind or spirit can undo.”[5] In particular, Fromm viewed “much of our cultural and political life as expressions of low-grade, chronic schizoid tendencies.”[6]
In contemporary psychoanalytic thought, Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) and Otto F. Kernberg have formulated in some detail differing conceptions of the “grandiose self,” and their approaches to narcissism as a personality disorder are widely cited. I won’t attempt to discuss their respective theories here (I’m inclined to favor the latter’s approach), but do want to flesh out a bit the enumerated diagnostic criteria above with some material from two of Kernberg’s later works, which build upon his seminal book, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975). According to Kernberg,
“The typical symptoms of the narcissistic personality disorder in the area of pathological self-love are excessive self-reference and self-centeredness; grandiosity and the derived characteristics of exhibitionism, an attitude of superiority, recklessness, and overambitiousness; overdependency on admiration, emotional shallowness; and bouts of excessive insecurity alternating with grandiosity. In the area of pathological object relations [‘object relations’ is a technical term in psychoanalytic thought—‘a psychodynamic theory within psychoanalytic psychology’—in which ‘objects’ refer to other persons in one’s world as well as internalized images of others],[7] these patients’ predominant symptoms are inordinate envy (both conscious and unconscious); devaluation of others as a defense against envy; exploitativeness manifested by greediness, appropriation of others’ ideas or property, and an attitude of entitlement; an incapacity to truly depend on others in a mutual relationship; and a remarkable incapacity for empathy with and commitment to others. The basic ego state of these patients is characterized by a chronic sense of emptiness, evidence of an incapacity to learn, a sense of isolation stimulus hunger, and a diffuse sense of the meaninglessness of life. [….] [These patients also] present some degree of superego pathology, including the incapacity to experience self-reflective sadness, deep mood swings, a predominance of shame as contrasted to guilt in their intrapsychic regulation of social behavior; and a value system more childlike than adult; that is, they value physical beauty, power, wealth, and the admiration of others as against capabilities, achievements, responsibility, and relation to ideals.”[8]
Elsewhere Kernberg is keen to remind us that individuals with narcissistic personality often “function along a broad range of social effectiveness. Their social functioning may show very little disturbance.”[9] There’s quite a gap, in other words, between the face one presents to the world, and one’s inner life, for
“[b]eneath a surface that is often charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness. [Pathological narcissists] typically feel restless and bored when no new sources feed their self-regard. [I can’t help but recall here Schwarzenegger’s reply to a reporter’s question as to why at the end of his term as Governor of California, he commuted the prison sentence of the son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, convicted for his role in the slaying of one Luis Dos Santos: he irritatingly replied that the reporter’s question ‘bored’ him.] Because of their great need for tribute and self-adoration from others, they are often considered to be excessively dependent. But they are, in fact, unable to depend on anyone because of a deep underlying distrust and devaluation of others and an unconscious ‘spoiling’ of what they receive related to conflicts about unconscious envy.”[10]
So ends our introduction to the narcissistic personality disorder.
I think it’s imperative that we explore the causes and effects of a cultural ethos and social system that attracts, encourages and rewards individuals prone to public display of not a few symptoms of pathological narcissism. In as much as we deliberately create or passively acquiesce in or tolerate that ethos and this system, we are in some sense or some measure complict in if not responsible for the proliferation of prominent public figures behaving badly. Relatedly, we might think long and hard about our penchant for electing men (and sometimes women) to political office only by way of feeding compensatory and malign power relations. The philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty suggests the following Freudian-inspired explanation:
“The structures of power have an astonishing stability. In the large range of constructive imagining of options we turn again and again to archetypal patterns, to the Charismatic Leader, to the Band of the Brotherhood Committee, to the Pure Young Hero, to the Good-Bad Earth Mother. Why are our imaginations of power structures so fixed? It is because we learn from experience; and our most formative experiences of power, and of power relations, are those we have during our prolonged and wholly dependent infancy. While this prolonged infancy makes empathy and psychological complexity possible, it exacts a cost. We are formed not only by what we have learned from experience, but by the ways we learn. As long as we are in a complex and highly benign compliance to those who nurtured and sustained us as infants, we associate security and well-being with dependence on power figures. It is to these beginnings that our imaginations return when we are discomforted, depleted, in need. Even though we eventually chafed at the restrictions of our nurturing figures, even though, if we were lucky, we developed sympathy and autonomy, we still have as part of ur expectations our early experiences of childhood, where reality meant dependency, being Subject to a Boss. If that relation was a benign one, we are all the more subject to gravitate to reconstructing it when we are troubled; but if it was a malign relation, then we are all the more incapacitated. For then a malign power relation is what we expect of the world. It is what defined normality. And of course if it was malign, then we are crippled in our abilities to envisage alternative structures.”[11]
We can begin to see why Rorty argues that perhaps the most important way “the Boss” controls “the Subject” is through “control” of her imagination. With regard to our aforementioned complicity in forging the chains that bind us, Rorty elaborates nature of the power relation (implicit in Hegel’s ‘master-slave’ dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit), including the notion of the latent power of the Subject:
“Every power carries a hidden powerlessness, that of being dependent on cooperation. Every powerlessness carries a hidden power, that of withholding cooperation. Sullenness, silence, ridicule, and destruction are the Subject’s hidden power. Since powerlessness is a function of desire, the powerless can, in principle and within severe limits, overcome their powerlessness by detaching themselves from their desires. But the Subject can only realize his hidden powers if he has insight, if he is imaginatively and intellectually enabled. The true latent power of the Boss is therefore that of forming the mentality of his Subjects, his being in a position to control their capacity to recognize their situation and the possibilities that it holds.”[12]
And it is here that we come upon the difficult terrain that endeavors to account for the psychological mechanisms by which ideological beliefs are formed and entrenched, for instance, by the shaping of preferences that make for, literally and figuratively, the “happy slave,” or those adaptive preferences whereby our dreams and desires are adjusted to our constricted conception of possibilities (‘sour grapes’ syndrome), the sort of adaptive preference formation that may account, for example, for the lack of desire for self-realization. As Jon Elster stated in Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (1983), the Boss need not directly form the mentality or control the imagination of his Subjects (although this is attempted in totalitatarian regimes), but merely exploit the ideology they themselves have spontaneously generated: “It is a massive fact of history that the values and beliefs of the subjects tend to support the rule of the dominant group, but I believe that in general this occurs through the spontaneous invention of ideology by the subjects themselves, by way of dissonance reduction, or through their illusory perception of social causality.”[13] Although Marx spoke, for example, of religious ideology as the “opium of the people,” Elster reminds us that “opium can be taken as well as given; not all addicts are manipulated into addiction.”[14]
Notes:
[1] Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds., Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (1990): 124.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “Psychobabble” entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychobabble.
[4] American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR (Text Revision) (2000): 717.
[5] Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (1991): 134-135.
[6] Ibid., 144.
[7] Please see, Morris N. Eagle, Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation (1984), and Lavina Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations (1997).
[8] Otto F. Kernberg, Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (1992): 73-74.
[9] Otto F. Kernberg, Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies (1984): 192.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (1988): 344-345.
[12] Rorty (1988): 336.
[13] Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (1983): 164.
[14] Ibid., 165.
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