Читать книгу All About Me: Loving a narcissist - Simon Crompton - Страница 7

The first person to take the myth of Narcissus and give it a specific significance in describing human nature was the British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis in 1898. He used it to describe a form of pathological self-absorption. But it was the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who in the early twentieth century tied the idea of Narcissus more specifically to human psychological traits, and presented the first coherent theory of narcissism in human beings.

Freud said that narcissism was a natural part of the human makeup, but also a characteristic that if taken to extremes can prevent us from having meaningful relationships. In 1914, Freud distinguished between primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism, he said, is the love of self in our infancy which precedes our ability to love others. It is a natural and essential stage of the child’s development, when a child asserts a sense of identity – learning how to love themselves before they can love anyone else.⁵ This idea of the formation of the ‘self’ in childhood has been built on by many of Freud’s followers in psychoanalysis. The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan, for example, put a new twist on primary narcissism by developing a theory of the ‘mirror phase’, where babies develop a sense of self and others only once they have recognised their own reflection in a mirror.

Secondary narcissism is something very different – a form of self-love that people can develop in adulthood when they should be well beyond primary narcissism and should have learned to find external objects for their love. Secondary narcissism is a form of regression back to childish self-absorption, as a result of having tried to reach out to objects of desire, but failing to gain their love or attention. It is, in effect, a means of protecting yourself against further rejection.

These ideas are still relevant to modern and emerging ideas of narcissism. When we talk about narcissists today, we are referring to secondary narcissists – people who are stuck in, or reverting to, childish self-centredness. Freud’s work demonstrates that ‘narcissist’ isn’t just an abusive term – it’s something inherent in all of us, and something that we are all liable to fall back on as a result of emotional trauma.

Freud’s definitions are important because they set the groundwork for our increasing understanding that people become narcissistic and self-regarding not because they are simply ‘bad’ or ‘difficult’ but because they are vulnerable. There’s now a widely-held belief that real narcissism in adulthood usually has its roots in emotional rejection or deprivation from one’s parents in childhood. It’s a pattern born of a lack of empathy and love, and results in people being in turn unable to empathise or love. Narcissists breed narcissists, because their behaviour forces their children to create an artificial idea of grandiosity and self-esteem around themselves. It’s self-defence.

Many psychoanalysts have pointed out that it’s not just our relationships with our parents that can encourage narcissistic tendencies – it’s our relationship with other people and society too. Freud’s followers have picked up on the term ‘narcissism’, because it seems increasingly relevant to our modern times.

As psychoanalyst Marion F Solomon says, many people today suffer from ‘a narcissistic vulnerability that permeates all their relationships’. This is the result, she says, of a number of converging factors, including ‘the messages that society sends us, the emotional failure between parents and children, and the history of failed relationships that has today become part of the life of many.’ Narcissistically vulnerable people desperately wish to be involved in a relationship, but have unreasonable expectations of what they should give to the relationship, and what they should get from it. This inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration for both themselves and their partners.⁶

Because of our experiences, some of us have strong narcissistic traits in adulthood, and others have milder ones. All of us will have narcissistic traits as children. And all of us are likely to revert to narcissistic, self-centred patterns of behaviour at times of stress. We all become needy and demanding when we feel we can’t cope. This has a name: it’s called reactive narcissistic regression. Even if you’re the most empathetic, selfless person around, you’ll have some understanding of narcissism if you try to imagine how it feels when you’ve been really upset and are demanding attention. Say you’ve just had an argument with someone you love. You’ll cry and make a scene and make demands on people – probably your friends – that you would never do normally. You might even exaggerate your own achievements a bit to boost your own sense of power, and compensate for the vulnerability you are feeling inside. ‘I told him like it was … I’m too good for him, and he knows it.’ That’s you, essentially, reverting to a primary narcissistic state. The thing about people with strong narcissistic traits is that they are like that most of the time.