Narcissism - An Evaluation

You may wonder what it has been like spending about 6 months reading up on narcissism. Quite frankly, quite a narcissistic exercise. I found the whole thing quite fascinating but quite self indulging and illuminating. As the topic is quite a broad subject, I had found myself focussing on introversion an idea originally introduced by Jung and debated between him and Freud. Whereas Jung thought it was a psychic strategy Freud was more interested in the levels of energy invested in it. I do find myself wondering whether differences in opinion or perception can sometimes be harnessed to save friendships and relationships. In this instance it seemed not by Jung, not being in the slightest interested in forming a biological basis for someone else’s opinion. All the same I found their arguments quite interesting but also intrusive into how I might interact from time to time with others. I suppose it is easier to focus on how someone else might exhibit narcissistic traits and forget that it exists to a lesser or greater degree in all of us.

I must say digging deep into the realm of the mind was initially rather scary. It did feel a bit safe at first attributing the traits to abnormal behaviour in adults until someone like Pearls identified that even normal people ‘hallucinate’ from time to time.

What really opened my mind about the topic was when I touched on the area of prejudice and it was Dalal that did it for me in his amazing explanation of how the fear of feeling being taken over by another could be associated with feelings of wanting or possessing something about them. I guess the pain being in the psychic emergence of ‘the other’.

Symington I had to read twice and he seemed to put it all into perspective that ‘all mental disturbances emerge from recognition of the other’. I wonder if anyone else agrees that there is a certain discomfort sometimes about others coming into an other’s personal space. And yet Fairbairn hypothesises that ‘relation is what we yearn for’.

Modern Day Narcissism

Now why do I seem to return to the topic of narcissism lately? Apart from it being a major topic I am writing about, I do experience and observe it being a major player at different levels in all of us. Some of us find it hard talking about the subject let alone believing that narcissism may form any part of our complex personalities. Here I am though and I put my hands up, I am not perfect and will probably be examining my levels of narcissism from time to time. You have probably guessed, I do find it a fascinating subject, particularly how it starts to evolve normally in infancy and then the way it can be acted out in adults, especially in extreme or exaggerated forms. Someone once told me that 'it’s not good to keep examining yourself every day', maybe not, but how do you evaluate your affect on others, if part of your daily routine is to cause yourself certain types of anxieties when the psychological emergence of an other person starts to break through, that is, their separateness and personality proves that they don’t think or behave exactly like you?

Well, there is plenty of room for debate here and reasons for unconscious motives for what could start off the process of hatred towards an other  just for being different! Consequently, and consciously, some might say or describe the other in some way as inferior: as a dim wit, unfeeling or unintelligent, or is the reality of "otherness" simply a matter of rejection of creative 'difference'? I wonder whether any of these perceptions have anything to do with envy, jealousy and prejudices, or a matter of admiration being diverted even for a moment to an other person being some kind of regression to infancy. Well, whatever form it takes, I wonder how easy it would be to show others love and appreciation for similar likeness, rather than rejection of the notion of sameness, as a delusion of an attack on the sense of being a unique ‘me’, by the behaviour of blocking room for sense of otherness?

One suggestion I had in mind was to work through any kind of aspect of hatred or hatred to the excess, initiated by narcissism or narcissistic traits, this could include perception of colour, race, culture, prejudices and racism. After all, at the base level, we all started with the same biological form and instincts didn’t we.