Narcissism - a disease?

Reading possibly the thickest book I've ever seen in my life (and I own a hardback, A3 Bible), I finally reached the end of the essay that I was reading, and with an inner sigh of relief, thanked God that I was finally finished making notes on the pleasure principle and the compulsion to repeat that which causes us no pleasure (yes, Freud, I get it, we all are masochists with Daddy Issues). All I wanted was to relax in bed with an episode of Gossip Girl and some food. And then I saw the title of the next essay.

"On Narcissism."

Well, I couldn't resist, could I? For the next forty minutes, I lapped up every word that my favourite crazy scientist had to say, and for once, was surprised to find that Freud's theories on narcissism actually seem to agree with mainstream psychology (those who have had any experience reading Freud will know that he's not usually the most conventional of gentlemen).

So, what exactly did Freud have to say on narcissism? Well, firstly, that narcissism is a way of clinging onto childhood. As children, we often find ourselves perfect. We don't have insecurities and inferiority complexes. However, this level of arrogance is not socially acceptable when we grow up, and it often becomes repressed. When a man's ego gets criticised by others and condemned by his superego (or conscience), he seeks comfort in creating this "ideal ego", which he can worship. Thus, this degree of self-love, or ego worship, is a defence mechanism, created by the unconscious, to deal with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.

This may explain then, why the narcissist reacts so strongly to perceived criticism, and will even go so far as to assume that anybody that refuses to worship them is "jealous", another way that the mind deals with potential trauma. First, the narcissist will laugh off any criticism, accusing people of being jealous, and of "wanting to be them". They are incapable of believing that perhaps somebody genuinely doesn't like them, or isn't attracted to them. Their ego can't deal with it, and so they create the delusion that people are jealous of them as a way of preventing this mental collapse.

Anybody remember Samantha Brick? Samantha wrote an article for The Daily Mail last year about how women hate her because she is beautiful. Now of course this caused mass public offence, as women everywhere were quick to point out that the reason they dislike Ms Brick, is nothing to do with her looks, but because she seems like an arrogant, ignorant piece of work. However, Samantha refused to believe that the dislike could stem from anything but jealousy, and remained adamant that her personality had nothing to do with society's dislike of her. Now, I don't know about you but I don't particularly want to have pillow fights and talk about boys with Samantha Brick, and this has nothing to do with her being prettier than me. It's more to do with the fact that she seems like a horrible woman with a toxic world view, and not somebody that I want to be spending my time with

But let's not waste our time hating on old Bricky. She's got enough haters. My point was merely that Samantha's fragile ego simply could not handle the enormous backlash that her article received, and so created a delusion that all the outrage stemmed from jealousy of her good looks. This is a typical Freudian defence mechanism. Has anybody seem Shutter Island? The protagonist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is unable to cope with the fact that he murdered his wife, and by extension, his children, and so represses the memory and creates an alternative reality in which he is a completely different person. Although a more extreme example, this still illustrates that same point: we are masters of believing our own delusions.

So what happens if the narcissist is unable to believe his/her delusions? Well, that's when we finally see some real emotion. Anger. And I'm not talking about the kind of anger you feel when your house mate doesn't wash the pots, again. I'm talking about a murderous fury, a blind rage that makes you want to ruin somebody's life, end somebody's life. This sounds extreme, and it is, but we must remember that this kind of anger is a completely normal response for the narcissist. Patrick Bateman, the psychopathic killer in American Psycho, murders when people make him feel inadequate, usually by having better taste than he does.

We can also see a flirtation of this in the ITV series, Gossip Girl, with Blair Waldorf. A classic narcissist, Blair lives off control and domination, gaining pleasure only from the manipulation and social control of others. Whenever she feels scorned (usually by some imagined incident, exaggerated in her mind), she goes out of her way to seek revenge on whoever she feels has wronged her. Extremely insecure about her mother preferring her best friend, and her first love cheating on her with the same friend, Blair makes everything a big game in order to regain some of the control that she doesn't have in other aspects of her life. (She also suffers from bulimia, a common result of people who feel as though they have no hold over their own lives. By controlling what they eat, people with eating disorders can take back that control.) I could sit here and analyse Blair all day, talking about how she looks down upon people poorer, or of a lesser social status than her, in order to make up for the deep-seated insecurities that she truly feels, but again I'm getting carried away. This was never supposed to be a psychological profile of Blair Waldorf.

I guess the key factor in narcissism, which I hadn't really considered before this week, is it's roots in mental illness. Although I've always known that narcissistic people are really making their own insecurities, I've never thought about it past that. Adler, who coined the term "superiority complex", says this: "The normal person does not have a superiority complex, she or he does not even have a sense of superiority. She or he has the striving to be superior in the sense that we all have ambition to be successful; but so long as this striving is expressed in work it does not lead to false valuations, which are at the root of mental disease."

It is easier to recognise narcissism for what it is - a mental illness - when we consider the other qualities that a typical narcissist demonstrates. These qualities can include but are not limited to glibness (superficial charm), a grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, being manipulative, showing a lack of remorse for actions and empathy for others, and a failure to accept responsibility for their own actions. When we consider that psychopaths are not just found in movies or behind bars (did you know that 1/100 people is a psychopath?) this word, "narcissism", that is so often thrown around, suddenly seems a lot more sinister. 

My last point, and the last characteristic that Freud spoke about when addressing narcissism, was that of paranoia. He stated that when one is so unhealthily self-obsessed, a paranoia develops. The foundations of this paranoia, are not rooted in the external world, but in the subject's own ego. In other words, they are that obsessed with themselves that they think that everybody else must be as well. A lecturer told me a few weeks ago that teenagers have been proven to be less perceptive of facial expressions and what they mean than adults. The lecturer then went on to say that many teenagers are egocentric. Thus, the egocentrism, married with the poor perception, results in the "What do you think you're lookin' at?" phenomenon, as the teens become paranoid that everybody is "out to get them." 

This is similar to the narcissist, who is highly sensitive to perceived criticism. While a normal person's superego usually provides a healthy amount of self-criticism, the narcissist's inflated superego provides an almost endless stream of judgement and criticism, masking itself as paranoia of the outside world. Rather than tell the ego "You look fat today," it will tell it "Jessica thinks you look fat today," creating a distrust and paranoia, the same paranoia that can so easily lead to the extreme outbursts of anger I mentioned before. The narcissist wants more than anything to liberate themselves from outside influences (parents, society) that pose a threat to its fragile ego. They repress the inferiority, replacing it with a shallow sense of superiority, and vow to ruin anybody that threatens their ego. 

Interesting, ey?