Narcissistic States Research Articles

Grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic states in interpersonal situations

ABSTRACT Clinicians have noted that narcissistic individuals fluctuate in levels of grandiosity and vulnerability. The present study is the first to examine narcissistic states assessed during interpersonal situations. Perceptions of others’ warmth and dominance, momentary grandiosity and vulnerability, and one’s own warm and dominant behavior were assessed across situations in daily life (person N = 286; occasion N = 6,837). Results revealed that more grandiose individuals perceived others as colder and behaved more dominant and colder, on average. But in the moment, higher grandiosity was associated with perceiving others as warmer and more submissive, resulting in more dominant and warm behavior. Trait vulnerability was associated with perceptions of coldness and cold behavior, and this was amplified in the moment.

Current conceptualizations of narcissism.

Definitions of narcissism have traditionally differed across psychiatry and subfields of psychology. This review aims to highlight emerging points of consensus and suggest further directions needed to obtain a more comprehensive and cohesive conceptualization of the construct. An emerging consensus is that stable individual differences in the phenotypic expression of narcissism are best captured with a taxonomy that includes the core traits of entitlement, grandiosity, and vulnerability. Recent work has also begun to conceptualize and assess narcissistic states matched with these dimensions. We combine emerging taxonomic knowledge with principles from Whole Trait Theory to propose a multilevel conceptualization of narcissism that focuses on its manifestation at the trait level, state level, and within-situation level. Efforts to understand the phenotypic structure of the core traits associated with narcissism have been successful. As the field moves forward, it will become critical for researchers studying narcissism at multiple levels to align and integrate these perspectives so that a more comprehensive and cohesive conceptualization of the construct can be developed.

Development and validation of the Narcissistic Vulnerability Scale: An adjective rating scale.

There is an ongoing debate regarding the nature of narcissism such that some argue that narcissistic individuals oscillate between grandiose and vulnerable states, whereas others argue these dimensions are stable traits (e.g., grandiose individuals remain in grandiose states). Scales sensitive to fluctuations in narcissistic states are necessary to address this question. The current study (N = 1,613 across three samples) validates the newly developed Narcissistic Vulnerability Scale (NVS), a brief (11-item) adjective-based measure of vulnerable narcissism. Expert ratings were used for item selection. The NVS's factor structure was evaluated along with its correlations with measures of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, five-factor model traits, and self-esteem. A subset of NVS items were also evaluated using an ecological momentary assessment design. Results indicate the NVS is a unidimensional measure of vulnerable narcissism that could be used in either trait-oriented or state-oriented analyses, the latter of which may be particularly well suited to answering the most pressing questions in the study of narcissism. (PsycINFO Database Record

‘Her Majesty the Baby’: narcissistic states in babies and young children

This article considers narcissistic states in babies and young children with some reference to the myth of Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The object-seeking character of babies from the beginning of life is elaborated in connection with selected research from mother–baby interaction. This forms the backdrop to a discussion of withdrawal into illusions of self-sufficiency and denial of dependence in adverse circumstances. Two clinical cases are discussed in some depth. One boy whose superiority, self-reliance and pseudo maturity is prompted by anxieties around separation as he approaches starting school is considered within the parameters of ordinary transient narcissism. The lengthy psychotherapy of another child, who developed entrenched narcissistic defences as a response to traumatic, abusive and neglectful experiences in early life, and who needed considerable help, is described in greater detail. Some links are made with difficulties associated with the emergence from narcissistic functioning and encountering the pain of separation and loss.

The Evolution of a Meme Cluster: A Personal Account of a Countercultural Odyssey through <em>The Age of Aquarius</em>

The Evolution of a Meme Cluster: A Personal Account of a Countercultural Odyssey through <em>The Age of Aquarius</em>

Tentatives de suicide graves et répétées, et vicissitudes du travail de séparation à l’adolescence. Réflexions théoriques à partir d’un cas clinique

Clinicians who work with hospitalized teenagers often face some young patients’ relentless suicidal determination: these patients seem to have sentenced themselves to death. For several months, sometimes years, no one manages to revoke this incomprehensible capital punishment. This painful conviction that they are unworthy often comes with depressive affects that resist on a long-term basis, despite the combination of antidepressants and a psychotherapeutic approach. Thinking is too stressful: they long to suspend any psychic life, to stop the emergence of any desire and to end any relational impulse. They keep trying to stay in a factitious world, far from real life requirements, as a temporary alternative to death. Through the anaesthesia it produces, the use of drugs offers them a strong protection from their pain. The regressive search for a feeling of lacking psychic differentiation seems to confirm a defect of development within the first phase of the separation individuation process. Narcissistic vulnerability is often underlined in most psychopathological studies concerning suicide attempts during teenage years. Combined with the incapacity to endure any loss, this last element seems to imply that a “relationship of encroachment” exists between the subject and its environment, as well as a persistence of a broad area of lacking differentiation within the maternal imago. From this theoretical point of view, suicidal gestures from these patients are often understood as desperate and paradoxical attempts to reach their boundaries, to maintain their identity and to “withdraw themselves from the object of alienation”. These relevant interpretations hide the “search of a narcissistic state of undifferentiated union” that F. Ladame highlighted during the psychoanalytical counselling of numerous young and seriously suicidal patients. Through this article, we propose to try and re-examine the theoretical concepts related to the ups and downs of the psychic separation work needed by teenagers, particularly for those who went through serious suicide attempts. The presentation of a particularly difficult clinical situation will help us bring context to our subject. The uncompromising posture of this young patient seems to give credence to the hypothesis claiming that the active pursuit of death may be a way to reconnect with an undifferentiated state. In the case of our teenager, everything is going as if his disappearance was the only way to escape from the torments of a separate consciousness, and therefore recover the unconditional love from primary objects through the guise of a fusion fantasy. How can we guide adolescents caught in this narcissistic trap? The therapeutic challenge could be to guide them through the elaboration of the shame attached to their sexual body and of the ambivalent feelings they experience towards their parents. The aim would be to allow them be less dependent on their defensive way to support this deadly quest of symbiotic union with the “primary object”.

When interpretations are not enough: Interactions between the analytic pair, an intersubjective approach

Psychoanalysis today is increasingly turning its sights on narcissistic and borderline states, in which archaic forms of defense predominate and accordingly burden the analytic setting. Mental function suffers, and psychic pain cannot be experienced as a mental emotional experience. As a result, the whole situation tends towards the direction of enactment. In such cases, interpretations are not enough, at least on a primary level. Instead, there should be a possibly lengthy period of containment of this archaic nonverbal communication within the psychic space of the analyst in order give it meaning and subsequently remit it into the potential space between the analyst and the analysand in the analytic setting. It has been increasingly accepted by the psychoanalytic community that the analyst's response towards the analysand's transference is likely to contain elements that come from the analyst's own mental and affective processes. Such a holistic view of countertransference is open to acknowledging, and even embracing, the subjectivity of the analyst in the analytic process. The analyst's affective reaction toward and involvement with his patients, which is absent from the classic description of countertransference, turns the latter concept into a valuable and reliable tool for understanding severe pathology within an intersubjective frame of interaction. This paper presents the clinical case of a middle-aged man with narcissistic disorder and an incapacity to mourn. It describes the course of the interaction within the analytic pair that, in a setting of intersubjectivity, worked toward reconstructing the patient's sense of loss and absence.

What Went Wrong?: Reappraising the "Politics" of Theory

What Went Wrong?Reappraising the "Politics" of Theory Joseph Keith (bio) Review of: Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. What went wrong? How to explain the dismal state of today's political landscape in the U.S.--with neoconservatism and free-market triumphalism in such dominance and the left in a state of apparent haplessness? According to Timothy Brennan in Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, much of the left's trouble can be traced back to the post-Vietnam period of the late seventies. It was during this moment of "reassessment and political fatigue" (x) that the left largely and mistakenly abandoned Marxism and the social democratic politics of the 60s for an identity politics founded on the coalescing field of "theory"--namely poststructuralism and variants of postcolonialism--which has remained dominant to this day. (A partial list of those whom Brennan includes among "theory's . . . shared canon of sacred texts"[xii] is Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Butler, Kristeva, Arendt and the book's chief theoretical foil, Heidegger.) Brennan claims that "theory," while portrayed as a source of radical critique, has actually functioned as a surreptitious adjunct to the rise of free-market triumphalism and political neo-conservatism over the last several decades. It has done this by disavowing and silencing meaningful and organized social democratic politics based on discussion and debate in favor of a politics founded on the inarguable "ontological virtue" (14) of identity or being. This has led the left, in turn, to wallow in a narcissistic state of "virtuous inaction" (36) and to espouse positions that re-iterate the very neo-liberal logic and values it purports to challenge. "Theory," in the end, does not embody a vital counter-tradition of radical thought but what Brennan refers to as an acquiescent "middle way," testifying to a deepening convergence in this country since the dawn of Reaganism of "the cultural politics of Left and Right." Brennan develops his confrontational thesis by distinguishing between the book's two key theoretical terms--a "politics of belief" versus a "politics of being." To understand what these concepts mean for Brennan it is helpful to jump to the end of Wars of Position and Brennan's concluding reading of Antonio Gramsci. Brennan argues that contemporary theory has reduced Gramsci's work to a handful of reified terms (e.g., "hegemony," "subaltern," "passive revolution," "common sense") whose meanings have been divorced both from the larger context of his writings and from the communist intellectual and material history out of which they directly emerged. Nowhere is this more evident, Brennan argues, than in the case of "subalternity." Within contemporary postcolonial thought, "subalternity" has come to occupy a highly privileged position; indeed the term evokes one of the central ethical imperatives of the entire field--subjugated knowledge whose recovery can provide a radical counter-narrative to traditional history. More specifically for Brennan, subalternity has become highly revered as a kind of ontological resistance or "ideational essence"--that is, as defining a philosophical perspective whose value is measured and cherished in postcolonial theory precisely to the extent to which it remains removed from public life and any political engagement. For Brennan, this received wisdom is a profound and telling misreading of Gramsci's concerns. Gramsci never intended to privilege the standpoint of subalternity but instead theorized it as a condition that needed to be overcome through political action. "Having no desire to 'give voice' to the essential wisdom of the subaltern, or to glorify subalternity as such, Gramsci repeatedly made clear in his writing the need for the training and discipline provided by education, national-popular literature, and other practices that would in essence eradicate subalternity" (263-64). The distinction between these two versions of subalternity provides one of the more elegant examples for the book's central polemic against the cultural left's shift from a "politics of belief" to a "politics of being." Gramsci's vision of subalternity expresses a "politics of belief"; it is intimately tied to a radical social democratic vision and to specific political strategies to eradicate subalternity and the inequality it describes. This has...

The psychology and ideology of an islamic terrorist leader: Usama bin Laden

AbstractThis essay presents what the author proposes are the motivational bases for Usama bin Laden's avowed “holy war” against the United States. Bin Laden's biography is presented against the backdrop of the recent political history of the Middle Eastern Islamic world including the emergence of radical Islam. In assessing bin Laden's personality from the data that are available, three features are prominent: archaic narcissistic states (expressed as conscious and unconscious fantasies), paranoia and a Manichean sense of reality. It is shown that his ideology derives from his personality and his perception of and reaction to political events involving the United States and nations in the Middle East. The findings suggest that bin Laden imagines that he is walking in the shoes of the prophet Muhammad as he engages in an apocalyptic war to restore Islam as a potent force in the world. Usama bin Laden is compared to Hitler as a charismatic, messianic leader. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

A Character in Search of Character: Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Ego State Therapy

The individual diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder presents with grandiosity, extreme self-involvement, and lack of interest in and empathy for others. This paper reviews current theories concerning the development and treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and introduces the use of Ego State Therapy for its treatment. The ego state model of treatment will be described and demonstrated with case material. Initially ego states that reveal the grandiosity will be accessed. As therapy progresses, ego states that hold the underlying feelings of emptiness, rage, and depression are able to emerge. With further treatment, transformation and maturation of the ego states occur, reflecting the changes in internal structure and dynamics as well as improvement in external interpersonal relationships. Issues concerning Ego State Therapy as utilized with personality disorders will be discussed and contrasted with more traditional methods of treatment.

The Interaction between Self and others

This paper explores a perspective that expands the scope of the “healthy” narcissistic function to include the narcissistic preservation of self-identities during interaction between self and others. After a brief review of the literature from Freud to current views on the subject, the author describes the mutual influence of narcissistic processing and object relation and goes on to theorize that self-preservation is accomplished by the narcissistic envelope through immunization and defensive processing. Narcissistic immune processing provides familiarity, cohesiveness, equilibrium, integrity, and continuity to the self's separateness in an affective state of stability, which may make the libidinal need for object relation and interrelation with the world possible without undermining the constancy and safety of the self. The defensive processing preserves the self from incohesiveness and vulnerability during exposure to the unfamiliar (by creating a false selfidentity, withdrawing into a narcissistic state, or preventing new interactions). The theoretical implications of this argument and their practical application are illustrated by several clinical vignettes.

Early trauma in the development of masochism and depression

Gabriel J, Beratis S. Early Trauma in the Development of Masochism and Depression. Int Forum Psychoanal 1997;6:231-236. Stockholm. ISSN 0803-706X. The association of psychic trauma to masochistic behavior, either erotogenic or moral, and to depression has been repeatedly ascertained in the psychoanalytic literature. The following report is about the case of a patient with a traumatic childhood, who engaged in erotogenic masochistic behavior and intermittent depression combined with moral masochism. The evolution of the case shows that whenever the patient was threatened by separation anxiety he resorted to erotogenic masochism so as to handle the trauma of separation and maintain his self integrity. On the other hand, when severe exogenous traumatic events such as actual loss of a significant other occurred, caused the erotogenic masochism to fail as a defense, the patient regressed to an immobilized narcissistic state, characterized by severe depressive symptomatology with moral masochistic elements. It was as if his catatonic form of reaction enabled him to achieve a symbiotic union with his internal objects and prevent further psychotic disorganization.

Postmodern Perspective: The Paranoid Eye

Postmodern Perspective: The Paranoid Eye Jerry Aline Flieger (bio) This paper deals with the relation between paranoia and postmodernism, in both fiction and theory, in at least three registers: thematic, structural, and transferential (referring to the transactional nature of the reading process). This continuum in turn opens to a fourth realm—the domain of the social, widely construed, which is the context most germane to the discussion on East/West cultural studies in which we are engaged here. The transparency of our information-saturated global monad, in the age of instantaneous “contact” and access, doubtless confers a paranoid modality to “postmodern” life, giving us the feeling that we are watched everywhere, monitored and transcribed by a ubiquitous information bank. Much postmodern writing reflects this feeling of being under the gaze of an anonymous surveillance—the sense that the ever growing database which catalogues us all has its eye on us, tracking our social and economic history, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes to facilitate the new economic or cultural order (as in the credit rating system in the West). Given the concerns of this age, which Teresa Brennan has termed “the age of paranoia,” a raging debate continues to take place concerning the ramifications of this postmodern condition. 1 Is it a bleak or even psychotic moment, leading to the effacement of the individual and the diminution of social contact? Or is it rather an expansion and recasting of the definition and the possibilities of the social in the global information age? Does it increase contact with otherness—in the spirit of the East/West encounter fostered by the exchange of essays in this volume—or does it efface otherness in a culture of the virtual and the instantaneous, leading to a diminution of productive difference (the meeting, as Terry Eagleton puts it, of Mao with McDonald’s)? In other words, what is the status of the global—to use a familiar postmodern marker—and is it conducive to cultural cross-pollination which would go beyond mere commercial exoticism (Thai restaurants in Tucson) or does it disseminate an epidemic of sameness, a culture free of ethics, obedient only to the demands of performance? I would like to suggest that part of the answer depends on how we define the concept “paranoid,” as a clinical psychosis, in Freud’s sense, or as an episteme, a (postmodern) mode of knowledge. I focus here on [End Page 87] a particular aspect of paranoid modality, its relation to the specular and the visible, and hence its relation to the Lacanian Imaginary mode, as adumbrated in his concept of the mirror stage in human development. For paranoia may be considered an imaginary construct, in Lacan’s sense of the term, because of its etiology: it stems from a fixation, as Freud tells us, in the narcissistic state, and is characterized by the overtones of specular identification implied in narcissistic imaginary constructs like projection. In fact, postmodern paranoia may be considered a special case of the specular imaginary—which Jean Baudrillard has called “hypervisibility”—the preeminence of the virtual in the millennial era, accompanied by an increasing blindness to the real material conditions that ground us. 2 But I want to ask here—expanding on Lacan’s topography of the human psyche—if this postmodern hyperimaginary of the virtual might not be countered by something like a postmodern hypersymbolic, a symbolic of the sublime (as Lyotard, among others, suggests), depending, in Lyotard’s words “on the presentation that the unpresentable exists,” and on the persistence of matter itself, in a face-off with the virtual and the technological. 3 (Even in our cyber-lives, the computer “goes down” for maintenance, the disk fails, the real cables are disrupted.) This obdurate quality of the object and of matter reminds us of the ineluctability of the real, its intrusion even into the ether of cyberspace. Against the naysayers of postmodernism and “post-culture,” I would like to ask what an engaged postmodern subject might be, if not a soporific video consumer, mesmerized in front of a monitor? Engaged in anticipatory thinking and projection vis-à-vis the Other, the world and its objects, this subject would not merely be reduced...

On autoerotism and object relations in the psycho-sexual development: some viewpoints on Freud's drive theories

Autoerotic gratifications are necessary for children suffering from a disturbed mother relation, and constitute symptoms of the same (jactatis capitis, extreme masturbation, etc.). The origins of the autoerotic functions go as far back as the foetal stage (thumbsucking). In the habits of so-called normal human beings, they also have an important stabilizing function to psychic autonomy. We are accompanied by primary and sublimated autoerotic functions all through our lives, which offer comfort and satisfaction during the different vicissitudes of life. Freud's monistic drive theory seems more plausible to me than his later dualistic theories. In accordance with the former, man can regress from object-libidinal cathexes into autoerotic positions when feeling psychically or physically threatened, and during normal conditions when asleep, sleep constituting a normal narcissistic state.

Book Reviews: Narcissistic States and the Therapeutic Process.

Book Reviews: Narcissistic States and the Therapeutic Process.

Institutional pathology in a psychiatric inpatient service.

Government hospitals appear to be particularly prone to certain forms of institutional pathology manifested in bureaucratic malaise, inadequate compensation for difficult work tasks, distorted communication between groups, and a sense of despair, low morale, and “burn-out” in the staff. It is also manifested in anonymous, autocratic leadership that, although fitting the system in which it works, results in a “narcissistic state,” felt by the staff as fundamentally injurious. The consequence is a collusion among leadership, staff, and patients that feeds the institutional pathology and erodes the work task. Finally, quality is relinquished, individuality is forgotten; education, service, productivity, creativity, and patient care become secondary to stability and security.

Problems of early maintenance and entry into group psychotherapy with persons suffering from borderline and narcissistic states

Problems of early maintenance and entry into group psychotherapy with persons suffering from borderline and narcissistic states

Some Aspects of the Dream in Psychosomatic Disease

Sleep is a regression to a primitive narcissistic state when the ego attempts to recover from injuries to its narcissism by going back to earlier stages in instinctual development. These nightly regressions serve two purposes: They temporarily deny reality on one on one hand, and on the other hand block the motor portion of the brain center. A case of angioneurotic edema and one of convulsive seizure were shown to have had symptoms only during and after a dream state. In both of these cases, impulses to act out the conflict in dreams could not be exercised by the motor apparatus so that these energies seemed to reinforce the sensory apparatus and to increase internal perception. The increased internal perception produced dreams in which forbidden aggressive and instinctual drives were acted out in the dream state and the symptom complex was substituted for the thwarted motor discharge. In one individual the psychic charge was released through the vegetative system. There is some evidence for a familial and personal predisposition for skin disorders in this man. It can only be conjectured that the skin represented an erotic outlet which was equated in some manner to an earlier stage of sexual development. In the other case, an unendurable psychic conflict generated enough energy to stimulate the motor cortex and cause a convulsive seizure. This seems to have represented the ego's attempt to defend itself against murderously aggressive drives by regressing to an infantile stage in which rage and uncoordinated movements could be discharged without danger to the ego or offense to the super-ego. The symptoms in both cases seemed to represent a simultaneous gratification and punishment for forbidden sexual and aggressive strivings. It is commonly accepted that the actions during the day and repressed thoughts of that day may be portrayed in dream. However, it is less fully realized that symptoms may follow dreams; fairly frequently minor somatic symptoms, which appear most often in the morning, may be attempted solutions of unresolved conflicts in a dream of the night before. Such symptoms may appear 1) as safety valves against the appearance of repressed material 2) and/or as a harbor for libidinal energy. Endopsychi'c perception of illness in dreams has often been reported in cases of psychoses and in not a few cases of serious organic disorders. Some writers have even included death as having been predieted. In the presented cases, the temporal sequence of dream and disease is suggestive of the manner in which the unconscious may forecast organic illness. As an addition; in the above cases, suggestion under hypnosis prevented the reliving of a symptom by producing amnesia from the moment of conflict awareness, to a period several hours after the symptoms subsided. Thus the period when physiologic changes occurred was circumvented. By short-circuiting the psychic charge produced by a conflict the symptom-complex which usually followed could be avoided. This may offer some tentative evidence that symptoms anticipated in dreams can be avoided by other psychologic means. At the present time, psychoanalysis offers the best means for this.