Narcissism

Narcissism

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arcissism is the leading psychopathology of our time. Most of my younger contemporaries – especially the Boomers – are infected with this disease. Since the psychosis of the individual is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture, an analysis of narcissism in individuals reveals a lot about the shortcomings of our culture. As Ken Wilber says, in our pluralistic, postmodern society all is Flatland, horizontal surfaces without a vertical dimension. In other words, we have a society from which the transcendent, the spiritual has been systematically excluded. The results are devastating, not just ecologically and culturally, but also personally.

            Narcissism is the product of a culture centred round the individual ego, a culture which sees the world in terms of self and objects, all other besides oneself being viewed as objects. Ostensibly brimming over with self-love, the narcissist is actually filled with self-hatred, from which arise the feelings of emptiness, alienation, panic, fragmentation of the self and bottled-up rage which, psychoanalytically, characterise the real self observed in clinical narcissism.         

Baby Boomers, being narcissistic, are obsessed with their own bodies and those of others. I keep telling the Boomers I know, “As the Hindus say, the biggest mistake you can make is to identify yourself with your body. It’s a temporary structure”. Of course, they ignore me, being narcissistically subconsciously convinced they are immortal.

The cult of the body leads to the formation of disastrous relationships, especially when the worshipped ‘hard body’ begins to lose its youthful tautness. When I survey the wreckage of so many relationships around me, all founded on body worship, ignoring character, I am reminded of the story of a girl who informed her elderly schoolmistress that she intended to marry “a magnificent blond beast”. “By all means do so, my dear,” was the cool reply. “Just remember that when the blondness fades, the beast remains”. 
            David’s middle-aged secretary, Lisa, a husband-hunting divorcee, was inordinately vain. “People say I have the body of a nineteen year old”, she would tell him. One day he was foolish enough to reply, “Really? A nineteen year old what?” She never forgave him for the joke. From that day on she set out to sabotage him in every possible way with the Administration. Wounded vanity can be more dangerous than a wounded tiger – and nothing wounds vanity like ridicule.

            Ada is notorious for ridiculing friends and foes alike. As a result she has almost none of the former but scores of the latter. She herself becomes hysterical if she is ridiculed. She has never stopped to consider that what she herself finds painful might also hurt others, because she sincerely believes that other richly deserve ridicule while she does not. This is part of her general overestimation of herself, a classic feature of pathological narcissism, in which self-love actually disguises intense, subconscious self-hatred. Her conduct is ingeniously designed to gratify both.

            Julian’s niece, Lynne, whom he had helped considerably, told him it was no good his expecting gratitude, because she “did not even know the meaning of the word.” Being young, brash and impudent, she was not afraid of saying what most people feel and think but are too sensible to voice aloud. Gratitude is a useless word, found only in the dictionary but not in life, as La Rochefoucauld observed.

            Inner emptiness is found everywhere today. As T.S. Eliot saw, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction”. We look within and find, not a soul, but a classical computer, which we programme with trivia. Since machines are ultimately scrapped this leads to intense terror of old age and death.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM