Narcissism

Freud considered a narcissistic disorder as an inability to form relationships. This means that someone with narcissistic issues views another person as an extension of their own world or needs and struggles to genuinely show interest and concern for that person. The undertone of such a relationship is primarily ‘utilitarian’. In other words, the relationship is maintained as long as there is ‘utility’ in it.
It is essential to recognize that this is a spectrum ranging from ‘normal’ to ‘pathological’. We all seek answers to the question: what is love? And we all use each other to some extent. The pathology increases when this transaction occurs on false grounds, for example, by suggesting love when there is little or none. We can recognize this in ourselves when we mainly judge others based on their utility and forget how enriching the experience of appreciation for another can be. If we never experience that richness, we are in the danger zone. Conversely, if we inflate the value of another to superhuman proportions, we are also in the danger zone.

A well-known symptom of problematic narcissism is the insatiable need for validation, admiration, and applause. While we all need affirmation, this looks different in less damaged individuals. Everyone has a need for validation, admiration, and applause to varying degrees. However, the average person seems able to reach a saturation point. Relatively healthy individuals can internalise the appreciation. Someone with problematic narcissism, due to a poor relationship with their own self, cannot assimilate the admiration. It remains foreign, external, and therefore quickly fades. The appreciation does not land because there is insufficient foundation of the self-image, and the person in question deep down feels it is undeserved since it is based on inauthentic behaviour.

A relatively healthy person, with a relatively healthy form of narcissism, can enjoy being alone and can have lively interests or a rich flow of relatively friendly thoughts. The more intensely someone struggles with narcissistic emptiness, the harder it is for them to be harmoniously alone. Instead, there is a heightened self-awareness and a threatening experience of emptiness. To avoid that unpleasant feeling, overly ambitious projects are started, or new stress factors are sought to fill or mask the void. Or, in some cases, inner peace itself is made into a project to ‘score’ with.

Due to the alienation from their own foundation, a person with narcissistic problems displays systematically inauthentic behaviour. This inauthentic behaviour can take various forms. A common symptom of narcissistic problems is the ‘charming mask’. Underneath this charming mask often lies a vast emptiness, too painful to experience, and typically covered by a busy and restless life. People who have spent considerable time with such individuals may eventually discover how quickly the person in question can put on the mask when meeting a new person and then relatively quickly change their demeanour when the new person leaves. This can be a frightening experience that ties into the next symptom.

Switching masks does not necessarily have to be problematic. Highly intelligent, often somewhat busy, fast-talking, and fast-thinking people can switch masks or roles without issues when circumstances call for it. The problematic aspect emerges in the speed, size, or unexpectedness of the contrasts. People in the environment may eventually discover that the charming mask is quickly replaced by grimmer behaviour. Often, it involves the contrast between idealising and devaluing.

One way people with narcissistic problems make themselves feel special is by alternately idealising and then devaluing others, sometimes after exposing them as flawed. This behavioural sequence of idealising, unmasking, and devaluing fits the definition of ‘narcissism as an epidemic of modern times’ mentioned earlier in this article. It aligns with the current cancel culture.

Idealizing fits the need to feel special. If you idolise someone, you emphasise the importance of being special. You indirectly participate in their ‘specialness’ because you determine who is special. So implicitly, you yourself are also ‘special’. Often, it takes little to knock someone off their pedestal and move them to the category of devalued. The American tendency to categorise people as ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ fits the image of narcissism as an epidemic. We also see this in the tendency to divide people into groups, with one group (expressing the main narrative) being idealised and the other (questioning or being critical of the main narrative) devalued, shadow-banned or completely cancelled.

Due to the poor grounding of the self-image in concrete experiences, there is a tendency to alternately overestimate oneself and then become disappointed in one’s own performance. In a relatively healthy person, this pattern exists in a milder form and leads to self-improvement. In cases of narcissistic problems, it results in periods of almost manic drive for achievement alternating with deep gloom over one’s shortcomings (often projected onto others or unfavourable circumstances as if they are the cause). As we will discuss below, regarding the causes of narcissistic problems, caregivers often fail to provide sufficient boundaries for the self-image of the growing child. This lack can foster a barely concealed omnipotent self-image.

Omnipotence fantasies can lead to taking on overly ambitious projects doomed to fail because the person lacks just enough talent, perseverance, or genuine relationships that could help realise the plans. This creates the tragedy of a reasonably talented person who just fails to achieve their grandest goals. Instead of facing the painful reality, this person will blame their failure on not being sufficiently understood. This misunderstood genius syndrome is essentially a shift from not being lovingly perceived (and provided with boundaries) by caregivers.

Due to the underlying sense of emptiness (and the legitimate pain of emotional neglect), narcissistic problems can manifest as an inflated sense of victimhood. Without taking sufficient responsibility for their own life, someone might overly emphasise their victimhood. Due to the secret omnipotence fantasies, there often arises a sense of entitlement to special treatment. This feeling of being special and deserving can lead to a diminished conscience function. Being “entitled” then means feeling above the law.

With limited conscience function and empathy, a person with narcissistic problems might make their partner feel as if they are not entirely sane. This behaviour is named after the film *Gaslight*. A variation is blaming the other (e.g., for being incapable of love) for issues that the person themselves also suffers from. Related to blaming is a long-term desire for revenge for perceived wrongs. We see this behaviour frequently in so-called high-conflict divorces. It’s important to note that there is often a “narcissistic collusion” here. Both partners amplify each other’s problems, and mutual accusations and entrapments are partly an acting out of deeper anger.

People with narcissistic problems can avoid psychotherapeutic treatment for a long time because they have found a form of balance in which they act out in a certain way. Their suffering is not severe enough to confront the underlying emptiness. Only when, for example, many relationships fail, many projects fall apart, or an addiction becomes destructive, motivation for seeking help might arise. Treatment is complicated by the fact that these individuals have often become so inauthentic that they do not know how to reconnect with themselves. Later on, we will provide some tips on how to start a process of (self)diagnosis and (self)healing as soon as possible.

The underlying emptiness, the anger over being exploited, and the lack of genuine interest can also be covered with superficial virtue. In such cases, part of their own self-hatred and anger is converted into harshly disapproving, cancelling, or demeaning others. This is also evident in the so-called ‘woke’ ideology, where even a minor deviation from the ideology, such as incorrectly addressing a group, can provoke intense indignation. You know you are dealing with narcissistic problems when virtue has an almost violent character of: “I am good and superior, and you are bad and inferior.”

Printing money creates a dangerous mental emptiness in society. It’s necessary to view money as a symbol of invested time and effort. We work an hour and get paid for it. The currency then symbolises how the market values everyone’s contributions. When that unit we worked for can be easily printed by others without them working for it, it often creates an unconscious feeling of indignation or being exploited. Nomi Prins describes in her book “Permanent Distortion” how the manipulation of the money market causes a significant distortion in the psyche of the population. It creates inauthenticity and unreliability, a deep feeling of powerlessness among workers, and an equally emptying, unconscious guilt among the abusers. It should come as no surprise that the anger over being exploited or feeling entitled shifts to other areas and manifests in narcissistic expressions elsewhere.

Another harmful variant has emerged: the bullshit job. Because the government and larger organisations need to sustain themselves, many unproductive jobs are created. People in these jobs indicate that their work is meaningless. Yet, they don’t leave because they are “addicted” to what seems like easy money. They pay for it with increasing inner emptiness and loss of connection. In fact, we are all partly in a bullshit ‘job’: we have to give more and more money to a growing government that increasingly demands our time and energy to comply with bureaucratic rules.

The implications of this social flaw are enormous. While improvements in production methods should ideally lower prices and raise the quality of goods, the opposite is happening. Extra money is being created out of nothing, based on debt. This debt is often bought by pension funds that “must” receive interest, especially as money continues to lose value. To pay off these debts, the economy “must” keep growing, using the created added value to repay the debt. To get people to buy things, goods must either break quickly, be slightly improved continuously, or people must be made to feel dissatisfied and/or unhealthy through advertising. A satisfied and healthy consumer is a threat to this economy. This has trapped us in a destructive cycle of working harder for things we don’t really need to keep the increasingly devalued money circulating.

The above means that we are living beyond our means by borrowing money that future generations will need to pay back for us. This overconsumption doesn’t feel good at all because, deep down, we realise we are addicted and not truly wealthy. We are like children who receive no loving boundaries from their caregivers.

Because money is continuously printed based on debt, there is immense pressure on the production chain to keep making profits despite devaluation. This has led to the monetization of everything. Both parents must work more hours, and their children must be cared for – at a cost. What used to be done by the stay-at-home parents is now monetized. Attention to children becomes a product or service, and the lack of attention given by the parents is compensated with expensive gifts or privileges. This can lead to a less personal bond and thus the risk of a beginning depression and narcissism.
Food is transformed to be quick and easy. Ready-made meals replace the traditional home-cooking process. The cost of food decreases, and so does its quality, but it becomes monetized. Nutritional value drops rapidly and is compensated with flavour enhancers, salt, and sugar. There is a less personal connection to food, and due to the flavour enhancers, a diminished sense of quality. Harvests are accelerated with pesticides and fertilisers, and trees are removed from large fields to facilitate mechanisation. Yields per hectare increase tenfold, but the quality of the food declines dramatically. There are more poisons and plastics in the food and in our bodies. The supplements needed to compensate for the reduced food quality created an entirely new market.

As money loses value faster, people invest their savings in home ownership. This makes land in cities increasingly scarce. The number of parks and playgrounds decreases, and the connection with nature and active play for children diminishes. Children who cannot cope well with the limited movement space are given medication. This also monetizes a free process (playing outside) and causes a loss of connection. Additionally, since urbanisation, having children has become more of a luxury. On the other hand, in some rural areas, children are cheap labour. This is far from ideal either, but if done in moderation and with enough playfulness, there are some positive sides to it. It can improve the bond between parents and children, and the children are engaged in meaningful activities with their parents. Ken Robinson pointed out the inverse relationship between available square metres per child and the diagnosis of ADHD. This negative correlation has also been demonstrated in the Netherlands.

The healthcare sector has also become highly monetised. Not only is every action charged, but there is also a profit-driven model for the pharmaceutical industry. Natural products are being pushed out of the market because they cannot be patented, and thus no money can be made from them. Immunisation has increasingly become a business model, raising questions about the extent to which children’s natural immune systems can still retain their strength. These trends can also be seen as a metaphor for alienation. It would be a win-win for humanity if, while preserving the knowledge gained about healthcare and lifestyle, we helped our children build stronger immune systems. It is likely that this would also help reduce healthcare costs. This could then be part of a shift away from the current profit model.

In other respects, the body is also being monetised. Strictly defined and widely promoted beauty ideals teach young adolescent girls to start saving early for silicone implants, labia corrections, or lip fillers. Young men quickly follow suit with hair implants and sometimes even silicone to replace muscles.
Advertising and fashion fuel dissatisfaction: do you have the right clothes? What’s the latest trend in electronics? Do you have the newest phone, the latest headphones, the latest AR glasses? Owning certain items becomes a requirement to ‘fit in’. On one hand, our sense of natural connection is undermined, and on the other, artificial connection based on material goods is heavily capitalised on. The narcissistic void resulting from all of the above becomes a profit model in itself. The use of antidepressants and mood enhancers becomes an additional service offered in the market.

William Strauss and Neil Howe describe that every society, after a great war or disaster, goes through four stages they call “turnings” or a kind of socio-economic season that changes per generation. It is the aforementioned cycle of:

Bad times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Good times create weak men
Weak men create bad times

According to these authors, western people are now in the “fourth turning” after World War II. We have become alienated from the basic principles of hard work, meaningful contribution, and the values that make a community strong and cohesive. Instead, we have withdrawn into the isolation and delusion of social media. We have weakened and believe we should be taken care of by a powerful state. We see this reflected in the way we collectively allowed ourselves to be locked down during the COVID-19 crisis and permitted the economy to be inflated with seemingly free money. Instead of relying on our own resilience, a large part of the population agreed to receive free vaccines. Of course, these are not free: a few companies have made billions from them, money ultimately paid by the population through taxes.

Narcissistic issues can only be understood if you also have insight into the contemporary context. The problem of narcissism has always existed, but its current epidemic proportions are connected to various other aspects of our society. After describing all the macroeconomic causes above, we now come to the pedagogical causes (which are directly related to the socio-economic factors). The question is: What is the role of the caregivers in narcissistic issues?
Central to this is the inability of caregivers to give genuine attention to their child. Instead, they see their child as an extension of themselves, of the story they want to tell about their own life. The child fits into their image or ideal, or there is a strong (often unconscious) desire to fill a void through the child.

Firstly, there’s a general inability to show warm interest in the child. The child is emotionally neglected as a result. Sometimes, to compensate, many gifts are given or expensive clothes are bought. The message then becomes: look at all you’re receiving, you must not be unhappy. This creates the first narcissistic split in the soul: the child begins to behave happily and masks their discontent. Alternatively, they may behave unhappily, but in such an exaggerated manner that parents might say, “What an ungrateful child.” Narcissism here consists of two components: the emotional void from receiving little genuine warmth and the falseness that arises from the imposed denial of reality. The child may start behaving gratefully and happily because they feel the pressure from their parents. Here also arises in the child a sense of ‘deserving compensation’ as thanks for their performed acting (by the way, the child itself believes in the role it plays). This is the core of the gaslighting process. After all, the child is then ‘gaslighted’ by believing they are happy.

Related to emotionally neglecting the child is allowing the child to become emotionally boundless. These parents may be eager for a child who has more self-confidence than themselves. They give the child everything they want, thinking it will build self-confidence and not allow it to have any uncertainty. They are not capable of setting boundaries to enable the child to learn. These parents would rather be their child’s friend than their educator, or else are excessively boundaryless, exhausted, or depressed in tackling the ever more heavy task of upbringing.

Attempts to circumvent the parenting task are also seen in parents who give easy or excessive rewards for their child’s achievements. The child’s ego thereby becomes boundless, while it subconsciously understands it’s not realistic. Still, they don’t want to miss out on the gratification they derive from ‘getting one’s way’ or ‘winning praise’. The parents are not able to withstand the pressure the child exerts on them to maintain this pattern. For the child, this signals problematic relationships ahead in adulthood. As an adult, it will be expecting too much applause too, while underneath its confident persona lies a deep-seated insecurity. This in turn has to be compensated with extra applause (or another form of gratification), enforced from a sense of entitlement.

Fourthly, there is the variant of parentification. If the parents themselves have experienced significant deficiencies in their youth, they may turn their child into a partner or even a parent. This could be termed as ‘narcissistic extension’. The child becomes an extension of the parents. They exploit the child’s innate empathy to satisfy their need for a listening ear. The child then is complimented that it is a good listener or that it is already so mature. Then the problem begins, as the child must sacrifice a part of their childhood and thus develops a false self-image. In adulthood, this can lead to significant ambivalence towards a dependent partner. On one hand, identity is derived from ‘taking care of’ the partner, while on the other, this provokes anger stemming from being abused as a child.

The fifth variant is the demanding narcissistic parent. This is another form of ‘narcissistic extension’ where the child is used to make up for a lack of achieved success by the parent, such as an unsuccessful career. Sometimes this involves a combination of poverty and the parent’s desire for success. Here too, parents exploit the child to fulfil their own needs. Children are then stimulated at too young an age to compulsively excel in something. This could be in the arts, their physical appearance, or in a high-status job. They are introduced too early into the adult world and thus lose a part of their own childhood.
In adulthood, this prolonged abuse or even mistreatment can lead to temporary success, often followed by severe depression or self-destruction. The demanding, accusatory, and contemptuous caregiver is then internalised due to, on one hand, the success (never enough), and on the other, the emptiness.

The sixth variant is the parent who seeks admiration for themselves. The child is then used to be part of the admiring audience. If the parent is actually famous, the child is exploited to share in the fame or at least enhance it. If the child objects to this (though that’s very difficult), they are told how lucky they are to have been born to such successful parents. As the child grows up, they must find an inner balance between appreciation for their parents and sorrow over their own shortcomings.
A variation of this is the misunderstood genius as a parent. Here, the caregiver demands the child’s understanding that they have not received from the world. This creates a covert form of narcissism in the child: participating in greatness through admiration. Often, these children experience severe emotional neglect. In a favourable scenario, they receive love from their caregivers or family members of the parents.
In adulthood, these individuals must work hard to filter reality. How gifted were their parents really? How gifted are they themselves and what obstacles stand in the way of their recognition? And would that recognition truly bring peace?

The seventh factor that can contribute to the development of narcissistic issues in a child is summarised under the term ‘Münchhausen by proxy syndrome’. It is the psychiatric condition where a parent suggests (or sometimes causes) that the child is ill and then seeks attention from the medical world through the child. While the pure form of this syndrome is not very common, we currently see aspects of it in the tendency to impose various problems related to gender identity on children from a young age. Here too, the child can become estranged from their own needs and self-perception because parents (or society) impose various ‘alien’ ideas. Of course, we do not wish to overlook the fact that there are people who want a different or no gender identity, but we must be careful not to overestimate the number. The media can play a very powerful role in steering open minds in a certain direction.

The last and most grim variants involve physical and mental abuse. The child is then used to vent anger on or even sexually satisfy the parent. This creates loaded narcissistic problems in the child because, on the one hand, it gets the message that it is worth nothing and, on the other, it is given enormous power in the system. Here, too, a dangerous mix of omnipotence (I have been able to satisfy my parent), anger (I have been abused), grief (I have lost my childhood) and ‘entitlement’ (I am entitled to compensation) then arises.