An essential aspect of narcissism is being seen as the centre of attention. Self-consciousness can become acute and anxious when a child loses the protection in a narc relationship and is asked to tolerate a degree of separateness. They now feel conspicuous and exposed to their mother’s gaze, making them vulnerable to humiliation and rejection, which can be devasting and unbearable. Being looked at and admired can instil a sense of pride, pleasure and importance with the gratification of exhibitionistic impulses. This gaze can also lead to feeling embarrassed, shamed and exposed. The child may feel belittled, defiled, demeaned, scorned, worthless or vulnerable. The child can become preoccupied with using defences and behaviour to avoid a repeat of such an experience and injury.
Projective and introjective identification asks a client to appropriate the desirable qualities that belong to the narc object, independent of themself, and therefore unable to separate truly. The narc client denies their independence and behaves as though they possess such qualities, which nourish their grandiose needs. If the narc loses their sense of omnipotence and self-sufficiency, they fall into dependency, being needy with feelings and wishes, which creates anxiety and uncertainty. If the object of narc supply frustrates and angers them, the object is met with contempt and disgust. If they also recognise their love and dependence on the object and its goodness, it comes up against envious thoughts and feelings as they feel they don’t have such qualities. The narc withdraws into psychic retreats or mergers to avoid distance and differentiation between self and object, which nullifies feelings of envy.
The primary object, usually the mother, validates or contradicts the child’s image of itself. The child learns it is dangerous to express or desire libidinal needs, where their nascent love conflicts with rejection by the rejecting mother. This is equivalent to discharging the libido into an emotional vacuum, which can be devasting, forming an emotional abyss /void. Intense humiliation over the depreciation of their love reduces the state of worthlessness and helplessness.
Their intrinsic value feels inferior and not good enough
Shame is used to sustain the power of a primitive punishing superego, obstructing the development of a more mature ego into a depressive position (Klein). The child’s healthy curiosity is transformed into omnipotent and omniscient voyeurism and control. The whole part of the eyes is to enter the humiliating object, reverse feelings of smallness, and become the object of admiration and envy. They possess and use the object for structural support to help them engage with reality. Possessing the object ( introjection) means one can’t be humiliated, as there is no self or other within the merger. They also do not face any resulting guilt and loss as the primary object is fused within an idealised state. Melancholia may also be a defensive position via identification with the damaged / dead object, which can’t be relinquished and mourned, casting a shadow over any love and hate directed at the same object. Identified with a damaged internal object can be experienced as bodily terror, numbness, detachment or somatic hypochondria.
Suppose the child can learn to tolerate their pain and despair. In that case, the result can be tolerating guilt, enabling remorse and wanting to repair broken relationships to restore the damaged object. A shift in the depressive position goes from concern with the primary object to a preoccupation with the critical observing object, making the object more authentic and whole. A child turns towards a good-containing object to gain approval, nourishment and understanding. To evacuate bad, overwhelming feelings onto the good object, who holds these feelings of destruction, paranoia and guilt, who can then hand them back in more sustainable amounts. The emergence from the narc retreat gives rise to depressive feelings such as guilt, remorse and despair, which, if not tolerated, can lead to fragmentation and withdrawal back to the retreat. The injured child becomes enraged, full of resentment and a desire for revenge, inflamed with an insatiable hatred towards injurious objects. They desire to destroy the offending object, wanting them to feel the same pain and assert their power over it. They feel a sense of unfairness and unequal power, and they need to even out the discrepancy and reinstate one’s authority to re-establish the playing field.
Primal scene
The Freudian sexual relationship between parents brings forth a 3rd object (father) into the previously perceived symbiotic dyad ( child/mother). This shatters the illusion and exclusiveness of the symbiosis and brings differences between adults and children and power differentials where the child is faced with facts of life and reality. The child resents such discoveries, being subjected to unfair power dynamics, and seeks revenge for the old perceived possession of omnipotence. The father’s will imposes structure via persuasion and authority based on power, wielding a threat of castration if not adhered to. The father breaks the “incest barrier ” by claiming exclusive access to the mother sexually. The child is forced to oblige, and the oedipal complex is only dissolved when the child gives up an exclusive wish for their mother and seeks sexual objects externally. It is a compromise, nonetheless, as it does not deal with the underlying resentment and wish for revenge. As adults, they may repeat their tyrannical willpower over their children.
The once omnipotent child now feels exposed, vulnerable and fragile.
Mother needs to be seen and allowed to be an individual, no longer a possession or primal horde to be sought after, nor an accomplice in the infantile scenario of oedipal triumph. The child may feel they have committed a betrayal when acknowledging the idealised object is not real; to separate is forbidden and disloyal. The children eventually realise they need the destroyed object in fantasy, combined with feelings of guilt, remorse and despair. Once able to tolerate the loss of the loved object, the child learns to need and value good objects, even if they are also the bad object. The child learns of the impact of their behaviour and accepts their acts of aggression and destruction upon the good object, leading to a painful effort to try and repair the damage caused and to find forgiveness. The oedipal child must defend the idealised mother against persecutory harmful objects (father). Any genuine acknowledgement of the mother’s sexual relationship with the father is tantamount to castration from the powerful father, motivated by hatred and envy and left with a deep sense of injustice and violation that permeates as revenge. The child is forced to give up incestuous wishes because of the cruel father, feels aggrieved and seeks revenge for oedipal triumph and gratification.
When the narc fantasy collapses, the child fears the promise of anticipated intimacy, which has been broken and betrayed by the intrusion of the father . The child believes their mother has played a passive part in the betrayal and remains idealised and desired. The child gradually realises she is an active accomplice in the betrayal and becomes hated and envied. The child needs to find the strength and courage to overthrow and rebel against the parental demands and give up wishes for revenge to separate and individuate from the primal scene. The child must confront and accept the loss of loved idealised objects, where the ego can become identified with newly integrated objects of their own making. To develop their capacity to protect themselves against internalised persecutory objects and the forces of the instinctual ID. Feelings of despair and abandonment must be surmounted if reality is to be faced, development to proceed, the ice to be broken, and an impasse to be worked through. Change always involves giving up the old and its familiarity and facing the anxiety of the new. They need to give up their omnipotence and need for control and face losses.
If losses can’t be faced, melancholia can result in the object no longer existing in the external world but being retained as a dead internal object. Possessed and controlled internally and projected onto new objects, playing the same role in the child’s mental equilibrium as the original object. The child becomes obsessed and preoccupied with the internal object to deny separation and ensure that the fate of the subject and object are inextricably linked. If the object dies, they also die with it; if the mother survives, the reality of the object’s loss is denied, and mourning fails into melancholia. Can the child give up control over the object, be willing to live with the uncertainty of losses, be able to accept it can’t preserve the object forever and allow the idealised object to die with convergent desolation, despair and guilt?
If the object’s goodness is possessed, there is nothing to envy.
Depressed Patient
Early narc wounding was inflicted on the child by parents who failed to fulfil the potential of the child and the believed premise of narc perfection. Counter to this injury is the hope of finding the ideal object to reverse this injury and fulfil the initial premise of admiration, uniqueness and omnipotence. The resented and idealized figures are the same; the resented figure only has to apologise for their betrayal and become ideal again, just misbehaving. An internal longing and craving for a perfect object to take away feelings of badness, especially feelings of failure, humiliation, shame and sadness. This creates an inherent hatred of aliveness and those aspects of aliveness, such as spontaneity, creativity, and imagination. These have all been rejected and subject to narc wounding by parental figures, and they try to possess goodness externally through identification with a suitable object.
So they become a rescuer, people pleasers always giving and unable to receive. They become intolerant of receptive dependence, which allows them to be loved and valued. This stirs up unconscious hatred and anger, reactivating the repressed envy where the primary object was envied and attacked to deny a lack of love and acceptance. The superego instigates manic defences against any creative linkage, where the child may be envied or humiliated, unable and unwilling to allow the possibility of a complementary mutual relationship. To deny the difference in separation, to ward off the potential shame of power dynamics, sexual differences and individuality.
Steiner, J. (2011) Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat (New Library of Psychoanalysis) , Routledge; 1st edition (28 Feb. 2011)
