Summary
In the prior episode Freud established the ego-ideal, a mental representation of an “ideal” state of the self. It possesses every perfection there is to value. Also the person’s ego-ideal is the goal to reclaim the time in childhood, when the person was his or her own ideal. The self can apply emotional investment to objects or oneself, with a depletion of emotional investment, when oneself or an object predominates.
Emotional investment
Freud also established that the emotional investment on objects can also increase the self-esteem at the same time, and that not all emotional investment in others is depleting to self-love. By identifying oneself with a valued person, situation or object, the self-love increases. The identification is a form of imitation of those ideal qualities.
Exploitation
This can be good or bad depending on whether the self-love is based on coercion and theft or actual accomplishments. As Narcissists only pay attention to you when you make them get closer to their ego-ideal, any discrepancies can wound them and make them feel empty and resentful. Naturally they scapegoat the people who were unconscious of their role as a failed accomplice. Victims were not explicitly told at any point that this was their role, as an obsequious pet.
The comparison wound
Try to remember situations in your life where a narcissist looked wounded at witnessing your skills or intelligence. In my experience there are physical manifestations that we intuitively recognize, but ignore to keep the peace.
- This usually is a widening of the eyes, often associated as the evil eye in traditional cultures. It signifies the self-wound. See Totem and Taboo: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
- Then there is a drunken movement, like the narcissist is losing balance was purposefully wounded by the target.
- Hostile gossiping and character assassinations, to find allies to close the gap, between the real and the ideal.
Like in the cycle of abuse there are always reasons to justify personal agendas, often involving abuse towards the victim, who feels they are just minding their own business. Your skills are never just “minding your own business.” Your skills encroach on the mental territory of others which live in a fluctuating gap between the real self and the ideal self. This is against your assigned role your narcissist gave to you, to behave and “know your place.” To a narcissist, in their mind, “you are undermining me!” In a competitive world, your skills are seen as competition for a finite pie of resources and attention. Especially if you have empathetic skills, you can expose who the narcissists are, by detecting their lack of empathy, and counter their agenda. You then are an even bigger threat, because people are political and follow different sets of rules.
Learned-helplessness
For the victim, the results of these tactics lead to learned-helplessness, like in the famous study where the dog is punished no matter where it sits, so it gives up trying to escape. Just like the laboratory dog in the study, the victims find it hard to assert themselves and remain passive for fear of more punishment. Naturally people focus on this aspect of the narcissist, because the emotions they engender in the victims are so frustrating. Targets are frustrated because they can only imagine their revenge. This then leaves victims exhausted with no real outlet for anger. The only outlet is to remind ourselves that our skills and talents set off the vindictiveness of the narcissist in the first place. The victim must realize that it is a horrible compliment, to get narcissistically abused, but still a compliment. You were abused by people sick with envy.
The False Self
What is often not noticed is the motivation of the false self to engage in these cruel behaviours. To come to the aid of our understanding, are theories of the False Self. To understand the pain The False Self is creating will help victims, and future targets, to grasp the motivations behind the hostility. It may also predict how the suspects will behave.
Winnicott
One of the early psychoanalysts that theorized about the false self was Donald Winnicott. In pathological situations, the false self replaces the true self and becomes the only true self to the patient. The False Self becomes found out when situations appear where the true self is required, and the false self is lacking authenticity.
Winnicott makes a gradation from pathology to health:
- At one extreme, the false self is considered real to others, but fails at what only the true self can do.
- In a less extreme situation the true self lives a secret life and is protected by the false self.
- As health increases the false self is used until an environment can be found that is supportive of the true self.
- Toward further health the false self is identified with people and environments of the patient’s past.
- In normal health the false self is used for a social attitude in areas where the true self cannot make it alone. This is similar to Carl Jung’s Persona, which is the mask we wear in dealing with others.
Winnicott’s simplified description of the True Self is more straightforward in simply taking the body’s aliveness, and the multiple ways it manifests in the feeling body, as the True Self. He also talks about the value of play which factors heavily in future theories about intrinsic motivation and the energizing power of having the freedom to be creative.
Heinz Kohut and Sam Vaknin
With Heinz Kohut and Sam Vaknin, the False self constitutes defensive structures to defend the vulnerable true self. It is also used to manipulate others to get better treatment. The False self only allows the narcissist to love the impressions they get from people, but not the people themselves. The True Self is adaptable and can cope with intellectual and social problems.
Covert Narcissism
To me this is a big hint on how society will have to be run in the future if we want people to let their guard down with the false self. If attaining success and power requires endless covert action, then only being a narcissist will allow you success. A horrible double-bind where soul-crushing, mechanistic inauthenticity replaces aliveness and honesty. It means that being open and honest about weakness and vulnerability, will be exploited by others who are covert. Those who are open and honest will look more incompetent than they really are, and those who hide their mistakes and blame others will look more competent than they really are.
Exploitation
This is the gateway for Ponzi-schemes, con-artists, propagandists, and would-be dictators who thrive on the creativity of lies to hide mistakes. Being honest about mistakes is required for experimentation and creativity. As many scientists would attest, failed experiments often lead to discoveries that no one expected. Being afraid of mistakes leads to this tensing, to eliminate truth and authenticity, which stifles creativity and makes a workplace, for example, like a dictatorship.
Alexander Lowen
Alexander Lowen expanded on this this subject of the True and False self in great detail, and agrees with Winnicott that the embodied aliveness is the key to the self. His contribution to the debate, on how society puts pressure to follow an ideal image, is encapsulated in a quote. “When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues “image”, it must be regarded as narcissistic.”
Emptiness
One of the more resonating descriptions for me as a reader is Lowen describing narcissistic emptiness. In my experience, just being around a narcissist can create feelings of emptiness. Their constant attention on what is missing in one’s life, and pointing out vulnerabilities in others can make empathetic bystanders feel empty themselves. The emptiness he describes of narcissist’s is the deadening of the bodily needs of the self and overemphasis on image. This reminds me of Sonia Choquette, the life coach, that gets people in touch with their true self. The sadness that our society needs to have people teach this shows that, in the last 30 plus years since Lowen published his book, the need is greater than ever to reclaim the self.
WNAAD Stalking: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html
Attenuation of the self
Try and stay in the body. It literally takes effort to meditate and go into the body, and in Sam Vaknin’s experience, a severely narcissistic patient will find it nearly impossible to resuscitate the attenuated True Self. The True Self is so attenuated that all it can inspire in the narcissist is further embarrassment, due to its lack of skill and feeling. Then the mind bounces back to the False Self for protection, because it is more automatic and skilled.
The False Self as protection
Agreeing with Kohut and Vaknin, Lowen describes the need for this image to protect the self from ridicule. To face embarrassment or humiliation from society, is too much to feel. Achieving power and projecting an ideal image is the armour to bring comfort back. The price for this is emptiness, a cold false self, and robotic, contorted movements resisting the feelings of the self [True Self]. When embarrassment inevitably occurs then rage appears to attack what caused the embarrassment. See: The ‘Ratman’: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html
Get back into the body
Lowen then goes onto the consequences of sexual relations with this lack of emotional feeling. It leaves only lust and at the same time a lack of love and emotional passion. Sex becomes more about performance than connection. To me this is a major critique on society, and with the increase of screens in our lives, we have more images to idealize. There is a need more than ever for Yoga, Qi-gong, Tai-Chi, Massages and Meditation to ground people back into the body. The pattern of narcissism is to disembody into an ego-ideal, ignore the body’s signals of vulnerable emotions, and then rage, exploit and dominate others in order to protect the vulnerable true self, and reify the false self.
Narcissism: Denial of the True Self by Alexander Lowen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743255431/
The Analysis of the Self by Heinz Kohut: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226450124/
Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited by Sam Vaknin: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781983208171/
Playing and reality – D.W. Winnicott: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415345460/
Winnicott, D. W. (2016). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. Oxford Clinical Psychology.
Learned Helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/