Narcissism, 3

I would not have fully understood Marco without noticing that there were a considerable number of YouTube channels talking about narcissism. But there is a fundamental flaw in all of them. Unlike Silvano Arieti’s treatise which helped me so much to understand serious mental disorders (my summary here), these youtubers don’t illustrate their knowledge with specific cases. Perhaps they do so out of cowardice, as there are quite a few people like Marco in the world. They don’t even have to use real names but pseudonyms, so why they don’t use real-life cases to illustrate their theories is a mystery.

Quite independently of such an obvious flaw, I was impressed that these youtubers say that the malignant narcissist can be distinguished by his or her lack of empathy. As we saw in the previous post, Marco showed me off his cobwebbed house that reminded me of vampire castles without noticing that I watched in horror as the thick layer of dust also covered the armchairs in his living room. In fact, I had to turn over one of the cushions of one of his armchairs so that I could sit in his living room and not get dust on my trousers. To show off his house to me without realising that I was horrified, is to lack the most basic empathy.

Youtubers also talk a lot about the gratuitous rage of narcissists, who explode at the drop of a hat. As we also saw, Marco exploded in anger when the taxi driver and I couldn’t easily find his house without a street number. These youtubers also talk about paranoia, which I witnessed in that September call last year with his claim that his relatives craved to steal his house. Another thing the youtubers say that portrays Marco is that those who suffer from malignant narcissism have fluid contours in their ego, so they treat people as egoic objects. This is so surreal that I must illustrate it with an anecdote.

In the previous entry I had promised to explain why we didn’t meet in a mall last year. The answer is that Marco had told me he would meet me outside a restaurant. However, given the unpunctuality of Mexicans, I have been in the habit of meeting them inside a restaurant on my appointments. This allows me to bring a book and entertain myself if the Mexican in question is unpunctual. I told Mexican Marco a couple of times that I would wait for him inside the restaurant. In a Sam Vaknin video I saw yesterday, he said that the narcissist only registers what you say if it goes along with the narcissist’s narrative. It seems incredible, but even in something as prosaic as the location during an appointment Marco didn’t hear what I said more than once: he heard his original voice that he would look for me outside the restaurant.

The result was that we didn’t meet. It was very frustrating in that, although Mexico City is as large as Houston, with fifteen million more people and far fewer freeways it is very difficult to get around. I chose a Sunday for the appointment at the mall far north of the city because there is not much traffic on Sundays and the taxi driver only made an hour’s drive along a freeway from my house to the mall. Marco had arrived by public transport, so it took him an hour and a half to get to the mall. Counting the return trip for both of us, it was five hours of wasted transport, plus the hour and a half wasted in the mall thinking we had both been stood up. All because Marco didn’t want to register in his mind what I told him: that I would wait for him sitting down, inside the restaurant.

A trivial case you might say, but perfect to explain what it means to treat others as egoic objects: the will of the other guy becomes invisible, and one only deals internally with one’s own will, despite the calamity that Marco had to suffer (Perinorte, the mall referred to, is very notorious because the cell phone signal there is very poor, so we couldn’t communicate when we were in and out of the restaurant). But what causes a ‘narcissism’ that it is not even possible to convey such a simple idea as that we will wait for a friend inside a restaurant?

Thanks to the visit of Marco’s first cousin at my house, who had known him since he was a small child, I tied up some loose ends. I already knew that Marco had been raised by a slightly mentally retarded mother, who apparently had been raped: Marco’s absent father. What I didn’t know, and only learned from what the cousin told me, was that Marco had been raised exclusively by his mother. (Before his visit, I had been left with the idea that an aunt and grandmother, in addition to his mother, had been Marco’s guardian figures; I didn’t know that, from an early age, the mother had migrated from some villages to the capital, where Marco grew up.)

Now that single mothers are in vogue in the West, it is becoming clear what havoc some of them wreak on their offspring, especially boys, who have never had a father figure to attach themselves to. Marco, according to his cousin, suffered an absolute mental breakdown the day his mother died, to the extent that his cousin had to make all the arrangements for her funeral and burial while Marco was mentally blocked. I conjecture that this is when Marco’s depression began, as there was no longer the real source where the mother’s only child could settle accounts.
 

The schizophrenogenic mother

The word schizophrenogenic, which I abbreviate to schizogenic, never appears in the videos of the youtubers who talk about malignant narcissism. It doesn’t even appear in Vaknin’s videos when he openly blames those mothers who undermine the individuation process of their children. I sometimes use the term because it inverts the values of biological psychiatry to the trauma model of mental disorders. (Anyone who has not read what I have written about psychiatry in Daybreak, and still believes that psychiatry is a science, might now read ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’ on pages 105-127 of my book.)

Once we reject biological psychiatry and see it for what it is, a pseudo-science, it is easier to see that Vaknin fails by using so many diagnostic categories. I reject not only biological psychiatry, but the hundreds of diagnostic categories of psychiatrists and even clinical psychologists. The reason for this is simple. Even in the videos of Vaknin, who uses a plethora of diagnostic categories, it is clear that sometimes a subject deteriorates from a basically neurotic narcissism into a psychotic one where Vaknin already uses terms like ‘mood disorder’ and even ‘schizoid’. In other words, unlike somatic diseases where a heart condition doesn’t degenerate into a condition of, say, the thighs, in mental disorders everything is very fluid. Contrary to psychiatric claims, neuroses, which even normal people generally suffer from, can degenerate into psychosis (what happened to poor Marco).

What Vaknin does get right in his videos is that the infant internalises the gaze of his mother. When the infant is mistreated by a mother, he cannot say that the mother is bad but blames himself because of a sort of Stockholm syndrome (cf. these pages of my book Day of Wrath). The schizogenic mother, from the fluid contours of her ego, sends her infant an unconscious message: I cannot love you as you are; only when you suppress your individuality, your desires, your will that doesn’t agree with mine and your independence and separation from me. I love you not as a separate entity but as part of me forever, symbiosis, womb: mother and child forever united.

With this engulfing behaviour, the child’s internalised morality begins to turn towards self-denial. The infant seems to internalise a message: To function not only in the family, but in society at large, I mustn’t be myself. Thus the future narcissist begins to be engendered, someone with fluid contours of his ego with the environment. If mother rejects me, it is because I am a bad, spoiled, stupid, ugly child. Some psychologists call this a ‘bad object’ and this object, because it is so bad, has to be expelled. Thus the child projects this bad object, externalises it and turns himself into its antithesis, what some call ‘split’. By projecting it outwards the child purges the bad object from himself, cleanses himself; but at the cost of projecting it onto others.

Marco’s cousin cried when, suffering from paranoia that he and his son wanted to steal his second house, enraged, Marco ran him out of his main house. What the cousin ignores is that Marco has internalised the bad object instilled in him by his mother and now wants to expel it symbolically, by projecting it onto others. What many youtubers call ‘narcissistic abuse’ is nothing more than the unravelling of this long-standing, unresolved dynamic with the real mother.

When a narcissist is confronted with a relative who really loves him or her, like Marco’s first cousin, the narcissist doesn’t know how to cope. It was very stressful for him. Paradoxically, he perceives this love, now really brotherly love (not like the manipulative love of his mother) as manipulation and mistreatment. This sibling love is perceived as dangerous, and the narcissist falls apart and resorts to so-called narcissistic abuse: treating the cousin precisely as he couldn’t treat his biological mother because, as an infant, he was one hundred per cent at her mercy.

But why such a twisted dynamic, in which the grown-up narcissist then tries to act out theatrically with other adults? Because the infant had been conditioned to associate love with betrayal. When the infant, who will become a narcissist, is confronted day by day with this mixture of love and all the negative emotions of the devouring mother—shame, fear, guilt, anger, frustration—he learns to associate love with these negative affects. The abused infant seems to internalise the following: Love is bad, it means that I will be betrayed. Even an eighteen-month-old infant who is treated with this sort of behaviour already feels anger about it. But given the absolute power the mother has over him, he internalises that it is illegitimate to be angry with her. It’s even dangerous. So getting angry with mom must be buried in the mind. But what happens to the infant who buries his emotions?

The anger is internalised as long as it can’t be directed towards mom. The child redirects it to himself. But anger redirected to the internal self, rather than to the original source, transmutes into depression: which is what has happened to Marco since his mother died, with his house so spider-webbed that it reminded me of Nosferatu’s. Just compare what Marco did with his mind with my Hojas susurrantes, the first chapter of which is entitled ‘Letter to mom Medusa’ where I direct the anger outwards, towards the original perpetrators. That’s why I never suffer from depression! In contrast to the vindictive autobiographer, depression is a form of self-directed aggression (see ‘On Depression’, pages 27-41 of my book Daybreak).

And compare also what I do literarily with what Marco advised me: to stop writing my autobiographical books and forget about the past! The very Christian Marco is simply following the accepted wisdom: forgive and forget. But since the unconscious can’t be fooled, look at how my old buddy ended up: mad as a hatter! In other words, not only Christian values must be transvalued as far as Hitler and National Socialism are concerned, but also the Christian ethics of forgiveness, and the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parent whatever she or he does. Marco, who offended me in his last phone call by subtly advising me to join a Christian church went the opposite way and, as Vaknin says in one of his videos, that can lead to schizoid depression: which is exactly what happened to him.

See for example the five minutes from this point in another of his videos, and especially what he says after minute seventeen when he talks about the work with children of Margaret Mahler, who said: ‘Interpersonal relationships become internalised within the ego, or the self’. Mahler also said that what we call the ego or the self is simply a reflection of our relationships with others, and that all mental illnesses are related to interpersonal problems. It is an important video that Vaknin uploaded twice with different titles. And here Vaknin uses a word I’ve used a lot on this site, introject, about which I’ll say a few things in my next post.