Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited

Excerpts from the Archives
of the
Narcissism List

Part 7 cont.

7. Alexander Lowen

I do distinguish between cerebral and somatic narcissists and in my FAQ "Narcissism - The Psychopathological Default" I use a typology very close to Lowen's. Let me state that I regard Lowen's book as superb but not my cup of tea for a few reasons:

1. I am much less interested in the narcissist - and much more in his victims. My book is chiefly and primarily intended to assist those who have been inadvertently exposed to this hurricane known as the narcissist.

2. I think the fad of classifying (DSM style) is fast dying all over the world. It started in order to assist mental health professionals in their dealings with insurance companies. Psychiatry tried to resemble Medicine in which everything has a name and there are clear syndromes, signs and symptoms. I think it has been a wrong, reductionist, approach in medicine and led to an impasse. But it was doubly and triply wrong in psychiatry. The result of this alien imposition was "multiple diagnoses (co-morbidity)" and absolute confusion in new fields of knowledge (such as personality disorders).

I believe that there is a continuum between families of mental health disorders. I believe that HPD is a form of NPD where the narcissistic supply is sex or physique. I think that BPD is another form of NPD. I think that all AsPD are NPDs with a twist. I think that pathological narcissism underlies all these - wrongly distinguished - disorders. This is why my book is entitled NARCISSISM revisited and not NPD.

Lowen is a magnificent taxonomist of narcissism but I think his fine tuning is much too fine. I think that people are much less precise than Lowen would have us believe.

I think Lowen is wrong in implying that not all narcissists are pathological liars. He simply does not attribute too much importance to this fact. Virtually all the big names in PD research regard pathological lying as a trait of narcissists. Even the DSM defines NPD using words such as "fantasy", "grandiose" and "exploit" which imply the usage of half truths, inaccuracies and lies on a regular basis. Kernberg and others coined the term "False Self" not in vain.

Of course narcissists love to have an audience. But they love an audience only because and while it provides them with narcissistic supply. Otherwise, they are not interested in human beings (they lack empathy which makes other humans much less fascinating than they are to empathic people).

Narcissists are terrified of introspection. Not of intellectualization or rationalization or simple application of their intelligence - this would not constitute introspection. Proper introspection must include an emotional element, an insight and the ability to emotionally integrate the insight so that it affects behavior. Some psychologists are narcissists and they KNOW it (cognitively). They even think about it from time to time - is this introspection? Not in my book. Narcissists do engage in real introspection following a life crisis, though. They attend therapy at such time.

8. NPDs and other PDs

NPDs are afraid of abandonment and do everything they can to bring it about (and thus "control" it). BPDs are terrified of abandonment and they do everything they can either to avoid relationships in the first place - or to prevent abandonment (cling to the partner or emotionally extort him) once in a relationship.

But I think that these distinctions are pretty artificial and this is why we always have multiple diagnoses.

I think that the differential diagnoses between the Cluster B disorders are pretty artificial. It is true that some traits are much more pronounced (or even qualitatively different) in any given disorder. For example: the grandiose fantasies typical to a narcissist (their pervasiveness, their influence on the most minute behavior, their tendency to inflate and so on) - are rather unique in both severity and character to NPD.

But I think that all Cluster B disorders lie on a continuum. HPD, to me, is an NPD whose source of narcissistic supply is bodily/sexual. There is a mild variant of this in NPD: the somatic narcissist. The diagnostic criteria seem to overlap.

It used to be thought that NPDs are ego-syntonic ALL the time. That they do not have reactive psychoses and do not suffer from psychotic microepisodes under stress. Recent research has disproved these "differential diagnoses criteria". NPDs are so much like BPDs in so many respects that the likes of  Kernberg suggested to abolish the distinction. All Cluster B PDs seem to arise from pathological narcissism.

NPD rarely comes in its "pure" form. It joins forces with other disorders (OCD, BPD, HPD, AsPD).

9. Incestwithout Sex?

Not in the legal sense but surely in the theological and philosophical ones. Incest can be a product of the mind or the spirit as well as of the flesh. We still attribute magical qualities to words and letters. A thought can be as destructive (and often more) as an act. The Church (mainly the Catholic but also others) always maintained that such "intellectual" sins (heresy, for instance) should be dealt with with no less severity than acts.

More pragmatically:

The main problem with incest in today's world is not genetically defective progeny or problems with the rules of inheritance. These were the original (pretty good) reasons to prohibit incest. A good quality condom can take care of that. The problem is the ensuing disruption to the relationships among the family members and the dysfunction of the whole family unit which follows. The prevention of this disruption is a good enough justification for observing the incest taboo (to my mind).

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