“The triple heels to make his dwarf excel: and nothing else”: Carlo Emilio Gadda is dazzling when it comes to whipping narcissus. Even if it is he who reminds us that “the auto-erotic mechanism is lodged, more or less, in all souls”. We are all narcissists.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
But not in the same way. Especially not all of us have a narcissistic personality disorder, which is when the narcissistic traits become so marked that they interfere with the entire psychic and relational life. Narcissism forces us to deal with questions we don’t want to answer: Am I worth anything? How important is the judgment of others to me? Do I need to feel important? I am envious? Do I use others for my own purposes? Do I despise them, seduce them, fear them? Am I kind just to be liked? By fighting with these questions from an early age, inexorably linked to the gaze of those who raised us, as adults we can become arrogant, pretentious, devoid of empathy, manipulative, convinced that we deserve special treatment. But also timid, fearful of judgment, vulnerable to criticism, ashamed of what we are and envious of what we do not have. They are the two sides of the same coin that dichotomous psychiatrists define narcissism overt e covert. A medal bearing the effigy of Charles Foster Kane in Fourth Estate, Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, Stéphane Lachaux in A heart in winter, Jasmine Francis in Blue Jasmine and the unforgettable Norma Desmond in Avenue of the sunset.
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Self-esteem tightrope walker
A tightrope walker of self-esteem, the narcissist walks a tightrope between healthy self-love and its pathological celebration. Full of nuances and reflections, narcissism is a sea of possibilities. About thirty years ago an English psychoanalyst, Herbert Rosenfeld, proposed to distinguish the “thick-skinned” narcissists (thick skin, grandiose, devaluing, sure to please a lot) from the “thin-skinned” ones (thin skin, fragile, fearful of criticism, worried about not being liked enough). Although in opposite ways, both testify to a failure in regulating self-esteem, the inability to achieve a balance between affirmation of oneself and recognition of the other. The analytic experience, but also the frequentation of friends and colleagues (and of course of themselves!), Teach that the two forms of narcissism tend to coexist, perhaps on different occasions, in the same individual. In many cases they are nothing more than two grimaces of the same face grappling with the drama of its own worth: the vulnerable narcissist is always tied to his grandiose part, the grandiose narcissist harbors feelings of inadequacy and fears failure. Although they appear to us as different as day and night, the arrogant and the fragile narcissist share the self-centered position, little interest in others, omnipotent fantasies cultivated more or less in secret, feelings of envy and inauthenticity.
The thick-skinned narcissist
Starting from this common basis, the thick-skinned narcissist (again Gadda, brilliant, speaks of the “impenetrated skin of the egolatrous hippopotamus”) reflects the traits linked to aggressive domination, while the thin-skinned one hatches a taciturn grandeur because inadequacy. Vulnerable narcissists have a thousand antennae, are hypersensitive to criticism and easy to feel hurt in self-love. If in the thin-skinned case there is the experience of negative affects, in the thick-skinned case there is the terror of experiencing them. This is the case of shame: inaccessible to conscience in grandiose paintings and insidious presence in vulnerable ones.
Between these extremes is the so-called “healthy” narcissism. I would describe it as awareness and belief in one’s worth, a good regulation of self-esteem, a balanced satisfaction with one’s abilities and successes. A kind of self-joy, perhaps intermittent, but capable of supporting us without pushing us into rivalry or envious attacks. It is a constructive collaboration between attention to the gaze of others and trust in one’s own, the balance between the need for recognition and the ability to do without it. Self-love without presumption and the happy ability to feel gratitude. In the archipelago of narcissisms we could place the healthy one in the middle of a curve with two pathological extremes: on the one hand an image that is too negative of oneself, with feelings of inferiority and helplessness; on the other, an overly positive self-image, with feelings of superiority and omnipotence. Warning: the latter can be tinged with sadism and soar up to configure the serious forms of malignant or even psychopathic narcissism. If you have seen the series The Undoing, the one with Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman, you know what I mean.