Narcissism’s Taxonomy
A correspondent wrote describing how psychology parses narcissism. She located her field between neuroscience and philosophy — an interesting placement. Narcissism to me falls into two categories, ordinary and toxic. The first, which takes in solipsism and self-regard, is universal, wrapped up in ego, and sometimes harmful to self and others. The second overlaps and I think may be overtaken by behaviors attributed to sociopaths and psychopaths. There’s a border area to toxic transgression, and sociopaths and psychopaths are on the far side of it.
I took a semester of abnormal psychology at my first university. It was mostly sexual. The male professor said that knitting was sublimated masturbation. He may have been joking. The remembered content of this course came in handy when I ghostwrote a letter a psychiatrist signed. Sometimes you need letters of this sort, and he was willing to sign them. My letter was speculative: under the pressures of that, this could result. It was probably true, now that I’ve read Robert Duncan’s account of a similar situation. When I studied abnormal psychology, it was clear to me that much of it applied to me in some fashion, so what was this “normal”?
Ordinary narcissism turns toxic when the heart is injured. I read an account of this in a book by A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, that’s mostly a long riff on Dennis Winnicott, the child psychologist. Winnicott posits that we are pure beings as toddlers, and the hard knocks life deals us — gravity, the actual limits of our tiny bodies, the impositions of adults — make us wrap ourselves in ego as a kind of protective layer. This is what Wilhelm Reich called character armor, and he was speaking of adults for whom the ego had become a hindrance. Almaas observed that because love immerses us accidentally in moments of being, if our lover breaks it off, it’s like being forced to quit cold turkey from a habit-forming intoxicant. Not understanding the mechanism, we try obsessively to recover what we lost instead of shedding our shattered ego and letting ourselves “just be,” consciously embracing being as an acceptably human state.
The Zen philosopher Dōgen Eihei enters the picture here for me, arguing that being is a state like any other, so our awareness or consciousness of it is more on the order of recognizing it. To put this in another way, recovery from narcissistic grief and acting out means that we recognize our ego when it surfaces. Imperfectly, tentatively, this enables us to be better humans — better to others and of course better to ourselves, more willing to let life unfold, tell us what to do, and less prone to cast blame angrily or to feel hurt, humiliated, or spurned. Narcissism makes too much of us and too little. We puff ourselves up and beat ourselves up, delusively. Toxic narcissism dials this up: we resolve to puff up and beat down all comers, sometimes even us. Ordinary narcissism is more readily seen through, despite the pain involved. We can recover.
A nun wrote or said that we are better than our worst moments. Is there a point at which their sheer accumulation overwhelms that possibility? Winston Churchill thought that the Nazi leaders should be rounded up and shot. The trials were meant to establish their guilt and set a precedent for the dispassionate administration of justice. It worked in Germany, but it didn’t work in Japan, whose hidebound elite is still trying to revise history to conform to a view reminiscent of diehard partisans of the Confederacy, with their War of Northern Aggression. The shrine visits and the government’s on-again, off-again attitude toward wartime guilt and reparations reflect this. Yet the majority of Japanese citizens acknowledge the actual legacy of Japan’s imperialist-militarist past and resist right-wing efforts to change its pacifist constitution.
The recent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein reminded me of the nun’s comment. A Catholic prelate, an advisor to Pope Benedict XVI on the issue of priests molesting boys in their charge, described such priests as incorrigible — an evil that had to be confronted and uprooted. Epstein appeared to fall in this category, preying incessantly on underage women. The question that arises from his suicide is its motivation. Hitler and Goebbels also committed suicide rather than face the wrath of the crowd or death by tribunal. Epstein’s victims feel he cheated them of a reckoning.
Suicide is an assertion of control in a situation that offers little or none of it. Epstein’s world had come apart, and — as in the game of go — you don’t play a sequence out if it has a known ending. Narcissism in its toxic forms seem to be about control, organizing life so your whims are at the center. As long as you can keep the game going, keep control of it, anything goes.
As the Vatican prelate noted, some narcissists are evil. If there are shreds of humanity, as the nun reminds us, are they real or just part of the act? How psychopathic are narcissists like this? And how, as a society, should we deal with them? Epstein’s death exceeded what justice could have demanded. To be confronted by his victims was seen by both as the greater suffering.
When Norway executed Vidkun Quisling, its wartime fascist leader, it repealed for a day its constitutional ban on capital punishment, acknowledging the gravity of his betrayal and the lives it cost. This placed him in the same situation that he’d thrust on his countrymen, using state murder as a political weapon. The crimes of Anders Breivik, a terrorist and mass murderer now serving a 21-year sentence, might seem to deserve a similar fate, but his punishment is tempered by Norway’s unwillingness to sacrifice its hard-won values to provocation. So, he lives on and will eventually be released. He seems unrepentant, the mark to me of a real monster.
I described my theory of narcissism to a friend. There are three categories: ordinary, toxic, and monstrous. You don’t see monsters now like the militant atheist Sigismondo Malatesta, who had two priests hanged before him on his deathbed for offering to hear his confession.
Monsters are part of our human capacity. Men are said to be more monstrous than women, and It seems true at the margins — men are evildoers at an epic scale, but everyday life is filled with the lesser evils that women and children also inflict. Mea culpa — every monstrous act I ever committed lives on in my stricken conscience, but garden-variety monsters like me can seek absolution for their sins and repent of them. Epic monsters retain this possibility, the nun reminds us. History has its enlightened humanists who started out as ruthless warlords. These instances of unexpected, fundamental change are exceptions that show the contingent nature of life and the situational nature of ethics. They point to the spectra of character that the enneagram depicts. Its thesis is that the flaws embedded in human nature are early coping strategies and we can draw on insights from our lived experience to transcend them.
Dōgen Eihei’s radical nondualism also sees our spectra of behavior as implicitly human. We never lose the capacity to be flawed, and we share that capacity with our fellows, but we retain the capacity to live otherwise. What’s sometimes called the art of living speaks to this — loving our neighbors as ourselves, as Jesus taught, and extending self-care to others. We do this because we gradually understand the consequences of our actions and connect them to flaws that we always seemed to be “who we are.” As we experience the limitations and pitfalls of our flawed ways of life, we can end up knowing too much to continue as we are. The knowledge fills us with shame, and all we can humanly do is change — a slow, uncertain, very human process.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, Jesus also taught. In the era of social media, crowd-shaming and the assignment of guilt as a matter of not-to-be-questioned belief are prevalent. I see it as a holdover from adolescence, a peak period for behavior of this sort.
What others think of us, what we think ourselves, is a constantly shifting thing. Much of what we do in life, however flawed it may be, reflects our willingness to experiment, to test the limits of what it means to be human. If toddlers construct an ego to deal with their hard knocks, we emerge disabused. What constraints are fundamental, what actions cause grief — learning this, we do less harm, but we also learn how to live well with ourselves and others in this milieu. It’s a kind of heightened realism that attracts us more than the distorted one we thought we knew. This describes most of us, in reality. There are monsters out there, but fewer than we imagine.
