Narcissism Transforms Smoothly

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I will try to psychologize ordinary things. In life, we do not do this - which is normal. But sometimes, if the work is like this (including on yourself), then you can

When a baby is born, he does not ask what I want, whether people around me like it, whether I am good, whether I love my crib and my parents. It goes without saying that everything is only YES. This is how we are genetically arranged - the baby is "sure" that a good mother and the world met him good. And this is infant narcissism, which is the norm.

The instincts of life and development do not give the child any choice, good or bad, whether it is good for me or not. The baby absorbs everything. Like a sponge without sorting. A healthy baby is a 24/7 absorber of food, communication, time. And also aggression, cold, hunger, emptiness. Very quickly becoming more and more selective. The baby's narcissism is becoming more and more focal.

What aroused the strongest feelings was the focus. And the more selective the child becomes in his “I want this”, the more this is about love. Love for tenderness. Or love of power. Love of violence. Or love of communication. Love for the body or love for things.

The realization of this all comes only later. If it comes.

Adults react to the assortment offered depending on how we are with our narcissism. Whether our narcissism has become a love for it or not. For example, to your body. Or to another creature. Or hunger and violence. Or to caress and beauty. What are we filling with our narcissism? In other words, your libido. What is his focus?

If we are okay with our narcissism, we are socialized, satisfied with ourselves and have reached the level of individuation at which we feel what we call love for ourselves and others. It is a complex process with many obstacles, but the result is always simple and trivial. It is the ability to achieve contentment and complacency. Many find it boring. Or worthy of envy. And for some it is a constant race.

If a parent is able to be happy that his infant is filled with complacency, then the parent feels that he is just a normal parent. We have a more or less happy child, we are quite good parents. This is narcissism and this is love.

If a parent has problems with the feeling that everything is OK, then love becomes a complex, obsessive, confused and problematic choice and burden. Then it is not I, but my child who should and should. The world owes me this and owes me this. Other people owe me. Why can't I get it all ??? Getting the feeling “I'm okay” is problematic and it's a vicious circle. People are all wrong. Channeling your efforts and focus constantly becomes an unsatisfactory story. The personality develops in the direction of "how to twist so that I get better." That is, not in the direction of self-development, but in the direction of compensation.

And there are a lot of very, very successful people, attractive and interesting - but deep down in the miserable. It’s very bad when we didn’t even manage to compensate. And tragedy is when compensation is destructive.

Unhappy inside, for whom nothing smoothly turns

The constant presence of an intrapsychic bad object that is not balanced with a good one - this is the explanation for dissatisfaction, emotional exaltation, emotional scarcity, obsession and dependence on others. It is also an explanation of perfectionism, laziness, phobias, panic attacks, depression.

When you want to find something good, to do something wonderful, to become someone outstanding, or at least normal, but everything is not right, not the same, there is no strength for anything, everything is disappointing. That is, a bad object inside is stronger than a good one. Positive thinking is the same attempt to construct a missing good object within oneself.

There are as many types of narcissistic compensation as there are people in the world.

Love, as something complicated and confusing, can actually bring pleasure. As compensation. And what to do if you don’t know otherwise how to make yourself “good and pleasant”. If I cannot go through life simply, then I will rush or drag along it with adventures - this is not so empty and humiliating.

Not to feel love for life and people, not to feel it in yourself is scary. And it's a shame. Then dramas, losses, anguish and passions replace what is not. In the worst case, rage and aggression take the place of care and love. At its best - art, business, improvement. The feeling that I represent something from myself - for the sake of this, people do whatever they want. War and suffering are invented, but also new sciences, buildings, music, gadgets and medicines.

A person with a deficit of a good object in depth is dissatisfied. Moreover, it can be a successful and rich person.

Exit? A good object is needed. It is necessary that he appeared inside the psyche. How does it get there? Outside. It is literally swallowed, absorbed, seeped, taken from the outer world to the inner one. How long does it take for this? It's not the same for everybody. From a year to 10-15.

For many centuries, this role was played by God. With varying degrees of success in terms of love for all forms of life. God played the roles of other objects as well. What internal objects people have - they are projected onto God.

Old fairy tales and modern fantasy are the same attempts to cope with an intrapsychic bad object with the help of a good one. We will always be fascinated to look at the struggle between good and evil, knowing how it will all end. Recently, it already ends up ambiguously well - growing up.

Where else can you get a good object so that it doesn't let you down?

In order for a good object to get inside us and become a part of our psyche, we need a real living person or people who will be with us for as long as we need. They will be alive, will inspire confidence and a desire to be like them, we will be able to idealize them, experience and try, do anything with them, and they will (it should seem to us) to understand and will not hit us back, but they will feel everything and even suffering with us, will slightly disappoint us as a result, but also not critical.

What then, from this point of view, is mental health and norm?

This is when good from any source can always come to the fight against internal evil (which means there is an awareness that it is ours, internal!). And this arrival is quite enough. Until the new series of the arrival of evil. And this is a temporary and relative victory. Victory is not perfect, but good enough.

Modern psychoanalysis solves this problem as well.

What to read about this? Hines Kohut and Donald Winnicott.