Crypt scene from Italian/Spanish film “La Cripta e l’Incubo,” directed by Camillo Mastrocinque, 1964. Released in the US as “Terror in the Crypt.”
In having come so far, why not go all the way, and try to fill in the hole that has been at the center of this discussion? What is the secret of the pathological narcissist?
The three prior installments in this “Mourning in America series” have sought to unpack some of the cultural complexity surrounding the eruption of a pervasive gaslighting/narcissism in our political culture during and since the 2016 election. In Mourning in America1, I looked at what it meant for millions of Americans to experience Narcissistic Victim Syndrome, and I sought to explore it through what the survivor’s literature tells us about coming to grips with the behavioral logic of the pathological narcissist. In Mourning in America2, I looked at gaslighting as a tactic through the differences between lying, bullshitting, and gaslighting. In Mourning in America3, I considered POTUS Trump, a “self-conjured caricature of a self-made man pursued by personal demons,” as an exemplary case of pathological narcissism, and followed the trail of several writers who have sought to ask and answer the question, “who does he see when he looks in the mirror?” Across this effort, the clinical characteristics of NPD or Narcissistic Personality Disorder were repeatedly described–the personality traits; the behaviors; the False Self; the need for narcissistic supply; the narcissistic wound; narcissistic rage seeking revenge.
In the third piece, as was mentioned, these were mapped (somewhat convincingly I hope) to POTUS Trump. But a fundamental problem remained. At the end of Mourning3, I said that the answer that comes back when we ask, “who is Donald Trump?” is that he is a pathological narcissist; and when we then ask, “who is the pathological narcissist?” we are presented with something of a puzzle, because the question entreats us to talk directly about psychopathology, specifically about neurotic mental illnesses. What does it mean to insist on trying to make sense of something that resists all such efforts? In having come so far, why not go all the way, and try to fill in the hole that has been at the center of this discussion? What is the secret of the pathological narcissist?
The (Boring but Necessary) Case for a Depth Psychology
To speak meaningfully about psychopathology is generally to assume (with varying types of justification) that in and through abnormal utterances and behaviors, there is something that is being communicated, and that some measure of translation is possible. If we want to be able to say that there is some explanation, some truth that is being spoken in and through the narcissist’s pathology, then we need to be able to at least entertain the idea that the neurotic’s utterances and behaviors can be read and interpreted.
Depth psychology is simply the premise that the mind (yours, mine) needs to be understood as something of an “undiscovered country.”
I am not here to grind an axe either for or against psychoanalysis, Freudian or otherwise. In fact, I have literally nothing to say about the possibility that some forms of neurosis can be “cured,” (greater integration, less suffering?) that people who are suffering can find their way, through transference with an analyst and through self-reflection, to some measure of enduring recovery. I also have no attachment to some sort of structural theory of the human mind that suggests the “real existence” (whatever that means) of an Id, an Ego, and a Superego. I take these to be names for functional relationships and patterns that are used to describe things that are observed in clinical practice.
Instead, for purposes of telling what I consider to be an interesting, if not compelling story, I would simply like to make a limited case for depth psychology and the things that this entails. Depth psychology is simply the premise that the mind (yours, mine) needs to be understood as something of an “undiscovered country.” That is, there are conflicted aspects of ourselves that exist under conditions of repression, and are not readily available to everyday consciousness. You’d think this would be obvious, given the monumental amount of time, energy and creativity every human being puts into the daily trial of managing their sexual desires (sure, this is just about reproduction). Regardless, that there are people who suffer mightily from neurotic illnesses strikes me as beyond dispute. Such persons consistently say and do things that make sense neither to other people nor even to themselves. In addition, the efforts of clinicians working to alleviate this suffering have long seen evidence to support the notion that neurotic utterances and behaviors can be indicative of a kind of symbolic language, one specific to the sufferer.
Years ago, I worked in a psycho-diagnostic lab, and met a shy, well-dressed elderly man who for years had been bagging his feces, date/time labeling them, and storing them in a back bedroom. I was told that he had no good explanation, at the outset of treatment, as to why he was doing this. Other than the smell in his neighborhood, and the state of his manicure, you’d really have no idea that he was a person whose internal processes had become severely confused and disturbed.
But I digress. Let us assume, for the moment, that it is reasonable to infer from the existence of dreams that there is an unconscious; and from our analysis of dreams, that we speak to ourselves through them in a fractured symbolic language, and that the scene of this dreaming involves expression of conflicts often located in early childhood experiences and traumas. My sense is that while the specific contents and underlying conflicts may be either more or less universal (some of those described in Freud certainly seem specific to late 19th century Viennese) there is probably a kernel common to all who share our existential situation (finite, rational, self-conscious, subject to various drives and instincts).
All of this is simply laying the ground for the story that I wish to tell about narcissism as psychopathology. Following on some measure of acceptance of depth psychology I wish to entertain the notion that there can be something sometimes called a depth hermeneutics. That is, that the strange, partial, broken and even mutilated communication of the neurotic is a text that can be deciphered, and thus meaningfully interpreted. Further, one also has to entertain the notion that in interpreting the text of neurosis, the interpreter is fighting against the resistance of the sufferer, who is speaking this strange language, and behaving in these strange ways, precisely because they are both disclosing and hiding their internal disturbances, and to some degree are intent on maintaining self-deception.
Psychoanalysis and Narcissism
The place and role of ideas about narcissism in the history of psychoanalysis is extremely nuanced. To begin with, a great deal of the contemporary literature has to do with the ethics of the profession, and about self-policing, given that the analyst is someone who has power over the vulnerable patient, and must not abuse it. Also, healthy, or “primary” narcissism is a key part of Freud’s reconstructive account of the transition from infantile, pre-Oedipal relations between “self and other” to adult “object relations” and the mature ego. But as early as the first decade of the 20th century, the group of analysts around Freud had begun to assert that disturbances of these early processes were at the root of the most severe kinds of psychopathology – what came to be called the “narcissistic neuroses” that included what today we refer to as narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and some forms of psychosis.
Between 1909 and 1912, Freud’s associate Sandor Ferenczi had identified the process of “coming to love another” as an ego ideal, and the subsequent mourning of the loss of the beloved in rejection, separation, or death, he also named, calling it “introjection.” In the process of mourning, where the part of the self that was invested in the loved one is slowly assimilated back into the ego, the original broadening of the ego, whereby autoerotic interests are extended to include objects in the external world, is likewise also seen.
The world of the adult ego, where the differences between “self and other” are first established, yet the bridge to others — passionately and morally — is also cemented, is something that is accomplished in the transition from infantile to adult structures of personality, in the transformation of our basic drives and auto-erotic instincts. We become capable of loving others, in some sense, when we have introjected them, taken them into ourselves, and fixed these others, imbued with part of ourselves, as an ego ideal, external to ourselves. When we lose the object of our love, and mourn the loss, we introject this self-other construct back into ourselves once again, and in healing, our energies are freed for new objects of loving.
In 1919, Freud published Mourning and Melancholia, and sought to highlight the differences between the normal process of mourning the loss of a beloved object, and the pathological process, which he dubbed melancholia. It is proper to speak of the “work of mourning,” Freud says, where the attachment is in some significant sense taken back bit by bit after overcoming internal opposition, and then the ego becomes over time once again free and uninhibited.
I won’t go into the Wolf Man’s dream. Suffice to say, it has something to do with a pack of wolves and a wolf with an erection.
While there are some similarities between what occurs in mourning and what happens where the subject is beset by melancholia, the key difference appears to be that where the mourner is suffering the loss of a beloved object (usually another person, but not always) the melancholic is suffering a loss with respect to his or her own ego. As Freud writes, “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself.” In melancholia, Freud muses, something has occurred that shatters the object relationship, so that “an object loss was transformed into an ego loss,” and says that this failure of appropriate withdrawal (and psychic healing) is effected on a narcissistic basis, representing a regression to original narcissism. In this process of regression from narcissistic object choice, he concludes, we see a transformation of normal mourning into pathological mourning, and we get extended symptoms of depression and lack of interest in the world.
Sudden Libido and the Exquisite Corpse
But there were also indications, during this period, that something more was going on here, something more profound than a narcissistic reaction to loss resulting in symptoms of depression where there should be healing. As told by Maria Torok in her 1968 paper, “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse,” Freud’s associate Karl Abraham wrote to him in 1922, asking for corroboration of some very unusual clinical symptoms he had observed in a number of cases. Astonishingly, Abraham asks the master whether he was aware of the onset of a kind of mania that sometimes followed after melancholia. Specifically, Abraham noted that a fair number of people shamefully admitted to experiencing extreme horniness (ok, not Abraham’s exact words!) shortly after a death. “The illness of mourning does not result, as might appear, from the affliction caused by the objectal loss itself, but rather from the feeling of an irreparable crime: the crime of having been overcome with desire, of having been surprised by an overflow of libido at the least appropriate moment, when it would behoove us to be grieved in despair.” In response to Frenczi’s query, Freud declines to identify a normal transition from melancholia to mania; nor does he affirm the suggestion that increased libido after object loss is a valid addition to the parallel between mourning and melancholia.
As Torok later points out in her book with Nicolas Abraham, “The Wolf Man’s Magic Word” Freud at this time is having his own problems with narcissistic neurosis. If you have perhaps heard of the case of ‘The Wolf Man,’ it is because Freud returns to this famous case time and time again. The History of Infantile Neurosis (1918), The Uncanny (1919), Fetishism (1927), New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis (1932) and others, all featured the case of the Wolf Man. I won’t go into the Wolf Man’s dream. Suffice to say, it has something to do with a pack of wolves and a wolf with an erection. The case was prominent, not because it was ‘text book,’ so to speak, but because despite repeated attempts, he could not cure the neurosis, and he had to continually revise his theories in light of its stubborn unintelligibility. Something was wrong with him, something that made him speak endlessly to analysts in order not to be heard, in order to insist on himself as an enigma.
Incorporation as the Fantasy of Non-Introjection
Everything said up to now has been to setup the story I wish to tell about the identity of the pathological narcissist, and what it is that is wrong with him per se. As it turns out, the story is a lot like a horror movie. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, as previously mentioned, made the condition of failed introjection, and the related illnesses of mourning, the focus of their work since the 1960s. Abraham and Torok spend a good deal of time exploring the case of the Wolf Man (whom they show to be hiding a shameful secret involving both his father and his sister) and the cases first identified by Ferenczi concerning “mania after melancholy” in the form of sudden bursts of libido after the death of a loved one. These investigations revolve around a parallel concept to introjection, what they refer to as “incorporation.” Incorporation occurs on the basis of failed introjection. Where introjection denotes a process, a process of growth and a broadening of the ego, incorporation denotes a fantasy of a particular sort. In fantasy in general, Abraham and Torok point out, we see something already essentially narcissistic—in fantasy we transform the world, via a secret topography, to avoid inflicting injury upon ourselves. In incorporation, which is introjection gone bad, the ego’s healing process is denied, and an instantaneous and magical substitution is seen—or rather not seen, because the non-process of incorporation, as a fantasy of non-introjection (of not having to suffer the pain of loss and the work of mourning) occurs in the presence of conflicts that give rise to immense shame, and which therefore must be banished from conscious awareness.
The refusal to mourn is co-extensive with the refusal to love; and as RuPaul says, if you can’t love yourself, how are you going to love anybody else?
In her paper “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse,” Maria Torok offers an explanation for the strange phenomenon first pointed out by Ferenczi, namely the mysterious increase in libido at the moment of loss. The libido, Torok makes clear, is sending up a kind of a flare. The flare is a message from the other side, from the place of banished conflicts which must not be recognized. In the cases where introjection and normal mourning fail, the loved one, who functioned as a kind of ego ideal or imago as in the normal cases, was nevertheless also the locus for a shameful desire, and the repression of this desire, while simultaneously working to keep this desire alive (if the work of mourning through introjection were complete, the hope of the forbidden and conflictual desire would also come to an end). In the unexpected orgasm, we see a hallucinatory fulfillment under conditions of repression.
I do not wish to tell you lurid stories about suffering individuals who display these characteristics. They are stories, as one might imagine, involving childhood abuse and trauma. They concern the immense conflicts that occur in the psyche when people also experience awakening desire and sexual satisfaction in the context of what we must regard as (all too human) failure to behave in an upright manner, if not in some cases outright betrayals of trust and love of the highest order. The main thing here is the entry into the non-process of incorporation, as opposed to normal introjection. In lieu of the work of mourning, the would-be mourner fatefully refuses the work, and instead enacts a macabre substitution; un-mourned, the object loss is swallowed whole, taken into the ego as a kind of dead thing, yet buried alive there, along with all the associated feelings and conflicts, and covered over, as if through this regressed, primary narcissistic swallowing, the work was somehow accomplished, as if by magic.
The Crypt in the Ego
In order to grasp the mechanism at work, and the consequences of incorporation as the fantasy of non-introjection, as a kind of lie, a false healing, we need to return to Karl Abraham’s observation made to Freud: “The illness of mourning does not result, as might appear, from the affliction caused by the objectal loss itself, but rather from the feeling of an irreparable crime…”. Incorporation, as the refusal of introjection because of the failure to transmute our drives, erotic interests, etc., in relation to superego prohibitions (guilt and shame) leads to the erecting of a kind of a monument that commemorates the circumstances in which the specific contents, under extreme repression, are banished. Inside the monument, therefore, there is a crypt. Incorporation is inverted tomb raiding: an illegal act, whereby a set of contents (including ilicit desires) are placed inside a secret crypt.
The refusal of mourning–through the fantasy that somehow swallowing the object in a live burial–constructs the crypt, and splits both the ego and the unconscious. In his introduction to Abraham and Torok’s “The Wolf Man’s Secret Word,” Jacques Derrida describes the love object as remaining like a living dead thing, abscessed in a specific spot in the ego. The refusal to properly mourn a significant ego loss (whatever it might be) under conditions of conflictual desires and prohibition, causes the ego to split itself, without having knowledge of the split or the crypt and its contents, and the crypt has no knowledge of the ego. As Derrida writes, “Two egos, unknown to each other…a special kind of unconscious in the ego, of which the ego is unconscious.”
In refusing mourning, in failing to introject loss, and in substituting incorporation for introjection, the pathological narcissist is like a kind of insomniac who nightly fails to enter REM sleep.
The double fracturing implied here (the split within the ego and the split within the id) explains, in part, why it is that people suffering from these kind of neurosis (like Freud’s Wolf Man) are so difficult to successfully analyze – where the language of mental illnesses (those that can be meaningfully addressed via a depth psychology and a depth hermeneutics) show forth in fractured symbols, here the process of interpretation is inhibited by the existence of symbols that are doubly fractured, and doubly unavailable (conforming to the split off ego crypt is the working of the split of id in relation to it and it’s banished desires).
The pathological narcissist then, having chosen fantasy and dark magic over the work of mourning, having protected himself from the pain of injury, thereby becomes injured, through the creation of the cryptic dead zone. As we saw in the description of processes of introjection, the refusal to mourn is co-extensive with the refusal to love; and as RuPaul says, if you can’t love yourself, how are you going to love anybody else? By resisting introjection, the narcissist has kept a portion of himself safe, hidden away in the crypt. But in so doing, he cannot re-assimilate the loved object into himself, and he remains untouched by the other, and the moral relationship to the other is destroyed, and the destruction is not recognized.
The conditions under which illnesses of mourning are seen to arise are highly specific, and the details are infinitely variable, because they are intimate and belong to the most private spheres of our lived experience. But the universality of our limit experiences as such, of being finite in our wills, of encountering and adjusting to meet an external world that will not do our bidding, of recognizing other people as separate from ourselves and yet investing them with our love and regard, these are the conditions of challenge that must be met in order to grow up to become a decent human being. However, the pathological narcissist, in refusing mourning, in failing to introject loss, in substituting incorporation for introjection, is like a kind of insomniac who nightly fails to enter REM sleep. He paces back and forth alone, frustrated and angry, pursued by his inner demons, projecting his false self, protecting his narcissistic wounds, gaslighting, and venting his narcissistic rage. He cannot sleep, and he cannot dream; and he does not have nightmares. Instead, he is a nightmare for the rest of us.
