Abusive Parents - Excerpts Part 14 - Narcissists and Abandonment

Written by Sam Vaknin

The minute we divorced - she was deleted from my archives. I never spoke to her again. Not because I am angry at her - but because she is not a worthwhile investment any longer. With limited resources of time and mental energy I began vigorously pursuing other sources of narcissistic supply. She no longer constituted one, even potentially - so, why bother? She was so effectively deleted from my mind and memory that I find that I have no interest in what has or hasn't happened to her in the slightest. I rarely if at all think about her or us.

Had she tried to contact me I would have regarded it as an insolent intrusion upon my private life, a waste of my precious and cosmically significant time, a boring, irrelevant post mortem of a now defunct business venture with nothing to gain from it. I would in turn be flattered (that she emotionally NEEDS me so, that I am indispensable), then I would have gotten bored and then simply angry at having to go through all this. I would have become discourteous and finally abusive in an effort to terminate this utterly superfluous exchange.

It could be speculated that my behavior is a defense mechanism against the pain and hurt inflicted upon me by her abandonment (what I call EIPM - Emotional Involvement Prevention Mechanism here). But this is, at the very best, a very partial explanation. I behave the same with "close" friends, business "associates", other women in my life who never hurt me nor were contemplating to. No, the better, more complete explanation is the shift of scarce energy from a defunct source of narcissistic supply - to a newly promising one. The shift is so abrupt and so total that it is MECHANIC, not human. Hence the apprehension and tremendous agony of those who are its objects.

Many theoreticians and clinicians came to the conclusion that narcissism is, indeed, a disturbance in development, growth interrupted. They invented special technical and non-technical terms to describe this: "Puer Aeternus" (the Eternal Adolescent - a term coined by the Jungian Satinover) or "The Peter Pan Syndrome" (though the latter was not exclusively linked to narcissism).

Freud - as opposed to Jung and others - regards narcissism as a permanent, fixated regression to very early childhood. The narcissistic feelings of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience compensated the child for the creeping realizations of powerlessness, object temporariness (mother or other objects disappear sometimes), and ignorance. It is a defense mechanism the child - with the help of a "good enough mother" (Winnicott) - is supposed to dispense with later in life. But if the mother (or other primary caregiver) is not "good enough", the child feels too insecure to overcome his narcissism and "gets stuck" at that stage for the rest of his adult life. The narcissist refuses to grow and face his own limitations and the world which he perceives - after his the model provided by his mother - to be hostile, unpredictable and cruel.

Much more in FAQ 64 and FAQ 25

6. Realizations

I realized:

• That the only enemy worth considering are inside me.
• That only semantics separates illusion from reality.
• That being hurt is a not a conscious decision or a choice -
  and that therefore, I should stop feeling guilty or blameworthy.
• That it is only through others that I can be led to myself.
• That my detractors possess only the power I give them and never more.
• That "Everything Flows" is both a source of sadness and a source of hope and strength.
• That, therefore, sadness is a source of hope and strength.
• That only I possess the licence and the wherewithal to perpetuate my abuse.
• That even my premeditation is accidental.
• That my intelligence is a double edged sword.
• That anything I say can and will be used against me but it should not deter me.
• That my omnipotence is powerless and my ignorance is omniscient.
• That I live only once and am whiling my present away mourning the past and fearing the future.
• That, in the face of dead ends, it is best to reverse course.

7. Narcissism and Nihilism

I don't think that there is a necessary connection between the will to power (Nietzsche) and narcissism. Narcissism has more to do with UNREALISTIC, grandiose fantasies, and lack of empathy. A realistic pursuit of power would not qualify as narcissism, to my mind.

To my mind, the "morphogenetic field" of "cultural narcissism" is a set of potentials. It includes many possible behaviors (some of them socially permissible, others not). The narcissist, having been subjected to abuse (doting and spoiling are forms of abuse because the child is treated as the parents' extension) - selects from the set of potential behaviors those behavior patterns that define him as a narcissist.

The big mystery is: why do we select behaviors the way we do? Why does one react to abuse by developing a personality disorder and another be seemingly glossing over it? I think that the answer is: genetics. Our repertoire of reactions (=personality) is genetically predisposed.