Are all personality disorders the outcomes of frustrated narcissism?
Well into early adolescence, the empathic guide of parents, caregivers, role models, authority figures, and peers is crucial to the evolution of a stable sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and self-confidence. Traumas and abuse, smothering and doting, and the steady breach of emerging boundaries yield the entrenchment of rigid person narcissistic defenses.
In my e book "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited", I defined pathological narcissism thus:
"Secondary or pathological narcissism is a pattern of questioning and behaving in adolescence and adulthood, which involves infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of others. It manifests in the persistent pursuit of personal gratification and attention (narcissistic supply), in social dominance and private ambition, bragging, insensitivity to others, lack of empathy and/or excessive dependence on others to meet his/her responsibilities in each day living and thinking. Pathological narcissism is at the core of the narcissistic personality disorder."
What happens when such an individual faces disappointments, setbacks, failures, criticism and disillusionment?
They "resolve" these recurrent frustrations by developing personality disorders.
The Narcissistic Solution – The affected person creates and projects an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent False Self that generally replaces and represses the discredited and dilapidated True Self. He uses the False Self to garner narcissistic furnish (attention, both wonderful and negative) and thus help his inflated fantasies. Both the Narcissistic and the Schizotypal Personality Disorders belong here due to the fact both contain grandiose, fantastic, and magical thinking. When the narcissistic solution fails, we have the Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The Borderline patient's focus that the solution that she had opted for is "not working" generates in her an overwhelming separation nervousness (fear of abandonment), an identity disturbance, affective and emotional lability, suicidal ideation, and suicidal action, persistent feelings of emptiness, rage attacks, and transient (stress related) paranoid ideation.
The Appropriation Solution – This answer entails the appropriation of anybody else's imagined (and, therefore, confabulated and false) self rather of one's dysfunctional True Self. Such human beings stay vicariously, via others, and with the aid of proxy. Consider the Histrionic Personality Disorder. Histrionics sexualize and objectify others and then internalize (introject) them. Lacking an internal truth (True Self) they over-rate and over-emphasise their bodies. Histrionics and different "appropriators" misjudge the intimacy of their fake relationships and the diploma of dedication involved. They are effortlessly suggestible and their senses of self and self confidence shift and fluctuate with enter from the backyard (narcissistic supply). Another instance of this kind of answer is the Dependent Personality Disorder (codependents). Manipulative moms who "sacrifice" their lives for their children, "drama queens", and humans with factitious issues (for instance, Munchausen Syndrome) also belong to this category.
The Schizoid Solution – Sometimes the emergence of the False Self is stunted or disrupted. The True Self remain immature and dysfunctional but it is not replaced by a functioning narcissistic defense mechanism. Such patients are mental zombies, trapped forever in the no-man's land between infancy and adulthood. They lack empathy, their psychosexual life is impoverished, they prefer to avoid contact with others, and withdraw from the world. The Schizotypal Personality Disorder is a mixture of the narcissistic and the schizoid solutions. The Avoidant Personality Disorder is a close kin.
In my book "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited", I described the Aggressive Destructive Solution thus:
"The Aggressive Destructive Solution – These humans go through from hypochondriasis, depression, suicidal ideation, dysphoria, anhedonia, compulsions and obsessions and different expressions of internalized and modified aggression directed at a self which is perceived to be inadequate, guilty, disappointing and precious of nothing however elimination. Many of the narcissistic factors are current in an exaggerated form. Lack of empathy turns into reckless dismiss for others, irritability, deceitfulness and crook violence. Undulating shallowness is changed into impulsiveness and failure to layout ahead. The Antisocial Personality Disorder is a top instance of this solution, whose essence is: the complete manipulate of a False Self, besides the mitigating presence of a shred of True Self.
I tend to believe that malignant self love underlies all known personality disorders. Granted, different attributes and traits are emphasized in each personality disorder. But they all share the foundation of a failed personal psychological and psychosocial evolution. They are all the lamentable end results of stunted and compensatory trajectories of deformed growth and development."
التسميات :
Psychology