In The Impossibility of Sex: Stories of the Intimate Relationship Between Therapist and Patient, author Susie Orbach presents a course of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a woman she calls Belle. Although Orbach never uses the word, Belle is clearly a narcissist -- a label with near-universal pejorative connotations. What's brilliant about the piece, however, is how it makes clear that narcissism is not merely an annoyingly overamped assessment of one's own worth, or, as is increasingly thought these days (though this is seldom articulated in so many words) an unproblematic and ethically neutral life-style choice. What comes across is that narcissists are damaged, broken in some fundamental way, in some essential inner heartspace. And they pass this damage along to others so they don't have to feel it in themselves.

Not surprisingly -- if you've ever been there yourself -- much of the story centers on lying...

Lies told in personal relationships are unpleasant. We may excuse a white one because it saves face, but most people are uneasy with a habitual or a purposeful liar because lying is an affront. To accept it tarnishes us. It makes us a cuckold by sweeping into our nest a bad egg not of our making. Lies perpetrated in friendship or in the family are especially disapproved of and the offensive action is quickly pushed away so as not to taint the recipient. (p. 54)

There are reasons a person adopts narcissism -- and at some point it is a conscious choice to defend the damaged self in this particular way. If not "conscious" in the usual sense, let's just say it requires a significant effort to remain unconscious of the destructive impact narcissism has on others.

The lies and conceit that had structured much of her sense of self could be understood as ways in which she was putting together a life and creating a story about herself. There was much to it... but in essence it was not so much about being a liar as it was about creating stories for herself to live by. (p. 62)

This explains the appeal of "collective archetypes" and other such personality accessories available in better New Age boutiques everywhere. Thus the Campbell cover. Let's be clear on this: it's there for spot color, not as a buy recommendation. But back to Orbach. The strategy of the narcissist is to idealize, then devalue. Endgame is the summary kiss-off.

Belle dismissed how much people gave her and their commitment to her. She had a capacity to stir up in others a great desire to meet her, look after her or make things better for her. she always drew people to her -- those who had helped her after she had moved to Britain, the men who had bailed her out of difficulties, her friends who had lived through her anguish over abortions and rootlessness -- and these people gave tremendously of themselves. For all her saying how marvelous they were, she could not acknowledge their value and their meaning. In time she would betray them or feel betrayed by them. Disaster surrounded the endings of nearly all her relationships, so they we never there to rely on or go back to -- or finally to matter. (p. 65)

Ultimately, narcissism is a form of spiritual usury that depends on the belief of others, then undermines that belief by absorbing it into a delusionally inflated sense of autonomous, anti-relational self. Vampirism comes to mind, and not just by way of poetic analogy.

I wanted Belle to be able to tell me about the lie because I knew its utterance between us was significant. The lies that she proffered to keep people interested in her (so much more interesting to be mugged than to lose car keys) made those very same people less valuable to her when they believed her fabrications. Their belief in her stories turned them into gullible fools whom she privately, or at least unconsciously, mocked. (p. 72)

That is the meaning of a word strongly associated with narcissism: contempt. But it's worse than that...

She did not like to see or feel herself as empty and in need of others to fill her up or attach herself to. It panicked her and it was part of why she hustled. She needed to make herself busy lest a gap she could not cope with opened up and reveal the terrible emptiness inside her. So if someone became too important, she needed to claw back what she had invested in them and in this disengaging show herself she could go without, thus experiencing a short-term high. (p. 65-66)

Yes, that was your soul getting sucked through a crack pipe. Oh well. Best move on. Somehow, the DSM-IV doesn't convey the full feeling, doesn't quite flesh out the MO. Susie Orbach does. Here's the more prosaic version...

from: Psychotherapeutic assessment and treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorder by Shannon D. Smith source: Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association, 1 July 2002
via: HighBeam™ Research

...the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA, 2000) has grouped Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) together under "Cluster B" personality disorders with its sister disorders (including Borderline, Histrionic, and Antisocial Personality Disorders). Beginning in early adulthood, an individual must demonstrate at least five of the following DSM-IV diagnostic criteria in any combination to qualify for NPD: a grandiose sense of self-importance; a preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, beauty, or brilliance; a belief that he/she is special and unique; a need for excessive admiration; a sense of entitlement; interpersonally exploitative behaviors; a lack of empathy for the needs of others; envy toward others and a belief that others are envious of him/her; and finally arrogant, haughty behaviors.

I picked up the Orbach book after I found out she was deeply associated with attachment "theory" (although it was reviled for decades by the Kleinian Borg of the British Psychoanalytic Association, the best psychoanalytic minds these days no longer consider it so theoretical). Here's a clip from a piece Orbach wrote on the subject in 1998, connecting attachment with social issues that go beyond the child development concerns with which it's usually associated.

WHY IS ATTACHMENT IN THE AIR?

... When Thatcher stated that there is no such thing as society only the individual, she shocked a nation with her barbarity, her daring and her stupidity. That phrase more than any other crystallised the effort of her administration. It spoke to the corrupt values we were all supposed to ascribe to in the eighties in which money replaced relationship and the individual displaced the community. While it is easy to deride Thatcherism, we have to be able to account for her popularity... I would suggest that she very cleverly tapped into... the individual's needs for self expression. However... she then created the conditions under which individual fulfillment was an impossibility.

As the con disintegrated and even people in the mass media who had taken up Thatcher's call could not fail to recognise the devastation that was now Britain, a new value system began to be adumbrated. ...it found a new metaphor, a new way of explaining from whence came the individual and individual agency and uniqueness.

For this Attachment theory and theories of intersubjectivity were at the ready. They understand how the individual is made and held within relationship, how there can be no such thing as an individual outside of relationship, that it is relationship -- the fact that we are in relation with one another -- that makes human endeavour, human individuality as we know it possible. Anthropology shows us that everything we associate with being human is experienced in culture. Attachment, relationship, the transmission of culture is a unique human enterprise: without attachment we cannot hope to be human let alone individual.

The depth and implications that this attachment perspective poses are now beginning to get a hearing outside the clinic. This is extremely welcome. For the challenge that attachment stimulates and the roads it opens up for us are far more profound than the rhetorical and worryingly reactionary agenda of communitarianism.

Attachment however is easily misunderstood, used as a buzzword to make a consensus where sharp differences exist. This is as true within psychoanalytic politics as it is in discourse about the public realm. We need to position ourselves so that the revolutionary edge of attachment theory, not simply its nice cosy sounding edges are engaged with. We need to position the discussion on attachment so that it isn't only about the heart as in some journalistic uses of it, but to put forward the idea that equality, reciprocity, mutuality, the key features of attachment are at odds with many of the ways we currently organise our social relations.

Susie Orbach © 1998
Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Volume 19, No. 1 (1999)