A mother is walking down the street with her child. She’s in high gear and the child of three-ish is having to run to keep up. She looks at him with annoyance and says, ‘why are you running?”
The boy, out of breath, replies, ”because I’m not.”
The poor lad cannot face the denial of his reality in her question, the dismissal of his inner world to which the only honest answer is a forbidden truth-telling version of, ‘because you’re in a big bad mood and stomping off…
without looking to see if I’m left behind….
And so the only thing he can do is to deny his own reality. At least there will be common ground if only on the basis of shared contempt for the child’s point of view. This will cost the child his footing. On the pavement and in life.
This boy is not, ‘failing to internalize values’ (Kernberg)
He’s internalizing them only too well.
I … am not quite real, but I can run and walk at the same time. Look out everyone it’s the fantastic running/walking boy!
Where adequate treatment fails, double think and grandiose Self structures ensue. We can’t be whole for as long as we identify with an expectation to run and walk at the same time.
Otto Kernberg coined the phrase, ‘Grandiose Self Structure’, to describe Narcissism. But his insistence on it having a ‘pathological formation’, tends to strip it of meaning before we’ve even had a look around.
The problem with calling anything abnormal is that we tend to lose respect for it and forget to ask helpful questions.
and so he has to account for sadism by saying that,
”the infliction of suffering is the child’s attempt to defend against his own helplessness, through the exercise of omnipotent control over another.” O. Kernberg
No, that’s what kings do.
Not children. Y’all confuse’.
Important names for things can get in the way of experiencing them. Its like mastering the Kama Sutra without ever looking your partner in the eye,
The thing about early deprivation is that it urgently needs to split off and project desperation. The child concludes that it is un-held because it is lacking or deficient. Moreover, the baseline of how people treat each other, reality itself, is violated. The intrusive dark splinter of not quite being real has to be visited on another.
and even more pointily when collectively encoded in religious lore…
DO AS I SAY ON PAIN OF DEATH..
in one moment and…
DO AS YOU PLEASE SO LONG AS YOU PRAISE ME.
on the other.
His poor flock are suddenly awash in persecutory anxiety and paranoia. Their double/bind is unbearable and can only regain their composure by joining Yahweh in his unreality …
”I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” St Paul.
and so it begins.
Kohut is unequivocal, Narcissism,
”results from massive shortcomings in mothering.” Kohut.
and even Kernberg will give a bit and refers to incipient..
”intolerable reality in the interpersonal realm.” Kernberg
which I suppose is a sanitized way of talking about the unbearable misery of being a child who is related to in an ideal way or not at all, which is what you get when Mother has had her spiritual essence sucked out of her by animus-ity which refuses to sacralize her mothering .
And so the crucial detail is that the Grandiose Self Structure is largely uninhabited by any one permanent resident, though there are tenants who might be acquainted
but not necessarily
in the way you might like.
or that might like you
and so we pollute because we don’t, and lie and cheat because we never and start wars because we’re not.
People don’t dumb themselves down with the nonsense of being accepted on the basis of rejection unless they have been systematically devalued already, and not in adversity, but by a child’s soul not being sufficiently welcome…
”until he too, loses all sight of it.” Alice Miller.
So paranoid anxiety might well be an appropriate response to having insufficient toe holds in the world. But what do you do with a kid who’s too smart to read the instructions at the front of his exam paper? The spouse who turns the Aga oven off in Winter and back on in May? The dismissive colleague…who isn’t.
If you are just benign he’ll take advantage and if you are too confrontative there will be no safety. So, you do as you would with any kid whose acting out because they’re not getting enough of the good stuff, you pick your battles..
and try to love them at least as much as you hate them in the meantime.
