The two “kinds” of posts on this blog that get the most action are, first, narcissism and, second, adult oppositional defiance disorder. They’re supposed to be something real, categories that exist in real life with edges that can be located, but in fact they are not any more definable than pornography or good art. They are just hypotheses, ideas, old tales and the busy busy busy busy statistical surveyors and crunchers. Pot lifters.
So I was pleased to find this old article from 1991 by a guy named “Wink.” (I love it.) He just straightforwardly compared the six most common “instruments” for determining if someone is “narcissistic.” They’re old by now. I don’t know what the more recent ones are like. What interested Wink (a professor at Berzerkly) was that the six tests divided into two quite distinct descriptions that did NOT correlate.
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI); the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory narcissism scales; and Wink’s-and-Gough’s instrument seemed to endorse each other. They were drawn from the DSMD-III. The adjectives (which are mostly all they have in the end) are: self-aggrandizement, rebelliousness, outgoingness and impulsivity. On another list: highly energetic, extraverted, experience-seeking, self-confident, tend to assume leadership roles, characterized by open grandiosity, conceit, and egotism. These are summed up as openly displayed grandeur and exhibitionism.
The other three indexes were QUITE different: diminished self-esteem, depression, inadequacy, unhappiness, worry, shyness, lack of empathy, and the “Expoitativeness-Entitlement factor” on the NPI, which is associated with suspiciousness, anxiety and neuroticism. Which presents the question, what makes these two different ideas both relate to narcissism? The hypothesis is that there are two kinds of narcissism: overt and covert. Reich, predictably, says that arrogant self-assurance, blatant self-confidence and flagrant display of superiority are “phallic” narcissism. Zip it.
Wink and his team gave the quizzes, had 70 people observed by supposedly objective people, and interviewed the spouses of the married participants. They looked at impulse control (esp. aggression and eroticism), unconventionality and rebelliousness, insistence on self-expression even at the expense of others. Spouses could have said their partner was in one of three sorts of people:
I. bossy, intolerant, cruel, argumentative, honest, opportunistic, rebellious, conceited, arrogant, demanding, temperamental, loud.
II. worrying, emotional, defensive, anxious bitter, tense, complaining, mature, dependent, contented, dissatisfied, or moody.
III. Aggressive, hard-headed, modest, outspoken, restless, show-off, assertive, egotistical, determined, evasive, impulsive, self-centered.
People in pursuit of explanations and advice are not going to be helped here very much. I have two people I measure this stuff against: Bob Scriver and myself. Both of us fit just about every string of adjectives here, both covert and overt. But it’s situational. Sometimes I am high-handed, arrogant, over-bearing, and generally authoritarian. I was this way when I was pre-school, so maybe that’s my basic temperament. Luckily I was little then. My mother used to lock me into the basement where I would sit with my back against the door and scream as loud as I could. Other times I was terrified, particularly if there were a lot of other little kids my age. That’s still kind of my pattern -- I do NOT like crowds. I just don’t scream much now. Bob was the boss: he was an orchestra and band conductor who would not tolerate any shirking or sour notes, but in a situation where we might have been arrested or were otherwise being scrutinized by authorities (don’t ask), he could not have been more meek.
From another point of view, perhaps everyone is really a narcissist and goes back and forth between overt and covert versions. Maybe this is what underlies bipolar disorders. But I think it fits better with my idea about being a vulnerable creature able to generate a shell or force-field or armor that allows a person to be powerful but somehow blinds the essential person to basic empathic information about how other people are feeling and thinking. Except what's in their own interests, of course.
When that is overwhelmed/removed, the essential person -- exposed -- can be terrified, entirely unable to negotiate or compensate. But when such a person voluntarily sets the shell aside, the intimacy can be intense. The potential that one has to damage an “unshelled” person is like relating to a small child who has no defenses, no ability to rationalize or even call for help. What assurances can a person give them that they will be protected on their own terms? I never found any that worked for Bob and I guess he never found anything that worked on me either. For a lot of people I think it is money.
For conformists it is the culture that reassures and protects: if there is a community consensus about what’s polite, what’s “good” behavior, where the boundaries are, that removes a lot of the anxiety and also provides a few bright lines to show what’s getting out of hand. But if the culture is mixed or ambivalent some way -- like a reservation, like a different kind of education, like the changing times or the difference between urban and rural -- then a person is likely to be overweening or on the other hand cringing without even realizing it. There is likely to be embarrassment and even outright damage, fistfights, lost jobs.
It seems as though the inquiries I get about both of these “syndromes” or whatever they are, both narcissism and defiance, are hard to understand partly because no one can figure out what the person is reacting to. Most often there seems to be a woman who feels she is being treated unfairly, even blamed, by a man who can’t be satisfied and flies into rages over small things. The Archie Bunker pattern. The emotions seem to be displaced from someplace else, not arising from the moment. Dear Abby always says, “Have you checked with his doctor?”
My own “conceit” when I was dealing with Bob was that I could see the tender needy child under the brawny cowboy-booted shell. This recurrent fantasy is much endorsed by the culture. I try to discard it, but the pattern creeps back. I just watched Helen Mirren’s “Prime Suspect” series from one end to the other -- it streams on Netflix. But on disc I watched “Love Ranch” which also stars her and is almost a parody/reversal of the BBC cop structure. It’s based on the real life “Mustang Ranch” in Nevada. Mirren’s character is enmeshed with a grandiose narcissist -- no doubt about it. She runs a brothel of child-like women. Then an Argentinian boxer shows up, a child of nature, big tough guy -- with brain trauma. The Mirren character is de-shelled and overwhelmed, but the more she is the better we like her and want to protect her. There are clues in there someplace. But there is NO advice about how to be safe. Being alive means being in danger. To some of us protection imposes limits we don’t want to accept. We'd rather be naked. But where does that come from?
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