MY OWN NARCISSISM

The larger culture has been working on gender relations ever since the previous balance was destroyed by effective birth control, which threw the fertility basis of marriage off-center, and thus the proper turnover of the generations.  At the same time diligent people have been trying to understand how they personally fit into all this.  This includes me.

I’ve seen how the ag and small town patterns have affected my parents and their generation.  Everything hinged on marriage to an effective provider and the occupations or national framing that controlled their income.  But in the generation that was me, my siblings who were both male, and my cousins, our lives spread out in quite different ways.  The constant was gender assignment and my differentiation was a combination of education and denying conception. It took me right out of the family.

My nuclear family was knocked off-norm in two ways: a concussion gradually destroyed my father and my mother had wanted an education, in compensation resumed her college and guaranteed mine, though a scholarship I earned was a major contribution.  In those days boys owed military service which paid for their college degrees.  The pattern is that the mother provides the culture for a family and the father provides the income.  Our father has been expected to be golden because the family carried him to a Master's degree, the highest anyone had gone. But in a few decades his MA in the economics of potatoes was far overshadowed and he was much diminished.

The conventional ag pattern for a family is that the father’s well-being and success is a priority for the whole family and that the mother is expected to make him a higher priority than herself.  In this instance my father was what we label a narcissist: a man absorbed in himself and his own interests. His occupation (supporting small ag co-ops) meant he was the road most of the time. He lost track of what we were doing and beyond that his subtle brain damage grew so that his temperament and general equanimity were irascible and phony.  My mother did her best to keep him stable, pass her classes, and keep up with child life.  It was clear in a subconscious way that two children (which were planned) were a burden but a third made even more cost and demand, even in the thriving Fifties. 

Reading, esp. the grandmother's novels in the home which were Edwardian (Gene Stratton-Porter, Lucy Maude Montgomery, Harold Bell Wright) and demanded that a woman be exceptional, artistic, and highly idealistic, influenced my understanding that the proper goal was to find an outstanding man so as to contribute to him.  In Browning I did that, choosing an older definitely narcissistic man of considerable skill and accomplishment (sterilized, which helped).  

Maybe because of WWI, there was a feminist movement that urged women to patronize men and develop their own lives. Then the pattern that evolved is the one proposed by Grannon and Vaknin.  A man taught to be narcissistic has in effect a boundary around him. Those women who still expected a partnership based on love in which the man was primary, could not access love because they couldn't get through that boundary.  In the attempt they became hysterical and even psychotic.  In the meantime some of the men so focused on themselves also became psychotic.  Both people were living in fantasy.

Narcissism has come to mean something like “spoiled” or self-centered which is not exactly what the mythic story that Freud used was about.  This means room for a lot of interpretation and switching from good to bad and back.  The myth of the beautiful boy in love with his own appearance does not fit people who are concentrated on their own pursuits — whether artistic or scientific or business — to the point of ignoring everything and everyone else.  This much tight focus might be justified by achievement but the attempt alone would make the narcissistic circle tighter.

Narcissism, confining energy to one’s own self, might be a necessary condition for existence, as a child or toddler finds natural.  Sickness might demand a person’s total control.  Or possibly the context of the person’s life is so hostile and confining that only putting every energy into maintaining a big enough circle will allow existence.  Then in a new circumstance, that extreme defensiveness may have a different effect, overpowering others who were not oppressors and preventing both widening the circle and allowing intimacy..

We say “circle”, assuming a boundary of the person’s identity which is established both by what the individual finds necessary and by what the environment, esp. other people, insists on.  It might be rigid, like that around someone in a religious order based on self-discipline.  It might be flexible in a person confident of their core or wanting intimacy out of desire.  This circumstance asks for a certification of authenticity.  Vaknin is now proposing the narcissism of a person who is uncertain about his real identity and therefore creates a front which is his boundary, something like an avatar in social media — much encouraged these days.

For some the relationship of big to little, top to bottom, S to M, esp as defined in cultural gender roles, is always sneaking around in there according to presumed entitlements or paybacks for gifts.  Grannon points out that  gifts, favors, supports are often attempts to push boundaries in towards someone, or even dissolve them.  It’s so natural in a mercantile world.  Both describe the effort of the one who feels they love the narcissist and want to help him, as a kind of narcisssism of desire, an attempt to get “in” for support and reassurance.

It’s the pattern of the fort and the wild trying to get in for good or bad reasons, which can very much alarm and drive away someone “forted up.”  Then the person outside must increase efforts, invent tricks and deceptions, even become psychotic in assaults, using force and destruction that are quite real.

Vaknin proposes that a narcissistic needs a steady stream of praise, proof, and favors — “a supply” for which he will pay attention and maintain relationship.  Until he finds a better supplier, or unless the person who is addicted to the circle-barrier finds a better goal — a more important narcissist, a way of being independent, or an event that diminishes the narcissist.

When my father became unemployed, barely capable of taking care of himself, my mother treated him as a fourth child, though she despised the habit he had of calling her "Mommy."  But the original pattern of wife irrevocably devoted to the husband held on as a fantasy.  It has persisted as a fantasy in my own life because the narcissist I chose became famously complicated and aged quickly since he was twice my age.  The people who considered him a genius have assumed I would stay in his circle.  But I became my own narcissist with my own circle.  Only once since then has anyone gotten past my boundary.  I must be getting old myself.