why we're all members of the nsc

Here is my not-so-secret secret: we are all members of the Narcissist Survivors’ Club.  Many have known, in one sense, what it means to grow up under the care-less-ness of the narcissistic wing.  But this club reaches far further afield than that, down to the roots of what it means to be a human being, and what it means to live in this fallen, troubled world.

You may know, from previous articles, that each of us is born in the narcissistic condition: so-called primary narcissism.  Much as a baby’s world may be wondrous, it is also undifferentiated.  Mother and child form a dyadic relationship, and the baby assumes control, and is surprised by misattunements.  When we say someone “is an extension” of someone else, this is what we mean: a baby cries because the breast is not already moving toward their mouth, not because they’re asking a totally separate person for help and nourishment.

We all grow from this all-is-me beginning, and must learn, through maturity, that each other has volition, an independent mind, legitimate feelings and a consciousness just like our own.  This transformation is a radical and imperfect thing.  Like tree rings, we always carry our original state within us, and grow out towards the world through the encounter of inner resources with external relating.  The transformation is not into something wholly different.  Instead, it’s a transformation of what we mean by self-centredness, of the qualities of our narcissism: a loving person, after all, is not without a centre.  Their world view still originates in a singular point of consciousness.  

Each human survives their own narcissism just as they hope to survive familial and cultural narcissism. No one can take a caring, empathic family for granted, or democracy, or fair, meritocratic treatment.  In reality, we’re surrounded by negating forms of dominance, by the autocratic, by tyranny, tribalism, and those who view us as nothing but a use, number or profit.  

Ontology

Ontology is a useful way to think about the dynamics of how we relate to one another and the self, because it is concerned with the nature of being: how it is, and what it is.

The child’s sense of being (existence, identity, agency) is deeply influenced by parents’ interdependent pathologies. The child’s very reality is shaped by how each parent allows or disallows the child to exist as an autonomous subject.

This process, as we know, happens in familial, cultural, and historical contexts.  I’ve long been fascinated by, for example, the long-lasting influence of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”  As a figure, he has a quasi-prophetic position in our history, a forerunner of what was to come.  He was a father-figure to our societal, ontological reality. 

Although his most famous phrase is written in the positive, his reasoning was, above all, doubtful.  He was saying, in effect, that if I doubt absolutely everything, the very thing I can rely upon is the doubter: the fact that there must be something doing the doubting.  The background to this mathematician’s perspective is the overriding power of the church, while the future-ground is the intense lens of scientific rationalism, framed through doubting reductionism.  The zeitgeist was turning from a religious hold on power and perspective, to a scientific-positivistic one.  Descartes’s famous statement was taken as the cornerstone of modern Western philosophy, and the Church was firmly in his crosshairs.

Now, all of this is quite wordy, even high-falutin’ stuff, and we need to ground ourselves again.  Think for a moment about what Descartes’ pithy statement omits.  Why, for example, shouldn’t we borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to phenomenology and say: “I move, therefore I am.”?  Or perhaps, by way of Freud: “I desire, therefore I am.”  Or, from many others: “I feel, therefore I am.”  Our being –here’s the point –is not reducible to thought, rationalism or let alone, doubt.  The very idea - the very defensive, reduced, crouched - idea, is actually horrific. 

What Descartes was actually voicing was a transfer of power.  He was writing at the early stages of scientific revolution, and the musculature of Newton, Bacon, Kepler et al is bulging from the seams of his mind.  He was writing with the confidence of mathematical successes, especially in geometry, in understanding the world.  The problem is that the new would mimic the same corruption as the old, and set the stage for our current problems with reductionism.

Dogma over being-with

A common dogma, for example, exists in the positions of the “new atheists”, such as Dawkins, Hutchins et al.  Their point is to lampoon “fictions” and “superstitions” in the articles of religious faith.  It often ends with a straw man argument about “sky fairies” or “flying spaghetti monsters”, or variations on the reductio ad absurdum argument.

Descartes, and his contemporaries, were sick of the stories, and sick of the way they were being defended.  If your new philosophy is to doubt, and try to rebuild our concept of truth, these stories are bound to be in your way.  The new cornerstone of western philosophy positioned the self as, above all, a thinking, doubting thing.  It’s quite a castle to retreat to, because to doubt Descartes appears to confirm his truth, not undermine it.

But much as we may admire this mathematic castle, it comes with attendant problems.  First: is it dogmatic, in itself?  Is it a new scripture?  

Worst still is the problem of corruption.  The crimes of the old church were/are problems of reductionism and dogmatism.  Any links to slavery, for example, or to child abuse, or various persecutions - are all problems of reduction whereby the sanctity of an individual, through corruption, is lost.  Dogmatism empties the symbolic of meaning. Descartes’ “last fortress,” by contrast, sits along a fault line of intellectual anxiety: in the face of potential cosmic illusions, all he can do is trust the interior sense of thinking.  But in so doing, he also reduces us, and lays the groundwork for the “nothing but” scientism to follow.  Another story is being told, in which we are mere things.

The best, the very best, response or counter weight to the battles over dogmatic reductionism came from the arts.  In particular, the renaissance, and the romantics.  “Here we stand”, they say, “full, strong, holy, beyond your clasp!”  The “mind-forged manacles” and “dark satanic mills” be damned.  The most successful art and artists stood up for the dignity of the self via the dignity implied in Martin Buber’s “I-thou” self-other relationship.  

It is this relationship which is always problematic in the course of human history.  In some large degree, this is because the Self is invisible and immaterial.  As such, it is first in line - along with God - to be executed by doubt, reduction and positivism.  The ontological questions– what being is, and how being is –are deeply vulnerable to the violent swings in how - or whether - we view ourselves.  

In psychoanalysis, this same narrative has played itself out.  Freud was an ambitious rational scientist.  His first stab at things position the self as a desiring, animalistic It.  Jung, and later on, the relational turn of psychoanalysis, reasserted the self as “Thou”.  Not coincidentally, Jung was also very focussed at re-energizing the symbolic, at rescuing it from dogma and literalism.  He knew that the I-Thou relationship needed to be culturally reasserted.  Most good psychotherapists these days would be careful not to objectify or otherwise reduce clients, whether through the abuse of power dynamics of abstract ideas of the self.   A recent exception in a minority is the precarious idea of viewing self as non-universal, a political identity, an abstraction, rather than the authentic self.

Whenever institutions—be they churches, schools, corporations, or families—privilege a rigid framework over genuine, vulnerable, equitable relating, they end up dehumanizing individuals. What’s supposed to be a sanctuary for our deeply felt, immeasurable selves regularly becomes a machine that regards people as cogs. The Church has at times epitomized this corruption: the very place that proclaims “holiness” in relationships—between soul and Creator, between congregants—has far too often perpetuated systemic violence, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual.  But so too, has positivism, often through materialism.  If we are mere matter, we do not matter at all.

The self is both invisible and immeasurable. Because we can’t chart or weigh it like cargo, our egocentric or bureaucratic impulses find it all too easy to discount it. In the same way that Descartes, by reducing certainty to the “I think,” unwittingly empowered a culture of mechanistic reduction, so too do literalist or dogmatic systems reduce the rich, ambiguous tapestry of human interiority to checklists, data and commandments. People become background to the “grand narrative” of the institution or dogma. Ironically, the faith tradition that should best guard the mystery of the soul can, at its worst, crush that very mystery under a rigid scaffolding of rules and prohibitions. When form takes precedence over content, rituals and doctrines turn hollow. 

The Encounter

What is needed, then, in this Narcissist Survivors’ Club, is a constant re-affirmation of the self-other encounter as holy in and of itself—holy not because it follows a rule perfectly, but because in that moment of genuine connection, something larger than “framework” takes place. 

The universe, like the self, is a mysterious place, no matter what we think we know of it.  It stands, unknowable in defiance of what is known, beyond what we can imagine, let alone pin down to data, or reduce to literalism.

Therapy, to me, is like this.  I recently met a person –a very intelligent prospective client –who wanted to know every book and author I had read.  He intended to rank therapists by this assumptive knowledge base in order to find help.  But therapists are not machines.  We encounter knowledge, just as we encounter ourselves and our clients.  It is a relationship with these things that we bring into the therapy room.  We relate and impart as humans in a creative act.  To put it another way, there are an infinite number of responses, in terms of tone, information, timing, wording, to any given thing a client may say, and a wide array of ways they may say it.  In psychotherapy, we co-construct something from how and what we are: our shared ontological moments.  This is, in many ways, the opposite of burping out data points at one another.  Rather, the aim, probably more artistic than scientific, is the encouragement and nurturing of your being, and that is rather a wonderful thing to be a part of.