Extended Note on Group Narcissism

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Get ready for a tour de force

I touched upon the diversity of theories of narcissism briefly in the previous post, but based on feedback from psychologists and group narcissists, I think the subject requires additional tedious elaboration here to fully articulate what I mean when I say group narcissism.

I’ll begin with a very rough survey of the assumptions inherent to different kinds of psychodynamic and contemporary models of narcissism. From there, I’ll refine what I think should be retained for my model of group narcissism and address some objections.

Psychodynamic Theories

For Freud and later Hans Kohut, a primitive part of the narcissist’s self becomes pathologically fixed at an early age because of a developmental failure caused by a classical parental trauma. In a normal child, this primitive self would merge into more sophisticated parts of a well-developed self, while in the narcissist this self remains apart and dominant, making primitive demands upon the narcissist and the world. This primitive self can be understood as an anachronistic extension of the young child who, for instance, irrationally rages against himself and the world when he stubs his toe, betraying his irrational convictions about his own omnipotence and the nature of the world.[i]

For Otto Kernberg, difficult relationships with caregivers at crucial periods of personality formation cause the emergence of distorted relationships among “objects” in the narcissist’s mind, including the narcissist’s actual self-image, their abstract omnipotent self-image or “self-object”, and the omnipotent observer we discussed in the previous post (usually a parental image or “ideal object”).[ii] These images and objects are fused so that the narcissist feels in some sense that he is the omnipotent self and ideal object, which fusion permits the use of fantasy to defend against the difficult emotions he associates with meeting his own basic needs. In contrast with Kernberg, Kohut is prone to keeping the omnipotent self-image and ideal object apart in a narcissist’s mind, with each representing some primitive module in the narcissist’s mind.

Christopher Lasch is another writer in the psychodynamic tradition, although he is most famous for leveraging the tradition’s insights to produce thoughtful criticisms of modern western society. For Lasch, narcissism is not a metaphor for society or group behavior, but rather a pathology induced in individuals by the structure of society.[iii] The transfer of various productive functions of the family, village, and religion to the state and corporations induces narcissism, for Lasch, because such omnipotent caregivers as state and corporation pander to individual self-images, make individuals feel helpless, and frustrate their abilities to meet their own needs in the same way that our young narcissist was frustrated in childhood. Thus for Lasch, the early traumatic events relied upon by psychodynamic theorists as etiologies could be caused by the institutions of society itself throughout an individual’s lifetime.

Kernberg expressed skepticism toward theses like Lasch’s but speculated that changes in familial conditions could increase the rate of narcissism.[iv] Kohut, on the other hand, could be said to have presaged Lasch, and even considered a kind of group-level narcissism:

The current materialistic rationalism in Western culture, on the other hand, while giving greater freedom to the enhancement of the self, tends to belittle or (e.g., in the sphere where a militant atheism holds sway) to forbid, the traditional forms of institutionalized relatedness to the idealized object…..the Suppression of narcissistic structures, however, become intensified as their expression is blocked; they will break through the brittle controls and will suddenly bring about, not only in individuals, but also in whole groups, the unrestrained pursuit of grandiose aims and the resistanceless merger with omnipotent selfobjects. I need only refer to the ruthlessly pursued ambitions of Nazi Germany and of the German population's total surrender to the will of the Führer to exemplify my meaning.[v]