Why We Remain Blacks - Part 2.01 (Beta Release)
Why We Remain Blacks - Part 2.01 (Beta Release)
Whose Blackness? Which Intersectionality?
Substack has turned me into a graphomaniac, to use Nordau’s term for Wagner. This has unfortunately ballooned the series to such an extent that I will subdivide this part 2 into separate entries.
PART 2.01
“We will always be black, you and I, even if it means different things in different places.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
“If the Jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent him.” – Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew
“Blackness came to define whiteness—and whiteness defined American democracy prior to the Civil War.” – Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project
In Part 1 we surveyed one social-psychological source of group narcissistic defenses, John Murray Cuddihy’s ordeal of civility, which describes how the modern world, with its harsh rules of decorum and ethos of personal responsibility, is experienced as cold and unforgiving by first and second generation white ethnic arrivals, and by blacks like Frantz Fanon and Blacks like Nikole Hannah-Jones.
We further learned of how the abstract-omnipotent group self-image of the Black group narcissist interposes itself between the modern world and the black group narcissist, re-interpreting the world with defensive rationalizations and misinterpreting it with hostile projections in response to this ordeal.
In Part 2.01 we’re going to look at the evolution of group narcissism within a more academic context. In doing so we’ll keep the ordeal in mind but broaden it to encompass more than mere embarrassment at interpersonal incivility and cultural parochialism. This will allow us to observe how the group narcissist’s group self-image can take on multiple, often contradictory, definitions to aggrandize itself and address immediate perceived threats.
As with the previous entry, we will focus on Black group narcissism, although we will draw upon other literary group narcissistic traditions like modern Judaism and white nationalism to illustrate the general applicability of group narcissism as a metaphor.
The purpose of this part and part 3 is to reinforce how narcissism and its defenses are useful metaphors for illuminating the instability and volatility of group identity.
Narcissism Refresher
We’ve detailed narcissism, its etiologies, defenses, and appearances, here. I’m going to extract and refine salient elements for this Part of the series, though I think these sections might be removed in the final book form.
Psychodynamic theorists famously refer to the womb as the original Garden of Eden for the narcissist, where the ideal and desired are identical to the real, where there exists a primordial union of the self, the ideal self, the external other or object and the ideal external other or object. The narcissist is then ripped from this primordial utopia through birth and presented with harsh realities that separate him from his desires through the limitations of reality, including the limitations of his own abilities and those of his parents.
The narcissist often has cold and unforgiving parents who constantly frustrate his attempts to meet his needs, causing him to be overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety, frustration, and envy. In response he develops a defensive fantasy world dominated by an especially strong concept of himself that is both abstract and omnipotent, meaning it is always on top in some sense in every situation. Further, to escape the need to rely upon his parents, whom he also dreads, his fantasy world is defined by a similarly abstract and omnipotent fantasy “other” in his mind that punishes and then confers validation upon his fantasy self.
But this self-image must prove itself to be supreme when confronted by threats like negative judgments from the outside world, otherwise it would be a pure hallucination and our narcissist would be a schizophrenic. Further, the narcissist often does prove himself to be superior, meaning he is able to adapt and function because he has a comparatively strong ego, unlike borderline cases. It is this functional adaptability of the narcissist that is central to the metaphor of group narcissism.
In adapting to existence, Otto Kernberg observes that narcissists are motivated by an overarching fear of being dependent upon anybody else, “because to depend means to hate, envy, and expose themselves to the danger of being exploited, mistreated, and frustrated.”[i] The narcissist’s fantasy world provides initial respite from these feelings but also fuels the concepts of self and the outside world that later render his adult behavior pathological.
A crucial way in which the fantasy world creates relief for the narcissist is by internalizing control over how the narcissist’s self is perceived and appraised, by creating a fantasy version of the omnipotent other, like parents or a civilization, that may initially be judgmental, but which through fantasy comes to confer praise or some other form of validation upon the narcissist’s ideal self. Otto Kernberg summarizes how a fully self-aware narcissist might explain the paradoxical rationale behind his defensive fantasy existence:
It is as if they were saying, "I do not need to fear that I will be rejected for not living up to the ideal of myself which alone makes it possible for me to be loved by the ideal person I imagine would love me. That ideal person and my ideal image of that person and my real self are all one, and better than the ideal person whom I wanted to love me, so that I do not need anybody else any more."[ii]
For this reason, the omnipotent observer in the narcissist’s fantasy world often comes to resemble, or fuses with, the narcissist’s own ideal self-image. Kernberg continues:
“In other words, the normal tension between actual self on the one hand, and ideal self and ideal object [omnipotent observer] on the other, is eliminated by the building up of an inflated self-concept within which the actual self and the ideal self and ideal object are confused.”[iii]
The narcissist deploys a suite of defensive behaviors to maintain the omnipotence of his self-image in his mind and reality, beginning first by projecting negative aspects of the self-image, such as negative aspects of his self that don’t accord with the desired appraisals of the idealized outsider in his mind, onto objects in the external world, which he then devalues. Because he is constantly devaluing the world – projecting the negative aspects of his self-image onto the world – he is constantly haunted by fears of persecution and threats from an outside world that he perceives to be hostile and oppressive.
Simultaneously, the narcissist is constantly seeking external validation from the world for a variety of reasons. First, because the omnipotence of his self-image must be true, he is constantly seeking confirmation of that omnipotence. This paradoxical dependence is explained by the narcissist’s ability to escape the feelings of dependency and dread of the external validator, either by devaluing it as described above, or through fusion with it. The latter case is often referred to as the defense of idealization, whereby the narcissist rationalizes away his dependence upon an external authority for validation by identifying with or controlling it in some way (either in reality or in his mind). Kernberg writes of narcissists:
Idealized people, on whom these patients seem to "depend," regularly turn out to be projections of their own aggrandized self-concepts.”[iv]
Second, the narcissist seeks to conform with the rules of the external world for purely cynical reasons, as Kernberg explains:
“Narcissistic patients characteristically adapt themselves to the moral demands of their environment because they are afraid of the attacks to which they would be subjected if they do not conform, and because this submission seems to be the price they have to pay for glory and admiration…”[v]
In other words, submission to the spirit of the age is acceptable so long as it confirms the omnipotence of the narcissist’s self-image. Once again, what is paramount is the self-image’s omnipotence and not its adherence to any fixed standard of excellence, duties, or real-world ties.
The narcissist further relies upon the defenses of denial and splitting, in the former case, by simply denying unpalatable realities, and in the latter by splitting otherwise incompatible conceptions of himself and others into discrete categories, so that, for example, sometimes his self-image is omnipotent for one reason (I’m the strongest), and sometimes for another wholly incompatible reason (I’m the supreme victim).
Thus, the narcissist is constantly denying reality by re-presenting and rationalizing himself and facts about the world, which means in turn that he is constantly devaluing anything that potentially threatens the omnipotence of his self-image in the real world. Tragically, this means he must devalue those from whom he has received the most, as Kernberg illustrates
“the devaluation of objects and object images on the part of patients with pathological narcissism creates a constant emptiness in their social life and reinforces their internal experience of emptiness. They need to devaluate whatever they receive in order to prevent themselves from experiencing envy. This is the tragedy of these patients: that they need so much from others while being unable to acknowledge what they are receiving because it would stir up envy; in consequence, they always wind up empty.”[vi]