Identity, narcissism and the emotional core, Part 1
Identity, narcissism and the emotional core, Part 1
Link: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/53664973/West-2004-Journal_of_Analytical_Psychology-libre.pdf?1498481201=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DIdentity_narcissism_and_the_emotional_co.pdf&Expires=1737614809&Signature=OsjcgYF7T8ax52PjkfRgV5AXMqmREDcPBPo0Ls8U6vgZtB6pICY7NSzFbmxz3OEGPLWMO4dT72LAvhCrLcXVC8rN04TcKUOIRkfvhbOGAmfncqhMb2PeMqS9hw0jhgaGULTwr1rMcCQOQ8S-uq5xu2BxMEstTZzdBiqs7LbE-j5QQluybMMhJquMGuimUcJ-Me1W4mOpw9Yu6y7ThVJkocZrOswxt976-i2KYqPYUWGHk4HLoerUUpEpKX181kmiyyPpDHUpzPQJpb7MLjjhggTyYQqlYEtLAy4BJSlGcLFlYs82s2pMcS0DDqPKaW22dO3qCcViCjgEjA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA
Citation: West, M. (2004). Identity, narcissism and the emotional core. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 49(4), 521-551.
Full disclaimer on the unwanted presence of AI codependency cathartics/ AI inferiorists as a particularly aggressive and disturbed subsection of the narcissist population: https://narcissismresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/AIReactiveCodependencyRageDisclaimer
Narcissists may try to evade admiring someone by projectively identifying. The hope is that by making the person more like themselves, they can take on the painful, admirable difference and won’t even have to bother with the admiration and deference behaviors that the mature adult is more than happy to give. It is a vanity based strategy to avoid admiration and the narcissistic injury of not having that thing that is admired such admiration would entail.
Narcissists may try to relate more intensely through projective identifications by aggressively projecting themselves on the victim to share a self with them.
Such an innate tendency and preferencing of similarity can result in an individual either turning away from relationship (to avoid difference and frustration) or trying to relate more intensely through projective identifications (to foster and enforce sameness).
Thin-skinned narcissism is often the first to try to aggressively identify projectively. This is to both co-opt the positive feature in the others for themselves because otherwise they cause them narcissistic injury as things they don’t have or it is to eradicate shame and project their unwanted self on the other in order to torture and eliminate it for its unwantedness, where unwantedness is a vulnerability that must be destroyed by the narcissist.
Ironically their own narcissism, envy, jealousy, and need to co-opt, extract, and appropriate another's wanted features for themselves is most often the subject of this hated unwantedness and to varying degrees of dangerousness rejected and denied with full-out denial the most dangerous expression where projective identification remains very clearly in place.
In Rosenfeld’s (1987) terms the former is a kind of ‘thick-skinned narcissism’, whilst the latter is a form of ‘thin-skinned narcissism’, which Britton (1999) calls ‘schizoid’ and ‘borderline’ respectively.
The paranoid-schizoid position is held as the narcissistic position because it is closed off due to vulnerability while paranoid insofar as it thinks things that have absolutely nothing to do with them are to do with them. Only a narcissist would have this struggle to that degree.
Klein also argued that there was no primary narcissism, i.e., turning away from relationship, and held that object relations coincide with narcissistic functioning (viz. Hinshelwood 1989, p. 354). Hinshelwood further comments that ‘the use of projective identification has become almost synonymous with narcissism in Kleinian literature and the paranoid-schizoid position has been referred to as the ‘narcissistic position (Segal 1983)’ (ibid., p. 35)
Projective identification is the narcissistic position and it is specifically only seen in any healthy rendition in infants. Thus the idea that narcissist acts like overgrown infants is based on the projective identification in the narcissist which is only found otherwise on infants.
The infants have no established bank of their own inner reality, so they grab on and hyperfixate to facial expressions and show a preformal logic rudimentary thought process. This is fine on infants, but in adults it becomes inappropriate, disturbing and grotesque to have such a deep conflation between what is perceived to what the perceiver is experiencing only found on infants.
The adult stuck in backwards development phases uses it to avoid awareness of separation, dependence, or admiration.
By making the person like them they can claim all the parts they could never have and avoid narcissistic injury instead of just doing what the grown adult does and admiring.
Thus the infant, or adult who goes on using such mechanisms (of projective identification) powerfully, can avoid any awareness of separateness, dependence, or admiration or of the concomitant sense of loss, anger, envy etc. But it sets up persecutory anxieties, claustrophobia, panics and the like. (Joseph 1987, pp. 65–6)
Projective identifiers will try their best to associate the person with themselves or some part of themselves that they hate about themselves and then try to push the person to take up the identification.
Then when they have they will treat them how they treat themselves; if it is an unwanted feature, they will show the narcissistic expression and now that they have a “willing party” willing to “actually externalize it” they then try to externalize and attack it to get in front of it as if destroying this person will destroy it as well again through preformal logic based in this case in magical thinking.
I began to develop what I take to be a more properly analytic attitude. I no longer took it that it was necessary or beneficial for me to participate and share in Rachel’s feelings in a like-for-like manner; that is, I allowed myself to be separate from her. I tried to remain simply who I was, neither welcoming nor avoiding the pressures to identify with her (to take on her projective identifications). I noted the presence of these pressures upon me, as I became conscious of them, and tried to understand what they meant in the context of the analysis, interpreting them to her as seemed appropriate.
Feelings of rejection can induce the projective identifier to try to make the other person feel how they have been made to feel. These especially revolve around feelings of badness. An “inability to be good” or even an inability to want to be good may feel like a disability to the psychopath who is constantly rejected by society.
Similarly, projecting painful desires through projective identification onto the victim of them acts to immediately reject the unacceptable impulse, of hate, or lust, of murder or torture, onto the victim so the narcissist can remain ego syntonic by conflating reality with their inner perception. They show an "allergic reaction" to the true feeling, often hate, which they find unacceptable and immediately try to find an acceptable projective identifier for. An agreeable therapist may not realize how dangerous their agreeability is when dealing with a projective identifier. Some critical work to reachieve seperateness is critical at such highly charged, highly inaccurate points. Fact-checking is a good way to do this. They genuinely believe it is in the other person at these critical junctures and need solid proof of the evidence it resides best in them. This work should be done with a therapist but when therapy is not forthcoming, as it tends not to be with narcissists and psychopaths, a clear "fact-checking" response is critical as opposed to an agreeability response. It is safe on other people but not these people, the projectively identifying psychopath and narcissist and sometimes the comorbid psychopathic narcissist.
They show a profound inability to respect or engage in truth-like, high integrity behaviors. It is truly compulsively antisocial to the point it can resemble a disability. Part of his act is a mocking of those who care about psychopathy as a disability as it is also a rejecting of the features of it that are genuinely torturous and disabled to him; such as an inability to have a relationship where he is not constantly betraying the person while presenting otherwise to their face.
He feels he has a choice to not repeat the pattern but in reality he just replays it with the same antisocial behavior again. He is stuck between a reality of feeling like he is the most powerful, able to betray anyone at a whim from choice alone, when it becomes clear there's a real pattern he he can't escape. Then it begins to feel like an entrapping disability.
He knows it’s true, thinks it’s funny, but can’t beat it. He thinks he decides it but he’s also just a psychopath that can’t do better. His personality is inherently hideous to society and for good reason.
A massive diagnosed psychopath like Ted Bundy would probably try to make the other person act in ways that reminded him of himself and then desperately try to push harder for the projective identification to get rid of the shame he felt for this disability to love or feel empathy or understand more emergent features of reality that the holistic-emotional brain can easily feel and understand.
Then when it was a sufficient projective identification, meaning they did things that he felt valueless for, he would have likely tried to induce how “much he had suffered” for his psychopathy on the victim until “they felt how he felt”. Glamorizing or replicating this without having the attendant features trying to power-share over a horrific crime based in the diagnosis of real psychological features that caused the crime to occur is just disgusting.
This also suggests that his last words might have been an “ingestion” of this kind of split off countertransference of his victims, things that they said in their last words that he found “particularly beautiful” or that haunted him, ghosts of what his victims may had said to him that he tried to take on in himself to have that same sort of value to society as they had and to also take on the admired quality by being it, instead of having to admire it in a way that would cause narcissistic injury being as it therefore would be nothing he himself could claim...the ability to love that would have a stopping effect on his ability to commit those crimes.
Instead his ability to love is conflated with female anatomy as what it represents that he does not understand or possess much at all in himself, just has very basic, rudimentary intuitions of that he can only express it a typical humiliating psychopathic fashion where it causes him narcissistic injury to even recognize it that much so he must "humiliate it back" through sheer delusion where most people do not find the recognition humiliating whatsoever.
He is permanently it seems stopped up in the commodification and objectification of sexualized body so underdeveloped that he cannot even get close any other way than through the hyperfixation of commodification; that is his closest experience to love, suddenly fixated on a humiliating commodification as a way to "humiliate back" that which has evoked this "humiliating feeling" in him that has caused him narcissistic injury to even basically feel a grain of.
It is grotesque but these individuals tend to act exactly like the less psychopathic people they know society values precisely for being unwilling to do these grotesque, horrific acts.
If I was released from the burden of carrying her I had, nevertheless, to accept my responsibility for what effect this would have on her. I would say this was one of the biggest countertransference tasks and struggles of the whole analysis—bearing, dealing with, modifying and digesting the feelings of badness that Rachel induced in me. This badness might be seen as a projective identification of Rachel’s own sense of badness at her experience of feeling rejected by me.
A lot of the narcissistic paranoid-schizoid feature, which is not the psychopathic feature, shows signs of actual arrested development where the therapist-therapy relationship actually mirrors the internalization of prerequisite and somehow missed or botched, due to external or neurological features, interaction with the mother now with an attending, terrifying adult intelligence attached in the person with the arrested development.
Once the normal period that usually happens in infancy is replicated and maneuvered well enough about the disturbing attending adult intelligence, they show a more intelligent response to telling the difference between internal experience, perception, and perceived.
The disturbing effect of projecting very clearly on reality and not even remotely showing signs of seeing how inaccurate the projection is slowly lessens as they spend time with an analyst that helps them establish boundaries of “me” and “you”, “correct” and “wrong”, “inside you” and “out there”. A lot of this is literally just logical work; it is not all emotional work. It’s about as much brainwashing as knowing you have two items instead of one is brainwashing. You can certainly pay for two if it’s one, but in the end it’s just one. The only person that loses out is the person that refuses to improve.
. As experiences of separateness were allowed into the analysis, and survived by the patient, she began to function through the medium of her ego, which allowed her to develop a stable and ongoing sense of ‘I’, and allowed her to begin to relate in a different way—without the predominance of excessive projective identification.
The ego in this case is preconscious, as is the logic; the logic is preformal logic. As form is correctly appraised, logical precision and separateness come with it. Very strong, accurate appraisal is able to accurately and precisely delineate between “this, not that”. You can see this accurate delineation of presence and absence in the second-by-second movements of a skilled, proven artist drawing and allowing the feedback of the drawing to correct their hand without much ego interference or psychological overstructuring of a preinvolved heuristic skewing the appraisal well out of the lines of what it actually resembles (and the world often very happy to point out as much). However, upon psychological injury, even the best of artists can collapse in appraisal. Otherwise, grotesque inaccurate appraisals that are more to do with the perceiver than the perceived result and create real injustices. Whether or not this is a disability is up for grabs given how much it responds to competent logical and therapeutic work.
The paper describes how consciousness, which is not seen as identical with the ego, moves between the mode of functioning of the ego and that of the emotional core, i.e., shifting in and out of states where projective identification predominates.