The Narcissist
It is time to look at a recognized psychological malady: narcissistic personality disorder. Not every bully is a narcissist, but many of them are, and these are the people least responsive to kind and compassionate overtures of any kind. The reader can decide if these features sound familiar.
First it is important to state that there is a natural “residue of childish narcissism, i.e., the child’s natural self-love,” and that a “severe impoverishment” in the child getting its narcissistic needs met will tend to make more difficult “the later absorption of this narcissism into more mature self esteem.”11 So some residue of narcissism is considered normal. We are not talking about this normal phenomenon when we speak of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). The standard definition of NPD, from the DSM-IV, is “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”12 People with this disorder are obsessed with power and self-importance; they cannot tolerate criticism and they lack empathy. While the person with mature self esteem will moderate his own claims in consideration of the views of others, the narcissist will devalue and disdain others, and “respond with despair and rage when their pressing narcissistic needs/demands were not responded to.”13 They frequently express contempt while secretly envying others. A person with narcissistic personality disorder will be “extremely sensitive to failures, disappointments, and slights. . . . To real or imagined slights, he responds with shamefaced withdrawal and depression, or with ‘narcissistic rage.’”14 Unlike psychotics, who suffer from personality disintegration and delusional states, narcissists are relatively stable and socially functional.15 They can “play the game,” and hold on to leadership positions for years, but their lack of empathy and moral principle injects poison into human systems.
We have to face the fact that techniques for handling normal conflicts simply will not work with narcissists. Chilling though it may be, there are people in the church who are “evil, who target moral leaders (usually pastors) for destruction.”16 A narcissist who is making a grab for power can lie without a twinge of conscience, and there is no way to have a constructive conversion with someone who lies. Negotiation is a useful technique for handling most conflicts, but it will not work when the complaint is coming from a narcissist, who does “not have a normal rational process.”17
A wholly different tack is taken by Randall and the field known as self psychology, founded by Heinz Kohut. This school of thought insists that narcissistic needs are normal, even in adulthood, but some people are better able to cope with the frustration of these needs, and some people lack good self-cohesion. Self psychology does not say that everyone is the same, but it does say that everyone has the same basic underlying narcissistic needs. I think this theory has much to offer, but its rhetoric is complicated and technical, and it may have limited usefulness in practical settings. However, its insights are important enough to receive some attention here.
Randall describes the three basic narcissistic needs that everyone has, although every individual will have a primary need among the three: the need to be mirrored and affirmed, the need for an ideal leader to look up to and from whom to borrow self-respect, and the need to have like-minded fellows. Randall writes: “Pastors and parishes long to feel whole and secure. Their selves reach out for responses that confirm that they are admired, immersed in the specialness of significant figures, and surrounded by like-spirited others”; both pastors and parishes may have “pressing narcissistic needs.”18 Kohut discovered the second of these needs when he noticed that many of his patients would start to show signs of recovery only if they could make a connection with Kohut and experience him as an ideal parental figure. But, “Inevitably, the narcissistically disturbed individual experienced Kohut as flawed and failing. When this happened . . . a wide spectrum of rageful reactions also poured out at the one who had dared to be so insensitive.”19
Randall looks at individuals and groups in relation to these needs. Every congregation has a sort of “personality” or culture deriving from its unique constellation of narcissistic needs and “and the quality of its self-cohesion.”20 Churches, like individual pastors, have primary narcissistic needs and have varying levels of self-cohesion. A pastor or a congregation with weak self-cohesion will experience chaos, despair, and fragmentation if its narcissistic needs are not met.
Everyone has a natural need “for mirroring acclaim,”21 for affirmation. The second category, idealizing needs, is where parishioners “whose self-cohesion is weak” manifest a need to “find their selves uplifted, supported, and spiritually nurtured by being in resonating contact with the revered pastor.”22 I tend to have contempt for this need, thinking that people ought to be adults and to stand on their own two feet, which shows that this is not my primary need. Self psychology has opened my eyes to the view that this is a normal and expected need for many people, and that we have to allow for it. The third level, where one seeks cohorts or fellows who have similar understandings to oneself, seems perfectly normal to me, which probably reveals that this one is my own primary narcissistic need.
Randall talks about narcissistic injuries or “narcissistic depletion and rage,” when there is a mismatch between the congregation’s longings and the pastor’s leadership, or even where there is an “unempathic disregard for the pastor’s personhood.”23 If the self of pastor or parish is weak, and they are not shored up with loving relationships, then “depressive withdrawal and lifelessness” may follow, for either pastor or parish.24 I know of a person who withdrew from a church for over a year, complaining of too many names on the mailing list and other obscure matters, but never telling the pastor what her real complaint was. She maintained a relationship with a previous pastor and waged an angry campaign against the current pastor from a distance, writing a negative letter to the district superintendent and broadcasting a passive-aggressive public letter full of vague complaints, never mentioning the pastor but praising a ministry in the church run by someone else. Somewhere underneath all this bluster and hostility was undoubtedly some legitimate need, but it was never expressed.
The problem is not narcissistic needs, since we all have them. The problem is “archaic needs” (stemming from childhood) that are not expressed in an adult and rational manner. A wise “pastor attempts to help them gradually transform these immature structures into internalized, empowering, creative-productive ambitions and goals.”25 I read this to mean that the keys are maturity and transformation, with ethics being implied. To make self psychology useful for me, I need to heighten the key themes of ethics, maturity, and transformation, and occasionally use more colloquial terms such as “control freak” or “a complete transformation of attitude.” I think most readers have some idea of what those terms mean. I can understand that a clinical psychologist would want to be more