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A Clear Example of Narcissistic Rage

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Clarissa

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Now is not a good moment for narcissists. They are feeling especially aggrieved by how much attention is being directed to the events in Gaza and Ukraine. For a narcissist, nothing is more terrifying than the possibility that attention will move someplace else. Narcissist imagines him or herself as a perennial infant and assigns the rest of the world the role of the Mommy. If Mommy gets distracted, an infant’s life might be at risk. And for narcissists, not being the center of attention really feels like a questioning of their entire right to exist.

Here is a classic response of a narcissist to the annoying current events that tend to get in the way of the narcissist’s enjoyment of everybody’s undivided attention:

Yesterday, four little Palestinian boys from the same family playing on a Gaza beach were killed by an Israeli missile. Today, a plane full of people was shot down while flying over the Ukraine. There’s an ebola outbreak in Africa right now, not to mention an ongoing human rights crisis in Syria. Women in Egypt regularly face sexual harassment and assault, and no one seems to give a shit what happens to teenage girls stateside. Why would anyone reproduce into this mess?

When I was in my twenties, I was never sure about having children.

If you suggest to the author that her reproductive choices are not even remotely in the same order of magnitude that deaths in Gaza, Ukraine or Africa, the narcissistic rage that inspired the article will only intensify. It is useless to inform her that nobody cares whether she has children or not. She knows that nobody cares. And this is precisely what is killing her. The narcissist’s subconscious is screaming, “I’m a child whose Mommy has gone!” So the narcissist, very predictably, begins talking about children. The symbolic denial of smaller children’s right to exist is simply a way to insist on her own right to be the only child in the world.

The response this writer is fishing for is, “No, it’s not that bad, don’t give up having children because of Gaza, Africa and Ukraine!” This would be a very welcome response because it would give the narcissist exactly what she hoped for: a recognition that everybody else made a mistake by fixating on Gaza because things are not even really that bad there. The way a narcissist responds to welcome answers is to ramp up the intensity of fishing for attention. The moment you give her this response, she will clamp on to you forever, sucking attention, recognition, energy, and emotions out of you.

What is really sad, of course, is that the chances that this person will, indeed, choose not to reproduce are exceptionally slim. A child is the easiest, most defenseless audience for a narcissist. At the same time, nothing makes narcissists rage more than a child because they honestly feel like an infant is taking their place.

P.S. Thank you, reader Stringer Bell, for this curious link.

9 responses to “A Clear Example of Narcissistic Rage”

  1. el Avatar
    el

    Since the attention is being directed to the events in Israel too, is this a good moment for Israeli narcissists? 🙂

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    I also ‘like’ how she compares the teenage girls in US to Gazans and Syrians.

    “no one seems to give a shit what happens to teenage girls” – I am not aware of something specific happening to them. And the ones “giving a shit” are supposed to be their parents, first of all.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      “The world has never been a good place full of hugs and sunshine and getting along. It’s just that within the last fifteen years or so, we’ve been more aware of the bad than ever before.”

      – She really believes this, which is scary in itself. The coincidence between this imaginary heightened awareness and the time span in which she’s been following news doesn’t even occur to her. I started watching the news = the entire world started watching with me, not a day earlier or later.

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  3. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Thanks for the post! That article was annoying but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason why.

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  4. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    You know, in the past I would not have had the capacity to analyse character thorugh a text in that way, but I am starting to see how it makes sense to do so. I would have analysed it purely formally, in the sense of assuming the writer had a lot of things on her mind that she wanted to draw together, and that she was starting with a big picture, drawing it in to make a very small picture (herself) and then drawing away again from the small picture and back to the big picture focus. It might seem a rather strained piece of writing, in the formalistic sense, but it was written for a vaguely feminist outlet, Jezebel. So maybe she wanted to talk about women and child-bearing within a context of acknowledging the reality of global violence.

    I am sure the writing can be viewed that way, and that appraising its qualities in a formal, literary sense, rather than a psychological manner is often important to do.

    On another level, though — the level of cultural critique — one could ascertain that the writing is narcissistic. That’s because there is so much that comes out on the Internet that does not even attempt to take the individual outside of herself or himself and place them into the broader context they have mentioned. Instead, the world must shrink to occupy the smaller space of the self. There should at least be a two-directional pathway between the broader world and self, with information flowing in BOTH directions. If information flows only one way, that is a sign that the writer may not be a deep thinker.

    Having said that, I will now talk about myself. My original position was diametrically opposite to that of the writer who channels everything into the smallness of herself. As dramatic as it sounds, I used to have almost no sense of the self at all. Everything used to be outward looking. As as result, I aggressively attacked myself at an unconscious level, in such a way that it played havoc with my immune system and left me perpetually exhausted. I don’t know how this happened, but I think that having been brought up in a time of war, all our energies were directed to the next episode of attack or defence or what was on the news (who was killed, who remained alive), so there was no focus on developing and inward sense of self and no time for it.

    Having developed an outward looking character structure, even the intense inward focus of the writer tends to register to me on a literary-formalistic rather than individual-as-subject level.

    I am actually just learning, these days, from an individual that Clarissa wrote to on my behalf, how this individual-as-subject level of reflexive interpretation works. I’ve really always been blind to it. For instance, I keep saying, “shamanism is a formal structure of experience that one passes through,” whereas it seems he says, “shamanism is the capacity of the individual to perform effectively.” Even this difference of perspective indicates how little prepared I am to take the individual as a separate structure unto himself all that seriously. While I can do so, that is not my reflex and is really a second language I am learning.

    Speaking a different language from others, by reflex, though, is not always the best for analysing the world. So I must make a shift from viewing the whole world in terms of literary formalism and start taking the individual expresssions of the self more seriously.

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  5. Z Avatar
    Z

    Interesting analysis of this phenomenon. My mother always told me not to have children because of what the world had become, and overpopulation, and the contribution of every US person to the coming eco-disaster (because we use more resources per capita than the planet can handle) and I took it to mean she really did not want me to have children. But — narcissism — yes. So: do you think narcissists are made or born? I am betting you will say it is a result of trauma, but I am just checking.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yes, severe and very early trauma. However, we need to remember that no trauma is an excuse for hurting people. And narcissists can inflict a lot of hurt.

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  6. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    I completely agree with you about her motivation and (as often happens) am reminded of an onion article….

    http://www.theonion.com/articles/neurotic-woman-turns-to-neurotic-friends-for-suppo,361/

    I’m reminded of that rticle every single time I make the mistake of going to jezebel. Every. Single. Time.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Welcome back, my friend!

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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