NARCISSISM
The term Narcissism has already been mentioned and some slight
indication of its importance in character development has been given.
We have also examined the derivation of the term, and found that it
implies self-interest, self-importance, self-worship; all of which
characteristics are in modified degrees possessed by everybody. There
are, however, many other manifestations of Narcissism, many tricks by
which it gets past our conscious intentions, many ways in which it
associates itself with other instincts, and unknown to us works our
undoing. We shall therefore, in this chapter, examine the development
of Narcissism from its very earliest stages, and trace out in some
detail whither it may lead.
Most people were they asked at what moment the child’s mind first
began to register feelings, thoughts, and emotions, would probably at
once and without hesitation say, “At the moment of birth.” It seems
the obvious thing to say, but like many other obvious things such a
statement appears to have but little evidence in support of it and much
against it.
The act of birth has performed no sudden or miraculous change upon the
growth and tissues of the body. It is true that oxygen is now absorbed
through the lungs instead of as originally through the mother’s blood,
but the essential tissues, the brain, the muscles and the bones have
undergone no sudden change. Before birth, they were living tissues,
and we know that the muscles were at work, for we had felt the baby’s
movements _in utero_; we know that the heart was at work, driving
the blood through the child’s arteries. We had learnt this also by
means of the stethoscope many weeks before the child was born. Why
then should we assume that the brain had registered nothing at birth?
We do indeed know that it must have been at work in part, for it was
learning to regulate the action of the child’s heart and the child’s
secretions, the blood pressure, and the motions of its limbs. We are
therefore justified in assuming that it must be capable of registering
impressions, even though it were incapable of reason or thought.
It is true that at birth it commences to undergo many vivid new
experiences, but that is no reason for assuming that it has not
undergone any experiences _in utero_, and that these experiences have
not made some impressions on the brain. Let us see for a moment what
impressions it is likely to have received and registered. First of
all, it would most certainly hear sounds, the sounds of the blood
rushing through the mother’s arteries and the sounds from the outer
world, muffled and indistinct when they had penetrated the mother’s
body. All these sounds would be of a soft crooning nature, and those
caused by the blood in the mother’s arteries would be of a rhythmic,
humming, rising and falling nature, a kind of rhythmic lullaby very
similar in many respects to the lullaby the mother will hum to the
child when she wishes to put it to sleep at a later period. We should
expect these sounds to be registered on the child’s brain so that if
it ever heard their like again, some chord of _feeling-memory_ would
be struck, and some emotional association brought to mind. In the
second place, external movements would be registered on the child’s
mind as the mother walked about. There would be a swaying or swinging
movement. Again we should expect that when, in after life, the child
experienced a swaying or swinging movement, a chord of memory would be
touched again, and these earlier associations would be revived; not as
a conscious memory or fact, of course, but as a feeling.
Again, conscious movements of its own limbs might be impressed upon it.
It would find, when it tried to move, that its movements were limited,
and that it attained more perfect peace by refraining from attempting
to struggle and change its position. It would be impressed by the
pleasantness of inertia as opposed to the unpleasantness of making
an effort. And finally, its general position with the knees drawn up
and the chin bent down would be firmly registered, so that when in
after-life it again assumed this position, once more the chord of
memory would be struck, and the old feeling of repose would be likely
to return.
Now, we cannot assume that the child has any active mental state before
its birth, but we know that its condition (taken in conjunction with
its extremely limited experience) is one as near omnipotence (from its
standpoint) as may be. It breathes, or rather absorbs oxygen without
any effort of breathing. It is fed, it is kept warm and comfortable
without any effort whatsoever. It lives in a world entirely its own,
where everything works together for its comfort and well-being. It has
to make no struggle for existence. It has to deal with nothing _real_,
save perhaps that its voluntary movements are limited, and this perhaps
is bad for its education, since at that period of its life it learns
that it can be most comfortable by making least effort! And here we see
the beginning of that which we all possess in after-life, _inertia_,
the difficulty of making a beginning at anything, the objection which
we have to making efforts.
Now let us see what happens to this omnipotent little creature at
birth. It goes through the probably painful process of having its
position roughly changed and being thrust into an atmosphere which is
cold and unusual to it. Moreover it has to make its first struggle for
breath, its first effort to sustain existence. And in its struggle for
breath it utters cries, which by experience it very soon finds to be
magic sounds which enable it to fulfil its wishes. But of this, more
later.
After its first rude awakening, let us once more see what happens. It
is wrapped up in something warm; that is, it is returned to a semblance
of the womb, by having something round it which keeps out the cold. It
is gently rocked to and fro by the nurse or other attendant, and again
the semblance of the previous rocking in the womb is returned to it.
Crooning sounds are murmured over it, and the semblance is still more
complete. It frequently draws its knees up somewhat if it is placed in
such a position that it can do so with ease, and falls asleep. It has
attained as nearly as possible once more the semblance of its pre-birth
condition, where it has no cares, and is warm and comfortable again.
And though it has become acquainted with effort, it is quite obvious
that its feeling of omnipotence, if we may so term it for the moment,
is hardly yet disturbed, and the world it has come into differs but
slightly from the world which it has left; it is still a world in which
the infant is the centre and ruler, in which its every want is attended
to without an effort on its part, save that it may sometimes have to
call attention to its wants by means of that magical cry which it soon
learns how and when to use, and which acts in a truly magical manner in
accomplishing the fulfilment of all its desires.
During the first few weeks of the infant’s life this delusion on the
part of the child is largely kept up. Few people think there is any
harm in attending to all a baby’s wants in the first month of its
life. They do not think it could possibly be wrong to spoil it at that
age, because its intellect has not developed. They forget entirely
that its mental condition and attitude towards life, apart from actual
thought, may inevitably be affected at this period. Hence, whenever
the baby cries, it is not uncommonly rocked to sleep, or fed, or if
it holds out its hand and shows its desire to possess anything, it is
immediately allowed to possess it, and to play with it. It has to make
but the faintest attempts to adjust itself to its environment, it has
to face but the slightest reality; all its desires are immediately
fulfilled, and kept in a condition of almost continual fulfilment. And
it may remain for a considerable period as near being an omnipotent
creature as it is possible for any living thing to be. Its omnipotence,
however, is really a fallacy, or as I prefer to term it at a slightly
later stage, a phantasy, for the world in which it lived before birth,
which seemed to it as a world, was not really a world at all, but a
very small and a very temporary abode, and the world in which it is
living for the first few months after birth is again not really a world
but a combination of extremely limited and carefully selected portions
of the world, in which every attempt is made to disguise from it the
realities of the actual world.
Again let us emphasise the fact that the chief effort that the infant
has to make is the effort of crying. And it may learn very quickly
that this is so all-powerful as to practically efface the unpleasant
task of having to adjust itself to the realities of life. This process
is carried on with slight modifications for many months. The infant has
but to wave a magic wand, as it were, has but to emit a little magic
noise from its mouth, and all the world it knows is set in motion to
give it satisfaction and some semblance of its pre-birth omnipotence.
_This cry which brings it gratification, if it has been really
effective over a too-prolonged period, will tend to fix permanently
in the child’s mind the fact that either weeping or making a magic
noise with the mouth will always attain for it gratification. And
although at a later stage the conscious mind will be obliged to accept
a considerable amount of reality and to reject the idea of omnipotence,
yet the unconscious mind will persist in the struggle and will make
futile efforts to forget reality, to change reality into phantasy, and
to regain its omnipotent state._
When a man uses expletives because some task of his has failed to
result in success, he is really repeating the infant’s cry. He is
really uttering a magic sound which his unconscious mind hopes may
somehow remedy the failure. He has not definitely accepted the reality
of failure as a commonplace hard fact of life at the moment at which he
utters his expletive.
When a person weeps at some unpleasant happening or in anger at
something which has touched his pride, exactly the same is taking
place. He, or she, has failed to make a complete adaptation of
himself to the facts and realities of life. _He has obeyed the law
of regression_, to which I referred in a previous chapter, and has
returned to the infantile method of expression, namely weeping, with
the unconscious hope that a magic compensation will result; that
instead of his having to adapt himself to the facts of life, the facts
of life will somehow adapt themselves to his phantasy.
Hence, the first piece of advice that one must give to parents is
that they should, from the earliest possible moment, train the
infant to understand that the magic cries will not at once produce
their expected result; and the first week in the infant’s life is
all-important in this matter. The choosing of the nurse who has charge
during that period should be done with great care, and what is required
of her should be insisted on. Too great emphasis cannot be laid upon
these points.
The child should be fed at regular and proper intervals, and should
be kept warm. But if it cries, as it will do naturally, it should be
left to itself to cry. It should not be picked up, rocked to sleep,
given another meal nor petted. If it is left to cry, it will learn very
rapidly and at the right period of its life that the sounds which it
emits are not magical, and it will begin to adapt itself to the fact
that it lives in a real world which has not been built solely and only
for its own delight.
It is curious to note how regression, this instinct to return to the
earlier mode of expression, to return apparently even to the pre-birth
state, persists in the unconscious mind.
During the war, I knew a youth who was intensely agitated by the
air-raids. He felt perfectly safe, however, if he could crawl under
the bed or table, where he would curl himself into practically the same
position as that of a normal baby before birth. When questioned, he had
not, of course, the slightest conscious knowledge of why he felt safe
in such curious circumstances. But it does not seem improbable that
the association of ideas produced by his position and by the confined
space created a feeling akin to that feeling of safety which has been
his in his pre-birth omnipotent position where nothing could harm him.
A similar feeling of security was experienced by many normal persons in
cellars and other confined spaces and was probably of the same origin;
for there is no doubt that this safety was felt even though their
reason told them that a bomb was as likely to reach their confined
space as any other place in the neighbourhood.
Again, I know of innumerable cases in which soldiers felt very much
safer from bombs which fell at night when they were under cover of a
canvas tent. Logically, of course, the thing was absurd; emotionally,
it was a fact. And all were equally unconscious of any possible
reasons for the feeling of security produced. An example of this same
tendency at an earlier age is seen in children who cover their heads
with the bedclothes when they are frightened.
To return to our Narcissistic infant, we are now impressed with the
fact that one thing of the utmost importance in the first years of its
life is that it shall gradually come into contact with reality, shall
discover that all things do not belong to it, that its omnipotent
feelings are based purely upon phantasy and not upon reality; and upon
the method of its disillusionment and the age at which this begins
largely depend the future powers of adaptation of the child to its
surroundings. It has now become obvious that the new-born infant lives
in a world of phantasy, in which, the relative importance of itself to
things outside itself is not merely distorted but is entirely absent.
And if we can suppose a child kept artificially in this condition till
it reached adult life, every wish satisfied instantaneously, every
force it knows directed entirely towards gratifying its immediate
desires, we do not require much imagination to understand how
absolutely helpless and lost this omnipotent creature would be if
suddenly turned into the world to face life and reality. His one desire
would be to return to his omnipotent state, his one effort to keep at
bay reality and turn it into the pleasant phantasy of the previous
twenty years. For he would surely, before his disillusionment, have
really come to believe himself omnipotent, the only real thing in a
phantasy world of his own fashioning and dreaming.
An extreme case of this kind is, of course, an impossibility. But there
are many and various degrees in which it is approached. Probably the
nearest approach to it may be found in cases where some sort of moral
or mental conflict has been too much for an extremely Narcissistic
mind, which has then completely regressed, refused to recognise the
outer world, and developed a certain form of insanity; and from this
stage of complete Narcissistic regression all degrees and kinds of
manifestations of it may be found, until we reach at the other end of
our list a person who expects everyone around to consult his wishes
and peculiarities or who is merely somewhat impatient, or inclined to
irritability, or merely over-sensitive to either mental or physical
pain.
There is no more certain fact than that if an infant be allowed to
postpone its acquaintance with reality too long it becomes fixed in a
more or less degree in conditions in which phantasy plays too prominent
a part, and regression of some kind takes place as it meets with real
difficulties.