Nathan Schwartz-Salant’s Brilliant Jungian Study of the Narcissistic Character Disorder
The late Nathan Schwartz-Salantt was a truly great Jungian psychologist. His first book, Narcissism and Character Transformation: The Psychology of Narcissistic Character Disorders, published in 1982, remains the unsurpassed study of that subject. Throughout his career, Schwartz-Salant greatly expanded the depth and breadth of alchemical understanding.
by William Stranger
Both before and ever since, I’ve never had a call like the one early that morning from my elderly friend Bill G. At the time, I was the minister to Adidam’s practicing community that surrounded The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary in rural Lake County. That job made me the first responder for all manner of personal problems. Bill was on duty at the Sanctuary in the wee hours that morning and had been reading one of the books I had recommended for devotees taking a course on Adi Da’s Teachings on “emotional-sexual self-understanding”. It turned out to be quite some morning for the man.
Along with all devotees of Adi Da in the Lake County parish community, Bill was taking a four-week course designed to examine the defining incidents and experiences of our early life (with our parents, siblings, and others) that might provide important clues as to our characteristic way of relating to people now, in our adult years. Adi Da had spent years making it abundantly clear that each of us tends to endlessly repeat an almost ritual pattern of interaction with one another that unconsciously but repetitively duplicates our early emotional reactions to life. His purpose in having us undertake this examination was simple but profound: our unconscious emotional patterning is the principal reason for not only our chronic failure to be happy and love other beings, but also for our self-defeating failure to consistently recognize, receive, and respond to his own Spiritual Transmission of Love-Bliss-Brightness This was no small matter since recognizing and receiving the Master’s Transmission is the eternal core and essence of spiritual practice in his church of Adidam.
Having observed that too many of my fellow devotees were uninstructed in human psychology and often had no clear idea even of what a neurotic pattern looks like, I had suggested that those taking the course (which, it turned out I had written while working for Adidam’s Education Department a couple of years earlier) augment their study of Adi Da’s own seminal teachings on the matter by reading an accessible psychology book from his recommended reading list, The Basket Of Tolerance. The list was fairly long so I picked out about five or six books that I thought people would find most useful. Bill had chosen a personal favorite of mine that also happened to be the most sophisticated of the lot, Nathan Schwartz-Salant’s Narcissism and Character Transformation: The Psychology of Narcissistic Character Disroders. And so, as dawn broke over Lake County that morning, Bill met his new day by reading the first thirty pages or so of the great Jungian analyst’s book. It affected him as if he had seen Medusa. The shock of self-recognition that came through the author’s descriptions of the so-called narcissistic character cisorder had left him almost literally immobile for a half an hour. When I answered the phone, the first thing he told me was that it took him several minutes to actually be able to walk the four feet from his chair to the telephone to me to tell me of his plight.
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Emotional maturity rarely, if ever, comes easy. To truly grow up most of us must pass through a profoundly difficult ordeal of self-knowledge filled with crises large and small. It is immensely humbling to see how our early life fears, traumas, misunderstandings, confusions, evasions, and repressions have long controlled our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Even so, great psychology must do more than expose the roots of our precious self-conceits. It must also lift us beyond ego-bondage. Heightened sensitivity to the why’s and wherefores of our egoic ways and wiles becomes truly consequential only when we are moved beyond our neurotic dramas of self-confining, other negating reactions of self-protection into both a vital and a psychic connection to our fellow human beings, the natural world and, most importantly, the Joyous Spiritual Reality that Encompasses everything. For when all is said and done—and with due respect to the hard core humanists among us—only the Living Spirit can truly soften the armored confusion that characterizes a typical human lifetime. This is why the great English psychiatrist E. Graham Howe advised us “any psychological system must be unsatisfactory and misleading, both in theory and practice, until it does admit our essentially spiritual nature.”
By such a measure, the late Nathan Schwartz-Salant gave us great psychology. Through five seminal books—Neurosis and Character Transformation, The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing, The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self, The Black Nightgown: The Fusional Complex and the Unlived Life, and The Order-Disorder Paradox—along with his well-curated anthology, Jung on Alchemy, and numerous clinical papers in the respected Chiron Clinical series that he edited, Schwartz-Salant established himself as perhaps the most daring and depthful analytical psychologist of the past few decades. What makes Schwartz-Salant’s work so unique is his ability to both walk and widen the path of archetypal and alchemical wisdom pioneered by C. G. Jung himself. In so doing, he integrated body, psyche, and spirit in a manner that has broadened the scope of contemporary clinical practice and issued an implicit challenge to the entire profession.
As we see in their titles, Schwartz-Salant’s first books—Neurosis and Character Transformation: The Psychology of Narcissistic Character Discorders and The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing—are dedicated to the two most discussed (and difficult to treat) so-called “character disorders” of our time. Both are masterpieces of understanding and vision that completely redefine their subjects, opening up new pathways of understanding and healing. A third book, The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self, is so unique as to be unclassifiable. Advertising itself as “a thought-provoking and inspiring text for anyone who wishes to engage the mystery of growth within themselves and within their relationships”, it is in fact a kind of Ariadne’s thread offered to committed partners who would explore devilishly difficult realms of their personal and interpersonal lives. Schwartz-Salant takes us into the nether zones of the psyche wherein even relatively normal people sometimes experience near psychotic confusions of daunting intensity. That can require a Dantesque ordeal for those who dare the journey. But the reward can be the liberation of extraordinary powers of intimacy and healing between true lovers.
Accompanied by my friend Eliot Hurwitz, in the fall of 2008 I interviewed Nathan Schwartz-Salant at his office just a block or two from Princeton University, in New Jersey. I remember the occasion vividly. Although built of brick, the room in which we met—and where Schwartz-Salant saw clients—had a light, airy quality created by skylights, pleasingly underpopulated bookshelves, and hanging plants. Schwartz-Salant himself had a grounded and relaxed yet expansive quality that radiated openness and goodwill. I found myself thinking that if ever were to go into psychotherapy I would want it to be with a person like him. As he tells us in the accompanying interview—a story which he put into print in his final book, The Order-Disorder Pareadox, Nathan Schwartz-Salant was yet another a psycho-spiritual conversion story that made the psychedelic 1960s one of the most extraordinary cultural moments in American history. Het was in the midst of filling the rigorous doctoral program in Engineering Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley when suddenly “the quest seemed meaningless” and “the bottom had suddenly dropped out of my existence”.
It was early fall, 1964. At my apartment in Berkeley, California, the day after this awareness, and still stunned by it, I happened to listen to KPFA, a public radio program, and heard Harvard professor Timothy Leary speaking about the wonders of a new hallucinogenic drug, LSD. By coincidence, within twenty-four hours a friend arrived at my apartment with the drug, which he had just brought back from the East Coast. Several days later, alone, I took 100 micrograms of LSD, and the result was a vision of Light that was life changing.
I use the term “Light,” although it was not an ordinary light. My readings, years later, led me to notions of the “White Light” or “Invisible Light,” which is akin to what I saw. Beauty, and the impossibility of anything being that beautiful, was perhaps the central impression, as was a sense of the Light being infinite. It was as though I was transported outward toward the Light, and then, after I became frightened as I felt sucked away into it, I managed to shake free of the experience and reenter space and time. Now I would say that my soul went out to this infinite dimension, and then returned to space-time existence.
The shock of reentry was extreme. Today I can still feel a mild version of the traumatic affect, and I am often aware of—but no longer so intensely apprehend—the presence of the Light. But that Other dimension remains a main orientation in my life.
The Light experience led to a radical transformation, something known as a “rebirth”.
To most people, Jung of course is the man who put the spirit back into Western psychotherapy. While he treated esoteric spirituality respectfully, however, it would be more accurate to say that Jung put the psyche back in psychology. In his writings and clinical work the individual’s psyche is seen as much more than the self-enclosed box of repressed sexual longings and aggressive impulses so brilliantly charted by one onetime mentor, Sigmund Freud. Of course Jung, like Freud found an abundance of those intensities in his patients, as well. But he discovered that the psyche is also encompasses much more. Indeed, the psyche is the indispensable bridge to the powerfully vivifying forces and subtle resonances that herald the presence of the Living Spirit. In Jung’s work, the mind escapes its narrow, private prison of fleshy, mechanical mortality and becomes animated by forceful archetypes as contemporary as they are ancient. Jung’s theory of the archetypes presents us with a psyche that speaks through the characters of ancient personae acting out patterned narratives that may nevertheless become the vehicles of Divine Power.
Jungians pay a price for violating the yet dominant materialism of our day. Up against the reductive realism of Freud’s instinct theory, much less the garden variety social psychologies that serve mostly benign but limited social purposes, it is hard for Jungians to shake off the unfair impression that they indulge in a kind of woolly minded mysticism incapable of meeting the grit and grind of our perpetually frustrated, endlessly desiring mental-emotional conflicts. Part of the reason for this lies in the seductive power of Jungian terminology. “Animus” and “anima,” “persona,” “Self,” “collective unconscious” “syzygy,” and the like are highly symbolic notions that can all too readily can be replayed like a deck of Tarot cards whose meanings may appear to wear out from overuse. But Schwartz-Salant’s writings never give us that impression. Although he is clearly a master of the entire Jungian corpus, ranging from not only the Swiss sage himself but also including wings as diverse as Michael Fordham’s British semi-Freudian school and James Hillman’s literary polytheism (named Archetypal Psychology), his employment of Jung’s basic ideas always feels freshly minted out of his clinical encounters, rather than the reverse. Likewise, although Schwartz-Salant, like all Jungians, readily drew from the vast well of human mythology from which Jung himself gathered so much inspiration that it became his distinct trademark, he always undertook his own historical research into and parsing of even the most well-known myths. Thus, even familiar mythic archetypes were reborn afresh out of the long, protracted, and often exceedingly difficult ordeal of self-knowledge shared by client and analyst. Moreover, Schwartz-Salant had an special affinity for Jung’s alchemical writings and through them he daringly integrated what to many will seem the esoteric phenomena that unfold in the interactive field between patient and analyst with psychoanalytic understanding.
But Schwartz-Salant was not closeted with the schools spawned by C. G. Jung. He drew as easily from Freudian psychoanalysis—both in its classic form, the Kleinian/object relations school, its Lacanian rereading, the Kohutian self-psychology revision (for which he appears to have a special affinity), and other variants—especially those that stay close to our felt, bodily experience—as he did from the academically snubbed “subtle body” esotericism of a G.R.S. Mead. But none of this was mere intellectual syncretism. Schwartz-Salant absorbed these resources from the inside out, as it were.
In other words, he was a natural alchemist who looked to integrate body, psyche, and spirit. His working laboratory was the interactive field between himself and his clients. Indeed, Schwartz-Salant’s inspired and not infrequently daring employment of the tricky, mercurial, analyst-implicating data derived from the so-called “counter-transference” (the analyst’s unconscious reactions to his patient) is one of his most distinctive contributions to analytic psychology. We will get to this in a follow-up piece when I discuss his pioneering extension of the Kleinian notion of “projective identification” into the realm of the psychic field between patient and analyst. That is the arena in which the analyst’s subconscious reactions to his patient, rather than being a mere negative, finds a genuinely creative use. But first a few words about how I, a man who has never been in analysis, came to admire Schwartz-Salant’s writings. This requires an introduction to the topic of his still seminal book on the “narcissistic character disorder”, Narcissism and Character Transformation.
THE NARCISSISTIC CHARACTER DISORDER
I sometimes joke to friends that studying social psychology during my abbreviated college years did more to prepare me for my many years in a spiritual community than anything I may have previously learned about religion and spirituality per se. While not entirely true (let’s give my crazy mom, good schools, and my Pisces sun and Mars moon their due), learning how to navigate the challenge of social relationships, or social space, is a critical part of everyone’s required growth. Social space can become especially hard to bear in those testing moments when talented narcissists whom you have no option but to engage cloak their games of domination in “spiritual” camouflage. That’s when the religious imperative of humility and acceptance runs smack into the human imperative of drawing the line on bullshit. Neither is ever an easy task on its own. Taken together they are more than twice as hard.
By virtue of having spent almost my entire adult years practicing in the exceedingly good company of the Enlightened Adept Avatar Adi Da Samraj, the Living Spirit has become the obvious and pervasive context of my life. Because the Avatar’s Spiritual Transmission was so generously, unstintingly given to all His devotees, in our community everyone was deeply, bodily infused by His Blessing Presence. And because my spiritual practice unfolds in the potent social space of an enduring community setting—traditionally viewed as an irreducible necessity if one’s spiritual life is to be truly consequential (and certainly one of Adi Da’s most basic requirements of his own devotees)—I have had ample opportunity to observe in myself and others the manner in which our unconscious patterns and motivations all too easily traduce the Spirit’s inherent imperative to surrender the ego in love and service to God. (All too easily? Hell, let’s be honest here: All but constantly!) This is most commonly seen in the psychic inflation to which any one of us can easily succumb when our unconscious fears and hidden ambitions get conflated with the Spirit’s own gifts.
During the years of his most active and playful engagement with devotees, Adi Da was a genius at generating precisely the conditions in his community that would laminate this tendency—most often by giving authority and power to individuals who possessed the testing combination of sensitivity to his Spiritual Presence, a confusing, hard-to-handle admixture of heart-intelligence and egoic cunning, and a distinct need to dominate others. The Adept’s payoff for this arrangement could hardly be bettered. The individual in authority would inevitably be brought low by his or her own hubris while everyone else would have to deal with the revelation of their own characteristic oedipal pattern of reaction to a threatening and more-than-occasionally capricious authority figure. Whether one aggressively reacted to or passively accepted such an individual’s provocations, in the setting of our spiritually-charged community everyone’s game eventually became obvious. The more skilled the individual in authority, however, the more difficult it would be to bring about the turn of events in which he or she too would have to become responsible for his or her own behavior.
It was in relation to one such person—an undeniably talented, frequently inspirational member of our community who Adi Da had invested with leadership responsibilities—that I found Schwartz-Salant’s descriptions in Narcissism and Character Transformation especially valuable. This man’s role and status in Adidam was for several years roughly equivalent to that of head monk in a Buddhist Zendo. As such, he rightly possessed a fair degree of disciplinary authority that could not help but offend those upon whom it was exercised. Head monks are of necessity the instruments of the demands that the Spiritual Master places on his devotees. As such they are deservedly protected by the one they serve from the retaliation of their fellow practitioners. That protection becomes even more necessary in relation to a Spiritual genius like Avatar Adi Da, who in his early teaching years routinely engaged in unconventional “crazy wisdom” behavior that, in fulfillment of a promise he made in the epilogue to his autobiography, The Knee Of Listening, deliberately offended and confounded virtually every one of his devotee’s expectations, preferences, false dualities, and unconscious seeking. It is no easy matter to hold the first chair in a choir singing such a Master’s changing Songs, and our head monk’s job of faithfully executing Adi Da’s at least sometimes apparently contradictory instructions guaranteed him no small measure of bruised egos. Fair enough. But over the years this particular individual had also engaged in enough high-handed, nakedly self-aggrandizing behavior—including the use of heavy handed tactics to disarm or distance potential critics—that the for-him unwelcome moment of his own reckoning had finally arrived. Understandably, amongst his erstwhile peers there was a fair amount of trepidation about actually forcing the event.
Before continuing with our special case here, a cautionary word is in order. It has been said that psychological terminology is all too commonly employed as a “vocabulary of denigration”. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” we are told in Ecclesiastes.We all do well, therefore, to show humility when using the profession’s often highly loaded technical terms. Given that all human beings—short of the egoless Enlightened—are obliged to overcome their own persistent self-conceits, it is best to check the mirror before uttering the word “narcissist”.
Nevertheless, there are some individuals who raise the common, even universal liability of ordinary human narcissism to a high art. I am talking about those often talented but decidedly ruthless people whose self-regarding power and control needs are so thoroughly unmediated and unmitigated by either critical self-reflection or community feeling that they pursue their selfish ends with a relentlessness that not even passing years seems to bend or diminish. Of course, when such tendencies become absolute we talk of “sociopaths”—that small, often charming, but ultimately lethal cohort whose own capacity for empathic feeling is simply non-existent. I am not addressing that type of individual, who we all by know have come to know through the movies as the smiling “friend” who sits unperturbed on the shoreline sipping a mai-tai while their trusting companion drowns.). The determined narcissist certainly suffers a large deficit of empathy, there is no doubt about that. But they lack the naked sociopath’s willingness to inflict harm, or even kill, without conscience. My subject here, then, are those of us afflicted with what psychoanalytic ego psychology terms the “narcissistic character order”. A few paragraphs from Lawrence Joseph’s useful survey of the character disorders in his book Character and Self-Experience provides us with a basic introduction.
Narcissistic characters have traditionally been understood as persons who are overtly superior but covertly inferior. They have been described as smug, conceited, pompous, grandiose, condescending, contemptuous, exhibitionistic, and entitled. Narcissists seem to need to be the center of attention, evoking others’ admiration if not envy. The thinking of narcissistic characters tend to be self-centered, focused on fantasies of greatness and triumph. Egocentric in their thinking and unable to see the world from another’s point of view, they develop a degree of narrow-mindedness, so that there is a difficulty in appreciating emotional conflicts from multiple perspectives. Their egocentrism makes their conduct somewhat stimulus-bound and overly reactive to the demand characteristics of a situation, so that their behavior may at time be impulsive and show poor judgment. When they are feeling good, their affective expression tends to be animated, buoyant, and happy, as though they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. They seem “full of themselves”—indulged and sated individuals without a care in the world. Yet narcissists are quick to take offense, easily feel slighted, and as a consequence are easily angered. Narcissists are not at all shy in expressing their anger. They can be cutting, sarcastic, and clever in putting someone down. They can also be wrathful and demanding, unafraid of making a scene if need be. In situations in which narcissists feel it would be tactless and petty to waste their time being openly angry, they can be haughty, cold, and impersonal.
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Others tend to experience the narcissist as off-putting and intimidating in the long run. The narcissist attempts to overpower the other with awe for the narcissist’s greatness. Initially, the other may be seduced by the narcissist’s charisma. The other feels entertained, flattered, and fortunate to have the good luck of being in the narcissist’s good graces. . . .
Over time, though, it gradually becomes apparent that the narcissist is unsharing and that a relationship with a narcissist is not reciprocal. It begins to seem that the narcissist derives some sadistic glee in being a “have” while others remain “have nots.” The narcissist’s gloating over being a competitive winner evokes envy and resentment in others.
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If denial, overcompensation, overvaluation, and illusory wish fulfillment are universal defenses against narcissistic injury, then . . . [w]hat is unique to the narcissistic character is to deploy an overarching strategy of defense in which one remains a center of attention and never relinquishes center stage. . . . Like the child’s game “king of the hill,” the narcissistic character believes that if one can only stand one’s ground at the top of the hill, a place where there is only room for one, then all of life’s problems will be solved.
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The core identity theme of the narcissistic character appears to be to establish oneself as a totally unique, completely special, unusually talented, and exceptional person who by virtue of these superior qualities is automatically entitled to an exalted position in life to which all others should graciously defer and pay homage. Challenges to this identity theme provoke anger, hostility, hatred, vindictiveness, and contempt as a means of elevating the self by devaluing the other. Lack of support for the identity theme results in feelings of boredom, emptiness, and depletion. Dependency, neediness, vulnerability, and envy of others are construed as incompatible with the identity theme and are aspects of the self which are therefore repudiated.
The narcissistic character is shocked, hurt, angered, and disbelieving to discover that others view her as an arrogant, cold, and hostile person. No matter how often the narcissist receives such negative feedback, it is perfunctorily dismissed as a product of the others’ envy of her special attributes and possessions. Due to the narcissist’s egocentric world view, there is no room for multiple perspectives of equal validity but only for one absolute truth, in comparison to which all other viewpoints are indubitably erroneous.
Imagining that others would be happy and smugly self-satisfied to see the narcissist downed and defeated leads to a private sense of suspiciousness and mistrust. The narcissist would rather die than give others the pleasure of her defeat. Thus, any genuine sense of suffering or unhappiness must be kept to oneself. . .
In general, the narcissistic character is privately mistrustful and suspicious toward others.
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Unconsciously, narcissistic characters feel inferior and inadequate, viewing the self as a “have not” in a world of “haves.” Unconsciously, narcissists feel deprived, neglected, and ignored in a world in which others have captured the center of attention.
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Narcissistic characters feel that no one finds them attractive and, feeling starved for recognition, warmth, nurturance, and relatedness, they begin to feel rapacious and greedy. Narcissists feel that the sense of neglect which they experience must be due to their lowly status. They feel like homeless beggars, paupers, or orphans—individuals who are the lowest of the low without a place to belong. At bottom, narcissists feel utterly alone—cut adrift to fend for themselves in a cold, impersonal, competitive, and cruel world. Frightened of being lost and never found, narcissists feel vulnerable and weak.
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The narcissist, believing that no warm nurturing home will ever provide a haven in a heartless world for waiflike persons, hardens and toughens the self for survival in a ruthlessly competitive world populated by opportunistic others. . . .
Despite this attempt at emotional hardening, the narcissist is quite envious of others’ success and would like to spoil and devalue who others are and what others possess. What is especially envied is the moral integrity others possess, for it is just such inner substance that the narcissist seems to lack.
While wonderful clear, vivid, and accurate, this description needs to be deepened. Although Josephs ably identifies key qualities and compensatory motivations that animate the dedicated narcissists among us, he does little to explain the genesis of this emotional pattern. Yes, fearful vulnerability makes for desperate compensations. But only the saints among us have put those motivations behind them. Besides a few sidelong references to squandered creativity and the like, his portrait of the narcissistic character does not sufficiently articulate the particular skein of early life experience, skewed presumptions, fearful motivations, and, most especially, psycho-spiritual confusions that enable us understand why some of us enact this particular pattern.
A turn to the Freudian tradition (in its classical, existential, and Lacanian forms) gets us further under the hood to examine not only what drives the grandiosity for which the narcissistic character type is so well-known but, even more, to understand how and why, in the face of his or her endlessly repeated frustrations, that pattern and pursuit remains so firmly in place. The broad answer, as every psychologist should know, lies in understanding the complex logic of the neurotic desiring that fuels this condition’s endlessly renewed failures. For all real Freudians, of course, the vicissitudes of desire begin with mom, every infant soul’s most consequential bearer of the promise of paradise. The psychoanalyst M. Guy Thompson’s distillation of some key aspects of Freudian theory in the first edition of The Death of Desire (the second edition is a very different book) brilliantly lays this out for us. In explaining the self-defeating dialectics of the dedicated narcissist’s obsessive pursuits, Thompson’s Lacan-inflected description here also gives us a short course in some of the best psychoanalytic theorizing of the past few decades. The following lengthy passage is demanding and may well require rereading but it fully repays the effort.
Narcissism, which delays the encounter with the real, is more emphatically constructed in what has recently—especially in America been termed “narcissistic disorders,” categories of a newer pathology noted in numerous works by Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut. Situating this idea of a pathological narcissism between the neurotic and psychotic predispositions, it is in reality a neurosis of a most complicated form which contains the compulsive qualities of the obsessive and the envious disposition of the hysteric, rooted in flagrantly paranoid features. No better term than “grandiosity” could hope to characterize the extraordinary self-reference through which they encounter others. Consumed by an unremitting demand to achieve love and admiration, their inflated concept of themselves is only exceeded by the extreme tributes they require in order to keep their omnipotence alive. While affecting great interest and concern for the object of their attention, their only real interest is in the tributes which support their enterprise. Underneath their concern lurks the contempt that maintains their supposed superior status. Their envy eventually destroys the good services of their benefactors, whom they exploit, suck dry, and then abandon before the other has a chance to abandon them, which their paranoid inclination feeds upon. Like the obsessive, the so-called “narcissistic type” enjoys nothing save the glorification of his identity, which, of course, is dependent on others for confirmation. Incapable of mourning the loss of his mother, he in fact keeps her alive by making himself indispensable—a trait not uncommon in the hysteric.
The man of resentment par excellence, if you disappoint him he will never feel genuine sadness or, as in the obsessive, guilt. Instead, he will be consumed by a seething anger which is occasioned by vengeful fantasies. These feelings are capable of being replaced by a melancholic depression which only serves to perpetuate his grandiosity. It is at these moments, of course, that these people get a glimpse of the profound insecurity and impotence which lies beneath their omnipotent posture. We would concur with Kernberg’s assessment that, “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.”
Like all neurotics, but perhaps in his case even more so, the narcissistic type is essentially a conformist. He conforms, not to the other’s expectation of him, but to his ego which relies on the other to perpetuate this image. And this is what lies at the heart of his resentment and his downfall, for the admiration of others is precisely what perpetuates his unholy course in keeping his mother alive, and subverting his never glimpsed emancipation. Locked in the prison of his maternal bondage, the narcissist perpetuates the omnipotent fantasy of being the phallus for his mother by projecting his wounded grandiosity onto all of his relations and sublimations, so that the debt for his aborted freedom need never be acknowledged or paid. The bastard son of his obsessive and hysteric ancestors, the narcissist is certainly superior, if only in the relentless zeal with which he orchestrates his neurotic destiny. A neurotic’s neurotic, he is admired and envied by those even more perversely neurotic than he is, since what they themselves admire is the voyeuristic spectacle of his folly—a folly which they need only admire, but which he must endlessly pursue. No friend of desire, what all these neurotics share in common is the dread with which they keep their desires at bay.
In its fully articulated (sublimated) form, desire is the desire to be recognized by another subject of desire who desires the same thing. This dialectical structure of recognition comes to dominate the articulation of desire through the subject’s use of that language which ushers him further into a discourse in which his ceaseless desire for dominance and completion can be realized. Once this gratification was evoked in his bodily integration inside the mother’s body. Then he attempted to reestablish it through his intermittent encounter with the breast. And then an imaginary communion with self was formulated at the hands of an egoic structure the creations of which merely served to alienate him from himself. By means of language a new dominant experience is constructed, that is, a drama which relies on another subject of desire to be the slave to his ceaseless demands. And it is through this dialectical structure that he establishes a system of reciprocity which serves to recapitulate the attentive love of the mother’s gaze upon greeting his birth into the world.
But his quest for communion is not merely a demand for completion (which is the alienating directive of the ego grasping at straws). The speaking subject encounters an open-ended world of possibilities in which his desire can never be satisfied or completed. Indeed, the recognition by another does not recognize his subjectivity as an entity in its own right. Rather, the other recognizes in the subject’s appeal only what that appeal means to the one who listens to it: a recognition which depends on the other’s desire.
The problem with the neurotic is that his speech is not directed to another subject, but rather to himself. In other words, his discourse serves to uphold that alienation within his egoic personality which symbolizes that which he takes himself to be. He tries to measure up to his own expectations and in doing so completes the circle of his own egoic captivation. Thus, his speech is censored by his ego as it passes through the filter which stands between himself and the other (and between himself and the object of his desire). Consequently, the other is apprehended as merely that confirmation of himself who does not need to listen to his words in order to comprehend the message of his demand. Instead, he is expected to nod his head in agreement, to be the slave to his blind demands. In the service of his own servitude, the subject seeks positive reinforcement—which is music to the ego’s ears-for all manner of narcissistic and self-serving directives, whose only purpose is to maintain a dialogue with himself by trapping the truth of his desire in the web of the ego’s unquenchable appetite for his death in the form of satisfaction.
Individuals possessed by the narcissistic character disorder characteristically fail to know the difference between appropriate anger and destructive rage Any one of us can—and indeed, sometime should—be profoundly angered by one or another of the slights, betrayals, and even deliberate injustices, large and small, personal and collective, that inevitably befall sentient beings in this morally impoverished world—especially those injustices systemically, institutionally inflicted upon whole populations under the color of law. Mature people understand that responsible, controlled, but never loveless expressions of anger may indeed be necessary to deal with events.
Narcissists are generally incapable of just such self-control and self-overcoming. They are all but defined by a chronic disposition of self-righteous rage over endlessly remembered, rehearsed, and rehashed injustices—not seldom real ones but also many that are perhaps imagined. The narcissist, therefore, is not enraged because of injustices inflicted upon innocents—although public controversy over acts and patterns of exploitation may provide them with an excuse to enact their intense reactivity. (In any event, skillful, high-functioning narcissists who become visible leaders grasp that the public expression of their deep-seated rage will only discredit them. They more commonly confine their tantrums to private circumstances while seeking devious ways to humiliate opponents in secret.) But many low-functioning narcissists have no such qualms about acting out public dramas that no sane, sensitive person would dream of doing. Such individuals are typically both exhibitionists and solipsists. Utterly oblivious to their effects on others and incapable of grasping how obviously they are driven by primitive, ungoverned egoic needs, they notice only the degree of their audience’s compliance. Thompson’s observation that what the narcissist’s loyal fans “themselves admire is the voyeuristic spectacle of his folly—a folly which they need only admire, but which he must endlessly ‘s pursue”—explains the public narcissist’s enormous appeal to the tens millions of admirers similarly afflicted. Their ritual celebration of grievances binds them together.
Having invoked Freudian theory, it would be rather odd to overlook the very thing that made Freud so famous and influential: human sexuality. Emotionally speaking, people with the narcissistic character disorder come in all sizes and shapes and it would be fatuous to ascribe a particular sexual script to them all. However, recalling M. Guy Thompson’s mention of the narcissists “flagrantly paranoid features” , it is worth nothing that Freud advises us that paranoid personalities typically have a pronounced homosexual component. (This by no means suggests that homosexuals are any more narcissistic than heterosexuals. Nor does it mean that such narcissists are active homosexuals.) Freud is pointing to an unconscious aspect of the narcissist’s competitiveness with their own sex. This squares with my own observations over many decades. It seems to me that many narcissists look to sexually humiliate members of their own sex, not seldom even very close friends, by seducing their spouses. The scale of that empathic failure was brought home to me when, after years of suffering his flagrant infidelity, the most ruthlessly promiscuous such individual I knew suffered the indignity of having his own once captively loyal wife finally retaliate with her own very public infidelity. Witnesses to the aftermath reported that the freshly cuckholded rake looked as if he’d aged 100 years overnight. Narcissists are solipsists. They have little motive to dedicate their imaginative capacities to empathetically identify with their fellow human beings.
But the epidemic of narcissistic character disorders bespeaks a cultural pathology that will forever escape Freudian theory. All decent Freudians “know” that real and lasting happiness is a mirage, the imagined perfect satisfaction (always wished for, always pursued, never fulfilled, but never relinquished) of being the fulfilling object of our mother’s affections (viewed, of course, through substitutes—sex partners, status, honors, wealth, etc.) This view is a limit on psychological theory not because it is wrong to hold that there can be no final fulfillment in this mortal world. Human beings are indeed perpetually frustrated, even tormented, by inevitable pain, loss, and death. Who can argue that, as the Buddha taught, human life as it is ordinarily known and lived is suffering? The limit of Freudianism lies in its adherence to the materialist scientism that would confine human experience solely to the conventional objects and goals of this apparent world. Of course our socialized egos are almost entirely bound to the ordinary world of appearances that is the arena of most of our conflicts. But to hold that the material world is the only reality is to deny the esoteric, subtle, visionary, or “vertical” dimension of human experience, and therefore the possibility of genuine self-transcendence.
This is why Jung’s explicit argument for (and, indeed, his demonstration of) the verity of the objective psyche, along with his personal and professional briefs on behalf of humankind’s esoteric spiritual traditions, are so important. In its dual role as both the locus of egoic consciousness and the gateway to the vertical transcendent whereby the living Spirit most often becomes known within our human frame, the psyche must be revalued as both the seat of our self-conscious suffering and the bridge to our inherent connectedness to nature, humankind, and God (or the Divine). As such, bringing the magical potentials of the psyche’s visionary function to life is an absolute necessity for human culture. Without it, we have no means to transcend our linguistic, social ego mind and the separate, isolated, and therefore ultimately meaningless life otherwise dictated by sorrowful mortality.
In contemporary letters, the word most often used to describe this visionary function is the Imaginal (a word coined by Henry Corbin, a student of Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology who later became a celebrated scholar of esoteric Islam; it has since been adopted by many Jungians). The Imaginal refers to the faculty of Imagination, or active Imagination, that was so lionized by the European Romantic movement. It has remained a strong background counter-cultural force ever since., The Imaginal is the awakened, visionary psyche cultivated in most of the world’s esoteric spiritual traditions, East and West alike, as the means whereby we expand our awareness beyond the data of the five senses. Nevertheless, although as profoundly important this function is to human sanity and integrity, since the European Renaissance the Imaginal’s modes and means have not been welcomed—that is, have not been operationalized—in Western culture. This is the arena in Schwartz-Salant really shines. His had a great ability to integrate the examination of neurotic patterns with an expanded psychic, Imaginal process that prompts transcendence. Remarkably, it is through serving the integration of this higher psyche with the lower soma (that is, the mind with the body), without excessively valorizing one over the other, that he is able to liberate the much praised eros that Freudians consider to be the sine qua non of human fulfillment (but whose pleasures they otherwise seem to know only in brief spasms) from confinement to material flesh. To the ancient Platonists and Neoplatonists who celebrated it so liberally, eros is most essentially the motivating force to spiritual transcendence, not merely the means to sexual release.
Ashrams are far from immune from the complexities of human politics. To the contrary, in authentically esoteric societies the exercise of power and authority typically requires a sensitivity to dimensions of life and spirit much greater than we ordinarily consciously contend with in daily life. Since valid spiritual authority is derived from and expressed via those who enjoy a surfeit of spiritual virtue and intelligence, the usual negotiations of our democratic egalitarianism cannot be blithely applied here. Thus, my friends and I were burdened with the special requirement to separate the imperatives of our friend’s role in the ashram (which we respected and agreed deserved a high level of tolerance) from those driving his narcissistic need to remain immune from the consequences of his own abuses (which we suffered and for which we agreed he must finally, at long last, be held accountable—not least for his own growth!). It was when some in leadership became confused and hesitant by the burden of exercising their discrimination and bringing our friend to accounts that I sent them key excerpts from Nathan Schwartz-Salant’s description of the so-called “narcissistic character disorder” to bolster their native intelligence.
I of course had seen more than a few reflections of myself and many of my friends in Narcissism and Character Transformation. The good doctor makes clear that narcissistic defensiveness and power seeking is a common aspect of every kind of human neurosis. But as a complex and dominating pattern in itself, the narcissistic character is unmistakable. The problem for me was that no reductive description, however worthy (such as the ones provided by Josephs and Thompson above), could possibly capture in an integral manner the psychological needs, moral complexities, and spiritual ambiguities that characterize this syndrome. This is where Schwartz-Salant’s spiritual intuition, ably wedded to his clear-sighed realism, serves so well. Therefore, despite the risk of being seen as inappropriately importing psychological thought (even of a Jungian stripe) into such a thoroughly sacred context, I felt entitled to send my friends the several pages you will see below. In what follows, I quote liberally from Narcissism and Character Transformation not only to fill out the story, but equally to display the depth and usefulness of Schwartz-Salant’s writings. I’ll begin with his brilliant “Profile of the Narcissistic Character”, itself a small masterpiece of Jungian understanding.
The following descriptions highlight the dominant features of the narcissistic character disorder. Everyone has in his or her personality some of these features, but in the narcissistic character they are chronically present.
Lacks penetrability
The experience of being with a person with a narcissistic character disorder is one of being kept away, warded off. Often this is accompanied by a body tightness or tension. Extreme self-reference is dominant in the narcissistic character, so that whatever one says is immediately transformed by that person into a story or fantasy or idea about himself (or herself). One feels like a stimulus to a response which excludes participation.
Rejects interpretation
A common analytic experience is that interpretations, if given, are distorted or have little effect. If the analyst attempts to expand the analysand’s self-awareness by interpreting a family or life problem in the light of dreams or other psychic material, the interpretation may be 1) totally ignored or rejected; 2) enthusiastically accepted, only to be totally nonexistent in the following session; or 3) taken in and selectively modified to serve the person’s a priori inflated or deflated self concept. In all cases, the resultant experience is that the interpretation was useless or even destructive.
Cannot tolerate criticism
Criticism is met with extreme resistance. The person with a narcissistic character disorder has so little sense of identity—a feature of which is the capacity of the ego to be separate from, yet related to, the Self and the outer world—that any criticism at all is felt as a personal threat. This extends to reductive analysis generally, for viewing himself relative to any psychic content other than his own grandiose (or deflated) self concept threatens his identity. Criticism of any kind, before a good rapport is established (which can take a very long time), may result in the patient’s abrupt termination of therapy.
Cannot integrate synthetic approach
While reductive analysis is not feasible, at least until the narcissistic transferences are worked through, it is equally, but more subtly, destructive to employ what Jung calls the synthetic approach. The narcissistic character is presymbolic, unable to appreciate the reality of the symbol because of the ever-present merger between ego and Self, or ego and world. The symbol is the “other,” the nonego characterizing the objective psyche, and unless it bursts through in the form of a unio mystica (a very rare occurrence) symbolic reality will not exist for the narcissistic character. Thus interpretations along symbolic lines, stressing the positive, synthetic nature of unconscious contents, will only result in inflating an already grandiose ego-Self merger.
Unfortunately, this feeding of a person’s narcissism is a seductive approach that often keeps narcissistic characters in therapy for a long time, with little transformation. Furthermore, unconscious rage is built up by the synthetic approach, for the person knows he is really not being related to. If anything, the premature reference to symbolic reality makes it more difficult for the patient to express anger, and as such actually blocks transformation.
Low empathetic capacity
Just as narcissistic characters are difficult to reach empathetically, so too they can be cruel and self-centered in situations that beg for the slightest degree of empathy. Often one gets the feeling that it is not just a question of a low empathetic capacity, but rather that empathy is withheld for cruel, sadistic purposes.
Takes pride in having no needs
The narcissistic character rejects feelings of need for another human being, for experiencing such needs can unleash rage and envy that could flood the weak ego structure. Narcissistic characters often take pride in having no needs, while doing a great deal for others. “I can do it” is often their motto. If their own needs for sympathy or relatedness are kindled, this often is experienced as a blow to their self-esteem, and can lead to depression and loss of energy.
Lacks sense of history or process
Narcissistic characters experience history in a marginal way. Situations are not really experienced because every situation is met out of the weak ego’s complex of low esteem. Consequently, historical process is only assimilated to the extent that it aggrandizes the ego. Another class of events remembered with great tenacity are those which wounded the ego’s self-esteem.
History is also distorted. We have seen how the narcissistic character can distort interpretations; this can extend to extensive lying. For the internal-grandiose pressure so overwhelms the ego that it causes the ego to meet situations not with a realistic response, but with lies that meet the inner demands of omnipotence. Thus it is not what actually happens historically that is of importance to the narcissistic character, as much as how that event meets—or can be twisted into meeting—inner, grandiose pressure.
A lack of real, historical sense may manifest in other ways. For example, narcissistic characters often feel much younger or older, but rarely their actual age. Their sense of age may be diffuse, varying greatly from one situation to the next. Another example is their tendency to tell the same story over and over again, with no awareness that they are repeating it to the same person. This can be especially painful to a more conscious partner who, pointing out the repetition, gets the response, “That is so new to me,” or “I didn’t know you’d feel that way,” when the same issue has been talked about over and over again. The sense of “newness” is very real for the narcissistic character, but the repetition is confusing and annoying for the person listening.
The narcissistic character’s lack of a sense of history includes a poor relationship to inner psychic processes. This may be a response to the grandiose pressure; which (as shall be described later in the section on narcissistic structures) can be characterized as a negative magician or negative senex figure. As such, the rejection of history is a result of the lack of this archetypal potential on an inner level, a potential that would stem from the positive senex or father constellation.
Disturbed masculine and feminine functioning
Both masculine and feminine functioning are disturbed in the narcissistic character. The realm of spirit as a connecting link to creativity and religious values, as well as a positive connection to the “spirit of the times”—and especially as the capacity for reflection—are missing. Instead there is a grandiose power drive. Under its control, certainty must reign and chance be suspended. Along with this constellation, which has affinities with the “black magician” of fairy tales and folklore, the feminine realm of being (including proper relatedness to the Self and the body) is absent; crushed by the power drive and compulsion of the “magician,” but basically under the influence of a negative feminine constellation. In the language of fairy tales this is called the “false bride” –the negative mother in the form of the witch who usurps the place of the “true bride.” Through the “false bride” the value of the Self is usurped by the ego, leading to inflation and the denial of the positive significance of suffering. All is oriented toward appearances, outer rather than inner beauty (see section ten in this chapter).
While feminine and masculine functioning are disturbed in the narcissistic character disorders of both men and women, the burden of transformation usually falls upon the proper connecting link between consciousness and the unconscious. Thus, for men the anima problem is usually central, while for women the problem is mainly with the animus.” (We shall see in the next section how envy of the opposite sex, so common in narcissistic characters, stems from the anima/animus problem.)
When the anima emerges in positive form, the potential exists for internal mirroring, for ego and Self to enter into a relationship of mirror symmetry. Similarly, the emergence of a positive animus yields reflection and objectivity. For both men and women, the transformation of the contrasexual components results in the capacity for union and involvement with another person based upon consciousness and experienced needs. Thus the archetype of connection, the coniunctio, both to outer and inner worlds, is born and/or resurrected in the transformations of the narcissistic character disorder.
Potential for positive archetypal constellations
Both the outer and inner world of the narcissistic character have few good objects. Archetypally, the negative aspects of the mother and Self are dominant, so that the inner world is experienced as full of hate, rage, envy and crushing demands. This leads to a feeling of emptiness. But it is crucial to recognize that the narcissistic character is in a sense unborn, and that especially unborn are the positive archetypal constellations. Consequently, while the person’s experience of his inner world is one of emptiness and danger, it is not uncommon to find, for example in dream material, a positive inner world ready to be born. But for this to occur (as will be clear from later discussions and clinical material) the transference. countertransference process must be constellated in a stable manner.
Until the inner world constellates in a positive way, reflection and imagination are superficial; flashiness substitutes for depth. But with the emergence of positive, archetypal factors comes the possibility for imagination to creatively function; the person no longer has to stay on the surface of life and the unconscious, but may instead experience a growing ability to penetrate into both realms. This signals the transformation of the narcissistic character.
This very useful list of qualities, grounded in Schwartz-Salant’s penetrating explanations of their manner of functioning, appears early on his book. The rest of the Narcissism and Character Transformation, which is invaluable, goes deeply into the genesis, structure, and potential for transformation of the narcissistic character disorder. That material is far too rich to summarize here. But we do not need to finish reading his book to make use of what we have just read. At this point, however, I would add a further elaboration of one of Schwartz-Salant’s description of the narcissist’s “Disturbed masculine and feminine function”. Based on my coming to know well several individuals who fit his description to a T (one of them a woman), I would also add that many of those afflicted with the narcissistic character disorder like to be seen as hypersexual. But that I do not mean that they greatly enjoy the sex act. That may or may not be the case, and in any case I have no way of knowing if any given individual does or not. I mean that a very considerable part of the narcissist’s lifetime is devoted to making sexual conquests and to their self-presentation as an intensely sexual being.
Schwartz-Salant points out that the narcissist’s refusal of the vulnerabilities of authentic relationship leave them with the problem of where to put the excluded archetypal energies, which can be powerful. The solution for the emotional and spiritual starvation that ensues is to displace those archetypal energies onto sex. In everyone’s case, when love and desire are poorly combined, sexual pursuits are fraught with power issues dictated by the imperatives of our precious self-image. But when love is weak or even absent in sexual relationships, narcissism takes over completely . It is then that the sexual arena is held sway by the narcissist’s envious disposition. And where envy rears its green head, the games of competition will alway be joined. However much or little any given narcissistic character may enjoy the physical act of sex, their often relentless pursuit of sexual attention and conquest has a large—and largely unconscious—component of competitiveness with members of their own sex. These days many such people are often spiritual poseurs who presume to offer their impressionable conquests wise guidance that they are in no way qualified to provide.
To put it bluntly, narcissists look for undeveloped egos who will worship them and who are not really capable of exposing their moral vacuity. (As Joni Mitchell sings, “You don’t like strong women because they’re hip to your tricks.”). For men (and the rarer women who enact the same pattern) such relationships are by definition episodes of later life. In their early and middle years the narcissist’s relationship with a partner of the same or similar age most often foundered when—seen by that partner for who they were and faced a humiliating crisis requiring self-knowledge, confession, repentance, and change—they failed to meet requirements for change that none of us like, most of us resist, but which we ultimately embrace out of humility, love, and respect for the other. A person with a narcissistic character disorder simply cannot bear to be seen as the crass, frightened, immature being that they are. Consequently, they cannot or will not suffer the loss of face that is often the price of a deepened intimacy. At root, their avoidance is as much spiritual as a moral fault.
I have seen this pattern played out a number of times, proving the accuracy of Schwartz-Salant’s descriptions of the resolute narcissistic’s very distinctive manner of dys-relationship to the spiritual or sacred dimension of life. Indeed, in many ways his characterization of the narcissistic character pattern echoed the simpler, more direct criticisms addressed to virtually all his devotees by Adi Da himself, proving Schwartz-Salant’s point about the universal applicability of this pattern. Perhaps the crowning irony of the latter’s intense portrait of the narcissistic character, whose usurpation and betrayal of the living Divine Itself is positively Miltonian, is that the narcissist is always a conformist. It turns out that those who most fervently believe in their self-presumed grandiose role in life (that is, their persona) are the most banal of people. Here I quote extensively from Schwartz-Salant’s stunning summary, “Transformation of the Narcissistic Self,” which also appears early on in Narcissism and Character Transformation. Note especially his commentary on the difference between his own and the classic Neoplatonic view of “mirroring”. This points to the underlying psycho-theology of “incarnation” (or coming into life) that is so key to understanding the difference between traditional other-worldly spirituality and the Jungian approach. In all that has been written on the Narcissistic Character Disorder, I know of no better description of the complex itself and the process—truly, a conversion—that transforms it than this one:
The Self in the narcissistic character disorder is an amalgam of autonomous elements, a “false uroboros.” There is an absence of the tension between opposites that characterizes a healthy psychological structure. When one of the elements is dominant, it has no connection with any of the others. Instead, it takes over and triggers the ego’s defensive system, making consciousness difficult and limited. When transformed—which happens when they are recognized and assimilated by consciousness—these amalgam elements form a differentiated structure with an inherent tension between opposites. Then the ego can begin to function in a stable manner.
Within the undifferentiated amalgam four primary elements can be recognized. They may be approximated as follows:
1) The black magician, a term borrowed from folklore, represents that factor in the psyche that drives for control and exhibits extreme grandiosity. It insists upon total determinacy of events, so that spontaneity and chance are defended against. Rather, reality is equated with its thoughts and needs, and the power to “know” and control is continually exhibited. This omnipotence simultaneously demands mirroring, without which its very existence is threatened. A good example of this quality is the dark side of the Old Testament Yahweh.
2) The partner of the black magician in the amalgam may be called the false bride. This represents a wrong connection to the Self in terms of concern with power, and it manifests in the identification with appearance. Just as the witch in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” has a magic mirror that she consults to assure herself of her beauty over all others, so too the bewitched feminine side of the narcissistic character (whether male or female), rather than relating the ego to the Self, turns psychic energy back onto the ego. Hence the person is always referring internal and external events to his or her own ego.
The false bride is the enemy of the true bride, who represents the proper soul connection to the Self and functions in part as the capacity for being. The dominance of the false bride leads rather to continual thinking and fantasy, and especially doing, usually concerned with gaining self-esteem.
A prime feature of the false bride, often united with the black magician, is the refusal to show suffering. This would reflect a weakness that would endanger their drive for power. Instead, they present a facade of well-being: “I’m okay, I can handle everything.” Analogously, the bride of Yahweh during the exile was said, in Kabbalistic tradition, to be the witch Lilith! Yahweh was separated from his true soul, the Shekinah, who suffered along with the children of Israel until her reunion with Yahweh.
3) Ego-persona identity is characterized by undifferentiated social compliance and adaptability. Social acceptability is so dominant a need for the narcissistic character that the ego cannot separate from the persona, which in this case becomes a rigid mask carrying the inner false bride attitude that paradoxically denies the need for another person. The persona ego is not individual; it demands omnipotence and perfection according to collective values. It continually strives to meet these impossible demands, often collapsing under the strain, manifesting as energy loss and depression.
4) The shadow is the fourth element. Its primary characteristic is envy and an associated rage. Narcissistic rage, with its unforgiving quality for wounds to the ego’s self-esteem, colors much of the individual’s sense of history. Envy, the recurrent conviction that “nothing will ever be there for me, only for others, so I’ll spoil any potentially giving object,” chronically inhibits change and the integration of anima or animus.
In the unconscious, untransformed state of the Self, these elements are not separate, they are parts of a homogeneous amalgam. This mixture is often created by the ego’s regressive fusion with the Self, a result, perhaps, of improper handling by parental figures of the emerging exhibitionism and idealization during childhood. Usually this exhibitionism is carried by instinctual and aggressive energies. In its regressive flight, the ego attempts to recreate the original paradise or uroboric condition. But it is a “false uroboros” in which needs are repressed rather than automatically filled by a positive parental experience.
In psychotherapy the transformation of the amalgam takes place in a manner analogous to the ascent and descent of energy known to the alchemists.” It is a circular process by which “matter is spiritualized and spirit materialized.” But the alchemists’ projections reflected the transformative dynamic within the Self, while in the psychotherapy of narcissistic character disorders, the ascent and descent of libido unfolds through the transference-countertransference process. This is the vessel to contain the “circular movement,” inhibited by.the regressive ego-Self merger.
The ascent of libido is analogous to the idealized transference, while the descent of libido corresponds to the mirror transference. The spiritual “ascent,” through the patient’s idealization, in turn “descends” through the analyst’S proper relationship to the induced mirror transference; for example, by containing while experiencing his own exhibitionism. Equally, the mirror transference and its exhibitionistic energy is caused to “ascend” by - the analyst’s induced idealized response, and the proper processing of these energies. In this manner, the ascent and descent of libido is mutually experienced through the analytical vessel.
Although a general topic of chapter two of this study, it is worth noting here that the mirror was taken by the Neo-Platonists in their commentaries on the Narcissus myth as having the effect of drawing the soul down into matter and bodily life. Mirroring does have just this function. In distinction to the Neo-Platonic dread of matter, modern man should welcome this descent when there is a concomitant spiritual awareness.
When the elements in the narcissistic character disorder begin to transform through the constellation of the transference-countertransference process, they begin to be experienced as separate aspects of a totality. With this new Self structure, ego and unconscious exist in a relationship of consciously realized mirror symmetry, each influencing the other.
The quaternity structure that appears as a result of the transformation can be represented and characterized in the following way:
The uroborus, symbol for both narcissistic self-absorption and individuation as a circular, self-contained process. (Eleazar, Uraltes chymisches Werk, 1760)
The false bride and the black magician. Could it be said any better? The more I pondered these two “characters,” the more I appreciated how powerfully they summarize the narcissistic syndrome. Indeed, we would be well-advised to post these passages on the bulletin boards of all organizations, not merely the churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, zendos, and yoga retreats hosting the people most likely to value such wisdom. Even so, those of us who presume to be on a spiritual path owe Schwartz-Salant special heed here. For the false bride and black magician combination are always in the wings looking to lay claim to the life and mind of any and every would-be spiritual aspirant upon whom a divine charism alights. This is precisely why every truly effective spiritual tradition seeks to protects it own practitioners from such self-inflation by benign protocols of deference, respect, and humility toward not only one’s teacher and the Divine Itself, but also ones fellow practitioners, including “even the least amongst us”. Yes, we all betray the living spirit in every moment of our active egoity. But betrayal becomes most pernicious when it is enacted in the face of (and even during presumed advocacy of) spiritual revelation itself: corruptio optimi pessima (“corruption of the best is corruption at its worst”).
That being said, merely to suffer a hobbled self-consciousness is obviously no antidote to this universal liability. What makes Schwartz-Salant’s work so useful is that his inquisitive, open-minded, and non-reductive approach to human psychological development serves our self-knowledge without leaving us feeling merely objectified or otherwise denigrated. In the incarnation process we value the many little and not so little defeats of our egoity not because we masochistically revel in humiliation but because they force a repentance and redirection of our life and mind that reestablishes our conscious connection to the Transcendent and to other beings. Schwartz-Salant describes the transformation of the the black magician, false bride, ego, and shadow complex of the narcissistic character disorder this way:
1) The black magician gives way to a positive spirit; the Self is felt as a “content of the ego” and as its source, both “father” and “son.” The positive puer-senex constellation emerges. An embodied awareness becomes possible for the ego. Compulsive doing becomes reflection.
2) The false bride gives way to the true soul. The positive value of suffering emerges. Psychic energy is channeled toward the Self and away from its excess investment in the previous ego-Self merger. The capacity to be appears as a positive value. Relatedness, as opposed to being right, becomes a primary value. Generally, the care for one’s soul becomes meaningful and represents the transformation of the previous attitude in which appearances were the dominant factor. A capacity for empathy develops.
3) The ego disengages from the persona and becomes a carrier of personal identity. The capacity to feel and express needs for another person emerges. An awareness of rage at not being mirrored or at one’s idealizations being improperly treated is more conscious, and gradually becomes a capacity to express anger in a related manner. The ego also becomes aware of its “pettiness” and becomes chagrined at the experience of envy, which it gradually recognizes to be a common, all-too-human psychic experience.
4) The shadow of the new quaternity structure becomes the old narcissistic character disorder. That is, the narcissistic character disorder in its exhibitionistic-grandiose form does not simply disappear. Rather it becomes the substantial shadow side, always potentially regressive, of the new personality structure.
The narcissistic character disorder does not only result from insufficient maternal empathy. It is also an archetypal pattern and constellates to protect a new Self structure from invasion from other archetypal contents, as this aspect of the Old Testament Yahweh protected the monotheistic vision from the mother archetype. Equally, it exists as a resistance to change, and then it functions just as a narcissistic character formation stemming from early infantile deprivations. It then causes a merger with the Self, and all the old symptoms of exhibitionism and grandiose control tend to appear. Hence, the duplex nature of narcissism stays as the shadow side of a Self constellation, either protecting its integrity, or else resisting its transformation, whence different archetypal centers would become dominant.
Our creative struggle with our neuroses, then, doesn’t simply mark us as permanently damaged beings. Human neuroses are not merely faults to be eradicated, although of course faults they surely are. Like Jung, Schwartz-Salant believes that our neurotic patterns are most basically opportunities and goads for us to grow beyond the emotional and spiritual limitations that would otherwise remain unnoticed by the usual “well-adapted” ego. As such, neuroses possess a dynamism that forces us to grow up and grow beyond. Schwartz-Salant may have been the only psychotherapist on Earth who found in the narcissistic character disorder a serving dialectic that drives the individual to take new risks for such growth Further, he even perceived in this disorder the emergence of a new and profoundly significant archetype in the culture as whole:
Jung’s general attitude toward neuroses was that in the long run they have a positive purpose. He believed that those who become neurotic are also in a sense chosen—because they are often forced to deal with the unconscious. Narcissistic characters may be carrying the seeds of a new conscious experience of the Self in which both matter and spirit, both ascent and descent, have equal value. As such, they would be heralding a change in the collective unconscious Self image.
As encouraging as that may sound, the journey of self-knowledge required to reconcile the ego and Self demands a great deal of both patient and therapist. While Schwartz-Salant’s brand of Jungian psychotherapy can bear extraordinary fruit, progress comes at a price. Speaking here of the suffering that must be accepted by those afflicted with the so-called “borderline character disorder” (in which, as the name implies, the individual dips in and out of outright madness) , Schwartz-Salant also notes the “act of faith” required of the therapist if the patient is to be enabled to face his or her demons:
The link between the self as a positive force and the psyche’s dark, destructive qualities poses an important question. For if the self is encapsulated within or possessed by dark aspects of existence, are we to regard these darker aspects as parts of the self? The answer is that it is important to do so (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 25), for the therapist’s attitude toward the self is crucial for its potential regeneration in positive form. If we undervalue the borderline patient’s psychotic mechanisms and treat them as something to be suppressed or changed, rather than encountered and actively explored in the face of a multitude of defenses that deny pain, we will lose the self and at best gain an ego and an enhanced capacity for repression. A religious issue is involved: the will of the self, itself apparent through dreams and fantasies, is too weak to incarnate into space-time functioning. An act of faith on the part of the therapist is necessary if the person is to embrace his or her madness rather than flee from it, for the borderline person can only imagine the perils of change, not the rewards, and experiences surrender as a descent into emptiness or madness from which there will be no return.
When psychology moves us beyond the punitive rationalism so characteristic of our times it can midwife the awakening of the living, breathing, feeling psyche itself. But Schwartz-Salant’s surmise that the current prevalence of narcissistic character disorders heralds our culture’s dire need to overcome the ancient split between “matter and spirit” certainly doesn’t make the disorder any kind of deus ex machina for spiritual awakening. There’s hard work to be done and crisis aplenty for everyone (therapist and patient alike) in this journey. And even a “successful” outcome of treatment is no guarantee that we will awaken to a truly fruitful relationship to the Divine. As I said earlier, that requires something more: in fact, a genuine religious and spiritual conversion. Even so, it is a passage that will establish in our lives a platform for stable spiritual growth, should we be wise enough to build upon it. It is a necessary but not a sufficient foundation for life turned beyond egoity. Real spiritual growth begins from here.
In any case, I don’t think any Jungian of recent years did a better job of mapping the dialectical process of such psychological growth than Schwartz-Salant. That was not only because of his willingness to accompany his patient into the chaotic, fragmented, and deeply dissociated—even psychotic—states of mind that may need to be admitted on the path to healing. If you’re an honest and capable therapist, that goes with the territory. What lifts Schwartz-Salant’s therapeutic work to another level is his ability to endure the chaos, the bewilderment, and not infrequently the numbing deadness that may inhabit the psyche-in-transformation all the while patiently awaiting the spirit archetype to make its salvatory appearance. As he noted, doing so takes “faith”. That a key dimension of how he lived such faith came out of his highly original work with the psychological process known as “projective identification” should be of interest to us all. But before we take a look at that aspect of his work, we need to first more deeply appreciate how the archetypal approach totally revisions our understanding of interpersonal dynamics. I will cover both topics in part II of this review essay.
At its core, Jung’s idea of the Self refers to the integrated or individuated personality in whom the unconscious and conscious minds have achieved a healthy balance. Since such individuation requires a viable connection between the ego and our spiritual nature, Jungian psychology is built to assist the psyche’s opening to or reception of our higher being. But Jung is not playing the part of a religious evangelist here. His approach was dictated by the inner dynamic of his patients’ healing. If we think of the religious dimension of Jungian thinking as an invocation of the “vertical” dimension of existence into the “horizontal” interpersonal or social dimension of our personal relationships, we can appreciate how their integration vastly expands our conventional understanding of human development. In fact, where the vertical and the horizontal intersect is the precise locale of Schwartz-Salant’s most original and far reaching contributions. That he is especially adept at retooling accepted psychoanalytic notions pertaining to our social relations from an archetypal perspective is a strength that gives him just claim to a professional audience beyond the usual Jungian cohort.
For example, in both Narcissism and Character Transformation and The Borderline Personality: Character and Healing, Schwartz-Salant does an extraordinary job of linking two central notions of Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology—“grandiosity” and “idealization”—to Jungian archetypal process. As mentioned before, he believes that the intense egoic energy manifested by narcissists is often an aggressive displacement of archetypal energies from their Divine Source onto the field of our interpersonal relationships. The therapist must simultaneously keep both vectors in mind when dealing with such persons
Given its archetypal nature, a spiritual attitude towards the Cephisus-like [masculine invasive] force is necessary. The problem is not only one of personal relatedness. Rather there is a religious problem embedded in the issues of narcissism . . . An attitude that respects archetypal dominants, while paying due regard to issues of relatedness and transference problems, is essential in the therapy of narcissistic character disorders.
Grandiose and idealizing attitudes and behaviors are commonly viewed as little more than character flaws—as bad manners or childish naivety, in the case of the former, and delusion, in the case of the latter. But by relating these conceptions to childhood frustrations and confusions occurring in the unfoldment of our connection to the Spirit archetype (first mediated to us by our parents, who for children hold the place of the gods), we gain a whole new depth of understanding of the genesis of our emotional patterns. Most parents understand very well what is going on when their children do something grandiose and exhibitionistic. They likewise realize that they are there to function as protective/appreciative God-Parent to their children, and as such are idealized by them. They may even sense this is how their child is handling the force of the Spirit archetype, whether assumed for self or projected onto another.
But if a parents fail to receive their children’s projections with patience and humor, their negative reactions can be hugely damaging to the child’s development. This usually comes from the parent’s parent’s own failure in this regard. The English psychiatrist E. Graham Howe has forthrightly stated that parents not infrequently hate their children. Likewise, Schwartz-Salant tells us “It is not unusual for the parents to envy the talents or abilities of their children, quite unconsciously. In such cases the child hears, ‘You have something special,’ but with the underlying message, ‘I hate you for it.’ . . . Analysis often reveals an underlying feeling of having been hated, the object of intense envy.” Treating others “in the way he experiences being treated himself”, envy thereby can easily become a dominating trait of the narcissistic personality, “the dark side of the narcissistic character.” The hardest place to observe this envy in operation is in our closest intimacies:
Envy can dominate the life of the narcissistic character. A man may envy his wife’s activities, femininity and way of being. Whatever she has he wants. And the narcissistic woman may envy her mate’s physical prowess, business acumen, or social ease. They can be totally unaware of their envious feelings, for to admit them consciously would be too “petty” and demeaing to their image of themselves as benevolently interested in the other person.
Envy of this kind appears to be rooted in the fact that the contrasexual components of personality, the man’s anima and the woman’s animus, are especially undeveloped in narcissistic characters. They are largely assimilated by the exhibitionistic-grandiose form of the self, so that their proper functioning, which is to relate the conscious personality to both the outer and inner worlds, is deficient. Instead of reflection and relatedness there is compulsion and a continual self-reference.
Integrating these “contrasexual components”—Jung’s famous anima and animus, which refer to the unconscious feminine personality within a man and the unconscious masculine personality within a woman, respectively—is essential to achieving balance. Bringing it about is a famous and very well-trod feature of the Jungian path. Properly excavated and aligned, the anima and animus are the conduits and accomplishers of our psychological connection with the archetypal or spiritual energies of the “Self”. If they remain frozen, undeveloped, compulsive, “The narcissistic character keenly feels the pressure of individuation, and equally the lack of a living relationship between ego and Self when they are merged in a grandiose form.” You will recall that the failure to achieve this integration is a very telling sign of a narcissistic character disorder. What Schwartz-Salant adds to the discussion, however, is a newly elaborated and very daring reconsideration of a key contribution made by venerable Freudian child psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, the famed founder of Object Relations theory. Our discussion of his work in that regard will appear in a succeeding article.
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