Posted by Quintal on September 20, 2007, at 11:46:17
In reply to Re: Does Anyone Else Have a Disordered Personality » Quintal, posted by pegasus on September 20, 2007, at 11:29:50
My quote was from the Wiki article on NPD! In fact the entire passage was. There seems to be some conflict among psychologists about what constitutes NPD. The quote you isolated would seem to be an example of the most severe, intractable and inflexible form of NPD. It's clear from the rest of the article that there's much more to NPD than narcissism, and that it overlaps in some ways with BPD and other cluster B personality disorders. I'm in the middle of a discussion about this on another board, but we just seem to keep on tying ourselves in knots. The most we can agree on is that by narcissism, psychologists mean that the pathological narcissist is self-absorbed (as opposed to truly self-loving). Perhaps the pathological narcissist is in love with the false self, and demands excessive admiration for it, lacks empathy for others etc, but that's not really self-love is it? Or is it?!... because the false-self is one's own creation. Soooo..... maybe NPD is self-love by proxy?
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True self, false self
Alexander Lowen describes pathological narcissism, and narcissistic personality disorder, as "the denial of the true self"[11]
Masterson describes the creation of a false self as:
"when a young child fails to separate her own self-image from that of her mother. This happens roughly between the ages of two and three, often because of a parent’s own emotional problems. A mother’s encouragement of a child's self-assertion is vital. When the mother suffers from low self-esteem, she has difficulty encouraging her child’s emerging self. The child experiences this absence as a loss of self, creating feelings of abandonment that lead to depression. To deal with the depression, the child gives up efforts to support her emerging self. Instead, she relies on her mother’s approval to maintain the esteem of a "false self." [12]
Narcissistic personality disorder and shame
It has been suggested that Narcissistic personality disorder may be related to defenses against shame. [13]
Gabbard suggested NPD could be broken down into two subtypes[14]. He saw the "oblivious" subtype as being grandiose, arrogant and thick skinned and the "hypervigilant" subtype as easily hurt, oversensitive and ashamed.
He suggested that the oblivious subtype presents a large, powerful, grandiose self to be admired, envied and appreciated, which is the antithesis of the weakened and internalised self that hides in a generic state of shame, in order to fend off devaluation, whereas the hypervigilant subtype, far from fending off devaluation, is obsessed with it, neutralising devaluation by seeing others as unjust abusers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
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poster:Quintal
thread:784003
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070916/msgs/784146.html