Who am I?
I am a psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with people in the UK with a diagnosis of personality disorder and post traumatic difficulties. I have worked in a range of settings – sometimes with particularly severe and complex cases in secure forensic settings and at other times with clients who are successful professionals who also have a diagnosis personality disorder. I have been lucky enough to work with some highly influential authors on the subject of personality disorder in particular, and this is the field in which severe narcissism is most often found and talked about.
You will not find me on any professional networking sites. I am using a pseudonym. This is simply because I see clients in the UK National Health Service. In this blog, I might want to exercise freedom to think creatively around the boundaries of thinking about this subject, and maybe explore some conflicts in today’s thinking about narcissism. I would not want to give the impression to a client that today’s evidence-based therapies are confused. Actually, there is often good evidence supporting the techniques of modern therapies. Finding evidence for the theories - that try to explain how and why they work - is more difficult. Of course, I will not write about my clients here in any specific way. My reference material is altogether different. My case studies and their stories are already famous.
What to expect in narcissism, influence and celebrity
This blog will revolve around a question: what do the lives of iconically famous people tell us about narcissism, and what does narcissism theory tell us about the links between trauma and fame?
This is not primarily a blog about celebrities. I will not be selecting the freshest twenty-somethings gracing west London bars on a Thursday night. I want to look at the predictions that narcissism theory makes about the childhoods of narcissistic people, and then look for illustrations of these in biographies and interviews of iconic people - archetypal examples of idealisation, power and influence. These biographies should, I hope, be good places to look for graphic illustrations of idealisation, power, denigration, relationship problems and destructiveness. The blog will dive deep into the details of the lives of the greatest icons, with the ‘map of narcissism’ as a guide. How exactly does the same trauma lead to both creativity and violence? Charisma and self-destruction? If narcissism can be thought of as darkness concealed by light, then I will be looking at this paradox in the brightest of places. I will explore the life of one iconically famous person at a time.
What is narcissism?
Narcissism can be thought of as the taking up of particular strategies – to make ourselves idealised, admired, powerful or to be denigrating in order to avoid feelings of vulnerability or shame – specifically because experiences of vulnerability and shame have, for some particular reasons, become unmanageable. I will devote a post to describing how narcissism is thought to develop in childhood. Theory tends to position narcissism as a consequence of specific types of ‘attachment trauma’ (see theory post).
Narcissism and trauma
I hope to show how fame and celebrity are often – especially in their extremes – a response to certain kinds of trauma. Narcissism theory predicts specific kinds of experience in combination priming a child to set course towards idealisation, performance, influence and power – other factors permitting1,2. This same course, however, also gives the child a ticking time bomb to carry. If they do not overcome it, it will bring them back full circle to trauma and in some tragic cases, a premature death. Along with a number of prominent psychologist authors on the subject, I don’t define narcissism as a kind of person but as a set of strategies with a specific purpose – to deal with the after-effects of a specific type of trauma – for better or worse.
Why am I doing this?
Research suggests that narcissism generally may be increasing in western society2. But Lasch3 has claimed specifically that,
“Celebrities, many of whom have experienced severe childhood trauma are more narcissistic than the general population and have become role models with bad consequences.”
Researchers Young and Pinsky4 gave a narcissism test (the Narcissism Personality Inventory) to 200 celebrities. Reality TV stars scored highest for narcissism, closely followed by actors. Overall celebrity scores were 17% higher than the US average. Wallace and Baumeister5 give one reason as to why celebrity might be associated with narcissism - arguing that “narcissists may gravitate to working environments where opportunities for high performance will lead to self-glorification”. As a chosen occupation, it seems to fit.
Which story gets told?
These awesome facades can perform important functions for us – leading culture, driving change, providing escape – and yet there is often a collapsing – a deflating. A fall. The trauma that was escaped with such energy, such determination and such drive – seems to overtake them in the race and ultimately wait for them at some unexpected corner. And then as a society, we have to make sense of a switch in our experience of the person. A narrative develops as to what has happened. Did fame put too much pressure on a talented human being? Was it the cruel partner? Perhaps they were only using fame to achieve criminal ends and we were all just taken in by it.
I will let you add the names in here.
Who controls these narratives about what has happened and where lie the interests of these people? The manager? The publisher? The parent? The same media who have developed a narrative that is now in pieces?
I started asking some more specific questions: What part did narcissism play in them becoming famous? To what extent is it a good thing? What part did trauma play in narcissism?
The ‘split’
I started noticing that as a psychologist with an interest in narcissism I was hearing about the lives, words and actions of celebrities, leaders and influencers through a particular lens of my training. I have become fascinated by the disconnection between the success, influence, glamour and power we see at the height of a celebrity’s fame, and the traumatic or neglectful experiences that might have specifically brought about the drive for this fame, power and success. What we see as success might be a highly developed and complex strategy of self-protection.
With these icons, often, we either idealise or denigrate. Neither the ideal or the denigrated images the media play with are the whole person. But as society, we often choose to view one side at a time. The façade is what we enjoy. It is creative and more. Perhaps it points to a state of being in which limitations and the mess of humanness no longer constrain us. But when the façade finally falls, and the success ends, as it often seems to do, I think that we see not so much the ravages of what fame has done to the person. I think that we often see the brokenness that had been hidden all along. The individual who chose this path did not do so by accident. They needed the façade and persona. More than we ever needed the entertainment. But in some cases, this can have devastating consequences not just for the influencer but also for the influenced – as the victims of Jimmy Savile and R. Kelly will testify. We can’t afford for this conversation to be either superficial or exclusive.
Diagnosing, pathologizing and stigmatizing
Although I will need to talk about the concept of ‘personality disorder’ (this is the area of psychology in which narcissism is most thought about), I do not plan to diagnose any celebrities with narcissistic personality disorder*. And I don’t think I need to. I do not want to write about ‘narcissists’, as so many authors have done. In some blogs and books there is a ‘them and us’ when it comes to narcissism. I think this conversation has become superficial and simplistic. Reading about ‘the narcissist’ might be quite relieving if you have been victimised. But in the UK, we no longer talk about ‘schizophrenics’ or ‘depressives’ or ‘borderlines’ (borderline personality disorder). These are only concepts to help clinicians understand a mental health problem in order to treat it. If we are labelling someone ‘a narcissist’, we have probably stopped trying to understand them as a person. We are probably trying to do something else. This is not to say that we should shy away from labelling behaviour – if it is aggressive, belittling, intrusive, self-idealising…
I also think there is another conversation about narcissism that I read about in textbooks. This seems to me at times over-elaborate, confusing and even intimidating such that very few people can join the conversation. It may be that if we break narcissism into its ‘procedures’, ‘defences’ or ‘strategies’, some books and blogs actually show themselves to be doing something narcissistic. I want to argue that narcissism is a spectrum that most of us are on somewhere – at least some of the time. I think that most of us pick it up and put it down again – sometimes in a helpful way, sometimes not. I will argue that a healthy position is simply having the option to put it down when we need to. Some icons may turn out, when I read about them, to be good at this. So, my choosing them to read about is not necessarily a reflection of narcissism, but instead of one characteristic: earned iconic enduring fame.
Am I saying celebrities are only a bad influence?
I don’t want to question and pathologize everything that icons of culture and politics give to us and leave behind. I think I want to tread a narrow path between celebrating the awesome legacies and the gifts of entertainment, fantasy, inspiration and escape on one side, and the often-tragic driving forces we understand so little about on the other. I am not irritated by celebrity as such (jealous at times, yes). I am frustrated by the confusion and inaccessibility of some theories of narcissism and their inability to help us - when we are devastated by the sometimes-disappointing lives of our idols or the devastating impact someone famous has had on those around them. Is it a problem that we promote to positions of leadership and cultural inspiration those who might have a particular kind of problem to do with emotional connectedness, relationship, cooperation and kindness? Do these selected influencers make for a less connected, less kind society?
Forgiving narcissistic behaviour?
A perspective on narcissism based on attachment trauma (see theory post) may appear more compassionate than the perspectives found online or in self-help books. I am not here thought to be compassionate about narcissistic behaviour. I am not trying to promote understanding in order to argue that we give such behaviour “one more chance” in painful relationships where patterns have become persistent. I believe in giving adults with narcissistic problems responsibility for any victimising behaviour. This doesn’t just help the victim. It is often the only motivator for the victimiser to seek help (unlike being called a ‘narcissist’ which will usually have the opposite effect). We all have to take responsibility for how we affect those around us. But in getting their points across, they can often misunderstand or simplify what narcissism is. And that can add risks of its own.
In the next post, part B of the introduction, I will describe some criteria for choosing which iconic names to explore in this blog and why. I will then describe a ‘map of narcissism’ (a theory) before moving onto my ‘icon no 1’.
*To be clear, although I will be referring to named celebrities and other real people in this blog, I am not suggesting by doing so that they have a particular mental health condition. As I have said, I am using the word narcissistic to describe strategies and defences that we all use from time to time.
References
Diamond, D., Yeomans, F.E., Stern, B.L. & Kernberg, O.F. (2022) Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference Focussed Therapy. Guildford
Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.
Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W.W. Norton.
Young, S.M. & Pinsky, D. (2006). Narcissism and Celebrity. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 463-471.
Wallace, H.M. & Baumeister, R.F. (2002). Narcissism and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 819-834.