The Narcissist as Eternal Child and Youth
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
Click HERE to view the video
Malignant Self Love - Buy the Book - Click HERE!!!
Relationships with Abusive Narcissists - Buy the e-Books - Click HERE!!!
READ THIS:
Scroll down to review a complete list of the articles - Click on the blue-coloured text!
Bookmark this Page - and SHARE IT with Others!
When healthier people come
across narcissists, they are often struck by their rigid immaturity and childlike
vibe. There is a clearly infantile
entity where an adult (or a person) should have been.
At the same time, the narcissist makes them feel infuriatingly inferior by
establishing his or her grandiose delusional superiority: intellectual,
pecuniary, biographical, or otherwise.
This discrepancy creates a jarring dissonance: children are not supposed to
make us feel inferior! And we are not supposed to feel aggressive, envious, and
competitive towards kids! On the contrary: we should find them endearing and
protect them! Narcissists are like aliens as they were depicted in old sci-fi
movies: of slight build with giant (babylike) eggheads. And inaccessibly
foreign.
Less grandiose narcissists (and goal-oriented psychopaths) try to redress this
offensive, dissonant, and incongruent power asymmetry by pretending to need and
desire the other party. Narcissistic and psychopathic men tell women how
charming, intelligent, and irresistible they are and how much they yearn for
their company and sex. They let men know that they find them shrewd and
reliable and knowledgeable and would like to hang out with them.
But some narcissists are too full of themselves to play this game. They are
utterly self-sufficient and solipsistically self-contained. They are superior
and are not ashamed to communicate it. Nor do they intend to ameliorate the
impact of this natural imbalance. They care little what people (the lesser
specimens) think about them (for example: that they are unattractive or asexual
or gullible) or what they do to them in retribution. This apparent
invulnerability only frustrates their interlocutors even further and renders
them more aggressive, devaluing, and vindictive - a vicious circle of hurtful
escalation.
"Puer Aeternus" – the eternal adolescent or youth, the sempiternal Peter Pan – is a phenomenon often associated with pathological narcissism. People who refuse to grow up strike others as self-centred and aloof, petulant and brattish, haughty and demanding – in short: as childish or infantile.
Childhood involves the acquisition of new skills and adaptation to change. Modern life continuously challenges us to do both and thus we remain in a perpetual state of “infancy”. But, while a normal adult seeks to confront these challenges head on, the narcissist is hell-bent on avoiding and evading them.
Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial - the perpetrators could be parents, teachers, other adults, or peers. Pampering, smothering, spoiling, and "engulfing" the child are also forms of abuse.
In an abusive environment, the child finds it difficult to assert his personal boundaries, to separate from his parents, and to individuate. Consequently, it chooses either of two solutions: to internalize and introject the abuser (to become a monster), thereby siding with the strong and winning party – or to remain a child forever, thus securing empathy, compassion, and pity in a heartless, hostile universe. The typical narcissist is unusual in that it chooses to adopt both solutions at once and is, therefore, simultaneously a monster and a child.
The narcissist is a partial adult. He seeks to avoid adulthood. Infantilisation – the discrepancy between one's advanced chronological age and one's retarded behaviour, cognition, and emotional development – is the narcissist's preferred art form. Some narcissists even use a childish tone of voice occasionally and adopt a toddler's body language.
But most narcissist resort to more subtle means.
They reject or avoid adult chores and functions. They refrain from acquiring adult skills (such as driving) or an adult's formal education. They evade adult responsibilities towards others, including and especially towards their nearest and dearest. They hold no steady jobs, never get married, raise no family, cultivate no roots, maintain no real friendships or meaningful relationships Many a narcissist remain attached to their families of origin. By clinging to his parents, the narcissist continues to act in the role of a child. He thus avoids the need to make adult decisions and (potentially painful) choices. He transfers all adult chores and responsibilities – from laundry to baby-sitting – to his parents, siblings, spouse, or other relatives. He feels unshackled, a free spirit, ready to take on the world (in other words omnipotent and omnipresent).
This curious abdication may have to do with what I termed the “Inversion-Null Dynamic.” Briefly: the narcissist always seeks to fulfil the role of a child. His parents, his spouse, even his own kids usually compliantly respond to this hidden signal. This is the “inversion” part.
Then, when another child enters the scene (the narcissist’s siblings, or his own newborn offspring), everyone react awkwardly, dismissively, or abusively towards the addition to the family because it is perceived as threatening to usurp the narcissist’s role and to upset the delicate dynamics and equilibrium that rule the narcissist’s intimate relationships. The newcomer is, thus, “annulled.”
Such "delayed adulthood" is very common in many poor and developing countries, especially those with patriarchal societies. I wrote in "The Last Family":
"To the alienated and schizoid ears of Westerners, the survival of family and community in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) sounds like an attractive proposition. A dual purpose safety net, both emotional and economic, the family in countries in transition provides its members with unemployment benefits, accommodation, food and psychological advice to boot.
Divorced daughters, saddled with little (and not so little) ones, the prodigal sons incapable of finding a job befitting their qualifications, the sick, the unhappy – all are absorbed by the compassionate bosom of the family and, by extension the community. The family, the neighbourhood, the community, the village, the tribe – are units of subversion as well as useful safety valves, releasing and regulating the pressures of contemporary life in the modern, materialistic, crime ridden state.
The ancient blood feud laws of the kanoon were handed over through familial lineages in northern Albania, in defiance of the paranoiac Enver Hoxha regime. Criminals hide among their kin in the Balkans, thus effectively evading the long arm of the law (state). Jobs are granted, contracts signed and tenders won on an open and strict nepotistic basis and no one finds it odd or wrong. There is something atavistically heart-warming in all this.
Historically, the rural units of socialisation and social organisation were the family and the village. As villagers migrated to the cities, these structural and functional patterns were imported by them, en masse. The shortage of urban apartments and the communist invention of the communal apartment (its tiny rooms allocated one per family with kitchen and bathroom common to all) only served to perpetuate these ancient modes of multi-generational huddling. At best, the few available apartments were shared by three generations: parents, married off-spring and their children. In many cases, the living space was also shared by sickly or no-good relatives and even by unrelated families.
These living arrangements – more adapted to rustic open spaces than to high rises – led to severe social and psychological dysfunctions. To this very day, Balkan males are spoiled by the subservience and servitude of their in-house parents and incessantly and compulsively catered to by their submissive wives. Occupying someone else's home, they are not well acquainted with adult responsibilities.
Stunted growth and stagnant immaturity are the hallmarks of an entire generation, stifled by the ominous proximity of suffocating, invasive love. Unable to lead a healthy sex life behind paper thin walls, unable to raise their children and as many children as they see fit, unable to develop emotionally under the anxiously watchful eye of their parents – this greenhouse generation is doomed to a zombie-like existence in the twilight nether land of their parents' caves. Many ever more eagerly await the demise of their caring captors and the promised land of their inherited apartments, free of their parents' presence.
The daily pressures and exigencies of co-existence are enormous. The prying, the gossip, the criticism, the chastising, the small agitating mannerisms, the smells, the incompatible personal habits and preferences, the pusillanimous bookkeeping – all serve to erode the individual and to reduce him or her to the most primitive mode of survival. This is further exacerbated by the need to share expenses, to allocate labour and tasks, to plan ahead for contingencies, to see off threats, to hide information, to pretend and to fend off emotionally injurious behaviour. It is a sweltering tropic of affective cancer."
Alternatively, by acting as surrogate caregiver to his siblings or parents, the narcissist displaces his adulthood into a fuzzier and less demanding territory. The social expectations from a husband and a father are clear-cut. Not so from a substitute, mock, or ersatz parent. By investing his efforts, resources, and emotions in his family of origin, the narcissist avoids having to establish a new family and face the world as an adult. His is an "adulthood by proxy", a vicarious imitation of the real thing.
The ultimate in dodging adulthood is finding God (long recognised as a father-substitute), or some other "higher cause". The believer allows the doctrine and the social institutions that enforce it to make decisions for him and thus relieve him of responsibility. He succumbs to the paternal power of the collective and surrenders his personal autonomy. In other words, he is a child once more. Hence the allure of faith and the lure of dogmas and ideologies, especially in troubled times, when everyone's narcissistic defences are out in full force.
But why does the narcissist refuse to grow up? Why does he postpone the inevitable and regards adulthood as a painful experience to be avoided at a great cost to personal growth and self-realisation? Because remaining essentially a toddler caters to all his narcissistic needs and defences and nicely tallies with the narcissist's inner psychodynamic landscape.
Pathological narcissism is an infantile defence against abuse and trauma, usually occurring in early childhood or early adolescence. Thus, narcissism is inextricably entwined with the abused child's or adolescent's emotional make-up, cognitive deficits, and worldview. To say "narcissist" is to say "thwarted, tortured child".
This article appears in my book "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"
Click HERE to buy the print edition from Amazon (click HERE to buy a copy dedicated by the author)
Click HERE to buy the print edition from Barnes and Noble
Click HERE to buy the print edition from the publisher and receive a BONUS PACK
Click HERE to buy electronic books (e-books) and video lectures (DVDs) about narcissists, psychopaths, and abuse in relationships
Click HERE to buy the ENTIRE SERIES of sixteen electronic books (e-books) about narcissists, psychopaths, and abuse in relationships
Click HERE for SPECIAL OFFER 1 and HERE for SPECIAL OFFER 2
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook (my personal page or the book’s), YouTube
It is important to remember that overweening, smothering, spoiling, overvaluing, and idolising the child – are all forms of parental abuse. There is nothing more narcissistically-gratifying than the admiration and adulation (Narcissistic Supply) garnered by precocious child-prodigies (Wunderkinder). Narcissists who are the sad outcomes of excessive pampering and sheltering become addicted to it.
In a paper published in Quadrant in 1980 and titled "Puer Aeternus: The Narcissistic Relation to the Self", Jeffrey Satinover, a Jungian analyst, offers these astute observations:
"The individual narcissistically bound to (the image or archetype of the divine child) for identity can experience satisfaction from a concrete achievement only if it matches the grandeur of this archetypal image. It must have the qualities of greatness, absolute uniqueness, of being the best and … prodigiously precocious. This latter quality explains the enormous fascination of child prodigies, and also explains why even a great success yields no permanent satisfaction for the puer: being an adult, no accomplishment is precocious unless he stays artificially young or equates his accomplishments with those of old age (hence the premature striving after the wisdom of those who are much older)."
The simple truth is that children get away with narcissistic traits and behaviours. Narcissists know that. They envy children, hate them, try to emulate them and, thus, compete with them for scarce Narcissistic Supply.
Children are forgiven for feeling grandiose and self-important or even encouraged to develop such emotions as part of "building up their self-esteem". Kids frequently exaggerate with impunity accomplishments, talents, skills, contacts, and personality traits – exactly the kind of conduct that narcissists are chastised for!
As part of a normal and healthy development trajectory, young children are as obsessed as narcissists are with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, fearsome power or omnipotence, and unequalled brilliance. Adolescent are expected to be preoccupied with bodily beauty or sexual performance (as is the somatic narcissist), or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion. What is normal in the first 16 years of life is labelled a pathology later on.
Children are firmly convinced that they are unique and, being special, can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associate with, other special or unique, or high-status people. In time, through the process of socialisation, young adults learn the benefits of collaboration and acknowledge the innate value of each and every person. Narcissists never do. They remain fixated in the earlier stage.
Preteens and teenagers require excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation. It is a transient phase that gives place to the self-regulation of one's sense of inner worth. Narcissists, however, remain dependent on others for their self-esteem and self-confidence. They are fragile and fragmented and thus very susceptible to criticism, even if it is merely implied or imagined.
Well into pubescence, children feel entitled. As toddlers, they demand automatic and full compliance with their unreasonable expectations for special and favourable priority treatment. They grow out of it as they develop empathy and respect for the boundaries, needs, and wishes of other people. Again, narcissists never mature, in this sense.
Children, like adult narcissists, are "interpersonally exploitative", i.e., use others to achieve their own ends. During the formative years (0-6 years old), children are devoid of empathy. They are unable to identify with, acknowledge, or accept the feelings, needs, preferences, priorities, and choices of others.
Both adult narcissists and young children are envious of others and sometimes seek to hurt or destroy the causes of their frustration. Both groups behave arrogantly and haughtily, feel superior, omnipotent, omniscient, invincible, immune, "above the law", and omnipresent (magical thinking), and rage when frustrated, contradicted, challenged, or confronted.
The narcissist seeks to legitimise his child-like conduct and his infantile mental world by actually remaining a child, by refusing to mature and to grow up, by avoiding the hallmarks of adulthood, and by forcing others to accept him as the Puer Aeternus, the Eternal Youth, a worry-free, unbounded, Peter Pan.
Tinkerbell: she fell in
love with and was the lifelong companion of a man who wouldn't grow up, Peter
Pan.
Boyish charm is irresistible. A childlike man harps on the maternal
heartstrings of every woman, rendering her protective and subservient.
Like every toddler, he is delightful, innocent, funny, unpredictable, and pure.
They both find Neverland: a realm of fantasy that suspends a melancholic and
ugly reality.
But then life happens: adults chores and responsibilities beckon. A partnership
of equal adults is the only recipe for coping with the vagaries and exigencies
of life. Women then dump the thrilling but immature in favor of the staid but
reliable. Commitment trumps infatuation every time.
These ineluctable breakups are traumatic: the woman feels that she had
abandoned and dumped her son, the infantile man is yet again discarded as a
forsaken child.
Typology of Childish Adult
There are three
types of adult children:
The Intellectually Disabled Adult Child
Is very curious but has severe learning disabilities and attention deficits. Is
very naive and trusts people because he or she misreads social and sexual cues
and body language. Has concrete thinking. Is often also autistic. Good hearted
but self-centred and lacks full-fledged empathy, so can be inadvertently cruel,
inattentive, and insensitive.
The Delightful Adult Child
Is superintelligent, very curious, unconventional ("fresh") thinker,
kind hearted, self-centered, and goal-oriented: all are qualities typical of a
child.
The Narcissistic Adult Child or Peter Pan
Refuses to fulfill adult roles and chores. Is parasitic and dysempathic. Has
dysregulated moods and affects. Egotistical, entitled, spoiled, and petulant.
To
fully grasp the narcissist's
mind, all you need to
know is one word: CHILD. The narcissist's personal development and growth had
been arrested between ages 2-3 (an extreme pathology, like mine) and 11
(high-functioning). This is also the range of his emotional age.
Here is a description of a quintessential CHILD
between the ages of 2 and 3 years old. It reads like a flawless, insightful,
and comprehensive encapsulation of the narcissist (and the grandiose
borderline):
Flippant, fickle, not committed or invested, no
long-term horizon or planning, unable to link consequences to actions
Curious, but gets bored easily (low boredom
threshold and tolerance)
Playful with toys both animate and inanimate,
alternating between solitary and gregarious
Grandiose
Tries to impress adults and convert them into
parental figures, insecure attachment style, hesitant object relations
Sexually immature, undifferentiated,
experimental, and autoerotic
Socially awkward, hypervigilant
Itinerant, desultory
Impulsive, reckless, defiant, demanding,
emotionally dysregulated
Dysempathic, aggressive, mildly cruel
Fantast, poor reality testing, delusional
Unreliable, irresponsible, reckless
Unskilled, autodidact, shallow
Imitative (playacting)
Petulant (low frustration threshold and
tolerance, temper tantrums), entitled, labile
The Narcissist’s Credo
I am a child tyrant emperor:
infantile, petulant, moody, divine, and delusional.
I am a Wunderkind: a boastful genius.
I want just to play. Nothing else. To have fun. That's all (shared fantasy). I
renounce reality and truth.
My game is: you are my vastly inferior slaves and disciples.
You must accept me as I am. You are expected to fully forgive and love me
unconditionally, regardless of my conduct or misconduct, even when I inevitably
hurt you badly time and again.
I am immutable, opinionated, obstinate, grandiose, labile, dysregulated, and
depressive. You should not try to change or fix me or to bargain with me: you
are not my equals.
You can play only with me, unless I let you play with others (when you are no
longer my playmates, just my servants).
I am entitled to take anything I want from you. I can do to you and with you
anything I wish. You have no right to protest, decline, or resist my demands.
You are my property, my chattel to dispose of and do with as I please.
You must obey my wishes unthinkingly and promptly, never disagree with me, and
even please me with your agony.
You have no right to expect or demand anything from me. If I give you anything,
it is because I choose to. I give only what I decide to give, usually only as
little of my time, attention, knowledge, and money as absolutely necessary to
keep you hooked and around as my playmates.
Only I decide which game we play, based on how capriciously bored or thrilled I
am at any given period.
If you are not fit to play my game, I lose all interest in you.
If you refuse to play my game exactly how and when I want it, or if you make
any demands whatsoever, I walk away and look for a new playmate.
Simple, really. And it works! I have had no reason to regret any of it over the
decades of my life. Compared to the overwhelming vast majority of humanity, I
am in a good place and have spent the time allotted to me on this Earth
precisely as I had wanted to: my way.
I spent the first 9 years of my life
being adored and adulated as a world-class genius prodigy (Wunderkind). I learned two lessons from this period, two coping
techniques and survival strategies:
1. I must remain a kid. A precocious child is always far more memorable,
awesome, and adorable than a talented adult;
2. I impress and imitate, I do not communicate or really exist.
I seek to overwhelm people with my intellect, cornucopia of new ideas, and
encyclopedic knowledge - all the while maintaining a childlike charm, demeanor,
and innocence.
As a pseudo-kid, I imitate
adult skills, traits, and behaviors: emotions, empathy, sex, making money. I
give out no man vibe, or even neuter vibe: only the vibe of a petulant freakish
kid.
I am not a person who does imitations - I AM the imitations. There is nothing
else and no one there. I am mere smoke and mirrors.
Sex with me is very pyrotechnic and accomplished, but soulless and objectifying
- a virtuoso performance to an audience of one; my "emotions" and
"empathy" ring hollow, and robotic; my body language is stilted and
forced. It all smacks of manipulation. Watch my video on the uncanny valley.
People in my milieu - especially women in intimate relationships with me - feel
that I am fake, off-key, artificial intelligence gone awry, a creepy childish
emanation or apparition.
They get alarmed and recoil in loathing and horror when confronted with the
shape-shifting alien being that I am, the reptilian that usurped the
holographic mimetic man they thought was there. They are traumatized by the
absence that is my sole existence.
To reel in his or her next
"intimate partner" (source of secondary supply and service provider),
the narcissist parades his or her "inner
child": the wounded, tearful,
tortured True Self. The male narcissist harps on the nurturing maternal
instincts of his prey and the female variant of the subspecies provokes the
paternal protective impulses of her quarry.
But isn't such display of vulnerability and pain an admission of imperfection
and the undermining of the narcissist's inflated grandiosity and fantasies?
There is no imperfection involved. The narcissist grew up being a victimized
child. This child is now a fossil. An exhibit. An old newsreel from before the
time of the narcissist's apotheosis. Having become a divinity, the narcissist
merely recounts the time he or she had been a mere mortal.
The narcissist's interlocutors misinterpret what he or she says to mean that
the narcissist is STILL a broken, vulnerable child in need of maternal or
paternal love and protection - not that he had merely been one once upon a
time. And this misinterpretation costs them dearly.
It is not a dynamic between
two adults, but between an adult and a child.
Yet, the child has the expectations of an adult and pretends to be one. You are
trapped with a deranged infant who firmly believes that he is a grown-up.
Then one day, he wakes up, looks in the mirror and sees a kid there. It is a
bad LSD trip, a psychedelic experience, terrifying.
When men refuse to grow up, they remain spoiled brats.
When women refuse to grow up, they become psychopathic men.
There is nothing that a spoiled brat hates and fears more than a psychopath.
There is nothing that a psychopath detests more than a spoiled brat.
Both genders are refusing to grow up at record rates.
Do the math. Draw your own conclusions.
When we come across someone who refuses to grow up, rejects adult chores, roles, skills, and responsibilities, assumes the mantle of a petulant child, and would not invest or commit in any undertaking or relationship - our reflexive reaction is revulsion coupled with disrespectful contempt.
Women feel deceived and fooled and they respond this way to a Peter Pan type: they shame and humiliate him in public, sometimes by openly and ostentatiously cheating on him with ripe adult males.
Men abscond with the Puer’s women and with his property, both material and intellectual. They ostracize him and subject him to a toxic mix of ritualized aggression and acidulous derision. If he is rich or famous or powerful, they await his downfall with glee or precipitate it maliciously and enviously.
These reactive behavior patterns are ancient and in big part biological. The stunted personal growth and arrested development of the eternal adolescent threaten the survival of the species by inhibiting procreation and child-rearing, for example.
The Puer Aeternus is also essentially a free-rider: he enjoys goods and services produced by others but evades rendering a productive contribution to the collective effort. His conspicuous absenteeism - often cloaked in a self-justifying ideology - undermines the survival and the welfare of the many by wasting scarce resources and potentials and by shirking the proportionate sharing of the communal burden.
Refusing to grow up is, therefore, an antisocial act and elicits the same attitudes and responses reserved to egregious criminal behavior.
Also Read
To Age with Grace (Narcissism in Old Age)
The Prodigy as Narcissistic Injury
Narcissists - Stable or Unstable?
Abusing the Gullible Narcissist
Narcissists and Social Institutions
The Narcissist's Confabulated Life
The Narcissist's Reality Substitutes
Narcissists, Disagreements and Criticism
The Opaque Mirror (Narcissism and Reality)
The Dual Role of the Narcissist's False Self
For the Love of God (Narcissism and Religion)
Portrait of the Narcissist as a Young Man
Beware the Children (Narcissists and Children)
The Entitlement of Routine (Narcissism and Entitlement)
Pathological Narcissism - A Dysfunction or a Blessing?
Transformations of Aggression (Narcissism, Rage, Envy)
The Enigma of Normal People (Narcissists and Social Cues)
The Intermittent Explosive Narcissist (Narcissistic Injury and Rage)
The Delusional Way Out (Narcissists and Deficient Narcissistic Supply)
Copyright Notice
This material
is copyrighted. Free, unrestricted use is allowed on a non commercial basis.
The author's name and a link to this Website must be incorporated in any
reproduction of the material for any use and by any means.
Frequently Asked Questions about Pathological Narcissism
Excerpts from the Archive of the Narcissism List
World in Conflict and Transition
Internet: A Medium or a Message?
Write to me: palma@unet.com.mk or narcissisticabuse-owner@yahoogroups.com