What's behind a narcissistic man's rage?

A narcissist sees and experiences the world primarily with respect to his own needs. It is all about him; other people merely supply or frustrate these needs, seeming to lack individuality, dignity, or needs of their own.

There is a time in life, in infancy, when we are all narcissists. In this early developmental phase we implicitly believe the world revolves around us, and properly so: we have but to feel a need, and the world moves to meet it. The people who remain stuck in narcissism, whether everyday narcissism expressed as ordinary self-centredness or the extreme forms we label as pathologic, are the ones who never fully developed past that early stage. We graduate from a developmental phase only if our needs at that stage were fully satisfied. And in our society, most children do not get their needs met.

The growth of a healthy self depends on emotionally rich, attuned interactions with parents who are emotionally present and available. Stressed, depressed or anxious parents, or those who were themselves traumatized, may be incapable of providing their children with such interactions. In our increasingly alienated, isolating, and hyper-stressed culture, many children grow up under conditions characterized by what the seminal psychologist and researcher Alan Schore has called "proximal separation": the parents are physically there but often emotionally absent. In this context healthy human development is impaired. Thus narcissism pervades our culture.

From what dynamics does this narcissistic male anger flow? 

The rage against women is rooted in what the late feminist scholar Dorothy Dinnerstein identified as the "female monopoly of early child care," where an isolated woman is seen by the child as the sole source of nourishment, physical soothing, and emotional support. In a mobile and economically unstable society, it falls upon an individual female to become the entire world for the child. The male child, finding his needs frustrated, develops rage. As the brilliant Canadian psychologist Gordon Neufeld points out, "frustration is the engine of aggression."

Rage against the mother later becomes generalized into rage against women. In pathological cases, that hostility is acted out precisely in moments when intimacy is sought, such as sex, because it was in early moments of vulnerable intimacy that the narcissistic wound was sustained. The rage is an implicit memory of intense proximal separation. Many boys also witness and absorb the hostility of their overworked and emotionally alienated fathers and, unconsciously, blame their mothers for not having protected them.

The problem is worldwide and as old as civilization. We fool ourselves if we believe that our advanced society has come even near to resolving it. A new consciousness and a new conversation are needed. Jian Ghomeshi, in all his traumatized dysfunction and for all the pain he has inflicted, may have done us the favour of waking us up.

This post originally appeared in the Toronto Star

Source: https://drgabormate.com/jian-ghomeshi-problem-narcissistic-male-rage/