Daniel Shaw on Traumatic Narcissism

Daniel Shaw advocated for transparency and demystification when speaking to the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, on Saturday, February 2, 2019, about traumatic narcissism. He noted patients can benefit from both psychoeducation about the therapeutic process and from understanding of how negating, narcissistic parents can make both separation and connection unsafe-- engendering a disorganized attachment, Mary Main’s ‘fright without a solution.’  Likewise, patients can benefit from understanding something about the analyst’s mind. One part of psychoeducation includes how narcissists disavow and project their own shame and dependency needs, then degrade the other (child, follower) in order to uphold their own delusions of superiority and grandiosity.

Shaw, himself a cult survivor, became interested in how sociopathic, malignantly narcissistic leaders fashion their abusive, exploitative relationships with their followers. He came to recognize that families, workplaces, houses of worship, and politics can also function like cults, where a charismatic leader denigrates others to preserve the delusion of omnipotence. The traumatizing narcissist grooms others to believe that they are the ones who desire what it is that the traumatizing narcissist is desiring. The relationship of the traumatizing narcissist is subjugation, and it is maintained through shame and fear. Sometimes patients may want to subjugate themselves to an idealized, ‘omnipotent’ therapist, while a therapist may prefer to negotiate power and authority. In moving toward transparency, the therapist may eschew defensive opacity and not be the silent, still faced analyst of old who turned the patient’s complaints back on the patient.

The negating, narcissistic parent calls the child ‘selfish, weak, immoral’ for having needs. Only the narcissistic parent’s needs are valid. They do not apologize or admit wrong doing. There is no recognition of the child’s subjectivity. Abandonment is a looming threat. The child may then grow up to disown her/his childhood rather than feel its shame (as Eugene O’Neill did ). To survive, the child  may also externalize their shame and dependency, later becoming traumatizers themselves; or they may internalize the ‘badness’ [Fairbairn] and remain objectified and subjugated in subsequent relationships. Just as the child was ‘gaslighted’ by the parents who denied their cruelty, so, later, the rejected, betrayed part of self may give way to the traumatizer part of the self which attacks and blames the self (‘It’s your own fault.’) or others (who can never do enough to compensate for what has been done to the child self). In therapy, these multiple, disparate parts may be encouraged to be in conversation with one another, so that disavowed shame might be openly mitigated and defensive grandiosity might be tamed.