Narcissism: The Untreated Child of Modern Psychology’s Spiritual Divorce (Part 2 of 2)

The early psychoanalysts—going back to Freud’s 1927 work The Future of an Illusion— had considered anything spiritual or religious as fundamentally illusory, and God but a delusional outgrowth of an Oedipal complex; while narcissism had been considered untreatable.

Even Jung—who panned Freud’s book—thought that yoga shouldn’t be attempted by anyone having a telephone. And when I attended the Zurich institute in the early 1970s, there was a hesitant regard toward anything which might unseat the ego—whether yoga, meditation, or psychoactive substances. As if even Jungian analysts were still conducting business under the banner of Freud’s mantra.

In a way, these early clinicians shouldn’t be blamed for their devaluing regard of religion and spirituality. For the kind of religion and spirituality then largely practiced in the West was largely coasting on fumes, and burdened by dog-eared dogmas that left people subject to repression—a bane of their age; just as narcissism has become for ours.

On the other hand, the devaluing of all religion and spirituality threw out the baby along with the bathwater--not dissimilar to the impulse that outlawed the previously prevailing religious and spiritual practices by Theodosius I. Evolution isn’t an unbroken trail of success, but one littered with false starts and regressions. Just as cultures can experience cognitive revolutions, they can later undergo damaging cultural losses that only impede evolution.

In shrugging incapable shoulders toward narcissism (much like Trump toward the coronavirus) and by placing spirituality outside of its purview, the early psychoanalysts had failed to see spiritual awakening and the transformation of narcissism as two wings of the same inner work. Meditative practices and other spiritual tools that subcultures of adepts had employed for millennia were left unused by the side of the road.

Lacking both these tools--and any training in how and when they should be employed-- perhaps it’s no wonder that the early psychoanalysts considered narcissism untreatable. For narcissism is as much a spiritual problem as it is a psychological one. (Seeing the two as separate gives birth to stunted offspring: a spirit-less psychology, an ethnocentric religiosity, a spirituality that can lack psychological savvy). And narcissism simply can’t be fully addressed when psyche and spirit remain divorced from each other.

For even a clinically valid view of narcissism—one that references the correct number of diagnostic criteria to properly give the diagnosis-- can still remain blind to what the complete opposite of narcissism—and thus its full healing--even looks like. Lacking reference to a more demanding standard, and the exemplars from spiritual lineages who have embodied it (and the practices that enabled them to do so) has limited the scope of what a therapy might provide.

It has also diminished psychology’s view of a more commonly experienced narcissism that has now become normative, “the narcissism of everyday life”—while only able to recognize it in a tiny, more florid fraction of the population deemed to have this personality disorder.

Yet if we think narcissism only applies to those people—or that president—it may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. (And all of us have a bit of char on our pot. It’s just in the ether of our age). And so, it may be at least as useful to see narcissism as a cultural epoch’s developmental and evolutionary challenge, as it is to view it as a personality disorder only suffered by a minuscule fraction of the population.

At some point, modern psychology might profit from a fresh look at some of the assumptions it’s still operating from—lest it find itself increasingly irrelevant to the spiritual, political, developmental, and environmental challenges we’re facing today. For these challenges are interconnected.

Like narcissism itself, the polarized, political “meme warfare” suffered today is a case of arrested development. One that has left us with a malignant narcissist in the White House; and enabled by a political party now operating from a pre-18th century world-view impervious to science, having similarly regressed back to “the divine right of kings”—with approximately 40 percent of the population only able to echo the Narcissist in Chief.

And to further complicate matters, a cultural force that should be expected to help us with our various forms of arrested development hasn’t quite been up to the task. For in the last two editions of the official manual of American psychiatry, we still see the lingering impact of psychology’s early, spiritual divorce.

The 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was published in 1994. It gave us the official estimate of the prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Americans (0 to 6.2%) still considered valid today. And in this 900 plus page doorstop there are a total of two sentences for the entire category of religious and spiritual problems.

And it’s hard to know if this was due to how little American psychiatry has understood religious and spiritual problems, or how marginally it still held their significance. Though humanity has been suffering from spiritual and religious problems—including its narcissism—throughout its history, and no less so today than thousands of years ago when narcissism was first being recognized.

What seems more certain is, how difficult it has been for a lot of Americans to make a pivotal developmental and evolutionary leap. Though we’re considered a “developed” nation, that’s mostly just true technologically. We’re still mired in divisive polarizations that have left us less able to adapt to the unique challenges facing us today—whether they be the preservation of the rule of law, responding to climate change, or the COVID-19 pandemic.

And when even the current edition of American psychiatry’s official manual (DSM-5) estimates that the prevalence of narcissism in Americans could be as low as 0 percent, it might be evident to even a moderately observant layman, that narcissism has been, and still is being narrowly conceived. And hence, badly in need of a “re-visioning.”

This re-visioning is part of a new, more comprehensive “cognitive revolution” urgently needed now. For the stakes couldn’t be higher. The survival of American democracy—and the fate of our species—may depend on it.