Dear all,
Please let me know if you are unable to retrieve this PDF document. It was published in the
Psychiatric Annals 39:4 which generally requires a subscription to their journal or a one-time fee to read an article. This link appears to be 'free' for viewing.
Hugs,
CZ
"Mature love requires the establishment of a sustained relationship with a romantically attractive, non-incestuous object toward whom a certain amount of ambivalence can be tolerated and in relationship with whom affection and sensuality can both be expressed and received. This concept underscores the necessity to have mastered the oedipal realities of childhood (eg, feelings of smallness, rivalry, and exclusion) and to have found a love object that is neither a replica of the primary oedipal love object nor utterly devoid of its qualities. Besides this, capacity for separateness, respect for the lover’s autonomy, and affects of tenderness and care need to be brought under the spectrum of experiences collectively called “love.”"
"...Deficient in the capacity for empathic attunement, the narcissistic individual often fails to discern signals of readiness from the romantic partner. The narcissist might also not feel the need to subtly convey his own desire since he assumes that his need will automatically be met with gratification. Worse still, the narcissist might deliberately overlook the partner’s appeal signals in order to sadistically withhold affection from them. At such moments, the narcissist’s identification with the depriving mother of early childhood is unmistakably evident.
"...Excessive narcissism has a powerful deleterious impact upon an individual’s love life. I have categorized the resulting phenomena as pertaining to romantic love, sexuality, and the martial relationship. In all three realms, narcissistic individuals manifest behavioral rough edges and subjective distress. They have impaired capacities for sustained affection and sensuality. They also frequently make marital object choices that instead of ameliorating their pathology further consolidate their grandiose and self-centered defensive stance. The ordinary, admiration-seeking narcissist shows more problems in young adulthood and the shy narcissist during midlife; the malignant narcissist has more sadomasochistic elements in his love life than either of the other two types. Not surprisingly, the distress of these individuals seeps into the soul of their partners who seek help with depressive symptoms and impotent rage.
"Narcissistic men and women differ in the surface manifestations of their troubled love lives. Narcissistic men display sexual promiscuity coupled with a pronounced lack of tenderness, reciprocity, and affection in the context of sexual relations. Narcissistic women find it difficult to renounce autonomy in order to enter marriage. Some of them “gravitate from one famous man to another” since their desire for an ideal man is coupled with an equally intense tendency to compete with and devalue their partner. Both narcissistic men and women fail to simultaneously maintain self-concern and object-relatedness in the realm of affection and sensuality.
"Cultural factors also play a pathoplastic role in the phenomenology under consideration. For instance, in instinctually repressed societies with few rights for women, marriages of narcissistically dominant and sadistic men remain “stable” over time. Parallel avenues for extramarital sex, usually with socially inferior partners, are tolerated. When such couples migrate to countries where sexual mores are relaxed and where women find avenues for self-expression, they end up having a divorce. Breakthrough of sequestered homosexual tendencies in such immigrant narcissistic
men is also not infrequent. On the positive side, such cultures, where arranged marriages are the norm, might help a narcissistic individual marry a much healthier partner who, over time, might help ameliorate their psychopathology to a certain extent. In contrast to such scenarios, the sexually relaxed societies in the West unwittingly facilitate postponement of marriage by narcissistic individuals; this is because ample non-marital sexual outlets are available and there is less familial pressure for getting married.
"In summary, the ultimate clinical picture resulting from the impact of pathological narcissism upon love life depends upon the degree of overall psychopathology, the gender of the narcissistic individual, and the cultural context in which such love relations are established and carried on. Of course, there is the ever present, additional variable of serendipity. Random external events can at times spur internal development in unexpectedly positive and negative ways. The narcissist, regardless of his belief to the contrary, is no exception to this rule."
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* * * Salman Akhtar, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. Address correspondence to: Salman Akhtar, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Jefferson Medical College, 33 South 9th Street, Suite 210-C, Philadelphia, PA 19107; fax: 215-503-2851; or e-mail: Salman.
Akhtar@jefferson.edu.
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