Ever wonder why there are so many wacko narcissists/sociopaths running things?
The microcosm is the macrocosm.
Yes, it starts All in the Family.
Over the course of a few generations, mainly after WWII in the US, family structures have been socially engineered to be narcissistic and/or sociopathic.
The Century of the Self
“Have we been unwittingly “sleeping with the enemy,” inducing trauma even as we try to heal it?”
In Consumerism and Identity: Some Psychoanalytic Considerations, we learn:
In On Narcissism (1914), Freud described the ego-ideal as the heir of infantile narcissism and as a psychic agency (an ego) capable of conscious self-observation…The Freudian concept of the ego-ideal is an amalgam of idealized images, fantasies and wishes against which an individual measures their experience. It represents an attempt in later life to recreate the condition of primary narcissism, the period of infancy when a child imagined itself to be the centre of a loving admiring world.
In this process, often referred to as the ‘ego project’, the ego-ideal can be built on cultural and professional achievements, on nostalgic recreations of a golden past, or utopian visions of a glorious future. (Lasch, 1980; Gabriel & Lang, 1995; Schwartz, 1990) The project involves a fashioning of an image in which an individual can admire their self and through which he/she can gain the respect of others.
Sigmund Freud, At the Root of Spychiatry
Some of the favorite tricks of the narcissist/sociopath are:
Creating Scapegoat and Golden Children
Playing the Martyr for Pity
Gaslighting
What is “Gaslighting”?
Are you being Gaslighted?
In The Sociopath Next Door, author Martha Stout reveals that:
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.
Sigmund Freud, At the Root of Spychiatry
