My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Women abused by narcissists and psychopaths often write to me, and a typical question is, his father is a narcissist, we divorced a few months ago, but he has visitation or custody rights.
You wrote that narcissism breeds narcissism. How can I prevent my child from becoming a narcissist under his father’s influence?
Well, to this kind of question, I usually answer.
Your son is likely to encounter a narcissist in his future. In a way, he will be better prepared to cope with them, more alert to their existence and chicanery, and more desensitized to their abuse.
For this, actually, you should be grateful. There is nothing much you can do otherwise.
Stop wasting your money, time, energy and emotional resources on this intractable problem of how to insulate your son from his father’s influence. It is a lost war, though in a just cause.
Instead, make yourself available to your son. The only thing you can do to prevent your son from emulating his father and becoming a narcissist is to present to him another role model of a non-narcissistic parent, you. Hopefully, when he grows up, your son will prefer your model, your behavior, your conduct and your example to his father’s.
But there is only that much that you can do. You cannot control the developmental path of your son.
Having unlimited control over your son is what narcissism is all about, and it is exactly what you should avoid at all costs, however worried you might be right now.
Narcissism does tend to breed narcissism, but not inevitably. Not all the offspring of a narcissist inexorably become narcissists, some of them, or actually the majority of them, don’t.
The narcissistic parent regards his or her child as a multifaceted source of narcissistic supply. The child is considered and treated as an extension of the narcissistic personality.
It is through the child that the narcissist parent seeks to settle open scores with the world. The child is supposed to realize the unfulfilled grandiose dreams and fantasies of the narcissistic parent.
This vicarious life-by-proxy can develop in two possible ways.
The narcissist can either merge with the child or be ambivalent towards him.
The ambivalence is the result of a conflict within the narcissist between his wish to attain his narcissistic goals through the child and his pathological destructive envy of the child and the child’s accomplishments.
To ameliorate the unease bred by such emotional ambivalence, the narcissist resorts to micromanaging the child’s life through a myriad of control mechanisms. These can be grouped into guilt-driven mechanisms.
The narcissistic parent would say, I sacrificed my life for you. Dependence-driven mechanisms. A typical narcissistic parent would say, I need you. I cannot cope without you. Goal-driven mechanisms, where the narcissistic parent will tell the child we have a common goal which we must achieve. And explicit mechanisms, where the narcissist will simply say, if you do not adhere to my principles, beliefs, ideology, religion, or any other set of values, and if you do not obey my commands, orders, and edicts, I will impose sanctions on you.
The exercise of such control helps the narcissist to sustain the illusion that the child is a part of him. Such sustenance calls for extraordinary levels of control on the part of the parent and extraordinary levels of obedience on the part of the child.
The relationship is typically symbiotic and emotionally vicissitudinal and turbulent. The child fulfills another important narcissistic function, that of narcissistic supply. There is no denying the implied, though extraordinary, immortality in having a child.
The early, natural dependence of the child serves to assuage the fear of abandonment that all narcissists share. Fear of abandonment is an important driving force in the narcissist’s life.
The narcissist tries to perpetuate the child’s dependence using the aforementioned control mechanisms.
The child is the ultimate secondary source of narcissistic supply. He is always around. He admires the narcissist. He accumulates and remembers the narcissist’s moments of glory. He loves the narcissist unconditionally, and owing to his wish to be loved, he can be extorted into forever giving without ever receiving from the narcissistic parents.
For the narcissist, the child is a dream come true, but only in the most egotistical sense.
When the child is perceived as reneging on his chief duty to provide the narcissistic parent with constant adoration, the emotional reaction of the narcissistic parent is harsh, sudden, and revealing.
It is when the narcissistic parent is disenchanted with the child that we see the true nature of this pathological relationship.
The child is then totally objectified.
The narcissist reacts to a breach in the unwritten conflict with words of aggression and aggressive transformations, contempt, rage, emotional and psychological abuse, and even physical violence.
The narcissist tries to annihilate the real child, brought to the narcissist’s awareness through the child’s refusal to act as before, through the child’s emerging autonomy.
The narcissist tries to substitute a subservient, edifying, former version of the child for the current growing, maturing, autonomous child.
The narcissistic parent tends to produce another narcissist in some of his children, but this outcome can be effectively countered by loving, empathic, predictable, just, and positive upbringing, which encourages a sense of autonomy and responsibility, differentiation, and individuation, separation in the child.
Provide your child with an alternative to his father’s venomous and exploitative existence. Trust your son to choose life of a death, love of a narcissism, human relations of a narcissistic supply.
