READING TIME: 4 Minutes
Narcissism: Benign versus Malignant
Self-centeredness in leaders does not necessarily portend dysfunction. Extraordinary levels of self-confidence and high levels of pride in one’s achievements might even be considered prerequisites for a successful career in politics, as a leadership role requires the promotion of one’s own views and the capacity to persuade others of one’s capacity to enhance the prosperity of one’s organization or nation.
Two capacities are typically retained in the narcissistic leader:
- A capacity to persistently attend to the way things really are, and
- A capacity to self-correct that continually adjusts and responds to changes in the way things really are.
When the above two capacities are retained, the narcissistic leader may be said to manifest a benign form of Narcissism. If the leader’s capacity for reality contact and self-correction is impaired, he manifests malignant narcissism.
The Centrality of Work
The leader who manifests benign narcissism retains the capacity to distinguish between the success that he imagines will be realized from his work, on the one hand, with the way things really are as a result of his work, on the other. In addition, he retains a corresponding capacity to self-correct: when confronted with evidence that a problem has not been addressed or has been made worse by his efforts, he can change his behavior to generate responses that conform more closely to that which is demanded by the reality-based problem.
This capacity to persistently recognize, attend to, and self-correct is impaired in the malignant narcissist. The malignant narcissist experiences all that he does as uniquely brilliant and efficacious. From his perspective, all he does is necessarily genius because such efforts originated in his own mind. The point of reference that the malignant narcissist uses to determine whether a thought or action is correct, beneficial, or great resides not in the real outcome of his efforts but in the degree to which he conceives the thought or action as having originated in himself.
The way things really are is not only irrelevant to the malignant narcissist: exposure to anything resembling real evidence is experienced as deeply insulting and is likely to generate a hostile response. Although information that might contradict the malignant narcissist’s notions of his own greatness is often ignored, malignant narcissism is by no means an exclusively passive process: The malignant narcissist actively seeks to erase from consciousness any indication inconsistent with his own greatness.
Why the Break with Reality Can Only Worsen
Two processes are inevitably set in motion when the Malignant Narcissist assumes power. The first process occurs within the malignant narcissist’s mind. Because he lacks the capacity to self-correct in response to feedback that indicates that actions or policies he has enacted have led to negative outcomes, negative outcomes that ensue from his actions begin to accumulate, to an extent that the health and well-being of the organization or nation led by the malignant narcissist becomes increasingly conspicuous. The malignant narcissist’s capacity to apprehend that his group’s situation is deteriorating under his leadership is impaired, however, so that his speech and actions are increasingly at odds with – and oftentimes diametrically opposed to – the way things really are. A vicious circle develops whereby the worsening of the reality-based situation increases the visibility of leader’s incapacity for reality contact, which, in turn, precipitates speech and actions in the leader that are increasingly out of synch with that which is demanded by the reality-based situation. The degree of dysfunction manifest in the leader becomes increasingly conspicuous to a growing number of stakeholders.
The second process set in motion when the malignant narcissist assumes power is interpersonal in nature. The term “malignant” is germane because the impairments manifest in the leader “metastasize” to his subordinates. To retain employment and access to power, subordinates must relinquish any evidence of reality contact such that they must not only automatically comply with the leader’s dictates but must also mirror the leader’s responses to evidence inconsistent with greatness of everything the leader says and does. The actual work performance and level of functioning in subordinates may be entirely irrelevant to the leader, but subordinates are obligated to respond to criticism or feedback inconsistent with the leader’s greatness in the same manner as the leader: they must “fight back” by vigilantly attacking all who question the greatness of all the leader says or does. Failure to do so will lead to their dismissal – or worse. An incapacity to speak and act in a manner commensurate with the way things really are is thus a prerequisite for remaining employed by the malignant narcissist.
The two processes culminate in negative outcomes, for the impairments manifest in the leader proliferate, increasingly divorcing the leader and his team from contact with reality and further compromising his capacity to correct dysfunction. While some “true believers” may continue to blind themselves to reality as a means of retaining access to power, increasingly large numbers of people affected by the malignant narcissist are eventually compelled to recognize (or at least intuit) that their situation has deteriorated. They begin to recognize that their leader is incapable of recognizing or improving situations with which he is confronted, and use terms such as “unhinged”, “unwell”, “unfit” or even “crazy” to describe him. A process of correction then begins that was formerly precluded by impairment in the malignant narcissist but that is now externally compelled by processes his impairments set in motion.
Notes:
The term “malignant narcissism” was introduced by Erich Fromm in his book The Heart of Man: His Genius for Good and Evil in 1964 (Harper & Row).
The term was expanded upon by Otto Kernberg. In Kernberg’s psychoanalytic theory, malignant narcissism includes grandiosity, antisocial behavior, paranoid tendencies, sadism, lack of conscience, and a pattern of aggression that is consistent with the person’s self‑image such that it does not generate an internal conflict. Kernberg describes malignant narcissism in his influential book Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies, published in 1984 by Yale University Press.
Workosophy 