Envy: Unpicking the Cluster B Achilles’ heel
Envy and jealousy are so closely related in the public mind that it’s often hard to know the difference. LanguageTool have helpfully lent a hand with this: while envy is “the painful feeling of wanting what someone else has, like attributes or possessions”, jealousy is much more hostile: it’s feeling “threatened, protective, or fearful of losing one’s position or situation to someone else”. Envy is about getting more; jealousy is about losing less.
Cluster B disorder sufferers — particularly those with Narcissistic Personality Disorder — are well-documented to experience both, in profound quantities. The camps are broadly split: involving two parties, there are those who are envied by the NPD and those who are believed to envy the NPD. Involving more than two parties, there are those who provoke situational jealousy in the NPD: distractions to supply, competitors in social circles, etc. Narcissists actively pursue the first bunch. The aim is to control those individuals and their attributes: what one has, one no longer craves. While envy moves from an unconscious place, its motivations are reasonably conscious: a new car, a new house — the trigger is felt. But for clinical narcissists, could the depths of this tendency stretch back beyond all known drivers?
NPD is produced by integral human processes. We’ve all experienced the need for original supply in our mothers when we were born: this is primary narcissism. Every child needs a huge degree of initial input to survive and sees the provider as essential to their existence. The mother must mirror the infant externally in order to build its ego; if this goes to plan, the ego will later be mirrored by the self internally. But if things go awry and that child doesn’t receive enough supply, its self will be insufficient. It will unconsciously start to build a “false self” to get what it needs from the distracted parent.
Sometimes, the lack of mirroring isn’t the only problem. In cases where a child has a narcissistic parent themselves, that parent may subconsciously envy the child. The parent is no longer the centre of attention, and the diversion is their responsibility. Should that child show any special gifts or talents, woe betide them; Nathan Schwartz-Salant tackles this in his Jungian treatise Narcissism and Character Transformation:
“The child hears, “You have something special,” but with the underlying message, “I hate you for it.” The child’s psyche responds by identifying with the feeling of being very special, and splitting off from the feeling of being hated. The sense of specialness is continually inflated as a defence against the feeling of being hated.”
The NPD pot starts heating up: the core belief under the false self is here one of being despised. And while the child can’t afford to turn on its parent, it can subconsciously afford to turn on itself: planting the seed in the pathological narcissist not of self-love, but self-hatred.
Over time, this hatred turns into shame and envy, strangling the child with two beliefs: 1. that they’re unworthy of their own love, and 2. that other people don’t feel half as bad about themselves. Unable to confront either, the child projects them outwards in what Schwartz-Salant calls a defence against “the belief that no object will be willing to be idealised or controlled for [their] benefit. Instead, the belief is the opposite: no-one would ever care enough.” Ultimately, “this leads to hatred of the object of transference” — and in particularly malignant cases of NPD, to the conscious wish to destroy their targets.
Whether the child of a narcissist or not, clinical adult narcissists end up mirroring everyone externally, as a substitute for their self mirroring their ego internally. Because their self has been crushed at the starting line, this organic psychological mirroring never happens. But being permanently dependent on other people is made more challenging by the awareness that the NPD cannot give what those other folks can. As Schwartz-Salant says, “this is the tragedy of these patients: that they need so much from others while being unable to acknowledge what they are receiving because it would stir up envy.”
