Moana is a movie about knowing who you are. Moana follows the voice inside her heart that calls her, and finds out who she is. In the process, she tells Te Fiti and Maui who they are. This article is about Maui the narcissist.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder, like seemingly all personality disorders, is caused by child abuse. In NPD, a lack of unconditional love from your parents means you never learn how to unconditionally love yourself. You feel that you only deserve to love yourself if you’ve earned it. So you spend a lifetime trying to prove you’re the perfect best person. Just to achieve the bare minimum of feeling like a decent person. To feel like you deserve to exist, and don’t deserve to listen to the whispering voice inside your heart that says to kill yourself.
We don’t know why some abused children turn into narcissists instead of borderlines, schizoptypals, or antisocials. It might have to do with the specific nature of the abuse, or with genetics, or with a lot of different factors.
But Maui’s childhood is the perfect kind of childhood to create a narcissist.
I had human parents. They… They took one look and decided they… did not want me. They threw me into the sea… like I was nothing. Somehow I was found by the gods. They gave me the hook. They made me… Maui.
The love Maui’s parents gave him was not unconditional. Maui failed to be what they wanted, for reasons entirely outside his control and his understanding, and his parents sentenced him to death for it. So why wouldn’t he feel like all narcissists, that in his base state, being a mere person, he deserves to die? Maui’s salvation was being taken in by the gods themselves. He was only treated like he deserved to exist when he was among gods. So, his entire identity in terms of being someone who deserves to live, is having power and divinity and magic and doing great works. That’s the only context in which he knows love. He doesn’t feel safe being without greatness, because he thinks it means being without love.
Maui became a hero, and he became loved by humans. He can’t separate the two. And even being a demigod, the guy needs to feel accepted by his native kind. At the very least, he needs to feel that his existence is a net good. That’s why he’s so easily manipulated by Moana, a teenager, into joining her and returning the heart. She tells him that humanity no longer loves him. Essentially, that his existence is no longer justified. This hits on his deepest trauma. Maui needs to be a hero and to be loved. He needs grandiosity.
At his greatest, Maui’s grandiosity raises everyone around him. You’re welcome for that. Besides his great deeds to help humanity, Maui is capable of stunning kindness as they arrive at Te Fiti for the first time and he tells Moana how amazing she is. Narcissists know how to make someone feel awesome about themselves, because we have no choice but to do it for ourselves every day.
But when Maui is feeling bad, when the object that he associates with being loved and treated like he deserves to exist is damaged, Maui becomes less nice. When his fishhook is broken, Maui is just as effective at tearing Moana down. With his walls of grandiosity shattered, Maui’s overpowering shame can rush in, bearing jealousy and anger upon its tide. Maui tears Moana’s ego down because he can’t bear to think that she’s better than him. He’s searching and flailing desperately, like a drowning man, looking for a reason to believe he deserves to be alive. Even the tiny comfort of being better than a teenage girl is like a piece of driftwood that might mean safety from this suffocating death. He can’t control it, his instincts say he’s dying and this is the way to live.
NPD is a powerful destructive force, in equal measure to its potential to create greatness. Maui is a great, and a destructive person. This duality exists within him as it does in all narcissists. It is because Moana knows who she is that he can wrangle Maui’s ego and help him overcome his disability to do great things. This isn’t a burden a teenager should have to bear. But the ocean chose Moana because it knew that she could do it.
And when Maui’s mental health is supported, he is the hero he claims to be.
