Narcissistic Mortifications: Netanyahu, Biden, Trump

Trump, Netanyahu, and Biden suffered egregious public humiliations: having lost the 2020 Presidential elections, having suffered the indignities of the October 7, and having been exposed as the hapless subject of the ravages of cognitive decline in a most widely watched public debate.

These kinds of events are called “narcissistic mortifications”.

Narcissistic mortification is “intense fear associated with narcissistic injury and humiliation … the shocking reaction when individuals face the discrepancy between an endorsed or ideal view of the self and a drastically contrasting realization” (Freud in Ronningstam, 2013). Rothstein (ibid.): “… fear of falling short of ideals with the loss of perfection and accompanying humiliation”.

This fear extends to intimacy in interpersonal relationships (Fiscalini), unrealized or forbidden wishes and related defenses (Horowitz), and, as Kohut so aptly summarized it: “fear associated with rejection, isolation, and loss of contact with reality, and loss of admiration, equilibrium, and important objects.”

Kernberg augmented this list by adding: “fear of dependency and destroying the relationship with the analyst, fear of retaliation, of one’s own aggression and destructiveness, and fear of death.”

Narcissistic mortification, is, therefore, a sudden sense of defeat and loss of control over internal or external objects or realities, caused by an aggressing person or a compulsive trait or behavior.

It produces disorientation, terror (distinct from anticipatory fear), and a “damming up of narcissistic (ego-)libido or destrudo (mortido) is created” (Eidelberg, 1957, 1959).

The entire personality is overwhelmed by impotent ineluctability and a lack of alternatives (inability to force objects to conform or to rely on their goodwill). Mortification reflects the activity of infantile strategies of coping with frustration or repression (such as grandiosity) and their attendant psychological defense mechanisms (for example, splitting, denial, or magical thinking).

Early childhood events of mortification are crucial in teaching the baby to distinguish between the external and the internal, establish ego boundaries, recognize his limitations, delay gratification, and select among options.

Of course, it is possible to be overtaken by multiple internal and external mortifications (“traumas”) to the point that repression and dissociation become indispensable as well as compensatory cognitive deficits (omnipotent or omniscient grandiosity, entitlement, invincibility, paranoid projection, and so on).

Bergler and Maldonado reminds us that pathological (secondary) narcissism is a reaction to the loss of infantile omnipotent delusions and of a good and meaningful object, associated in the child’s mind with ideals, a loss which threatens “continuity, stability, coherence, and wellbeing” of the self.

In adulthood, a self-inflicted internal mortification, usually founded on these distortions of reality, compensates for an external one and disguises it and vice versa: an internal mortification such as an autoplastic defense (“It is all my fault, I made it happen”) restores a grandiose illusion of control over an external mortification while a persecutory delusion (an external mortification) replaces an internal mortification (“I have evil and hateful thoughts towards people”).

But, the only true solution to a mortification is the regaining of control and, even then, it is only partial as control had clearly been lost at some point and this cataclysm can never be forgotten, forgiven, or effectively dealt with.

The need to reframe narcissistic mortification is because – as an extreme and intolerably painful form of shame-induced traumatic depressive anxiety – it threatens the integrity of the self, following a sudden awareness of one’s limitations and defects (Lansky, 2000 and Libbey, 2006).

When they are faced with their own hopeless “unlovability, badness, and worthlessness”, mortified people experience shock, exposure, and intense humiliation, often converted to somatic symptoms. It feels like annihilation and disintegration.  

Hurvich (1989) described it as: “a virtually intolerable intolerable experience of terror, fright, or dread related to a sense of ‘overwhelmed helplessness, reminiscent of the overwhelmed helplessness of infancy … annihilation anxiety … ‘Fear of the Disintegration of the Self or of Identity’” (Libbey, 2006).

Libbey postulates that narcissistic mortification is a “sudden loss of the psychic sense of self, which occurs simultaneously with a perception that the tie to a self-object (Kohut, 1971) is threatened.” Kohut added: “if the grandiosity of the narcissistic self has been insufficiently modified…then the adult ego will tend to vacillate between an irrational overestimation of the self and feelings of inferiority and will react with narcissistic mortification to the thwarting of its ambitions.” Object relations theorists concurred: Bion’s “nameless dread”, Winnicott’s “original agonies” of the collapse of childish consciousness as it evolves and mature into an adult’s.

This may have to do with a lack of evocative constancy: “The capacity to maintain positively toned images of self and others with which to dispel feelings of self-doubt (Adler and Buie, 1979). Self-reflexivity – “the ability to oscillate easily among varying perspectives on the self” (Libbey, 2006) crucially relies on the smooth operation of evocative constancy (Bach, 1978, Broucek, 1982).

Libbey describes two strategies that narcissists use to restore a modicum of cohesiveness to the self. The “deflated” narcissist debases the self and inflates or idealizes “the object in order to reacquire it … It can include, for example, atonement, aggrandizement of the other, self-punishment, and self-flagellation … designed to appease and hold on to selfobjects.” Anna Freud presaged this with her concept of “altruistic surrender” (self-sacrificial and, therefore, self-disparaging altruism).

Another strategy, of “inflated” narcissists and revenge seekers, involves “debasement of the object … attacking the other, in order to aggrandize and re-stabilize the self. There is always a winner and a loser. Such narcissists ‘fight fire with fire’ or ‘take an eye for an eye’ … ‘arighting the scales of justice.’ There are only winners and losers, and they must be the winners … (Shamers) are also adept at short-circuiting the plunge into mortification altogether, preemptively expelling impending feelings of shame and defectiveness by humiliating the other … Whichever route is taken, the individual cannot recover from mortification until a tolerable, familiar self-state is re-acquired, either by re-establishing the other as an approving object, or by destroying the other, temporarily or permanently … narcissistic conceit, designed to project the defective self-experiences onto self-objects.”

Some narcissists are attracted to promiscuous, labile, and dysregulated women also because of their potential to cause mortification. In their homemaker phase, these women make the narcissist feel dead. But in their “borderline” stage, these intimate partners guarantee mortification and only mortification restores freedom from commitment and the adventure of the next shared fantasy.

Only mortification makes the narcissist feel alive and sexually aroused: sadism, masochism, and libido maximized and a recreation of the primary unresolved conflict. In the mortification crisis, the narcissist sees himself through other people’s eyes and stands a chance to free himself of the shackles of his taskmaster, the False Self, via re-traumatization. 

These women are the narcissist’s pawns: he selects them in order to fulfil roles in both the shared fantasy and the liberating antifantasy mortification.

They need to integrate in the shared psychosis, retraumatize the narcissist (reenact the unresolved conflict with his mother and mortify him), and free him to move on to the next shared fantasy. These women often protest: “We cheated on you because we felt that this is what you wanted, to please you, to prove you right”. The narcissist does not push them away – he cajoles them to push him away! 

This could lead to finally force the narcissist to accept and to internalize the insight that he is “very sick”: in itself a mortification, it is the first step in a therapeutic process of healing – or of giving up on himself and on life.

Treatment should focus on converting mortification to shame “which includes the capacity to tolerate it and to use it as a signal … Both defensive styles require continued dependence on selfobjects and must be mounted again and again. Tolerating bearable shame can make self-appraisal and self-tolerance possible, ultimately leading to psychic separation and self-reliance.”

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