René Girard XXIII: Deconstructing Narcissism

The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

One of my favourite intellectual performances by René Girard was his takedown of the popular understanding of narcissism. I found it so enlightening and useful that I often feel compelled to share it with others. This is what I intend to do here. But first, let’s put narcissism into perspective.

Several years ago I was first exposed to the public discussion of narcissism in the business world. The debate was about how common are narcissistic traits among CEOs and other types of leaders, and how bad of a thing is that?

A search on your news aggregator will reveal that the media still loves to chew on the topic. Last fall’s article from BBC talks about how narcissists, “these self-centred, over-confident people” are unfortunately “29% faster in their career progression to the position of CEO.” It describes narcissistic CEOs as a danger to society, villains that steal the bread out of the mouths of “hardworking-but-humble workers” and run their companies into the ground. It ends by advising its readers to learn how to survive in the unfair and sexist system that tolerates these brash and reckless frauds.

Meanwhile, Forbes, obviously a more business-friendly publication, wrote an article around the same time (and as though in response) summarising a study of narcissistic CEOs by Stanford University (coincidentally, René Girard’s academic home of many years). The study goes by the similar broad definition of narcissism, characterizing it with undesirable traits – “an inflated sense of self-importance, an excessive need for attention and admiration, and lack of empathy” – but also some “possibly acceptable” ones – “self-confidence, risk tolerance, a focus on goal achievement, and more extraverted personalities.” The article also insists that the concept of narcissism is vague, considering “the difficulty in distinguishing between narcissistic and self-confident leaders.” Finally, it throws an eye-poke by quoting a finding that narcissistic CEOs are more common in socially conscious enterprises. Take that, lefties!

The topic of narcissism in the corporate world remains hot. Every corporate scandal gives it a new boost, from Enron to Bernie Madoff, and nowadays with Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy.

As an ambitious, yet “hardworking-but-humble” MBA student in the early 2010s, and an impressionable one as well, I was devastated by the thought that I live in a universe in which my dream of earning millions of dollars in salary, commanding an army of white-collar foot soldiers all while eliminating global poverty was going to be foiled by a legion of demonic narcissists. Sociopaths, basically. Psychos.

From what I had read about them in the papers, these guys would be serial killers if you didn’t let them into corporate offices. And even there, they were probably snorting cocaine all day, one bad trip away from turning into the guy from The American Psycho and starting to murder blacks and prostitutes. 

“Is that what it takes to be successful?” was the question that tortured me.

But narcissism is a phenomenon far broader than the business world. It’s been a buzzword ever since Sigmund Freud’s On Narcissism, and it holds a central role in modern psychiatry. The popular website Psychology Today opens its entry on the topic thus: “Narcissists have a prominent place in the popular imagination, and the label ‘narcissist’ is widely deployed to refer to people who appear too full of themselves.” 

Girard critiques Freud’s conception of narcissism in his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, in the chapter titled “Psychoanalytic Mythology.” I’ll give a short summary, though I’m not a Freud expert (here’s some info).

Briefly, Freud distinguishes between “object-love” and “self-love.” He postulates that all children are dominated by “self-love” because to survive, they need to be the centre of attention of their parents. In adolescence, the sex-instinct (or the instinct to propagate the species) separates from the instinct for self-preservation and drives love outwards, to a greater or lesser degree, moving it towards “object-love,” or attraction to other people. Narcissism is lack of this object-love and excess of self-love. 

Freud thought narcissism was especially common among attractive women. He gives some reasons relating to adolescent bodily transformations, I think, as to why such women are full of self-adoration and look for men who are going to obsess over them as they obsess over themselves. Their ideal victims are males characterized by excessive “object-love,” perhaps men like Freud himself, intellectuals whose noble focus on others has the unfortunate side effect of turning them into slaves at the feet of these narcissistic femme fatales. (We can see that old uncle Sigmund wades here a bit into them “penis envy” waters, which have gotten him into all that trouble with feminists. One way or the other, no narcissistic alpha-male CEOs for him.)

Now let’s get into René Girard’s critique. As usual, we must start with his understanding of desire. Desire is distinct from mere instinct, which is any urge that is coded genetically to promote bare biological survival. Humans, like all animals, have a sex instinct, but unlike animals, we have a magnificent and terrifying structure of desire built on top of it.

If desire does not spring directly from genetics, where does it spring from? Girard answers that we learn our desires from others. Our desires are informed by the culture around us, by our mentors and role models. These he calls mediators of our desire. I see my mediator, whom I admire, either desiring or in possession of an object that appears to hold the secret to his happiness. The “object” may be a material possession, a romantic partner, or a social position. As I emulate the mediator in every way, I will also emulate his attraction to that object. In turn, the mediator takes my emulation as confirmation of the object’s value, and he guards it jealously. My model then becomes my rival. A third person may see us contending over that object, and he may join in our mimetic strife. This increases the value of the object further in the eyes of everyone involved. And so on.

To Girard, as to Aristotle, the defining trait of humans in distinction to other animals is our marvellous capacity to imitate. From it spring our intelligence, ability to learn, as well as our desires. But uniquely human powers of imitation created a uniquely human problem from the beginning. When individuals of a less intelligent animal species strive for the same object, such as a delicious carcass, they settle the dispute through a series of physical duels that end up establishing a pack hierarchy. From then on, the alpha individual gets to eat first, then the beta, and so on.

With humans, who figured out how to throw rocks and sharpen sticks, the duels tended to end up in mass death. To avoid that (and there may have been many times when they didn’t), they needed to establish a system of rituals and prohibitions – a culture – that was also founded on imitation, but this time a novel type of imitation that replicated behaviour suppressing conflictual instincts and promoting “cultured” behaviour conducive to social harmony.

Human culture of every time and place was preoccupied with preventing “acquisitive mimesis,” people desiring the same thing as their neighbours. This prohibition was famously enshrined in the tenth commandment. Ironically, it is the very progress of culture that led us to the point where, today, we have trouble acknowledging that we desire according to the desire of others. We have it so drilled into us that imitating the desires of others is bad that we can’t admit that we’re guilty of it.

To Girard, romanticism is all the cultural attitudes that celebrate authentic desire, unaware that it’s all a mirage. The romantic usually places the collective in opposition to the authentic individual. He sees the collective as a soulless mob looking to stunt and oppress individuality as a source of disorder that threatens the collective’s power structure.

It is precisely this blindness to mimesis, with its corresponding lie of authentic desire, that warps the modern understanding of narcissism. Starting with Freud and coming to today’s reference websites, narcissism is understood to entail authentic self-love, pathological as it may be. The narcissist is credited with a self-sufficient swagger reminiscent of ancient deities: he is arrogant, charismatic, grandiose, dominant. To be fair, “the need to be admired” is also cited as a narcissistic trait, but its central significance is not recognized.

What is missing from the picture is the observer – you, me, us – who see the narcissist as such. Once we zoom out and look at the narcissist in relation to those who are affected by him or her, we can observe the complete picture of mimesis at work. We can see the dynamic of the triangular desire.

The narcissist and his observer, his victim, unknowingly imitate each other in their desire to possess the same object and to achieve the same transcendental being that the object appears to bestow upon its possessor. What creates the difference between the narcissist and the victim is that the narcissist is convinced that he already possesses that transcendence, and the victim does not. The victim objects to the narcissist’s claims, but his frustrated objections are not quite convincing. He “doth protest too much.”

Consider Freud and his narcissistic woman. Freud and the woman share in the fascination with the woman’s body as a prized object endowed with transcendence: sexual nirvana, elevated social status, etc. To be sure, Freud is ahead of the game compared to a completely bewitched admirer, for he is critical of the woman, but the proof of his lingering fascination with her is precisely his concept of object-love - the object must be significant to merit its own category of love! In her self-love, the woman possesses an attitude of which Freud is incapable.

Yet Freud’s and the woman’s fascination with the woman’s body are mimetic – they copy it from each other. They feed and reinforce each other’s fascination. The woman is convinced that she is special by her many suitors, not by some mysterious developmental - or genetic - predisposition to arrogance. The attention she receives provides abundant nourishment for what Freud would call her “ego.” But ego, as useful and legitimate of a concept as it may be in day-to-day life, is a mystifying abstraction. It muddies the waters. What is really happening is that the woman collaborates with her suitors in transfiguring her own body into a sacred object – she joins the crowd of worshippers in venerating it. The only thing that distinguishes her from other worshippers, that makes her a narcissist and feeds her ego, is that she is the owner of the object of worship.

The woman’s “self-love” and her admirer’s “object-love” are not categorically different, they are the same obsession over the woman’s body, which the two learned from each other. The body itself, the object, is secondary to the mimetic interaction of the woman and the admirer, or the narcissist and his victims in general.

Now, not all attractive women, nor men, nor successful people are narcissists. Those who are not are those who refuse to plug into the positive feedback loop of desire with others and participate in the group sacralization of their personal success. They overcome a great temptation.

Freud’s conception of ego is a mystifying abstraction because, like all myths, it covers up an embarrassing truth. In this case, the truth is that our sense of self-worth is built entirely on what others think about us. We do not have an internal generator of self-worth. Interpreted in the light of mimetic theory, the size of one’s ego can perhaps be understood as the degree to which one can persuade himself and others of one's self-sufficiency. To be sure, the ability to do so may be founded on real differences in talent, ability, or physical attractiveness, but self-sufficiency remains a lie.

Narcissism is ego at a grander (or more pathological) scale: it is a strategy to convince others of the transcendence of one’s self-sufficient and therefore transcendental being. But the strategy cannot be deliberate. Girard insists that a narcissist must himself be as deluded about his transcendence as his victims. You can’t sell a product, after all, that you don’t believe in yourself. The narcissist’s delusion is what makes him a suitable dancing partner to his observers. It is what generates his pathology. 

The myth of self-sufficiency leads us to talk about our own sovereign ego, but it also leads us to bestow others with still greater, even immaculate egos – with narcissism. In this way we make veritable idols out of them. We are needy, flesh-and-blood humans, and they are genetically programmed, stone-hearted idols, motionless in their self-sufficiency, yet demanding our tribute and feeding on our lifeblood.

By cropping the picture of the narcissist to include the individual only, and exclude the society around him, modern psychiatry attempts to isolate the subject in its peculiar type of “lab environment.” But by looking at the individual alone it cannot see the mimetic, deeply interpersonal structure of narcissism. It ends up, like Freud, with mystification rather than revelation. The narcissist is found to be a strange animal; narcissism is a mental illness, a mysterious product of shadowy biochemistry. WebMD proclaims:

“The exact cause [of narcissism] is not known. Like most mental and personality disorders, it’s likely due to a complex combination of factors including: genes, environment, including parent-child relationships, neurobiology (the connection between your behaviour and your nervous system).”

Like scientists in general, psychiatrists are prone to hacking reality into digestible pieces that are meant to increase our understanding, but in this case at least, they obscure it. To that extent, “social science” here operates in the same manner and for the same purpose as mythology (and its accompanying rituals, which often end in hacking a sacrificial offering and distributing its pieces equitably among hungry revellers). Girard argues that science inherits this habit all the way from Plato, one of its great founding figures. Plato famously conceives of cosmos made up of distinct and irreducible forms, which include things like chairs and beds. In psychoanalysis, the mind is hacked into irreducible and unexplained conscious and subconscious; love is hacked into object-love and self-love; we get the id, ego, and superego; then narcissism itself is split into its grandiose and vulnerable species (as defined by WebMD).

* * *

Our narcissistic CEO does not appear as firmly enthroned in his narcissistic self-sufficiency as a femme fatale from Freud’s belle epoque era. The increasing accusations of narcissism against him are indicative that the idol is teetering on his pedestal. The unquestioning worship previously accorded him has begun acquiring negative connotations; the acolytes are beginning to suspect that the divinity may be made of sullied stuff, things like personality disorders, arrogance, and such. 

This lesser narcissism approaches a form of sadomasochism, a topic on which Girard elaborates elsewhere in the book. The narcissistic CEO is a sadist, and his underachieving hater is a masochist. Both are preoccupied with the same desire – corporate success. The sadist is a halfway actor. He role-plays success, but only because he believes in the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach. And the masochist falls for his act.

Yet again we have the positive feedback loop of mimetic desire. To fascinated onlookers, the narcissistic CEO's transgressive success and self-sufficient bliss give him an aura of some demonic deity. To the narcissist, the indignation of the onlookers serves as proof that he “has what it takes”, that he has gotten hold of kudos of the Homeric epics or mana of Polynesian myths. The envy of the onlookers convinces the CEO of his transcendence. If he was faking it before, now that he’s envied, he has the affirmation that he has finally made it.

The narcissism game has levels. In the highest reaches, those occupied by many celebrities and billionaires, we barely see any narcissism at all. We see only the serenity, mastery, and divine auto-sufficiency. In its lower spheres, where the narcissist is not so successful, we recognize the cracks in the armour of narcissism more readily. This is where we perceive the narcissist as “vulnerable.” In the lowest reaches, we readily perceive the self-centeredness of losers as despair for attention, as a cry for help. These losers’ attempts to convince people around them of their transcendence have failed miserably and turned into a joke.

A catastrophic failure of narcissism occurs when the push to display an aura transcendence derails from reality and the narcissist becomes a pathological liar. This will definitely get you diagnosed. I’m talking about the person who creates his whole persona and his whole life story out of pure lies, and does so with astounding attention to detail and without a trace of hesitation. The domineering, transcendent other that the narcissist strives to become, and to convince others that he is, now becomes a demon that has taken possession of him. He counters the lack of credulity in his audiences by showering them with ever more grandiose lies. Narcissist as pathological liar is the extreme case of that mode of narcissism that manifests itself primarily as lack of genuine personality and its replacement with an artificial mask.

But even in its functional forms, ones ascribed to celebrities and CEOs, narcissism implies that a degree of pathology has sullied the divine-self sufficiency of the narcissist. Its very existence suggests that our culture is becoming disenchanted with great individuals, who no longer command unequivocal admiration that was theirs in eras pasts. Narcissists are failed seducers.

The toppling of idols is indeed characteristic of modernity. Previous eras had no notion of narcissism to the extent that social hierarchies were much more stable. Social classes and social roles were kept strictly separate. But to perceive someone as a narcissist, we must perceive him as possessing something that we ourselves subconsciously covet. Narcissism is indicative of the attenuation of social boundaries characteristic of the modern era.

In eras before that of Freud, a man wouldn’t accuse a woman of something like narcissism because of course that implies frustrated desire on his part. But he would be too ashamed to own up to desiring something outside of his reach. Such desires were taboo because, like the plague, they were dreaded as causes of social collapse, chaos, and death. Imagine a medieval peasant accusing his lord of narcissism. “Off with his head!”

(Now compare that to the attitude of that most modern of today’s leaders, Elon Musk. In response to accusations of narcissism, he tweeted, and I may be paraphrasing: “I may be a narcissist, which is probably true, but at least I’m productive.”)

What about the myth of Narcissus itself, you say, was that not from an era before Freud? It was, but what the Greeks took out of the myth was not the same as what Freud did. Freud’s reworking of the story was yet another myth, crafted for modern audiences. Precursors to the modern concept of narcissism are rather to be found in literature and theatre, in various coquettes and seducers of great comedians.

Nevertheless, Freud’s theory of narcissism, though it had to wait for Girard for its great resolution, was the beginning of a great revolution. His entire life’s work, including also his ideas on repression, the subconscious, foundational murder, Oedipus complex, and taboos, was a pioneering tentative to diagnose quintessentially modern problems. They heralded much of modern social science, including Girard’s mimetic theory.

Girard, like all great theorists, did not come out of nowhere to crash the party of established science. He was the great synthesizer that tied together its many loose ends.

Neither are Girard’s intuitions alien to mainstream culture. He frequently pointed out that great literature always carried an implicit understanding of the mimetic nature of desire, which was its great advantage relative to science - and relative to Freud - in shedding light on the human condition. Shakespeare’s tragic and comic heroes, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Dostoevsky’s underground man, and Proust’s many snobs are all tossed by the currents of mimetic desire. The world’s seducers and charmers who do not exhibit the pathologies of narcissism seem to have an intuitive mastery of it. Modern advertising is built on mimetic desire. The scientific mind, on the other hand, with its penchant for isolation and classification of objects, has had an especially big blind spot for it.

Yet, Girard himself follows a scientific trend in moving away from what he calls “platonism,” the penchant for hacking phenomena into endless categories, and moving towards an "evolutionary approach" to building his theory. This approach has Darwin, of course, as its great exemplar. But the trend can be seen in other sciences, like theoretical physics, which have exhausted the approach of splitting the universe into an ever-expanding list of fundamental particles and are now exploring more unified theories. It can even be observed in the latest psychiatry, which is moving away from labyrinthine categorizing of “personality disorders” and beginning to talk about “spectrums.” (Alas, some other fields of social sciences continue to explain human behaviour by creating ever more categories…)

But wait, if Girard’s take on narcissism is “science,” what evidence is there that he’s right? What evidence is there that narcissism does not spring from within the individual, that it is a position within a system of relationships?

To see the relational or “interdividual” nature of narcissism, consider what happens when the relationship disappears. What happens to the narcissistic woman when she loses her admirers? What happens to the CEO or an actor who falls from grace? In the least, their narcissism deteriorates into one of its more pathetic forms. Or it disappears altogether. The narcissist may then begin to be viewed as a victim by others, and of others. Or they may go through a spiritual conversion, which recognizes the emptiness of the game that was played. One way or another, their supposedly intrinsic narcissistic traits crumble or disappear altogether.

Another way to perceive the relational nature of narcissism is to look at a system of desire in which you do not participate. Imagine a group of people who are into something that means nothing to you. Say you travel to some remote island on which everyone is obsessed with collecting seashells. You may observe the islanders competing with and resenting each other as they hoard seashells, and describing some of their winners like how we describe our narcissists. But you, as long as you retain your indifference to seashells, will find the whole affair comical. The narcissism of the seashell “billionaire,” torturous as it is to the islanders, would merely appear amusing to you.

The reason we have difficulty getting over the narcissism of the rich and the beautiful of our own culture is that we feed their narcissism by wanting to be like them (or with them).

So, in the end, what would be Girard’s advice for dealing with narcissists? It would be simple: stop seeing them as narcissists. Again, narcissism is not something that exists inside the individual, but within a relationship. Or, if you can’t afford so much compassion, stop looking at them altogether. It is your gaze that feeds their narcissism. And like raccoons, narcissists go away once you stop feeding them.

I don’t know how effective modern psychiatry is in curing narcissism. Judging by how widespread the problem is claimed it be, or rather how fast it appears to be growing, it seems that it is not very effective. Girard and the two psychiatrists with whom he wrote Things Hidden back in 1978, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, didn’t think that it was, either. 

At some point in the book, the three men discuss how, if psychiatry fails to cure the narcissist or his victim, it’s because the psychiatrist collaborates with his patient in the mystification of desire. Like his patient, the psychiatrist is under the false impression that the narcissist truly possesses self-sufficiency. Yet he may suspect the truth when, during talk therapy, he advises the victim to stop “enabling” the narcissist. Otherwise, he jumps all too readily to prescribing pills.

Someone can email Dr. Oughourlian on this topic, but from what I’ve gathered, the three authors would have agreed with the old prescription: Psychiatrist, cure thyself!

Read more in the book Catharses.