A Review of Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation

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Notes

¹ The Latin root of “patient” is patior, to suffer.

² This group seems to comprise his most fundamental group of influences, starting with his influential article on analytic love (Shaw, 2003), although he now seems more surefooted in, and committed to, the “relational canon” (Harris, 2011) of Aron, Benjamin, Bromberg, Ghent, Harris, I. Z. Hoffman, and Mitchell.

³ Other examples from my own clinical experience include the quasi-therapeutic cult that grew up around Ayn Rand, the Hare Krishnas, cult-like martial arts schools, and certain religious communities.

⁴ “… it is no mere poetic license to compare the mind of the neurotic to a double malformation, something like the so-called teratoma [tumor-like twin] which harbors in a hidden part of its body fragments of a twin-being which has never developed. No reasonable person would refuse to surrender such a teratoma to the surgeon’s knife, if the existence of the whole individual were threatened … I can picture cases of neurosis, in fact I have often met with them in which (possibly as a result of unusually profound shocks in infancy) the greater part of the personality becomes, as it were, a teratoma, the task of adaptation to reality being shouldered by the fragment of personality which has been spared. Such persons have actually remained almost entirely at the child-level, and for them the usual methods of analytical therapy are not enough. What such neurotics need is really to be adopted and to partake for the first time in their lives of the advantages of a normal nursery” (Ferenczi, 1930, pp. 441–442).

⁵ My parenthetical definitions are vastly oversimplified. The best-known work on these four loves by C. S. Lewis (1960) does not help much; he viewed each type through his particular theological lens.

⁶ We are not sure who began to use this expression (cf., Ogden, 2003).