Parent-child/family
Parent-child and any family relationship are based on the same principles of a narcissistic abuser. The narcissist needs validation of self and feelings of power and control. Results of research show that misbehavior in their children, for example, may provoke them to physically make them believe the child's misbehavior is a direct rebuke of their authority. The same can be true for any family members, although the dynamic between siblings, for example, is different than that between a parent and their child.
Workplace
Research suggests that narcissistic abusers can and do climb the corporate ladder more readily and are able to charm and gain trust from other co-workers and management to do so. Narcissistic abusers charm others to climb up the ladder and undermine co-workers in various ways to push them down. They covertly sabotage others by unethical means. They may even have these tendencies in their personal relationships outside of work. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, harassment, intimidation, and covert coercion at work "is akin to domestic violence at work, where the abuser is on the payroll." This form of covert abuse occurs more frequently than we might assume. Research indicates that as many as 75% of workers have been affected by workplace bullying, either as a target or a witness (Fisher-Blando, 2008).
Viewpoints
21st century transactional analysis has highlighted clients who suffered some narcissistic abuse as children (that is, an injury to their developing selves), examining for instance the boy in an all-female household who only survived by developing powerful emotional antennae in order to respond to the emotional needs of his mother and sister.
Post-Jungians have explored the after-effects of an intense narcissistic wound resulting from an oppressively unempathetic parent. In particular, Polly Young-Eisendrath emphasizes how the narcissistic longings of mothers (or fathers) to amass reflected glory through their children can bring disastrous results for mother and child if both lose their capacity for autonomous development.
Object relations theory for its part stresses both that the most traumatizing experience of all is the absence of emotional giving from a mother or father, and that, in an intergenerational pattern, people who have been brought up by tyrannical authoritarian parents will often parent their children in the same way. Adam Phillips adds that the mother who colonizes her child and stifles gestures of autonomy and difference breeds in him or her an often unconscious craving for the dead-end justice of revenge.
In another tradition, Julia Kristeva points out how a pairing of mothers and fathers, overprotective and uneasy, who have chosen the child as a narcissistic artificial limb and keep incorporating that child as a restoring element for the adult psyche intensifies the infant's tendency toward omnipotence.
M. Scott Peck looked at milder but nonetheless destructive common forms of parental narcissism, as well as the depth of confusion produced by his mother's narcissism in a more serious instance.
Theorists
The roots of current concern with narcissistic abuse can be traced back to the later work of Sándor Ferenczi, which helped to shape modern psychoanalytic theories of "schizoid," "narcissistic," and "borderline" personality disorders.
In "Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child", Ferenczi observed that patients often displayed "a striking, almost helpless compliance and willingness to accept my interpretations" even if he encouraged them not to agree with him. Ferenczi traced his patient's behavior to childhood trauma. He found that in cases of sexual abuse, children often misinterpreted the emotional responses of adults and responded to them by becoming passive toward the adult. The child developed an "anxiety-fear-ridden identification" with the adult, as well as "introjection of the guilt feelings of the adult":
· "The same anxiety, however, if it reaches a certain maximum, compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor."
Ferenczi also argued that a child's tender love for a caretaker often involves a fantasy of "taking the role of mother to the adult". In what he identified as the "terrorism of suffering", the child has a "compulsion" to right the wrongs of the family by taking on responsibilities that are far beyond the child's maturity level. In this manner, "a mother complaining of her constant miseries can create a nurse for life out of her child, i.e. a real mother substitute, neglecting the true interests of the child." Within such distorted patterns of parent/child interaction, 'Ferenczi believed the silence, lies, and hypocrisy of the caregivers was the most traumatic aspects of the abuse'—ultimately producing what he called 'narcissistic mortification'.
Ferenczi also looked at such distortions in the therapist/patient relationship, accusing himself of sadistic (and, implicitly, narcissistic) abuse of his patients.
Kohut, Horney, and Miller
A half-century later, in the wake of Kohut's innovative pronouncement that the age of "normal narcissism" and normal narcissistic entitlement had arrived – the age, that is, of the normative parental provision of narcissistic supply – the concept of its inverse appeared: narcissistic abuse. According to Kohut, maternal misrecognition amounts to a failure to perform the narcissistic self-object functions of "mirroring", the cause of a narcissistic disturbance. Paternal misrecognition could produce the same result: Kohut explored for example a son's transference reproaches directed at the non-mirroring father who was preoccupied with his own self-enhancement and thus refused to respond to his son's originality.
Karen Horney had already independently highlighted the character disorder – particularly the compulsive striving for love and power – resulting from the childhood hurts bred of parental narcissism and abuse. She thus heralded today's work in this area by Alice Miller and others.
Alice Miller lays special emphasis on the process of reproduction of narcissistic abuse, the idea that love relations and relations to children are repetitions of previous narcissistic distortions. Miller's early work in particular was very much in line with Kohut's tale of deficits in empathy and mirroring, with a stress on the way adults revisit and perpetuate the narcissistic wounds of their own early years in an intergenerational cycle of narcissistic abuse. In Miller's view, when abused for the sake of adults' needs, children could develop an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively, that is, unconsciously, to this need of the mother, or of both parents, for him to take on the role that had unconsciously been assigned to him.
Modern theories
Current point of view of modern psychiatrists believes that today's society is at fault for the increase in narcissistic abuse because society promotes competitiveness. Many features of narcissism are sources of success in the modern competitive society. The question is that to what extent the opportunistic abilities to bring out one's own proficiency and constantly strive for the better result in trample on other people and having an irresponsible and insensitive attitude to other people (Lucher, Huston, Walker & Alex Houtson, 2011).
In 2011, Maatta, Uusiautti & Matta published a study with an indication that modern society may shape the patterns of narcissistic abuse. The ideas of pleasing yourself first, taking care of yourself, climbing the ladder and general success in life are desired traits. And the explanation for the increase in narcissistic disorders may at least partly be found in the societal development as competitiveness, individualism, and opportunism are admired - those exact features that are often typical narcissists.
Wider developments
Miller's work, in its emphasis on the real-life interaction of parent and child, challenged the orthodox Freudian account of Oedipal fantasy, in a sustained indictment of the moral and pedagogical underpinnings of the therapy industry; and did so at a point when 'the keyword of the 1980s was invariably "abuse".
With the passing of time (and of the polemical edge), a more slimmed-down, pragmatic version of the concept of narcissistic abuse gradually came to permeate most of the wider culture of psychotherapy.
Only in the Freudian heartland of mainstream psychoanalysis has the term retained a more restricted, pre-Ferenczi usage. Thus in a "comprehensive dictionary of psychoanalysis" of 2009, the only appearance of the term is in connection with misuse of the couch for narcissistic gain: The fact that it is seen by some patients and therapists as a "status symbol" lends it to narcissistic abuse.
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