The Five Narcissistic Hurts (copyright 2005)

Nobody wants to read about narcissistic hurts—it’s too painful. We’ve all got some narcissism we’re eager to protect. As it happens, we’re born with a pretty good dose of megalomania, which is immediately forgiven because we’re so cute and cuddly. A little baby, with knowledge only of its own existence, believes (in the emotional and hallucinatory manner of infancy) that he is she is the center of the universe. Our job as we grow up is to overcome our resistance to appreciating the world outside of our self-absorption.

For the first narcissistic hurt, we backtrack four hundred to five hundred years when Copernicus and then Galileo and Kepler established that the earth was not at the center of the universe.  People of the time were upset about this knowledge and resisted it. They—us, we humans—had been demoted. Not just demoted but greatly diminished, now just a sideshow in the universe instead of the apple of God’s eye. Even more heart-wrenching, we were reduced in our own eyes, the glorious assumption of our indispensability to existence in tatters. Church elders didn’t like it either and, fortunately, the official version of the cosmos remains preserved on the scrolls of the Flat Earth Society.

A second narcissistic hurt assailed us when Darwin published The Origin of the Species about 150 years ago. Apes for ancestors, monkeys for mothers, chimps for cousins—what could be more disgusting! There we were, basking in the Age of Reason, upholding the Enlightenment, glorifying in the Industrial Revolution, minding our own profitable business, when along comes Darwin to stick a primate’s butt in our face. Darwin, let us pray, has now been done in by the Creationists, who are having some success disproving him by showing, through their intellectual prowess, a ceiling on evolution.

We barely had forty years to recover before Freud started poking his nose in our underpants. Hearing that we lusted after our mother, craved the demise of our father, we were rightfully insulted! Bird brains in our own house, he said! Death wishes in the attic of our mind! Once again, religious authorities rushed in to denounce this heresy, saying that the psyche, narcissism, and the oedipal complex were all bad Greek to them.

Freud also accused us of being under the influence of powerful, life-governing mechanisms such as transference, projection, identification, resistance, repression, and regression. It was all unconscious, he said, meaning we didn’t know about it. We didn’t want to know it about either—still don’t! Where’s the Pleasure Principle in revealing our quirks? In revenge, we marginalized him and introduced behavioral, cognitive, and existential methodologies that leave unchallenged our hidden psychological dynamics and our unconscious negativity.

Two other great narcissistic hurts are still largely unknown. This knowledge has not penetrated into the public consciousness nearly as far as the first three. The first of these—the fourth narcissistic hurt—is the discovery in psychoanalysis in mid-20^th century of the extent of our unconscious negativity and our attachment to negative emotions. This greatly feared knowledge is not part of the public discourse nor is it included in university curriculums. In fact, I’d better not say more about it, except that it is an esoteric subdivision of psychoanalysis that our narcissism has successfully submerged in cognitive dissonance. If you insist on being insulted, go to The Secret of Human Misery.

While the fourth narcissistic hurt produces a blank stare when mentioned, the fifth narcissistic hurt often produces a profound “Duh.” Evolution is asking us to give up our ego in order that we feel and know the unity of human existence and the living oneness of the earth. Many poets and mystics have made admirable attempts to describe non-duality, that we are both our individual consciousness and one great collective spirit. We are not just flying solo. Our light shines brighter when others are warmed in its glow. Our narcissism, however, does not subscribe to this reality. It opposes the coming together of the human family. Consequently, people align with sectarian interests that are often in conflict with each other. People with hard-edged egos represent the armies of resistance to evolvement and human destiny. Their refusal to cross the bridge to the 21^st Century maintains our narcissism’s preference—me versus you, us versus them, self-interest above common interest.

These Defenders of our Old Mentality (DOOM) have had enough of our insults. Who can blame them? A fixed idea about the nature of life has its benefits: floating along in a dream state and never having to say we’re wrong.