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October 16th, 2025                                                                     Edited 22/10/2025

I haven’t posted anything for a while. I usually manage to post something twice a month, but sometimes life happens. Today’s post refers to a book I’ve been reading recently by Durvasula Ramani, PhD: Don’t you know who I am? It’s an exploration of narcissism; unhealthy entitlement, antagonism and incivility, which she believes are pervasive in our modern cultures and societies for a variety of sociopolitical and cultural reasons that she discusses in the book. The book is very accessible, a background in psychology is not necessary, and actually, it could serve as an overall introduction on these themes. Ramani discusses narcissism and toxicity from many angles, and situates the phenomenon within historical contexts, with an emphasis on the West, particularly America, where she lives. I oscillated between writing a short summary of the book and a longer piece. As you can see, I’ve opted for the longer version, and yet I will only briefly touch upon the basic themes presented and discussed in this 400 page book.

Ramani interestingly begins her book by providing examples of entitled tantrums, drama and toxic behaviours up in the air during plane flights. Any kind of work we produce is always situated and Ramani’s aware of that, and although the issues she explores and analyses are universal and the behaviours she discusses have probably become more prevalent everywhere, she also includes in the conversation her own larger context. She poses the question of whether Americans might be more narcissistic and antagonistic. It seems that there is some research from the USA that suggests that Americans themselves certainly think so, and respondents from around the world have rated Americans as more narcissistic and antagonistic. This, she writes, may be due to the valuation of individualism, uncritical adherence to capitalism and the cultural ethos regarding the pioneer spirit, Calvinistic work ethic, intense adoration of celebrity and penchant for competition. She makes reference to Christopher Lasch, writer, historian and academic, who, she notes, in 1979 wrote “one of the most prescient books on the veering towards more pathological levelsof narcissism.”

The book does not focus on what is termed NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), which is a diagnostic label from the DSM, but rather it embraces a large spectrum of toxic or difficult personality traits and relational patterns, dynamics and behaviours. Ramani clarifies that one of the struggles in her work is finding the right word or term that captures the triangle of narcissism, entitlement, and toxicity, which despite their broad overlap are also independent. She provides definitions for toxic and what we might mean by describing someone as toxic, and is also discerning about the fact that different people may have different experiences of a toxic person. She states that toxic behavior tends to be associated with traits congruent with narcissistic, antagonistic, sociopathic, psychopathic, dysregulated and passive-aggressive personality styles, and that individuals with these traits are overtly or covertly invalidating, deceptive and manipulative, and can in the long run cause great damage. Narcissists, she writes, “change the value of psychological currencies. Compassion, empathy, reciprocity, mutuality, gratitude, and loyalty are the main currencies of healthy and close human relationships…”

She asserts that we should all be concerned with the proliferation of human toxicity, incivility and narcissism in political and corporate leaders and celebrities because this is a bellwether for the rest of society. People do what they see. We’re all, including our children, witnessing or experiencing it, and entitlement, narcissism, incivility, and toxic and abusive human behavior and interactions are becoming the new normal, and it seems that “….the most toxic amongst us appear to be controlling the narrative and shaping our reality.” She writes: “The system is rewarding narcissism and human toxicity in all of its forms right now. It’s hard to sell compassion and empathy in a world that rewards narcissism, psychopathy, incivility, and materialism,” and elsewhere she notes, “We devalue kindness, especially in men, and we characterize compassion and vulnerability as weakness. Having empathy in the current epoch becomes a setup to be manipulated or exploited.”

The book is divided in three parts. In Part I Ramani concentrates on uncovering narcissism and discussing: the five sets of patterns underlying narcissism, some of the various flavors of narcissists, why social media, which is a key means of communication, of learning about the world, and a tool for constructing identity, is the accelerant for the modern toxic and narcissistic world, the three Cs of narcissism, the ways in which our economy, consumerism, and ideas about success all impact the rise of narcissism. She also provides an overview of the different theories on the origins of narcissism.

She describes narcissism as: an interpersonally toxic pattern, characterized by entitlement, grandiosity, lack of empathy, validation seeking, superficiality, interpersonal antagonism, insecurity, contempt, arrogance, poor emotional regulation, out of proportion rage, and it’s a person’s predominant and consistent way of relating with the world. She refers to the disagreement between psychologists, researchers and others, the difficulties in measuring it, the different presentations and combinations of these clusters of traits, and the various models of personality. Work using the Five Factor Model of Personality (McCrae & John, 1992) characterizes narcissists as being high in extraversion and low in agreeableness. This model also describes narcissism as reflecting higher-than-average levels of angry hostility, assertiveness, activity, and excitement seeking, and lower-than-average levels of self-consciousness, warmth, trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness (e.g. empathy) (Campbell and Miller, 2013, cited in Ramani, 2019). It seems that there is a constant need for external validation (‘narcissitic supply’) to offset insecurity and a tendency to become rageful under conditions of frustration, disappointment or stress. This inability to regulate emotions, tolerate distress or experience empathy usually means that in the face of stress or pressure people with more antagonistic personalities will often resort to rage, projection or acting out.

Also, Ramani writes that at the core of it, difficult people and narcissists are insecure; however, they are not only insecure themselves, they flourish under conditions of insecurity and chaos, prey on insecurity, and ultimately create more insecurity in the world. She writes: “…they actually suck out whatever security or sense of self another person has, leaving their victim completely insecure and the narcissist on the search for more validation.” Also, for all of their lack of empathy, they are able to study people and suss out their vulnerabilities and blind spots. She uses the term data-gathering approach. Once they identify someone whom they may want to draw in, they pay very close attention to him or her. They learn that person’s strengths, traumas and vulnerabilities to control, exploit and use against them.

Questions are posed around diagnosing and the medicalization of bad and harmful for others behaviour. Allen Frances notes that a diagnosis for NPD, for instance, doesn’t hold unless the person is experiencing significant emotional, personal, social, or occupational distress. Ramani adds that this list of traits generally reads like a corporate playbook for success, and that the patterns that might facilitate success and fame in a highly competitive world don’t work well in relationships. Toxic, high-conflict and difficult people literally make us psychologically and physically sick through their behaviours.She also refers to the toxicity paradox. She writes: ‘For the amount of time, effort, and money people spend on healthy diets, getting enough sleep, special vitamins, exercising, healthcare, detoxes, and the avoidance of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco—all in the name of promoting health—something is being missed. All of these behaviors are integral to good health; that is true. However, when you take a longer lens and reflect on the amount of money spent on organic food to avoid the toxins of pesticides, or air filters to avoid toxins in the air, or purified water to avoid the toxins in water, or specialized household cleaners to avoid environmental toxins, or lower-emission or electric cars to avoid toxic exhaust emissions, or high-end cosmetics made from carefully sourced ingredients to avoid toxins on the skin, then why do most people keep toxic people in their lives?”

As mentioned so far, the core pillars of narcissism are: lack of empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, validation seeking, and dysregulation. But I found the brief analysis of the five clusters of narcissim a helpful and useful way to understand the many different combinations of toxic patterns found in people. Also, because many of these features are part of everyone’s make up and lie on a continuum, Ramani distinguishes between normal and pathological levels of these qualities, with some exceptions like gaslighting, for instance, which is never acceptable.

Narcissistic traits are broken into five basic areas:

a) The interpersonal features of toxic people and narcissists are often the most challenging and harmful. There are eight typical patterns within a narcissist’s interpersonal features: lack of empathy, manipulation, projection, lying, poor boundaries, jealousy, gaslighting, and controlling. “Narcissists have underdeveloped psychological endoskeletons,” writes Ramani, and “lack of empathy, makes narcissists problematic partners, parents, friends, coworkers…” For narcisssits, she notes, life is a zero sum game and they play it well. While discussing gaslighting she also refers to the phenomenon of gaslighting by proxy, which occurs when other people make excuses for the narcissist or validate their lies. Concerning control she concludes that a toxic person is more likely to view or engage with people as chessboard pawns than to engage with them as human beings with agency and their own will and desires.

b) The behavioral aspects of toxic and / or narcissistic people are the actions and attitudes we can observe. There are four visible behavioural patterns: superficiality, covetousness/envy, being cheap (in spirit as well), and carelessness. She describes carelessness as being ‘psychologically stunted, impulsive, emotionally restricted, and incapable of stepping out of themselves,…,’and adds that it can also imply a devaluation and lack of respect of the other person.

c) Dysregulation: Toxic and narcissistic people cannot control their emotions or tolerate any level of distress, and, in part, that is due to the fact that they regulate their self-esteem from the outside in. Patterns that fall within a narcissist’s dysregulation are: fragility/insecurity, anger/rage, constant validation seeking, inability to be alone, and shame. Ramani interestingly observes that it’s the dynamic of anger and rage that often results in strangers’ tantrums and rageful behaviours (in a restaurant, means of transportation, park, street or other public place) impacting us. She notes that these incidents take a toll on the observers, even though they are not part of the interaction. As for validation seeking, because it’s a way to regulate self esteem, narcissists will ask for it endlessly, but will rarely offer any, and when they do offer validation, it is often in the name of manipulation or to get something they want.

d) Antagonistic features: Ramani writes, that toxic and consistent antagonism feels deeply unsettling and threatening, and negatively affects anyone in the toxic person’s path, whether they are a colleaugue, stranger, partner or family member. There are eight common patterns within a narcissist’s antagonistic repertoire: grandiosity, entitlement, passive aggression, schadenfreude, arrogance, exploitation, failure to take responsibility, and vindictiveness. Schadenfreude is a German word that is defined as “malicious joy,” or as “a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction when something bad happens to someone else.” These people are good at spotting blind spots and gathering information about people’s past and traumas, and then taking advantage of vulnerabilities. Toxic people, writes Ramani, also generally avoid any ownership of bad behavior, and are revisionists and rationalizers. They consistently don’t take responsibility and tend to perceive their behavior as payback or a vindictive quid pro quo. They deflect, lie and enjoy making examples of other people.

e) Cognitive features: There are five main patterns within a narcissist’s cognitive features: paranoid, hypersensitive, lack of insight, skewed sense of justice, and hypocritical. Ramani writes that many narcissists are prone to isms—racism, sexism, nationalism, classism, and that, “just as we are seeing more painful, prejudicial and divisive conversations in the realm of the isms, and even the spewing of what feel like conspiracy theories, we are also observing what appears to be a societal uptick in narcissistic patterns.” She refers to what has been labeled as “healthy cultural paranoia,” which suggests that people that have experienced trauma or violence, people being harassed or living in unsafe neighbourhoods may harbor a loss of trust and suspiciousness, or an extreme caution. Lack of insight reflects very low self-reflection and lack of self-awareness, and it also likely reflects a cognitive error driven by lack of empathy. It is, writes Ramani, “as though the person cannot connect the moral, ethical, and personal dots to recognize that a behavior was “bad” and may have hurt someone, to know that genuine apologies and self-reflection should naturally follow, and to learn from the episode.”

In Part II she looks at the toxic, entitled, and difficult people in our life like partners, family members, in-laws, bosses, coworkers and friends. She notes that interestingly, most people who have one narcissist or toxic person in their lives actually have multiple narcissists or toxic people in their lives. There are many contributing factors to this, one being that ‘it is a riff on a phenomenon called “habituation.” She writes: “In the simplest example of habituation, if we get accustomed to something in our environment—a reward, or even something more noxious, such as noise—over time, we basically adjust to it, and it doesn’t capture our attention, nor do we question it.” Ramani notes that because narcissism is becoming more common it can actually be more difficult to avoid interaction and relationships with more toxic people. She explains that multiple roads get people to their narcissistic and toxic relationships and situations, but work on “co-narcissism” suggests that people who are raised with narcissistic or antagonistic parents become wired to be “pleasers,” to take on a role of providing validation to the people around them often to the point of exhaustion. They are also more likely to become prey for people high on antagonistic traits, and more skilled at being “the delivery people of narcissistic supply.” She also describes what each of these relationships can do to us and how to handle them individually, while, at the same time, understanding the larger context in which they are happening.

In Part III Ramani discusses how to survive in a more narcissistically oriented world and, how to recognise toxic people, how to avoid them when this is possible, how to manage toxic relationships, how to enforce boundaries and break some of the patterns that may be attracting these less agreeable and empathic people, how to retain one’s sanity, preserve one’s sense of humanity, protect oneself and even grow and thrive. She’s critical of the idea of co-dependency, and writes that “It’s a risky paradigm. Co-dependency is a term that originated in the clinical literature on addiction.” Finally, she highlights the need to teach people about these patterns, so they do not enter these relationships in the first place, and the need for self-preservation, because, as she says, these toxic relationships can be “a death by a thousand cuts, prolonged and subtle, until it becomes your normal, and perhaps ultimately your demise,” self-preservation may be our best tool to fight narcissism. She reflects on why it can be so difficult to walk away from these relationships, and also presents some major types of narcissists, even though there are many subtypes depending on which features mentioned above are more pronounced. Ramani writes: “…. when we reflect on the thirty traits that comprise the various facets of narcissistic or difficult / toxic people, it can help to consider the trait that is the most noticeable.” Finally, she concludes that probably, and hopefully, a narcissistic or toxic person won’t have all of these features.

The five major types of narcissists that most people have heard of are: the grandiose; the malignant; covert / vulnerable; the communal and the benign narcissist.

The Grandiose Narcissist tends to be more arrogant, entitled, grandiose, superficial, vain and charming. Ramani suggests that these people tend to be charming and successful, often appear to be “pillars of the community,”and do well as public figures or leaders. Covert or Vulnerable Narcissism, writes Ramani, presents as less grandiose and is a more “stealth” form of narcissism characterized by lack of empathy, projection, entitlement, hypersensitivity, arrogance, passive-aggression, skewed sense of justice, vindictiveness and insecurity. As for Benign Narcissists, Ramani writes that “There is a superficial immaturity to benign narcissists,” and “they may simply be jerks or attention-seeking fools.” Malignant Narcissists [a term coined by Erich Fromm and described as “the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity”], she writes. are dangerous, and while they may not engage in overt violence, their abuse of power, gaslighting, lack of empathy, slippery ethics and their perception of people as disposable can wreak havoc in others’ lives, and many people in relationships with these people will report experiences that resemble those observed in people with post-traumatic or complex post-trumatic symptomatology, including anxiety, rumination, reliving the experiences, social withdrawal or isolation, nightmares, and hypervigilance. Finally, she refers to the toxic toll on physical health, and even, a potential decrease of one’s longevity.

Communal narcissists are an interesting “category.” They may be generous in their time and energy when taking part in political activism, charitable events, volunteering and supporting different causes, but they are motivated by an intense need for external validation and can “become mini tyrants when doing so.” Ramani comments, “Communal narcissists may seem like they care very much about people facing challenges around the world……,  but in their own life, they can have all of the usual narcissistic relationship patterns, including detachment, lack of empathy, entitlement, and anger,” and they can be quite dictatorial. Anyone ever involved in political campaigns, college political groups or events supporting worthy causes has probably witnessed or experienced this juxtaposition in people, who seem to care for just causes, on the one hand, and can be toxic, controlling and manipulative in personal interactions. And of course, we need to be careful because there are many caring people with healthy motivations that do good and work for positive change in the world, and as Ramani writes, there are “many well-intentioned people who really do put others first and who give the best of themselves and endless uncompensated hours to charitable endeavors.” Finally, she distinguishes between narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, who usually lack capacity for any kind of remorse, and one could say are on the extreme end of a continuum of traits and behaviours.

Entitled People: Unhealthy entitlement falls under the anatgonisitc trait. Ramani claims that the challenge of entitlement is that no one is born this way, in contrast to other traits, like introversion, extraversion and agreeableness that are in part temperamental and, as such, inborn. People mostly learn to feel and behave in entitled ways. She ponders on causes and reasons, one being “an overcorrection in reaction to the more authoritarian, emotionally distant, and even militaristic child-rearing approach of prior generations, with a subsequent focus on chronic self-esteem enhancement.” Also, she notes that the increasing gap between rich and poor in the US and around the world further fosters these assumptions of entitlement, and that wealth can result in what is referred to as “acquired narcissism” or “acquired entitlement,” and a kind of “entitled hypnosis,” in which wealthy and privileged people may become out of touch with reality and what living in the world entails for most people. She writes: “We are increasingly becoming a culture that is cruelly dismissive of those who have “less” and reveres those who have “more” (regardless of how they acquired it). We are in the era of the genetics of luck….” She also explores entitlement from a psychological perspective, and claims that it’s not good for people. For instance, entitled individuals may be less resilient and are more likely to rely on drugs and alcohol to cope with life stressors. She also clarifies that not all people of wealth or privilege are toxic, but highlights the need to consider the problematic distributions of wealth around the world, and I would add the need to create states and structures that increase the chances for a decent life for everyone.

Focusing on the much broader picture Ramani sheds some light on how and why narcissism is a growing trend in our society, fueled by media and social media (a playground for internet trolls that tend to be a mix of covert and malignant narcissism), capitalism and the free market, how we measure success, dissemination of materialistic messages and insecurity, obsession with fame and attention, the shift in values and priorities across contexts and stuructures, like education for instance, where there’s been a shift away from teaching critical thinking, ethics, and empathy. She poses that in our current world having narcissistic traits makes a person more likely to be successful and that being empathic can be economically inefficient. Timothy Judge, and his colleagues (cited in Ramani), have carried out research data that support the idea that that agreeable people tend to earn less money, and this finding is even more pronounced for men.

Ramani explores the contribution of masculine ideology in the current state of affairs, as well. She comments that “most of our history books appear to be stories of masculine ideology gone awry.” She writes that many men never got the opportunity when they were young to learn how to be with or how to regulate their emotions in non toxic ways, and this, she says, has resulted in their emotions coming out in harmful ways both for them and those around them (substance abuse, violence, lack of empathy, poor communication, social withdrawal, and rage). She further explains that narcissism is at its core a deficit in emotional regulation, and that brooding rage and unresolved emotions are often what underlie covert narcissistic patterns. However, she clarifies that while most men and boys are vulnerable to the expectations of traditional ideology, thankfully, many men do not manifest “toxic” masculinity. Even so, the way we socialize boys and men increases the probability of narcissistic and entitled patterns in our society.

Also, she discusses New Age Narcissism, The Secret, crystals and tarot cards, expensive retreats, asking the universe to deliver what you want, putting positive intentions into the universe and chanting the myriad injustices, problems and antagonisms of our current world away. She writes: “Sadness or other difficult emotions become forbidden in these settings, all magically solved by joy and one’s inner light. The fact is that negative mood states sometimes need to be played out. In challenging times, it is okay to question, to feel irritable, and to have a normal reaction to an abnormal situation,” and the irony is that often, “the people promoting these New Age manifestos are business people and are selling only half of a message.” She cautions about the danger of getting sucked into spaces inhabited by grandiose, exploitative and controlling individuals (“enlightened” gurus and yoginis, etc.).

The origins of narcissism and toxic personalities

Part of the book is dedicated to the various theories and the many interacting factors that might lead to one becoming narcissistic, antagonistic and toxic. Broadly toxic and narcissistic people grow out of an interaction between an inborn temperament and their micro and macro environment. I will only very briefly mention the many explanatory theories and potential origins of toxic antagonistic personalities and behaviours. I should mention that it’s wise to bear in mind that there are always many contributing factors, and every person displaying these features will be the result of different combinations of causes and circumstances, and different features will be more pronounced in different people. Categories and theoretical models help us study and understand phenomena, but people are diverse and complex. Ramani claims that “Narcissism evolves from numerous pathways: how a person is parented; the way local communities and community-based entities such as schools interact with a child (sports, other activities, spiritual communities, neighborhoods); the values society imparts to all of us. All of these pathways intersect with an individual’s temperament. Not everyone who is raised in an invalidating environment will develop the same way. And, at some level, all of us are vulnerable to the societal pressures of narcissism.”

In the book there’s an overview of the different approaches and explanatory models concerning these personality types. Ramani refers to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, who basically viewed a nested series of systems that children reside in and examined children’s development through their interaction with their environments and culture. It has also been postulated that there may also be a “biological vulnerability,” which may relate to temperament, emotional regulation, or reactivity. We also know that children learn to regulate themselves, to delay gratification or endure frustration, for instance, and over time, Ramani writes, they may even check in to see whether someone else needs their help. However, this process may be thwarted, to one degree or another, by a variety of factors. Adult individuals high on narcissism often resemble young children. She notes that narcissism “is actually one of those things that you ideally develop out of, not into.” Heinz Kohut focused on the process of mirroring (mentined in the previous post) which requires a parent to be present and appropriately validating. Mirroring entails parents’ offering “emotional mirroring, appropriate approval, and feedback in a consistent and realistic manner.” Parents’ love or good intentions may not always be sufficient. They need support and knowledge / information, and in the absence of these and lack of awareness, there is a always the risk of not adequately addressing a child’s needs or overcompensating.

Additionally, inconsistent mirroring can prevent a child from developing a realistic sense of self and worldview, and Kohut argues, that emotional regulation is also thwarted. Narcissist people project their emotions onto other people, because they are unable to tolerate emotions within themselves, and are prone to disappropriate rage and sudden angry outbursts (much like young children throwing a tantrum). She refers to Otto Kernberg who believes that when children have unempathic, cold or distant parents, they remain emotionally malnourished, which Ramani writes, results in their psychological “insides” never fully developing; therefore, they are forced to develop their outer world. She also reflects on cultural factors that may discourage parental warmth or emotional expression, and cultures that rely on deeply authoritarian models of parenting. Freud and others believe that the origin of narcissism is likely some form of unresolved conflict from childhood that is playing out in adulthood. She quotes Freud who stated that “Whoever loves becomes humble.Those who love, have so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”

Ramani views the process through the lens of various theories. Attachment theory focuses on our earliest relationships with our parents or other early primary caregivers and on the availability and responsivity of the caregiver, as well as, the closeness and connectedness of the contact with the caregiver. Through the lens of humanistic theory it could be argued that narcissistic adults did not receive unconditional love, but had conditions of worth placed on them as children. Instead of simply feeling loved, they felt that love came attached with conditions (they received love if they got good grades, behaved well, were good at sports, or kept quiet). She also presents ideas on the origins of narcissism that have been developed since Freud, Kernberg and Kohut published their work. For instance, Alexander Lowen has postulated that narcissism relates back to shame and humiliation during childhood because the parents were controlling or emotionally cold and distant or chronically critical and invalidating and shaming or they issued disproportionate punishments. This kind of upvringing could result in a child learning that power is the means of managing close relationships and that expression of feelings is a weakness.

Richard Ryan and Tim Kasser address extrinsic and intrinsic value systems as well as materialism, the drive to consume, possess, and show off external objects and achievements, as a central characteristic of narcissism. From a Behaviorist perspective behaviours that are rewarded are repeated and reinforced. Ramani writes: “Narcissism may be a reflection of how children’s behaviors are shaped into adulthood by parents, extended family, teachers, communities, and society at large,” and thus, all of us are vulnerable to this way of acquiring narcissistic behaviours and attitudes. Also, parents and adults model behaviours. Albert Bandura postulated a model called social learning theory, which suggests that children do what they see, especially when the model is a parent, a sibling, a peer, a teacher. He also constructed the idea of “vicarious conditioning,” which suggests that a person will watch a role model person engage in a behavior and then observe the consequences from the environment. So, it is easy for children to learn behaviours such as entitlement, and so on. The book is written in a conversational style and it contains humor. Ramani wonders about “what happens to a generation of children who observed adults buried in devices?”

As for the biology of behavior, Robert Sapolsky makes the observation that the social context around us impacts how our central nervous system works, because it comes down to how we interpret events. Ramani also reflects on the role of society and motivation. She refers to a few motivational theories from the many within the field of psychology, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, being the most well known perhaps. David McClelland, she writes, believed that a) we learn motivations, and b) there are three motivators we are all driven by: the need for affiliation (belongingness, choosing the needs of the group over individual needs, and avoidance of uncertainty); the need for achievement; and the need for power (a drive for control over others, enjoyment in winning and competition, the pursuit of status and recognition). These needs, she explains, are shaped by our families, cultures, and communities, and by our treatment by these institutions and groups. We’re all driven by these motivating forces to varying degrees, with one of them serving as a dominant motivator. For highly antagonistic individuals, narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, and high-conflict, or toxic, individuals, that dominant motivator is the need for power.

Both overindulgence and underindulgence can also be contributing factors. Theodore Millon characterized narcissism as “a disregard for the ‘sovereignty’ of others and believed this derives from the entitlement and the extremes of either overindulgence or neglect or both,” in other words both spoiling and neglecting kids can bring about similar behaviours and attitudes. On the other hand, Ramani reminds us that we should also consider the importance of disposition, temperament, personality, and constitution. We all come into the world with a temperament, which is believed to have a genetic component, which then interacts with the environment, and how each child is supported in managing frustration. She comments that while past generations of parents did get it wrong in many ways, they were far better at letting their children experience disappointment and get through it, and that now we are as parents and a culture, becoming worse and worse at this. She wonders whether we are stuck in a generation of parental over-correction, as mentioned above, in reaction to the more authoritarian, emotionally distant, and even militaristic child-rearing approach of prior generations, over-compensating and trying to engineer optimal outcomes for our children, worrying about the antagonistic world they are entering, and thus, shifting “the focus from building a good, kind, empathic kid to building more of a warrior.”

The author includes dynamics and roles within families in her discussion of origins. In brief, she begins by clarifying that no one gets it just right, since parents’ sadness, worries, circumstances, disappointments, psychological issues, traumas, and distraction, all become part of their children’s developmental story. Old familial patterns are often replayed in numerous ways. Parents with narcissistic, entitled, toxic features can have a long lasting impact on their children’s lives because “Parenting and narcissism do not mix. The key requirements of parenting—consistency, empathy, compromise, sacrifice, self-awareness, discipline, and equanimity…” One common dynamic in families with more narcissistic or antagonistic dynamics is that of a child or family member being parentified or scapegoated or if it’s a daughter being foced into a kind of Cinderella role. This, Ramani writes, “is an extraordinarily painful dynamic for a child, who may feel as though the entire family system is conspiring to bully him or her, and highlights fears of ostracism and isolation. It is not unusual, within a narcissistic family system, in addition to the scapegoated child, for there to also be the “golden child,” a role that is not always a simple one.”

Families and small groups are always embedded within larger systems and they feed on each other, and the child or member of a family singled out as a scapegoat will often experience a systemic driven psychological mobbing or a kind of public punishment and chronic coercive control, with detrimental consequences in all areas of their life. Ramani notes that there can be real fear that, within groups of friends, educational and work settings the scapegoating dynamic may replicate. Rebecca C. Mandeville, who has coined the term FSA (Family Scapegoating Abuse) and has conducted research on this, focuses on topics like family mobbing driven by systemic forces, and systemic workplace mobbing. I’ll probably write more, in future posts, on family systems, roles and dynamics.Roles in more healthy systems might include the roles of nurturing and providing, educating and setting healthy boundaries,  advocating for, teeling the truth and providing insight and the possibilitiy for change.More dysfunctional roles would include children being parentified or viewed as the identified patient, scapegoating, children placed in the role of the golden child, the lost child, the martyr or the glass child, etc. There is also great overlap. For instance, a glass child might be scapegoated or not, depending on the dynamics of the family system.

Meanwhile, there are two great illustrated children’s books, Scapegoat, written by Eva Keyes and illustrated by Aleksandra Szmidt, and Escape Goat, written by Ann Patchett and illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser, which can help young children understand these undermining and blaming dynamics at home or at school. You can find both stories on YouTube.

The greater targeting of children through advertising; thus, setting children up with a belief system that organizes around consuming and regulating their sense of self through acquisition of objects outside themselves, is also explored in the book. Children are becoming more acquisitive and materialistic, and more extrinsically oriented, at exactly the phase of development when they would be best served by developing their inner worlds and regulatory mechanisms.

There is a lot to be said on the potential reasons for developing a highly antagonistic personality in the book; however, what is important to remember is that similar experiences may impact people and children differently depending on a multitude of converging factors. Ramani sums this process up as, “… the alchemy of our early environments—parental relationships, attachments, rewards, punishments, motivation, and how we are loved—sets the complex architecture for the psychological underpinnings of narcissism. And all of this occurs against the framework of our society, culture, and communities.”

Conclusion

Throughout the book the writer explores how to raise and create people of depth who are empathic and driven by mutuality in their relationships within this new world quest for fame and fortune, and the need for a balanced, responsible approach to social media. She writes: “Parents, educators, and academic and occupational curricula all need to focus on building digital literacy and social skills.” She discusses how to cultivate genuine interpersonal relationships, and writes that we are rarely told to take a really careful look at whether a person is kind or warm. She says, “People who are more inward in their focus, or who are more circumspect and wise, often do not build up their external and charismatic muscles; it’s rare to find both characteristics in the same person. That said, if a person leads with charm and charisma and plenty of confidence, sit up straight and pay cautious attention. Make sure that there is empathy, that entitlement is not at play, that the person is genuine, that there is respect ….”

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A few thoughts and ideas on kindness

“I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else…….  .To be kind – it covers everything, to my mind.” Roald Dahl

“When whole groups fail to care, cultures of hate, retribution and vengeance can be created that reproduce the traumatic conditions of their own making. There is less chance of the kind of citizenly care that provides a bulwark against political corruption, unbridled market forces or religious fundamentalism.” (From The Capacity to Care: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity by Wendy Hollway, 2006, p.2)

Today’s piece includes a few thoughts, ideas and books related to the overlapping human capacities for care, kindness and acts of generosity.

Care

I read somewhere that care can be understood in the light of Donald Winnicott’s concept of “holding” [briefly discussed in the previous post], in which the basic needs are met in ways that create possibilities for a person to flourish. So, care here is understood as a facilitating environment that allows someone to develop agency, creativity, spontaneity, and a sense of safety and belonging. Winnicott’s idea of the true self requires a good holding environment early on, in which the infants aggression, creativity, expression and needs are met and tolerated, an environment that balances interdependence and individuality without falling into individualism. His concept of holding could be considered as lying on a continuum from the private and personal to the public and political. Also, Winnicott and others’ work has influenced the recent interest and literature on the politics of care and the exploration of how a state could care for its citizens in non-controlling ways and the ways it could increase inclusion and equality.

Wendy Ann Hollway’s care ideal, suggests that an adult will have the capacity to engage in four kinds of care. Hollway, was a professor I had while doing an OU degree, whose approach and qualitative research model that integrate psychoanalytic theory with social science to understand (inter) subjectivity, identity, and social relations, has resonated with me and influenced my way of perceiving things. Her work focuses on affective and relational aspects of knowledge, and along with Tony Jefferson, she created an interview research method that incorporates the unconscious dynamics that occur between researchers and participants.

In a nutshell, Hollway’s care ideal, assumes that an adult will have the capacity to engage in four kinds of care. First, they will be capable of reciprocal interdependent care receiving and care giving. Second, they will be capable of providing the non-negotiable, asymmetrical demand for care that has always been required of mothers and is required of fathers and others who ‘mother’ babies and young children. Third, they will be capable of self care. Fourth, they will be capable of extending their care to both human and non-human objects (the environment or non- human animals). She explores how these capacities can be achieved through the development of the self, the mind and morality, how the capacity to care about and to exercise caring agency is supported or undermined by the available practices and discourses that have implications for care, and what kind of conditions and dynamics either foster or erode the development of a good enough capacity to care.

Kindness

Aristotle defined kindness as “helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped.” In the Cambridge dictionary it is defined as “the quality of being generous, helpful, and caring about other people.” Poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes about kindness: “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things, / feel the future dissolve in a moment / like salt in a weakened broth. / What you held in your hand, / what you counted and carefully saved, / all this must go so you know / how desolate the landscape can be / between the regions of kindness…..” An act of kindness is an act we do, often spontaneously, arising from our empathic attunement to others, for no other reason than to offer support, encouragement, help, joy or a sense of inclusion to the people close to us, but also to strangers. Kindness might also involve our standing up for others, resisting non kindness concerning not only the ones close to us, but also strangers and those unknown to us in distant places.

On Sunday (14 / 09 / 2025) we watched two Greek sailing boats leave the harbour of the small island I live on to join a fleet of forty four boats from ports from all around the world to sail to Palestine in order to open a humanitarian corridor and help end the ongoing genocide of the people there. Susan Sontag wrote that “Compassion is an unstable emotion.” It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Perhaps the people participating in this risky venture are translating their compassion into action, an action of kindness one could say. In his novel Life and Fate Vasily Grossman writes: “Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness…… This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being….. This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind….. It is as simple as life itself.”

Charles Darwin believed that our human capacity for kindness was actually instrumental to our evolutionary success, our survival as a species. It seems that kindness was one of our defense strategies, which helped us survive in a world full of bigger, stronger and faster animals and harsh conditions. Our cave men ancestors that were better able to take care of their tribe, the women, children, the sick and the elderly gained an evolutionary advantage against those who failed to do so. Scientists have argued that their motives were at a deeper level self-serving, which might also be true. Moreover, research studies today show that being kind has a positive physiological and psychological impact on the person doing the kind act, too. Apart from feeling good after acting kindly, which is relatively easy to observe, it seems that it has a positive impact on our psychological and physical health, as well.

However, were our cave ancestors really at that point in human history, able to analyse their unconscious motives, or did they to some extent respond from a place of benevolence, empathy and even altruism, inherent in the human genome. As Margaret Drabble notes in an essay (2015), in which she envisions a future, where there are no more food banks, sweat shops and gulags simply because there is enough for everyone if resources were distributed a little more rationally and evenly, “unless we really are a hateful, murderous Hobbesian species, we can surely envisage a fairer future on a beautiful planet.” Fairness and kindness are complementary and they work together.

In any case, one cannot easily imagine how as a species we could have come thus far without the millions of acts of care, kindness and generosity performed across the time we have inhabited this planet. Even when we consider our own lives, with all the traumas, injustices and indecencies that we may have suffered along the way, it is still difficult to imagine how any of us could have survived in a totally aggressive, non empathic and cynical world that was devoid of individual acts of care and kindness and care ideals in our societal structures. This brings to focus the importance of building caring communities, and highlights the necessity of nurturing environments from the cradle to the end.

Finally, the capacity for kindness more or less reflects some level of awareness that mostly there is no need to not be kind and supportive when this is needed or asked for, and also, some capacity to disengage from our natural human undercurrents of competitiveness, meanness or indifference. A study I read somewhere suggested that wisdom is the combination of qualities like curiosity, tolerance, creativity, humility, resilience and kindness. The capacity to care and act kindly requires inner strength, empathy and compassion, all of which are viewed as markers of psychological health because they indicate an ability for better emotional and social functioning. An absence of empathy and a stunned capacity for care in caregivers, for instance, leads to insecure attachments for the child, and in broader sociocultural contexts this absence results in cynicism, exploitation, aggressions and violence.

And, are there any downsides to kindness?

There is the risk of burnout, exhaustion, and what some refer to as “compassion fatigue,” if we neglect our own needs and are unable to set healthy personal boundaries. An inability to say “no” to others, for whatever reasons, can lead to being taken advantage of or being exploited. Over extending ourselves might lead to losing ourselves or losing sight of our own needs and neglecting our goals. Kindness is often accompanied by emotional vulnerability, and therefore, it can at times cause us disappointment. Also, kindness should not be confused with over-tolerance of bad behaviours or lack of assertiveness when this is necessary. Overly competitive individuals might perceive an (over) generous or kind predisposition as weakness. Therefore, kindness and generosity need to be accompanied by discernment. Intentional kindness would involve balancing compassion for others with discernment, wise boundaries and a healthy sense of self preservation. As George Eliot wrote: “It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don’t give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.”

Picture books for children and adults that explore the themes of kindness, goodness and friendship:

The three questions by one of my favourtie illustrators Jon J Muth, inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s story.

A young boy, Nikolai, is sometimes unsure about what to do or if he is doing the right thing, so he goes about asking his friends. However, he is not quite satisfied with their answers and goes up the mountain to meet Leo, a wise turtle that has lived for a very long time. He asks three questions: What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?

Amos and Boris by William Steig, a beautiful tale of kindness, love, courage and friendship between two seemingly incompatible creatures, a mouse and a whale, willing to help, to their immense surprise, a fellow mammal.

Each Kindness written by Jacqueline Woodson and illustrated by E. B. Lewis, a moving story with lovely illustrations about kindness or lack of it, inclusion and belonging, and lost opportunities.

How to Heal a Broken Wing by Australian author and illustrator Bob Graham, a tender story for younger children

Because Amelia Smiled by David Ezra Stein, illustrates the potential for kindness to have a ripple effect, and how witnessing the good and choosing to pass it on in creative ways can travel far and wide. Similarly, a picture book with no text that I found on a local bookstall a couple of weeks ago, Small acts of kindness by Slovenian illustrator, Marta Bartolj, also illustrates how one small act of kindness triggers another and then another, like a kind of chain reaction that in the book comes full circle. However, for the ripple effect to occur the observers or recipients of kindness, must perceive it as positive, and then more importantly must choose to act kindly, too, and individual acts of kindness can have a more significant impact when these acts are collective.

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August readings about life, love, care and loss                       Edited: September 7th, 2025    

“Nevertheless, in the study of anyone individual we find the past as well as the present, the infant as well as the adult.”  Doanld W.Winnicott

“Is not this contribution of the devoted mother unrecognized precisely because it is immense?”                   D. W.Winnicott

Part 1 of today’s post is a kind of potpouri of brief references to some of my August readings by Donald W. Winnicott, Joan Didion and Susanna Kaysen. Part 2 contains a summary of a recent Being Well podcast (Forrest and Rick Hanson) concerning important figures in the field of psychoanalysis and psychdynamic informed theories and therapeutic practices. Part 1 and Part 2 are actually two separate pieces that I’ ve been writing this last month, but because they are, to some extent, thematically related, I’ve decided to post them together. I’ve also uploaded some older artwork of portraits of people in the field of psychology.

Part 1

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”  Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) by Joan Didion, an American writer and journalist, considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism [a style of journalism developed in the 1960s-70s, which uses literary techniques and is characterized by a subjective perspective, in which journalists immerse themselves in the stories; whereas in traditional journalism, the journalist is supposed to be “invisible”], is a surgically precise examination of her grief and bereavement process following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. It is an acute, poignant and yet detached and detailed examination of a loss that devastated her. And one could say it is both candid and discreet, and I think this contributes to her succeeding in turning the very personal into something universal, a story that can concern and reflect the experience of the bereaved wherever they may find themselves. Didion narrates a year that started when her husband collapsed from a fatal heart attack while they were having dinner on December 30th, 2003, after having visited their daughter who was put on life support in an intensive care unit.

Didion is called to deal with the loss of her husband and the caring of her daughter, Quintana Roo, who was in an induced comma in hospital, at the same time..There is from the beginning a parallel or rather intertwined narrative about her daughter’s unfolding drama, a case of double pneumonia that turned into septic shock. Didion could only tell her about her father’s death sixteen days later, after the doctors had managed to remove the breathing tube and reduce sedation to a point at which she could gradually wake up.

The expression in the title of the book, magical thinking, points to a childlike way of thinking, a psychological defense or mechanism of denial that Didion recruits, semi-consciously, to move through the days and weeks and months after the event. She reports several instances of her engaging with magical thinking and her inability to fully come to terms with the reality and finality of her husband’s death, hoping that he will somehow magically reappear to wear his shoes or pick up his book.

First she turns to literature, studies and medical books and articles to understand what happened, if her husband’s death oculd have been avoided and what to do for her daughter because as she explains: “In times of trouble I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. There was the journal CS Lewis kept after the death of his wife, A Grief Observed, but not much else.” She turns to Freud and Melanie Klein’s writings about grief and mourning, and buys a medical book on neuroanatomy.in an attempt to make informed decisions concerning her daughter.

Eventually, her defenses crumble as she comes to grips with the abyss of grief and the reality of her husband’s sudden departure. She’s easily distracted and she feels fragile, disoriented. She notices a decrease in her cognitive capacities. She writes: “attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself,” On grief she writes: “Grief comes in waves…… paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves,” and elsewhere: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

The second book I read by Joan Didion was Notes to John (2025), consisting of 46, I think, largely unedited diary entries.The book was put together after her death. In 1999 Didion began therapy sessions because her family “had had a few rough years.” Didion described these sessions in a journal she had created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Over some length of time she recorded conversations she had with psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. It is a very intimate account. The sessions focused on her adopted daughter’s serious alcoholism and its effect on her work and decision making, Didion’s constant worrying, motherhood, individuation, over-protectiveness, guilt, adoption and the complexities of her relationship with her daughter. Later they discussed Didion’s own work and the difficulty she had in sustaining it amidst her worries, her own childhood, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe, the question of her legacy. They also discussed ways of responding and supporting her daughter’s participation in AA groups when Didion herself disapproved of them intellectually, and whether to support her daughter financially, suicide risk, financial decisions, and more.

While I was reading the book I kept wondering whether this packaging of her notes and diary pages into a book after her death without her ever having expressed any desire for them to be published, was wise or ethical. I also wondered if it was just my view or whether others or book critics had similar feelings. So, I looked at some reviews on the Net, and yes, there were people who thought that maybe it was a misguided decision to publish these very intimate and personal notes. The fact that she was a writer and that she had written these pages did not instantly mean that they were meant for publishing. These diary entries could have been a way for Didion to further process what took place during the analysis, a way of also involving her husband in the process, or simply a recording of a period in her life, perhaps for use in future books. Also, Didion had written The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, both very personal books, about her husband and daughter’s deaths, so the publishing of the diary pages did not seem necessary. Some critics referred to a crude fascination in seeing the material below or behind the finished books, but I think it’s still an invasion of Didion and her family’s privacy after her death.

The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001), written by Susanna Kaysen, is a memoir-novel, one could say. Defining it as a novel allows the writer more freedom to tell a personal story while shaping her narrative the way she needs. The title is an artistic reference to the body organ she writes about. Kaysen writes unflinchingly about a gynaecologically related health condition and her long struggle for answers and relief from pain from the physicians and the health providers she visits when there seems to be no satisfactory answer or agreement among them about neither the causes nor the treatment.

As we might guess when it comes to health, things can be complex, and a variety of causes, some more obvious and others less apparent, can contribute to a singular issue or a condition can be linked to other symptoms or difficulties. Moreover, it is often difficult to separate physical conditions and symptoms from psychology, early trauma or current relationships. Kaysen writes: “Don’t separate the mind from the body….. Don’t separate even character—you can’t. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It’s up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.”

She gradually comes to some understanding about certain things about herself, others and broader contexts. She notices a more forceful and non empathic aspect of her boyfriend, she is befriended by a younger man, who sends her conflicting messages, she remembers her mother, who has been deceased several years. She writes: “Watching my mother die had made me realize that it’s important to have a doctor you like. She did. He couldn’t stop her from dying, but he didn’t leave her to die by herself.” One of the health care professionals reminds her of certain aspects of her childhood toilet training. During a meal with friends, who knew her as a child, and while she was recounting a particularly unpleasant incident, when her high school principal had accused her of going barefoot and had become furious about it, when in fact she’d been wearing beige shoes, and under the influence of a medication she had been given, she began to dissociate and then have trouble remembering words. Visits to friends, wit and humor, and fresh realizations, get her through this odyssey of uncertainty, pain, frquent visits to doctors and experimentation with a variety of treatments, which bring more problems than relief.

I also read The Child, the Family, and the Outside World by Donald W.Winnicott (1896-1971), a pioneering and influential paediatrician and psychoanalyst. Much of the book is based on talks broadcast by the BBC at various times and was first published in 1964. Because it’s for mothers, parents and caregivers, and the general public, the language is very accessible. It provides clear, practical and empathic guidance, and the tone is non-judgmental and humane, respecting mothers’ intuitions about child-rearing. In the introduction he writes: “To begin with, you will be relieved to know that I am not going to be telling you what to do. I am a man, and so I can never really know what it is like to see wrapped up over there in the cot a bit of my own self, a bit of me living an independent life, yet at the same time dependent and gradually becoming a person. Only a woman can experience this….”

Winnicott draws on his long experience, as both a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, to take us on a journey from infancy to independence, creating a supportive frame for mothers and parents to navigate the challenges of child care and parenting. I should add though that all books and works exist inside a historical context, and therefore, books written over sixty years ago need to be read with this in mind, in order to both better understand the material, and also, to glean what is relevant and of value. Having said this, and although the book was first published in the 60s, there is a lot of wisdom in its pages and its insights and information remain highly relevant and continue to influence the understanding of child psychology and parenting today.

The book covers a variety of themes concerning child development, parenting and the dynamic interaction between family and environment. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of development: feeding, breast feeding, food, the digestive process, weaning and the necessity to view the baby as a person from the start. He notes: “The story of a human being does not start at five years or two, or at six months, but starts at birth – and before birth if you like; and each baby is from the start a person, and needs to be known by someone. No one can get to know a baby as well as the baby’s own mother can.” He clarifies that the tendency towards life and growth is something inherent in the baby, and discusses the innate morality of the baby and how far parents should try to impose their standards and beliefs on the growing child, instincts and normal difficulties, young children and their relationships with father and other people, the need for support for parents, siblings, the only child, twins, shyness, natural aggression, distress, anger, jealousy and independence. Winnicott recognises that living and human development has its inherent difficulties. He writes: “Even the most kindly, understanding background of home-life cannot alter the fact that ordinary human development is hard, and indeed a perfectly adaptive home would be difficult to endure, because there would be no relief through justified anger.”

He stresses the great significance and value of play in a child’s development and the child’s experiments for independence. He writes: “Whereas it is easy to see that children play for pleasure, it is much more difficult for people to see that children play to master anxiety or to master ideas and impulses that lead to anxiety if they are not in control. Anxiety is always a factor in a child’s play, and often it is a major factor…..For in so far as children only play for pleasure they can be asked to give it up, whereas, in so far as play deals with anxiety, we cannot keep children from it without causing distress, actual anxiety, or new defences against anxiety.”
Finally, in the third part, The Outside World, there is an exploration of the needs of the under-five, the role of the nursery school, which he writes,“is not to be a substitute for an absent mother, but to supplement and extend the role which in the child’s earliest years the mother alone plays,” parents and teachers and the issue of influencing and being influenced, sex education in school, visiting children in hospital, juvenile delinquency, the role of dreaming in a child’s maturation, and aggression, which, Winnicott says has two meaning, “…it is directly or indirectly a reaction to frustration.,,,,& ,,,, it is one of the two main sources of an individual’s energy.”

Two extracts from the book:

“It is vitally important that we should get to understand the part played by those who care for the infant, so that we can protect the young mother from whatever tends to get between herself and her child. If she is without understanding of the thing she does so well she is without means to defend her position, and only too easily she spoils her job by trying to do what she is told, or what her own mother did, or what the books say. Fathers come into this, not only by the fact that they can be good mothers for limited periods of time, but also because they can help to protect the mother and baby from whatever tends to interfere with the bond between them, which is the essence and very nature of child care.”

“As to the theory that training baby must start as early as possible, the truth is that training is out of place until the infant has accepted the world outside himself and come to terms with it. And the foundation of this acceptance of external reality is the first brief period in which a mother naturally follows the desires of her infant………. This word ‘training’ always seems to me to be something that belongs to the care of dogs. Dogs do need to be trained. I suppose we can learn something from dogs, in that if you know your own mind your dog is happier than if you do not; and children, too, like you to have your own ideas about things. But a dog doesn’t have to grow up eventually into a human being, so when we come to your baby we have to start again, and the best thing is to see how far we can leave out the word ‘training’ altogether. There’s room for the idea that the sense of good and bad, like much else, comes naturally to each infant and child provided certain conditions of environmental care can be taken for granted. But it is a complex matter, this process of development from impulsiveness and claiming to control everyone and everything, to an ability to conform. I cannot tell you how complex it is. Such development takes time. Only if you feel it is worth while will you allow opportunity for what has to happen……..In the process of integration, impulses to attack and destroy, and impulses to give and share are related, one lessening the effect of the other. Coercive training fails to make use of this child’s integrative process. What I am describing here is in fact the gradual build-up in the child of a capacity to feel a sense of responsibility……”

There’s a little more on Winnicott’s ideas and work in the text below:

Part 2

I also listened to two Being Well podcasts this month, both worth listening to for those interested in this material. One could say it’s a critical introduction to leading figures of the psychoanalytical world or people in the field of psychotherapy that were influenced by psychoanalytical ideas. Forrest and Rick Hanson present key ideas, the movement of these ideas through time, and how we can understand the idea of psychodynamics. Forrest expalins that psychodynamics is just the notion that we’re not a fixed system and that there are different kinds of often conflicting forces at play inside of us. Consequently, the mind is not always in agreement with itself. By going through some kind of psychoanalytic process we’re practically trying to ,make sense of what’s happening in the deeper layers of the mind. By bringing this material into conscious awareness, we can increase our understanding of our decisions, behaviours, and also better our life. They also provide some critical commentary, and discuss the practical takeaways and what we can apply to our lives.

I will focus on Part 2 (Watch at: https://rickhanson.com/being-well-podcast-9-lessons-from-the-great-minds-of-psychoanalysis/)

In this second part Forrest and Rick begin their discussion by loosely discerning “three schools”, one could say: a) the ego school; b) the more relational and developmental school and c) the depth and meaning school.   

The first school of thought involves Alfred Adler, Anna Freud and Erik Erikson’s work and theories. Forrest and Rick summarize their work by asking the questions explored or answered in their work: How do we develop this thing that we call ego strength? How do we reinforce the ego’s ability to make good choices, to do the things that bring us closer to what we want to accomplish in life and overcome different kinds of challenges?

In brief, the first school was founded when Alfred Adler broke away from Freud at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly due to Freud’s focus on sexual drives and Adler’s view of Freud’s ideas as “a grim approach to psychology.” About Frued’s grim view of things Rick comments: “Freud’s description of the individual almost in isolation as a kind of victim or passenger of these primal instinctual processes slamming into societal and Victorian era rules….” They note that in Adler’s work there’s no Oedipus complex, instead it is a more growth-oriented, future-focused, aspirational model of development than what we see in more classic psychoanalysis with Freud, and also that Adler promoted a more egalitarian power dynamic, “much flatter power dynamic,” between the analyst and the client.

Adler also located the individual in a social context and explored people’s adaptations to their social context, as we all start by being little bodies that have to manage a sense of inferiority, in a complicated world full of big, powerful adults. The common notion of the inferiority complex comes from Adler, who was interested in how we gradually develop a healthy sense of worth and how we manage to build up our own sense of identity as a “me” in a complex relational world. Rick says that there is within us an important need as social primates to contribute to the world, to contribute to others, to feel of value, and for our contributions to not be thwarted, and that “Adler was one of the first people to really normalize that longing to contribute, to be of worth, to matter, including in terms of the social contextualizing of mattering.” However he cautions us “to be aware of doomed quests in which we’re trying to grow corn in the Sahara,” maybe repeating a pattern from childhood. So, we need a suitable and repsonsive environment.

Anna Freud, who, as Forrest notes, has probably contributed more to the actual practice of therapy as we know it today than her father, particularly in terms of her work on defense mechanisms. Her basic insight was that our ego, stuck between the id and the superego, tries to overcome this position by adopting a variety of defense strategies to protect itself from painful thoughts and feelings. Anna Freud was in particular interested in how the ego operates in children and in how their ego responded when under attack in the moment. Some defenses are repression, denial, projection, rationalization, sublimation, which involves the channeling of feared material, unwanted impulses and emotions, or trauma material into one’s work, art or other activities that can contribute to the world. Defenses are normal, useful and protective, and they help us cope in life, especially early on; however they can be both adaptive and maladaptive.That is why we need to learn and be able to function from a different place as we get older. Even awareness of how and when we fall back on them can be freeing. As Forrest says, as we increase our tolerance of the dreaded experience and we increase our capacity to express ourself fully, we are able to gradually push back the bars on the invisible cage.

The third person of the “ego focused school” they talk about is Erik Erikson (1902-1994). Development and questions of identity were central issues in his personal life and work, and he is known for his stages of development. On the podcast it is said that Erikson used Freud’s idea of internal conflict and expanded this out into a socially embedded and contextual developmental framework. Erikson suggested that the ego needs to adapt to face different kinds of real-world challenges, which he broke down into eight stages. He framed each stage “around a core conflict that we need to face, and we are either able to overcome it or we’re not.” If we don’t negotiate each developmental stage successfully, we carry it with us into the next phase of our life. However, we can if we choose to or have the opportunity, through therapy or other practices, “try to revisit that conflict in effective ways.” Rick adds that the stage series in Erikson is grounded in new science on neuroplasticity, and that there is an opportunity for all of us to keep growing and learning throughout our entire lifespan.

These stages according to Erikson were: Trust versus Mistrust, in infancy; Autonomy versus Shame or Doubt when one is a toddler; Initiative versus Guilt, from three to five; Industry versus Inferiority, mostly from six to eleven; Identity versus Role Confusion, tasks that to some extent need to be negotiated from the age of 12 to 18; Intimacy versus Isolation during adulthood (18 to 40); Generativity versus Stagnation, during middle age (40 to 65); and finally, Integrity versus Despair, during the final years of our life. Rick explains that what we’re talking about during this phase of life is acquiring a sense of wholeness, acceptance, inclusion, reflection and inner peace.

Others. like Daniel Levinson, built on Erikson’s ideas, and on notions of inevitable periods of construction, destruction and reconstruction during our life. Rick clarifies: “where you are constructing a life structure of some kind, which then sometimes kind of falls apart as it gets reorganized, not so much destroyed, but reorganized into the next stage. So, they’re normal rhythms, and there’s a wisdom in accepting the rhythms.” It is good to bear in mind that there is overlap between stages and drawing strict arbitrary lines between stages can be a bit problematic. Τhe basic takeaways, Rick notes, are that we never stop growing and changing.

Concerning the “relational and developmental school,” which mostly focused on primary caregiver relationships, and how early experiences get played out in different ways throughout our life, Forrest and Rick focus on Klein, Winnicott and Kohut.

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was one of the most influential psychologists and her most important contribution was object relations theory, which suggests we internalize our mother, father, and people we are in relationship with as objects. Forrest and Rick provide examples to explain the basic idea of this theory: “we develop knowledge of the world in a frame, in which there is a me over here and then everything else over there…” The over there object, they explain…….. could be the cup of milk, or father, or children at school. We understand ourself in part due to our relationship with the external object, whether it is a group of people or person or thing. They become the foundation of how we understand relationships, love, loss, trust, and so on. We then generalize these learned object relations patterns, with their associated feelings, desires, scripts, expectations, and behavior patterns, and we transfer old experiences into our current settings.

Klein’s theory suggests that we internalize the people that we depend on as objects, and over time, if we have had a healthy relationship with our mother or / and primary caregivers we internalize ourselves as also being something that we can depend on. Forrest explains that the idea is that all babies by nature are quite “paranoid and schizoidal.” Practically, this means that if the infant is hungry and the mom can’t or doesn’t respond, anger is directed at that bad object. Over time if things go okay, infants realize that “their mom is in fact, both the good breast and the bad breast at the same time. The caregiver that they love and the one that has kind of made them suffer in their mind, at least, is actually the same person. And this then moves the child into the depressive position. So, they experience grief and mixed feelings and complexity about the fact that their mom is both of these individuals…” This is a healthy part of development, and if the mother responds effectively to the distressed infant and the rupture is repaired, then this positive outcome is internalized, and this enables the child to gradually hold conflicitng or different things in their mind.

However, what happens when things weren’t good enough? Various learnt defense mechanisms like splitting, for instance, develop, which can cause problems in adulthood, and features like idealization and devaluation can then be present in a relationship or we have an inability to accept that people contain multitudes. They conclude with questions that can help us in adulthood to discern our internalized objects and modes of relating: What are we carrying around? What are those relationships like for us? Forrest notes that even awareness of the presence of the objects that we’ve internalized and are functioning as a kind of script for our behavior can be so useful and freeing. Klein was also one of the early developers of play therapy believing that for children it was a more effective way than free association to access their unconscious material.

Donald W. Winnicott paediatrician and a psychoanalyst (1896 – 1971), referred to above, focused on the ideas of good enough parenting, a holding environment and the notion a true self that exists inside of all of us. We become that true self through early relationships that support emotional authenticity, and value what is real in us. Forrest asks: “How do we develop authenticity, and how is authenticity developed in a child? How do they feel safe enough to be authentic? And what are the kinds of conditions that support that”

Winnicott believed that infants and children do not need perfect but good enough parenting, a responsive caregiver, who pays attention to the baby’s needs and is not fearful or impatient with the infant’s distress or aggression. His notion of a holding environment, as described in the podcast, is “both literal holding and kind of metaphorical, emotional, psychological holding where the caregiver could survive the child’s distress…” In the book mentioned above Winnicott allows us to see what a holding environment could look like.

Heinz Kohut (1913 – 1981) moved his focus from Freud’s internal drive states to a more relational stance. Rick mentions that Kohut explored how we express our subjective sense of self and how we feel felt by other people in different relationships. And one way that we do that is through mirroring, which is how parents and others respond to us, a smile, a nod, an encouraging gesture, or other things that make us feel like we are valued and that our inner life is seen and affirmed by them. Healthy self-esteem requires supportive relationships. The question then that arises is whether these needs were met for a person when they were very young or did they feel more or less invisible, fearful even. Forrest says that “In the sense that we to a great extent become ourselves through our relationships, when we haven’t been supported adequately, we might need to “reckon with our developmental history a little bit…”

The third person discussed in this school of thought on the podcast is Otto Kernberg, who focused on pathological narcissism and borderline conditions and pointed to the combination of unmet normal narcissistic needs, which when unmet in our earlier years, then “typically, in adulthood people either suppress and deny those normal narcissistic needs for mirroring, validation, joining, and cherishing and prizing,” or they develop a fragile ego and become angry and pathological narcissistic, constantly looking for a way to fill themselves up from the outside. In the case that the process described above in relation to Klein’s theory didn’t go so well, some people will deal with this, as Rick puts it, by “looking to others to get plugged in to their frame, their motherboard, to complete their sense of healthy person-ness, and that leads to often treating others as objects that are just plugins. And you know kind of what it feels like when you realize that you’re just sort of a plugin module into someone’s motherboard to enable them to maintain some kind of emotional equilibrium……”

Rick and Forrest move on to other important figues, who took the psychoanalytic view of the layered and complicated mind in a very different direction. One of the people discussed is Wilhelm Reich (1897 – 1957). Many of us have read something by him. Forrest refers to The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933, one of the most political pieces of writing in the history of psychology. Reich, to focus on the positive part of his work, explored how trauma and repressed emotions can have a physical toll on our body, and the idea of character armor, which are the defenses that we developed to protect ourselves, the ways of holding ourselves or modes of posture. By investigating these, we can learn something about our deeper psychology. There is mention on the podcast of Antonio Damasio’s notions of somatic markers, the subtle ways in which musculoskeletal processes are adjuncts to our overall emotional memory systems, and how a lot of today’s trauma-informed work builds on his ideas that the residues of experiences are not purely psychological or purely mental, but have a physical cost to us.

They briefly discuss Jung and the neo Jungians and their ideas about fundamental archetypes and the collective unconscious, which Jung used to explain why we “share various themes in our psychology, even if two groups of people have never met each other.” These people focus more on the symbolic mind of dreams, fantasies and myths, are less focused on pathology or symptoms, and are more interested in existential goals. Jung believed that “The archetypes are the images of the instincts,” and Rick expands on this saying that “….something deep within our biology is imagined, like as a functional process in the psyche as it gradually bubbles into awareness through imagery of one kind or another that can often take forms.And to realize, that you are that jungle…. It’s too big to control. You can’t control the jungle. Maybe you can hack out a tiny clearing, sit in it next to your campfire … there’s this kind of underlying current of different forms of art will sort of show us the way or connect us to something….. more meaningful for ourselves.”

They refer to one of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a feminist analyst, who reframed myths and fairy tales. In her books she analyses well known fairy tales through feminist lens.They also briefly mention Marie-Louise von Franz’s work on fairy tales. Finally, they discuss James Hillman (1926 – 2011), who believed that we need not try to recover or better ourselves, but that the psyche expresses itself through our dreams, desires, and even our “pathologies.” His relationship with depression, for instance, was unlike the typical approaches to psychology, which consider it a negative thing. Hillman framed depression as a rational response to a world that includes a lot of pain and ugliness, and therefore, by exploring what the depression, for instance, might be trying to say could help a person understand parts of their self, and also depathologize the experience.

Finally, they discuss the basic ideas of Irvin Yalom’s existential psychotherapy. Yalom is still alive, aged 94, and was a professor at Standford and a psychotherapist. He has also written many books. Many of his books have been translated into Greek, where, I believe, he enjoys a large readership. Rick and Forrest suggest that his core insight is that a lot of our distress in life comes from trauma, relational wounds, but also from a kind of confrontation with existential facts of life, particularly death, freedom, isolation, and the need for each one of us to construct their own meaning. These deeper existential fears shape the unconscious mind, and to some degree or other, we all have to grapple with the existential anxiety that comes up in life. This knowledge of our mortality can give rise to different defenses like obsessions and compulsions, anxiety or depression, or other activites and behaviours that we might employ to stave off our often unacknowledged fears.