"I don't want, what I can get"
A column about narcissism and sexuality
Many people know about this phenomenon: everything just easily comes to these people: their partner is committed to them, they still have butterflies in their stomach after all those years together and they tend to see the world through rose-tinted glasses. But somehow some people just don't get the same experience in life. What's going on here? A lot of things sort of fit together yet the other person's efforts in love are rejected: it’s because you don't want what you can get.
True to the motto of the harder the better, many people go off in search of the next challenge, the next kick in the hunt for someone they can never be sure of, who will quite possibly reject them and who, at any rate, will put up some degree of resistance. Because, more often than not, it is only this resistance itself that makes it all seem so attractive. Why is it that people go about collecting everything that gives them a sense of confirmation as well as validation? The phenomenon can only be understood if you consider the political and economic conditions of society. In principle, people are alienated from one another: they find themselves in competition with one another in a variety of different ways. Quite often it is simply a question of you or me or the extent to which the other can contribute to one's own advancement in life, whether personal, professional or both. Since exchange is the dominant economic principle, people's relationships with one another are no longer based on wishes, desires and needs but become on a material bond, one that is highly transactional in nature.
It is, therefore, not at all surprising to observe nowadays that the choice of one’s partner is made in such a way that the other person should contribute to one's own greatness. Since the ego is so far from being on an equal footing and because society is not concerned with people's needs, it tries to correct this deficiency. The ego, which is perceived as being small and insignificant primarily because society is not concerned with the ego, continually creates a larger object that it can look up to, from which it can derive gratification in order to compensate for its own inadequacy.
The more people have to fight to win over others, the more they devalue other people and, in so doing, they end up emptying themselves of their own importance to the point of feeling rather empty. One of the most important psychoanalysts, Otto Kernberg, insightfully writes: "The tragedy of these people is that they [...] need so much from others, but cannot even recognize what they get because it would make them too jealous" (Kernberg, 1983/2014, p. 273).
Basically speaking, then, people in these narcissistic relationships also give their chosen object a lot of power, because they make themselves dependent on their object's recognition and are only able to stabilize their own ego in this way.
Image: Unsplash: Aleksandr Popov, 2024
Write comment
Your email address will not be published. Comments are published only after moderation.
Comments ()