Re:Narcicism and depth

<<<I am of the opinion that almost anyone who chooses to can be helped, atleast somewhat.>>>

That's a pretty big step, choosing to seek help, so I wouldn't be surprised if you were largely right with most people. But there are times when even their cooperation doesn't neccessarily guarantee any progress.

I think the deal with pathological narcissism is first that they are less likely to cooperate with a therapist because they tend to have a powerful aversion to authority figures. Second, to a unique degree pathological narcissism affects every aspect of the person's life: their thoughts, their feelings, their relationships, their every action. It isn't limited to some domain or subset of their life, some specific eccentricity or peculiarity that can be cordoned off somehow. It affects and is affected by everything.

Having such pervasive and deep roots makes a condition particularly hard to treat. Think about what happens to the life of a chronic alcoholic. Their dependency grows roots into every aspect of their relationships, thinking, action, and feeling, and becomes very hard to pull out.

Martin Seligman, who is Director of Clinical Traiing at the University of Pa, reviews a lot of outcome research and has an interesting three-part model of difficulty of change, which he considers a matter of the "depth" of a problem:

(1) biological depth - a problem that is genetically represented and heritable because it was adaptive in some environment is not going to be something we can go against very easily. Some theorize that manic depression has its roots in the seasonal cycling of energy. Fear of contamination was probably adaptive for us long before we discovered the reason for such a fear: germs. Obsessive fear of contamination features in many pathologies. There are probably adaptive features of narcissism as well.

(2) evidentiary depth - is there evidence available to disconfirm the beliefs helping to support their problem ? If someone has a pathological fear, they are likely to avoid that thing, and so will be less likely to disconfirm the basis for their fear. A fear that might be relatively simple to treat if they were exposed to the object of fear without consequences will become more recalcitrant because they take pains to avoid that exposure. Narcissists, like the rest of us but perhaps to a unique degree, tend to arrange their lives so that they tend to see the things that help support their own beliefs.

(3) explanatory depth -- the predictive power of the beliefs underlying a problem will also entrench it. The distorted beliefs of the narcissist tends to make sense of how they perceive themselves, again like the rest of us, but probably to a unique degree, so they are loathe to try to change them.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re:Narcicism and depth, by Mijoe, 08/04/02 Seligman info, by Todd, 08/06/02 Re:Seligman info, by Jansen, 09/01/02

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