The Emotional Dynamics of Narcissism

Since its introduction into the psychological literature, narcissism has been conceptualized as an emotional disorder—a result of excessive pride and shame. Following Freud (1914/1957), Kernberg (1975) argued that the central psychological process underlying the disorder— identifi cation with an idealized ego—necessarily leads to pride. Kohut (1971) placed greater emphasis on shame, viewing it as the typical response to the “narcissistic wound”—a loss of grandiosity thought to occur in the narcissist’s early development. Lewis (1981) also viewed shame as central, but as an etiological factor underlying narcissism’s development, rather than a response to the narcissistic wound. In this view, narcissism is essentially a shamecoping response mechanism (Morrison, 1989). Broucek (1982) integrated both of these perspectives, arguing that shame is a response to the narcissistic wound and a stimulus to narcissistic selfaggrandizement. Eventually, shame became pinpointed as the “keystone” affect in narcissism (Broucek, 1982; Wright, O’Leary, & Balkin, 1989). Thus, although socialpersonality researchers have only recently begun to emphasize the specifi c emotions underlying narcissism, clinicians and psychodynamic theorists have long argued that shame and pride critically shape this personality process. This emotionfocused perspective leads to one of the paradoxes of narcissism: how do two seemingly opposite emotions interact to produce a coherent personality?