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In the voluminous literature on narcissistic personality disorders and among other well-defined clinical features, the emotional characteristics of this disorder remain loosely defined and insufficiently specified. This is particularly true of a wide spectrum of negative narcissistic emotions, which are an important part of the overall narcissistic emotional life since they are present in many different instances of narcissistic failure.
In this article I will focus on the negative emotions of narcissistic personalities. More precisely, I will analyze a specific negative emotional state emerging in one particular type of narcissistic failure-narcissistic decompensation. As I will show, an overwhelming sense of futility specifically colors the whole personality and ego functions (i.e., feelings, thoughts, and actions) of the decompensated narcissistic patient; consequently, the emotional state emerging in narcissistic decompensation has all the taxonomical characteristics of pathological mood. Guided by its dominant phenomenological expression (experience of futility and specific coloring of “somberness”), I have denoted this emotional disturbance as a pessimistic mood, or pessimism.
Primarily philosophical, the term and notion pessimism appears in psychiatry both colloquially and literarily, and its usage is twofold: first, it is employed as a wide concept (a unit in the dichotomy pessimism/optimism) denoting any negative expectation or overestimation of future obstacles (Rycroft, 1972): and second, in a narrower meaning, to describe certain depressive manifestations (Beck, 1974), depression in general (Jacobson, 1971), or dysthimic disorder (Klerman, 1980).
This multiple usage of the term brings about a risk of oversimplification, when similar (but actually different) emotional categories are equated.