Chapter 1 The Anxiety of Being Seen: Narcissistic Pride and Narcissistic Humiliation

Both seeing and being seen are important aspects of narcissism. Self-consciousness, which is always a feature of narcissism, becomes acute when a patient loses the protection of a narcissistic relationship and is obliged to tolerate a degree of separateness. Having felt hidden and protected, he now feels conspicuous and exposed to a gaze that makes him vulnerable to humiliation. This experience can feel devastating and unbearable, particularly if it is felt to arise in retaliation to the patient’s own use of gaze to establish a superior position from which he could look down on others. In this chapter I describe how the need to avoid or cut short such humiliation may be so acute that the patient is unable to deal with guilt and other emotions connected with loss, which might otherwise be bearable. This will impede his development unless he receives the support he needs to understand his humiliation and hence tolerate it better.

We are all familiar with the emotions aroused when we are being observed. We know that being looked at can give rise to both pleasant and unpleasant feelings. It may result in feelings of pride, pleasure at being admired, and gratification of exhibitionistic impulses. However, it can also lead to the extremely uncomfortable feelings of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation. I want to focus on these feelings in this chapter because I think they are important in clinical practice and can profoundly colour the patient’s experience of analysis. Moreover, humiliation seems to have something peculiarly unbearable about it, which demands urgent relief. It may be so dreaded that the patient becomes preoccupied with the need to avoid the experience. Some patients try to hide from view, some try to reverse the

experience by attempting to elicit admiration and others try to protect themselves by inflicting humiliation on someone else. In the transference relationship, a struggle over dominance may ensue (Steiner, 1999, and Chapters 5 and 6). Here the d