Empathic Inhibition and Psychoanalytic Technique

Those patients who suffer a narcissistic character disorder have repressed their capacity for empathic response as a defense in the protection of the illusion of Oedipal triumph. This illusion of Oedipal triumph is essential for the maintenance of their primary omnipotent core. Such a grandiose self-concept, with its roots in early development, protects the patient against the confusing early mother-child relationship which was experienced by the child as threatening because of the irreconcilability of what he perceived and what he was told. The retention of omnipotence preserves the child against a state of overwhelming helplessness and anxiety as he is flooded with tension in the face of the conflicting stimuli which cannot be organized.

Both the hypotheses that these individuals retain their primary omnipotent position and that difficulty arises within the framework of the early mother-child relationship are in essential agreement with others, for example Reich, Kernberg, Kohut. The difference in my hypothesis stems from the dynamic conception that it is the confusion resulting from the contrast between the child's apperception and the mother's input, which leads the child to inhibit his own apperception and to fail to develop, as an extension of this inhibition, an empathic responsiveness. The therapeutic attitude and the therapeutic technique are quite different whether one considers that the empathic capacity has been crippled, as have many investigators, or if one can assume the potential empathic capacity is present but inhibited and defensively blocked.