You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Daniel Shaw's Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation is volume 58 of the Relational Perspectives Book Series. In this book, Shaw looks at the traumatic impact that pathological narcissism has on others. The dependence that children have on their parents, students have on their teachers, and patients have on their therapists makes them particularly vulnerable to the narcissistic pathology of the individuals upon whom there is dependence for love, learning, and healing. Individuals in trusted positions of authority may abuse that trust to meet their own narcissistic needs at the expense of the individuals who are dependent upon them. What Shaw calls “traumatic narcissism” may involve physical or sexual abuse, as well as more subtle boundary violations, but most centrally, it is a type of trauma in which one is denied the right and the ability to have an independent mind of one's own. Traumatic narcissism is a kind of brainwashing that instills a dread of thinking for oneself. Shaw shows how traumatic narcissism is particularly at play in cults, be they religious or therapeutic in nature.
Shaw notes the irony that, although psychoanalysis is presumably a liberatory social practice that should enable individuals to think for themselves, it has too often possessed cult-like qualities. Psychoanalysis has too often been perverted to systematically undermine the ability of analysands, supervisees, and students to think for themselves by dogmatic assertion of what is or is not psychoanalysis. And in the privacy of the analytic or supervisory relationship, boundary violations have been committed by idealized clinicians who often possess “guru-like” reputations in their local institutes. At a discipline-wide level, it is well known that new ideas in psychoanalysis have often been initially rejected for not being “real” psychoanalysis, though at a later point, such ideas may become widely accepted within the analytic community. Relational psychoanalysis has been