The Disguised Cry for Help: Narcissistic Mothers and their Children

The present communication reports and examines some of the successes and failures in our past and present work with a large number of narcissistic mothers. These parents, suffering from feelings of worthlessness, failed to differentiate themselves from their children. Their search for help for their children then had really a disguised meaning. When they told the therapist of their child's school phobia, defiant behavior, eating disturbances, constant fidgeting, and so forth, and wondered how they could help their children, they were indirectly pleading for help for themselves.

The parents did not feel a need to apply for help at a family agency or to seek the help of a private therapist for their own problems. They needed to turn to child-focused treatment where their children were studied and treated rather than themselves, because of their greatly weakened capacity for self-awareness, and because they needed their children to mirror their own early childhood disturbances. Hyman Spotnitz, Leo Nagelberg and Yonata Feldman have described some narcissistic parents “who refer their child as a test of the agency's ability to handle the emotional problems of the family concerned. When their child shows improvement, they then apply for help for themselves.” 5

In presenting their main complaints about the children, these mothers unconsciously revealed their own chief difficulties. For example,