which his sense of inescapable badness is
cemented.
What I want to emphasize in spelling out, in
these four organizing principles, the essential
dynamics of the traumatizing narcissist’s
relational system is that the abused child who is
the object of this behavior is not, to say the least,
being recognized as a subject in her own right.
Her role in the construction of her sense of self
is now forcibly taken out of her hands and
appropriated by the traumatizing-narcissist
parent. Her sense of being the object of, and
being defined by, the other is joined with her
sense of shameful badness. She is stripped of
agency and objectified.
I identify two fates of the adult children of
traumatizing narcissists: There are those whose
traumatization leads them to struggle again and
again to know themselves and be recognized as
subject, against the powerfully reflexive pull to
identify as the object of the other, as the victim,
the one who is “done to.” Unable to truly
separate from the abusing parent, they may
spend a lifetime trying to persuade themselves
that they are not the unlovable, bad persons they
were made to feel they were. Taking on this
badness, which Fairbairn called the child’s
“moral defense” (Fairbairn, 1952), is the
children’s best shot at believing the parent is
good—it is too horrible to believe that the one
they totally depend on is truly bad. Better to
take on the burden of the badness, and try and
try again to redeem themselves. When the
children grow older, and even acknowledge the
badness in the parent, the internalized sense of
badness is still very difficult to free themselves
from. To me, these persons are not merely
depressed, or anxious, or deflated—they have
lost the battle to develop and assert their own
subjectivity they have been forced to accept
objectification they have had to submit their
own subjectivity to the subjectivity of the other.
The other path I can identify that adult children
of the traumatizing narcissist can take, as I
mentioned earlier, is to do what the traumatizing
narcissist has done: Erect manic defenses against
any sense of weakness, need, and badness, and
project all the shameful affects out of
themselves, and into others. The traumatizing
narcissist finds others who are likely to take in
his projections, and to take on as their own the
narcissist’s shame of dependency and sense of
inferiority. This is the traumatizing narcissist’s
relational system.
Who Is the Follower of the Traumatizing
Narcissist?
Now I will switch gears and offer some ideas
about the follower of the traumatizing-narcissist
cult leader. I think I am qualified to do so, for as
the psychoanalyst Erwin Singer once said, “it
takes one to know one.”
When I first attended a conference of the
International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA),
I was only a year or so out of the cult I had
joined. It was such a relief to speak with and
meet so many others who knew exactly what I
had been through—in a way, I’m not sure my
analyst ever did. I found a moment to ask a cult
expert there if he thought that people who
became involved in these groups had some
common psychological traits. His answer was a
definite “No!,” which surprised me because I
was pretty sure that there were commonalities.
At least for those who were not born into but
joined this kind of group, it seemed obvious to
me at this point that the cult leader was like an
idealized parental figure, and the group like an
idealized family. Affiliating with the group, for
me and for many others, was at least in part an
attempt to compensate for some sense of lack in
our families of origin. But at that time, this
understanding was thought of as a form of
blaming the victim. The line of thinking then, in
1994, about people who got into cults was that
cult followers were the victims of charismatic
con artists who used mind-control techniques, as
defined by Robert Jay Lifton (1961) and by
Singer and Lalich (1995), to entrap and control
followers. These techniques were essentially
those Lifton had identified as those used by the
Chinese Communists in prison camps. Those
who got into cults, according to the thinking at
this time, were people who just happened to be
unlucky enough to get sucked in and exposed to
mind control, also known as thought reform.
Although I in fact recognized every one of
Lifton’s mind-control techniques as integral to
the authoritarian culture of the group I had been
International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 5, 2014 7
cemented.
What I want to emphasize in spelling out, in
these four organizing principles, the essential
dynamics of the traumatizing narcissist’s
relational system is that the abused child who is
the object of this behavior is not, to say the least,
being recognized as a subject in her own right.
Her role in the construction of her sense of self
is now forcibly taken out of her hands and
appropriated by the traumatizing-narcissist
parent. Her sense of being the object of, and
being defined by, the other is joined with her
sense of shameful badness. She is stripped of
agency and objectified.
I identify two fates of the adult children of
traumatizing narcissists: There are those whose
traumatization leads them to struggle again and
again to know themselves and be recognized as
subject, against the powerfully reflexive pull to
identify as the object of the other, as the victim,
the one who is “done to.” Unable to truly
separate from the abusing parent, they may
spend a lifetime trying to persuade themselves
that they are not the unlovable, bad persons they
were made to feel they were. Taking on this
badness, which Fairbairn called the child’s
“moral defense” (Fairbairn, 1952), is the
children’s best shot at believing the parent is
good—it is too horrible to believe that the one
they totally depend on is truly bad. Better to
take on the burden of the badness, and try and
try again to redeem themselves. When the
children grow older, and even acknowledge the
badness in the parent, the internalized sense of
badness is still very difficult to free themselves
from. To me, these persons are not merely
depressed, or anxious, or deflated—they have
lost the battle to develop and assert their own
subjectivity they have been forced to accept
objectification they have had to submit their
own subjectivity to the subjectivity of the other.
The other path I can identify that adult children
of the traumatizing narcissist can take, as I
mentioned earlier, is to do what the traumatizing
narcissist has done: Erect manic defenses against
any sense of weakness, need, and badness, and
project all the shameful affects out of
themselves, and into others. The traumatizing
narcissist finds others who are likely to take in
his projections, and to take on as their own the
narcissist’s shame of dependency and sense of
inferiority. This is the traumatizing narcissist’s
relational system.
Who Is the Follower of the Traumatizing
Narcissist?
Now I will switch gears and offer some ideas
about the follower of the traumatizing-narcissist
cult leader. I think I am qualified to do so, for as
the psychoanalyst Erwin Singer once said, “it
takes one to know one.”
When I first attended a conference of the
International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA),
I was only a year or so out of the cult I had
joined. It was such a relief to speak with and
meet so many others who knew exactly what I
had been through—in a way, I’m not sure my
analyst ever did. I found a moment to ask a cult
expert there if he thought that people who
became involved in these groups had some
common psychological traits. His answer was a
definite “No!,” which surprised me because I
was pretty sure that there were commonalities.
At least for those who were not born into but
joined this kind of group, it seemed obvious to
me at this point that the cult leader was like an
idealized parental figure, and the group like an
idealized family. Affiliating with the group, for
me and for many others, was at least in part an
attempt to compensate for some sense of lack in
our families of origin. But at that time, this
understanding was thought of as a form of
blaming the victim. The line of thinking then, in
1994, about people who got into cults was that
cult followers were the victims of charismatic
con artists who used mind-control techniques, as
defined by Robert Jay Lifton (1961) and by
Singer and Lalich (1995), to entrap and control
followers. These techniques were essentially
those Lifton had identified as those used by the
Chinese Communists in prison camps. Those
who got into cults, according to the thinking at
this time, were people who just happened to be
unlucky enough to get sucked in and exposed to
mind control, also known as thought reform.
Although I in fact recognized every one of
Lifton’s mind-control techniques as integral to
the authoritarian culture of the group I had been
International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 5, 2014 7
