Joanna's Narcissism

This is an email I wrote for Joanna, a  Bulgarian women of 28 who lost her way, like many others from Eastern Europe:

"Wir schaffen das,” were the famous words of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spoken on August 31, 2015, during the height of the European refugee crisis. Eleven years later it was clear that the Germans remained what they always have been, a resentful, and therefore dangerous people. On 6 September 2026 The New York Times, the leading Western newspaper stated: “Far-Right Victory in German State Seen as Omen Across Europe. A vote in eastern Germany has given fresh momentum to hard-right parties hoping to win elections elsewhere on the continent next year, analysts said. 

When a far-right party won a landslide victory on Sunday in a small state in eastern Germany, its reverberations could be felt from Downing Street in London to the Élysée Palace in Paris. Rarely has the result of a regional election been viewed with such portent for the fate of democracy in Europe.

This wasn’t just any European country; it was Germany, a country that has relentlessly isolated far-right political parties since the calamity of Nazism. And it wasn’t just a strange outlier, but rather the latest step in a steady, decade-long march that has brought the far right ever closer to the fulcrum of power in Europe.

With elections scheduled across Europe next year, the striking success of the party, Alternative for Germany, could be a harbinger of further far-right victories, according to analysts, as well as a template for how they can be engineered. Its populist, anti-immigrant message echoes those of nationalist leaders in Britain, France, Italy and Spain, all countries where voters harbor many of the same grievances as those in Germany…

“Developed Europe is going through a version of sophisticated state failure,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst who specializes in Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “Governments are unable to address cost-of-living concerns. They are not able to deliver for their voters.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/world/europe/afd-germany-europe-far-right-saxony-anhalt.html 

A regional Dutch Newspaper reported a day later that the AfD-victory in Saxony-Anhalt, former East Germany, was not surprising, according to a GDR expert. “They didn't used to be bothered by foreigners,” the same resentment that helped Hitler come to power, more than nine decennia earlier. 

To understand the fears and xenophobia of the Eastern-European former communists one could read the famous work Crowds and Power of the Nobel Prize winner (1981) Elias Canetti, who was born in Bulgaria. He points out that “It is difficult to resist the suspicion that behind paranoia, as behind all power, lies the same profound urge: the desire to get other men out of the way so as to be the only one; or, in the milder, and indeed often admitted, form, to get others to help him become the only one…

The survivor is mankind’s worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom. Is it possible for us to escape him, even now at this last moment?” In the world today the activities of the high and mighty “have become so terrifying that we scarcely dare look at them: a single individual can easily destroy a good part of mankind. To bring this about he can use technical means he does not understand; he can himself remain completely hidden; and he does not even have to run any personal risk in the process. The contrast between his singleness and the numbers of those he can destroy is so great that we can no longer find a meaningful image to express it. One man today has the possibility of surviving at a single stroke more human beings than could generations of his predecessors together. The precepts of earlier rulers are there to be studied and it is not difficult to learn from them. Rulers profit from all our discoveries, as though it were expressly for them that they had been made. Today the stakes are immensely higher: there are many more people and they are all much closer together. The means have increased a thousandfold, but the victims, if not as submissive, are fundamentally as defenceless as ever. All the terror of a supernatural power which comes to punish and destroy mankind has now attached itself to the idea of the ‘bomb’; and this is something an individual can manipulate. It lies in his hands. An earthly ruler can now unleash destruction surpassing all the plagues with which God visited the Egyptians. Man has stolen his own God. He has seized him and taken for himself his armory of doom and terror. The most audacious dreams of those earlier rulers in whom the desire to survive had become a passion and a vice seem meagre today. Seen in retrospect, history appears innocent and almost comfortable. Everything lasted for so long then and in an unexplored world there was so little to be destroyed. Today there is only a moment between decision and effect, and, measured by our potentialities, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and Hitler seem pitiful amateurs. Whether there is any way of dealing with the survivor, who has grown to such monstrous stature, is the most important question today; one is tempted to say that it is the only one. The fragmentation and fluidity of modern life blinds us to the simplicity and urgency of this one fundamental issue. Hitherto the only answer to man’s passionate desire for survival has been a creative solitude which earns immortality for itself; and this, by definition, can be the solution only for a few. To set against this growing danger which we all feel in our bones, there is one other new fact which should be remembered. Today the survivor is himself afraid. He has always been afraid, but with his vast new potentialities his fear has grown too, until it is almost unendurable. His triumph, when it comes, may last only for hours or minutes. For nowhere in the world is safe, even for him. There is nowhere the new weapons cannot reach, including whatever refuge he may make himself. His greatness and his invulnerability have become incompatible. He has overreached himself. Rulers tremble today, not, as formerly, because they are rulers, but as the equals of everybody else. The ancient mainspring of power, the safeguarding of the ruler at the cost of all other lives, has been broken. Power is greater than it has ever been, but also more precarious. Today either everyone will survive or no one. What is really required, however, is to deal with the survivor himself; and for this we must learn to see him for what he is even when his activity appears most natural. The most unquestioned and therefore the most dangerous thing he does is to give commands. We have seen that the command, even in the domesticated form found in any community, is no less than a suspended death sentence; and we know that strict and effective systems of commands are in force everywhere. Anyone who works his way to the top too quickly, or, by any other means, suddenly seizes control of such a system, will acquire an abnormal measure of the anxiety of command and will inevitably try to get rid of it. The threat which he uses continually, and which constitutes the real essence of the system of commands, finally turns against himself. Whether or not he is actually in danger from enemies, he always feels himself menaced. The most dangerous threat comes from his own people, those to whom he habitually gives orders, who are close to him and know him well. The ultimate means of deliverance, which he never wholly renounces (though he may hesitate to use it), is the sudden command for mass death. He starts a war and sends his people where they are supposed to kill, but if large numbers of them die there he will not regret them. However much he may dissemble, he is never free of a deep and hidden need to see the ranks of his own people thinned. To free him from the anxiety of command what is really necessary is that not only his enemies should die, but also many of those who fight for him. The forest of his fears has grown so dense that he cannot breathe and he longs for it to be thinned. If he waits too long his vision becomes blurred and he may do something which will seriously weaken his position. The anxiety of command increases in him until it results in catastrophe. But before catastrophe overtakes him it will have engulfed innumerable others. The system of commands is acknowledged everywhere. It is perhaps most articulate in armies, but there is scarcely any sphere of civilized life where commands do not reach and none of us they do not mark. Their threat of death is the coin of power, and here it is all too easy to add coin to coin and amass wealth. If we would master power we must face command openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting.”

Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power (pp. 607-611).

Joanna, deep inside this mentality hides a common psychological disorder, called narcissism. Christopher Lasch wrote in his world-famous book The Culture Of Narcissism. American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979):

According to Kernberg (dr. Otto Kernberg, world-famous originally Austrian psychiatrist. svh.) “narcissistic patients, often admire some hero or outstanding individual” and “experience themselves as part of that outstanding person.” They see the admired individual as “merely an extension of themselves.” If the person rejects them, “they experience immediate hatred and fear, and react by devaluing the former idol.”

Joanna, what I found characteristic in your attitude was het lack of self-knowledge. Being 28 years now, your gravity still fails and negativity won’t pull you through. I noticed this for instance when you called me in Italy and asked me six times if I still considered you intelligent. Although I still consider you to be intelligent, you made yourself psychologically smaller than you are. So be careful.  The American historian Lasch:

“Just as heroism differs in subtle ways from celebrity, so hero worship, which esteems the hero’s actions and hopes to emulate them or at least to prove worthy of his example, must be distinguished from narcissistic idealization. The narcissist admires and identifies himself with “winners” out of his fear of being labeled a loser. He seeks to warm himself in their reflected glow; but his feelings contain a strong admixture of envy, and his admiration often turns to hatred if the object of this attachment does something to remind him of his own insignificance. The narcissist lacks the confidence in his own abilities that would encourage him to model himself on another person’s exalted example. Thus the narcissistic fascination with celebrity, so rampant in our society, coincides historically with what Jules Henry (well-known American anthropologist svh) calls “the erosion of the capacity for emulation, loss of the ability to model one’s self consciously after another person.” One of the high school students interviewed by Henry said flatly, ‘I think a person shouldn’t mold himself after someone else.’

To pick a person after whom to model one’s self [Henry writes] is an aggressive act of will, and is much too anxious and passive to do… When cynicism, resignation, and passivity enter life the first makes all emulative choice of properties seem vain, and passivity and resignation sap the will necessary to the emulative decision. But positively, in order for a morally sound emulative choice to be made there must be present some faith in one’s self; a certain amount of naive optimism and a certain quantity of will. 

The narcissist cannot identify with someone else without seeing the other as an extension of himself, without obliterating the other’s identity. Incapable of identification, in the first instance with parents and other authority figures, he/she is therefore incapable of hero worship or of the suspension of disbelief that makes it possible to enter imaginatively into the lives of others while acknowledging their independent existence. A narcissistic society worships celebrity rather than fame and substitutes spectacle for the older forms of theater, which encouraged identification and emulation precisely because they carefully preserved a certain distance between the audience and the actors, the hero worshipper and the hero.

When the superego consists not so much of conscious ego ideals but of unconscious, archaic fantasies about parents of superhuman size, emulation becomes almost entirely unconscious and expresses not the search for models but the emptiness of self-images. The protagonist of Heller’s ‘Something Happened,’ who completely lacks “naive optimism” and a sense of self, experiences an “almost enslaving instinct to be like just about everyone I find myself with. It happens not only in matters of speech, but with physical actions as well… It operates unconsciously… with a determination of its own, in spite of my vigilance and aversion, and usually I do not realize I have slipped into someone else’s personality until I am already there.” […]

Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, “are afraid of not belonging to the company of the great, rich, and powerful, and of belonging instead to the ‘mediocre,’ by which they mean worthless and despicable rather than ‘average’ in the ordinary sense of the term.” They worship heroes only to turn against them when their heroes disappoint them. “Unconsciously fixated on an idealized self-object for which they continue to yearn… such persons are forever searching for external omnipotent powers from whose support and approval they attempt to derive strength.” Thus the presidential assassin establishes with his victim a deadly intimacy, follows his movements, attaches himself to his rising star. The machinery of mass promotion encourages this identification by simultaneously exalting and humanizing the Olympians, endowing them with the same appetites and eccentricities that we recognize in our neighbors. Through his desperate act, the assassin or would-be assassin joins their exalted company. Assassination itself becomes a form of spectacle, and the inner lives of assassins — Oswald’s difficulties with Marina, the state of Bremer’s soul as recorded in his diary — provide the same popular entertainment as the private lives of their victims or near-victims.

Joanna, next time I will cite Professor Lasch on psychology, sociology, and psychoanalysis. In the meantime keep on trucking.

Stan