Narcissism, understood as self-love and the pursuit of satisfaction produced by admiration, is present in parental relationships. Parents project in their children a great impulse to live and love; however, this impulse is often mediated by your desires to a greater or lesser degree, maintaining a relationship of unconscious narcissism, not self-centered, but anxious or waiting.
Literature and theory aimed to show how relationships with parents influence children, however, it is difficult to find clear references in literature to narcissism present in parental relationships, understood as the other’s vision as its own or, as it is, it. , looking at the child’s characteristics as his own.
- The first vestiges of interest of this phenomenon are found in Freud.
- Who theorized about the tendency to attribute all perfections to the child (it should be noted that it was.
- In this case.
- Only the way parents formed relationships with their children).
- This is noticeable at the beginning of relationships with parents.
- When the baby becomes the king of the house.
So, the phenomenon, Your Majesty the baby? It becomes a way to renew in children the privileges they imagine having as children and those who have had to give up. We note that parents give their children privileges and considerations, detaching their qualities. and then demand that your development fit your employer.
That is, many parents end up projecting their children’s “ideal self,” offering them and themselves a “perfected and perfectionist” version of what they believe or would like to have been.
Let us say that we can understand that an ideal self is conceived in the children themselves, making them responsible for healing the deepest frustrations and desires of the parental child ego.
That’s why we talk about unconscious narcissism, because when we talk about projection, it would be more of a love for themselves, for the way they believe or want to be, deploying that loving relationship in a certain way.
The clinical experience leads professionals in the field of parent-child relationships to delve into the unconscious narcissism that occurs there, for which the psychoanalyst Juan Manzano evokes the four essential elements that constitute this unconscious paternal narcissism:
Parental projection of your own childhood lived as abandonment or disability. The parent who makes this projection does not want his/her child not to have what he wanted and desired; in turn, they see in their children the perfect representation of their ideal self. This projection may be largely unconscious or at least there may not be explicit reflection on it.
The father or mother considers that their child is part of themselves or of their internal objects to a greater or lesser extent, that is, the father identifies in such a way that the feeling of possession is exacerbated, making it difficult to build one’s own. child.
As mentioned, the purpose of this complementary projection and identification is to obtain narcissistic satisfaction, however, other objectives, such as the rejection of a loss, can be added to the achievement of the desired profile.
The interaction is based on previously assigned roles, so it will go beyond imagination and shape the development of relational dynamics with others and with oneself, creating a fictional profile that eventually becomes reality.
In pathological cases, children can react in different ways, sometimes they assume the roles assigned to them, creating problems later, which will cause the child to rebel because he feels abandoned, that sense of abandonment is determined by the simple reason that the relationship between him and the parents does not exist or is rare, because he feels that his desires are not his own , but are imposed by the expectations of the parents.
NOTE: The content of this article was extracted from what is stated in Juan Manzano’s “Narcissistic Paternity Scenarios”.