Chances are you have met men with interpersonal difficulties who needed to become attached to women who adore them. This adoration is commonly described as a narcissistic supply that the mother gives the child during his early years. If she doesn’t provide this, the danger of raising a narcissist arises. During these years, it is required by the mother to help her son experience moments of inner separation when he realistically endures that she is not one with him. Although the mother may have shown delight at his experience of being grandiose and powerful, he must learn to temper and regulate these feelings and to wait and delay gratification because, in the healthy development of the child, he must come to know that they (mother and child) are emotionally and physically separate beings. For example, when a mother tells her 2-year-old, “Use your words, not your hands—hitting isn’t allowed,” the child knows his mother has a separate vision of how he should behave. They are separate individuals. This cements the clarification the child needs that he can’t do whatever he wants; he has a mother who is different from him and who may restrict his actions. If she fails to do so, he will feel too powerful and omnipotent, leading to the potential for the development of pathological narcissism as an adult. Children don’t want to feel more powerful than their parents. In fact, it’s scary for a young child to feel more powerful than his mother. The child needs her to set limits so that he knows how to relate to others in a way that is acceptable. If he is too powerful, he expects that he is entitled to more than a child should have. If, for example, the child isn’t stopped from hitting his sibling, he feels more powerful than he should and doesn’t know how to limit his impulses to express his frustrations and anger. This is a child who could grow up into a narcissistic adult man who feels that he has power and control over others under unreasonable circumstances. He learns to manipulate and coerce others unrealistically when it serves his ambitions. When this period of development does not proceed normally, the young boy becomes fixated, leaving him mentally stuck at the time when he needs great adoration. He does not proceed to the realization that he is differentiated from his mother and cannot expect her to always affirm his sense of infant-like greatness. When this failure to develop occurs during these early years, a man never successfully overcomes these needs for affirmation and adoration. These needs come to characterize his personality, and if he is indeed endowed with a superior intelligence that is applauded too much by his parents, he may be overindulged inappropriately and develop an overestimated sense of entitlement. This developmental phase is crucial for a child’s later acceptance (as an adult) of his realistic power and control over himself and others. He must learn that he is not as extraordinary as he may wish to believe in his interactions with others. Each time he fails to get the recognition he longs for, he may feel very ashamed and vulnerable. This is his plight, his Achilles’ heel, his flawed sense of self that can lead to a significant drop in self-esteem and even depression. These early experiences greatly affect an individual’s lifelong lines of development. Narcissistic men did not wholly succeed in their psychological birth—where the boundaries between self and other were clearly defined, allowing a mutually satisfying marital relationship to form when they grew up. It’s as if the child was not properly given enough autonomy to give up a kind of bossiness, which impeded his progressive development. He did not give up reasonable control over his mother, so he cannot feel safe and secure in a relationship and has clear boundary issues with his parents. While it is healthy to be motivated by ambitions, it is not healthy to love them unconditionally. Then, there are emotions of disappointment that contain shame. This shame results from infantile grandiose fantasies that are not restrained in the adult’s personality. He experiences narcissistic humiliation when the admiration and confirmation of his ambitions are frustrated. Thus, we have seen the remarkable significance of the first three years of life on the narcissism of a young boy as he grows up to be a man. His relationship with his mother during his infantile stages greatly affects his capacity to develop into a mature, normally narcissistic adult who can express normal intimacy with a woman. Hollman is the author of the books Are You Living With A Narcissist? and Unlocking Parental Intelligence. She has also written several parenting guides as well as articles on mental illness for Long Island, NY health professionals and schools, discussing issues relevant to educators and mental health counselors, including ADHD, the gifted child, and depression or anxiety in children.
