Hungry Ghosts and Heroes: Understanding Narcissism with Matthew Bennett

“We infer a black hole exists. We can't observe them directly because black holes suck everything into them, including light and electromagnetic radiation. So we're never going to detect one directly.”  - Matthew Bennett

In this video and transcript, Dr. Matthew Bennett  unpacks “narcissism”—from the myth of Narcissus to hungry ghosts to psychoanalytic diagnosis guru Nancy McWilliams. Stevie Weinstein-Foner, a therapist at The Alamo, engages Dr. Bennett in a deep conversation about how narcissism is understood—and misunderstood. Bennett is the author of Towards an Integrated Analytical Psychology (2024) and also, Stevie’s former teacher at Pacifica Graduate University. Together, they connect popular and psychoanalytic concepts for a fuller understanding the narcissists among us and inside of us.

Introduction

I feel fortunate to have learned from Dr. Matthew Bennett during my time at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and doubly fortunate to have studied with him during the time he was preparing his book, Towards an Integrated Analytical Psychology, for publication. The book proposes a model of development of personality structure through six harmonic layers and four quadrants of a circumplex model, and blends psychoanalytic, Jungian, and even cognitive-behavioral theories. Dr. Bennett’s teaching has deeply enriched my understanding of myself and my work as a psychotherapist, and his book, which is the culmination of years of experience as a teacher and a clinical psychologist, feels like a wonderful way to continue learning from him after my time as a graduate student ended. He was kind enough to join me for a conversation on what he calls in his book “second quadrant” personalities, or what we generally refer to as narcissistic personalities.
—Stevie Weinstein-Foner

Transcript

Stevie Weinstein-Foner: Thank you so much for making time to speak with me. I've gotten so much out of your book, and learning from you as a student has been an incredible pleasure. So thank you. 

Matthew Bennett: Thanks, Stevie, the feeling is mutual. 

SWF: Your book, Towards an Integrated Analytical Psychology, feels like such a gift as a student to take with me as I move on in my career.

 MB: Thank you. It's very gratifying. I appreciate that. I'm glad; it makes it all worthwhile.

SWF: In this interview, I thought we could focus on something you write about in the book, which you call the second quadrant personality, which narcissistic personality organization is sort of the mode of, although I know in the second quadrant you've also included psychopathic and paranoid personalities as well. If you want to talk about the spectrum there, you can, but I think that in our culture today, we have such a pop culture understanding of narcissism, and there's a lot of finger pointing and saying, “this person's a narcissist” without having a humanizing perspective, or a deeper understanding of what creates those conditions and how it can be seen developmentally. So I thought we could hear from you about where you have put this in the arc of the spiral journey that you describe in your book.

MB: Sure. I'll try not to get too distracted by my own theory, which is pretty complex and requires some layup, but I'll say briefly that one of the problems is that it's very challenging to define narcissism. In my opinion, as a clinical psychologist, we don't really have any reliable, super effective and super valid ways of directly measuring it. It is one of the harder constructs to operationalize and define, and therefore it has become subject to a lot of folklore and folk wisdom about what it really is. And I think that's no accident. One of the things that might be obvious to sensitive observers at this time and place, in this corner of the world is that there's something in our culture which deeply lionizes narcissism and normalizes it, and respects it and even admires it and votes for it and gets into relationships with it and is easily seduced by it. It's a very, very deep, I hesitate to call it an illness, because I think that's reductive, but it's it's a very deep phenomenon that's hard to understand, and I think the fact that narcissism is so hard for us to understand has to do with the nature of our culture and our blind spots. 

In terms of clinical nosology of clinical psychology, the way the DSM works, and the systems we have for categorizing mental illnesses, including personality disorder, it's all very surfacey. It's all about behavior, behavior, behavior. You know, a narcissistic personality disorder is a person who does a B and C. A borderline personality disorder is a person who does D, E and F and so on. Rather than getting what we would call psychodynamic, about the function of what is the person up to, and what is this at a deeper kind of conceptual level. So I've learned to think about it in terms of energies. I had a forensic assessment practice for many years, and I don't know a single psychological test instrument, which, in my opinion, is particularly good about picking up on narcissism. The MMPI doesn't pick up on it very well. The Rorschach doesn't pick up on it very well. The MCMI claims to but I'm a little bit skeptical. So it's amorphous and it's difficult to nail down. 

So I think one of the best ways to think about narcissistic personality, the energy of narcissistic personality, is most evident in its cost and its impact, especially at the relational level. You see its impact, especially the distortions and the impoverishment of that impact, not only on the narcissist but especially on the people around them. So you tend to see it show up most, and the strongest, in the people who live with, or are married to or work with the narcissistic personality disorder. And I've learned to compare it to, that narcissistic personalities are like black holes. We infer a black hole exists. We can't observe them directly because black holes suck everything into them, including light and electromagnetic radiation. So we're never going to detect one directly. We infer that they exist because of their effect on surrounding space. There's this area of space in which everything is kind of falling into it and disappearing into it. It's this hungry patch of nothingness. And so there is something dark and hungry about narcissists. In Shakespearean language, “yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look”. Narcissism has a hungry, cannibalistic, negative space kind of feeling to it. It's not generative, it doesn't connect, it doesn't affiliate, it doesn't attach, it doesn't give. It can only hunger, and that makes it hard to talk about.

SWF: You say in your book that the myth of Narcissus is a bit of a miss in terms of the mythological component, that it's more like the concept of the Hungry Ghost.

MB: The problem with the word narcissism coming from the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image in the water has led us down this primrose path of thinking that narcissism is a kind of self love, even Freud started off there. I think that's one of the reasons why we fall for it and why we're vulnerable to it, because we think it's self love, and we admire narcissistic people because of what we think they're doing, which is that they love themselves. They have confidence. They aren't plagued by the doubts that I am plagued by. They don't tend to hate themselves or doubt themselves or second guess themselves the way I do, or that most people do. How refreshing it must be to just be drunk on power and confidence and to have no doubts. That's true of personality disorders in general, there's something very elemental about them, and it's therefore very seductive, like you're in the presence of a god or a goddess, and they're not full of doubt like you, they're not complex like you. My experience of being a human being in the world is, you know,I'm just this overweight, balding, middle aged guy who chose this professional field, and I'm trying my best to muddle my way through it, and I'm never quite sure what I'm doing, and I never quite feel like I've arrived, and I'm always full of doubt. I'm always second guessing myself, I'm always wondering what else I should be doing, and I never feel like I've arrived, and I don't have that personality disordered sense of “I am that which is triumphant and vindicated,” as Nancy McWilliams says, to always be on top. The narcissistic feeling is of standing victorious on top of the bleeding and broken bodies of your enemies and your competitors, and how exhilarating and thrilling that must feel. To your point, this myth of Narcissus has seduced us into thinking that that's what it is.

I think it's a Japanese mythology around the idea of the hungry ghosts. You know, these are ghoulish like beings who are driven by powerful, insatiable, carnal appetites, and the more they eat, the hungrier they become. And I think that gets us back to that black hole analogy that they have a great, almost cosmic need to be fed and to be loved and to be admired, but they don't meet that in a symmetrical way. It never comes back out of the black hole. So it's just a negative space, and we're most likely to see it unfortunately in ourselves, and then in our reactions to others. Going back to your point about my book, where I talk about it as the so-called second quadrant, the second of four. The point I'm trying to make is that there is something archetypal about narcissism. It is an aspect of the human condition. It is all too human and all too ubiquitous and all too endemic and native to our beings to be entirely pathologized. 

Psychoanalytic literature and tradition over time has kind of vacillated back and forth between thinking of narcissism as a developmental stage that we all go through, like the terrible twos of childhood. There's something about kids who are two or three years old, kind of obstreperous and selfish and demanding and needy, and that that's just a phase we go through, versus another perspective, that there's something kind of intrinsically broken about narcissistic personalities, that there's something intrinsically wrong about it, or that it's some kind of aberrant way of being. This is reflected in the classic debate between Kernberg and Kohut. Kohut’s idea is that narcissism is a natural human experience. And Kernberg’s perspective is that, no, there's something kind of intrinsically impoverished about narcissism. 

The two things I'd say that support that perspective is that narcissistic personalities, first and foremost, I've learned to think of it as a kind of shame allergy. Some people can't tolerate gluten or dairy. Narcissists can't tolerate shame, their system can't process it. So shame is experienced as a disintegrative effect, it'll just evaporate them or pop them. The other major characteristic is, as Nancy McWilliams says, their stunted capacity to love. They have this inability to reciprocate in a symmetrical way their needs with the needs of others. Those two things, the difficulty tolerating shame and the relative impoverishment of not being able to reciprocate. In long term intimate relationships, especially, and certainly in love, we have to be vulnerable to the person we love. Love is a way of deeply encountering another person and being changed by them. You don't just get to hang on to who you are. It's almost like you dissolve into your loved one and they dissolve into you, and you, the two of you, emerge into a third, and we call that the inter subjective third, right? But there's something in the energy of narcissism which resists the dissolving. 

So my model is an attempt to kind of reconcile those two perspectives. Because, on one hand, it is a developmental stage in the sense that we all do this. The second quadrant of four suggests that we're at the first half of psychological development that has more to do with childhood in the early phases of life, like establishing a footprint in the world and becoming someone and you have to know who you are and have a sense of selfhood that you've learned to defend and to build walls around it before you can then fall in love head over heels with another person, and let all of that go and just surrender your selfhood in the name of love. But we first have to have that construction of the self, and that's what the narcissist is up to, archetypally. But on the other hand, in the case of people that would qualify as a narcissistic personality disorder, if this kind of neediness and this kind of nihilistic, Hungry Ghost quality extends into adulthood to the point that it impoverishes relationships and prevents love from occurring, then it is no longer on the main sequence of human experience. That is what we might call a personality disorder. At one level, it is a natural aspect of human experience, but in another way, if it rises to the level of personality disorder, it requires a lot of work to address, and until it's addressed, it will continue to have all kinds of calamitous, destructive impacts, especially on relationships.

SWF: It seems like it's something to move through, and if you move through it successfully, you can be on the other side of it and recognize that, yes, I have this quality inside me, we all do, but it's something you don't want to get stuck in.

MB: Something to be tempered with humility. You know, I don't enjoy shame either. I'm sure you don't. None of us like it, but I've learned to tolerate its presence and to have a gentle acceptance of it. I don't feel like it's gonna pop me like a soap bubble when I experience it. For one thing, I can talk about it, I can acknowledge it. I'm aware of its corrosive effects on my own heart. I don't have to deny that it exists, and I don't have to contort myself, or you, into a pretzel in order to avoid feeling it. And that's the difference.

SWF: A big achievement psychologically is just acknowledging that we have shame. God bless us if we get there.

MB: Exactly. That’s the task of life, I would argue.

SWF: I just started reading an Adam Phillips book, Missing Out, and this sentence jumped out at me. In this context, in terms of developmental growth, he says, “in this sense, growing up is always an undoing of what needed to be done. First, ideally, we are made to feel special, then we're expected to enjoy a world in which we are not.” It seems like the second quadrant, or narcissistic personality, is a need to feel special over and over again without gaining any pleasure from that.

MB: Well, I think you're right. I like that quote. It's almost like life calls for us to be both special and ordinary. And in one sense, we are special, and we are made of star stuff, and we are unique spiritual beings of some majesty and power. And at another level, I'm just another guy, just another fool trying to nose my way through life like an idiot. And we have to be both special and ordinary. And I have noticed that there's almost a character patterning in that; it almost comes down to what we call personality. Which of those is harder for you? And I've noticed in psychotherapy, some people have more trouble with being ordinary and some people have more trouble with being special. 

People that are more depressively organized tend to have trouble with being special. This shows you the different relationship to shame. Shame has become so ego syntonic with the depressive personality that the idea that you're just another broken, imperfect, suffering person who doesn't know what the hell they're doing has become so comfortable for you that the idea that you could have expertise or that you could have power or that you could be desirable in a special kind of way almost becomes the hard part of it. And that's almost the thematic inversion, or opposite of the preferred posture of narcissism, which is to cling to the special and ordinariness starts to feel deadly. 

And so in psychotherapy, clearly, as we might guess, oftentimes the work involves finding safe ways to be ordinary, and in many cases, I think the most powerful tool of the psychotherapist is to model, as I've tried to do, if the alert viewer might notice, I've tried to model that in our conversation. You know, I've told you what's hard for me. I've admitted to how easy it is for me to fall into the trap of being seduced by my own ordinariness, which tends to blind me to ways in which I'm not ordinary, and that causes me problems. For the therapist to demonstrate how they're able to hold their own shame lightly, to show their own capacity to be ordinary, to be just a regular person, clinging to the face of the earth like everyone else and doing the best we can. The therapist’s highest aim and highest goal in psychotherapy is to demonstrate how that can look and how that can be tolerated and survived, you know, just just the idea of being ordinary and making mistakes. The therapist might cheerfully admit mistakes, for example, or acknowledge their own humanity. 

The way I've learned to think about it, when I work with a narcissistic personality, I have to remind myself that my self esteem is not in the room. My self esteem is safe. My self esteem is in a lock box 3000 miles from here, under a mountain and a vault. I don't mean to say that it's inaccessible, but it's just that nothing that happens in this room and in this session is going to impair my self esteem, because my self esteem is flexibly and lightly held, and it doesn't depend on being special all the time, and it doesn't depend on winning all the time. My self esteem includes the possibility of just being ordinary, and being broken, and being limited. Often the most powerful thing you can do in therapy, that is, an important safety tip when we're talking about having a therapeutic relationship with a narcissist, is to model that. 

But I want to add that if you're just at the mercy of a narcissistic personality in the wild, a boss or a partner, that's different. It isn't on you to fix them. This is a trap that many people fall into, like, “maybe if I did this, maybe if I did that, maybe if I were a little more accommodating, maybe if I tried a little harder than they would learn to love me.” It’s very easy to get trapped on that hamster wheel of feeding in, again, to the black hole of narcissism. And you know that doesn't help from either the point of view of trying to live with narcissists out there in the wild, nor even in a therapeutic situation. I feel like I need to emphasize that the posture you take as a psychotherapist with a narcissist is going to be different from if you're just the victim of one. If you're just the victim of one, then it just becomes a matter of, how do you get away, how do you survive? How do you insulate yourself? How do you protect yourself? It is not on you to fix it, because many, many people have been lost in throwing themselves into that bottomless pit.

SWF: Well, that's probably a good place to end. I know you have limited time, but those are good words of advice. Thank you for your time and your wisdom, and I'll try not to make you feel too special.

MB: Well, thanks, and maybe on that note, I'll end with a quote I really like by Ernest Becker. In Revolution in Psychiatry he writes, “a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self esteem, or from a basic sense of self worth. It is all too absorbing and relentless to be an aberration. It expresses the heart of the creature, the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation. And if everyone honestly admitted their urge to be a hero, it would be a devastating release of truth.”

SWF: It's beautifully said.

 MB: Thanks Ernest Becker, and thank you, Stevie, for this useful conversation.

SWF: Thank you so much for your willingness and generosity, and I'll continue to seek out your support and guidance. And I’m grateful to have the book, so thank you.

Matthew Bennett, PsyD, is a licensed psychologist, clinical director of the Aion Institute, and a current professor and former Co-Chair of the Department of Counseling Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. He lectures widely on personality development, personality disorders, and comparative models of psychotherapy. He is the author of Towards an Integrated Analytic Psychotherapy: Return to Freedom and Dignity, published by Routledge in 2024.