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Annie Reich's compensatory narcissist, Daniel K.

The psychoanalyst, Annie Reich, was the first to define the compensatory narcissistic type, and her analysand, Daniel K., serves as a good prototype. Reich wrote:

Daniel K. was a very accomplished writer who wrote one book after another, with marked success. But he did not feel gratified by this. Nothing he did was as grandiose as he wanted it to be. He would feel reassured, for a time, when he looked at his book shelf and counted: "Here are seven books I wrote, six volumes I edited; there are twenty-three articles I brought out in other people's publications; I am quoted so and so many times:--There are about two and a half feet of Mr. K. on the shelf." The phallic meaning of this little game was obvious. He had to reassure himself that his phallus was not only there, but of extraordinary size.

Daniel's life consisted to a large extent in behavior of this kind; he was constantly preoccupied with attempts to feel great and important. He was active in innumerable civic and cultural enterprises and had attained a leading position in his community. But neither this nor his prolific literary production nor his erotic successes sufficed to make him happy. He was a man of considerable talent, well informed, and rich in ideas. But frequently his writing was careless and superficial, not up to the level of his capacities, because he was driven to produce too fast. He could not wait for results, could not stand tension and unpleasure, although he knew better. He had an inner standard of quality for his work as well as the gift for it, but was unable to muster enough self-discipline to realize his potentialities. He had to have the immediate gratification of success. This need was so overwhelmingly strong that he had little control over it. He also was touchy, quick to take offense at the slightest provocation. He continually anticipated attack and danger, reacting with anger and fantasies of revenge when he felt frustrated in his need for constant admiration....

The narcissistic goal against which he measured himself was most clearly expressed by his fantasies in puberty: he would see himself successively as the Mayor of New York City, the President of the United States, and as the president of the world, until he had to stop with the painful question: "And then what?" Later, he wanted to be the outstanding genius of his time. Of course, no success in reality could measure up to such limitless inner demands, and his state of dissatisfaction was all the more intensified because he had to sacrifice more mature superego demands in reaching out for his illusory aims.

...Daniel continually felt not only slighted, unloved, unappreciated by others, but also awkward, embarrassed, and "self-conscious." Moreover, he harbored severe anxieties regarding his state of health. He was forever anticipating early death from cancer or heart attack, etc., and anxiously watched himself for signs of disease....(46-47)

Reich uses Edith Jacobson's definition of self-esteem:

[Jacobson] considers self-esteem to be the expression of discrepancy or harmony between self-representation and the wishful concept of the self.

Or, to put it differently: in the course of growing up, we must learn to evaluate our potentialities and accept our limitations, continued hope for the impossible represents an infantile wish, revealing a basic lack of ability to face inner and outer reality. Self-esteem thus depends on the nature of the inner image against which we measure our own self, as well as on the ways and means at our disposal to live up to it. That this inner image is influenced by many factors, especially by the particular form of the superego, is obvious. Living up sufficiently to the demands of one's superego is a mature form of self-esteem regulation (45-46).

This definition is like William James's formula for self-esteem which accompanies his discussion of the problem of self-esteem in The Principles of Psychology.

Self-esteem = Success / Pretension.

Reich, Annie, (1986). Pathological forms of self-esteem regulation. In Morrison, A. P., (Ed.), Essential Papers on Narcissism. pp. 44-60. Reprint from (1960) Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Vol. 15, pp. 205-32.



Noteworthy examples of the Inventive personality type



Many people (and not just those of the Inventive personality type) have inventive traits or behave in a inventive manner. The traits and behaviors of the Inventive personality type are not so inflexible and maladaptive or the cause of such significant subjective distress or functional impairment as to constitute

Compensatory Narcissistic personality disorder

The noteworthy examples of the Inventive personality type are examples of a *type*, not of a disorder. It is my opinion that the ideal type which is described above is best characterized as inventive, and that the Inventive personality type represents the pervasive and enduring pattern of the personalities of the people listed below better than any other type.

Noteworthy examples of the Inventive personality type are:

 Index of noteworthy examples


Inventions

Inventiveness
  • Clusty // Clustering inventiveness
  • Invention: Enhancing inventiveness for quality of life, competitiveness, and sustainabilty

    Mapping Invention

    With all that as backdrop, what makes the inventive mind inventive? Studies in cognitive science disclose that highly inventive people consistently display a range of abilities and character traits. While this pattern can be organized in several ways, one way of representing it is as a kind of map (see diagram) with a central region representing the essence of inventive thinking, a surrounding region of characteristics that directly support inventive thinking, and an outer region representing important social aspects of inventive enterprise that the inventor needs to function effectively. In particular, at the core, the inventive mind displays transgressive cognition, meaning a tendency to cross boundaries in various ways, and a practical-technological orientation. Both of these characteristics receive support from technical knowledge, dogged persistence, and a systematic and strategic frame of mind, and further depend on socially oriented capabilities concerning collaboration, leadership and coordination, market sensitivity, and entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship.
  • Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - imagination
    "Traditionally, the mental capacity for experiencing, constructing, or manipulating 'mental imagery' (quasi-perceptual experience). Imagination is also regarded as responsible for fantasy, inventiveness, idiosyncrasy, and creative, original, and insightful thought in general, and, sometimes, for a much wider range of mental activities dealing with the non-actual, such as supposing, pretending, 'seeing as', thinking of possibilities, and even being mistaken."




Egoboo

The Word Spy - egoboo

egoboo (EE.goh.boo) n. Recognition and praise for a task well done, particularly a task that is performed for free. Also: ego-boo.

Example Citation:

"In science-fiction-fan-speak there's a phenomenon called 'egoboo.'...It means a boost in reputation. Hackers operate in a gift economy in which giant-size egos compete with one another for attention and reputation on the Net. If you do something cool, like reduce the length of a subroutine by 50 percent, you score major egoboo." �Mark Frauenfelder, "Man Against the FUD," LA Weekly, May 21, 1999



Traits, characteristics, and keywords for describing the Inventive personality type



All human, anthropogenetic desire--the desire that generates self-consciousness, the human reality--is, finally, a function of the desire for "recognition." And the risk of life by which the human reality "comes to light" is a risk for the sake of such a desire. Therefore, to speak of the "origin" of self-consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for "recognition."

--Alexandre Koj趥, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, quoted in The End of History and the Last Man (pg. 143) by Francis Fukuyama.




  "Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" - Friedrich Nietzsche.

I hypothesize that the personality theories of personality theorists best describe themselves and those of their own type.



Erik H. Erikson

  • In the cover story of the November 1999 Atlantic Monthly, Fame: The Power and Cost of a Fantasy [Page 1, Page 2, Page 3], Sue Erikson Bloland, the daughter of the eminent psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, discusses why her father strove for fame:

    In the relationship between the public image of a famous person and the private human being there is inherently something profoundly paradoxical. The public image is the reverse of the private person as experienced by him or her self and by intimate others. It might be accurate to say that the public image reflects what the private person most longs to be. It represents an ideal self.

    ....

    Many writers about narcissism (Heinz Kohut, Andrew P. Morrison, and Helen Block Lewis, among others) have suggested that narcissism (or grandiosity) is, essentially, a defense against shame -- with shame defined as a sense that the self is deeply flawed or deficient. To feel shame is to experience the self as small, weak, insignificant, powerless, defective. It is the experience of the self as not good enough.

    ....

    Despite his brilliance as an analyst and a writer, and his great charisma, he was an insecure man, described as "exceedingly vulnerable" by his friend the analyst Margaret Brenman-Gibson in a reminiscence about him after his death. He evoked in those closest to him a wish to comfort and reassure him; to make him feel that he was worthy and lovable; to help him wrestle with his lifelong feelings of personal inadequacy, his punishing self-doubt.

    ....

    I think it was just such feelings of inadequacy that impelled my father to seek fame; fame did not simply come to him because he was an extraordinarily brilliant thinker and writer, which he certainly was. But from early childhood on I was aware that his drive to achieve recognition was monumental.

    ....

    We imagine that our heroes have transcended the adversities of the human condition and have healed their childhood traumas by achievement of the extraordinary. We want to believe that they have arrived at a secure place of self-approval; that achieving recognition -- success -- can set us all free from gnawing feelings of self-doubt. We want to believe that if we ourselves could just secure enough recognition and approval from the outside world, if we could feel sufficiently admired, we would be healed and our self-esteem secured. Like the celebrities we admire so much, we would be rescued from the relentless need for validation.

    But the truth is that the security of the self is never stable. My father never felt that he had arrived safely anywhere. He continued to feel anxious at the height of his success, uncertain that he could maintain the reputation he had won or that he could write again as well as he had written before. His success rested on gifts that he feared might abandon him. And eventually they did.



  • The long-awaited "first comprehensive biography of Erikson."
    Amazon.com: Reviews: Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson

    "Drawing on private materials and extensive interviews with Erikson's family, students, and closest colleagues around the world, award-winning historian Lawrence J. Friedman illuminates the relationship between Erikson's personal life and his groundbreaking ideas. This book lays bare the identity crisis that was at the root of this remarkable man's lifelong quest to discover who his father was." -- Scribner

    As a man with "pronounced narcissistic tendencies," Erik had "to reestablish this mistrust of himself." Aichhorn urged Erik to ask himself, in each of his new personal relationships, whether he was pursuing self-advancement and "narcissistic satisfaction" or a "true relationship" of mutual trust and sharing. By "mistrusting" his motivations, Erik would be forced "to think about the situation of the other person...and prevent you from having to 'betray' anybody. In this way, Aichhorn advised, Erik could eliminate his pattern of establishing personal relationships "which then you fail to fulfill." (100)

    The focus on the autobiographic essay in Life History occurred largely because of an arresting essay on the cover page of the New York Times Book Review in late March 1975, featuring a recent photograph of Erikson with his impressive white hair, well-groomed mustache, penetrating eyes, and characteristically reflective countenance. Above the photograph was the caption: "Erik Erikson, the man who invented himself." The essay on Life History was written by a former Harvard graduate student Marshall Berman, who had periodically attended Erikson's graduate seminar during the late 1960s. Berman had read and reflected deeply upon most of Erikson's publications. (429)



  • http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/archive/2000/2/strout.html

    The Americanized Psychoanalyst - Book Review by Cushing Strout of Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson

    Friedman?s subject kept pace with his own theory of the eight-stage life-cycle. The historian recognizes that as Erikson in old age struggled with its issues of "integrity and despair," he tended to substitute "spiritual evocation" for "shrewd analysis,"and his prose grew increasingly abstract. In 1975 Erikson was under wounding attack by Marshall Berman for being "the man who invented himself," charged with dropping his stepfather?s name Homburger to disguise his own Jewish origin. Increasingly assailed also by radical feminists, orthodox Freudians, and neoconservatives, he paid the price for his extravagant eminence as the most publicized and honored psychoanalyst in America.


  • Erik Erikson - Dr. C. George Boeree.

    We cannot pass over this little piece of biography without some comment: The development of identity seems to have been one of his greatest concerns in Erikson's own life as well as in his theory. During his childhood, and his early adulthood, he was Erik Homberger, and his parents kept the details of his birth a secret. So here he was, a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy who was also Jewish. At temple school, the kids teased him for being Nordic; at grammar school, they teased him for being Jewish.


  • In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson, Sue Erikson Bloland.

    "The challenge of intimate personal relationships is that they require a willingness to accept in oneself and to reveal to others one's "flaws," both real and imagined. To be capable of genuine intimacy, one must feel acceptable to others in spite of being flawed, so that one's defenses can gradually be let down and more of the self revealed. When a person feels compelled to hide behind the mask of an ideal self, the demands of intimacy can seem very threatening indeed. It may feel safer to court the public, relying on an idealized public image as a safeguard against potentially devastating self-exposure" (pg. 189).

    Chapter One

    "We have become convinced that fame is the ultimate in human achievement?that there is no more absolute measure of a person?s worth than the attainment of celebrity. We imagine that the famous not only have achieved a unique social status, but actually have triumphed over the exigencies of the human condition. The gods have smiled upon them, granting them special gifts?extraordinary beauty, talent, intelligence, wisdom?which we assume have set them free from the relentless self-doubts and desperate strivings that afflict the rest of us. They have arrived at a special state of grace."


  • The Fame Motive - New York Times

    In her memoir, ?In the Shadow of Fame,? Sue Erikson Bloland, daughter of the renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, writes, ?He had the kind of charisma that made people hungry to know him ? to become privy to what he was thinking and feeling and writing about.?


Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography

Reinhold Niebuhr's biographer, Richard Fox, highlighted Robert Calhoun's critique of Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man:

"Robert Calhoun, historical theologian at Yale and fellow member of the Younger Theologians (now, in deference to the onset of middle age, renamed the Theological Discussion Group), made the most trenchant critiques of The Nature and Destiny of Man. He rightly observed that it was a prophetic, not a scholarly, work. "No cautious weigher of evidence here," he wrote, "but a preacher expounding the Word in line with his private revelation. . . . Other authors, Christian and nonChristian . . . are swiftly divided into sheep and goats. The former are treated with enthusiasm and insight, the latter dismissed as not worth much bother. Swiftness is the word always." Calhoun saw to the heart of Niebuhr's enterprise. The selective mining of the Christian tradition to illuminate and dramatize his personal vision: the prophets (especially Amos and Isaiah) preferred to the Wisdom literature; Paul to the Synoptic Gospels; the "Hebraic" to the "Hellenistic," a bias Niebuhr inherited from Harnack; a "Protestant" to a "Catholic" Augustine; Kierkegaard as the modern seer. At a more fundamental level: the passionate intensity, the urgency to speak, the carelessness with detail, the impatience with logical consistency. Speak now, discriminate later. Always on the run, suitcase packed, in dread of passivity. Obsessed with delivering his message; there might not be enough time. A spiritual vocation with evident if obscure psychological roots" (pp. 203-204).

"Yet even Calhoun went out of his way to praise the book for its insight into the human condition. "The real ground of the author's doctrine is not what he has read but what has happened to him as a struggling self"; his reflections on the mysteries of selfhood "must become a permanent part of any reader's thinking." Niebuhr had managed the uncommon feat of dissecting the intricacies of the self while communicating his own sense of wonder at its secrets. Analysis framed by amazement. He marveled at the capacity of the self to step back and examine itself; he shook his head at the thought of "a spirit who can set time, nature, the world and being per se into juxtaposition to himself and inquire after the meaning of these things." The book displayed the wisdom of one who knew what it meant to pass beyond knowledge and see again with the eyes of a child. He found the prophetic voice he had been seeking: authoritative and humble. Understanding human nature meant probing its paradoxes--the creaturely creator, determined yet free, sinful but responsible--and reveling in its mysteries" (204).



F. Scott Fitzgerald

Some Notes on the Themes of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Compare Hemingway)

Central Theme: The corruption and failure of the American Dream, and the false and distorted forms in which that dream exists in the modern world.


"Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval. . . . The greatest grow out of these periods as the tall heads of the crop." - F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes.

Jay Gatsby

On that hot, fateful afternoon on the trip to the city, Daisy tells Gatsby that he always looks cool, that he resembles an advertisement. And he does. In him the inward confidence expresses itself in outer surfaces. He does not wear a mask, he becomes one. The inner self is expressed in the creation of an ideal role, and there is no distance between facade and self. When his dream world is shattered, Gatsby cannot experience disillusionment; he simply collapses (Lindberg, 1982, 138).

I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody. -- Jay Gatsby



Fitzgerald's pretentiousness

Perhaps the most tragic element of Fitzgerald's saga was the desperate need of a first-rate writer to escape from his middle-class origins and pretend to be many of the things he was not - the war hero, the dazzling athlete, the passionate husband or lover, the intellectual author and concerned social observer (Mellow, 1984, xx).

"For what are the tragedies but the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have admired things external?" - Epictetus.

  • Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Great Gatsby: Chapters 1 - 4 - Monarch Notes.

    The Fragile "Enchantment":

    The problem, of course, is that false identities do depend essentially on externals, and the result is personal vacuum. Combined with Gatsby's optimistic "faith" that every desire can be turned into reality with the right stage-props, with the right gestures or "productions," there remains the nagging fear, the inevitable panic resulting from the fact that the "enchantment" itself can last only so long as the external appearance remains intact. Given any change in external circumstances; given any sudden eruption of crisis, or intrusion of real emotion, and the entire edifice must collapse; the "enchantment" fades away like cheap neon light, and the result is . . . nothing at all.

    There is no room, in an Enchanted Palace, for the sordid demands and necessary commitments of reality, and it is for this reason that Gatsby's protection of Daisy at the end of the novel represents something far more profound than chivalry; in protecting his Ideal, he is literally fighting for his own survival. For Jay Gatsby has so "enchanted" his own vision that without the enchantment he quite simply does not exist. Defined by externals, there is nothing beneath the surface; without his "faith" in material acquisition-the stage-props-as a means of securing his enchanted ideal, his glowing "promise," there is nothing but the Valley of Ashes, with the yellow eyes of Doctor Eckleburg peering over a desolated landscape from which all the fairy-girls and golden hosts have long since fled.

    That Gatsby does have the Ideal, however, at once defines his non-reality and somehow redeems it as well, for it is by means of the Ideal that Gatsby transcends his own materialism-unlike the merely gross flesh of a Tom Buchanan. And it is for this reason that Nick, despite the fact that he finds Gatsby absurd and even offensive, nevertheless remembers the "purity" of Gatsby himself; the peculiar innocence and child-like hope, the sense of wonder that Gatsby radiates even in his complete inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between the real and unreal.

  • Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Great Gatsby: Chapters 5 - 9 - Monarch Notes.
  • Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Structure Of The Great Gatsby - Monarch Notes.


Fitzgerald's weakness of showing off

The attractive, egoistic, socially insecure boy now revealed a crucial lifelong flaw in his character which would hurt him as a writer. He had a weakness of showing off instead of listening and observing, and was unaware of the effect he had on others. "I didn't know till 15," Fitzgerald said, "that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty." Two of his closest friends later criticized the narcissistic self-absorption that limited Fitzgerald's understanding of other men and women (Meyers, 1994, 10).

Lindberg, Gary H. The Confidence Man in American Literature. New York: Oxford University, 1982.

Mellow, James R. Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: a biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.



Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you tell me now I have no faith, you are perfectly right, only I did not have it before either. It is plain, isn't it, that when a man wants, as it were, to invent a machine for becoming decent, such a man has no faith. But what am I to do? I am clear about one thing: I am far too bad to be able to theorize about myself; in fact I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve, and that's that! Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw (Monk, 152-53).


Ray Monk (278): There is no doubt that, though he regarded ethics as a realm in which nothing was sayable, Wittgenstein did indeed think and say a great deal about moral problems. In fact, his life might be said to have been dominated by a moral struggle - the struggle to be anst䮤ig (decent), which for him meant, above all, overcoming the temptations presented by his pride and vanity to be dishonest.

It is not true, as some of his friends have insisted, that Wittgenstein was so honest that he was incapable of telling a lie. Nor is it true that he had no trace of the vanity of which he was always accusing himself. Of course, to say this is not to claim that he was, by ordinary standards, either dishonest or vain. He most certainly was not. But there were, equally certainly, occasions on which his concern to impress people overcame his concern to speak that strict truth. In his diary he says of himself:

What others think of me always occupies me to an extraordinary extent. I am often concerned to make a good impression. I.e. I very frequently think about the impression I make on others and it is pleasant if I think that it is good, and unpleasant if not.

And though, in stating this, he is only remarking on something that is platitudinously true of all of us, yet he is also drawing attention to what he felt to be the biggest barrier between himself and anst䮤igkeit - namely, his vanity.


Monk, Ray (1990).Ludwig Wittgenstein: the duty of genius. New York: Penguin Books.



More noteworthy examples of the Inventive personality type





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