WHAT does it mean not to feel? Let us begin with an extreme example—a catatonic man who stands motionless in a corner for hours like a statue. He has suppressed all feeling, including pain, which is why he can stand immobile for long periods of time. It is as if his body were in rigor mortis, without impulse or internal movement. Having deadened himself, he is anesthetized to pain. Of course, this deadening is not complete but only extends to the voluntary musculature. The other organs still function normally.
All neurotics, including narcissists, use this mechanism of deadening parts of the body to suppress feelings. One can set one’s jaw to block an impulse to cry. If the set is maintained indefinitely, the jaw becomes frozen in this position and crying becomes impossible. One can suppress anger by “freezing” or deadening the muscles of the upper back and shoulders through chronic tension. Yet although this mechanism is used by narcissists, there is another, more important defense typical of this disorder—denial of feeling.
The concept of denial of feeling requires some elucidation. First, it must be recognized that a feeling is the perception of some internal bodily movement or event. If there is no such happening, there is no feeling because there is nothing to perceive. If one lets one’s arm hang motionless for five minutes, it will become numb and one will not feel one’s arm. To regain feeling, one must move one’s arm. Thus, by inhibiting movement, one can deaden oneself, much like the catatonic I described. But there is another way to cut off the access of impulses and actions to consciousness: One can block the function of perception. This is the mechanism by which feelings are denied.
A common example of the denial of feeling is a person who shouts and yells in a discussion as if he or she were angry. But when one asks what he or she is angry about, the person answers: “Who’s angry?” The explanation I would offer is that this person’s image is of a rational and logical being; nothing is allowed to enter consciousness that might contradict this image. Another example is a young psychologist I know. This man kept trying to convince me that he was a great therapist. Every time we met he harangued me with “I know,” “I can do that,” etc. Almost every sentence began with the word “I,” in typical narcissistic fashion. Whenever I became annoyed and pointed out his narcissism, he countered with the argument that I refused to recognize his superiority. He refused to see his narcissistic need to impress me. To sense his desperate need for approval might undermine his image.
The need to project and maintain an image forces the person to prevent any feeling from reaching consciousness that would conflict with the image. Behavior that might contradict the image is rationalized in terms of the image. Thus, our angry person might explain the “necessity” of shouting by saying: “People weren’t really listening. They didn’t hear me. I was simply trying to present my views.” Similarly, the young psychologist rationalized his behavior by blaming me. In a normal person, actions are associated with the feelings that motivated them. In the narcissistic individual, however, the action is dissociated from the feeling or impulse and justified by the image.
The denial of feeling characteristic of all narcissists is most manifest in their behavior toward others. They can be ruthless, exploitative, sadistic, or destructive to another person because they are insensitive to the other’s suffering or feeling. This insensitivity derives from an insensitivity to one’s own feelings. Empathy, the ability to sense other people’s moods or feelings, is a function of resonance. We can feel another person’s sadness because it makes us sad; we can share another’s joy because it evokes good feelings in us. But if we are incapable of feeling sadness or joy, we cannot respond to these feelings in another person, and we may even doubt that they have such feelings. When we deny our feelings, we deny that others feel.
Only on this basis can we explain the ruthless behavior of some narcissists like the corporate executives who drive their employees remorselessly and create a reign of terror by their indifference to human sensibilities and indiscriminate firings, without regard for people’s feelings. Of course, they are equally hard on themselves; their goals of power and success demand an equal sacrifice of their own sensibilities and feelings. These executives see themselves as generals in some war in which business success spells victory. With such an image of themselves, they can only treat their subordinates as dispensable soldiers in the drive to win.
One of the ways in which our culture fosters the narcissistic personality is by its exaggerated emphasis upon the importance of winning. There is a popular slogan that says winning is the only thing that counts. Such an attitude minimizes human values and subordinates the feelings of others to this one overriding goal to win, to be on top, to be number one. But the commitment to this goal also demands the sacrifice or denial of one’s own feelings, for nothing must stand in the way of winning. However, the image of success derives its power to dominate behavior only when feelings are denied. We are confronted with that old dilemma: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In this case, the same question can be asked: Which came first, the image or the denial of feelings? The answer to these questions is that each is an aspect of the other. Without the denial of feeling, the image would not gain its position of dominance, but only when it does become dominant are feelings continually denied.
Behavior that is injurious to or destructive of others can only be fully understood in terms of the denial of feeling, the goal of winning, and the image of power. Executives who exploit their employees and con artists who swindle elderly pensioners operate on the same principle. Both fail to see others as real people; in their eyes, others exist only as objects to be used. Specifically, the elderly pensioners are not seen as human beings, because the swindlers don’t see themselves in human terms. They live by their wits and are identified with their ability to outsmart or outmaneuver others. That they lie or cheat is unimportant to the goal of winning or their ego image of superiority based on their ability to put one over on another person.
The connection between the overriding importance of winning, the denial of feeling, and the role of the image is most evident in warfare. Since victory or defeat is seen as a matter of life or death, there is no room for feelings. Soldiers function largely in terms of images. However, they retain their humanity by their feelings for a buddy or the squad members with whom they have personal contact. Without these feelings they risk becoming killing machines or going insane. A soldier is not a narcissist, but war forces him to act like one.
Unfortunately, warfare is not limited to armies fighting each other. In most large cities, there are gang wars in which the members of a gang function like soldiers denying feeling and human values. But we also have business wars, political wars, and family warfare which promote a narcissistic attitude and encourage behavior that is injurious and destructive to others. The enemy is not pictured in terms of real people, for it is not easy to kill real people. Soldiers are taught to see the enemy as an image—the “Jap,” the Hun, the Nazi, etc.—which it is their duty to destroy. But to do this, they, too, must become an image. They are soldiers whose role is to obey orders, to fight but not to question, to act but not to feel. They must not let themselves feel their fear or their pain or their sadness. To be in touch with these feelings would undermine the soldier image and make it impossible for them to function effectively on the battlefield. And they cannot reject this image, for that would bring them into conflict with their leaders, which might also endanger their survival.
When one is identified with an image, one sees the other as an image that in many cases represents some rejected aspect of the self. Narcissism splits the reality of an individual into accepted and rejected aspects, the latter being projected, then, upon others. The attack upon these others stems partly from the desire to destroy this rejected aspect. For example, the con man who thinks of himself as shrewd and superior must see his victim as gullible and stupid. Similarly the soldier whose image is of fighting for the right, for justice and for honor will, often, see the enemy as cruel and dishonorable. If the narcissistic image is one of toughness and strength, one will project upon others an image of vulnerability and weakness which must be destroyed.
Does this principle also explain acts of gratuitous violence in peacetime? A case in point was the action of a gang of boys who set fire to an old vagrant sleeping on a park bench. It was such an inhuman act that most people were shocked and confounded by it. Where were their feelings? Obviously, they had none for the old man. They did not see him as a real person but only as an image, an image of decrepit age which they found repulsive and so destroyed. But unlike soldiers who have no personal contact with the human beings they kill, these boys were in the presence of a living person. In killing him so wantonly, they denied his humanity and in the process denied their own. Most likely they had lost their humanity before they committed this crime. Most probably the horror and insanity of their own lives had caused them to deny their feelings.
There is a continuous line from violence against helpless persons, to rape of helpless women, to seduction and exploitativeness. What the rapist and the seducer have in common, though to different degrees, is an insensitivity to the sexual partner, an overinvolvement with their egos and a lack of sexual feeling on a body level. Sexual feeling, as opposed to genital excitation, is experienced as love, tenderness, and the longing to be close to another person. The denial of this feeling, because of its association with neediness and vulnerability, promotes overexcitation of the genitals, leading to the act of rape. The genital charge is overpowering because the individual cannot contain the feeling. Unable to approach a woman in a state of relaxation, the rapist is driven or propelled into a violent action, which also expresses his intense hostility to women. Fearing women, the rapist is sexually aroused only by the image of aggressive power over a woman. Similarly, the seducer depends on an image for sexual arousal—the picture of an irresistible, dominant, and controlling “lover.” Both types exemplify narcissistic behavior because they do not see their victims as people in their own right but only as images. Both rape and seduction are pornographic scenes in that sexual desire depends on denying the other’s humanity or personhood and seeing only a sex object.
Slightly less psychopathic and violent than a rapist, but equally without feeling, was a casting director who required all young aspiring actresses to undress and engage in sexual acts with him as a condition for getting parts. The requirement of sex was not overtly stated, but the director did make some advances and the women were well aware that a failure to respond would result in rejection. The effect was rape, in that their integrity was violated and their human dignity denied. The young women were not persons to the director but only names and dames. Later, he bragged about the number of actresses, some well known, whom he had possessed. His sexual activity, however, was without feeling or pleasure. It merely gratified his image.
Moving along the line toward lesser degrees of narcissism, we find the male executive who seduces his female secretary. This is not to say that every sexual relationship between an employer and an employee is tainted with narcissism. It is a question of feeling, of love between the parties. For the male executive-seducer, sexual desire is often strong because he feels himself to be in a superior or dominant position socially. This position alleviates his fear of women and permits him to feel strongly excited on a genital level. Yet without a feeling of love or affection for his partner and respect for her feelings as a human being, the sexual act is largely a narcissistic expression. It amounts to exploitation.
Obviously, a person can be genitally excited without any real sexual feeling. The excitation is strictly limited to the genitals. A man, for example, can have an erection without any desire to be close and intimate with a woman—that is, without any feeling of love. The desire is in his head just as the excitation is in the head of his penis. Sex for such a man serves two purposes: to release the excitation in the penis (which can become painful) and to bolster a weak and inflated ego with the conquest and humiliation of a woman. Sure, it feels good to discharge sexual excitation, but the pleasure of release is strictly local, limited to the genitals. A localized feeling should more properly be called a sensation. Sexual feeling, in contrast to genital excitation, is a total body feeling of excitement, warmth, and melting at the prospect or experience of contact and intimacy with another person. When the total body responds sexually, the climax is imbued with the feeling of joy or ecstasy.
In the world of images, we inevitably encounter the question of fit. By itself an image has no validity. A narcissist’s image of superiority has as much meaning as a conscientious person’s image of integrity and honesty. An image, by definition, is a representation of something. Thus, we cannot judge an image except in terms of its relationship to the reality it purports to represent. When reality is objectifiable, this determination is easy. The circumstances of a person’s birth, family, and background, for instance, are definable facts. To misrepresent them is to lie. For an impostor, however, the lie comes easily because the reality has long since been denied in an emotional sense. The impostor does not want to acknowledge an average birth and background, for that would not contradict a sense of inferiority or vulnerability. No, the impostor must be someone else, someone special and superior. It is not difficult, then, to extend this image to include the idea of nobility.
The tendency to lie, without compunction, is typical of narcissists. At an extreme is the psychopathic personality, who seems to have no sense of the difference between right and wrong on a feeling level. This is a person without a conscience or, in psychoanalytic terms, someone who lacks a superego. There is no guilt. Although most narcissists are far from this extreme, in both their subjective denial of feeling and in their use of an image that contradicts the truth of their being, they share certain similarities with psychopathic personalities. In this regard, they have lost the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Let us return to our example of an impostor. This impostor holds himself out to be a nobleman, even though he knows, intellectually, that he was not born to high estate. What happens is that he sees himself as being of noble birth when he acts the part. And his acting is convincing because he has become convinced. He identifies with his image, and this becomes his only reality; he no longer senses that he is distorting or denying the truth. In effect, he denies or ignores the reality of his being, but the denial is no longer deliberate or conscious. The actor has become so identified with his role or pose that it has become real for him.
The impostor who believes he is a nobleman is a psychopath for whom subjective reality has displaced the objective reality of his birth. The narcissistic character is more in touch with objective reality but is dominated by the image. Beatrice was a case in point. As she stood before the group at a bioenergetic training workshop in Europe, she held herself up as if she were superior with a bearing that could almost be called imperious. I was not surprised, therefore, when she said that she had always thought of herself as a princess. For a moment I thought I might have had to deal with a psychopathic personality, but Beatrice then added, “I grew up in a castle.” Was she, then, a real princess? Beatrice explained, “My father was an engineer who made a lot of money before I was born and bought this castle. He treated me like a princess.” Beatrice was an only child.
Her problem was a lack of feeling, particularly sexual feeling. Her belly was contracted and her pelvis was held tightly, allowing little spontaneous movement. Her feelings were confined to the upper half of her body, but even here they were rigidly controlled. Beatrice related a recurrent dream in which she saw herself as a princess lying in a glass coffin. She recognized that the glass coffin was the castle and that by being made to think of herself as a princess, she was both deadened and imprisoned. Like Sleeping Beauty, she awaited a rescuer who would free her and bring her back to life. The coffin also represented the rigidity of her body in which her feelings were imprisoned. Beatrice, too, had to cry to release the sadness that was locked up in her tight belly. By getting her to breathe deeply so that the respiratory movements involved the pelvis, both her sadness and her sexuality could then be experienced and expressed.
At the beginning of this chapter, I alluded to the difference between the suppression of feeling and the denial of feeling. One can suppress feeling by deadening the body and reducing its motility. Again, if there is no internal movement, there is nothing to feel. An emotion is a movement (motion) toward (the prefix “e” denotes an outward direction). Every emotion is movement from the center to the periphery, where it is expressed in action. The feeling of love, for example, is experienced as an impulse to reach out to someone; anger, as an impulse to strike out; sadness, to cry out. The impulse of the emotion must reach the surface of the body to be experienced as a feeling. It need not, however, produce any overt action. If the impulse sets up a state of readiness to act in the musculature, it will be experienced as an emotion. One does not have to strike out to feel angry, but the body does have to be primed for such an action. In most people, a strong feeling of anger will result in a spontaneous clenching of the fists. In others, the anger may surface as a look in the eyes. I don’t believe it is possible for a person to feel an emotion and not allow some expression of it to show, however subtle it is.
Inhibiting movement through chronic muscular tension has the effect of suppressing feeling. Such tension produces a rigidity in the body, a partial deadness. It is not surprising that soldiers are drilled in standing rigidly at attention. As we have seen, a good soldier must suppress much feeling and become, in effect, a killing machine.
Because rigidity is associated with the suppression of feeling, one can tell which feelings are being suppressed by studying the pattern of tension. Tight jaw muscles, for instance, will inhibit an impulse to bite. We can guess that such persons have suppressed biting impulses as children. These impulses may, however, come through in biting sarcasm. A tight jaw will also block sucking impulses, suppressing the desire for closeness and contact. A constricted throat prevents deep sobbing and helps the person suppress sadness. Stiff shoulders diminish the intensity of an angry reaction.
Overall body rigidity deadens the body by restricting respiration and limiting the body’s motility. Normally, breathing is not a conscious undertaking; the movements of expansion and contraction occur without voluntary action. Babies and young children breathe in this very natural way. But as we learn to control and suppress our feelings, we tense our bodies and inhibit this natural respiration. By doing so we reduce the intake of oxygen, diminishing metabolic activity and decreasing the energy available for spontaneous movement and feeling. We can, of course, still move by using the will, but such movement is mechanical. One finds such overall rigidity in some narcissistic individuals whose style is to pose in a statuesque manner. But many narcissistic individuals have bodies that are fairly agile and flexible. They can be actors, athletes, or jet-setters. Their bodies have a seeming aliveness and grace, suggesting the presence of emotions. Their behavior, however, is without feeling, which means that we must search for another mechanism whereby feeling is cut off. That mechanism, as I have already indicated, is to block the perceptive function rather than the movement.
Since perception is a function of consciousness, it is generally under ego control. Normally we perceive those things which interest us and ignore those which have no interest for us. We can also deliberately focus our attention on certain objects or situations to perceive them more clearly. But by the same process, we can refuse to see them or ignore them. Often the decision is made subliminally, at the margin of consciousness. For example, we rarely allow ourselves to see the pain and sadness in the faces and eyes of our loved ones. Few parents see the unhappiness in their children’s faces. And children learn very quickly not to see the anger and hostility in their parents’ eyes. In a similar way, as I pointed out earlier, we don’t let ourselves see the expression in our own faces when we look in the mirror. We might see some wrinkles, but we close our minds to the evident despair; a man might carefully trim a mustache but not see the tight, cruel lips below it. In effect, we don’t see what we don’t want to see. Many people walking the streets of a large city like New York do not see the dirt or hear the noise. Their minds (attention) are focused elsewhere.
I think that one principle underlying selective perception is that we do not want to see a problem that we can do nothing about. To see the problem might put us into an intolerable state of stress or pain, which could threaten our sanity. In effect, we block out or deny some aspects of reality in self-defense. But this denial implies a previous recognition of the situation. We cannot deny that which we do not know. Denial is a secondary process. First, we see the painful situation; then, when we realize that we can neither support it nor change it, we deny its existence. We close our eyes to it.
In the beginning, then, the denial is conscious. One doesn’t make a decision to deny the reality of a situation, but one is aware of its painfulness and of one’s desire to avoid it. In time, however, the denial becomes unconscious; that is, one no longer senses the pain in the situation, nor sees its ugliness. Instead, one creates an image of a pleasant or happy situation, which enables one to carry on as if everything were all right. At this point, the denial becomes structured in the body as localized chronic muscular tensions rather than overall rigidity. The locus of that tension is at the base of the skull, in the muscles that bind the head to the neck. This area is close to the visual centers in the brain and has some influence on visual perception. I have often been able to help a patient visualize an angry or crazy look in a parent’s eyes by applying some pressure with my fingers to these muscles. The tension in these muscles seems to block the flow of excitation from the body into the head, which is thus cut off from body feeling. The psychological effect, dissociating the ego from the body’s feelings, is similar in some ways to the dissociation from reality that occurs in schizophrenia, although to a much lesser degree.
The block in perception produces a denial of feeling, which is the purpose. Evoking the feeling should remove the block, just as removing the block should lead to feeling. This is illustrated in Sally’s case.
Sally, a young woman participating in a bioenergetic training workshop, described the nightmare she had lived through in the past ten years. She had been married to a man who beat her physically, ran around with other women, and threatened to take her children away if she divorced him. She was terrified of him, for he was a powerful man, physically and otherwise. But she did divorce him and keep her children. What was surprising was that in telling this story, Sally displayed very little emotion. I was also struck by the shallowness of her breathing. Although her whole body wasn’t rigid, her throat was constricted. To understand the origin of this constriction, I asked her about her childhood.
Sally immediately responded that she had had a happy childhood. To date, I have never worked with anyone who had a happy childhood. I had heard such statements from a number of patients before, but they always turned out to be a denial of the reality. If Sally’s childhood had been a happy one, I would not expect her to constrict her throat as if she were blocking off feeling, or to marry a man who abused her. As I have pointed out in another book,1 most men marry women who are like their mothers, and women tend to marry men who are like their fathers. I asked Sally to tell me something about her father.
Sally used the same words to describe her father that she had used to describe her husband. He was, she said, a rather powerful man. She remembered being close to him as a child. But he drank and their relationship suffered. He became unpredictable. Because drinking men may also be violent, I asked Sally if her father ever hit her. Despite my suspicion that this might have been the case, I was somewhat startled by her answer: “He used to punch me with his fist, sometimes hitting me in the face. I never knew when a blow would come.” I could see that Sally had been as terrified of her father as she later was of her husband. But since she was a child and could not leave her home, she suppressed and denied her terror. This denial of fear blinded her to the potential violence in the man she married.
The particular subject of this workshop session was breathing. I was demonstrating the connection between voice and breathing. Suppressing the expression of sound reduces one’s breathing by closing the throat. Limiting one’s breathing in turn decreases one’s vocal production. The particular exercise I was working with involved lying over the bioenergetic stool.2 The person is instructed, first, to breathe easily and deeply. After a number of breaths, he or she is asked to make a sound and to sustain it as long as possible. In the beginning, the sound is usually well controlled and has no emotional quality. But as the sound is prolonged, it reaches a breaking point, where it may easily turn into crying. In Sally’s case, she broke into violent sobbing mixed with screams. This continued for several minutes, even after she left the stool. Such a pronounced reaction does not occur routinely; Sally was ready to release these feelings. It was the ninth day of the workshop, and considerable feeling had already been expressed by other participants.
After this breakthrough of feeling, I talked to Sally about the horror of her childhood, and she was able to see it for the first time. She could no longer pretend that it had been a happy period. Now she admitted the latent violence in her home and the fear it engendered. How could she be sure when the violence would erupt (which it did from time to time)? And how could her father, who proclaimed his love for her, abuse her? Believing in his love, she could not understand the split in his personality. It was incomprehensible, as insanity usually is. Sally had had to deny the horror to guard her own sanity. After this session she looked truly alive.
I do not want to give the impression, however, that this experience constituted a cure. It was a meaningful experience for Sally, enabling her to see both the depth of her problem and a way out. That way out would take considerable work, often extending over several years, in the course of which Sally would deepen her insight, sense the feelings she had denied, and learn to express them without becoming overwhelmed. Therapy is a process of extending self-awareness, increasing self-expression, and achieving self-possession, which is the ability to contain and sustain strong feelings. Bodily tensions and rigidity have to be gradually reduced so that the body can tolerate the higher level of excitation associated with strong feelings. I believe the best approach to this objective is one that combines analysis with intensive body work.
Perhaps you are wondering: Can any human being act totally without feeling? Does the denial of feeling mean the denial of all feeling? Only a machine can operate without any feeling or consciousness whatsoever. Although some people function like machines, with cool efficiency and seemingly without feeling, we must recognize that feeling is potentially present. And it does manifest itself on occasion, but in distorted form. In narcissistic individuals, expressions of feeling usually take two forms: an irrational rage and a maudlin sentimentality. The rage is a distorted outbreak of anger; the sentimentality is a substitute for love. Hitler might be described as a person without feeling, but he was known for his intemperate rages. I would call his love for the German people pure sentimentality. To act without feeling is to be a monster; but true monsters, like Frankenstein’s, exist only in our imagination. Human monsters are characterized by their irrational rage, their sentimentality, and their insensitivity to others. Parents who beat or torture their children are such human monsters, as we just saw in Sally’s case. To guard her sanity, Sally had to deny the horror of the situation and close her eyes to the monstrous aspect of her father. She, too, had to cut off feeling, although she did this to a lesser degree.
Parents who beat their children were probably beaten as children themselves. Having denied their own feelings about that experience, they cannot experience any feeling for the child. Still, it is beyond my comprehension how parents can justify the beating of a child. I see it as an expression of cruelty. I am always horrified when I hear patients relate how they were required to fetch the switch with which the beating was administered. In the same way, I cannot understand cruelty to animals. They are sentient beings, capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, sadness and joy, fear and anger. Human beings who lack these feelings are in some way lower than animals.
Of course, on the level of feeling we do differ from animals. Our emotional life is more intense. We are capable of a greater love and a fuller hate, a higher joyfulness and a deeper sadness, a stronger fear and a more intense anger. And human beings can also “control” their feelings through their egos. We can limit the degree of feeling, and we can act as if we had feeling. But there is a problem in doing this. Emotions are total bodily responses. For that reason, one cannot suppress or deny fear, for instance, without at the same time suppressing the feeling of anger. This is an important concept for therapists to understand.
Often one sees patients who seem able to express anger but not fear or sadness. I have found that this seeming display of anger is without feeling. It is a defensive maneuver intended to frighten the other person rather than an expression of genuine emotion. In addition, by acting angry, the person denies his or her own fear. One may believe one is angry, just as impostors believe their lies or actors identify with their roles, but a genuine feeling of anger stems from a feeling of having been hurt. If one denies the hurt, what is there to be angry about? If one cannot feel one’s sadness, why is one angry? My initial approach with all narcissistic patients is to help them get in touch with their sadness. This is not always an easy undertaking.
Linda, a woman close to forty, consulted me because she had been severely depressed some years ago and was afraid this was going to happen again. When she entered my office, I was impressed by her appearance. She was an attractive woman, strikingly but tastefully dressed, with a shapely figure. She smiled easily and seemed free in her manner. Granted, her voice was slightly husky, without much range of tone. Still, it was hard to believe, at first glance, that Linda had any serious problems.
Her major complaint was that she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere in life. She had held the same job for a number of years. Although it was a creative position and paid her well, she felt unfulfilled. She thought she should move on, get a job with more responsibility and more money. But she didn’t know what else she wanted to do. She was also dissatisfied with her personal life. She had never married and felt desperate about the prospect of never having a family. Yet she wasn’t sure if that was her most important goal. She was confused about her direction in life, caught between her desire for a career and her wish for a home. Some women, she commented, achieve both, but she hadn’t attained either. On the surface, Linda seemed to have the potential for both—brains and beauty. What was wrong?
Linda’s present depressive reaction had begun just after the breakup of a relationship with a man. She hadn’t been in love with him; she herself had terminated the relationship because it wasn’t going anywhere. Nevertheless, she experienced the breakup as a failure and became depressed.
The first cue I had to Linda’s problem was her voice. I had noticed its lack of resonance. I could not sense any excitement in her voice; it sounded unalive. When I remarked on this to Linda in our first session, she replied, “I’ve always been ashamed of my voice. It doesn’t sound right.” The voice, as I have indicated, is one of the main channels of self-expression. The lack of resonance in her voice suggested a lack of feeling in her body.
Since Linda had said that she was unhappy and frustrated about her life situation, I suggested that she try to express some feeling about this. Could she voice some protest about her fate? I asked her to lie on the bed* and kick her legs against it as a form of protest. To kick about something means to protest. This is one of the regular exercises in bioenergetic therapy. All patients have something to kick about. Neurotic individuals suppress their feelings, and kicking is one way to help them express these feelings. The voice is also engaged in this exercise. With the kicking, the person is told to say “No” or “Why?” Both words imply a protest. I specifically directed Linda to raise her voice as loud as possible, letting it come out as a yell or scream.
Linda tried the exercise, but her kicking was mechanical and her voice sounded weak. It lacked any note of conviction. She complained that she had no feeling of protest in her, so she couldn’t do the exercise properly. Did she have any feeling of sadness which she could express by crying? She didn’t feel sad and she couldn’t cry. Nor could she feel any anger. In fact, she didn’t feel any emotion strongly enough to be able to express it. That was her problem.
I realized that Linda’s appearance was a façade. She projected the image of a successful woman of the world, but the image did not correspond to her inner being. I could guess that in her inner being she felt herself to be a failure. The fear of failure had led to her first depressive reaction. For some reason, the image was so important to her that it absorbed most of her energy, leaving her without the strength to express herself with feeling as a real person in the world.
To help Linda, I had to understand both the exact meaning of the image and its relation to her sense of self. What was the image of success so effectively concealing? Why and how did it assume such an overriding importance in Linda’s life? What did failure signify? It is insufficient to answer these questions in general terms. The narcissistic image develops in part as a compensation for an unacceptable self-image and in part as a defense against intolerable feelings. These two functions of the image are fused, for the unacceptable self-image is associated with the intolerable feelings. It was only as Linda’s therapy progressed that we came to understand the exact meaning and role of her success image.
Therapy is a process of getting in touch with the self. Traditionally, the approach to the self has been through analysis. Every therapy must include a thorough analysis of the patient’s history to discover the experiences that have shaped the patient’s personality and determined his or her behavior. Unfortunately, that history is not readily available. The suppression and denial of feeling result in a repression of significant memories. The façades we erect hide our true selves from us as well as from the world. But analysis has other material to work with, in addition to remembered history.
The analysis of dreams is one way to acquire additional data. Then there is the analysis of present-day behavior, especially as it is evidenced in the therapeutic relationship. This relationship is often a highly emotional one because feelings toward important figures from the past, like the parents, are transferred to the analyst. Through analysis patients come to see the connections between their adult attitudes and actions and their childhood experiences. This traditional approach, however, is limited because it is too dependent on words, which are themselves only symbols or images.
Getting in touch with the self involves more than analysis. The self is not a mental construct but a bodily phenomenon. To be in touch with oneself means to sense and be in touch with one’s feelings. To know one’s feelings, one has to experience them in their full intensity and that can only be done by expressing them. If the expression of a feeling is blocked or inhibited, the feeling is either suppressed or diminished. It is one thing to talk about fear, another to feel the fright and scream. Saying “I am angry” is not the same thing as feeling the emotion surge through one’s body. To truly feel one’s sadness, one has to cry. This is what Linda was unable to do. She had choked off her sobs and her screams. She had swallowed her tears. The chronic tension in her throat affected her speaking voice, making it sound unalive.
In addition to verbal analysis, then, Linda’s therapy involved working with her body physically to reduce its rigidity, to deepen her breathing, and to open her throat.
I have mentioned earlier in this chapter some of the exercises I use—kicking the bed while saying “no” as an expression of protest and hitting the bed to express anger. These are expressive exercises. They would also include reaching out with one’s hands to touch, to call for mother or to ask for help, and reaching out with the lips to kiss or suck. Most people have a lot of trouble reaching out; they are inhibited by a fear of rejection which is structured in tensions around the shoulders and the mouth. I also use a number of positions to help a person feel his body from head to toe. The simplest of these is a standing position with the feet parallel and about six inches apart, the knees slightly bent, the weight of the body on the balls of the feet, the belly out and the pelvis slightly back. If the person will breathe easily and deeply with the shoulders relaxed, he will feel himself down to his feet. It is the position to which one lets oneself down from the rigid holding of oneself up. Many people doing this exercise feel some anxiety about letting go or letting down. One can then sense how tightly one holds to maintain control. Another position, called grounding, enables a person to feel his contact with the floor or earth. The person bends forward and touches the floor with the points of the fingers. The feet are parallel and about twelve inches apart, the knees slightly bent. Again, breathing deeply and freely is important. If one feels one’s legs in an alive way in this exercise, they will vibrate as the current of excitation flows through them. The vibration reduces the tension in the legs and gives the person a sense of aliveness in the lower part of the body. All exercises must be attuned to the needs of the person as they are manifested in the expression of the body. Such work with the body aims at and facilitates the release of feeling. And this release often brings to consciousness a significant memory from the past. The release of feeling removes the block in the function of perception.
After a number of sessions and considerable work, Linda broke through her throat block. As she noted, “I was able to cry with deep sobbing, and I experienced a lot of sadness. I recalled that as a child I was so frightened because Mom and Dad argued so much. I was terrified that either he would hurt her or she him. I always tensed up in bed when they were arguing, petrified or terrified that one of them would get hurt, possibly killed. But I couldn’t express my feelings, my fear, or my pain. Did I subconsciously want Daddy to kill Mother so I could have him all to myself?”
In the following session we looked at this problem more closely. Linda commented on the two areas where she felt stuck—her love life and her career. At the time she was living with a man who was still attached to his ex-wife, who drank and didn’t have a place of his own—not even a mailing address. She remarked, “I feel stifled that he is still with me all the time. I think I love him, or at least I need him.” With respect to her work, she said, “I’m having a problem with my career—I need a change. I don’t want to be doing the same thing next year or five years from now, and that frightens me. I am really desperate. I’m not feeling suicidal, but I have bouts of despondency.” When I asked her if she felt like a failure, she replied, “Of course I do.” I then asked if she was able to cry about it, and she began to sob softly. She said it made her sad to realize she had shut off her feelings.
As we turned to the relationship with her father, the question of sex came up. Linda recalled, “When I was a child, I felt that masturbation was evil. I felt sneaky sitting on someone’s knee—possibly an uncle’s—and feeling good. But I have no memory of my father’s physical affection—he never held me.
“My parents would accuse each other of being wrong,” she continued, “and I as a child had to listen to each side separately. They would complain about the other to me, a little ten-year-old child, and tell me how they felt. Naturally I suppressed ever expressing how I felt. I never had the courage to tell them to shut up when they were arguing. It was an intolerable situation. I feel he was the instigator since it was his gambling that brought on the arguments—and at the same time, I could not tolerate her when she argued. I used to go to bed at night with a pillow over my head to shut off their screaming. I even remember that when I was about six or eight, I wanted to commit suicide because I couldn’t stand the arguing. I was afraid he would hit her. But they never really hit each other.”
Linda’s story, however, did not seem complete. She reacted to the conflict between her parents as if it had a nightmarish quality. She described it as “intolerable,” saying she was petrified and had wished to “die.” Yet parental arguing is too commonplace in and of itself to be a horror story. Why, then, do many patients report their experience of parental fighting as a horror? The child fears that such arguing will result in one of the parents being killed. Linda indicated this fear, which I then related to the Oedipal situation. She had suspected the connection. In the Oedipal period, at three to six years of age, children have death wishes against the parent of the same sex.3 At the same time, the child feels terribly guilty about these feelings and tries to reject them. I thus assumed that Linda had been afraid her father would kill her mother because on some level she wished he would so that she could have him all to herself. On a conscious level, however, Linda turned against her father and wished he would die. She even said that she still wished this, for it would make her mother’s life much easier. But in turning against her father, Linda also turned against herself, against her love for him and against her sexuality, which was an expression of that love. At least, this was my hypothesis. To test it, I checked her feelings toward me, for as her therapist, I was a father surrogate.
As Linda lay on the bed, I leaned over her, with my face about twelve inches from hers. As our eyes made contact, I could sense that she looked at me with a positive regard. I asked her if she would like to kiss me. (I don’t kiss my patients, but I do permit them to express their feelings verbally.) Linda said she was afraid to kiss me, that it was improper and “dirty.” But as she said this, she began to cry and sob. She was in a conflict about her feelings. If she could not accept them, she could at least protest. So I suggested that she kick the bed and scream “Why?” After this exercise, which she did with some feeling, Linda felt some release.
In the next session, I asked Linda to reach up and touch my face. Here are her words about the experience as she recorded it in her notes after the session: “Big breakthrough came when I had to hold his face and tell him I like him. I couldn’t do it. The words were choked in my throat—they wouldn’t come up—and when I finally got them out, I cried. I really cried hard before I was able to say anything. I could not say ‘I love you.’ I could not bring the words up past my throat. But as I sobbed, I said, ‘What am I afraid of? Why can’t I say I love you?’ I can really feel my sadness.”
I told Linda that I sensed she didn’t feel she had a right to burden anyone with her sadness. Her attitude in the face of sorrow was to put on a “happy face,” to keep smiling. She then remarked, “My parents told me all their problems and how upset they were. I naturally felt I shouldn’t share any of my upsets with them. Consequently, I pushed all my sad feelings down. Why couldn’t I tell my parents I was unhappy and sad that they argued all the time and felt miserable? I can see now why I have such a neurosis about my voice and throat—including a great fear that I could develop throat cancer. I never felt like an articulate person.”
After this session, in her notes Linda wrote, “I was finally able to break down. It was sad and painful, but I felt uplifted and wonderful when I left—and remained so the rest of the day.”
We can see now that Linda’s image and her inner reality were opposites. The image presented to the world was one of a worthy, competent, and successful person. She was a “somebody.” Unfortunately, Linda didn’t feel worthwhile; she didn’t feel she had the right to express herself as a person, to have a voice in her own affairs. Had she felt this, there would not have been a problem. But at the beginning of her therapy, I couldn’t tell what she felt. She had suppressed all feeling. Only after the experiences I have described was she able to open up and reveal her inner self.
The true sense of self is determined by the feelings of the body. And it is reflected in the body’s expression. I mentioned that Linda was an attractive woman. In one respect, however, her body was misshapen. Her pelvis and buttocks were too heavy and too large. There was a passive quality about this area, and in fact, it was difficult for her to move her pelvis easily and freely. Linda was aware of this difficulty, having experienced the passivity of the lower part of her body during sexual encounters. (She had never reached a climax with a man during sexual intercourse.) The passivity related to a feeling that sexually she was “there” for the man but not for herself. When we discussed the significance of her pelvic immobility, Linda remarked that her mother had the same problem. Was she, then, identified with her mother? “I suppose we’re alike in some way,” Linda replied, “but I’ve always tried to be different from her.” The difference was expressed in the role that Linda adopted, in the image she projected. The similarities, however, came out on the bodily level and in patterns of behavior that were unconsciously determined. Both women were sexually passive, suggesting deep feelings of sexual guilt, which foster feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Belonging to the modern generation, Linda rebelled against her “fate,” in contrast to her mother, who accepted hers, married, and raised a family. But Linda had to pay a price for her rebellion—namely, no marriage and no children.
I posed a question earlier about Linda’s image: What was its exact meaning? To be a successful woman meant to be different from her mother. Failure meant that she was no better than her mother. But how does the idea of competition between mother and daughter (or father and son) arise? I do not believe that it is natural.* In the natural order, children tend to emulate their parents, not compare themselves with them. Competing with or comparing oneself with a parent implies an equality of level. Children can only feel equal to their parents if they are treated as equals by one or both parents. Both parents did this to Linda, sharing their problems and anxieties with her. The parent who looks for understanding and sympathy from a child treats the child as an equal, placing the child in an adult position. A similar situation occurs when a parent shows that he or she is sexually excited by a child. In both cases, the child is seduced and used. The effect, however, is to make the child feel special. That is what happened with Linda.
Linda’s therapy continued to progress in a satisfactory manner. She was able to sense and express more feeling. She cried more easily and more deeply about her past and present life. Through the body work with her pelvis, she developed more sexual feeling. Then, she met a successful man, unlike her previous lovers, who was interested in marrying her. Her marriage necessitated a move to another city, and her therapy with me ended.
Linda’s case illustrates a number of points about narcissism. The grandiose self-image that characterizes the narcissist compensates for an inadequate and ineffective sense of self. It represents a conscious effort to be different (better), but it fails to change the basic personality or the self. The self is a function of the body’s aliveness; it is not subject to conscious control. All one can do consciously is to alter one’s appearance—in effect, change one’s image—and this has only a superficial effect on the personality, just as changing one’s clothes does not change one’s body underneath. More profound change requires the expression of the suppressed and denied feelings. To do this, one must release the chronic muscular tensions that block feeling and raise the repressed memories to consciousness.
This procedure is the basic therapeutic approach to all neurotic problems, including narcissism. But no therapeutic procedure is effective if the therapist does not understand the patient as a person. Every character problem develops through the interaction or interweaving of many forces, each of which stems from some important early life experience. Each thread of the personality fabric must be sorted out, its origin determined and its function elucidated. In Linda’s case, the role of the image as a compensation for a sense of inadequacy was clarified. As Linda worked through the origins of her fears and guilts, mainly sexual, she was able to function with more feeling and with less concern for her image. Her narcissism decreased. She felt less of a need to deny her feelings.
The image itself is a denial of one’s feelings. By identifying with a grandiose image, one can ignore the painfulness of one’s inner reality. But the image also serves an external function in relation to the world. It is a way of gaining acceptance from others, a way of seducing them and of gaining power over them.