“Narcissism is the opposite of love.” [1]
This idea was put forth by a man named Erich Fromm, who was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher. [2] Born in 1900, he lived through World War I, experienced the rise of Nazism (he was Jewish), and went on to live through World War II, the cold war, and the eventual takeover of consumer culture. [3]
Fromm’s statement is noteworthy to us as Christians, because anything that is the opposite of love bears scrutinizing. If we truly wish to be followers of Jesus, we must orient our lives along the axis of love.
These days, with psychologists warning about the rise of narcissism in parallel with the rise of social media, this issue becomes even more relevant to our spiritual wellbeing.
So, why did Erich Fromm assert that narcissism is the opposite of love?
As psychoanalyst and professor Daniel Shaw puts it,
Perhaps nothing shaped Fromm’s interests and ideas more than the horror of witnessing nations of civilized people fervently embracing the insanity and unspeakable cruelty of the Nazi ideology. For Fromm, the essence of man’s cruelty to man was not a death instinct, as Freud or Melanie Klein might conceptualize, but narcissism, the malignant narcissism, as he called it, of a person or a group that refuses to recognize, that despises and seeks to destroy, the other. [4]
For me, this was a whole new idea.
The majority of Nazis weren’t psychopaths, as many of us might think, but narcissists.
One key attribute of a psychopath is that she has no compunction about breaking laws or stepping over lines that most of us don’t dare to cross. Why? Because laws don’t apply to her.
However, a pathological narcissist is different. He is convinced that whatever he does is right. If the Nazis were narcissists, this would explain why at the Nuremberg trials there were so many people who were unrepentant. Those people didn’t claim that the international laws didn’t apply. Rather, they insisted that what they’d done was right, all the way up to their executions.
How valuable, then, are Fromm’s next observations:
It is the goal of man to overcome one’s narcissism…The Old Testament says: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Here the demand is to overcome one’s narcissism at least to the point where one’s neighbor becomes as important as oneself. But the Old Testament goes much further than this in demanding love for the "stranger." (You know the soul of the stranger, for strangers have you been in the land of Egypt.) The stranger is precisely the person who is not part of my clan, my family, my nation; he is not part of the group to which I am narcissistically attached. He is nothing other than human ... In the love for the stranger narcissistic love has vanished ... If the stranger has become fully human to you, there is no longer an enemy, because you have become truly human. To love the stranger and the enemy is possible only if narcissism has been overcome, if "I am thou.” [5]
I’d suggest sitting with this quote for a few moments, as I have, and possibly reading it again. There’s a lot of wisdom and truth packed Into it.
Now, let’s take a moment to expand our focus to include the implications of narcissism in our spiritual lives.
Fromm stated, “It is the goal of man to overcome one’s narcissism.”
If this is our goal, then first we must cultivate a basic understanding of what narcissism is. It’s a term we throw about often in popular culture, but deep-seated pathological narcissism is less commonly understood.
What is a Pathological Narcissist?
First, I should point out here that there is a difference between pathological narcissism (an incurable personality disorder) and the general personality trait of narcissism, which exists along a continuum for all people. The personality disorder is narcissism taken to its utmost extreme. It is the far end of the continuum, and most people don’t ever reach it. That being said, it’s important to understand the extreme in order to understand where we fit into the continuum.
I’ve interacted with two pathological narcissists in my own lifetime, so I will try to convey what a pathological narcissist is, and what he or she might do. This information is based on several years of personal experience and on a variety of books and articles I’ve read more lately.
A pathologically narcissistic person has usually incurred a deep psychological wound in childhood which results in his desire to hold absolute control over his world, and to impose whatever order on it is necessary to protect himself from future hurt. Often a narcissist will project the shame he feels onto others.
He constructs a complex worldview in which he is the only person who exists in the world. He imagines a reality in which he is omnipotent. All other people who exist aren’t really people at all to him. Other people exist as objects, to be used by the narcissist when convenient, and discarded when they become inconvenient.
The narcissist is, at his core, the sole owner of personhood. This is the source of his actions, beliefs, and values. This means that the narcissist has no duty to the truth. He can manipulate and destroy with impunity. He will only do what he wants to do, and never sacrifice for those he claims to love. He has no duty of loyalty or care to the people who inhabit his world—because they are not really people at all. They are objects. Cruelty is a matter of course, because objects cannot experience emotions the way the narcissist can.
When one of these objects gets uppity and tries to exhibit his or her own personhood, the narcissist makes it his goal to demolish that personhood and put the object back in its proper place.
The Implications for Us
This sort of definition is pretty horrifying, but if Fromm is right, then we all—to varying degrees—struggle against some of the mentalities that pathological narcissists embrace completely.
As you consider this information, perhaps something may be starting to become clear to you, as it became to me after reading Fromm’s words:
We Christians might be wonderful people in general, but when we turn to our relationship with God, we often begin to exhibit narcissistic patterns.
Let me elaborate.
1. God is wholly “other” from us. We necessarily cannot treat Him as we would a human being. However, He is still a Person. He still has thoughts and feelings. Reading the scriptures, we can find times when He gets angry, when He’s sad, when He’s happy, when He’s sarcastic. And yet, too often we diminish God to having just a few emotions. We can’t imagine Him thinking or saying anything other than what’s recorded in the Bible. We eliminate His personhood from our worldview.
2. When we pray, sometimes all we do is talk. We’re not interested in listening to what God has to say. We allow ourselves to express our own thoughts and feelings completely, without a thought to God’s.
3. We tend to use and discard God, depending on what’s convenient for us. When we’re in trouble, we come running to Him in prayer. When things are going well for us and we feel like we don’t “need” Him (or when He asks us to obey Him in some way), we discard Him. [6]
4. Narcissists tend to find and fuel each other. In the same way, sometimes we find and fuel other Christians who also display these same narcissistic tendencies.
Our human tendencies towards narcissism are rooted in our tendencies towards sin. Because not many of us have a personality disorder, we likely don’t exhibit the extremes of narcissism the way we might struggle with some of our other sins.
However, I believe it’s important for us to recognize the truth of Fromm’s statement:
It is the goal of man to overcome one’s narcissism.
When we submit ourselves to God, and work towards this goal, He enables us to not only fulfill that goal but also to properly follow Jesus’ teachings.
Remember, Jesus said:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ Upon these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets.
(Matthew 22:37-40)
This leaves us with a vital truth:
Overcoming our inherent narcissism is essential not only to fulfilling the second-greatest commandment (“love your neighbour as yourself”) but also to obeying the first-greatest commandment (“love your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength”).
Without fighting against our own spiritual narcissism, we disable ourselves from interacting with God as the Person He is, from experiencing the abundant life. We live behind the fun house mirrors we construct to obscure our own identities and vulnerabilities from Him. We don’t really have a relationship with Him at all. We have only a one-sided conversation that allows Him no real input into our lives.
Fromm was right: only when we overcome our innate narcissism are we able to properly love our neighbour.
But he didn’t quite go far enough.
The other side of the coin is this:
Only when we overcome our innate narcissism are we able to properly love our God—as a Person, and not just an object of convenience.
Lord God, today I confess to You that I’ve been a narcissist when relating to You. I’ve constructed You as a two-dimensional being in my mind. I’ve been more interested in what I have to say than in what You have to say. I’ve discarded my relationship with You when it becomes inconvenient, and I’ve used You when I’ve gotten myself into trouble. I’ve encouraged other people in sinning against You, and I’ve been unrepentant in my attitudes towards You.
Lord Jesus, thank You that You are not a narcissist. Thank You that You’ve sacrificed Yourself for me. Thank You that in the Garden of Gethsemane, You decided to obey even when You sweat drops of blood, even when a part of You didn’t really want to go through with Your plan.
Please touch my heart today. Please enable me to be courageous enough to face my own flaws, and secure enough in You to bring my weaknesses to You—to show them to You, and allow You to change me. Father, thank you that You have promised to continue to work in my heart until the day when Jesus comes again. Thank you for the confidence that I have—that one day Your work will be completed, and I will be perfected through the blood of Your Son. Until that day, please enable me to trust You and relate to you in a way that’s healthy and complete. Amen.
NOTES
[1] Paraphrase of statement in Daniel Shaw, Traumatic Narcissism (New York: Routledge), 2014, p 98 of 556 in ebook.
[2] "Erich Fromm," Wikipedia, Last accessed 14 August 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm.
[3] Daniel Shaw, Traumatic Narcissism (New York: Routledge), 2014, p 98-99 of 556 in ebook.
[4] Ibid, p 99 of 556 in ebook.
[5] Ibid, p 99-100 of 556 in ebook.
[6] I’ve been disturbed to see the common trend of removing God’s requests for obedience from songs purporting to be founded on specific scriptures. For instance, one song removes the line, “as we forgive those who sin against us” from the Lord’s Prayer when it asks God to forgive our sins. Likewise, another song removes all mention of the Lord’s staff and rod from its version of Psalm 23.
