The Closet Narcissist Personality: Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” Jungian and Object Relations Theory

The Phenomenon of Two Types of Narcissists: Grandiose and Closet Narcissists

The definition of the “closet narcissist” grew out of Dr. James Masterson’s work with personality disorders at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where he studied along with Donald Rinsley, Otto Kernberg, and many others. Masterson is now deceased, but his work carries on. He explicitly discusses the psychic structure of the character disorder syndrome he calls “closet narcissist” in his 1981 book on Narcissistic and Borderline Disorders and his 2000 book on personality disorders. Dr. Masterson (1993) dedicated the whole book to closet narcissism and entitled it The emerging self: A developmental, self, and object relations approach to the treatment of the closet narcissistic disorder of the self.

The layman is most familiar with the term narcissist in relation to the more grandiose narcissistic character, who is exhibitionistic, expansive, out there, and in your face; while underneath the performance there lies a desperate and clinging child self, who craves mirroring by an audience to feel viable, rather than severely depressed or fragmented. The grandiose narcissist seeks to create an inflated and “grand” image of himself/ herself that can be performed for an audience. He/she compulsively seeks to have this grand image self, or grandiose self, accepted by an audience, as if it is the actual self. He/she is compelled to have that image self recognized or reflected back to him/her, as a mirror would reflect any external image. However, the grandiose narcissist also must project out (and into others) the undeveloped and psychologically deprived child within him. He projects out this dissociated “inadequate” self, to avoid consciousness of his “loser,” as opposed to “winner” image self. The narcissist creates a vacuum inside the internal world by projecting out this dissociated, but real, inner self. The subjective experience of this vacuum can be that of an emptiness, or of severe depletion. Consequently, consciousness of this authentic internal world experience must be avoided at any cost. The successful grandiose narcissist will avoid this internal world emptiness by continually performing to win admiration from the mirroring audience.

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It has been necessary to define the grandiose narcissist to now define the closet narcissist, because the closet narcissist cannot have her/his character defense system operate without the presence of a grandiose narcissist in their lives.

The Closet Narcissist

The closet narcissist is someone who gets the “high” of an inflated narcissistic character by merging in with the image created by a grandiose narcissist and operating as a self-extension of the grandiose narcissist character.  Like the grandiose narcissist, the closet narcissist can be warding off conscious awareness of a split off or dissociated inadequate self structure.  The “inadequate,” emotionally abandoned self, has been left underdeveloped in the first three years of life. It is in these first three years that the internalization of a “good-enough mother” is needed. This early time is also when the “good-enough mother” experience must be maintained throughout the two- and three-year-old period, when separation-individuation and self-integration normally transpires. Otherwise, the person’s psychological development will become arrested, rather than evolving in a forward-moving developmental process. Having been deprived of this “good-enough mother” internalization (for whatever reasons), the closet narcissist refuels her own sense of inflation by merging in with the grandiose narcissist, within her/his own mind. To gain access to such merger the closet narcissist must mirror, please, and cater to the grandiose narcissist, thus entering experiencing her or his self as one with the grandiose character, and as one with the inflated performance character of the grandiose narcissist.

In reverence to historical precedent, I have recalled the work of Annie Reich in 1943 and 1950. Two journal articles of Annie Reich resonate with my inspiration from James Masterson (1981, 1993, 2000), who specifically writes about an interactive variation on the grandiose narcissistic character. Also, Trevor Pederson’s concept of a “doppelganger” (2019, p.46), in a book on film, highlights the projection of one character into a mirror-like other character, one being an alter ego of the other. Pederson writes: “The analysis of her double begins with the fantastical creation of a character who is a physical duplicate of the protagonist (a doppelganger).” Heinz Kohut’s idea of a “twinship transference,” as part of narcissistic transference states, also can be seen as a precedent to recognizing the psychodynamics of a closet narcissist attempting to merge with the figure of a grandiose narcissist, as well as his idea of mirroring and idealizing transferences (Kohut, 1977).

In the 1940s and 1950s Annie Reich was a well-known American female psychoanalyst, who was part of the then totally dominant New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute operation. She was known as a classical Freudian psychoanalyst and theorist. She wrote two critical articles on the closet narcissist phenomenon, without calling the phenomenon such, since this was prior to the time of James Masterson’s books on the character disorders. Reich wrote journal articles (later edited book chapters) entitled “Narcissistic Object Choice in Women” (Reich, 1953/1973) and “Extreme Submissiveness in Women” (1940/1973). In these two articles Annie Reich speaks about women who choose to marry grandiose narcissistic men to fuel their defensive narcissistic need for their own self-image inflation. These women operate from a psychological craving to have the “glow” of the false grandiose narcissist inflated image reflect on them. In these cases, women become part of the narcissistic “glow” of the grandiose narcissist by mirroring their grandiose narcissist husbands. In the paper on “Narcissistic Object Choice in Women,” Reich (1953) describes a marital situation in which the wife regains her narcissistic glow, as reflecting the “glory” of inflated image of the husband, each time the wife had sex with the husband. So, the psychic merger with the grandiose husband, and his false grandiose image self, occurs through the sexual merger with the husband. The wife then needs to compulsively have sex with her husband, to maintain her own narcissistic glow.

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In her paper “A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women,” Annie Reich (1940) highlights the compliant submission of the closet narcissist wife to the grandiose narcissist husband, which is the wife’s psychological avenue into merger with her husband’s inflated image. This submission can take place in many forms, not only through sexual intercourse. The main thing is that the submission to any, and all, of the husband’s demands creates the illusion that the wife is one with her husband. In this way, the closet narcissist wife can bask in the narcissistic glow of her husband’s performance image, which gets mirrored by the world at large. We get a picture of the sycophant here. We can also get a picture of the wife who fails to be a protective mother in the face of a narcissistic husband’s aggression towards his children. Often such a wife colludes with her husband, even when he is not being a “good enough” father, to merge with her husband’s grandiose image self. This leaves her children without protection or understanding in relation to their vulnerable situation in relation to their father.

Example of the Closet Narcissist in Fictional Film Character Portrayal

I would like to use Woody Allen’s film portrayal of his main female character in his “Blue Jasmine” movie to illustrate some of the psychodynamics of the “closet narcissist.” Jasmine is introduced to the film’s viewer as compulsively talking about herself, chewing the ear off of the poor passenger who sat next to her on an airline flight to San Francisco. Jasmine is obviously in a high state of anxiety behind her compulsive talking. She emits her talking as a highly pressured narcissistic monologue about herself and her history. The focus of Jasmine’s monologue is about her now deceased husband, around whom her life had circulated since her college days, when she first met the man. Jasmine’s history becomes the history of how her deceased husband came into her life, and how her whole existence was molded around this older man, who already had a son from an earlier marriage. As Jasmine’s monologue unfolds, it can be seen that the reason for Jasmine’s high state of anxiety is related to the loss of her husband, and the consequent loss of the life and definition of herself that she had molded around her husband’s identity. When confronted with the reality that her husband’s identity, with which she had merged, is the false narcissistic identity of a very successful con man – Jasmine is devastated. Playing the role of Jasmine, Kate Blanchet demonstrates the Greek tragedy of the false Image self, with disconnection from any sustained sense of an internal self. Jasmine explodes into dramatic narcissistic rage, as the movie reaches a crescendo from Jasmine’s underlying despair.

Alec Baldwin plays the role of the successful husband con man, who cheats as much on Jasmine with other women, as he cheats daily in his real estate business dealings. However, it is when this grandiose narcissist husband threatens to abandon Jasmine for a younger woman that Jasmine’s retaliation lands her con artist husband in prison, where he promptly commits suicide.  We witness Jasmine saying to her Narcissistic husband’s son — who now hates her for turning his father in to the FBI — that as soon as she made the phone call to turn her husband in, she regretted it. Yet it is apparent that Jasmine’s retaliatory impulse towards her cheating, and now abandoning, husband could not be resisted since Jasmine is faced with the acute and severing loss of her whole adult life’s identity — when she is severed from her husband.

As movie viewers we learn that Jasmine had molded herself around her husband, and therefore had no viable Self and identity without this charismatic con artist husband. Her husband had tantalized Jasmine into living decades with an unconsciously chosen ignorance about all her husband’s nefarious business activities. Jasmine’s husband’s false grandiose image self had paid off for Jasmine, so she dissociated all her real feelings and thoughts for the many years of the marriage. In this way Jasmine goes from an ingénue in college to a middle-aged high society

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“trophy wife,” who props up her secretly betraying husband’s performance in an elite New York world.

After her husband’s imprisonment for a multitude of white-collar real estate crimes, and after his suicide, Jasmine flies to San Francisco to be put up by her sister Ginger whom she had formerly contemptuously devalued. Jasmine’s flight to San Francisco is a flight to the modest home of this sister, who like herself had been adopted. She resorts to dependence on her sister in desperation, but even while financially destitute after her husband’s crooked past is revealed, and the government had confiscated all her assets, Jasmine lets it slip out with her sister that she somehow got a first-class ticket on the flight. Jasmine can’t accept her reduced financial status in life because she now has nothing to pin her narcissistic image self upon.  Before her financial status had been totally tied in with her former husband’s financial and social status, bought through her husband’s charade. Now, in her compulsive filibuster on her airline flight, at the expense of her airline seat neighbor, Jasmine reveals that her husband (played by Alec Baldwin) had been her first lover. She also reveals that she very readily gave up any aspirations of her own to use a college education. In fact, she married her husband before graduating college. Apparently, Jasmine gives up the obviously flimsy vocational fantasy of becoming an anthropologist, a profession that Jasmine mentally conjured up in college to have a college major of some kind. When her husband found her as a young willing and naïve virgin, who he could mold to his likings, as Pygmalion molded Galatea, Jasmine all too willingly gave up any challenge to create her own life and identity in the world.

Through Jasmine’s narcissistic merger with her husband via marriage, she won several decades of hanging out in a pseudo life, where her contrived personality could operate with a certain amount of social credulity, as long as her husband’s contrived personality, on which her own was propped up, could be sustained. All this erupted into nuclear fallout when Jasmine’s husband moved from compulsive and incessant affairs on the side of his marriage, which he later labeled “flirtations,” to an affair with a much younger woman than his wife — a young nanny, perhaps also waiting to be molded – who he intended to spend the rest of his life with.  Suddenly, the hens came home to roost for Jasmine, who had cultivated her ignorance of her husband’s true nature with a sycophant’s flair, always willing to accept his lies as truths and his truths as lies. When her husband attempted to silence her in her rage, and in her abandonment terror, she escalated into a state of abandonment panic that triggered her most primitive retaliatory impulses. The minute her husband left her sight she called the FBI and turned in her husband for illegal business activities, despite having claimed for the whole course of her relationship with her husband that she knew next to nothing about the true nature of what his business activities entailed. Earlier on in this marriage, when she had come close to recognizing one of her husband’s extramarital affairs – following the reluctant but well-meaning report of her sister – Jasmine had quickly repaired the damage to her vulnerable narcissistic psyche by inviting her husband to “make love” to her. She re-established the psychological merger with her husband in this way, just after he lied to her about his extra-marital affair. To not believe his lies would have meant a disintegration of her whole fragile “false self,” which was tied to her husband’s false grandiose narcissist “star.”

When the final crash of her marriage came, Jasmine’s parasitic identity could not forestall the consequences of her own desperate retaliation, and of her own downfall, with that of her husband’s. Things moved quickly, with her husband being picked up on the street by FBI cops and imprisoned, through the total apprehension of her property by the government, as in the case of Bernie Madoff, followed by her husband hanging himself in prison. A later scene reveals that Jasmine lives with an addictive, repetitive, and eroticized accounting of how —

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when a man hangs himself — he is actually killed by the snapping of the back of his neck, not by suffocation. The eroticized suicide story keeps Jasmine bound to her dead husband’s attempts to cover up.

Unsuccessful Attempts at a New Life

Once deposited on her sister’s doorstep, Jasmine attempts to cover up her contempt for the sister that her parents had always devalued in comparison to her. She tries unsuccessfully to overcome the contempt she has nurtured for years, for Ginger, the sister who lives in a working-class home, has a working-class job, and has two kids from a former marriage. Jasmine never owns responsibility for how her sister’s marriage broke up due to Jasmine’s husband’s rip off of the funds that Ginger and her ex-husband had planned to use to build a business and life together. Jasmine’s sister also has a current boyfriend, who considers himself her fiancé. The fiancé reluctantly postpones his plans for marriage to accommodate the — supposedly temporary — intrusion of Jasmine moving into her sister’s apartment. Jasmine’s sister’s family and fiancé are totally disrupted by Jasmine, who always tolerated her sister’s existence with an air of arrogant contempt, covered up by superficially accommodating actions.

Jasmine’s sister is not keen to have her sister long term but feels she has no other choice than to let her sister crash at her place. When Ginger learns that Jasmine has hardly any idea of how to live on her own and must create a way of making a living for herself, she suggests Jasmine settle for a current job opening at a local dentist’s office, as a receptionist. Jasmine is, of course, incensed by such a suggestion. Nevertheless, she manages to stomach this job as a preliminary way of taking computer classes so that she can eventually learn to be an interior decorator through online study. So, with this idea of a new identity for herself in the world, Jasmine tries only out of desperation, to begin to live an independent life, rather than living as the narcissistic extension of a man.

However, with the unethical sexual harassment of the dentist Jasmine seeks employment with Jasmine’s attempt at a viable independent identity dies rapidly! As viewers we might imagine, however, that if not for the sexual harassment, Jasmine would have needed to find another reason to short-circuit her plans for an independent existence. She was incessantly compelled by the psychic structure of a closet narcissist to head back to the state of a self extension of another, of a man.

Inevitably perhaps, in terms of Jasmine’s closet narcissist condition, Jasmine is defeated in her attempt at a pro active creation of her own life. She returns to seeking a man to support her financially, socially, and most of all psychologically. However, before she does this, she blows up with semi-stifled rage in her sister’s home. Kate Blanchet, as Jasmine, maneuvers this explosion with remarkable precision. Kate, as Jasmine, desperately screams out her despair: “Who do I have to sleep with to get a Martini with a lemon twist here?” when disrupted from her attempts to study in her sister’s home. Jasmine is clearly losing it before she walks out on her receptionist job. She had been ready to blow. The attempt to operate as an autonomous adult is clearly too much for her.

Then Jasmine is invited by a classmate to a party where she can use artful, but also enormously contrived, skills to meet a man. She does encounter a man who takes an interest in her. The new man, Dwight, is charming and charismatic, a diplomat, with plans to be a major player in the world, hoping to run for political office as a congressional candidate. He notices Jasmine’s designer bag right away. He is looking for a well-dressed, sophisticated woman, with a sense of humor. When mirrored by the man’s attention, Jasmine can become all the things he desires, as she has been well schooled in the facile chameleon-like adaptation to be what the “alpha” man wants. The man she meets is flattering, and he immediately takes to Jasmine’s reflection

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back to him of his own image. Yet he is also a much more authentic specimen of humanity than Jasmine’s psychopathic lying former husband. He is charming and charmed, as Jasmine portrays herself as an interior decorator. Of course, Jasmine conceals that she is just someone who aspires to be an interior decorator – not having been educated to be one, not having been licensed, and not actually being more than a society dilettante – who dabbled in decorating the houses of friends.

Jasmine wins the day with her new man by falsely claiming to be an interior decorator, intuitively matching his desire to have an interior decorator to design the décor of his new, large and elegant home. Also, during the conversation between her and Dwight, at the party where they first meet, Jasmine describes her status in parallel with the man. He says his wife died of illness. Jasmine ricochets back that her husband died of natural causes, a heart attack. Here she explicitly lies, covering up the whole seedy ordeal of her dead husband’s crimes, rip offs, betrayals, and suicide. As she begins to date her new man, she is questioned by her sister about her false presentation of herself to the new man she is dating, while Jasmine offers to decorate the new man’s home. Her sister questions Jasmine’s “lying,” but Jasmine defends herself. She claims that historical facts about a person are not important: all that is important is her way of being, her way of expressing herself, her sense of humor. Here we see “alternate facts” at play!  Jasmine’s sister is obviously skeptical, because her sister lives a totally different kind of life, without affectations, without charades and performances. When the movie ends sister Ginger has found the meat and potatoes of love and relationship. She finds intimacy, authentic sexuality, playful engagement with the intimate other, and commitment.

Meanwhile, Ginger’s sister Jasmine will enter a downward spiral. Jasmine will crash like Icarus flying too close to the sun.  Jasmine’s entry into her demise begins with her new man’s proposal of marriage. In a pivotal moment of critical drama all her new man’s promises to give her a new life, by fitting herself into his life, crashes and burns. Lulled into her narcissistic bubble of renewed grandeur by her new man’s promises of living for a time in Vienna, and then holding her by his side as he campaigns for a seat in Congressional political office, Jasmine is back in the “closet narcissist” game! She is equipped for one thing in life: becoming the extension of a man by reflecting his glory and bouncing off his perceptions of what he might wish her to be in her chameleon portrayals. She briefly lives in the new narcissistic bubble created by the image reflected in Dwight’s eyes. This shields her from the absence of her own separate and defined identity.

Then fate throws Jasmine another curve ball. Poised on the doorstep of a jewelry store where her new man has taken her to pick out a diamond engagement ring, Jasmine is forced to encounter the ex-husband of her sister who had been royally ripped off by her deceased husband. The man assaults Jasmine with the hardships that he must now live with since his one chance to begin his own construction company was squashed by Jasmine having suggested that he invest his once in a life-time lottery win with her husband’s real estate dealings. Obviously, he is bitter that he had been scammed and dammed, leading to loss and divorce, and ultimately to “laying pipe all the way to Alaska” (the man’s description of the construction work he was doing due to having been scammed out of money by Jasmine’s husband).  He does not hold back in lambasting Jasmine for her crooked lying and scheming husband, who took everyone who had trusted him, with him, into disaster. By assaulting Jasmine with the true facts of her life, in front of her now profoundly shocked fiancé, her sister’s ex-husband does not fail to mention that Jasmine has a son, her ex-husband’s son. At this revelation Jasmine can no longer keep up her pretense in front of Dwight.  She cries out, “You know where David is?”

Shock, after shock, overtakes Jasmine’s new man. Dwight is beyond being shaken by all the lies and deceits, and cover-ups, revealed at that moment by Jasmine’s sister’s ex-husband. When

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Jasmine wishes to return to the fiction she has created and lived in with her new guy, by beginning to motion towards entering the jewelry shop, to purchase the promised engagement ring, Dwight stops her in amazement, “Do you think I would go in there after this?  Oh my god, it was just by a chance encounter that I found out the truth!” He gets into his car with Jasmine, and demands that Jasmine explain why she didn’t tell him any of the truth about her life, about her husband’s criminal activity, about her husband’s son. Jasmine mumbles that she would have told him in time. “When,” he cries, “after I married you?” Dwight’s disbelief escalates as he confronts Jasmine in the car.  He tells Jasmine that if she had told him what happened, he and she could have faced the truth together, even if it was difficult, but then accuses her that she had pretended to be someone completely different than she is This blast of truthful confrontation devastates the bubble encasement that Jasmine had been living in – like Sylvia Plath’s bell jar! Then Jasmine cries out in the terrified but enraged cry of one found out, and of one being stripped of one’s identity in being found out: “So, you think I was just entrapping you?” Then she screams that she must get out of the car, in the middle of nowhere, and Dwight tries to calm her some, saying he will drop her at her sister’s.  But Jasmine can’t tolerate sitting still!  She has been stripped of her false self identity, just like the little man behind the curtain, at the end of the Wizard of Oz. Filled with her own psychological nakedness and ugliness, she pushes open the car door and almost gets killed. She cannot sit, she cannot be, she cannot contain the eruption of rage and terror inside of her frail bodily being. There is no longer any false narcissistic image to hide behind. Her exploding rage and terror overwhelms any such flimsy defensive mask, since no solid internal identity exists. Jasmine can no longer merge into the image of the man, nor into the man’s fantasy image of her.

Jasmine returns to her sister’s house in a cold narcissistic rage. Then she evacuates her rage onto her sister’s fiancé, a fiancé who has fought to win her sister back after her sister had broken up with him. He is ecstatic in being able to finally commit to Ginger for marriage, and step fatherhood. He deflects Jasmine’s rage. But Jasmine cannot give up one final attempt at narcissistic cover up for him and for her sister. Although she has been humiliated and mortified beyond imagination, she reacts to her rage and terror by insulting her sister’s fiancé. She then covers up the travesty she has just ran away from. Her sister and her fiancé still think she is about to get remarried. Knowing they have no idea what just happened between her and her new man, she arrogantly proclaims that she will be going to Vienna with her new guy. Jasmine tries to leave them with their illusion of her. But then her true primitive state of helpless rage and enfeebled cover up is revealed as Kate Blanchet as Jasmine desperately screams out – like Lady Macbeth compulsively craving to wash away her sins – that she must have a shower! She erupts with intense primitive need, as she screams out her lust for a shower. She must, must, must have a shower – to bathe away the stains of her lies, and of the false closet narcissist personas. She cries for the shower like a baby would cry for the mother’s arms and breast.

Jasmine is left with nothing but the casual clothes she wears after the shower. She goes to a park bench in a nearby park, and starts babbling about herself, as if speaking to a strange woman who has been seated on the park bench. We movie viewers now return to Jasmine’s self-absorbed babbling, which mirrors the first scene in the film. Now destitute, without a home, a job, or an identity, Jasmine talks incessantly to herself. The unknown lady on the park bench next to her rapidly flees. At this end point Jasmine can obviously be seen to be living in her own psychotic world of isolated delusion once more. The movie ends with Jasmine’s psychological state mirroring that same psychological state that she had inhabited at the film’s beginning, but now with a denouement demise that mimics Greek tragedy.

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Applying Marion Woodman’s Theories to the Closet Narcissist Phenomenon

The woman who could never symbolically leave her father’s house is also the woman who lacks grounding in her body, and that lack of grounding in her body is related to the lack of having internalized a chthonic mother in the primary stages of infancy, and I would add in the second year of life during “separation-individuation.” The lack of having an adequate warm, holding primal chthonic internal mother will always prevent the natural development towards relating to the father as a separate individual, rather than as a narcissistic extension of the self. Consequently, separation from the father (and siblings) is obviated. The father can be seen as an idealized extension of the self, when the split off aggressive or “bad” part of the mother is experienced as being in the mother, but any actual involvement with the father, from a highly dependent position (due to the lack of the internal mother) will result in the father turning all bad. Thus, I have written about the demon lover complex from an Object Relations view where the idealized muse god for the female artist inevitably turns demonic, becoming a possessive, abusive, and abandoning figure, ultimately abandoning the daughter to the point of death.  In the case of many female artists, such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, this results in an erotic attachment to death itself. Death, and the erotic merger with it in suicide, can become the ultimate demon lover marriage, which Marion Woodman has also spoken of in her book on Addiction to Perfection (Woodman, 1982).

We have seen the “death marriage” in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” where the idealized older man turns into the psychopath who abandons her, ultimately leading to a psychic death, when relating to a healthier man fails. Here we see the nexus between the closet narcissist characterological phenomenon and the demon lover complex. We also see the psychic incest rape of the closet narcissist’s addiction to perfection. The closet narcissist woman spends her whole life trying to be the ideal for the grandiose narcissist husband. So having at least the image of perfection is essential to be the narcissistic extension (trophy wife) of the man, but this is death to the authentic development of the self (through the individual’s experience, feelings, thoughts). So, the woman lives in a state of psychic incest with the original father, from whom she can’t separate without an adequate chthonic mother inside, and adequate mother of separation (Eve). Thus, the woman can only be possessed through images by the grandiose narcissistic male she chooses as a partner. She is psychically raped rather than being psychologically ravished, in Marion Woodman’s terms. She is not connected to her “internal maiden” in Marion Woodman’s terms. So, she can’t be penetrated and engaged with in a healthy psychic or sexual intercourse. She can’t receive the penetration of a healthy male. She instead colludes and reacts, rather than responds. She colludes by becoming the trophy wife extension of the man’s reflected narcissistic image; rather than being a woman with a center in her own right, who could receive the male phallus through surrender, rather than the self annihilating submission.

Patient

One of my patients, a woman who I wrote about in the case of June in Mourning, Spirituality, and Psychic Change (Kavaler-Adler, 2003), hated sex, unless it had a sadomasochistic enactment. However, this was only before she worked out her anger towards her mother for failed separation, and with her father for his verbal attacks on her as a teenager. She had to mourn the loss of the early mother, and deal with rage towards both parents, as part of an overall developmental mourning process, before she could open to healthy sexual desire, and healthy phallic penetration. Before that time, she could only engage in sex as a sadomasochistic fight. She fought against submission, but she couldn’t surrender. Ravishment, as Marion Woodman describes it, requires conscious trust, not unconscious submission out of fear. Without ravishment the woman remains addicted to the perfection of living to make an impression,

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which the Closet Narcissist does by living through the grandiose image of the other. i.e. living out images of herself that she thinks will please the grandiose narcissist man she is dependent on for any sense of self.  However, the only sense of self she has through merging herself into the grandiose image of the narcissistic man is a false self, predicated on merging with the grandiose male’s idealized image.

In this case of June (Kavaler-Adler, 2003), as well as in another version of the case described in “My graduation is my mother’s funeral: Transformation from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position in fear of success, and the role of the internal saboteur” (Kavaler-AdIer, 2006), I show how the woman projects all her potential abilities and talents into the female analyst. After an 8.5-year-analysis (3 to 5 sessions a week), in which June went through a full separation-individuation process, a full developmental mourning process (Kavaler-Adler, 1993), and a full self-integration process, the transformation from closet narcissism to a whole and subjective self can be seen. The woman called June (Kavaler-Adler, 2003), also referred to in a case of Sandra in “Fear of Success” (Kavaler-Adler, 2006), transforms from someone living vicariously through what she interprets as the strengths, talents, and abilities of the analyst into someone who takes back projections of her own potentials that resonate with the true abilities of the analyst. She then owns her talents and abilities, of a considerable nature, and goes on to develop herself on all fronts.

Rape versus Ravishment

In ravishment, there is an active receiving, an active receptivity, giving and receiving in love in the woman. In rape there is a walled off hatred, with outer submission to the negative masculine, who wants to possess with power, rather than to truly interact through intercourse as in the power of love. Marion Woodman (1982) and I agree that in Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” Heathcliff can’t feel that his grandiose image of power is achieved until he can possess Catherine by holding her in his arms, when she is dead.

This is the ultimate demon lover example of masculine power. The grandiose male must possess the woman, and he possesses the closet narcissistic woman through images, similar to how Heathcliff possessed Catherine concretely in her death. But the closet narcissist woman is dead to the extent that she can only express herself through the contrived agenda of performing for the grandiose man’s image of her. Psychologically, she is totally dependent on the narcissistic man with whom she must merge to gain and re-gain her fragile sense of self, as she is reflected in his eyes. Heathcliff can only fully possess Catherine in concrete, and not just psychological, death. The concrete highlights the symbolic here. Heathcliff makes Catherine ill with his manic erotic masculine intensity that is not grounded in the feminine, as the love of the true lover is. The true lover of a woman is a man with frailties, flaws, and boundaries, who has not been bought by his own addiction to perfection. He is not the God muse (or a Demigod), who possesses the woman with his ideals. Merging with such a male muse through projection and introjections destroys the woman rather than creating her. The true male lover, who has the feminine well established within himself, does not seek possession of the woman. He seeks to open her soul and heart through penetrating her body, and wishes to thus give her feminine, and separate, soul (self) its freedom and life. He must be able to own his flaws and regrets to be available in this way. He must surrender his dogmatic ideals, and yield to the process of mutual creating through relationship, and through intimacy in sexual intercourse. The woman can surrender when not overshadowed by the masculine ideals.  She can find the positive masculine in searching for meaning.

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Blue Jasmine and the Closet Narcissist

The closet narcissist is not grounded in the feminine. She is locked into psychic incest with a male father figure, who does not offer true love or freedom. However, her “demon lover” (Kavaler-Adler, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1996) offers her protection and financing, as in Kate Blanchet as Blue Jasmine in relation to the psychopathic grandiose husband character (Alec Baldwin), whom she is totally dependent on. The female closet narcissist, Blue Jasmine, is addicted to the male muse who turns into a demon, as in the demon lover complex.  Such demon lover attraction goes on unconsciously in the mind of the closet narcissist. She cannot be separate from the man, and she thus cannot be truly connected to herself.

Rather than connect, she merges with the grandiose narcissist male. She is thus vulnerable to the victimization of dependence on the malevolent and possessive masculine, the demon side of the muse God. This is all part of the demon lover complex, which can be described in both Object Relations theory terms and in Jungian theory. Marion Woodman represents the Jungian outlook, as she relates to the notion of the demon lover archetype and the muse numinous arousal. Without the man, the closet narcissist woman is helpless, or she goes crazy, as in Blue Jasmine’s case — becoming psychotic at the end of Woody Alan’s movie. She can also become suicidal, and in fact Blue Jasmine was so destructive in the end that she is committing a slow, if not a fast, suicide.  When wishing to merge with a grandiose male the closet narcissist woman seeks dependence with a pseudo veneer of independence. The merger with the grandiose other (usually a man) is essential for the closet narcissist woman (or man). Blue Jasmine cannot connect. She can only merge. Projective identification is the Kleinian defense operation of merger. Marion Woodman (1982) speaks of the projection of the father inside of the demon lover addicted raped woman on to the man whom she unconsciously and compulsively needs to be controlled and possessed by (Catherine and Heathcliff). The closet narcissist woman has not separated from her internal father because she has not grounded herself in the feminine. She lacks the “good enough” internalization of the chthonic mother, but also, she is not free of her image self, which is hooked into the manic male’s grandiose image self. This Image Self gives her a false sense of having an authentic self. She is desperate to keep it, and therefore is kept by the man, until he throws her away, as the Alec Baldwin character throws away Kate Blanchet as Blue Jasmine. The rage of the possessed and dependent woman is seen so vividly in the character acting of Kate Blanchet as Jasmine. When she cannot win another man to merge with (Dwight), she goes over the psychic hill in her mind to despair, to self preoccupation, to talking to herself, to overt lying about who she is, and to desperation when her image self fails to keep or win the man, who she could merge with.  Her Persona is corrupted by her need to live inside of it all the time, rather than just having a flexible social persona she might put on or take off. Instead of this, the closet narcissist’s persona becomes her clothing and her body. She is disconnected from her body. The body of the closet narcissist woman becomes a tool to merge with the grandiose male, who has images that she become a part of.  She wants the man sexually who will be the idealized self she cannot be.

She is Marion Woodman’s (1982) woman, who is addicted to perfection (the narcissistic woman). But the closet narcissist woman does not create her own image self. She must merge with the grandiose images of the male narcissist, as in the Alex Baldwin character in Blue Jasmine. The idealized male, who serves psychologically as the muse god of the female closet narcissist, creates the false grandiose images for both he and his wife.

Marion Woodman: The Failure to Own Eve and the Dark Whore Side of the Virgin

Marion Woodman (1982, 1993) speaks of redeeming one’s femininity through discovering the mythic archetype of Eve within oneself. She has women write of this inner discovery in her 1993

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book, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity. In her earlier book on The Addiction to Perfection, Woodman (1982) writes of a “dark whore side” of the virgin in women, through speaking of the biblical myth of Eve, while giving the biblical tale her own interpretation. After reading Woodman, I interpret the tale in the following manner. Eve eats the snake’s apple and becomes conscious. She needs to be let out of paradise, which is owned by a narcissistic grandiose God. The serpent frees Eve. She needs to own the phallic sexuality of the serpent to be human and capable of a mutual love relationship, where each person in a couple has their own power. Otherwise, she remains an unconscious Virgin, without any differentiation, a part object devalued feminine self, who is only the “rib of Adam,” or Adam’s entourage. However, to own the phallic sexuality she must also own the feminine container. She needs the internalized feminine from the Great Mother (Sophia), or the chthonic mother, of her infancy. She can only contain the phallic sexuality if she has a psychic womb and vagina that can serve as an adequate container for her emotional life, and which can temporarily house the emotional life of the male lover, during a loving sexual intercourse. Only this allows for ravishment rather than rape.

The myth of Medusa in Marion Woodman (1982) is a tale of a woman’s psyche and soul being frozen in horrific paralysis. Through Athena’s curse (being a phallic woman, not grounded in the feminine and the internal mother), Medusa is not only frozen. She also has snakes coming out of her head. In fact, her look freezes the other. This is phallic sexuality in the woman gone mad, when not grounded in the feminine. Athena, born without a mother or a nurturing birth womb, is launched, not born, through the head of Zeus. She is intellect without heart. She is merciless with Medusa. Her curse is a death penalty retaliation for some narcissistic slight she felt from Medusa. There is no healing or forgiveness in this tale. There is no prospect of regret. The phallic intellect without heart, and without grounding in the earthy womb of the chthonic mother (the holding environment), cannot mourn, and can therefore can never empathize with the other. Medusa is frozen because, without the primal mother inside of herself, she has no alive affect life, no feelings, no vulnerability, and no improvisational spontaneity in the moment. She is so contrived that she is frozen, and she has no Winnicottian (1958, 1965, 1971) being established before doing. She is the ultimate horror of extreme manic and compulsive doing without the core of being that Winnicott (1958) writes about in “The Capacity to Be Alone.” Without the internalization of a mother who can “be” and be with her, she lacks Winnicott’s capacity to be alone and thus lacks any capacity to be with another (Kavaler-Adler, 2021).

Brunhilde and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Linda Schierse Leonard (1986, pp. 111-129) helped me to understand the transformation of Brunhilde in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In The Ring Cycle, as Brunhilde is rescued from being owned by her male god father, and thus rescued from psychic incest that would entrap her forever, by the fragile hero, Siegfried. For the first time, she can be born into being human, but only when Siegfried enters the “ring of fire” that her father has placed around her. The father claims to protect her with his “ring of fire,” but he imprisons her, and only a vulnerable human male – not a patriarchal one – is able to free her.

Brunhilde has still never been born through a woman. Nevertheless, Brunhilde’s hard phallic masculine helmet and armor is penetrated by the vulnerable male in the character of Siegfried. Thus, her psychic incest masculine image self is penetrated by the human male lover, and supposedly she can open to a soft feminine vulnerability. Her psychic incest merger with her father God is resolved, as she becomes capable of truly marrying a human male through a rich sexual intercourse. Through this she is for the first time in her body, rather than remaining in her armored, and thus defensive, mind.

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When Brunhilde is rescued by Siegfried her story is analogous to the real-life story of Elizabeth Barrett, who was rescued by Robert Browning from her demonically possessive father.  Her father had dominated her to the point of her losing the masculine power to stand on her feet, and to walk upon her legs (a nineteenth century hysterical paralysis). When Robert Browning falls in love with Elizabeth Barrett, and offers escape from her father, she re-owns the power of her own legs. She finds an independence with the ravishment of Browning, rather than the psychic incest rape and possession of her father.

Elizabeth reached out to Robert Browning through her poetry.  She had found power in the written word that could give her a voice, even when her legs failed her. Robert is drawn to her, as he finds her first through her poetic voice. Then, when Elizabeth is ready to wed, she can write her poem of ultimate ecstasy, though surrendering oneself in love: “How much do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love you to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach” (Sonnet 43 of Sonnets of the Portuguese”).

The Jungian, Linda Schierse Leonard

Linda Schierse Leonard (1986) distinguishes between the false external wedding/marriage and the psychologically valid internal connection wedding/marriage. The woman must be ready for this internal marriage that can then manifest as an external marriage. She needs to see the prince in the outward Beast male. She needs to see the core potential to give and love in a man. In The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers (Kavaler-Adler, 1993/2013), I wrote about Charlotte Bronte, and of her female alter ego character, Lucy Snowe, seen within her last novel, Villette. Villette is Charlotte Bronte’s most advanced psychological novel, with character development evolving the story, rather than the plot driving the story. In my description of Charlotte Bronte’ development, which evolves through the mourning process as a developmental process, we see the evolution of the truly feminine self. We also see the evolution towards a true marriage to a man in the world. This follows the female author’s internal development, which we can see within her creative process, and its developmental mourning process, seen in her novels-, particularly in Villette. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, we see the false marriage of Rochester and his dependent wife. In the enforced 19^th century role of dependence for women, and perhaps also due to closet narcissism, she went mad, and was ultimately hidden away within the attic, until she died from being annihilated in a fire.  Spiritually, and psychodynamically, Rochester had to be burned in the fire that burned his wife to become a fallible man. Only then could Jane Eyre risk of loving him openly, then only acknowledging her love to him. However, in Villette the chauvinistic man ultimately yields some of his power to love the female and feminine Lucy Snowe. He surrenders, as does Lucy. There is a mutual surrender. Mutuality, as well as an emotional, psychological, and spiritual marriage results, even though an actual marriage in the world is precluded.

Seduction and Betrayal

The susceptibility to seduction interacts with the demon lover complex and the closet narcissist. One can be seduced by the suave con artist salesman in business transactions, as Jasmine, in Blue Jasmine, was seduced by her con artist husband. Jasmine lived through her husband’s grandiose image as a closet narcissist. However, it was her own split off grandiosity that merged with his grandiose performance self.  One’s own vulnerability to grandiose wishes can be played upon by salesmen.

The alluring muse of the woman artist/writer turns into the demon lover. Then he turns into death, as he enacts possession, control, abuse, and abandonment. With the average woman, the suave and seductive salesman can be the muse. He promises that all the woman’s ideals of perfection will be fulfilled, ala Marion Woodman (1982) in her book on Addiction to Perfection.

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The former Muse turns demonic within the mind of the closet narcissist woman, as he swindles and scams her. The woman is shocked that she has been cheated, as exemplified by Jasmine in Blue Jasmine. In that film, Jasmine is shocked when she finds out that her husband had been cheating on her for years. The salesman flatters the woman’ grandiose image as well as her idealistic aspirations for herself.

The male demon lover salesman — just like the male demon lover husband or boyfriend — mirrors back to her what she wants to hear. One such salesman would shout out “Superstar!” whenever he contacted the gullible woman (from a clinical case).

Also, in keeping with Marion Woodman’s ideas and theories, being ravished, rather than raped, depends on the woman being in touch with the feminine “maiden” within her woman’s body/mind self. Without being ravished the woman remains untouched.  She is the woman who might not be open to penetration, psychic or sexual. The overly masculine/phallic woman, who can’t surrender control, lacks surrender to mutuality in intercourse, and to orgasmic merger, in the moment. She remains the victim, for the demon lover male, who rapes rather than loves, rather than ravishing the woman through healthy masculine phallic penetration. The closet narcissist has been kept in a state of psychic incest with her father, and this also relates to the lack of containment by the chthonic mother. The closet narcissist becomes the target for projections from the demon lover, rather than being emotionally and spiritually engaged for romance and love. So, she seeks to be contained by the image projection, or by image introjections from a grandiose muse/demon lover male partner.

The closet narcissist woman becomes locked into an intrapsychic merger with a muse/demon lover, evidencing the lack of a father, and the primal lack of containment by the chthonic primal mother. She is possessed rather than being ravished.  Therefore, she cannot be wed into a truly loving and mutual marriage. She merges with the man, rather than marries. It is a false developmentally arrested marriage. The merger takes place through narcissistic images, as in the closet narcissist, obviating the experiential moment of sexual and emotional intercourse that could renew life. The closet narcissist woman (or man) does not wed the man, and she cannot be psychically penetrated or ravished. She is still merged with her internal father, who must necessarily turn demonic, because he has too much power over her. He can control her because he has too much power over her, and she is not secure as separate feminine centered self, due to the early issues with the mother. She tries to control through submission or dominance because she cannot authentically surrender.

Inside the Mind of the Closet Narcissist: A Clinical Case

I can turn again now to the case of a closet narcissist patient, who went through many developmental stages during her Object Psychoanalytic Treatment. As I mentioned, I call this woman analysand June, since I have written about her under that name in one of my books, Mourning, Spirituality, and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis (Kavaler-Adler, 2003a). June was able to resolve primal level infant and separation-individuation stage trauma in treatment. She underwent self-integration through developmental mourning (see Kavaler-Adler, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2005, & 2018) and became a whole and independent person. The road to this wholeness was long and painful! Grief for multiple levels of losses needed to be felt, processed, and understood. Rage combined with grief then, and they led to a separation process in relation to me, her psychoanalyst.

However, in the beginning of June’s treatment she evidenced the psychodynamics of a closet narcissist. She saw me as the image of all that she wanted to be. She felt that she herself could never put herself out in the world and risk exposure. However, through her very impassioned

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observation of me she was able to merge into the image she saw of me, and to feel a vicarious avenue to being out in the world. In fact, due to her attending some lectures of mine, and reading some of my books, she felt like she was merging in with me as a star who could perform out in the world. If she herself were to try such outward self expression, she feared she would be torn apart, by what she projected out in the world to be the vampires of envy who would rip her apart. This was a projection of her internal world envious mother, who lived inside of her, and of her own envy, and of her own split off and dissociated aggression related to this envy. However, through me, she felt, she could ascend to the heights. In fact, when she read some of my books, she said that she felt that she was seeing through my eyes, feeling through me; and like I was writing inside her mind, as she read the writing of mine in my books. When she was at this early stage of psychotherapeutic treatment June felt she needed to merge into me through her vision of me, and through her hearing the sound of my voice. She would say “I need you on the inside!” For without her merger with me, her psychophysical being felt empty and blocked. She said that she felt like there was a metal rod stuck inside of her, extending from under her neck, through her body and torso, and running down through her legs. Her internal self had been so traumatized that she had sealed off and numbed out all affective feeling states.

This all changed so dramatically in the years of her treatment that it is difficult to remember.  With many levels of mournful grief crying and memory, and with many levels of formulating the meaning of her rage, this woman became one of the most sensitive people, tuning in to all subtle shades of feelings. However, June had begun her healing process in a state of numbed out and sealed off emotional unavailability. June felt like metal because she was so tightly closed off.  However, she lived a vivid manic existence through her image self, which became, at the very beginning, a vicarious unconscious design, related to her images of me that danced in her mind. All her dissociated states could first be felt through feeling me, by seeing her images of me, even though without me she felt only a blank numbness and internal emptiness.  She also felt a kind of split off adrenalin rush when she viewed me out in the world, especially if I gave a presentation. She described this as a state of ecstasy at times, and as sexually arousing.

However, June also felt a dissociated “killer rage,” which she saw as part of her internal deprivation state. She did not associate this “killer rage” with me. She owned this, as well as she also turned the killer rage against herself at times. She spoke of a fantasy of committing hara-kiri as she lay upon the psychoanalytic couch. The dissociated images that she projected into me were of a woman with a special psychological vision of the unconscious and of human internal life in general. She would cry out with a mixture of aching envy and potential admiration: “I want to have the vision you have!” Then she would modify her cry into a hope and began to say, “Maybe I can get there.” So, after an early period of thinking that she could never have any of the enviable characteristics that she at first focused on in me, she started to think that she might, bit by bit, become more like me in the ways she admired. In fact, June was dissociating from her strengths and seeing them projected into me as she saw traits in me that she envied and wanted. She was disowning all her very significant and abundant talents and abilities. She could only see these potentials as actualities in me.  This allowed her to overlook all my failings, until later in treatment. She rationalized all my mistakes and failings in the beginning, seeing them as reactions to how I was being mistreated by all the envious others in the world.

Eventually June would own her own personal talents, abilities, multi levels of feelings and fantasies, and her ever growing true empathic abilities, which would subsume her former mode of primitive identification. Eventually also, the former void state, which had persisted inside

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of June, would become filled with a rich internal world of fantasy and feeling. This would lead to a state of inner peace and calm strength, as she settled into what she would come to call “the home within.” She also called this internal home of peace within her “an ocean cave,” and would describe the sense of depth she had come to feel inside herself as her intensive treatment (3, 4 and 5 sessions a week) came to its culmination.  June also would experience her body separating out from that of her mother in a dream. This signified that she was separating from the psychological merger that she had shared with me at the time. June could then see me as a powerful oedipal mother that she had to stand up to with her own independent agency and assertive aggression.  She felt agency and assertiveness at this later stage of treatment, instead of her earlier “killer rage.” She began to identify with Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, rather than with homicidal murderers. June’s closet narcissist merger with me, her female psychoanalyst, became resolved in her psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic treatment, with its “developmental mourning” healing process.

CONCLUSION

As can be seen in this case of the woman I have called June, a closet narcissist can undergo personality transformation through a “developmental mourning” self-integration process, and separation-individuation process. Psychoanalytic Object Relations treatment can open the dark side of the personality, which harbors split off parts of the Self that are intertwined with oppressive “demon lover” figures (part objects) within the Internal world.  The closet narcissist character also merges with an external muse/god or muse/goddess, who enacts the psychic structure of a grandiose narcissist, who lives in a fallacious omnipotence reinforced by an Image Self that continuously seeks external mirroring from the world. Closet narcissists offer that mirroring to the grandiose narcissists, since they seek to merge with the glory of the successfully performing grandiose narcissist, as the fictional Blue Jasmine character of Woody Allen merged with her grandiose and psychopathic husband (played so well by Alec Baldwin).

The Jungian theory of Marian Woodman, related to the “demon lover complex,” interacts with my own descriptions of the demon lover complex, described in articles and books that present an object relations perspective (Kavaler-Adler, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1992b, 1993, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2006b, 2018).  The Jungian, Donald Kalshed, in 1996, quoted my view of the demon lover complex in two pages of his first book: The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypical Defense of the Primal Spirit. His quote was from my 1993 Routledge book, The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists.

In the demon lover complex, we see the hidden dark side of the closet narcissist wife who enacts a sycophantic role. Woody Allen beautifully captures the eruption of the dark side of the closet narcissist (played so well by Kate Blanchet) in his depiction of “Blue Jasmine.” Therefore, I have employed the themes of that film to illustrate the psychodynamics of the closet narcissist character, which is hidden behind a false self, one which emulates the image self of the grandiose narcissist.

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