Pathological narcissism is on the rise, says Harvard Medical School psychologist STEVEN BERGLAS. Just when certain people seem to have it all, their kingdoms come crashing down. Berglas believes they are often victims of a syndrome that a bigger bank account won't ever cure. Reprinted from Time.com
Q. You've been studying and treating rich and successful people for nearly a decade. What have you discovered?
A. Individuals who suffer from success have what I call the four A's -- arrogance, a sense of aloneness, the need to seek adventure and adultery. These are the core attributes of people who achieve stellar successes without the psychological bedrock to prevent disorder. All my patients and the individuals I've studied suffer from at least three out of four of these patterns.
Q. Can one be a healthy narcissist?
A. Yes, there can be authentically healthy levels of narcissism, and that's a goal of therapy. But the groups I'm dealing with are those that only appear to be healthy. They marshal resources and legions of loyal people, and they are very influential. But they carry in them a germ seed, or they are affected by their success in a manner such that they ultimately implode. They get to a point in life beyond which they can't go further. I've written much about this problem in a book called The Success Syndrome.
Q. Some components of this syndrome seem to turn up in many well-known people.
A. There are countless examples. The sense of arrogance can be Donald Trump saying his bankers were tossing money at him or John Gutfreund's Salomon Brothers cornering the treasury-bill market illegally and failing to report it. It can be Leona ("Only the little people pay taxes") Helmsley and her bragging to a little person who is going to be her undoing. The sense of aloneness is born of a mistrust of underlings, which can approach Howard Hughes' isolationism. The adventure-seeking behavior can be insider trader Dennis Levine plotting to dupe SEC regulators with offshore bank accounts. Pete Rose, Gary Hart, Imelda Marcos, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken: they all seem to have committed self-destructive acts that follow on the heels of enormous success. I have never met or treated any of them, but they do fit a prototype that I've derived from both research and clinical case studies.
Q. Can all four A's turn up in one person?
A. "Hitting a quad" in my practice is as rare as winning the daily double at Aqueduct. The televangelists have, and they appear the most pathological of all.
Q. Can't one be happily successful and also be arrogant at times? And studies show that most married people commit adultery.
A. Of course. We're not talking about the need for purity. We all have clay feet. We fall from grace. But it's so easy to have an extramarital affair without getting caught. Context is everything. Why, right after the big success, do they start doing it? And why do they get caught? These people, such as Hart, are ragingly self-destructive.
Q. Is this pathology particularly modern or American?
A. How many people can name a single one of last year's Nobel Prize winners? In America we define status by financial success. It's much easier to sacrifice family for career, and our culture reinforces that.
Q. Is success itself conducive to psychological problems, or do these individuals have some fatal flaw to begin with?
A. I think it's both. First of all, there are stresses of success. I can have students go through an experimental paradigm in a lab, and they will show cracks under the stress of success. But there are also identifiable developmental influences that render some individuals more susceptible than others to self-sabotage. They are like a virus that lies dormant unless it's given the right environment to flourish. What causes the germ seed of the "healthy" narcissist to explode is really the success beyond which he or she can't comfortably proceed. It creates a level of arrogance at which some of them, such as a Gutfreund or Levine, cease following rules. That's really the classic undoing.
Q. Feeling above the rules is one thing. What drives these people to actually break them?
A. In Levine's new book, Inside Out, his wife repeatedly asked him, "Why?" Why did he need the ill-gotten money? He really couldn't answer. But let's look at what Levine did for a living. He put people together and arranged deals. In the time you and I spent on the phone arranging this visit, he could have made tens of thousands of dollars. You don't feel efficacious or psychologically competent when people bring things to you and, essentially, do your paper work for you. There is no challenge. You may feel rich, but you can't buy the feeling that you're great from watching passive income accrue. And when the rewards are coming in faster than you can count them, they become meaningless.
Q. Levine says that when he was earning $100,000 a year, he hungered for $200,000. When he was making $1 million, he hungered for $3 million.
A. That doesn't give you a sense of psychological well-being. Part of what drives these people is realizing that the promise of the Horatio Alger story is a myth. They didn't know that money would be so dissatisfying when it finally arrived. Yet instead of turning inward and saying, "I need a mid- course correction here," you get more of the same. They don't say, "If $200,000 didn't make me happy, why should $300,000?" It's bad logic. It's what I call well-intentioned self-destruction. Why not switch to more control of the organization, shaping lives in a positive way? Or switch to more free time? Instead, the secret account in the Bahamas becomes the challenge.
Q. Doesn't the shock of public humiliation affect these folks?
A. It can be turned around by the narcissist to say, "Look how important I am that all these people care about my life." A narcissist in Gutfreund's position might say, "Look at my impact on the financial world. My screw-up has instituted a wave of reform." This is why Levine is bouncing back, consulting, giving lectures at business schools. He's had the audacity to stand in front of students and talk ethics. You or I might have been shamed into suicide. I mean, I would die if, like Levine, I was arrested and my parents saw me dragged to jail. I would die. But if you are a master of the universe, the normal contingencies of success and failure don't apply.
On a behavioral level, it's the Orwellian Big Lie. "I did this, but it really doesn't matter -- I'm back." Or "It may have been bad, but it wasn't Dennis." Keep saying it, and they'll buy it. That's how narcissism operates. It doesn't say, "You are an unredeemable slime." It says, "You're special." And it permits them to somehow make it.
Q. Some people would say enough with the psychology, these miscreants are simply immoral.
A. It's nothing resembling a moral deficiency. We know that something, probably an ego deficit, made them obsessed with proving competence. They carry an open wound that they're really running to escape from. In Leona's case, it would seem that she was running from a fear of being "a little person," and the fact that she was a real estate saleswoman who happened to marry one of the richest men in New York.
What I think is significant is how these people find that material success does nothing to assuage that injury. At a certain level, success exacerbates it, making you more alone, arrogant, adventure-seeking or adulterous. You strive and strive and get more; then you wonder, "How would I ever know if I am loved independent of my success? If everything was gone?" In a very primitive way, they almost have to dive off the cliff to test it. The televangelists seemed to be begging for it all to end. There's a pressure keeping up the narcissistic facade and masking the depression. These are not happy people.
Q. What's Trump's problem?
A. Again, I've never met or treated him, but he appears to be trying to escape from the shadow of a father who gave him a tremendous head start. Why does he need his name on everything? It could be that he's trying to say, "I'm not Fred's boy. I'm the guy who owns the airplane, the yacht, the building. My company is myself." These are what we call narcissistic extensions.
Q. Aren't there plenty of successful people without the germ seed of self- destruction?
A. Of course. Joe DiMaggio didn't have Pete Rose's problem. He could retire and move on to other things. But Rose didn't seem to have a differentiated ego. In other words, he didn't derive self-esteem from multiple sources. He was a ball-park rat. There may not have been anything else for him to do. People like Rose and Levine and Milken seem like fundamentally limited men. In the business world, look at Peter Lynch, who walked away from running Fidelity's Magellan fund with the express purpose of spending more time with his family and charities. Likewise, Sam Walton, one of the richest men in America, who has steadfastly maintained a commitment to benefit the people of Arkansas, motivate his employees and live modestly. These leaders are stellar examples of psychological health.
Q. O.K., you're Jewish, I'm Jewish, and that allows me to get away with the next question. How come so many of the insider-trading scoundrels are Jewish?
A. You're not the first person to ask. The Jewish tradition, back to the Talmudic scholar, is to show strength through the mind. The prototypical Jew doesn't win a Golden Gloves championship; he doesn't jam with both hands. He thinks and/or makes money. And, in a pathological way, I believe these guys were being bright Jewish boys who went awry. They were saying, "Look, Mom, I beat the system. I'm a valedictorian." They didn't set out to hurt anyone. They had raging arrogance, grandiosity and deceptive intent, but I don't think they had malicious intent.
Q. Milken's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, calls Den of Thieves an anti-Semitic book, in part because it focuses heavily on Jewish insider traders.
A. I wish Dershowitz would understand that the Jewish culture has always overemphasized intellectual prominence and strength as a source of self-worth. That's why people raised in that ethos are more susceptible to finding that they have to chronically manifest greater and greater levels of competency to feel psychologically secure. When the mere acquisition of money loses its significance, beating the system can become a convenient mechanism for recapturing one's self-esteem. Actually, if Dershowitz understood how truly desperate these men were to validate their sense of self-worth, he might use the success syndrome as a defense for Milken.
Q. What's the cure for a bad case of the success syndrome?
A. What's often missing in these people is deep community or religious activity that goes far beyond just writing a check to a charity. You don't have to believe in Jesus or Yahweh or some higher being, but you have to subordinate yourself to a greater cause. When you do that, you don't take advantage of people, you don't exploit them.
I think everyone who gets a $100,000-plus job on Wall Street should be assumed guilty and sentenced to do community service as a pre-penalty. I can't emphasize it enough. Take your next class of M.B.A.s coming in the door of Salomon Brothers and sentence them. N.A.A.C.P. interest you? B'nai B'rith? You want to rant and rave for Act Up? Go, be a part of a community. I've seen it work. It's the only antidote for narcissism. Be an Indian, not a chief. Lose your identity in a group. The healthiest people have that commitment.
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