We are noble failures

I conceived this scorched notion out of an observation that will help my client feel better about herself. We had been talking about her self-sabotaging baseline of ambivalence. This was planted, most likely, in an insecure mother-infant attachment. It grew in a little girl’s desire for her narcissistic older brother’s “approval.” Critical need and psychological health began to conflict with each other: need for bond, un-need for a toxic bond. Her root of ambivalence later polluted two relationships: with her malicious ex-husband and her clingy, nearly stalking, boyfriend. She despised them both, but couldn’t reject them. Her explanation was – as are so many people’s self-understandings – wrong: She could not cut these men out as that would mean she had once again failed. Another failure would be intolerable.

Why was this a wrong explanation? Because “failure” is not a feeling, sensation or emotion, and therefore can’t be a fact of self-indictment. “You are not feeling like a failure, because failure is not a feeling. Throw the word away. Sink into your holistic state, your body feeling, when you image the severing of ties with your ex-husband and your boyfriend.”

While that process was left for homework (she had a teletherapy audience: Her son was ambling about in the background), the idea of failure as a mis-identified feeling led to a stranger and contradictory insight:

If we are psychologically dysfunctional, “neurotic,” we will be a failure in everything we do. But since dysfunction is ubiquitous, we can yet redefine failure as “human nature.”

A Narcissistic Personality-disordered man may make a billion dollars a year. But he will be a failure. With no capacity for empathy and selfless love, he will fail in every relationship, as he will corrupt it while being unable to join it. His partner will feel dehumanized, treated like a supply. His children, like President Trump’s, will bond with him by fusion: molded to be his reflection, molded to be him. He will succeed at accumulating wealth, but happiness will be alien: He lives on a delusional shell, beneath which is “the underlying rage and depression associated with an inadequate, fragmented sense of self.”*

A dysthymic (long-term depressed) individual will have such a constricted and drained palette of feeling, and such a paradoxical fusion of symbiotic need and discon­nected­ness, that he will inevitably join another wounded person. If she were emotionally healthy, his vacuum would suffocate her. If she were not, they would starve each other: two failed need-meeters.

Any person who grew around her unmet critical needs for visibility (mirroring) and love will find no truly right work, no resting place on earth or by someone’s side or in her mind. “Failure” could be the name of the never-given, the unanswered question that she is.

We should accept this logic: We can’t be sinners if it’s Original. We can’t be a failure if it’s our crown of thorns.

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* James F. Masterson, M.D., The Search for the Real Self, “Portrait of the Narcissist,” p. 90.