A Timeless Mirror-World

Narcissism, Trauma, and the Purge of Time

Photo by Elias Maurer on Unsplash

In myth, the curse is the fatal self-fixation of Narcissus, entranced by his own reflection, unaware of the world beyond the image. In psychological reality, narcissism tends to emerge as a defensive curse of its own, a shield forged in childhood to guard against deep wounds. How does a child’s yearning for safety and attunement turn into an adult’s preoccupation with grandiosity and self-image? Can the narcissist’s grandiose self be understood as a traveling echo, a response to an absence, a reverberation from an empathic black hole in early attachment? If so, what happens to one’s inner chronology and narrative and to their sense of time and memory when they live life behind the mirror of that false self?

Every infant enters the world expecting or, rather, needing attunement—an environment of consistent care and empathy to mirror their feelings and provide a secure base. Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, shows that when caregivers provide consistent emotional support, a child develops a secure attachment and a basic sense of safety and value, but when caregiving is inconsistent, neglectful, or insensitive, insecure attachment styles arise.[i] These insecure patterns, far from being mere personality quirks, are fundamental adaptations to early relational trauma. An anxious-preoccupied attachment, born of unpredictable caregiving, leaves a child fearful of abandonment, clinging and desperate for reassurance; a dismissive-avoidant attachment, mostly from emotionally unavailable or rejecting parenting, teaches the child to wall off their needs and rely on self-soothing; a disorganized or fearful-avoidant attachment, from abuse or chaotic care, imbues the child with both longing for and terror of intimacy. Narcissistic traits are deeply rooted in these insecure attachment dynamics, often emerging from dismissive-avoidant or fearful-avoidant attachment patterns, where vulnerability feels too dangerous and the child learns to cope by either denying dependency or vacillating between idealizing and despising others.

From the standpoint of attachment theory, then, narcissism can be seen as the armor a child crafts when early attachment figures fail to offer reliable love. If a child’s emotional bids are met with coldness or only met on the condition of performance, they face an unspeakable pain, the implicit feeling that “I am not enough or perhaps I don’t exist at all unless I meet my caregiver’s needs or expectations.” The brain is literally shaped by early relational experiences. The psyche of the developing child can’t tolerate the void of validation, so it fills it with a defensive structure, as the right brain systems that govern emotion regulation and stress response depend on attuned interactions with a caregiver, and when caregivers are present physically present but not emotionally, the child’s healthy self-development is impaired. If their calls for emotional presence go unnoticed, they may remain fixated at a stage of needing to prove their worth, forever seeking the nurturance they lacked.

The developing mind of a baby who, upon feeling distress, finds no comfort, confronts the empathic failure of the caregiver to feel and respond to their internal state, failure experienced by the child as a rupture in the development of the cohesive self. Normally, a loving parent glues together the pieces of a child’s nascent self by soothing the child’s fears, admiring and reflecting their joy and little triumphs—empathic responses through which the child gradually learns that they exist and are seen, that their efforts and feelings are recognized. Healthy narcissism is a normal, necessary part of early development. The young child naturally believes they are the center of the world, but under healthy conditions, this grandiosity is slowly tempered by reality. The caregiver’s task is to provide enough empathic mirroring and a small degree of frustration so the child’s grandiose self gradually evolves into realistic self-esteem.

When this process fails—when the child either receives too little mirroring through neglect, criticism, emotional absence, etc., or grossly distorted mirroring (overindulgence, overpraise)—the developmental trajectory skews. The child’s early grandiosity never gets properly shaped or moderated by empathic attunement and they never learn to manage disappointment or limits. They may grow up ashamed of their normal human imperfections and desires, since those were never accepted by the caregiver, and develop a personality that remains, in some part, stuck in the egocentric reality of the small child. The untempered grandiose self carries on into adulthood, endlessly seeking the praise and validation that were missing in childhood.

This is how attachment trauma lays the kindling for a narcissistic defense. Early emotional neglect becomes an inner void that the child must fill with something, and that something becomes an inflated self-image or fantasy. Developmental trauma expert and psychiatrist Dan Siegel describes how the brain’s memory systems respond to trauma, especially trauma in early years: when a child’s emotional pain is not resolved through comfort, the experiences remain as fragmented, implicit memories like sensations or emotional imprints rather than integrated, explicit narratives. The hippocampus, the brain region critical for forming autobiographical memory, is highly sensitive to stress in early life. Childhood abuse or severe neglect can impair its growth and lead to difficulties in encoding and retrieving memories,[ii] as trauma freezes pieces of experience outside the flow of time, the feelings unable to fade as normal memories do because they were never fully processed. The child who was left to “cry it out” night after night may not remember it in words, but in their body and unconscious mind, that panic and loneliness live on, timeless. They might, at age 5 or 15 or 50, still feel an urgent void inside whenever they sense someone important pulling away, an echo of the original abandonment. Here we see the roots of what psychoanalysts call narcissistic injury, a deep wound to the developing self, not a single event but a chronic pattern like inconsistent caregiving, parental depression or rage, absence of affection, that leaves the child feeling unseen and unsafe. The narcissistic personality is one possible scar that forms over this wound. It is a maladaptive solution to the problem of unfulfilled attachment needs. Rather than live in constant pain or dependency, the child’s psyche says, unconsciously, “I will create a version of myself that doesn’t need to feel this pain. I will become perfect and need no one.” Then the stage is set for the grandiose, self-sufficient facade.

As psychoanalytic therapists point out, many narcissistic personalities originate in childhood environments where love was highly conditional.[iii] Some were valued only for their accomplishments or attributes (“the special child”), others endured constant humiliation or harsh criticism (“the shamed child”), others were materially spoiled but emotionally ignored (“the spoiled child”). In all cases, the child wasn’t really seen; they were either inflated unrealistically or deprived of genuine care, sometimes both.[iv] From these early experiences, they draw a basic conclusion about relationships: vulnerability is dangerous, being your authentic self, with fears and weaknesses, results in pain, abandonment, ridicule, in the sense of letting your mother or father down. And so, to survive emotionally, the child abandons the development of the true self and constructs a false one, an idealized persona designed to secure the approval that was lacking. By performing the role that pleases the parent, the child hopes to finally feel loved, but the tragedy is that the false self later solidifies into the narcissistic personality structure, which compulsively performs for admiration but never truly feels loved, since any love received is for the facade, not the real self hidden behind it.

In psychoanalytic terms, the child internalizes an “idealized image” and an “admiring audience” into their mind because the real parents didn’t reliably provide them. The child imagines a perfect, approving parent or becomes their own ideal parent to compensate for the real parent’s failures. Simultaneously, they cultivate their own grandiose self-image to merge with that ideal. It is why narcissistic individuals crave admiration time and again. They are constantly seeking what psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, best known for his development of self psychology, calls selfobject experiences, interactions that shore up their fragile self. Lacking a stable inner core, they use other people as mirrors or as ideal figures to merge with, as pathological narcissism entails exploiting people as functions to stabilize an unsteady identity. The narcissist, although arrogant and self-sufficient in appearance, is frail and chronically hungry for validation inside, the grandiose display being a form of self-medication for a hidden wound.

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What about aggression and manipulation, the hallmarks of narcissistic behavior, how do they relate to early trauma? When a child’s needs aren’t met, anger is a natural protest. But expressing anger toward all-powerful caregivers is perilous for a dependent child, so many learn to repress or redirect the rage. Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, who studied narcissistic and borderline patients, emphasizes that these individuals carry a load of unintegrated aggression, symptoms manifesting as a defense against not only lack of empathy but also against harsh, aggressive parenting or an environment of intense competition. If a child is treated cruelly or valued only for being “better than others,” they might identify with the aggressor, and the outcome is a personality organized around power, contempt, and envy, as in the case of the classic “arrogant narcissist” who must demean others to feel superior. Yet even this grandiosity, Kernberg believes, masks a deep emptiness and rage, and, indeed, Kohut and Kernberg both highlight the phenomenon of narcissistic rage, the primal anger that erupts when the narcissist feels slighted or abandoned, seeing it as “a response to empathic failure,” the child’s fury at not having their needs understood.[v] In adulthood, minor criticisms or disappointments can reactivate that old fury, leading to disproportionate outbursts or vindictive behavior, as if the narcissist carried a time bomb from childhood. Reactions may range from inexplicable torrents of anger to sullen withdrawal, the intensity coming not just from the present moment but from the accumulated past hurt underneath.

The sense of self and other in narcissism is skewed by trauma. In normal development, through secure attachment, a child gradually recognizes that others are separate beings with their own needs, which gives rise to empathy and realistic expectations, but the narcissistically injured child doesn’t fully make that leap. The other remains, if you will, not a true other but an extension or a threat to the self. If caregivers were experienced as either sources of pain or only conditionally loving, the narcissistic child learns to relate to others in one of two polarized ways, either as sources of supply, mere objects that exist to fulfill their needs, or as sources of danger or frustration, things to be avoided or controlled, manipulated or conquered. Therefore, the adult narcissist can seem utterly lacking in true empathy, because in their internal world, others aren’t experienced as full subjects, and they only value aspects of others that serve their needs, and only value themselves based on certain conditions like success, perfection, etc. A person who can’t relate in a fully human, mutual way is, at heart, a consequence of not having been valued as a whole person in childhood. The narcissist was valued for what they did or devalued for what they didn’t do, never simply for who they were. Then in adulthood, they can’t help but repeat the pattern, treating themselves and others as ordinary objects.

To live like this, behind a defensive façade, is to live at a remove from one’s own authentic history. Narcissism, as mentioned, involves a kind of developmental arrest, due to part of the self remaining fixated in childhood needs and fears that were never resolved. Psychologically, trauma produces what Freud calls “repetition compulsion.” A person unconsciously recreates aspects of the trauma in later life, as if stuck on a loop, because the original scenario was never mastered or integrated, and this temporal distortion in pathological narcissism has been termed “the destruction of time” by Otto Kernberg.[vi] According to him, severely narcissistic and borderline individuals show a failure to extend the self in time, struggling to connect their past, present, and future in a meaningful narrative. Why? Because their identifications with others, including across generations, are weak or nonexistent. The narcissistic self is self-contained in a pathological present. Kernberg, using object-relations terminology, links it to an inability to work through the “depressive position”: normally, in maturing, a person comes to accept whole pictures of self and others, integrating the good and the bad, mourning the loss of the infantile illusion of perfection. This mourning allows one to perceive time, to see that the past is gone, feel regret and gratitude, gain perspective, value the future. But the narcissist has not mourned or accepted loss. They are still, on some level, refusing to accept a world where they are not omnipotent or perfectly admired. And so then, Kernberg notes, they experience a kind of temporal void, an endless repetition of old patterns with no true progression, accompanied by feelings of emptiness and a nagging fear of death—if their psychological development is frozen in a childlike state, where they can’t conceive of their non-existence, the reality of mortality remains an unintegrated terror. The narcissists’ failure, he writes, “to develop significant object relations results in a chronically empty internal world, depleted of emotionally deep and meaningful experiences, that condenses, retrospectively, the experience of time: nothing memorable has happened in the past, except the ongoing efforts to shore up self-esteem and confirm the grandiosity of the self. The narcissistic patients will often find themselves ‘waking up’ at age 40, 50, or 60 with a desperate sense of years lost.” They may fend off aging and mortality by clinging to youth, or simply by living in a desperate presentism that ignores future consequences.

“[Narcissists] experience a kind of temporal void, an endless repetition of old patterns with no true progression, accompanied by feelings of emptiness and a nagging fear of death—if their psychological development is frozen in a childlike state, where they can’t conceive of their non-existence, the reality of mortality remains an unintegrated terror.”

There is, in a way, an absence of a true past or future in their inner world. Their story, lacking continuity or context, is irrevocably broken. A narcissist’s memory becomes a servant to the ego rather than an accurate archivist, painful memories, especially those that induce shame or vulnerability, are dissociated or repressed, erased from conscious recall. A parent’s neglect or a humiliating failure don’t fit the grandiose narrative and so are either forgotten or heavily distorted. In place of real memories, they confabulate, unconsciously inventing stories that fill the gaps in a way favorable to them. For instance, if they had a falling out due to their own misdeeds, they might genuinely remember themselves as the victim or as having left by choice, because admitting fault or abandonment would be too injurious to their self-image. These “plausible plug-ins” in memory appear to outsiders as blatant lies, but the narcissist believes them. Their memory is in flux, rewritten as their internal needs evolve, leading them to contradict themselves about past events, seemingly unaware of it.[vii] Because the memories were never integrated with genuine emotion, being more like ideas than felt recollections, the person has no stable autobiographical truth to consult. They remember in the service of the present self, a kind of temporal solipsism—what they feel to be true in the moment becomes the truth, until further notice.

Memory disturbances in narcissism can sometimes resemble dissociative disorders. Pathological narcissism has been compared to a kind of dissociation or even a shallow form of multiple selves.[viii] The person may present a “kaleidoscopic gallery of mercurial images” rather than one stable personality. The True Self and False Self are like two personalities, the true one hidden, suppressed, lingering in the shadows of the unconscious, holding the pain and longing which occasionally break through in moments of crisis, and the false one performing, taking the stage in conscious memory. Because of the split, the narcissist’s autobiographical memory lacks integration. The memories associated with the vulnerable true self are dissociated, inaccessible to the false self’s narrative, and the false self’s memories are skewed by defensiveness. In therapy, helping narcissistic clients may involve painstakingly re-membering their life, putting back the disavowed pieces of their story. Dan Siegel uses the term “re-membering,” literally reassembling the members of the self, for trauma healing, as the person must take the disowned fragments and weave them into a coherent narrative. It is solely by reclaiming the pain that was split off that one could have an honest continuity from past to present, until then they do not, in a sense, exist in their present—part of them is living in a spectral past that they refuse to acknowledge but can’t fully escape, an ineffable presence that shapes their life without ever being named. The unspeakable pain becomes the unremembered past that nevertheless dictates present behavior. Only through articulating and integrating the early wounds, through empathic connection from relationships that provide the trust and acceptance that were missing, can the narcissist finally step out of their timeless mirror-world.

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[i] Shimiaie, Jason M.D. “Narcissism and Manipulation: The Attachment Model.” Psychology Today, 25 Jan. 2025, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/an-interpersonal-lens/202501/narcissism-and-manipulation-the-attachment-model

[ii] Siegel, Daniel J. “Brain Insights and Well-Being.” Dr. Dan Siegel, 22 Jan. 2015, https://drdansiegel.com/brain-insights-and-well-being-3/

[iii] Shimiaie, Jason M.D. “Narcissism and Manipulation: The Attachment Model.” Psychology Today, 25 Jan. 2025, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/an-interpersonal-lens/202501/narcissism-and-manipulation-the-attachment-model

[iv] Keil, Mitch. “Understanding Narcissism.” Dr. Mitch Keil, 12 Nov. 2020, www.drmitchkeil.com/post/understanding-narcissism/

[v] Blackstock, Joel. “The Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut: Revolutionizing Narcissism and the Psychology of the Self.” Get Therapy Birmingham, 26 Oct. 2024, https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-self-psychology-of-heinz-kohut-revolutionizing-narcissism-and-the-psychology-of-the-self/

[vi] Galanaki, Evangelia, and Aikaterini Malafanti. “Loneliness and Personality Pathology: Revisiting Kohut and Kernberg.” Psychology, vol. 14, no. 7, July 2023, pp. 1123-1135. Scientific Research Publishing, doi:10.4236/psych.2023.147061.

[vii] Vaknin, Sam. “Dissociation and Confabulation in Narcissistic Disorders.” Journal of Addiction & Addictive Disorders, vol. 7, no. 2, 2020, article 39, doi:10.24966/AAD-7276/100039.

[viii] Vaknin, Sam. “Dissociation and Confabulation in Narcissistic Disorders.” Journal of Addiction & Addictive Disorders, vol. 7, no. 2, 2020, article 39, doi:10.24966/AAD-7276/100039.