When the Self Is Denied: Understanding Narcissism Through the Shadow
Contemplating Narcissism Through a Jungian Lens
Finding My Way to This Work
Narcissism is not a pathology of too much self-love, as it is often described, but rather a condition rooted in too little self-insight — the capacity to understand one’s own thoughts, emotions, values, and behaviors, and how these shape perception and impact others (Miller, 1981). Long before I had language for narcissism, I was already living inside its dynamics. I was shaped by intimate narcissistic systems in which I was covertly cast as the invisible scapegoat.
Escaping the recurring pattern of attracting people who mistreated and intentionally misunderstood me — often to spare themselves responsibility — required a painstaking excavation. I had to pull incongruent beliefs, internalized roles, and inherited stories out by the roots, some of which have fragments in the self-narrative I must still contend with. These narratives had quietly trained me to occupy the scapegoat position again and again, mistaking familiarity for connection.
Through that excavation, familiarity with narcissism research, clinical theory, and intervention emerged alongside something more personal: The slow integration of boundaries with people who use rather than relate. Though this healing process is not easy, it has made one thing possible — conscious awareness of the dance, of my own role within it, and tools to protect myself from further wounding going forward (Kohut, 1977).
Even now, when I sense myself nearing entanglement in someone else’s projective story, the experience can be destabilizing. The impulse to label the other person “a narcissist” and to tell them to fuck off is immediate. Protective parts rise quickly, ready to fight on my behalf. Yet one of the cruel paradoxes of narcissistic abuse is that overt self-advocacy often fuels the very dynamic it seeks to escape (Miller, 1981).
Despite direct experience with individuals exhibiting pathologically narcissistic traits — and despite the culture’s increasing permission to label — I remain uneasy with reducing a person to “a narcissist.” Not because the label might wound them, but because it is ultimately too simplistic. It strips context, complexity, and humanity from a condition that is already defined by psychic isolation. Beneath harmful behavior exists a person ensnared in a relentless internal structure that renders genuine self-insight nearly impossible — and therefore prevents access to the redeeming experience of unconditional self-love (Kohut, 1977).
For this reason, I tend to speak instead of narcissistic systems, narcissistic people, or people with narcissistic traits. At times, the narcissistic person in one’s life can appear almost evil. In severe cases, narcissism approaches malignancy or psychopathy, producing behavior that feels less human and more mechanical — as if the psyche were programmed to dominate, extract, and destroy (Miller, 1981). Yet for most individuals with narcissistic traits, the pattern is better understood as a psychic program — often shaped by heredity and reinforced by environment — that makes turning inward with humility and curiosity profoundly threatening.
Over time, the narcissistic defense becomes so rehearsed that attempts by others to appeal to empathy, insight, or relational repair collapse before they begin.
When my nervous system is regulated enough, compassion for my muse for this work can arise — not as an obligation, but as wholehearted softening to the complexity of her story. I imagine my muse as a child doing whatever was necessary to survive emotionally and psychologically in a family system that could not tolerate her true self. The lens widens to include heredity, yes, but also the ways narcissistic traits were rewarded, required, and reinforced for ego preservation at the cost of authenticity. My heart aches for that little child who did not have the development or power to construct alternative routes to adulthood.
I became a container for my muse’s shame and disowned qualities. The story she tells of “me,” is little more than the reflection of herself in a mirror. That role left wounds I continue to tend and that are inflamed by her, still, from time to time. While I do not blame her, I do hold the adult version of her accountable for the damage she causes — quietly and from a distance. Thus far, she has demonstrated a reflexive inability — more than an unwillingness — to engage in responsibility, accountability, or repair (Pressman & Pressman, 1994). She cannot recognize me as a safe person who could support her healing, because she cannot actually see me.
What brings me some peace in an otherwise heart-wrenching situation, is understanding narcissism as a spectrum disorder of impoverished self-insight and shadow projection, not of malicious intent (though it can feel that way). We all have bouts of limited self-insight and projection. What makes narcissism clinically or pathologically significant is not the presence of self-focus or defensiveness alone, but the rigidity and resilience of these mechanisms and the harms they cause to the person experiencing them and those in their close orbit (Pincus & Lukowitsky, 2010). Here, C.G. Jung becomes a vital guide, offering a language spacious enough to hold both harm and humanity (Jung, 1968/1980). This framework does not offer redemption — the narcissistic mechanism actively resists it — but it does render the disorder intelligible.
Refusing the Shadow
Jung understood the psyche as a system constantly negotiating what is acceptable and unacceptable — internally, relationally, and culturally. The shadow is composed of traits, impulses, emotions, and needs once deemed unsafe, unlovable, or forbidden. These parts do not disappear. They are exiled. And what is exiled does not remain quiet.
Jung was clear that the shadow is morally neutral. It contains aggression, envy, selfishness, shame, and dependency — but also vitality, creativity, tenderness, and power. The shadow becomes dangerous only when it is denied (Jung, 1968/1980).
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— C.G. Jung (1968/1980, p. 130)
From this perspective, narcissism can be understood as a defensive structure designed to prevent conscious contact with the shadow. The narcissistic personality does not lack a shadow — it is dominated by it, precisely because it cannot be acknowledged. Where integration would require humility, grief, and accountability, narcissism substitutes inflation and projection (Kohut, 1977).
Narcissism: Defending Against the Shadow
In Jungian terms, narcissism reflects a rigid overidentification with the ego-ideal — the image one must perform in order to remain lovable, worthy, and powerful. This idealized self is often polished, superior, righteous, self-sufficient, and exceptional. Everything that contradicts this image — needs, shame, vulnerability, dependence, envy, apology, fear — is relegated to the shadow (Jung, 1968/1980).
Because the shadow remains unconscious, it cannot be owned. Instead, it is projected. Jung understood projection as one of the psyche’s primary strategies for avoiding inner conflict. What cannot be tolerated internally is perceived externally — often exaggerated, distorted, and attacked.
Thus, narcissism is sustained through projection. Dependency is disowned and perceived as neediness in others. Shame is disowned and experienced as defectiveness elsewhere. Aggression is disowned and reframed as victimhood. Self-doubt is disowned and projected as incompetence or weakness (Jung, 1968/1980).
This process is not typically conscious manipulation — thought is certainly feels that way for the target. It is more so an unconscious attempt at psychic survival with collateral damage to those around them.
Grandiosity as Compensation, Not Confidence
Jung differentiated true selfhood from ego inflation. Confidence emerges from integration. Narcissistic grandiosity emerges from fragmentation. The louder the self-praise — or the hunger for admiration — the more precarious the internal structure tends to be (Jung, 1968/1980).
From this view, narcissism compensates for an ego that cannot metabolize failure, limitation, or relational rupture. The narcissistic persona becomes armor — impressive, convincing, and hollow.
This pattern often originates in narcissistic family systems, where children are not permitted to develop full selves but are recruited instead to stabilize a parent’s fragile ego (Miller, 1981). In such systems, authenticity threatens survival. Emotional truth is dangerous. The shadow is not explored — it is punished.
Children adapt accordingly. Some disappear into self-erasure, others identify with the narcissistic defense itself, and many fall somewhere along the continuum between these poles. All adaptive responses in children from narcissistic family systems reflect environments that could not nurture wholeness and that likely perpetuate intergenerational patterns of narcissistic behavior (Pressman & Pressman, 1994).
The Narcissistic Wound — A Jungian Reframe
Though Jung did not speak of “narcissistic injury” in contemporary terms, he described what occurs when the ego must split from large portions of the psyche to survive. When contradiction cannot be tolerated — I am both strong and afraid, capable and limited, loving and angry — the ego becomes brittle (Jung, 1968/1980).
In narcissism, the ego clings desperately to the favored side of the polarity and wages war against the other. This dynamic helps explain why shame is so intolerable: Threats to the ego-ideal can feel catastrophic, risking the collapse of the self’s carefully maintained structure and flooding consciousness with disowned shadow material. Rage, blame, withdrawal, and domination are not expressions of power here — they are emergency exits triggered when the fragile self is endangered (Kohut, 1971, 1977).
The Limits of Healing in Narcissistic Structures
Any genuine engagement with narcissism must face a difficult truth: Not every well-established psyche is equipped for transformation.
From a Jungian perspective, healing requires ego strength, curiosity, and the capacity to tolerate psychic tension. Narcissistic structures are defined by their inability to hold such tension. Where growth requires self-reflection, narcissism defaults to ego-protection.
Several limitations consistently constrain healing:
The absence of self-insight. Introspection threatens exposure to shame, grief, and dependency — affects experienced as annihilating rather than informative (Kohut, 1977).
The intolerance of shame. Even mild (or perceived) critique can provoke collapse, rage, or retaliation, making sustained therapeutic work difficult.
The collapse of accountability into humiliation. Responsibility becomes equated with worthlessness, leading to avoidance rather than repair.
The inability to recognize others as separate beings. Others are unconsciously experienced as extensions, mirrors, or threats, undermining mutuality.
The problem of motivation. Narcissistic defenses are often ego-syntonic — meaning, they feel familiar, necessary, and justified from the inside (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Kohut, 1971; Freud, 1923/1961). Because these patterns feel “right” to the psyche itself, the possibility of change is generally hindered.
When growth does occur, it is often partial and fragile. Insight may remain intellectual rather than fully embodied. Behavioral changes can appear without genuine accountability, and progress may unravel under pressure. These limits reflect the architecture of the psyche, not a failure of morality. Recognizing this allows those trying to support a narcissistic loved one to release the hope that being clear, compassionate, or enduring abuse or mistreatment will reliably contribute to positive change (Miller, 1981).
Shadow Integration — and Its Threshold
Jung believed healing does not come from eradicating darkness, but from consciously relating to it. Shadow integration does not mean indulging destructive impulses; it means reclaiming responsibility for one’s inner life. It is in exploring the shadow that we can understand the sacred wound causing suffering in our lives and seeking transformation.
For narcissistic patterns to soften, several capacities must emerge: acknowledging dependency without humiliation, experiencing shame without annihilation, allowing others’ subjectivity, accepting limitation without collapse, and holding guilt alongside worth (Jung, 1968/1980; Kohut, 1977).
This is not a moral undertaking. It is a developmental one. Working with narcissistic patterns or the shadow isn’t about being “good” or “bad,” or judging oneself or others morally. Instead, it’s about growth and psychological development — learning new ways of relating to oneself and the world.
An Argument for Self-full-ness
From a Jungian perspective, the opposite of narcissism is not selflessness — it is wholeness. Self-full-ness, another way to conceptualize wholeness, can be understood as a state of being that honors the fullness of one’s internal world: A balance of self-regard and regard for others, care and compassion for oneself, care and compassion for others with no reward, and the capacity to relate authentically without overextension or depletion. It is not selfishness, which assumes scarcity in the world and takes at others’ expense, nor is it selflessness, which assumes internal insufficiency and neglects one’s own needs — it is a cultivated equilibrium of self and other.
Self-full-ness mirrors Jung’s invitation to individuation: The lifelong process of becoming an integrated — beautifully complicated and messy — whole self rather than a perfected or idealized one. This process asks us to relinquish fantasies of superiority or perfection, tolerate complexity, and acknowledge all aspects of the self — including the parts previously exiled in order to survive relational pressures. It asks for the courage to hold vulnerability, limitation, shame, worthiness, and strength simultaneously.
When narcissism is present, it is not a reflection of “too much self-love” but of a psyche that was never permitted to develop full self-regard and thus failed to learn how to cultivate self-insight, work with shame as a tool for behavioral correction in relationships, or feel at home in humility and celebrating others’ wins. Cultivating self-full-ness allows for the conscious integration of the shadow: The disowned parts of ourselves that wait patiently, not to destroy us, but to be recognized, named, and woven back into the living fabric of a whole, resilient self (Jung, 1968/1980; Kohut, 1977).
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596Freud, S. (1961). The ego and the id (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1923)Jung, C. G. (1980). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1968)Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self: A systematic approach to the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. International Universities Press.Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self. International Universities Press.Miller, A. (1981). The drama of the gifted child: The search for the true self. Basic Books.
Pincus, A. L., & Lukowitsky, M. R. (2010). Pathological narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 6(1), 421–446. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.121208.131215Pressman, R., & Pressman, J. (1994). Children of the self-absorbed: A guide to surviving parental narcissism. Berkley Publishing Group.