In the Nature v Nurture debate, we sometimes find ourselves
wondering about narcissism. Some of us can clearly look back up the family tree
and see abusive, narcissistic ancestors, people who abused their kids, giving
them that “narcissistic injury” that trapped the child emotionally in the
pre-logic years, creating a narcissist. But some of us cast an eye over the
family gene pool and realize that our grandparents were loving people, good
parents, wonderful examples that, for some odd reason, our narcissistic
parent(s) did not emulate. How does that happen?
For each biologically inheritable trait you possess, there
are two genes. You get one gene from your mother and one from your father.
There are dominant genes and there are recessive genes.
Brown eyes are dominant over blue, for example, but a brown eyed person who had
an ancestor with blue eyes may carry the blue-eyed gene, even though s/he has
brown eyes and so do his parents and grandparents. That blue-eyed gene is
recessive and it is the brown eyed gene that is being “expressed.”
But if this brown eyed person has a child with another brown
eyed person who also has a recessive blue eyed gene, there is a 25% chance that
they will produce a blue-eyed child.
Diabetes works much the same way: the gene for diabetes is
recessive but if two people who have the recessive gene have a child together,
there is a 25% chance that the child will be diabetic. Now, there are
environment factors that come into play with diabetes: some people will be
diabetic from childhood…Type 1 diabetes is where the pancreas ceases to
function, which is typical of juvenile diabetes. Type 2 occurs when the body
becomes resistant to the insulin the body produces. This resistance is usually
attributed to obesity, improper diet, and even age. What is left out of most of
the articles on this subject, however, is that obesity, improper diet and age
are not, in themselves, sufficient to bring about the onset of diabetes. For
that to happen, you have to have inherited that gene.
This explains why you may know people who seem to be a
normal weight to you and they are diabetic and you also know someone who is
morbidly obese and is not. It has to do with the genes. If you have the
diabetic gene and you eat poorly, exercise little, and become overweight, given
enough time you will develop diabetes. If you don’t have the diabetic gene,
then no matter what happens to you, you won’t get it (unless something awful
happens to your pancreas, like cancer or disease).
I think narcissism works much the same way. We know it runs
in families…we also know that people from normal families develop it, much to
the confusion and dismay of their families. My mother’s dysfunction was a cause
of concern and confusion for her own family, and in later years, my father and step-mother
as well. Her parents were normal, loving, compassionate, civic-minded people
who, while acceding to the values of their society (gender equality did not
exist in the 1930s and 40s for example), did not abuse their children. My
stepmother, having met my maternal grandparents on numerous occasions, did not
find them to be unusual in any way, my uncles report a normal upbringing in
which my mother was spoilt by their father as the only girl, and my mother’s
aunt reports that my mother was always, in her words, “difficult.” A picture of
my mother, put together from my own experiences plus the reports of other who
knew her in her early years, emerges of an entitled, headstrong, spiteful and wayward
child who grew into a woman who retained all those qualities and more.
If neither of her parents were narcissistic nor were they
abusive, where did my NM come from? I don’t know much about my great-grandparents,
but I do know that my grandfather’s mother was notoriously difficult. She and
my Nana didn’t get along, partly because GGM was bossy, tried to infantilize my
grandfather, and refused to learn to speak English. GGM therefore had an excuse
to carry on extensive conversations with other family members, leaving my Nana
out because she didn’t speak German or Russian. When she came to visit, she
tried to boss Nana around in her own kitchen, using her few English words to
make it very clear to Nana that everything she was doing was wrong, pushing
Nana out of the way to demonstrate the “right way” to do something, and
generally pretending Nana didn’t exist or, at best, was a scullery maid at her
beck and call. It’s not too big a stretch to think that GGM might have
contributed a recessive gene for narcissism to my grandfather. On Nana’s side,
her sister—the aunt who identified NM as being “difficult”—was a bit of a
difficult one herself. Married multiple times in a society that frowned
severely on divorce, and so focussed on having a daughter that she gave her
three sons androgynous names and, once that daughter arrived, pretty much
leaving the boys on their own so that she could focus exclusively on the girl,
Auntie was known as the family “eccentric.” She so enmeshed that daughter that the
child had a panic attack when it was time to separate from mama and go to
school (she was kept out of school for a year due to it), and the daughter did
not successfully go out on her own until after Auntie passed away. But Auntie
was charismatic, with flaming red hair and grand gestures and a big voice—always
the centre of attention and able to turn any conversation to herself, but in a
way that made people love her—in small doses.
And so if Nana’s sister was an N—and Auntie had all the
hallmarks of it—then obviously her own genetic heritage harboured the gene. And
if Nana inherited one copy of the gene from her parents and Grandpa inherited
one copy of the gene from his mother, and if their second child got two copies
of the gene…one from Nana and one from Grandpa…then my mother would have born
with two copies of the gene, which would activate it. And if my uncles got no
copies of the gene…or even they only got one copy each, that would explain why
they were so normal and their sister was so very, very different from them.
This, of course, is merely speculation. There is no proof
that a gene for narcissism exists but if it does, this is how it can be passed
down the generations and how a seemingly normal, perfectly functional family
can produce a narcissist without any narcissistic injury occurring to the child.
Nurture certainly has its part—I have to wonder how different my mother might
have been if her father had not spoilt and indulged her as a child, reinforcing
her notion of entitlement, and if she had been held accountable the same way
her brothers were. But, knowing that my mother dismissed her coddling as her
due and was furiously jealous of the freedom her brothers were allowed, it
probably would have made little difference. Rather than take into account the
social restrictions of girls in that time, my mother chose to perceive her parents
as “favouring” the boys over her, and herself abused as a result.
There is a danger, if you believe narcissism is transmitted
genetically, to back off and think “oh, the poor thing can’t help it!” That
would not be true. Just as the Type 2 diabetic can eat right, exercise, and
keep their weight down, the narcissist has control over the expression of the
gene. Biology is not destiny, and narcissists fully comprehend what their
society expects of them in terms of behaviour and are fully capable of
displaying those behaviours, as they often do when it is to their advantage. Narcissists
have no less choice than non-narcissists when it comes to behaviours: just as
the diabetic can choose to eat chocolate or an apple, the narcissist can choose
between lying and telling the truth. The difference is no more than a matter of
desire: some diabetics choose to eat the chocolate even though they know they
are not supposed to because they want the reward, the taste, the feeling
chocolate gives them…and narcissists are no different.
Neither of my maternal grandparents were diabetic, but Nana’s
father was…and so was one of her children. Neither my father nor my mother were
diabetic, but I am. It is clear that the gene can be carried to the descendants
of the diabetics by non-diabetics. I know that families headed by fair, loving,
compassionate parents can produce a malicious, vindictive, selfish narcissist
because I have seen it in my own family. And knowing how the gene for diabetes
can “skip” a generation or two, it would stand to reason that if someday a gene
for narcissism is discovered, it is transmitted in much the same way, so that
parents who do not express the gene but carry it, may pass it down to their
children.
It bears thinking about.