COVID-19: 1st Narcissistic Pandemic (Webinar on Psychiatry, Psychology, & Public Health, Aug 2020)
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2020-08-17

Some cultures and religions regard the body as the temporary abode of the mind, a necessary evil, an encumbrance, or even an illusion. They invest in its maintenance minimally and use the body mainly to modulate and regulate states of mind.

Other cultures and religions are somatic: they cherish and worship the body as a shrine, God’s handiwork, to be nurtured and cultivated. Adherents invest inordinate amounts of time to master and modify their looks, get rid of or control illness, enhance and buttress health, tailor wholesome nutrition, exercise, and leverage corporeal assets to obtain goals, such as sex or money. 

Normally, the way the pandemic is viewed reflect these differences. In the former societies, there is no panic, only a calm acceptance of the vagaries of the fragile containers we call “bodies”. In the latter collectives, there is a frenetic - hysterical panic - search for vaccines, cures, and risk-mitigation measures.
 
The global branding firm Forsman & Bodenfors have published an analysis of 8 cultural shifts occasioned or accelerated by the pandemic.

1. Frugality vs. consumption: people expect durability, longer shelf life but still wish to consume in order to regulate their moods and fill in the emptiness.

2. Meaningfulness: people are looking for diversions, ways to fill in their idle leisure time.

3. Tech matters: tech that helps people to connect is most valued.

4. Business practices spotlight: corporate social responsibility and activism matter.

5. Agenda: altruistic, community-oriented, prosocial, and charitable businesses will come on top.

6. Community: communal ties are strengthening and so does social solidarity.

7. Relationships: re-examining and reframing interpersonal relationships such as friendships and marriages.

8. Self-care: social distancing can spur self-growth (or self-neglect - SV).

Six External Shocks

1. The exponential inexorable contagion which fosters a feeling of impending doom (extreme stressor);

2. The extreme uncertainty regarding every facet of the disease – from the pathogen to the nature of the illness through to the long-term social and interpersonal effects of the desperate and ever-escalating  attempts to rein it in. This led to rising rates of anxiety, depressive helplessness, hopelessness, and disorientation;

3. A lack of clear horizon and timeline which engender a sense of alarming insecurity;

4. Mortal fear of disability and death;

5. The transformation of the familiar – including one’s body, nearest and dearest, habits, and familiar landmarks – into alien, minacious, estranged entities to be avoided on pain of life, as a condition for survival; 

6. The breakdown or incapacitation of all support networks, human and nonhuman (technologies).

So, what gives? Why now? The answer is an effluent confluence of: 
 
1. Ignorance 
 
Functional illiteracy is at an all time high and the education system had crumbled. 
 
2. Social media 
 
Fake news, rank nonsense, and conspiracy theories are the only pseudo-intellectual diet of most people. 
 
3. Distrust of authority 
 
People distrust the government, experts, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, labs, universities, politicians, and the media. Instead, they rely on uninformed word of mouth, charlatans, and con-artists whose trashy wares are purveyed on YouTube and other such online unmitigated garbage dumps.  
 
4. Narcissism 

Infatuation with one's self leads to extreme risk aversion and inordinate measures of pampering, self-medication, and self-protection. People consider their cosmically significant and unprecedently unique and treasured lives to be worthy of the utmost efforts at preservation.

Narcissistic mortification

Narcissistic mortification is “intense fear associated with narcissistic injury and humiliation ... the shocking reaction when individuals face the discrepancy between an endorsed or ideal view of the self and a drastically contrasting realization” (Freud in Ronningstam, 2013). 

Rothstein (ibid.): “... fear of falling short of ideals with the loss of perfection and accompanying humiliation”. This fear extends to intimacy in interpersonal relationships (Fiscalini), unrealized or forbidden wishes and related defenses (Horowitz), and, as Kohut put it: “fear associated with rejection, isolation, and loss of contact with reality, and loss of admiration, equilibrium, and important objects.” 

The entire personality is overwhelmed by impotent ineluctability and a lack of alternatives (inability to force objects to conform or to rely on their goodwill). Mortification reflects the activity of infantile strategies of coping with frustration or repression (such as grandiosity) and attendant psychological defense mechanisms (eg, splitting, denial, magical thinking).

The pandemic of COVID-19 hit everyone simultaneously as a universal, inescapable external shock. We are going through the five stages of the Kubler-Ross cycle of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.