Narcissism -

Mania . And. Manic Depression

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings in this article.

Mania is the escape from the dreariness of a life dominated by nothing higher than materialistic values, the escape from the domination by drudgery, and the escape from the domination by the small minds of other people. The intensity of the mania correlates to the intensity of the drudgery that the person is escaping from. Therefore the deepest depression breeds the highest flight of mania.

It is always anxiety or depression (whether actual or incipient) that sets off the mania. So in manic depression the control and management of the disorder should be focused on treating the depression and the poor quality of life of the person. Mania reflects the poverty of idealism in the person's normal way of life. Mania reflects the absence of quality in the person's life.

Anxiety is the action of fear on vanity. So one long-term effect of persistent anxiety on a person with a lot of subconscious fears is to increase his vulnerability, due to the incessant attrition of his vanity. To compensate for this effect the person has several options :

a) The striving to prove oneself, channelled by the inferiority complex. [²]

b) The development of mania.

c) The creation of ideals.

Ideals are always channelled through an emotional base of vanity, in one of its forms. Noble, or altruistic, ideals utilise vanity ; the vanity mode of pride gives rise to the desire for power (ideals of social or political development and control) ; and the vanity mode of narcissism generates the will to power (ideals of self-development). [³].

Now option (c) can utilise vanity, or switch to will to power, or to desire for power. Both option (a) and option (b) function through the vanity mode of narcissism. The difference is that anxiety is a part of the inferiority complex but is absent from mania. It is hard to maintain the mood of narcissism when anxiety is present ; it is easier to switch to jealousy or to pride.

The most effective way to maintain narcissism without anxiety is to generate mania.

There is no anxiety in the manic state, that is its attraction.

The difficulty is that mania makes the person susceptible to rejection and ridicule – critical remarks that are overheard are taken to refer to oneself, so the switch to depression or to pride (in the mode of hatred of other people) ensues.

Excitement

Both mania and catharsis can produce excitement and a sense of joy, so they can often be difficult to tell apart. When joy and excitement are self-induced, one of two possible sequences is initiated:

d). If the joy is a catharsis
then the feeling mode of the abreaction of guilt follows. Resentment is the end product, but it may not be identified if self-awareness is limited. Instead the person may feel that his life has become chaotic or, more likely, he develops a headache on the left side of the head (the headache is produced by the resentment). [4]

e). If the joy is mania
it may end in depression or in pride (mode of hatred of other people).

The difference between catharsis and mania depends upon what the joy reflects. If the joy focuses on materialistic values, on dancing, on having a good time, on thoughts of naughty immorality, then catharsis is usually operative. If the joy reflects higher values, or spiritual daydreams, or beneficial social action, in fact anything that can underpin a sense of importance or a sense of creativity, then mania is being experienced. Cathartic joy ends in resentment because happiness can never be separated from unhappiness. Manic joy ends in depression because the person lacks the power and the ability to make his daydreams come true.

During the years of my self-analysis I found that the easiest way to initiate a cycle of manic depression was to go on holiday. The holiday was my escape from dreary routine. The change of procedure from the dreary analysis of the dark side of my mind to one of hill walking in the comfort of solitude and pleasant countryside usually set off mania. Coming home after the holiday brought on a new depression as I returned to dreary routines.

Emotional Dynamics

Mania is the escape from the dreariness of life. Two negative beliefs arise when life is interpreted as unending dreariness, and these beliefs maintain the mania and any depression associated with it. These beliefs are unconscious, and so I call them unconscious ideas.

The unconscious ideas that maintain the mania and the depression are : [5]

Mania implies I help victims.

Depression implies I am a victim.

In the manic state the person wants to help victims. This is the reason that he focuses on beneficent social actions, or sees himself as a channel for spiritual forces, or desires to be a religious teacher. Mania produces the certitude that beneficent or spiritual states of mind have been accessed. Since the depression comes first, either consciously present or else being dominant in the subconscious mind, then the way that the person classifies himself as a victim is likely to be a major influence on the themes of his manic dreams. That is, the themes of the mania are often a compensation for the ways in which he has been victimised.

The cause of the depression is alienation, which is generated by social guilt. The guilt leads to jealousy, which then turns into the depression. [6]
In addition, manic depression can be a cyclic process of several emotions – see article Mind Loops.

When the person is an idealist, then the essential theme of mania is character transformation, as a means to compensate for the self-hate within the guilt. [7]. Since the person does not like hating himself, so he has to transform those hateful aspects of himself before he can begin to establish a better self-image. But usually the person does not have the ability to change, or lacks knowledge about how to change. Therefore mania produces only an illusion of transformation. This is why the person is susceptible to rejection ; it bursts his bubble of illusion, it clearly demonstrates that he has not really managed to rise above his inadequacies and be a better ethical or noble person.

For comparison, in other states of mind the attempts to repress the self-hate mode of guilt can lead to the pursuit of tranquillity, or to the quest for the ecstasy of meditational trance. But these focus on the person's individuality.

What distinguishes mania, however, is that it can lead to the idea that spiritual progress is a social phenomenon.

Hence mania has its uses.
Although it is a state of illusion, it can nevetheless steer the person's spiritual ideals into social directions. Once he learns to manage his mania, his social inclinations will lead him into a different evolutionary direction than the spiritual ideals derived from Eastern meditation and renunciation.

Ideals and Values

Mania can lead to social progress in the right circumstances. Mania has a positive side to it – it can enable the person to jump over the boundaries of his mind and create a new vision, a new ideal. The new vision or new ideal will need new values. The greater the depth of depression that the person sinks into, so the higher becomes the ideals that he sets himself. The difficulty here is that the ideals may be unattainable. The person has to learn to scale down his hopes until they become realistic.

In my case I became obsessed with the ideal of reaching Nirvana. The drive to Nirvana became a major feature of my reveries. I had incessant daydreams of being a teacher of divine love. These daydreams had a source other than mania, but mania emphasised them. Although these daydreams were unrealistic, they at least kept me going whilst I was analysing my way out of my confusion.

Ideals create values. New ideals create new values. But new values first require new subjective meanings. By this I mean that the person first explores his subjectivity in order to discover what is meaningful in life to him. Then he can turn his subjective ideals into objective values ; these values can then be used to regulate his journey through life.

The meaning of a person's life is simply the meaning of the ideas and ideals that are important to him. And values are only habitual meanings. The purpose of life becomes the way in which the will is used to give expression and manifestation to these ideals, these values, these meanings. [8]

When materialism no longer interests a person, when materialistic desires have lost their glamour, when the person no longer wants Earthly delights, then Western life becomes a charade of meaninglessness. Then the basis of making judgements about life changes. The person wishes only to improve the spiritual quality of his life. In a dream, I was given the idea that :

If you do not judge by want, then you judge by wish.

When the needs and wants of a physical life become superficial or devalued then the person judges life by his mental or spiritual aspirations and ideals. No person is the same as any other. Therefore each person creates his own path to Nirvana by creating his own idealistic meanings and values.

Philosophy

It is not always possible to separate psychology from philosophy, especially when values are involved in any problem. A new ideal, a new vision, with the accompanying new values, is rarely the product of rationalism or empiricism being applied to philosophical ideas. Instead, psychological tensions generate new philosophical issues. [9]

In the view of Friedrich Nietzsche, the task of the philosopher is to create new values ; he creates these values in the process of overcoming himself, in the process of overcoming his own limitations. This view is an excellent understanding of the function of philosophy, and contrasts strongly with the barrenness of much twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. But then Nietzsche was an existentialist, as I am, and he lived his ideas, as I do. When philosophy has no living ideas, it sleeps.

Mania is an element in the euphoric nihilism of some of the trends of post-structuralist thinking in European philosophy. The euphoria of being able to create one's own meanings, of being free and non-restrained in the creation of meaning, can be directed either to social change or to change of individuality. To make the dreams of mania and post-structuralist nihilism possible requires a knowledge and practice of dynamic psychology, plus an ethical discipline that is free from resentment. Then out of euphoria may come credible new values. It is always psychology that puts depth into philosophy.

Oblivion

The drawback to mania is its usual association with depression. Manic depression generated in me the most intense psychic pain that I have ever experienced. I learned to desire oblivion as the way to make consciousness cease. The intensity of the pain that the disorder induces is partly related to the frequency of the oscillation between mania and depression.

For several weeks from January 1991, I experienced spells of intense bitterness, alternating with fear and anger. Much of my anger came from my reaction to the Gulf War, with America and Britain against Iraq. The crassness of American foreign policy appalled me. I could not escape from bitterness ; as the war progressed, the intensity of the bitterness reached new depths in me.

I was used to the regular pain of incessant, never-ending cycles of abreaction. But this present depth of pain was extreme, and it created a new response in me. As a reaction to my sorrow all I wanted to do was to curl up into a ball and dissolve into oblivion, into total non-sentience, so that no pain would ever be able to affect me any more. Oblivion is the darkest hell. Fortunately the pain subsided for a short while. [10]

In the middle of February the psychic pain escalated to the most extreme intensity that I have ever felt. For the next week my emotions oscillated very rapidly. I did not have a stable mood. I never knew what my mood would be like from one hour to the next.

Again I generated the desire to curl up into a ball and dissolve into oblivion. Again I wanted to destroy my consciousness. The strain of masking my sorrows from my job as a porter at a local hospital put me under terrific pressure. I could maintain a mask of sociability whilst at work, but back home the full force of the sorrow would hit me. I was at bursting point. At least the bitterness of the previous months had been spread out over a few weeks. That seemed like paradise compared to what I was now going through. The experience was so intense and concentrated that I could not penetrate into what was going on. The desire for oblivion reached its apogee during those few days. What was happening to me ? ? ?

Finally I began to have some success in analysing my experience. One moment I accepted an idea. A little later I rejected it. One moment I am depressed. The next moment I am up in the air with excitement. There must be another cycle operating on me, different from the usual one of abreaction. Suddenly it dawned on me. Depression, then mania. I am a manic depressive !

And with this insight the cycle ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I was amazed. What had fooled me was the sheer rapidity of the cycles. Usually manic depression follows a course over several days, weeks or months. Whereas I had been going through a cycle about once a day for the past week (according to my notes it was just one week, though I remembered it as two weeks). So all the psychic pain that is usually spread over a few weeks for each cycle had been condensed into a single day for me, and then repeated daily for a week.

The intensity of the pain came from the combination of manic depression with bitterness. The drama of the past weeks had begun with very intense abreactions that kept me nailed to the floor because of the bitterness, and then the rapid oscillations of manic depression had almost destroyed me.

Madness cannot be understood from the outside (as when clinicians observe patients) but only through the experience of it. I have an unlucky destiny. At one time or another this destiny threw the whole range of psychotic disorders at me to give me the experience that I needed in order that I could understand and formulate the patterns of madness.

In the case of manic depression, it was my soul that initiated the cycles of it, and also stopped those cycles once I understood what was happening to me.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. A summary of the factors of some important emotions is :
Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.
Anxiety = vanity + fear.

My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions (which includes anxiety) are given in the three articles on Emotion. See Basic Ideas page. [1]

[²]. The inferiority complex is described in the article Social Approval & Inferiority, on my website The Subconscious Mind ; or in the article Approval & Inferiority & Power, on my website Discover Your Mind. [2]

[³]. The terms "will to power" and "desire for power" are explained in the article Power, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind.
The reason that ideals function through vanity modes is that idealism is the sublimation of vanity. There is an article on Sublimation on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. [3]

[4]. My in-depth analysis of abreaction is given in the five articles on Abreaction. See home page. Catharsis is the first stage of the abreaction of guilt, and is described in the article Catharsis and Suggestion.
There is a section on headaches in the article Psycho-somatics. [4]

[5]. I introduce the term "unconscious idea" in the first article on Emotion, section Unconscious Ideas. See also glossary for Emotional Dynamics. [5]

[6]. There is an article on Alienation on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. See Links page. [6]

[7]. There is an article on Character Transformation on my website The Subconscious Mind. [7]

[8]. There is an article on Meaning and Value on my website A Modern Thinker. See Links page. [8]

[9]. New values, a new vision, arise when a person follows a new quest. This process is described in the article Confusion, sub-section A New Quest, on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. This article is a longer version of the article Confusion and Identity on this site. [9]

[10]. Oblivion is described in the article Depression, Autism, and other States of Despair, section Oblivion. [10]

The articles in this section are :

Guilt & Meaning - part 1, catatonia and faith

Guilt & Meaning - part 2, trauma and slow-onset catatonia

Narcissism & Schizophrenia

Narcissism - Mania & Manic Depression

 

Jealousy & Kundalini Psychosis

Pride & Paranoia

Depression & Autism & other states of despair

Mind Loops

Copyright © 2003 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

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Ian Heath
London, UK

www.confusion.discover-your-mind.co.uk/index.htm

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