If a parent systematically fails at this function of mirroring a child’s feelings and experience (naming and recognising what the child is living through — the pain, the anger, the tiredness), then the child will not be able to put together an adequately complete and coherent sense of self. In that case the psyche will not manage to “set” into a structure with strong internal connections, and what we call fragmentation occurs.
It is important to clarify that no parent is perfect, nor should they be. Theories of child development and clinical practice alike tell us that children need parents with imperfections — parents able to recognise their mistakes and repair them. A child can connect with, and try to emulate, a parent who makes mistakes but tries to repair them far more than a parent who seems to have everything under control and projects an illusion of perfection. So it is normal that a parent — particularly one who is not a professional and has not been in personal therapy — cannot always mirror successfully what their child feels. Psychological fragmentation concerns systematic failure: when most of the time the child does not find someone who sees and recognises the difficulty they are living through and helps them work it through.
Fragmentation refers to a composition of the child’s psyche that is not harmonious and integrated across its different parts; instead, some parts of the personality remain incompletely developed as the child grows, frozen at earlier developmental stages and creating internal gaps. The child therefore does not feel like a unified, stable entity, but like a mirror with many broken pieces. One example is a successful woman who feels strong and invulnerable in her work environment, but who in her emotional life can easily feel that her inner world is dissolving and collapsing at every hint of rejection or doubt.
The consequence is that the child cannot express themselves authentically, precisely because they learn that their real self, with its needs and weaknesses, is something unmanageable or threatening for the parent. So they learn to wear masks and step into roles, carrying a false self. The excessively polite and accommodating child, or the very rebellious child, or the very quiet child, can all be masks of an adaptation the child was forced to make because they could not develop otherwise in an environment where their authentic self had no room to exist.
Within this interpretative frame it is worth also seeing narcissism as an adaptation of the child’s personality: in order to bind together the fragmentation they are experiencing, they resort to adopting a grandiose self. This excess is not love of the self but an attempt to cover the lack and the emptiness they feel. Children need this narcissistic supply — absolute attention, love, acceptance and presence — in order to feel that they matter and are loved. If a child does not receive this absolute adoration from their parent and these very important emotional needs are not met, they will remain open and hungry throughout life, seeking every possible way to be filled. Children who did not receive absolute and unconditional love will go to any lengths to obtain it.
Many people find it hard to recognise their trauma, because they associate it with extreme physical danger, abuse or neglect. Many say “my parents didn’t hit me, so I don’t have trauma”. What clinical practice shows, however, is that the most common type of trauma is the feeling of being neglected, or of having one’s existence ignored, by those who raised us — or of disconnection, or of not being understood and accepted by our parents. Especially when parents equate material provision with meeting their children’s needs, the likelihood of emotional neglect probably increases.
Narcissism, then, is the disorder of lack. The admiration I did not receive as a child from my parents — or worse, the devaluation and the diminishment of my dignity and human standing that I suffered — I try to convert into an endless thirst for importance and significance. And of course this mechanism is destined to fail, because it is trying to fill an early emotional emptiness that cannot be filled. It is an emptiness that demands constant feeding but can never be full.
Psychotherapy here can help a person recognise and grieve the lack, and begin to join the broken pieces of the self with a new binding substance, so that the pursuit of perfection can give way to the emergence of authenticity.
