Narcissistic personality disorder is a cognitive affliction where people experience a bloated sense of their own significance, an urgent appetite for admiration and a deplorable deficit of empathy for others. But beneath this cloak of ultra-confidence lies a pathetically flimsy sense of self-esteem that's easily triggered by the slightest membrane of criticism.
My grandfather, the "great" Micah Carpentier, suffered profoundly from this irksome indisposition. And though he made some beautiful art, as a human being he was an insufferable brute.
Carpentier's narcissism made it impossible for him to sustain a healthy, loving relationship. Wherever he worked - Carpentier taught drawing and design at about a dozen prestigious art schools and universities throughout Latin America - he ran into difficulties because he was tone-deaf to the needs of his students and the expectations of his colleagues. He felt entitled to a kind of special treatment and whenever he wasn't granted the special favors or admiration he felt he deserved he fell into a funk of bitterness and disappointment.
People simply didn't enjoy being around him which created a self-defeating cycle where he complained that his relationships were empty and unfulfilling.
He called it his "fear of intimacy" - a consequence of his genius and a necessary wage of his artistic election.
The truth is that he was in desperate need of some serious psychoanalysis but he was terrified of the demons this type of introspection might arouse.
Toward the end of his life he joined a small sect of evangelical pot smokers, a tawdry collection of equally damaged souls who made getting high into a childish theology. It was the ring of hell that Dante himself would never dare to imagine. A cult of inebriated narcissists forever coughing up the virtues of collective self-absorption.
May his blessed memory become a cautionary tale ...
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