One thing that has appeared to me is the pain of being overlooked, particularly by a primary care-giver. There is a sensation, an emotional sensation, similar to being hit with a stick, when someone looks at you, and looks through you; when they ought to recognize another sentient, emoting, needing human being out there, but fail to do so.
I will offer one obvious example. My mother has a consistent habit of projecting her own feelings and needs onto others. If she is hungry she will assume everyone else is hungry and act on it. She does this to this very day. My children have noticed it. Even though, of course, she would claim to care about the feelings of others, something just isn’t wired right. There is no there there.
This process is obviously not limited to childhood, but it is particularly damaging in childhood. Obviously, this is the outcome of interacting with narcissists. They create on-going, daily, minor electrical shocks, that I am calling Ontic Shocks, because they attack your very being, your sense of self, your sense of being of value and important.
And I did, in my dreaming period every morning before I get up, see what might be called Narcissistic Current. The role of the Other, for the Narcissist, is to provide a polarity that induces current, from the narcissist, to you, and then back to the narcissist. You in essence form an energetic mirror, allowing them to see themselves more clearly, allowing them to exist. As I think I have noted, narcissism is very much a disease of non-existence. The Other allows them to exist, even if they are unable to grant the Other any ontic validity, and independent sense of self.
Those who spent too much money for a largely useless degree in the humanities will readily recognize my capitalized Other. It is used often in leftist political discourse, more or less to denote a presumed Western hostility to cultural difference; to denote our presumed tribalism.
It is an interesting fact, though, that the British empire in particular accomplished a great deal of what we would call good, if in our public discourse we still recognized such a thing applying globally. No nation in history has ever undertaken the eradication of slavery, but Britain did (read this very interesting article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-point-of-an-honest-discussion-of-race/ ). They put an end to suttee in India, which was the practice of more or less requiring widows to jump onto their husbands funeral pyre and be incinerated alive. They ended the Thuggee cult. They generalized the ideas, practices and cultural habits–such as the notion of expecting to be granted rights–of democracy.
They did all this not out of not understanding the Other, but out of fully understanding them and not accepting some aspects of their behavior. You can fully understand someone, and still reject them. This is allowed.
The problem with narcissists is precisely a lack of understanding, of the capacity for interactive empathy. As I keep saying, the true tribalists remaining are the fanatical Muslims and the Leftists–the Cultural Sadeists, as I call them. Sybaritic Leftists are capable of empathy, but not of forceful expression; not of consistently expressed, coherent morality that they are willing to defend in the face of antagonism. They do not fully exist, which makes them easy prey, over time, for the Cultural Sadeists, whose narcissistic sense of perfection makes them magnets for the weak.
One final point: love is expansion. If narcissism–selfishness, self-absorbed-ness, egoism–is using others to see yourself, then love is using yourself to see others. It is wanting to see them as they are, to interact with them as they are, to build them, help them, comfort them, hold them, help them use themselves to help themselves. All of this work activates latent potentialities within us; it builds us; their joy becomes are own joy amplified.