Narcissistic states of privilege.

Abstract

This paper attempts to conceptualize the subjectivity of privilege and its impact upon states of consciousness. A psychoanalytic understanding of privilege is constructed by capturing how alterations and limitations in awareness are utilized to sustain a sense of narcissistic wholeness. Paradoxically, this lived system of being renders the individual incomplete, unaware of certain dissociated aspects of identity as well as compromised in their range and depth of subjective experience.

The insistence on exclusion: The anti‐integrative impulse and thwarted mourning in large groups

“…Social privilege involves differential access to defensive processes, including disavowal and projection; social privilege is in part constituted by the capacity for those with privilege to successfully and ongoingly off-load negative projections onto groups of people with less privilege (Rao, 2021). This enhances self-regard, but at the expense of psychic wholeness (Anen, 2020). Structural social forces allow those projections to be retained within certain groups rather than others with relative stability, leading to marginalized groups that function as long-term repositories for devalued attributes of dominant groups.…”