Whatever someone brings into psychotherapy—panic attacks, somatizations, work-related stress, dead ends in couple relationships—behind almost all of it lies the same persistent question: “Do I have value? Do I truly exist for the other, or do I cease to exist the moment they stop seeing me?” This is the ground of narcissistic problematic functioning. And for this reason, in every therapy, sooner or later, narcissistic questioning unfolds before us, along with the narcissistic spectrum. This is not yet another diagnosis, but a relational axis: from the edge of disintegration (“if you reject me, I cease to exist”) to the edge of rigid self-sufficiency (“I do not need you for anything, therefore you cannot hurt me”). Between these two extreme poles stretches the entire field of our everyday relationships: couples struggling between intense fusion and abrupt coldness, parents oscillating between overprotection and emotional absence, patients who idealize their therapist only to devalue them the very next moment.
Dimitris Seferiadis (Wed,) studied this question.