Freeing Yourself From the Narcissist in Your Life by Linda Martinez-Lewi

Author:Linda Martinez-Lewi [ Martinez-Lewi, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101216132
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2008-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

AYN RAND: SELF-OBSESSED VIRTUOSO

Flamboyant philosopher and novelist of best sellers The Fountain-head and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand played a compelling role as a classic supernarcissist. Grandiose, pathologically self-absorbed, cunning, vindictive, Rand built an intellectual cult of followers who worshiped at her elaborate throne. The darling of a loyal band of Northeastern and West Coast intellectuals, business leaders, academics, and college students, Rand rose to prominence during the fifties and sixties as the architect of a new philosophical system called Objectivism. Objectivism chooses the reasoning process as the sine qua non of human behavior. Irrationality and the spontaneous expressions of feelings are rejected as inferior qualities. The needs and desires of the individual reign over the benefits to the group. Actions must be driven by self-interest. In economics, capitalism and free markets have supremacy over the state.

The Passion of Ayn Rand, by Barbara Branden, a close friend and follower of Rand’s for nineteen years, offers a chilling portrait of a woman incapable of empathy. Branden speaks of their first encounter, how she was struck by Rand’s penetrating eyes and the full range of their expression: intelligent, childlike, cruel, cold, desperate, vengeful, enraged, judgmental. Branden describes what was missing, however, in all their years together, through triumph, betrayal, and tragedy: “There was something I never saw in Ayn Rand’s eyes. They never held an inward look—a look of turning inside to learn one’s own spirit and consciousness. They gazed only and always outward.”4

On February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was born. Alissa would become famously known as Ayn Rand. From the beginning Alice (Alissa) had a deeply strained relationship with her mother, Anna. There was never a hint of love or true affection between them. Anna openly told her children that they were unwanted and that she took care of them out of a sense of duty alone. Mother and daughter were polar opposites. Anna was frenetically social, nonintellectual, constantly busy. Anna appreciated her serious, misanthropic daughter for her intellectual prowess and academic achievements. Alice’s relationship with her father, a successful self-made chemist, was tolerable although formal and distant. They engaged in intellectual discussions when Alice reached her teens. Alice was a loner. Children at school avoided and dismissed her as odd and eccentric, and she was removed from the normal social milieu. “From her parents and from the other adults she encountered, love and admiration were purchased by the qualities of her mind.”5

Ayn Rand grew up in a tumultuous period that witnessed the fall of the czar and the rise of the violent Bolsheviks. Forced from their comfortable environs in St. Petersburg, the Rosenbaums fled to the Crimea, where they eked out a subsistence living. Here, Rand was subjected to daily doses of hunger, cold, and fear. The childhood years under the crushing yoke of communism brought feelings of hopelessness and humiliation. It wasn’t the lack of food that caused Ayn psychological pain at that time and for the rest of her life. It was the dreariness, the absence of hope, the incessant grimness of daily life—the total futility of existence itself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.