A Letter from Canada to My American Cousins

Donald Carveth

March 20, 2011

Dear Cousins,

At the risk of coming on like a Canadian “wild analyst” you haven’t hired, I’m writing to you today to comment on papers by Elovitz and Summers, both of whom diagnose your culture and behaviour, especially your foreign policy, as symptomatic of pathological narcissism. We Canadians have our particular perspective on these matters, for we live just on the other side of “the city on the hill.” We suspect from your perspective this is the wrong side, for it looks as if most of you view us, if you are aware of us at all, as occupying a kind of “outback,” inhabiting “the back of beyond,” like poor rural cousins full of awe and envy in the face of the wealth, power, glamour, glitz, and shopping opportunities enjoyed by our larger-than-life, “hip” cousins to the south.

Despite certain advantages we enjoy (definition of a Canadian: an unarmed person with a health plan), we have tended to suffer from something of a national inferiority complex. This is rather understandable when, to use the words of our most famous (and uncharacteristically sexy) prime minister, Pierre Trudeau: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” As Elovitz and Summers both point out, you have a lot of twitches and grunts, for you are a narcissistic beast and narcissists don’t generally sleep easy, and neither do we who have to sleep beside you. Narcissists are controlling and we have had to struggle hard to hang on to whatever degree of autonomy we still retain. Narcissists are touchy and self-righteous, so we have to be awfully careful about what we say to you and how we say it, especially if it is at all critical. A lot of us are still surprised and gratified that when you invited us to come along with you to Iraq, we managed to decline and got away without paying too high a price in retaliation (except for the manu-

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facturers of redwood lumber in British Columbia, who definitely felt the pain).

But the contributions of Elovitz and Summers put what we have considered our national inferiority complex in a somewhat different light. While Elovitz emphasizes the narcissist’s need for boundaries and a sense of limits, and Summers stresses the narcissist’s need for empathic attunement and containment enabling relinquishment of grandiosity in favor of more creative, stable, and positive means of achieving self-esteem, the Kleinians have stressed the role of destructive envy in narcissistic pathology, a painful and humiliating emotional state often warded off through invidious behavior. Merriam-Webster defines the latter as action “tending to cause discontent, animosity, or envy.” The grandiose narcissist gets rid of his shameful envy by invidiously inducing it in others through defensive grandiosity—arrogant boasting and brash and bombastic displays of his power, wealth, and celebrity. In this light, our Canadian inferiority complex might be seen as resulting, at least to some degree, from the emotional induction or projective identification of your underlying, warded-off feelings of weakness and inadequacy onto us. Whatever other reasons we may have for feeling this way, it is well known that those who live with grandiose narcissists generally wind up feeling inadequate and often depressed, for they are induced to carry the feelings of weakness and deflation that the defensively inflated narcissist refuses to contain.

None of this is to deny the reality of Canadians’ widespread anti-Americanism, or our own not-so-subtle compensatory feelings of moral superiority. While some of this is surely justified by your arrogance and bullying, some of it surely flows from our envy of you. But not all of our envy arises simply in the face of your “greatness” (as you may be inclined to think). It also stems from your envy, the envy underlying your grandiosity and grounded in the very feelings of inadequacy that you project into us and that we, good neighbours that we are, have done our best to contain and carry for you (rather like the depressed wives of narcissistic husbands).

We didn’t have your revolution. A lot us rather liked the Brits and decided to move up here to stick with them. We didn’t act out our adolescent rebellion by dramatically breaking off rela-

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tions with Dad. We had the opportunity for a more gradual growing up. We still haven’t broken our tie with the folks, but they now reside in a kind of retirement community back home while we manage things over here on our own. We sometimes wonder whether, if you had had a chance to mature more gradually without having to violently reject our parents’ authority altogether, you might have been able to gradually modify your superego and might thereby have avoided the chronic phallic narcissism (and gun-slinging) of the entitled perpetual adolescent you sometimes appear to us to be. While many of us have reacted critically to this, others, unfortunately including our current political leadership, have started to ape your worst traits and attitudes.

Before signing off, let me acknowledge that there is more than one of “you”: there is the phallic narcissist, to be sure; but a society cannot be so easily subsumed in one diagnostic category which even individual personalities generally transcend. Let me also make another admission: whatever its disadvantages, life with a grandiose big brother has its advantages as well; your fondness for weapons and violence has enabled us to count on your protection and to spend our hard-earned tax dollars on socialized medicine instead of the military. For this and many other things we are forever grateful.

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