By Berta Loret de Mola (Mexico)

Daniel Shaw, LCSW is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and Nyack, NY. Faculty, Clinical Supervisor, National Institute for the Psychotherapies, NYC. Author: Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, Classic Edition, with a new Introduction by the author, published in 2025 for the Relational Perspectives Series by Routledge. His follow-up book, Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery: Leaving the Prison of Shame and Fear, was published by Routledge in 2022. In 2018, the International Cultic Studies Association awarded him the Margaret Thaler Singer Award for advancing the understanding of coercive persuasion and undue influence.

Berta Loret de Mola, Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Clinic from Centro ELEIA, Master’s in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the Asociación Psicoanalítica Mexicana. She is founder and coordinator of the Master’s in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Universidad Marista de Mérida (Mexico) and a Board Member of IARPP.

Daniel Shaw

Berta Loret de Mola

In this interview, we have the privilege of speaking with Daniel Shaw, relational psychoanalyst and author of the influential book, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Routledge, 2013). Shaw approaches narcissism not as an isolated individual trait but as a relational structure deeply marked by trauma, dysfunctional attachment, and the intergenerational transmission of suffering. Through his clinical experience, his personal journey within a cultic group, and a solid theoretical integration, he invites us to rethink narcissism from an intersubjective and ethical perspective, focusing on the treatment of those traumatized by traumatizing narcissists.

Reading his work creates immediate resonance with clinical practice, as well as with the power dynamics that occur in various settings—families, psychoanalytic institutions, and broader social contexts. In this conversation, Shaw generously and insightfully shares his thinking, his personal journey, and his proposals for a clinical approach rooted in mutuality, recognition, and therapeutic love.

Berta Loret de Mola: Daniel, first, I want to thank you for your time and willingness to do this interview. Reading your book has been deeply enriching. You guide us from the libidinal conception of narcissism understood as a psychology of one person to the relational perspective grounded in theories of development, attachment, and intersubjectivity.

As reading progresses, the concept of narcissism expands, deepens, and takes on clinical significance. It’s important to connect your ideas with our patients as well as with teachers, psychoanalysts, and leaders. Although you’ve said that politics is not your field and should be left to historians, what are your thoughts on the current rise of so many traumatizing narcissistic leaders?

Daniel Shaw: Thank you so much, and thank you for your generous description of my work.

As far as the current political situation goes, it’s horrifying, but it is not surprising, at least not to me. I left the cult I’d been in for 13 years in 1994 and entered the mental health profession just after leaving. What I saw going on in my country back in 1994 was the politicization of religion, particularly well-organized in fundamentalist Christian sects, centered initially around the so-called “pro-life” movement. This movement asserted then, and continues to do so, that the United States is a Christian nation and should be governed according to Christian principles — flying in the face, of course, of the founders’ intention to keep church and State separate. Since that time, the Christian nationalist movement, which has strong links to patriarchal, misogynist, imperialist, racist and anti-Semitic ideologies, has taken center stage in the plans of Project 2025. That is the name of Trump’s blueprint for ending democracy in the USA, which is based heavily on the way that the dictator Viktor Orbán “legalized” white Christian nationalism in Hungary.

In addition to the flourishing of many cults aligned with right-wing political agendas, conspiracy cults proliferated online during and since the COVID pandemic. As millions of people were confined to their homes and sat in front of their screens, I was, and every one of my cult expert colleagues was, besieged with desperate calls from people whose wives, husbands, parents and children were emptying bank accounts, leaving their families, and running away to follow cults formed by healers, psychics, coaches, shamans, and so on. Internet influencers mushroomed online, and followers were taking off not just for QAnon and anti-vax cults that had formed communes, but every other possible kind of cult — religious, wellness, health, dating, yoga, martial arts, fitness, investment, multi-level marketing, personal growth,you name it.

And then there is the cult of Trump. Many followers worship Trump as a divine savior, and millions of others voted for him because they are in the cult of Fox News, a propaganda outlet owned by oligarchs, where a constant stream of lies and distortions convinces viewers to be afraid of and outraged by immigrants and any and all minorities. This propaganda, straight out of the Goebbels playbook, claims that America is being destroyed by liberal Democrats whose agenda is the persecution and dispossession of white people! Trump’s anti-wokeness crusade, which is designed to restore white supremacy and eradicate all things related to diversity, equity and inclusion, is extremely far-reaching and,as many historians have pointed out, is exactly modeled on both Orbán’s and Putin’s dictatorships.

When I left a relatively small religious cult in 1994, I felt like part of a small, stigmatized group of cult survivors. Today I feel like about half my country is in some kind of cult, organized around the same kind of malignant narcissist leaders as the cult leader I left.

BLM: And that’s what is happening in many countries. It’s like your book is tapping into the unconscious of what is happening in society. You put it in words before it appears so clear to all the other people. Going back to your experience in a religious cult, would you say that the seeds of your theory can be found in that experience? How did you gain the clarity to leave that environment? And what led you to psychoanalysis?

I left just after grad school had started. I was lucky to have had a psychoanalytic supervisor at my internship. I asked her about what to read, and she recommended Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child. This was my first exposure to the concept of narcissism — something I did not really know much about until then. My supervisor, the late Valerie Oltarsh, was a self-psychologist, and she suggested that I also read Kohut’s How Does Analysis Cure? Kohut’s emphasis on empathy immediately appealed to me. I realized I had been in a relationship with a guru who was pathologically devoid of constructive empathy. The guru I followed, who took over after the death of the original male guru, had acute empathy, but she used it as leverage to elicit deeper dependence and deeper submission in those it was to her advantage to control. So, when I had to write a final paper for social work school, I decided to write about traumatic abuse in cults.

Understanding constructive empathy as the basis of all human relationships, of all attachment, and of all healing, it became clear why the relationship I had with that guru was so destructive. There can be no mutuality with a person who weaponizes empathy and uses it to control you.

After leaving the cult and working through my experience at the same time as I was getting my professional training, I became more and more aware of the ways in which many of the people I was now seeing in my practice had been subjugated, either in their families or in their current relationships. I saw that many people were painfully attached to a parent or a partner who was dominating and controlling, from whom they could not break free. These relationships had led to Complex PTSD symptoms in the patients I was seeing. It was as if they were imprisoned by shame and fear.

My question was, why did these controlling, dominating people, people like the guru to whom I had been devoted, believe that they were always absolutely right, always superior? How did they get other people to believe it? How did I end up believing it? These people were clearly narcissistic, but they didn’t seem to oscillate between grandiosity and insecurity, the way Kernberg described the behaviors of pathological narcissism. They appeared to be all grandiosity, all the time. That was the beginning of seeing this person as a particular kind of narcissist, one who was traumatizing. I was trying to understand why this kind of narcissistic person needed to subjugate others.

Learning and thinking more and more about cult dynamics, and listening to many patients describe similar dynamics, I came to see that this kind of narcissistic person develops ways of subjugating others in order to bolster and sustain a delusion of omnipotence. This delusion, though unstable, does not give way to depressive insecurity. This narcissist, the traumatizing narcissist (TN), is so skillful that their successful subjugation of others continually reinforces their manic delusion of omnipotence and holds it in place.

A person with the delusion of omnipotence, according to traumatic narcissism theory, needs that delusion to deny and disavow their own shame and their own vulnerability. They are profoundly phobic of dependence, which for them equates to humiliating impotence. This person has typically had a childhood in which they felt chronically humiliated and powerless. Their solution, usually developed in adolescence or young adulthood, begins with fantasies of omnipotence, of being all-powerful. And then the fantasies become delusions, and they convince themselves that no limits and no boundaries apply to them, that they are always entitled and justified to dominate. If they can convince others as well, the delusion is bolstered. The delusion of omnipotence is the opposite of feeling dependent, shameful, humiliated and impotent. You can see this metamorphosis, from shame to shame-less [Berta, is the dash here intentional as a way to emphasize the word? Because it typically does not take a dash: shameless rather than shame-less. My preference is to do it without the dash, but if you or Dan want it there for emphasis, I’m ok with this], in the biography of every cult leader, and in many of the people who become oligarchs and dictators as well.

When I first started writing about this, the only language I had was from the theories of pathological narcissism. I knew I had to describe what I was looking at differently, and Lew Aron helped me settle on the phrase traumatic narcissism. The most important difference between traumatic narcissism and pathological narcissism is that Kohut was, and Kernberg continues to be, thinking about what pathological narcissism is and how pathological narcissism can best be treated. That is not what my work is attempting. I am trying to help victims recover from having been traumatized by pathologically narcissistic people — traumatizing narcissists (TNs) — people to whom they have been profoundly attached and by whom they have been subjugated.

BLM: I see that you transform your pain into knowledge.

DS: That was lucky for me. I had a lot of help, from friends and loved ones, from my analyst and from my colleagues.

BLM: Writing your books has been healing for you.

DS: Yes, very much, and so has meeting and becoming colleagues with many other cult survivors and working for 30 years now with both cult survivors and even more with survivors of traumatic abuse in families and relationships. Unfortunately, many of the patients who have come to me have seen other therapists who were unable to help them understand the extent to which they had been subjugated in previous relationships, whether in a marriage or an intimate relationship. Sometimes, these patients had been encouraged to keep trying to make these relationships work or encouraged to forgive the abuser. I have wanted to make clear that the person I call the traumatizing narcissist, who is operating from an underlying delusion of omnipotence, cannot tolerate any relationship in which they are not able to control and coerce the other into submission. That includes a relationship with a therapist. The TN, on the rare occasion that he or she will agree to see a therapist, will either control the therapist, or leave the therapy.

A predator instinctively knows they can gain tremendous power over someone by claiming they can heal all your attachment wounds and meet all your deepest needs, help you realize your deepest potential.

What the TN is then able to take is similar to the way that Dracula sucks others’ blood. The TN takes their victim’s idealization and submission and feeds on it, inflates himself on it, while alternately inflating and deflating the victim. The TN’s relational system of subjugation is both predatory and parasitic.

In order to ensure that their narcissism will be continually fed and inflated, the TN needs to continually control and subjugate the other. It’s a sadomasochistic dynamic. But influenced by Ghent’s essential work on surrender vs. submission, I want to help victims understand that their vulnerability and their woundedness is nothing to be ashamed of. Their wish for a surrender, for a deep attachment to another, was exploited and turned into a demand for their submission. The TN always pulls off a very successful bait and switch, preying on vulnerability.

This is why I believe it is so important for therapists to find a way to be encouraging and hopeful on behalf of the patient, while being really careful not to offer themselves as some kind of savior. For this reason, my clinical focus is on finding ways that I can help the patient to find self-acceptance, to develop trust and faith in the self.

BLM: It’s being human / to be vulnerable.

DS: Yes. Unfortunately, those attachment needs, especially at times of greater vulnerability, are what the TN recognizes and sees as a golden opportunity for exploitation.

Being taken advantage of, being exploited by a predator, is something that happens to many, many people, whether in their families or later in life as adults. The isolation that the victim feels, the shame, the stigma of having allowed themselves to be abused — the complex PTSD of subjugation trauma — is what traumatic narcissism theory is meant to address.

When the victim of a TN is seen, incorrectly in my opinion, as an inverted or covert narcissist, or seen as masochistic, neither of those ways of diagnosing these victims are actually what will be therapeutic and healing. What’s healing is to help them honor and respect their own vulnerability and their own attachment needs and understand that those needs are not wrong or shameful or weak, and that there are ways of getting those needs met that do not require your own subjugation.

BLM: What would you say are the main challenges in treating the children of traumatizing narcissists? Is it recognizing shame, or what would you say?

DS: First, it is important to help victims of the TN recognize the extent to which they have been subjugated and the extent to which they have been taught that only submission is acceptable if they want to maintain their attachment. So that’s the first part of the work, and it involves the integration of some psychoeducation. Psychoeducation was traditionally frowned upon in psychoanalysis, and as far as I can tell it is often still discouraged. This is unfortunate. I find that psychoeducation about narcissism, subjugation, abuse, trauma, affect regulation, and dissociation are extremely helpful for traumatized patients. Psychoeducation can be integrated into any therapeutic modality, including psychoanalysis.

Next, I think it’s important to help victims understand the psychology of the traumatizing narcissist, why and how that person needs to subjugate them. Victims can be helped to understand the fragility and the instability of the TN’s delusion of omnipotence, which helps demystify the TN’s power and charisma, and exposes the TN’s profound neediness, the need for constant confirmation of his delusion of omnipotence.

By understanding how the TN encourages dependence, while also creating an environment of   intimidation, keeping victims walking on eggshells, victims can understand more clearly how they came to be subjugated. I want to help them understand the extent to which the person they became attached to put them in a state of constant fear. Understanding that they had become intensely dependent on someone by whom they were chronically intimidated — which is very much the same situation as what we know as disorganized attachment — can help the victim understand how dissociative they had to become to survive the relationship. Helping victims come out of dissociation is a very important part of the work of traumatic narcissism theory.

Another phase of the work is to help victims recognize and overcome shame, to overcome fear and self-condemnation. These are the things that were instilled in them in this relationship, which I want to help them work through.

And finally, the work becomes about helping them find and strengthen faith and trust in themselves. That is what Janina Fisher refers to as the healing of self-alienation. It involves self-forgiveness for having been so mistaken, so wrong about what they believed. They have to forgive themselves for having been so vulnerable, for letting themselves be abused, for having become so intimidated, so unable to do anything but submit. They have to claim the right to a sense of dignity.

BLM: The traumatized patient is hoping to receive love from the traumatizing narcissist. To renounce that constitutes a mourning process.

DS: There’s a mourning process for sure. Part of what’s so painful about freeing yourself from subjugation to the traumatizing narcissist is that there was something in the love that was offered that seemed very, very real. What the victim dissociates is the abuse; what they try to cling to is what felt real about the love. People often tell me that their love for the TN was the greatest love they had ever experienced. What’s difficult and painful to bring to the victim’s attention is that the TN’s love was entirely conditional on the victim’s submission.

BLM: So, you say that the traumatizing narcissist is convinced of his righteousness and moral superiority. He’s a good person, according to him. Do you think it’s part of his delusion?

DS: Yes, their belief in their unimpeachable goodness is part of their delusion of omnipotence.

The TN is different in that way from the malignant narcissist, the autocrats and dictators and oligarchs we’re seeing in politics today. The malignant narcissist believes that, in their Ayn Rand-inspired “every man for himself” world, they are the fittest, the most superior, and they should therefore dominate. The malignant narcissist has no qualms about morality, there’s no law they consider themselves subject to. They can break any law because they are the master race, they have the superiority, the genetic superiority, to do whatever they want.

The TN, on the other hand, sees himself as morally superior. They alone are honest and they alone are innocent, always pure. That’s why they will never acknowledge they were wrong. They will always turn the victim’s complaint around on the victim, and make the victim apologize, when in fact it’s the victim who is owed the apology. The TN performs moral superiority as part of his delusion of omnipotence. The malignant narcissist cares nothing for morals, ethics, boundaries. That’s a big difference between the TN and the malignant narcissist. And of course, there can be overlap.

BLM: Yes. While I was reading your book, I thought it’s so clear that the traumatizing narcissist involves the psychology of another person. I asked myself, why hadn’t anybody seen it this way before Daniel Shaw?  I think that the first theory of narcissism is a narcissistic theory, because we do not consider the other.

DS: Well, you know Freud did talk about the “primal father,” the leader of the primal horde, in the Group Psychology paper. Even Kohut wrote a little-known paper on charisma that discusses the Messianic narcissist, and he describes a narcissist in that paper that could be straight out of Kernberg’s description of the grandiose narcissist. And Erich Fromm, certainly, wrote about the malignant narcissist and his impact on followers.

But psychoanalysis, and this is kind of weird if you think about it, paid more attention to the treatment of the pathological narcissist than to the treatment of the traumatized victims of narcissists. Which is why Alice Miller’s book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, became so hugely popular for a time. It was the first really robust statement within psychoanalysis on the traumatic impact of narcissistic parents on their children.

BLM: Yes, yes, but you have developed a much more extensive comprehension of the dynamics of two persons. And you want to focus on those who are traumatized by the narcissist.

DS: My focus is on the traumatized victim, but helping the victim requires a complex understanding of the perpetrator. Kernberg’s work is very influential for me in terms of describing grandiose narcissistic behavior, but my focus differs from his. My focus is on the delusion of omnipotence, and how that drives the TN’s behavior. In my latest writing, I’ve singled out eight behaviors that are characteristic of the TN, that make it possible to recognize the TN’s underlying delusion of omnipotence.

Still, it’s not easy as a teacher and a supervisor to have students who are critical and confronting. That’s not easy. But when it happens, you know, I’d like to be able to think that I can hear the complaints, hear what’s being said. Just as with an enactment with a patient where I might have to really search myself to recognize my participation, I will try to do the same as a teacher and as a supervisor.

If I can model that to students, that I’m able to be accountable, and not ashamed to be remorseful when I’ve caused harm, then hopefully as they advance in their careers, that will have been a model that will have meant something to them. I think that a lot of teachers and supervisors are extremely generous and generative in what they do and what they give. We’re never going to have a perfect record of satisfying every student’s needs or being the perfect teacher or supervisor for everyone. But we can model as best as possible this spirit of inclusiveness, egalitarianism. We can model openness and accountability, and those are things that we can try to pass along.

BLM: Yes, I remember a moment while I was teaching in a classroom when a student offered an example to illustrate what I was explaining. I listened, and then I said, “I have another example,” and proceeded to share a clinical vignette that, for me, more precisely captured the idea I was trying to convey.

The student, half-joking and half-complaining, replied: “You always have the last word. You always have the perfect example.”

In a playful tone, I responded, “Sorry, that’s my narcissism,” and added, “I’ll be more careful next time.”

Everyone laughed, and I realized that by acknowledging it consciously — as the teacher — I was also modeling something important: that we’re not perfect, that we can fall into narcissistic patterns, but we can also recognize them, name them, and adjust.

DS: Yeah, I think that earlier in our careers, there’s a tremendous pressure — probably cultural, but also personal — to know the answers, to be right, to say the right thing.
But as I’ve gotten further into my career, you know, 30 years in, I’m actually much more comfortable with not having the answer and not knowing, and I’m not ashamed of it.
If I’m not ashamed of not knowing, I often find that my patients know! They know what I’ve been unable to know; patients can show me and teach me! And then psychoanalytic therapy becomes a more mutual relationship, not one in which I do all the giving and they do all the taking. That early career pressure to know the answer, to be the authority, and to be right — that’s something we can help students and candidates with as well. We need not be ashamed of not knowing.

BLM: Yes, that’s great. You conclude your book by affirming that analytic love is the faith that where there was trauma, mutuality can emerge, and that healing from narcissism occurs through therapeutic love. To end, I’d love to hear you speak more about this idea of love.

DS: My first published paper was about analytic love, looking at it through the work of Ferenczi and the British Middle School and others like Loewald, who all spoke of analytic love. I was always drawn to the trauma theorists, even if they didn’t use the word trauma. And I was drawn to the attachment theorists, even if they didn’t use the word attachment. They were there from the start. Later, we have Bowlby and we have all of the attachment theory work, which is brilliant, which has now been more integrated into psychoanalysis.

So it’s impossible now for psychoanalysis to ignore trauma, which at one time was, if not ignored, certainly minimized. Now we can’t ignore trauma, relational, developmental trauma. People are wounded when they have not felt recognized. I am referencing Jessica Benjamin’s way of thinking about recognition, which includes love and respect for the person as a person in their own right — which Loewald, Winnicott and Fairbairn also talked about.

And that kind of recognition is what I think is most important about analytic love. If I wanted to construct today an updated idea about how I think of analytic love, it would include holding a basic, fundamental love and respect for the humanity of each person as a separate, unique individual. Analytic love, I think, calls us to try to remember to hold love and respect for the potential of each person who seeks our help — their potential for freedom, for becoming who they are.

BLM: Lovely conclusions, Daniel. And what can you tell us shortly about your next book?

DS: Well, first of all, Traumatic Narcissism was recently reissued by Routledge in a Classic Edition, for which I wrote a new introduction. There’s also, without the new introduction, a Spanish translation and an audiobook version. The Classic Edition is the one to look for if there are some new readers out there.

Also, there is a new series Routledge is producing, a contemporary psychoanalytic introduction series. Each book is no longer than 40,000 words or about a hundred fifty pages. I am working on consolidating, clarifying and updating traumatic narcissism theory and that should hopefully be out later in 2026.

BLM: Okay. We will be waiting for it. So, I want to thank you for this extraordinary book and for your time. It was such an enriching experience for me. And I believe your book is a must-read for every psychoanalyst and psychotherapist.

DS: Thank you so much. I’m grateful and honored to speak with you.

Daniel Shaw, LCSW
New York, NY, USA
Email Daniel Shaw
www.danielshawlcsw.com

Berta Loret de Mola, Ph.D.
Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico
Email Berta Loret de Mola