The Worst Form of Immaturity | Dr. Keith Campbell

One of the things that we established when we were looking at the developmental course of maturation. So tell me what you think about this. So it seems to me that a lot of what we see as narcissism is actually something like prolonged immaturity. Now, it's a little more complicated than that.

So the little kids that we studied—and this is true of those who've studied little kids in general—so there's about 5% of males at the age of two who hit, kick, bite, and steal when you put them with other two-year-olds. And they're almost all male, and there's only one in 20. And so you could say most two-year-olds aren't psychopathic narcissists by temperament. So these are probably the boys who are disagreeable extroverts by temperament, right? And so they're competitive, they're pushy, and they're, when they're very young, they're impulsive.

Now, most of them are socialized by the age of four. Now our studies of long-term criminality indicated that it was the minority of that 5% who weren't socialized by the age of four that became the long-term predatory criminals. And it was very difficult to do anything about that after the age of four. But that's also made me think more recently that what we're seeing as that narcissistic predatory parasitism is probably something like a fail of maturation.

It's like rather than being a pathology in and of itself, it's just the maintenance of self-centered immaturity far beyond its expiry date. And so I'm wondering what you think of a formulation like that.

I like that idea and that there is an immaturity to narcissism. I just— to take it in a little bit of a Freudian direction— it seems you can think, you know, if you think about it in terms of a sort of developmental model, the narcissism is like being stuck in the phallic stage a little bit rather than being stuck in, say, the oral stage or anal stage. So I don't think it—there can be different types of being immature. I think that, right, right, right, dependent for example. Yeah, it's not—you're not a dependent, not like, I just need someone to take care of me, I'm 50 years old. It's more you get stuck in this, like, I should say, adolescent, this childish phallic masculine, I'm going to do this, I'm going to get this. And you get stuck in that model.

You know, you can use it as an adult, but it's kind of like a— you're a little bit of a cartoon. And so that's something I see. It's like you’re a cartoon child acting like an adult, like I'm a big deal. Like the guys that try to be alpha. And I'm like, yeah, dude—so, yeah, I do see— I do calm down there. Yeah, calm down, come on.

So I do see that for sure. But I do think it's a sort of one path in development that you don't develop. It's not all the paths.

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Yeah, yeah, well, I think that's a good distinction because it shines a light on another social or psychological phenomenon. So one of the things that we see is the rise to a certain type of stardom of people like Andrew Tate. The Andrew Tate phenomenon has really interested me because I have some sympathy for him. Now, it's limited, but it's limited in the way that you just described.

So you could imagine that the worst form of immaturity, the most counterproductive form of immaturity, would be something like, well, the Freudian oral stage. If we reformulated that in more modern terminology, that would be something like prolonged infantile immaturity. So you're basically stuck as a dependent, right? And so you have no— all your locus of control is external. All you do is whine to get people to deliver to you what you want. Now, that's perfectly acceptable if you're six months old, although you could even use smiling at that point as an invitation.

But then you might imagine that if you are stuck at that dependent stage and you have an impulse for maturation, if someone who was more narcissistic and aggressive came along, they would actually look attractive to you because, first of all, it would be better to be— it's better to be a narcissistic extrovert than it is to be a dependent infant. That doesn't mean it's good, right? But it does mean that it's better.

Yeah, well, and you could think about that from an evolutionary biological perspective too because it's definitely the case that manipulative psychopaths can be successful in finding sexual partners. Whereas infantile dependent men, they're just not going anywhere on that side of things because they can't— like no women, virtually no women are attracted to infantile dependent men. Some women are attracted to narcissistic blowhards, right? So yeah, is that in keeping with your understanding of the developmental progression?

Yeah, I mean, I think that makes sense. And I like how you're saying that, like, look dude, it's better to be narcissistic and full of yourself if you're a guy than just to be a dependent loser. But that isn’t the highest stage of male development. Isn't being a peacock, you know? It's helping; it's being a provider. It's being— doing more than that. It's leading the family; it's leading people.

But again, it is better to be narcissistic than just dependent, so yeah, it makes sense. Oh, you mentioned Andrew Tate, and it's not— I'm kind of old for this, but I see a lot of younger guys that are attracted to this more sort of alpha, in quotes, personality model. And I understand it too because they're not getting a lot of really good male role models out there. So they see one that looks sort of cartoonish and seems functional and seems to have some agency and seems to be navigating life effectively in a way that would be appealing to a 15-year-old guy. And so I understand it; I just wish we had better role models, you know? But I understand it.

Well, it might also be that there is a time at which that's actually developmentally appropriate. So you know, one of the things we found in our analysis of the development of psychopathology, so imagine with teenagers, okay? Imagine there are two patterns of rule—three patterns of living with the rules. Say when you're 13 to 15 and you're a male. Now, it also applies to females but less so because they're not as aggressive.

But so imagine that you're a 13 to 15-year-old male who never breaks a rule ever. Okay? Now imagine you're a 13 to 15-year-old, and you break a rule all the time. And then imagine that you're somewhere in the middle. Okay? So that's the whole distribution. Well, the males who never break a rule, they are at higher risk for dependent personality disorder, for depression, and anxiety later in life. Now, the ones on the other end of the spectrum are much more at risk for lifetime criminality, let's say, and substance abuse, violence, and all that. So there's pathology associated with both extremes with regards to rules.

Now the kids in the middle, they are going to experiment. And so now you could imagine that if you're a kid who comes from a good home, and you're pretty rule-oriented, there might well be a time between the ages of 13 and 15 or 16—something like that—where it's actually appropriate for you to admire the rule-breakers to some degree because that's one of the things that pops you out of that childhood dependence on your parents. Right? But hopefully you would supersede that as you mature, and that is the pattern for most men. Right? I mean, criminality drops off like mad around 25, and so does substance abuse. Something like that. And that's often when men who are like men, women like men four to five years older.

And so it makes sense that it's about 25 or so that men start to get their act together, and that's when they take that step beyond the more narcissistic and showy aspects of masculinity and take on these roles that are oriented towards a longer time span and a broader social horizon. What you're making me think of is the classic—you know Jack Block's work on, you know, drug use in Berkeley back in the 70s. It was the people who didn't use any and used too much that got into trouble, and then there's this golden mean in the middle. And you see that golden mean in a lot of things where, you know, you want to have a little edge, but not too much edge. You don't want to be perfectly moral, but you don't want to be immoral. There's always that little bit of edge. And you're right, developmentally, I think it's appropriate for young guys to kind of go to that little darker side for a while. Maybe.