From Household Tyranny to State Violence: Narcissistic Micro-Politics and the Architecture of Power

Résumé

This article proposes that the family is more than a mere metaphor for the state : it must instead be treated as its primary rehearsal stage. Building on my earlier clinical analysis of imperial behaviour (The Dark Tetrad Traits of Empire, 2014) and the psycho-historical case study of Congolese governance (From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets, 2016), I argue that narcissistic family systems reproduce, at a reduced scale, the same patterns of instrumentalisation, gaslighting and sacrificial scapegoating that later appear in autocratic regimes.

 Drawing on testimonies and case material analysed more clinically in my separate work on narcissistic mothers-in-law and scapegoating (Journal of Health & Psychology, 2023), I identify three recurring configurations: the sacrificial child, the charismatic abuser and the silent institutional bystander (extended family, church, school).

I place these configurations in dialogue with the symbolic and epistemic frameworks laid out in Scripts of Warfare (USK JPSE, 2022), particularly the analyses of scriptural justification of empire and symbolic sovereignty.

The article suggests that the colonised mind described there is not only the product of external propaganda but also of internalised, everyday micro-violence. 

The historical and psychosocial evidence suggest that any serious Pan-African federative project must be accompanied by a politics of psychological demilitarisation at the level of households, or it will simply transfer the architecture of intimate tyranny to the scale of the state.