What institutions know about the leaders they hire, and what gets left behind.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Consider a fictional pastor named Joseph. For twenty years, he has led the same congregation. He knows the families who sit in the first six rows and the elders who arrive early. He knows which staff members linger outside his office after meetings and the particular hush that settles over the sanctuary when he steps into the pulpit. People ask him to baptize their children, visit their parents in the hospital, counsel their marriages, explain difficult passages of Scripture, and stand beside them at funerals. Younger pastors seek his advice. Staff members routinely check with him before making consequential decisions. His photograph appears on the church website, his name is printed in the bulletin, and several hundred people arrange part of every Sunday around listening to him speak.

After two decades, Joseph barely notices most of this. He has lived so long inside the role that people turning toward him with theological questions or waiting for his approval before acting feels ordinary. Years inside one institution produce thousands of encounters in which other people recognize a leader’s expertise and seek his judgment. They respond to the authority of the position and make room for the person who occupies it.

Now add one fact to the hypothetical: Joseph has pathological narcissism. Contemporary clinical research describes pathological narcissism as involving grandiose and vulnerable forms of functioning. Grandiosity can include entitlement, superiority, self-importance, and a strong investment in recognition. Vulnerability can bring shame, insecurity, hypersensitivity, anxiety, depression and unstable self-esteem, with the same person capable of moving between grandiose and vulnerable states as circumstances change (Pincus and Lukowitsky 2010; Pincus, Cain, and Wright 2014).

Research on narcissistic traits and social status adds another piece. Stathis Grapsas, Eddie Brummelman, Mitja Back, and Jaap Denissen developed the Status Pursuit in Narcissism, or SPIN, model to describe grandiose narcissism as strongly organized around social rank. Their model follows the way people high in grandiose narcissism seek situations that offer status and watch closely for information about where they stand. When status can be gained or threatened, self-promotion and competition may follow. Nikhila Mahadevan later proposed a theoretical account of grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic traits as different strategies for navigating status, with grandiose narcissism oriented toward gaining standing and vulnerable narcissism toward protecting standing that feels insecure or endangered (Grapsas et al. 2020; Mahadevan 2024).

Joseph’s office supplies such signals continually. His title identifies him before he enters a room. Staff members seek his approval because their work requires it. Congregants turn their attention toward him when he speaks. Invitations arrive because he occupies a respected position. Religious leadership carries an additional kind of authority because people may entrust a pastor with questions about conscience, suffering, forgiveness, death and God.

The church is only one setting in which a position can provide this steady confirmation of status. Long-serving university presidents, professors, executives and artistic directors can spend years in environments where their names carry weight and other people routinely accommodate their authority. For many leaders, the position becomes one part of a larger identity. Someone whose self-esteem depends heavily upon recognition and status may come to rely on the institution for something more consequential: a daily environment that repeatedly confirms his standing.

The loss of the position can therefore remove an entire social environment at once.

The psychoanalytic concept of narcissistic mortification helps explain one form such a crisis can take. Sam Vaknin has developed a detailed theoretical vocabulary distinguishing narcissistic injury, wound, scar, mortification and collapse. He also writes from the unusual perspective of someone who publicly identifies as a narcissist and, by his own account, has twice been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder (Vaknin 2023b). His sustained first-person observation of narcissistic experience gives his work a particular usefulness when considering the interior logic of narcissistic crisis.

Throughout this essay, I use Vaknin’s taxonomy as a theoretical framework for distinguishing forms of narcissistic crisis and read it alongside peer-reviewed clinical and empirical research from scholars such as Pincus, Ronningstam, Grapsas, Mahadevan, and Braun, whose work addresses pathological narcissism, status, shame, self-esteem regulation and leadership.

Once these ideas are placed inside institutions, another problem comes into view. Joseph may leave a congregation that has watched him exercise authority for twenty years and enter another that knows him primarily through his résumé, accomplishments, references, interview, and his own explanation of what happened before. The people considering him for a new position may have only months of direct experience with a man his former community knew for decades.

That difference in knowledge is the central concern of this essay.

Joseph is a fictional composite created solely to illustrate the psychological and institutional patterns discussed here. His experiences are hypothetical and do not depict any particular person, church, institution, or real-world event.

Narcissistic Mortification Before Vaknin

The concept of narcissistic mortification predates Vaknin’s work by decades. Psychoanalyst Ludwig Eidelberg devoted a 1957 article in Psychiatric Quarterly to narcissistic mortification, examining the phenomenon in relation to a sudden loss of psychological control (Eidelberg 1957).

Elsa Ronningstam and Arielle Baskin-Sommers later discussed mortification within contemporary clinical work on narcissistic personality disorder. Their 2013 review connects it with intense fear surrounding narcissistic injury and humiliation, and examines what can happen when an idealized understanding of the self encounters information that sharply contradicts it. Rejection and loss of admiration can carry particular force when a person has relied heavily upon relationships with others to regulate self-esteem. Isolation and threatened relationships may deepen that distress (Ronningstam and Baskin-Sommers 2013).

Joseph may have weathered criticism many times during twenty years of ministry. A congregant dislikes a sermon. An elder questions a decision. Staff members object to the way he handled a meeting. Such episodes may sting, anger him or provoke defensiveness while leaving his larger understanding of himself intact. In his own mind, he remains a gifted pastor and strong leader whose judgment deserves respect.

Vaknin’s distinctions among injury, wound, and scar offer a way to describe what happens when those challenges begin accumulating.

Injury, Wound, and Scar

Vaknin was distinguishing narcissistic injury, narcissistic wound, and narcissistic scar in published material by 2009 and in a recorded lecture by 2011. He describes an injury as an occasional or circumstantial threat to a person’s grandiose view of himself. The threat may concern intelligence, attractiveness, morality, competence, authority, success, or another quality the person has made central to his sense of superiority or importance (Vaknin 2009; 2011).

Imagine that Joseph has come to regard himself as an unusually gifted preacher. During a staff meeting, an associate pastor tells him that a recent sermon handled an important theological issue carelessly. Several staff members agree. Within Vaknin’s framework, the criticism can function as a narcissistic injury because it strikes directly at a quality Joseph has made central to his understanding of himself.

A narcissistic wound develops when similar injuries repeatedly strike the same vulnerable area. Other staff members begin questioning Joseph’s judgment. An elder challenges the way he handled a conflict. The circumstances change, but the message reaching Joseph remains painfully familiar: people whose judgment carries weight are questioning qualities he experiences as evidence of his ability and importance.

Vaknin uses the term narcissistic scar for the psychological defense that develops around a recurring wound. Joseph may begin surrounding himself with staff members who readily agree with him or limiting opportunities for disagreement during meetings. He might control which concerns reach the board. Persistent critics may come to be treated as people whose loyalty to the church is suspect. Many motives can produce those behaviors. Vaknin’s term applies specifically when the behavior helps shield the grandiose self from a threat the person has learned to anticipate.

The distinctions describe a progression in which repeated challenges expose a recurring vulnerability, and the anticipation of that vulnerability begins shaping behavior. Joseph can still preserve his larger picture of himself. One critic can be dismissed as inexperienced; another conflict can be explained as the price of strong leadership. Each challenge can still be placed inside a story that leaves his underlying identity largely untouched.

Mortification begins under different conditions, when an experience becomes powerful enough to overwhelm those familiar defenses.

What Makes Mortification Different

In his 2021 lecture “How Narcissist Is Mortified,” Vaknin describes mortification as a breakdown in the defenses supporting the narcissist’s grandiose understanding of himself. A humiliating reality becomes too powerful for the person’s ordinary explanations to absorb, producing what Vaknin calls decompensation, a temporary failure of the defensive structures that have protected the grandiose self (Vaknin 2021).

He develops the distinction further in a 2023 conversation with Daria Zukowska. In his account of external mortification, another person precipitates the humiliation in the presence of an audience whose opinion carries psychological importance for the narcissistic person. The suddenness of the event matters because it leaves too little time for the familiar defenses against threats to grandiosity. Vaknin’s emphasis falls on what happens to those defenses in the humiliating moment, rather than simply on the severity of the criticism itself (Vaknin 2023a).

Return to Joseph. Imagine that several years of staff complaints have led to an investigation. Elders have interviewed current and former employees and reviewed documents. They have also spoken privately with people who once worked closely with him. Joseph enters a board meeting expecting to correct what he believes are misunderstandings. During the meeting, an elder describes a pattern of concerns gathered from people Joseph respects, including some who have supported his ministry for many years.

Joseph may still have explanations for individual events. He remembers why particular decisions seemed necessary at the time. He believes someone has remembered a conflict incorrectly. The larger difficulty lies in what the elders have already done before he enters the room. They gathered information without him and compared accounts. By the time Joseph begins explaining himself, they have already started deciding what his conduct means.

Vaknin’s emphasis on the audience becomes particularly useful here. Criticism from a stranger does little to alter the relationships through which Joseph experiences his standing. These elders have spent years praying with him and listening to his preaching. Some have defended his decisions and recognized him publicly as their pastor. Their changed judgment now carries the history of everything their approval once communicated.

Clinical research gives us reason to take the underlying emotional territory seriously. Pincus, Cain, and Wright describe narcissistic vulnerability as capable of including intense shame, anxiety, depression, unstable self-esteem, and severe distress in clinical populations. Ronningstam and Baskin-Sommers likewise place fear and humiliation near the center of narcissistic vulnerability. Vaknin adds the more specific theoretical proposition that mortification occurs when a sufficiently powerful humiliation temporarily disables the grandiose defenses that ordinarily help the narcissistic person regulate such experiences (Pincus, Cain, and Wright 2014; Ronningstam and Baskin-Sommers 2013; Vaknin 2021).

Collapse Takes Longer

Vaknin uses narcissistic collapse for a process that unfolds across time. His 2025 lecture “How Narcissists Grieve Their Collapse” describes narcissistic supply as the attention, recognition, admiration, and other responses from people that help the narcissistic person regulate self-esteem. Collapse develops as familiar ways of obtaining those responses repeatedly fail (Vaknin 2025).

A leadership crisis can contain an acute humiliation followed by a much longer aftermath. Joseph may experience one meeting as a profound psychological rupture. Leaving the church then changes his ordinary life in hundreds of small ways that continue accumulating after the departure itself is over.

Six months later, a regional conference invites someone else to preach. A pastor who once called Joseph regularly for advice rarely calls now. The associate pastor who assumed many of his responsibilities appears in photographs from events Joseph once attended. Former congregants remain cordial when they see him but seldom seek his counsel. Meanwhile, the congregation continues worshiping, hiring staff and making decisions without requiring his presence.

Vaknin describes a related experience as internal mortification. In his 2025 account, prolonged collapse can become humiliating through what he calls “self-audiencing.” The person begins seeing in the pattern of his own life that the previous level of attention or influence has failed to return. The evidence comes from experience rather than from a single humiliating encounter.

Time can therefore alter Joseph’s understanding of what happened. He may initially expect the congregation to reconsider or believe another church will soon offer a comparable position. Former supporters may also seem likely to return once they have heard his explanation. As months pass, the successor becomes established, and professional relationships reorganize. Opportunities arrive at a different level from the one Joseph once held. He keeps encountering the consequences of his departure in parts of life that once confirmed who he believed himself to be.

The Institution as a Status Environment

Joseph’s experience raises a broader question about what institutions provide psychologically to the people who lead them.

Leadership positions make social rank unusually visible. Joseph stands in the pulpit because the church has authorized him to occupy it. His office door carries his title, and his biography appears on the website. Other people defer to decisions that fall within his authority. A university, corporation, theatre, school or nonprofit has its own equivalents in reporting structures, public ceremonies, committee assignments, control over resources and decisions that affect other people’s lives.

Vaknin uses pathological narcissistic space for an environment in which a narcissistic person reliably receives the attention and affirmation he calls supply. An institution can serve this function because the same people repeatedly acknowledge the leader’s importance through the normal workings of the organization. The SPIN model gives an empirical reason to take that setting seriously. Grapsas and his colleagues describe people high in grandiose narcissism as selecting situations that offer opportunities for status and remaining vigilant for information about their rank. Mahadevan’s work similarly describes grandiose narcissistic traits as oriented toward gaining status, while vulnerable narcissistic traits are especially concerned with protecting standing that feels insecure or endangered (Grapsas et al. 2020; Mahadevan 2024).

I use institutional audience for the people whose recurring responses tell a leader how much authority and influence he possesses. One person seeking Joseph’s advice means little. Twenty years of employees, younger pastors, elders and congregants repeatedly seeking his judgment can become part of the evidence through which he understands his place in the world. Religious leadership can intensify this because a pastor receives forms of trust that reach far beyond administrative authority. He enters hospital rooms and family crises. He presides at marriages and funerals. People bring him theological questions and private struggles of conscience. For someone whose self-esteem is organized around recognition, those encounters can carry psychological weight alongside their pastoral meaning.

An institutional audience also accumulates memory. Joseph’s congregation did not know him in his twentieth year the way it knew him in his first. A new leader is usually encountered through qualities people can see quickly: confidence, intelligence, professional accomplishment, charisma and a compelling vision. Time reveals what an interview cannot. Employees learn what happens when the leader is contradicted. Colleagues see how he responds when someone else succeeds. Trustees hear complaints that would never appear on a résumé. People who once experienced troubling events separately may eventually discover that others had similar experiences.

That accumulated history changes the nature of disagreement. Joseph can tell the elders why he made a disputed decision, and they may understand his reasoning perfectly well while remaining troubled by the way he treated the people involved. Their judgment develops from his account and from what others have told them, but it also rests on years of their own experience with him.

For someone whose self-worth depends heavily on being recognized as wise or important, this creates a difficult limit. Explanation may influence what another person thinks, but it cannot determine the conclusion another person reaches. The people who once confirmed Joseph’s understanding of himself can eventually use their shared history with him to arrive at an understanding he rejects. Vaknin’s account of external mortification gives that possibility particular weight because his theory places unusual importance on humiliation before an audience whose approval helped establish the status now under threat.

Research on vulnerable narcissism and leadership gives an empirical reason to take failure in this setting seriously. Susanne Braun, Birgit Schyns, Yuyan Zheng, and Robert G. Lord examined vulnerable narcissism, attribution of failure, shame and abusive supervision across three studies. Vulnerable narcissism was positively related to abusive supervision or intentions toward it, and internal attribution of failure played an important role in that relationship. Shame appeared in the proposed pathway in one study but not consistently across all three, which the authors treat cautiously (Braun et al. 2025). Their work shows that vulnerable narcissism can shape the way leaders process self-relevant failure and may affect people working beneath them.

Grief and Grievance

A person who loses a role held for many years eventually has to find a place for that role inside the life that remains.

Vaknin describes narcissistic collapse as involving grief. His 2025 model includes shock and denial, followed by anger, fear, isolation, depression, efforts to make meaning of what happened, and the eventual construction of a new narrative. This sequence belongs to Vaknin’s theoretical framework rather than to an established clinical stage model of grief, but it raises a real question about what a narcissistically organized person may be trying to recover after the loss of an institution (Vaknin 2025).

I find the distinction between grief and grievance useful here, understood as an interpretive distinction rather than a clinical category. Grief can gradually allow a former role to become part of a life story that continues. Joseph can remember decades of ministry with pride and sorrow. He may miss people he served and regret things he wishes he had done differently. Eventually, another pastor leading the congregation can become part of the reality he lives with rather than an ending he still expects to reverse.

Grievance keeps the ending under active dispute. Joseph continues returning to the board that acted unfairly or the colleague who betrayed him. An allegation still needs correcting. A decision remains something that should be reversed. The former role stays psychologically present because the argument over why it ended remains central to the story he tells about himself.

Real injustice complicates any attempt to interpret persistent grievance. Institutions sometimes mistreat people, and false accusations can damage careers. Whistleblowers can become targets. A board can also make a consequential decision from incomplete or inaccurate information. Continued anger therefore tells us very little on its own. The surrounding evidence and the person’s pattern of behavior matter far more.

Within Vaknin’s model, external blame can also serve a defensive function after mortification. In his 2023 conversation with Zukowska, he describes an alloplastic defense in which responsibility for the mortifying event shifts outward, and the people involved become malicious, ungrateful, conspiratorial, or otherwise responsible for what happened (Vaknin 2023a). For Joseph, such an explanation can preserve the identity he held before the loss. If betrayal or malice fully explains why he no longer occupies the pulpit, he can continue understanding himself as the gifted pastor who properly belonged there. His account of the people around him changes dramatically while his account of himself requires far less revision.

Grief asks him to live with the possibility that the role has ended permanently. Some people who once admired him may continue seeing him differently, and the congregation may build a future in which his former office no longer supplies daily evidence of his importance.

A new institution can change those circumstances quickly.

The New Audience

The visible parts of a career travel well. Joseph’s seminary degree remains verifiable, his years of experience still appear on his résumé, and successful programs, publications, conference appearances, or awards can be presented to another search committee.

The history surrounding those accomplishments travels less easily. Former elders may know why an investigation began. Staff members may remember what preceded a resignation or how conflict changed the workplace. Other experiences may never have become formal complaints at all. Some of this information will be confidential or disputed; other parts may be thoroughly documented. The next institution has access only to the history its search process manages to uncover.

I use missing archive for this gap between the professional record a candidate can readily present and the accumulated knowledge held by the people and records of the institution he left.

Joseph arrives at another church with twenty years of ministry experience, respected accomplishments, and his own account of the circumstances surrounding his departure. His former institution holds something that is harder to summarize: knowledge created over years of working beside him. The new congregation gains access to that history only to the extent that its search moves beyond the materials Joseph can readily provide.

For someone who has experienced a major narcissistic loss of status, the new environment may also hold particular psychological appeal. Vaknin’s 2025 account of collapse describes the construction of a new narrative and renewed access to external regulation after the old system fails. Independently, the SPIN model identifies selection of status-rich situations as part of grandiose narcissistic status pursuit (Vaknin 2025; Grapsas et al. 2020). Read together, these ideas suggest a hypothesis worth studying directly. A prestigious new position could restore experiences lost with the previous role. A title makes standing visible again and places the person’s judgment back in demand. The hiring decision itself communicates that another institution considers him worthy of authority.

The research cited here does not establish a causal pathway from narcissistic collapse to repeated movement between institutions. People change jobs for ordinary reasons every day, and difficult departures can lead to genuine reflection or better leadership elsewhere. The question becomes more interesting when a major loss of status is followed by persistent externalization of responsibility and an urgent effort to regain comparable authority, especially if similar conflicts later emerge in another organization. A receiving institution does not need to diagnose the candidate in order to investigate that history responsibly.

Institutional Memory as a Safeguarding Problem

Safeguarding research provides some of the starkest documentation of what can happen when important information fails to travel with a person from one institution to another. This literature concerns sexual misconduct and organizational failures surrounding it, a problem distinct from pathological narcissism. I use it here for a narrower institutional point: a person’s authority can move to a new organization while consequential knowledge about the previous exercise of that authority remains behind.

Education researchers use the phrase “passing the trash” for situations in which educators accused of sexual misconduct move into new school positions while information surrounding their previous employment is hidden, minimized or otherwise fails to reach the next employer. Billie-Jo Grant, Stephanie Wilkerson, and Molly Henschel examined state efforts to implement federal requirements intended to prevent the practice and found substantial gaps in state laws and policies at the time of the research (Grant, Wilkerson, and Henschel 2019).

A 2010 investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office examined fifteen cases involving public and private schools that hired or retained people with histories of sexual misconduct. At least eleven involved people who had previously targeted children. In at least six cases, offenders later used new school positions to abuse additional children. GAO also identified schools that allowed employees facing discipline for sexual misconduct to resign and, in some cases, provided positive references afterward (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2010). The investigation showed how a receiving institution could obtain accurate employment information and even favorable professional assessments while remaining unaware of facts essential to evaluating whether the person should again be entrusted with authority.

Federal officials continue to treat the problem as current. On July 10, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education announced a national K-12 initiative addressing adult sexual misconduct in schools and the movement of suspected offenders into new schools or roles. The Department reiterated federal requirements directing covered educational agencies to maintain policies prohibiting assistance in obtaining another education job when there is knowledge or probable cause to believe a person engaged in sexual misconduct involving a student (U.S. Department of Education 2026).

Religious institutions have faced comparable failures of information. Sociologist André Armbruster examined cases from Ireland, Germany, and the United States in which Catholic priests who had sexually abused minors were transferred to new parishes without receiving communities being told the real reason for the move (Armbruster 2022).

This literature demonstrates a practical problem that reaches beyond the psychological theory considered earlier. A criminal background check can return no conviction. A professional license may remain active, employment dates may be accurate, and references may describe genuine talent. The receiving institution can still lack the information it needs to understand why the person became available for another position.

Authority can travel much faster than institutional memory.

What a Receiving Institution Should Ask

Search committees naturally begin with achievement because achievement establishes qualification. A senior candidate may bring an impressive résumé and respected publications. Successful programs, strong references, and a compelling interview can reinforce the picture. A responsible search also needs to understand what happened when that candidate’s authority came under pressure.

That requires learning how the previous role ended and whether complaints or investigations preceded the departure. A receiving institution can ask whether an investigation reached findings and whether the candidate remained eligible for rehire. Former colleagues may be able to describe what happened when the person faced disagreement or criticism, particularly from people with less power.

Specific questions usually produce more useful information than broad evaluations. A former supervisor may sincerely regard someone as brilliant while also remembering that employees were afraid to challenge her. Asking how the candidate responded when staff disagreed can reveal more than asking whether she was a good employee. Questions about how complaints were handled or whether the former employer would again place the person in comparable authority may reach information that a general reference request never touches.

Patterns across institutions deserve attention as well. One difficult workplace may explain one difficult departure. When a career contains repeated ruptures with boards, employees, administrators, students or congregations, the receiving institution has reason to examine what changed from place to place and what remained constant. Careful investigation may ultimately show that the candidate experienced genuine mistreatment, which is precisely why the purpose of the inquiry should be understanding rather than suspicion.

Timing matters because organizations develop interests of their own once a hire has been made. After a respected candidate has been recruited and publicly announced, the institution has already invested some of its own reputation in the choice. Troubling information that emerges later raises questions about the judgment of the people who made and supported the appointment.

Fiona Gardner’s work on institutional betrayal in the Anglican Church examines the defenses that can arise when an organization encounters information that threatens the way it understands itself. Her analysis concerns institutional responses to abuse, but the organizational problem has broader relevance. Protecting a respected leader can protect an institution’s preferred story about its own judgment, including the judgment of people who hired or defended him (Gardner 2022). Under those conditions, a quiet resignation can solve an immediate institutional problem while creating a future one elsewhere. Once the person leaves, scrutiny can fade and ordinary work resumes. Meanwhile, the former leader becomes a candidate somewhere else, where a search committee may encounter an employment record far cleaner than the circumstances surrounding the departure.

Completed investigations, accurate records, lawful disclosure, careful references and responsible safeguarding procedures preserve information that another institution may eventually need.

The Institution Has Its Own Reckoning

Leadership crises also require organizations to examine their participation in the careers of the people they elevate. A congregation that has praised the same pastor for twenty years may eventually have to ask why staff concerns received little attention. Elsewhere, employees who questioned a powerful administrator may have been dismissed as difficult because visible success bought that leader unusual freedom from scrutiny.

Those questions are painful because institutions participate actively in creating authority. They choose leaders and place resources in their hands. They publicize accomplishments and structure organizations around decisions those leaders are authorized to make. Gardner’s analysis of institutional betrayal describes the pressure organizations can feel to preserve an established understanding of events when disturbing information emerges. An institution willing to resist that pressure can examine what happened to earlier complaints, which reporting systems failed, who knew about concerns and whether people with less power had a safe way to speak (Gardner 2022).

That examination also allows an institution to tell a more accurate story about its past. Joseph may have preached sermons people continue to treasure while also having exercised authority in ways that harmed staff members. A professor may have inspired generations of students and still have treated colleagues badly. Both experiences belong to the history of the institution that employed them.

What the Evidence Allows Us to Say

The argument here draws on different kinds of scholarship, and each can support only part of it.

Clinical and empirical research on narcissism helps explain why status and other people’s evaluations can carry unusual weight for people with pathological narcissistic traits. It also gives us a clearer picture of shame, unstable self-esteem, and the vulnerable states that may follow self-relevant failure. Pincus and his colleagues describe grandiose and vulnerable forms of narcissistic functioning. Grapsas and Mahadevan examine social status, while Braun and her colleagues provide evidence that vulnerable narcissism can shape harmful leadership behavior following failure.

Vaknin supplies a more specific theoretical account of narcissistic crisis. His distinctions among injury, wound, scar, mortification, and collapse provide language for experiences that vary in severity and duration. His concept of self-audiencing addresses a particular part of prolonged collapse: the point at which continued loss becomes visible to the person through the unfolding pattern of his own life.

Safeguarding research answers a different institutional question. It documents what can happen when someone enters a new organization while important information remains in the old one. The GAO cases and research on “passing the trash” show this in schools. Federal policy continues to address the problem, and scholarship on undisclosed clergy transfers documents comparable failures of information in religious institutions. Taken together, this work demonstrates how consequential an incomplete employment history can become when a receiving institution gives someone authority.

The research cited here does not establish a direct causal sequence in which narcissistic collapse leads people to move repeatedly between institutions. It does give us reason to ask what may happen when a person deeply invested in status loses a position that supplied it. Vaknin theorizes that collapse can create pressure to develop new sources of external regulation, while research on narcissistic status pursuit shows the appeal that status-rich environments can have for people high in grandiose narcissism. A new institution can provide authority again while knowing far less about the person than those who spent years watching him lead.

Receiving organizations can respond to that uncertainty without diagnosing anyone. They can learn how a previous position ended and investigate concerns that preceded the departure. They can speak with people who actually worked under the candidate’s authority and look closely at repeated conflicts across previous positions.

A candidate naturally arrives with the record that fits on a résumé: degrees, titles, publications, awards, accomplishments, references and years of experience. What rarely travels as neatly is the record built over years of meetings, complaints, conflict, investigation and ordinary observation inside the institution itself.

A good hiring process tries to learn enough of both histories before giving the person another audience.

For more essays on narcissistic psychology, visit the How Narcissism Works series.

Joseph is a fictional character created solely to illustrate the psychological and institutional patterns discussed here. His experiences are hypothetical and do not depict any particular person, church, institution, or real-world event.

The same questions about status, authority, and institutional memory can arise in universities, businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations.

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Sources and Further Reading

Armbruster, André. “On the Undisclosed Transfer of Abusive Catholic Priests: A Field Theoretical Analysis of the Sexual Repression Within the Catholic Church and the Use of Legitimate Language.” Critical Research on Religion 10, no. 1 (2022): 61–77. DOI: 10.1177/20503032211015282.

Braun, Susanne, Birgit Schyns, Yuyan Zheng, and Robert G. Lord. “When Vulnerable Narcissists Take the Lead: The Role of Internal Attribution of Failure and Shame for Abusive Supervision.” Journal of Business Ethics 202 (2025): 707–725. Published online September 2, 2024. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-024-05805-w.

Eidelberg, Ludwig. “An Introduction to the Study of the Narcissistic Mortification.” Psychiatric Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1957): 657–668. DOI: 10.1007/BF01568757.

Gardner, Fiona. “Institutional Betrayal, Psychoanalytic Insights on the Anglican Church’s Response to Abuse.” Religions 13, no. 10 (2022): 892. DOI: 10.3390/rel13100892.

Grant, Billie-Jo, Stephanie Wilkerson, and Molly Henschel. “Passing the Trash: Absence of State Laws Allows for Continued Sexual Abuse of K-12 Students by School Employees.” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 28, no. 1 (2019): 84–104. DOI: 10.1080/10538712.2018.1483460.

Grapsas, Stathis, Eddie Brummelman, Mitja D. Back, and Jaap J. A. Denissen. “The ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Narcissism: A Process Model of Narcissistic Status Pursuit.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15, no. 1 (2020): 150–172. DOI: 10.1177/1745691619873350.

Mahadevan, Nikhila. “Conceptualizing Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism as Alternative Status-Seeking Strategies: Insights from Hierometer Theory.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 18, no. 6 (2024): e12977. DOI: 10.1111/spc3.12977.

Pincus, Aaron L., Nicole M. Cain, and Aidan G. C. Wright. “Narcissistic Grandiosity and Narcissistic Vulnerability in Psychotherapy.” Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment 5, no. 4 (2014): 439–443. DOI: 10.1037/per0000031.

Pincus, Aaron L., and Mark R. Lukowitsky. “Pathological Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 6 (2010): 421–446. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.121208.131215.

Ronningstam, Elsa, and Arielle R. Baskin-Sommers. “Fear and Decision-Making in Narcissistic Personality Disorder: A Link Between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 15, no. 2 (2013): 191–201. DOI: 10.31887/DCNS.2013.15.2/eronningstam.

U.S. Department of Education. “U.S. Department of Education Launches National K-12 Initiative to Protect Students from Adult Sexual Predators in Schools.” Press release, July 10, 2026.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. K-12 Education: Selected Cases of Public and Private Schools That Hired or Retained Individuals with Histories of Sexual Misconduct. GAO-11-200. December 2010.

Vaknin, Sam. “Narcissistic Injury, Narcissistic Wound, and Narcissistic Scar.” Article, November 6, 2009.

Vaknin, Sam. “Narcissistic Injury, Wound, Scar, and Rage.” Video lecture, October 16, 2011.

Vaknin, Sam. “How Narcissist Is Mortified (Empathy Aphantasia).” Video lecture, March 2, 2021.

Vaknin, Sam. 2023a. “Women Narcissistically Mortified More than Men: Mortification not Injury.” Conversation with Daria Zukowska, May 4, 2023.

Vaknin, Sam. 2023b. “Repentant Narcissist, Therapist Must Accept Diagnosis (12 Steps of Narcissists Anonymous).” Video lecture, September 12, 2023.

Vaknin, Sam. “How Narcissists Grieve Their Collapse.” Video lecture, January 15, 2025.