Narcissistic abuse experts: Racamier, Hirigoyen, Cyrulnik

In the article that follows, I set out the theoretical landmarks of narcissistic perversion. On this theme, I designed a test sur les traits narcissiques that helps identify the mechanisms of coercive control, with a guide to take the reflection further. And if you have concrete messages to decode, ScanMyLove analyses your conversations with your partner from a simple export and reveals their real dynamic. I have also written two books on this subject, Se libérer des relations toxiques and Trauma Bonding, if you would like to go further.

Three names come up as soon as you look seriously into this subject. They do not say the same thing, they do not work on the same object, and one of the three never wrote about narcissistic perversion.

Knowing who said what is not a scholarly curiosity. It is what allows you to recognise, in an article or a video, what rests on clinical work and what merely invokes it without knowing it.

Paul-Claude Racamier: the man who coined the term

In 1986, in Paris, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst spoke two words he had just put together in front of a circle of practitioners: narcissistic perversion.

Racamier was no populariser. He spent most of his career in psychiatric hospitals, alongside people whose identity fractures, and it was there — not in the comfort of a consulting room — that he formed his way of seeing. For years he observed a phenomenon that no word covered: some people seem to maintain their own psychic balance by having someone else carry it. They are well because someone next to them is unwell in their place.

What "pervert" means in his work

A misunderstanding has to be cleared up here, because it poisons everything. In everyday language, "pervert" suggests sexuality. Many people therefore dismiss the phrase out of hand: there is nothing sexually abnormal about my partner, so this is not it.

That is not what Racamier meant. The word is to be taken in its Latin sense, pervertere: to turn round, to divert from its use. To pervert something is not to sully it, it is to take it and make it serve a purpose other than the one it served.

What is perverted, therefore, is not sexuality. It is the relationship. It stops being an encounter between two subjects and becomes a tool at the service of one of them. The other is no longer someone: they are an available space.

Decorporation

This is Racamier's most original contribution, and the most disturbing. In his view, the person who functions in this way does not merely say hurtful things. They transfer: the shame they cannot feel, the guilt they cannot take on, the sense of inadequacy they cannot look at — all of it is expelled and comes to lodge in the psyche of the other. Racamier called this decorporation: putting out of oneself what is unbearable, and making it inhabit someone else.

This explains something that accounts describe constantly: the person on the receiving end does not merely hear that she is mad, she begins to feel genuinely disturbed. She is not only accused of being ungrateful, she feels a diffuse shame whose origin she can never locate — because that origin is not in her.

Racamier died in 1996, without seeing what his concept was to become.

Marie-France Hirigoyen: the woman who made it public

October 1998. A Parisian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst published a modest-sized book with a publisher who expected little of it: Le Harcèlement moral : la violence perverse au quotidien.

Within weeks it passed a hundred thousand copies. It would be translated into dozens of languages, quoted by parliamentarians, invoked before employment tribunals. In 2002, a French law introduced moral harassment into the Labour Code — and the wording of that law owes a great deal to what this book had described.

The decisive shift

Hirigoyen acknowledges her debt to Racamier, but she makes a change of viewpoint, and it is that change which explains the success.

Racamier looked at the inner workings of the person who destroys. Hirigoyen looks at what it does to be subjected to it.

She describes the mechanics of daily life: the pointed silences that force the other to guess what she has done wrong, the sentences that invalidate perception — "you are too sensitive", "you are making it up", "you are the one who provokes" — the irony that wounds and then takes shelter behind not being serious, the reversed accusation that turns the injured person into the culprit of her own injury.

She does not talk about "manipulation" in general: she names, she distinguishes, she gives examples. For thousands of readers, it was the first time their life had been written down somewhere.

What she showed and what is rarely quoted

Her least-quoted contribution is perhaps the most important: the most destructive form is almost never the one that shouts. It is the one made of micro-disqualifications — a sigh at just the right moment, a question whose intonation turns it into a verdict. In front of a witness, none of these can be argued: "he sighed" is not a grievance. Only the sequence, over months, becomes devastating, and nobody has seen it apart from you.

It is this observation that explains why so many people are not believed when they speak.

Boris Cyrulnik: the man who did not write about this subject

His name appears everywhere in content about narcissistic abuse. Let us be clear: Boris Cyrulnik did not theorise narcissistic perversion. A neuropsychiatrist and ethologist, he brought something else — and that something matters to you, but it lies elsewhere.

His work concerns resilience: the capacity to resume development after a trauma. What he established, with others, comes down to one simple and long-contested proposition: a trauma does not write a destiny. What follows depends on what is available around the person — what he calls resilience tutors, those people, bonds and activities that make it possible to find a footing again.

This therefore comes into play afterwards, in rebuilding, not in the analysis of the mechanism of control. And it corrects a widespread and demoralising idea: leaving a destructive relationship does not condemn anyone to carry its mark for ever.

One clarification, because it circulates: resilience is not a quality one either has or lacks. It is not strength of character, and it is certainly not an injunction to be well.

The point all three share — and that popular content forgets

Here is what none of the three did, and what should appear in any serious content on this subject.

The phrase "narcissistic pervert" appears in no medical classification. Not in the manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5), nor in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), nor in any validated questionnaire. No professional can, strictly speaking, "diagnose a narcissistic pervert".

What does exist in the DSM-5 is narcissistic personality disorder, defined by nine criteria. And it is worth noting what does not appear there: organised manipulation, strategic lying, isolating the person one loves, methodically denying what the other has seen. None of that is a criterion. One can receive this diagnosis without ever having put anyone through that; one can put someone through exactly that without ever receiving it.

As for the ICD-11, which came into force in 2022, it has removed the category. The word "narcissistic" appears in none of its codes: the classification has abandoned the very idea of separate personality categories in favour of a single disorder whose severity is rated, supplemented by dominant traits.

Why this changes nothing about what you are living through

The absence of an official label does not make your experience any less real, and for a precise reason: manuals do not classify forms of suffering, they classify disorders in a person who has been assessed. They are designed to say what the person sitting in front of the practitioner has, not to describe what happens between two people.

But coercive control is not inside one head. It is a relationship. No classification of individual disorders was designed to capture it. That is not a flaw in your situation, it is a blind spot in the tool.

And each of the mechanisms involved is itself documented: gaslighting, the reversal of responsibility, traumatic bonding, the unfolding in phases. The overall figure has no official status, but each of the pieces that make it up does.

Take the test: Test sur les traits narcissiques → — Not in order to label anyone, but to identify the mechanisms at work in one specific relationship.

How to read content on this subject

Three landmarks, drawn from the above.

Content that promises to help you "recognise a narcissistic pervert in 10 signs" is selling a label, not an understanding. Lists of signs are designed for you to recognise yourself in them — that is their function, not their quality. Content that invokes Cyrulnik to describe a manipulator has the wrong reference. Cyrulnik is talking about what comes afterwards. Content that claims this is a diagnosed disorder is mistaken, or is misleading you. The correct formulation exists: a destructive relational pattern, clinically described, whose mechanisms are documented, and which does not constitute a nosographic category.

If your safety is at stake, that takes precedence over any reading. Contact your local emergency services, and wherever you are, findahelpline.com lists the helplines available in your country. befrienders.org also offers emotional support in many languages.

References

• American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.).
• Cyrulnik, B. (1999). Un merveilleux malheur. Odile Jacob.
• Hirigoyen, M.-F. (1998). Le Harcèlement moral : la violence perverse au quotidien. Syros.
• World Health Organization. (2022). International Classification of Diseases (11th revision). https://icd.who.int
• Racamier, P.-C. (1992). Le Génie des origines : psychanalyse et psychoses. Payot.