November 23rd, 2008
Famous narcissists – Eva Peron
Maria Eva Duarte de Peron, First Lady of Argentina, the richest and most powerful woman in the country, was the most loved and despised of women.
She used and then discarded people. She often pretended feelings of friendship, affection, or love, but actually hated everyone. She was adept at self-promotion, although the self she promoted had no basis in truth.
When she met Colonel Juan Peron, who later became president and dictator, she seduced him with flattery, adulation, and feigned passion. Peron was Eva’s ticket to fame, power, and wealth. She treated Peron the way many narcissistic parents treat their child. She bullied and dominated him but also told him he was special, god-like, and unsurpassable. Eva and Peron had a symbiotic relationship. She depended on him for her power and he depended on her for the heady self-inflation that only she could make him feel.
Eva was impatient, overconfident, threw tantrums when criticised or could not get her way, and was highly corrupt. Both Peron and Eva were power hungry opportunists who bled their country, and especially its poor, dry. Eva presented an image of caring for the masses, but it was only a charade. Eva and Peron misappropriated money raised for earthquake victims and Eva’s ‘charitable’ foundation made her one of the wealthiest women in the world because she used its funds as her own personal fortune.
Anyone who dared criticize Evita disappeared or found themselves in jail. She vindictively pursued and punished all her ‘enemies’ (such as anyone who had ever dared hold a superior position to her, been more successful, or refused to donate to her ‘charity’). Eva Peron was a criminal who helped ruin Argentina in the six short years she held power.
By the time of her death at thirty-three in 1952, Eva’s narcissism was so extreme and out of touch with reality that she genuinely believed she was a saint.
So what forces shaped her destructive personality? Eva began life in poverty and squalor in a one-roomed, dirt-floored shack, one of five illegitimate children of a clever and unscrupulous peasant mother and a lazy middle-class father who gave most of his time and money to his legitimate family. When she was seven, her father was killed in a car crash and in a country where a woman was literally nothing without a man, the family’s social and economic position fell even further.
In a society dominated by male chauvinism and a rigid class system Eva was the lowest of the low, poor, illegitimate, and female. To boost her ego she ‘inflated’ herself and the false grandiose self-image of the narcissist was born.
Other village children were not allowed to associate with Eva and her siblings because they were ‘bastards’. She hated her low status family and loathed the local wealthy landowners who had what she wanted. From childhood, she was obsessed with dreams of riches and grandeur.
She was uneducated, uncultured, and untalented but had the supreme confidence of the narcissist and was certain she would achieve greatness. But she never intended to succeed through hard work or self-improvement. Her tactics were intrigue, manipulation, and sex. Even as a child, she knew how to get her way through either being sweet or nasty.
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