Where does narcissistic leadership come from? From an early deficit in unconditional recognition, what clinical psychologist Martin Appelo calls an ‘oersoep’ (primal soup) problem, compensated by narcissistic inflation, which produces a structural deficit in reciprocity, which drives others away, which confirms the original belief that others cannot be relied on, which fuels further inflation. This self-reinforcing loop is the narcissistic circle, and it is a risk profile formed in childhood, not a moral failure chosen in adulthood.
Ask the popular literature where narcissists come from and you get a shrug dressed as an answer: some people are just like that. Ask the leaders themselves and you get the professional narrative: I worked hard, I saw opportunities, I made sacrifices. Both answers are wrong in the same direction. In Let’s Talk Leadership I put it as a rule I have never seen violated in practice: every professional narrative conceals an emotional narrative. “I became CEO because I worked hard” conceals “I became CEO because being needed made me feel safe.” This article is about the concealed narrative behind the narcissistic pattern specifically: where the engine was built, why it was built, and why understanding the construction changes what you do about it.
One framing before we start, because it governs everything: we are describing risk profiles, not destinies. As Martin Appelo puts it in our joint work, there are many successful leaders with this history, many without it, and a great many people with the same history who never lead anything at all. The childhood explains the pattern; it does not sentence anyone to it, and it excuses nothing.
The soup
Every child arrives needing one thing before all others: unconditional recognition. To be claimed, delighted in, allowed to exist without earning it. Martin’s term for this early emotional nourishment is the oersoep, the primordial soup, and I have kept the Dutch word in my English work because no translation carries its blunt physicality. When the soup is served properly, the child internalises a quiet conclusion: I am acceptable as I am. That conclusion becomes the floor a person stands on for the rest of their life, and people with a floor, as I argue throughout Let’s Talk Leadership, rarely feel the need to spend that life proving anything from a stage. Healthy people rarely function as leaders. The sentence offends every leadership industry instinct, and two decades of biographical intakes keep confirming it.
The pattern we are tracing begins where the soup fails, and it fails in two opposite ways with the same structural result.
Too little: the depressive route
The first route is deficit. The child receives too little emotional validation, is frustrated in its need for symbiosis, and is often forced into autonomy years before it is ready. The improvisation this child builds is heroic self-sufficiency: if nobody will be there for me, I will do it alone, and better than everyone, and when they finally come looking, I will no longer need them. Martin calls this the depressive narcissistic dynamic, and describes it from the inside, because it is his own: the premature independence, the lifelong allergy to anyone acting like his boss, and the strange calm in crisis that made people fetch him whenever a fight broke out, at school and in every organisation since.
Grown up, this route produces the solitary top performer. Brilliant, driven, unimpressed by authority, magnificent in the fire, and structurally alone. In the leadership scripts vocabulary of our work, these are natural alpha wolves and often gifted inspirators, and they are chronically weak in the Director script, the one made of reciprocity. Their deepest conviction, installed before language, is that depending on people is how you get hurt, and no quarterly result ever quite refutes it.
Too much: the entitled route
The second route is surplus. The child receives validation without conditions or boundaries, is treated as exceptional by decree, and is denied the ordinary frustrations through which humans learn that other people are real. The improvisation here is entitlement: the world exists to serve, disagreement is betrayal, and mirrors are for confirming. Where the depressive route builds armour out of self-reliance, this route builds it out of expectation.
Grown up, this route produces the leader who consumes organisations: courtiers selected for reflection, dissent experienced as insubordination, and a curious brittleness under real pressure, because the inner floor was never load-tested. Different childhood, opposite failure of the same soup, and an identical structural outcome: a deficit in wederkerigheid, reciprocity. In both variants the other person is not fully real, either unnecessary (the depressive route) or instrumental (the entitled route). Equality, the precondition of every genuine relationship, is unavailable in both directions.
The circle closes
Now the mechanism that makes this a circle rather than a line. The inflation drives behaviour that pushes people away: the winning at everything, the credit absorption, the short fuse when the applause falters. The withdrawal of others confirms the founding belief (people cannot be relied on; I am alone in this), which justifies further inflation, which drives further withdrawal. Around and around, each rotation reinforcing the last, which is why the pattern hardens rather than mellows with age and why the most outwardly self-assured person in the building is so often, on honest inspection, the least secure. The circle also explains the signature hunger. The adult chases conditional recognition (applause, status, the deal, the watch) as a substitute for the unconditional kind that was missed, and the substitution can never saturate because it is the wrong nutrient. In Rescue the Alpha Wolf Martin and I traced where this ends when it is never seen: the triumphant leader who is privately miserable, the abrupt exits into vineyards and bed-and-breakfasts, and in the darker cases the depression that follows the discovery, always resisted and always eventually arriving, that the pursuit was structurally unwinnable. I am pursuing something I can never obtain this way. Handled without support, that discovery is dangerous. Handled well, it is the beginning of the only development that matters.
Why the origins matter in practice
Not for excuse value, and not because executives need therapy hours with their coach; in the change process I run, behaviour is redesigned in the present, not litigated in the past. The origins matter for three working reasons. First, prediction: the circle tells you what the pattern will do under pressure better than any competency model, which is why my engagements begin with a full biographical timeline before any goal is set. Second, self-compassion of the load-bearing kind: the executive who sees that the armour was a child’s intelligent solution to an impossible situation can examine it with curiosity instead of shame, and curiosity is the only solvent that works on armour. I know this route personally; my own pattern, the anxious variant, was built by a gifted child in a village school that punished deviation, and I found it described in Martin’s work during the burnout that ended my first career, on pages that read like surveillance. Third, direction: the circle specifies exactly what development means. Not less drive, but reciprocity, deliberately installed where the soup never put it. That is the polishing of the alpha wolf, and it is the difference between a leader who spends his life extracting recognition and one who has learned, late and imperfectly, to exchange it.
The quotable version: the narcissistic circle is a child’s solution still running the adult’s life, and you do not break it by attacking the solution but by finally addressing the problem it was built to solve.
Frequently asked questions
What is the narcissistic circle? A self-reinforcing loop described by clinical psychologist Martin Appelo: early deficit in unconditional recognition, narcissistic inflation as compensation, resulting deficit in reciprocity, withdrawal of others, confirmation of the founding distrust, further inflation. It explains why narcissistic patterns strengthen over time rather than fading.
What does oersoep mean? Dutch for “primordial soup”: Appelo’s term for the early emotional nourishment, unconditional recognition and safe symbiosis, that every child requires. Both a deficit and an unbounded surplus of it are associated with later narcissistic dynamics, via opposite routes.
Are narcissistic leaders born or made? The evidence points overwhelmingly to made, early: attachment history and childhood validation patterns shape the improvisation. Temperament contributes, and adult environments (power, applause, filtered information) reinforce heavily. Leadership style is an echo of attachment history, as I argue in The Source.
Is it my parents’ fault that I lead this way? Fault is the wrong instrument for a two-generation chain of unmet needs; most parents served the soup they themselves received. The useful question is not who is to blame for the armour but whether you intend to keep wearing it now that it is optional.
Can understanding the origins alone change the pattern? No. Insight without behavioural design dissolves by the next bad quarter; awareness without action is vanity. What changes the pattern is structured, stakeholder-measured behavioural work, for which the origins provide the map but not the vehicle.
Arvid Buit is a master executive coach (ICF, EMCC, APECS, Marshall Goldsmith SCC), founder of TRUE Leadership, and author of Let’s Talk Leadership, Red de Alfawolf (with Martin Appelo) and Wahlberg. Organisational psychology for professional contexts, not clinical advice; if childhood material raises more than professional curiosity, a qualified therapist is the right companion for that work. The full field guide · About the coaching practice