Chapter Two: Uniqueness And Intimacy, Part 4

Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisit
by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

(Page 8 of 8)

DESTROYING THE FRUSTRATING OBJECT

Other narcissists "choose" to destroy the object that gives them so much grief by provoking in them feelings of inadequacy and frustration. They display obsessive, blind animosity and engage in a compulsive acts of rivalry often at the cost of self-destruction and self-isolation.

In my essay "The Dance of Jael", [Vaknin, Sam. After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. Prague and Skopje, Narcissus Publications, 2000 – pp. 76-81] I wrote:

"This hydra has many heads. From scratching the paint of new cars and flattening their tyres, to spreading vicious gossip, to media-hyped arrests of successful and rich businessmen, to wars against advantaged neighbours.

The stifling, condensed vapours of envy cannot be dispersed. They invade their victims, their rageful eyes, their calculating souls, they guide their hands in evil doings and dip their tongues in vitriol… (The envious narcissist's existence is) a constant hiss, a tangible malice, the piercing of a thousand eyes. The imminence and immanence of violence. The poisoned joy of depriving the other of that which you don't or cannot have."

SELF-DEPRECATION

"There are those narcissists who idealise the successful and the rich and the lucky. They attribute to them super-human, almost divine, qualities…

In an effort to justify the agonising disparities between themselves and others, they humble themselves as they elevate the others. They reduce and diminish their own gifts, they disparage their own achievements, they degrade their own possessions and look with disdain and contempt upon their nearest and dearest, who are unable to discern their fundamental shortcomings. They feel worthy only of abasement and punishment. Besieged by guilt and remorse, voided of self-esteem, perpetually self-hating and self-deprecating – this is by far the more dangerous species of narcissist.

For he who derives contentment from his own humiliation cannot but derive happiness from the downfall of others. Indeed, most of them end up driving the objects of their own devotion and adulation to destruction and decrepitude… "

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

"… But the most common reaction is the good old cognitive dissonance. It is to believe that the grapes are sour rather than to admit that they are craved.

These people devalue the source of their frustration and envy. They find faults, unattractive features, high costs to pay, immorality in everything they really most desire and aspire to and in everyone who has attained that which they so often can't. They walk amongst us, critical and self-righteous, inflated with a justice of their making and secure in the wisdom of being what they are rather than what they could have been and really wish to be. They make a virtue of jejune abstention, of wishful constipation, of judgemental neutrality, this oxymoron, the favourite of the disabled."

AVOIDANCE - THE SCHIZOID SOLUTION

And then, of course, there is avoidance. To witness the success and joy of others is too painful, too high a price to pay. So, the narcissist stays away, alone and incommunicado. He inhabits the artificial bubble that is his world where he is king and country, law and yardstick, the one and only. The narcissist becomes the resident of his own burgeoning delusions. He is happy and soothed.

But the narcissist must justify to himself – on those rare occasions that he does catch a glimpse of his internal turmoil – why all this hatred and why the envy. The object of envy and hatred has to be magnified, glorified, idealised, demonised or elevated to superhuman levels to account for the narcissist's strong negative emotions. Outstanding qualities, skills and abilities are attributed to it and the object of these emotions is perceived to possess all the traits that the narcissist would have liked to have but doesn't. This is very different from the purer, healthier, forms of hate directed at an object, which is genuinely – or is genuinely perceived to be – ominous, dangerous, or sadistic. In the healthy case, the properties of the hated object are not ones the hating person would have liked to possess! Hatred is thus used to eliminate a source of frustration, which sadistically attacks the self.

Jealousy is aimed at another person, who sadistically – or provocatively – prevents the jealous self from getting desirable things.

Most narcissists had a functioning parent – but one that was indifferent to them and used them for his own narcissistic ends. Narcissists tend to breed narcissists and perpetuate their condition. The conflict with the frustrating parent is carried forward and reconstructed in intimate relationships. The narcissist will likely direct all the major transformations of aggression towards his spouse, partner, and friends. He hates, hates to admit it, sublimates and explodes in an occasional outburst of rage. The more intimate the relationship, the more the other party has to lose by severing it, the more dependent the narcissist's partner is on the relationship and on the narcissist – the more likely is the narcissist to be aggressive, hostile, envious, and hating. This serves a dual function: as an outlet for pent up aggression – and as a kind of test.

The narcissist is putting meaningful people in his life to a constant test: will they accept him "as he is", however obnoxious? In other words, do people love him in the essence – or do they like the image that he so elaborately projects? A narcissist cannot understand – or believe – that as far as normal people go, the difference between what they "really" are and the public persona is limited and, mostly, negligible. In his case, the gap between the two is so substantial that he resorts to extreme means to ascertain WHICH of the two do people around him really love – or, rather, who is it that they profess to love.

The narcissist concludes that if people choose to hang on to their relationships with him despite his despicable, intolerable behaviour – than he must be as unique and precious as he feels himself to be. The narcissist's aggression leads to his reassurance on a continuous basis. When not possessed of the right set of victims – the narcissist indulges in fantasies of unmitigated aggression and sadism. He might find himself identifying with figures of outstanding cruelty in human history or with periods, which represent peaks of human degradation.

So, the narcissist's intimate relationship are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction: love-hate, well wishing and envy, fear of being abandoned with a wish to be left alone, control and paranoid fears of persecution. The mental armies are aligned along the great divide of the primal trauma and the later, compounding experiences. The narcissist's psyche is torn in an all-pervasive conflict which never ceases to torment him, regardless of external or extenuating circumstances.

Mental Map # 1

Bad, unpredictable, inconsistent, threatening object leads to defective internalisation (introjection of bad objects) and to an unresolved Oedipal conflict.

Damaged object relations aggression, envy, hatred
Low self-esteem
Fear that these emotions will erupt.
Narcissistic defence mechanisms
Repression of all emotions, good and bad (the self as object)
Compensatory functions
Redirection of negative emotions at the self)
Grandiosity, fantasies
Avoidance of emotional situations
Uniqueness, demands adulation, "I deserve" (entitlement).
Intellectual compensation, exploitativeness, envy, lack of empathy, haughtiness.
Objectification of the OTHER
Formation of False Self (FF)
Defective interpersonal relationships
(transference relationships)
Narcissistic Supply Sources (NSS)
Fear of the (potentially) meaningful
(=external fortification of FF) other:
1. Touching upon deep emotions will provoke negative ones
2. Fear of abandonment
(result of mal-nourishment of True Self – TF)
3. Narcissistic vulnerability: True Self – (TF)
a. Negation of uniqueness
b. Ego hurt when abandoned
Anhedonia and Disphoria
Feeling of Annulment, disintegration (of TF)
Fear of exposure, condemnation, persecution (FF)
Ego-Dystonia (stress)

The above mental map includes three basic building blocks of the soul of a narcissist: the True Self, the False Self and the Narcissistic Sources of Supply.

About the Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited. His Web site " is an Open Directory Cool Site and a Psych-UK recommended Site. Sam is not a mental health professional though he is certified in