Collapse is when the narcissists can no longer secure an uninterrupted flow of high quality narcissistic supply, any kind of attention, actually.
When there's a failure, a systemic failure in obtaining supply, despite all the stratagems, all the variants, all the activities, all the attempts, all the collaborations, nothing works.
The narcissist tries everything imaginable and many unimaginable things and nothing works. There's no narcissistic supply. The narcissist is ignored, ridiculed, rejected, abandoned, forgotten, obscured, and then nothing is left.
This is a state of collapse. This is what is known as narcissistic collapse.
Not failed narcissist. Many self-styled experts use the phrase failed narcissist, which is completely wrong. A failed narcissist is actually a borderline. A collapsed narcissist.
And today we're going to discuss the narcissist's internal reaction, affective reaction to the state of collapse, because collapse has profound impacts on the narcissist's internal world, emotional regulation, mood lability, perception, cognition, you name it.
Collapse, in other words, alters, transforms and transmogrifies the narcissist.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, and a collapsing professor of clinical psychology, which in itself is a discipline in a state of total collapse. So many collapses in one sentence. You've got to give me credit for that at least.
Collapse has a lot to do with entitlement.
Entitlement is the feeling that the narcissist harbors that he or she deserves special treatment by special people, regardless of any investment, any commitment, any hard work, any true life accomplishment.
There is a gap, a discrepancy. The narcissist's feeling of entitlement is incommensurate with real-life achievements, real-life effort and real-life planning, or goal or in goal planning.
So the narcissist walks through life, and he believes, I'm going to use the male gender pronoun, okay, although half of all narcissists are women.
So the narcissist walks through life and he believes that he deserves everything. He deserves the best, he deserves the most. He deserves before other people deserve. He has desert. He is in a state of constant desert just for existing, just because he exists.
He believes that his presence is a sufficient contribution. And that by bringing himself into a conversation, into a workplace, into a relationship, just by bringing himself there, he's making a major concession.
He over-evaluates, overestimates his own participation. This is known as overperception.
So this is entitlement.
But this is the superficial way of looking at entitlement. This is the operational way, the functional way.
Lassie says, you owe me that, I deserve that, give me that. This should be mine, not yours.
There's a lot of envy embedded in entitlement. Entitlement is envy driven. Envy is one of the diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorder.
But all this is again on the surface.
What's under the surface is that narcissists identifies entitlement with unconditional love. Entitlement is the flip side of unconditional love.
It's as if the universe has, should in the narcissist's mind, the universe should love the narcissists unconditionally, should give the narcissists unconditionally.
So this is the entitlement.
The narcissist as a child has been deprived of and denied unconditional love. Any love the narcissist has received as a child would have been predicated or conditioned upon performance. Or in many cases it would have been absent altogether.
Whatever the path, the developmental path that led to narcissism, adversarial path, adverse childhood experiences, tampering and spoiling and idolizing, instrumentalizing, parentifying, all these paths lead to narcissistic personality disorder in some cases, but all of them involve the absence of the lack of a kind of maternal love, mainly maternal, the mother is the key, the kind of maternal love that is utterly disconnected from, not related to, is not conditioned upon and doesn't depend on the child's performance.
And so the narcissist goes through life, looking for unconditional love.
And what's the best way to prove, demonstrate unconditional love to exhibit it is to give the narcissist what he does not deserve.
So if you give someone something that is not the outcome of self-interest, not the outcome of any performance on the part of the recipient, then you love the recipient unconditionally, clearly. Giving is loving, sharing is caring.
And the narcissist goes through life feeling that he's entitled to unconditional love, because everyone else has had unconditional love at least once in a lifetime during early childhood. The narcissist didn't have it so now he deserves it, he deserved this and this is entitlement collapse.
Therefore, when the narcissist is denied this unconditional love, denied attention, denied narcissistic supply, is ignored, placed in a corner, rejected, mocked, demeaned, shamed, humiliated. When any of these happen, the ensuing collapse is perceived as a loss of unconditional love even more profoundly as a loss of maternal love.
It's as if the entire universe, so at the very least the human environment in which a narcissist finds himself embedded, they are mother's substitutes. And if they don't give the narcissist unconditional love and cater to his entitlement, then this proves they don't love him and they don't love him unconditionally.
What do we do when we are denied maternal love? What do we do?
When we lose something that matters to us a lot, like narcissistic supplies, something we depend on, something that defines us.
Narcissistic supply is a kind of drug, there's an addiction involved, but the addiction is to external regulation.
Narcissists supply attention, the other people's gaze to be seen by other people, to be noticed by other people. This allows the narcissist to regulate his internal environment using these external inputs and external feedback. This is external regulation.
When this is absent, it's a major loss. Possibly in the narcissist's life, it's THE major loss.
And of course, every loss engenders grief. Narcissists grieve a state of collapse.
In the wake of collapse, the narcissist feels that he or she has lost something, they have lost something that is, you know, immeasurably critical, something that is actually co-extant or tantamount to their core identity. They have lost, in other words, themselves.
So the grief is huge. It is grief over an external aspect of reality, the narcissistic supply that emanates from other people, but it is also grief about the obliteration of the internal landscape, the internal objects that represent sources of narcissistic supply and are no longer active or cannot be active, and the loss of one's self, one's ego, one's sense of self-worth, all these are constructed on the fly by the narcissist from inputs provided from other people, by other people.
So it's like a hive mind.
When the narcissist finds himself all alone, alone, abandoned, ignored, neglected, rejected, the narcissist is unable to construct minute by minute, day by day, on the fly, a sense of self, a sense of core identity.
And at the same time the narcissist is unable to carry out regulatory functions, emotional regulation, mood regulation or mood stabilization, and the regulation of a sense of self-worth.
So as you see, the loss is huge. And the grief is commensurately huge.
One could even say, one could go as far as saying that collapse is a form of internal mortification.
Back off for a minute, Vaknin. What is mortification?
Narcissistic mortification is the sudden, abrupt, unexpected, humiliation and shaming of the narcissist by another person. The infliction of a narcissistic injury or narcissistic wound that is so massive that it actually consumes the totality of the narcissist.
And it must be sudden. It must be unexpected and abrupt so that the narcissist's defenses are not at the ready.
In the majority of cases, this generates a huge sense of shame because thenarcissist, denuded of his defenses, is then unable to fend off the early childhood reservoir of shame inside.
Many scholars believe that narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a compensation for shame.
And when it's gone, when the defenses are down, when there's a process called decompensation, the shame erupts, erupts volcanically, and reduces the narcissists to ashes.
So, in a state of collapse, the main effect is shame, life-threatening shame that leads later to depression.
So this is classic narcissistic mortification.
Usually narcissistic mortification is amplified tenfold if the humiliation and the shaming are done publicly, especially in front of peers, significant others, role models of the narcissist and so.
But there is a possibility of internal mortification.
Internal mortification is a form of collapse. It's the shaming and humiliation of the narcissist in front of an internal audience, self-audiencing.
The narcissist becomes his or her own audience.
And then the failure to obtain supply is shameful, is humiliating, is degrading, is denigrating and demeaning.
So the failure to obtain supply is the narcissistic injury that is abrupt and sudden in front of an audience that is actually the narcissists himself or herself, a process known as self-audiencing in self-supply.
But Vaknin, you say, the process of collapse is a process, not an event. There are warning signs that the narcissistic collapse is dwindling and waning.
The narcissist should be aware that soon, shortly, the spigot of narcissistic supply is going to be turned off and the flow is going to cease.
In other words, while in external narcissistic mortification, the humiliation, the shaming, the rejection, the abandonment, the mocking and ridiculing are abrupt and sudden and destabilizing and decompensating, in internal mortification, this should not be the case, because the narcissist should be able to predict the imminent, oncoming, looming collapse.
And yet, the narcissist perceives the collapse as a point-like event, which is sudden and abrupt.
And the reason is, because the narcissist constantly denies the signs of the imminence of the collapse.
Whenever the narcissist is confronted with some fact or some utterance or some behavior, which indicate that soon, soon, very soon, imminently, there's gonna be a collapse.
The narcissist denies these signs, ignores this data and information, reframes them, and somehow succeeds to pretend that collapse is not around the corner.
Which is why narcissists often involve in the collapse of companies, in the collapse of countries, because they deny reality. They have impaired reality testing.
So internal mortification, although admittedly and indeed being a process, is perceived by the narcissist to be an event because of the denial of all precursors and all paths leading to the collapse.
So both external mortification and internal mortification are experienced as sudden and abrupt, destabilizing and deregulating.
Now, grief is at the core of pathological narcissism, together with shame. The narcissist actually grieves himself because he is constantly ashamed.
Narcissists, remember, are two-year-old infants who are trapped in a post-traumatic condition characterized by a perpetual prolonged, complicated grief coupled with depression.
They grieve the forlorn relationship with the mother. They grieve who they could have become and never would be. They grieve their breached boundaries. They grieve the way they've been abused and mistreated.
There are many things to grieve in the narcissist's early life history.
So grief is a prominent feature of pathological narcissism.
Already in 1942, Harvey Cleckley hypothesized that narcissists and psychopaths may be actually emotionally hypersensitive and inordinately intelligent.
Be that as it may, because these contentions are disputable, these disorders, especially pathological narcissism, are defensive attempts to wall off, to isolate, to firewall emotions that were at the time in early childhood so profound that they threatened to overwhelm and disregulate the narcissist.
So as a child, the narcissist learned the arts of burying and repressing and suppressing and denying emotions, especially positive emotions, because positive emotions got linked with negative outcomes. Love led to pain. Attachment led to hurt and rejection. The narcissist learned to not do any of these.
So these are defensive attempts.
And there is a post-traumatic state.
Narcissism, other Cluster B personalities, these are post-traumatic states. And they can best be described as complicated grief or prolonged grief reactions.
A later scholar, J. S. Grothstein suggested in 1984 that borderline personality disorder was the outcome of a failed effort by the child to deploy pathological narcissism in order to avert and forestall ominous emotional reactions to extreme abuse.
Kernberg, Otto Kernberg called narcissism a defense against the emotional dysregulation of the borderline.
We see here some kind of devastation, system wide devastation and chaos, where there are desperate attempts by the individual to somehow defend against these internal scenes of battle and conflict.
And all this is so self-harming and so self-negating that there's a lot of grief, there's a lot of mourning involved.
The individual mourns who he is and the individual mourns who he could have become and would never be and the individual mourns the impossibility of meaningful relationships and the individual has a lot to mourn.
Self-destructiveness and self-defeat, there's a lot to grieve in the narcissist's life.
And in the wake of collapse, there is this process of grieving over the loss of narcissistic supply, a major loss, as I said.
So there are stages of grief in the wake of collapse.
And what I'm about to say now in the remainder of the video applies to any kind of grief.
It is a major expansion of the classic model by the Swiss, American, I think, psychiatrist, Kubler-Ross, came up with the five stages of grief.
I think there are many more than five. Others think there are many more than five, Kessler and others.
And I created this chart of stages of grief which comprises or incorporates Kubler-Ross and extends it massively.
And it applies to any kind of grief, but it definitely applies to grief and mourning experienced by narcissists.
As a general state, a background noise, but more acutely in the wake of collapse or internal mortification.
It starts with shock.
Because the collapse is experienced as abrupt and sudden and unpredictable and unjustified, there's shock.
And the reaction to the shock is numbing, emotional numbing, and reduced affect display.
The narcissist essentially freezes. His face becomes an indecipherable mask, more like a statue, a statue, than, let's say, a poker face. He becomes a marble, a marble simulation of a human being.
Following the shock and the numbness, there is denial initially. The narcissist denies what has happened. It's too much to bear, it's intolerable, it's unacceptable.
And Freud himself taught us that when we are faced with, when we confront experiences which are highly traumatizing and challenge our self-concept or the way we see the world and so forth, we deny these experiences. We pretend they've never happened. This is also known as dissociation, so dissociative reaction.
But there's only that much that someone can deny, even a narcissist. At some point, reality intrudes and pushes back. The narcissist has to accept that something really horrible has happened. He or she has been rejected or mocked or ridiculed or shamed or humiliated or whatever.
Narcissist has to accept the state of mortification, external or internal.
And so the denial metamorphosizes into anger. It becomes anger, rage in the case of the narcissists.
Narcissists are capable of narcissistic rage. An observation first made by Heinz Kohut.
So the narcissists go into tirades and temper tantrums in the wake of the denial.
But as the narcissist assimilates the fact that there's no narcissistic supply to be had, no attention to be harvested or garnered, fear settles in.
The narcissist dreads mortally the absence of narcissistic supply because the narcissist derives his own sense of existing via narcissistic supply. The narcissist becomes through narcissistic supply.
Narcissistic supply mediates the narcissistic sense of being.
In the absence of narcissistic supply, the narcissist feels that he is dissolving into so many molecules, like in the famous painting by Dalí, Galatea.
And so he is dissolving. The narcissist feels that he's falling apart about to disappear altogether and to vanish.
And it creates angst, dread, fear, even more than anxiety, existential anxiety, fear. Fear leads to panic and panic leads to a loss of control or self-control and a loss of self-control leads to disintegration.
First decompensation, all the defenses are down, they're no longer active or efficacious, and then the narcissist simply vanishes.
He does not experience himself as alive or as existing or as occupying a space or as present.
I'm at a loss of words on how to describe this internal experience of absence, of not being.
But it is probably the most terrifying thing ever.
Perhaps the closest comparison I can make is if you were in a coma, in a vegetative state, and you would be able to experience this coma or vegetative state as an absence of yourself.
Gradually, the narcissist emerges from this dissolution, from this dispersion and at some point the narcissist feels guilty.
He soul searches, but not guilty in soul searching in the classical sense.
I did something wrong, I'm so sorry, I'm remorseful, I'm regretful, no, guilty about having failed.
The soul searching is about the failure of efficacy.
When the narcissist experiences collapse, his self-efficacy goes down to zero.
His sense that he is efficacious, that he is capable of securing positive outcomes from the environment, this sense collapses together with the actual collapse and goes down to zero.
And the narcissist asks himself, what have I done wrong? What could I have done differently? How could I have acted in a way that would have somehow sustained and guaranteed and buttressed my self-efficacy?
The soul searching is about constructing an alternative mode of action for collapse to never happen again.
So it's not so much soul searching as I would say SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and so on.
Having done that, the narcissist feels that he has regained a modicum of control, over himself at least.
He begins to interact with himself. He begins to serve as audience to himself. He begins to resupply himself somehow.
To do that, the narcissist needs to isolate himself. He needs to be in an environment that would never challenge him, never undermine his incipient baby steps back to narcissistic supply.
The narcissist becomes schizoid in order to avoid threats from the environment. The human environment pushes back on the narcissist inflated, fantastic, ridiculous self-concept and self-perception. It's very difficult to deceive yourself into believing that you are godlike when you're among human beings.
They don't let you.
So to cheat himself, to somehow reconstruct the narrative that he is godlike, that is divine, that is impeccable and perfect, error-free, omniscient and omnipotent, to reconstruct in short the cognitive distortion known as grandiosity, this misperception of one's self-conceptive.
To do that, the narcissist needs to be alone, completely alone, because at this stage is very vulnerable.
And any countervailing data or information from reality could impede, undermine, obstruct the process of reconstruction.
So there's a period of isolation.
During this period of isolation, the narcissist, as I said, reconstructs a grandiose narrative, begins to believe in it himself, self-supplies and somehow resuscitates or is revived, somehow re-emerges into vivaciousness.
And all this is done in isolation.
During this period of self-imposed hermetic state, the narcissist searches for a fantasy.
The fantasy is an organizing principle. It's a movie within which the narcissist operates and in which he resides. So he inhabits the fantasy. It becomes his habitat, his ecosystem. He creates a new fantasy. Why new? Because the old one has failed. The old one has led to the collapse. So he needs a completely new story. Sometimes narcissists emerge from this hibernation phase so changed that they're unrecognizable to their loved ones, nearest, dearest and so. And so it's a bit like the transformations of insects, you know, from larva to butterfly and cocoons and all these stages of the insect. So, narcissists searches for a fantasy on his way to becoming a butterfly and emerging from his cocoon. At this point, the narcissist feels sufficiently equipped to confront reality yet again he has a fantasy he has a narrative he is self-sufficient and self-contained because he self-supplies he is his own best audience he thinks that he is able now to cope with reality much more efficiently because he developed or redeveloped self-efficacy and found new ways, new strategies, new techniques of securing supply. If he is equipped, if he's armed, if he's ready to take on reality again, but on his own terms and conditions, of course.
So the narcissus begins to bargain with reality. I'm going to reintegrate in you, he says to reality, only if you act in certain ways or change in certain ways or react to me in certain ways. So there's a bargaining process between the narcissists and his reality. When I say his reality, I mean mostly other people. Narciss begins to negotiate with other people. It's not about compromising. It's about molding other people, brainwashing other people.
It's not about compromising. It's about molding other people, brainwashing other people, and training other people, preparing the ground with other people, converting other people to the new religion of the Nazis. So the bargaining phase is coercive, immersive, and involves substantial changes in the identities of everyone around the narcissists.
This is coupled mysteriously with depression.
The bargaining phase usually fails. Initially, the bargaining phase usually fails, initially. Initially, the bargaining phase fails. As people around the narcissists have witnessed the collapse. They have witnessed the narcissus, withdraw, isolate himself. They've witnessed the nauseous inability to act efficiently, to react maturely, they are disappointed and disillusioned and disenchanted by the narcissus. And to find completely new sources of supply is a lot of work. It's a conversion process, long-term investment and so on.
Narcissus is too depleted to do that. Initially he reverts to people around him that have been around him while he has collapsed. So the initial bargaining phase doesn't work to him.
People are far from convinced. The narcissist acted as a leader, as a strong person, as a resilient, as super intelligent as this and that, and then suddenly he falls apart and acts like a two-year-old baby, toddler. And that's a very disconcerting, disconcerting sight. So people hold back, they're waiting to see what happens. This induces in the narcissist depression. The frustration becomes aggression and the aggression is self-ized and directed at the self and it becomes depression
then what the narcissists does during this depressive phase he tries to reach out and test his human environment sometimes physical, and so it tries to test. Finally, the narcissist is forced to accept reality as it is. He is forced to accept that he has gone through a stage of collapse, that it would take a lot of time and a lot of work, and a lot of effort, and a lot of imagination, and a lot of work and a lot of effort and a lot of imagination and a lot of charisma and superficial charm to convert people around him back to the cause and to accept his new shared fantasy so he accepts reality, accepts reality, imposes on it the new narrative.
Gradually people come around, come round to his point of view, to his new story, to his new movie. He succeeds to convert new people to the cause.
It's a long drawn-out process. Recovering from collapse could take years.
And then the narcissist finds meaning and hope in the new narrative. And that is the end of the grieving process.
And the narcissist is again reconstituted the way he has always been and obnoxious, disempathic, insensitive, exploitative, envious, aggressive person, out to use people as props and actors in a theatre production, the theatre production that is his life.