I keep getting messages saying, my narcissist, notice the possessive, my narcissist, like my pet or my deep fryer. My narcissist adores people. He's always surrounded with people. Fans, admirers, followers, accolades, friends, his family. He's never alone. He's the life of the party. You're wrong.
Narcissists are not schizoid. They actually love people.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever about narcissistic abuse. And I'm a professor of clinical psychology. So if I say something, you better pay attention.
And what I say is the following.
Narcissists hold people in contempt, in utter, unmitigated disdain. Deep inside, narcissists hate people virulently.
Get it?
And yes, all people, their spouses, their children, their family, their neighbors, their colleagues, their government. And should aliens land on Earth, narcissists would be the first to hate them and hold them in contempt as infinitely inferior to them, the narcissists.
Get the picture?
Now to your question.
Narcissists go through schizoid phases when they collapse, when they are unable to secure a regular flow of narcissistic supply. These are phases, and they are followed by what is known in psychology as gregariousness. I'll discuss it in a minute.
But before I do, I want to make something very clear.
And this is something, this is a general observation. It doesn't apply only to narcissists.
Liking people is about giving. Liking to be with people is about taking.
They're not one and the same.
Let me repeat this for you, because I love the sound of my voice.
Liking people, empathy is about giving. Liking to be with people, gregariousness, is about taking.
Not one and the same.
When you like people, you want to help people. You want to make people feel good. You want to contribute to people. You want to help people you want to make people feel good you want to contribute to people you want to elevate people you care about people's emotions and well-being when you like people it's all about others not about you.
When you like to be with people it's about you. When you like to be with people, it's about you. It's about taking.
When you like to be with people, it's because people entertain you or because people are helpful to you. Or because there's some benefit, emotional, financial, social, some kind of benefit to you from being around people.
So the motivations, the motivational background is completely different.
Actually, people who like people, people who are empathetic and compassionate and considerate and affectionate, people who are capable of loving and caring for people, sometimes they're schizoid. Sometimes they're not very sociable, but when they come across someone, they're empathic.
While people who like to be with people, very often are misanthropic, they actually hold other people in contempt. They're very critical of other people.
But being with other people, spending time with other people, socializing with other people has its benefits. So they do. It's a form of hypocrisy. They're hypocritical.
Okay, narcissists do not like people. Get it once and for all. Get rid of your malignant optimism.
Narcissists do not like people as a matter of principle because they consider themselves superior to other people. They regard any time spent with people as a total waste of time unless there is some predefined, utterly clear, unambiguous and equivocal benefit.
Otherwise, they regard people as disposable objects. The way you would regard your razor blade.
But many narcissists, actually the majority of narcissists, are gregarious. In other words, they like to socialize, they're extroverted, they like to be with people.
And why is that?
Because people are the only sources of narcissistic supply or the best source of narcissistic supply. It is only by socializing with people that the narcissists can extract narcissistic supply from people.
I've always said in my entire work over the last three decades that narcissists are not antisocial. They are not antisocial. They are not psychopaths.
Narcissists are pro-social. They are communal. They seek other people because of what they can extract from these people, what they can get from these people. They are focused on getting, they are focused on taking from other people.
But in order to take something from another person, you need to be in the company of that other person, of the source.
So bear this distinction in mind as we discuss the psychology of socializing.
Let's start with gregariousness.
Gregariousness is a tendency to enjoy the company of other people, to want to associate with other people in a variety of social activities and settings.
When people are gregarious, when they socialize, they report an elevated sense of security. There's safety in numbers.
People who tend to socialize more than others feel more secure than others. They enjoy the companionship, the acceptance, the sense of belonging.
Even in animals, non-human animals, gregariousness is a tendency, because we see that animals move in packs, in herds, in flocks. Birds of a feather flock together. So animals are always embedded in groups. Even animals which are essentially solitary, for example wolves, they hunt together. So gregariousness has a biological basis.
Asusual in narcissism, the narcissist's gregariousness has nothing to do with the companionship, the acceptance and the sense of belonging that healthy and normal people seek.
The narcissist's gregariousness is exploitative. The aim of the narcissists is to take advantage of other people to somehow use them or leverage them to secure a regular flow, uninterrupted flow of narcissistic supply.
It is the narcissistic supply that gives the narcissist the sense of safety, security, predictability and determinacy.
In other words, the narcissist's secure base is not other people. The narcissist's secure base is what other people can give him or her.
Half of all narcissists are women.
Okay. What does gregariousness have to do with extroversion, or extroversion as it is often mispronounced?
Extroversion is one of the elements of the big five and five facto personality models. Extroversion is an orientation. It's when your interests and energies are directed at the outer world, at the outside, not internalize, not inward looking, but public facing. People, things out there, the environment matter to you when you are an extrovert more than your internal subjective experience.
Extroverts, for example, are much less introspective than introverts. Extroverts are much more sociable than introverts.
Extroversion is a broad personality trait. It exists on a continuum, of course, a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors.
Generally speaking, extroverts are relatively outgoing, gregarious, sociable, openly expressive, and generally, generally speaking, the life of the party.
In Eysenck's dimensional model, extraversion is one of the three personality dimensions.
Again, a narcissism break.
Narcissists are extroverted in the sense that they tend to socialize. They tend to become the focus of attention in a group, the life of the party. They tend to influence or affect the agenda of a group.
For example, by introducing topics for debate, they tend to be ostentatious and spectacular in their social behavior.
So, for example, they would buy a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. It's a form of poppy-cocking. It's a form of ostentatious vanity and attention-seeking behavior.
But it's not extraversion in the healthy normal sense described in the various personality models and also by Jung and others.
It's not this kind of extraversion because this kind of extroversion has to do with the recognition that other people are separate to you, from you. They're external to you. Recognition that other people have their own minds, their own agendas and dreams and hopes and knowledge and wishes and so on.
The narcissist, those of you who have been unfortunate enough to watch my videos, the narcissistis not like that. The narcissist is unable to recognize the externality and separateness of others. I call it the othering problem.
Narcissists treat other people, conceive of other people, and relate to other people as if other people were merely internal objects, representations, avatars, icons, imaginary figments of the imaginational elements in the narcissist's mind.
The narcissist is having constantly a dialogue, but only with himself. And with the population, the internal objects that populate his mind.
And so in this sense, other people are like props in a theater. They're like objects. And these objects represent social functions.
But it is the narcissist in his own mind that is responsible for the entire social interaction on both sides of the equation.
The narcissist is socially interacting only with himself as you may recall the narcissist also finds himself to be sexually attractive he is sexually attracted to himself and again we have a situation where a social activity, which is sex, is self-directed in a process known as auto-erotism.
The narcissist may become attracted to himself sexually via the intercession and intermediation of another person's body.
In other words, he may end up masturbating with another person's body.
But these are bodies, warm bodies, objects in sex and in any other type of social interaction.
The narcissist is solipsistic. He talks to himself. He entertains himself. He is attracted to himself. He debates with himself. He has dialogues within himself.
And all the time he seems to be sociable. He seems to be gregarious. He appears to be willing to interact with other people, actually welcoming the interaction.
But it's all a fake. It's all a facade.
When normal healthy people socialize, they have a multiplicity of motivations to do so. Nature has equipped us with multiple reasons to socialize, to have sex, to reproduce, and even to get married or to form couples.
Everything we do is grounded in our evolution, essentially, and not that I'm a proponent of evolutionary psychology, I'm not. But still, one cannot deny the existence of the brain as the outcome of an evolutionary process.
So one of the reasons people socialize is what is known as the self-serving bias.
The self-serving bias is the tendency to interpret events and activities in a way that assigns credit for success to oneself and at the same time denies one's responsibility for failure. Failure is blamed on external factors and on other people.
So the self-serving bias says whenever I'm successful, it's because of me, because of who I am, because of the effort and investment that I put in. Everything to do with success has to do with me. And everything to do with failure is not my fault. It's other people's fault. It's the circumstances's fault. It's other people's fault. It's the circumstances' fault. It's the environment's fault. It's the government's fault. It's my mother-in-law's fault. And so on and so forth.
And this is known as a self-serving bias. It's a form of self-deception, designed to maintain or regulate, actually, a sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
Now when you socialize with people, you engage in self-serving bias because you are telling yourself two things.
Number one, people like to socialize with me. The socialization process requires reciprocity. You choose to socialize with someone who chooses to socialize with you in return.
This act of selection is self-aggrandizing. It's a form of flattery. It's flattering. It makes you feel self-confident, elevates your self-esteem. So the element of choice.
Similarly, when you choose to associate with someone, you idealize them. You tend to attribute to them traits and behaviors which render them all good or perfect.
What actually you're telling yourself is, I chose to be in the right company and the right company is choosing to be with me. That means that we are both perfect. The company I keep and myself. We have both been chosen. We have both gone through a vetting process. We've both the outcome of selection.
And so this is the self-serving bias and it is much more pronounced among narcissists, of course.
When the narcissist socializes with people, he idealizes them. We'll come to that in a minute.
Above all, we socialize with people because we need to calibrate ourselves. We need to learn what it is that we're doing wrong. What it is, which of our thoughts is abnormal? How better to behave what is common statistically speaking what is typical?
This is a process of calibration and it is known as NFA in psychology or NAF, need for affiliation, the desire to have personal relationships with other individuals.
The need for affiliation manifests itself in the urge to form friendships and attachments and to join collectives, organizations, institutions, clubs, nations, football clubs, you name it. We enjoy social gatherings.
But not everyone has the same level of need for affiliation.
The more regulated your sense of self-worth, the more internal your locus of control, the more sure you are of your identity, the more stable and calm, the less anxious you are, the less you need external regulation, the less you need to associate with other people in order to outsource your psychological requirements.
In other words, you rely on other people much less when you can rely on yourself much more.
And so people with a high need for affiliation often seek the approval and acceptance of other people.
That is typical of narcissists. This is known as narcissistic supply.
Stressful situations typically intensify the need for affiliation.
When you find yourself embedded in a natural disaster or undergoing a life crisis, suddenly your need to socialize increases dramatically because you need to affiliate, you need to be affirmed, you need input from the outside to regulate you, regulate your emotions, regulate your thinking inside. This is known as external regulation.
And so you would tend to gravitate when you're in a state of crisis, you would tend to gravitate to other people who are undergoing the same crisis, like-minded people.
Being part of a group helps to reduce the unpleasantness of a situation. Being part of a group helps to ameliorate and mitigate the uncertainty of the environment.
You are using other people to gain or to create a secure base, to gain a sense of safety in numbers, affiliation and belonging.
Now these observations were first described in 1938 by Henry Alexander Murray and extensively researched much later by David McClelland. Those of you who would like to study more.
All this has to do with what is known as the social instinct. The social instinct is a postulated instinct. No one has measured it. But we can observe its effects, its manifestations, its expression.
The social instinct is a desire for social contact, a feeling of belonging, as manifested by the tendency to congregate, affiliate and engaging group behaviors.
Alfred Adler created a branch or a school of psychology known as individual psychology. He said that the social instinct is an innate drive. We are born with it. It's an innate drive to cooperate with people, to work together in teams, in groups.
And this leads individuals to incorporate social interest and the common good into their efforts to achieve self-realization or self-actualization.
What Adler is saying basically is that when we attempt to gratify ourselves, when we try to accomplish something, when we set life goals and create a life plan for ourselves, when we have a vision of how we should be, this is known as the ego ideal or what we should become or could become self-actualization Abraham Maslow's self-actualization.
When we engage in all this introspection, when we try to get to grips with who we are, our core identity and where we are going, we take into account the common good. We take into account we incorporate other people, the social interest.
And so everything we do ends up being beneficial to us, but also to the greater contributing to the greater good.
Adler said in other words that the social instinct is one of the dimensions of determinants of who we are, not something superimposed on who we are, not something alien to who we are, but an integral part of who we are.
And many scholars who studied the social instinct, they talk about the herd instinct. The herd instinct is common to non-human animals. It's when they congregate in groups, in flocks, in herds, and they form goal-oriented social groups.
In animals, the group has a goal to hunt together, to raise the young, etc. The herd instinct in animals has the equivalent in the social instinct, in humans.
But whereas animals are always goal-oriented, when humans flock together, when humans join forces, when humans socialize, it's not always goal oriented.
Actually, in the majority of cases, it's not goal oriented, or at least not consciously goal oriented.
People talk to each other because it makes them feel better. People talk to each other because in a crisis and they need someone to comfort them and suit them and listen to them. Or people join together to watch a football game.
It's not a goal in the animal sense. It's not something that is a precondition for survival. or the survival of the individual and the survival of the species. It's not survival related.
One could do, one could survive without watching football games. I can tell you this from personal experience.
So people socialize because they socialize. Socialization is its own goal, its own end.
There is a purpose and it's a direction, a behavioral direction.
So socializing is an activity. You make money, that's a goal. You accumulate power. That's a goal. You raise children. That's a goal. You socialize. That's also a goal.
And that sets us apart from animals.
There's only one exception among humans, narcissists and psychopaths.
Narcissists and psychopaths socialize the way animals socialize.
Narcissists and psychopaths socialize because they have a goal in mind.
They socialize because they want money. The psychopath wants money. The psychopath wants money. The psychopath socializes because he wants to have sex that day. Or he wants power. He wants something.
The psychopath wants something. Exactly like an animal would want something when it joins a herd. The animal wants to hunt and eat. The psychopath wants to hunt and become richer or more powerful or sexually seated.
The narcissist joins social groups because he is in need of narcissistic supply. End of story. He's a junkie. The narcissist is a junkie of narcissistic supply. And people are the collective pushers of the drug.
In this sense, psychopaths and narcissists are much closer to animals than to humans in as far as the motivation for socializing goes.
Affiliation is a social relationship. It's when a person joins or seeks out one or more other individuals, usually on the basis of liking or personal attachment, not perceived benefits, material or otherwise.
We affiliate because it makes us feel good. The seeking of cooperative, friendly associations with other people who resemble us, or like, or when we like someone, it's a fundamental human desire. It's what we call affiliation motivation, affiliative drive, affiliated need.
It doesn't have anything to do with accomplishing something, securing a goal, an aim, a purpose. It's not, in other words, a purposeful activity.
But with narcissists and psychopaths, it is.
Narcissists don't seek to affiliate. They don't even seek to belong. Belonging is the feeling of being accepted, being approved by a group or by society as a whole. This is known as belongingness.
Narcissists and psychopaths don't care about belonging because they hold everyone else in contempt and disdain. It is beneath them. It's unbecoming for them to belong to with other people.
Because if you belong with other people, you're equal to them, you're like them.
And narcissists of course are one of a kind. They're Sui generis. No one is like the narcissist. He's godlike. He's far above the madding crowd and the frailty and concerns and foibles of humanity.
When the narcissist and the psychopath join other people in social activities they have something in mind.
The narcissist seeks attention, the life of the party, is the focus of attention.
The psychopath is looking for an angle. Can I take money from this guy? Can I sleep with this woman? That's a psychopath's angle.
In other words, narcissists and psychopaths do not create groups, nor do they belong in what is known as the in-group.
The in-group is any group to which one belongs, however, momentarily. If you spend time with total strangers in a bar waiting for a flight, you have created an impromptu on-the-fly in-group.
Affiliation and belonging immediately emerge, even in a casual encounter, even in casual sex, where the partners are anonymous. The reactions are identical, psychologically speaking.
The feeling that you are a member of a select club, a member of a group, that you belong, that you are affiliated, that there is some allegiance, some loyalty to the group.
When you belong, that you are affiliated, that there is some allegiance, some loyalty to the group. When you belong in a group, you identify with it and you judge the group to be different to other groups.
The in-group is characterized by intense bonds of affiliation. Each member feels a sense of kinship, a degree of loyalty to the other members, by virtue of the common group membership, nothing else.
This is known as the we group, and it was first defined in 1906. Yes, I'm that old. In 1906 by US sociologist William G. Sumner. He died four years later. I hope not because of the work he has been doing.
Okay, Shoshanim.
Narcissists don't seek this. They don't want to create a group, they don't feel good in an in-group.
On the very contrary, when the narcissists and psychopath belong in a group, when they are affiliated, when their allegiance is expected, when they're supposed to be loyal, they feel bad. They feel bad.
The narcissist feels that he has been reduced to the level of the other group members. He's superior. She is godlike. They should never be equal to anyone ever.
They may lead the group as a charismatic leader, but they would never belong to a group.
It's like a famous joke, I would never belong to a club who would accept me as a member.
Okay?
And the psychopath doesn't want to belong to the group because psychopaths don't do loyalty. They don't do belonging, they don't do emotions, they don't do bonding.
They don't do loyalty, they don't do belonging, they don't do emotions, they don't do bonding, they don't do attachment, they don't know any of this nonsense.
Psychopaths are after something, after your money, after your sex, after your contacts, after your access, after your apartment key. I mean they want something from you.
So there's nothing to do with an in-group.
When normal healthy people join forces with other people, in any setting whatsoever, however casual, however limited in time, when people join together, this creates an in-group.
And there is something known as in-group extremity effect.
It's the tendency to describe and to evaluate the other members of the group, their actions, their values, their beliefs, their products, to describe all this in exaggeratedly positive ways.
Now there's a name for that. When you exaggerate the positive qualities of someone, you're idealizing them.
So the in-group extremity effect is an idealization effect.
What happens is when you join with a group of people, you automatically and unconsciously idealize them.
That happens to healthy normal people as well, not only to narcissists.
By idealizing the members of the group, you're actually elevating the group.
You're declaring that the group is special, unique, superior, qualitative.
And because you belong to the group, you are equally superior, equally qualitative, equally elevated, equally exalted.
And this process is known as core idealization.
When you join a group, when you socialize with other people, you tend to idealize them and by idealizing them you idealize yourself because they have chosen you to be with them and they are perfect, they're ideal.
The group itself is idealized and this is known as the in-group extremity effect.
The in-group extremity effect. The in-group extremity effect is divided to many types of misperceptions, delusions, and biases.
Consider, for example, the linguistic intergroup bias.
It's a tendency to describe and evaluate positive behaviors by in-group members and negative behaviors by all group members more abstractly the negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors.
In other words when your in-group members behave positively and when people outside your group, for example, people on the next table in a restaurant, they don't belong in your group.
Only the people around your table belong in your group. The people on the next table in a restaurant, they don't belong in your group. Only the people around your table belong in your group. The people on the next table don't belong in your group.
So there's automatically an in-group and out-group.
When the people around your table in a bar, in a restaurant, behave in a positive way, for example, they pay, they share the bill, or they're funding, or they're interesting, or whatever.
So when they behave in a, or when they have positive traits, and when people in the other table, the out group are perceived as negative because of the way they behave, maybe they are too noisy, maybe they're too rude or whatever.
You tend to regard the positive behaviors of your in-group and the negative behaviors of the out-group in an abstract way.
In other words, you tend to regard these behaviors as the norm, the standard.
And exactly the opposite, when your group behaves negatively and the out group behave positively, then you would tend to say, ah, this is an exception.
This is known as in-group bias.
The tendency to favor one's own group, its members, its characteristics, and its products, particularly in reference to other groups.
The favoring of the in-group tends to be more pronounced than the rejection of the out-group, but both tendencies become very, very clear during periods of inter-group contact.
So when two groups come together, you would tend to idealize your group much more than normal much more than you do normally and you would tend to devalue the other group the out group the group to which you don't belong you would tend to devalue them in a much more pronounced manner this is known as in-group favoritism.
There's a group serving bias.
Anyone of a number of cognitive tendencies that contribute to the overvaluing of one's group, particularly the tendency to credit the group for success and to blame external factors for failures.
This is known as the sociocentricbias. And of course it's a form of cognitive distortion.
There's a fundamental attribution error. The tendency to overestimate the degree to which your behavior is determined by your personal characteristics, attitudes, and beliefs, and to minimize the influence of the surrounding situation on your behavior, financial pressure, social pressure.
In other words, I'm behaving well I'm being altruistic and charitable and being compassionate and caring and loving because that's who I am that's why I am in essence essentially naturally that's why I am this is nothing to do with the environment this is not to do with settings. This is who I am. This is who my group is.
And on the other hand, if the out group behave in a way which is positive, altruistic, charitable, generous, kind, you would say, ah, they are reacting to the environment. They are being influenced by the circumstances. That's not who they are. They are acting. Or maybe even they're hypocritical. They're manipulative.
So this is known as the fundamental attribution bias. It's a correspondence bias or an over-attribution bias. It was first described by the social psychologists, American social psychologist, Lee Ross.
Now, finally, there's the ultimate attribution bias.
It's the tendency for people from one group, the in-group, to determine that any bad acts by members of the out group, a racial out-group, a minority outgroup. Any bad acts by members of the outgroup are caused by the internal attributes or traits of the outgroup.
Again, not by circumstances, not by the situation, but because that's who they are. That's who they are.
And so all these biases and all these cognitive distortions come into play when you join a group even if you're totally healthy and totally normal when you join a group when you join the group you suspend the group, you suspend your own mind, you suspend your judgment.
You adopt group think. You adopt the group's mind, the hive mind of the group.
By becoming a member of the group, you've actually acquired new dimensions of cognition and emotion, new reactivity, and new behaviors, which are typical of the group, not you. This is totally normal. This is totally typical. It is not indicative of any underlying pathology.
Narcissists never join groups. Narcissists may appear to be within the in-group because they imitate and emulate behaviors very astutely. They're great simulators but it doesn't mean that they truly belong that they're affiliated that they have any allegiance or loyalty to the group they're there because it so happens that the group is available and can provide them with narcissistic supply should the narcissistic supply in the group or emanating from the group dry up the narcissist would immediately transition to the other group.
Narcissists have zero loyalty and faithfulness. The narcissist is an opportunistic predator and the psychopath even more so.
So as you can see, spending time with people, socializing with people, even joining in groups with people, even collaborating with people, they mean nothing. They mean nothing.
It's about taking. It's goal oriented.
But when you truly like people, when you truly find people, you're equals, worthy of dignity and of good treatment. When you empathize with people, the emphasis is on the other, not on you.
You would take into account other people's emotions, other people's thinking, values, beliefs, hopes, dreams, expectations, and you would accommodate them, and you would modify your behaviors, and you would adjust yourselfin order to fit in with them not to cause harm not to hurt not to inflict pain.
A narcissist and psychopath would never do this, never ever. They don't like people. They hate people.
People are disgusting and stupid and inferior, contemptible. They don't like people. They like being around people.
Because they can take things. They can take money. They can take sex. They can take narcissistic supply.
It's about the taking.
When you like people, you give.
When you hate people, you take.
When you like being around people and spending time with people, you take.
When you truly like people, you don't necessarily socialize. You are not necessarily an extrovert.
It's simply a mode of reaction. It's simply a triggered automatic behavior.
When you like people and you find yourself around people, you treat them well, not yourself, you treat them well.
Narcissists and psychopaths, this thought would never occur to them. They would find this wimpy and weak and stupid.
And they would move on in social circles, become the life of the party, attract attention, entertain, you name it.
At the end of the day, at the end of the day, they will devour you and cast your shell aside and move on to the next victim, the next commodity, the next consumable object, because that's what people are to them. Nothing more than consumables.