Narcissists firmly believe that they are unique.
He says that you are unique, but are you?
What the heck is uniqueness?
How to define this elusive concept?
How to capture it?
This is the topic of today's unique video.
By the unique Sambakhnin, the unique author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a unique visiting professor of psychology, and uniquely on the faculty of CEOPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies.
You will be hearing the word unique and uniqueness uniquely on this video.
Stay tuned.
Try to survive this.
One way to look at the idealization-devalluation cycle in the shared fantasy is as temporal splitting.
Let me remind you what is splitting.
Splitting is an infantile, primitive defense mechanism.
People who split have something called dichotomous thinking.
They divide the world into all good and all bad, all black and all white, all right and all wrong, all something and all the opposite.
This is splitting.
Now, idealization is the opposite of devaluation, and devaluation is the antithesis of idealization.
And yet, they're applied to the same person, only at different points in time.
So we could say that the narcissist splits his intimate partner or friend or child.
The narcissist splits the object of intimacy, the person with whom he is having an interpersonal relationship, a shared fantasy.
The narcissist splits this person.
At the beginning, this person is all good, perfect.
And at the end, this person is all bad and even evil.
So there is a process of splitting, but it is temporal splitting.
It is splitting in time of the same person.
In both cases, the idealization and the devaluation involve uniqueness.
The idealized object is perceived as unique, unprecedented, amazing, perfect.
The devalued object is perceived as exceedingly malevolent and malicious, evil to the point of demonizing it.
So idealization devaluation is splitting, smeared, spread over time, and it is splitting of the same object by attributing to the object perfection, positive perfection or negative perfection.
In other words, by attributing to the split object, attributing to her or to him uniqueness.
The narcissist is faced with a serious existential problem, one of many.
Everyone is unique.
Stop to think about it for me.
Everyone is a unique specimen.
There is an arrow of time which is unidirectional.
Time flows from the past to the future, never backwards.
So just by virtue of having been born at a specific moment in time, you're unique.
This moment in time never recurs.
You share this uniqueness with a few thousands other people.
But then as your autobiography unfolds and your personal history accumulates, you become more and more unique.
More and more unique because everyone, every human being is non-repeatable, non-replicable.
No one is someone else's perfect copy.
Even two people who are very much the same, identical twins, for example, experience life differently, have different emotions and cognitions.
This renders them unique, special.
It's also the main problem with psychology and why it is a pseudoscience rather than science.
But we will leave it aside.
Everyone is non-repeatable.
Everyone is non-replicable.
Everyone is non-copyable from one nanosecond to the next.
The concepts of self, core identity, which are immutable, are of course counterfactual nonsense.
We change, we transform every split second.
We are like a river.
No one can step into a river, into the same river twice.
Our brain, a typical brain, fires 220 trillion times a second.
Yes, you heard me right.
The neurons in the brain discharge electrically and electrochemically, 228 trillion times a second.
The number of permutations between these neurons exceeds all the elementary particles in the universe since its inception.
The entire age of the universe is not sufficient to capture one hour of activity in the brain.
Yes, the universe excluding the brain, of course.
So we are all unique, period.
That's not debatable.
If I were to commit suicide right now, which would please an inordinate number of you, if I were to commit suicide right this very second, the universe will never be the same.
That's simply a fact.
Without me, by definition, the universe is not the same because the universe includes me and I am a constituent part of the universe, a great argument to never ever unalive yourself.
As the saying goes, so we are all unique.
And the narcissist fallacy is, the narcissist says, if everyone is unique, no one is unique. And the only way to be unique is to not be unique like everybody else. This convoluted kind of thinking is typical to narcissists. Let us try to deconstruct the impossible, to try to untangle the narcissist strands of dysregulated thought, aka cognitive distortions. The narcissist says, if everyone is unique, if everybody is unique in some way, however minimal, then no one is unique.
Uniqueness is not unique.
So the only way to be unique is to not be unique because that's unique.
And how to not be unique?
That is the core of the narcissist dilemma.
The narcissist's constant attempts, constant efforts to render himself unique actually drive him to become more and more like other people.
I call it the facade of normalcy and how we correctly called it the mask of sanity.
The more the narcissist endeavors to become unique, the less unique he becomes because everybody else is doing exactly the same.
The narcissist's options are to withdraw from society, to avoid it somehow, thereby rendering himself a recluse or a hermit, which is indeed unique, or to destroy society, to destroy everyone around him so that there's no basis for comparison and no competition.
This is precisely the engine, the engine that drives the narcissist's extreme aggression, disguised as sublimated competitiveness.
Monkeys must deny the uniqueness of other people, either by eliminating them, eradicating and obliterating everything that sets them apart, or by emphasizing commonalities so as to denude them or deny them their uniqueness.
At the same time, even as he is attempting to expose commonalities among people so as to render them less unique, he is denying the applicability of these commonalities to himself.
He is negating the denominator common to him and to other people.
He sets himself apart.
This is a slippery slope because it involves a series of logical fallacies.
The narcissist often ends up denying his own uniqueness.
In his attempts to stand out, he becomes like everybody else.
In his attempts, in his efforts to destroy everybody else's uniqueness, he renders himself effectively invisible.
This is why the narcissist chooses to idealize or to devalue a subset of internal objects that represent people out there, external objects.
The narcissist is unable, as you know by now, those of you who have been unfortunate enough to listen to me, the narcissist cannot perceive the externality and separateness of other people.
He cannot do othering.
The narcissist does not do othering.
They do not do the other.
They convert people into internal objects.
And then he idealizes these snapshots, these introjects.
He idealizes them and he renders them unique in his mind.
Later on, he engages in coercive snapshotting.
He tries to coerce people to conform to the internal object that represents them in his mind.
He fails typically and then he devalues them.
Devalluation equally involves uniqueness, as I've explained a bit earlier.
So the narcissist ends up with a group of internal objects, all of them unique positively or negatively.
And this is the way the narcissist experiences his own uniqueness.
It is vicarious uniqueness, uniqueness by proxy.
It's as if you imagine that you were a collector, you were collecting ancient books, you were a bibliophile, you were collecting first editions.
Your uniqueness would be defined by your collection, your collection of ancient books in Kuna Bula, Palimpsas, and I don't know what.
This collection would render you unique.
The same with the narcissist.
The narcissist collects internal objects.
Then in his mind, he photoshops them, he renders them unique.
And it is by virtue of possessing this internal landscape, this internal space replete with these internal objects which are now unique.
By virtue of possessing all this, the narcissist becomes unique.
The narcissist's uniqueness is a derivative of the uniqueness of the internal objects in the narcissist's mind.
But this raises some philosophical and logical questions.
Is being unique, is being special, the property of an object, let's say a human being, even an internal object, being unique independent of the existence or the actions of observers, or is being unique a product of the common judgment of a group of people, a group of reference, a reference group, role models, for example.
That's a very, it's a question that keeps haunting and tormenting the narcissist.
The narcissist harbors in his mind, the narcissist has inside his mind, several internal objects concurrently, all of them idealized or devalued, and in any case unique.
The possession of these unique objects inside his mind renders him unique.
But does he need to communicate this uniqueness to others in order for this uniqueness to come into being, to emerge?
Does the opinion of other people, the judgment of other people, are these crucial to the verification of the veracity of the narcissist's uniqueness?
Or can the narcissist stay at home and say, "I'm unique because I possess a host of unique internal objects and I don't want, I don't need anyone to tell me that this is so."
Actually narcissist fluctuates between these two solutions.
Sometimes they seek external approbation and approval and confirmation of the uniqueness of their own internal objects and by extension of their own uniqueness.
And sometimes they stay at home and they tell themselves how unique they are.
And this is of course self-supply.
In the first case, when the uniqueness of an object is independent of the existence of observers, every human being is special, one of a kind, sui genovis, unique.
The property of being unique is not context dependent.
It is a ding an sich, an womanan in philosophical lingo.
In this case, the narcissist just needs to convince himself that his intimate partner, for example, is a unique specimen.
By idealizing her, he accomplishes this goal.
And then inside his head, there's an internal object, an avatar, that represents her and it is of course as unique as she is.
And by virtue of possessing this avatar, manipulating it, controlling it, defining it, by virtue of all this, the narcissist himself is rendered unique.
Uniqueness in this case is the emergent outcome of a unique assembly, collection of data with a one of its kind list of specifications, personal history, character, social network, and so on and so forth.
Narcissist creates a spec list or a job description for people in his social milieu and potential partners in his shared fantasy and so on.
And then he makes them meet these criteria in his mind.
And this is what we call idealization.
Our idealization is where the narcissist says, "I'm unique because the internal objects in my mind that represents the people in my life, they are unique." Not two individuals are identical.
Not even the delusional narcissist would deny this.
The question in the narcissist's mind is, where does this difference, where does the fact that people are distinguishable from each other, where does the difference turn into uniqueness?
It's one thing to be different to one another, and it's another thing to be unique in the narcissist's mind.
The narcissist does not understand that they are one and the same.
If you are different to someone, if you are different to everybody else, then you are unique.
In the narcissist's mind, there are numerous traits and characteristics common to two specimens of the same species and even across species.
Shared DNA, for example, across species.
So the narcissist says, "The commonalities overwhelm the differences." Only in my case, the differences overwhelm the commonalities.
The commonalities sets me apart, elevates me, renders me special.
The narcissist does not deny that everyone possesses characteristics and traits which set them apart.
It's just a matter of ratio, as we will see shortly.
The narcissist believes that there must be a quantitative point where it would be safe to say that the difference outweighs the similarity.
Let's call it the point of uniqueness, wherein where individuals are rendered unique.
But as opposed to members of other species, differences between human beings consist of a multitude of data, personal history, personality, memories, biography, and so on.
So always the differences outweigh the similarities.
We can safely postulate Trimavachi that all human beings are unique.
And this is something the narcissist rejects.
He tends to regard people as variations on a given theme.
He caricaturizes them.
He objectifies them.
In this process, of course, he dehumanizes them.
He refuses to countenance the fact that everyone, all human beings are unique.
Then not two human beings are the same because this would threaten his sense of specialness, his claim to fame, and his the cognitive distortion that is grandiosity, which underlies the precarious balance of his disordered chaotic personality.
Now to non-narcissists, it's very comforting to think that everyone is different.
Uniqueness is not dependent on the existence of an outside observer.
It is a byproduct of existence.
It's an extensive trait, not the result of an act of comparison performed by others scientifically, so to speak.
It's very comforting to think this way.
And it renders human life cherished, and even in some minds sacred, this difference, this distinction between individuals.
Let's radicalize our thinking.
Let's go to "ad extremis".
What would happen if one individual were to be left in the whole world, single individual, survives, I don't know, a nuclear apocalypse?
Can this individual still be considered unique?
Can he still be said to be unique?
Ostensibly, yes.
The problem is then reduced to the absence of someone able to observe, discern and communicate this uniqueness to others because there are no others.
But does this fact that there are no others, there's no audience, does this fact detract from the fact of this single survivor's uniqueness in any way?
Is this sole survivor's uniqueness, does it depend crucially on an audience?
Is a fact not communicated, no longer a fact?
And in the narcissist's mind, this seems to be the case.
Because the narcissist confuses uniqueness with a certainty, probability of uniqueness.
Universe is there, period, whether it is observed or not, whether it is measured or not, whether it is described or not, whether it is committed to paper or some other medium or not.
It's there, it's there, the way the universe is there, it's just there.
However, the probability of uniqueness, probability of the existence of uniqueness is dependent on uniqueness being proclaimed, being announced, being promulgated.
The more it is enunciated, the more it is transmitted, the more it is communicated, the greater the certainty or the probability that the uniqueness exists, that there is uniqueness.
So one should never confuse these two issues.
Narcissism is there, the probability that it is there is a human artifact or an artifact of the human mind.
And the narcissist focuses on the probability of uniqueness rather than on the actual uniqueness.
When he scans people with his cold empathy, the question in his mind is not are they unique, but how probable is it that they are unique?
Because they are all potential competitors for scarce resources such as attention.
In this restricted sense, the assuredness, the determinacy, the certainty of the existence of uniqueness is indeed the result of the common judgment of a group of people, of an audience, of a public.
The larger the cohort, the larger the population, the greater the certainty that it exists.
To wish to be unique is not the hallmark of narcissism.
The wish to be unique is universal, so universal human property.
And I think it has to do with safety and survival in infancy because the baby needs to attract the caregiver's attention in order to survive.
Baby needs food, baby needs shelter, baby needs attention, physical proximity, many things, just in order to survive.
So baby needs to stand out, baby needs to attract attention, baby needs in other words to be perceived as unique, definitely as separate, definitely as external, but also unique.
Because why would mother or father invest all these resources in baby, even a perceived baby as unique, for example, as a vehicle for the transmission of their own genes?
So the wish to be unique is a survival strategy and it's a universal human property.
The very existence of uniqueness is not dependent on the judgment of a group of humans, though the probability of the existence of such uniqueness is, as I've explained.
Now, how do we communicate this probability?
Uniqueness is communicated through sentences, theorems, and these sentences are exchanged between humans and among humans.
The certainty that a modicum of uniqueness exists is dependent upon the judgment of a group of humans and therefore, crucially, it's a derivative of efficacious communication.
The greater the number of people communicating the existence and the probability of a uniqueness, the greater the certainty that this uniqueness is actually there.
If a million people agree that Taylor Swift is unique, then Taylor Swift is unique.
If no one were to agree, not a single person on the planet, I doubt very much that Taylor Swift would be selling out, selling concepts.
So communication of uniqueness is crucial to success, to survival, and so on and so forth.
The narcissist has a problem with this, too.
These narcissists don't communicate the way other people communicate.
Their communication is coercive and manipulative, and even worse, their communication is grounded in fantasy, not in reality.
The narcissist feels that it is important to ascertain the existence or the probability of existence of his uniqueness.
Of course he does.
And he attempts, he does his best to communicate his uniqueness, but he doesn't do it the way healthy or normal people do, just by being there.
He puts pressure, he blackmails, he attacks.
In short, he externalizes aggression.
He must distinguish between exogenous and endogenous certainty of uniqueness.
Most people find it sufficient to have a moderate level of exogenous certainty regarding their own uniqueness.
This is achieved with the help of spouse, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, and even random but meaningful encounters.
In short, normal healthy people go through life accepting any feedback offered by others, and feedback that attests to the existence of their own uniqueness, but they don't depend on it crucially.
They definitely don't try to extort it from the environment the way a narcissist does.
Moderate level of exogenous certainty when it comes to uniqueness, certainty that comes from the outside, from others.
This moderate level is usually accompanied by a high level, with a high level of endogenous certainty.
There is a certainty, a conviction, inner, internal, I am unique and that's it.
It helps if others agree, but if they don't, it won't change my mind. I know I am unique because of the way I experience myself.
Most people love themselves and feel that they are distinct, that they are unique.
Here the narcissist faces an even bigger problem because the narcissist doesn't have a self.
Narcissism is a disruption in the formation of the self, or the ego as Freud called it.
So there is no sense of self here.
So the narcissist cannot resort to his internal resources, endogenously, and say, "Okay, I don't care what people say, I know I am unique."
Narcissist is exactly like borderlines, regulate externally.
The narcissist stabilizes and regulates his sense of self-worth via feedback from the outside known as narcissistic supply.
So the main determinant of feeling unique in healthy people is the level of endogenous certainty regarding one's uniqueness.
And in the narcissist, the level of exogenous certainty regarding his or her uniqueness.
And so in healthy people, communicating their uniqueness is a limited secondary act.
And there are specific people who play roles in the life of the healthy individual.
And they are usually also the sources of confirmation of the individual's uniqueness.
They tell the individual, "Yes, you're special to me.
I love you, you're special to me.
Love is a way to affirm or confirm uniqueness.
Love is not idealization, however.
Idealization is putting the emphasis on the outside at the expense of the inside.
Love is putting the emphasis on the inside with the help of the outside.
Narcissists maintain a low level of endogenous certainty.
They're not sure that they're unique.
They are quiet.
They feel inferior and they are quiet, convinced that they're actually not special, unworthy, bad, stupid, ugly.
This is what we call the bad object.
Narcissists deep inside hate themselves, loathe themselves, detest themselves, regard themselves as failures, as inadequate.
They feel that they're worthy of nothing and they consequently lack uniqueness.
And this low level of endogenous certainty, this bad object, must be offset by a high level of exogenous certainty imported from the outside.
In other words, the narcissist must solicit narcissistic supply aggressively if needed, just in order to maintain not only a sense of uniqueness, but even a sense of existence.
And this is achieved by communicating uniqueness to people able and willing to observe, verify, and communicate the narcissist's uniqueness to others.
These people are known as sources of narcissistic supply.
Some of them become intimate partners in an intimate setting known as a shared fantasy.
As we said before, narcissists pursue publicity, engage in political activities, social activism, artistic creativity, etc.
There are numerous venues and ways and channels to communicate uniqueness in order to garner the kind of responses and reactions that allow the narcissist to regulate his internal sense of uniqueness and self-worth and his very sense of existence, his very sense of substitute for the sense of self.
To maintain the continuity of the sensation of uniqueness, the continuity of these kinds of activities has to be preserved and maintained.
Sometimes though, the narcissist uses self-communicating objects to secure a sense of uniqueness.
Remember the example that I gave you about the collector of first editions books and how the collection renders him unique, at least in his own eyes.
I'm unique because I have a unique collection of unique books.
This is a self-communicating object.
The books are self-communicating objects.
The books create the uniqueness.
It's an epiphenomenon.
It's an emergent phenomenon.
The books are rare.
They're first editions.
They're unique and they bestow this uniqueness on the owner, on the collector.
So some narcissists secure a sense of certainty in their own uniqueness from objects, in animate objects, which these objects self-communicate uniqueness or contain uniqueness or are unique and rare.
An object that is also a status symbol is really a kind of condensed packet of information concerning the uniqueness of its owner.
Compulsive accumulation of assets, consumerism, compulsive shopping, there are also forms of somehow trying to uphold and prove to oneself one's uniqueness via the unique objects one possesses or purchases.
Art collections, luxury cars, stately mansions, they all communicate uniqueness.
At the same time, they constitute a part of this uniqueness.
There seems to be some kind of uniqueness ratio between exogenous uniqueness, a sense of uniqueness that comes from the inside, an exogenous uniqueness, a sense of uniqueness that comes from other people and their feedback or input.
So this is the uniqueness ratio.
Another pertinent distinction is between the basic component of uniqueness and the complex component of uniqueness, PCU and CCU.
The basic component of uniqueness comprises the sum of all the characteristics, qualities, and personal history which define a specific individual and distinguishes individual from the rest of mankind.
So this ipsofacto is the very kernel, very core of this individual's uniqueness, the basic component.
The other type, the complex component of uniqueness, the CCU, is a product of rarity, how rare, and what I call obtainability.
The more common and the more obtainable someone's history is, someone's characteristics are and possessions, the more limited his CCU or her CCU.
Rarity is the statistical distribution of properties and determinants in the general population and obtainability is the energy required to secure these rare artifacts and determinants.
As opposed to the CCU, the PCU is axiomatic.
It requires no proof.
We are all unique by definition, period.
We don't have to prove anything to anyone, not even to ourselves.
The CCU is something different.
The CCU, the complex component, involves possession, ownership, and the communication of this fact to others so that they can communicate back the uniqueness.
So you buy a rare sports car, vintage car, you show it off, people tell you how unique the car is and how unique you are as the car's owner.
The CCU requires measurements, the dissemination of information, data, comparisons.
The CCU is dependent on human activities, on human agreements, on human judgments, human inputs.
The greater the number of people who agree, the greater the certainty that the CCU exists and to what extent it exists.
In other words, both the very existence of the complex component and the magnitude of a complex component depend on the judgment of human beings.
And they are better substantiated, more certain.
The more numerous the people who agree in their judgment, whose exerted judgment is in agreement.
The more people to tell you, "Your car is amazing," the more likely it is to be unique and the more likely are you to be unique.
Human societies have delegated the measurement of the CCU to certain agents.
For example, universities. Universities measure uniqueness.
This uniqueness component, this complex component of uniqueness is called education.
Education certifies the existence and the extent of the CCU in the university's students.
A student who graduates a university is unique by virtue of his education.
But his education is meaningless unless it is recognized by institutions and by other individuals.
So, it is a complex component of uniqueness.
Consider, for example, banks and credit agencies. They measure elements of uniqueness called affluence of wealth and credit worthiness.
Publishing houses measure another component of uniqueness known as creativity and marketability.
All these are uniqueness gatekeepers.
Social agents whose role is to confirm and certify uniqueness.
The absolute size of the group of people involved in judging the existence and the measure of a CCU is sometimes less important.
It is sufficient to have a few social agents, gatekeepers, who represent a large number of people or society at large.
There is therefore non-necessary connection between the mass communicability of the uniqueness component and its complexity, its extent, or even its existence.
What I'm trying to say is that uniqueness can be communicated to the masses or uniqueness can be communicated to highly select uniqueness agents, gatekeepers.
The analysis focuses usually on the masses.
It tries to impress the largest number of people possible.
It tries to elicit from the biggest number of people that it can input feedback that confirms his uniqueness.
A person might have a high CCU, but he may be known to only a very limited circle of relevant social agents.
He's not famous, he's not a celebrity, he's not renowned, but he's still very unique in his field, for example, as an expert.
Narcissists don't see it, they do.
As far as a narcissist is concerned, his acclimation, his approbation, his confirmation as a perfect being must be universal.
The narcissists don't recognize the concept of a gatekeeper because it implies some kind of superiority and authority.
Narcissists are antisocial in this sense, they are a bit defiant and conscientious. They reject authority.
No one is above them because they are godlike, they're divine.
So they don't accept the authority of gatekeepers, institutions and so on to decide whether they are unique or not.
They want the masses to have a voice.
In this sense, narcissists are protopopulists and great demagogues.
No wonder many of them end up in leadership positions.
The sickness is potentially communicable, but its validity is not affected by the fact that it is communicated only a small circle of social agents and gatekeepers.
This is where the narcissist fails.
This is what he cannot understand, cannot grasp.
You don't need a million people to tell you that you're a genius if Albert Einstein tells you that you're a genius.
Period.
Albert Einstein's view of you, that you're a genius, outweighs the views of the rest of humanity combined with regards to this particular question.
But the narcissist won't find, will not find Albert Einstein's view is sufficient.
He would need also the confirmation of the remaining 8.2 billion people on Earth, at least.
The last for publicity has, therefore, nothing to do with the wish to establish the existence of the measure of self-uniqueness in non-narcissistic people and everything to do with this when we talk about narcissists, when we discuss narcissists, when we talk about narcissists.
Both the basic and the complex uniqueness components are not dependent upon their replication or communication.
The more complex form of uniqueness is dependent only from the judgment and recognition of highly relevant individuals, social agents, institutions, especially those who represent large numbers of people, for example, universities.
But again, the narcissist fails to understand this.
He has no basic component of uniqueness because he doesn't have a self.
He derives his entire sense of uniqueness from the outside.
And so if it comes from the outside, the more the merrier.
He needs the masses.
He needs a totality of humanity to confirm to him his uniqueness.
He doesn't recognize hierarchies.
He doesn't recognize levels of authority and expertise.
He doesn't recognize that Albert Einstein's view is more important than the views of the rest of humanity combined because Albert Einstein is just one guy.
This is a mega failure in narcissism, by the way.
The lust for mass publicity and for celebrity is connected to how successfully the feeling of uniqueness is internalized by the individual.
It is not connected to objective parameters related to the substantiation of the individual's uniqueness or to the scope of an individual's uniqueness.
If an individual internalizes his sense of uniqueness, if he can rely on endogenous uniqueness, on a basic component of uniqueness, then what other people have to say about his or her uniqueness is less relevant.
Only if a person cannot internalize the self-belief that he or she is unique, only if a person is besieged by and devoured by a bad object, only then this kind of individual develops a critical dependency of the opinions and judgments and feedback of other people for him or her to feel unique.
We can postulate the existence of a uniqueness constant that is composed or comprised of the sum of the of endogenous and exogenous components of uniqueness.
It is highly subjective, of course.
Concurrently a uniqueness variable can be introduced, which is a sum total of BCU and CCU, and this one is a bit more objective.
The uniqueness ratio that I mentioned before oscillates in accordance with the changing emphasis within the uniqueness constant.
At times, the exogenous source of uniqueness prevails and the uniqueness ratio is at its peak with the CCU maximized.
At other times, though, in healthy people, the endogenous source of uniqueness gains the upper hand and the uniqueness ratio is in a trough with the BCU maximized.
Healthy people maintain a constant amount of feeling unique.
Their uniqueness is stable.
There may be shifting emphasis between endogenous and exogenous, BCU, CCU, depending on circumstances, the environment, and the CCU's ups and downs of life.
But all in all, in all, the sense that I'm unique, I'm special, I'm me, this sense is stable in healthy people, and of course, non-existent in the narcissist.
The narcissist reconstructs his sense of uniqueness on the fly, reactive to feedback from the outside.
The uniqueness constant of healthy people is always identical to their uniqueness variable, which is not the case with the narcissist.
With narcissist, the story is different.
It would seem that the size of the uniqueness variable in narcissism is a derivative of the amount of exogenous input, exogenous feedback.
The BCU, however, is constant and rigid and asymptotic to zero, aspiring to zero.
Only the CCU varies the value of the uniqueness variable.
It affects the value of the uniqueness variable because only the CCU exists.
There's no counterbalance, internal counterbalance to what other people say about the narcissist.
The narcissist can be plunged to the depths of despair and shame and humiliation by a casual comment by someone because there's no internal sense of uniqueness.
Nothing comes from the inside.
Everything comes from the outside.
A minor consolation for the narcissist is that the social agents, the gatekeepers that I mentioned before, who determine the value of one CCU do not have to be contemporaneous or co-spatial with the narcissist.
In other words, the gatekeepers or social agents don't have to exist in the same period as a narcissist or in the same space as a narcissist.
Let me explain what I mean.
Narcissists can compare himself to his contemporaries.
Narcissists can compare himself to people in his city or in his country, but a narcissist can choose to compare himself to people in the 19th century, to other geniuses throughout human history, to other leaders that preceded him and are long dead.
The narcissist sometimes flees, escapes, escapes his own temporal and spatial environment in order to be able to adopt a frame of reference which is conducive or beneficial or helpful for him to derive a sense of uniqueness from the outside.
Narcissists like to quote examples of geniuses whose time has come only posthumously.
Kafka, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, they were all recognized only after their death.
They've had a high CCU which was not recognized by their contemporary social agents and gatekeepers, media, art critics, colleagues, but has been recognized decades after they've died.
These people were recognized in later generations, in other cultures, in other places, societies, by the dominant gatekeeping social agents and institutions of these much later periods.
Belated posthumous recognition is the narcissist's refuge and solace.
So although true that the wider an individual's influence, the greater his uniqueness, influence is measured by the narcissist, not the way we measure it.
Influence is measured by the narcissist over enormous stretches of space and time.
Influence can be exerted, says the narcissist, on biological or spiritual descendants.
It can be overt, genetic, covert.
Narcissists find loopholes and escape clauses in their contract with society.
They say, "Maybe I'm not recognized now, but future generations will appreciate my grand contributions." Narcissists self-aggrandize by dislocating themselves from their period in history and space, spatial coordinates.
The narcissist introduces as many individual influences into his life using and leveraging history as well so that he can, in the worst case scenario, self-supply.
When the narcissist creates a totally fictitious frame of reference, which involves, I don't know, fifth century Athens or the Renaissance or 19th century, the Enlightenment or whatever, when he creates this kind of frame of reference, he can then self-supply.
He says, "My contemporaries are inferior and they're stupid.
They're stupid and inferior and these are the Middle Ages, the New Middle Ages.
I will compare myself to the 17th century or 18th century or 19th century where people like me would have been appreciated.
And when the time comes and these centuries will be recreated in the future, I will be recognized for what and who I am, unique.".