How do you know who is a real narcissist?
The one who had some traumas in the childhood, or someone who developed later on in their life?
We have two types of narcissism. There is a narcissism that is a reaction to early childhood trauma, and it is a post-traumatic condition.
My recent work is that I am attempting to reframe narcissism. It is actually not a personality disorder at all, it is a post-traumatic condition.
So there is post-traumatic narcissism, which is by far the most common type.
And then, given highly specific life circumstances, for example becoming a celebrity, on these highly specific life circumstances you can develop something called acquired situational narcissism.
Acquired situational narcissism was first described by a professor in Harvard, Millman, and Millman studied rockstars. He discovered that rockstars become narcissistic, they haven't been narcissistic before, but the fact that they are rockstars made them narcissistic.
So yes, you can acquire late onset narcissism, depending on your circumstances. But this kind of narcissism is more transient, we hope, we don't know yet. We think that it's more transient and it recedes when the circumstances change. We are not sure yet. It's a speculation.
The victim's narcissism, for example, is acquired situational narcissism. Circumstances create narcissism, which is indistinguishable from normal narcissism, from regular narcissism, but it's different because of the etiology, because of how the reason why it was created, the reason for its creation.
Narcissism is a defense. It was first described by Sigmund Freud in 1914 as a psychological defense mechanism, and it is the narcissistic defense.
Later on, scholars like Melanie Klein and Winnicott and Bleuler and others, they all describe narcissism as a kind of defense. It could be a defense against many things. Each one thinks it's a defense against something else, but it's still a defense.
So, of course, a victim exposed to constant attack, constant abuse, constant negation, invitiation, constant criticism, a victim's narcissistic defenses would also be activated, normally, because everyone has healthy narcissism.
So the defenses are activated.
If the defenses of the victim are activated on a regular basis, the victim becomes a narcissist, technically. The narcissist is a person whose narcissistic defenses are constantly activated because of early childhood trauma.
If the victim's defenses are constantly activated, then the victim is indistinguishable from the narcissist. We even have documented situations where victims become psychopaths and are indistinguishable from psychopaths.
And today we think that CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which is indistinguishable, which is the outcome, I'm sorry, of prolonged narcissistic abuse, the orthodoxy, what we teach in schools and so on, is that it is exact equivalent to borderline personality disorder.
So, victims who develop CPTSD become effectively borderlines, and they have dysregulated emotions, liability, abandonment, anxiety, and so on and so forth.
Now, one of the major dimensions of borderline is narcissism, of course. We diagnose borderline, the tests have a segment which is about narcissism. All borderlines are narcissistic.
So, here's another example where CPTSD is the same like borderline and borderline to a very large degree. It's the same like narcissism.
So, narcissism is contagious. It spreads like infectious disease.