My name is Sam Vaknin, I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Heterosexual narcissists desire women as any other red-blooded male does, or even more so because of women's symbolic nature in the narcissist's life. Humbling the woman, humiliating her and subjugating her in acts of faintly sadomasochistic sex, is a way of getting back at mother.
But the narcissist is frustrated by his inability to meaningfully interact with women, by women's apparent emotional depth and powers of psychological penetration, real or attributed, and by the sexuality. Women's incessant demands for intimacy are perceived by the narcissist to be a threat. He recoils instead of getting closer.
The cerebral narcissist also despises and derides sex. Thus caught in a seemingly intractable repetition complex.
In approach avoidance cycles, the narcissist becomes furious at the source of this frustration. Some narcissists set out to do some frustrating of their own. They tease passively or actively, or they pretend to be asexual, or they turn down rather cruelly any feminine attempt to court them to get closer or to have sex.
Sadistically, such narcissists tremendously enjoy their ability to frustrate the desires, passions, and sexual urges of women, makes them feel omnipotent and self-righteous.
Narcissists regularly frustrate all women sexually and significant women in their lives, both sexually and emotionally.
Somatic narcissists simply use women as objects and then discard them. They masturbate using women as props, flesh and blood aids. The emotional background in both cases, cerebral and somatic, is identical.
While the cerebral narcissist punishes through abstention, the somatic narcissist penalizes through excess. The narcissist's mother kept behaving as though the narcissist was and is not special to her. The narcissist's whole life is a pathetic and pitiful effort to prove his mother wrong.
The narcissist constantly seeks confirmation from others that he is special, in other words, that he is, that he actually exists.
Women threaten this quest.
Sex is best true. Sex is common. Everybody does it. There is nothing special or unique about sex. Women's sexual needs threaten to reduce the narcissist to the lowest common denominator, to render him average, mediocre.
Intimacy, sex and human emotions are common even to intellectually challenged people. Narcissists cannot be identified with these dimensions of human existence. Everybody and anybody can feel, copulate and breed.
There is nothing in these activities to set the narcissist apart and above others.
And yet, women seem to be interested only in these pursuits.
Thus, the narcissist emotionally believes that women are the continuation of his mother by other means and in different guises.
The narcissist hates women virulently, passionately and uncompromisingly. His hate is primal, irrational, the progeny of mortal fear and sustained abuse in early childhood.
Granted, most narcissists learn how to disguise or even repress these untoward feelings.
But their hatred does sometimes get out of control and erupts and the mask falls and you see the true face of the narcissist.
To live with a narcissist is an arduous and eroding task.
Narcissists are infinitely pessimistic. They are bare-tempered, paranoid and sadistic, in an absent-minded and indifferent manner. Their daily routine is a rigmarole of threats, complaints, hurts, eruptions, moodiness and rage.
The narcissist rails against, true and imaginative, alienates people, humiliates people because this is his only weapon against his own humiliation wrought by their indifference.
Gradually, wherever the narcissist is, his social circle dwindles and then vanishes. Every narcissist is also a schismic to some extent. A schismic is not a misanthrope, but the narcissist is.
Narcissists don't necessarily hate people in the deeper sense of the word. They simply want not to need them. They want to negate their dependence on them for narcissistic supply.
Narcissists regard social interactions as a nuisance to be minimized. The narcissist is torn between his need to obtain narcissistic supply from people and his fervent wish to be left alone. This wish springs from contempt and overwhelming feelings of superiority.
There are fundamental conflicts, of course, between dependence, counter-dependence, contempt, neediness and devaluation, seeking people and avoiding people, turning on the charm to attract adulation and reacting with wrath and rage to the minutest provocations. These conflicts, this unpredictability, this instability and liability of the narcissist conduct, these lead to rapid cycling between gregariousness and self-imposed ascetic seclusion.
Well, as far as women is concerned, such an unpredictable but always bilious and festering ambience typical of the narcissist's romantic liaisons is hardly conducive to either sex or love.
Gradually, both sex and love become extinct in the relationship. Relationships are hollowed out.
In perceptibly, the narcissist switches to asexual cohabitation with his female spouse or partner.
But the vitriolic environment that the narcissist creates is only one hand of the equation.
The other hand involves the woman herself.
As we said, heterosexual narcissists are attracted to women, but simultaneously repellent, horrified, bewitched and provoked by them. They seek to frustrate and humiliate women.
Psychodynamically, the narcissist probably visits upon women, his mother's sins.
But such simplistic explanation does the subject great injustice. Most narcissists are misogynists. Their sexual and emotional lives are perturbed and chaotic. They are unable to love in any true sense of the word, nor are they capable of developing an immeasure of intimacy.
Lacking empathy, they are unable to offer to their partners emotional sustenance.
Do narcissists miss love and loving? Would they have liked to love? And are they angry with their parents for crippling them in this respect? Who knows?
But I think to the narcissist, these questions are incomprehensible. There is no way they can answer these questions and answers they've never loved.
They do not know what it is that they are supposedly missing. Observing it from the outside, love seems to them to be a reasonable pathology.
Narcissists equate love with weakness. They hate being weak and they hate and despise weak people.
And therefore they hate and despise the sick, the old, the young and women. They do not tolerate what they consider to be stability, disease and dependence.
And love seems to consist of all these three.
These are not sour grapes. The narcissist really feels this way.
Narcissists are angry men, but not because they never experience love and probably never will. They are angry because they are not as powerful or inspiring and successful as they wish they were and to their mind as they deserve to be.
Because of their daydreams, they refuse to stubbornly refuse to come true, refuse to converge with reality. It makes them rageful. They are their own worst enemy.
And in their unmitigated paranoia, narcissists see adversaries plotting everywhere and feel discriminated against and contemptuously ignored.
Many types of narcissists, borderline narcissists for instance, cannot conceive of life in one place with one set of people, doing the same thing in the same field with one goal within a decades old game plan or career path or relationship.
To them, this kind of existence is the equivalent of death. They are most terrified of boredom and whenever faced with its daunting prospect, such narcissists inject drama or even danger into their lives. They become reckless, abusive. This way they feel alive.
The narcissist is a lonely wolf. He is a shaky platform indeed on which to base a family or plans for the future.