My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
What is the difference between narcissists and psychopaths?
We all heard the term psychopath, or sociopath, but these are the old or colloquial names for a patient with antisocial personality disorder.
It is hard to distinguish narcissists from psychopaths. Psychopaths may simply be a less inhibited and less grandiose form of narcissists.
Some scholars have suggested the existence of a hybrid, psychopathic narcissist, or narcissistic psychopath if you wish.
Indeed, the committee of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual No. 5, the next edition, they are considering to merge these two personality disorders and to subsume them under a general heading of personality disorder.
Still, there are important nuances setting these two mental health afflictions apart.
First of all, as opposed to most narcissists, psychopaths are either unable or unwilling to control their impulses or to delay gratification.
Psychopaths use their rage to control people and to manipulate them into submission.
Like narcissists, psychopaths lack empathy, but many of them are also sadistic. They take pleasure in inflicting pain on their victims or in deceiving them. They even find it funny.
Psychopaths are far less able to form interpersonal relationships. Even the twisted and tragic relationships that are the staple of the narcissists are beyond the pale and the scope of the psychopath.
Both the psychopath and the narcissist disregard society, its conventions, its social cues, and social norms.
But the psychopath carries this disdain to the extreme, and he is likely to be a scheming, calculating, ruthless and callous career criminal, as opposed to the narcissist.
Psychopaths are deliberately and gleefully evil, while narcissists are absentmindedly and incidentally evil.
In my book Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, I have written, as opposed to what Scott Peck says, narcissists are not evil. They lack the intention to cause harm.
As Millon, Theodore Millon, notes, certain narcissists incorporate moral values into their exaggerated sense of superiority. Here, moral laxity is seen by the narcissist as evidence of inferiority, and it is those who are unable to remain morally pure who are looked upon with contempt by the narcissist.
So narcissists are simply indifferent, callous and careless in their conduct and in their treatment of others. Their abusive behavior is off-handed and absentminded, not calculated, remediated, like the psychopaths.
Psychopaths really do not need other people at all. They are completely self-enclosed and self-sufficient.
Narcissists, on the other hand, are addicted to narcissistic supply. They need attention, admiration, adulation from others. They are dependent on other people for their constant supply and for the regulation of their own self-worth and self-esteem, self-confidence.
In an isolated island, as castaways, the psychopath will thrive. The narcissist will dwindle and die.
Millon and Davis write, with the egocentricity, lack of empathy and sense of superiority of the narcissist, cross-fertilize with impulsivity, deceitfulness and criminal tendencies of the antisocial, the psychopath.
The result is a psychopath, an individual who seeks the gratification of selfish impulses through any means, without empathy and without remorse.