Background

Narcissist's Pathological Grandiosity

Uploaded 11/19/2010, approx. 5 minute read

I am Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

Daydreaming, fantasizing, are healthy activities. They are the anti-chamber of life. They often anticipate life's circumstances. They are processes of preparing for eventualities and planning.

But healthy daydreaming is different to malignant and pathological grandiosity.

Grandiosity has four components, the first being omnipotence. The narcissist believes in his own omnipotence that he is all-powerful. Believe in this context is a weak word. The narcissist knows it is a cellular certainty, almost biological, and it flows in his blood and permeates every niche of his being.

The narcissist is convinced that he can do anything he chooses to do and excel in it.

What a narcissist does, what he excels at, what he achieves, depends only on his volition, believes the narcissist.

To his mind, there is no other determinant and no limitations.

Hence, the narcissist's rage when confronted with disagreement and opposition, not only because of the audacity of his evidently inferior adversaries, but because such discord, such disagreement, such criticism, threaten his worldview and endanger his feeling of omnipotence.

The narcissist is often factually daring, adventurous, experimentative, and curious precisely because he believes in this hidden assumption of can-do. He is genuinely surprised and devastated when he fails, when the universe does not arrange itself magically to accommodate his unbounded fantasies, when the world and people in it do not comply with his whims and wishes.

The narcissist often denies away such discrepancies, deletes them from his memory, and as a result, he remembers his life as a patchy quilt of unrelated events and people.

The second strand in pathological grandiosity is omniscience. The narcissist often pretends to know everything in every field of human knowledge and endeavor.

Because of the narcissist's lies, prevaricates to avoid the exposure of his ignorance, he resorts to numerous subterfuges to support this godlike omniscience.

Where the narcissist's knowledge fails him, he feigns authority, he fakes superiority, he quotes from non-existent sources, he embeds threads of truth in a wide canvas of falsehoods, he transforms himself into an artist of intellectual prestige-digitation.

As the narcissist gets older, this invidious quality may recede, or rather, metamorphose. He may now claim more confined experience, but a deeper one. He may no longer be ashamed to admit his ignorance and his need to learn things outside the fields of his real or self-proclaimed expertise.

But this improvement is merely optical.

Within his territory of knowledge, the narcissist is still as fiercely defensive, as possessive, and as fallacious as ever. Many narcissists are avowed auto-deductors. They are unwilling to subject their knowledge and insights to pure scrutiny, or for that matter, to any scrutiny.

The narcissist keeps reinventing himself, adding new fields of knowledge as he goes.

This creeping intellectual annexation is a roundabout way of reverting to his erstwhile image as the iridite Renaissance man.


And then there is omnipresence. While even the narcissist cannot pretend to actually be everywhere at once in the physical sense, instead, the narcissist feels that he is the center and the axis of his own universe, that all things, happenstances, and people revolve around him, and that cosmic disintegration would ensue if he were to disappear or to lose interest in someone or something.

He is convinced, for instance, that he is the main, if not the only, topic of discussion in his absence. He is often surprised and offended to learn that he was not even mentioned. When invited to a meeting with many participants, he assumes the position of the sage, the guru, or the teacher guide, whose words carry a special weight.

His creations, books, articles, works of art, are extensions of his presence, and in this restricted sense, he does seem to exist everywhere.

In other words, the narcissist stamps his environment, he puts a stamp on it, he leaves his mark upon it, he stigmatizes it.

Finally, there is perfectionism and completeness. The narcissist is an omnivore.

There is another omnipoponent in grandiosity. The narcissist devours and digests experiences and people, sights, smells, bodies, and words, books, and films, sounds, and achievements, his work and his pleasure and his possessions.

The narcissist is incapable of enjoying an entity because he is in constant pursuit of perfection and completeness and hoarding.

Classic narcissists interact with the world as predators do with their prey. They want to own all of it, to be everywhere, to experience everything. They cannot delay gratification. They do not take no for an answer, and they settle for nothing less than the ideal, the sublime, the perfect, the all-inclusive, the all-encompassing, the engulfing, the all-pervasive, the most beautiful, the cleverest, the richest, the most brilliant.

The narcissist is shattered when he discovers that the collection he possesses is incomplete, that his colleague's wife is more glamorous, that his son is better than he is in math, that his neighbor is a new flashy car, that his roommate got promoted, that the love of his life signed a recording contract.

It is not plain old jealousy, not even pathological envy though. This is definitely part of the psychological makeup of the narcissist.

It is the discovery that the narcissist is not perfect or ideal or complete. This realization does him in.

And so the narcissist is grandiose as a kind of self-defense. When anyone challenges the assumptions underlying the narcissist's grandiosity, he reacts with rage to this narcissistic injury.

If you enjoyed this article, you might like the following:

Narcissist: Confabulations, Lies

Confabulation is a common human trait, but the distinction between reality and fantasy is never lost. However, the narcissist's very self is a piece of fiction, concocted to fend off hurt and pain and to nurture the narcissist's grandiosity. The narcissist fails in his reality test and is unable to distinguish the actual from the imagined, the real from the fantasized. The narcissist's countenance, no disagreement, no alternative points of view, no criticism. To him, his confabulation is reality.


Narcissist: Your Pain is his Healing, Your Crucifixion - His Resurrection

Narcissists need their victims to suffer to regulate their own emotions and feel a sense of control. They keep a mental ledger of positive and negative behaviors, with negative behaviors weighing more heavily. Narcissists need counterfactual statements to maintain their delusion of being special and superior. The grandiosity gap is the major vulnerability of the narcissist, and they are often in denial about their limitations and failures.


Narcissistic Mortification: From Shame to Healing via Trauma, Fear, and Guilt

Narcissistic mortification occurs when a narcissist is confronted with the reality of their imperfections, leading to feelings of defeat and terror as their false self crumbles. This experience is often triggered by external challenges or criticisms that clash with their idealized self-image, resulting in a disorienting realization of their limitations. The narcissist may respond to this mortification through various defense mechanisms, such as grandiosity or aggression, as they struggle to regain a sense of control and avoid facing their true self. Ultimately, mortification can serve as a potential catalyst for healing, as it forces the narcissist to confront their condition and the possibility of reintegrating with their true self.


Why Narcissists Love Borderline Women and Why They Hate Them Back

Narcissistic mortification is a challenge to the false self, which crumbles and is unable to maintain defenses and pretensions. Narcissists use two strategies to restore some cohesiveness to the self: deflated and inflated narcissist. Narcissists engage in mortification, a form of self-mutilation, to feel alive and free from commitment to their false self. Narcissists seek out borderline women to mortify them and experience the unresolved primary conflict with their mother.


Narcissist's Grandiosity: Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Perfection

Narcissistic grandiosity has four components: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and the omnivore. The narcissist believes in their own power and that they can do anything they choose to do and excel in it. They often pretend to know everything in every field of human knowledge and endeavor. The narcissist is an omnivore, incapable of enjoying anything because they are in constant pursuit of perfection and completeness.


When the Narcissist's Parents Die

The death of a narcissist's parents can be a complicated experience. The narcissist has a mixed reaction to their passing, feeling both elation and grief. The parents are often the source of the narcissist's trauma and continue to haunt them long after they die. The death of the parents also represents a loss of a reliable source of narcissistic supply, which can lead to severe depression. Additionally, the narcissist's unfinished business with their parents can lead to unresolved conflicts and pressure that deforms their personality.


Old-age Narcissist

Narcissists age without grace, unable to accept their fallibility and mortality. They suffer from mental progeria, aging prematurely and finding themselves in a time warp. The longer they live, the more average they become, and the wider the gulf between their pretensions and accomplishments. Few narcissists save for rainy days, and those who succeed in their vocation end up bitterly alone, having squandered the love of family, offspring, and mates.


Why Narcissist APPEARS So STUPID (Borderlines and Psychopaths, too!)

Narcissists, despite often possessing high intelligence, frequently exhibit profound stupidity in their interactions and decision-making due to cognitive distortions like grandiosity and a lack of empathy. This disconnect from reality impairs their ability to learn from past experiences, leading to repetitive mistakes and self-destructive behaviors. Their immaturity and reliance on external validation further contribute to their inability to navigate life effectively, making them susceptible to manipulation and poor judgment. Ultimately, their intellectual capabilities are overshadowed by their emotional and social dysfunctions, rendering them inadequate in real-life situations.


Grandiosity as Cognitive Bias (Kruger-Dunning Effect)

Grandiosity in narcissism is an inflated self-image that is divorced from reality and self-perception. It is a set of cognitive biases constructed on a foundation of cognitive deficits that emanate from a flawed reality test. The narcissist perceives reality wrongly and lacks empathy, making it impossible for them to anticipate others' reactions, needs, and preferences. The narcissist's grandiosity is a derivative phenomenon that relies on cognitive biases, such as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where they overestimate themselves and underestimate others.


I Can Achieve and Do Anything If I Only Put My Mind to It

The belief that there are no unrealistic aspirations and that positive outcomes are guaranteed is narcissistic and delusional. To avoid self-deception, we need to accept our limitations, learn from our mistakes, and develop a growth mindset that embraces challenges and sees failure as an opportunity for growth. To develop a realistic self-assessment, make a list of your positive and negative traits and ask others to do the same. Compare the lists and grade the answers on a scale of one to five.

Transcripts Copyright © Sam Vaknin 2010-2024, under license to William DeGraaf
Website Copyright © William DeGraaf 2022-2024
Get it on Google Play
Privacy policy