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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: 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 Supply Deficiency Coping Strategies

Sam Vaknin explains that the grandiosity gap between a narcissist's self-image and reality is grating on their nerves. As a result, the narcissist resorts to self-delusion, which can lead to various solutions. These include the delusional narrative solution, the antisocial solution, the paranoid schizoid solution, the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution, and the masochistic avoidance solution. Ultimately, the narcissist's pronounced and public misery and self-pity are compensatory and reinforce their self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.


Raging Narcissist: Merely Pissed-off?

Narcissistic rage is a phenomenon that occurs when a narcissist is frustrated in their pursuit of narcissistic supply, causing narcissistic injury. The narcissist then projects a bad object onto the source of their frustration and rages against a perceived evil entity that has injured and frustrated them. Narcissistic rage is not the same as normal anger and has two forms: explosive and pernicious or passive-aggressive. People with personality disorders are in a constant state of anger, which is effectively suppressed most of the time, and they are afraid to show that they are angry to meaningful others because they are afraid to lose them.


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.


Narcissist's Vulnerability: Grandiosity Hangover

Narcissists often engage in shared delusions and collective denial, clinging to an inflated sense of self and past moments of perceived superiority. Their vulnerabilities, particularly the grandiosity hangover and grandiosity gap, can be exploited, especially when they face authority or feel their self-worth is threatened. Any challenge to their perceived uniqueness or entitlement can provoke intense rage, leading them to react aggressively in an attempt to restore their grandiose self-image. Confronting a narcissist with questions or statements that undermine their self-perception can effectively deter their behavior.


Narcissist's Routines

Narcissists have a series of routines that are developed through rote learning and repetitive patterns of experience. These routines are used to reduce anxiety and transform the world into a manageable and controllable one. The narcissist is a creature of habit and finds change unsettling. The narcissist's routines are often broken down when they are breached or can no longer be defended, leading to a narcissistic injury.


Grandiosity, Idea Of Reference, Other, Apophenia, Pareidolia, Hostile Attribution, Confirmation Bias

Grandiosity in narcissism is a complex phenomenon that involves cognitive distortions and biases, leading individuals to perceive themselves as the center of the universe and to misinterpret external events as being directly related to them. This includes ideas of reference, where individuals believe that innocuous actions or events are specifically about them, and object apophenia, which is the tendency to see meaningful connections between unrelated things. The inability to perceive others as separate entities, termed "othering failure," results in a solipsistic worldview where the narcissist's self-image is constantly validated through external attention or narcissistic supply. Ultimately, this internal conflict and reliance on distorted perceptions create a fragile sense of self that can lead to aggressive behaviors and emotional instability when challenged.


Self-Aware Narcissist: Still a Narcissist

Narcissism is pervasive and defines the narcissist's waking moments, infiltrating and permeating their dreams. Narcissists only admit to a problem when they are abandoned, destitute, and devastated. Narcissistic behaviors can be modified using talk therapy and pinpointed medication conditioning, but there is a huge difference between behavior modification and a permanent alteration of a psychodynamic landscape. Narcissism may improve with age, but it is rare.


Narcissistic Humiliation and Injury

Narcissists react to humiliation in the same way as normal people, only more so. They are regularly and strongly humiliated by things that normally do not constitute a humiliation. The emotional life of the narcissist is tinted by ubiquitous and recurrent insults, humiliations, and slights. The narcissist is constantly on the defensive, constantly being targeted, and is a kind of paranoid.


Narcissist's Shame and Guilt

The grandiosity gap is the difference between self-image and reality, causing feelings of guilt and shame in narcissists. Narcissistic shame is the pervasive feeling of worthlessness experienced by the narcissist due to the absence or deficiency of narcissistic supply. The narcissist adopts primitive psychological defense mechanisms to counter this shame, such as addictive or impulsive behaviors. Guilt is an objectively determinable philosophical entity, while shame is the outcome of avoidable outcomes.

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