Background

Narcissists: Achievers and Failures

Uploaded 7/7/2011, approx. 4 minute read

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

The narcissist often strikes people as being laid back, or less charitably as being lazy, parasitic, spoiled and self-indulgent.

But as usual with narcissists, appearances sometimes deceive.

Narcissists are either compulsively driven overachievers or chronic underachieving wastrels.

Most of them fail to make full and productive use of their potential and capacities.

Many narcissists avoid even the now-standard path of academic degree, a career, a family life.

The disparity between the accomplishments of the narcissist and his grandiose fantasies and inflated self-image is what I call the grandiosity gap. It is a staggering abyss and in the long run it is insupportable and unsustainable. It imposes onerous exigencies of the narcissist's grasp of reality and on his social skills. It pushes the narcissist either to seclusion or to a frenzy of acquisitions, cars, women, wealth, power, anything to sustain his self-image.

Yet no matter how successful the narcissist is, many of them end up being object failures, but many of them end up being great successes and pillars of their community.

But never mind how successful they are, how high up the ladder, the grandiosity gap can never be breached.

The narcissist's false self is so unrealistic and his expectations of himself are so way out there, his superego is so sadistic, these inner voices that criticize him, that there is nothing the narcissist can do to extricate himself from the Kafkaesque trial that is his life.

The narcissist is a slave to his own inertia.

Some narcissists are forever exhilarating on the way to ever higher peaks and ever greener pastures, never obtainable, always on the horizon.

Other narcissists succumb to numbing routines, to the expenditure of minimal energy, the path of last released resistance, to prey on the vulnerable.

But either way, the narcissist's life is out of control and the mercy of merciless inner voices and internal forces emerges.

These are one-state machines programmed to extract narcissistic supply from other people.

To do that, they develop early on a set of immutable routines.

This propensity for repetition, this inability to change and rigidity, confine the narcissist's horizons, stunt the narcissist's development and limit his horizons.

Add to this toxic admixture the narcissist's overpowering sense of entitlement, his visceral fear of failure and his invariable lead to both feel unique and to be perceived as unique.

One often ends up with a recipe for inaction and the narcissist starts really paralyzed by these conflicting forces.

Underachieving narcissist dodges challenges, eludes, tests, shirks, competition and responsibility, sidesteps expectations, ducks all kinds of duties, evades authority.

And this kind of narcissist does all this because he is afraid to fail and because doing something everyone else does endangers his sense of uniqueness.

Hence, the narcissist's apparent laziness and parasitism. His sense of entitlement with no commensurate accomplishments or investments aggravates his milieu.

People tend to regard such narcissist as spoiled brats.

In specious contrast, overachieving narcissist seeks challenges. He seeks risks, provokes competition, embellishes expectations, aggressively beats for responsibilities and authority and seems to be possessed with an eerie self-confidence.

People tend to regard such specimen of narcissist as entrepreneurial, daring, visionary or tyrannical. Yet these narcissist too are modified by potential failure and they are driven by a strong conviction of entitlement, strive to be unique and be perceived as such.

They have an identical psychodynamic landscape to the underachieving narcissist, only they choose a different solution.

The overachiever-narcissist hyperactivity is merely the flip side of the underachiever's inactivity. It is as fallacious and as empty and as doomed to miscarriage and disgrace and failure. It is often sterile or illusory, all smoke and mirrors rather than substance.

The precarious achievements of such narcissist invariably unravel with time. Such narcissist often act outside the loop or outside social norms and in contravention of social ethics and mores.

Their industriousness, walk-onism, ambition and commitment are intended merely to disguise their essential inability to produce and to really build something.

These narcissists are in the dark, where life is a pretension, a fortemkin life.

All make believe in thunder without little essence.

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

Narcissist: You All Exist Only in My Mind (Hive or Swarm False Self and Ego Functions)

Narcissists have a dysfunctional true self, which is introverted and comatose. The ego, which performs certain functions in healthy people, is dormant in narcissists. Narcissists need feedback from the outside world to perform basic ego functions, which is what is called narcissistic supply. The false self is a collage of reflections, a patchwork of outsourced information, and is a kind of hive self.


How Narcissist Is Mortified

Narcissism can be addressed through behavior modification and treatment modalities, but pathological narcissism remains largely immutable. Mortification occurs when a narcissist's grandiose self-perception is challenged, leading to a collapse of their defenses and a confrontation with their true self. This process is exacerbated by aphantasia, which prevents narcissists from visualizing others empathetically, and the misinformation effect, which distorts their memories and self-perception based on external inputs. Ultimately, narcissists may create rich false memories to cope with the shame and humiliation of mortification, reinforcing their grandiosity and distorting their reality.


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.


Narcissist's False Narrative and False Self

The narcissist constructs a false self that is godlike and seeks admiration, adulation, and attention from others. They create a narrative of their life that is partly confabulated to prove the veracity of their grandiose claims. However, reality intrudes, and a gap opens between their self-perception and their pedestrian existence. The narcissist copes with this by denying reality and inventing a new narrative that accommodates the intrusive data.


Narcissist's Sadistic Inner Judge and Critic

The narcissist is tormented by a sadistic superego formed from negative evaluations and criticisms received during formative years, leading to a fluctuating sense of self-worth. This internalized critic affects the narcissist's self-esteem, self-knowledge, and self-confidence, creating a constant battle between seeking external validation and confronting self-doubt. The narcissist's life becomes a dual mission to satisfy the demands of these inner judges while proving their harsh criticisms wrong through achievements. Ironically, only in moments of incapacitation does the narcissist find temporary peace, as they can shift blame for failures to external circumstances, alleviating the pressure from their relentless inner tormentors.


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.


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.


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.


Narcissism: Silence of the Introjects, Including You (Multitasking to Infantilism)

The false self in pathological narcissism serves to silence the inner voices and introjects that conflict with its grandiose self-image, effectively acting as a censor. Narcissists can be categorized into two groups: those with a bad object who compensate with an idealized false self, and those who only possess an idealized object due to overindulgent upbringing. The false self not only suppresses these introjects but also misidentifies itself as the authentic self, leading to a distorted perception of reality. When the narcissist experiences mortification, the suppressed introjects can resurface, causing significant internal turmoil and emotional dysregulation.


Narcissistic Grandiosity Bubbles

Grandiosity bubbles are a rare event in the life of a narcissist. They involve the creation of an imagined, self-aggrandizing narrative that the narcissist weaves around elements of his real life. The narcissist modifies his behavior to conform to the newly adopted roles and gradually morphs into the fabricated character he has created. The deflation of a grandiosity bubble is met with relief by the narcissist, who views it as an experiment at being someone else for a while.

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