Good after morning, survivors.
Today we are going to delve a bit deeper into idealization.
When the narcissist idealizes you, who are you in the narcissist's life? Are you a potential intimate partner, what I call an insignificant other, are you just a source of supply? Are you slated to become a flying monkey? Or are you the narcissist role model? The person the narcissist wishes to emulate.
Narcissists idealize all four.
They idealize potential participants in the shared fantasy, intimate partners or friends. They idealize sources of narcissistic supply, they idealize flying monkeys, at least initially, and they idealize role models.
Idealization is a transient phase and is followed invariably and ineluctably by devaluation and discard.
But today we are going to focus more on the happy times with the narcissists, the very beginning of it all, when the fantasy reigns supreme.
And apropos fantasy, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever written about narcissistic abuse. I am also a professor of clinical psychology in multiple higher education institutions around this shrinking polluted globe. Never say that I don't give you a dose of optimism every single morning.
I mentioned that idealization, or more precisely the shared fantasy, is the only way that narcissists relate to other people. All the narcissists' interpersonal relationships are actually structured shared fantasies.
Consequently, narcissists idealize in every type of relationship, in every interpersonal interaction, narcissists idealize, because idealization is the first stage of the shared fantasy.
In internet relationships or romantic options and potentials, the narcissist would love bomb you. Love bombing is a form of idealization or involves idealization.
But the narcissist does exactly the same with potential friends, colleagues. He wants to impress or to like him. Bosses, the church. I mean, wherever the narcissists is, where the narcissists comes across other people, he immediately starts with superficial charm, embarks on a charm offensive, so to speak, idealizes people and lets them experience their own idealized version via his gaze.
This has addictive consequences. People become addicted to seeing themselves as perfect beings through the narcissists' eyes.
Narcissists idealize not only sources of narcissistic supply, not only insignificant others, not only potential intimate partners, not only friends, not only participants in the shared fantasy, narcissists idealize also flying monkeys and role models.
When the narcissist idealizes a role model, the narcissist is actually engaging in co-idealization.
The same applies to all other forms or all other targets of idealization.
Narcissists idealize you in order to idealize themselves. End of story.
Regardless of your role in the narcissist's life and unfolding drama, the only reason the narcissist idealizes you or the main reason is so as to idealize himself.
If you are perfect and he owns you, it means that he is perfect. If you are perfect and he imitates or emulates you, it means that he is attaining or acquiring perfection. If you are flawless, if you are supreme and superior, and you are the narcissist's intimate partner or you're the narcissist friend or you are the narcissist flying monkey.
That means that the narcissist has the same qualities only more so.
You are superior and he is superior over you. You are supreme and he is more supreme. You're perfect and his perfection is on a higher plane or level.
By idealizing you and then by claiming ownership over you, by subsuming you, by digesting you, by consuming you, by co-opting you, even by collaborating with you, or by aspiring to be like you, in all these situations, the narcissist kind of acquires or appropriates your ostensible perfection.
So having idealized you, the narcissist then absconds with the very qualities that he attributes to you. He kind of absorbs you in a way. You become an extension of the narcissist, a figment in his theater of the absurd, an element in his mind, an internal object.
So narcissists idealize role models. Role models are people the narcissists aspires to be like, emulates, imitates, and so he idealizes them. He often envies them as well, but at the point that he idealizes them, he actually believes himself to have merged with them.
In the narcissist's mind, idealizing the role model, regarding the role model as the reification of perfection, is the same as merging with the role model, becoming one with the role model, fusing with the role model.
And this gives rise, of course, to dysfunctional behaviors, such as stalking, erotomania, and other delusions.
So the narcissist idealizes the role model and by merging with the role model, by becoming one with the role model, the narcissist acquires the properties and qualities and traits of the role model, thereby rendering himself perfect, flawless, godlike, supreme, superior, omniscient, omnipotent, famous by extension, a celebrity or a legend in his own mind.
What about the envy?
Narcissists envy role models. They envy anyone who they deem somehow superior to them, somehow elevated.
When you aspire, even healthy people, when they aspire to become like someone, when they aspire to emulate or imitate someone, there is a tinge of envy there.
But in the narcissist's interactions with his role models he regards the role model as a kind of external regulator, the narcissist channels his envy. The narcissist's envy in the case of the role model is productive because it causes the narcissists to acquire new skills, to transform himself or herself, to behave differently.
And so the role model has an impact on the narcissist that modifies the narcissist's behaviors and regulates the narcissist's internal landscape, his moods, his affects or emotions, and his cognitions. The role model is the one who takes over the narcissist in a way.
So the envy is there, but it is channeled. It becomes productive, not destructive, and not self-destructive.
This is especially true of pro-social narcissists, but all narcissists, overt, grandiose, overt, prosocial and antisocial, malignant and schizoid, somatic and cerebral, all narcissists have role models. All of them adopt a public figure, could be a public intellectual, could be a footballer, could be anyone, could be a politician, could be someone from the arts or culture or an actor.
So they adopt a role model and they then mold themselves to become that role model.
In the narcissist mind, becoming like the role model means surpassing the role model, subsuming the role model, taking over the role model, becoming the role model to an exponential level.
It's as if the narcissist says, this is my role model, but if I only put my mind to it, I can become a better version of this role model. I'm more intelligent, I'm more handsome. I could become much more of a celebrity.
So the narcissist, when he interacts with the role model, his aim, at least psychodynamically, is to somehow digest the role model, absorb it, subsume it, consume it somehow, become one but by way of a hostile takeover.
It's a process of appropriating the role model, absconding with it, owning it somehow.
Nothing new here. It's the same process exactly that occurs with the narcissist in all his interpersonal relationships, with an intimate partner, with a friend, and so and so forth.
So when the narcissist interacts with the role model, the narcissist usually does some kind of research. He is attuned to surface information. We call it headline knowledge. He is attuned to surface information.
And because he doesn't delve deep, narcissists never delve deep. Narcissists are always on the surface. They're always superficial. They're always dilettantes. They pretend to know, but they actually don't.
Even when the narcissist is highly interested in a topic, in a person, in a period, the narcissist would usually garble up some concocted pieces of broken fragmented information and pretend to have become an expert.
Same applies to role models. The narcissist would skim and browse a few bits and pieces of information online, maybe offline, maybe talk to someone, and that's it. That would render him an expert on the role model, on the celebrity, of the public intellectual, on the politician, on the actor, on the footballer, on the scientists, you name it, whoever the role model may be.
The narcissist becomes the number one expert worldwide on this person, on this role model, by virtue of having spent half an hour skimming or browsing or surfing the Internet.
This headline information has an impact on the way the narcissist emulates and imitates the role model.
Because what the narcissist does, he creates a caricature of the emulated and imitated person. The narcissist exaggerates or completely ignores critical distinguishing facets of the role model or gets the role model completely wrong because of ignorance. Narcissus is not aware of some data.
So the result is a deformed, caricatured, surrealistic version of the role model, which in the narcissist mind, is perceived as an improvement of the role model.
It reminds me that once in the 19th century, there was a guy who printed a Yiddish edition of Shakespeare. And on the front page he wrote, William Shakespeare translated and improved.
So it's the same here. The narcissist emulates and imitates the role model, translates the role model into his or her own criteria and standards, and then claims to have improved the role model.
The role model is good at something, the narcissist is even better. All it took was an effort, a superficial acquaintance, and an effort at emulating or imitating some moves, repeating some sentences, pretending to knowledge.
It's all fake. It's all a theater production. It's a facade, Potemkin village.
And so this is a relationship between the narcissist and the role model. The role model is there in the narcissist's life is therefore merely a trigger.
It triggers the narcissist to create a caricatured version of the role model and then pretend to be vastly superior to the role model.
And that reflects, of course, the underlying seething, passive-aggressive envy.
In the case of narcissism, envy, pathological narcissism, envy is a critical clinical feature.