Personality disorders and especially pathological narcissistic personality disorder are described as rigid patterns.
That's the language in the diagnostic and statistical manual. And that is something you would hear from many psychologists and psychiatrists.
But is it correct?
I beg to differ. I think narcissists are not rigid at all. I think they are hyper-flexible.
I think the problem is now of narcissists is that they are too flexible, not that they're rigid.
Because they lack a core identity, because they suffer from identity diffusion or identity disturbance, because they're dissociative and confabulate a lot, because they are highly reactive to external input, they are externally regulated, because they are totally dissociative, and therefore they are discontinuous and disjointed because of all these and many other features of pathological narcissism.
The narcissist is actually too flexible, not rigid.
The narcissist is like a fuzzy cloud, not like a construction site, not like a building.
So I think it's a mistake. I think rigidity in this sense is the wrong approach to personality disorders with emphasis on Cluster B personality disorders.
Ironically, Cluster B personality disorders are known as erratic or dramatic. And I fail to see how erratic and dramatic people would be rigid.
And there's a philosophical question here. Aren't we all rigid in this sense? Our personalities are rigid. They're supposed to be consistent across situations, circumstances, environments, and time itself. We're supposed to be the same person. And this renders us recognizable.
When I say, I'm Sam Vaknin and I have this personality, it means that it's the same Sam Vaknin now as 40 years ago in some respects. there are constants, there are immutable figments or immutable elements and ingredients of identity, which never change.
I therefore think that we are all rigid to some extent and flexible to a large extent.
What separates the narcissists from healthy people is that his rigidity is close to zero.
There are no or very few unchangeable, immutable recognizable element in the narcissist not to mention the borderline they are different from one day to the next they change professions and jobs and hobbies and interests in values and beliefs and in jobs and intimate partners and friends and location and places and locations and everything changes kaleidoscopically tumultuously dizzyingly vertigiously in the narcissist life there's too much flexibility.
This is the topic of today's video.
How we get it wrong about narcissism.
It's too flexible. It's not rigid enough or even not rigid at all.
I will try now to break this down into the various clinical features that give rise to this hyper-flexibility, which is reminiscent of hyper-reflexivity. Topic for another video.
It's very misleading to say that pathological narcissism is rigid. There's no flexibility there.
This is a result of a confusion between the envelope and its contents.
While the envelope of pathological narcissism is rigid, the contents of the envelope are actually kaleidoscopically varied.
The narcissist can easily transition between jobs, between interests and hobbies, between partners. The narcissist life is adventurous, is variable, is rich, is colorful.
But the narcissist reactive patterns, the narcissists affects, the narcissists cognitions, the narcissistic psychodynamics, internal processes, the narcissists dependence on an addiction to narcissistic supply, all these are indeed rigid.
So we should make a distinction between the envelope and its contents. The contours and the figures painted within the contours.
What the narcissist does, which as I said is flexible, hyper-flexible actually, the narcissist flexibility is such that he doesn't seem to possess a core identity. There is identity diffusion or identity disturbance similar to borderline personality disorder.
So there's a huge flexibility there.
Ironically, this flexibility arises from the core pathology. It is an outcome of the pathology.
When we look at, for example, the absence of core identity, an impaired reality testing, and above all, dissociative gaps in memory, when you put all these together with identity disturbance or identity diffusion, you get a lot of fuzzy areas, a lot of flexibility, a lot of unpredictability, indeterminacy, a lot of uncertainty.
And so, again, it would be wrong to say that personality disorders are rigid patterns. They are rigid, reactive patterns on the one hand, but the reaction is to a very flexible and varied life.
And today we are going to deal with the question of what holds this life together? What, in which sense is the narcissist, let alone the borderline, the same person from one day to the next?
The key answer is, of course, supply, narcissistic supply, in its various forms, one of which is known as self-supply.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and I'm a professor of psychology.
So we have established that there is a lot of flexibility in pathological narcissism. That is the outcome actually of the pathology itself.
The dissociative and dissociated narcissist feels normally incomplete or even non-existent.
When your memory is not continuous, you feel disjointed. When a lot of information is missing about your past, it would be very difficult for you to develop a core identity stable across time and space.
So narcissists feel fragmented. It's like a collection of shards, or my favorite metaphor, a kaleidoscope that is ever revolving.
Narcissists feel incomplete and non-existent.
And this is why narcissists are obsessed with the past. They desire desperately to secure some kind of access to their past. They maintain the physical presence of the past in their lives.
That's why they collect mementos and trophies and souvenirs and certificates and proofs and evidence.
No matter how onerous and obscene the past had been, it's still perceived by the narcissist as a crucial element in the self-concept of the narcissist.
It's as if, if you don't have a past, how can you be godlike? If you're deprived of access to the continuous movie of your life, how can you make any claims, reasonable claims, about your characteristics and traits, including your grandiosity?
The narcissist feels compromised by the fact that his perception of the past is hampered, impeded and obstructed by the elements, the core clinical features of his pathology.
Narcissus has a conflicted relationship with the past.
He wishes to dwell upon the past. He wishes to cherish and relish the past. He wishes to embalm the past. He wishes to acquire or reacquire the past. And he wishes, of course, to leverage the past to sustain his inflated, fantastic, grandiose self-image and batters his cognitive distortions and prove to himself that all his claims are real. They're not fantastic.
But the narcissist is incapable of having access to the past, precisely because of the elements that I've mentioned, dissociation, impaired reality testing and so on so forth.
The past defines the narcissists identity. The narcissists are, they're the stuff that memories are made of. They're memory creatures, their dream creatures.
And yet, the past has to be concocted, conjured up, confabulated, falsified in a way.
The memories are disjointed and hazy and suspect. Even the Narcissus realizes that many of his memories are perhaps not memories. They are unreal.
The Narcissus is fully aware of his capacity to create worlds, to conjure up realities. Narcissus regards himself as Godlike.
And yet God's main predicament and God's main shortcoming is God can never be sure of his or her past because God creates everything. When you create your own past, you can never be sure that it had really happened.
So narcissists are forced to inhabit a present, the present. They don't have a past. They are creatures of the present, but not in a good, healthy way, not in a mindfulness kind of way. They are captives of the present, the prisoners of the present.
And this raises a major problem.
Because if you are deprived of a past, if you have no past, to talk of, and if you are constantly in the present, this challenges grandiosity and grandiose claims about the self and grandiose history and a grandiose future.
Creatures who are entombed in the present are very short-lived and their impact is highly limited. They definitely cannot claim to be godlike as far as the narcissists perceives it.
So there's a clash here between the narcissists need to come up with a mythology, a personal mythology, that relies somehow on shreds of evidence regarding the past, the fragments and shards of a broken perception or memory of the past, on the one hand, and then the need to claim godlike powers over past, present and future.
It is a theological question, which is why I keep saying that narcissism is a private religion.
If you, like God, are a creature of the present, if everything to you is the present, the past, the future, they're all present. The same way, relativity theory regards time, relativity theory regards past and future as illusions.
So, if you're a creature of the present, can you claim any knowledge about the past? It's a huge problem.
And the solution the Narcissus comes up with is fantasy.
Narcissus' fantasy or capacity to fantasize, bridges the memory gaps.
The fantasy affords self-enhancing, self-congruent narrative continuity.
And within the fantasy, narcissistic supply is the glue that holds the compensatory fantasy together.
What is narcissistic supply?
It is input and feedback from the environment, the human environment usually. Input and feedback that says, Mr. Narcissist or Miss Narcissist, your fantasy is not a fantasy at all. It's reality.
And so then this reduces the narcissist anxiety and allows him to develop a delusion of continuity.
The misguided belief that it does have a past, and that the past conforms fully to his false self and to the way he sees himself as godlike.
So this is the sequence.
Dissociation, gaps of memory, impaired reality testing, inability to access the past because of all these.
Absence of past, constant present is a challenge to one's self-perception as godlike and grandiose.
Compensation solution fantasy that bridges the memory gaps via confabulations fantasy that feels good is egosyntonic, false self-congruent.
And a fantasy that is a narrative.
Because it is a narrative, a story, a movie, a theatre play, provides the illusion of continuity.
Fantasy, delusion, illusion, clearly these solutions are insufficient.
And so here comes the role or the function of narcissistic supply.
Other people should tell the narcissist, should inform the narcissists, should confirm to the narcissists that the fantasy is real, not delusional, not illusory, not a hallucination, is absolutely real.
The narcissistic supply is a form of confirmation bias. It's a way to garner or harvest reactions, input and feedback from other people that will allow the narcissist to delude himself, deceive himself, lie to himself more efficaciously. It's a part and parcel of self-efficacy.
But there is a problem with narcissistic supply.
The uninterrupted flow of narcissistic supply cannot be guaranteed.
Moreover, sometimes the supply is negative, challenging, even mortifying. Sometimes the supply undermines the narcissist's illusion of continuity, perception of grandiosity. Sometimes the supply, because supply is input and feedback from the environment.
The narcissist cannot control the content of this feedback. He can to some extent coerce people to give him feedback, to provide him with input, to react to his demands, to his solicitations, but he cannot control the content.
So narcissistic supply could be ruinous, could actually undermine the fantasy, challenge the cognitive distortion of grandiosity, ruin everything the narcissists has constructed over years, sometimes decades.
And so the narcissist maintains an inner dialogue, an internal dialogue when it comes to the narcissistic supply. When the supply is disrupted in a condition of deficient narcissistic supply, also known as narcissistic collapse, the narcissist says to him so, I am no longer able to secure narcissistic supply. And I'm no longer able to secure narcissistic supply for either of two reasons. Either I have failed in everything I've ever attempted, which is what we call narcissistic injury or narcissistic modification or people are evil. They deny me supply intentionally in order to undermine me, in order to hurt me, in order to destroy me, in order to take me down. So it's a strategy. Denial of supply is a strategy. Either case is threatening to the precarious internal balance of the personality or whatever is left of the narcissist. So then the narcissist goes to the next stage in the internal dialogue and it's a totally internal dialogue. The self, the narcissist's false self, is an internal object. And you remember that narcissists maintain interactions only with internal objects. So then the narcissist says to himself basically, I don't need anyone. I actually don't need anyone because I'm far superior to everyone. There's nothing they can give me that I cannot self-generate. And there's nothing they can give me that I want or need.
And this leads to what is known as self-supply. The self-supplying narcissist is grandiosely self-sufficient. The self-supplying narcissist is defiant in your face. F off. The self-supplying narcissist is a universe unto himself he is both God and a worshipper he is creation reified and embodied and in this sense the self-supplying narcissist is clinically a psychopath, antisocial. Self-supply works for a while. The narcissist becomes his or her own audience, self-audiencing. Nassist provides himself or herself with narcissistic supply, the narcissist convincese that he is superior, that is Godlike, that is the, but it can hold only for so long. Because there is the issue of the fantasy, the fantasy, the delusions, the illusions, the self-deception, the confabulations that are aimed to bridge memory gaps. All these require external regulation, external affirmation, require feedback and input from the outside that tells the analysis that he is on the right path, that he is not misleading himself, that he is not gone astray. So self-supply is limited in time. The ability to self-supply is compromised because in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, emanating from a harsh and unforgiving reality, the narcissists can no longer self-delude. There's a limit to how much a narcissist can deceive himself or herself. There's a limit to the powers of delusionality, powers of fantasy. When the narcissists reaches this limit, it's also the limit of self-supply. At that stage, the narcissists generates drama as a substitute for self-supply. And years of drama usually end up in self-destruction and gravely dangerous situations. The narcissist then withdraws from the world, becomes a schizoid, goes through a second phase of self-supply and distracts himself. He becomes compulsive. He hoards, compulsive shopping, compulsive gambling, compulsive traveling. It's a single strategy. I'm going to distract myself. I'm going to ignore the problems facing me. The fact that I cannot generate external supply. I cannot generate cell supply. So I'm going to not be by distracting myself. I'm absenting myself from my own conundrum the destructive this distractions these compulsive activities provide the narcissists with a hiatus with a with a with a with a pause with a break allowed the narcissist to recuperate and recover. And then the narcissist begins to seek out sources of narcissistic supply, constructs a shared fantasy and induces or choruses people into the shared fantasy, and the cycle starts all over again from zero. This is the cycle of narcissistic supply.
And narcissistic supply goes hand in hand with a compensatory fantasy.
The compensatory fantasy is needed in order to imbue the narcissist with a sense of coherent, continuous identity, which relies on memories, real and confabulated.
This is the mainspring of pathological narcissism.
And within this, there is a capacity for rejuvenation, for reinvention. There's a flexibility of self-definition and self-identity.
The narcissist is hyper-flexible, not inflexible.
It is true that the narcissist reacts, there are reactive patterns which are identical across all situations.
Nevermind how varied, how different these situations are, the narcissist is still identifiable as the same reactive entity with the same reactive patterns.
And this raises the question, aren't we all?
What is the meaning of personality?
When we say personality or when we use someone's name, John, Eliza, I mean, we identify people as themselves.
We say John is John, Eliza is Eliza, because they're the same. They're the same across multiple situations.
They display the same characteristics, the same traits, the same reactive patterns, the same speech acts, the same preferences, the same fears, the same, I mean, that's the same.
Cognitions, everything is the same. This sameness should not be confused for rigidity.
I therefore challenge the perception in clinical psychology that narcissists are rigid.
I would say that it's exactly the opposite.
The problem with pathological narcissism is too much flexibility, not enough rigidity.
There's no core identity. There's nothing unifying. There's no unitary individual there. There's no individuation to start with.
So it's all a cloud, a fuzzy cloud.
And in this sense, the narcissist's hyper-flexibility is such that he is an absence, not a presence.