There are many differences between narcissists and psychopaths. I advise you to head over directly to the comorbidity's playlist on this channel and spot the videos which deal with these differences.
One difference, of course, is the narcissist uses narcissistic supply to regulate his internal environment, his moods, his emotions, his cognitions, and so on.
The psychopath is in no need of external input. The psychopath self-regulates.
Another difference is that psychopaths are perfectly able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. They have intact reality testing. They are also able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. They have intact reality testing. They are also able to tell the difference between external objects and internal objects, both of which are denied to the narcissist.
The narcissist is unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. He's fully invested emotionally, he's fully cathected in his own shared fantasy and believes it to be true.
And there are many other differences.
But today I'm going to discuss one crucial difference as far as the victims are concerned.
The narcissist manipulates you very differently to the psychopath.
And this is the topic of today's video.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology.
So, the psychopath and the narcissists are Machiavellian.
In other words, they manipulate people.
They manipulate people for different ends.
The only goal of the narcissist is narcissistic supply.
Narcissists, of course, avail themselves of your sex, of services that you can provide, of your presence, which instills in them a sense of secure base or safety, and so on.
So narcissists take a lot of things from you. There's no denying this.
But what they really need, what they really aspire to, what they really subsist on, what they really consume and what they cannot exist without is narcissistic supply.
The inflow of feedback and input from the environment that somehow buttresses and upholds their inflated, fantastic, grandiose self-concept, self-image and self-perception.
This is the ultimate goal of the narcissist. Everything the narcissist does and everything the narcissist refrains from doing has to do with securing a regular undisturbed flow of narcissistic supply.
The psychopath is a lot more varied. The psychopath is goal-oriented or goal-focused the psychopath.
Seeks money or sex or power or access or what have you.
So they're both goal oriented but the narcissist is a lot more constricted, a lot more rigid than the psychopath.
The psychopath's repertoire is much wider and both of them manipulate you to obtain their goals.
But here's a major difference.
The psychopath distorts your perception of external reality by manipulating your internal reality.
The narcissist distorts your perception of internal reality by manipulating your external reality.
It's as if the psychopath and the narcissists were mirror images of each other when it comes to Machiavellian manipulation of people, manipulativeness.
Let me expand a bit on what I've said. It sounds cryptic, but it's pretty straightforward, actually.
The psychopath's aim is to distort your perception of external reality.
The psychopath gaslights you.
He wants you to distrust your own judgment of reality. He wants you to feel disoriented, dislocated. He wants to induce in you dissociative defenses.
The psychopath's aim is to isolate you from the world, to take you away from the universe, from reality, from your environment, from your social milieu, and therefore and thereby exert total control over you which would allow the psychopath to obtain or to realize or to attain his or her goals.
Most psychopaths are men.
And how does the psychopath achieve this how does he accomplish this induced delusionality in the victim? How does he divorce the victim from the victim's grasp of reality, from the victim's ability to gauge and evaluate what's true and what's not, what's real and what's unreal? How does the psychopath accomplish this?
By manipulating your internal reality?
The psychopath pushes your buttons, leverages your vulnerabilities, penetrates your armor. The psychopath brainwashes you in some ways.
Whatever the case may be, the psychopath uses internal psychological dynamics in you, uses chinks in your armor, weaknesses, shortcomings, vulnerabilities in order to make you distrust your own senses, to make you doubt and become suspicious of data emanating from the environment, to make you question everything that's happening to you and everyone around you.
Rendering the psychopath the only stable presence in your life, the only person you can trust, the only rock you can lean against, the only shoulder you can cry on.
So let's summarize this bit.
The psychopath manipulates your internal reality in order to distort your perception of external reality, which is a great definition of gaslight.
The narcissist does exactly the opposite.
The narcissist distorts your perception of your internal reality. The narcissist entrains you.
The narcissist installs an introject, a representation of himself in your mind.
The narcissist talks to you from within your mind. The narcissist takes over your mind. You outsource many functions to the narcissist, ego functions, and so on.
And through this hostile takeover, through this merger, union, fusion, through this symbiosis, induced symbiosis, the narcissist regresses you, infantilizes you, renders you a helpless infant, a helpless toddler, a baby once again.
So narcissists work very hard on distorting your perception of who you are, on destroying your core identity, on negating your being in existence, on taking away your agency, personal autonomy and independence.
Having done this, they proceed to manipulate your external reality.
Now you are defenseless, now you're weak, now you're vulnerable, now you're broken and damaged, and now you're available to participate in the narcissist's fantasy, to lie to yourself that the fantasy is reality, to become delusional when it comes to the narcissist and to his paracosm, his alternative reality.
In short, the narcissist plays with your mind, invades your mind, takes over your mind in order to impair your reality testing, to destroy your capacity, to gauge and evaluate reality properly.
The outcome is sometimes perceived by the victims to be identical, and yet the paths, the trajectories that lead to the outcome are completely different.
The damage in the case of the narcissist is far more pervasive and extensive and sometimes lifelong. It's trauma.
The damage in the case of the psychopath is usually something external. For example, losing money or having coercive sex or introducing the psychopath to people.
So the psychopath is focused on surface outcomes on external consequences whereas the narcissist is laser focused on becoming you, on taking over, on subsuming and consuming you so that nothing much is left behind.
And I will reiterate what I said at the beginning.
In order to manipulate your internal reality, in order to make you subservient and submissive and compliant, the psychopath gaslights you. It distorts your perception of external reality, rendering you dependent on the psychopath.
What the narcissist does is exactly the opposite.
The narcissist plays with your mind to start with.
And because he rearranges the furniture within your mind, you lose touch with reality.
And again, you become dependent on him as the only reality tester, the only touchstone of reality.
The outcome is pretty identical. The goals are different and the way to the outcomes. The ways to the outcome are different.
Now, this has massive implications when it comes to the treatment of the aftermath of narcissistic abuse versus psychopathic abuse.
In the case of psychopathic abuse, we are faced with the equivalent of PTSD, post-traumatic effects.
It's coming across a psychopath is the equivalent of having been in a natural disaster or an accident or a crash.
The exposure to the narcissist has far-reaching consequences, much wider than the exposure to the psychopath.
The narcissist has taken over who you are, has denuded you of your core identity, and has become you. You are an extension of the narcissist. You're a figment of his imagination. You're a participant in his script or play, theater play, movie. You are no longer. It's not only that you are no longer you, but you're no longer.
And so in the aftermath, in the wake of narcissistic abuse, we need to reconstruct the victim from scratch basically and this is why I'm aghast when people make a distinction between useful, helpful, admirable narcissists and all other narcissists.
You see victims of narcissists online, castigating narcissists, chastising them, criticizing them, attacking them, hating on them, and then admiring other narcissists who are powerful, rich and accomplished.
So it seems like there are two classes of narcissists.
There's the humdrum pedestrian narcissists and they are monsters and they are evil, and they are to be extirpated and they are to be obliterated and eliminated and incarcerated.
And then there's a small elite of narcissists.
These are the super rich narcissists, the super powerful narcissists, the super accomplished narcissists, or those narcissists who manage their public relations and image so well that they become admired and adored, gurus, public intellectuals and so on.
And these narcissists, for some reason, are special. They're exempt. They have the right to be grandiose, they have the right to abuse other people they're accepted they're perfectly okay they're forgiven because of their alleged real contributions to society.
The grandiosity of these narcissists is not perceived as fantastic because it is grounded in real life achievements.
These real life achievements, real or imagined, by the way, give them the right to abuse people. They are forgiven.
And this is really bad. This attitude of discriminating between classes of narcissists is really bad as far as the victims go.
Because it allows the narcissists access to the victim's psyche.
And most of these accomplished super rich, super powerful narcissists are actually malignant narcissists. They're psychopaths as well as narcissists.
You have been warned.