Narcissism is often and intuitively connected to aggression. We link the two phenomena. We say narcissists are aggressive, and very often we think that aggressive people are highly narcissistic.
Research tends to support both these assertions. Covert narcissists are less grandiose, less aggressive than grandiose narcissists.
But generally, narcissists are aggressive. Grandiose overt narcissists are the most aggressive because they have a much more pronounced anti-social component. They're much more psychopathic in other words.
Similarly, many aggressive people are aggressive because they feel entitled. And they feel entitled because they are grandiose.
So the component element of grandiosity is present in externalized aggression.
This is the topic of today's video, the aggressive narcissists.
And apropos, aggressive narcissists, my name is Sam Vaknin, and the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. I am also a professor of clinical psychology in your face. Get it? Okay, Shoshanin, don't be alarmed.
There is a debate. Is the aggression in narcissism a primary drive? Is it an effective motivational force? In other words, some kind of emotion that motivates action. Or is it a reaction to narcissistic injuries and mortifications? Is it an integral part of what we call reactants?
Meisner in 2008 suggested that healthy narcissistic investment in what he called well organized and adaptively functioning self-system is not a bad thing. The self-system benefits from such aggression. It is a domain general adaptive trait.
He said, and I'm quoting, it is only when failures and defects in the self-system are operative, that the pathological vicissitudes of narcissism holds sway.
Now that's very interesting because many scholars have suggested that pathological narcissism is just another name for a fragmented self, a self that didn't come into being, a disruption in the formation of the self, the constellation, and the integration of the soul.
And that's exactly what Meisner is suggesting.
But Meisner's insight goes even deeper.
Meisner says aggression is there, and whether it is beneficial and self-efficacious, socially acceptable and operational in a good way depends on the cohesiveness and the coherence and the functionality of the self.
When the self is dysfunctional, disrupted somehow, then aggression becomes bad both socially and to the individual.
Then we can talk about narcissism.
Aggression can be viewed as a narcissistic investment in a dysfunctional maladaptive self.
In other words, where people, healthy people, have a self that is self-enclosed, boundaried, a core identity, coherent, cohesive, continuous. These people, healthy people, they don't need aggression. They definitely do not invest aggression in themselves.
Aggression then becomes a tool, a kind of communication protocol I aggress against you because I'm unhappy with your behavior and I would like you to change it it's a behavior modification instrument in healthy people.
But in the narcissists where the self is highly fractured, dysfunctional, disoperational, problematic, non-cohesive, non-consistent, non-coherent, mess, the self is a mess. Aggression is the glue or the attempted glue to hold this kind of self together.
It's a narcissistic investment. It's an attempt to fix the self via some kind of delusional fantasy.
Remember how we started this video, aggression is grandiose.
So the fragmented self, the broken self, tries to put itself back together with the aid of aggression. Aggression is grandiose. It is helpful to the formation and maintenance of the false self.
The false self is misperceived by the narcissist as a self, as a functioning self.
So this is the sequence.
Pathological narcissism is a compensatory reaction to a disruption in the formation of a functioning self.
Then the narcissists uses grandiose aggression and invests it, cathects, invests this grandiose aggression in a substitute for the self, for the dilapidated self, a substitute known as the false self.
So now the false self is imbued, infused with grandiose aggression. The grandiose aggression holds everything together because it provides, it affords a kind of narrative which makes sense.
At that point, the narcissist identifies with the false self, believes that the false self is not false, that it is a self and that it is himself.
The narcissist identifies itself with himself with a false self.
And so aggression is perceived as very self-efficacious, conducive to functionality, a good thing.
There is emotional investment, there is cathexis, in aggression in two ways.
One, as a grandiose outlet, an affirmation and confirmation of the inflated, fantastic self-image of the narcissist.
And two, as a way, as a tool, as an instrument, to keep the narcissists together, to keep this humpty dumpty, to put it back together somehow. Aggression is the glue that holds the narcissists together.
Aggression is also correlated strongly with narcissistic injury or mortification.
Kohut suggested the term, the phrase, narcissistic rage.
And so whenever the narcissist is confronted with a challenge to his grandiose, inflated, fantastic self-concept. At that point, the narcissists feels ashamed, humiliated, and reacts with aggression.
Narcissistic injury, narcissistic mortification, trigger narcissistic rage. A panicky, desperate attempt to ward off, to fend off the countervailing information from the environment which exposes the narcissists as a fragile, brittle, wizard of oz.
And so aggression is actually associated with discrepancies between what we call explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem.
Explicit self-esteem is the ostentatious display of self-confidence and self-esteem in public. Implicit self-esteem is how the person really feels about himself or herself, what is the true level innate inside the true level of self-confidence and self-esteem.
And so when there is a discrepancy between the display of self-esteem and the actual experience self-esteem, between the explicit self-esteem and the implicit self-esteem, that triggers aggression.
Studies have shown that aggression is not correlated with absolute self-esteem, whether high or low, but it is correlated with incongruent self-esteem.
This is known as the donut theory. There's a donut, but there's a hole in the middle.
So there have been some studies about 10 or 15 years ago that correlated aggression with high explicit self-esteem, grandiose, overt narcissism.
But these studies have been superseded with other studies, which found out that it is not the high self-esteem or the low self-esteem, the trigger aggression.
It's when you display your surface-esteem has nothing to do with the way you truly feel about yourself.
You feel inferior, you feel like a bad object, unworthy, and lovable, etc.
But outwardly, you are the king of the jungle, you are god, your godlike.
And this triggers aggression.
We will say in a minute why.
Aggression is also a form of extreme symbolic identification and internalization of externalization of external objects.
When the narcissist comes across external objects, other people, you, you remember that the narcissist internalizes you, converts you into an introject, into an internal object, but this is a very, very aggressive act.
Snapshotting is a very aggressive act because it involves eliminating you as an external object, obviating, negating and vitiating you, no longer accepting your independent existence, your separateness, your externality, your personal autonomy, your agency, and your self-efficacy. All these are rejected by the narcissist.
Instead, consuming you, digesting you, subsuming you, and assimilating you into a representation of you in the narcissist's mind, the introject or the internal object or the snapshot.
This process of consumption becoming one with the external object via a hostile takeover, negating the external and separate existence of objects. This is of course a very aggressive act, a display of aggression.
And this symbiotic identification and internalization of external objects is a defense against envy, frustration, separateness, and anticipated abandonment and rejection.
The aggression is also a defense against the awareness of aggression, as Rosenfeld has observed.
So by being aggressive as a habitual normative behavior, something that's normalized, it's not only perceived as aggression. It's a defense against the awareness of aggression.
Aggression is socially handicapping and in a way it is a disservice of schizoid grandiosity.
Remember that whenever the narcissist is confronted with narcissistic mortification or narcissistic collapse or narcissistic injuries on a massive scale, or regular repeated injuries and so on. Whenever the narcissist is unable to secure an uninterrupted regular flow of high-grade narcissistic supply, at that point, the narcissist withdraws, avoids the world, constricts his or her life, and becomes a schizoid.
Aggression helps with this.
Because when you're aggressive, people avoid you, people shun you, people walk away. Or maybe you're incarcerated. Whatever the case may be, aggression is socially handicapping and is very helpful to establish or to bring about a condition of schizoid isolation. So it's instrumental in this sense too.
Aggression is a manifestation of entitlement and haughtiness, superiority, which are integral parts, integral aspects of narcissism.
Let it be clear. Aggression, manipulation, they have a bad rep, but they are useful in healthy individuals as well.
We are all aggressive from time to time. Aggression is called for in a variety of settings and situations. People who are not aggressive when needed something's wrong with them. People pleasers, for example.
Similarly, manipulating other people is a normal habitual part of normal healthy life. We manipulate everyone around us all the time, nothing wrong with it.
But the narcissist's aggression is different.
Proactive aggression is a part of normal narcissistic development, as Stone has observed. But pathological narcissistic aggression is not at the service of protecting oneself, self-defense, communicating displeasure, etc.
Narcissist aggression is at the service of maintaining a fantasy which is double-edged, a fantasy of the self as omnipotent, omniscient, godlike, perfect, and a fantasy of others as participants in a cult in a shared fantasy.
So at the service of the narcissists as service objects or service providers.
And this is of course a type of aggression that is dehumanizing, objectifying, highly antisocial, or at the very least asocial, but usually antisocial. It's a psychopathic type of aggression.
Walders, W-A-L-D-E-R, not with umlaut I think, as early as 1925, by the way, came up with the idea of the narcissistic personality.
Freud linked narcissism to both sexuality and aggression he suggested that there is idealized love, which is sexuality essentially, and avoid them destructiveness, which is a form of aggression.
Freud also suggested that aggression can be self-directed and linked to phenomena such as depression.
Reich suggested that narcissism is a pathological form of self-esteem regulation, and it involves self-inflation and aggression, which are used to protect the self-concept of the narcissist.
Hepworth, to kind of point at this aggressive aspect of pathological narcissism, like coined the phrase phallic narcissists.
But as I said, aggression is an integral part of a healthy personality and of normative social structures. It's not necessarily, aggression is not necessarily linked to anome or chaos.
Aggression is used to assert dominance within hierarchies, for example.
But the narcissist uses aggression to assert dominance when there is no other way to self-enhance.
When self-enhancement is denied, where the narcissist cannot obtain supply, when people refuse to collaborate with the narcissist in the shared fantasy, when a variety of confluence of circumstances and situations and environments and people conspire, so to speak, to put the narcissists down, to pull the mask, to expose the narcissists, first and foremost to himself, so that he experiences shame and so on.
When all this is happening, mortification, injury, you name it, the narcissist uses aggression to reassert the fiction of his own godlike superiority and perfection.
He establishes dominance not on realistic grounds. This is not meritocratic somehow, but he establishes dominance via coercion, via imposition of a delusion on others.
Horny called it, Karen Horny called it, aggressive, expansive type.
So the overt externalized aggression that is associated with grandiose narcissism is a coercive measure.
In the covert, the aggression is passive aggressive.
So in the covert, the aggression manifests in disguised and coded forms, which mainly involves sabotaging others.
But in the overt, it's in your face.
I've mentioned the covert and the debate in psychology has been ongoing well over 70 years whether narcissism, pathological narcissism is compensatory, whether all narcissists are actually one way or another, fragile, brittle and vulnerable or shy or exposed to shame.
Narcissistic vulnerability involves a discrepant sense of self-esteem, not a secure one.
The self-esteem, self-confidence, or more precisely, the sense of self-worth of the vulnerable narcissist is discrepant.
It's not high. It's not secure. It's not even explicit. It's implicit and it's challenged. It's compromised. It's iffy, if you wish, contingent.
And so this yields in the vulnerable narcissists or some kind of aggression.
And this aggression is self-directed sometimes and leads to emotional dysregulation or suicidality, but most times this aggression is externalized either openly, overtly, ostentatiously, conspicuously or covertly and passive aggressively.
Both types, the overt grandiose and the covert fragile vulnerable shy, both types react to threats aggression in both types is reactive to threats threats against the self concept or the sense of self, or actually more precisely, the sense of the false self.
They react to these. That's why they're hyper-vigilant. They scan for insults, for rejections, for provocations, for humiliations, for shaming, for criticism, for disagreement.
They constantly scan. This is cold empathy, very coldempathy.
They scan everyone and they make misattributions and misinterpretations of other people, speech acts and behaviors.
They constantly attribute to other people malintent, malice, and envy.
And they react to this, and they perceive the whole world as a powder cake of threats, and they react to this with aggression.
Whenever they fail to self-enhance, whenever they fail to convince themselves somehow, that the false self is not false, that the shared fantasy is not a fantasy, and that they are indeed godlike and perfect.
Whenever this attempt fails, essentially all narcissistic supply is self-supply because all people are external objects.
Whenever this fails, they again become aggressive. It's a defense.
But this time it's not a defense against external threats. It's a defense against internal shame.
When aggression is externalized, it's against perceived real or imaginary threats to self-concept, self-image, and self-perception, which is grandiose, fantastic and inflated.
Whenever the aggression is internalized, it's a defense against shame, intolerable, unbearable, life-threatening shame.
So there are many mechanisms involved in the aggression of the narcissist, externalization, external attribution or misattribution, projection of blame.
All these mechanisms have to do with an attempt to regulate the internal environment.
Now, technically the regulation is external. The narcissist uses narcissistic supply from the outside to regulate his internal environment.
But in reality, as I just said, all narcissistic supply is self-supply, because the narcissist perceives the narcissistic supply as coming from the inside, from the introjects, from the internal objects, from the representations of other people in his mind.
He doesn't recognize other people's externality and separateness.
Some scholars suggest that vulnerability is about shame rather than aggression, rather than envy. It's all about shame.
And I tend to adhere to this point of view.
Klein said that envy is an innate form of aggression.
But she didn't dwell much about shame, she didn't deal much with shame, nothing. It's a major lacuna, major missing link in her work.
Watsonfeld and Kernberg and others described aggression as a feature of narcissism. Kernberg said that the pathological grandiose self is a combination of negative kind of self condensed with object representations.
So there is a self that is negative and there are negative devaluing views of others known as object representations. And this is one part of the pathologically grandiose self.
And then there's another part of the pathologically grandiose self, which is the positive grandiose self, the self-idealized grand self.
So there are two components there, and there's an enormous tension between them, which gives rise to anxiety. Coupled with aggression, destructiveness internal and external ensues.
Kernberg said that aggressive, dissociated and projected poorly differentiated superego functions are also at play. He called it primitive superego, but that's a bad phrase because it's been appropriated decades before Kernberg by others. But that's what he meant, poorly differentiated superego.
In malignant narcissism, sadistic aggression is egosyntonic.
So according to Kernberg, malignant narcissists are sadists. Whenever they torture and torment and harshly criticize and put down and humiliate and degrade other people, they feel elated. They experience narcissistic elation, probably because it supports their self-conception as omnipotent and godlike, god- like, god meets justice. It's a sense of power when you hurt someone else and it's joyful when it comes to the malignant narcissist.
Aggression in the works of early psychoanalysts and well into the 1960s, I would say. Aggression is kind of death drive, thanatic drive, thanatos. And it is associated with a primary destructive motivation to eliminate representations of others as well as a representation of the self.
In other words, aggression was perceived in early psychoanalytic and psychodynamic and object relations literature. Aggression was perceived as a kind of obliterating indiscriminate force, destroying everything in its path, kind of nuclear Armageddon.
Someone wrote, the self is identified with the hated object and self-elimination is the only way to destroy the object as well. I think it was Kernberg, as far as I remember.
So one could say, and these are my words now, not Kernberg, one could say that aggression can be conceptualized as anti-introjection, not as extrojection.
In other words, aggression is not about eliminating the external object, it's actually about eliminating the internal objects.
So it's anti-introjection, it's against the introjects, not extrojection, not an attempt to somehow destroy external objects.
And this sometimes leads to idealized recklessness or even idealized death by suicide. There's an idealization of death and recklessness because that would definitely eliminate and destroy all the introjects in the self.
Andre Green of dead mother fame, I mentioned him a lot in my work, the French psychoanalyst, brilliant Andre Green said that he coined something called negative or death narcissism. He had a great way with phrases and words, I envy. So negative or death narcissism, we said this is a situation where the death drive, the destrudo, paralyzes the self. There's emptiness there, nothingness, and there's decathexis, the withdrawal of emotional, psychic, psychological energy from anything and everything. Objects, external, internal, and so on. There's just a suspended state of psychological animation, kind of vegetative state.
And this is because negative or death narcissism in a way eulogizes and idealizes death. The death drive paralyzes the self because it is given power over the self through idealization.
It's a bit like Satanism, where the Satanist admires Satan rather than God.
But of course, death narcissism or negative narcissism is unique, rare phenomenon. The overwhelming vast majority of narcissists are not death narcissists or negative narcissism.
In these cases where there is a flirtation with self-annihilation as a way to get rid of nagging, bothersome, or even life-threatening objects, internal objects, and affects, emotions.
In these cases, narcissistic supply is the denial of cravings for objects.
In other words, when the solution is, I cannot stand my introjects, I cannot stand my internalized bad object, I cannot stand the turmoil and the chaos inside me, I cannot obtain supply on a regular basis, or if I do, it comes at a price.
I'm fragile, I'm vulnerable, I'm broken, I am dependent and I hate it, dependent on other people, for narcissistic supply, and I hate it, where, in short, there is a pervasive systemic state of egodystony, and the solution seems to be let me destroy myself and my objects, my introjects, and get rid of all this mess.
Not necessarily physical suicide, but definitely mental suicide.
Narcissistic supply in this case would be a mirror image of narcissistic supply in the overt grandiose case.
In death choosing, death affirming narcissists, the supply would be a denial of craving for the objects, usually by devaluing them or also by devaluing them, as Manacas has observed.
A disengagement, a withdrawal, avoidance, constriction, and psychic death. A self-directed form of aggression. Narcissistic rage inwardly directed. I hate myself.
Rothschild, who suggested that borderline is a failed form of narcissism and the videos dedicated to his work on this channel, Rothschild said that injuries in separation individuation in this phase of separating from mummy and becoming an individual injuries in this phase can lead to aggressive responses.
He said that whenever the narcissist is exposed to narcissistic injuries, the non or narciss injuries, the narcissistic mortification, the narcissist loses an ideal perfect self and at that point the narcissist reacts with aggression in order to reconstitute and reestablish this lost ideal perfect self.
Because the narcissist doesn't know any better, doesn't have any other option. Having failed in separation, he is not an individual.
The injuries or the disruptions in the separation and individuation process mean that the narcissist is attached irretrievably and inextricably attached to an ideal perfect self, which is essentially a parental figure or a maternal figure even.
The ideal perfect self, the false self loves the narcissist unconditionally. That's a perception of the narcissist. So it's a maternal figure, an internalized maternal figure.
And whenever it's threatened, the narcissists react with aggression.
Okay, these are a few pointers, ideas, insights, and concepts regarding aggression in narcissists.
Okay, I hope you didn't find this lecture too aggressive, but frankly, if you have, it's your effing problem.