People with borderline personality disorder are ashamed of their diagnosis. Clinicians are aware of this, and to the best of their ability, they try to avoid labeling people with borderline personality disorder. There's a stigma attached.
Narcissists and psychopaths on the other hand are quite proud of their disorders. They regard their disorders as evolutionary adaptations, as competitive advantages, as something to boast about, and to be emulated by others who are less fortunate to have become or have been born narcissists and psychopaths.
This is pretty ironic, because narcissism and psychopathy involve choices, whereas borderline personality disorder is basically hereditary.
In psychopathy there's a genetic component, of course, but the psychopath's actions as well as a narcissist's actions are usually determined on the fly, day to day, and involve decision-making.
My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. I'm also a professor of clinical psychology in several universities.
Today we are going to discuss the emotional investment of narcissists and psychopaths in their disorders. This is known as cathexis, the connection, the love affair between narcissists and psychopaths and their narcissism and psychopathy, respectively.
Cluster B personality disorders involve a disruption in the formation of a functional self. It used to be called ego. Call it anything you wish. This core identity, which is supposedly immutable, this essence, that is who we are. The formation, the creation, the constellation and the integration of thisnucleus is disrupted in early childhood.
Now in all these cases probably there is a genetic predisposition. Not all children who are exposed to abuse become narcissists, codependents, borderlines, psychopaths, etc.
But in the vast majority of cases, there is a background of adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, so we know there's some kind of connection between trauma and abuse in early childhood, other adverse circumstances, adversity generally, and the emergence of personality disorders later in life.
The mistake that self-styled experts make is they consider pampering and spoiling as the opposite of adversity.
But actually, pampering and spoiling can be onerous. It's very difficult to grow up in an environment with overprotective parents who isolate you from reality and from your peers, breach your boundaries, merge with you, treat you as an extension, and impose on you their wishes, fantasies, dreams and expectations.
Possibly this is the worst form of abuse, parentifying, instrumentalizing, objectifying the child.
And yet, when narcissists and psychopaths grow up, when they supposedly become adults, which they never do, they remain stuck developmentally in early childhood. There's what used to be called arrested development.
So when they grow up, they somehow develop an ideology, a kind of religion around their disorder. They elevate, glamorize, and glorify their disorders. They convert people to the cause. They become missionary. They brag and boast and swagger when it comes to their disorders.
They regard their disorders as gifts and endowments, something bestowed upon them by a benevolent universe or a loving God, transforming them in the process into god-like creatures with the perfection of a divinity.
And this is the background to the emotional connection, attachment and bonding between the narcissist and his narcissism, the psychopath and his psychopathy.
It is actually the only time narcissists and psychopaths display attachment and bonding.
Why is that?
Because it's safe.
Early childhood abuse and trauma have severe impacts.
One of them is known as object in constancy. The disbelieve and distrust in other people, people are going to betray you, they're going to abandon you, they're going to hurt you. This is object in constancy or an extension of object in constancy.
Similarly, this generates separation insecurity, abandonment anxiety, but not only separation insecurity and abandonment anxiety from any specific individual, related to any specific individual, it's not only about intimate partners or friends or spouses or what have you.
It is a general feeling that the world might abandon you at any minute, that you may find yourself solipsistically floating adrift in a hostile space, in an inferno of your own making, perhaps, but still an infernal.
It is this anticipatory anxiety, this perception that something really bad is going to happen, this catastrophizing, in effect, that gives rise to the anxiety that underlies both psychopathy and narcissism and to the shame of being unable to cope with these predicaments efficaciously, starting in early childhood.
And so when you review this psychodynamic landscape, you realize that psychopathy and narcissism are compensatory.
They compensate for something.
What do they compensate for?
A lack of sense of safety. A lack of sense of stability, a lack of sense of predictability and determinacy. The world is chaotic and random and terrifying.
And so the disorders, narcissism and psychopathy, restore the sense of safety.
The narcissist is grandiose, thereby godlike, thereby untouchable, invulnerable, impermeable. No one can hurt the narcissist because he is a divinity.
The psychopath's defiance demonstrates the psychopath's overriding omnipotence.
The defiance is a message to the world. It's defiant signaling, saying, you can't do anything to me.
Self-sufficiency in both cases, narcissism and psychopathy, also has to do with a restoration of the sense of safety via independence.
I am not dependent on anyone. I don't need anyone. I can survive and subsist all on my own.
And that, of course, makes you feel safe, makes you feel secure.
What narcissists and psychopaths do, they convert their disorders into ersatz's artificial secure bases.
Their parents fail to provide a secure base in a variety of ways.
And so these children grow up becoming their own secure bases via the mechanism of the false self in narcissism, the false self is a kind of godlike imaginary friend and becomes a secure base and in the case of the psychopath a combination of defiance recklessness and impulsivity which provides a shell or a firewall safeguarding the psychopath, this protective layer.
And so this, of course, if you are omnipotent, if you're godlike, if you can afford to be defiant, if you're self-sufficient, totally independent, don't need anyone, if you are perfect, if you're a perfect entity, you could feel safe, you need anyone. If you are perfect, if you're a perfect entity, you could feel safe. You could feel secure. Everything will be okay. It's a form of self-soothing.
Narcissists and psychopaths disorders are compensatory self-soothing.
It's a way of telling yourself everything is going to be fine because of who I am.
Everything is going to be fine because I am so supreme, I am so elevated, superiority guarantees, not only the ability to avoid the adverse consequences of one's actions, because as a superior being, you're exempt and you're entitled.
But superiority also guarantees submission, submission of other people, which renders you invulnerable when other people submit to you en masse when everyone submits to you because they recognize your supremacy your superiority your elevation there's a kind of hierarchy instant hierarchy that is formed, at least in the narcissists' mind and the psychopath's mind, of course.
There's a kind of instant hierarchy where the narcissists and psychopaths are so above the madding crowd. They are so removed and distanced from the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, the masses, which they're holding contempt, that actually they become untouchable. If you're floating, so if you're floating well above, no one can reach you.
Superiority is the underlying facet of the sense, the artificial sense of safety and security generated by psychopathy and narcissism.
And that is why narcissists and psychopaths are often, there's often a confusion as to who is a narcissist and who is a psychopath.
And self-styled experts get it wrong as usually. And they say that all psychopaths are narcissists, which is nonsense of course. I mean, many psychopaths and all narcissists are grandiose. Grandiosity is a defense mechanism. It's compensatory. It's a cognitive distortions which renders reality far more habitable and acceptable and tolerable and bearable and non-threatening. That's the key point, non-threatening. Fantasy insulates the narcissist and to a large extent the psychopath from reality. Because reality is perceived as dangerous, as hostile as out to get you. There is paranoid ideation. There's a paranoid core which infuses narcissism and psychopathy, imbues it with hypervigilance, suspiciousness, catastrophizing assumptions about human nature, which is bad, malevolence, conspiracies, and so on and so forth. Conspiracism. So, fantasy is actually a defense against internal paranoid ideation, the paranoid core. Now, I've said many times in many videos that paranoia, paranoid ideation is nothing but another form of narcissism because the paranoid keeps believing, keeps convincing himself firmly that he's important, that he's at the center of things, that is the focal point of conspiracies that everyone around him is interested in him and so and so forth. Paranoia is about placing yourself at the center of affairs. And so it is a grandiose defense. It is a kind of fantasy defending against reality where perhaps you're much less conspicuous and much less important than you consider yourself to be. Both narcissism and psychopathy are compensatory. And being compensatory, they're goal oriented. They yield outcomes conducive to survival. That's why goal orientation is perceived by the psychopath, and to some extent the narcissists, is a form of self-efficacy. The psychopath is emotionally invested in obtaining goals.
And no, I'm not talking about life goals. You know, I'm going to study, then you're going to have a job, then I'm going to have a family. Not this kind of goals.
The psychopath's goals are short-term and they are much more limited, much more minimal. I want to have sex. I want to steal this person's money, etc., etc. These are psychopathic goals.
The narcissist's only goal, exclusive goal, is narcissistic supply, attention, in other words.
So they're both goal-oriented, but they mis-label, misidentify, misunderstand goal-orientation for self-efficacy.
Actually, narcissists and psychopaths are not self-effications and yet consider themselves to be of superior performance. They think they are much better at doing things, accomplishing aims, setting goals and pursuing them, much better than all other people.
That's why they hold everyone around them, even colleagues and bosses and so they hold everyone in content because they are so vastly so vastly improved so vastly superior goal orientation does yield outcomes some of these outcomes are conducive to survival but ironically in the case of psychopaths and narcissists many of the outcomes are detrimental, self-defeating and self-destructive. And yet the psychopaths analysises believe that they are optimizing machines. They are perfect at obtaining goals. And all these goals add to their value, to their value, add to their resume, add to their survival prospects, add to their social acceptability and attractiveness, add they regard the attainment and accomplishment of goals as additive as something which augments their aura and their godlike propensities and properties omnipotence, omniscience and so.
You see the psychopath and narcissists are invested emotionally in their disorders, because they have nothing else. There's nothing there except the disorder.
I'm often criticized for equating the disorder with the disordered.
But take away the narcissism from the narcissist and there's nothing left but an empty black hole as numerous scholars have observed. Take away the psychopathy from the psychopath and you see a subdued shell of a person reduced to nothingness. I've seen them in prison. So if you take away the disorders, what's left? Nothing. These disorders are narratives. These disorders are the glue that holds the various fictional strands of narcissism and psychopathy together. And so it is understandable that when you have nothing but your disorder, you would be attached to it. You would bond with it. You would trust it to lead you, guide you. You would invest everything in it, you would commit to it, you would develop it, you would augment it, you would worship it, you would cherish it, you would try to export it to others, you would try to conduct others into your cult and sect. These are all understandable behaviors when we begin to grasp that the person that used to exist in early childhood is gone forever. That parenting in early childhood has erased the child and left behind an emptiness and absence masquerading as a divine presence. The divine presence, which the narcissist and psychopath ultimately worship.
I'm Sam Wagner and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. Some narcissists get better. They modify their behavior, they become more socially acceptable and less abrasive.
But no narcissist heals. No narcissist gets well.
The reason is the narcissists enormous, lifelong, irreplaceable, an indispensable emotional investment in his own disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder serves two critical functions, which together maintain the precariously balanced house of cards that we call the Narcissis personality. The Narciss's disorder endows him with a sense of uniqueness, of being special, and it provides him with a rational explanation for his misconduct, with an alibi. Most narcissists reject the notion or the diagnosis that they are mentally ill or disturbed. Absent powers of introspection, the total lack of self-awareness, are part and parcel of narcissistic personality disorder. Mathological narcissism is founded upon alloplastic defenses, the firm conviction that the world or others are to blame for one's behavior, defeats, failures, and frailties. The narcissist firmly believes that people around him should be held responsible and accountable for his reactions for having triggered them. With such a state of mind so firmly entrenched, the narcissist is incapable of transformation, or even of admitting that something is wrong with him. But that is not to say that the narcissist does not experience his disorder. He does, but he reinterprets this experience. He regards his dysfunctional behaviors, socially, sexually, He does, but he reinterprets this experience. He regards his dysfunctional behaviors, socially, sexually, emotionally and mentally, as conclusive and irrefutable proof of his superiority, brilliance, distinction, prowess, mind, of success.
Rudeness to others, for instance, is reinterpreted as decisiveness and efficiency, or even brutal honesty. Abusing behaviors are cast as educational, tough love. Sexual absence as proof of preoccupation with higher functions. The narcissist rage is always just, it's always a reaction to injustice or to being misunderstood by intellectual widgets. Thus, paradoxically, the disorder becomes an integral and inseparable part of the narcissists inflated self-esteem and vacuous, grandiose fantasies. Narciss's false self, the pivot of his pathological narcissism, is a self-reinforcing mechanism. The narcissist thinks that he is unique because he has a false self. His false self is the center of his specialness. Any therapeutic attack on the integrity and functioning of the false self constitutes a threat to the narcissist's ability to regulate his wildly fluctuating sense of self-worth and an effort to reduce him to other people's mundane, pedestrian, mediocre existence. A few narcissists that are willing to admit that something is terribly wrong with them displace their alloplastic defenses. Instead of blaming the world, blaming other people, or circumstances beyond their control, they now blame their disease. Their disorder becomes a catch-all, universal explanation for everything that is wrong in their lives and for every derided, indefensible and inexcusable behavior. Their narcissism becomes a license to kill, a liberating force, which sets them outside human rules and codes of conduct. Such freedom is so intoxicating and so empowering that it is difficult to give up. The narcissist is emotionally attached to only one thing, his narcissistic personality disorder.
The narcissist loves his disorder, desires his disease passionately, cultivates his illness tenderly, is proud of his achievements.
His emotions are misdirected.
When normal people love others and empathize with them, the narcissist loves his false self and identifies with it to the exclusion of all else and all others, including his true self.