Transcription
Oh Dorothy, you're no longer in Israel. You're out of Israel. You should not speak Hebrew. You should speak English. Let's try it. My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of "Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited." That went well. I'm also a professor of psychology and a professor of finance in SEEU's Center for International Advanced Professional Studies, which is the outreach program of the CIAS consortium of universities. And I'm also a professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, yes, in the Russian Federation.
And today, we are going to discuss why the narcissist cannot love you, and what can you do about it? It's a much deeper topic than you can imagine. And so, stay with me for a bumpy ride into the narcissist's demented soul, those of them who have one.
And we start with the nature of love. What is the nature of love? You all know that it is impossible to love other people if you do not love yourself. But did you ever bother to ask yourself why? Why do you need to love yourself as a precondition for loving other people? It's because all love is actually self-love. Being loved is a way of loving yourself. You love yourself, and you regard yourself through the eyes of your lover, through the gaze of your lover. And the gaze of your lover allows you to apprehend yourself as an external object. Suddenly, you see yourself from the outside. And seeing yourself from the outside, you are able, first of all, to realize and to accept that you do exist. I know it sounds crazy, but many people don't feel that they exist. Many people don't feel alive. I would even go as far as saying that most people don't feel alive, especially in postmodern societies.
So, being loved is a way of experiencing directly, not indirectly, but experiencing, sorry, indirectly existence, experiencing indirectly being alive through the gaze of the man, of the woman who loves you. You become an external object, and you're able to delineate your boundaries. You're able to become, it's a process of becoming. And this process of becoming allows you to regulate your sense of self-worth internally, allows you to take on the world, gives you energy, empowers you, and pushes you to become a better, or just a different version of yourself. It is your lover's gaze, your lover's gaze, which is like a projector on a theater stage. Your lover's gaze, your lover's gaze, put you in focus, at the center. And so you become centered.
Now, love is not about merging. Love is not about fusing. Love definitely is not about enmeshment. Because to merge with your lover, to fuse with your lover, to become one with your lover, a single organism with two heads, that's not love. Because you disappear. If you were to become one with your lover, you would disappear. It's a form of vanishing. And love is exactly the opposite. Love allows you to enhance your boundaries, to make them much more clear, to demarcate them, to become separate, actually, from the world, separate even from your lover. And this process of healthy separation leads to individuation. Your lover looks at you, you see yourself through your lover's gaze, you realize that you exist separately from your lover as an external object. You form more or less tenuous boundaries, stronger boundaries, and then you become safely within these boundaries. It's very similar to separation individuation from mother, and it gives you the same type and amount of energy to take on the world.
Now, I have a video here about self-love and the four pillars of self-love, and I recommend that you watch it. So, this is love. But narcissism? Narcissists cannot love because narcissism is not a form of self-love. I repeat, all the wannabe online experts with and without academic degrees who tell you that narcissism is self-love, they don't know the first thing about either narcissism or self-love. Narcissism is not self-love. There is no self to love. Narcissists don't have a self. Narcissism is a failure to constellate, to create, to generate a self. Narcissists, ironically, are self-less. They don't have a functioning ego. Their ego functions, and especially ego boundary functions, are outsourced. They don't exist unless they are seen. The narcissist needs the collective gaze of hundreds, dozens, thousands of people to feel that he's alive. His existence is derivative. His mind is a hive mind. I recommend that you watch my video titled "Ego is the Opposite of Narcissism."
So, narcissists have no self to love, so they cannot have, they cannot have self-love. They outsource their, their self. Their self is imported from the outside and critically depends on the collective feedback from numerous people. So, when you have no self, you cannot have self-love. And so, because narcissists don't have self-love, don't experience self-love, and have no self to love, they are incapable of loving you. They can't love others. You remember how we opened this video? When we were all much younger, the condition to loving others is first to experience self-love. Because the narcissist is incapable of the latter, he is incapable of the former. He cannot love you. He even fails to generate self-objects or object representations. Instead, what he does, he creates a static snapshot of you in an internal object, an introject. It's a much more primitive level of interacting with people.
So, not only is the narcissist incapable of self-love because he has no self, not only is the narcissist incapable of loving you because he doesn't love himself, because he has no self, but he is even incapable of seeing you. He is even incapable of recognizing you as an external object, as out there, as someone separate from him, as someone who instead is, he interacts with a photo of you. It's not even a video, it's a photo. It's static, it's stable across time and non-reactive to circumstances. So, narcissists can perfect, in other words, they can invest emotional energy in you, but they can never love you.
Narcissism is a form of self-loathing. Narcissism, I repeat, is a form of self-hatred, self-rejection, self-loathing. The child rejects his helpless self. The abused child, the traumatized child, the child who is physically bitten, sexually molested, or on the other hand, instrumentalized, pedestalled, spoiled, prevented from having any contact with reality, parentified, these are all forms of abuse. So, the abused child becomes helpless. He is not allowed to separate from his parents and to become an individual. Is not allowed to maintain a separate life. He is not allowed to be. So, the child rejects his helplessness, rejects his lack of self-efficacy, his inability to induce change, favorable change in his environment, because it is the mercy of abusive parents. And he is ashamed of it. Many scholars, for example, Masterson, had suggested that narcissism is a form of shame, is a mismanagement of shame over the lifespan. My wife, Lidia Vangelovska, also had a few things to say about this.
So, the narcissist, as a child, creates the false self. And what is the false self? The false self is everything the child is not. Everything the narcissist is not. The narcissist is helpless. The false self is all-powerful, omnipotent. The narcissist cannot predict the behavior of people because he misreads social cues, and because to him, people are mysterious, unpredictable, dangerous. The world is hostile. And on the other hand, the false self is omniscient. He's like God. He knows everything. So, the false self is everything the narcissist is not. That's not self-love. That's self-rejection. The narcissist eliminates himself, destroys himself, sacrifices himself to the false self because he abhors himself. He finds himself unacceptable. And so he creates an imaginary friend in a paracosm, in an imaginary reality, in a phantasmagoric reality, and then he becomes that imaginary friend because he doesn't want to be, he doesn't want to be. There's no form of greater self-hatred than narcissism. Narcissism is not self-love writ large. It's not exaggerated self-love. It's exactly the opposite. It's the investment of all the mental energies in a piece of fiction, in a story, in a theater play, in a movie. And by doing so, the narcissist ceases to exist.
Narcissism is a form of dysphoria, kind of depression, prolonged grief over an internalized dead object. The narcissist, as a child, had been rejected, abused, and told that he is bad and worthless if he doesn't perform. The narcissist had received only conditional love, and the condition was to not be the messenger. The narcissist had received from his parents, especially the mother, is, "You're not good enough as you are. You're not good enough for my love. You want me to love you? You have to be someone else. You have to perform. You have to provide." And so, the narcissist goes through life trying to regain this lost love, unable to separate from this internal object which represents his mother, for example, an internal object that keeps torturing him and keeps telling him, "You're inadequate. You're not good enough. You should do more." Even overt narcissists grant the osmosis, the swaggerers and braggarts, those who go around like Donald Trump, telling you how wonderful they are, and so deep inside, they're terrified little children. They constantly measure up to a standard of perfection that they can never attain. They're never good enough. Ask Donald Trump's father.
And so, watch the video that I've made titled "Real Narcissists Are Covert. Grandiose Narcissists Are Psychopaths." We are beginning to understand the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of research in narcissism is teaching us that all narcissists are actually compensatory. They're compensating for a deep-set feeling of inferiority. This borrows on work by Adler and goes all the way to Theodore Millon and many others. Narcissism is compensatory. The narcissist is a poor rendition, an uncompleted, incomplete human being, a draft, a draft version of what could have been. And to compensate for that, he puts forth a perfect, fantastic image, the false self. That's not self-love. That's the ultimate self-rejection. And it has three sources: ego destiny, ego discrepancy, and ego incongruency.
I'm going to explain, of course, each one of these three. Ego destiny is the opposite of ego sympathy. It's also called ego dystonia. Ego destiny is a situation where your thoughts, behaviors, dreams, compulsions, desires, emotions, cognitions, everything inside you is in conflict with your needs and with the goals of a healthy ego, in conflict with your ego ideal, with the ideal self-image, with your ideal self-image of how you would have wanted to be, how you would have wanted to turn out, your, the dream of you. So, when you have a personality where your everything that's happening inside you, or your internal processes, undermine, conflict, and challenge your dreams, where everything inside you, all your internal landscape, suppresses your ego, the needs of the ego, the goals of the ego, and consequently, contacting with reality, that's ego dystonia. Ego destiny is experienced as a severe discomfort with who you are. Every thought, every emotion, every behavior, every compulsion, every desire, every wish, every urge causes you extreme unease. You are ill. It is you're ill. So, ego destiny is very rare with healthy people because usually healthy people do conform to their ego needs and goals. The ego is in control. Part of the ego is known as the superego. That's conscious, conscious, that represents social, social interjections, or social interjects. Society tells you what to do. So, you have your own ego, and you have the superego, which is essentially society mediated by other parents in the process of socialization. A healthy person has all these checks and balances. He's in touch with reality, so he's rarely ego dystopic. But the narcissist is constantly ego dystonic. He has no functioning ego. He is a very harsh, sadistic inner critic, a superego. So, he's constantly ego dystonic. He's constantly unhappy, dysphoric, depressed, anxious, envious. Negative affectivity is the only, only feature of the narcissist's world.
But if these were not bad enough, narcissists experience two other processes. One is known as ego discrepancy. Ego discrepancy is a theory developed by Edward Tory Higgins in 1987. The ego discrepancy theory states that individuals compare some kind of actual self to internalized standards of an ideal self, of how I ought to be. So, there's always a comparison between who am I now, who am I, and how I ought to have been. And, and Freud preceded, of course, this theory by suggesting that there is a conflict between ego and ego ideal. The ego is the reality principle in Freud's trilateral model. It's a reality principle. The ego tells you how to function in reality and puts you down, kind of suppresses your grandiosity, and, and renders you in the ego, makes you obtain your goals. But there's a compromise there, because you have an ego ideal, something you would have wanted to be, a dream, a fantasy of yourself, how you should have been, how you ought to have been. And so, the, the self-discrepancy theory says that there is always a conflict between the actual self and the imagined or the ideal self. There's an inconsistency between actual, ideal, and ought. These three components: actually you, the idealized version of yourself created from life experiences, and the ought self, who you feel you should be, who you feel you should become. And this creates a lot of emotional discomfort, even panic or fear, a sense of threat, restlessness. Such discrepancy is the gap between two, two self-representations, and it leads to negative emotions. And so, different types of discrepancies between representations of the self are related to different kinds of emotional vulnerabilities. Higgins himself illustrated the internal disagreement, this internal civil war, this conflict, and showed that it causes emotional and psychological turmoil. There were other previous theories, of course. There's nothing much new in this. There's a cognitive dissonance theory, there's the imbalance theory, Heider's imbalance theory, 1958. But Higgins took it a step further. He said that there are specific emotions that surface as a result of these internal mismatches, of these internal disagreements, or these internal debates, if you wish. All previous self-imbalance theories recognized only positive and negative emotions. The self-discrepancy theory assigned specific emotions and effects to any particular type of disparity. So, the certain discrepancy theory provided us with a map, a map of the inner battles in every person, even healthy people. So, everyone has a variety of self-discrepancies. Everyone has negative psychological situations that are associated with different types of discomfort. And self-discrepancy theory allows us to understand these types of contrasting ideas and how you would feel if you would have such a clash, clash inside you, these negative emotions.
So, self-discrepancy theory says that we should classify the different kinds of discomfort, discomfort that is created by contrasting ideals. We should classify the various types of emotional vulnerabilities failed by these, engendered by these discrepancies, and we should consider the role of the different discrepancies in influencing this or that kind of discomfort. The narcissist experiences all possible ego discrepancies simultaneously and always. I repeat this. The poor narcissist is not only constantly ego destroying, but he is constantly ego discrepant. Why is that? Because he is emotionally invested, he is concocted in a piece of fiction, in an imaginary friend, in a transitory object, transient object that had never transitioned. The false self is a godlike deity or divinity that the narcissist can never measure up to. The false self is constantly challenged by reality. Reality provides countervailing information. It undermines the false self. There's a lot of negative feedback. And so, the narcissist constantly experiences a discrepancy between who he is and who he thinks he should be, which is a false self. The narcissist's battles are internal, but the false self is sometimes perceived as ego alien. Now, in 99% of the time, the narcissist believes himself to be the false self. He regards himself as the false self, and he has a wall protecting the false self from the challenges of reality. It's known as confirmation bias. The narcissist filters out information that can challenge the false self. But sometimes there's too much of it. Sometimes it's a tsunami, an avalanche of undermining, challenging, disagreeing, criticizing information and analysis. Walls crumble down. His firewalls are disabled. The process called decompensation. And the narcissist can no longer protect his false self and goes into narcissistic injury or narcissistic mortification. In extreme cases, at that point, the narcissist experiences his false self as something alien, and this is known as estrangement. The narcissist becomes estranged from his false self, and then his ego destiny and his ego discrepancy are at a maximum. He is no longer defended. He can go into extreme deep depression, and clinically, he becomes a borderline, replete with suicidal ideation.
And the last process that operates in the narcissist is ego incongruency or ego depletion. Carl Rogers in the '50s suggested that there is a mismatch between experience and awareness. There is a tension between dreams and reality. In my work in the 1990s, I suggested that the narcissist experiences a grandiosity gap, a gap between how he experiences his life and himself and his accomplishments, and how he would have liked to have been. In an ideal world, he would have liked to have become the false self, but he is always one step removed. He is always not exactly there. This explains narcissistic perfectionism. So, Carl Rogers said that feelings are not aligned with actions. And then there's ego incongruency and ego depletion. The ego actually is disabled or inactivated when the gap is too big. Humans, said Carl Rogers, are intentional. They aim at goals. They are aware that they cause future events. They seek meaning, value, creativity. They want to better themselves. The narcissist fails in all these tasks, in all of them. So, he is constantly ego incongruent and ego depleted. Narcissists are unable to empathize. They suffer from severe emotional and cognitive deficits, up to the point of failing the reality testing. Narcissists are therefore incapable of love. And loving masses don't love themselves. They're emotionally invested in a fictitious concoction, the false self, and in the reaction, the default self garners from their sources of narcissistic supply.
So, what is the difference between self-love and narcissism, and how does it affect the capacity to love others? To answer this, we need to do what Freud had done. We need to go back 2,500 years to the ancient Greeks, who seem to have known everything about everything. I don't know why we bother. Greek myths gave us the word narcissism, as well as the very concept of malignant self-love. Malignant self-love is a phrase that I coined in 1999. The Greeks distinguished between various types of love and self-love. Philautia was the love of oneself, which is a prerequisite for loving others. "All friendly feelings for others are an extension of man's feeling for himself," said not Vaknin, but Aristotle. Then there was another kind of love in ancient Greece, the philia. The philia is the love between friends. It's more like enhanced affection, um, a romance. Philia is usually among fighting men, the ancient equivalent of today's bromance. And then there is storge, or should be pronounced, by the way, storge. It's the love for family members. And then there is eros. Eros is love coupled with enduring lust. It's not flirtatious infatuation, limerence, or a crush, especially among the young. This the Greeks called ludus, game. Eros is much deeper, much more profound, much more mature. And sometimes it leads to Agape. Agape is a love that leads to action and involves courage, sacrifice, and strength. So, the Greeks made a distinction between philautia, which is a love of oneself, but a healthy love of oneself, philia among friends, storge love for family members, or storge, eros mature love coupled with sex drive, and agape, which leads to action, involves courage, sacrifice, strength. So, Freud borrowed eros and incorporated as a component of libido.
Now, there are two differences between healthy self-love and pathological narcissism. Number one, the inability to tell reality from fantasy. Love, mature love, is grounded in reality. You don't split your lover. You don't consider your love, your lover, 100% perfect. That is love bombing. That is grooming. That's not love. That is idealizing the lover, which is the first stage in the shared fantasy. Mature love is grounded, feet on the ground, is grounded in reality, centered. The mature lover sees you warts and all, your good sides, your bad sides. He integrates you. He doesn't split you. He, he, he sees you as a human being with feelings and shortcomings, with strengths and talents and skills, and with limitations. That's mature life. Everything else is fantasy, and usually narcissistic.
The second difference between narcissism and self-love is in the ability to empathize and indeed to fully and maturely love other people, to see them first of all, to accept that they exist separately from you, not as your extension or as a form of an instrument of gratification. The narcissist does not love himself. It is because he has very little true self to love. Instead, there's a monstrous, a malignant construct, the false self, and it encroaches upon the narcissist's true self and devours it. Ultimately, the narcissist loves an image which he projects onto others, who reflect it back to the narcissist. And this image is of old self. Indeed, Narcissus himself, the youth, didn't fall in love with himself. He fell in love, he fell in love with his reflection. And his reflection was so alien that he didn't realize he was looking at himself. This process, this process of extracting narcissistic supply by projecting a false image, a false self, this process reassures the narcissist of both the objective existence of his false self and of the boundaries of his ego. And it blurs all distinctions between reality and fantasy. In other words, the narcissist projects the false self, people react to the false self. So, the narcissist, well, says, well, if people are reacting to the false self, it must exist. And if it exists, it has boundaries. But of course, it's a sham. It's a fantasy. It's a lie. It's false. So, the narcissist inhabits a fantastic space. Narcissism is a fantasy defense gone out of control, gone awry. The false self leads to false assumptions, into a contorted personal narrative, to a false weltanschauung, false worldview, into a grandiose inflated sense of being. And this grandiose inflated sense of being is rarely grounded in any real accomplishments or merit or effort or work or study. The narcissist's feeling of entitlement is all-pervasive. It's demanding and aggressive. It easily deteriorates into open verbal, psychological, and physical abuse of others.
The opposite of love, maintaining a distinction between what we really are and what we dream of becoming, knowing our limits, our advantages and faults, having a sense of true, realistic accomplishments in our life, these are of paramount importance in the establishment and maintenance of our self-esteem, sense of self-worth, self-acceptance, and self-confidence. I again implore you, beg you, on my knees, many begs you, to watch the video "Four Pillars of Self-Love" that I've made.
Reliant as a narcissist is on outside opinions, on outside feedback, on outside judgment, the narcissist feels miserably inferior and dependent. The narcissist rebels against this degrading state of things by escaping into a world of make-believe, daydreaming, pretensions, delusions of grandeur. The narcissist knows little about himself and finds what he knows to be unacceptable. He rejects himself. Our experience of what it is like to be human, our very humanness, depends largely on our self-knowledge and on our experience of ourselves. In other words, only through being himself, only through experiencing his self, can a human being fully appreciate the humanness of others. If you don't experience yourself, you can't identify your human aspects in anyone else. Empathy is a resonance between you and others. But if you are not in the equation, there are no others. The narcissist has precious little experience of his self, precious little experience of his self, because there's no constellated, integrated self. There's identity disturbance in borderline as well. The narcissist, instead, lives in an invented world of his own design, where he is a fictitious figure in a grandiose script, a movie, a Cecil B. DeMille movie. The narcissist, therefore, possesses no tools, not tools to enable him to cope with other human beings, share their emotions, put himself in their place, empathize, and of course, love them. They very often don't exist at all, except as mirages, except as flickering images in his mind. Loving is a demanding task of interrelating. Narcissists can hardly relate to himself, and can definitely not relate to anyone else. The narcissist just does not know what it means to be human. To cut a long story short, he is a predator, rapaciously preying on others for the satisfaction and gratification of his narcissistic cravings and appetites for admiration, adoration, flaws, affirmation, and attention. Even more so, the narcissist devours other people, uses them as a supply in order to feel alive. It's a, it's really like a vampire, you know, he sucks their essence one way or another in order to feel alive. His very sense of existence, of being, of becoming, crucially depends on eliminating, annihilating, vitiating, and negating other people. Humans are mere narcissistic supply sources, and they are over or devalued according to their contributions to this end.
Self-love is a precondition for the experience and expression of mature love. One cannot truly love someone else if one does not first love one's true self. If we have never loved ourselves, we had never experienced unconditional love, and therefore we do not know how to love others. If we keep living in a world of fantasy like the narcissist does, how could we notice the very real people around us, the people who ask for our love, deserve it, demand it, require it? If we live in a world of fantasy, there's no reality, and if there's no reality, there are no real people, right? Many don't misunderstand narcissists. Like every other human being, they want to love. The narcissist wants to love. In his rare moments of self-awareness, after a narcissistic injury, definitely after mortification, the narcissist feels ego dystonic, as I said, unhappy, unhappy with himself, with his situation, and with his relationships with others. This is the predicament of the narcissist. He is sentenced to isolation, permanent, perpetual, some paternal isolation, precisely because his need of other people is so great.