Transcription
By now, you're all acquainted with the metaphor of the black hole, the howling void, the emptiness, or the empty skitsoid core at the foundation of the narcissist and the borderline. A presence that is actually an absence and threatens to consume them from the inside and, at the same time, subsume other people. It is an expanding hyperreflexive entity. A bit terrifying, reminiscent of a horror movie.
But today, I'm going to focus on another issue. How does this black hole consume you? How does the narcissist and borderline's emptiness end up invading you, compromising you, taking over, kind of hostile décor, merging with you? This is the topic of today's video.
Those of you who would like to refresh your memory regarding the black hole phenomenon or the emptiness, um, postulated at the core of narcissism and borderline personality disorders or personality organizations, you may wish to go to the description. You have links to three videos. Each one of them deals with another aspect or another way of looking at the, um, emptiness that we are discussing. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of *Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited*. I'm also a professor of psychology.
So emptiness, black hole, howling void, deep space, it all emanates from some cataclysmic break, some unbelievably all-pervasive, all-consuming disruption in the formation of the self or the ego, to use Freud's language. Something happens in early childhood that renders the child vacuous, vacated, renders the child, renders the child a shell, which envelopes basically nothing. What happens is a failure in maternal mirroring. The child acquires a self. The child becomes one's self. The child acquires personhood, separates and individuates by looking into the mother's eyes. It is through the mother's gaze that the child comes to realize its own separateness and the mother's externality. It is through the mother's interactions with the child. And that's what I mean by, by gaze. Through the mother's interaction with the child, through the fact that the mother notices the child, that the child is seen by the mother in the most profound sense. It is through these dynamics that the child realizes that there's a world out there, is able to create boundaries and then, within the boundaries, safely develop a self, constellated and integrated.
And when this delicate, fine-tuned process fails, what we have left behind, like so much detritus, is the emptiness. The paternal mirroring and genders the child's self as well. It introduces the child to the world, to reality. The mirroring failure prevents the emergence of a self, impairs reality testing. And instead, what the child does in a desperate attempt to compensate for this, the child internalizes his or her mother. And the internalized mother reflects the way that a child sees a mother, any child sees any mother as perfect. This perfect being, she's godlike, she's infallible, she's omnipotent, she's omniscient. And, of course, this is exactly the false self. The internalized idealized mother is a crucial component of the false self. And the false self is comprised of an idealized counterfactual pseudo self, an idealized object which is the counterfactual good mother. And when you put the two together, you get a totally idealized construct, the false self. All the bad objects, the bad aspects of the self, the bad aspects of the mother, all of these are aggressively projected, at least initially. Much later, these elements, in healthy people, are re-internalized and integrated in order to form a nuanced vision of other people and of reality. There's a transition from a splitting defense, all bad, all good, to a more subtle perception of how the world works and how other people's minds operate. The theory of mind and internal working models crucially depend on the ability to get rid of the primitive, infantile defense mechanism known as splitting.
When the mother's gaze fails, when there's a mirroring failure, when the mother is not sufficiently good, not good enough, then we have a situation where the child remains stuck at the splitting phase. The child divides everything and everyone into all good and all bad, all black and all white, all right and all wrong, and proceeds through life into adulthood exactly this way. And then the false self becomes the repository of the all-good, all-idealized parts. The self, the internalized mother, other internal introjects and so on. That's the false self. The false self is unimpeachable, omnipotent, omniscient, godlike, perfectly good. Whereas the rest of the world is, by definition, inferior, contemptible, and all bad. That includes the true self. That includes, ironically, the narcissist himself. The narcissist spends his entire life trying to please the false self, trying to prove to the false self that he deserves it. The false self is all good. The narcissist is all bad. The narcissist has an internalized bad object. And he attempts, or she attempts, the narcissist throughout their lives attempt to prove to the false self that they are actually not all bad, that they are worthy of integrating with the false self, of merging with the false self, of becoming the false self.
And so what's your role in all this? I'm confining myself to, uh, an intimate partner in a romantic relationship. But whatever I'm going to say henceforth applies equally to all the narcissist's interpersonal relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbors, you name it. Narcissists interact with the world in very rigid, inflexible, identical ways, collectively known as the shared fantasy. So what's your role? Your role is to regulate the narcissist. You're an, and, and the borderline. External regulation is a clinical feature of both narcissism and borderline. Your role as an external regulator requires you to absorb the narcissist's dysregulation or the borderline's dysregulation. You're like a shock absorber. Deep inside the narcissist and deep inside the borderline, there's tumult. There's mayhem. There's chaos which threatens to overwhelm the narcissist or the borderline and consume them alive, destroy them, drown them. It is your role to act as an absorbent, to absorb this, to the, the, the narcissist and the borderline. Outsource this mayhem, this chaos, this tumult, these vicissitudes, these exigencies, this discomfort, this displeasure, this ego-dystonia, they outsource all this. They project it onto you. They hand these, and these rejected parts of themselves, they hand them over to you in a process known as projection. So you are there to absorb the dark side or the shadow side or the complex side or whatever you want to call it, to absorb this penumbral side of the narcissist and the borderline. You're there to assimilate this toxicity, to take it away from the narcissist and borderline. And, of course, it has an impact on you. Obviously, it poisons you gradually. You find yourself not only consumed by this dark, foreboding, forbidding emptiness. You find yourself becoming it. Suddenly, you're hollowed from the inside. Suddenly, there's howling winds in the corridors of what used to be your mind. Suddenly, you're nothing but a mirror, and a shattered one at that.
Many scholars of narcissism and borderline realized everything I've just said. Kohut, for example, suggested that narcissists are stuck in early stages of self-development, that they interact with people in archaic ways from that position of arrested development. Kohut said that, to the narcissist and to the borderline by extension, people are mere self-objects. Self-objects are extensions of the self, figments of the self, elements of the self. They're fully internalized and assimilated. The role of other people is to regulate the narcissist's self-esteem and to reduce his or her anxieties, external regulation of affective correlates of the ups and downs of daily, downs of daily life. Other people are supposed to provide unconditional support, succor, admiration, attention, total empathy, attunement. The same way a parent provides internal regulation to a child. Initially, the child is externally regulated by the parent.
André Green, of *Dead Mother* fame, suggested in 2001 that there is something that he, he called, he, he called death narcissism. Death, like the opposite of life, death narcissism or negative narcissism. It is when the death drive paralyzes the self. This creates void, depletion, emptiness, a withdrawal of psychic energy, cathexis, and the what he called, what André Green called the aspiration for nothing. In other words, self-annihilation, self-negation, self-destruction, the vanishing and dissipation and disappearance of the self are the driving motivations or driving energy, driving force of the dead narcissist or the negative narcissist. But I would venture to suggest that all narcissism is dead. All narcissism is negative. The narcissist seeks its own, own annihilation and negation. The narcissist wishes to vanish and disappear and reappear within the false self. Narcissism is about rejecting who you are for another version of you which has, never had, never existed. Another version of you which is the exact opposite of you. You're helpless. This other version is omnipotent. You're ignorant. This other version is omniscient. You are less than brilliant. This other version is a genius. The false self is a mirror image. It's the exact opposite of, of you as a narcissist. The exact opposite of the narcissist. The narcissist wants to eliminate and eradicate and obliterate himself in order to give himself the chance to become the false self, to become that which he is not. Narcissism is not about becoming, it's about unbecoming. And in narcissism, which is so death-oriented, narcissism is a death cult. The narcissistic gratification in this state is achieved by frustrating the desire for the object, disengagement, striving towards death, mental, psychological, and maybe physical. There's an unconscious identification, suggested Green, with the dead mother. A mother who is depressed, emotionally unavailable, selfish, frustrating, instrumentalizing, parentifying, overprotective, and so on. This kind of dysfunctional mother, in his language, dead mother, metaphorically, the child unconsciously identifies with her. He needs this mother, but she cannot be relied on. She's not there for him. He is not seen. Yet, he cannot abandon this mother. And this leads to a denial and a rejection of intimate or emotional relationships, coupled with an internal sense of non-existence, of absence, of emptiness, of deadness.
I would like to introduce to you this, uh, tome, this book. It's a bit old. Some of the information in it is a bit out of date, but it's still very valid. Most of it is still valid and a wonderful read. It's *The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Theoretical Approaches, Empirical Findings and Treatments*, edited by one of the most preeminent authorities on narcissism, Keith Campbell, and by Joshua, Joshua de Miller. So I'm going to quote from, from, uh, this book. I'm going to read to you something that Sigmund Freud had said. Sigmund Freud suggested the construct of ego ideal. And this is how he defined the ego ideal. The subject's narcissism, said Freud, makes its appearance displaced onto this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal. So the ego ideal sounds a lot like the false self, and where the false self could be subject to injury and to mortification, and we could therefore say that the ego ideal is vulnerable to failure, to defeat, to mortification, and to injury. The ego ideal, in my opinion, is just another name for the false self. And what Freud shockingly was implying is, is that we all develop a false self. Healthy people learn to integrate it with the actual self. There's a process of constellating, constellation of the ego ideal and it becomes a distant, something, standard benchmark to aspire to. Whereas narcissists do not have an ego and do not have a self, and there's nothing to integrate with the ego ideal. The ego ideal is the only thing left, the only construct left standing, and so it becomes the false self and the child merges with it.
Freud suggested that vicissitudes in what he called self-regard. Uh, these vicissitudes are the results of critical self-observations and self-reproach, harsh inner criticism or self-criticism. And this is accompanied by unattainable, unrealistic goals and ideals. Another psychoanalyst, much later, Otto Kernberg suggested in 1990 and 1994 that unconscious or externalized self-criticism is a crucial clinical feature of narcissism. The emptiness, the void may be the outcomes of acidulous, corrosive, harsh, unforgiving, uncompromising, rigid, self-rejecting self-criticism, and the relationship between this form of self-criticism and the superego and superego injunctions is a matter for debate because, in the absence of a fully integrated and functional ego, there's no superego. So these, this harsh criticism, self-criticism, this obliterating and annihilating and self-negating self-hatred and self-loathing at the core of narcissism cannot be associated with the superego. They are disembodied. They're like ghosts wandering the corridors of the narcissist's mind, destroying everything inside.
According to Otto Kernberg, there's a discrepancy between entitlement and demandingness and underlying depletion and self-deprivation. And this depletion and self-deprivation are rooted in this ongoing, inexorable, unstoppable, uncontrollable, and mostly unconscious dynamic of criticizing unto death, self-destructive, self-rejection, self-hatred, self-negation, self-criticism. Self-criticism contributes to the need to be special and confirmed. And it underlies the shame and guilt for narcissistic failures and vulnerabilities. The shame and guilt that gets buried and repressed deep inside this repository of toxic material that sometimes seeps to the surface in narcissistic mortification or narcissistic injury. Ironically, narcissistic mortification was first described by who else? Sigmund Freud in 1938, much before Kernberg and others. And in Freud's work, narcissistic mortification was the early injuries to the child's burgeoning ego. Freud didn't take it a step further. He did not suggest that these injuries could be traumatic to the point of not allowing the ego to constellate, to integrate, to become, to emerge. He didn't suggest this, but it stands to reason. If the injuries are sufficiently, um, sufficiently harsh, sufficiently traumatic, these kind of injuries can prevent the ego from ever functioning or ever becoming. Freud said that narcissistic mortification is the shock when the child is faced with a discrepancy between endorsed or ideal views of the self and drastically contrasting realizations. I, in my work, suggest that the mother's gaze is the first such trauma. The realization that there's a world out there. The, the comprehension of the separateness and externality of the universe and mother in it. They are very traumatic. Possibly the most traumatic event of all in one's personal history. The emptiness is a result of failure. Failure in parental mirroring and failure in parental underinvestment, underpresence, absence, or parental overinvestment and overpresence. When the parent is too present, overprotective, spoiling, pampering and so on, this kind of parent does not allow the child to separate and to become an individual. Does not allow the child to experience friction with peers and reality, loss, the main engines of personal growth and development.
I would like to read to you, um, would like to read to you an extended, uh, series of paragraphs from this book. Remember, *The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder*. This is from the article, the chapter authored by Elsa Ronningstam. Ronningstam is a major psychoanalyst, a leading expert on narcissism. She says, "Narcissism has been assigned a significant self-protective and sustaining function, like a psychic envelope of the self." She's quoting Stolorow, 1998. Normal narcissistic development of self-regard, self-preservation, assertion, and proactive aggression sets the foundation for healthy entitlement, empathy, and desire for affiliation and creativity. According to Stolorow again, in the anus, in the miracle year of 1998, Stolorow, in 1975, refers to several central functions of the self: its continuity, its coherence, organization effect, and self-esteem. Threats or injuries to any or all of these functions are narcissistic in as much as they interfere with self-protection and cohesion or with sustaining perceptions of oneself. These are associated with strong reactions. These kind of injuries, these kind of threats are associated with strong reactions, especially aggression, rage, shame, or withdrawal. Narcissistic rage was first described by Heinz Kohut. The origin of this vulnerability, says Ronningstam, stems from normal early developmental disruptions, disappointments, or rejections. Winnicott, in 1967 and 1971, emphasized the importance of the sense of self as emerging and developing through the experience of being seen in the eyes of another, the parent; a mirroring of the self in the parent's face that contributes to self-recognition and self-identification. The forming and developing of a relation to the real object as a separate and external entity includes the challenge of leaving behind the object as a reflection or confirmation of the self, as well as the gradual modification of the age-appropriate omnipotent aspects of the self. There's a lot of baggage to leave behind when one becomes an individual fully embedded in the world with intact reality testing. Ronningstam continues, "Such a real object, the parental figures, usually, typically the mother. Such a real object can help to modify the grandiose self into an integrated self with realistic ambitions and self-esteem and the ability to form mutual real object relationships. Various disruptions and distortions can happen when the child is missing the function of a structuring object that can be internalized to contain an experience of the self and of the other. In other words, the experience of a mother or a parent. Both narcissistic reactivity as well as the potential for narcissistic personality disorder occur." Kernberg, described in 1998, of course, described gaze aversion in children who experience themselves as functions of the parents' needs or expectations. What they have seen in the parents' eyes, these children, is not a, um, um, uh, exactly what healthy children see. So they, they, as far as Kernberg suggests, I would like to summarize this because it's a bit, a bit long. So what they have seen in the parents' eyes is not a reflection that promotes their self-identity but an image of a parental expectation that does not correspond to their own sense of self. Avoidance of eye contact serves in such cases a self-protective function. Kernberg also mentioned separation anxiety in children who experience having an impact on the parents' self-esteem or self-regulation. Children who are instrumentalized or parentified. That is, these children exist in the service of the parent but not as an autonomous being. The child is assigned power or ability that supports an illusion of his or her grandiosity, perfection, or invulnerability. In both cases, the self-development is compromised due to an imbalance between the external unrealistic assignment and the age-appropriate needs for realistic self-reflection and self-evaluation. Also in adulthood, the meaning of gaze, seeing, and being seen takes on a narcissistic function that can be either protective or devastating. According to Steiner, in 2006, experiences that oppose, affront, or threaten the individual's self-esteem or notion of his or herself are specifically challenging. Although the word trauma has often been used intermittently with injury to define the accompanying narcissistic reactions, a clarification of definitions is called for. Rosenfeld, in 1980, considers primary narcissistic injuries in the separation-individuation period as a predisposition for defensive and regressive, mainly aggressive responses to narcissistic injuries later in life, especially when facing challenging stages, limitations, and required adaptations. Loss of perfection and ideal self-state is especially challenging. Grier, in 2005, compares narcissistic injury or blow with the narcissistic consequences of trauma. A blow causes defensive actions like splitting, dissociation, encapsulation, or withdrawal into self-sufficiency as part of a self-protective effort. A trauma, on the other hand, creates a hole; an acute internal state that threatens the continuity, coherence, stability, and well-being of the self. That is the emptiness that Kernberg mentions. The defensive narcissistic processes, the narcissistic envelope that aims at organizing and understanding the traumatic experience is failing. The psychoanalytic theory on trauma recognizes two types: the real external trauma, abuse, terror, or torture, and the internal, intrapsychic trauma that involves loss or distortions of ideals and meanings. According to Maldonado, in 2006, the latter type is of specific importance for understanding the narcissistic personality. In object relations terms, the intrapsychic trauma is caused by a change in or loss of bond between the subject and a good object, usually the mother, on which the ideals are based. The trauma causes damage or destruction of the idealized object as well as the idealized aspects of the self associated to this object. Maldonado suggests that the trauma is leaving an empty space where the idealized, um, um, sorry, where the idealized protective and supportive functions of the object, the ideal object, the mother, have previously been. So let me read it again. I'm sorry, I lost my, my place. Maldonado suggests that the trauma is leaving an empty space where the idealized protective and supportive functions of the object, the ideal object, the mother, have previously been. Anxiety overwhelms the ego and weakens or damages its ability to recognize and adopt. Trauma causes a false ego organization with specific efforts to handle the loss of ideals, including various narcissistic strategies such as denial, omnipotence, invulnerability, and limitlessness. It also produces fantasies, but the fantasies are separate from and do not correspond to the trauma. Through repetition compulsion, there is a tendency, especially when facing negative experiences, to repeat a trauma, in particular, those aspects of the traumatic experience that could not be symbolized and could not be assigned a specific meaning. In strong support of the drive theory, Rosenfeld, in 1971, suggested that libidinal thin-skinned narcissists represent the idealization of the self vis-à-vis the good object and destructive thick-skinned narcissism represents the idealization of the omnipotent destructive self. Kernberg, in 2001, concurred with this and all these dynamics that I've just read to you. All of them are recreated and reenacted within the shared fantasy with a substitute maternal object which happens to be you. You go through all these phases again with a narcissist. The narcissist infantilizes himself, becomes a child, and you become his unconditionally loving and accepting mother. You're put to the test, narcissistic abuse, and you, if you survive, if you stick around, you get the job. As I said, Rosenfeld, who has influenced Kernberg's work, did describe a form of narcissism where the omnipotent destructive self is idealized. There's a lot of self-destructiveness in narcissism. It is your role to absorb this self-directed aggression, internalized aggression, this toxicity when it is externalized. It is...
Your role is to regulate the narcissist's internal environment. It is your role to act as a mother would, providing regulation from the outside, and it is your role to cope with a roller coaster of internal psychodynamics that create the borderline personality organization and the narcissist. Vicissitudes or oscillations between elation, the oceanic feeling, and collapse; between grandiosity and an overt state, and despondency, despair, self-hatred, and possible suicidality in covert narcissism.
Stler said that the function of narcissism—all types of narcissism—as a developmental line, as object choice, as self-esteem regulation—he says all narcissism has a few main critical functions: to maintain the structural cohesiveness, temporal stability, and positive effective coloring of the self-representation. Mner, in 2008, had developed a completely different view. He said narcissism is motivational. It aims at affecting the evolution of self-organization. In other words, the main purpose of narcissism is to motivate the narcissist to maintain self-esteem, to regulate a sense of self-worth, to engage in self-preserving behaviors, to maintain self-coherence, to take care of self-valuation. The self, he said, is a primary object of narcissistic motivational investment.
Now I'd like to read to you something about Misner from Ronstam's article in the book. Misner, she says, has strongly objected to the concept of narcissism derived from drive theory. And here is what he had to say: "When the self-system is reasonably well organized and adaptively functioning, the narcissistic investments tend to be correspondingly well modulated and do not give rise to pathological distortions. It is only when failures and defects in the self-system are operative that the pathological vicissitudes of narcissism hold sway." And so there's a debate, as you see in psychology, whether narcissism is a kind of energy, motivational attitudinal energy, or a structural defect. For example, a replacement of the real self—what should have been a real self—and representations of others with a false self, which is idealized, and with idealized counterfactual representations of others.
Let's see what Rosenfeld, who again I mentioned has had an inordinate effect on Kernberg's work, has to say. Rosenfeld, in 1963, argued against Freud's stand and introduced the narcissistic omnipotent object relation, indicating the presence of a different type of object relatedness or relativeness. Rosenfeld, in 1987, wrote: "The patient identifies by projection or introjection with the object—in this case, the therapist—to the extent that he feels he is the object and the object is himself." And that's exactly what the narcissist does to you: he snapshots you; he converts you into an internal object; and, of course, he owns it. He is the internal object by virtue of being internal. The object is part of who the narcissist is. Your separateness and externality are abolished in this process. You're no longer an external object. You're just a figment or a prop in the narcissist's inner theater. Rosenfeld further suggested that narcissistic omnipotent object relations are partly defensive against the recognition of separateness of self and object. Such modes of relating obviate the aggressive and ambivalent feelings aroused by frustration, as well as any awareness of envious or aggressive feelings. I disagree with this part in Rosenfeld's work. I think aggression and envy remain fully conscious and, in many, many cases, are externalized, either directly or passive-aggressively, negativistically. Um, Rosenfeld's work, Ronstam says, is especially relevant for understanding the intolerance of dependency and the role of envy in narcissistic people. Rosenfeld suggested that dependency makes the narcissistic person feel vulnerable to pain and separation. The aggressive, grandiose self, on the other hand, serves a protective function. Good qualities in other people evoke a sense of humiliation and inferiority, and feelings of envy are warded off by devaluing or avoiding such people or by trying to destroy whatever good comes from them in order to protect self-esteem and maintain superiority.
Kernberg elaborated a bit on this. Kernberg says, Roning Stam in her article outlines three areas in which narcissistic character traits can be manifested: Pathological self-love expressed in grandiosity, superiority, omnipotence, emotional shallowness, and a discrepancy between exaggerated talents and ambitions and actual capacity and achievements. Pathological object love characterized by envy and devaluation of others, exploitative behavior, lack of empathy, and inability to depend on other people. And superego pathology expressed as an inability to experience depression. Inability to experience depression because there's no feeling of being. The narcissist is not there. So who would experience a depression? Yeah. So inability to experience depression, severe mood swings, shame-regulated self-esteem, and superficial or self-serving values. In addition, the unintegrated sadistic superego can cause harsh, sadistic self-attacks that often are projected and perceived as external attacks from others.
Kovut begged to differ in some respects. I'm continuing to read from Ronstam's article in the handbook of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorders. According to Ronstam, "empathic failures lead to developmental arrests, a failure to integrate and neutralize the normal grandiose exhibitionistic self in the normal transformation of narcissism. Parents' insufficient or unreliable ability to mirror the child leads to the insufficient integration—either splitting or repression—of grandiose exhibitionistic needs and a fragmented and vulnerable sense of self with low self-esteem. In the arrested state, the narcissistic individual is left searching for such mirroring and idealized self-objects in other people." And that is where you come in—his mother substitute or her mother substitute. Yes, it applies to women as well. They're also looking for a mother substitute, not for a father substitute. It's a common mistake by self-styled experts online.
Who else? Together with Wolf, continues Ronstam, together with Wolf, in 1978, Kernberg outlined five narcissistic personality types that represent various ways in which the individual is managing to balance or protect self-esteem and sustain self-cohesiveness, fight off the emptiness. These types are: number one, the mirror-hungry, seeking admiration from others, type of narcissist; number two, the ideal-hungry narcissist, seeking others to idealize; number three, the alter ego narcissist, seeking relationships with others as self-objects confirming themselves; number four, the merger-hungry, seeking to control others to maintain structure; and number five, the contact-shunning, who avoids others to maintain control of themselves and of their deep need for others.
And finally, I would like to read to you something about Fiscalini. Fiscalini did a lot of work in the interpersonal relational school and intersubjectivity school of psychology. And here is what Ronstam has to say about his contribution. But not before I drink something. It's water, not vodka. Warning, Ronstam. Fiscalini identified two types of narcissism: a defensive characterological type, similar to self-centeredness, that represents a maldevelopment caused by experiences of interpersonal shaming and spoiling; shaming or spoiling lead to the same characterological problem, characterological defect, or dysfunction, according to Fiscalini, a defensive type; and an archaic developmental narcissism, the second type, that is more natural and representing early interpersonal needs. Fiscalini also identified a set of clinical features that form a core narcissistic constellation: self-centeredness and lack of empathy; grandiosity; cyclic contempt and idealization of self and others; thick-headedness; psychological inaccessibility; thin-skinnedness; abnormal vulnerability; entitlement; other-directedness; search for admiration, approval, attention, and acceptance; and power orientation of striving for control and coerciveness. Narcissism, according to Fiscalini, is a way of protecting a fragile and narcissistically injured interpersonal self, and it is formed in the interpersonal interaction between parent and child, mostly the mother. Fiscalini suggested five developmental patterns that diverge from healthy narcissistic development and that represent interactional vicissitudes of needs and desires: that is, the shamed child, the spoiled child, the special child, the spurned, rejected child, and the seduced child. Interactive patterns between defensive narcissism, injured pride, and or narcissism representing developmental deficits due to unmet needs—the wounded need. These interactions are very common, and I may add that we find them in all narcissists combined. All narcissists are both overt and covert, both vulnerable and grandiose, both fragile and false self-oriented. All narcissists contain all these aspects, dimensions, and manifestations. The taxonomy that has emerged, especially in the late 80s or in the 80s today, seems less and less correct. And possibly in the future, the separate diagnosis of covert narcissism is going to disappear into the black hole that all of narcissism is.