Transcription
The narcissist holds everybody in utter, unmitigated, profound contempt, disdain, disgust. The narcissist considers everyone inferior somehow: intellectually, morally, physically, accomplishment-wise, historically, some way. Contempt, therefore, is intimately linked with a sense of innate superiority.
Don't get me wrong, narcissists do have role models. They do admire and adulate top-dog narcissists. There's a hierarchy in narcissism. But even then, the contempt, the disdain, they're never far below the surface. They're close to the surface. They are ready to erupt any second. The narcissist exudes this potential for contempt in all interactions, broadcasting: "I know that I'm superior to you; or even if I consider you superior to me, it's a momentary position, momentary situation. Sooner or later, later, I will reassert my incontestable, indisputable superiority over you."
Contempt is a complicated effect. Many self-styled experts link it erroneously to grandiosity. It is not linked to grandiosity. It is actually the outcome of shame. The narcissist projects his or her shame, and in this process of projection, the shame alchemically becomes contempt. How we're going to explore in this video, and I propose contempt. My name is Savakin. I'm the author of *Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited*, and I'm a professor of psychology, which is indeed worthy of disdain. Okay, Shashim, stay with me. I know it's a Monday and everything, but you know, we have to survive, all of us. And so, the narcissist's contempt for you is shame projected.
Let's start with the construct of shame. There's another video on this channel which I posted a few days ago where I explained that shame is a reaction to abuse, to trauma, to hurt, to pain. When you're exposed to pain and hurt and abuse and trauma, you develop shame. Because you're helpless. Helplessness breeds shame. And why is that? Because to feel helpless is intolerable. It's unbearable. When you're helpless, you're dehumanized. You're objectified. You lose agency. You're just a plaything, a throw-around. You are, in many ways, deanimated, without a life force. So pain and hurt and trauma and abuse, especially protracted ones, they create a strong sense of helplessness. We call it learned helplessness. How to overcome this? By developing shame. What is shame? Let's deconstruct this effect or this emotion of shame. Shame means that you're somehow responsible for something that has happened. Shame goes hand in hand with personal responsibility. But wait a minute, if you're responsible for what has happened, then you are in control. There is mastery here. You're the master of what has happened. You've orchestrated it; you have somehow made it happen. I mean, if you were not responsible for what has happened, if you did not contribute to what has happened, if you did not make what has happened happen, then why would you feel ashamed? There would be no shame. So shame is the assumption of responsibility for a situation that is perceived as adversarial or to some kind of adverse situation. And this mastery and control gained ironically through shame imbue the circumstances with hope, because shame means: "I have made this happen. I have caused this to happen. I'm responsible. I've contributed to this. Therefore, I can undo this. I can make amends. I can remedy the situation. And I render the whole thing predictable." So the transition from pain and hurt and trauma and abuse, the transition from helplessness to shame is an attempt to reassert control and mastery over the situation and thus restore predictability and hope, and at the same time take responsibility for whatever has happened and feel ashamed. This is the irony in shame. Shame empowers, actually, and to not confuse shame with guilt. Guilt is an entirely different effect. Guilt has strong social components, and guilt is intimately linked and enhances, actually, helplessness. Although at some point guilt transforms to shame, which is in many ways motivational. We'll discuss this some other time.
So this is the first thing you need to understand: Pain and hurt, especially in early childhood, lead to helplessness. And the only way to get out of helplessness is by developing a sense of shame. "It's all my responsibility. I have made this happen. I've contributed to this." Okay. But narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a rejection of shame. The narcissist shuns, avoids shame. The narcissist is terrified by the repository of shame inside him because it is life-threatening. When the narcissist gets in touch with his or her shame, the narcissist experiences life-threatening mortification, narcissistic mortification. So narcissists avoid shame. They evade it. They escape it. They reject it, and they shun it at all costs. Nothing terrifies a narcissist more than humiliation and shame. But we have just said that shame is a strategy for reasserting a sense of control, self-empowerment, and mastery over the situation. And so by rejecting shame, by avoiding shame, the narcissist gives up on one of the main strategies we have for feeling re-empowered and agentic. So by avoiding shame, the narcissist remains stuck in the helplessness phase. The narcissist cannot transition from helplessness to shame because the narcissist dreads shame much more than the narcissist is afraid of helplessness. Narcissists, in other words, prefer a sense of helplessness to the experience of shame. And yet, because the narcissist never accepts responsibility, because the narcissist has alloplastic defenses, everyone else is to blame. Everyone else is guilty. Everyone else has misbehaved. Because of this, the narcissist's helplessness is morally righteous. It's a form of moral injury or righteous indignation.
So here's the sequence: The narcissist experiences pain and hurt and abuse and trauma, especially in early childhood, but also throughout life when the narcissist is exposed or humiliated or attacked or criticized or whatever, then the narcissist is under the threat of getting in touch with his or her life-threatening reservoir of shame. To avoid this, the narcissist remains stuck in the helplessness phase. The narcissist refuses to transition from helplessness to shame. The narcissist refuses to reassert control and mastery over his life by embracing shame as a motivational effect. Narcissists refuse to do this and he's permanently, permanently stuck in the phase of hurt and shame and helplessness. So the narcissist is constantly helpless. How to overcome this sense of helplessness, or pervasive, consuming, subsuming sense of helplessness? How to overcome this? By demonizing other people, by saying, by attributing to other people malevolence and malice and envy and stupidity. The narcissist's helplessness is not the narcissist's fault. The narcissist's helplessness is perceived by the narcissist as proof positive of the moral and intellectual inferiority of other people. Other people are evil. The narcissist is helpless because he refuses to be evil. The narcissist's helplessness, therefore, supports, ironically, the narcissist's grandiosity as a morally upright agent. He attains the high moral ground as an intellectually superior person worthy of the envy and malice of everyone around him, as someone with accomplishments or with looks or with intelligence or with assets of this or that kind. And all these provoke envy in others. The narcissist is helpless because he chooses to be helpless. He convinces himself: "Helplessness is my choice, as the alternative is aggression. The alternative is wickedness. And I am a good person."
So when the narcissist is confronted by the choice: helplessness or shame, the narcissist cannot embrace shame because shame implies some kind of misbehavior, responsibility, some kind of inferiority, moral at least inferiority. Shame is humiliating. Shame undermines grandiosity. So the narcissist gives up on shame, and the only alternative to shame is the helplessness of being abused, of being mistreated. And so the narcissist becomes a victim in his own mind. His helplessness is converted or transmogrified, transforms into a form of victimhood. His helplessness is the helplessness of the morally righteous and upright victim, of the blameless victim, of the pure, angelic victim. That's his helplessness, the narcissist's helplessness. And by doing so, the narcissist regains or restores or buttresses his grandiosity.
How to regain a sense of mastery when one rejects shame as a strategy? How to regain a sense of mastery, an internal locus of control when one feels helpless all the time, the plaything of malevolent, malicious, wicked, evil forces, the victim of circumstances and people and environments and institutions? How, in this narrative, can one at the same time claim to be godlike, masterful, in control? How does one square the circle? On the one hand, if you are the victim of evil people, then you are not in control. You are not the master, and you're definitely not godlike. Victims are not godlike. They're not omnipotent. They are not omniscient. Victimhood is the exact opposite of divinity. So, how to square the circle? How to restore a sense of mastery as a victim? How to leverage helplessness to regain control and to restore the grandiose, inflated, fantastic, self-enhancing perception as godlike? How to do that? Contempt is the answer. Contempt is a way to project the shame, to project the helplessness onto other people. It's what we call, what Libby called, an external solution. Contempt is, as I said, I'm going to repeat this, it's very important: Contempt is the narcissist's projected shame. Contempt. Contempt is the narcissist's projected helplessness. What is contempt? What is the underlying sentence, the underlying narrative of contempt? "They ought to be ashamed of themselves. They are contemptible. They are inferior." So by adopting contempt as the overriding effect, the narcissist squares the circle. The narcissist says: "I'm not ashamed. I'm responsible for nothing. I've done nothing wrong. I'm not ashamed. On the very contrary, I'm helpless because I'm being victimized. I'm the victim." But the people who are victimizing me, they should be ashamed of themselves. They are inferior. They are contemptible morally, intellectually, and so on. I hold them in disdain and am disgusted by them. And by saying this, by deploying this narrative, the narcissist restores a sense of superiority, restores a sense of mastery and control. Because if you're surrounded by midgets and you're the only giant, it's not your fault. Nothing is your fault. If you are misunderstood, discriminated against, envied, it's not your fault. Nothing is your fault. They should be ashamed. You have nothing to be ashamed of. And your helplessness is simply the outcome of the inferiority of people around you, of their shortcomings, of their envy, of their deficiencies, and of their moral turpitude. They are the ones who are stingy and impetuous and envious and destructive and hateful. They are the ones; you're just there, superior and august morally and intellectually. You're helpless. You're helpless against the horde. You're helpless against the crowd and the mob of people besieging you, attempting to take you down. It's not much to do. But you are never ashamed, and you're definitely superior.
Contempt is not the same as grandiosity. Grandiosity is motivational. Grandiosity motivates you to act. In order to sustain, maintain, preserve, buttress and augment your grandiosity, you have to do things. For example, you have to coerce people to provide you with narcissistic supply. You have to behave in highly constricted, well-defined ways. Grandiosity generates behavioral scripts. Grandiosity is also a cognitive distortion. It's a misperception of reality, a reframing of it, a falsification of the world. Grandiosity is a narrative within which you are God. You are godlike. The narcissist's grandiosity is godlike; is this perfect, perfect entity, and grandiosity is motivational because it generates, as I said, behavioral scripts. It dictates behaviors, whereas contempt is not motivational, is attitudinal. Contempt is inert. The narcissist holds everybody in contempt, but it doesn't motivate him to do anything. That is distinct from the psychopath. The psychopath holds everyone in contempt, and this motivates the psychopath to harm people, to damage people, to take advantage of people. So in not, in, in psychopathy, contempt is motivational, not attitudinal. In psychopathy, whereas in psychopathy the grandiosity is attitudinal. Psychopathy, in this sense, is a mirror image of narcissism. In narcissism, grandiosity is motivation. It motivates a narcissist to act in certain ways in order to sustain and preserve the grandiose view of himself and to self-enhance. Whereas in narcissism, contempt is attitudinal. "I hold everyone in contempt, but it doesn't mean that I have to do something about it," says the narcissist. Whereas in psychopathy, it is exactly the reverse. In psychopathy, the grandiosity is attitudinal. "I'm superior to everyone. Everyone is stupid." That's an attitude. Whereas the contempt in psychopathy is motivational. The contempt is the effect that drives the psychopath to harm and take advantage of people.
In narcissism, in pathological narcissism, grandiosity is about uniqueness, not about superiority; grandiosity is about being special, one of a kind, sui generis, not about being superior. For example, the narcissist could feel grandiose as a victim. The narcissist could feel grandiose as someone who has failed spectacularly. Grandiosity is about the spectacle, not about feeling superior. Many narcissists, many narcissists use their inferiority, their failures, their defeats, their checkered history, their—they use this, they leverage their own victimic victimhood. They leverage their inferiority in order to render themselves unique and special. And this is their locus of grandiosity, their inferiority. In other words, narcissists can feel grandiose for being uniquely inferior, uniquely victimized, uniquely unique failures, uniquely defeated and so on. And that is the seat of grandiosity in these specific narcissists. Whereas contempt is not about uniqueness. It is not about being special like grandiosity. Grandiosity is about being special and unique. Contempt is about being superior to others. Contempt is a haughty sense of superiority over other people who are perceived as, in some way or some ways, inferior. So grandiosity is about being special or unique. Contempt is about being superior. And they're not the same. They're not the same. If the locus of grandiosity also happens to be superiority, in other words, if the narcissist's way of self-enhancing is via displays, ostentatious displays of superiority; if the narcissist's narrative or way of thinking is: "I'm special and unique because I'm superior," then contempt can contribute to the buttressing, preservation and enhancement of the grandiosity. Contempt can contribute to the falsification of reality, the impairment of reality testing. But if the grandiosity is about being inferior, contempt has nothing to do with it. Contempt will preserve some kind of a sense of superiority. Ironically, sometimes contempt can mean: "I am superior for my inferiority; like, no one has been victimized the way I have been victimized. That renders me superior, and all other victims inferior. No one has failed the way I have failed spectacularly. My failure was headline news. My failure was all over the media. I'm—I—my failure is being taught in university business, business administration classes, and so that's my failure." So in that case, the contempt would be reserved for people who have failed less than the narcissist, in a lesser way. So contempt is malleable. The sense of superiority is linked to the grandiose narrative. But grandiosity in itself is not necessarily about superiority. Grandiosity can revolve around unique and special and unprecedented inferiority. And the contempt then would still retain a sense of superiority. And when it is linked with a grandiosity, it would be the superiority of one's own inferiority. You see how convoluted narcissism is. And when self-styled experts and even scholars bandy about all kinds of observations, I'm sorry to say, but in most cases they have no idea what they're talking about, because very few people on earth understand narcissism, pathological narcissism, intimately. I think to some extent it takes introspection as well as observation. And in this sense, scholars who are also narcissistic or scholars who are narcissists, they have an insurmountable advantage over scholars who are healthy, normal people. And we should listen to the first group and discount to a large extent the second.