Transcription
Narcissists use words, and you use words. Narcissists even use sentences, and you use sentences. The speech of a narcissist is comprised of grammar and syntax, and shockingly, your speech sometimes is comprised of grammar and syntax. So what's the difference between the narcissist's speech acts and your speech acts? What's the difference between the way the narcissist communicates and the way you communicate? Well, the difference is very simple. The narcissist does not use words in sentences and language to communicate. The narcissist leverages language in order to impress you, manipulate you, coerce you. And so there's never a dialogue.
Narcissists actually use speech in five ways; there are five types of narcissist speech. Narcissists speechify, they lecture, they hector, they ramble, they go off on tangents, and they rant. They never dialogue; they never listen. And so whatever it is that they're doing with their mouths does not constitute communication in any meaningful way, or any way known to non-narcissistic humanity.
Speechify: I'm going to read to you the dictionary definitions from a variety of dictionaries. Speechify is to deliver a speech, especially in a tedious or pompous way. Sounds familiar—these videos, for example. Next, lecture: an angry or serious talk given to someone in order to criticize their behavior or to establish the superiority, the supremacy of the speaker. That is a lecture. The narcissist also hectors. To hector is to talk and behave towards someone in a loud and unpleasantly forceful way, especially in order to get them to act or to think the way you want. It's a kind of moralizing; pro-social narcissists and communal narcissists usually hector. Next, narcissist ramble: to ramble is to talk or to write at length in a confused or inconsequential way. Narcissists go off on tangents: to go off on a tangent is to start talking about something that is only slightly or indirectly related to the original subject. And finally, of course, narcissists rant: to rant is to speak or shout at length in an angry, impassioned way, the way some VAKIN does. Okay, these are the five ways the narcissist uses speech and language. The narcissist speechifies, lectures, hectors, rambles, goes off on tangents, and rants; never dialogues, never listens.
This is called, in psychology, an elocutionary act. There is a theory of speech, by the way; it's known as the theory of speech acts. An elocutionary act is the act that is performed by saying something, as opposed to the act of speaking itself. So when you say something, when you ask something, when you order something, when you threaten people, when you convey information, you're engaging in an elocutionary act, and you're doing this by speaking; and the speech itself is the locutionary act. Okay, so elocutionary acts are intended to cause an impact on other people, to cause an effect on others, to persuade people, to amuse people, to inspire people, to inform people. Elocutionary acts are directional; they are directional speech acts. In this sense, they're very reminiscent of emotions, and so there is a connection between locutionary acts, which is the anatomical, physiological speech; elocutionary acts, which is what you're trying to do when you speak; and perlocutionary acts, the results of the speech. Okay, this is the theory of speech acts.
Now, in practice, among normal and healthy people, most utterances involve the performance of all of these three acts simultaneously. That's why we say that speech acts are performative; they involve performance. But not so with the narcissist; not so with the narcissist. The narcissist engages in elocutionary acts—acts that are performed by saying something. So the narcissist, of course, uses speech, which is a locutionary act, but the narcissist engages in elocutionary acts with a mind to the perlocutionary act; in other words, with a mind to the results. The narcissist uses speech as an instrument, uses language, leverages language in order to secure outcomes. Language becomes an integral part of the narcissist's self-efficacy. Whereas people communicate and talk and speak and laugh, and whereas people engage in all these speech acts simply in order to express themselves or maybe to communicate something to someone else, the narcissist uses all these in order to secure highly specific consequences in his listeners. It's a mavan instrument, a mavan tool, and part of a strategy of manipulation.
Now, this—all this theory of elocutionary acts and so on and so forth—was first described by British philosopher John Langshaw Austin, um, about, um, half a century—almost a century ago, actually. And Austin emphasized the performative aspect of speech. He said that performative speech denotes an utterance, a sentence, a statement which very deliberately accomplishes the stated intention of the speaker. So when you say, for example, “I apologize,” or “I promise,” or “I declare this business open,” all these are performative acts because the very statement, the very delivery of the statement establishes the intention of the speaker and communicates it to the listeners. The nature of performative speech acts, um, has been a main state of linguistic philosophy in the 20th century—the main topic. The narcissist's speech is performative, but in a highly specific way. I would call it manipulatively performative. Whereas people use performative speech—they perform the speech, and sometimes they even act a bit—they perform the speech with flourish, or with some emotional tint, or with some, with some, um, direction, body language, or whatever—normal people do this, healthy people do this—but the intention, the motivation counts. People perform speech acts; people engage in performative speech acts because they're trying to say something about themselves. When you say, “I apologize,” what you're saying is, actually, “I'm in a state of mind of sadness; I'm sorry.” When you say, “I promise,” what you're trying to say is, “In my mind, I'm planning to do something.” It's performative; speech acts convey information about the speaker. The narcissist uses performative speech acts in an entirely, entirely different way. He uses performative speech acts in order to induce change in the listener, to modify the listener's behavior, to engage the listener in a fantasy, to alter the listener's perception of reality, because the narcissist's perception of reality is different. So the narcissist wants the listener's perception of reality to conform to his or her own. So it's a, it's a tool; it's the language weaponized and instrumentalized at the service of obtaining favorable outcomes, at the service of sustaining self-efficacy. And this is not, this is not something that healthy and normal people do, by and large. Of course, there are exceptions—the moments in one's life when one is trying to influence other people, their moods, their perceptions, their reality testing, their, their, their affects, the cognitions. Normally, political speech is such an example; propaganda is such an example. When you're trying to negotiate a business deal, you engage in manipulative performative speech, but these are highly limited enclaves. They constitute, I don't know, 3% of the total speech acts of a healthy, normal individual. With the narcissist, 100% of the language, 100% of the speech acts, 100% of the utterances, 100% of the sentences and the statements and the declarations and the promises—100% is intended to get you to do something, or to agree with the narcissist's way of seeing reality, or to collaborate, to collude with a narcissist in his fantasy, or to serve the narcissist somehow. It's all about changing you, whereas normal, healthy speech is mostly about conveying information regarding the speaker. The narcissist's speech is about changing your identity, making you a new version of yourself, more compatible with the narcissist's goals and self-concept.
And there are several clinical reasons for this. Narcissists do it automatically, unconsciously. Narcissists are not psychopaths. Psychopaths leverage language, use language in order to con you, to swindle you, to scam you, to steal something from you, or to obtain a goal. Now, psychopaths are goal-oriented, so the psychopath is fully aware of the performative quality of the language; he's fully aware—the psychopath is fully aware that he's abusing language, molesting language. The psychopath does—the narcissist, I'm sorry—does exactly the same, but unconsciously. There's no cunning, no scheming, no deliberation and premeditation. That's the difference between psychopaths and narcissists. A psychopath, you could say, is a self-aware narcissist, a narcissist who knows what he's doing. The psychopath can tell apart fantasy and reality; the psychopath's reality testing is intact, and yet the psychopath would use fantasy to delude you, to deceive you. The narcissist would do the same, but the narcissist would be unaware of his or her motivations.
So what are the reasons for the narcissist's convoluted, convoluted leveraging of speech? What are the reasons for the metastatic or cancerous way the narcissist introduces speech into interpersonal interactions? Why, in other words, does the narcissist use speech just in order to manipulate rather than communicate, just in order to impress rather than communicate? Why do narcissists give up on communication, actually? And there are several, several reasons, several clinical reasons. Number one: narcissists are incapable of perceiving the externality and separateness of objects. When they're faced with other people, they're incapable of perceiving other people as separate, as autonomous, as agentic, as independent. Narcissists don't perceive other people as “out there”; they perceive other people as internal objects. There's a confusion between internal and external; it's a bit psychotic. So the narcissist engages in inner dialogue, internal dialogue among internal objects. All the narcissist's speech is internalized, interiorized, so that actually the interaction takes place between the narcissist and your representation in the narcissist's mind. When the narcissist talks to you, when the narcissist communicates with you, when the narcissist uses language in his interaction with you, he is not talking to you; he is not communicating with you. You don't exist; you're not there. What the narcissist is doing, he is verbalizing an internal dialogue with the inner object, with the internal object, with the inject that represents you in the narcissist's mind, with your avatar. So that's why the narcissist's speech is so bizarre in many ways, because it's as if you're not there, as if you were transparent or something. The narcissist doesn't talk to you; he talks at you. And I would even say that the narcissist talks through you. That's clinical reason number one: the inability to perceive other people as “out there,” external.
Reason number two: as I mentioned, narcissists seek to impress and seek to manipulate, not to communicate. And the reason is that narcissists devalue interlocutors. The narcissist regards you as a threat if you're more intelligent than the narcissist, more knowledgeable than the narcissist, more sociable than the narcissist, more qualified, more trained, more educated, more skilled, more anything—you're a threat. And because the narcissist always takes into account that you might constitute a threat, his or her defense is to devalue you. The minute the narcissist starts to talk to you, there's a process in his mind that devalues you, denigrates you, demeans you, criticizes you, degrades you somehow. When the narcissist starts to talk to you, and you could be anyone—you could be a bank teller, you could be a taxi driver, you could be a waiter or waitress, you could be a spouse, you could be a child, the narcissist's own child, you could be a pastor, you could be the Prime Minister—the minute the narcissist starts to talk to you, he generates an internal object which represents you in his mind, and then he proceeds to devalue this internal object. He says to himself, “My interlocutor, the person I'm talking to, is inferior to me, because I'm Godlike, and I'm infinitely superior.” So the opinion of my interlocutor, the knowledge of my interlocutor, the contributions of my partner to this conversation—contributions, the opinions, the knowledge—are inferior to my own. So there's a narrative which devalues the other participant in the conversation, the partner in the dialogue, devalues the other person, the interlocutor, and elevates, by comparison, the narcissist into a position of uncontested superiority.
And finally, narcissists overvalue their time and their contributions; they overvalue themselves. So this is known as overperception. The narcissist has an overperception of his own inputs and underperception of other people's inputs. A conversation is a series of verbal inputs, linguistic inputs into a common pool, the pool of communication. So the narcissist says, “Whatever it is that I'm saying, whatever it is that I'm contributing to the conversation is vastly superior to anything my interlocutor can offer.” And so, because of this overperception and underestimation or devaluation of the other person's inputs, the narcissist is not interested in communication; regards it as a kind of waste of time. By positioning himself as a teacher, as a guru, as a—, the narcissist is not interested in what other people have to say; he is even irritated and irked when they insist on saying so, or when they offer criticism, even constructive criticism, or when they provide an alternative point of view, another angle, effect the narcissist was unaware of. It triggers the narcissist; infuriates the narcissist. Consequently, the narcissist's responses and speech acts have little to do with what you have to say, with interlocutors. This is known as irrelevancy. You become irrelevant in the conversation. Whatever you contribute, whatever you say, whatever you promulgate, whatever you announce, whatever you declare, whatever you promise, whatever you convey, whatever you communicate—all your speech of whatever nature is utterly irrelevant. The narcissist is having, having a conversation with himself, mediated via your representation in his mind. He is using you—kind of using your presence in his mind—to talk to himself. And so his responses strike you as bizarre; his speech has nothing to do with what you have just said.
Narcissists are focused on self-enhancement; they're totally solipsistic. Sometimes the narcissist's part of the dialogue appears to be disjointed, coming out of nowhere, having nothing to do with what you've just said or what you've just asked. Even the narcissist's speech can sometimes, on rare occasions, degenerate into what is known as disorganized speech—word salad—when the narcissist experiences injury, real, imagined, anticipated, or incipient. When the narcissist experiences mortification, for example, when there's a public—and the public prefers you to the narcissist, prefers your input to the narcissist, agrees with you and disagrees with the narcissist—when this is happening in public or among your peers, the narcissist experiences mini-mortification or mini-collapse. When the narcissist cannot obtain any positive input, any positive reaction to what he has to say, in all these situations of injury, collapse, mortification, and so on and so forth, the narcissist's coherence—this—and the cohesiveness of the narcissist's speech deteriorate dramatically. The narcissist begins to stutter, to fumble, to fidget, to mumble, to rumble, to rant, and to go off on very eccentric and schizotypal tangents. Narcissist organization totally crumbles; the precarious balance of the narcissist's inner world collapses, and a variety of internal objects begin, begin to interact with each other in a highly unstructured manner. It's total chaos. And so, on rare occasions, the narcissist would resemble someone with schizophrenia, actually, but that is rare. In the vast majority of cases, throughout the narcissist's corpus of communication with other people, the narcissist would be talking to himself, using the presence of other people as an excuse, and his speech would be intended to mold you, to shape you into something or someone that coheres, adheres, and conforms to your representation in his mind. The narcissist's speech would attempt to take away from you any demonstration, evidence of independence, personal autonomy, agency, the ability to interact with other people. So try to isolate you somehow, modify your behaviors, or eliminate them altogether, paralyze you in effect. So narcissist speech is a, is an awesome weapon, a very dangerous weapon, and it is through language that the narcissist coerces you into becoming what you have never been, into losing your identity, into injecting the narcissist—inviting this hostile presence into your mind like a Trojan horse or fifth column—and then, from within your mind, the narcissist uses language to stage a hostile takeover, a merger that has never been wanted. And gradually, you dissipate and dissolve and disappear in the narcissist's acidulous, acidic, acrid speech—a speech that is that never strays too far from bullying.