Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited

(faq page 79 cont.)

The narcissist is sometimes perceived as whimsical, traitorous, posing and double crossing. The truth is that he is the most predictable, consistent of all people. He follows one over-riding principle: the principle of Narcissistic Supply (upon which we will expand in the next few chapters).

The narcissist has internalised a bad object. He feels bad, corrupt, deserving to fail, to be disgraced and punished. He is forever surprised and thankful when good things happen to him. Out of touch with his emotions and with his capabilities, he either exaggerates them or underestimates them.

He is likely to be grateful to his partner for having selected him. He is also be likely to berate her for doing precisely this and to think that no other would have been (or will be) as foolish, blind, or ignorant as to commit the same mistake and choose him. The stupidity and blindness of his mate or spouse is substantiated by the very fact that she IS his mate or spouse. Only a stupid and blind person would have preferred the narcissist, with his myriad deficiencies, over others.

This feeling of perchance occurrence is the true source of the asymmetry in his relationships. The partner, having made this incredible choice, having elected to live with the narcissist (=to bear this cross) is worthy of special consideration. The partner represents an eventuality as rare as a supernova or the appearance of a comet. The partner warrants special treatment and the application of a special (double) standard. The partner can be infidel, not contribute in any way (emotionally, financially), be dependent, be abusively critical and display unforgivable behaviours - and, yet, be forgiven unconditionally.

This, no doubt, is the direct result of a very flawed sense of self worth and of a prevailing sense of inferiority.

This asymmetry is also an effective barrier against the expression of anger, even legitimate anger.

Instead, anger is accumulated every time that the partner takes advantage of the asymmetry (or is perceived by the narcissist to be doing so). The narcissist believes that this is an expected result of the daily friction between two cohabiting humans, especially partners with radically different personalities.

Some of the anger is passively-aggressively expressed. The frequency of sexual relations is adversely affected. Less sex, less talk, less touch. Sometimes the aggression erupts volcanically in the form of rage attacks. These are usually followed by panicky reactions intended to restore the balance and to reassure the narcissist that he is not about to be deserted or rejected. Following such rage attacks, the narcissist resorts to passiveness, tenderness, appeasing gestures, or to wimpish and infantile behaviour. The same behaviour is not expected (and in certain cases, not accepted) from the partner. She is allowed to explode without as much as apologising.

Another hurdle in the narcissist's way to establishing lasting (if not healthy) relationships is his excess rationality and, chiefly, his tendency to generalise on very flimsy evidence (hyper-inductiviteness).

The narcissist regards abandonment or a rejection by a specific emotional-sexual partner as a final verdict concerning his very ability to engage in such relationships in the future. Because of the self-denigrating mechanisms described above, the narcissist is likely to idealise his mate and believe that she must have been uniquely predisposed to have elected him. His internal dialogue races on to generate images of the way the partner self-sacrificed herself on the altar of the relationship. The more convinced the narcissist is that his partner invested extraordinarily in the relationship and the more assured he is that she was uniquely equipped to succeed in it - the more frightened he becomes. Why the fear?

Because if this partner, as qualified as she was, as desirous of the relationship as she was, failed - surely, no one else is likely to succeed. In this case, the narcissist is doomed to an existence of loneliness and destitution. He stands no chance of constructing a resilient, healthy relationship with another.

The narcissist will do anything to avoid this seemingly foregone conclusion. He would beg his partner to return and re-establish the relationship, no matter what transpired. Her very return proves to him that he is of value, the preferred alternative, someone with whom a relationship is both constructible and maintainable.

The partner, in other words, is a living piece of market research. The narcissist's selection by this living market survey (=by the partner) is tantamount to receiving a quality award.

This "one-man-selecting-committee" and "chosen product" dyad is only one of the pairs of roles adopted by the narcissist and his partner. There are also "the sick" and "the healthy", or "the doctor/psychologist" and "the patient", "the poor, underprivileged girl" and "the white knight in shining armour" dyads and so on. These roles are analysed in detail in later chapters. Suffice it to say, at this stage, that both roles - even the one willingly (or unwillingly) adopted by the partner - are facets of the narcissist's personality. Through complex projective identification processes and other projective defence mechanisms the narcissist fosters a dialogue between parts of his self, using others as mirrors and communication conduits. The relationship has a highly therapeutic value on the one hand. On the other hand it suffers from all the symptoms of a successful (or, worse, a not so successful) therapy: transference, counter-transference and the like.

Let us briefly study the pair "sick-healthy" or "patient-doctor". The narcissist can assume either role in this pair.

If he fulfils the role of the "healthy" he attributes to his partner his own inability to form long-standing, emotion-infused couple relationships. This would be because she is "sick" (sexually hyperactive, "Nymphomaniac", frigid, unable to commit, to be intimate, unjust, moody, or traumatised by events in her past). The narcissist, on the other hand, judges himself to be perfect in this respect: homely and striving to establish a "healthy" couple. He interprets the behaviour of his partner in a manner supportive of this theory and she displays emergent behaviour, which conforms with her role. Sometimes, the narcissist invests less in such a relationship because he regards his mere existence - sane, strong, omniscient - to be a sufficient investment (gift, really), voiding the need to add "maintenance efforts" on top of it.

In the other, converse case, the narcissist easily identifies many of his behaviour patterns as "sick". This usually coincides with latent or open hypochondriasis. The partner's health is idealised to form the background against which the narcissist's sickness is contrasted. This is a responsibility shifting mechanism. If the narcissist's pathology is deep seated and irreversible - then he cannot be held responsible for his actions, past and future.

These roles are the narcissist's ways of coping with an insoluble dilemma:

He is mortally terrified of being deserted. This fear drives him to minimise the interaction with his partner to avoid the future, inevitable, pain. This, in turn, leads to the feared abandonment. The narcissist knows that his behaviour instigates the abandonment that he is so afraid of. In a way he is happy about it, because it gives him the illusion that he is the exclusive master of the relationship and of his own fate. To explicate his bizarre brand of behaviour he elaborates these roles, which mask the true state of things, that the narcissist is very sick, regardless of the state of the mental health of his partner.

Ultimately, the narcissist loses his partners in almost all his relationships. It is understandable that he hates his self for it, that he is enraged to a suicidal point. It is because of the life-threatening magnitude of these negative emotions that they are repressed. Every possible psychological defence mechanism is employed to sublimate, transform (through cognitive dissonance), dissociate or re-direct this self-mutilating rage. A constant battle generates constant fear, which is manifested in the form of anxiety attacks, or an anxiety disorder. A permanent feeling of unease further compounds the picture. The narcissist begins to believe that he is intrinsically deformed and defective. That he is irreparably dysfunctional when it comes to establishing and to maintaining relationships (which is true!).

The narcissist - especially during a life crisis - loses touch with reality. Defective reality tests appear during therapy and even psychotic micro-episodes, though this is much more common in the Borderline Personality Disorder. Narcissists interpret a (fairly common) mismatch between personalities in an apocalyptic manner. Dependence, a symbiotic interaction is transformed into a series of statements regarding the narcissist's very ability to form relationships.

But through all this, the narcissist needs a collaborative partner. He needs someone to serve as a sounding board, a mirror, a victim, a bitch and a witch. In other words, he needs a polyandric woman.

The narcissist reduces all women to two types: the Monoandric and the Polyandric.

The Monoandric woman is psychologically mature. She is usually also of ripe chronological age and sexually sated. She prefers intimacy and companionship to sexual satisfaction. She is in possession of a mental blueprint, which dictates her short-term goals. She emphasizes compatibility and is predominantly verbal.

The narcissist reacts with fear and repulsion (mixed with rage and the wish to frustrate) to the Monoandric woman. Consciously, though, he realises that intimacy can be created only with this kind of woman.

The Polyandric woman is young (if not chronologically, then at heart). She is still sexually curious and varies her sexual partners. She is not adept at creating intimacy and emotional rapport. Because she is more interested in the accumulation of experiences - her life is not guided by a "master plan", or even by medium-term goals.

The narcissist is aware of the transience of his relationship with the polyandric woman. So, he is attracted to her while being devoured by a fear of being abandoned by her.

The narcissist will, almost always, find himself paired with a polyandric woman. She poses no threat of getting emotionally close to him (=being intimate). The incompatibility between them is so high and the probability of abandonment and rejection so palpable - that intimacy cannot be forged against such a background. Moreover, this consuming fear of being left behind leads to the reconstruction of the primordial Oedipal conflict and to a whole set of transference relations with the woman. This complex inevitably results in the very abandonment so feared. Serious psychological crises follow (narcissistic trauma or injury).

The narcissist knows (or, if less self-conscious, feels) all this. He is not as attracted to the polyandric woman as he is repelled by the monoandric one. The latter threatens him with the two things deemed by him to be worse than abandonment: intimacy and a loss of his uniqueness. She offers to him the possibility to communicate with his very threatening inner world by (her) proxy. She wants him to settle into a moulded form of life common to virtually all humanity: marriage, children, a career.

On the one hand, there is nothing like children to threaten a narcissist. They are the embodiment of commonness, a reminder of his own, dark, childhood, and an infringement upon his privileges. On the other hand, there is nothing like children to boost an habitually flagging ego. In short, nothing like children to create conflict in the tormented soul of the narcissist.

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