My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
In my writings, I often compare narcissists to alien lifeforms, to robots, to automata, to machines.
People often bristle at such comparisons.
They say, well, surely narcissists are human beings, as human as we are.
But you see, narcissists lack a critical piece of equipment. They lack the ability to empathize.
Empathy is what binds us together. Empathy is the quintessence, the essence, of what it means to be human.
In the absence of empathy, emotions and cognitions are skewed, deformed, and in a word, alien.
To empathize means to put yourself in the shoes of another person, to understand, to accept, and sometimes to sympathize with that person’s needs, emotions, fears, hopes, wishes, preferences.
For a split second to be someone else is to empathize.
It is this ability to become someone else, however momentarily, that allows us to feel compassion, mercy, pity, and to help altruistically and unselfishly.
The narcissist, usually being the victim of early childhood abuse, did not develop this critical capacity. The narcissist is unable to empathize.
Everything human is strange to the narcissist alien. He cannot grasp the three-dimensionality of other people.
To the narcissist, people are instruments of gratification, mere extensions of himself.
Psychopathic narcissists regard other people as playthings, and they can even go to the extent of becoming sadistic, physically, emotionally, verbally, and psychologically.
It is because of that that I keep saying that narcissists cannot truly communicate with other people. They cannot communicate with their family, with their friends, with their colleagues at work, with underlings, subordinates and bosses, with neighbors, and even with a therapist.
This lack of empathy sets them apart. It is an important criterion in diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder, one of the nine in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it also makes them easily recognizable.
This coldness, this aloofness, this detachment is unique to narcissists and psychopaths. Some people call it a reptilian quality.
In my book Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, I suggested that narcissists and psychopaths actually do possess a form of empathy, which I call cold empathy.
They easily hone in on other people’s vulnerabilities, weaknesses, frailties, and foibles, and they leverage and take advantage of this knowledge in order to exploit, manipulate, maneuver, and sometimes simply humiliate an infante.
Yet this is not all empathy. This is not an empathy that leads to positive feelings. This is the empathy, type of empathy, cold empathy, that renders the narcissists and psychopaths the ultimate predator.
