My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
The narcissist has no private life, no true self, no domain reserved exclusively for his nearest and dearest.
The narcissist’s life is a spectacle, with free access to all, constantly on display, garnering narcissistic supply from his ever-changing audience.
In the theatre that is the narcissist’s life, the actor is irrelevant, only the show goes on.
The false self is everything the narcissist would like to be, but alas, cannot. It is omnipotent, omniscient, invulnerable, impregnable, brilliant, perfect and in short, it is godlike.
Its most important role is to elicit narcissistic supply from others, admiration, adulation or obedience and in general, unceasing attention.
The narcissist constructs a narrative of his life that is partly confabulated and whose purpose is to buttress, demonstrate and prove the veracity of the fantastically grandiose and often impossible claims made by the false self.
This narrative allocates roles to significant others in the narcissist’s personal history.
Inevitably, such a narrative is hard to credibly sustain for long. Reality intrudes, and a yawning abyss opens between the narcissist’s self-imputed divinity and his drab, pedestrian existence and attributes, and I call this the grandiosity gap.
Additionally, meaningful figures around the narcissist often refuse to play the parts allotted to them by him. They rebel. They get exhausted. They abandon the narcissist and move away.
The narcissist copes with this painful and ineluctable realization of the divorce between his self-perception and this less-than-stellar state of affairs by first denying reality, by delusionally ignoring and filtering out all inconvenient truths that contravene and contradict his narrative.
Then, if this coping strategy of denying reality fails, the narcissist invents a new narrative, which accommodates and incorporates the very intrusive data that served to undermine the previous, now discarded narrative.
The narcissist even goes to the extent of denying that he ever had another narrative at all, except the current modified one.
That is the narcissist power of self-delusion.
