My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
The overwhelming majority of narcissists, male narcissists, hate women, they despise them, they hold them in contempt, they are afraid of them, afraid of their sexuality, their power to bring life to the world, their alleged ostensible irrationality, etc.
But there is a tiny minority of narcissists who actually love women. Both narcissists who love women, philogenists, and narcissists who hate women, misogynists, both of them end up torturing women, frustrating them and sadistically using them for their own ends.
The sadistic women lover, the philogenist, is drawn to women, he desires them, he covets their traits.
This kind of narcissist admires women and generally prefers to spend his time with them. This narcissist adores women’s company. He surrounds himself with women.
But it is precisely this inexorable pull that terrifies the philogenist, the sadistic, narcissistic women lover. He is mortified by the fact that he cannot resist, that he finds women irresistible. He is awed by women’s hold over him. He is very afraid of his own resultant women-centered obsessions and compulsions.
This kind of narcissist, the philogenistic narcissist, is poorly equipped to deal with and is overwhelmed by the emotions that women provoke in him.
In a desperate attempt to extricate himself, this kind of narcissist adopts avoidant behaviors. He shunts women, he frustrates women, he abuses women, tortures and humiliates them, frequently, overtly and intentionally, but very often not.
This panoply of avoidant behaviors restores his sense of control, power and superiority over women. This is an anxiety reduction mechanism.
These kind of behaviors are intended to restore the inner carbon piece of this type of narcissist.
Now, thus rehabilitated, he can embark on a new cycle of approach avoidance with his next female target.
And then there’s the sadistic women-hater, the misogynist. As I said, the majority of narcissists are like that. They hold women in utter contempt, they detest them, they wish them ill and they seek to punish them.
This kind of narcissist, the misogynistic sadistic narcissist, displays the same range of behaviors that the sadistic women lover does.
In other words, it’s very difficult to tell apart the philogenistic women lover narcissist from the women-hating narcissist. They both act the same, but for entirely different psychodynamic reasons.
The sadistic women lover seeks to restore a semblance of balance, of balance of power, balance of potency between himself and the women he finds so irresistible. The sadistic women-hater aims to annihilate women, to remove women from his life, to penalize them harshly for daring to intrude on his being with their demands for love, sex and intimacy, which he perceives as women’s self-interested manipulation.
The sadistic women-hater fears women. He understands that they can gain access to his innermost resources. He regards them as the embodiment and the reification of his weak points, his areas of penetration, his vulnerabilities.
In an attempt to distance himself from these shortcomings and failings as he perceives them, he punishes the messenger, the women, who bring forth these tidings that he cannot countenance, cannot live with, cannot contemplate.
The narcissist regards women as mirrors, mirrors of his own deficiencies. He therefore breaks the mirror. He hates women. He makes sure to turn their lives into living hells.
