My name is Sam Vaknin. Twenty-two years ago, I have written a book about psychopathic narcissists. I even coined most of the language in use today, including narcissistic abuse.
Yet, when I come across a psychopathic narcissist, even I am shaken to my foundations. There is something utterly reptilian or alien about these people.
Psychopathic narcissists and histrionic and borderline women, they are driven by primitive urges, unrequited needs, raw negative impulses like rage and vindictiveness, and psychological defense mechanisms run amok and awry.
It is not so much a lack of empathy as it is a kind of one-track mindedness that renders these people robotic or zombie-like.
You cannot contract, make a contract, make an agreement with a psychopathic narcissist or with a histrionic borderline woman. They recognize no rules. They have no deep emotions. They get attached to absolutely no one, not even to their own children.
They play mind games with everyone. They lie incessantly and usually unnecessarily. They will not hesitate to hurt you fatally if it gratifies the triflest of their wishes.
These people, psychopathic narcissists and borderline histrionic women are not sadists. They are not out to inflict pain on you.
You are merely a kind of collateral damage. They do what they do absentmindedly. They don’t care. They are not there.
Where a human being should have been, there is a vast deep space of emptiness, a void with howling primordial winds. It is chilling.
These defective renditions of humans have no real spouses. They know no children. They maintain no friendships. They keep no families. There is no continuity.
It is like a series of disjointed snapshots with nothing much to connect them.
These people plow through their lives and through the lives of their so-called nearest and dearest, like an unstoppable, unconscionable, wrecking balls. They swing apathetically between compulsions and obsessions. They have an ever more dimming awareness of the stirrings that pass for their consciousness.
It’s like these people are raw material, unformed, yet to become human. Some elements are there. Many are missing.
I think that is what frightens people. That’s what put most people ill at ease. This is the uncanny valley.
Psychopathic narcissists and borderline histrionic women appear fully formed and fully human. Many of them are charming. Many of them are irresistible.
When you get a bit closer, on a second look, on a second meeting, the second exchange of correspondence, when you bond or attach to them, you discover that they are the wind.
Like Dalí’s painting Galatea, they are an assemblage of molecules. Ever colliding, never restful, never can be grasped, never comprehensible. Very painful.
Again, despite having written this book, Malignant Self-Love, and having been exposed for 22 years to thousands of such people, with every new encounter, I am dumbfounded, and sometimes even downright frightened
