I look like the very old telephone switchboards inside.

My narcissism does two things for me. It always did.

Number one, it isolates me from the pain of facing reality and facing my non-existing self. And it allows me to inhabit the fantasy land of ideal perfection and brilliance.

And above all, and that’s the third thing of two, above all, it is a wall, a thick, impenetrable wall, which goes all the way to heaven, all the way to God.

So wall separating me from the horrors, the horrors of my childhood and the pain and the hurt and the fear, the terror that accompany these horrors.

If I were to tap into this reservoir, I would die by my own hand or otherwise.

These ones, vital functions are bundled into what is known to psychologists as the false self.

For self is my best friend, my only friend and my only protection.

It is this sole guarantee for my continued existence.

Am I likely to give this up? Would you have given this up?

The narcissist balances a sadistic superego, a sadistic inner critic and a demanding and fantastic false self. He is between a rock and a hard place.

Both these constructs keep demanding, keep criticizing, keep pushing, keep motivating. It’s depleting.

Narcissists describe themselves as machine or automata because no human being could survive this.

When narcissists do gain self-awareness, when rarely the narcissist engages in role, in soul searching, like after mortification, it is in order to enhance their skills at attracting and maintaining their sources of narcissistic supply.

Narcissist goes to therapy to restore himself as a narcissist to become again, self efficacious.

He wants to learn from the therapist, how to garner even more narcissistic supply.

That’s why narcissists populate the dating coach websites, you know, the pickup artists, dating coaches, business coaches, all the clientele and narcissists.

But are narcissists able, capable of introspection? Can they look inside in any way, shape or form? Can they redirect their gaze internally? Can they distinguish the false self from who they really are or are not? Can this help them in the therapeutic process?

I want to read you a passage by Nathan Salant Schwartz.

He wrote a book called Narcissism and Character Transformation published by Inner City Books in 1985.

And he wrote, psychologically the shadow or reflection carries the image of the self, not the ego.

It is interesting and even psychotherapeutically useful to have persons suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, to study their face in the mirror.

By the way, Richard Nixon used to say, Richard Nixon went to see a psychiatrist. He got himself to treatment, believe it or not.

And the first thing he told the psychiatrist, the first meeting, the first minute of the first session, Nixon said, when I look in the mirror, there’s nobody there.

So Salant Schwartz says, you should force people with narcissistic personality disorder to look, to study their face in the mirror.

I continue to quote, often they will see someone of great power and effectiveness, precisely the qualities they feel a lack of.

For even though they may overwhelm others with their energy and personal qualities, they themselves feel ineffective.

Narcissus must possess his idealized image. He cannot allow its otherness, for that would be too threatening to his basic design to be mirrored himself.

Hence the sudden switch.

Shall I be wooed or shall I woo?

Narcissus libido quickly changes from an idealization into a mirror form, showing how his unredeemed inflation, in psychoanalytic terms, his grandiose exhibitionistic self gains control.

This was a bit Jungian, mind you.

But what the author is trying to say rather poetically, is the basic relationship between the true self and the false self.

No theoretician has ignored this dichotomy, most basic to narcissism, pathological narcissism.

The true self is synonymous to what Freud had described as the ego.

That’s why the narcissist has no ego.

The true self is shriveled, dilapidated, atrophied, stifled, marginalized by the false self.

False self kills the ego, because the ego is reality-based. The ego is truth-based. The ego is never a simulacrum.

The ego maintains veracity, and is grounded firmly in reality.

False self is false.

So there’s an enmity, an award to death, unto death between the false self and the ego.

The narcissist draws no distinction between his ego and his self. He’s incapable of doing so.

He relegates his ego functions to the outside world.

His false self is an invention, the reflection of an invention.

Narcissists, therefore, do not exist.

The narcissist is a loose coalition, based on a balance of terror between a sadistic idealized superego and a grandiose and manipulative false ego.

These two obnoxious creatures interact only mechanically.

Narcissists are narcissistic supply-seeking androids.

No robot is capable of introspection, not even with the help of mirroring. There’s nothing there.

What is there to introspect? What is there to inspect?

What can the narcissist learn about himself when he has no self?

Narcissists often think of themselves as machines, the automata metaphor.

They say things like, I have an amazing brain, I’m this, I’m that.

The narcissist likes to think of himself in terms of being an automaton, or a robot, or a device, or a machine, because he finds machines to be aesthetically compelling in their precision, in their impartiality, in their harmonious embodiment of the abstract.

Machines are so powerful. Machines are so emotionless. They’re not prone to hurting.

So this is the narcissist’s ideal.

The narcissist is the only human, type of human, whose ego ideal is non-human.

Ego ideal is what we aspire to become.

Everyone, healthy people and unhealthy people, have an ego ideal. It’s how we would like to see ourselves in the future, what we would like to become when we grow up.

The narcissist’s aspiration, anticipation, hope, dream, wish is to not become, is to not become, is to stop being human, and to be rendered unto metal and plastic.

The narcissist often talks of himself, as I said in the third person singular.

And so he carries with him these burdens, these burdens of aspiring to not be, even as because he’s still an entity, a biological, organic entity, he has somehow to be.

It’s dissonance, it’s an enormous contradiction.

Sometimes the narcissist does gain self-awareness and knowledge of his predicament.

Typically in the wake of a life crisis, divorce, bankruptcy, incarceration, accident, serious illness, the death of a loved one.

Mortification sets it.

But in the absence of an emotional correlate, the feelings that are not there, this is merely cognitive awakening.

And cognitive awakening is useless. It does not gel or congeal into an insight.

The dry facts alone cannot bring about any transformation, let alone healing. Let me tell you this.

There is very little I don’t know about narcissists, if anything.

And yet have I changed?

Yes, I have changed a lot for the worse.

Narcissists often go through soul searching, but they go through soul searching, as I said, to optimize their performance, to maximize the number of sources of narcissistic supply, to better manipulate their environment and other people.

They regard introspection as an inevitable and intellectually enjoyable maintenance chore and upgrade.

They introspect in order to upgrade to the next version.

The introspection of the narcissist is emotionless.

It’s like taking an inventory of good and bad sides, without committing to any meaningful change or rebalancing.

Then the introspection does not enhance the narcissist’s ability to empathize.

It does not inhibit his propensity to exploit other people and to discard them when their usefulness is over.

Nevermind how self-aware the narcissist becomes, how introspective he doesn’t temper, his overpowering and raging sense of entitlement. He doesn’t deflate his grandiose fantasies.

The narcissist’s introspection is yet another futile exercise, arid, arid exercise of bookkeeping.

He’s an accountant of his own lacking soul, a soulless bureaucracy of the psyche.

And in a way, it’s even more chilling than the alternative.

The narcissists who are blissfully unaware of their own disorder, they are more palatable. They are more acceptable.

We can say, poor guy, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not self-aware.

But what can you say about a narcissist like me, who is 100 million percent self-aware and yet keep on doing, keep on behaving or misbehaving in the same ways, time and again and again and again and again, yes, mechanically, approach avoidance, what Freud called repetition compulsion with severe emotional deficits.

The narcissist may become self-aware and knowledgeable about narcissistic personality disorder, but this knowledge doesn’t lead to healing.

In extreme cases, it might lead to behavior modification. Some abrasive counterproductive behaviors may be modified.

You see, Jeremiah knew everything there is to know about narcissists.

He said, can the Ethiopian change his skin? Can the leopard change his spots? Jeremiah 1323.

But if the narcissist becomes self-aware, if he accepts that he’s a narcissist, isn’t this the first important step towards healing?

Here’s the thing.

Narcissism defines the narcissist’s waking moments. Narcissism defines the narcissist’s nocturnal dreams. It’s all pervasive.

Everything the narcissist does and everything the narcissist is, is narcissism.

Narcissism is a personality, not a behavior, not a trait, not something that can be tackled with psychedelics or medicines.

That’s why narcissists are never prescribed medication.

Narcissism is the entire personality.

Everything the narcissist does is motivated by narcissism. Everything the narcissist avoids is the outcome of narcissism. Everything the narcissist feels dimly is narcissism.

Every utterance, every decision, every body language, every element of body language, everything, everything, everything, everything, this lecture, everything, is a manifestation of pathological narcissism.

It’s rather like being abducted by an alien, the false self.

It’s rather, it’s like being ruthlessly indoctrinated by this alien ever since.

The alien is the narcissist’s false self.

It’s a defense mechanism constructed in order to shield the true self from hurt, from inevitable abandonment, and then the defense mechanism goes awry and takes over.

It’s like the computer hull in Odyssey in Space, 2001, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece.

Cognitive understanding of the disorder does not constitute a transforming insight.

In other words, it has, knowing everything there is to know about who you are as a narcissist has no emotional correlate, has no effect, resistance is futile.

The narcissist does not internalize what he understands and what he learns about his disorder.

This new gained knowledge does not become a motivating part of who the narcissist is.

It remains an inert, an indifferent piece of knowledge with minor influence on the narcissist psyche.

The narcissist knows everything there is to know about orchids.

He knows everything there is to know about the Visigoths, Napoleon.

He knows everything there is to know about political history and he knows everything to know about narcissism.

And all these pieces of knowledge have the same impact, the same weight.

The narcissist may grow aware of certain behaviors.

He may realize that certain behaviors are pathological, dysfunctional, so defeating and productive.

He may even label these behaviors as wrong, bad, but he never grasps the psychodynamic significance of his own conduct.

The deeper layers of motivation, the relentless inexorable engine at the convoluted and tormented core of his being.

So the narcissist may say, I really like attention. I‘m an attention whore.

Or even disparagingly or self-deprecatingly, he may say, you know, I’m really sometimes too much.

I’m abusive, I’m hogging the conversation, I’m monopolizing everything.

He may criticize, be self-critical, but it leads nowhere.

It’s like an intellectual exercise at analysis and dissection.

The narcissist won’t be able to fully account for why he is, what he is, and why it is that he’s addicted, for example, to narcissistic supply.

What role the supply plays in his psychology, interpersonal relationships, life.

He may know the answer, but he does not feel or experience the answer.

The narcissist may realize belatedly that he is ticking, but never what makes him tick.

Sometimes I’ve witnessed this.

When narcissists first learn about narcissistic personality disorder, the narcissist really believes that he could change.

There is this, if you’ve seen the movie Awakenings, stunning movie, Robert De Niro.

So the narcissist, when he’s introduced to narcissistic personality disorder as an organizing principle, as a disease that makes sense of his life, imbues it with meaning, suddenly understands everything that had happened to him.

He understands his behaviors, his conditions, his interpersonal interactions.

Suddenly, narcissistic personality disorder is the spell, is the keyword, is the password.

So for a moment or for a day or for three months, he thinks he got it. That’s it. That’s the key to transformation. That’s the hermeneutic text he’s been seeking.

And usually it follows a period of violent rejection of the charges against him.

But once he accepts his own narcissism, he fervently wants to change. I have seen it with my own eyes.

Narcissist really wants to change, especially when his entire world is in shambles, when not only did he hit rock bottom, he became rock bottom.

Time in prison, a divorce, a bankruptcy, the death of a major source of narcissistic supply, dislocation, all these are life transforming crises.

The narcissist admits that he has a problem, but he does so only when he’s abandoned, when he’s destitute, when he’s despondent, when he’s devastated.

The narcissist feels he doesn’t want anymore of this. He doesn’t want this to happen again.

Mortification is terrible, because mortification takes away your false self and leaves you at the mercy of a two year old self, the true self.

The true self knows nothing about the world, and knows even less about you, and you’re at the mercy of this thing.

It’s even more horrifying than being at the mercy of the false self.

And the narcissist wants to change.

And there are often signs that he is changing, hopeful signs, signs of spring, but it’s never eternal spring.

The narcissist fades, the changes are reversed. He reverts to old form.

The so-called progress that he had made evaporates, virtually overnight.

Many narcissists report the same process of progression followed by recidivism, by remission, by relapse.

And many therapists refuse to treat narcissists, because it’s sisyphean.

It’s frustrating, all your accomplishments as a therapist, are gone, and you have to start from square one, from zero.

I never said that narcissists cannot change. I only said that they cannot heal.

And yes, I was among the first to say, if not the first to say, in 1995, that they cannot heal.

So whenever you will, narcissists cannot be healed, narcissists cannot be cured.

It’s my words, because I was the first to say them.

There is a huge difference between behavior modification and a permanent alteration of the psychodynamic landscape.

Narcissistic behavior can be modified, using a cocktail of talk therapy, conditioning, sometimes medication.

But I’ve never, ever encountered a healed narcissist, what’s called recovered narcissist. It’s fake, it’s fiction, it’s con artistry.

The people who are telling you that narcissists can be healed or cured or recovered are con artists, end of story.

And I don’t care if they have a doctor in front of the name, they are con artists.

The emphasis in therapy is more on accommodating the needs of the nearest and dearest to the narcissists. His spouse, long suffering spouse, his devastated children, his out of the minds colleagues, he’s worried and treated and eroded and corroded friends.

The therapist ends up treating everyone around the narcissist and the narcissist is gone.

If the narcissist’s abrasiveness, rage, mood swings, reckless and impulsive behaviors are modified, those around the narcissist benefit most.

And this as far as I’m concerned is a form of, not therapy, but social engineering.

There’s one last hope though.

Narcissism, although rarely, does tend to ameliorate with age, especially if it’s antisocial narcissism, psychopathic or malignant narcissism.

Ironically, the worst type of narcissist, psychopathic narcissist, malignant narcissist get much better with age.

It is the garden variety narcissist, the common narcissist of all stripes, overt, covert, you name it.

Who doesn’t change?

But the psychopathic ones do change with age.

And there are many forms of pathological narcissism that are essentially reactive and transient.