My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Healthy narcissism is common and welcome in adolescence.
Their narcissistic defenses help them cope with the anxieties and fears engendered by the demands and challenges of modern society.
Getting home, going to college, sexual performance, marriage, and other rites of passage are very taxing and intimidating. There is nothing wrong with healthy narcissism. It sustains the adolescent in a critical time of his life and shields him or her from emotional injuries.
Still, under certain circumstances, healthy narcissism can transform into a malignant form, destructive to self and to others.
Adolescents who are consistently mocked and bullied by peers, role models, and socialization agents, such as teachers, coaches, and parents, such adolescents are prone to find the core in grandiose fantasies of omnipotence, omniscience, and revenge.
To sustain these personal myths and narratives, they may resort to violence and counterbullying. The same applies to youths who feel deprived, underestimated, discriminated against, or at a dead end. These youths are likely to evoke narcissistic defenses, to fend off the constant hurt, and to achieve self-sufficient and self-contained emotional gratification.
Finally, pampered adolescents, who serve as mere extensions of their smothering parents and their unrealistic expectations, are equally liable to develop grandiosity in the sense of entitlement, which are incommensurate with their real-life achievements.
When frustrated, such adolescents become aggressive. This propensity to other directed violence is further exacerbated by what Lush, Christopher Lasch, called the culture of narcissism.
We live in a civilization which condones and positively encourages malignant individualism, a civilization which elevates bad hero worship.
Remember the movie Born Killers? A civilization which regards traits and behaviors such as exploitativeness, inane ambition, and the atomization of social structures and support networks as welcome.
A alienation is a hallmark of our age, not only among youngsters.
When societies turn anomic under both external and internal pressures, narcissists tend to become vibrant.
In societies that are subjected to terrorism, to crime, to civil unrest, religious strife, economic crisis, immigration, widespread job insecurity, war, rampant corruption, and so on, narcissists come to the fore, they become pillars of the society, and they become aggressive and violent and in need of fulfilling their sense of entitlement.
This is because communities in anomic states offer little by way of externally imposed impulse control. They offer little by way of peer regulation of impulses, of penal discipline, and rewards for conformity or good behavior.
These societies have nothing to offer to their members because they are in the process of disintegration. In such settings of collapse, communities become serial and manic.
On a greater, remember Hitler, or a smaller scale.
Adolescents are no exception. They are equally influenced by their environment and surrounding.
They imitate and emulate the adult world. They too want to partake in the orgy of destruction and violence that has become our society and that is so visible and manifest in our media.
Thank you.
