My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Is the narcissist confined in his grandiose fantasies to one subject, one topic, one area or field of life?
The answer is more complex than you would imagine.
The narcissist is bound to make use of his more pronounced traits and qualities in both the design of his false self and in the extraction of narcissistic supply from other people.
So much is true.
A cerebral narcissist is likely to emphasize his intelligence, his brain power, his analytical skills and his reach, and very fond of knowledge.
The somatic narcissist accentuates his body, his physical strength, his appearance, his sex appeal or sexual prowess, and so on and so forth.
But this concentration on forties is only one facet of the answer.
It seems that narcissists engage in what could best be described as narcissistic hedges.
They hedge their best.
The narcissistic hedge is when a narcissist colors more than one field of activity with his narcissistic hues.
A narcissist infuses selected subjects, topics, areas, people with narcissistic investments. We call it cathexis.
He prepares these fields, areas, topics and people as auxiliary sources of narcissistic supply and as backup options in case of a systems failure.
Another type of narcissistic hedge involves a charm offensive that is intended to forestall or ameliorate the consequences of the disclosure of embarrassing, demeaning or damaging information about the narcissist and his misconduct.
This charm offensive reacquires the source of narcissistic supply that is most likely to be disenchanted and disillusioned by such revelations.
These ostensibly redundant activities and interests constitute a fallback option during a life crisis.
The majority of cases, the chosen subjects or fields all belong to the same family.
A cerebral narcissist might select mathematics in art, but not mountain climbing. A sportsman might choose to be a radio sports commentator, but not a philosopher of science and so on.
Still, the correlation between the various selections the narcissist makes may not be very strong, which is why they can be used as hedges.
Experience shows that this hedging mechanism is not very effective.
Narcissists’ response to events in his life is one single rigid unit. His reactions are not differentiated or scaled or graduated. A failure or a success in one domain contagiously spreads to all the other fields of activity.
The narcissistic contagion effect dominates the narcissist’s life in its entirety.
The narcissist measures his personal history in terms of fluctuations in narcissistic supply.
He is blind to all other aspects, angles and points of view. He is like a thermometer which reacts to human warmth, admiration, adoration, approval, applause, affirmation and attention.
The narcissist perceives his life in gradations of narcissistic temperature, therefore.
When a source of supply ceases to exist or is threatened or is diminished, all the other parts of the narcissist’s world, including these backup options, are affected.
The chill sets in. The dysphoric and euphoric moods which are related to the absence or the presence of narcissistic supply engulf the entire personality and consume the narcissist’s life.
A case study to illustrate these economic principles of the narcissist’s soul might be helpful.
Imagine a narcissist who has a successful career as an economic commentator in several mass media.
As a result of his criticism of the policies of the government, he is threatened and there are signs that a book that he is about to publish will not be published after all.
A narcissist has other subjects from which he is able to derive narcissistic supply and these are, of course, the narcissistic hedges aforementioned.
What would the likely reaction of such a narcissist be, therefore?
Being threatened, in this case by the government, endangers these narcissist’s feelings of omnipotence and superiority. He is reduced to size or cut down to size.
The special treatment that he believed himself to be entitled to is all but an operating.
And this is a major narcissistic injury. Worse, it looks as if the very availability and existence of its main and serious narcissistic supply sources, in this case, the mass media, the publishing of the book, these sources are at risk.
And so, dysphoria, kind of mild depression ensues.
The narcissist counters the situation hysterically and with paranoia.
The paranoid straits in his reaction serve to re-establish the perturbed balance of his own grandiosity.
Only important people are persecuted. He soothes himself.
The hysteria is the result of panic at the prospect of remaining bereft of narcissistic supply sources and drag addict would have reacted the same way to the arrest of his pusher.
In theory, this would be the perfect time to revert to the alternatives, to the hedges.
But the narcissist energy is too depleted to make this switch.
He is depressed. He is dysphoric. He is unhand only.
In extreme cases, he even entertains through his civil ideation. He jumps to radical and sweeping conclusions.
He says to himself, if this happened to me once, it could well happen again.
His output and achievements deteriorate. As a result, his narcissistic supply is further reduced and a vicious circle is set in motion.
And this is the absurdity of the narcissistic mental household.
The hedges brought into play only when they are not needed.
Once a crisis erupts, the violently reduced narcissist, a faltering shadow of his former false self, is too depleted to make use of the narcissistic hedges that he has created in the first place for exactly such a situation of emergency.
