I’m Sam Vaknin, and I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
John M. Horovitz writes in his book, Stress Response Syndrome, published in 1998 in York, the following.
When the habitual narcissistic gratifications that come from being adored, given special treatment, and admiring the self when these are threatened, the results may be depression, prejudices, anxiety, shame, self-destructiveness, or rage directed toward any other person who can be blamed for the troubled situation.
The child can learn to avoid these painful emotional states by acquiring a narcissistic mode of information processing. Such learning may be by trial and error methods, or it may be internalized by identification with parental modes of dealing with stressful information.
Indeed, narcissism is fundamentally an evolved version of the psychological defense mechanism that we know as splitting.
The narcissist does not regard people, situations, entities, collectives, workplaces as compounds of good and bad elements, good and bad size, good and bad components.
The narcissist is an all or nothing primitive machine, and he likes to use this metaphor of a machine when he talks about himself.
The narcissist either idealizes his objects or devalues them.
At any given time, the objects are either all bad or all good. There is no gray zone. There’s no compromise. The world is in black and white. The bad attributes of these objects are always projected, displaced, or otherwise externalized and attributed to others. The good ones are internalized in order to support the inflated self-concepts of the narcissist and his grandiose fantasies, and in order to avoid the pain of deflation and disillusionment.
Thus, everything that’s good in other people, situations, places, collectives, is the narcissist’s attributes to himself. Everything that’s bad is always someone else’s fault.
The universes, other people, collectives. This often translates into persecutory delusions and renders the narcissist somewhat paranoid.
The narcissist’s earnestness and his apparent sincerity make people wonder whether he is simply detached from reality, unable to appraise it properly, or whether he is willingly and knowingly distorts reality and reintervices it, subjecting it to his self-imposed censorship and grandiosity.
And the truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.
The narcissist is dimly aware of the implausibility of his own constructions and confabulations. He has not lost touch with reality completely. He is just less strepulous in remolding it and in ignoring its uncomfortable angles.
Horowitz continues to say, the disguises are accomplished by shifting meanings and using exaggeration and minimization of bits of reality as a minus for fantasy’s elaboration.
The narcissistic personality is especially vulnerable to regression to damaged or defective self-concepts on the occasions of loss of those who have functioned as self-objects.
In other words, what I call sources of narcissistic supply.
When the individual is faced with such stress events as criticism, withdrawal of praise or humiliation, the information involved may be denied, disavowed, negated or shifted in meaning to prevent the reactive state of rage, depression and shame.
That’s Horowitz.
The second psychological defense mechanism which characterizes the narcissist is the active pursuit of narcissistic supply.
The narcissist seeks to secure a reliable and continuous source of supply of admiration, adulation, affirmation and attention, as opposed to common opinion, which unfortunately infiltrated literature and cinema.
The narcissist is content to have any kind of attention, whether good or bad. If fame cannot be had, not a right he would do.
The narcissist is obsessed with his narcissistic supply. He craves attention. He is addicted to it.
He is a narcissistic supply junkie. His behavior in the pursuit of narcissistic supply is impulsive, compulsive and uncontrollable. And he won’t be ignored.
Again, if he cannot secure a positive supply, he will do it the bad way. He will become an evil person, a criminal, an antisocial, a vicious entity.
Horowitz again.
The hazard is not simply guilt because ideas have not been met. Rather, any loss of a good and coherent self-filling is associated with intensely experienced emotions such as shame and depression, plus an anguished sense of helplessness and disorientation.
To prevent this state, narcissistic personality slides the meanings of events in order to place the self in a better light.
What is good is labeled as being of the self, internalized.
Those qualities that are undesirable are excluded from the self by denial of their existence, disavowal of related attitudes, externalization, and negation of recent self-expressions.
Persons who function as accessories to the self may also be idealized by exaggeration of their attributes. Those who counter the self are depreciated. Ambiguous attributions of blame in a tendency to self-righteous rage are a conspicuous aspect of this pattern.
Such fluid shifts in meanings permit the narcissistic personality to maintain apparent logical consistency while minimizing evil or weakness and exaggerating innocence or control.
As part of these maneuvers, the narcissistic personality may assume attitudes of contemptuous superiority towards others, emotional coldness, or even desperately charming approaches to idealized figures.
