Chapter 8, The Soul of a Narcissist, The State of the Art - Relationship with a Narcissist

Written by Dr. Sam Vaknin

Functioning and Performance

A grandiosity shift:

A preference to be emotionally invested in grandiose career-related fantasies
in which the narcissist does not have to face practical, rigorous and consistent demands.
The narcissist avoids success in order to avoid emotional involvement and investment.
He shuns success because it obliges him to follow through
and to identify himself with some goal or group.
He emphasises areas of activity in which he is unlikely to succeed.
The narcissist ignores the future and does not plan.
Thus he is never emotionally committed.
The narcissist invests the necessary minimum in his job (emotionally).
He is not thorough and under-performs, his work is shoddy and defective or partial.
He evades responsibility and tends to pass it on to others while exercising little control.
His decision-making processes are ossified and rigid
(he presents himself as a man of "principles" - usually referring to his whims and moods).
The narcissist reacts very slowly to a changing environment (change is painful).
He is a pessimist, knows that he will lose his job/business -
so, he is constantly engaged in seeking alternatives and constructing plausible alibis.
This yields a feeling of temporariness, which prevents engagement, involvement,
commitment, dedication, identification and emotional hurt in case of change or failure.

The alternative to having a spouse/companion:

Solitary life (with vigorous emphasis on PNSS) or frequent changes of partners.
Serial vocations prevent the narcissist from having a clear career path
and obviate the need to persevere.
All the initiatives adopted by the narcissist are egocentric, sporadic and discrete
(they focus on one skill or trait of the narcissist, are randomly distributed in space and in time,
and do not form a thematic or other continuum - they are not goal or objective oriented).
Sometimes, as a substitute, the narcissist engages in performance shifting:
He comes up with imaginary, invented goals with no correlation to reality and its constraints.
To avoid facing performance tests and to maintain grandiosity and uniqueness
the narcissist refrains from acquiring skills and training
(such as a driver's licence, technical skills, any systematic - academic or non-academic - knowledge).
The "child" in the narcissist is reaffirmed this way - because he avoids adult activities and attributes.
The gap between the image projected by the narcissist
(charisma, unusual knowledge, grandiosity, fantasies)
and his actual achievements - create in him permanent feelings that he is a crook,
a hustler, that his life is unreal life and movie-like (derealisation and depersonalisation).
This gives rise to ominous feelings of imminent threat and, concurrently,
to compensatory assertions of immunity and omnipotence.
The narcissist is forced to become a manipulator.

Locations and Environment

A feeling of not belonging and of detachment
Bodily discomfiture (the body feels as depersonalised, alien and a nuisance,
its needs are totally ignored, its signals re-routed and re-interpreted, its maintenance neglected)
Keeping his distance from relevant communities

(his neighbourhood, coreligionists, his nation and countrymen)

Disavowing his religion, his ethnic background, his friends
The narcissist often adopts the stance of a "scientist-observer".
This is narcissistic detachment -
the feeling that he is a director or an actor in a movie about his own life.
The narcissist avoids "emotional handles":
photographs, music identified with a certain period in his life,
familiar places, people he knew, mementoes and emotional situations.
The narcissist lives on borrowed time in a borrowed life.
Every place and period are transitory and lead to the next, unfamiliar environment.
The narcissist feels that the end is near.
He lives in rented apartments, is an illegal alien, is fully mobile on a short notice,
does not buy real estate or immovables.
He travels light and he likes to travel.
He is peripatetic and itinerant.
The narcissist cultivates feelings of incompatibility with his surroundings.
He considers himself superior to others and keeps criticising people, institutions and situations.
The above behaviour patterns constitute a denial of reality.
The narcissist defines a rigid, impenetrable, personal territory
and is physically revolted when it is breached.