Chapter 6, The Soul of a Narcissist, The State of the Art - Narcissist and Relationships

Written by Dr. Sam Vaknin

If she is lying and doesn't really love the narcissist, he feels justified in responding with paranoid rage, suspicion, hostility and a desire to frustrate her, i.e. to be aggressive towards her.

If she is interested only in sex, it means that she perceives the narcissist merely as a sex object and thus she totally negates his uniqueness. He is likely to panic and keep his distance from this expressly anti-narcissistic agent.

If the third possibility is true, that the woman is not interested in someone special, this means that she is not special, or that she does not experience herself as special, or that the issue of uniqueness is of no interest to her.

In other words, her order of priorities is radically and substantively different from the narcissist's who is obsessed with uniqueness. Maybe she supports the view that everybody (and, therefore, no one) is unique. No relationship can survive such an utter lack of compatibility.

Loving a woman in the absence of a PNSS (when the narcissist does not feel unique) means

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risking being loved as merely a sex object, being lied to, or having to live with a radically incompatible person. In all three cases the relationship is doomed.

The narcissist does not love his True Self (with which he is unacquainted). His True Self, he feels, might as well be non-existent. He loves his False Self, the one which he presents to the world and which gives him narcissistic gratification.

The narcissist would have liked to be loved by a woman but he feels that he has got nothing to offer to her without PNSS. The narcissist's True Self is well concealed, it is not functioning, and it is fragmentary, disintegrated and distorted. The False Self functions only in the presence of PNSS. If there is no True Self and no functioning False Self - "what is it that she loves?", wonders the narcissist.

In the absence of PNSS the narcissist experiences annulment. As far as he is concerned there is simply no one there to make emotional contact with the woman - or for the woman to interact with.

Moreover, the narcissist does not believe that he has a right to exist and he hates the burden of existence. He exudes an air of absence and people around him are receptive to this eerie message. It is reciprocal. The narcissist treats people around him as though they did not exist and they often treat him as though he were transparent.

Even when he becomes known or famous he plants seeds of self-destruction in his fame and reputation so as to preserve the option not to exist, when (not if) it all becomes unbearable. Women threaten him because they force him to confront his existence (physical and emotional).

The narcissistic equations are pretty straightforward and easy to follow:

The narcissist's True Self is perceived by him as a void, a non-entity. This experience is debilitatingly frightening. Moreover, the internalised voices in him tell him that he (his True Self) has no right to exist even if he could (because he is "bad").

Only the narcissist's invented, False Self feels alive.

The narcissist knows that if he were to be in touch with his True Self he would pay a dear emotional price.

This True Self is hurting, is full with negative, ominous emotions. Danger and aggression lurk in this abyss. The narcissist prefers to refrain from entering there.

The solution:

The True Self is maintained incommunicado and, therefore, is devoid of any meaningful mental existence. The narcissist invents a False Self instead. But how does the narcissist know that the self, that he has just created, is the right and functioning one? He badly needs feedback to refine his Golem to the point that it becomes indistinguishable from an authentic True Self.

This feedback he derives from the outside world through the NSSs. The NSSs are sources of information, which pertains to the "correctness" of the False Self, to its calibration, intensity and proper functioning. The NSSs serve to define the boundaries of the False Self, to regulate its contents and to substitute for some of the functions normally reserved to a True, functioning, Self.

Women, though, have access to the True Self. Sexuality, friendliness, and emotions in general are all elements of the True Self. The narcissist's False Self is perceived by most women he is intimate with to be a mask, which they should penetrate to reach the True Self. To the narcissist, this is subversion. It is a serious threat because numerous ego functions have been transferred to the False Self and it serves as a shock absorber and a protector against the intrusion of unwanted emotions.

The narcissist wants a woman to fall in love with his narcissistic circumstances and False Self because it would be impossible for her and dangerous for him if she were to fall in love with his True Self. When PNSSs are abundant he can get involved in an emotional affair based on the third layer, the extraordinary circumstances of his life. The best of all worlds is when a woman falls in love with him because of a combination of the two: his narcissistic circumstances and the extraordinary details of his biography.

Any other motivation renders the woman an anti-narcissistic agent. She would be thus negating the narcissist's preciously acquired sense of uniqueness. She would be demonstrating how unimportant uniqueness is to her ("You are special - but this is not why I love you"). This would constitute a roundabout criticism of the narcissist's order of priorities and way of life.