Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 37

1. Application to the Media
2. Grandiosity and Rage
3. Second Amazon Interview
4. Interview granted to JustViews
5. Revisiting My Self
6. Interview granted to Independent Success!

1. Application to the Media

My name is Sam Vaknin. I was released from jail in 1996. I carried a few crumpled clothes in a shabby duffle bag. That is all that was left of my life as Israel's most prominent stock broker. This and an improvised cardboard bound notebook in which I kept a record of a journey of self-discovery within the prison walls. This was later to become "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" (ISBN: 8023833847). Until recently, I was the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia (of Kosovo crisis fame) and a political and economic columnist. But I am also an acknowledged and self-aware narcissist - the victim of the pernicious Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

I am a published and awarded author of Hebrew short fiction.

My first act was, therefore, to transform my surreptitious notes into a coherent manual.

What emerged was a guide to pathological narcissism and a detailed phenomenology of the path of destruction strewn with victims that narcissists often leave behind. The full text of "Malignant Self Love" - available on this web (http://www.geocities.com/vaksam) - has attracted more than 500,000 readers and 4,000,000 impressions in 3 years.

My web sites attract 5,000 daily impressions. There are 660 members in my Narcissistic Abuse Study List and another 2600 in my private mailing list. I get letters daily. The pain and devastation are great. The disorder is under-diagnosed and co-occurs with other mental health problems and with substance abuse or reckless behaviour (such as gambling).

The orthodoxy is that pathological narcissism is the outcome of early childhood trauma or abuse by parents, caregivers, or peers.

There are dissenting views, though. Dr. Anthony Benis from Mount Sinai Hospital postulates a genetic origin of the disorder. Others (such as Gunderson and Roningstam) even described a transient form of narcissism. It is a new mental health category (defined as late as 1980) so not a lot is known. Scholars (such as Lasch) even ascribed pathological narcissism to whole cultures and societies.

I am at your disposal should you decide to discuss this emerging leading mental health problem (today believed to be at the root of many others).

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

2. Grandiosity and Rage

Grandiosity and rage are also features of the manic phases of various disorders, including substance-abuse disorders. So, the answer to your question is: if a person is a narcissist, he is a narcissist, on and off alcohol.

3. Second Amazon Interview

I was born in Israel and I am 40 years old. Both facts are pertinent. As an Israeli of Sephardic origin, I was exposed to the dominant Central and East European (CEE) culture in Israel. As a child of the 60s, I witnessed the gradual disintegration of the Soviet block through the distant echoes of Russian immigrants to the Israel and their media. Living in Israel meant living in constant existential uncertainty. That people chose to immigrate from seemingly omnipotent Russia to ephemeral Israel - revealed to me the extent of the inner rot of the Evil Empire. A decade of living and working in the Balkans, this cesspool of history, has only served to strengthen my convictions, now hardened into near prejudices.

I wrote all my life. It was my preferred venue of escape. I published short fiction, works of reference and columns in periodicals. Writing sits well with my personality disorder. It provides me with narcissistic supply. It is magical in that symbols lead to action. It provides the twin illusions of eternity and sagaciousness. I have never thought of myself as anything but an author.

I have always been drawn to short fiction - although most of my published work (in Hebrew, Macedonian, other languages) is non-fiction. There is an essence in short fiction, distilled and aromatic which is missing in the homeopathic equivalent of the longer genres (such as the novel). I have thus found myself enamoured with A.A.Poe on one end of the spectrum - and Francoise Sagan on the other. The last two decades have been a revelation to me in that they provided me with legitimacy. My short fiction deals with amoral characters, making amoral decisions about emotionally harrowing (to them, emotionally neutral) situations. Post modernism liberated me and allowed me to pursue this line of writing.

I try to abstain from romantic literature and am pretty successful at doing so. The scariest book I ever read is the Amityville Horror. It required a whole sleepless night to wear off. The funniest book I read is "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome. I love wry, marginally vicious humour. I also found "Tom Jones" by Fielding hilarious.

I hate music. All types of music. It makes me intolerably sad. It osmotically infiltrates me, cell-level, and drowns me. Short of breath I barely make it to the gramophone (I prefer vinyl records) and turn it off.

I am reading Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners". How easy it is to pathologize an entire nation. All it takes is the right Petri dish - centuries of bilious libel coupled with a licence to kill. How powerful is language - to incite, to motivate, to disguise. And how easy it is to tear through the veneer of "civilization" and "kultur". The most ordinary people will commit the most unspeakable atrocities with glee and inventiveness given half a chance and legitimacy.