Can Narcissists be Cured? - Excerpts Part 7 - Narcissists as Drug Addicts

Written by Sam Vaknin

4. The Enemy

Narcissism is partly a reactive formation, a complex of intertwined defense mechanisms, a network of survival tactics. One develops narcissism because the alternative is death (slow or fast). Death from emotional starvation, pain, abuse, and trauma. These negative emotions coupled with the negative events that fostered them sink and accumulate in one's spiritual veins, a sediment leading to the emotional infarct called "narcissism".

Without my narcissism, I am not only naked - I am a fetus. I am exposed to bursts of hurt that stand an excellent chance of eliminating me altogether, emotionally, perhaps physically. My narcissism is functional, it is adaptive, it helps me breathe. By denying and repressing my SELF, I deny and suppress my biggest enemy.

I have seen the enemy - and it is I.

5. Victim or Survivor?

Although the prognosis is encouraging, the appropriate term is "victim" and not anything else. Or maybe "surviving victim". Living with a narcissist is the equivalent of enduring a natural catastrophe (like a hurricane). Leaving him is surviving a natural catastrophe. But the narcissist has a mind, a consciousness, intentions. He can control many of his behaviors. So, he victimizes and the survivors are also victims. The narcissist victimizes by contempt, humiliates by indifference, subjugates by fear, and conditions by alternating between idealization and devaluation.

Did you see "Good Will Hunting"? Robin Williams, the therapist, clasps Will's shoulders, looks him in the eyes, and repeats a mantra of healing, ever softly but firmly: "You are not guilty" (until Will breaks into tears).

6. Narcissists as Drug Addicts

Narcissists are drug addicts. Their drug is called "narcissistic supply". They will do ANYTHING to obtain it, both morally acceptable and morally reprehensible. Give him his supply and he will read about narcissism enthusiastically and incessantly. Be creative. For instance: tell him that you NEED him to EXPLAIN to you about narcissism. You have been trying to understand this complex concept by yourself and failed. Think of other ways to boost his supply. Believe me, with the proper inducement he will become a world expert on pathological narcissism and I will be out of a job ... :o((

7. Alexander Lowen

I do distinguish between cerebral and somatic narcissists and in my FAQ 40 "Narcissism - The Psychopathological Default" I use a typology very close to Lowen's. Let me state that I regard Lowen's book as superb but not my cup of tea for a few reasons:

1. I am much less interested in the narcissist - and much more in his victims. My book is chiefly and primarily intended to assist those who have been inadvertently exposed to this hurricane known as the narcissist.

1. I think the fad of classifying (DSM style) is fast dying all over the world. It started in order to assist mental health professionals in their dealings with insurance companies. Psychiatry tried to resemble Medicine in which everything has a name and there are clear syndromes, signs and symptoms. I think it has been a wrong, reductionist, approach in medicine and led to an impasse. But it was doubly and triply wrong in psychiatry. The result of this alien imposition was "multiple diagnoses (co-morbidity)" and absolute confusion in new fields of knowledge (such as personality disorders).

I believe that there is a continuum between families of mental health disorders. I believe that HPD is a form of NPD where the narcissistic supply is sex or physique. I think that BPD is another form of NPD. I think that all AsPD are NPDs with a twist. I think that pathological narcissism underlies all these - wrongly distinguished - disorders. This is why my book is entitled NARCISSISM revisited and not NPD.

Lowen is a magnificent taxonomist of narcissism but I think his fine tuning is much too fine. I think that people are much less precise than Lowen would have us believe.

I think Lowen is wrong in implying that not all narcissists are pathological liars. He simply does not attribute too much importance to this fact. Virtually all the big names in PD research regard pathological lying as a trait of narcissists. Even the DSM defines NPD using words such as "fantasy", "grandiose" and "exploit" which imply the usage of half truths, inaccuracies and lies on a regular basis. Kernberg and others coined the term "False Self" not in vain.

Of course narcissists love to have an audience. But they love an audience only because and while it provides them with narcissistic supply. Otherwise, they are not interested in human beings (they lack empathy which makes other humans much less fascinating than they are to empathic people).

Narcissists are terrified of introspection. Not of intellectualization or rationalization or simple application of their intelligence - this would not constitute introspection. Proper introspection must include an emotional element, an insight and the ability to emotionally integrate the insight so that it affects behavior. Some psychologists are narcissists and they KNOW it (cognitively). They even think about it from time to time - is this introspection? Not in my book. Narcissists do engage in real introspection following a life crisis, though. They attend therapy at such time.