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But I AM different and we both know it. Therein lies the root of my hostility. I tear you down because in reality I am envious of you BECAUSE I am different. At that haunting level where I see my illusions for what they are, the illusion that you too create illusions collapses, leaving me in a state of despair, confusion, panic, isolation, and envy. You, and others, accuse me of all sorts of horrible things. I am totally baffled, clueless. I have done nothing wrong. The injustice is too much. It only makes the confusion worse. Or is this too merely another illusion?
How many others like me are there? More than you might think, and our numbers are increasing. Take twenty people off the street and you will find one whose mind ticks so much like mine that you could consider us clones. Impossible, you say. It is simply not possible for that many people - highly accomplished, respected, and visible people - to be out there replacing reality with illusions, each in the same way and for reasons they know not why. It is simply not possible for so many robots of havoc and chaos, as I describe them, to function daily midst other educated, intelligent, and experienced individuals, and pass for normal. It is simply not possible for such an aberration of human cognition and behavior to infiltrate and infect the population in such numbers, virtually undetected by the radar of mental health professionals. It is simply not possible for so much visible positive to contain so much concealed negative. It is simply not possible.
But it is. That is the enlightenment of Narcissism Revisited by Sam Vaknin. Sam is himself one such clone. What distinguishes him is his uncharacteristic courage to confront, and his uncanny understanding of, that which makes us tick, himself included. Not only does Sam dare ask and then answer the question we clones avoid like the plague, he does so with relentless, laser-like precision. Read his book. Take your seat at the double-headed microscope and let Sam guide you through the dissection. Like a brain surgeon operating on himself, Sam explores and exposes the alien among us, hoping beyond hope for a resectable tumor but finding instead each and every cell teaming with the same resistant virus. The operation is long and tedious, and at times frightening and hard to believe. Read on. The parts exposed are as they are, despite what may seem hyperbolic or far fetched. Their validity might not hit home until later, when coupled with memories of past events and experiences.
I am, as I said, my own worst nightmare. True, the world is replete with my contributions, and I am lots of fun to be around. And true, most contributions like mine are not the result of troubled souls. But many more than you might want to believe are. And if by chance you get caught in my web, I can make your life a living hell. But remember this. I am in that web too. The difference between you and me is that you can get out.
Ken Heilbrunn, M.D.
Seattle, Washington, USA
Prologue
I met Sam on an Internet list about 5 years ago. I'd been studying personality disorders and narcissism at the time, looking at it from Jungian, spiritual, and literary points of view as well as psychological, and I was just not too terribly impressed with the psychological state of the art on those topics.
Sam invited me to visit his site, and without knowing him from Adam I just wrongly assumed that he was one more run-of-the-mill shrink writing standard stuff about narcissism. I replied something like, "No, that won't be necessary, I am the only person in the whole world who truly understands narcissism." A supremely narcissistic reply, in other words.
I went ahead and visited his site anyway, and was most impressed. I emailed him back then, and told him of my mistake, and said I thought his work was way ahead of the standard psychological writings on the subject. You just can't understand something as complex and subtle as narcissism without integrating your feelings, your soul and your heart with it, and the supposedly "objective" stuff written by professionals was just missing key dimensions that made it flat and cold "dead information" instead of "living knowledge."
Sam's writing on the subject pulsated with heat, it ran red with blood, it crackled with flames of passion, it cried out in agony. Sam *knew* narcissism like the fish knows the water and the eagle knows the air, because he had lived it. He described it's small insignificant currents, he knew what it does when the weather changes, he knew exactly what happens to little frogs, snakes and crickets whenever they fall into the stream. Most psychologists only know *about* narcissism; Sam *understands* it.
Paul Shirley, MSW
United States
purchase: "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
Read excerpts from the book
next: Read a chapter online: The Soul of a Narcissist, The State of the Art
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