NPD and Neuroses

The personality disordered maintain alloplastic defenses (react to stress by attempting to change the external environment or by shifting the blame to it). Neurotics have autoplastic defenses (react to stress by attempting to change their internal processes, or assuming blame). Personality disorders also tend to be ego-syntonic (i.e., to be perceived by the patient as acceptable, unobjectionable and part of the self) while neurotics tend to be ego-dystonic (the opposite).

The Hated-Hating Personality Disordered

One needs only to read scholarly texts to learn how despised, derided, hated and avoided patients with personality disorders are even by mental health practitioners. Many people don't even realize that they have a personality disorder. Their social ostracism makes them feel victimized, wronged, discriminated against and hopeless. They don't understand why they are so detested, shunned and abandoned.

They cast themselves in the role of victims and attribute mental disorders to others ("pathologizing"). They employ the primitive defence mechanisms of splitting and projection augmented by the more sophisticated mechanism of projective identification.

In other words:

They "split off" from their personality the bad feelings of hating and being hated because they cannot cope with negative emotions. They project these unto others ("He hates me, I don't hate anyone", "I am a good soul, but he is a psychopath", "He is stalking me, I just want to stay away from him", "He is a con-artist, I am the innocent victim").

Then they force others to behave in a way that justifies their expectations and their view of the world (projective identification followed by counter projective identification).

Some narcissists, for instance, firmly "believe" that women are evil predators, out to suck their lifeblood and then abandon them. So, they try and make their partners fulfill this prophecy. They try and make sure that the women in their lives behave exactly in this manner, that they do not abnegate and ruin the narcissist's craftily, elaborately, and studiously designed Weltanschauung (worldview).

Such narcissists tease women and betray them and bad mouth them and taunt them and torment them and stalk them and haunt them and pursue them and subjugate them and frustrate them until these women do, indeed, abandon them. The narcissist then feels vindicated and validated totally ignoring his contribution to this recurrent pattern.

The personality disordered are full of negative emotions, with aggression and its transmutations, hatred and pathological envy. They are constantly seething with rage, jealousy, and other corroding sentiments. Unable to release these emotions (personality disorders are defence mechanisms against "forbidden" feelings) they split them, project them and force others to behave in a way which legitimizes and rationalizes this overwhelming negativity. "No wonder I hate everyone look what people repeatedly did to me." The personality disordered are doomed to incur self-inflicted injuries. They generate the very hate that legitimizes their hatred, which fosters their social ex-communication.

The Borderline Narcissist A Psychotic?

Kernberg suggested a "Borderline" diagnosis. It is somewhere between psychotic and neurotic (actually between the psychotic and the personality disordered):

• Neurotic autoplastic defenses (something's wrong with me);
• Personality disordered alloplastic defenses (something's wrong with the world);
• Psychotics something's wrong with those who say that something's wrong with me.

All personality disorders have a clear psychotic streak. Borderlines have psychotic episodes. Narcissists react with psychosis to life crises and in treatment ("psychotic microepisodes" which can last for days).

Narcissism, Psychosis, and Delusions

Masochism and Narcissism

Isn't seeking punishment a form of assertiveness and self-affirmation?

Author Cheryl Glickauf-Hughes, in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, June 97, 57:2, pp 141-148:

"Masochists tend to defiantly assert themselves to the narcissistic parent in the face of criticism and even abuse. For example, one masochistic patient's narcissistic father told him as a child that if he said 'one more word' that he would hit him with a belt and the patient defiantly responded to his father by saying 'One more word!' Thus, what may appear, at times, to be masochistic or self-defeating behavior may also be viewed as self-affirming behavior on the part of the child toward the narcissistic parent."