The Narcissist's Time - Narcissist Self

Written by Sam Vaknin

But there is a fourth, simpler, explanation:

The narcissist just does not know what he is doing. Divorced from his True Self, unable to empathise (to understand what it is like to be someone else), unwilling to empathise (to constrain his actions in accordance with the feelings and needs of others) - he is in a constant dreamlike state. His life to him is a movie, autonomously unfolding, guided by a sublime (even divine) director. He is a mere spectator, mildly interested, greatly entertained at times. He does not feel that his actions are his. He, therefore, emotionally, cannot understand why he should be punished and when he is, he feels grossly wronged.

To be a narcissist is to be convinced of a great, inevitable personal destiny. The narcissist is preoccupied with ideal love, the construction of brilliant, revolutionary scientific theories, the composition or authoring or painting of the greatest work of art ever, the founding of a new school of thought, the attainment of fabulous wealth, the reshaping of the fate of a nation, becoming immortalised and so on. The narcissist never sets realistic goals to himself. He is forever floating amidst fantasies of uniqueness, record breaking, or breathtaking achievements. His speech reflects this grandiosity and is interlaced with such expressions. So convinced is the narcissist that he is destined to great things - that he refuses to accept setbacks, failures and punishments. He regards them as temporary, as someone else's errors, as part of the future mythology of his rise to power/brilliance/wealth/ideal love, etc. A punishment is a diversion of scarce energy and resources from the all-important task of fulfilling his mission in life. This over-riding goal is a divine certainty: a higher order has pre-ordained the narcissist to achieve something lasting, of substance, of import in this world, in this life. How could mere mortals interfere with the cosmic, the divine, scheme of things? Therefore, punishment is impossible and will not happen - is the narcissist's conclusion.

The narcissist is pathologically envious of people - and projects his feelings unto them. He is always over-suspicious, on guard, ready to fend off an imminent attack. A punishment to the narcissist is a major surprise and a nuisance but it also proves to him and validates what he suspected all the time: that he is being persecuted. Strong forces are poised against him. People are envious of his achievements, angry at him, out to get him. He constitutes a threat to the accepted order. When required to account for his (mis)deeds, the narcissist is always disdainful and bitter. He feels like Gulliver, a giant, chained to the ground by teeming dwarves while his soul soars to a future, in which people will recognise his greatness and applaud it.

IV. Depersonalisation and Derealisation

Time is a quality of the physical world - or, at least, of the way we perceive it. Many narcissists do not feel a part of reality. They feel "unreal", fake facsimiles of "tangible", normal, people. This dents their perception of time and causality. That the narcissist possesses a prominent False Self as well as a suppressed and dilapidated True Self is common knowledge. Yet, how intertwined and inseparable are these two? Do they interact? How do they influence each other? And what behaviours can be attributed squarely to one or the other of these protagonists? Moreover, does the False Self assume traits and attributes of the True Self in order to deceive?

Two years ago, I suggested a methodological framework. I compared the narcissist to a person suffering from the e Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - formerly known as the Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD).

Here is what I wrote:

"A debate is starting to stir: is the False Self an alter? In other words: Is the True Self of a narcissist the equivalent of a host personality in a DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) - and the False Self one of the fragmented personalities, also known as 'alters'?

My personal opinion is that the False Self is a mental construct, not a self in the full sense. It is the locus of the fantasies of grandiosity, the feelings of entitlements, omnipotence, magical thinking, omniscience and magical immunity of the narcissist. It lacks so many elements that it can hardly be called a 'self'.

Moreover, it has no 'cut-off' date. DID alters have a date of inception, being reactions to trauma or abuse. The False Self is a process, not an entity, it is a reactive pattern and a reactive formation. All taken into account, the choice of words was poor. The False Self is not a Self, nor is it False. It is very real, more real to the narcissist than his True Self. A better choice would have been 'abuse reactive self' or something like this.

This is the core of my work. I say that narcissists have vanished and have been replaced by a False Self (bad term, but not my fault, write to Kernberg). There is NO True Self in there. It's gone. The narcissist is a hall of mirrors - but the hall itself is an optical illusion created by the mirrors... This is a little like the paintings of Escher.

MPD (DID) is more common than believed. The emotions are the ones to get segregated. The notion of 'unique separate multiple whole personalities' is primitive and untrue. DID is a continuum. The inner language breaks down into a polyglottal chaos. Emotions cannot communicate with each other for fear of the pain (and its fatal results). So, they are kept apart by various mechanisms (a host or birth personality, a facilitator, a moderator and so on).

And here we come to the crux of the matter: All PDs - except NPD - suffer from a modicum of DID, or incorporate it. Only the narcissists don't. This is because the narcissistic solution is to emotionally disappear so thoroughly that not one personality/emotion is left. Hence, the tremendous, insatiable need of the narcissist for external approval. He exists ONLY as a reflection. Since he is forbidden from loving his True Self - he chooses to have no self at all. It is not dissociation - it is a vanishing act.