Can the Narcissist Have a Meaningful Life?
By Sam Vaknin

We all have a scenario of our life. We invent, adopt, are led by and measure
ourselves against our personal narratives. These are, normally, commensurate
with our personal histories, our predilections, our abilities, limitations,
and our skills. We are not likely to invent a narrative which is wildly out
of synch with our selves.

We rarely judge ourselves by a narrative which is not somehow correlated to
what we can reasonably expect to achieve. In other words, we are not likely
to frustrate and punish ourselves knowingly. As we grow older, our narrative
changes. Parts of it are realized and this increases our self-confidence,
sense of self-worth and self-esteem and makes us feel fulfilled, satisfied,
and at peace with ourselves.

The narcissist differs from normal people in that his is a HIGHLY
unrealistic personal narrative. This choice could be imposed and inculcated
by a sadistic and hateful Primary Object (a narcissistic, domineering
mother, for instance) - or it could be the product of the narcissist's own
tortured psyche. Instead of realistic expectations of himself, the
narcissist has grandiose fantasies. The latter cannot be effectively
pursued. They are elusive, ever receding targets.

This constant failure (the Grandiosity Gap) leads to dysphorias (bouts of
sadness) and to losses. Observed from the outside, the narcissist is
perceived to be odd, prone to illusions and self-delusions and, therefore,
lacking in judgement.

The dysphorias - the bitter fruits of the narcissist's impossible demands of
himself - are painful. Gradually the narcissist learns to avoid them by
eschewing a structured narrative altogether. Life's disappointments and
setbacks condition him to understand that his specific "brand" of
unrealistic narrative inevitably leads to frustration, sadness and agony and
is a form of self-punishment (inflicted on him by his sadistic, rigid
Superego).

This incessant punishment serves another purpose: to support and confirm the
negative judgement meted out by the narcissist's Primary Objects (usually,
by his parents or caregivers) in his early childhood (now, an inseparable
part of his Superego).

The narcissist's mother, for instance, may have consistently insisted that
the narcissist is bad, rotten, or useless. Surely, she could not have been
wrong, goes the narcissist's internal dialog. Even raising the possibility
that she may have been wrong proves her right! The narcissist feels
compelled to validate her verdict by making sure that he indeed BECOMES bad,
rotten and useless.

Yet, no human being - however deformed - can live without a narrative. The
narcissist develops circular, ad-hoc, circumstantial, and fantastic
"life-stories" (the Contingent Narratives). Their role is to avoid
confrontation with (the often disappointing and disillusioning) reality. He
thus reduces the number of dysphorias and their strength, though he usually
fails to avoid the Narcissistic Cycle (see FAQ 43).

The narcissist pays a heavy price for accommodating his dysfunctional
narratives:

Emptiness, existential loneliness (he shares no common psychic ground with
other humans), sadness, drifting, emotional absence, emotional platitude,
mechanisation/robotisation (lack of anima, excess persona in Jung's terms)
and meaninglessness. This fuels his envy and the resulting rage and
amplifies the EIPM (Emotional Involvement Preventive Measures) - see Chapter
Eight of the Essay.

The narcissist develop a "Zu Leicht - Zu Schwer" ("Too Easy - Too
difficult") syndrome:

On the one hand, the narcissist's life is unbearably difficult. The few real
achievements he does have should normally have mitigated this perceived
harshness. But, in order to preserve his sense of omnipotence, he is forced
to "downgrade" these accomplishments by labelling them as "too easy".

The narcissist cannot admit that he had toiled to achieve something and,
with this confession, shatter his grandiose False Self. He must belittle
every achievement of his and make it appear to be a routine triviality. This
is intended to support the dreamland quality of his fragmented personality.
But it also prevents him from deriving the psychological benefits which
usually accrue to goal attainment: an enhancement of self-confidence, a more
realistic self-assessment of one's capabilities and abilities, a
strengthening sense of self-worth.

The narcissist is doomed to roam a circular labyrinth. When he does achieve
something - he demotes it in order to enhance his own sense of omnipotence,
perfection, and brilliance. When he fails, he dares not face reality. He
escapes to the land of no narratives where life is nothing but a meaningless
wasteland. The narcissist whiles his life away.

But what is it like being a narcissist?

The narcissist is often anxious. It is usually unconscious, like a nagging
pain, a permanence, like being immersed in a gelatinous liquid, trapped and
helpless, or as the DSM puts it, narcissism is "all-pervasive". Still, these
anxieties are never diffuse. The narcissist worries about specific people,
or possible events, or more or less plausible scenarios. He seems to
constantly conjure up some reason or another to be worried or offended.

Positive past experiences do not ameliorate this preoccupation. The
narcissist believes that the world is hostile, a cruelly arbitrary,
ominously contrarian, contrivingly cunning and indifferently crushing place.
The narcissist simply "knows" it will all end badly and for no good reason.
Life is too good to be true and too bad to endure. Civilization is an ideal
and the deviations from it are what we call "history". The narcissist is
incurably pessimistic, an ignoramus by choice and incorrigibly blind to any
evidence to the contrary.

Underneath all this, there is a Generalised Anxiety. The narcissist fears
life and what people do to each other. He fears his fear and what it does to
him. He knows that he is a participant in a game whose rules he will never
master and in which his very existence is at stake. He trusts no one,
believes in nothing, knows only two certainties: evil exists and life is
meaningless. He is convinced that no one cares.

This existential angst that permeates his every cell is atavistic and
irrational. It has no name or likeness. It is like the monsters in every
child's bedroom with the lights turned off. But being the rationalising and
intellectualising creatures that cerebral narcissists are - they instantly
label this unease, explain it away, analyse it and attempt to predict its
onset.

They attribute this poisonous presence to some external cause. They set it
in a pattern, embed it in a context, transform it into a link in the great
chain of being. Hence, they transform diffuse anxiety into focused worries.
Worries are known and measurable quantities. They have reasons which can be
tackled and eliminated. They have a beginning and an end. They are linked to
names, to places, faces and to people. Worries are human.

Thus, the narcissist transforms his demons into compulsive notations in his
real or mental diary: check this, do that, apply preventive measures, do not
allow, pursue, attack, avoid. The narcissist ritualizes both his discomfort
and his attempts to cope with it.

But such excessive worrying - whose sole intent is to convert irrational
anxiety into the mundane and tangible - is the stuff of paranoia.

For what is paranoia if not the attribution of inner disintegration to
external persecution, the assignment of malevolent agents from the outside
to the figments of turmoil inside? The paranoid seeks to alleviate his own
voiding by irrationally clinging to rationality. Things are so bad, he says,
mainly to himself, because I am a victim, because "they" are after me and I
am hunted by the juggernaut of state, or by the Freemasons, or by the Jews,
or by the neighbourhood librarian. This is the path that leads from the
cloud of anxiety, through the lamp-posts of worry to the consuming darkness
of paranoia.

Paranoia is a defence against anxiety and against aggression. In the
paranoid state, the latter is projected outwards, upon imaginary others, the
instruments of one's crucifixion.

Anxiety is also a defence against aggressive impulses. Therefore, anxiety
and paranoia are sisters, the latter merely a focused form of the former.
The mentally disordered defend against their own aggressive propensities by
either being anxious or by becoming paranoid.

Yet, aggression has numerous guises, not only anxiety and paranoia. One of
its favourite disguises is boredom. Like its relation, depression, boredom
is aggression directed inwards. It threatens to drown the bored person in a
primordial soup of inaction and energy depletion. It is anhedonic (pleasure
depriving) and dysphoric (leads to profound sadness). But it is also
threatening, perhaps because it is so reminiscent of death.

Not surprisingly, the narcissist is most worried when bored. The narcissist
is aggressive. He channels his aggression and internalises it. He
experiences his bottled wrath as boredom.

When the narcissist is bored, he feels threatened by his ennui in a vague,
mysterious way. Anxiety ensues. He rushes to construct an intellectual
edifice to accommodate all these primitive emotions and their
transubstantiations. He identifies reasons, causes, effects and
possibilities in the outer world. He builds scenarios. He spins narratives.
As a result, he feels no more anxiety. He has identified the enemy (or so he
thinks). And now, instead of being anxious, he is simply worried. Or
paranoid.

The narcissist often strikes people as "laid back" - or, less charitably:
lazy, parasitic, spoiled, and self-indulgent. But, as usual with
narcissists, appearances deceive. Narcissists are either compulsively driven
over-achievers - or chronic under-achieving wastrels. Most of them fail to
make full and productive use of their potential and capacities. Many avoid
even the now standard paths of an academic degree, a career, or family life.

The disparity between the accomplishments of the narcissist and his
grandiose fantasies and inflated self image - the Grandiosity Gap - is
staggering and, in the long run, unsustainable. It imposes onerous
exigencies on the narcissist's grasp of reality and on his meagre social
skills. It pushes him either to reclusion or to a frenzy of "acquisitions" -
cars, women, wealth, power.

Yet, no matter how successful the narcissist is - many of them end up being
abject failures - the Grandiosity Gap can never be bridged. The narcissist's
False Self is so unrealistic and his Superego so sadistic that there is
nothing the narcissist can do to extricate himself from the Kafkaesque trial
that is his life.

The narcissist is a slave to his own inertia. Some narcissists are forever
accelerating on the way to ever higher peaks and ever greener pastures.
Others succumb to numbing routines, the expenditure of minimal energy, and
to preying on the vulnerable. But either way, the narcissist's life is out
of control, at the mercy of pitiless inner voices and internal forces.

Narcissists are one-state machines, programmed to extract Narcissistic
Supply from others. To do so, they develop early on a set of immutable
routines. This propensity for repetition, inability to change and rigidity
confine the narcissist, stunt his development, and limit his horizons. Add
to this his overpowering sense of entitlement, his visceral fear of failure,
and his invariable need to both feel unique and be perceived as such - and
one often ends up with a recipe for inaction.

The under-achieving narcissist dodges challenges, eludes tests, shirks
competition, sidesteps expectations, ducks responsibilities, evades
authority - because he is afraid to fail and because doing something
everyone else does endangers his sense of uniqueness. Hence the narcissist's
apparent "laziness" and "parasitism". His sense of entitlement - with no
commensurate accomplishments or investment - irritates his social milieu.
People tend to regard such narcissists as "spoiled brats".

In specious contrast, the over-achieving narcissist seeks challenges and
risks, provokes competition, embellishes expectations, aggressively bids for
responsibilities and authority and seems to be possessed with an eerie
self-confidence. People tend to regard such specimen as "entrepreneurial",
"daring", "visionary", or "tyrannical". Yet, these narcissists too are
mortified by potential failure, driven by a strong conviction of
entitlement, and strive to be unique and be perceived as such.

Their hyperactivity is merely the flip side of the under-achiever's
inactivity: it is as fallacious and as empty and as doomed to miscarriage
and disgrace. It is often sterile or illusory, all smoke and mirrors rather
than substance. The precarious "achievements" of such narcissists invariably
unravel. They often act outside the law or social norms. Their
industriousness, workaholism, ambition, and commitment are intended to
disguise their essential inability to produce and build. Theirs is a whistle
in the dark, a pretension, a Potemkin life, all make-belief and thunder.

A Comment about Shame

The Grandiosity Gap is the difference between self-image - the way the
narcissist perceives himself - and contravening cues from reality. The
greater the conflict between grandiosity and reality, the bigger the gap and
the greater the narcissist's feelings of shame and guilt.

There are two varieties of shame:

Narcissistic Shame - which is the narcissist's experience of the Grandiosity
Gap (and its affective correlate). Subjectively it is experienced as a
pervasive feeling of worthlessness (the dysfunctional regulation of
self-worth is the crux of pathological narcissism), "invisibleness" and
ridiculousness. The patient feels pathetic and foolish, deserving of mockery
and humiliation.

Narcissists adopt all kinds of defences to counter narcissistic shame. They
develop addictive, reckless, or impulsive behaviours. They deny, withdraw,
rage, or engage in the compulsive pursuit of some kind of (unattainable, of
course) perfection. They display haughtiness and exhibitionism and so on.
All these defences are primitive and involve splitting, projection,
projective identification, and intellectualization.

The second type of shame is Self-Related. It is a result of the gap between
the narcissist's grandiose Ego Ideal and his Self or Ego. This is a
well-known concept of shame and it has been explored widely in the works of
Freud [1914], Reich [1960], Jacobson [1964], Kohut [1977], Kingston [1983],
Spero [1984] and Morrison [1989].

One must draw a clear distinction between guilt (or control)-related shame
and conformity-related shame.

Guilt is an "objectively" determinable philosophical entity (given relevant
knowledge regarding the society and culture in question). It is
context-dependent. It is the derivative of an underlying assumption by
OTHERS that a Moral Agent exerts control over certain aspects of the world.
This assumed control by the agent imputes guilt to it, if it acts in a
manner incommensurate with prevailing morals, or refrains from acting in a
manner commensurate with them.

Shame, in this case, here is an outcome of the ACTUAL occurrence of
AVOIDABLE outcomes - events which impute guilt to a Moral Agent who acted
wrongly or refrained from acting.

We must distinguish GUILT from GUILT FEELINGS, though. Guilt follows events.
Guilt feelings can precede them.

Guilt feelings (and the attaching shame) can be ANTICIPATORY.  Moral Agents
assume that they control certain aspects of the world. This makes them able
to predict the outcomes of their INTENTIONS and feels guilt and shame as a
result - even if nothing happened!

Guilt Feelings are composed of a component of Fear and a component of
Anxiety. Fear is related to the external, objective, observable consequences
of actions or inaction by the Moral Agent. Anxiety has to do with INNER
consequences. It is ego-dystonic and threatens the identity of the Moral
Agent because being Moral is an important part of it. The internalisation of
guilt feelings leads to a shame reaction.

Thus, shame has to do with guilty feelings, not with GUILT, per se. To
reiterate, guilt is determined by the reactions and anticipated reactions of
others to external outcomes such as avoidable waste or preventable failure
(the FEAR component). Guilty feelings are the reactions and anticipated
reactions of the Moral Agent itself to internal outcomes (helplessness or
loss of presumed control, narcissistic injuries - the ANXIETY component).

There is also conformity-related shame. It has to do with the narcissist's
feeling of "otherness". It similarly involves a component of fear (of the
reactions of others to one's otherness) and of anxiety (of the reactions of
oneself to one's otherness).

Guilt-related shame is connected to self-related shame (perhaps through a
psychic construct akin to the Superego). Conformity-related shame is more
akin to narcissistic shame.