16 Quotes by Sam Vaknin

Even when he seems to be interacting with someone else, the narcissist is actually engaged in a self-referential discourse. To the narcissist, all other people are cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional animated cartoon characters, or symbols. They exist only in his inner universe. He is startled when they deviate from the script and prove to be complex and autonomous.

The popular misconception is that narcissists love themselves. In reality, they direct their love at other people’s impressions of them. He who loves only impressions is incapable of loving people, himself included.

The narcissist has to condition his human environment to refrain from expressing criticism and disapproval of him, or of his actions and decisions. He has to teach people around him that any form of disagreement, however mild and minor, throws him into frightful fits of temper and rage attacks and turn him into a constantly cantankerous and irascible person.

But both the narcissist and his partner do not really consider each other. Trapped in the moves of an all-consuming dance macabre, they follow the motions morbidly – semiconscious, desensitized, exhausted, and concerned only with survival.

The dynamic unconscious is made of basic mental experiences, which are really dyadic relations between self-representations and object representations in either of two contexts: elation or rage.

Rage can easily convert to hatred. There is a wish to control the bad object in order to avoid persecution or fear. This control is achieved by the development of obsessive control mechanisms, which psychopathologically regulate the repression of aggression in such an individual.

Having invented himself, the narcissist sees no problem in recasting that which he had designed in the first place. The narcissist is his own repeated Creator – hence his grandiosity.