If you have heard that being a Narcissist is an illness, you most likely heard it in some tabloid-psychology group. In reality the narcissistic personality type is ethical beauty, humane morals and a celebration running right through life. They are more like beautiful Princes and Princesses.
You know a great many narcissistic actors and singers: Tom Cruise and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Elizabeth Taylor and Alain Delon, Leonid Agutin, Dmitry Malikov, Nikita Mikhalkov, and on and on. Most writers and directors in our culture, and very many painters, are narcissistic. This personality type serves our culture and forms the bohemia of society.
Narcissists, extraverts in an active life position, are constantly proving their own independence. Precisely because it is their right to independence that is violated. This is a hyperfunction: underlining, defending and exalting oneself. At the same time they want to be liked, to charm, to arouse sympathy, to be an idol. Hence the name, "Narcissists": it is a trait proper to them, a certain self-infatuation, self-admiration, an all-embracing interest in themselves. Along with a certain capriciousness, a tireless pressing and provoking of others into underlining his or her uniqueness.
The active form of the violation of the right to independence, of the dependence on other people's opinion, shows itself in negation.
They always say “no”, and they find it hard to say “yes”
Narcissists learn socially not to voice it, but it is always clear that it means “no”. When the narcissistic personality type is better balanced, softer phrasings appear: “not now”, “not today”, “I'll think about it”. They can refuse very beautifully, but a refusal is what it will be.
The negation, the “no”, is not formed towards everything as such, but towards everything ordinary. The narcissist rejects the everyday and the usual and at the same time strives for the inimitable, the exclusive, the distinctive. He likes altered states of consciousness, and because of that narcissists are prone to addictions of various kinds: gambling, chemical, alcohol and so on.
They are revolutionaries: they constantly want to remake something, to improve the world, that is, they are forever changing ideals. And the ideal is themselves. Clearly, where the world and the order of things are concerned, he cannot be the ideal; but the person living in that ideal order of things will be him.
While proving their independence, they prefer to keep others at emotional and sensual closeness. They are good at manipulating people.
But the main thing is that these really are very beautiful people by nature, and they make active use of it. It is an interesting kind of beauty, and that goes for their clothes as well.
However a narcissist dresses, it looks stylish. The hysteroid type puts in a mass of effort to look fashionable, and you look at it and think: “Good heavens! Every item is fashionable on its own, the labels are famous, but together it looks awful!” A narcissist can put on a rag and on him it will look stylish. So they are something of trendsetters. They are exactly the ones (together with the schizoids) who came up with the whole metrosexual theme. They took it up and breathed a mass following into it.
If epileptoid women are the generally acknowledged standard of beauty, narcissistic women are the most stylish: they have an innate sense of style. Yet for all that sense of style they will not create the little black dress.
Inside themselves these women carry a very fine tuning fork of morality and a high sense of their own dignity. In narcissistic men this comes out more in outward actions and displays; in women it lies on the inner plane. Narcissistic women in a way dictate what people are to say (if I do not accept anything bad, then I create situations in which the bad will not be voiced at all and only the good will be heard). That is why in the presence of narcissistic women even the coarsest boors do not swear — provided the woman carries inside her the sense that it must not be done. And not because it has been forbidden: it simply feels awkward somehow, the tongue will not form the words.
They are sociable and easy to talk to, and they make good public figures. Narcissists are good for representative duties, because they are beautiful.
On the one hand they personify morality, as it were. On the other hand they stretch it a little. This is the real bohemia, that is, not the crowd of hangers-on, not the snake pit of show business, but genuine bohemian life. It means a great many painters, theatre people, directors, actors, writers, members of the cultural elite.
And yet the one place where the narcissistic personality type really does feel bad is the bohemian crowd. A bohemian crowd is full of unrecognised Narcissists, each of whom considers himself a genius, each of whom is so unique that in this uniqueness they all come to look alike.
A vivid manifestation of the narcissistic personality type is Mikhalkov: the master has arrived, and everyone is to smile. It is a constant wish to create a celebration, to have everything around be interesting.
What lies behind it? The greatest fear of all: the fear of the everyday, of drabness, of sameness. That is exactly why they try to create a celebration, and they make that celebration out of themselves.
The good part is that this makes them the soul of any gathering. Charm, charisma, cheerfulness, positivity — as long as they do not sink into depressive states. They are quite active, and they represent an organisation well once they have joined one.
An unfulfilled narcissist, of course, starts to feel bad; he begins to suffer and to sink into depression. An unrecognised genius is, from a narcissist's point of view, a very bad thing. They really do feel very bad.
There must always be a group of people beside them, that is, they can hardly bear loneliness. They are in fact terrified of being left alone, so they gather the company themselves, invite people, draw them in. But as soon as the company has gathered, they withdraw into a state called public loneliness.
“I stand alone in a crowd of wimps”
The more of the outward there is in the narcissistic personality type, the colder he becomes inside. The more strongly a person's personality type is expressed, the more emotionally cold he is. On the outside everything seems to be there, but the moment you step into the zone of close relationships it turns cold and empty.
Narcissists find states of closeness very hard to live through. But if that same narcissistic personality is brought into balance, or is expressed a little less sharply, closer to the middle, and warmth appears in him, then it is a pleasant state.
Naturally, all is very well with them where sex is concerned. Many people consider them the best lovers, because there is beauty in everything and they carry that beauty. Or rather, they do not so much carry it as find it natural. The whole of tantra probably rests on narcissists. Yoga, for instance, is already a manic current.
The most beautiful men in society are acknowledged to be narcissists. They keep their bodies in fairly beautiful shape without much effort. That said, any narcissist may soften and take on many depressive features, and depressives tend towards plumpness.
Narcissists are good-natured mentors and quite good teachers, as long as they do not let stardom go to their heads. A good teacher can come of them, but more often what comes out is a “halfwit”, once they start believing in their own divinity and higher calling. From that moment on they are not very good teachers, because they start giving pupils not what the pupil needs but what they themselves feel like giving right now. Whether the pupil is able to carry it away interests nobody. That he has been crushed under a weight of knowledge does not matter much — what matters is how I did it.
In the counsellor's profession this is, for instance, the situation in a therapy group where the whole group sits and simply watches in delight as the counsellor cracks open this participant's problem, unfolds his inner world — and then, just like that, he leaves, while the participant is left in that state. The whole group is delighted, of course, at how brilliantly he did it; but what does the particular participant get out of it? Who is going to finish the job? Who will complete the processes that have been set going? Narcissists are in more danger here than many others, because “I, for my part, have done my job.”
Enjoyment and the need for attention
For the narcissistic personality type it is his own enjoyment that comes to the fore: I must find it pleasant, and I must definitely be praised — praised, what is more, for what I find pleasant. The focus of attention is displaced onto presentability, praise, positive attention. For the hysteroid personality type it makes no difference what attention it gets, negative or positive, as long as there is attention; the narcissistic personality type needs precisely and only positive attention, a positive appraisal — keep all your negative opinions to yourself.
Life is a celebration, and I am the main present at that celebration
The narcissistic personality has a neurotic need to be liked and to receive admiration from a large number of people. Admiration from one person is too little!
If this point is watched — especially by a narcissist who is not strongly expressed, who is balanced — then attention to the other person appears, and the ability to feel with him, and then those processes do get finished and completed, and they can be very good teachers. That is, if a narcissist goes into a school, he is the teacher people afterwards remember for practically the rest of their lives. The girls fall in love with him.
They are the shop window of morality
Because of this striving for positive attention, part of a narcissist's consciousness is always monitoring how beautiful his own actions are. They have a very good feel for beauty, since they have been oriented towards it since childhood. In choosing a deed, they appraise it from the standpoint of beauty (never mind whether it is right or wrong).
Thanks to this striving for beauty, the narcissistic personality type is the shop window of morality and personifies it. Where everyone else talks about morality, narcissists are obliged to act within the bounds of morality. A person who personifies moral values cannot breach them; a breach of morality is not forgiven in a narcissist.
It is the retinue that makes the king. If the retinue turns away and leaves, there is no king.
Narcissistic people broadcast social norms, and therefore they also carry the basic social fears within them. The general social fear of our civilisation is the fear of losing one's mind. When narcissistic people behave out of keeping with morality, they run head-on into the fear of going mad, which is why at that moment they look slightly off-balance.
Men broadcast moral values more through themselves; women with a violated right to independence do it by steering a man. The classic saying “the man is the head, the woman is the neck” is about narcissists and about the right to independence.
Self-made, that is, they made themselves. And they carry that with them: “I can, I made myself, you can make yourselves too.” So they are conduits of a certain positive view of life.
At his peak a narcissist can be mistaken for a manic. In medicine, for instance, there is the term “manic-depressive syndrome”. Depressives stand next to narcissists, and narcissists at their upper point of contact look very much like manics. When a manic goes into a clinch, takes the rostrum and starts holding forth and preaching an idea, he is very narcissistic. And when a narcissist rises to the top, an overvalued idea appears in him. The manic moves from the idea to his own display of it, the narcissist from his own display:
“while I was talking, an idea turned up as well”.
Narcissists also resemble manics in their appetite for work. Beauty is an artificial thing, and narcissistic people need to look beautiful in any place and against any background. That takes work, so narcissists know how to work, but they prefer to draw others into the working.
A leaning towards good deeds
Narcissistic people are inclined to good deeds; this allows them to preserve their dignity, their narcissism. It is in their performance that such acts become what they are.
One narcissistic good deed lies behind the legend of Saint Martin of Tours, dated to the 6th century AD. Martin was canonised for a single deed. As a Roman legionary he was returning home one evening; it was cold. Near the gates of the French city of Amiens in Gaul, so the story goes, he saw a poor man, a Christian. Martin took off his warm military cloak and gave it to the poor man, left in nothing but his shirt.
There was less than a block left to walk home, mind you, and at home he had a second cloak. But he gave an expensive thing away to a man in need just like that, for nothing! At that time, for the Roman Empire, this was an astonishing event, all the more so in the light of Christian values. The key aspect, the weight of the deed, lies in the number of followers. His sanctity is not that he gave away the cloak but that he set an example. It was a broad, beautiful gesture, “a fur coat off the master's shoulder”. A great many people wanted to imitate him.
Roles and manipulations of the narcissistic type
What games do narcissists "play"?
- the rescuer, or else
- romantic leading men,
- princes on a white horse,
- princes who leave their brides for a hundred years' war. For a hundred years at the very least.
- The macho style: so charming, so unattainable.
- Ladies and geishas.
- “Navels of the world”.
- People who are presents.
- Superstars.
- The feminist fighting for something, for independence from those brutes.
The narcissistic type in relationships
Narcissistic people try to be quality partners, though they do not always manage it, because they tie the partnership to themselves, to their own wishes, aims and notions. The second person in the partnership is always exactly that, the second one; equality in the partnership is broken from the outset, there is always the principal one and the second one.
It is very hard to come to an agreement with narcissistic people, because they alone decide whether you have agreed with them or not. Now and then they may drop out of that position, but they do not come level: they fall lower, and then the partner's interests become just slightly higher. As a rule this does not last long, and afterwards they are sure to take revenge.
Narcissistic people keep a certain distance. Any deviation from their recommendations, however minimal, is a betrayal. In others they watch very closely that agreements are kept. Narcissistic people take offence at a breach of the partnership, but they do not withdraw into resentment: they actively assign blame, attacking the partner with guilt. They point out to the other person straight away which agreements have been broken, even where it is a matter of observing outward formalities. The resemblance to psychopathic people is that narcissistic ones are given to announcing: I have said it, therefore we have agreed. Psychopathic people do this in an aggressive form, remarkably managing to obtain confirmation first (did you hear me? — Yes), whereas narcissistic ones simply announce it as a declaration of will. And to breach that is betrayal.
