The perpendicular Narcissist

I remember encountering a second diametrical opposite to the Narcissistic Personality disordered man. The first opposite would be, casually speaking, a saturatedly depressed person with zero self-esteem and no ego backbone. The man I knew was a pure parallel (or perpendicular?) universe to the disorder, and illuminated a lesser studied aspect of it.

Like a Narcissist, the client never did a job for the sake of the work or the money, but for the “supplies” he would win. “I need constant praise and adoration,” he said. “I need to feel I’m doing something special or changing the world.” If no praise came after some felt-appropriate period of time, he would quit the job. This had happened a number of times. He had dreams of New York City stardom as some undetermined sort of artist. His ego was Masterson’s “inflated balloon” of Narcissism: It had to be constantly filled else he felt empty and wrong. He needed to be up, happy, loved at all times.

But this man was also Alice Miller’s searcher and struggler for “admiration,” which “is not the same thing as love.”* He never felt good enough; felt like a jack-of-all-trades, master of no competencies, though I had no reason to suspect he was not good at his technical job.

See the primordial strands of Narcissism. The childhood aborted self, ego. The need for glory to bury pain and emptiness. The inner childishness (cite: Trump the “man-baby”): Remarkably, he knew he prized his ingenuousness and immature style, like a more pathological version of “boys will be boys” men. But that was all. The remainder of him was down to earth, humble and fragile. He knew he had depression and anxiety.

I believe that the true Narcissist is much more similar to this man than he or we would believe. A primary difference – that he needs to believe in his perfection and transcendence while my opposite man wants to own these qualities – is not that big a difference. I’ve written elsewhere** that the Narcissist doesn’t wake up in the morning feeling good. First consciousness is blankness, emptiness, his real self. It must be inflated quickly. This is done by a second primary difference between them: the alienation and anger that accompanied his losses in childhood. We can say that contempt and fear must raise him above others. Need and fear made my client seek others.

Contempt has given up on love. The struggler remembers it, or the shadow of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bq5mStroM.

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* Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, p. 35.

** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/08/mini-statement-don-one.html.