The vehicle of a narcissistic personality, the disturbed inner environment that forms his world, is a belief: a belief in perfection, unique specialness, a priori entitlement, absolute ascendency, and differentiation and alienation from all other people. The engine of that vehicle is a feeling. But it is not a feeling of perfection: “Perfection” does not exist as a feeling or emotion in the human spectrum. It is a disturbing feeling that fuses anxiety, emptiness, a disabling falseness of the adult self and the dreaded reality of the never-grown child. The feeling’s engine is the truth of, and possibly the sense of, developmental failure in the first few years of life. Something – often the parents’ empty idealization (“you are the best”; “you’ll play at Carnegie Hall one day”; “you are the smartest little boy”) – plants the future means of escape from that truth. The person may have been pathologically immature at fourteen and suddenly falsely mature and intellectualized at fifteen. His buried feeling of still being a child will remember his parents’ attribution of specialness. It will not contain love and will feel alone. He has become the solipsist whose entire universe is a mirror.
Narcissistic personality is a delusion, which is a false belief a person is deeply invested in, making it feel true. It is a core delusion, protecting the person from feeling his lack of identity. There are other, non-core delusions that a narcissist may have. He may lose his arrogant certainty that his political party is always right (he may detach and feel that it is not a reflection of him). He may even stop believing his spouse loves him (deciding she is psychologically botched), and his ego would remain intact. But he would not be able to shed his belief that he is physically appealing or that he is perfectly expert in his chosen field. Dismantling these beliefs would cause him to descend into the all-consuming fire of infancy pain.
The most obscure aspect of narcissism is its identity of pristine perfection. Hard work and assiduous effort mean nothing to a narcissist. Excellence is intolerable: It doesn’t say he is above all others and it allows for inferiority. A narcissist requires absolute Godliness in one way: There is only one god.
A narcissist who moved away from civilization, who had to survive alone, would be distressed to feel his sense of uniqueness and perfection fading away. He must be unique and fundamentally unlike other people. But literally alone, any sense of self would disappear. With no one to be better than, he would feel nothing but the radical emptiness of the child he was who never grew. He would collapse in a painful void. Struggling to maintain his only sense of living, his narcissism, he might exalt feeble virtues: He walks with perfect stealth on the hunt. He designs the flawless trap. He grows the perfect crop. His thoughts are noble and stern and master his world. Only these conceits could keep him safe. He would eventually, in a terribly lonely moment, give in to the wish that he could just be a person, a feeling person who could lean on someone, cling to someone, fall into someone, a caring nurturer. But there has never been that person. So he had to be alone, not needy, not dependent, unique and impervious. He could only feel pain so he had to become a thought, a belief. Pain became deluded to pleasure. Failure became deluded to success. Inferiority became deluded to superiority.
In sum: Feeling is pain to the future Narcissist, the pain of never becoming. To have human feelings is that early abort. He had to be beyond the human: perfect.
