Narcissistic Personality - Characteristics of NPD

Characteristics of NPD

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NPD belongs to a class of personality disorders known as Cluster B, the "dramatic/emotional/erratic" personality disorders. This class includes Histrionic, Borderline, and Antisocial personality disorders.

The most heavily researched personality disorders are two in this group, borderline and antisocial personality disorder. That's because people with these disorders appear for treatment in large numbers. Borderlines are often forced into treatment because of socially disruptive behavior. Antisocials commit 40% of the violent crimes people are imprisoned for, and these people are evaluated by court order, then forced into treatment.

Current epidemiological research permits no reliable estimate of how prevalent NPD is in society.

Officially, the principal characteristics of NPD are:

inflated self-esteem (i.e., puffed-up self-esteem, actually compensatory for low esteem)

lack of empathy for others

feeling entitled to special treatment and privileges

disagreeableness

That says nothing about the all-consuming need for ALL available attention that bears fruit in these character traits.

As for their own fruit: "psychopathic tendencies are conceptualized as being on a continuum with narcissism, with both involving a motivation to dominate, humiliate, and manipulate others." (Handbook of Psychopathy, by Christopher J. Patrick, p. 162).

Since the real world conflicts with their view of themselves, narcissists live in a fantasy world of their own creation. This is like the fantasy world little children live in. If you think way back to your earliest memories, you can barely remember what this fantasy world was like. Imagine it persisting into adulthood! Little children are the stars of their fantasies and are preoccupied with them. Imagine an adult with that going on in her or his head!

Malignant Narcissism in the Land of Pretend.

Like the fantasies of little children, these fantasies aggrandize the narcissist's importance, service, and accomplishments. (This is a child's way of coping with being so small and faulty and insignificant in a world of giants.) Their version of their participation in any endeavor leaves everyone else out of the picture. In fact, they may even drive another out of a picture to have the spotlight all to themselves.

The NPD illusion of superiority is a facet of a generalized disdain for reality. These individuals feel unconstrained by rules, customs, limits, and discipline. Their world is filled with self-fiction in which conflicts are dismissed, failures redeemed, and self-pride is effortlessly maintained. They easily devise plausible reasons to justify self-centered and inconsiderate behavior. Their memories of past relationships are often illusory and changing. If rationalizations and self-deception fail, individuals with NPD are vulnerable to dejection, shame, and a sense of emptiness. Then they have little recourse other than fantasy. They have an uninhibited imagination and engage in self-glorifying fantasies. What is unmanageable through fantasy is repressed and kept from awareness. As they consistently devalue others, they do not question the correctness of their own beliefs; they assume that others are wrong. The characteristic difficulties of individuals with NPD almost all stem from their lack of solid contact with reality. If the false image of self becomes substantive enough, their thinking will become peculiar and deviant. Then their defensive maneuvers become increasingly transparent to others (Millon & Davis, 1996, pp. 405-423).

— Sharon C. Ekleberry, Dual Diagnosis and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder

A fantasy, of course, is a lie. One must constantly lie to oneself to maintain a fantasy.

A preference for fantasy over Truth is natural in little children. What magic thinking a lie and then believing it does!

Magical thinking is natural in little children, too.

In a young child's view, it is very possible that it rains because the sky is sad. If your baby brother gets sick and goes to the hospital, it could be your fault if you were mad at him the day before. If you want something very, very badly and it happens, then your wanting caused it to happen.

These are examples of magical thinking.

They are also examples of egocentric thinking — not that the young child is selfish. It's just that he cannot take anyone else's perspective, so that everything in the world revolves around him. When he's sad, he cries. So, it must be that the sky does, too.

(An egocentric child, on seeing his father upset, hands him his favorite teddy bear. This act shows that the child is not selfish. He is offering the thing that he finds most comforting. He cannot imagine that his father would not have the same feelings.)

The preoperational [preschool] child's understanding starts and stops with what he sees. Logical rules (operations) do not yet come into play.

— Dr. Benjamin Spock

But children learn by experience. Adults, when behaving neurotically, revert to childishness and magical thinking, even though they know better. They just choose to unknow that mind has no power over matter and that, therefore, altering their perceptions does not alter truth and reality. Hence magical thinking in adults manifests itself as a strong belief in make-believe = that believing a thing makes its so.

You can find examples of this in the daily newspaper. For instance, in politics there is an element persistently stating known falsehoods as if shouting their lies loud enough and repeating them often enough to silence all contradiction makes their fiction fact. The best you can get from them is an allowance that there may be such a thing as "your truth" and "my truth," but many of these wing-nuts will argue with you till the cows come home that the moon is made of green cheese for you if you choose to believe that it is.

You can see the advantage in magical thinking and egocentric thinking: magical thinking makes you omnipotent, and egocentric thinking makes you all-important! Despite the temptation to cling to these childish errors, normal children do choose to leave Never Never Land at the proverbial Age of Reason, even though as adults they may revert to childish magical thinking about some things.

Narcissists are Peter Pans who stubbornly refuse to ever leave Never Never Land. Since they thus lie to themselves constantly, malignant narcissists are pathological liars who lie to everyone else too. And since the purpose of their egocentric thinking is to feel all-important, their egocentric thinking becomes wholly selfish, willfully and wantonly selfish.

Their sense of entitlement proceeds from these fantasies, these delusions of importance and grandeur. It exempts narcissists from rules that apply to others. Just as a baby is exempt from the rules that apply to others. This sense of entitlement is common among the high and mighty who view themselves as superior: because they are higher than the rest of us they need a lower set of standards to live up to. (Their upside-down logic, not mine.)

But notice that a sense of self-importance and grandeur is also a characteristic of little children. In fact, it's common behavior in the young of all higher animals. It's adaptive. Nature has made the young of every species cute and lovable = attractive to their parents. Nature has programmed the young of every species to clamor for attention and to behave as though their needs are the most important thing in the world. It's easy to see why Nature has done this.

Hence, the parents of every species later must unspoil and wean their young, giving them an unceremonious shove out of the nest. In human development, this is likely to be countered by the child with temper tantrums. But eventually the child's concept of personhood takes shape and he sees advantages in leaving Never Never Land. The child likes having more control concerning himself and getting to make some of his own choices like a big boy. So, he will accept a commensurate amount of responsibility and will respect others as persons in their own right, with needs and rights of their own that he must respect.

This is what psychiatrists are talking about when they say that every child goes through a narcissistic stage of development. Unfortunately, narcissists never get through it.

Narcissists are prone to rage when others don't behave in a way that echoes or reflects their grand specialness. In other words, at the drop of a hat.

Sometimes this is a seething rage, sometimes a violent one. Rage is a primitive emotion, common in little children during a temper tantrum but rare in adults.

Adults normally experience rage only in extreme situations like combat or when under attack by the severe abuse of some willful and wanton outrage. Even then, adults rarely let 'er rip. Like absolute dictators, narcissists feel no need to restrain themselves — unless the coast isn't clear and they might get a bad reputation or land in jail.

In other words, they are as irresponsible as children are, too: the only reign on their behavior is what they think they can get away with.

Nothing is so aggrandizing as power. Hence, narcissists are control freaks. In fact, being a control freak is so at-the-heart of malignant narcissism that it is a red flag of NPD.

It takes much less power to exert negative control than positive control, so narcissists flatter themselves about how powerful they are by being infuriatingly negative. Like Katharina (the shrew) in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, narcissists cross people and disagree at every turn to exert control through gratuitous obstructionism. They play Keep Away with things others want. In short, they deal in power plays.

Notice how much this too is like the behavior of little children. Adults constantly have to keep them from controlling and bossing around littler children, often treating a littler child like an object (e.g., like a doll to dress up and play with). Children also frequently show no interest in a toy until they see that another child wants to play with it. Then suddenly that toy is the most important thing in the world, something to fight over, to keep away from that other child who wanted it.

To feel their power, they domineer. They manipulate (to control people like mere objects, tools). They humiliate.

Whenever they can get away with it, they boss people around to a ridiculous degree by issuing arbitrary and pointless orders, such as to sit in a different chair or to clean a different room first. Always testing boundaries, they learn at a young age the art of "shock and awe" in using a sudden temper tantrum to blind-side and run over a playmate.

Since power used to bash and destroy is spectacular, and power used to defend or build isn't so much fun, they prefer to bash and destroy. They get a big charge — almost erotic pleasure it seems — out of bashing and destroying, because of the power rush they get.

The narcissist makes himself feel powerful by destroying things even a weakling could destroy.

Besides, it takes much less power to destroy something than it did to make it. So, like terrorists, they pretend that if they knock down something someone else made, they are as mighty as the builders.

Not.

The bad news is that narcissists view other people as objects to be powerful on. So, they have as much regard for others' feelings as we do for a nail we are hitting with a hammer. Which is why they have no compunctions about exploiting people.

Narcissists are not the only people who have no empathy/humanity though. Neither do psychopaths. And neither do infants or toddlers, who will abuse smaller children and animals on a whim with nothing but keen interest in the victim's suffering. In fact, all people can revert to this mental state by turning off their human sensibilities like a light switch.

The resulting mental state is known as brutality, the unfeeling state of mind that a brute beast has, like a predator. In fact, the word brutality is the opposite of humanity.

Brutality isn't always a bad thing, so this ability to turn off our human sensibilities is adaptive. One could hardly clean a fish without this ability. It enables us to function in ordeals such as combat or natural disaster. How could a doctor commit surgery, a dentist an extraction, or anyone mouth-to-mouth resuscitation without a little brutality? What about people who have had to do terrible things, such as amputate a limb, to rescue someone from a heap of rubble?

Unfortunately, however, this mental state of brutality also enables us to watch a lynching or a burning at the stake or the Holocaust in a brutish state of mind.

Psychopaths and other narcissists are unique in that they have that light switch permanently turned off for everyone but themselves. And I mean "everyone," even their own children.

In fact, they don't know what humanity is. They think it's having hurt feelings. Since their feelings are easily hurt, they think they have humanity. Which would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

It's beyond them to realize that an animal (i.e., a brute beast) has hurtable feelings and that humanity is having human feeling for other beings, especially other human beings.

They do try to pass for normal. It is well documented that they often (badly) imitate the normal human feelings they see in others by putting on melodramatic shows of "concern" and "sympathy" that are so overdone one sometimes wonders if it is parody. For example, at a funeral they don't know how they should feel, so they watch other people, trying to mimic their expressions of emotion.

That said, I am not convinced that narcissists can have no empathy. I think that they won't have empathy.

I say that because I have known some shockingly brutal narcissists for a long time and have observed a couple things that could have been expressions of true feeling and, in one case, a search for feeling that the narcissist wanted to believe she had. Not that I think it was genuine: I just don't know what to think about these events. It could have been mockery. A narcissist's lines are characteristically vague, duplicitous and can have double meaning.

My best guess is that narcissists view feelings as weakness and vulnerability. They think everyone is a predator like they are, so they armor themselves by repressing their feelings (and conscience) and refusing to empathize — throwing the switch into Brutal Mode. They must do this with the same willful and obdurate stubbornness they do everything else, compulsively.

How long can one do this before it becomes a habit? perhaps even a conditioned reflex? In any case, it's like Brutal Mode is their default setting. They must be so used to it that they wonder why the rest of us feel and emote the way we do.

Anything repressed can surface to consciousness, however. But if it does, you can bet that your narcissist won't tolerate it there: he or she will bury it in the subconscious again immediately.

Since no one but the narcissist is worthy of any attention/regard in his version of the world, the narcissist hates it when reality intrudes on this delusion. He is typified by the wicked queen on the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" Like her, the narcissist is consumed with pathological envy. He projects this distressing emotion off onto the one he envies. That is, he fantasizes that the victim envies him. That gives the narcissist all the excuse he needs to "protect" himself by attacking.

Malignant narcissists are troubled little children in adult bodies. We normally think of little children as sweet and innocent. But, when you think twice, you realize that it's a good thing they're so small, inexperienced, and controllable. (See Now We Are Six by Joanna Ashmun.) Indeed, it is often (and truly) said that the most terrible thing in the world is a grown up child. Take these malignant narcissists for example: Adolph Hitler, Nero, Saddam Hussein, Josef Stalin. Power without conscience or accountability.

So, if you are dealing with a malignant narcissist, never forget for a moment that you are dealing with a mind that works exactly as a little child's does. A mind as impulsive as a little child's is. A mind as irresponsible as a little child's is. Reason and morality will have no more influence on it than they have on a little child's mind.

© 2004 � 2008, Kathleen Krajco � all rights reserved worldwide.
The URL of this page is: http://www.narcissism.operationdoubles.com/characteristics_npd.htm.
It was last updated on 3/7/2008.
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