Narcissistic Personality - The Projection Machine

The Projection Machine

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Narcissists don't just project their faults and failings (character flaws and bad acts) onto you, they also project their feelings, emotions, and beliefs onto you. Actually, "into" you (See Projective Identification next).

The projected beliefs may be beliefs about themselves or beliefs about you or beliefs about anything. In fact, in posing to the mirror of your face, they are projecting their image onto you = their belief about themselves onto you.

The projected feelings and emotions may be positive ones or negative ones that they want to get rid of.

Note that the narcissist projects both positive and negative things onto you. In projecting positive things on you (e.g., his grandiose false image) he is using you as a mirror.

In projecting negative things on you, he is using you as a dumping ground.

Here we focus on the bad, or negative, things narcissists project, their faults and failings in particular.

When narcissists slander and calumniate you, they have two objectives. One is projection, and the other is to muddy a bright spot in your character with whatever slander or calumny they're projecting at you. It's as though any shine on your image diminishes the glow of their glory.

Don't take my word for it: test a narcissist. Praise someone before a group and see what happens. The next day the narcissist launches a smear campaign against that praised person.

This is, of course, the mentality of the rapist, who must tear others "down off that pedestal." The narcissist just does the deed in a non-sexual way.

Now, you'd think it would be hard to accomplish both objectives — projection and smearing — at the same time. But it's uncanny how narcissists manage to do so! It's all in the way they word their "line" on you. They are glib and amazingly adept at killing two birds with one stone: they not only ditch one of their faults, they muddy one your virtues in the process.

Note that in doing this, the narcissist isn't attacking your faults and shortcomings: she is attacking your virtues and accomplishments. Consequently, when she is conducting a campaign of character assassination against someone, the arrows she shoots never hit one of that person's real flaws.

The result is something like Dr. Frankenstein accomplished with body parts. A chimera. The narcissist's false image contains the virtuous qualities in other people's characters, and their images have had those virtuous qualities replaced with the flaws in the narcissist's character. In other words, the narcissist steals your virtues and dumps on you her faults.

In doing so, the narcissist is stealing your identity, pulling an identity switch with you, piecemeal.

Malignant narcissism projects to pull an image switch.

It's a kind of magic, an illusion created with nothing but words, which can warp perceptions by making anything of anything.

For example, let's say that the narcissist is stingy and that one of your virtues is that you are outstanding for your generosity. She hates the glow of that shiny spot in your character, because it serves as foil to her stinginess, making it more noticeable by contrast. So she muddies your image and glorifies her image by misappropriating your generosity to herself and misappropriating her stinginess to you.

How? She goes around lying about how much she gives to charity and about helping people out all the time. More important (since one must be careful and subtle about boasting), she just makes everything she does sound generous. She also goes around telling lying stories about you, stories that have you being stingy. More important, she makes everything you do sound stingy, however generous it manifestly is. In The Art of Lying I gave an example of how a narcissist can make one $500 purchase sound like payment for room, board, toiletries, cigarettes, and laundry services for twenty years — in order to unsound like a freeloader.

This is what makes narcissists stand out. Normal people do project. They sometimes even smear. But not in such a calculated fashion. In "What Makes Narcissists Different" (in What Makes Narcissists Tick), I enumerated the difference between the way normal people project and the way narcissists do:

Normal people project when put on the defensive. Narcissists project in unprovoked attacks.

Normal people don't smear themselves off on just anyone. They wouldn't dream of harming those near and dear. All people are nothing but objects to narcissists, so they smear themselves off on their own parents and children as thoughtlessly as we smear ourselves off on a towel. For no reason other than to cause pain, they will say anything — ANYTHING — about them, without a second thought.

Normal people are likely to shake themselves off on whoever happens to be near at the moment. So, they sometimes project a flaw off onto someone who actually has it. But narcissists project ironically, accusing those with the corresponding virtue of a vice.

Normal people stick to slander (which has at least some degree of truth in it), rarely engaging in calumny (lies). When they do calumniate someone, they at least have a natural reason for animosity toward the target. Narcissists are perverted. There is no natural reason for what they do.

Even when normal people do calumniate someone, they don't go hog-wild and calumniate that person so badly and so widely as to destroy them and ruin their whole lives. Narcissists do go hog wild. They are mental children and therefore as dangerous with their mouths as an angry five-year-old with an assault weapon.

In fact, a narcissist is most likely to smear off on someone he owes gratitude, because needing help damages his image. So he repays help as though it were an insult. He must devalue it by devaluing the giver of it, as if such a contemptible person is incapable of really helping someone as grand as he.

Unlike narcissists, normal people don't do it because damaging others makes them feel good. In fact, doing this makes a normal person feel ashamed. But it makes a narcissist feel grand.

When it's fully conscious calumny a narcissist is spreading, he just thinks it's funny that people are such idiots that he can get away with it, feeding them ridiculous lines about others. Lines that are preposterous in the light of the target's known conduct. The narcissists I have known all let it show at one time or another that they had nothing but contempt for the people who believed them. I am sure that a narcissist views his success at lying as proof that he is brilliant and that all mere mortals are as stupid as sticks.

Narcissists aren't projecting guilt so much as they're projecting shame. In fact, it may well be that they have no concept of guilt and have it confused with shame. Which is pain.

So this wicked behavior is a way to ditch their pain onto you. It's a psychological pain-killer, like a drug, and that's why causing you pain makes them feel good.

Here's an example of a famous smear that illustrates how it works.

The first thing people noticed about Jesus of Nazareth was that, unlike the other prophets, he spoke on his own authority, appealing only to logic, and never prefaced his teaching with "God says…." This is but one of many examples of his exceptional care to avoid blasphemy. He went way beyond custom in this regard. His tremendous reverence for the name of God was his most glaring virtue, because he put everyone, including the prophets, to shame in this.

Okay, so, if you or I wanted to smear Jesus, blasphemy would be the last thing we'd accuse him of, right? Because that accusation would be laughed at as a joke.

Or would it?

Well, whether people would get the joke or not, we're normal, so we'd accuse him of something believable, like being a drunk or something. But that isn't the way a narcissist thinks.

The narcissist(s) in the Sanhedrin who plotted against Jesus went right for that greatest shining virtue of his in leveling the charge of blasphemy against him. They just had to muddy it o'er.

Unbelievable. Yet the people believed it!

And consider the source of this accusation. Look who's accusing him of blasphemy. The Sanhedrin, blasphemously acting in the name of God.

In other words, in the very act, they were projecting the blot of their sin onto his outstanding virtue.

Unbelievable. Yet the people believed it.

Near the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition, a Spanish archbishop or cardinal (whose name I forget) remarked that the accusations leveled by the Inquisition were so widely believed because people are much readier to believe the unbelievable than the obvious. He said a mouthful.

I call narcissists "projection machines." I am convinced that projection is a knee-jerk reflex in them. That is, whenever a moment of self-awareness threatens to let them know a flaw in their character they're revealing or some bad thing they're doing, they instantly go into denial about it (= repress conscience of shame) by projecting the semblance of that flaw or misdeed off onto the handiest scapegoat — usually the very victim of whatever abuse they're dishing out.

How's that for maximum irony? Hence, while hurling a hailstorm of wild accusations at you, you can count of one them being that you are hurling wild accusations at them. Every single time. They can't help it. I think they have been twisting their thinking for so long (since early childhood) that twisted thinking is hard-wired into their brains. I think projection is such an ingrained habit in them that often they're unaware that they're doing it.

Projection is such a reflex in them that they give themselves away by some of the accusations they hurl. For example, if a narcissist says he fears you might attack him physically, look out: he is at least pondering whether to attack you physically. If she says she fears you might get into her bank account, know that she is at least pondering getting into yours. Every single time.

Narcissists aren't the only people who project. But they are different in that they have done it so much for so long that they do it like a machine — automatically, every single time. And they rarely hit one of the target's real faults. Instead the accusation is a joke, smearing one of that person's virtues as a vice.

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