Narcissism Fridge Magnets
Channel: Sam Vaknin
Date: 2015-11-20

Here are 15 quotes from the my book "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited" (http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/thebook.html):

1. To forgive is never to forget. But to remember is not necessarily to re-experience.

2. Pathological narcissism is a life-long pattern of traits and behaviours which signify infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one's gratification, dominance and ambition.

3. Narcissus is not in love with himself. He is in love with his reflection.

4. The narcissist is an actor in a monodrama, yet he is forced to remain behind the scenes. The scenes take centre stage, instead.

5. The narcissist ages without mercy and without grace. His withered body and his overwrought mind betray him all at once.

6. Children, to the narcissist, are both mirrors and competitors. They reflect authentically his constant need for adulation and attention. Their grandiose fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are crass caricatures of his internal world.

7. In the narcissist's surrealistic world, even language is pathologized. It mutates into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables.

8. The narcissist's lies are not goal-orientated. This is what makes his constant dishonesty both disconcerting and incomprehensible. The narcissist lies at the drop of a hat, needlessly, and almost ceaselessly.

9. The narcissist holds his sycophantic acolytes in contempt. He finds his fans, admirers, and followers repulsive and holds them to be inferior.

10. The narcissist is never whole without an adoring, submissive, available, self-denigrating partner. His very sense of superiority, indeed his False Self, depends on it.

11. The narcissist identifies being loved with being possessed, encroached upon, shackled, transformed, reduced, exploited, weakened, engulfed, digested and excreted.

12. Psychopathic and narcissistic abusers hate it when other people are happy. Besieged by gnawing inadequacy, the narcissistic abuser does his best to destroy everybody else's celebratory mood.

13. Raging narcissists usually perceive their reaction to have been triggered by an intentional provocation with a hostile purpose.

14. Deep inside, the narcissist hates himself and doubts his own worth. He deplores his desperate addiction to Narcissistic Supply. He judges his actions and intentions harshly and sadistically.

15. When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives: self-directed confabulations which place him at the center of others' allegedly malign attention.