Don't Waste Your Love on the Narcissist (Conference Presentation)
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2023-12-07

Narcissist cannot love - but he also does not let himself be loved. His bad object feels threatened and resists it. 

Love always ends in heartbreak, pain, hurt and abandonment.

Paranoid ideation and projection: love offered is not real (a fantasy) or it is fake and manipulative. It needs to be tested and probed all the time. 

Love is for commoners, not for the exceptionally superior.

Love is dependency and neediness: dependency is risk and neediness is mortifying. It challenges the narcissist’s self-sufficiency (I don’t need you, see if I care).

Love is vulnerability and therefore dangerous and weak. It demands micromanaged and coercive control to avoid a devastating loss.

Love requires adult skills and sets the narcissist - the perennial abused child - up for failure. 

Love requires emotional maturity, a secure attachment style, and a grounded center. The narcissist is an addict with none of the above: his only relationship is with his drug, the fantasy sustained by a constant influx of narcissistic supply. 

Love requires the recognition of the Other. Narcissists are incapable of othering and feel threatened by the partner’s personal autonomy and agency, an external object gone amok and which threatens the inertly perfect universe of their internal objects. 

Narcissists blindly devour and consume. They are mimicking parasites suspended in a sempiternal symbiotic fantasy, frenzily feeding off their successive hosts. 

They push away and resist any attempt to love them. Their approach is acquisitive, their avoidance preordained by their need to reenact the unresolved conflict with a dead mother. They are automata, programmed with their own shame-driven compulsion, dummies to a self-conjured ventriloquist, the False Self. A seeking homing in algorithm gone awry. 

Video presentation at the Addiction World Conference, San Francisco, September 2024

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