Posted on August 20, 2010.
A Look At Narcissism The authors of the recent spate of financial frauds in the USA acted with callous disregard for both their employees and shareholders - not to mention other stakeholders. Psychologists have often remotely diagnosed as "malignant, pathological narcissists".
Narcissists are driven by the need to defend and maintain a false self - a concocted, grandiose, and demanding psychological construction typical of narcissistic personality disorder. The false self is projected into the world to garner "narcissistic supply" - adulation, admiration, or even notoriety and infamy. Any kind of attention is generally considered by narcissists is preferable to obscurity.
The false self is suffused with fantasies of perfection, grandeur, brilliance, infallibility, immunity, significance, omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience. To be a narcissist is to be convinced of a great personal fate inevitable. The narcissist is preoccupied with ideal love, the construction of brilliant, revolutionary scientific theories, composition or painting or the creation of the greatest work of art, creating a new school of thought, the realization fabulous wealth, the reshaping of a nation or a conglomerate, and so on. The narcissist does not set realistic goals to himself. He is always preoccupied with fantasies of uniqueness, record breaking, or breathtaking achievements. His verbosity reflects this trend.
The reality is, of course, quite different, which gives rise to a difference of magnitude. "The demands of the false self are never satisfied with the accomplishments of the narcissist, standing, wealth, power, sexual prowess or knowledge. megalomania and narcissistic sense of law are also incommensurate with his achievements.
To bridge the gap size, the malignant (pathological) narcissist resorts to shortcuts. These very often lead to fraud.
The narcissist cares only about appearances. What it is the facade of wealth and social status and narcissistic supply officer. Witness the extravagance of Tyco's Denis Kozlowski transvestite. Media attention only exacerbates the dependence of the narcissistic and does his duty to go to extremes more wild to ensure an uninterrupted supply from this source.
The narcissist lacks empathy - the ability to put oneself in the shoes of others. It does not recognize boundaries - personal, corporate or legal. Everything and everyone are to him mere instruments, extensions, objects unconditionally and without complaint available in its quest for narcissistic satisfaction.
This makes the narcissist pernicious exploitation. He uses, abuses, devalues, and discards even his dearest and closest to the way the greatest. The narcissist is utility motor, obsessed with his overwhelming need to reduce his anxiety and regulate his labile sense of self-esteem by providing a constant supply of his drug - attention. U.S. officials acted without compunction when they raided the pension funds of their employees - such as Robert Maxwell a generation earlier in Britain.
The narcissist is convinced of his superiority - cerebral or physical. In his opinion, he is a Gulliver hampered by a horde of narrow-minded and envious Lilliputians. The dotcom "new economy" was infested with "visionaries" with a contemptuous attitude toward the simplest: profits, business cycles, conservative economists, doubtful journalists, and analysts are cautious.
Yet, at bottom, the narcissist is painfully aware of his dependence on others - their attention and admiration, applause, and affirmation. He despises himself to be so dependent. He hates people the same way a drug addict hates his pusher. He wants to "put in their place", humiliate them, teach them how inadequate and imperfect they are in relation to self Regal and the little he craves or.
