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The Cognitive Decline of the Aging Narcissism – Failure to ever develop a REAL AUTHENTIC SELF

 

 

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The Cognitive Decline of the Aging Narcissism – Failure to ever develop a REAL AUTHENTIC SELF  

Pathological narcissism, life-crippling narcissism is a defense mechanism intended to isolate the narcissist from his environment and to shield him from emotional hurt and injury, both real and imagined. Hence the False Self - an all-pervasive psychological construct (the Big Self- Deceptive Lie) which gradually displaces the narcissist's True Self. It is a work of fiction intended to elicit praise and deflect criticism. The unintended consequence of this fictitious existence is a diminishing ability to grasp reality correctly and to cope with it effectively. Narcissistic supply replaces genuine, veritable, and tested feedback. Analysis, disagreement, and uncomfortable facts are screened out. Layers of bias and prejudice distort the narcissist's experience.

Yet, deep inside, the narcissist is aware that his life is phoney, an artifact, a confabulated sham, and a vulnerable cocoon of avoidance of the real-life and real living.  The world inexorably and repeatedly intrudes upon these ramshackle battlements, reminding the narcissist of the fantastic and feeble nature of his grandiosity. This is the much-dreaded "Grandiosity Gap".

To avoid the agonizing realization of his failed, defeat-strewn, biography, and personal history,  the narcissist resorts to reality-substitutes. The dynamics are simple: as the narcissist grows older, his sources of supply become scarcer, and his grandiosity gap grows wider. Mortified by the prospect of facing his actuality of whom he really is and has become, the narcissist withdraws ever deeper into a dreamland – delusional states, of concocted accomplishments, feigned omnipotence and omniscience, and childish entitlements.

The narcissist's reality substitutes fulfill two functions. They help him "rationally" ignore painful realities with impunity - and they proffer an alternative universe in which he reigns supreme and emerges triumphant.

The most common form of denial involves persecutory delusions.

"(The narcissist) perceives slights and insults where none were intended. He becomes subject to ideas of reference (people are gossiping about him, mocking him, prying into his affairs, and so on). He is convinced that he is the centre of malign and mal-intentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, punish him, abscond with his property, delude him, impoverish him, confine him physically or intellectually, censor him, impose on his time, force him to action (or to inaction), frighten him, coerce him, surround and besiege him, change his mind, part with his values, even murder him, and so on."

The narcissist's paranoid narrative serves as an organizing principle. It structures his here and now and gives meaning to his life. It aggrandizes him as worthy of being persecuted. The mere battle with his demons is an achievement not to be sniggered at. By overcoming his "enemies", the narcissist emerges victorious and powerful.

The narcissist's self-inflicted paranoia - projections of threatening internal objects and processes - legitimizes, justifies, and "explains" his abrupt, comprehensive, and rude withdrawal from an ominous and unappreciative world. The narcissist's pronounced misanthropy - fortified by these oppressive thoughts - renders him a schizoid, devoid of all social contact, except the most necessary.

But even as the narcissist divorces his environment, he can remain aggressive, or even violent. The final phase of narcissism involves verbal, psychological, situational (and, mercifully, more rarely, physical) abuse directed at his "foes" and "inferiors". It is the culmination of a creeping mode of psychosis, the sad and unavoidable outcome of a choice made long ago to forego the REAL in favor of the surreal, the fabricated lie of both themselves and the world. They simply never found the TRUTH or their REAL SELF during their lifetime. A completely wasted life of trivial childish musings and behaviors. Lost their entire adult life in a subjective fantasy world where they could hide from themselves and others in their make-believe world always looking for the next fix of a grandiosity narrative where they saw themselves in some heroic role, a super- hero role and so on. Desperate magical thinking to the extreme.

 

November 5 2020

 

 

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