The Narcissist’s Weapon of Language

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

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"A sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use."

(Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving)

“He spoke with deliberation, occasionally emphasizing, somewhat dramatically, with his voice or by gesture, a remark which he deemed of transcendent importance, or chuckling at the mention of some incident which he considered amusing ... He objected strenuously to the ‘continuity of his thought’ being disturbed by interruption and frequently stated so in a most imperious way, intimating that the interruption had placed in immediate jeopardy of destruction some thought of vital interest and importance to the community.”

(Contemporary news reports describing Charles Guiteau, President Garfield’s assassin)

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. “Conversational narcissism”, Charles Derber calls it, replete with “shift responses” (replicas that shift the attention back to the narcissist).

Narcissists (and, often, by contagion, their unfortunate victims) don't talk, or communicate. They fend off. They hide and evade and avoid and disguise. They lecture and hector and preach. In their planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes they perfect the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches. Their speech is impregnated with first-person pronoun density: it is saturated with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine").

The ensuing convoluted sentences are arabesques of meaninglessness, acrobatics of evasion, a lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. The narcissist prefers to wait and see what waiting brings. It is the postponement of the inevitable that leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival.

It is often impossible to really understand a narcissist. The evasive syntax fast deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures. The grammar tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise the source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed of its degeneration into rigid "official" versions.

Buried under the lush flora and fauna of idioms without an end, the language erupts, like some exotic rash, an autoimmune reaction to its infection and contamination. Like vile weeds it spread throughout, strangling with absent minded persistence the ability to understand, to feel, to agree, to disagree and to debate, to present arguments, to compare notes, to learn and to teach.

Narcissists, therefore, never talk to others - rather, they talk at others. They exchange subtexts, camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts. They read between the lines, spawning a multitude of private languages, prejudices, superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumours, phobias and hysterias. Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the scent or to obtain Narcissistic Supply.

The narcissist's inability to listen and pay genuine attention stems from his overriding need to sustain his grandiosity and to rehearse his next lines, retort, or clever response while his interlocutor - really merely his audience - is talking. After all: why should the narcissist waste his precious time on listening when he is omniscient?

This has profound implications. Communication through unequivocal, unambiguous, information-rich symbol systems is such an integral and crucial part of our world - that its absence is not postulated even in the remotest galaxies which grace the skies of science fiction. In this sense, narcissists are nothing short of aliens. It is not that they employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a new Freud. It is also not the outcome of upbringing or socio-cultural background.

(continued below)

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It is the fact that language is put by narcissists to a different use: not to communicate but to obscure, not to share but to abstain, not to learn but to defend and resist, not to teach but to preserve ever less tenable monopolies, to disagree without incurring wrath, to criticize without commitment, to agree without appearing to do so. Thus, an "agreement" with a narcissist is a vague expression of intent at a given moment - rather than the clear listing of long term, iron-cast and mutual commitments.

When the narcissist speaks, there is an undercurrent, a stream of occult and dual messages that permeate the overt text. A narcissistic mother may say “I love you” and mean: “I am dependent on you, don’t leave.”, or “Look how much I have sacrificed for you. You are mine now, guilt-ridden and blameworthy!” She may exclaim: “All I want is for you to be happy” and actually mean: “I hope you remain a miserable failure. That way I get to maintain my superiority over you and have you running errands for the rest of your life.”

The rules that govern the narcissist's universe are loopholed incomprehensibles, open to an exegesis so wide and so self-contradictory that it renders them meaningless. The narcissist often hangs himself by his own verbose Gordic knots, having stumbled through a minefield of logical fallacies and endured self inflicted inconsistencies. Unfinished sentences hover in the air, like vapour above a semantic swamp.

In the case of the inverted narcissist, who was suppressed and abused by overbearing caregivers, there is the strong urge not to offend. Intimacy and inter-dependence are great. Parental or peer pressures are irresistible and result in conformity and self-deprecation. Aggressive tendencies, strongly repressed in the social pressure cooker, teem under the veneer of forced civility and violent politeness. Constructive ambiguity, a non-committal "everyone is good and right", an atavistic variant of moral relativism and tolerance bred of fear and of contempt - are all at the service of this eternal vigilance against aggressive drives, at the disposal of a never ending peacekeeping mission.

With the classic narcissist, language is used cruelly and ruthlessly to ensnare one's enemies, to saw confusion and panic, to move others to emulate the narcissist ("projective identification"), to leave the listeners in doubt, in hesitation, in paralysis, to gain control, or to punish. Language is enslaved and forced to lie. The language is appropriated and expropriated. It is considered to be a weapon, an asset, a piece of lethal property, a traitorous mistress to be gang raped into submission.

With cerebral narcissists, language is a lover. The infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrotechnic type of speech which sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay more attention to the composition than to the content. They are swept by it, intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the spiralling complexity of its forms. Here, language is an inflammatory process. It attacks the very tissues of the narcissist's relationships with artistic fierceness. It invades the healthy cells of reason and logic, of cool headed argumentation and level headed debate.

Language is a leading indicator of the psychological and institutional health of social units, such as the family, or the workplace. Social capital can often be measured in cognitive (hence, verbal-lingual) terms. To monitor the level of comprehensibility and lucidity of texts is to study the degree of sanity of family members, co-workers, friends, spouses, mates, and colleagues. There can exist no hale society without unambiguous speech, without clear communications, without the traffic of idioms and content that is an inseparable part of every social contract. Our language determines how we perceive our world. It IS our mind and our consciousness. The narcissist, in this respect, is a great social menace.

The Narcissist’s Verbose and Florid Prose

The narcissist’s writing is too embellished and ornamental. It is so cumbersome that it bothers on incomprehensible at times.



There are several reasons for such style of authorship:



1. Trying to impress and inspire awe rather than communicate and attempting to place oneself above the rest of humanity who are too inferior and stupid

to truly understand one's depth, insights, and erudition;



2. An inability to separate the wheat from the chafe, giving every bit an equal weight (in extreme cases because of vanity and grandiosity: "every idea and shred of thought of mine ought and deserves to be recorded for posterity");



3. Perfectionism and fear of the imperfect and the imprecise;



4. Underestimating the readership and feeling the need to spoon-feed them rather than leave some space for free thought and own conclusions



5. "Stream of consciousness" recording (documentation) of every passing thought process in real-time and as it unfolds.



6. Feeling uncertain about the subject matter and disguising this deficiency (or cognitive deficit) with verbiage.

Based on my Balkan and Central and Eastern Europe essays:

http://ceeandbalkan.tripod.com

http://samvak.tripod.com/guide.html

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