Narcissist: People are Silhouettes, Tools (Yesterday's Video Challenged)

Yesterday's video challenged. Watch it here

Q: Many say that your video yesterday about how you perceive and experience people is overly dramatic.

Sam: It underestimates the situation.

Q: In the video confession you posted yesterday, you said, and I quote: “I experience people as dim apparitions, inert characters in a boring novel or a tedious, overlong film – lifeless, except when they provide me with narcissistic or sadistic supply at which point they spring to life (like so many nutcrackers or gingerbread men) and become radiant, kinetic, idealized beings. Stuttering, then freezing frames in obsolete films or in burning celluloid photographs.” Could you elaborate on that? Do you see people like that from the first minute you meet them?

Sam: It is a form of aphantasia, an inability to visualize. Narcissists have an empathy deficit, what I call an empathy aphantasia.

When I meet someone for the first time, I see them through a glass darkly, like ectoplasm, a fuzzy emanation: faded, fuzzy, and forlorn. They are mute, as if their mouths are sewn shut. They fade into and out of them frame, there and not there simultaneously. The way healthy people regard objects through their peripheral vision.

Only when I consider people as sources of supply or partners to be inducted in the shared fantasy, do they come alive in my mind.

I then transition to the opposite pole: an intensive interest in them, an obsession with the details of their lives, a fascination with their personality.

But even then, they interest me as actors for my scripts or props for the production of my shared fantasy. I cathect them, true – but I decathect them with alarming alacrity, literally overnight. I lose all interest and I move on, not giving a second thought to them.

I experience my life and my past as a novel or a movie. I am more of an observer than a true participant. So, everyone in the book or on the set are characters, like in a video game. When the film is over and the novel had been read, the characters are sealed forever among the covers or the frames, trapped like ants in amber, a vague memory perhaps.

Q: Is it because “They cease to exist when they cease to give and I expect to be treated as transactionally”?

Sam: Yes. They are no longer of use, so why invest any scarce resources in recalling them? I do miss what I got from them: sex, supply, services, and safety. I do miss the period, their adulation at my accomplishments. But why would I miss them? Service providers are interchangeable.

Q: In the same video, you said: “People pass through my perimeter, devoid of all significance, their limbs askew, their mouths gaping. They invariably exit stage left, never to be brought to mind.” Care to explain that?

Sam: People are fleeting intrusions into my inner world. Regrettably, as a narcissist, I depend on their output. Unlike the psychopath, I am not self-sufficient or self-contained. So, I grant people temporary access to my life and mind and when they are expended and have become of no utility, I discard them the way one discards an old battery. My life is the smartphone, they are the batteries.

Q: So, this is true: “I have nostalgia for the period, for memories of abundant, high-quality supply – never for people. I don’t miss anyone ever: they are mere sepia memories trapped in the amber of my mind.”

Sam: It is true and it is a form of self-supply via secondary supply involving recall. When I recall moments of triumph and self-imputed, self-aggrandising glory, I become my own source of secondary narcissistic supply. It is then that I come as close as possible to self-sufficiency. So, I have a vested interest in erasing people from my mind: it renders me my own source of supply, it removes my ego dystonic dependency on others.

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