Time-less, Frozen Narcissist is Discontinuous

WATCH How to Tell Apart Narcissist, Psychopath, Borderline (HintStability Island, Time, NPCs)

Groundhog day, not hedgehog day. Apologies to both rodents.

Peter Thiel and his ilk champion the organizing principle of the “sovereign individual” or the “bizarre genius” (which is how they see themselves).

They are confusing self-sufficiency with selfhood. All major theories of the Self posit a relational internal reality (or object): the Self is the sum total of meaningful relationships and meaning takes time and social context to process and forge.

The narcissist inhabits an eternal present.

To the narcissist – and more so, to the psychopath – the future is either of two: a hazy, abstract, merely hypothesized concept, or an anticipated certainty, the preordained outcome of his magical thinking (he believes that he determines future events merely by thinking about them.) These two misperceptions of time – diffuse time and teleological time-inversion - are cognitive deficits and are owing to a confluence of several narcissistic traits.

The sense of time is a result of the way we process experiences.

Human development is the outcome of reflection on lived experiences and their integration into a sense of personal continuity (aka the Self). The subjective perception of time is the introspective living of this developmental trajectory.

In the footsteps of Janet, Freud observed that memories are constantly reframed and imbued with narrative significance in light of later events (Nachträglichkeit or afterwardness, retroactive attribution, or deferred action).

Owing to pervasive dissociation and compensatory confabulation, the narcissist fails to maintain a contextual or temporal-chronological linkage between lived events and this leads to a hermeneutic narrative failure which is experienced as “timelessness”.

Bion called is coherence: mental integration and the generation of meaning which is time-consuming and involves making sense of emotions (the K or Knowledge link). Sensory experiences are raw (unprocessed and unintegrated) and chaotic (beta elements). The human mind attempts to meaningfully cohere them into organized thoughts and images (alpha elements). In the Kleinian lingo, this is the transition from the paranoid-schizophrenic position to the depressive one.

Again, pathological narcissism is profoundly disruptive and impedes these dynamics. Narcissist are defensively denied access to their positive emotions and even to some negative affects such as shame. They remain permanently stuck in the primordial soup of direct experience which has no antecedents or descendants.

According to Bion, in early life the mother “contains” the child, allowing it to metabolize the raw products of its novel yet threatening experiences. Gradually, we learn to contain ourselves, introjecting the mother.

In the background of most narcissist, we find dysfunctional (“dead”) mothers who fail to provide containment. The narcissist spends the rest of his/her life soliciting containment from others. This constant pursuit of maternal substitutes results in hedgehog day dynamics (stunted development or arrested time).

Winnicott’s transitional liminal space is a "third," intermediate area of experience bridging an infant's inner psychic reality and the external, objective world. Developed through "good-enough" care and the provision of a secure base, it enables the transition from magical, omnipotent thinking to reality acceptance.

This space fosters creativity, play, and symbolization, often facilitated by transitional objects like blankets or toys. It also allows the infant to develop a theory of mind and secure attachment internal working models as well as learn to self-regulate via the mother’s continuous availability and responsiveness.

Again: the narcissist’s mother fails to provide these functions. The narcissist is forever trapped in an atavistic, primitive religion-like space, replete with magical thinking, and a protective yet sadistic divinity. Time does not pass in such a frozen realm.

Instability and Lability

The life of the narcissist is inherently unstable. This makes it difficult to perceive time as a linear flow of causes and their effects. The narcissist's time is cyclical, arbitrary, and magical.

LITERATURE

In his 2008 article “The Destruction of Time in Pathological Narcissism” Otto Kernberg

In “Latency, Containment, and Paced Intelligence: Toward a Psychoanalytic Framework for AI Alignment”, Sandy G. Ansari introduces the concept of “paced intelligence” which involves latency, vulnerability, and metabolization over time (as measured by tempo, rhythm, and responsiveness).

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