It is curious, but any internet user who frequents a general-interest forum on the net will sooner or later come across the continuous and prolific deification and magnification of supposed narcissists by supposed victims.
Without delving into whatever truth there may be in all the victims' complaints, I would like to focus here on the dynamics of the deception from a non-compassionate perspective.
One of the first things a budding con artist learns is that it is very complicated to scam an honest person, but relatively easy to scam a dishonest one. The "estampita" scam—the quintessential con of Francoist Spain, which today seems very outdated and naive to us, yet one we still fall for when we encounter its variations (the case of Javier Milei when he advertised a cryptocurrency whose collapse generated massive losses for investors who trusted the leader)—consisted of the con artist stopping a future victim on the street, posing as a person with an intellectual disability and showing them a bag full of what appeared to be legal tender. Next, the con artist would claim that those papers were nothing more than stickers or "estampitas" and that he had many more stored at home. Then, a second con artist would appear, pretending not to know the other with the supposed intellectual disability, approaching as a shill, offering the first one a good amount of money for the entire contents of the bag full of stickers. When the first con artist agreed to the sale, quite happily, the second would lament not having the money on him at that moment, implying that he could not scam the poor disabled person. If the victim was honest and told the supposed intellectually disabled person that those stickers were very valuable and that he should keep them safe, the scam would fail miserably; but if, on the other hand, the victim yielded to greed and did not hesitate to offer the person money for the stickers, believing they were cheating him, later—when both con artists had already fled—they would discover, enraged, that the bag full of what they thought were bills was nothing but painted scraps of paper, and they had been vilely scammed.
Just as in the "estampita" scam, one of the most important factors for the con to work was the ability of the con artists to identify someone potentially arrogant, greedy, dishonest, and foolish—a "cuñado"—and exploit their own capital sins, narcissists also possess a greater capacity to detect their future victims. It is, in a way, a practical and intuitive knowledge—like the unconscious knowledge transmitted after many hours of practice to a pianist's fingers to accurately execute the score their eyes observe—and this knowledge stems from the knowledge of themselves and of their mothers, the type of woman who modelled them to be the way they are.
Just as the narcissist’s mother is essentially another narcissist—a narcissist who perhaps does not know it because she does not want to know it—, the narcissist’s victim is one as well. Both are narcissists by proxy—narcissists who project their own narcissism onto another, whether it be a son or a boyfriend or lover. The queen mother birthed a new king, and the princess and the pea found her imposing prince. The great difference is that the narcissist’s mother deals with a child—the future narcissist she will model—, while the victim deals with the adult, much more structured and skilled at playing his cards in the emotionally destructive relationship that will be established.
The narcissist’s mother is a mother who essentially produces monsters. One will be the narcissist himself, a version of the Jekyll & Hyde monster, split between his charming side and his perverse alter ego; the other will be the Frankenstein monster, the monster incapable of satisfying her maternal expectations, the hysterical monster, condemned to continuous complaining and vital dissatisfaction due to the disdain and contempt of its creator.
The narcissist’s victim will also go from being the princess and the pea to being the Frankenstein monster in the narcissist’s eyes; from being rewarded in her palace of dreams and narcissistic delusions, to being exiled back to her hysterical structure—a structure that likely leads her to exhibit a higher degree of narcissism in relation to other ordinary men and women—though at the same time lower than that of the narcissist himself, which would explain why she ended up as a victim—, and that will lead to her long and excessive exposure in a relationship doomed to failure and emotional destruction, living immersed in the jouissance that occurs in her persistent and conflictual contest with the prince turned into a master and executioner, as well as her subsequent and excessive continuous complaining and vital dissatisfaction—all the while continuing to deify the prince turned frog in a kind of reincarnation of evil on earth, of a genius of evil.
Most of the supposed victims of the narcissist are not victims of Hannibal Lecter or Dorian Gray; they are victims of normal, run-of-the-mill louts, some not even narcissists in the classical and psychiatric sense, but simple arrogant and haughty men whom other women would have discarded in ten minutes. And if they continue to magnify and deify them, it is often because they still refuse to see themselves as they are, or worse, what they have become.
Accessed 102 times