Wednesday, November 21, 2007

When He's Only Into Himself ...: A Memoir & Guide to Understanding a Narcissist

by Ella Scott

ISBN-10: 1434319954
ISBN-13: 978-1434319951

Book Description

Awareness of the pernicious epidemy of pathological narcissism has been steadily growing over the last decade and has resulted in a prodigious and copious output of self-help guides,textbooks,and personal memories. Still,in all this cornucopia,it is difficult to find something akin to Ella's work:part textbook,part self-help tome,part personal and painful memoir. Narcissists are an elusive breed. They are shape-shifters and the nature of the disorder renders them alien,a sub-species of cunning artificial intelligence. Their ability to mimic human emotions is unsuprpassed,their charm sometimes irresistible,and their thespian skills unequalled. Narcissists defy,therefore,well-intentioned compilations of warning signs and batteries of psychological diagnostic tests. There is scarcely anything more painful than self-delusion. The narcissist is a cardboard cutout,the mere projection of a false self,unable to love,empathize,get intimate,or commit. Loving the narcissist is an exercise in protracted futility that invariably ends in heartbreak. What you see is never what you get. The narcissist is a drug addict. His psychological survival as a coherent,functional whole depends on the attention he garners(often,coerces)from others. He is a singleminded,single-purpose automaton. Behind the elaborate facade of these Potemkin humans lurks the void. The only way to effectively defend against a narcissist is to learn from the harrowing experiences of those who fell prey to the narcissist's advances and were subsequently victimized by him(or,more rarely,her).The emerging genre of victim lit is seriously enhanced by Ella's contribution. She has gone to great lengths to acquaint herself with the latest scholarly literature and to scrutinize her own encounters with narcissists with brutal honesty. The result is a compelling narrative:the detailed anatomy of two failed relationships with narcissistic men sagely set in the framework of the most current knowledge about the disorder. Makes for a riveting tour de force of the tortured landscapes of the la-la lands of malignant self-love. SamVaknin,author of "Malignant Self-love-Narcissism Revisited"