The most fundamental delusion of the human being arises from their most natural vulnerability.

Meral Aydın

While strength refers to the capacity to act and to express one's will, potency refers to the authority or ability of an individual or a collective to dominance, pressure, and control other individuals or societies, interfering with their freedoms and compelling them to behave in particular ways. While strength constitutes a fundamental necessity through which a person can manifest their will and bring themselves into existence, potency may harbor within itself countless forms of distorted reality. Potency cannot sustain itself on its own. Rather, it seeks to attach strength of others to its own fictional aims, redefining reality through them and compelling others to adapt to life conditions established through force. In doing so, it attempts to make its delusional objectives appear as the indispensable reality of others—and even as the only reality that everyone ought to accept.

The most innocent delusions of human beings are woven around their most primitive vulnerabilities. It is for this reason that humanity has sought immortality throughout its history. Death is the epaulette that glitters upon the shoulder of birth. Within the internal world of the individual, this reality operates as a timeless and causeless threat.

Yet human beings were not born to stand against the realities of life or to establish potency over them. Reality is a playground where the individual’s strength and will can emerge through their own unique emotional experience. However, most people do not know how to play, and some even struggle to step onto the playground. Play unfolds outside the mind—within the actual field of reality where the realities of other people encounter one another and interact. Many individuals cannot enter these fields with their own truth, as they truly are. Others, even when they enter, find themselves unable to participate in the play of realities with others. Even in environments where people appear to coexist harmoniously within the same reality, I believe that there are as numbers of different realities as there are individuals. It is often said that every translation is imperfect. Perhaps every reality is somewhat like that as well…

Individuals read the world and the “other” not merely through what is seen or what exists, but through their own internal realities. Most of the time we feel certain about the reality we believe we know. We rely on what appears obvious and even say, “the visible village needs no guide.” Yet we fail to realize that even a star we believe we see in the sky may have extinguished years ago. Still, because we continue to see it, we would confidently bet on its presence. While quantum physics divides the apparent immutability of physical laws into different dimensions, we can only infer the existence of quarks—the fundamental particles of matter’s smallest components—through the observation of hadrons.

What, then, may occur within the infinite creativity of the human mind? Can the mind reorganize the reality it receives from the world according to its own internal references? Can the unconscious create its own timeless states? Can a core affect, in its search for words through which it may be expressed, reappear throughout a lifetime in its original form, emerging in similar moments again and again? Can the mind reorganize and soothe a distorted reality within itself to maintain adaptation? Can the mind draw its own boundaries? What happens if the mind carries a fiction that cannot fit within itself? Or if a mind with infinite demands and insatiable hunger reflects itself onto the world? Are the delusions of a mind that does not know how to experience satisfaction like those of a mind shaped by severe traumatic experiences?

In expressing one's will and strength, the individual must be able to maintain inner balance through an awareness of intersubjective interaction, while accepting and integrating both internal and external boundaries and limitations. For this to be possible, healthy narcissistic development must have been established from early life onward.

Healthy narcissism requires three fundamental functions:

1.     The capacity of the individual to soothe themselves in the face of frustration and disappointment—in other words, the ability to regulate and reduce the impact of painful experiences.

2.     The ability of the individual to accept both their achievements and their failures even when they are not approved by others. This capacity is closely related to what we understand as self-confidence.

3.     The capacity for self-activation: the individual’s awareness of their unique and personal desires and their ability to pursue and realize them.

Where these capacities fail to develop, pathological narcissism emerges. In such cases, vulnerability and defectiveness become the two central themes that must be avoided at all costs. Particularly within grandiose narcissistic structures, individuals exist within an endless desire to become someone important, superior, special, privileged, and admired qualities often projected onto them by their parents to compensate for the parents’ own deficiencies. I emphasize the word endless, because such individuals fail to develop the capacity to validate themselves internally or to experience genuine satisfaction. These individuals become captives to the desire to feel good by striving to be more powerful, wealthier, and more extraordinary. Yet every achievement resonates within their internal world as a new threat of loss. They frequently believe that they are envied, and they fear fading into insignificance if they cannot continually possess more and better. To preserve their superior and special position, they may even wish to view ordinary people as followers or as instruments existing to serve them. When the opposite occurs, the very existence of others may be perceived as a threat.

When we speak of pathological narcissism, these individuals experience their own mind as the only valid reality in a one mindedness concept. Demands or expressions coming from outside this internal reality are perceived as attacks. Consequently, they remain constantly prepared for assault. Differences in opinion or perspective are not experienced simply as differences, but rather as matters of life and death. If access to the resources they seek is obstructed, the situation easily transforms into a battlefield in which, for them, everything becomes permissible. Within the delusional world of the narcissistic individual, the single aim becomes the acquisition of the resources they believe should belong to them. For these structures, stopping would mean falling into the fragile and empty void they experience within themselves. Therefore, they must continuously produce and possess new resources. When production becomes impossible, they may continue their struggle by attacking and destroying the resources of others who produce or possess them, thereby creating new areas of superiority for themselves.

While the narcissistic individual pursues God-like potency, omnipotence, and infinity within their delusional world, they remain in a constant effort to distance themselves from the fragile, empty, and fragmented reality they feel within. No matter what they achieve, they may experience brief moments of well-being or happiness—but they will never feel satisfied. Happiness is like a summer breeze that briefly brushes against us; satisfaction, however, is like a river that flows into the deepest layers of our cells. A delusional existence ultimately severs even the connection a person has with their own cells.