What is narcissistic supply?

Perhaps you suspect that someone in your life has a serious personality disorder. You’ve been reading everything you can find on narcissists, sociopaths and maybe even psychopaths. You keep coming across the term, narcissistic supply. What is it?

Here’s how Tiffany Kettermann, LPC, CADCI, MPA, described it in her Lovefraud webinar, Understanding and Recognizing Narcissistic Abuse:

Narcissistic supply is anything or anyone that feeds the narcissistic person’s ego and keeps the person artificially pumped up, protecting their fragile view of themselves.

“Think of narcissism, the ego, as a HUGE tank that needs constant filling,” Tiffany says. “It’s an addiction, a need, for someone to provide admiration, attention, constant reinforcement to prove to the narcissist that his ego is protected.”

Examples of narcissistic supply, Tiffany says, include:

• Fame
• Prestigious career
• Compliments
• Being the expert or savior
• Successful partner
• Admiration
• Image of a perfect family
• Good looks

There is no official definition for narcissistic supply in the peer-reviewed psychological literature. In fact, if you plug the term into Google Scholar, references are pretty slim. So we’ll go with Tiffany’s description — it’s as good as any.

Origins with Freud

The whole idea of narcissism began with Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis in the early 1900s. The term narcissistic supply concerned the essential needs of babies and toddlers to maintain their mental and emotional equilibrium, according to Darlene Lancer, JD, LMFT.

Writing in Psychology Today, Lancer says, “Freud identified two main paths to fulfilling narcissistic supply: aggression and ingratiation.” First, narcissists ingratiate themselves, Lancer says, using charm, seduction and manipulation to control what others think. The objective is to get recognition from others. If that doesn’t work, she says, they resort to aggression and narcissistic abuse.

I was always a bit skeptical about Freud’s ideas — according to him, just about everything is based on a desire for sex. But apparently Freud did come up with the concept of narcissistic supply, and it may describe what you’ve seen.

Narcissistic supply, according to Sam

Another website, Choosing Therapy, has an article on narcissistic supply by Nakpangi Thomas, PhD, LPC, TITC-CT. She says, “Narcissistic supply is a form of psychological addiction where the narcissist requires, and even demands, limitless special treatment, admiration, importance, or validation to feed their sense of entitlement and self-centeredness.”

Then Thomas starts talking about primary narcissistic supply and secondary narcissistic supply. Where did these ideas come from? She is quoting  Sam Vaknin.

Sam Vaknin is a self-identified psychopath. Yes, there is value in hearing disorder described by someone who is disordered. But psychopaths tend to gloss over the details and lie, so how can what this person says be trusted?  Is there any research or data validating his work? If so, I’d love to see it.

Narcissistic supply in business

So far, neither of the articles describing narcissistic supply are peer-reviewed scientific papers. As I said, there aren’t many — and most of those that exist are from business researchers.

In one paper, Tom Aabo and colleagues asked the question, Do narcissistic CEOs rock the boat? They  sought to establish a link between narcissistic supply and corporate risk taking. Here’s what they found:

The association between CEO narcissism and corporate risk taking depends on the admiration, attention, and affirmation of own superiority (“narcissistic supply”) that the CEO receives given her/his current position. Thus, a narcissistic CEO with an insufficient narcissistic supply (small firm/small compensation) will crave for more and take more risks (“rock the boat”) while a narcissistic CEO with a sufficient narcissistic supply (large firm/large compensation) will protect the status quo and be reluctant to take new risks.

In another scientific article, Antoinette Rijsenbilt and Harry Commandeur found that, “Highly narcissistic CEOs undertake challenging or bold actions to obtain frequent praise and admiration. The pursuit of narcissistic supply may result in a stronger likelihood of a CEO to undertake bold actions with potential detrimental consequences for the organization.”

Romantic relationships

One of the few scientific papers in the psychology field that mentioned narcissistic supply was written by Ava Green and Kathy Charles of Edinburgh Napier University. It’s called, Voicing the victims of narcissistic partners: A qualitative analysis of responses to narcissistic injury and self-esteem regulation.

The researchers interviewed seven members of a Facebook group called “Narcissism Abuse and Recovery Hotline” about their experiences with partners whom they believed were narcissists. The participants described experiencing narcissistic rage, with incidents of domestic violence as well as psychological and emotional abuse.

Three themes emerged:

• The participants reported that narcissistic rage manifested as overt and covert abuse.
• Narcissists who displayed grandiose characteristics reacted with rage to challenges to their self-perceived authority.
• Narcissists who exhibited vulnerable characteristics reacted with rage due to a fear of being abandoned, in other words, of losing their narcissistic supply.

The authors wrote:

The data demonstrated that grandiose narcissists were perceived to show little interpersonal distress, coupled with an inability to endure committed long-term relationships, suggesting that partners serve as narcissistic supply. Participants reported feeling deceived as their whole relationship appeared to be an illusion, much like the identity portrayed by the narcissist.

Narcissists or psychopaths?

The paper includes many direct quotes from survey respondents describing their experiences. As I read them, I wondered if the perpetrators were narcissists at all. Their behavior matched what I’ve heard from thousands of Lovefraud survey respondents.

Lovefraud has conducted seven internet surveys, and in each one, we asked respondents to estimate the level of psychopathic traits in the individuals they were describing. Usually, the scores were high, possibly indicating high levels of psychopathy.

There is a lot of confusion about these diagnoses. If the participants in the Edinburgh paper were actually describing psychopaths, no wonder they experienced narcissistic rage.

Narcissistic supply means you’re an object

Here’s the bottom line: For narcissists, psychopaths and antisocials, everything is all about them. They are only concerned about getting what they want, and they will use anything and anyone to do it.

What you need to understand is that millions of people living around us are users. They do not have the ability for give and take in a relationship; it’s you give and they take. These involvements are not healthy; in fact, they can be very damaging. Narcissistic supply means you’re an object.

There is no point in being someone’s narcissistic supply. If you are feeling used in any relationship, get out of it.

If you want to know more, check out Tiffany Kettermann’s excellent webinar on narcissistic abuse. It’s prepared for therapists, but anyone can understand the information. Her discussion of how narcissistic parents affect their families is partucularly enlightening.

Learn more: Understanding and Recognizing Narcissistic Abuse