The promotion went to someone else, and he kept the victory speech anyway. Why narcissists never admit defeat, and why the opponent never quite leaves the audience.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

He lost, and he has been winning in public ever since. The promotion went to a colleague, the department vote to a rival, or the family business to a younger brother, and still his account of what happened proceeds with the composure of a victory speech delivered long after the hall has emptied. He speaks of having been proven right, of the other party having been exposed, of a reckoning that he alone foresaw, and foresaw, it seems, with the special clarity that only hindsight affords. Observers who know the record find the performance baffling, while those who encounter only his account may be persuaded. What sustains him is the conviction that the outcome belongs to the record while its meaning remains his to determine.

Ordinary disappointment requires some accommodation of the self to the facts, a process that can be painful precisely because it demands the revision of expectations. In the case that concerns me here, the accommodation runs in the opposite direction. The facts are continually interpreted in service of an identity that must remain intact, and because circumstances have a way of reasserting themselves, the interpretation must be performed again. I call this phenomenon the performance of winning, and its peculiarity lies in the moment at which winning ceases to be something that happens and becomes something a person must continuously be.

Every contest yields an outcome and an interpretation, each with a different temporal character. The outcome is finite and dated; it occurs at a particular hour, in a particular room, and may be entered into some form of record. The interpretation is durable and indefinitely revisable, carried by each participant out of that room and into dinners, meetings, and late-night conversations for years afterward. Institutions provide procedures that let disputes reach an identifiable conclusion, relieving those involved of the burden of endlessly negotiating the same questions. A department vote, a final score, or a board’s decision provides a practical resolution, even when the parties still understand its significance differently. For the man who lost, the result becomes another piece of contested evidence, acceptable only insofar as it can be reconciled with a story whose conclusion was settled before the contest began.

Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) offers a useful vocabulary for understanding this process, though Goffman describes the ordinary practices of social interaction rather than pathological narcissism. In his account, a performance is the activity through which a person influences the impressions observers form. Its central accomplishment is projecting a definition of the situation that others are invited to accept. Goffman recognized the moral weight of this projection. Someone who presents himself as possessing certain qualities implicitly asks others to acknowledge those qualities and respond accordingly, so that every self-presentation carries a claim upon its audience. Social life depends partly upon the cooperative maintenance of these claims, and audiences exercise tact and overlook small discrepancies because the collapse of one person’s presentation can disrupt the interaction itself; a good deal of civilized life consists of not asking the colleague who has just praised the report whether he has read it. The arrangement becomes strained when someone stakes his whole standing on a single definition of events and asks the people around him to sustain it against the record. Each listener who knows what actually happened must then choose between tact and accuracy every time the story is told, and most, wearily, choose tact.

Goffman distinguished between the cynical performer, who recognizes the constructed nature of his presentation, and the sincere performer, who believes in the impression he creates. Whether the man recounting his victory at dinner believes it is harder to say than it first appears. He may deliberately manipulate his listeners, sincerely embrace an interpretation that favors him, or move between these positions as the evening wears on. The performance can become so closely tied to his self-understanding that separating conviction from presentation grows increasingly difficult, perhaps even for him. Goffman’s distinction between front and back regions offers another way of approaching the problem. The back region is where a performer can let go of the demands of his public role and reconsider what has happened, and it is tempting to imagine that, in the car on the way home or awake at three in the morning, he privately concedes what he publicly denies. Where identity has organized itself around preserving superiority, however, those private hours tend to be spent polishing the account, and the back region becomes a rehearsal room. Goffman’s observation that the self emerges as a dramatic effect of a successfully sustained scene takes on pointed significance here, because his confidence in who he is may depend heavily on the scene continuing to work.

Sam Vaknin’s Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited (1999) describes this dependence through his concepts of the false self and narcissistic supply. In Vaknin’s account, an idealized identity develops around an exaggerated sense of personal importance and requires ongoing external reinforcement; narcissistic supply refers to the attention and recognition that confirm this identity. Vaknin’s work offers an interpretive account of narcissistic experience rather than a systematically tested personality model, yet his observations illuminate an aspect of public conflict that conventional explanations of self-interest can overlook. Attention may retain psychological value even when it is unfavorable. The theatre has long understood this: a bad review is still a review, and a scathing one is at least evidence that someone stayed for the second act. Opposition can establish a person’s continuing significance, particularly when he interprets criticism as evidence that others feel threatened by his abilities or moral authority. He may quote his critics more readily than his supporters, since their irritation is the surer proof that he still matters. A man engaged in an apparently futile dispute may therefore collect rewards invisible to anyone tallying only its financial or professional costs, since the controversy provides an audience, and the audience helps sustain the identity around which the controversy has been organized.

The empirical literature approaches narcissistic self-regulation through a different set of methods. Carolyn Morf and Frederick Rhodewalt (2001) proposed that narcissism operates as a dynamic system in which an elevated self-image is constructed and maintained through ongoing interactions with others. People high in narcissism depend upon social feedback to reinforce their self-conceptions while employing strategies that can undermine the relationships through which such feedback becomes available. Their model identifies a recurring paradox: efforts to secure admiration may produce the rejection and conflict that threaten the self-image those efforts were intended to protect. Rhodewalt and Morf (1998) had earlier found that participants scoring higher on narcissism exhibited greater emotional reactivity to success and failure, including pronounced anger following certain experiences of failure. Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart, and Joseph Boden (1996), examining the relationship between threatened egotism and aggression, similarly emphasized the consequences that can follow challenges to highly favorable self-appraisals. Read in this light, the man at the dinner table is doing something more urgent than saving face. A setback has registered as a threat to his standing, and each retelling is an attempt to repair it.

The work of Mitja Back and his colleagues (2013) adds a distinction that helps explain the direction such repairs take. Their model separates narcissistic admiration, a pathway to grandiosity associated with self-promotion and the pursuit of esteem, from narcissistic rivalry, an antagonistic pathway through which a person protects superiority by devaluing others. These dimensions are positively related, but their interpersonal consequences differ substantially: admiration can encourage engaging and assertive behavior, while rivalry is associated with distrust and deteriorating relationships. Both strategies remain available after a defeat. He may ask to be admired for his perseverance while describing his opponents as dishonest or small, and the combination can be especially effective in a public controversy, where the declaration of one’s own virtue gains rhetorical force through the condemnation of those who supposedly attempted to suppress it.

Stathis Grapsas and his colleagues (2020) develop this distinction through a process model of narcissistic status pursuit. Their account describes people with elevated grandiose narcissism as attentive to opportunities for improving their standing and sensitive to information about their relative position. Depending upon how they read a situation, they may seek to elevate themselves through self-promotion or diminish the standing of others through antagonistic behavior. Status pursuit unfolds through continuing social transactions rather than through the acquisition of a permanent position of superiority. Within this framework, an unfavorable outcome becomes the occasion for a renewed comparison, and the question of who won the contest quietly becomes the question of who behaved better while it was being lost.

Here the adversary acquires a function that exceeds his role in the original dispute. In a contest organized around an external objective, the opponent presents an obstacle, and his practical significance diminishes when the objective has been secured or abandoned. In a contest organized around relative standing, the opponent becomes a continuing point of comparison, since superiority is a relation that requires someone against whom it can be established. The man who lost may therefore remain invested in his adversary long after the formal contest has concluded, especially when the outcome failed to establish the hierarchy he expected. He makes his declarations, ostensibly, to colleagues and friends, yet he composes them with one absent reader in mind. The keynote he gives the following year includes an anecdote about loyalty that only one person, not in the room, is meant to fully understand, and his account of how events unfolded dwells on how thoroughly he exposed his rival. The opponent becomes an internal spectator, seated permanently in the house even after he has left the building, and part of the performance is staged for a response that will never be seen.

Once the adversary occupies this position, continued conflict can become psychologically rewarding. A dispute gives a man somewhere to stand, with recurring opportunities to assert importance and rehearse an identity organized around having been wronged. It supplies a plot through which otherwise unrelated developments acquire meaning, so that a promotion becomes vindication while an ordinary disappointment is attributed to the continuing influence of hostile forces. Vaknin’s account of narcissistic supply suggests why even unfavorable attention might deepen his commitment to the controversy: the opposition confirms that the contest remains active and that he continues to occupy an important role within it. The grievance becomes a kind of tenure, offering an enduring position in a narrative that might otherwise have reached its conclusion, and the adversary remains useful because the performer can invoke the adversary’s imagined defeat whenever he needs to renew his claim to superiority.

The practical machinery of reinterpretation follows from this relationship. A lost promotion becomes proof that the organization could not handle someone of his candor, and a narrow defeat in the club final becomes a moral victory over an opponent who played it safe. The family business passing to his brother is narrated as the moment the old man finally lost his nerve. Those who were in the room when the decision was made tend to listen to these accounts with a particular expression, which they have learned to keep to themselves. Such interpretations are familiar human responses to disappointment, and the tendency to take personal credit for favorable outcomes while attributing unfavorable ones to external circumstances is well established. In their 1999 meta-analysis, W. Keith Campbell and Constantine Sedikides found that self-threat magnifies this broader self-serving attributional bias. The performance of winning can be understood as an intensified interpersonal expression of the same tendency, given a continuing adversarial purpose by narcissistic rivalry. Its most revealing operation is revising the standard by which victory is measured, so a contest for a promotion becomes an occasion to establish which colleague possesses superior character, and the original outcome recedes into the background.

A striking parallel appears in Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter’s When Prophecy Fails (1956), which examined a small religious group whose prediction of an impending catastrophe was disconfirmed. Some deeply committed believers responded by intensifying their efforts to attract others to the group, preserving their convictions through a revised understanding of what had occurred. In The Sense of an Ending (1967), Frank Kermode considers the broader human tendency to reinterpret anticipated conclusions when events fail to conform to the stories through which people understand their lives. Prophecies can be recalculated and expectations reorganized so that the larger narrative survives its apparent failure. The man still taking bows follows a comparable logic. An outcome that threatens his account becomes material for its reconstruction, preserving continuity between what he expected and who he believes himself to be, and the growing frequency of his declarations betrays the labor required to keep the two aligned.

Goffman had examined the social management of loss before The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In his 1952 essay, “On Cooling the Mark Out,” he considered the confidence game’s final phase, in which the victim is encouraged to accept his loss without creating further difficulties. Goffman extended this observation to ordinary institutions, identifying arrangements that help people accommodate disappointments that threaten their social identities; a dignified resignation or an honorary title may provide a tolerable account of an outcome that would otherwise feel humiliating. The gracious concession, whether a toast to the new chair or a handshake at the net, performs a related function. It brings a contest to a public conclusion while allowing the loser to keep his dignity, and it facilitates closure because no one is required to pretend the result was other than it was. For a man whose identity is staked on the contest, that ritual becomes an opportunity to continue it. His concession has a recognizable sound. It congratulates the winner in a single sentence, then lingers on the forces arrayed against him, describing the outcome as remarkable for a contest no one expected him to make close. Gratitude is usually extended, toward the end, to those who always knew the truth. In this way, Goffman’s mechanism for helping people accommodate loss turns toward preserving the very conflict that accommodation was meant to resolve.

The greater difficulty is narrative. Dan McAdams (2001) describes identity as an internalized, evolving life story through which people organize experience into meaningful continuity, and Kermode understands endings as the structures through which the preceding duration acquires significance. A story organized around the protagonist’s superiority over a particular antagonist encounters a peculiar difficulty: its conclusion must establish the superiority upon which the protagonist’s identity depends. When events fail to provide that conclusion, the story remains suspended in anticipation of another decisive moment, to be settled by some future judgment or accomplishment that promises the recognition earlier developments failed to produce. Each new achievement arrives already cast in a role in the old drama. The narrative becomes an extended middle, a perpetual second act in which vindication is always approaching and the antagonist is always about to be exposed.

Here the inquiry arrives somewhere other than where it began. The performance of winning presents itself as an assertion of mastery, the claim of someone who controls the meaning of events even when he cannot control their outcome. Followed to its conclusion, it reveals the inverse condition. The man who has made victory an identity has surrendered the independence that victory was supposed to secure, because the self he performs requires the continued imagined witness of an adversary. The opponent, who may have long since stopped thinking about the matter and who hears the latest announcement secondhand, if at all, occupies a permanent place in the performer’s inner theatre. Whatever the final tally, the adversary retains an authority over the performer’s understanding of himself, acquired simply by having once been the person against whom everything was measured. The public claim to victory conceals a private dependence upon someone who may no longer be listening.

The distinction between the practical conclusion of a contest and the psychological abandonment of the rivalry is therefore asymmetrical. The same decision can impose a result on both parties, while freedom from it belongs to whoever no longer requires the comparison. Sometimes this is the adversary, who leaves the theatre without a closing speech, indifferent to whether the remaining audience believes he lost. His departure accomplishes something the performer cannot recognize, because it consists in relinquishing the need to be declared victorious.

Goffman’s audiences sustain performances through their participation, and when the audience goes home, the performance loses its social occasion. Yet the man still taking bows continues addressing an imagined spectator whose most important seat has long been empty. He remains determined to secure a final acknowledgment from someone who has already departed, and his inability to recognize that departure becomes the clearest evidence of how completely the contest has come to govern him.

---

Further Reading

Back, M. D., Küfner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: Disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013–1037. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034431

Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., & Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.103.1.5

Campbell, W. K., & Sedikides, C. (1999). Self-threat magnifies the self-serving bias: A meta-analytic integration. Review of General Psychology, 3(1), 23–43. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.3.1.23

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press.

Goffman, E. (1952). On cooling the mark out: Some aspects of adaptation to failure. Psychiatry, 15(4), 451–463.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor.

Grapsas, S., Brummelman, E., Back, M. D., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2020). The “why” and “how” of narcissism: A process model of narcissistic status pursuit. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(1), 150–172. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619873350

Kermode, F. (1967). The sense of an ending: Studies in the theory of fiction. Oxford University Press.

McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100

Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the paradoxes of narcissism: A dynamic self-regulatory processing model. Psychological Inquiry, 12(4), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1204_1

Rhodewalt, F., & Morf, C. C. (1998). On self-aggrandizement and anger: A temporal analysis of narcissism and affective reactions to success and failure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 672–685. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.3.672

Vaknin, S. (1999). Malignant self-love: Narcissism revisited. Narcissus Publications. (Subsequent revised editions.)

Related: How Narcissism Works, a five-part series examining introjects, splitting, triangulation, smear campaigns, and gaslighting through the fictional relationship of Daniel and Lena.

See also: After Narcissistic Collapse: The Search for a New Audience