It is an odd fact of human physiology that we will often crave things we are allergic to, which damage us. The narcissist, lacking a sense of self, seeks it everywhere. They seek to see themselves in the eyes of everyone they meet, to be important.
And narcissistic parents seek to see in their children fragments of themselves. Like the myth of the Horcrux in the Harry Potter books, narcissistic parents leave a part of themselves in their children, and that is the part of their children they most enjoy looking at. Large segments of the child’s identity and sense of self are invisible to the narcissist. Conversely, the child can only get its parents attention by fitting into the bounds established by their need to see themselves.
I was watching “Catching Fire” today, and thought the interview part the most interesting. It seems to me the sacrificial dynamic is one that arises from a generalized inability to differentiate oneself, to individuate; it arises from a group characterized by a wave pattern without particulates and particulars.
One can identify in a voyeuristic, vicarious way with the sacrificial victims; can connect it with some latent sense of self. Now the precise problem with the narcissist is that some trauma has caused them to be afraid to exist. Identification with something or someone who is to be destroyed is, though, without danger, perhaps because being gone the victim becomes a memory, and as unchanging as the person wants. They can always have been what that person needed them to be. There are countless ways to lie, and this is one of them.
The foregoing may make sense; it may not. You decide.