Identity Diffusion:

Identity diffusion can be a normal, though challenging part of adolescent development. It’s a time of unresolved identity crisis and unstable sense of direction, when a teen hasn’t actively explored or committed to a particular lifestyle, career, values, or beliefs. Severe or prolonged diffusion can lead to feelings of emptiness, low self-esteem, and a lack of personal meaning. Identity diffusion is also a core feature of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), specifically the grandiose type which prevents normal integration of self and ideal-self, required in a normal process of developing a stable identity. The narcissist sees themselves and others in polarized, all-good or all-bad terms, a primitive defense mechanism of splitting, linked to identity diffusion. The process works like this:

• Early development: Fails to form basis for integrated identity due to developmental trauma or parental neglect.
• Defensive fusion: Merges real and ideal self-representations, and ideal representations of others, into a defensive, pathological grandiose self.
• Absorption of ego-ideal: Grandiose narcissist absorbs functions of the ego-ideal, no longer striving toward realistic ideals. Ego-ideal is their ideal.
• Identity diffusion: Resulting self is unstable, vacillating between grandiosity and feelings of inferiority when criticized. This fragmented, unintegrated identity is the state of identity diffusion.