You are in a hotel bar. It is dusk, and you are witnessing the following inexplicable scene.
A woman staggers backwards, her face crumbling in disbelief as she absorbs the sheer force of a man's brutal, contemptuous and ostentatious rejection of her flirtatious invitation.
Every step she takes in her befuddled retreat results in his incremental arousal, an empowering affirmation of his omnipotence, validation of his auto-erotic irresistibility.
He says to himself, this is so way better than actual sex with her could ever be.
What has just happened? What have we just witnessed?
We will revisit this episode soon.
Two things to bear in mind while you watch this lecture.
Pathological narcissism, sadism, and psychopathy, which is a combination of both, typically, these are aggressive defenses.
Defenses against what? Against shame. Against envy.
These deeply buried and concealed emotions which are directed at both others and at bad objects, or part objects of the good self.
So there's a shame and there is envy and they are equally other destructive and self-destructive.
Another point to ponder before you start watching the video.
Sexual sadist. A sexual sadist is a person who is sexually aroused exclusively by degrading and defiling a partner, whether consensually, in the majority of cases, or coercively.
Sexual sadism is often auto-erotic and the act culminates in masturbation, not in penetration.
The act, such as it is, it's not exactly sex. It's more like a self-affirming power play, self-arousal via exerting absolute power over another person, total control.
These deeply concealed emotions, are directed at others, but they are also directed at good part objects or at the good self.
By redirecting these emotions of shame and envy and aggression at other people, the sexual sadist becomes all good. It's a form of splitting.
He projects the bad parts, the shame, the guilt, the self-hatred, the self-loathing, the aggression. He projects them onto the sexual partner, thus rendering himself immaculate, impeccable, and above all, super attractive to himself, a phenomenon known as auto-erotism.
So now, let's return to the hotel bar and to this incomprehensible scene between the woman and the men.
Have fun.
He is sitting at the hotel bar, sipping what hopefully is red wine.
A woman approaches. She's attractive. She's witty. She's youthful and she is all over him, flirtatious, almost inviting.
What does the typical man do, a red-blooded man who is also heterosexual?
He picks up the offer and the woman. And he gets laid. He enjoys the situation. He revels in it.
But not our man in this particular bar, in this particular hotel.
He looks at her in a cold, steely, almost reptilian gaze.
And he says, have I given you permission to talk to me? Or something to that effect?
And then he cherishes her bafflement. He relishes the devastated injury that he had caused her.
The pain in her eyes, how she stumbles backwards, as if hit physically. Her pain, her hurt, her agony even.
The mental trauma that he has caused and is unlikely to go away for quite a while, these are his rewards.
He's willing to trade great sex, wonderful companionship for these few moments of divine God-like power over another human being.
He is the sadist.
Let's take another example.
There is this YouTuber and the best moments in his day are when he bans and blocks and publicly humiliates fans, admirers, subscribers and followers, breaking their hearts by shaming them in public, causing them bitter disillusionment.
He keeps the quality of his product low, his language inaccessible, ten-dollar words intended to create frustration and anger and demonstrate his contempt.
And these moments of power over others, the power to unsettle them, to cause discomfort, even anger. These are the highlights of his day.
He is the sadist.
sadist.
One last example. He works with other people but he constantly humiliates them, criticizes them, shames them in public and on camera if possible, verbally abuses and berates them.
They are service providers, they are documentary filmmakers, their friends, their family, their journalists, their decision makers, their authority figures.
He doesn't care. He is an equal opportunity sadist. Their pain is his nourishment, his fuel, sadistic supply.
He knows because he's intelligent, because he is grounded in reality, to large extent he knows that his actions will garner him ill will, will provoke people, will bring on adverse outcomes, vengeance and revenge and hatred will render him defenseless and vulnerable to other people's machinations, misbehavior, conspiracies, smear campaigns.
He knows all this. He knows he's sacrificing his own best interests. He's sacrificing good sex. He is sacrificing friendships. He is sacrificing admiration, other people's admiration for him. He's sacrificing his income. He's turning away, his audience.
He knows all this. He knows how ostensibly self-defeating and self-destructive all these actions are.
And yet he persists and perseveres because he is the sadist.
Sadistic choices, sadistic behaviors. These are typical of the sadist.
Now, they are pure sadists and they are divided in two, emotional psychological sadists, who are almost never physical, and physical sadists who interact with other people's bodies in order to create the pain that affords them with arousal.
And so we have sexual sadists, we have physical sadists, we have emotional sadists, psychological sadists.
Anything goes.
The malignant narcissist is also a hybrid between narcissism and sadism. He is also a sadist, but not all abusers are sadists. Actually, a very small percentage of abusers are sadists.
Let me try to clarify the distinction.
The sadist pleasure principle, sadism is about pleasure. The sadist pleasure principle, sadism is about pleasure.
The sadist pursues his pleasure. The sadist is gratified, gratified by torturing others. Other people's pain is the gratification of the sadist, even at the expense of the reality principle.
So the sadist puts the pleasure principle above the reality principle.
Although he is aware that his actions and choices and decisions to torment and torture other people are likely to backfire, are likely to cost him dearly, there are adverse consequences and adverse costs to such behavior.
Even though at times sadistic behavior involves self-denial, like in the first example, he could have had sex, but he preferred the frustration and the pain of the woman to having sex with her. His gratification at her hurt, at her injury, at her frustration, at her anger, his gratification was far bigger than anything he could have derived or could have emanated from the sex with her.
And the reason is of course that sadism is psychosexual. The sadist is aroused by his sadism, and the arousal is to some extent sexual.
In the sexual sadist the connection is evident and clear.
In the psychological emotional sadist it's less clear.
But there is an auto-erotic component in sadism of all kinds.
The sadist aggrandizes himself, renders himselfirresistible to himself, by torturing and tormenting and abusing and hurting other people. It gives him a sense of, as I said, irresistibility.
And so the pleasure principle above the reality principle costs, like self-denial, self-defeat, or even in extreme cases self-destruction. These costs are ignored because the benefits of the sadistic activity are much higher.
The gratification, the sense of empowerment, the apotheosis, the godlike revelation, the emanation, the manifestation, these are much bigger than anything that people have to offer, much deeper and much more profound than sex, or than being admired, or then making money, or then pursuing a career.
The sadists will sacrifice all these just to hurt other people.
To this sadist, pain is a combination of oxygen, food, sanctuary, shelter, future, and egosyntony. A sense of inner peace, a reduction in anxiety.
The sadist in this sense of course is a psychopath.
I encourage you to watch the video I posted about the connection between psychopathy and fear.
The psychopath chooses fear over love and so does the sadist.
So these are the foundations of sadism.
It is mind-boggling. It is outlandish. It's alien.
What man would choose to turn away a drop dead gorgeous woman who is offering him sex?
The sadist would.
And he would because her pain, her rejection, the outcomes of her rejection, her devastation, her anger are as good as sex or even better.
Nothing can beat sadistic supply.
The same way that the narcissist is addicted to narcissistic supply, and the narcissist would do anything to obtain narcissistic supply.
Even at a heightened cost, even if your consequences are dangerous and risky and adverse, and self-destructive and self-defeating, the narcissist would go after narcissistic supply, the same way a junkie goes after his or her drug of choice.
The sadist would go after other people's pain the same way a junkie would go after his or her drug.
So the sadist self-denial, the sadist self-destruction, the sadist self-defeat, the adverse consequences of the sadist's actions.
They're not self-punitive. This is not about punishing himself. He doesn't even perceive these as so destructive or so defeating.
They just appear to be this way.
But in reality, the sadist is after the pleasures of other people's hurt.
When other people writhe in agony, he thrives. When other people fall apart, disintegrate, he flourishes. When other people are confused and baffled, he feels safe. When other people are angry, lose control, they're so frustrated that they become aggressive, he basks in their emanation and he smirks. He finds it funny. He finds other people's pain, funny, rewarding, and he is incentivized by other people's hurt.
Of course in sadism, there's grandiosity.
Hence, the psychopathic, antisocial element in sadism.
This is a sadist feels godlike.
At the minute of inflicting pain, at the minute of dispensing hurt, at the minute of rejecting someone, humiliating someone, degrading someone, hurting someone physically or sexually, at that minute, depending on the type of sadist, at that minute the sadist feels godlike. This is a narcissistic element in sadism.
And at the same time the sadist becomes paranoid because he knows he is hurting people and he anticipates a backlash or payback or revenge or vengeance or something. He doesn't expect people to take it lying down and many of them don't.
And so this paranoia combined with grandiosity, but these are not the core elements of sadism.
The core element of sadism is pleasure.
Freud would have said that the id is out of control. The seat of instincts and drives and urges is out of control, maybe coupled with the death instinct, the destrudo or mortido instinct.
But forget Freud for a minute.
It's clear that the sadists would do anything and sacrifice anything in everyone for the single moment of feeling as if he has the capacity to dismantle people, to pull them apart, to eviscerate them.
He is like a medieval inquisitor, a torturer who relishes his job, invested in it, is cathected, emotionally invested in it.
And so many sadists regard their sadism as an art form, the artists of pain.
Sadism is totally counterintuitive and therefore incomprehensible.
I keep giving this example of the beautiful woman, attractive woman, who is offering sex and then being then rejected brutally.
This is incomprehensible to most people, most men at least, or heterosexual men. It's incomprehensiblebeyond our ken of comprehension. It's not human in many ways.
And yet, if you realize that rejecting someone is a pleasurable activity, humiliating someone is gratifying, if you perceive this, then it's easy to understand the sadist.
This actually becomes a very primitive basic drive. Other people's pain, other people's humiliation, other people's discomfort, a proof positive of the divine omnipotence of the sadist, his locus of grandiosity.
Hurting people is an exhilarating apotheosis, an exhilarating process of transforming into a divinity. It's narcissistic elation.
Indeed, the sadist becomes one with his prey, one with his victim. There's a process of merger and fusion here, which is most manifest in sexual sadism, where the sexual act brings two bodies together, or in serial killing, many serial killers are actually sexual sadists.
So this union of bodies, this merger and fusion is not limited to the corporeal, is also mental, is also psychological, and it's oceanic, it's like going back to the womb.
It's just that the sadist identifies pleasure with pain. There's a misidentification, misattribution, mislabeling here. Some pathway went wrong, some connection was put together wrongly, pleasure pain.
While most people associate pleasure with the lack of pain or the avoidance of pain or the treatment of pain, the sadist identifies pleasure with pain, other people's pain.
But not always. In sadomasochism, it could also be the sadist's own pain.
Within the autoerotic transference, the sadist identifies his own pain as gratifying and pleasing and that's why many, many sadists are also masochists because they are their own sexual objects, they are sexually attracted to themselves.
And many, many sadists apply verbal abuse, a verbal sadism, psychological sadism to themselves. They are their own victims. They self- disparage. They loathe themselves. Self-loathing. They hate themselves. And they seek to destroy themselves.
So sadism is not limited to interpersonal relationships, to an interaction with an external object. It permeates the internal space and it affects internal dynamics and internal psychological processes.
In this sense, sadism is an organizational principle. It organizes the psyche and of course has impact on object relations.
The sadist is cathected, emotionally invested, in the sense of God-like power experience when he degrades and torments others, even when the degradation is consensual, by the way.
The sadist derives pleasure even from consensual degradation and humiliation and torture and pain, inflicted pain.
Because the consent given is proof positive of the extent and intensity of the Sadis' power.
Now, this is the Sadist.
As I said, only a small percentage of abusers are Sadists.
There are massive differences between the run-of-the-mill, typical abuser and the sadist. There are even huge differences between the narcissists and the sadists.
Only very few narcissists. About 3% of narcissists are also sadists, and they are known as malignant narcissists.
So sadism is a very, very rare and limited phenomenon.
People hurt other people. People are inconsiderate. People sometimes are dysempathic. People are self-centered.
But all this does not amount to sadism because the pain caused by such behaviors is not the goal, it's not the source of pleasure, is not the fount of gratification and doesn't lead to the regulation of a sense of self-worth, does not empower, and there is no emotional cathexis in the pain it's just a byproduct or a side effect.
Unintended in most cases, the abuser is goal oriented. The goal could be a fantasy for example in the case of narcissism, the goal could be a cognitive distortion, grandiosity, the goal could be money, the goal could be sex and power, such is the case in psychopathy.
But abuses are goal-oriented. Other people's pain, other people's discomfort are not goals in and of themselves. They are occasional byproducts, uncalled for side effects, off-handedly brought on and absent-mindedly produced.
Other people's pain, other people's discomfort these are not necessary conditions they are not they're not the elements in the interaction of the abuser that render the abuser pleased and happy and thriving and content.
The pain is incidental, not the core.
Mission accomplished.
When goals are accomplished, so mission accomplished, is proof positive of perfection.
And this is the locus of grandiosity.
So the typical abuser abuses because he's pursuing some goal. The goal could be the control of another person. The goal could be the avoidance of certain events, the suppression of certain behaviors in other people.
There's an infinite number of goals, but the focus and the emphasis, the cathexis, the investment, emotional investment, is in the goal.
If the pursuit of the goal, relentless and callous and discompassionate, if the pursuit of the goal brings about, brings on pain in other people, innocent bystanders, collateral damage, that's not the abuser's concern, nor is it the abuser's intent. It doesn't intend to cause pain. It just happens.
Not so with the sadists.
The sadist goal is gratification brought on by causing pain to other people, by humiliating other people, by shaming other people, by putting them down, by taking them out, by degrading them in sex or otherwise.
It is the pain that is the destination in sadism. Not even the pain, but the outcomes of causing pain, the sense of Godlike power, for example.
While with a typical abuser, the goals are multifarious and they have nothing to do with pain per se, they have nothing to do with causing pain as a goal. At best, at worst, causing pain is an instrument, but it's never a goal and causing pain never brings on gratification or pleasure in the case of a typical abuser. On the contrary, it's a nuisance, it's a diversion, it's something best avoided if possible.
The typical abuser is affected in the sense of experiencing a godlike power when she or he attains the destination and secures the aim.
The pleasure principle is applied or triggered with the accomplishment of goals, with securing some aims or purpose.
With a sadist, it is other people's reactions. The way they are transformed, the way they are metamorphosed, the way they are molded by the pain inflicted by the sadist.
The sadist inflicts pain on other people in order to melt them down, the way we would apply heat, to melt down something, to melt down a candle.
The sadist would apply pain to melt you down.
He wants to witness your disintegration, your confusion, your disorientation, your pain, your hurt, your rage, your helplessness.
He wants this. Your impotence feeds his grandiosity and so the sadist is caught in an infinite loop where to derive pleasure, to regulate his sense of self-worth, to experience a godlike power, gratify his grandiosity or narcissies, he needs to hurt you.
And hurting you produces an outcome, but it's limited in time.
So he needs to hurt you again.
It becomes habituated. It's a habit. It's conditioned.
In many ways, the sadist is conditioned to cause pain.
While the typical abuser secures an outcome and then relents.
Of course, some types of abusers, especially in domestic situations, use or leverage abuse as a form of control, it's a form of relationship management.
But it's not exactly a habit. It's just a mode of communication, it's a mode of interaction, it's not exactly a habit. It's just a mode of communication. It's a mode of interaction. It's a mode of management. It's a mode of control.
While with the sadist, even if there's no goal whatsoever, even when the sadist defeats his own purposes, denies himself pleasures such as sex or whatever, driveshis sources of income, ruins his reputation, he can't help it. He can't help it.
The sadist is conditioned. It's like he's a perpetual mobile. He's a machine, he's a device, programmed to behave this way.
And so, one could safely say that sadism is a form of addiction. It's an addiction. A process addiction but an addiction all the same.
While typical abuse is not an addiction. It's not an addiction. It's not an addiction. It's goal oriented. It's highly technical or technocratic if you wish.
It could be repetitive, it often is, but simply because it works. It attains certain goals. I mentioned control and so on.
There's a huge gap between the two.
And only very few abusers are also narcissists.
I'm sorry. Some narcissists are also sadists. Many more psychopaths are also sadists.
But sadism is like the icing on the cake. It's never the cake itself, except for the super ultra rare condition of what used to be called sadistic personality disorder, which is really, really super extremely rare.
And it's typical, for example among certain serial killers. Otherwise sadism is always comorbid with something, comorbid with narcissism, comorbid with psychopathy, comorbid with both in malignant narcissism. It's always comorbid with something because it is never the core process, the core psychological process.
It's more like dessert. When you go to a restaurant, it's never the main dish, it's a dessert.
But of course the dessert is the tastiest. The dessert is the pleasure as far as I'm concerned with you.
And so sadism is about the pleasure of being mentally ill. It's a pleasure element of being mentally ill.
When other people ooze pain, when they exude hurt, when they crumble, their faces crumble, when they tear up, when they are visibly injured, when they become helpless and impotent, when they withdraw, then the sadist flourishes, and for these few moments he takes over regardless of the underlying primary condition.