The lecture you about to watch deals with the development of pathological narcissism and its antecedents and roots in early childhood.
But I would like to qualify this by saying that it is very likely that pathological narcissism in later life is the outcome of a hereditary component, some genetic mutation or malfunction. It's also very likely that pathological narcissism is associated with brain abnormalities, both structural and functional.
And yet, we do not have convincing evidence for either. We do not have rigorous, conclusive studies that link pathological narcissism to any specific gene or array of genes, to any specific mutation, to any specific expression of genes, epigenetic or otherwise. The studies that we do have are unfortunately not convincing and I'm being charitable.
Similarly, we do not have studies that associate pathological narcissism and more precisely narcissistic personality disorder to any specific activities or lack of activity in the brain, to any specific brain parts or structures or organs, to any specific pathways in the brain. None. There are no studies that support such claims, at least not rigorous and scientifically valid ones.
We know that borderline personality disorder is linked to brain abnormalities and has a strong, pronounced, hereditary component. We know that psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder is similarly connected to changes in the brain, both structural and functional, and does possess a certain hereditary or genetic component. And we know that psychopathy and borderline personality disorders are members of the same family of disorders as narcissism, the Cluster B group of personality disorders in the DSM, in the diagnostic and statistical manual, the erratic personality disorders, the dramatic personality disorders.
So if borderline involves a genetic component and a brain abnormality and a psychopathy, the same, it stands to reason that there is a genetic predisposition to develop pathological narcissism later in life, and I think in due time this is going to be established beyond doubt.
However, right now, we do not have evidence to support this.
In the last 120 years, we have been studying pathological narcissism in a variety of ways in schools of psychology. And there is a preponderance of overwhelming evidence, a huge body of evidence, that demonstrates conclusively and beyond any doubt a connection between abuse, trauma and adversity in early childhood and the development of pathological narcissism.
So while we cannot say with certainty that genetics or malfunctions of the brain somehow bring on or bring about pathological narcissism, we can say with certainty that adversity, trauma and abuse in early childhood sometimes result in the emergence of formation of pathological narcissism later in life.
The definition of abuse has to be explained in this context, expanded in this context.
Abuse is not only physical, not only sexual, not only psychological or verbal. Abuse is any way at any time when the child's boundaries are breached, when the child is not allowed to separate from the parent and become an individual.
So a parent who spoils the child, pampers the child, idolizes or pedestalizes the child, a parent who instrumentalizes the child, a parent who parentifies the child. All these are forms of abuse.
Smothering is a form of abuse. Overprotectiveness is a form of abuse because the child is not allowed to develop boundaries to become an individual to interact with reality and with peers and to learn and to evolve.
Abuse therefore has multifarious forms and adversity the same.
It stands to reason that a child is born with some genetic tendency or inclination or proclivity and then mistreatment in childhood, abuse and trauma in childhood, adversity in childhood trigger these genes or these abnormalities in the brain.
And then a narcissist is born. It stands to reason, but we have no proof of this.
In science, we do not speculate. We study and investigate.
Baring this in mind, watch this lecture that I gave in Ohrid, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a world heritage site. And if you haven't been to it, if you haven't visited it, make this your next destination. Enjoy.
A child is born.
The transition from the womb is not easy. It's a major trauma.
The womb is a dark, warm and fluid place. The world is different. The light is harsh, there are sharp angles, all kinds of strange events happening. It's a major trauma.
But it is nothing compared to the next trauma.
And the next trauma is the child's mother, or to be more precise, the mother's gaze.
You see, when the child is born in the first four to five weeks, the child is unable to tell the difference between itself and the world.
The child identifies itself as the world. The child and the world and mother and everyone in the world. They are one.
Freud called it the oceanic feeling. And of course in Eastern mysticism and Eastern traditions, this is the condition we aspire to. We aspire to become one with the universe.
And yet we attain exactly this when we are born.
And for the first few weeks, the child is unable to distinguish itself from anything out there. The world is a unity.
And then the child sees itself reflected in the mother's eyes. The mother's gaze reflects the child.
Gradually the child begins to grasp, to understand, that the world is divided, the world is broken. It is the mother's gaze that destroys the unitary universe of the child.
As the child perceives itself in the mother's eyes, the child becomes, by definition, separate from her.
The first time in the child's life, there is the concept of separation.
And when the universe begins to crack through the mother's gaze, the cracks, exactly like in a physical wall, the cracks spread.
And gradually, this that used to be a unitary environment, a womb, an extension of the womb, out there, this world, this universe, falls apart, disintegrates on the child.
And this, of course, is a major, major trauma, probably the biggest trauma in life, regardless of what the child has gone through later. It's an enormous trauma.
What happens when the mother does not reflect the child?
When I say reflect, of course, I'm not talking about the physical reflection of the child in the mother's irises or pupils. I'm not talking about this.
Reflection means that the mother interacts with the child in a way that conveys to the child, communicates to the child, its separateness.
So there's a lot of work on this issue by Heinz Kohut and others, those of you who would like to study more.
And so what happens when the mother fails in this very basic obligation, this very basic duty of reflecting the child?
What happens when the mother is emotionally absent? When the mother is depressive, when the mother is selfish, when the mother has her own problems, physical problems, maybe she's sick, when the mother is physically absent?
In short, what happens when the process of reflection through the mother's gaze fails?
You realize, of course, that the condition for the emergence of the self is to separate.
You cannot have a self, or what Freud called at the time, the ego. You cannot have a self unless you are distinct, unless you are separate from all other people.
There's no such thing.
When the process of reflection by the mother fails, the process of formation of the self fails.
The child fails to develop a self, a functioning self, a core identity. There's no I.
The child doesn't develop the concept of I, because there's no feedback. There's no counterforce to convey to the child, to communicate to the child, this is where you end and mommy begins. This is where mommy ends and you begin.
If this interaction is missing, the child expands outwards and because the child doesn't meet a reaction, you know, Newton, action, reaction, because the child doesn't come across a reaction, the child continues to expand unhindered, unimpeded forever, eternally.
This expansion has a name in psychology. It's called hyper-reflexivity. And it is the core feature of psychosis. This is exactly what happens in psychosis. The psychotic person expands outwards.
So if the psychotic person has a voice in his mind, he thinks the voice is coming from there. If he has an image in his mind, he hallucinates and he thinks it's there because he has already expanded to include the room.
The collapse in the process, the disruption in the process, of the formation of the self, known clinically as constellation and integration.
The failure in constellating the self, leaves the child with a major dilemma.
At this stage, the child is merged with the mother, because the mother did not function, and did not separate herself from the child, did not allow the child to separate from her.
So at this stage the child is one with the mother. This used to be known as the symbiotic face in the work of Margaret Mahler and others. This was known as a symbiotic face.
We no longer use this term, we use the term in measurement.
So the child was fused with the mother, merged with her. The child couldn't tell the difference between itself and mother, mother and itself, itself and mother. They were one, a single entity, a single unity.
It is the job of a good mother, or a good enough mother, in the words of Donald Winnicott. It's her job to push the child away. A good mother pushes the child away.
That is the precondition for personal autonomy, independence, agency, later in life. The child needs to be pushed away so that the child is able to say, this force that is pushing me away cannot be me. It cannot be me. It must be someone else, or there must be something else.
The minute this thought enters the child's brain, there is something there that is pushing me away. At that moment, the self is born. At that very second, the self is born.
The child says, oh, there is my self, and there is something out there which later the child identifies as mother.
All this takes place initially in the first six months.
There is a problem though.
If the process is disrupted in the first six months and the child fails to begin to develop a self, what does a child have instead of a self?
Nothing. The child has nothing.
This kind of child remains with an emptiness, a void, a black hole.
This has been described in clinical literature by multiple scholars. Jeffrey Seinfeld, Otto Kernberg, 13, many others.
So, this kind of child goes through life and where there should have been someone, where it should have been self, where it should have been ego, if you wish, depending on your predilection, where there should have been a core identity, this thing that doesn't change, basically, no matter what happens to you in life, you maintain this delusional continuity, this belief that you are the same person. It's a counterfactual belief. It's untrue. Of course you're not the same person. But you still have a feeling that it's you.
This core identity, this feeling, is missing.
In children who are exposed to what we call dead mothers, dead metaphorically.
André Green, the famous French psychoanalyst, came up with a phrase, dead mother. When the mother is dead, not there, the child doesn't develop herself and remains stuck with an emptiness, a black hole and a void.
Of course, this condition is unbearable. It's intolerable.
Because the child keeps bumping against reality. The child keeps getting information from reality and so on. And the child needs to assimilate this data somehow. Child needs, in other words, to create a narrative. The child needs to create a story about what's happening.
But how can you create a story about what's happening when there is no author? When there is no one to write the story. There's nobody there.
You must understand, this is an absence pretending to be a presence. It's a void or a black hole masquerading as an existence. There's simply nobody there.
So of course this kind of child would have a severe difficulty to cope with reality.
And what's the alternative to reality?
Fantasy. Alternative to reality is fantasy.
If you can't cope well with reality, even as an adult, there's fantasy.
And this is what the child does. The child comes up with an imaginary friend. All children, most children, have imaginary friends, most of them. And they talk to these friends and they interact with these friends, these friends are entertaining or they are powerful or sometimes they're scary. But it's very common phenomenon in childhood.
The child who has been exposed to a dead mother, his imaginary friend or her imaginary friend, of course, could be either sex. This imaginary friend is not just a friend, is not just someone to talk to and so on.
This imaginary friend fulfills the emptiness.
You could think of it as a parasite.
You know the famous alien movies? Alien? Where the alien enters through the mouth and inhabits the body? That's what this imaginary friend does. It enters the child's mouth, if you wish, metaphorically, and inhabits the body. Inhabits the mental friend does. It enters the child's mouth, if you wish, metaphorically and inhabits the body, inhabits the mental body, the psychological body.
And then it devours the child from inside. It eats the child up until nothing is left.
And this imaginary friend has a name. It's known as the false self. It used to be called as if personality, but today we call it the false self, based on the work of Winnicott and others.
The false self is everything the child is not. The child is small. The false self is everything the child is not. The child is small. The false self is big. The child is helpless. The false self is omnipotent, all-powerful. The child cannot predict the behavior of adults. Adults terrify this child because they are unpredictable. They are crazy making, they are erratic, they are absent, they are emotionally rejecting, they are frustrating.
So the child cannot predict the behavior of these adults. The false self, the imaginary friend, is all knowing, omniscient. The false self is everything this small terrified child wants to be and cannot be.
And so the child makes a choice. I will, the child says, I will sacrifice my true self because my true self sucks. My true self is dysfunctional. It's not working. My true self is maladaptive, the child says, so to speak.
The child rejects the true self, rejects itself, and says, here's an alternative. It's a much superior alternative. Omniscient, omnipotent, all-powerful, all-knowing, brilliant, perfect.
What am I describing? I'm describing God. I'm describing a divinity.
In other words, the child invents primitive religion. That's what happens.
When the child is exposed to parental figures which are dysfunctional, which are rejecting, which are frustrating parental figures that don't allow the child to become at that point, the child makes this choice and the choice is actually a primitive religion.
What does a child do? Think of it. Think about it for a minute. The child invents a god. The child invents a deity. The child invents a divinity.
The false self is totally godlike. It's a godhead.
What do we do when we have a god? The first thing is primitive, because the child is primitive, yes? The child doesn't have a PhD, he's not a professor of psychology, so it's primitive, small.
What did primitive people do when they invented deities? What's the first thing they did?
Human sacrifice. Human sacrifice.
And that's what the child does. The child sacrifices itself to this God, the true self. The child says, my monarch, my God, here I am, here is my human sacrifice.
And at that point, the child vanishes for all practical purposes. The true self is totally suspended and disabled. And the only thing that's left is the false self.
The reason the child invents the false self and then becomes the false self is known in psychology as internalized bad object, or it was known in the 1930s as primitive superego.
I'm mentioning these things in case you want to go online and study more because it's a fascinating topic. I find it fascinating at least.
And so this kind of child, because this child is ignored by the parents, neglected by the parents, abandoned by the parents, rejected, sometimes abused physically, sexually, psychologically, and sometimes abused in other ways.
Many, many parental behaviors that we think are very nice, we say, wow, these are good parents. These are actually abusive behaviors.
For example, if you spoil the child, if you pamper the child, if you pedestalize the child, if you put the child on a pedestal, if you idolize the child, that's abuse. That's abusive.
Because you're isolating the child from reality. You're providing the child with wrong feedback, fallacious feedback. And usually you're overprotective and also preventing the child from interacting with peers. This is highly abusive behavior.
If you use the child as a parent, as a mother or as a father, if you use the child to realize your unfulfilled dreams and wishes. You wanted to be a pianist, you couldn't, your child will be a pianist. Or you're a medical doctor, your child will be a medical doctor.
If you are instrumentalizing the child, that is abuse. If you are parentifying the child, if you're using the child as your own mother, as your own father, many parents are immature, many parents are insecure, many parents are narcissistic.
And so what they do, they use the children as parents. The children parent them. The children become the parents.
And sometimes it involves emotional incest, where the mother uses her boy as a surrogate husband, as a substitute to the husband, or the father uses the daughter as a substitute for the wife.
These are all extremely abusive behaviors.
And so this child is abused, this child is traumatized because at this early age, these children don't have defenses. They don't even have evolved psychological defense mechanisms.
We'll talk about it a bit later.
There's no way for them to protect themselves against such behavior.
So they say, well, it's not mommy's fault. It's not mommy's fault. It's not my fault. I am bad. I am unworthy. I deserve to be punished. I deserve to be abused and so.
Because think about it for a minute. If you're a child and you're four years old, and mother mistreats you, abuses you, traumatizes you.
You have two options.
You can say, I'm good, mother is bad. Or you can say, mother is good, I'm bad.
If you say I'm good, mother is bad, you're in big trouble.
Because if mother is bad, you're dead. It's terrifying to think that mother is bad because you depend on mother for your survival.
So the outcome is something known as the moral default. The moral default is the child says, I am bad. Mami is all good, I'm all bad.
This is known as splitting defense. We'll discuss it a bit later.
And so the child develops an internalized bad object.
What is an internalized bad object? It's voices, voices inside the child. We all have these voices. Healthy and unhealthy people, we all have these voices. These voices are known as introjects.
So the child has these voices and the voices tell the child, you're stupid, you're ugly, you're unworthy, you're bad, you deserve to be punished, you deserve to be ignored, deserve to be neglected. She is doing the right thing when she's mistreating you.
And this is the internal bad object.
The false self compensates for the internal bad object.
Because the false self says, you are godlike, you are perfect, you're brilliant, you're amazing, you're super intelligent, you're genius, you're this, you're that.
So the false self silences the internal bad object.
We call this compensatory narcissism. This process is known as compensatory narcissism.
And this is at the core of today's lecture.
A bit later, between the ages of 13 months and 36 months, healthy, healthy normal children begin to separate from the mother.
Now, before I continue, usually at this stage, someone raises a hand and said, what about the father? Why do you keep accusing mothers and attacking mothers and so and so forth.
Well, probably because of my mother, but the reason is that the father is psychologically unimportant until age more or less three.
This is the work of Bowlby and many others. Everything that you have become females and males, women and men, there's no difference. Everything that you become in some respects depends crucially on the mother, until age three.
At age three, the father enters the picture, and the father is a socialization agent. The father teaches the child how to behave in society, social scripts, sexual scripts, skills. The father teaches skills, all kinds of skills, and so on.
So there are two clearly demarcated periods, 0 to 3 and 3 onwards.
If the mother is a dead mother between the ages of 0 to 3, the damage is incalculable, and it is lifelong. It's as simple as it.
So, between the ages of 18 months and 36 months, the child begins to separate from mother.
You know the famous scenes where you see a mother standing and then the child runs. There's a small child, tiny child, and he's holding her leg. And then he lets go of the leg. He walks a few steps, falls, gets up, walks a few steps, five steps, ten steps. And then he looks back, the child looks back, and runs back to mommy and hugs their leg.
This process is separation. This is the process of separation. The child explores the world outside mummy.
But only if he knows that mommy is there. If the child knows that mommy is a secure base, mommy is a secure base, I am safe, I can explore the world, nothing bad will happen to me because mommy is here and mommy is godlike. Mommy is infallible. It's a godfee. It's a divine figure, like father, the same. So nothing bad will happen to me.
It's a form of grandiosity, actually. The child becomes narcissistic, becomes grandiose.
So I can take on the world. I can leave mommy and I can take on the whole world.
And the child begins to explore.
But then the child wakes up and say, ooh, I left, where's mommy? I left mommy.
And the child runs back.
And this is exactly, exactly how it looks. Secure base, exploration, separation, and so on so forth.
There are many, many sub-stages, Rappoport, Schmo, all kinds of things, are not going to it right now.
A dead mother, a dysfunctional mother. A mother who is insecure and is afraid to lose the child. She is afraid that the child will become too independent and abandon her. Or she's afraid that the child will be too independent and abandon her. Or she's afraid that the child will be hurt, will have an accident, other kids will beat him up. So an overprotective mother.
This kind of mother will not allow the child to separate. She will not let the child separate. She is not a secure base because she is insecure and because she is absent, or because she doesn't care, or for whatever reason, she is not a secure base.
The child doesn't dare, doesn't dare to explore, to discover, to experiment. The child remains attached in an unhealthy way. It's an attachment style which is very unhealthy.
Here's a rule. Here's a rule in psychology. What you haven't experienced yourself, you cannot experience with others. If you have not loved yourself, you cannot love others. If you have not separated from mother, you can never separate from others.
Now why is this important?
Because in adult relationships, in adult relationships, the two adults recognize that they are separate, that they're not the same. They're not one, they're separate. They also recognize that they are external to each other.
So if I'll fall in love with a woman, I know that she is separate to me, and I know that she's, luckily, outside me. She is external.
These kind of children, as they grow up, are unable to realize that other people are separate and even much worse, they are unable to realize that other people are external to them.
They have never experienced separation. They don't know how it feels. They don't know how to do it. So they don't separate.
And because the false self is a construct, it's inside the mind, but it is the only reality of the child. Real reality was too much. The child withdrew from reality into his mind.
I'm saying he's her half and half. The child withdrew into his mind and cohabited with the false self in his mind, so this kind of child, when he grows up, also cannot accept that other people are external.
What this kind of child, when he becomes adolescent and adult, what these kind of people do, they interject you.
They see you, they don't accept that you are separate, you immediately become an extension, an element, a figment of the imagination, an internal object. You're not out there, you're in here.
And then they don't accept you as external separate object as well. They interject you, they convert you into an internal object.
I call this process snapshoting in my work. They take a snapshot and they continue to interact not with you, never with you. They continue to interact with the internal object, with a snapshot because they don't know any other way of interacting with people.
In clinical terms we say that these people have disrupted object relations. They are stuck in the self-object or they are stuck in the narcissistic object and they have not transitioned to, instead of self-object, to other object.
Okay, but that's for clinical guys and girls.
So these people, when they grow up, they get married, they fall in love, they think they're falling in love. They get married, they believe themselves, they're falling in love. They have children, they work with other people, they come across many other people.
And yet, all these other people do not exist. They are not perceived as separate. They are not perceived as external. They are perceived as puppets in the theater of the mind.
There's a theater here, and like Shakespeare said, and many, many puppets are in this theater. There's a puppet for you, and a puppet for you, and a puppet for you, and a puppet for you, and all these puppets.
Who is animating these puppets? The narcissist.
And now it's time to use the N-word.
The person I'm describing and whose childhood has just taken you through is known as a narcissist.
Now we have different levels of narcissism.
We have people with narcissistic style. That is the work of Len Sperry, narcissistic style. These used to be called a-holes or jerks when I was young. These are simply not nice people.
But they are not narcissists. They have narcissistic style.
We also have people with narcissistic personality organization.
These are people whose emotional investment, cathexis, emotional investment is in themselves, not in others. They are also not narcissists.
And we have people with narcissistic disorders, multiple. We have narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder is a form of narcissistic disorder.
So these are the narcissists.
And these are the people who have gone through everything I just described and consequently failed to develop a self and because they don't have a self, they cannot, they don't believe that you have a self and because they never separated, you are not separate and because everything happens inside their minds, you happen inside their minds.
This is the background. I call it in my work othering failure. I mentioned my work because othering failure, failure to other.
I mentioned my work because, historically speaking, I was among the pioneers of the field of narcissistic abuse. I was the pioneer, the field of narcissistic abuse in the late 80s and early 90s. So a lot of the language in use today, I invented it.
So that's why I'm mentioning all the time in my work, in my work, in my work, because I want you to be clear what is my work and what is other people's work. There are other people who did work, of course.
If your experience with mother has been such that you fully anticipated, you were hyper-vigilant, you fully anticipated abandonment, rejection, frustration, neglect, etc., any minute, you also develop something known as separation insecurity. Or on YouTube, it's called abandonment anxiety. We don't use abandonment anxiety anymore. We use separation insecurity.
Soyou also develop this fear that people in your life will abandon you, will leave you, will betray you, betray you somehow. You become hypervigilant.
Hypervigilant means you scan all the time. Where is the trouble coming from? Where is the threat?
You're constantly on your toes. You're constantly tense and muscle-wise also.
So these people are very, and it's a small step from hypervigilance to paranoia.
So narcissism involves a lot of paranoid ideation. Narcissus is very paranoid because they anticipate the worse. They catastrophize. They believe in catastrophes.
So they anticipate rejection and betrayal and a knife in the back and so they become paranoid. And paranoia and narcissism go well together because the paranoid believes that he is at the center of attention.
When you're paranoid, you believe everything and everyone revolves around you. The CIA is after me. The Mossad is about to kill me. So you are in the center of attention.
So this paranoia and narcissism go well, hand in hand. It's always him. It's all very difficult.
In a minute, I will transition and begin to talk about romantic and intimate relationships of narcissists. Something I think you will find unbelievable.
Everything has to do with narcissists is not recognizable to most human beings. It's a bit alien.
Narcissists lack basic modalities and basic functions of typical human beings.
Narcissists, for example, don't have emotional or affective empathy. They do have cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy, cold empathy. But they don't have emotional empathy.
Narcissists are unable to access positive emotions. They never experience love. Can you guess why?
Because the first time they experienced love, it didn't go too well. They love their mothers. And they experienced pain and rejection and hurt.
So they learn to associate love with negative affects, with negative outcomes, and they taught themselves to suppress these emotions.
And so narcissists never ever experience positive emotions.
Narcissists like psychopaths experience negative affects, negative emotions, like anger, hatred, envy.
Yes, they are big on this.
So if you take away empathy and you take away positive emotions, what's left?
In many of my lectures and seminars, especially to clinicians, I say to them, in which sense are these people human if they have no empathy and no emotions and no ability to discern other people as external and separate and not this and not, I mean the list is so long, in which sense are they fully human?
And I'm afraid the politically incorrect answer is they are not. We are dealing with a work in progress if we are optimistic or a flawed attempt to create a human being if we are realistic.
And so we will discuss the romantic and intimate relationships of narcissists, and you will find it extremely difficult to believe and to wrap your head around it.
It sounds like science fiction, but it's all heavily substantiated on, we've been studying narcissism for 110 years now. It's one of the oldest topics in psychology, actually. Havelock Ellis wrote about narcissism in the 1890s. Freud published his famous essay on narcissism in 1914. That's more than 110 years ago. So it's an old topic. We know a lot about narcissists.
So everything I'm telling you is based on decades, more than a century.
But it still sounds unbelievable.
It sounds like some kind of lunatic nightmare.
But it's the truth.
Okay.
I will mention two more things and then we move to intimate and romantic relationships.
By the way, how do you prefer? Do you prefer that we take a break and then we continue? Or do you prefer straight? Like two hours straight? Straight? No break? Do you don't want to break? Why don't you want to break? Okay. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Two more issues that you need to know about.
Reality has proven to be intolerable and unbearable to the narcissists.
Reality has been painful as a child. It's been excruciatingly painful.
The child could not process reality in any meaningful way because if the child were to allow reality to enter, the child would have been devastated and probably disabled.
So, because what's reality?
Reality is a rejecting mother. Reality is the pain of love not reciprocated. Reality is horrible.
So the child said, okay, enough with reality, I will live here. Here is safe. Inside is safe, and I have this friend who is God, so everything will be okay. All I have to do is sacrifice myself.
Consequently, because the child turned narcissist was unable to interact with reality on a continuous basis, we have a phenomenon known as dissociation.
Narcissists, exactly like borderlines, are dissociative. Dissociation is a way to reject reality.
You can reject it by forgetting. You forget what you...
So this is known as amnesia.
You can reject it by saying maybe this is happening but not to me. It's my body here having sex but I'm not here, for example.
So this is known as depersonalization.
Or you can say maybe this is happening but it's not real. It's a dream, it's a fantasy, it's my imagination, it's not real.
This is known as de-realization.
These are dissociative mechanisms, and the narcissist uses mainly amnesia.
The borderline uses de-realization and depersonalization.
To cut a long story short, the narcissist does not have a continuous memory. Does not. He has huge memory gaps, huge. So he remembers 1% of the day and then, so how to cope with these memory gaps.
The narcissist confabulates. Confabulation is a mechanism first described in psychotic disorders. Confabulation simply says the narcissist has one memory and then another memory. And between these two memories, there's a gap. When I say gap, gap, nothing. Nothing is accessible. Maybe under hypnosis, no one tried, but nothing, accessible to consciousness.
So the narcissist says, okay, I remember this and I remember this, what happened between must have been this.
So for example, I remember that I was in bed and I remember that I'm at work. So probably I got up from bed, I took a shower, I put on my clothes and I went to work. I don't remember any of this. I don't remember any of this. But it probably happened. It's plausible, makes sense.
And then he begins to believe this story. This story is known as confabulation. He begins to believe it.
And if you tell him, no, you did not, he will attack you.
So what are you talking about? I remember this. Clearly. And he will go into details. I was wearing this and that.
So the narcissist is protective of the confabulation, defends it.
Dissociation and confabulation are critical in narcissism, and the extent of memory loss in narcissism is staggering, staggering. I can say pretty safely that narcissists forget 90 to 95% of their life.
And I think I'm being on the low side. I think it's higher. At least 90, 95%.
But they substitute for it with confabulations.
So consequently, narcissists are perceived as liars or gaslighters.
But they are not actually, because they believe their own stories, and narratives and so.
So this is something you should know.
And the next thing you should know, and the last, before we go to intimate relationships, the minute the child sacrifices the true self, the minute the child becomes the false self, there is no child anymore, obviously. There's only the false self.
What is the age of the false self? The age of the child.
So, people with narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic disorders of the self, or narcissistic disorders of character, they are all children. They are children age two.
Most common, in my experience, I've been working more than three decades in the field. I've interviewed well over 2,000 narcissists with, I mean, people diagnosed as narcissists.
So I think I have probably the biggest database in the world.
So from what I was able to establish, and there are tests, easily administered tests that determine your age, your mental age.
So from what I was able to see, the majority of narcissists are between ages 2 and 4, 2, 3, 4, most commonly 2, 3 also, a little less 4.
Very, very few narcissists are age 6 and extremely rare are age 9.
That's it.
The vast majority of narcissists are age 2 or 3, mentally speaking.
I am not talking about skills. I am not talking about semantic memory, memory about how to do things. I'm not talking about education. I'm not talking about these things.
These things have nothing to do with psychological age. I'm talking about emotional maturity, or actually the lack of emotional maturity.
Now, if this is true, and it appears to be true, it's not only my view, yes, it's the view of most of the authorities in the field.
If this is true, then we are making a catastrophic mistake when we try to treat narcissists as adults.
When we use treatment modalities, when we use psychotherapies that are intended for adults, when we use them with narcissists, it's a big mistake because they are not adults. They're children. We should use child psychology and child psychotherapies to deal with narcissists.
That's point number one.
The second point is we judge narcissists as if they were adults. We get angry at them, we argue with them, we reason with them, we convince them, we educate them.
This is nonsense.
For example, if you are stuck at age two, your capacity to learn new things or to learn at all from your experience, for example, is very limited. Very limited.
If you are stuck at age two, your ability to gauge risks, to gauge reality, is severely compromised because the two-year-old takes on the world. The two-year-old abandons mother and goes out to the world. Only a crazy person would do this.
So a two-year-old has no capacity to evaluate risks and to create scenarios about the future, to accept the consequences of his or her actions, to have a horizon, there's no time perception. All this is missing in narcissism.
Narcissists live constantly in the present, by the way.
So it's a mistake to relate to narcissists or to treat them as if they were adults. And this mistake is cardinal.
Because narcissists are children, they use what we call primitive defense mechanisms or primitive defenses.
Primitive defenses are cognitive distortions, distortions in thinking patterns that allow the child, up to age two, more or less, allow the child to cope with reality, to interpret reality, to make sense of reality, and to survive in reality.
These defenses falsify reality.
By the way, all human beings, healthy and not healthy, have defenses.
But as we grow older, as we become adults, we have more mature, more evolved defenses, which I will not go into right now.
The defenses that we had when we were two years old, they die. Because of disuse, they disappear. It's use it or lose it. If you don't use it, you lose it.
So these defenses disappear.
The way a two-year-old sees the child, the reality, I'm sorry, is not the same as the way as an adult would see reality. So the defenses are different.
The narcissist is a child, so he has primitive defenses.
Splitting. Splitting is when you see people as all bad or all good. And you cycle rapidly, so you can see the same person, today is all bad and tomorrow is all good.
But it's always all and all. All bad, all good. All black, all white, all right, all wrong. All. There's no nuances, no gray zones, nothing in between. You're the devil or you're an angel?
So this is called splitting.
Another mechanism is projection.
Projection is when there are parts of you that you dislike, parts of you that you reject, parts of you that you cannot accept, or parts of you that society does not accept.
And so you take these parts and you give them to someone else. You project them.
So for example, if you are very weak and you hate it, you don't like to be weak, you like to be strong, you would say that your wife is very weak, not you. If you're stingy, you accuse other people of being stingy. This is projection.
In its extreme form, projection is known as reaction formation.
Reaction formation is when you behave in a way that rejects who you are.
So, for example, you're homosexual, you're latent homosexual. You're gay, but you're ashamed of it. You're ashamed of it. You would never admit it, it's a weakness, it's horrible, it's disgusting, and so on.
So you would begin to persecute homosexuals. You would begin to talk against homosexuals, to attack them physically, and so on, showing to the world that you are not homosexual.
So this way, rejecting who you are. This is a primitive defense projection.
We have projective identification.
Projective identification is when I project something and then I force you to behave according to the projection.
So for example, I'm an abuser. I'm the abuser. I verbally abuse. I physically abuse. I'm an abuser.
But I cannot accept that I'm an abuser because I have a self-image that I'm a good person. So I hate the fact that I'm an abuser because I have a self-image that I'm a good person. So I hate the fact that I'm an abuser. I reject it. I don't want it.
So I would say I'm not the abuser. She's the abuser. She made me do it. She provoked me. She's the abuser. She's the one who is abusing me.
So this is projection, but then I would force her to abuse me. I would force her to act the part of an abuser. And then I'm justified. I'm validated. I'm not the abuser. She's the abuser. You see, she's abusing me.
So this is called projective identification.
So these are all primitive defenses.
Let's talk a bit about intimate romantic relationships.
In all relationships with narcissists, not only intimate and romantic relationship, but in all relationships. In all relationships with narcissists, not only intimate and romantic relationship, but in all relationships.
There's a cycle. There's a cycle, half of it has been defined before I came on the scene, and the other half I defined. So I contributed to the description of this cycle.
There is a cycle of behavior. And initially, very long time ago, it was called approach, avoidance, repetition, compulsion. You approach, and then when the other party is interested, reciprocates, you avoid, you run away.
But in the case of narcissists, as usual, it's much more complex.
So the cycle in the case of narcissism involves idealization, devaluation, discard, and replacement, and sometimes hoovery.
I will explain each one telegraphically, and then I'll give you a break.
Idealization is when the narcissist converts you in his mind into an ideal...
And again, I repeat, this is not only an intimate romantic relationship. This could be a friendship. This could be at the workplace. This could be with his boss, with his colleague, with his pastor, with his neighbor. Doesn't matter.
The narcissist converts you into an idealized person, idealized perfect entity. You can do no wrong. You're hyper-intelligent. You're super gorgeous. You're amazing. You're unprecedented. He's never had such an experience, except for the first time in his life, he's having it with you.
So you are being idealized.
The next stage, always, always, the next stage is devaluation.
You can do nothing right. You're actually pretty stupid. You may be gorgeous, but compared to others, you're ugly, etc.
So, idealization turns into devaluation.
Then the narcissist gets rid of you. If you don't get rid of him first, he gets rid of you. This is discard.
Then he replaces you and if he is very slow, he replaces you within 24 hours. He replaces you and then at the last stage he may hoover you. Hoover you means he will come back to you and re-idealize you. He will idealize you again and try to suck you in to the relationship.
This for a very, very long time was, no one understood why this is happening. For a very long time, like I'm talking 70, 8 years.
Many, many people, many scholars and so on try to understand why is this happening all the time, inexorably, repeatedly, hundreds of times, thousands of times, why? Why the narcissist has this compulsion? It's a compulsion. Why? It's a narcissist compelled to behave this way.
And I spent the last five years coming up with a proposal, a theoretical framework, try to explain why, and try to explain what happens to the other person who is caught in the relationship.
So when you come back, if you come back, if you're sufficiently self-destructive, so when you come back, I will take as an example an intimate romantic relationship.
But bear in mind, the narcissist does the same to his best friend, to his colleagues, so this is just an example of, and I will go into the romantic intimate relationship and explain to you what goes on in the narcissist's mind and how the partner is co-opted into this and the danse macabre between the narcissist and the partner?
This will be the second part of the lecture and which we all survive.
Then we will reach the third part, and that is how to recover from relationships with narcissists. How to recover and how to heal.
Why am I mentioning recovery and healing?
I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse in the late 80s. No one described it before. I also gave it the name, narcissistic abuse.
And many scholars at the time asked me, why do you need, what's wrong with abuse? Why do you need narcissistic abuse? Why do you need to add this? I mean, there's already abuse. We know about abuse and so.
And I explained to them that narcissistic abuse is unlike any other form of abuse.
In all other forms of abuse that we know, and there are many forms of abuse, psychopaths abuse, borderlines abuse, healthy people abuse, healthy. It's not true that abuse necessarily implies some mental health issue. It's not true at all.
Sadists abuse, I mean they're at all. Sadists abuse. I mean, there are hundreds of forms of abuse. They are batterers, they're stalkers, there are erotomaniacs. They are like, it's the whole universe.
No one abuses like the narcissist.
Everyone else who abuses is goal-oriented. The abuser wantsto hurt you, to cause you damage, to steal your money, to torture you in some way, there's always a goal, it's always goal-oriented.
The narcissistic abuse is not about any goal whatsoever. There's no goal there.
The narcissistic abuse is about eliminating you, eliminating you, so that you can be reborn within the narcissist fantasy.
There's no way for you to become part of the narcissistic fantasy as long as you are independent, personally autonomous, a genetic, self-efficacious, as long as you run your own life, as you have your own friends, you have your own money, you have a family, as long as this is going on, you cannot be part of the narcissist's fantasy.
So he needs to isolate you. He needs to remove you from all your social contacts. He needs to take away everything you have. He needs to make you utterly dependent.
And then he needs to eliminate you, to vanquish you, to eradicate you as a person. He needs to take away your personhood so that you become a figment, an element in his fantasy within his mind, and so you become an avatar. You become a symbol, a manipulable symbol.
Very much like money. You know, money doesn't exist. It's fiction. Most money is in the banks, and so he converts you into this kind of fiat money, fake money.
This is the only form of abuse where the abuser wants to eliminate the victim because all other abusers want the victim to continue to be there because otherwise they cannot abuse.
The narcissist wants you gone in all meaningful ways. Gone.
Actually, the famous movie Psycho, yes? Hitchcock, 1960, a year before I was born. So Hitchcock in that movie there's this Norman Bates. Norman Bates runs a small motel on the roadside. And Norman Bates killed his mother. And then he mummified his mother.
And then every morning, Norman Bates goes up to her in his mother's bedroom. He takes her out of bed, he washes her, he sits her on a chair facing the windows, so that she has a nice time, and he talks to her for hours.
And this is the ideal partner of a narcissist. The ideal. This would be the ideal partner. She never talks back, she never disagrees, never criticizes.
People think that narcissists react to criticism and disagreement and conflict and so on because they are fragile and this threatens their self-perception as godlike. This threatens their grandiosity.
And to a large extent, it's true.
But there's a second reason.
If you disagree with me, it means that you exist. If you exist, you can abandon me.
This is the sequence. If you argue with me, you exist. If you exist, you can abandon me. This is the sequence. If you argue with me, you exist. If you criticize me, you exist. If you do your own thing, you exist. If you disappear for two hours, for coffee, you exist.
Your existence is a threat. A threat, because I'm a two years old. I'm a two year old.
And you can abandon me and hurt me in a way that I will never recover.
There are three ways the narcissists gets hurt.
One is known as narcissistic injury. It's when you challenge the narcissist's grandiosity, but about a specific topic.
The other one is known as collapse, narcissistic collapse. It's when the narcissist fails to obtain attention.
Narcissists are attention-seeking, as we will discuss. Fails to obtain attention, that's collapse.
And one is known as narcissistic mortification. Narcistic mortification is when the narcissist is shamed and humiliated unexpectedly and abruptly, especially in public.
These are the three forms.
And the narcissists are terrified of this.
And if you have a life of your own, if you exist in any meaningful way, then this is a threat that needs to be eliminated.
And this is the absolute laser focus obsession of the narcissist, eliminating you.
Because only by eliminating you, can the narcissists have any meaningful relationship with you?
And I know this sounds crazy.
It sounds crazy, because narcissists are crazy.
Otto Kernberg, the father of the field, suggested that narcissists and borderlines are actually, probably the second craziest people they are.
This mental illness is the second worst.
He said that borderlines are on the border of psychosis. That's why you call them borderlines, between neurosis and psychosis.
And Kernberg did not make a distinction between narcissists and borderlines. He said they're the same disorder. He said borderline is a defense against narcissism, but it's the same disorder.
So we are talking about seriously, mentally ill people bordering on schizophrenia.
This is a form of psychosis, actually.
We're not talking about just people who are not nice, they are unpleasant, they are not kind, they are, no.
They're talking about people who are no longer with us. They're not in reality. They're floating in fantasy.
And the terrifying thing, they are great at simulating normalcy. They simulate being normal.
So they become presidents of United States or they become chief executive officers or they become famous scientists.
It's what Harvey Lekley called in the 1940s the mask of sanity. They have a mask of sanity. You cannot see that they are crazy, but they are crazy.
And yes, of course, no clinician and no mental health professional and no professor of psychology should use the word crazy.
But they are bloody crazy.
If there is something you should, if there's a takeaway from this lecture, something you should remember is that a narcissist is a child.
You can forget all the rest.
The minute you reconceptualize a narcissist as a child, everything else falls into place, especially for those of you who have had children, the terrible twos and so on.
If you think of a narcissist as a two-year-old child, everything else falls into place.
Now, the narcissist relates to other people, the narcissist has relationships with other people, as interactions with other people, within something known as the shared fantasy.
The shared fantasy was first described and developed by Sander in 1989, and I borrowed it from him to apply to narcissistic abuse.
The shared fantasy is a sequence of steps. These steps arethey are compulsive, many of these steps are unconscious.
The narcissist in this sense is robotic, is totally driven, and is not aware of his motivations or his psychodynamics, though the narcissist is aware of his or her actions, which is why narcissism is not a defense. It's not an insanity defense in court because narcissist is fully aware of his action.
Narcissists also know the difference between right and wrong. They can tell the difference. They just don't know why they're doing things. They are driven from the inside.
The shared fantasy, as I said, is a sequence of steps.
Step number one, idealization, which I mentioned.
The narcissist idealizes you, converts you into a perfect entity or a perfect being.
By doing this, the narcissist is idealizing himself.
Because if my wife is ideal, if she is drop-dead gorgeous and super-intelligent and amazing and so. Then so am I. She is my wife. She is my property. She is my extension. She is an internal object. She's an element in my mind. So her perfection makes me perfect.
And this is known as co-idealization, a phrase that I coined.
Now, the idealization phase involves behaviors, highly specific behaviors.
One of them is known as love bombing.
Love bombing is when the narcissist targets you. He focuses his attention on you. He keeps telling you, amazing you are, how unprecedented, how unique, how unbelievable.
And so he love bombs you. It feels like bombing.
And so the love bombing phase leads to two outcomes.
The first one is what I call the hall of mirrors.
The hall of mirrors is the following.
The narcissist idealizes you. And then you see yourself through the narcissists' eyes. You perceive yourself through the narcissist's gaze.
And through the narcissist's gaze, through the narcissist's eyes, you're perfect, you're amazing, you're drop dead gorgeous, you're incredible, you're hyper-intelligent. You're flawless, but only through the narcissist's eyes.
He has the monopoly on your idealization. You're ideal only with the narcissists.
But it is addictive. It's addictive to see yourself this way. You cannot resist it. It's irresistible. You want more. You want more of this. You want him to tell you are amazing you are. How fascinating. You want him to look at you in a way that it is like.
So you become addicted to this and you are trapped in a hall of mirrors. Wherever you look, you see yourself.
It's as if the narcissus disappears and what remains is your image, replicated a million times in a million mirrors.
And so you're surrounded by yourself.
But it's not your true self. It's not who you truly are.
Because who you truly are is imperfect. No one is perfect, except me, of course. No one is perfect.
So you are imperfect in reality, but you are perfect in the hall of mirrors.
And you find this irresistible, and you get addicted. You can't exit. You can't extricate yourself. It's intoxicating.
So this is the first thing.
The second thing the narcissists does is known as entrainment or entraining.
Now this is a very new discovery. Ten years ago we discovered that musicians in rock bands, when they play rock together, their brain waves synchronize 100%.
In other words, there was no way to tell whose brainwaves belonged to which brain. All the members of the rock band who were playing a piece together, their brainwaves became identical.
And this is known as entrainment or in training.
The narcissist uses entrainment or entraining.
What the narcissist does, he uses words.
Now words are sounds. Words are sounds. Words have a tone. Words have musicality. Words are forms of music.
Actually, there are forms of music which use words, like rap. Rap music uses words. Hip-hop music, they use words.
So words are a musical element and component.
What the narcissist does, he synchronizes your brains.
If anyone who has ever spent time with the narcissist would tell you that the narcissist keeps repeating the same words again and again and again and again hundreds of times, thousands of times, again and again, if he abuses you, he abuses you with the same linguistic structure, with the same vocabulary, with the same syntax, with the same semantics, again and again and again.
This is actually a kind of brainwashing, but it's deeper than brainwashing because brainwashing is simply changing the cognitive content of the brain.
This is about synchronizing the brains. Synchronizing, meaning taking over, because it's the narcissist's waves that are replicated in your brain.
Not the other way. There's no reciprocity here. It's the narcissist who is the one who is synchronizing your brain, taking over your brain.
Now this sounds totally insane, but entraining and entrainment are very hot studies, hot topic, hot button studies in psychology nowadays.
And we started with music, and in 2016, we started to study verbal abuse and so on, so it's probably quite accurate that if you live with the narcissist and you're exposed to the narcissist's verbosity, to the narcissist's vocabulary and so on, your brain becomes a copy, a clone of the narcissist.
There's no form of control more extreme than this. None. You disappear. You truly become an extension. And you truly become an internal object, an element.
It's shocking.
This is done in the first stage.
At this stage, if you interview victims of narcissistic abuse, targets of narcissists and so on, they will tell you that this stage is captivating. It's addictive. It's irresistible.
And they feel that they are hostages. They feel they cannot extricate themselves. They cannot reverse. They cannot go away. They cannot change. They are totally, totally, totally immersed in the love bombing, and they find it something that they cannot live without, actually.
Victims initiate this communication. They're the ones who approach a narcissist, because in the love bombing phase, the input, the narcissist's output, the input, the feedback from the narcissist is always completely positive.
We have a name for this, of course. This is known as positive reinforcement. It's a form of conditioning.
The narcissist uses positive reinforcements to condition you, and you become like Pavlov's dog. You become conditioned.
This is not only operant conditioning where your behavior changes. This is classical conditioning.
The difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning is classical conditioning. There is a stimulus and another stimulus, and they get associated in the mind of the dog or the victim.
And so whenever one stimulus is present, the other one emerges automatically, even if it's not present.
So that's what the narcissist does.
Narcissist conditions you to expect positive outcomes if you approach him, if you stay with him, if you're responsive to him.
So this becomes classical conditioning.
You want positive outcome, you approach a narcissist. He encourages approach via positive reinforcement.
All this is not done consciously.
Psychopaths do it consciously. Psychopaths are goal-oriented. They're cunning, they're scheming, they're Machiavellian. Psychopaths know exactly what they're doing. They plan ahead. They gaslight. They lie. They manipulate. Psychopaths, in this sense, are very dangerous.
Narcissists do all this, but they're utterly unaware of the motivation. They are not aware that they are doing it.
If you ask the narcissist in the love bombing phase, why are you doing this?
I really feel it. I'm deeply in love. I never felt this way. She's amazing. Can't you see? She's perfect.
He's really into it. He believes his own confabulation.
This is the first stage.
At this stage, the narcissist begins to regard his or her partner.
Now, ignore genders. Genders are not reality. They are social constructs. Ignore gender.
So it doesn't matter if the narcissist is a woman and she is with a man, a woman with a woman. It all doesn't matter. It's the same scheme, the same schema, applies to all these relationships.
So at this stage, the narcissist begins to regard the partner, regardless of gender and genitalia, begins to regard the partner as a maternal figure.
Remember, the narcissist is a two-year-old, two-year-old in search of a mother. He's constantly searching for a mother because he never had a mother, or at least not a present and functioning one. She was upset, she was this, she was it.
So he never experienced a mother. He's searching for a mother.
And so the narcissist converts everyone, male and female, romantic, non-romantic, friends, colleagues, everyone around him, into maternal figures. Maternal figures, they become mothers.
But having idealized you, you become an idealized mother, not just any mother, but an ideal mother.
What is an ideal mother? It's a mother who loves unconditionally. Never mind what you do. Never mind your choices and decisions. Never mind who you are. Never mind anything. She loves you. Her love is unconditional.
But how can the narcissist be sure that your love is unconditional?
He chose you, he idealized you, your perfect being, now you can be his mother, but can he feel safe with you? Will you not reject him and abandon him? Will you love him, never mind what? Will you truly afford him the kind of emotions that his mother should have given him? Will you cater to his needs the way a mother does? Will you be a good mother? Not a good enough mother. A good enough mother is a mother who is imperfect. Will you be a perfect mother? Will you be an ideal mother? You know the Madonna horror complex? Will you be a Madonna? Okay.
How can the narcissist make sure? He has to test you. And the way to test you is, of course, to abuse you.
If the narcissist abuses you and you stick around, you're a good mother.
If the narcissist mistreats you, if the narcissist humiliates you, if the narcissist curses you, the narcissist beats you up, if the narcissist maltreats you and you do not abandon him, then your love is unconditional and you qualify to be the ideal mother.
Narcissistic abuse, therefore, is first and foremost a test, a test of motherhood, a test of maternal role.
Will you accept him as he is, will you remain with him, will you support him, will you never abandon him, will you never reject him? Will you never betray him? Never mind what he does to you.
And he escalates. And he escalates. And he escalates.
Because there's never certainty. Of course you could never be certain. He escalates.
And this escalation continues throughout.
The narcissist chooses you as a maternal figure because he has failed with his original mother. So he hopes to not fail with you.
He says, I will not fail. Let's try again. Let's try again with another mother. Maybe with this second mother I will not fail. Let's try again. Let's try again with another mother. Maybe with this second mother I will succeed.
So this is something known as repetition compulsion.
The narcissist repeats the early conflict and the early relationships with his mother of origin, with his biological mother. He repeats the same stages.
Remember what the stages are? Separation, individuation.
He failed to separate from the original mother. He needs to separate from you.
If you are the one, if you are the mother, then you will let him go.
Because good mothers push their children away. Good mothers allow the child to separate. Good mothers encourage the child to individuate.
So your ultimate test as a mother is to let him go. He needs you to let him go. He needs to separate.
And this is what victims and scholars and everyone fail to understand.
Why?
Why this constant process of choosing someone, idealizing them, devaluing them, discarding them? Choosing, idealizing them.
What's the aim of all this?
The aim of all this is a reenactment, a replay of the original relationship with the mother.
I found a mother, now I will try to separate from her. Maybe I will succeed. Maybe this time I will separate. Maybe this time I will individuate. I will become an individual.
And so he needs to separate from you. He needs to discard you.
But how to discard you? He's just idealized you. You're an ideal, perfect being. You've also succeeded to prove to him that you are a perfect mother because you stuck around. You did not abandon him when he tested you with narcissistic abuse. So you met all his standards and all his requirements.
How to get rid of you? How to discard something like that, which is perfection reified, perfection embodied. How to discard some?
He needs to devalue you. In order to discard you, he needs to change his view of you from ideal to devalued.
And this is the cause, the psychodynamic cause, for devaluation. It is the narcissist need to separate from you as a maternal figure that causes him to discard you.
And in order to discard you, because the discard is symbolic separation, the act of discarding you is like, I am discarding mommy, I'm discarding mother, I'm separating. You see, I'm my own man, I'm individual, I'm discarding her. It's a child. I'm discarding her.
But how to discard she's ideal? I'm going to devalue her. I'm going to change my view and I'm going to say she is exactly the opposite of what I thought.
But of course, it presents a major problem. Because if you idealize someone and then a few months later, a few years later, even a few decades later, you devalue her, your original opinion was wrong.
But you can never be wrong because you're narcissists. Narcissists are never wrong. Their grandiosity is such that they consider themselves infallible, incapable of making mistakes. They never make mistakes.
But if you're forced to devalue someone you have idealized, clearly you have made a mistake. Either you have made a mistake when you idealized them, or you're making a mistake when you devaluing them.
So there is a cognitive dissonance. The act of devaluation involves a cognitive dissonance.
And the narcissist resolves this by converting you into something called persecutory object.
The narcissist says she has changed. It's not that I haven't been, I haven't made a mistake at the time. At the time, I was right. Something has happened. She has been subject to bad influence of her girlfriends. Or she's sick. Or she sick mentally or sick physically. Or I don't know what happened. She has changed. I remain the same. I've always been right. I've been right idealizing her and I'm right devaluing her. She has changed.
So now that she has changed, she's a persecutory object. She's an enemy. She's a threat.
And that gives me the motivation, self-preservation, survival. I have to get rid of her.
And then he discards.
These are the key elements. It's a lot more complex, but these are the key elements in the shared fantasy.
Now if you look at the shared fantasy from a bit, stand back a bit, this is exactly what happens between the child and the mother in the separation, individuation phases. Exactly what happens. After the separation individuation phases. Exactly what happens.
After the separation is complete, according to Margaret Mahler and later others like Piaget and Sinha and many others, after the child is separated from the mother, he begins to see the mother more realistically. His view of the mother becomes more fine-tuned.
And so he begins actually to devalue her. The child before the separation said, mother is perfect. Mother can do no wrong. I am bad. She's good. I'm all bad. She's all good. Whatever she does, she's justified. She's beautiful also. And she's divine. And she's, that was before the separate.
After the separation, a child develops a more nuanced view of mother. Splitting stops. The splitting defense mechanism stops. And the child integrates the bad mother with a good mother. Or Melanie Klein called it pornographically, the good breast with a bad breast.
The child integrates the aspects of the mother which are frustrating and rejecting and not nice with the aspects of the mother which are really nice and loving and caring and compassion. He integrates it. He begins to have a more nuanced view of her. He sees her as she is.
And that compared to ideal, is devaluation. Of course. Because she's much less than she used to be. She is not on a pedestal anymore. She's not an idol. She's much less.
So the shared fantasy is a reenactment of childhood. And the narcissist goes through life doing it time and again and again and again.
Now I have on my YouTube channel, I have a whole playlist dedicated to the shared fantasy. I think there are over 100 hours of video there. That's how complex it is. It's a super complex structure. And there are numerous variants and so and so forth.
But this is in a nutshell, just to give you the taste.
How does it feel to be with a narcissist in a relationship?
To answer this question, we need to consult two books, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the International Classification of Diseases. These are the two diagnostic manuals that are used by the majority of the world, not by everyone, but majority of the world. Even countries like China who don't use these manuals, they actually copy-pasted the manual.
So, what do these two books have to say about the narcissists? How does it feel to be with the narcissist, to work with the narcissist, to love a narcissist, to share your life with a narcissist, to interact casually with a narcissist, to come across a narcissist on the way to the bus station? How does it feel?
First of all, and before I go into the DSM and the ICD, there is a phenomenon called Uncanny Valley. Uncanny Valley is an interesting concept invented by a Japanese, a roboticist, an expert in robotics. His name was Masahiro Mori.
Masahiro Mori said, robots will evolve and develop and become more human-like. He said, the more human-like the robot, the less comfortable we're going to feel.
Exactly opposite of counterintuitive. Our intuition is, if the robot is fully human, we will feel comfortable.
He said, no, exactly the opposite. The more it will resemble humans, the less comfortable with it.
People have uncanny valley reaction when they come across a narcissist.
Sorry, sorry to interrupt you've got some projects where robotics were developed or some massive foot on or something, AI and they look creepy and even they're scared of people that are actually building them.
Yeah, yeah, it's a well-documented phenomenon.
Very simple ones.
It's a well-documented phenomenon, the Uncanny Valley. By now, well over 55 years of documentation.
And we are seeing similar reactions when you come across a narcissist and a psychopath, which is one of the reasons I'm comparing narcissists and psychopaths to artificial intelligence or to robots.
Because they provoke, they trigger the same reaction. They look like a great simulation of a human being, but you feel that something is wrong, something is off-key, something is missing, something is awry, something was not put together perfectly, or maybe it's in the process, or maybe it's half-baked, or you feel something, and most people suppress it, of course, because if you look like a human being, you deserve the respect and the empathy.
So most people suppress this. It's politically incorrect. It's not civil. It's not okay to behave this way.
But people report this feeling of unease.
So that's the first thing. When you ask me, how is it like to be with a narcissist? You will constantly feel ill at ease. You will be on your toes. This is called walking on eggshells. You will be on your toes. You will not know what to expect. Some behaviors and traits and expressions and words would be incomprehensible to you. You will constantly try to make sense of what's happening, to decipher.
And all this is known as the uncanny valley reaction.
So we have this with narcissists and robots.
But there are things which are more clear.
I mentioned that narcissists lack affective empathy.
Now there are three types of empathy.
Reflexive empathy is when baby smiles, mother smiles at baby, baby smiles back. That's reflexive empathy. And it begins to develop at age four baby smiles back. That's reflexive empathy and it begins to develop at age four to five weeks. So by four to five weeks babies smile back at mother when mother smiles. This is reflexing.
We have cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is thinking. So when you see someone crying, you think and you say, oh, they must be sad. They must be sad because when I'm sad, I'm crying. And when mommy said, she's crying. So this is cognitive. It's a thinking process. And usually it develops by age five to six years old.
And then there is affective or emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is when you see someone crying, you feel sad. You feel sad. Because they are sad.
Now this is a lot to do with mirror neurons in the brain and I'm not going to all this mess.
But the fact is that the vast majority of humanity, luckily for us, have all three types. All three types.
Narcissists and psychopaths, but not borderlines. Borderlines have all three types. Narcissists and psychopaths have only the first two, reflexive and cognitive.
And I suggested to put them together and to call it cold empathy. Cold, like, cold.
So, that's the second thing.
After the uncanny valley reaction, when you will constantly feel uncomfortable within the relationship, you will also begin to notice the narcissist's inability to react to you emotionally when you most need it, when you need a shoulder to cry and when you need someone to listen to you, when you need a response that reflects profound understanding what you're going through, when you need an expression of emotions in your partner that reflects your emotions, all this will be missing.
The narcissists can analyze you the way artificial intelligence nowadays can analyze people. Narcissists can analyze you and narcissists could be even super insightful and super perceptive.
Psychopaths even more than narcissists. That's why psychopaths are great as con artists. They defraud you, they cheat you, they deceive you because they read you well. They understand you well, perfectly.
But in a cold way, like a machine. Narcissists the same, and you will feel that this is missing. And gradually it will become unbearable, a burden, and will grate on the relationship, will put huge stress on the relationship.
The second thing is that narcissists are afraid of intimacy, because they've learned to associate love with pain and so on. So they're afraid of intimacy. And they have something called dismissive avoidant attachment style.
So they crave intimacy or they say that they crave intimacy. Actually they crave the shared fantasy.
They are looking for a mother. So they want the mother, but they're also terrified of really developing commonalities with the maternal figure.
So vulnerabilities, they don't expose vulnerabilities. They keep secrets. They have double lives. They cheat and deceive, but automatically, unconsciously. They reframe reality in a way that makes it very difficult to you to get close to them.
Whenever you do get close to them, they penalize you. They punish you in some way.
So you express love, and they reject you or mock you or ridicule you.
So they destroy intimacy. Whenever intimacy begins to build, they destroy it in many, many ways.
I mean, there's 1,600 videos on my YouTube channel, you can imagine, in many ways.
But fear of intimacy and dismissive avoidant attachment.
Next, narcissists have no identity. As we said, there are no core identity, they have no self. They don't have an ego.
An ego is not the same as self. Ego is not the same as self.
Ego is in Freud's work. E ego is the component, the psychic component, that mediates between us and our drives, our urges, our instincts, mediates between these and reality.
So the ego is like interface, like computer screen. Inside us, there are instincts, their drives. We want sex, we want to eat, we're like animals, yeah.
And the ego mediates, brokers between these drives and reality. That's ego.
So ego is a component of the self.
Narcissists have no self, they have no identity. They don't have an ego, of course.
That's the irony.
Narcissists are not egotist because they don't have an ego.
And the other irony is that narcissists are selfless. They don't have a self.
So because of this, they don't have an identity.
Now we have a name for this. It's called identity diffusion or identity disturbance.
It's been described in borderline personality disorder mostly, but it's common in narcissists also.
So a narcissist could be one day with specific values, specific preferences, specific dreams, specific beliefs, and so on. The next day is the exact opposite.
Today is Vemeyotubo is the same. This kind of thing.
Today is a fan of this football club. Tomorrow is the opposite. Today he believes that adultery, cheating is a very bad thing, and people who cheat should go to prison. The next day he's cheating on his spouse.
See, there's no stability. There's no core. It's kaleidoscope. It's a kaleidoscope.
And the forces of reality and nature push the kaleidoscope.
It's a kaleidoscope. And the forces of reality and nature push the kaleidoscope.
And as the kaleidoscope moves on the waves, what's inside the kaleidoscope changes dramatically. No connection.
And this is known as identity diffusion.
Next is attention-seeking.
Narcissists are addicted to attention. They're junkies.
Attention is known as narcissistic supply.
Narcissistic supply helps the narcissist regulate his or her sense of self-worth.
The attention that's coming from outside allows the narcissist to sustain his self-esteem and self-confidence and self-worth.
When he doesn't get attention from outside, the narcissist collapses. He's unable to maintain this view of himself, which is inflated and grandiose and fantastic, and he collapses, he crumbles.
It's like, you know, a badly baked cake. Falls apart.
So attention is not just about attention. Attention is the fuel and the engine that keeps the narcissists together.
If you take away the attention, that's the glue. Take away the attention, everything falls apart.
So there's a lot of attention seeking.
But narcissists can seek two types of narcissistic supply.
The classical type. You're a genius, you're amazing, you're this, you're this classical type, and it helps the narcissists maintain a grandiose, inflated, fantastic, counterfactual, unrealistic view of himself.
That's one thing.
Small number of narcissists are known as malignant narcissists. Malignant narcissists are narcissists, psychopaths and sadists, all together. In other words, the perfect partner.
And so, malignant narcissists, they use sadistic supply. They derive a sense of omnipotence, being all-powerful, a sense of godlike. They feel like gods.
When they hurt you, when you're in pain, their ability to hurt you, their ability to cause pain in you, to inflict pain on you, that is what sustains them in their self-image as godlike.
So this is sadistic supply.
Narcissists are grandiose. I mentioned this.
And grandiosity means that they don't gauge, they don't perceive reality properly, of course.
If you're grandiose, you see yourself wrongly. Everything you think about yourself is wrong. Everything you believe about yourself is complete nonsense.
So it's the opposite of being attuned to reality. We call it impaired reality testing.
Narcissists are inside this bubble, which is essentially a telenovela. And in this bubble, they are everything. They are perfect. They're amazing. They're geniuses. They are this, they're there.
And they can never exit this bubble. And whenever someone tries to puncture the bubble or burst the bubble, they fall apart. They become aggressive or they become suicidal or they become depressive.
Whenever the bubble is burst and the grandiosity is challenged in a meaningful way, so that there's no escape from the challenge, the narcissist essentially becomes a borderline, emotionally dysregulated.
Because at that point, the narcissist gets in touch with his shame.
Narcissism is constructed around the core of shame. Shame of the child for having been abused and ignored and neglected, the internalized bad object.
When you burst the bubble, the narcissist gets in touch with the shame and this dysregulates the narcissist. The narcissist becomes unpredictable, erratic, overwhelmed, falls apart, and ultimately suicidal, which is essentially a borderline, becomes a borderline.
Entitlement is something different. Entitlement is this.
If I'm God, minimum God, yes? God is my deputy. If I'm God, then I deserve special treatment. I deserve to be treated by the best doctors. I definitely should not wait in the queue. You know, I should be treated. I should be immediately accepted. I should not work hard. I should make money without working hard. I should be recognized as a genius without going to university even.
Why do you go to university? I'm a genius.
So this is known as entitlement. All this is known as entitlement.
And all narcissists go around throughout their lives in the world and they demand. They demand special treatment, special people, special acknowledgement, special recognition, special.
The emphasis is on being unique.
Now, here is something that most people don't understand, and even I would say most scholars don't understand.
The importance is to be special.
You could be special in a bad way.
For example, you could be a special victim. Never been a victim like me. That's also grandiosity.
You could be a special failure. My company, when it failed, it was the biggest bankruptcy in the history of Macedonia.
It's grandiosity. Makes me special. No one failed like me. My failure was the failure, the number one failure.
So, grandiosity could be negative, not only positive. You could be grandiose about the number of women who rejected you.
It's amazing. I tried with a thousand women. Not one wanted to date me.
And he said, this cannot be a narcissist. It's a narcissist. He is bragging about his rate of failure, which is unprecedented. No one has this story. Only he has this story.
So, grandiosity can be positive, can be negative, and negative attention is narcissistic supply.
If you cannot love me, because internally I believe that I'm not lovable, I have a bad object, yes? If you cannot love me, because internally I believe that I'm not lovable, I have a bad object, if you cannot love me, if you cannot admire me, for my intellect, for example, if you cannot embrace me and accept me, okay, then be afraid of me, hate me, hate me, it's okay, it's narcissistic supply. Just don't ignore me. Just don't claim that I'm average. Never say that I'm average and never ignore me. If you have to hate me, hate me. Just give me attention.
So this is attention seeking.
Ananketya has a fancy name for obsession compulsion.
So narcissists have a lot of obsessions and a lot of compulsions. They ruminate a lot, and they have rituals.
Narcissists have many rituals that they use. I'm not going into it in depth because it's not very important.
Negative affectivity, I told you earlier, that narcissists are capable only of negative emotions. Anger, envy, hatred, but not love, joy. Joy. They're incapable of joy. They may pretend to be happy and content and cheerful and joyful.
Narcissists are antisocial. The clinical term is disocial. They are a bit psychopathic.
Now, there's a difference between narcissists and psychopaths.
Psychopaths are defiant, they are reckless.
Narcissists simply don't play by the rules automatically. They would play by the rules if they have some benefit, but when the benefit stops, they don't play by the rules.
A psychopath doesn't play by the rules as a matter of principle. No one will tell me what to do. And defiant. I have my own rules. I have my own morality. That's the psychopath.
That's the psychopath, not the narcissist.
Narcissists are prosocial because they need other people for attention. They need other people for affirmation, validation.
So they're prosocial. So what they do, they play with you. They act, they work with you, they play with you, until you are no longer a good source of supply, or until the circumstances change, or until they're tired and bored, or whatever. And then they break everything and go away.
Exactly like a child. That's what children do. They play with other children, they get bored, they break the toys and they go.
That's a narcissist.
So in this sense, the narcissist is a bit psychopathic, a bit antisocial.
Because there are moments, moments in time where the narcissist acts against society, against their law, against breaks the law, against the rules, against regulations, and appears to be psychopathic.
But psychopath is like that all the time.
Narcissists are antagonistic. They always argue with you, disagree with you, attack you, insult you, defame you. They are constantly in conflict. They are conflict prone and they actually love conflict because conflict gives them the illusion or the delusion that they are omnipotent.
If I go into conflict means that I'm godlike. I have power. I'm fearless. I'm not afraid.
And so it enhances. This is called self-enhanagement. It's a self-enhancing thing.
So they seek conflict.
Psychopaths are goal-oriented. So they will enter a conflict if it helps them. If they need to be in conflict to obtain the goal, a psychopath would do it.
A narcissist would seek conflict all the time. Where there's no conflict, he will invent conflict. Where there's no argument, he will invent a argument. Where someone agrees with him, he will find a way to disagree with himself. Always he will make a mess. It's always chaos. Always a situation where sometimes people scratch their heads. What just happened here? What happened with this guy?
And this is very typical of narcissists.
No one will ask this about a psychopath.
Because psychopath wants, everyone knows. Psychopath wants sex. Psychopath wants money. A psychopath wants power. It's very clear whatwants, everyone knows. Psychopath wants sex. Psychopath wants money. A psychopath wants power. It's very clear what a psychopath wants.
But with a narcissist, it's very unclear because it's nothing to do with goals or reality or anything. It has to do with internal regulation.
Narcissists regulate externally. They take input from the outside. They take circumstances and so, and they bring them inside, and they regulate their internal environment from the outside.
Borderlines do the same. Borderlines regulate with an intimate partner. Borderline use an intimate partner to regulate their moods, labile moods, dysregulated emotions and so.
These are people who externally regulate.
So narcissists externally regulate by conflicting, by aggression. They externalize aggression. They're always seeking to undermine peace and harmony. In peace and harmony, they feel invisible.
Because in peace and harmony, they feel invisible. Because in peace and harmony, everyone is content and everyone is the same.
Narcissists cannot accept that they're the same like everyone else. Or like anyone else, not only everyone, but like anyone.
And one way of standing out, and one way of attracting attention is to be a troublemaker, which they are.
So this is a narcissist, and narcissists are very famous for narcissistic rage.
Narcissistic rage is an explosive reaction to perceived insults and slights and criticism and disagreement.
Not always real, perceived.
The narcissist is hypervigilant.
So a narcissist would go around and misinterpret your behavior or misinterpret your words in a way that would insult him. He is actually insulting himself.
And you won't believe how far this goes.
For example, you could go to the narcissist and say, good morning. And he says, what do you think? I'm stupid. I don't see it's morning. You have to tell me it's morning I'm kidding you not.
Or you go to the narcissist and you say do you need help with this? Why? Do I look helpless? Do I look like I need anything?
Everything is perceived as an attack.
So the narcissist reacts with aggression. And this is rage. This is known as narcissistic rage.
I will open the floor to questions. I know that at least one or two of you had questions.
So you had a question?
Yes, please.
What is the relationship between narcissists and their own child?
No different to the narcissist to any other person.
The child is perceived initially as a competitor.
Then the narcissist regards the child as a source of narcissistic supply, someone to admire the narcissist and adulate, and so on.
Children are not critical, children don't disagree, children don't talk back initially, of course.
Then as a child matures, becomes, for example, an adolescent, then, of course, the narcissist begins to devalue the child and regards the child as a persecutory object.
Shared fantasy. No difference. The narcissist doesn't see any difference between his wife, his child, and you that he just met. None whatsoever.
Everyone is converted automatically into internal objects, stored, and analyzed for utility.
Can you contribute supply? No.
So it's a machine. It's a machine at work.
We all try to understand narcissists in human terms, but it's not.
It's like a father would look at a child, or mother would look at a child, oh, wonderful, beautiful, this.
Narcissists would look at a child and say, what's in it for me? What's in it for me and when? And what would be the cost? And how can I incorporate this thing?
Because the narcissist objectifies everything, everyone. How can I incorporate this element, this new element, this thing, into my shared fantasy?
I already have a shared fantasy with my wife. He is interrupting. He is disrupting the shared fantasy unless I can rewrite the shared fantasy to incorporate him or her, the child.
If I can incorporate a child in the shared fantasy, the child needs to abide by the shared fantasy. He needs to admire me. He needs to by the shared fantasy. He needs to admire me. He needs to adulate me. He needs to respect me. He needs to never criticize me. Never disagree with, etc.
If the child refuses or is incapable, a difficult child or adolescent or whatever, the child becomes an enemy, a persecutory object.
There's devaluation. And discard. and discard.
The narcissist would discard his child like this. No one has a privileged status, and no one has a separate existence. Everyone is an internal object with equal potential, and then the only question is who is activated and who is not.
That's as simple as that.
Do you want to ask?
Yes, I have several.
Several questions.
I was wondering about the cycle in the relationship.
So it said that they finished the cycle and they start new.
Do they start in the same relationship or they finish the relationship and go through?
Because I know partners, they are living a lot of years together.
So what is the cycle? Is in the relationship or it's taken to them?
Yeah. The cycle of the shared fantasy could occur within a relationship several times.
So there will be cycles of idealization, devaluation, re-idealization, devaluation, and so on.
And these cycles usually would involve discard.
Even if the two are together, there would be an element of discard.
For example, the narcissist would find a lover, cheat on the spouse, or the narcissist would go away suddenly, find a job that he has to be away for three years.
So there will be elements of discard, even in a long-term relationship.
Now there's another concept that is relevant here, and it's the island of stability.
Narcissists have one island of stability and a whole ocean of life.
So the island of stability is long term. It could be the intimate relationship, so they would have an intimate relationship with the same woman or the same man, 50 years. But they will change in the meantime 26 jobs. Or it could be the career.
They would have the same career with the same company until they become chief executive officer of the company, but in the meantime they will divorce and remarry seven times.
So one thing is stable, all the rest is unstable.
This could explain why there are shared fantasies that last very long.
But even within the shared fantasies, the dynamics are identical. It's just optically invisible.
But inside the relationship, for example, the wife can say he has changed. He used to love me a lot. Now he's not paying attention to me. He disappears.
So she experiences this.
If the partner of the narcissist is of a particular type, a psychological profile, she is much more likely to stay in their relationship than other types.
There are partners who would say, the hell with it, I'm out, I'm gone.
And there are partners who are unable to go because the shared fantasy caters to their needs, psychological needs, gratifies their psychological needs, regulates them.
The shared fantasy is used for regulation.
And so these partners are invested in the shared fantasy as much as the narcissists.
And usually these partners have very strong and pronounced mental issues.
For example, narcissism. There may be narcissists themselves. Covert narcissists are narcissists who are shy or introverted or brittle or fragile or vulnerable.
So they may be this line or they may be...
That was my second question about the covert.
It's his DSM-5 and what is the difference between over and...
Covert is not mentioned in the DSM-5 as such, but in the alternative model of narcissistic personality disorder, they talk in a way that incorporates covert, the covert picture.
Covert narcissists is something first proposed in the 70s and then in the late 1980s, Akhtar and others codified it.
A covert narcissist is someone who is in a constant state of collapse. It's a narcissist who constantly fails to obtain supply. He fails to obtain attention. He fails to be appreciated. He fails to be recognized. He fails in his career. He fails in his relationships. His accomplishments are not noticeable and so on so forth.
So this kind of person, having collapsed repeatedly, withdraws, becomes shy, introverted, vulnerable, fragile, and withdraws inwards.
And what he does, this kind of person, what they do is what I call self-supply. They supply themselves.
In their own eyes, they are geniuses. So they are their own audience.
This is a concept that I borrowed from the study of adolescence. In the study of adolescence, we know that adolescents have an imaginary audience, and they have what is known as a special fable or personal fable.
So the covert narcissistic is like that. He is his own audience. He says, others don't appreciate me because they're stupid, or because they envy me, they envy me, but really I'm a genius. I will be recognized. After I die in history, he will recognize me.
So he creates a narrative and he supplies himself as his own audience. That's one thing.
And second thing, because he constantly blames others, he has what we call alloplastic defenses. He constantly blames others for his failure, for his collapse, for his lack of accomplishments, for his defeats, he blames others.
So he becomes very bitter, very angry, and he becomes passive aggressive. He begins to sabotage. He begins to undermine. He becomes verbally abusive.
So the covert narcissist is simply a narcissist who didn't make it and consequently turned inwards and punishes everyone around for his failure.
Covert narcissist is much more, not aggressive, but much more damaging to his environment than the overt.
The overt narcissist, the Donald Trump, overt narcissists. It's easy. You see that he's a narcissist, he's arrogant, he's a bit stupid, you know, you see him coming.
And his aggression and even his violence, they're limited, they're reactive to triggers, and they are not characteristic of the total behavior.
While with the covert, aggression is all the time. Covert all the time, minute by minute, day in and day out, would undermine you, sabotage you, criticize you, prick you, challenge you, all the time.
And so gradually, you're worn out, you're exhausted, and you lose your ability to regulate your self-esteem, and you're just driven to the ground.
I mean, if I had to choose between being with overt or with covert, I would choose overt, definitely. Covert is a catastrophic experience.
Because the last question. You never mentioned treatment of the person or narcissistic perspective.
Because there isn't. We're able to successfully modify the behaviors of narcissists. So we're able to obtain behavior modification.
So if you use schematherapherapy, if you use some extent Gestalt, not very successful, if you use transactional analysis, if you use internal family systems, there are quite a few. And this is a family of treatment modalities.
And these treatment modalities, if the clinician is experienced and doesn't give in to countertransference and so on, then the clinician is able to modify the narcissist's behavior in the short term.
So there's always need for maintenance, maintenance sessions.
One example of how to modify the narcissist's behavior is to challenge the grandiosity of the narcissist, to tell him, I have here a challenge, a goal. I don't think you can make it, honestly. Even you, I don't think a narcissist. What do you mean?
And so by triggering and leveraging the narcissist's grandiosity, you force the narcissist to comply with the treatment plan.
So this is one way of doing it.
Another way of doing it is appealing to the narcissist as a restorer, a savior, telling the narcissist, she loves you so much, she's dependent on you so much. You have the total power over her. You're like a parent. You're like a god to her.
This appeals to the narcissist, right?
And then you tell the narcissist, but she needs you. She has severe problems. Only you can help her. Only you can save her.
And so this is known as the savior-rescuer complex. And you can appeal to that.
But this is limited to behavior modification.
In all the nine critical traits, or what we call trade domains, in all the nine trade domains of narcissism, therapy has minimal to zero impact.
Age helps a little. When the narcissist ages, he becomes a little less antagonistic, but that's more or less it.
Narcissism is lifelong.
Psychopathy, I'm not talking. Psychopathy is a total waste of time. Anyone who claims otherwise is a charlatan or a con artist. Psychopaths are untouchable. Completely untouchable.
Narcissists, you can play a little. You can play a little.
Especially, there's a group of narcissists. They are known as pro-social narcissists or communal narcissists. These are narcissists whose grandiosity is that they are good people. They say, I am the best person. I'm moral. For example, my morality, my ethics.
And these kind of narcissists, they become clergymen, they become gurus, they become therapists.
So these kind of narcissists, it's easier to work with them because you appeal to their morality or to what they believe to be morality, you appeal to their superiority as ethical, reliable people. And you say you're good people. How can you do this? Good people don't do this.
And so, prosocial communal narcissists are more amenable to...
But otherwise, it's not only me, I mean, in all the literature. And definitely when clinicians speak honestly.
Narcissism is a sisyphian task.
Can you skip from Narcissus? Can you avoid narcissists?
No, that's good. To escape.
Yes?
Narcissists will try to hover you, we'll try to re-idealize you, to take you back.
But narcissists actually are rarely stalkers. The narcissist regards most interactions with other people as humiliating.
The core issue in narcissism is shame. So everything is perceived in terms of humiliation.
If I want a woman, I'm a narcissist, I want a woman, and now I need to flirt with her, no, it's humiliating. Why would I need to flirt with her? I need to court her. Courting is begging. Begging is humiliating. I need to, she left me.
So if I stalk her means I need her. I want her. That puts me in inferior position.
So this element of shame and humiliation prevents a narcissist actually from stalking. I mean, some of them do. These are the psychopathic narcissists, the malignant. But majority don't, because they feel humiliated.
I'm giving these examples because they are extreme. A narcissist would approach a woman, and he would fully expect that within a minute or two, or if she's very slow, three, she would want him, agree to have sex with him, and the second meeting agreed to marry and have three children, more or less, if he's slow.
This is the perception of the narcissist. He is irresistible. He doesn't need to do anything. It's just him. He just has to stand. That's it. It's all he has to do.
To flirt, to court, to convince, to date, this is humiliating. It means he's begging her.
Narcissus would beg anyone? Why would he beg anyone? He's so vastly superior.
And if she is stupid enough to not notice that he's godlike, then of course she couldn't be his partner.
So these are the cognitive distortions.
Isn't it that you're getting to be left? That means I'm not good. She left me?
No, she's stupid.
He devalues sources of negative supply.
So he devalues people who criticize him, people who disagree with him, people who abandon him. They're all simply stupid.
So that's why they're doing this. It's proof that they're stupid. Their behavior is proof positive that they're stupid.
And now stupid people, narcissists generally hold, Narcissus holds everyone in utter unmitigated contempt.
Contempt is the core affect of narcissists. Everyone is inferior, everyone is an idiot.
So the contempt comes into play. Devaluation is defensive in this case.
In the case of the shared fantasy, the devaluation's role is to allow the narcissists to separate from the partner and to reenact the maternal dynamics.
But in casual encounters, the devaluation is used simply to restore grandiosity.
The narcissist restores his grandiosity, not by elevating himself, but reducing the other.
There are two ways. Or the other stays the same and you go up, or you stay the same and the other goes down. And this is the devaluation.
Thank you very much.
My pleasure.
Anyone wants to ask? You. Yes.
What's the incidence of narcissism in the general population? And conversely, what's the percentage of people that you would consider well psychologically and emotionally balanced?
Ah, don't get me started. YouTube is infested, and I'm using the word judiciously, by self-styled experts, including self-styled experts with academic degrees, doctors and so.
People don't understand, laymen don't understand, that if you have a doctorate in psychology, a layman don't understand that you could have a doctorate in psychology but not be an expert on narcissism.
These are fields, subfields.
I know very little about schizophrenia. I will not dare to go online and say, I'm an expert on schizophrenia, I know everything about schizophrenia.
But there are, I mean, on YouTube, I don't know of a single exception, I'm sorry to say.
All the self-styled, self-declared experts on narcissism have no background in narcissism. They never published anything on narcissism. Don't know anything about narcissism, spew nonsense and so on.
So one of the biggest of these names went and said that one of six people are narcissists, for example.
I mean, this statement alone is enough to disqualify her for life. This is a charlatan, total charlatan.
Here are the real figures, the correct figures.
As I said, we make a distinction between narcissistic style and narcissistic personality disorder.
The prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder in the general population is, depending on the study, between one, and depending on the society and depending on the period, between 1 and 3% of the general population.
These are people with NPD.
So now immediately people say, yeah, but narcissists don't go to therapy so they don't get diagnosed. So there is underdiagnosis.
That is not the way science is conducted. It's not the way we do this.
There are numerous other mental illnesses that they develop resistance to treatment, and they never attend clinical settings and never come to therapy.
We measure it by measuring the percentage of people who came to treatment out of the clinical population and extrapolating to the general population.
Okay, I'm not going to the statistics right now. It's a safe figure. There's no underdiagnosis.
So it's not that all the 1% came to therapy. This is an extrapolation into the general population. So it's a pretty safe figure.
In other words, one in 100 and maybe two in 100 have narcissistic personality, if so.
However, the prevalence and incidence of narcissistic style is much higher.
And we believe that about, we believe, there are not studies on this. I mean, there are studies, they're not serious studies.
We believe that 5% to 6% have narcissistic style or narcissistic personality organization.
In total, it would be safe to say that something like 10% of the population have narcissistic disorders, and that includes borderlinepersonality disorder. Something like 10%.
What was your second question?
Was the percentage of the population that you would consider psychologically and emotionally well-balanced?
Same, quote on forward.
Today, one third of the adult population in the industrialist world suffer from clinically diagnosable conditions.
I think the real figure is closer to 50% because we know that 35% are diagnosable with clinical depression, major depression, and with anxiety disorder.
So anxiety in depression today is about one-third of the adult population.
It's true that there is what we call comorbidity, in other words, multiple conditions in the same patient.
But even if you eliminate this or take this into account, I think it's safe to say that about half the population have clinically diagnosable conditions.
In other words, they are mentally unwell.
The other half, presumably, are mentally healthy.
But there's been a major shift in how we define mental health.
We used to define mental health and mental illness statistically compared to cohorts, compared to populations.
We don't do this anymore.
We define mental illness or mental health.
Two criteria, dysfunction. Are you dysfunctional? And ego-distony, are you not happy? Are you uncomfortable with your condition?
So you're mentally unwell if you are dysfunctional in one or more areas of life because of your condition, and if you're not happy with it.
You could be dysfunctional and very happy with it.
For example, a grandiose narcissist, also known as overt narcissists, they are usually egosyntonic. They're pretty happy with themselves. They're happy or lucky. They think they are gods and they are wonderful.
So that raises the issue should we treat these people.
And the answer, according to the new definition, is no. They're okay with who they are and how they are.
So if you use this more restrictive definition of dysfunction plus discomfort, distress, we call it distress, dysfunction and distress. If you put the two together, that's a much more restrictive definition.
And then you're talking probably about 25% of population.
We know that 15% of population have personality disorders, all of them combined. 15%.
We know that another 10% have psychotic disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, and other messes. And depression and anxiety, which are technically mental problem, mental health problems and so on so forth, are not brought into this definition because they cause temporary dysfunction and temporary egodystony.
Theoretically you can exit the depression and be again happy.
But you cannot exit narcissism. You cannot exit schizophrenia. These are permanent states that we have to take care of.
So, here's the answer to your question. 25 to 50%. No less than 25, definitely. Definitely more less.
Now this is shocking. This is a shocking number.
By comparison, when the diagnostic and statistical manual was first published in 1952, 3% of our population were diagnosed with mental health disorders. Three.
And it's not true that there was not awareness. There was huge awareness of, for example, autism spectrum disorders, or schizophrenia, as they called it at the time, neurosis. I mean, it's not true. There was even, I would say, more awareness of mental illness than today. And only 3% were diagnosed at the time with mental health issues.
And there's another indicator. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 1952, had 100 pages. The latest text revision of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has more than 1,000 pages.
So either we became 10 times more mentally ill, or I don't know how to explain this, or we are pathologizing unnecessarily all kinds of conditions.
For example, in the new DSM you can find coffee disorder. I'm kidding you not. Internet addiction and so.
I don't know if everything deserves to be pathologized.
And ironically, there's a debate about real catastrophic issues.
For example, there was a debate in the committee of the diagnostic and statistical manual whether to remove pathological narcissism completely, to delete narcissistic personality disorder, completely.
If there is anything I'm certain exists, it's schizophrenia and some types of personality disorders. These are the only thing I'm perfectly convinced exist as objective ontological entities.
I am not convinced that depression is a real thing. I am not convinced that anxiety is a real thing.
And I'll give you an example, and maybe you will understand.
If you were not depressed in Auschwitz, you were mentally ill.
It's contextual. The minute something is contextual, then it's not a clinical entity.
There is no context to tuberculosis. You cannot say, oh, in this environment, tuberculosis is not. Tuberculosis is tuberculosis, end of story. It's a clinical entity.
But if depression is okay, if depression is not. Tuberculosis is tuberculosis, end of story. It's a clinical entity.
But if depression is okay, if depression is healthy in certain environments, it cannot be a clinical entity.
So maybe it's a cultural, societal construct.
It's a fact that depression is only three or 400 years old. The first book about depression was about melancholy in the 17th century. It's a relatively new thing.
What happened? The ancients were not depressed.
There's no word in ancient Greek for depression, nor is there a description of depression in any of the books. And that includes Aristotelis, who wrote a lot about psychology.
There are, of course, descriptions of sadness and mourning and grief. Yeah, not depression. No one heard of depression.
Anxiety is even younger than depression. Anxiety comes from existentialist philosophy and psychology. Angst. Anxiety is a very new thing.
So we keep inventing all kinds of things. It's good for the pharmacological industry. I have no doubt. It's good for therapists and clinicians. It's good for the pharmacological industry. I have no doubt. It's good for therapists and clinicians. It's good for professors of psychology. We are all very happy.
And in the meantime, we decided that half the population are insane.
And I think we have gone way too far. Way, way, way too far.
I think we should begin to limit ourselves to biological conditions. Something that can be mapped to the brain.
Schizophrenia, yes, definitely. Depression no.
We've just discovered in a giant meta-analysis, that depression has little connection to serotonin. And all these antidepressants were bullshit. Excuse me for the word.
So now we don't know whether depression has anything to do with the brain, as opposed to two years ago.
But you can see the dysfunction of the person with depression. Yes, you can see this function of the person with depression.
Yes, you can see this function of the person with depression.
Whether it should be defined as mental illness or, for example, as a social illness or social reactivity, it's a totally different issue.
That's the difference between clinical entity and behaviors.
So, I don't know, maybe one day someone will find the brain.
We thought we found, we thought that serotonin is the cause of depression. We now know it's not true.
Because most serotonin is produced in the gut, by the way, the intestine is not in the brain at all.
So we were mistaken.
So now depression is unmoored. It's not connected to the brain.
Schizophrenia is bipolar, is no question about it, this thing.
So some diseases, so if we begin to say everything that is mental illness must have a connection to the brain. If you don't find this connection, at this stage is not mental illness.
The minute we do, it will enter the book. Believe me, the DSM will be 20 pages long.
By the way, psychopathy is connected to the brain.
I read that some of these conditions will be very easily healed in a short period of time with the advances of medicine and technology.
I don't know.
By pharmacofix of brain.
I know that some mental illnesses are correlated with abnormalities in the brain, structural and functional, some are not.
Psychopathy, for example, the brains of psychopaths are very different. They're not the same as the brains of normal people. Not only the brains, the physiology of the body is different.
Psychopaths don't sweat when they are afraid. Their skin conductance remains the same when they're afraid.
In their brain, there are at least five major differences to normal brains. Amygdala, white matter, and so on.
So psychopathy definitely exists. No question about it. It's a mental, it's a real issue.
Narcissism, I don't know. I don't know.
At this stage, no borderline, for example, exists for sure.
Because borderline has strong correlations in the brain.
We may be getting borderline wrong because of social issues, cultural issues and so on, but definitely it has a mirror in the brain.
Ultimately, we need to find some anchor.
We need to get back to the ground from this floating in deep space and the clouds. We need to go back to the ground.
And the ground is the hardware, the brain. And we need to find these connections.
At this stage, less than 5% of DSM has any connection to the brain. All the rest is observations, behavior, ADHD.
What the hell is this? Oppositional defined disorder. If a child disobeys authority, I'm kidding you not. If a child fights, it says in the criteria, if a child fights with the principal of the school and attacks the teachers, that's a mental health issue.
Why are these mental health issues? They are social issues, definitely.
Depression, in my view, is reactive. In my view, it's reactive.
Now that we know the depression has no connection to any biochemical or neurotransmitter in the brain, we go back to the old theories.
The old theories are that depression is reactive. It's reactive to what? Changing life circumstances, stressors, yeah. it's all true.
So it's a reaction.
Maybe one day we will find the brain correlate.
Right now, for me, it's a reaction.
What does it mean? Why is it not a mental illness?
Because change the environment, the depression will disappear. That's it.
So for me, it's not a clinical entity.
Anxiety is the same, in my view. I regard it absolutely the same.
I think most anxiety is anticipatory.
In other words, I think people are anxious about being anxious.
After they experience the first panic attack or so on, many people are afraid of the next panic attack, which brings the panic attack.
There's a lot of anticipatory element in this.
And so on and so forth.
So I keep saying that psychology is a pseudo-science.
It can never ever be a science, unless you reduce it to neuroscience.
Otherwise, it's not a science. It is literature. It's beautiful literature.
But it's literature. Dostoevsky was the greatest psychologist ever. This is literature, Nietzsche. This is literature.
So as literature, we observe people, we describe people, we analyze people. It's all understandable.
But it's still literature, not science.
If your raw material, if what you study changes all the time, you cannot have a science.
I'm a physicist. I have a PhD in physics. Among other degrees, I have a PhD in physics.
So, in physics, we study things that are essentially unchangeable, even in the quantum realm, they are unchangeable.
Ifstudy the sun, it's the sun, today, it's the sun tomorrow, it's the sun.
But if I try to study you, if I tell you, I'm studying you now, the very fact that I'm studying you changes you.
The very fact that I'm studying you, changes you. It changes reality. It changes you.
The very fact that I'm studying, it changes you.
It changes reality. It changes you.
You react, unconsciously, consciously.
And you know what?
I'm telling you, okay, we want to repeat the experiment tomorrow.
Are you the same person tomorrow?
Absolutely not. You're not the same person tomorrow? Absolutely not. You're not the same person.
You had a fight with your girlfriend. You ate something bad. You saw a movie, the depressed. You're not the same person.
So what kind of science is this?
When the raw material changes in observation, changes from day to day, it's nonsense. It's pseudoscience.
It must become neuroscience. Must. Or it will remain a joke, as it largely is.
Okay, Shoshanim.
I think that's it for today.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.