Two days ago, I've had a second talk with Conor Ryan.
And in this talk, Conor Ryan mentioned an article published in Scientific American a few months ago.
And this article captures the flux in the field of pathological narcissism.
The fact that there are raging debates, one could even say wars, as to what constitutes a narcissist.
Is narcissism overt and grandiose?
Is narcissism covert and shy and vulnerable and fragile and passive-aggressive?
Is narcissism, pathological narcissism, some kind of compensation for a bad object, for a constellation of voices that inform the narcissist that he is unworthy and unlovable and inadequate and so on and so forth, inferiority complex?
Or is narcissism the exact opposite?
The belief, the firm belief and conviction that the narcissist is godlike, infallible, omniscient, omnipotent, and in general, a kind of divinity.
There's a raging debate between clinicians in the field, therapists, psychologists, licensed social workers, psychiatrists, and theoreticians in academe, such as myself.
But these are just two facets of the same coin.
It's like the famous story with the elephant, where four wise men are blindfolded, or they're blind to start with, I don't remember.
And they're instructed to describe an elephant.
So one of them touches the elephant's legs, the other touches the elephant's trunk, the third one touches the elephant's tail, and the fourth one touches the elephant's expletive deleted.
So they come up with four different descriptions, but it's a single elephant.
And the elephant in the room is the fact that clinicians are much more likely to come across narcissists who have hit rock bottom.
They're much more likely to come across narcissists in crisis, in the life crisis.
So they are much more likely to be exposed to the fragile, brittle nature of pathological narcissism.
And they are much more likely to diagnose or misdiagnose their clients with covert, fragile, vulnerable shy narcissism.
So clinicians are exposed to covert narcissism, whereas theoreticians are exposed much more to the overt, grandiose, defiant, antisocial, pseudo psychopathic face of pathological narcissism, the one captured essentially in the diagnostic criteria of the DSM.
What we need to do is to reconcile these two views and to realize that all narcissists are sometimes overt and sometimes covert.
When narcissists collapse, when they are unable to obtain supply, when they are mortified, when they are severely narcissistically injured, they tend to become covert for a while, and then they rebound and become overt again.
So there's not type constancy, there's only type dominance.
Overt narcissist is typically overt.
Covert narcissist is typically covert, and yet they can switch places when life's exigencies, vicissitudes and circumstances force them to confront their own shame in adequacy and delusionality.
This is a very important observation because what we have done in the field of pathological narcissism, more generally in cluster B personality disorders and definitely in personality disorders in general, is we over specialize.
We need pick, we divide and subdivide and then divide again.
And so we create niches, we create niche clinical entities which do not conform to reality because we human beings cannot be put into a drawer.
We are unclassifiable, if you wish.
We cannot be captured with definitions.
We are in flux.
We are like a river.
And any clinician would tell you that a person may present with pathological narcissism on the first meeting and may even be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder only to emotionally dysregulate during the therapy and resemble a borderline and then transition to becoming a psychopath when he acts out and so on and so forth.
We are all everything.
We all mental patients and all clients and all people with mental health issues display a kaleidoscope, a panoply, a rainbow spectrum of all mental health issues.
Even the distinction between personality disorders and post-traumatic disorders is artificial.
Even the distinction between personality disorders and mood disorders may be wrong where mood disorders may be just a facet of personality disorders.
We need to begin to have a holistic view of psychology.
And this emerges from my talk with an inevitable one and only one Irish, if I recall correctly, Conor Ryan. So stay tuned and enjoy the show.
And those of you who survived to the very end, let me know. I'm recording.
OK. OK. So, sterity awaits. I think I'm recording as well.
OK, brilliant. OK, so Sam Vannian, thank you so much. My most requested guest to come back and talk to again, the guest that has the most views on my channel and people.
People must be traumatized over there.
It's in here. Yeah. OK, so let's talk today what we would talk about is intimate relationships.
We touched on it last time. And before we do that, we spoke in November of 2023. Are there any updates, any developments in that time period that have struck you, that have shocked you, that have changed your perspective?
It's only been three and a half months. Anything that springs to mind?
I'm not sure in which sphere of life, what sphere of life you're referring to. If you're referring to politics, for example, then there has definitely been a resurgence, not to say an insurgency of narcissists, avowed narcissists, open narcissists, proud narcissists, people who have converted narcissism into an ideology, ironclad ideology with explicit values. I've just read an article by a lady in France. She published a book and she says you need to be selfish. You need never have children. You need never get married. You have. She was talking to a female kind of audience or public. And that's an example. And she's she's fitted and celebrated. She's like, yeah, you're right, girl. I mean, go for it. And then.
So that's one example. And then, of course, you have the likes of Trump and others in Argentina and in Israel, Turkey, I mean, you name it. There's a murky wave of narcissism washing all over us. And I think the difference lately is the narcissism started off as a clinical entity, mental health issue. Then it became an organizing principle of life. Then it became an explanatory principle. You made sense of reality through narcissism. You said, for example, this guy is a narcissist. That explains his behavior. You know, politicians, you know, in show business, entertainment industry. I mean, so narcissism helped you to decipher the world, became an explanatory principle. But now narcissism is becoming the equivalent of a religion or an ideology if you are secular, secular minded, you know, it's not an organized, it's a prescriptive, prescriptive discipline. It tells you what to do in order, for example, to succeed. So you have coaches and so on online names withheld and they tell you be a narcissist like any of them. I think I mentioned it last time. You have to have pretty respectable magazines such as Scientific American. I'm sorry, new scientists and they came up with a cover story. Parents teach your children to be narcissist in July 2016.
So it is transition. It has transitioned from the periphery into the mainstream. And now narcissism is bent on. Narcissism guarantees success and accomplishments. Narcissism leads to self-efficacy. Narcissism, if you're not a narcissist, something's wrong with you. For example, if you're not selfish, altruistic, charitable, so either you are virtue signaling, you're fake, you're being fake or something's wrong with you because you should put yourself first. And so you need therapy. And so narcissism is permeating academia and literature. And now you have a whole class of respectable scholars who say that psychopathy and narcissism are the next stage in evolution. That high functioning narcissism and high functioning psychopathy is socially beneficialand so on and so on and so forth.
So if you regard narcissism as a kind of inevitable byproduct of human progress and human development and evolution, then you know, you accept it, that's it.
But if you don't, if you realize like I do, that narcissism is an aberration, a malignancy, then it's really terrifying to watch narcissism take over. It's tentacles, it's tentacles all over. It's like an all-over movie. It's like an alien invasion.
Yeah. It was an article relatively recently that came up in the Scientific American and a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, Elzer Ronningstrom was quoted as follows.
Pathological narcissism is characterized by an inability to maintain a steady sense of self-esteem. Those with this condition protect an inflated view of themselves at the expense of others. When that view is threatened, they experience anger, shame, envy and other negative emotions.
Now what I'm hearing, and I want to get your perspective on that as well, is the people in their orbit are going to suffer, right?
Yes.
Is there anything that you would add to that or disagree with that?
Well, it's a partial, it's, first of all, Elzer Ronningstrom is a true authority, not a fake YouTuber who claims to be an authority, but a true author. She has been working in the field of narcissism since the early 1990s, started together, I mean, I started at the same time, and she's been working since then. She published seminal works on narcissism already in 1996, for example, and she is a true, she knows what she's talking about.
But her description of narcissism is geared towards a popular audience. So it's more relational. It's like what narcissism would do to you, beware of narcissism, you know, kind of thing.
Narcissism is a lot more complex. These are the outside, the external manifestations of internal dynamicswhich are exceedingly complex, and potentially the most complex we know of, at least someone like Otto Kanner thought so. He thought that borderline and narcissistic personality disorders or disorders of the self are so complex that they are at times indistinguishable from psychosis or psychotic disorders. It's a really, really bad thing.
Narcissistic personality is not just about being an a-ball or a jerk. It's really bad out there.
So for example, the narcissist is unable to tell that other people are separate from him, that they're external, which is utterly psychotic feature. Consequently, he treats other people as extensions or instruments or tools. You know, the narcissist imposes a fantasy defense on reality. He divorces reality and he supplants it. He replaces it with fantasy.
That's okay. But then he tries to coerce you into fitting into this fantasy and affirming it. And if you refuse to confirm, to tell him that the fantasy is not fantasy, or if you refuse to play a role according to his fantasy script, if you're penalized, he becomes aggressive and he, you know, it could escalate and then very badly.
So these are two examples of how people around the narcissist are affected.
I think if you're looking for a metaphor, the narcissist is a black hole.
Now other physicists by training, other PhD in physics. So the black hole, you can't see a black hole. The only thing that comes out of a black hole is some kind of tenuous radiation, which is literally undetectable. Light cannot escape a black hole. So you can never see a black hole. But what do you see? What do you, how do you know there's a black hole out there?
Because everything around the black hole misbehaves. Everyone around the black hole is in some kind of crazy making cycle. All kinds of stars and all kinds of galaxies and all kinds of, you know, every, everyone goes haywire around the black hole.
And that tells you there's a black hole there.
The narcissist is the same. Even if you are unable to diagnose someone with narcissism because you need tests and structured interviews and so on, still the reactions of people around the narcissist ought to tell you that something is wrong with this person because he, he dysregulates other people.
I'm saying he, it's a she, half of all narcissists are women.
Narcissists dysregulate other people. They, they remove their, they trick away the defenses that other people have built, lifetime of defenses, habits, everything breaks down.
When the narcissist enters the scene, there's a collective meltdown, not only of individuals, but of institutions.
Have a look at Donald Trump, for example, there's an institutional meltdown, everything melts down. And so there's this issue of being unable to recognize the externality and separateness of other people.
It's known as an othering problem.
Another issue, for example, which she alluded to is that the narcissism is a disruption in the formation of a self. There's a problem. The self is not fully integrated, not fully formed. It's as if the narcissist is a kind of a kaleidoscope with all kinds of shards flying in space and it's not, nothing coalesced into a core identity.
As a narcissist trying to compensate for this, not pretending to be someone who is not, who is not, which is a false self.
And then he comes to you and says, I am this false self, right? And if you say, no, you're not this false self, he beats you on the head or metaphorically speak. And sometimes not metaphorically.
So this lack of core, of course, does not allow the narcissist to regulate his sense of self worth. He is a Romingstone, he uses the term self esteem. It's misleading. It's not self esteem. It's self worth. Self worth is comprised of self esteem and self confidence and self efficacy and many other selves.
When you don't have a self, anything that starts with self is absent. Like self esteem, you can't have self esteem. You don't have self worth. You can't gauge your worth. You don't know if you're worthy, not worthy and so on.
So we often say that narcissists have distorted internal objects.
For example, the vast majority of healthy people, they have something called good object. A good object is a group of voices, constellation or coalition of voices, internal voices that keep informing you that you're okay. You know, you're lovable, you're doing well, everything's okay. You have your shortcomings, you have your limitations, you have your deficiencies and lacks, you need to work on it. So you are given a realistic assessment of who you are, which is part good and part bad.
In other words, there's no splitting. You're integrated. You're the shades of gray.
This is a good object. The narcissist, non-narcissist, there's a good object. All narcissists are divided into groups. One group has what is known as a bad object. A bad object is a group of voices, coalition, constellation of voices. They're known as introjects. And these voices internally keep informing this kind of narcissist. You're bad, you're unworthy, you're inadequate, you're losing your failure, ugly, you're stupid, you're unlovable. And this kind of narcissist tries to compensate to silence these voices by pretending to be the exact opposite of what these voices are saying.
If the voices are saying you're not lovable, this narcissist is going to counter and say, I'm not only lovable and irresistible, or if they say you're stupid, the narcissist is going to say, I'm a genius. I'm a genius professor of psychology, for example.
So a bad object generates compensatory narcissism.
But there's another type of object which I find even more malicious. And that is the idealized object. The idealized object is when a child is raised by his or her parents or his or her parents. And the child is idolized, pedestalized. The child can do no wrong. He's perfect. He's amazing. He's God like.
This kind of child grows up to believe this. He believes this. He internalizes this object, this idealized object.
And these are the really, really bad narcissists. These are the narcissists with no boundaries, no inhibitions, no adherence to social worries and norms and rules. Nothing. In short, these are psychopathic narcissists, actually. They're a bit psychopathic.
And a portion of these, a percentage of these narcissists are known as malignant narcissists. And malignant narcissists are really dangerous because malignant narcissists are narcissists at the core. Although there's no core, but you know what I mean.
At the basis is a narcissist, the foundation. And on top of that, like a wedding cake, you have a psychopathic layer and a sadistic layer, sadistic.
And so this is the gift that keeps giving. If you're, if you happen to find yourself in the ambit or orbit of this kind of narcissism. So you can't reduce narcissism to three sentences in Scientific American. So hyper complex phenomenon.
You touched on it there, but I wanted to ask you about tips for the parent of a narcissist, a teenager diagnosed with NPD, right? There was a book written many years ago, when you talk about Kevin, which I think awakened the Western world to the issue.
So what you're talking about there kind of extrapolates on this idea that a parent may have filled the child with a sense of their own magnificence, which could develop into something clinical.
Would I be right?
First of all, to set the record straight in the case of Kevin in the book, Kevin has been rejected by his mother as a baby, the exact opposite. She rejected him. She refused to breastfeed him. She refused to touch him. Even she, she went through the equivalent of postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety. And she kind of, so that's, that's a case of bad object, actually, not idealized object. It's a perfect reification of a bad situation.
But yeah, if a child keeps getting told that he is, that, you know, he is the embodiment of new unificence and magnificence, and especially if the child is denied access to reality, when you tell a child you can do no wrong, what you're telling the child is don't listen to reality. This reality pushes back. Reality is harsh. Reality keeps telling you you are mistaken or you're stupid or you should deal.
And so the parent is informing the child, don't listen to reality. Reality is wrong. You're always right. And so this is to cut the child off reality. That's why it's abusive.
Pampering, spoiling, pedestalizing, idolizing. These are forms of abuse. They're not good parenting. These kind of parents are also usually overprotective. So they isolate a child from peer groups. They don't allow the child to be exposed to peers, or at least not meaningful.
Or at least schooling, what would homeschooling come into that equation? Homeschooling could come into this, or you're not allowed to play out, or I'm going to join you.
So there are kinds of helicopter parents who can join the kid. Wherever the kid goes, they're there. Never give the kid alone time, especially not with peers.
Chest eyes and castigate an attack. Other role models such as teachers. So the teacher is always wrong. Teacher hates the kid. She's envious of the kid. So they inject a student. A streak of paranoia. Paranoid ideation. This kind of child is totally thwarted and distorted.
And it reminds me of Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo wrote a book, not a lot. And in this book he describes a phenomenon which in the 19th century was quite prevalent, and they were known as kopacikosimwhich in the 19th century was quite prevalent, and they were known as kopacikosim. Kopacikosim were children who were abducted as babies by itinerants, gypsies. Sorry for the word. And then the children were inserted into bottles, and they grew up inside the bottle, and they took on the shape of the bottle. And then they became circus tricks and circus attractions, and they made a lot of money for their owners, and so on. This was a great phenomenon. Kopacikosim. Kopacikosim.
So the child with an idealized object is this kind of child. It is put in a bottle of the parents making, and it acquires the shape of the bottle. Now the parent projects onto this kind of child unfulfilled wishes, expectations, spoken and unspoken. The parent dictates the child's behavior, micromanages the child, and instrumentalizes the child. The child's role is to bring glory to the parent. The parent secures narcissistic supply vicariously through the child, and the child is penalized.
So the child learns, penalizes if he fails. So the child learns to link love with performance, and he has a perception of love. It's totally transactional. So it's a really f-ed up child at the very end of this cycle.
And these kind of parents are as bad as parents who commit incest or physical abuse or whatever, even to some extent more pernicious.
One of the reasons this kind of parenthood is a lot more threatened is because it's socially acceptable and even socially condoned. You know, we have this education system where every child is amazing. Every child is perfect. Every child is the greatest talent since Einstein, if not earlier. No child can do wrong. There are consolation prizes for everyone. Everyone is a winner. No one is a loser.
So the education system, especially I must say in the United States, isolates children from reality and embeds them in a fantasy bubble of their own grandeur, grandeur, their own, you know, this kind of education system fosters grandiosity as a cognitive distortion and collaborates in cahoots with parents who find this amazing because they want every parent wants to believe that their children are amazing and incredible, super intelligent and I know why.
So there's a collusion here, a collusion to create a fantastic space where the child would never ever find who he truly is, who he truly is, warts and all.
So it's really bad out there because this practice, as I said, is part and parcel in the fabric of modern society and modern education and modern parenting skills and modern everything. Their parents are told their children are sensitive. You should never be written. You should never shout at them. You should never God forbid beat them up and so on. I strongly disagree. I think these are all pedagogical tools. They're all educational tools that should be available to a parent. I think the child should be confronted with reality. I think suffering and pain and loss are the greatest engines of personal development and if you deny them to the child, he will never develop.
But suffering is unavoidable. They will encounter pain, suffering when they go out into the world in any capacity, even in the playground. They're going to encounter.
So that's why these kind of parents make sure that they don't have the opportunity to encounter losses.
But you're right that once this child is out of the family, I don't know how to call it next, shall we say bubble bubble or whatever, this kind of child is going to suffer disproportionately more than well, well constructed with well-constellated children.
So would you be recommending some kind of clinical intervention or some kind of therapeutic intervention or just coaching parents?
Depends. First of all, it is extremely bad practice to diagnose narcissism, pathological narcissism prior to age 21 and some authorities like Twenge and Campbell say 25. So we should, because the brain, for example, is not completed until age 25. Critical parts of the brain are missing until age 25, including major executive functions.
Second thing is grandiosity is a good, healthy thing in adolescence. Adolescence need to be grandiose in order to break away from the family and take on the world. You know, you need to be seriously grandiose to think at age 14 that you can succeed in the world or you can say goodbye to mommy and daddy and that's healthy, that's good.
Narcissism in this age, in adolescence, is actually adaptive, is very good. So it's bad practice to diagnose narcissism prior to age 21, it varies.
So why did I mention this? Because prior to age 25, even if you appear to be a narcissist, you are likely not an narcissist. You probably have a bad object or an idealized object or some problem with externalization and all kinds of things, all kinds of things which are treatable, simply treatable.
At around age 25, things begin to settle down, coalesce and become fossilized and ossified. And after age 25, it's pretty hopeless. If you had acquired narcissistic personality around the age of 25, are you pretty much a lost case? And yet there are many self-interested, self-enriching people online, offline, books, book authors, even with academic degrees, even with PhDs in psychology, who are lying, simply lying, that pathological narcissism is treatable.
Behaviors can be modified, you can modify the narcissist's behaviors by giving a variety of incentives, for example, by challenging the narcissist's brandyositity. You can accomplish this, no? You can't? Are you that weak that you can't? And then the narcissist, just to show you, to spite you, is kind of fulfills the therapeutic expectations. But otherwise, with the exception of minor behavior modifications, modifications of abrasive behaviors, antisocial behaviors, which are minor and fleeting, this 100% remission, relax after a while. With this exception, which is pitiable, you can't touch it after age 25. You can't touch it. It's don't. That's it. And that is the truth. This is the unvarnished truth that any clinician would tell you, in four eyes, like in a pub, when he's a bit drunk, they would tell you, "Yeah, narcissist is hopeless." So in modern treatment today, in 21st century, in 2024, those practitioners and clinicians that are treating people, are offering treatment or diagnosing, you're intimating that they are fully aware. Of course, sir. That this is not true. I say again, you can use schema therapy, you can use the MDR, you can use some forms of CBT. There are definitely treatment modalities, including current treatment modalities, transference therapy and so on. There are treatment modalities that do have an effect on narcissists, for they mellow them. They ameliorate the condition, they reduce abrasive, criminalized even, anti-social behaviors. I mean, yeah, you can kind of finesse the narcissist, fine tune the narcissist somehow. But you can't touch the core. There's no healing there. Absolutely none. Zero, nothing. This conditioning is a form of conditioning. You challenge the narcissist brandiosity, the narcissist will do anything. If you challenge the narcissist to be a moral person, he would become hyper moral. If you challenge him to be altruistic and charitable, for example, if there's a charity competition, if you organize a charity competition, you know, the narcissist would want to come on top by making the greatest contribution in human history.
So he would plunge five billion dollars just to show you that he is the greatest of them all. And then he would say, wow, what a charitable person, amazingly altruistic.
No, it's just manipulation via grandiosity. You can make the narcissist do almost anything by challenging or leveraging the narcissist's cognitive distortions, the narcissist sickness and pathology.
And this raises the question, how ethical is this?
For example, if you come across someone with psychosis and they believe that they are Jesus Christ or a lesser figure like Napoleon.
By agreeing with them, by colluding with the delusion, you can make them do things, you know, but it raises the question of ethics.
When I was a very young man, which was when the last dinosaurs were dying, there was a guy in Israel, Friedberg, and he invented an amazing way to treat what used to be called at the time paranoid schizophrenia.
Amazingly, there was a guy who came and I witnessed this particular occasion, this particular instance.
There's a guy who came and he said that the Mossad, which is the equivalent equivalent of the CIA in Israel, he said that the Mossad was chasing, was after him, was conspiring against him.
They wanted to kill him and whatever.
Of course, this was a case of paranoid schizophrenia, extreme mental illness.
So what the therapist did, he organized a court, he created a court, a simulated court.
And there was a judge and there was a prosecutor and the prosecutor was prosecuting the Mossad for persecuting the patient.
And the patient has his own defense attorney and there was a court, a trial, and the Mossad was found guilty and instructed by the judge to not persecute the patient anymore.
And this is a great way to assuage anxieties, paranoid ideation and so on and so forth.
But it does raise the question.
I think it's I personally feel it's unethical.
It may be efficient.
It may reduce the patient's anxiety, paranoid ideation.
It may have a beneficial effect on the patient, but it perpetuates a pathology.
And anything that perpetuates pathology, in my view, is not OK.
Morally, ethically not OK.
And today, the only way to treat narcissists is to perpetuate the pathology, even enhancing, amplified.
Is this ethical?
I don't think so.
And speaking of treatment, right.
Before we talk about treatment, let's talk about intimate relationshipsbecause this seems to be the most triggering for people who are watching these videos.
The idea that you would embark upon an intimate relationship with somebody who's a narcissistic abuser, you may not know it and all of a sudden you're knee deep in it.
Would the narcissistic person have difficulty, say, pair bonding, for example, or would they just be like the rest of us?
No.
Forming the relationship, as I said earlier, narcissists are incapable of perceiving other people as external or as separate.
So the only form of relationship and the only form of intimacy a narcissist can have is with not even with himself, because he has no self, but with structures, voices, objects inside himself.
It's the only kind of intimacy, intimate relationship you can have.
What he does in order to have an intimate relationship with you, he converts you into one of those objects or constructs or whatever you want to call, inside his mind.
He introduces you into his mind, insinuates you into his mind.
And then he continues to interact with your representation in his mind.
And so the narcissist defines himself and regulates himself through you.
And in this, the narcissist is similar to someone with borderline personality disorder.
He uses external regulation.
So, for example, if the narcissist wants to feel great about himself, he wants to idealize himself, he will first idealize you because if you are ideal and the narcissist owns you as an internal object that makes him ideal.
For example, a narcissist would date a woman and he would say she's drop dead gorgeous.
She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.
By insisting on this, by idealizing, what is he saying?
He's saying I'm the owner of a drop dead gorgeous object.
I'm the owner of the most beautiful thing the world has ever seen. And that makes me special. That makes me unique. So even this, even the process of idealization is about the narcissist, not about you. It's like owning a car, a flashy car, or you know, it's a status symbol kind of. So narcissists interact only with themselves through you. Nasties also need your gaze.
They need to see themselves through your eyes.
So they use your gaze to regulate themselves.
But this is not a safe method.
So what they do, they falsify your gaze.
They attribute to you. Cognitions, thoughts, emotions and so on that you may not have at all.
So they would say, for example, oh, he admires me. He thinks I'm a genius. Maybe I think I'm an idiot. Maybe what you truly think is that I'm a blowhard idiot.
But I would, as a narcissist, I would attribute to you certain emotions and thoughts and and beliefs and so on so forth that are conducive to my own idealization and brandiosity.
And there was no evidence to indicate that the person had those feelings in the first place.
You know, you're a placeholder. You're just a placeholder.
It's these are massive processes of projection.
The narcissist projects onto you parts of of himself that he cannot tolerate, that he rejects.
So you become a repository of the narcissist, bad emotions, bad object, self-castigation, self-criticism, self-rejection, self-loathing.
They are all projected onto you.
So if the narcissist is weak, he's not weak.
You're weak.
He attributes this to you.
So this is called projection.
Narcissist splits you.
One day you can do no wrong. The next day you are.
You can do no right or bad or good.
Black and white.
This is called splitting.
You are subjected to a roller coaster of totally infantile defenses, defenses which are typical of infants, babies.
And the narcissist instrumentalizes you to the maximum.
You have a job. It's a job description. It's not an intimate relation. You have a series of jobs.
For example, you should recall the narcissist's moments of glory.
And by recording these moments of glory, you regulate the narcissist's flow of narcissistic supply.
That's a job.
Another job you should confirm to the narcissist that his false self is not false and that his fantasy, the shared fantasy, is not fantasy. It's another, another job you have.
And there are many others and you're busy all the time and it's exhausting. It's depleting because essentially you become a maintenance worker. And your maintenance job is to make sure that the fragile, brittle, breakable, vulnerable thing that is the narcissist because it's not a self. It's a thing that is never impacted by reality. You're a buffer. You're a firewall.
And if you don't do your job correctly, you penalize very heavily. You devalue.
So it's a transactional thing because as you recall, the child who later becomes a narcissistic adult is exposed to transactional love. The only kind of love he knows, the associates love with performance and the associates love with pain. Pain is a punitive thing.
So this is the way you construct the shared fantasy.
And you are so the base requirement from you is to not be to suspend yourself and to reappear as a fictional character within a narrative that is self-aggrandizing and over-protecting. A narrative whose main role is to prevent narcissistic injury or God forbid narcissistic modification.
And you are the guardian of the narcissist.
That's why I have this principle of dual mothership where the narcissist actually tells you, you're going to be my mother and I'm going to be your mother. You're the mother. You're the guardian. You're the custodian of the narcissist.
Dangerous, life-threatening shame.
It is your job to feed the narcissist with so much misinformation and fake news that will prevent him from ever getting in touch with his internal shame, which could destroy and kill him.
So that would be narcissist.
That's what they call narcissistic supply, right?
Yes, that's narcissistic supply.
And you would be a source of narcissistic supply.
And the narcissist would use a narcissistic supply to regulate his internal environment and to buttress the fortress that he has constructed around the shame, isolating it somehow.
It's mainly shame.
There are other negative effects and other negative emotions.
Is a running some mentioned them like anger, envy and so on.
Narcissists are not capable of positive at all.
Not even one of them, not love, not forget about all this.
They're capable only of negative.
Well, that's quite interesting because that would intimate them that if somebody is experiencing love for another human being, that they couldn't possibly be.
Unfortunately, we're heavily dependent on self-reporting.
How would you verify that what this person is experiencing is love?
There's no objective test or anything.
It's totally difficult.
One of the funny things you see online doing any research on narcissism is that people are always wondering, are they themselves narcissistic or clinically narcissist?
And one way to offer yourself comfort would be to remember the times that you did experience a deep sense of love or you are if you are perhaps you are in love with somebody.
How do you know that you do not mislabel something else?
For example, dependency.
Yeah, it's often mistaken for love.
It's a problem with the emotions because we utterly depend on self-reporting.
The thing is that narcissists firmly believe that they experience highly intense love.
If you talk to the narcissist, I'm going to tell you, I love the way no one else can love.
I love so deeply and intensely and profoundly that I doubt anyone else is capable of this.
So they insist that they are capable of loving and that they've experienced love and that they are offering love and that they are creatures of love and everything.
They masquerade as borderline actually.
But what the narcissist labels love is nothing whatsoever to do with love.
Not even it's like not a Venn diagram where there's something in common.
It's like two circles.
It's nothing whatsoever.
What the narcissist labels is love is love is a process known as narcissistic elation.
It's an oceanic feeling of merging and fusing with a mother figure who then affirms the narcissist's grandiosity, the narcissist's perfection, the narcissist's love ability.
So this is called narcissistic elation.
It's the merger of fusion symbiotic with a mother figure or with a real mother, by the way.
When the infant reacts to a real mother, that's narcissistic elation.
And narcissist misidentify this as love.
And when you dig deeper with narcissist, which I've been doing for 30 years, when you dig deeper with narcissist, you come up across paradoxes of thinking and so on.
So they would tell you, then I know I'm in love because of the way it makes me feel.
You ask the narcissist, how do you know you're in love?
Or because I've never felt this way.
But wait a minute.
Love is not about you. Love is about the other person.
True love is about the other person.
It's more about how you make the other person feel, not yourself.
Narcissists are takers.
They measure everything in terms of give and take or take and take and performance.
So when the narcissist chooses what you might call erroneously an intimate partner, I call them insignificant others.
When the narcissist chooses an insignificant other, it's not because of who she is.
There is this law, self aggrandizing law among the victim communities, the so-called empath communities, that they're special.
That's why the narcissist chose them.
They were chosen because they're hyper and pathetic and they're amazinglynarcissist chose them.
They were chosen because they're hyper and pathetic and they're amazingly kind and they're nice.
And that's what she does.
Narcissists don't do empathy.
They wouldn't identify empathy if it fell on their head.
So narcissist chooses you because of what you can give him.
Narcissists are looking for sex, supply, sadistic and narcissistic, safety, object constancy, your constant presence, even addiction, I would say to the narcissist.
So safety and services.
If you give the narcissist two of these four, sex and services, services and safety, any two, you qualify.
You could be tall or short, dark or blonde.
You could even be a psychopath.
You could even be another narcissist.
It's meaningless.
They don't care who you are.
They care you're a service provider.
Like I don't care who owns my internet service provider.
I just want internet flowing through my computer.
So it's a highly performative and performance oriented, goal oriented approach.
And but the victims feel so commoditized.
They feel so marginalized.
They feel that they've been so interchangeable and dispensable that they react with a narcissistic defense.
They say it's not true.
I was very special to him.
I was empathic.
I was nice.
I loved him.
I, you know, I saw through, I saw that I saw his inner child.
You know, they try to make sense of what has happened to them and what has happened to them is simply they happen to be there.
Period.
And they happen to be givers rather than takers.
So maybe that's the only qualification.
You have to be a giver or a people pleaser.
Yeah.
Quick one.
Are you hearing any background noise at all when we're in this conversation?
No, from my side.
Nope.
Okay, cool.
And I have a builder and doing some work.
Okay.
So, um, no, nothing, nothing comes through.
It's coming.
That's fantastic.
Okay.
Let's talk about combating the narcissist.
Now I don't know if you have seen this, but I've noticed a lot of stuff online.
How to manipulate the narcissist, how to fight the narcissist.
And I'm wondering about, okay, well, is this a good idea folks?
I mean, what, what, what are we doing here?
How to attack the narcissist, how to defeat the narcissist, how to torture.
How to torture.
I saw something that, okay.
What's your perspective?
Narcissists are very gullible and extremely prone to manipulate.
I mean, to being manipulated.
They're very manipulative.
Yeah.
They don't have actual, actual defenses against manipulation and worse.
Because they consider themselves to be so superior, so godlike, so perfect.
So no one can pull the wool over a narcissist's eyes because no one is intellectually superior to the narcissist.
The narcissist is world savvy, is worldly, is experienced, is super knowledgeable.
These narcissists, the grandiosity of the narcissist is a cognitive distortion.
Cognitive distortion in clinical terms means that you miss perceive reality.
Simply when someone misperceived reality, it's an easy target, an easy victim and an easy mark for con artists.
And so narcissists very often fall for swindlers and con artists.
And they're easy marks.
Well, they would fall for flattery.
And for example, for example, yeah, love bombing, flattery, get rich, quick schemes.
Yeah, they're easy marks.
So actually most of these videos are correct.
I have watched of course my share.
They're pretty accurate.
It's true that you can do this to the narcissist.
If you take into account that the mental age, emotional age of a narcissist is probably anywhere between two and four years old, I'm not sure it's such a major accomplishment to con the narcissist or manipulate the narcissist.
I would be ashamed of doing this.
You're manipulating or conning or abusing a child in effect.
No, it's a very bad child.
It's a nefarious child.
It's a horrible child.
Very silly child.
You're taking advantage of this child's naivety, naivete, this child's gullibility, this child's lack of experience with emotions.
Nasties can be very experienced in business and politics and what have you.
But when it comes to emotional processing and so on, so forth, they're children.
So yeah, sure.
You can manipulate a child to do your bidding or punish the child.
And if you're proud of it, good for you.
So how would you start then?
What would you do?
What would you do?
You're talking love bombing.
Well, first of all, you have to identify someone as the narcissist.
Once you've done that, then flattery, love bombing, that type of thing.
But what would that give you?
What would you achieve by doing that?
I mean, promotion, perhaps?
You can make the narcissist do anything you want.
There are two vectors of attack.
If I boil all these two million videos, there are two vectors of attack.
One is grandiosity and the other is paranoid ideation, paranoia.
So you can use these two vectors to manipulate the narcissist to make the narcissist do and I mean literally anything you want.
Literally anything you want.
So if you cater to the narcissist grandiosity, flattery is one example, but it doesn't have to be flattery.
For example, you can pretend to be helpless.
And by pretending to be helpless, you aggrandize the narcissist.
You are my only hope.
Only you have the solution.
You're amazing.
I don't trust anyone else.
It's a way to cater to the narcissist grandiosity, which does not involve flattery in effect.
That's a codependence to this codependence.
Often use this form of emotional blackmail.
You know, I will die without you.
For example, this kind of thing.
So this is a vector of attack by a grandiosity.
And another vector is paranoia to create an ambience or an environment that would trigger the narcissist's paranoid ideation, fear and would cause the narcissist to behave in ways which would be self-defeating or self-destructive.
If you want to punish your narcissist, for example, these are the two vectors.
And a combination of these two is even more like a combination of these two is known as paranoia or paranoid personality disorder.
It's when your grandiosity combines with your paranoia.
And you say to yourself, I'm such an important person. I know so many secrets. I'm so unique. My skills are unparalleled.
So this means that people are conspiring against me. This means that I'm, I'm at the focus and the center of my line attention.
And so the paranoia feeds the grandiosity and the grandiosity feeds the paranoia.
And you can construct a perfect scenario which would push the narcissist to behave in ways which are, which conform to your goal or your own.
And con artists do this.
But in intimate relationships, it's important to understand that narcissism is infectious, literal infectious.
You get infected by a process called entraining where the narcissist verbally abuses you or verbally repeats you. It's the same message over and over again.
And ultimately, ultimately synchronizes your mind with his mind.
And that is not a metaphor.
The brainwave synchronized it's been discovered recently in neuroscientific studies. So he synchronizes your brain with his brain via training.
He creates a fantasy which is irresistible because, because it might cater to some of your needs or some of your fears.
And so on.
So he takes away hijacks of mind. He takes over your mind.
And your only defense at some point is to out-narcissize the narcissist.
To simply become a bigger narcissist or even a psychopath.
So we say in clinical terms that exposure to narcissism, pathological narcissism triggers narcissistic defenses.
Andregular and low key, but ambient all the time there.
So because narcissists do this all the time, you begin to develop a post-traumatic condition.
And as we know by now, post-traumatic conditions, complex post-traumatic conditions are indistinguishable from personality disorder.
That's why someone like Judith Herman, Judith Herman is the mother of the field of complex trauma. She coined the phrase CPTSD.
Judith Herman advocates to merge complex trauma with at least borderline personality disorder. She says you need to eliminate borderline personality disorder because it's a form of complex trauma.
And so the narcissist traumatizes you.
Gradually you become borderline.
Your emotions become dysregulated.
You are doing crazy things.
You act out.
You go bananas.
After that you become narcissistic.
You push back.
Narcissist tries to humiliate you.
You humiliate back.
There's competition.
You're more intelligent than narcissist.
Narcissist is more intelligent for you.
So there's a kind of, you know, you become more and more narcissistic.
There's reciprocity going on.
And finally you become psychopathic.
You become defined.
You become reckless.
You engage in dangerous behaviors.
You lose sight of laws and regulations and rules and inhibitions.
So the narcissist pushes you from borderline to narcissist to psychopath.
And after the narcissist exits your life, you remain stuck with this for a while.
Luckily, it's a transitory phase.
But for a while you are indistinguishable from narcissist to psychopath or borderline.
So that's why I say that narcissism is contagious.
When you're thinking about healing from the trauma and you mentioned that you used the word trauma there, what steps would you recommend to start that process?
Are you talking immediately, talking in appointment with a therapist?
What kind of self-work can you do?
Yeah, I strongly advocate to do some self-work before you attend therapy.
And the reason is simple.
Through the process of entrainment and other processes, the narcissist embeds in your mind, installs in your mind and up, puts places in your mind a voice, his voice, his introject, he injects himself into your mind.
And from that moment on, he speaks to you through your mind.
Not only that, the narcissist forms coalitions with other voices, with the same message.
So for example, if you had a bad mother, a mother who kept telling you that you're worthless and you are stupid and you're this, the narcissist, her voice inside your head would create a coalition with the narcissist's voice and they would magnify each other and attack you from inside.
So this voice is with you even after the narcissist has exited your life.
If you were to attend therapy immediately, this voice would coopt your mind.
This would coopt the therapy.
It would take over the therapy.
And actually you, the therapist would end up interacting with a narcissist in your mind, not with you.
So there are a few steps you need to take.
They're all on my website, on my website, on my YouTube channel.
There's a playlist titled narcissistic abuse, healing and recovery, where I detail all the steps and so on, but in a nutshell, you need to get rid of this voice.
And then you need to separate from the narcissist and become yourself again.
Why is that?
Because within the shared fantasy, you strike a bargain, a covert, a covert contract with the narcissist.
He becomes your mother.
You become his mother.
In order for the narcissist to become your mother, he regresses you.
He infantilizes you.
He pushes you to become an infant.
Back to the womb.
So when the narcissist is gone, you need to grow up again.
You need to grow up and separate the way a child separates from his mother.
And then you need to individually, you need to go through these phases by yourself.
And only then you should attend therapy.
I explained how to do all these things in detail, in great detail.
There are, there's one over 50 or 60 hours on this playlist.
And I want to repeat it here.
Just go to the playlist and listen to the sequence of videos on how to do this.
But yes, it's a crucial point.
Do not attend therapy before you've eradicated the narcissist's voice in your mind and you have separated from the narcissist.
You're no longer an infant, no longer a child, no longer dependent.
And I've heard you mentioned before body language, outward physical identifiers of narcissism.
What, what, what would you look for?
What body language would betray a narcissist if you like?
Depends if it's overt or covert.
The overt narcissist is Woty.
And to save all of us time, Donald Trump.
So look at Donald Trump.
Let's say overt narcissist.
He's Woty, he's contemptuous.
He's exclusionary.
He excludes people.
Doesn't bring them to him, but kind of stands apart.
He's mysterious.
He creates an air of mystery or mystique.
And he's presumptuous.
So Donald Trump.
Female equivalent.
Same.
All these distinctions between male and female narcissists were very pertinent in the 1980s, but today studies by, by various, Lisa Wade and many others, have shown that women adopted a masculine identity.
In 1980, women described themselves using adjectives and eight out of nine adjectives were feminine, caring and perfect loving and affectionate.
And so today studies today, I mean, in the last 10 years, women described themselves in masculine terms, eight out of nine adjectives nowadays are masculine, competitive, ambitious, a winner, tough, rough.
So today there is no clinical difference between men and women in terms of narcissism, and I suspect in all other ways.
So it's meaningless to us.
That's why I never make these gender distinctions in my videos.
Andwhere were we?
What were we discussing?
We were talking about body language.
I have body language.
Yes.
So it applies to women as well.
When it comes to the covert narcissist, this is really bad.
Whereas you see the overt narcissist coming, you know, you can't mistake Donald Trump for a humble altruistic person, unless you are legally blind.
But the covert narcissist can put on a very convincing display of a side of humility.
We actually have a name for it in clinical psychology.
It's called pseudo humility.
It can put up a sort of humility of self-deprecation, of self-awareness, of being charitable, altruistic, of being a savior or a fixer or a healer.
And above all, of course, of being a victim.
That's a typical body language of the covert narcissist.
He is slouched.
He is hurt.
He is agonizing.
He is in need of help.
He is very affectionate and compassionate and empathic.
He is, and he communicates this.
And I think the key is how ostentatious it is.
So if you see an ostentatious display of positive traits, it's likely a covert narcissist and indeed there are new studies that demonstrate that social activists and people who engage in virtual signaling are actually dark personalities.
In other words, people who have psychopathy, I mean, subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism and Machiavellianism.
This is known today as competitive victim.
So all these so-called victims and all these movements were hijacked by covert narcissists mainly and some psychopaths and some overt narcissists.
And these covert narcissists are pretending to be the victims.
Victimhood is a form of entitlement.
Regardless of how voracious it is, regardless of how true it is, you could be victimized.
Everyone is victimized.
I've been victimized.
You've been victimized at some point, but it doesn't make you a victim.
Victimhood is an identity, not a person of history.
So victimhood is very narcissistic. It's entitled, it's competitive, it's arrogant, it's self-aggrandized and so on.
But it also is making a request of other people to change their behaviour around them.
This is the problem.
Yeah.
And you used the word entitlement.
And that is a very good way to describe it because if I claim victimhood status, it means everybody else has to adapt.
Yes.
You claim a right.
When you're a victim, you make a claim to certain rights and rights impose obligations on other people.
Whenever a right, there's a corresponding commensurate obligation.
So if you have a right, that's to modify their behaviour in order to accommodate your right.
So anything from political correctness, you know, correct speech and you name it.
All victimhood movements have lists of grievances and derive rights from these grievances, which impose obligations on society at large.
This is a formula and it's a narcissistic formula.
Of course, we should help victims.
We should help victims.
Of course, we should help them with therapy, we should help them with the police if it's a crime, I mean, we should help victims.
Society should be geared to help victims, but society should not accommodate victimhood as a lifelong pursuit or a profession.
And no, victimhood does not give rights to rights, philosophically speaking.
You as a victim don't have rights just because you have been victimized.
And just to be clear, we're not saying that there's no justification.
Because you could be, the crime, if you like, that was committed against could be perfectly legitimate.
It could have been dreadful.
But the point is that you don't live your life as a victim.
And you don't make demands on other people.
It doesn't give you the right to make demands on other people.
None.
I know it's shocking maybe to modern, post modern ears.
But let me ask you about one thing then.
So that one thing that jumps to mind, there is a debate about reparations.
Right.
So you may see.
Perfect example.
And the whole of us, by the way, the whole of the industry.
So yeah, so there is a comparison there.
Yeah, it is.
It's deadly ground to even discuss.
But clearly the reparations issue.
The problem with the reparations issue is that there's nobody alive today.
That can be that repair can be done when it comes to, for example, slavery.
The Holocaust.
There's maybe a handful of survivors left.
At this point.
When an event of having been victimized, an event of victimization is converted into a narrative, an ideology, a manifesto of grievances and rights, like the Declaration of Independence in the United States, which was a classic victimhood thing, you know, read it again.
So when this is done, we are transitioning into pathological, a pathological area and also, to my mind, an unethical area.
This is an unethical.
The fact that you've endured victimhood, the fact that you have a victim, the fact that you've been victimized.
Does not give you the right to take from other people because they may perceive this as being victimized.
It does not give you the right to victimize others.
You take one dollar away from me. I'm sorry, you victimized me.
We don't owe you anything.
So.
There are, of course, society should accommodate.
Retributive justice, retribution.
Restorative justice.
Even retribution as its place.
As a kind of a soothing mechanism.
And of course, money should somehow change hands and so on and so forth.
But that's between the direct victim and the direct victimized.
Anything that exits this circle is illegitimate, unethical and reflects pathology.
And when I say reflects pathology, it's based on studies.
That's not something studies by Gabai in Israel, studies in British Columbia, studies in Taiwan.
By now there's a whole literature in the last four years.
There's a whole literature about competitive victims, set entitled victims, how victims manipulate other people to take away from them, all kinds of things.
And so on.
There's a whole literature on this.
But because it's politically incorrect, it doesn't gain the exposure, which I think it should have gained.
I think it's these are amazing breakthroughs, breakthroughs in so forth, and they're brave.
These people are brave.
Really takes bravery and takes courage.
You could lose your job of a socialworker, yeah.
And OK, so what do you feel about a narcissist propensity to change right themselves without treatment, without an intervention?
Say they identify themselves as narcissistic and they don't identify narcissistic traits. How would they change?
Would they change?
Would they want to change?
What's your perspective on that question?
So we must distinguish between antisocial, the antisocial dimension of narcissism, which exists in with majority of narcissists in a very pronounced way among psychopathic narcissists.
But it is enormous.
The antisocial dimension aspect ameliorates with age.
That is almost inexorable and nothing needs to be done.
It simply vanishes on its own.
Narcissists are far less criminal, criminalized in late age.
By the way, psychopaths as well.
Narcissists are far less antisocial, far less abrasive, more accommodating, etc.
So this happens.
The social aspect of narcissism, the ability to function within society in ways which are not powerful or deleterious to other people.
This takes care of itself.
However, the core is immutable to death, the point of death.
And the core is inability to perceive realities, cognitive distortions, grandiosity, fantasy.
This is lifelong and it doesn't resolve spontaneously.
And it doesn't resolve with therapy.
And therefore we should accept that there are people like that.
That's it. People who live in fantasy and think they're good.
They're good friends.
And if you disagree with them or challenge them, they punish you.
So better stay clear.
Yeah. We're talking about managing them as opposed to confronting them or treating them.
Well, managing them requires the manipulation, manipulative vectors to mention grandiosity, paranormal.
That's the only way to manage them.
But I wouldn't even, I would attempt wisely not to manage.
So I when I started my work in and especially in 1995, I came up with a set of 27 strategies and I titled them knock on top, which today is a very no one knows that I invented it, but I invented this.
And I still think it's the best.
I think it's the best.
I mean, knock on top, simply knock on.
Even if it's your mother, even if it's your son or daughter or whatever.
Knock on.
Well, it is an ideal strategy, but it's unfortunately in the society we live in, it's sometimes that may not be possible.
Sometimes you're reporting, you're working alongside people.
You just simply can't just.
Yes, that's why I came up with seven other strategies.
Grey Rock was one that is not mine.
It's not mine.
It's the second most powerful strategy.
It's wonderful and regret.
It is so fine.
Very fine.
And can you give me another one or two?
Mirroring, you know, there's a lecture on my website, on my YouTube channel, I'm sorry, which kind of it's a lecture I gave in Budapest where I kind of delineate the strategies and how the Nazis reacts or actually how the Nazis experiences these strategies internally and reacts to them.
So, but if at all possible to go no contact and very often it is possible.
For example, if you're divorcing a nurse, you can limit the interaction to intermediaries, such as lawyers and accountants.
You can refuse to communicate directly if you are cooperating with a narcissist, you can use safe houses or third parties to shuttle the child between the, you know, you can put buffers and partitions, the same process, enhance and increase the separation gradually.
And when people tell me I can't go no contact because I'm financially dependent on a narcissist, that is something I do not countenance or accept in any way, shape or form.
Absolutely.
If you have a common child, I understand.
If you, or if someone tells me it's my mother, how can I do this to her? I don't accept this.
I don't accept this.
This is about self-reservation, survival.
Narcissist threaten your survival, at least mentally, not because they're bad.
I'm often confronted with the question of narcissist evil.
They're no more evil than viruses or, and I make a distinction between purposefulness and intentionality.
The narcissist is purposeful.
He has a purpose like the psychopath.
He's goal oriented and the goal is narcissistic supply.
But yes, so he has a kind of game plan, but purposefulness is not the same as intentionality.
The psychopath is intentional.
Psychopath is intentional.
If he hurts you, he wants to hurt you.
If the narcissist hurts you, it's a bad problem.
It's a side effect.
He doesn't get off.
He doesn't arouse him to hurt you the way it arouses the psychopath often.
So a virus, a virus is a purpose.
Viruses are very good.
They go through a protocol, they invade a cell, they convert a cell into a factory.
They replicate it.
All looks very intelligent.
When we were fighting the COVID-19 virus, people were talking about the COVID-19 as if it was some kind of intelligent sentient enemy.
But no one in his right mind, at least, would impute intentionality to the virus.
And that's a narcissist.
A narcissist is an automatic pilot.
He's a programmed robot.
I compared the narcissist to artificial intelligence 30 years ago.
And I think that it holds, the same thing holds.
It's a form of artificial intelligence.
Now today when we confront or we come across artificial intelligence, or interact with artificial intelligence online, many of us have a feeling that our interlocutor is a human being.
Intentional and this and that.
Of course it's not.
It's a program.
A program out of control sometimes, but it's a program.
And the same with a narcissist.
It's a machine.
It's a robot programmed by bad mothers, bad fathers, to take on the world in highly specific ways.
Actually, narcissists are very rigid and constricted.
They're unable to extemporise and improvise.
They are highly predictable because they are.
So there were debates in philosophy in the 18th century.
Do animals have awareness, consciousness, or are they machines?
And many philosophers said animals appear to be conscious and so on, but they're actually machines.
They're pre-programmed machines.
And many pet owners would disagree.
But when we come to the narcissist, I insist on this.
It's a pre-programmed machine.
It's a highly sophisticated, complex machine that gives the erroneous impression of being a human being.
It's a simulation.
It's a great simulation of a human being.
And in 1970, there was a roboticist, was a Hyo Mori, a Japanese.
And he said that the time will come when we're going to have robots indistinguishable from human beings, androids.
And he said, well, this should happen.
Everyone would feel ill it is.
And he called it the uncanny value reaction.
He said, the closer robots will come to resemble human beings, the more and more people will feel discomfort and ill it is and so on.
And this is the narcissist.
This is the first Android.
It's a perfect emulation, imitation, simulation of a human being.
And yet we feel uncomfortable.
We, something's wrong.
Something's off key.
We often deny this gut feeling, this intuition often because of social reasons or because we're lonely and we want to have an apartment or whatever the reason may be, or because it's my mother or my father or what.
We deny this.
But no one can deny really that when you're in the presence of a narcissist, something doesn't click, something is not right.
Something doesn't fit, you know.
And I have this experience as a narcissist.
I meet people and I'm most, I am my most charming self. I'm outgoing and I'm empathetic, I'm super kind, don't ask.
And I see how uncomfortable that, how ill it is, how reluctant to engage, how reticent, how I see that I provoked this in them.
And of course, if the other party is obligated socially, the social expectation is then they deny, they suppress this, they suppress it and actually they're forced to act, they're forced to pretend, they're forced to fake.
They become fake.
I infect them with my fakeness.
This is social contagion of mercy.
Let's see, that's a picture.