So it is my great honor to announce Professor Sam Vaknin, who is also very famous as a writer, and one of the famous book is Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, where he was the first one to describe narcissistic abuse.
Sam also coined most of the language in use today to deal with this harrowing phenomenon.
Sam is also professor of clinical psychology in Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies in Cambridge and Birmingham, UK and then Ontario, Canada and the Outreach Campus in Osun, in Nigeria. He is also visited professor of psychology in the newly founded Southeast European University, and for five years he was visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Russia.
And today, we are really lucky to listen from him about narcissism and this phenomenon.
Thank you.
I'll give you one tip, free of charge. Never applaud until the end of the seminar. You may live to regret it. Okay?
So as you can hear from my voice, the first thing I picked up in Zagreb, free of charge, was common cold. So I'm a bit under the weather, as the British say. I apologize to you, but there is a bonus soundtrack to this seminar, cuffing and the all-time hit, Sam Vaknin clearing his throat. It's all part of the seminar. And again, you have my apologies in advance.
Okay, the seminar is long because I like to hear my voice, and it's divided to four parts.
The first part is psychodynamics.
Now, psychodynamics is not the same as clinical features. It's not the same as presenting signs and symptoms.
Psycho-dynamics means the internal psychological processes within an individual.
So we start with psychodynamics actually because psychodynamics are common to most, if not all, cluster B personality disorders.
The seminar is not about narcissism only, it's about Cluster Bpersonality disorders.
Then following the psychodynamics part, there will be a break.
Yeah.
And then after the break, those of you who are masochistic or self-hating, will be back.
And then we move on to the second part of the seminar, which I find the most interesting.
The second part is etiology.
How people with Cluster B personality disorders came to acquire Cluster B personality disorders.
So we will discuss bad parenting and more specifically, dead parenting.
We'll discuss it a bit later. We will discuss trauma. We will discuss dissociation.
And following trauma and dissociation, we will discuss the emptiness, the emptiness at the core of the borderline patient and the narcissistic patient.
This emptiness is actually the driving force, the motivating force, and borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder are compensatory. They are compensatory strategies intended to compensate for this emptiness.
I'm going to try to the best of my ability to make you experience this emptiness. It's very terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying.
And we'll try together to get a glimpse of it because that's all you can get.
How does one verbalize absence? How does one verbalize non-existence? How does one demonstrate or make other people experience that which has no experience?
So these disorders are absences masquerading as presences. And this is the core. And we're going to discuss this in the second part.
The third part is phenomenology.
That means we're going to discuss the various behaviors and traits of people with cluster B personality disorders.
They're lovely people. They're the kind of people you want to get married with and have children with.
So I'm going to demonstrate to you how lovely they are.
We're going to discuss phenomenology.
And then the last part, and I'm keeping it to the end so that some of you remain here.
The last part is about interpersonal relationships with emphasis on intimate relationships.
So, Cluster B personality disorders in intimate relationships, but whatever I'll be saying will apply equally to other types of interpersonal relationships.
Okay, I understand that most people present are clinicians or mental health professionals and practitioners of one kind or another.
So I'm afraid the lecture will be geared at and addressed to clinicians.
So those of you who are not clinicians and have difficulty with the language or some concepts and so on so forth, at the very end of the lecture, of the seminar, I'm sorry, there will be an hour and a half for questions and answers. So you will ask questions and if I have the answers, I'll give them to you, or you will give me the answers and I will question them. We'll see. See how it goes.
Okay.
I have a strange sense of humor and few people have recovered.
Exposure is dangerous so I advise you to just ignore me. It's the safest course of action.
Before we start with the psychodynamics of Cluster B personality disorders, and for those of you who are uninitiated, Cluster B personality disorders is a group of personality disorders within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual right now is at its fifth edition, Text Revision. It was published in 2022.
Within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, there's a list of 12 personality disorders, and they're divided into groups known as A, B, C, and D, surprisingly.
Now, cluster B is also known as the dramatic or erratic cluster. And the reason is that these personalities are dramatic and erratic. Who says there's no logic in psychology?
So they are mad and bad, but they're not so sad. We divide mental illnesses into sad, mad and bad. They are mad and bad. I am sad.
So now we are, I would like to make a few comments on Cluster B and so on so forth.
There is a competition between three approaches, three attitudes to the classification of mental health disorders and especially the classification of personality disorders.
We have the categorical model. The categorical model looks like your grandmother's shopping list. So you have like many bullet points, it's a list.
And then if the patient meets several of the diagnostic criteria, the patient is diagnosed.
That is the categorical model because all mental health disorders in this model are divided into categories. It's like putting them in drawers. Okay, this is model number one.
It is today considered inaccurate and very old-fashioned. And so we are gradually transitioning to the next type of model.
The next type of model is known as dimensional model. Dimensional model is a fancy word for literature.
Essentially the dimensional model is a piece of literature which describes the internal world, the traits, the behaviors of the patient.
I'm saying literature because that's exactly how it's written, like literature.
When the committee of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5 was meeting and was writing, was in the process of offering the DSM-5, there was a big debate whether to remain stuck in the categorical model or to transition to the dimensional model.
And so what they did, all committees do that, they adopted both.
So in the DSM-5 we have the categorical model and we have something called alternative model.
So for example, narcissistic personality disorder, you have the categorical model these are nine diagnostic criteria but you also have the alternative model of narcissistic personality disorder which is essentially a dimensional model okay even the dimensional model is considered old-fashioned and non-representative of our current state of knowledge.
So if you want to refer to a diagnostic manual that is fully updated and reflects the latest knowledge, you would go to the 11th edition of the ICD, the international classification of diseases published by the World Health Organization.
In the ICD, there is only one personality disorder, actually, one diagnosis of personality disorder, and varying traits.
So what you do as a diagnostician, you mix the traits, exactly like a recipe. You mix the traits and you cook the patient, which we anyhow do.
Okay, so this is the first commentary.
Whatever I'm going to discuss and whatever I'm going to say is perceived very differently in the categorical model, in the dimensional model, in the uni-personality model, which is the ICD model. These are competing models.
And the way we look at the patient from each model, via each model, is very different. And this creates major problems in presentations like this.
Sometimes I'm going to say something, and the DSM would agree with me but the ICD would not. And sometimes I would say something and vice versa.
Next comment I want to make, we are not yet in the psychodynamics file.
Next comment I want to make is that it is my view and the view of others, minor scholars like Otto Kernberg and so on, it is my view that pathological narcissism is at the core of most mental illness.
Pay attention, I did not say most personality disorders. I said most mental illness.
For example, Kernberg in the 1970s proposed a unifying model of psychosis, borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, and at the foundation of this model was pathological narcissism.
So this is also my view.
And when we are going to go deeper into the seminar to a point of no return, then we will discuss the contribution of pathological narcissism to other disorders.
Next.
When we discuss pathological narcissism, I'm very fond of using metaphors.
I'm fond of using metaphors because I'm a writer of short fiction, but I'm fond of using metaphors because pathological narcissism is such an alien phenomenon. Allian.
It's extremely difficult to communicate. There's no common ground between a healthy, normal person, whatever that may be, and someone who has distorted, deformed, thwartednarcissism.
There's not common ground. There's no common language. It's very difficult to communicate.
So the only way to do that is actually literature. So if you read Dostoevsky and so on so forth, you're exposed to the biggest psychologists who have ever lived.
Only literature is the medium, the mediating bridge between the essence, reality and experience of mental illness and the ability of others who are not mentally ill to somehow grasp what it means to be mentally ill.
I generally concede or claim that psychology is a pseudo-science. In principle can never be a science. In principle can never be a science.
And that therefore it is a form of literature.
But that's just my own thing.
Metaphors.
So I will give you an example of a metaphor.
We know that pathological narcissism starts to emerge in early childhood, and we know that what happens is the child is exposed to adversity, trauma, abuse, we'll discuss these a bit later, because there's a huge misunderstanding as to what constitutes abuse.
Many, many behaviors that do not appear to be abusive are actually very abusive.
Okay, so the child is exposed to adversity of one kind or another.
And some children, very few, luckily for us, some children develop pathological narcissism.
When the child develops pathological narcissism, the child creates an imaginary friend, an imaginary friend embedded in a fantasy world. The fantasy world is known as paracosm.
The imaginary friend is known as the false self. The false self is everything the child is not.
The child is powerless and helpless and terrified.
The false self is all powerful.
The child cannot predict the behavior of adults because the adults are abusive, crazy making.
But the false self is all knowing, omniscient. The false self is all knowing omniscient. The false self is omnipotent. The false self is omniscient.
The child is being told via the process of abuse and trauma. The child is being told that it is unlovable, that it is imperfect, that it is unworthy.
And so the false self is exactly the opposite. The false self is a perfect entity.
If we put all of this together, omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, what do we get?
Yes, we get God, of course. The child invents God.
So the metaphor I'm using when I try to explain pathological narcissism is that it is a private primitive religion, private primitive religion invented by the child.
Human beings have invented God and religion because they are terrified, essentially. It's a way to confront existential fear.
Same with the child. The child faces existential fear. And so the child invents God.
But it goes a bit further.
When the child invents the false self, the child destroys its own true self.
So the child chooses, has to choose between the true self and the false self, and the child chooses the false self.
What does that remind you in ancient primitive religion?
What is this?
It's human sacrifice.
So we have a religion with a god which is essentially like the monarch and the child sacrifices itself to this god. There's human sacrifice here and a new religion is born.
So I'm giving you right now an example of a metaphor to pathological narcissism.
Another metaphor would be a cult. There are cult dynamics in pathological narcissism.
Another metaphor would be private language. Pathological narcissism is a form of private language.
Now, if Wittgenstein was here, he would have disagreed with me because Wittgenstein said that language must be public. Language can never be private.
I think Wittgenstein was wrong in this particular case, and I think pathological narcissism is a private language.
But I will not go into all these metaphors. I just wanted to give you an example of how you could, through literature, the study of religion, the study of ancient cultures, the study of history, you could acquire clinical depth, clinical depth, depth that would help you in your clinical practice.
Now who was the first to do that?
Zygmone Freud, of course. Zygmone Freud introduced culture and archaeology and the study of civilization and so on, into his clinical practice.
Regardless of what you may think of Sigmund Freud, that was an interesting way to actually engage in attempted healing.
So, metaphors, as you will see during this seminar, would be important.
My entire work, and I'm not alone, of course, I actually represent the mainstream in this particular. I'm not a rebel, I apologize, I represent the mainstream.
So my approach is that cluster B personality disorders are the outcomes of trauma. And I'm using a trauma model which was first proposed by Colin Ross.
So you may wish to read up on it. It's known as the trauma model of personality disorders. And I'm using this model.
Finally, let me play the rebel card, because I don't want to disappoint you.
I doubt, I have my doubts whether personality disorders are actually clinical entities.
In other words, I have my doubts whether personality disorders, and especially Cluster B, are actually mental illnesses or mental health disorders. I have my strong doubts.
One reason that I have these doubts is that the diagnostic definition of these disorders is relational.
It's not about the individual. It's about what the individual does to other people. How the individual behaves in society, in some context, how the individual functions in a relationship, the effects of the individual in relationship to other people.
For example, envy others. It's directional, Exactly like love. You love others.
So the whole language which currently is used to describe cluster B personality disorders is relational. It involves other people.
That's not the case with schizophrenia. It's not the case with psychotic disorders. It's not the case with schizophrenia. It's not the case with psychotic disorders. It's not the case with bipolar disorder.
These are clinical entities. These are mental illnesses. These are mental health problems. They're clear, as clear as tuberculosis, you know.
But when you go to the description or diagnostic description of psychopathy, you come up with, it's a bad guy, he doesn't follow the rules, he's disobedient, he's defiant, he's reckless, you know, so.
So it's a bad guy, don't get married with him. I mean, don't be his friend. It doesn't strike me as a mental illness at all, psychopathy.
And indeed, when psychopathy was first described, which was well over 150 years ago, it was described as a disorder of character, or later, asocial disorder, which indeed it is, but it's not a mental illness.
Similarly, narcissists, narcissists are, you know, obnoxious, lonesome, repulsive. I mean, these are narcissists.
But does that amount to a mental illness? There is an open question here.
Narcissists are a-holes, but does that make them mentally ill?
My personal answer is yes, there is a mental illness there, but there is place for doubt, there is place for debate when it comes to cluster B personality disorders.
Indeed, today when we reconceive of borderline personality disorder, we are beginning to realize that borderline personality disorder is an issue of emotional dysregulation, which is often the outcome of exposure to long-term stress and trauma.
So we are beginning to conflate borderline personality disorder with complex trauma.
People like Judith Herman, the mother of complex trauma, she suggests to eliminate altogether the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and to call it emotional dysregulation or CPTSD. And the ICD 11 accepted part of this position.
Indeed, when people were writing the DSM-5, they wanted to take out narcissistic personality disorder. They wanted to eliminate it. And histrionic. And there were even debates about psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder.
So bear in mind, the entities we are discussing, the ostensibly clinical entities we are discussing, are a little like dragons, you know? You know the ancient maps when they didn't know some parts of the map, they didn't know what's happening there? They wrote, here be dragons.
So, this is more or less the DSM. Here be dragons.
So these are the initial comments and I want to read to you a quote, a short quote, and then we go into the second analysis.
The quote was written by Hazan and McFarland in 2010. So here's what they say.
When alarmed, the child seeks proximity to a caregiver, a safe base. Today we don't use the term safe base, we use the term secure base.
But proximity to a frightening caregiver only increases the alarm, and the child then attaches to an imaginary caregiver, the false self, which is Godlike.
That's the foundation of the entire seminar. Thank you very much for coming. If you have any questions.
Before we go into the psychodynamics, and I know I've said it already six times, before we go to the psychodynamics, some of you may ask, what about genetics? What about brain abnormalities? We are now medicalizing psychology.
Psychologists want to think, when they grow up, they want to be medical doctors. So we are medicalizing psychology.
Some of us are even wearing white robes. And so we are beginning to convert psychology into a branch of neuroscience, in effect, not psychiatry.
Psychiatry has to do mainly with psychopharmacology, with medication. But we are beginning to unite, to unify, psychology and neuroscience, trying, attempting to finda brain template, a cerebral, neurological, biological template for all the phenomena that hitherto we called psychological phenomenon.
So what about cluster B?
Buzón? Buzón. That was my part. I'm supposed to sneeze. I'vethere is a hereditary component. We know that genetics plays a part in borderline personality disorder.
If you have a first degree relative with borderline personality disorder, you are five times as likely to have borderline personality disorder, you are five times as likely to have borderline personality disorder as the average population.
We know that in psychopathy, there are brain abnormalities, massive. The brain of the psychopath is immediately distinguishable and has very little in common with a normal, healthy brain.
So we have problems with the amygdala, we have white matter discrepancies, we have problems with the hippocampus, with every part of the brain is affected in psychopathy.
And the physiology of the psychopath's body is different.
For example, reaction to fear, perspiration, skin conductance, they're all totally different among psychopaths, people diagnosed with psychopathy.
So there is no question that the psychopath is different to normal and healthy people as far as biology goes.
Same with the borderline, we're beginning to realize that the borderline's brain is different to the normal healthy brain.
So we can generalize and say that psychopaths and borderlines are probably genetically inherited, or at least there is a strong hereditary component, and that the brains of people with borderline and psychopathy are very different to normal healthy grades.
However, that is not the case in narcissism in the sense that we failed at this stage. We've been trying for about 20 years.
At this stage, we failed to find conclusive proof that the brain of the narcissist is different to a normal healthy brain.
There are many, many studies, small studies, some of them with two people, some of them with 30 people, tiny studies, non-representative, not serious.
There's nothing serious that shows that the brain of the narcissists is different.
Similarly, we have no indication or proof or study that supports the claim that narcissism is hereditary or has a hereditary component. None.
We did not find a gene, an array of genes, express genes, epigenetic studies, nothing. We failed to connect narcissism to genetics. End of story.
This may well change. And I believe that there is a hereditary component in narcissism, I think it's pretty easy to prove.
You take five children, including twins. They're exposed to the same family environment. One of them becomes a narcissists and ten others don't.
So clearly there is a genetic predisposition, we just fail to find it at this stage.
As to brain abnormalities, I don't know, because there are no studies.
However, there is a mountain of studies, mountain range of studies, that link pathological narcissism to childhood adversity, to what we call adverse childhood experiences.
There's a mountain.
Narcissism has first been described by Havelock Ellis in 1897, not Freud. 20 years later, Freud plagiarized Ellis, which he did with many others, and came up with on narcissism, the essay on narcissism, 1914.
So narcissism and narcissists have been studied repeatedly and regularly for the last 140 years.
The only other disorder which has been described earlier is psychopathy.
So that's the oldest clinical entity we know of, and we have a huge amount of material, and no question whatsoever, that the precipitating factor in pathological narcissism is something wrong, something that goes wrong in the family.
And we will discuss it, and I'm sorry to say, mostly with the mother. Mostly with the mother.
That's not only Sam Vaknin, that is John Bowlby and many others.
The mother here is critically responsible for the malformation of the child later on in life.
We did not find such a correlation in psychopathy, and we did not find such a correlation in borderline, where either of the parents could be a contributing factor, but in narcissism it's the mother, the mother and then it's the mother.
Mothers have very little to contribute, generally but also in narcissism.
I wanted to open the lecture by saying, ladies, ladies, ladies and a few brave gentlemen. Here.
I'm sorry, my voice is under attack.
I couldn't agree more.
Okay, psychodynamics, as promised.
I'm going to describe to you internal processes that are common to all cluster B personality disorders.
We don't have much time, I mean, seven hours is nothing, we don't have much time. So I'm going to, like, we do it like bullet points.
Remember, at the end of the seminar, there will be about one and half hours to ask questions and answers. I won't be here, but you can ask questions. I'll be here. You can ask questions and I will do my best to answer.
So write down, write down everything.
During the breaks, I usually talk to people, but because of the situation, I need to recover my voice. I won't be able to talk to you. So I apologize to all of you in advance.
Okay, the first crucial, the first crucial psychodynamic in Cluster B personality disorders is what is known as identity diffusion or identity disturbance.
Now identity diffusion is a phrase that was first used by Erik Erikson when he described adolescence. So he coined the phrase identity diffusion. Therefore I don't use identity diffusion because it's very confusing. So I use identity disturbance as do many other scholars.
Identity confusion or identity disturbance is that you don't have a stable identity from one day to the next, from one week to the next, from one set of circumstances to the next, from one day to the next, from one week to the next, from one set of circumstances to the next, from one environment to the next, you're not the same person. You have different values, different beliefs, different memories, different thoughts, and different emotions. For all practical purposes, you're not the same person.
And this is known as identity diffusion and disturbance. We'll discuss it when we come to dissociation and the empty schizoid core.
Of course, when you are empty, you're like a container. Yes, you are like a receptacle. This glass I can pour water, I can pour wine, and I can pour anything into this glass.
And you could conceive of cluster B personality disorders as receptacles, empty containers, empty glasses, into which life pours different contents at different moments in their lives.
So they change. They're not the same people. This is a key feature of Cluster B.
And yes, it applies also to psychopaths.
Now, just to be rigorous, psychopathy, let alone sociopathy, is not a clinical term. I hope you know that.
Psychopathy is a popularly used term, and there are scholars such as Robert Hare, Nathan Bebiak, and others who insist that psychopathy is not the same as antisocial personality using.
So there's a big debate on psychopathy.
Sociopathy is completely, completely wrong. Sociopathy was the old name for psychopathy is completely, completely wrong. Sociopathy was the old name for psychopaths, for psychopathy, simply.
So today when you read online or in the media about sociopaths and psychopaths, it's nonsense, it's simply the old name.
But I'm going to use the word psychopath and psychopathy because I do believe that there is a clear diagnostic profile of such people. And I do believe that there is an affinity to antisocial personality disorder, one of the cluster B disorders. And that this affinity is an affinity of quantity, it's quantitative.
In other words, the psychopath is an exaggerated antisocial, the end of the spectrum of antisocial, so to speak.
Orson Welles, believe it or not, had a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Seriously. He met Adolf Hitler by accident. It should happen to me. He met Adolf Hitler by accident. They were hiking. Both of them were hiking. And he came across Adolf Hitler.
And this is what Orson Welles had to say about Adolf Hitler, the poster boy of Cluster B personality, Hitler, not Welles. Orson Welles described Hitler this way. No personality whatsoever. I think there was nothing there. Amazing. Very perceptive, because he met him only for a few minutes.
And that's exactly the core psychodynamic of Cluster B personality disorders. Absence, emptiness, black hole, big void. We'll come to it in great detail later in the seminar.
Next, external locus of control and alloplastic defenses, I will explain it briefly.
External locus of control is the belief or the conviction or the theory or the narrative that your life is controlled from the outside, not from the inside. You're not in charge of your life. Other people, institutions, circumstances, history, they control you from the outside.
So external locus of control, and of course, in this case, whatever happens in your life, all your failures, all your mistakes, everything is not your fault. It's not your fault. You're controlled from the outside, so you're not responsible, you're not guilty.
This is known as alloplastic defense. Alloplastic defense is blaming other people or blaming the outside world for whatever is happening, whatever wrong goes in your life. Your life is not going as you think it should.
Not my fault. It's my boss. It's my long-suffering wife. It's Lydia. So, not my fault. This is alloplastic defense.
Of course, in other mental health disorders, we have autoplastic defenses. Autoplastic defense. It's all my fault. I am guilty. I'm responsible. I made it happen.
You heard of people pleasers? People pleasing?
So people pleasers have autoplastic defense. If someone is unhappy around me, it's because of me.
Children have autoplastic defenses. If mommy and daddy are fighting, it's because of me. If they're divorcing, it's because of me.
This is autoplastic defense.
Cluster B have exactly the opposite. Everyone else is guilty. Everyone else is to blame. Everyone else is responsible except the Cluster B patient.
Next, all Cluster B personalities are very confusing, and they're very confusing because they have pro-social, communal variants.
So classical Cluster B cases are antisocial, they're schizoid, but they somehow either avoid society or act against society.
But in all Cluster B personality disorders, you have pro-social variants, communal variants. These are people with Cluster B personality disorders who are actually super moral, hyper-moral, hypersocial.
So they could be social activists. They could be gurus. They could be professors of psychology.
They could never be professors. Zorozakoridl. Never ever. But you get the picture.
These are people whose grandiosity is, I am more moral than you. I'm holier than thou.
Their grandiosity is, I'm charitable, I'm altruistic, I'm helping people, I'm all for justice.
Indeed, in the past four years, starting in Israel of all places, there have been studies which demonstrated that social justice movements, including Me Too, Black Lives Matter, have been infiltrated and hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths.
You have the studies by Gabai in Israel, four studies, that demonstrated that some people have a victimhood identity. And this victimhood identity renders them narcissistic. They become entitled. They become aggressive. And then they form activism or social justice movements.
And so there's a lot of what is known as virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is, look at me, I'm so moral, I'm so nice, I'm so kind, I'm so altruistic, no one is like me.
And this is of course narcissism. So it's very confusing because you could see someone who is really helpful and loving and kind and charitable and so on, but actually is doing it in order to obtain supply, narcissistic supply, attention, admiration, and so on.
So these are the social, prosocial, communal narcissists.
The next point is very, very important and a bit difficult to understand.
Where's to start? Let's start with psychotics. People with psychotic disorders.
People with psychotic disorders cannot tell the difference between internal and external.
Right? They have a voice. There's a voice talking in their minds.
And they say, no, the voice is not in my mind. The voice is coming from there.
They have an image. And then they say, there's the image. It's going to attack me.
And they react. They have reactivity which reflects this counterfactual perception.
So what is happening with the psychotic?
The psychotic projects the inner world outwardly. The psychotic confuses internal and external.
What happens is the psychotic consumes the world, becomes the world.
This has a name. This is a clinical name. It's called hyper-reflexivity.
So, psychotics have hyper-reflexivity.
I mention psychosis because in cluster B there is hyper-reflexivity, but of exactly the opposite kind.
Whereas the psychotic confuses internal objects with external objects, Cluster B confuse external objects with internal objects.
Reverse psychosis. Mirror psychosis, if you wish. But still, psychosis.
Otto Kernberg, which I mentioned before, and others, equated narcissism and borderline, pathological narcissism and borderline, they equated it with psychosis.
Why the word borderline? Where does the word borderline? What's the border? What's the border?
It's the border between neurosis and psychosis. Bordermline, to neurosis and psychosis.
In other words, the borderline patient is pseudo-psychotic. Same with the narcissists. Narcissist is pseudo-psychotic. Same with the narcissist. The narcissist is pseudo-psychotic.
In which sense, they think that external objects are actually internal. Objects in some schools in psychology, objects means people. So we have object relations, yeah. They mean people.
Narcissists, borderlines and psychopaths confuse external people with internal objects.
In other words, they perceive you, when a narcissist looks at you, a borderline looks at you, a psychopath looks at you, they perceive you not as external, not as out there, not as separate, not as autonomous, not as independent.
They perceive you as internal. They perceive you as internal. They perceive you as avatars, some kind of representation.
And so they treat you as if you were extensions of themselves, as if you were parts, elements in their mind, not really out there. We'll discuss it a bit later.
This has shocking consequences. This inability to tell external from internal has shocking consequences, including in clinical setting with the therapist.
Of course, everything I'm describing applies to interpersonal relationships, but also to therapy.
In therapy, we actually recreate many of these dynamics. There's a process of transference, you know, we recreate many of these dynamics.
And the therapist must understand that he or she is perceived as an internal representation, or what we call in object relations internal object, not as anything external.
Because the therapist is internal, the therapist is controlled. It's controlled, it's manipulated. It's subject to the patient's agenda.
It's an extension. It's a tool. It's an instrument.
And whenever the therapist deviates or diverges from this perception, misperception, that creates aggression, including in clinical settings.
And the aggression has many forms. We'll discuss all this a little bit late.
Okay, next.
The next feature in Cluster B personality disorders is incongruence or discrepancy.
Everything in the Cluster B patient, everything is subject to discrepancies, incongruences.
In other words, everything contradicts everything. It's like the patient is comprised or composed of mutually exclusive modules, like the modules don't fit together.
I'll give you one example for you to understand.
The clinical term is ego incongruence, ego incongruence, or ego discrepancy.
I'll give an example, and you will immediately understand what I'm saying, and even if you don't immediately understand, pretend that you immediately understand.
Okay. Otherwise, I'll become aggressive. My internal objects.
So I'll give you an example.
Pathological narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder is a cluster B.
So the narcissist, there is a discrepancy between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem.
Internally, the narcissistic self-esteem is low. The implicit self-esteem is low.
But the narcissist projects overconfidence, very high self-esteem.
So we see a discrepancy and incongruence between internal reality and external reality.
This is one example.
Literally everything, everything you can think of, every dimension, everything to do with personality, every trait, domain, everything is discrepant.
So of course, these people are tortured. These discrepancies, these incongruencies, don't allow them to develop what we call core identity.
They don't have a continuous identity because the parts keep fighting. It's a state of inner conflict, permanent inner conflict.
Okay. Next.
Okay. Another internal object gone.
Okay. Next psychodynamic feature is compensation.
In all Cluster B personality disorder, there are compensatory mechanisms.
Because there is incongruence, because there is inconsistency, because there is discrepancy, because there's internal fighting going on all the time, there is a compensatory mechanism.
We will see that in each disorder the compensatory mechanism is different.
For example, borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, they have a false self, both of them, but it's not the same false self, different functions.
The narcissist and the borderline have a shared fantasy. They have a fantasy defense, but it's not the same fantasy.
So compensation is universal. The content of the compensation is highly specific to the disorder and to some extent idiosyncratic to the individual.
We'll discuss fantasy defense and so on a bit further.
Next is external regulation.
Noble, healthy people, this mythological creature, regulate internally. In other words, they have internal self-regulation.
We're not going right now into the dynamics of self-regulation, why we develop self-regulation. It's pretty interesting. And how self-regulation drives us away from reality. It's a counterfactual mechanism. Self-regulation is about deceiving ourselves.
But let's leave all that aside. And I will just mention that people with cluster B personality disorders cannot regulate internally.
So they import the regulation.
You regretted, huh? You had to return.
Okay.
So they import the regulation. They use other people to regulate their internal environment.
The narcissists, for example, uses attention, narcissistic supply. And he uses narcissistic supply to regulate the sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-image, self-concept, and so on.
The borderline uses her intimate partner to stabilize her labile moods and to regulate her emotions, to counter her emotional dysregulation. So she uses the intimate partner.
This is known as external regulation, and this is common to all Cluster B personality disorders.
Thank you. Cluster B personality disorders.
You remember that I told you that the common background to cluster B personality disorders is bad parenting, dissociation, trauma and so on, regardless of the genetic predisposition.
The genetic predisposition is there, but if it is triggered or not, depends on the environment.
So the environment has to be highly specific, adverse. We call it adverse tomorrow.
So these people are pain adverse. They're afraid of pain. They're afraid of hurt. They also associate positive emotions with pain.
Love, for example. Love always ends badly. Ask my wife. Love always ends badly because the first love ended badly. The love of mother ended badly.
So there is total association. And because of that, there is a tendency to avoid avoidance as a strategy, constriction, constrict life, and of course, paranoid ideation and hypervigilance.
If each and every one of you has the potential to hurt the narcissist or to hurt the narcissists, it would be afraid of you. It would be hyper-vigilant. It would be a bit paranoid.
So there is this in Coburn.
And again, we'll discuss all this much more deeply a bit later.
Primitive defenses.
The concept of psychological defense mechanisms was first proposed by Sigmund Freud, but he didn't elaborate on it. His daughter, Anna Freud, actually is the mastermind of psychological defense mechanisms.
They're interesting constructs, interesting ideas. I'm not sure how valid they are.
But at any rate, we distinguish between primitive defense mechanisms and adult defense mechanisms.
Primitive defenses or infantile defenses are common in very early childhood. And they include splitting, projection, and so on and so forth.
Cluster B personality disorders use only primitive defenses. They do not use adult defenses.
So, cluster B personality disorders clinically are infantile. It's a case of, if you wish, arrested development, but we'll discuss it a bit later.
The perception of time in Cluster B is very different. These people don't perceive time the way you perceive time.
And I will discuss it a bit later.
Because they perceive time differently, they live in fantasy.
Yes?
So within the fantasy, the fantasy has its own clock, its own time.
So they are divorced from you. Even if you live together, cohabit, family, or whatever, they're divorced from you as far as time goes. They misperceive time. And they have a totally different interpretation of time.
This is called time fluidity. It was described by me and then a few two decades later by Kenberg as well.
Okay. One or two more and I'll give you a break.
There's a nice pro social guy. Why love him? And not a nice person.
All these disorders have what is known as separation insecurity.
Separation insecurity is the clinical term for what is colloquially known as abandonment anxiety.
They're all terrified of abandonment one way or another, and they use control mechanisms to prevent abandonment.
The narcissist control mechanism, it converts you into an internal object.
When you become an internal object, you cannot abandon the narcissist because you're internal. That's a way of coping with separation and security.
The psychopath's way is coercive control, actual control, micromanaging your life, using aggression and sometimes violence to modify your behavior. That's a psychopath's way.
And so on. Each Cluster B personality disorder has his or her one way to avoid separation insecurity.
And that is because these people have what is known as object inconstancy. Object inconstancy is the inability to visualize a person who is not physically present.
So, person with object inconstancy is a person who cannot continue an interaction with another person when that person is not physically present.
And there is something which I coined, which I was the first to describe, introject inconstancy.
Introject inconstancy is when you are not able to create a representation of another person in your mind.
And so when that person is absent, there's no equivalent in your mind to that person.
We'll discuss all this a bit.
The reality testing of people with cluster B is short, is destroyed. These people don't live in reality. They cannot gauge or evaluate reality properly. They cannot predict the consequences of actions. They don't do causality. They have what we call impaired reality testing.
That reality testing is an ego function. And the reason their reality testing is compromised is because they don't have an ego.
Now that's a very interesting point.
Narcissists, for example, are selfless. Narcissists are not egotists, they're exactly the opposite of egotists. They don't have an ego.
Cluster B personality disorder is a disruption in the formation of the ego or the self. There's a disruption. There's no self, no ego.
So all the ego functions are outsourced, brought from the outside, and where there's no possibility to bring them from the outside, they're absent.
For example, reality testing.
So these people live in fantasy, they are divorced from reality and any attempt to bring them back to reality would fail, of course.
TheyIt was a phrase first coined by Giddens, ontological insecurity, is the feeling that you are not continuous, the feeling that you are disjointed, the feeling that you are like a salami, you know, that you wake up in the morning, you are not the same person in any meaningful way that you were yesterday. You are starting from zero, time and again, like an infinite loop.
So this is ontological insecurity.
You're beginning to see, you're beginning to see, I hope, and you're just beginning.
Wait until we get to the part with the bad parenting and this totally alien, this Martian psychology.
You're beginning to see how far these people are from you. How there's no commonality of experience.
Consequently, there's no commonality of experience, consequently there's no commonality of language, how it's impossibilities to traverse, to cross the intersubjective space between you and someone with cluster B.
We could say safely that someone with Cluster B never creates an intersubjective space with another person. Never. It's not capable of it.
They're like islands. They're like floating islands.
And their inner dynamics and inner experiences are so massively alien that I usually compare, sometimes compare it to artificial intelligence, something like that.
It's not a question of dehumanizing them.
But I think to be human, there are minimum requirements, you know, to be human.
And I think in the case of people with cluster B personality disorders, definitely narcissists and psychopaths, some of these minimum requirements are not met.
I leave it up to you what it means, what are the philosophical consequences of what I've just said.
But if you lack empathy, or affective empathy, if you lack access to positive emotions, if you have no access to reality, or no way to gauge or evaluate reality properly, if your identity changes day by day, I don't know. I think these are the minimum requirements. And they're missing.
So in a way, this seminar is about trying to disentangle the psychology of a life form. Not a deviant version of human psychology. Not a variant or mutation of human psychology, no, but the psychology of a new life form in many ways.
And I've been doing this for 30-something years.
The more I study, the more I learn, the more astounded I am by how extremely bizarre Cluster B personality disorders are, the bizarreness of it all, the surrealistic quality, the nightmarish environment which constitutes the inner world of these people and how their interactions with the outside are dictated by these completely outlandish processes inside.
It's very, very difficult to communicate and I hope that by the end of a seminar you will get a taste of it or a glimpse of it. It's extremely difficult to communicate.
We'll now take a break and then when we come back, we will begin to discuss trauma, dissociation, bad parenting, and what it does to the child.
Okay?