Tony called me. Tony, how many Tonys do you know? Tony Fauci. I went to school with his great-great-grandfather. Don't ask him. Anyhow, Tony calls me and he says, Sam, you should maintain social distancing. The people who are watching you, they're not six feet away. They can infect you. You can get sick. I mean, bear in mind that the people sit really close to the screen and it's like, you're in danger.
So I decided to shoot this video with a mask on.
Okay?
Now to my Minnie moment. Whoops? Isn't this a perfect allegory? A perfect allegory to a relationship with a narcissist.
You want to kiss him? You can't. You want to show your love by giving him something. Coffee. You can't.
He's behind a mask. He looks human. He acts human. He may even be intelligent and have a sense of humor, but whenever you get really, really, really close to him, all you see ultimately is the mask and his clouded shrouded eyeglasses full of vapor and fog and mist behind which he hides.
And that is the quintessence and a summation of the relationship with a narcissist.
So in honor of my long-term relationship with Minnie, I'm going to take off my mask, but Fauci is right. Yes mask, no COVID, no mask, yes COVID. Pandemic is out of control, going to our missteps.
So I'm going to take off the mask and I'm going to get on one-on-one touch with my Minnie.
Ah, nothing like coffee except maybe narcissistic supply.
Okay. Lame jokes aside, today we are going to discuss the cyberpath, an internet-based con artist.
Is she a psychopath? She a narcissist? How does she operate? What does it say about her internal world? What is the functionality of her lying? Delusions, self-deception. Does she know herself? Is it intentional?
Many, many questions. But before we come to that, as is our habit, let's clear some of the debris of the previous video.
I mentioned in the previous video that the true self is hard bricked. And then it occurred to me that hard brick and heartbreak, they sound the same. And similarly in smartphones and tablets, they get hard bricked when the motherboard gets damaged.
Same with the narcissist. The true self gets heart-bricked, inaccessible, non-functional, isolated, dead, unable to be recharged, doesn't pop up, doesn't interact, isolated, screaming, wounded child. The true self undergoes this monumental transformation when the motherboard is damaged.
Today's topic is, as I said, an internet psychopath.
But before we go to that, I will also discuss counter projection.
Now, people ask me with regards to the previous video, what is the definitive terminology? How do we know which terminology to trust, which vocabulary to adopt, what is legitimate, and what is not? How can we tell that combined narcissism, reverse narcissism, shy borderline empath, are not legitimate clinical terms? They are hype, or flights of fancy, or total nonsensical inventions?
How do we contrast these with the real language of psychology?
Well, several ways to go about it.
Everything in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and everything in the counterparty of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the International Classification of Diseases. So everything in the DSM and everything in the ICD is orthodoxy. The clinical terms used in these two books, in these two manuals, diagnostic manuals, the clinical terms are the clinical terms. That is the official language of psychology.
You won't find there. You won't find there, trust me, empaths, shy borderlines, and other such nonsense.
What you would find there is a distillation and a crystallization of the consensus.
Of course, there is place for innovation. There is place for entrepreneurship, even in psychology.
You can describe new and suggest new diagnoses. For example, Akhtar and Cooper in 1989, they suggested the new diagnosis of covert narcissism. Robert Hare has spent a lifetime defending a diagnosis of psychopathy as distinct from antisocial personality disorder.
And both these efforts are legitimate. And they're legitimate because they rely on big bodies of evidence, on decades of experience, clinical experience, in a variety of settings, on studies, on experiments, on case studies, etc. It's legitimate to offer new diagnosis and a new language, but there is no need to relabel, rename existing diagnosis or existing language.
And there is definitely no case, it's totally illegitimate to introduce new diagnosis, which are based on thin air, speculations, and other metaphysical nonsense.
Okay, enough with this.
Counter projection. Jung, as usual, was the one to come up with this idea.
He says that when someone projects something onto you, you sometimes react with counter projection.
But to remind you, what is projection? Projection is when I have something in me that I feel uncomfortable with. I have a trait, I have a behavioral pattern, I have a bias, I have a cognition, I have an emotion, I have a dissonance, I have a belief, I have a value, I have something in me. I have a sexual orientation, like homosexuality, I have something in me that I feel uncomfortable with.
Because I feel uncomfortable with, I isolate it, repress it, I deny it, I am not in contact with it, and then I take it and I throw it out.
I throw it out and it sticks, it sticks to you. You become the repository and the container of everything I hate about myself, everything I'm uncomfortable with, everything I'm egodystonic with, and you become the container.
If I'm weak, I would say that you're weak. If I have latent homosexual tendencies, I would attribute homosexuality to you. I would say you are gay, or you have gay tendencies, or you're effeminate. If I dislike my lack of generosity and stinginess, I would say that you are.
I would attribute to you everything that I am and wish I were not. This is projection.
Jung said when you project, the subject of a projection, the recipient, the receptacle, the repository, reacts sometimes with counter projection. Both parties are unconscious of the quality projected. Both of them, both the projector and the projectee, are unconscious.
But in counter projection, the recipient projects back to the projector.
So if I project onto you that you're weak, you will project back to me that I'm weak. So I say no, you're weak. And it will create mutual acting out, also known as explosion. We will both become aggressive, frustrated, aggressive, more and more in denial, more and more vehement, vociferous, and finally it may come to blows.
Projection and counter projection establish the foundation for mutual aggression.
Harry Stack Sullivan took counter projection and said, wait a minute, we can use it in therapy. We can use it in therapy because it will help us to ward off, to fend off, to protect against a compulsive reenactment of a psychological trauma.
We can emphasize the difference between the current situation and the projected obsession with the perceived perpetrator of the original trauma.
Many post traumatized people, they're very obsessive. They have intrusive thoughts. They can't stop thinking about the injustice they had gone through, about what had been done to them.
And so we can use counter projection. They project onto us the perpetrator or the trauma and we can push it back to them. We can counter project.
And in this process of projection and counter projection, it becomes evident that it's not real. It's not now. It's a form of truncated mindfulness. It's not here and it's not now.
It's a technique also originally used in Gestalt. And sometimes we use an empty chair technique to accomplish this.
At any rate, I want to refer you to an article published in Psychiatric Clinics of North America in June 2007, volume 30. The article is called Approaching the mind in clinical interviewing: the techniques of soundings and counterprojection. It was written by Lester Havens. It's an excellent expose, excellent introduction to counter projection.
When an interviewer, psychiatric interviewer meets a patient, even if the interview is structured, there are two minds meeting. Even the way the questions are presented matters. The content of the question triggers both the interviewer and the patient.
We tend to pretend that the therapist or the diagnostician or the clinician, they are like robots. They are like some kind of device or machinery.
That's not true. Therapy can be deeply traumatic to a therapist. We have even a phenomenon called burnout. Therapists go to other therapies to be treated. This process is called in psychoanalysis supervision. Therapists react very badly. They can be vicariously traumatized.
So, in structured interviews and so on, it's sometimes useful to use clinical imagination.
And the article reviews soundings and counter projection as two techniques that can enhance the interview's ability to create a shared psychological space with the interviewee. Highly recommended.
But today's topic is the psychopath.
The psychopath is a con artist, is an internet fraudster, is a cyber path.
Is the psychopath who we think he is or she is? Is it really a deliberative, premeditated, cold terminator, terminator six? Is it like the next generation of humanity once it is stripped of empathy and emotions and resonance and love and companionship and reciprocity and impulse control? What are we left with? Are we left with the psychopath? Or are we misconstruing some elements?
The entire video is based on an article in which I'm cited several times. But that's not the reason I chose the article. It's the article because it's the best to my knowledge. It's the best analysis of an internet scam artist ever done. And it's one of a series of articles which put together a constitute a voluminous tone, could have constituted a voluminous tone.
It's the deepest, most profound study of con artistry, fraud, internet and the confluence of these three phenomena.
The article is titled Research into the voices of the psychopathic predator: an analytical case study. It was written by Kreuter, Eric Anton, published in the International Journal of Psychology Research in 2012. And it's highly, it's riveting.
First of all, it's riveting. It's like watching a thriller, you know, because there's an anatomy there, very detailed anatomy of the process. And you see what happened to the victim and what happened to the perpetrator. And it's really, really a delight.
It's a middle article, like there were articles preceding it and articles published afterwards.
In this particular article I'm cited as an authority on narcissism.
So let's start with a basic question. Does the psychopath have a single self-state or does he have several self-states?
You remember in previous videos I've said that I regard narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder as private cases of multiple personality disorder, as forms, minor forms or limited forms of dissociative identity disorder.
Because narcissists and borderlines are post traumatized people. They had been traumatized in childhood and their condition is a post-traumatic condition.
Now many people react to trauma with dissociation. The dissociation, in case the trauma is extreme, the dissociation is extreme. The intensity of the dissociation reflects the intensity of the abuse and the intensity of the trauma.
And because narcissists and borderlines are usually engendered, fostered by extreme trauma and abuse, the dissociation is extreme, especially in the case of borderline where it is also a diagnostic criterion.
So is it the same for psychopaths?
I don't know. There's not a lot of literature about this topic and this is one of a few major contributions.
And so what he does, he had interviewed an internet fraudster, a repetitive offender who lacks remorse, lacks self-awareness, is highly manipulative, typical psychopath. He calls her Connie. That's the nickname or pseudonym he had given her.
And he reached a conclusion. He reached a conclusion about dissociation in her case.
He says, deconstructing Connie's statements from a new perspective, that of a splitting of her consciousness into multiple dimensions, distinguished by forms of self-reference.
The researcher, he says, speculates that Connie operates in several dimensions, but that these dimensions do not form distinct whole personalities. That's very similar to borderline.
You remember my previous videos where I said that borderlines have self-states, they are not full-fledged personalities, but they are sufficiently distinct from one another. And the borderline switches between them in conditions of stress, anxiety, anticipated abandonment and humiliation, etc. So he says the same about this particular psychopath.
He continues, rather, she may operate through subsets of the same mindedness with each one serving an identified purpose. Her conscious awareness of this shifting is a matter of speculation, possibly discoverable through psychoneurological testing.
Connie claimed that she had trouble hearing things said about her that were nice. One explanation is that she knew that such words were misapplied to the Connie that she was only pretending to be. So when she heard compliments or nice things said about her, she knew she was faking it. She knew she didn't deserve this thing. And to continue the text, she knew full well that she was not really the nice person some people thought she was.
Connie herself said, I'm quoting, my mind tells me the only words I understand are hurtful words, painful words. When I hear nice words about me, I can't contain myself. And I end up in tears.
In contradiction, based on interviews with almost 50 people who knew Connie throughout her life, all of them said that Connie never expressed genuine sorrow or real tears. So this one, this was also acting, this was also fake.
To elaborate a bit about the phenomenon of cyberspace psychopaths.
This is a subset. And we don't have sufficient data to tell you whether psychopaths who go online are merely using another conveyor belt, another tool, another instrument, another mode of access, or whether the internet, cyberspace, social media select for specific types of psychopaths. There is a self selection.
Some psychopaths prefer the face to face interaction, where they can leverage body language, expressions and micro expressions to obtain better outcomes, favorable outcomes to accomplish their goals. And some psychopaths actually prefer the anonymity. there you can call them schizoid psychopaths. They prefer the anonymity. They prefer to hide behind the screen. They prefer to manipulate under fake personalities, handles, sock puppets. So the cyberpath, cyberspace psychopath, the cyberpath.
The author says, colloquially, a cyberpath is defined as an individual with a pathological disorder, who has access to the internet and uses the internet is a medium for acting out his or her pathology. Another definition is that a cyberpath has come to mean a psychopath who uses the internet to find, stalk and exploit others while online or in real life. Many cyber paths appear to be seeking only thrills and restrict their activity to the internet only, never seeking direct contact. This type of individual moves from victim to victim, easily becoming bored.
Boredom, by the way, is a hallmark of psychopathy.
Because psychological and emotional dominance are what they seek and usually achieve, they leave a trail of psychological damage behind them. Other cyberpaths utilize the internet to find victims that they then proceed to exploit directly.
Psychopaths have low tolerance threshold for boredom and frustration. This is what sets them apart from narcissists, by the way. Narcissists countenance being bored and accept frustration as an integral part of obtaining supply. Psychopaths don't.
The author continues, the original meaning of the term victim was a person or an animal put to death during a ceremony in order to appease some supernatural power or deity, he is actually quoting Carmen, a scholar in 2007.
Internet victimization is a new domain in developmental victimology, including harassment and cyberbullying.
And I refer you to Wolac, Mitchell, Finkelhor, they published a series of studies in 2006. Very good introduction to the whole field.
Does such a psychopath have conscience? Conscience, superego, introjects, voices, something. She doesn't feel remorse. Get it. She doesn't feel regret. Understood. Does she hear voices? Is she a bit uncomfortable? Discomfited? Is there a twinge of a hint of a shadow of a doubt of a, you know, I've done something wrong? Is there?
We want to believe it so much. I call it malignant optimism. We want to believe this is a shred, the spark of humanity in these people. That they are not that, they are not utterly a robotic. They're not androids. We want to believe this.
When I say they're not human, this analysis and psychopaths are not human. I'm being accused of hate speech. It's not hate speech.
If you take the specifications of a human, they miss nice, I don't know, 70 percent. They don't have empathy. They don't have emotions.
Are you kidding me? In which sense are they human?
They are carbon based life force. I fully agree. They have intelligence. I fully agree.
So that doesn't make them human. Are they human? Conscience?
Peck, Scott Peck wrote in 1983, in summary, to a greater or lesser degree, all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves to the demands of their own conscience.
That's true. Emphasis, healthy.
Freud called it the superego.
The article says from a psychological and psychoanalytic perspective, Connie, the internet, the cyber buff, the internet fraudster, Connie confided that she had a degree of envy for other people and that degree on envy increased depending on how successful Connie viewed these people to be.
Parrott and Smith in 1993, they defined envy as an emotion which occurs when a person lacks another person's superior quality, achievement or possession, and either desires them or wishes that the other didn't have them.
In the early literature, Weston says in his article, in the early literature, the writers speculated whether pathological liars believe their lies or not.
So because if you don't believe you're lying, or if you believe your own lies, why would you have conscious pangs? Why would you regret? Why would you feel bad? Why would you feel uncomfortable? I'm not lying, you know.
That is not a new insight.
Koeppen in 1898, 1898, that's when I was like, in my mid 20s, found that patients have flashes of insight in the middle of fabrications.
Wundt, the father of experimental psychology in 1911, suggested that pseudologia fantastica is the other name for pathological lie.
Pseudologia fantastica occurs only when the patient truly believes the lie, but the awareness of the fabrication is never lost.
And in addition, Wundt said that there is a type of double consciousness in existence.
So when people use in these studies of psychopath, they use the term splitting, or doubling, or they're actually referring to Wundt's doubling, the doubling observed by Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, more than a hundred years ago.
It's like you lie as a narcissist, you lie. As a narcissist, you confabulate. Lying is rare in narcissism. Narcissists lie in order to avoid embarrassment, because they're ashamed of their discontinuity and the breaks in memory. They want to appear omniscient. They know everything.
So they can't admit, they say listen I forgot, no way. So they invent.
Psychopaths lie. Their lies are instrumental, goal oriented. Good psychopaths, I mean, accomplished psychopaths, purebred, top of the line psychopaths, believe their own lies.
This is what is so easy for them to convince other people.
But somewhere, the back of their mind, they know their line. They know they're fabricating, but they're reframing it.
I needed to do it. Or it's not that far from the truth. Or it incorporates a sufficient number of truthful elements to actually be true in some way.
You know, they tell themselves all kinds of stories. They reframe.
And this is the doubling. There are two processes simultaneously.
You remember in one of my previous videos, I told you that one of the hallmarks of personality disorders is the ability to maintain two conflicting cognitions, two conflicting emotions at the same time. Ambivalence tolerance, the ability to be two personalities, two self-states at the same time.
So, pseudologia fantastica, pathological line, Dolan, defined it in 1988 as a tendency to tell extravagant and fantastic falsehood centered around and about one's self.
And the term has been used with pathological lying, mythomania, Western, 2007.
Go back to the oldies, my generation. Kraepelin, in 1906, he found, you see, case studies, not just your speculation. He found that his patients know when they have left reality.
But when they're inside their confabulation, they begin to weave, to make it more complex, to weave a big, more dense, intricate web of lies. They enrich and embellish the lie.
And so, the liar develops a need to compound initial lies with a stream of lies to maintain the ruse.
One of the main ways you can tell if someone is lying is if he gives you too many details. And the details are such that a healthy, normal person would never remember.
Lying should be distinguished from multiple personality disorder. There is no evidence that the personality structure of the psychopath has distinct separate entities.
I said it's not full-fledged personality.
As the article says, Connie's shifting seems to take place as a defense mechanism needed because of her nature, which does not permit acceptance of responsibility for wrongdoing. She doesn't accept responsibility for wrongdoing, guilt, shame, except when doing so can be used as a manipulative device.
It is this feature of the psychopathic personality that makes them particularly dangerous.
Hare describes psychopathy this way, 2008.
Psychopathy is a socially devastating disorder defined by a constellation of affective, interpersonal, and behavioral characteristics, including egocentricity, impulsivity, irresponsibility, shallow emotions, lack of empathy, guilt or remorse, pathological lying, manipulativeness, and the persistent violation of social norms and expectations.
Now, using Hare's definition, you see how almost everyone online on YouTube is misleading you, making you confuse narcissists and psychopaths. These are psychopathic traits, not narcissistic traits. Majority of them are not narcissistic traits. And all these self-styled experts and coaches and so on, they are confusing you because they are confused. They're ignorant. They don't know the differences.
Lamb in 1996 said that the worst possible strategy is to confront a psychopath with his or her lies. Generally, by the way, later we discovered that generally it's a bad idea to confront someone with their lie.
Lamb wrote in 96, the more you blame a person, the more ashamed he feels, and the greater his tendency will be to hide his head, deny his wrongdoing, or look outward for causality. There does not seem to be any easy way to both blame and encourage another to take responsibility for his actions.
Ericsson himself, the big Erikson said in 1959, in adults, the impairment of basic trust is expressed in a basic mistrust.
So does she have a conscience? It doesn't seem so. It's consciously intricately connected to doing something wrong, like lying, manipulating.
So is she delusional maybe, because she believes her own lies, or she is in them, or is she, to some extent, deluded, maybe even hallucinating? Is it a psychotic state, quasi-psychotic state?
Is it like psychopaths are mentally ill? Is it a mental illness? Or is it a culture-bound societal judgment of people who hate society and hate authority and hate the law and hate rules and are defiant, contumacious? And is it reactance? Or is it delusion? Is it mental illness? Or is it rebellion?
For this, we need to study the issue of delusion. Delusional disorder.
Let's consider, for example, delusional disorder, erotomanic type. It involves the stalking of victims. I'm quoting from the article, stalking is a common form of contact used by the person who has the delusion that the other person is either having or interested in having a romantic relationship.
This subtype applies when the central theme of the delusion is that another person is in love with the individual.
This delusion often concerns idealized romantic love and spiritual union, rather than sexual attraction. The person about whom this conviction is held is usually of higher status. A famous person, superior at work. But it could be a complete stranger.
By the way, many common elements with the shared fantasy. Remember when the intimate partner tries to exit the narcissist's shared fantasy, the narcissist develops erotomanic stalking.
Narcissistic personality disorder, continues the article, exists along a continuum of severity, from the border with neurotic personality disorders to the most severely disturbed levels.
And this is, he quotes from Alliance of Psychoanalytic Organizations, a book published by them in 2006. Narcissists suffer from identity diffusion. It's more typical of borderlines, but there are many borderlines narcissists. Narcissists suffer from identity diffusion, lacking a constant sense, locus, core of inner directed morality and may behave in a highly destructive way, mostly by the way, self-destructive.
The psychodynamic diagnostic manual, not the diagnostic and statistical manual, an alternative book, which is pretty amazing and an excellent read, psychodynamic diagnostic manual, highly recommended. Says about this.
He says that we should emphasize individual variations as well as commonalities.
Although many psychopathic individuals run into trouble with authorities, some are quite effective at evading accountability for the damage they do to others.
The PDM diagnosis of psychopathic antisocial personality disorder is, they are much more preoccupied with self-definition than with relationship.
Here you're beginning to see the interface between psychopaths and narcissists and why I suggest to unify, have been suggesting for 25 years, to unify all Cluster B personality disorders into one, actually all personality disorders into a single diagnosis.
Psychopaths take pleasure. There's also the element of sadism in psychopaths, which doesn't exist in narcissists. Rarely, I mean, there are extremely few sadistic narcissists, but there are many sadistic psychopaths.
So psychopaths take pleasure in duping others, in subjecting them to manipulation.
Burston made a study in 1973. They find it hilarious. They find it fun. They find it like a challenge, like intellectual challenge, you know, it's like hacking or cracking a computer code or a software or a key.
Deutsch in 1955 developed the concept of imposter to describe all this.
The article says, there is empirical evidence that many people with this personality disorder have a higher than normal physiological threshold for stimulation. And therefore they seek it addictively. I refer you to studies as early as 1990 by Raine, Venables, and Williams.
The Alliance of Psychoanalytic Organizations in 2006 says their own emotional life, however, tends to be impoverished and their expressed affect often is insincere and intended to manipulate.
Now there are two subtypes, passive parasitic, and aggressive. Passive parasitic is also known as Henderson's type. They are more dependent, less aggressive, relatively nonviolent. They're manipulative, but they're not violent. And they are more the con artists and the scammers.
The aggressive types, according to Henderson again, 1939, they're more explosive. They're actively predatory and they're violent.
And so these are two types of psychopaths, as we came to call them, cleckley popularized the term about three years afterwards in 1942.
What about narcissistic personalities? Maybe call these a narcissist.
Kenberg in 1984 had described such patterns as suffused with malignant narcissism. That is narcissism blended with sadistic aggression.
Considering them closely related to those with psychopathic personality disorder, Kenberg and later Ronningstam, they described the psychopathic narcissist as a subset, a very small subset.
These are malignant narcissists. All the other narcissists are run of the mill. The psychopathic narcissist is the malignant narcissist that we're talking about.
Some narcissistic individuals, I'm quoting from the article now, some narcissistic individuals appear overtly diffident and often less successful and are internally preoccupied with grandiose fantasies. Rosenfeld, 1987, Akhtar and Cooper, 1989, they came to be called covert narcissists.
Now I'm quoting from a guy called Sam Vaknin who is quoted in the article. So I'm not inserting myself, it's in the article.
When asked to relate to his emotions, the narcissist intellectualizes, rationalizes, speaks about himself in the third person and in a detached, scientific tone or composes a narrative with a fictitious character in it, suspiciously autobiographical, Vaknin in 2007.
They tend to defend their wounded self-esteem through a combination of idealizing and devaluing others.
Narcissists are addicted to being famous, says Vaknin. Being famous endows the narcissist with power and fulfills important ego functions according to Sam Vaknin who is considered a leading expert on narcissism.
It's from the article, I swear, I'm not inventing a single word. The article is fully available online by the way, the whole text.
Now he's quoting from my work. Pathological narcissism is the art of deception. The narcissist projects a false self and manages only social interactions with this concocted fictional construct, Vaknin, 2007.
What about the brain? Maybe the psychopath or psychopathy is a brain disease. Maybe it's a brain disorder.
We used to think about depression, that it's mental. Now we know it's physical. We used to think about schizophrenia, that it's mental, psychological. Now we know it's not. We used to think about other forms of psychotic disorder, that they are psychological, they're not, they're brain disorders. And we used to think about autism, that it is the outcome of bad mothering, refrigerator mothers. Now we know it's nonsense.
Autism is a brain disturbance in the brain, electrochemical disturbance, we think. We're still not sure about the etiology, but we are quite sure about the brain correlates.
So maybe psychopathy is the same because psychopaths have pronounced brain abnormalities, not only brain abnormalities, their skin conductance is different to normal people. They have no fear reaction, amygdala, hippocampus, everything works differently.
Lehrer in 2010, he wrote about the psychopathic brain, and he wrote, neuroscientists are beginning to identify the specific deficits that define the psychopathic brain.
The main problem seems to be a broken amygdala, a brain area responsible for secreting aversive emotions like fear and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad. Aggression doesn't make them nervous. Terror isn't terrifying.
Brain imaging studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is activated when most people even think about committing a moral transgression when they're just considering the amygdala is all on fire and blood, huge flows of blood go there in functional magnetic resonance imaging. We see this. Nothing happens with the psychopath.
When you try to frighten the psychopath, his skin conductance and his sweating remain totally normal. He's not afraid.
It seems that something deeper here, it seems that psychopaths have combined somehow cluster B psychodynamic problems superimposed on a defective, deficient brain.
It's like the brain is a template, and then when you develop cluster B personality disorder superimposed on it, you become a psychopath. If you don't get this template, you become a narcissist.
By the way, borderlines are like psychopaths. They have also brain abnormalities. That's why we are increasingly reconsidering histrionic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder as forms of secondary psychopathy.
And yes, this view doesn't make me or these scholars that supported popular among borderlines. Borderlines are known to be vicious, sniping, aggressive and violent when they feel threatened. Trust me.
Cheers.