(English) Narcissist Predators: Their Prey and Habitat (Acibadem Sistina Hospital)

So let's first talk about the profile of the narcissist and then get rid of this boring part and go into the real fun, the real exciting terrain, which is the transformation of a newborn baby into essentially someone who is widely perceived for better or for worse as a monster.

Start with the profile.

There are two books, there are two diagnostic manuals in the world. One of them is known as a DSM, diagnostic and statistical manual, and one of them is known as the ICD, the international classification of diseases published by the World Health Organization.

The ICD and the DSM disagree massively about literally everything.

The ICD, for example, is dimensional. In other words, the ICD deals with spectra, spectrum or continuum. So in the ICD we have mild disorders, moderate disorders, severe disorders.

We don't have this in the DSM.

The DSM is categorical. Either you have the disorder or you don't have the disorder. It's like pregnancy.

The traits of narcissism and the traits of psychopathy are on a continuum. They are on a spectrum. You can be less empathic, less empathic, I mean, it's a spectrum. It's a continuum.

But the disorders themselves are binary, yes or no situations in the DSM, a spectrum and a continuum in the ICD, and this is not where the disagreement stops.

For example, the ICD is much more advanced than the DSM in terms of thinking about personality disorders.

In the ICD, there's only one personality disorder, a diagnosis of personality disorder. And then each person, each patient, each client, call it as you wish, presents with this personality disorder with some emphasis.

So we could have, for example, someone diagnosed with personality disorder with narcissistic emphasis. It's not called narcissistic. It's called dissocial. With dissocial emphasis. Or we can have someone with personality disorder, with emotional dysregulation emphasis.

This is someone who is overwhelmed by emotions. The emotions drown the person. The person cannot control the emotions. And this is called dysregulation and it leads to behavioral manifestations whichwe will not discuss today.

So in the ICD there's a single diagnosis. In the DSM there are 12 diagnoses.

Consequently, those who use the DSM end up diagnosing multiple personality disorders in the same person. A phenomenon known as comorbidity.

So if you go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist in the United States, you will leave the consulting room with three, four, five diagnosis. Borderline, narcissists, psychopath, mood disorder, so and so and so forth. It's very typical to have three to five diagnosis.

And this is known as comorbidity.

When you go in Europe, the situation is much better usually. Usually, not always, but usually.

So what is the profile, if we put together the DSM and the ICD, what kind of profile do we come up with?

And remember, the narcissist and the psychopath are alien to people who are healthy. There is no common denominator. It's a common mistake to believe that the narcissist and the psychopath are exaggerations of healthy people.

It's like we take a healthy person, we make a caricature or an exaggeration, and that's the narcissist that the psychopath.

Wrong. That is not true. That what is true is that there is very little in common between narcissists and psychopaths and normal, healthy, regulated, relatively speaking, people. If you can find people like that nowadays.

The first thing, of course, which everyone will tell you, is that narcissists and psychopaths don't have empathy.

By the way, on the screen, you can read the definitions of the diagnostic and statistical manual.

Now, a very interesting piece of gossip.

Because what is a lecture without gossip? It's boring. It's a very interesting piece of gossip.

There was a huge fight in the committee that wrote the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 5. There was a huge fight.

There was a group of scholars that wanted to eliminate narcissistic personality disorder, to delete it. And there was another group that wanted to describe it in a different way, rewrite the diagnostic criteria.

So what happens?

In the DSM, you have two possibilities, two lists, two descriptions of narcissism. And you can choose, and they are not the same, they are not compatible.

Imagine that you as medical doctors have two descriptions of tuberculosis and these descriptions have nothing to do with each other. I don't think you would feel very comfortable.

This is known as the polythetic problem. We'll leave it alone for a minute.

So in the DSM you find one description which is a list of nine criteria and another description which is known as the alternative model, page 881, for those of you who have copies of the DSM.

And this alternative model is totally different to the list. It's not the same.

So what I did to help all of us survive this lecture is I took the text of the DSM, the two texts of the DSM. I combined it with the text of the ICD and what you see here is a merger of the DSM alternative model with the ICD combined.

Okay? You can read, I will not read it for you, but you can read on the screen the description under each of the points.

What I will do, I will tell you, I will give you access, I will give you insight to the clinical presentation of these traits.

These are all known as trait domains. These are traits of the narcissists.

We start with lack of empathy.

Until very recently, there was a serious mistake in the literature and among scholars. They said that narcissists and psychopaths don't have empathy at all. They're unable to empathize with people.

Now for those of you who need a definition of empathy, which is not a good sign, those of you who need a definition, empathy is the ability to put yourself in other people's shoes, to see their point of view and then react to this insight emotionally.

It's not enough to understand someone. It's not enough to put yourself in someone else's shoes. It's not enough to say, oh, she's sad, he's happy. It's not enough to put yourself in someone else's shoes. It's not enough to say, oh, she's sad, he's happy.

It's to feel it.

The word empathy was first coined, believe it or not, by a German. A German came up with this word. And in German it is einfühlen. einfühlen. Feeling together. Feeling like a single feeling.

And the German who came up with this word, long dead by now, said that when we look at a painting, we resonate with a painting, we look at a painting, we resonate with a painting. The painting or a piece of music or piece of art creating us. These pieces of art creating us emotions.

So he said when you look at a painting, you have a feeling with a painting. Your feelings resonate.

And this became empathy. Because someone took this idea and said, wait a minute, why only painting? When we look at other people, we have also emotional reactions.

And this is how empathy was born in Germany of all places, which proves to you that history is unpredictable.

So, today we know that narcissists and psychopaths do possess empathy. It is not true that they don't have empathy.

This you will find in older textbooks in other places. But today, the cutting edge, I'm going to give you the recent advances. The cutting edge is they do have empathy.

But they have a special kind of empathy. I coined the phrase cold empathy. It's a combination of cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy, but not emotional empathy.

Let me explain. A baby is born. Baby looks at mommy. Mommy smiles, baby smiles. Back. If it's a normal baby, smiles back.

This is reflexive empathy. It's a reflex.

Similarly, the baby grows, becomes a toddler, infant, toddler, and a child. And a child begins to realize that other people experience emotions or effects that are similar to him, to the child.

So the child says, she is crying. When I'm crying, I'm sad. So she must be sad. It's a deductive process. It's a syllogism.

So this is cognitive empathy.

Emotional empathy is when the child becomes sad because someone else is sad.

This is where psychopaths and narcissists stop.

Psychopaths and narcissists fully decipher and decode and understand your emotions, fully. Even more than usual. Even more than normal.

The psychopath and the narcissist is able to scan you, scan you, and immediately find out your weak points, your vulnerabilities, your fears, the chinks in your armor, penetration vectors.

So this is the scanning process of the narcissist psychopath, which uses empathy, of course.

And then there's no emotional reaction.

The psychopath would see a woman crying. A healthy person would see another person, a woman. Let's take a woman because it's very sexist. So he would see a woman crying. A healthy man would see a woman crying. He would say, oh, she's crying. She's probably sad. I feel sad. Let me try to alleviate her sadness. Maybe it will help my sadness as well. Let's try to be happy together. And he will talk to her, calm her. And so.

A psychopath would see the same woman crying. And he would say, oh, she's crying. So she's fragile. She's vulnerable. I can have sex with her.

A narcissist would see a woman crying. And he would say, there are two possibilities. If she agrees to get my help, if she agrees for me to become the savior, the rescuer, then she's interesting because she could become a source of attention and admiration. She will let me save her. She will let me help her. She will let me rescue her. She will let me help her. She will let me rescue her. And so this makes me big. That's one option.

The second option, a narcissist can say, she's crying too much. It's too much work. She will not be able to give me attention or admiration or adulation. And so she's not interesting. And it would just walk away.

That's the difference between healthy people and narcissists and psychopaths, and this is known as cold empathy or cognitive reflexive empathy. No emotional resonance, no emotional reaction whatsoever.

The reason is that narcissists are unable to access positive emotions and psychopaths do not have any display of emotions. This is called reduced affect display. They don't display affect.

So we believe that they don't experience emotions at all. We'll come to it a bit later when we discuss fear and so on.

The next thing is fear of intimacy.

What is to be intimate? When you're intimate with someone, what is it? It's to expose your vulnerabilities. You're weak when you're intimate with someone. Intimate is weakness by definition.

Because the other person knows your weak points, your failures, your flaws, your vulnerabilities, and you trust the other person not to abuse this knowledge, not to make bad uses of the knowledge, not to leverage the knowledge, to manipulate you, to hurt you, and so on.

So intimacy involves two elements. It involves trust, trusting the other party, and it involves vulnerability, signaling of vulnerability, sharing of vulnerability.

Narcissists are incapable of both.

Because the narcissist is not vulnerable. He is not weak. He is perfect. The narcissist is perfect. He is godlike. I mean, just look at me. He's godlike.

So this conflicts with intimacy.

Because if you're godlike, you have no shortcomings, you have no flaws, you have no vulnerabilities, nothing. You have nothing to share. And you cannot become naked in the metaphorical sense.

That's the first point, and trust is a major issue with narcissists.

Narcissists have paranoid ideation. They assume the worst. They are suspicious and they're hypervigilant.

Why are narcissists so paranoid? Why they are so suspicious? Why are they hypervigilant?

Hypervigilance is when you constantly listen, is someone insulting me, is someone attacking me, is someone planning something bad to do to me? Is someone conspiring against me? This is hypervigilance.

So why are narcissists like this?

Because they are very fragile. It's easy to break the narcissists. Actually, narcissists are very vulnerable, as we will see a bit later in the etiology part.

So they cannot afford to trust anyone.

Because if they trust someone, that person has power. That person has power to challenge their self-perception as God.

The narcissist firmly believes that he is God-like, that he is a perfect entity.

And so if you challenge this, normally you challenge this. You cannot live together with someone or have a relationship or be a colleague of someone and not from time to time disagree, criticize, suggest something.

If you suggest something to the narcissist, if you're trying to give advice, if you're trying to offer help, it's an insult.

Because who are you to help me? I'm God. Who are you to suggest anything to me? I'm God. Who are you to give me help? I don't need help. I don't need to learn anything.

Narcissus never learn. I don't need to learn anything because I encompass all human knowledge. I am God in the fullest sense of the way.

So as you see, intimacy is impossible under these circumstances.

The next element is what we call diffuse or disturbed identity. Identity diffusion, identity disturbance. This is common to narcissists. It's very pronounced in borderline personality disorder. It's a major feature of borderline personality disorder and even in psychopathy.

It is the inability to have a core, an identity which never changes or rarely changes. It's a lack of sense of self.

Today the narcissist believes something. The next day he believes something else. Today he has these and these values. The next day has the opposite values. Today he is a Democrat. Tomorrow he's a Republican. Today supports abortion. The next day, he is the President of the United States.

So there's identity disturbance, identity diffusion, in the sense that there is no functioning self. There's nobody there, actually, we'll come to it in the etiology.

The big discovery since the 1960s is that the narcissist is not a presence. He is an absence. It's a black hole. That's the metaphor that we're using nowadays. It's a black hole. He is not a presence, he is an absence. It's a black hole, that's the metaphor that we're using nowadays, it's a black hole. We'll come to it a bit later.

So lack of identity, lack of stable identity across time and across situations. That means that the narcissist is unpredictable. Unpredictable. You cannot see the next step of the narcissist because the narcissist cannot see the next step of the narcissist.

There is this image that narcissists and psychopaths are evil, cunning, scheming, like Moriarty, you know, Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes.

But it's not true. They're very chaotic. They're very chaotic.

Actually, cluster B personality disorders, the cluster that includes narcissism, psychopathy, borderline, histrionic, this cluster is known as the dramatic erratic cluster.

Because they are totally unstable, all of them, psychopaths also, they're unstable, and they are not there. They are more like reflections.

I call it a hive mind. There's nobody there. It's an emptiness that mirrors influences from outside. It's like a huge mirror.

You can think of a narcissist like a huge mirror. And you are reflected in the mirror. And your reflections become the narcissist's identity. Your reflections, your input, your words become the narcissist identity.

And it's a process known as narcissistic supply. We'll discuss it in a minute.

That's why it's very important for the narcissist that your input should be positive, or more clinically speaking, egosyntonic.

It's very important for the narcissist that your input, your words, your reflections, your feedback will not contradict, will not undermine, will not challenge and will not destroy.

The narcissist self-image is God.

Why is it so important to the narcissist what you are saying?

Because the narcissist does not exist, except in your words.

It's not that the narcissist is listening to you and there is someone there who is listening to you and saying, I accept this, I reject this.

It's not like that.

The narcissist is the sum total of your feedback.

That's why he wants to control your feedback, to make sure that there is no disaster in the making.

Attention seeking behaviors are very important. They are common to narcissists, borderlines. To some extent, psychopaths, grandiose psychopaths.

But it's not attention the way you think about it.

We all want attention. Everyone wants attention. You may want the attention of your spouses or your children or your colleagues or your bosses. There is no human being who doesn't want attention, of course.

And the reason is very primitive, is very primordial.

If as a baby you don't get attention, you're a dead baby. Attention is critical. To be seen, to be noticed is a survival strategy from age zero.

So this remains with us. Imagine that there was a conspiracy here and all of them pretended to not see a specific individual. That individual would feel as if she is disappearing.

The gaze of other people defines us. The gaze of other people gives us identity, makes us who we are, creates the boundaries and the contours, shapes us, we appear, we materialize from the gaze of other people.

This is all healthy.

Where it becomes pathological is when it's compulsive, there's an element of compulsion.

I demand attention. And if you don't give me attention, I'm going to punish you.

And it has to be a specific type of attention, not any kind of attention, but a specific type.

It has to be an attention that supports my view of myself as God.

See, only attention I will accept. Any other type of attention is aggression.

If you give me attention that says that I am not God, you're my enemy. You're my persecutory object. It means that you're hostile to me. And it's war. This is known as antagonism.

So, attention seeking in the narcissistic sense is not the same as attention seeking with healthy people.

It's not about being seen only. It's about being seen my way.

The narcissist wants you to see him, his way. His way or the highway.

And it's very easy to flip. You say the wrong thing, you give the wrong look, your body language changes, the narcissist instantaneously transitions from your best friend to your worst nightmare. To your worst enemy and I mean instantaneously.

It's so instantaneous that we have a name for it. It's called switching.

And it's not only narcissist. It's also borderlines although for different reasons.

Today I'm not going to discuss borderlines, which is a fascinating topic in itself.

Borderlines seek attention, but for a completely different reason. They need to regulate themselves from the outside. That's a different story.

This is attention seeking, which is, in the case of the narcissist, compulsive and aggressive. Compulsive and aggressive.

Many people confuse narcissism with grandiosity.

So you find all kinds of self-styled experts on YouTube. They say all psychopaths are narcissists, when actually what they're trying to say is that all psychopaths are grandiose, which is also not true. Not all psychopaths are grandiose.

But okay, do not confuse grandiosity with narcissism.

Grandiosity is a trait. It's a trait domain.

You have grandiosity among narcissists. You have grandiosity among borderlines. You have grandiosity among psychopaths. You have grandiosity in the manic phase of bipolar disorder. There's also grandiosity there. You have grandiosity in paranoid personality disorder. You have grandiosity, etc.

Grandiosity is like temperature, like temperature in physical medicine, yes?

So narcissists have grandiosity as well.

What is the narcissist's grandiosity?

I am perfect. I am invulnerable. My actions have no adverse consequences. I will never pay the price for my actions, which is where the narcissist begins to resemble very much a psychopath.

This is the interface.

Grandiosity is the interface between narcissism and psychopathy.

That's why grandiosity is considered to be a form of antagonism. It's a subsection of antagonism.

So, I'm Godlike. I'm Godlike. I'm godlike. I'm godlike in every sense.

It's not that the narcissist says, wow, I have a high IQ, I'm a genius. Okay, it's arguable. We can discuss this.

The narcissist says, I am perfect in every sense. I am perfection reified. I am drop dead gorgeous. I am a genius. I am unprecedented. I am super brilliant. I am emotional. I'm more moralistic. I'm ethical. I'm etc.

So it's very important to understand the concept of grandiosity.

Grandiosity is not about being the best, being the biggest, being the richest. That's not grandiosity. That is Trumpism.

Grandiosity is about being special, being unique.

So for example, a narcissist can be very proud that he is the biggest loser, that his company had the biggest bankruptcy in the history of the world. He would be very proud of it because it makes him special. You could find narcissists who say, I fail so much, I don't know anyone else who is failing like me. That is grandiosity.

Victimhood. You heard of victimhood?

There are victimhood movements all over the world. Everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law are victims. There are so many victims in the world that is difficult to findwho is victimizing them. There's problem finding abusers.

So, victimhood is a form of grandiosity. Because in victimhood, what does the victim say? I am special. My history is unique. My personal story is unprecedented. And because I'm like that, I have special rights, and you have obligations towards me. Because I have these rights, you have duties to me. You have obligations to me.

So it's a power play. Victimhood is narcissism, of course, and we are beginning to discover this.

There are studies since 2020. There are studies in Israel, in British Columbia, in Taiwan, in China, studies that discovered that in victimhood movements, you heard of Me Too, you heard of Black Lives Matter, you heard of all these victimhood movements, you heard of the far right supremacist, white supremacists and so on. These are all victimhood movements.

We made studies of these movements and we found out that the prevalence and the incidents, I'm sorry, the incidence of narcissists and psychopaths in these groups is much higher than in the regular, in the normal population, in the general population.

In other words, narcissists and psychopaths gravitate to these social movements. They infiltrate these social movements and they take over. They take over these social movements.

Leaders with charisma, gurus and so on, they take over these victimhood movements and they use the victimhood movements for self-gratification, self-supply, narcissic supply, and so on.

So you see, grandiosity is not about being the best or the biggest, it's about being special. You could be special in a bad way. I'm the greatest serial killer in history. I'm the greatest failure in history. I'm the greatest, you know, loser in history. That's okay. That's a grandiose statement.

Of course, if you are so special, if you are so special and unique, then you are entitled to special treatment.

Some of you are doctors. You know the patients that come and they insist to meet the chief doctor, and they insist on the best treatment, and only they have this treatment, and they insist to meet the chief doctor and they insist on the best treatment and only they have this treatment and they should be first they should not wait in line and so on, you know, these kind of patients?

Well, this is called entitlement. Entitlement is the mirror image of grandiosity.

If I'm special, if I'm godlike, if I'm unique, if I'm perfect, then I deserve to be treated in a way which is different to other people.

All other people should wait in line. All other people can be treated by the nurse. All other people, you know, there are other people. They can have a bed not next to the window. There are other people. I deserve the best. I deserve the most.

This is entitlement. This is known as entitlement. It goes hand in hand with grandiosity.

And one of the major presenting signs of narcissists is this, that they are entitled. They demand special treatment.

Now, immediately they have no possibility to delay gratification. They're highly impulsive and they become aggressive. Frustration in the case of narcissists is immediately converted to aggression. If you frustrate the narcissists, narcissists becomes aggressive.

This was discovered first time in 1939 by a guy called Dollard, the frustrationaggression hypothesis.

So, entitlement. Anankastia is a very fancy way of saying, obsessive-compulsive features.

The narcissist, I told you, is a bit paranoid. It's a bit paranoid, so the narcissist, I told you, is a bit paranoid. It's a bit paranoid.

So the narcissist catastrophizes. The narcissist expects the worst. The worst case scenario is the most likely scenario.

Because the narcissist expects the worse, he engages in rituals. He has rituals to prevent the bad outcomes, to prevent the worst from happening, which is a good definition of obsessive-compulsive disorder or obsessive compulsive features, and this is known as anankastia.

Next is negative affectivity. Negative affectivity is simply the inability to experience positive emotions and the ability to experience only negative emotions.

Narcissists and psychopaths experience anger, rage, envy. Envy is very big in narcissism. Narciss envy. Nause everyone all the time. Ennisis, hatred. Yeah, they're big on this.

They are disregulated when they experience these emotions. They lose control. They become very voluble and expressive and in your face and ostentatious and so on.

But they are not able to experience any positive emotions, and this is known as negative affectivity. They cannot experience love. They cannot even experience joy and pleasure. They are anhedonic.

They think they experience pleasure and joy, but it's not. It's not real pleasure, not real joy. It's possessing something or being noticed. It's gratification, actually. Gratification is not an emotion. Gratification is a reactive state of mind.

They're unable to experience positive emotion. Think of a positive emotion and it is excluded to the narcissist. It cannot access it.

This is a very sad state of affairs and we will discuss why in the etiology what happened to this kind of person that he is unable to access emotions and so on.

But suffice it to say that narcissists have this negative affectivity.

I mentioned dissociality, these are antisociality, these are antisocial behaviors, some narcissists are a bit of a criminal, some narcissists are hate people, some narcissists are antagonistic and conflictual and so on so forth.

And now a few paragraphs about narcissists in therapy and narcissists in relationships and then we move to the etiology.

The etiology is a fascinating tour, and I don't believe that many of you came across this very arcane, rare literature.

Doctors here accepted.

So, therapy. When a narcissist attends therapy, a good diagnostician usually does not need psychological tests.

The problem with psychological tests with narcissists and psychopaths, that they're a bit stupid.

Because the psychological tests rely on honest self-reporting by the narcissist and psychopaths.

So what is the psychological test for narcissism, the NPI? And the psychological test for psychopathy, the PCLR.

These are self-reporting tests.

So the clinician is asking the psychopath, is it true that you tortured animals when you were young?

And of course, the psychopath being very honest, that psychopaths are well known for honesty. Of course, the psychopath would say, yeah, I torture them, I even killed them. And are you beating your wife on a regular basis? I'm kidding you not, these are some of the questions. Are you beating your wife or a husband on a regular basis?

And the expectation is that the narcissist or the psychopath would say, yeah, of course, would be honest, would be sincere.

I find it funny. I find it funny that people who develop these tests, who are leading experts on narcissism and psychopathy, fail to realize that you cannot expect honest answers from psychopaths and narcissists and that self-reporting should be excluded from the diagnostic process, not become the main core of the diagnostic process.

So a good diagnostician, actually, in my view, would not bother with the test.

A good diagnosis would observe the narcissist and the psychopath can act.

So they can act for one hour. They can act for one session. They can act for two sessions.

Sooner or later, the narcissist comes out. Sooner or later the narcissists exit comes out sooner or later the psychopath manifests and a trained experience qualified diagnostician will easily diagnose at that point.

It's important to understand that in the case of the psychopath, there is very, very little you can do as clinicians.

I don't know how many of you are psychologists or so on, but even those who are not.

It's important to understand that psychopathy is a lost case.

Now, many things I say today I am not allowed to say in a university I'm not allowed I'm not kidding I'm not allowed if I say these things I mean I'll be called because you are not supposed to say that it's hopeless that something is hopeless but we are we're in the family now. It's hopeless.

Psychopathy is hopeless. Psychopathy is the extreme end of something known as antisocial personality disorder.

And some forms of antisocial personality disorder are amenable to behavior modification.

If you provide these kind of people with some incentives, then they modify behaviors. They're very reactive in this sense.

But not for long. I wouldn't waste resources on a psychopath. I wouldn't waste resources on a psychopath. I wouldn't. End of story. Nothing. I mean like nothing. It's total waste of time.

Narcissus is a different story, a bit of a different story.

It's important. As I will demonstrate to you a bit later in the etiology part, the mental age or the psychological age of a typical narcissist is around two to three years old. A typical narcissist is about two to three years old, as far as mental and psychological age.

And in more advanced cases, six to nine years old. You have some narcissists who are six to nine years old. That's much more rare.

You will understand why I'm saying this when we discuss the etiology.

But they're babies, they're children, they're toddlers.

One of the huge mistakes of modern psychiatry is that we attempt to treat narcissists as if they were adults.

We bring the narcissist to our office, we make a therapeutic alliance with the narcissists, we make agreements and contracts, and all this time we are talking to someone who is two years old.

It's unwise, and I'm being very careful with my words. It's unwise, and I'm being very careful with my words. It's unwise.

To have any impact on the narcissist, in my view, and in the view of additional scholars who are now emerging, we think as a group, we think that we should use child psychology. We think child psychology would be much more efficacious with narcissists than adult psychology.

The second mistake is that narcissists are traumatized.

We will discuss it in the etiology.

Narcissism is a post-traumatic condition. Simply post-traumatic condition.

So we should use trauma therapies. We should use technique borrowed from trauma therapies.

What is a narcissist? It's a traumatized two-year-old. It's a two-year-old sitting in the corner, crying, terrified, doesn't know what to do, pretends that he's God.

We'll discuss this in the etiology.

And so when you come to a child who is two years old, it's terrified, traumatized, has been abused, has been suffered, whatever. It doesn't make sense to treat this child as an adult and to ignore the trauma.

To say this person is a horrible person, obnoxious, you know, unpleasant and so on. And as if there was no trauma there.

It's wrong. Simply wrong. On human grounds, it's wrong. It's immoral even, I would say.

And this is the state of current treatments which attempt to deal with narcissism.

It's a child. So you know how to deal with the child, at least those of you who are mothers. You know how to deal with the child.

One of the things you can do with the narcissists, for example, is leverage the narcissist's grandiosity.

If you want the narcissist to change, challenge his grandiosity.

Tell him, let's see if you can change, or only you can change. Or I'm giving you a challenge. I don't believe that you can change.

The narcissist would try to prove you wrong.

Grandiosity is a major therapeutic tool, major, and you have to play the game. You have to play the game. You have to enter the narcissist world, and you have to agree with the narcissist, conform to the narcissistic view of himself.

And then use the narcissist perception of the world, the narcissist's point of view, the narcissist's veld.

You have to use this against the narcissism.

Not against the narcissist, it's a child, but against the narcissism.

Narcissism is a defense. It's a compensatory defense.

Deep inside, the narcissists feels bad, feels frightened, feels unsafe, feels insecure, deep inside.

Narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a compensation for this.

Again, we'll discuss it in the etiology.

You need to work with the compensation.

If you fight the compensation, you will increase the trauma and you will trigger defenses, infantile defenses.

For example, splitting, the narcissists will say, I'm all good, my therapist is all bad. He's stupid. He doesn't know what he's doing. Or she is my enemy. She's colluding with my wife against me. It will create paranoid ideation.

Never confront the defenses.

And that applies to relationships with narcissists. If you have a narcissistic husband, a narcissist husband or a narcissist wife, or I know it's unheard of, a narcissist colleague, or a narcissist patient, it's the same. Same principles apply.

Don't go head in head, toe to toe, don't confront, don't conflict, don't attack, don't provide advice, don't offer help, don't put yourself in superior position that will trigger the grandiosity immediately.

But collaborate.

It's a story. The narcissism has a defense. It's a narrative. It's a movie. It's a story.

Enter the story. Enter the story.

And then from within the story, work with this child, work with this child to make the child feel safe, secure, so that the need for narcissism as a compensatory defense is reduced.

And the child attempts, attempts slowly to reach out and maybe even to grow.

But if you are confrontational as therapists, you're going to get nowhere. You're going to make a situation much worse.

Grandiosity is your friend. The narcissistic pathologies are your friends as clinicians. They're your friends.

So you can use all the features of narcissism against narcissism.

I mentioned grandiosity. Let's see if you can do it. That's an example.

So this is my advice to you.

Be more compassionate when you are looking at the narcissist. It's not a full-fledged human being, or at least not a full-fledged adult. It's a person in the making. It's a work in progress which has been disrupted at some point. Disrupted.

You know when you walk and see buildings which were not completed, you see buildings, which the construction is not finished, that's a narcissist.

As you would not expect to have amenities and the best living conditions in such a building, you cannot expect to have a normal intercourse or normal discourse with a narcissist and talk rationally and analyze and use techniques from adult therapy.

I mean, this is totally wrong approach, in my view. Totally wrong approach.

Let's talk about what makes a narcissist.

Let's talk about what makes a narcissist.

How does someone become a narcissist?

As I mentioned, biologically, narcissists are born, like all other people. They are newborns. They're babies.

And then something happens.

Whereas the vast majority of people, narcissism is overdiagnosed on YouTube.

But in reality there are very few narcissists. People with narcissistic personality disorder comprise 1% of the general population. And people with narcissistic style, another 6% to 7%.

But the disorder is 1%.

So something happens.

First of all, it's reasonable to assume that there is a genetic predisposition to narcissism.

Why?

Because you take a family and in the family there are five children and these five children are closing age like one year apart or something, only one of them becomes a narcissist, the other five do not become narcissists, and they're all exposed to the same mother, same father, same environment, same dysfunction, same circumstances, everything identical or similar, and yet only one becomes a narcissist.

So it's very logical to assume that there is some genetic, some hereditary component. We haven't found it yet.

While we did find genetic components in psychopathy, we did isolate and identify genes that affect or create the condition of psychopathy. We also, in numerous studies, we have demonstrated brain abnormalities in psychopathy.

The psychopath's brain is very different to a healthy brain, but I mean vary on multiple levels. The white matter, amygdala, I mean, everything is disrupted severely.

We didn't find this in narcissism.

When we studied narcissists, we at this stage, don't have any proof that it's a brain abnormality or that's any hereditary component at this stage.

So, because of that, we are forced to focus on the environment, not nature, but nurture.

We focus on the environment, we ask ourselves, what on earth has gone so wrong in these families that produced such a human being, or a non-human being as you wish, that produced such a constellation, such a person.

What has gone so wrong?

And now the second part of the lecture is about what has gone wrong.

In the background of narcissists, the narcissists we have studied, in the background, we find what we call adverse childhood experiences, ACEs.

We find abuse. We find trauma. We find suffering. We find pain. We find terror. We find suffering. We find pain. We find terror. We find events which are terrifying to a child. We find family dynamics which are conducive to anxiety and insecurity, for example, divorce. Or fighting between the parents that devolves into physical violence, domestic abuse, domestic violence, and so on.

There is no exception. In all narcissists that we have studied, there is a background of familial dysfunction.

However, it's very important to define the word abuse.

Because if you go to people and say, all narcissists have been abused as children. They say, it's not true. My narcissist's mother is the best mother. She loves him. She adores him. It's not true. He didn't suffer anything. There was no abuse, no trauma. This is bullshit. Many, many people say this.

That's because they misunderstand the concept of abuse.

There is classical abuse. There is classical abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, incest, psychological abuse, verbal abuse. These are classical forms. Easy to identify.

But that's not the majority of abuse. The majority of abuse is hidden and not easy to identify.

Let me give you a few examples.

If I have a child and I'm forcing the child to realize my unfulfilled dreams and fantasies, I had a dream to be a pianist and I never became a pianist, but I'm forcing my child to become a pianist. Or I'ma doctor and I'm forcing my child to be a doctor, which is a bit more common.

Well, that's abuse.

If I'm in a bad relationship with my husband and I'm using my son as a substitute spouse, my son becomes my confidant, my good friend, I'm consulting my son, I'm confiding in my son, I share everything with my son, I gossip about his father with my son, this abuse, this is known as parentifying, instrumentalizing.

If I am spoiling my child, I'm pampering my child, I'm super protective of my child. I don't let my child play in the dirt. I don't let my child socialize with peers. I don't let my child go out to the street because there are dangerous cars in the streets and so on.

And so I'm protecting my child. I'm a good mother, no? Or a good father. I'm a good parent.

Of course not. That's abuse. It's abuse because growth, personal growth, is driven by exposure to reality and to peers.

You need to be in touch with reality. You need to suffer. You need to experience loss. You need to be wounded. You need to be sick in order to grow. There's no other way to grow.

And if your parents isolate you, cause you, prevent you from this, don't allow you to play with your peers or go out to the street, they're abusive. This is abuse.

However, we don't consider it to be abusive. That's the enigma here. We don't consider such behaviors to be abusive.

Let me mention one more example.

A mother who does not let her child separate from her. She doesn't let the child separate. If the child tries to separate, she blackmails the child. She says, I cannot cope without you. I'm not going to live without you. You need to stay and help me. I am invalid. I cannot move. I need your help.

That's an example of abuse.

So there are numerous forms of abuse.

And when I say that in the background of all narcissists there is abuse, I am not talking about broken bones or sexual penetrationThere are many other options to abuse a child.

Abuse is any situation where the child is not allowed to become an individual, where the boundaries of the child are not respected or not allowed to emerge, and where when the parent objectifies the child, treats the child as some kind of object.

This is the definition of abuse, and it includes many, many behaviors which are considered to be very good, parental behaviors, but of course are very bad.

So what happens to a child who is exposed to abuse?

There is a concept in psychoanalysis. It's known as the dead mother.

Now, you notice, by the way, that I keep saying mother much more than father.

I'm using mother nine times. I'm using father once.

That's because I'm a man. And I'm chauvinistic and sexist.

No, it's not the explanation in this particular case.

That's because the mother has a critical role until age 36 months.

And the father's role in this initial period is much more limited.

Much more limited.

The father becomes more important than the mother after age three years when the father is actually a socialization agent. The father introduces society to the child, teaches the child skills and so on.

But this is much later. In the formative years, which are between zero and 36 months, and then there's another period, but the initial formative years, the mother is critical.

I would even go as far as saying that the mother is the only one, the only one with psycho-dynamic and psychological influence on the formation of the child.

I'm not alone in this, of course, Bowlby, who came up with attachment theory, had the same ideas, agrees with me or I agree with him, and so on.

It is, of course, politically incorrect to say this. If you dare to say this, you will be fired and probably driven over by someone in the academy, but it happens to be the truth.

We call these years formative years for a very good scientific reason. 80% of the structure of the brain is ready by age 3 and 90% of the structure of the brain is ready by age 5.

That's why we call this period the formative years.

So the mother is critical here and there is a concept in psychoanalysis known as the dead mother. Dead mother metaphorically.

The concept was invented by Andre Green, who is a French psychoanalyst, of all things.

Dead in the sense that it is an absent mother, emotionally absent. She is absent because she's depressive or she's absent because she's selfish or she's absent because she's entitled and grandiose or she's absent and the child is not good enough for her or she's absent because of her relationship with her spouse or her boyfriend or whatever be that as it may this is a kind of mother who does not function. It does not exist in the life of the child.

And in the vast majority of the anamnesis, an etiology of narcissists, we find a dead mother.

A dead mother is also a mother who takes over the child.

A mother who is overprotective of the child, a mother who is refusing to let the child go away, separate, individuate.

There's one test for a good mother.

Winnicott, who was a pediatrician before he became a psychologist, Winnicott suggested the coined the phrase, good enough mother.

But actually a good enough mother, there's one test, if you want to ask yourself, have I been a good mother?

There's one test. You push the child away. That's a good mother.

I know it's counterintuitive. It's against intuition. But that's a test of a good mother.

Did you push your child away? Not in a bad way. Not abusively. But did you give the child the freedom to separate from you with a full sense of security? This is known as a secure base, where you are secure base. Did you allow the child to walk away and to become a person, to acquire personhood?

And this process is known as separation, individuation.

Narcissists have not been allowed by their mothers to separate individuate.

This is a key insight in narcissism.

Narcissists are people who as children were not allowed to walk away, were not allowed to develop boundaries, we're not allowed to become individuals, we're not allowed to separate from mother.

This is the key.

If you want to understand narcissism with a single sentence, that's the key.

Is the same for the voice of the growth?

Yes.

The myth that female narcissists are different to male narcissists is just that. It's the myth. The pathology is the same.

There makes no difference.

That's not how we think today.

After, I mean, Lohen, for example, in his famous book about narcissists, did not take into account attachment theory. He did not take into account social learning theory and so on. Although his book was 1979, I think, an attachment theory was in the 60s. He didn't take it into account.

So here we have a child with a mother who is in some way dysfunctional. Motherhood does not provide good enough motherhood. She's not a good enough mother.

And consequently the child cannot separate from this kind of mother and become an individual. He doesn't undergo the process known as separation individuation.

Those of you who want to read or learn more about this process, you should read works by Margaret Mahler and Melanie Klein if you're so inclined.

The child at this point reacts emotionally.

The reflex, if you wish, the instinct, the drive, if you are Freudian, you're inclined to Freud, whatever name you call it, the drive, the inner drive, is to say goodbye to mother.

Have a look. Observe toddlers who are two years old. They hug, they hug the leg. I mean, they can't reach higher. They hug mommy. Then they let go of mommy. They walk a few steps. They walk a few steps. They look back. They look back and they run back to mommy.

This is separation, individuation in action.

The baby takes on the world.

Can you imagine? You're two years old. All you know is mother. That's your world. And suddenly you have the urge and the drive and the confidence and the bravery, the courage, to leave this island of stability, to leave this secure base and explore the world. The unknown.

It's the greatest adventure and the most extreme display of courage any of you will ever make.

Never mind what you did later in life.

There's nothing more courageous in this, and also nothing more frightening than this.

It's terrifying so the baby needs to know that mother is there, mother has his back, and this is known as secure base.

That's why babies run back to mommy after they explore, little they run back and back and back, and gradually they run a bit further and a bit further and a bit further until they end up in university.

So this is a process of separation, individuation.

And this is the failure in narcissism.

But this creates in the child emotional reactions.

Obviously, if you have a drive and you're unable to fulfill it, and at the same time, you're attached to a mother who is non-responsive, who is absent. So not only she doesn't allow you to become yourself, when you make this sacrifice of not becoming yourself, she is not there.

Who are you making this sacrifice for? There's nobody there. The mother is not there.

So this kind of child experiences three affects, three emotions.

Number one, shame, an enormous shame. The child obviously feels inadequate, feels that something bad is happening, feels out of control. There's a sense of being objectified, and it's a huge shame.

If I treat you as an object, your first reaction would actually be not anger, but shame.

Second would be anger. And very often the anger is triggered by the fact that I made you feel ashamed.

So, shame.

And then there is grief. The child grieves what it could have become and never did become.

So we have shame and we have grief. And then we have what?

Emptiness. We have emptiness.

This is known as the empty schizoid core. This is work by Otto Kernberg, by Seinfeld, not that Seinfeld, Jeffrey Seinfeld, there's quite a lot of work on this, on the empty schizoid core.

The child disappears, vanishes.

Why?

In the process of growing up, in the process of becoming, we internalize, we interject, we internalize, we internalize role models, we internalize people in our lives that we imitate and so on.

First person we internalize is mother. So we internalize mother.

If mother is an absence, if mother is empty, we would internalize emptiness.

And if we are not allowed to become an individual, we would remain an emptiness.

And this is the empty schizoid core.

The narcissist is an absence pretending to be a presence.

At that point, there is a huge sense of terror, absolute terror.

It's a two-year-old in the best case.

This process starts as six months, up to 36 months. It's a two-year-old, it's a one-year-old.

And this tiny being has no one to rely on. There's nobody there.

It's enormous fear, enormous terror.

And when the mother does interact with the child, her interactions are traumatizing and abusive. So the terror multiplies, it's even bigger.

And at that point, the child cannot be, cannot feel safe with mother. There's no secure base and the child fails to develop something called object constancy, object constancy.

Object constancy or object permanence is the belief that mother will always be there even if she is physically not present.

It's part of the internalization process. The child internalizes mother, so the child has an internal mother. So even when mother is not in the room, the child has a mother, mother introjection. It's a mother internal object that the child interacts with.

But if the mother is dysfunctional, if the mother is absent, if the mother is non-responsive, the child cannot internalize.

So there's no external mother and there's no internal mother.

And this is known as object inconstancy.

So the child is terrified. He doesn't know what to do, where to go.

And in some cases, luckily in very few cases, in some cases, a narcissist is born.

And I will explain now how narcissism compensates for this situation.

You remember, this is a lonely child. It's a terrified child. A child that has no one to rely on, no one to interact with, no one to talk to, a child that is not seen by the mother. The mother's gaze defines the child.

So this child has no core identity, he's empty inside, he's empty outside. It's terrified. It's like being caught in a swirling black hole.

And then the child finds a solution.

And that solution is pathological narcissism.

What is the solution?

The child invents an imaginary friend. The imaginary friend is everything the child is not.

The child is small. The friend is big.

The child is helpless. The friend is omnipotent, all-powerful.

The child cannot predict the behavior of adults around.

The imaginary friend is all-knowing, is omniscient.

The child is being told of experiences itself as a failure. He is ashamed. He's grieving over the unrealized, unactualized potentials.

The imaginary friend is perfect, brilliant, godlike.

This imaginary friend is known in clinical literature as the false self.

But here is something very interesting.

The false self is godlike. So it's a primitive religion. This is a religion invented by a two-year-old, right? It's a two-year-old.

And he invents this religion and there is a deity. There's a divinity here.

What do we know about primitive religions? What's the first thing we do in a primitive religion? Human sacrifice.

The development of the primitive religion of the narcissists, the child about to become a narcissist is similar. There's a bit of a human sacrifice.

The child sacrifices himself to this divinity, to this deity. This sacrifice actually eliminates the child, deletes the child, and the child merges with the false self, becomes one with the false self.

From that moment, there's a narcissist. It cannot be diagnosed. We cannot diagnose narcissistic personality disorder that early, but there's a narcissist, psychologically speaking.

So the solution is this imaginary friend who is going to protect the child and restore safety and stability and so on and so forth.

At that point, the child creates an imaginary world. This imaginary world is called paracosm. It's a fantasy defense. It's a kind of fantasy defense.

And the child inhabits this fantasy. The child gives up on reality, gives up on reality completely and emerges within the fantasy now as a god because remember he merged with the false self so now he's a god within the fantasy.

And it is within this fantasy that narcissism thrives and flourishes. When we give up on reality, it has a name, this is called dissociation.

The child dissociates. He deletes, he erases from memory, large parts of his life that are intolerable, unbearable, painful. He doesn't want to remember these things, so there's a lot of dissociation in early narcissism, and in borderline, of course. There's a lot of dissociation.

And to compensate for these memory gaps, there is fantasy.

So when you talk to a narcissist, a narcissist would tell you something and he would say but that's not true I have evidence that it's not true and the narcissist would say of course it's true. And it would argue with you.

Because the confabulations, these stories, these pieces of fiction that are intended to compensate for the memory gaps, they are perceived by the child as real.

The fantasy of the child is the child's reality. And that remains for life. That everything that's happening until age three remains with the narcissist for life.

Because the narcissist gets stuck at this point. Never, never evolves, never grows up. There is no progress, evolution or growth or development after age three or two in narcissism.

I mean, the narcissists can acquire skills. He can learn many languages. He can have very good episodic memory and so on, memory of professional memory, but emotionally and psychologically, that's a two, three-year-old, that's where he's stuck, and he never, never, ever moves forward. He never becomes an adult, ever. He is trapped in a world of fantasy.

And when he comes across you, when he says, oh, I want this person as my intimate partner, or I want this person as my best friend, or I want this person as my colleague or whatever, the narcissist forces you into his fantasy.

If you want to be with the narcissist, you must enter the fantasy. And that's why it's known as a shared fantasy.

If you refuse to enter the narcissist's fantasy, the narcissist will have nothing to do with you.

And if you do it aggressively, if you reject the narcissists aggressively, you become an enemy.

The narcissist is protective of his fantasy, of his grandiosity, and becomes very aggressive when you challenge the grandiosity or when you challenge the fantasy.

And the fantasy is a story, a movie, a theater production, play. It's a story about how the narcissist is wonderful and great and accomplished and amazing and handsome and I don't know brilliant and genius.

That's a story. That's a fantasy.

And because this is the narcissist's home, this fantasy, and because it's built on grandiosity, you cannot touch it. You're not allowed to touch it. You're invited as a guest. You can share with the narcissist the fantasy for many decades, but you're always a guest.

You need to understand this. If you're married to a narcissist for 25 years, you're his guest in his fantasy. You're never the owner of the fantasy.

You are never at liberty to change the fantasy, to negotiate the fantasy, to redefine the fantasy, or even to get fully acquainted with the fantasy. You're just a guest.

And as a guest, there are rules. You cannot with the fantasy. You're just a guest.

And as a guest, there are rules. You cannot attack the fantasy. You cannot challenge it. You cannot undermine it.

And one element of the fantasy is the narcissist's specialness, grandiosity, divine nature. It's a major element of the fantasy.

And this is the fantasy defense that emerges in childhood.

I have some good news. We are coming more or less to the end. So I will talk to you right now. We'll discuss right now the process of relationships.

How the narcissist forms a relationship.

Remember the narcissist is a child. Remember the narcissist is a child. Remember the narcissist is a child. Remember the narcissist is a child. Remember the narcissist is a child.

If you remember anything from this lecture, remember the narcissist is a child. End of story.

When the narcissist, as an adult, he's never an adult, is adult chronologically, is adult biologically, but he's never an adult psychologically.

When the narcissist as a chronological, biological adult, is trying to have a relationship with you, is trying to have a relationship with you as a child. As a child.

So let's take an example, an intimate relationship, a romantic relationship, a marriage, a girlfriend, this kind of relationship.

The narcissist approaches this kind of relationship as a child.

So who are you if he is a child? Who are you in the relationship if he is a child?

Yes, you're the mother. You're the mother. You're the maternal figure.

When the narcissist enters a relationship with you which is romantic or intimate, this is one example, yes, you're the mother.

And now what can you say about mother when you're a child when you're two years old when you're three years old how do you see mother you see her as perfect. She's perfect.

The narcissist idealizes the maternal figure.

You can do no wrong. You're amazingly intelligent. You're super gorgeous. He has never felt this way, the way he feels now, etc. You're unprecedented. You're a mother. You're an ideal mother.

You're not even a mother in adolescence.

In adolescence, adolescents begin to see the nuances. Mother can be good, mother can be bad. They're beginning to create composites. They have nuances, gray areas.

The child sees everything in terms all good, all bad, all black, all white. This is known as dichotomous thinking.

So when the child approaches you, you're all good, by definition, because you have to be the mother. You have to assume the maternal role.

Now, how do you know when you're two years old? How do you know if your mother is a good mother?

You test her. Nasavia. You have to test her, of course.

Because your original mother, the biological mother, sucked. It was very bad. It was not a good example.

So this time, you're not going to make this mistake again. You're going to test the mother.

How do you test the mother? You abuse her.

You abuse her. If you abuse the mother and she sticks around, she stays, she doesn't abandon you, she doesn't leave you, then she's a good mother. It means she loves you unconditionally. Never mind what you do to her. Without any conditions and prejudices, she will love you.

But you need to make sure of that, yeah? So you need to abuse her really badly, verbally, cheat on her, do horrible things to her. This is known as narcissistic abuse. I was the first to describe it in literature.

And this is narcissistic abuse. It's a test. It has other functions. But initially it's a test.

If you pass the test and you stick around, you're a masochist or dependent or something, you stick around, then you must be a good mother. You must be a good mother because you pass the test.

So at this point, you're a mother and he's a child. But at the same time, he becomes your parent. He becomes your mother, or your father, usually your mother. He becomes your mother.

So you experience the same. He regresses you, he infantilizes you, he pushes you back to the womb. You become his mother. He becomes your mother.

And this is my principle of dual mothership. There's a dual mothership here.

And so sometimes you feel as if you are the child and he is the father or the mother. And sometimes you feel as if he is the child and you are the mother.

And both feelings are correct. Both functions exist in the relationship.

This is the dual mothership, for instance.

And so at this point, there is a big happy family. There's a narcissist, you are his mother.

What next?

What happened with the original mother? The narcissist failed to separate from her. Failed to individuate.

Yes? The mother did not let him, did not let the narcissist as a child to become a person, to become an individual.

The narcissist this time needs to separate and individuate from you.

This is known in psychology as repetition compulsion. The narcissist repeats early childhood dynamics and early conflicts with the mother in his intimate relationships.

So now you're the mother and he's the child and he's growing up. He's growing up in the relationship.

And you're a good mother. You're a secure base. He can trust you because he abused you and you stayed. So you can be trusted.

Now he trusts you and you stayed so you can be trusted now he trusts you and now it's safe for him to go out into the world he is recreating age two simply recreating he lets go of you and he leaves you. He goes out into the world.

But how to do that?

Remember at the beginning of the relationship, he idealized you. He made you perfect.

How to give up on a perfect entity? How to give up on an idealized version of a mother? The perfect mother, the amazing, how to do that?

You devalue her. You say she is actually not a good mother. She is actually deceived me. Or she has changed. She has changed. She is not what she used to be. Etc.

And this process is known as devaluation.

So we have idealization. Devaluation.

Following devaluation, there is discard. Getting rid of the mother figure.

And this is the universal pattern of relationships with narcissists, idealization, devaluation, discard.

After that there are additional stages, replacement, hovering, we're not going to it right now.

But you understand now the dynamic.

It is a reenactment of age 2. Reenactment.

And he needs to separate from you. And to separate from you, he needs to make you an enemy. He needs to make you a bad object. He needs to make you devalued, not worthy of him.

And that way he gets rid of you. He separates from you and he has a chance to become an individual now because this time with this mother he got it right he separated but of course it never works it never works and he needs to go through the same cycle again and again and again

Why are you staying in such a relationship? Why? Why most intimate partners of narcissists stay with them, actually. Don't leave them. Minority leave them, but majority stay with them or stay with them and then leave them. Like, why do you stay at all? You've been abused. Why don't you walk away?

Because it's addictive.

What's addictive about it? What is so addictive?

The narcissist idealizes you and he gives you access to your idealized image through his gaze. You see yourself through the narcissist's gaze as an ideal object.

Suddenly you're amazing, you're perfect you are the recipient of laser focused attention you're the only person in the world you're godlike you're a goddess this is an intoxicating feeling you are given the opportunity to love yourselves the way a mother should have loved you.

A mother should have loved you as an idealized object.

When a baby is born. I mean, babies suck. Babies are really bad things. I mean, they cry, they do other things which I will not go into because I'm on camera. I mean, it's a tough job to raise a baby.

And it's not pleasant. I raised four of them, so I should know. It's not pleasant. It's not a pleasant thing.

And I'm being very gentle right now. It's horrible, actually. The sleeplessness and the dirt.

So the mother needs to idealize the baby. There's no other way.

The mother could not cope with all these challenges if she did not idealize the baby she says this is the most beautiful baby in the world it's the most clever baby in the world it's amazing so for what if he misses a leg it's a beautiful baby

Sorry, did any baby speak here? There's a baby here.

So the mother idealizes the baby.

A mother's love, a functional, healthy mother's love. Let it be clear. Initially involves idealization. Later on, but initially involves idealization.

So when you're idealized by the narcissists in the dual mothership, remember, he's your mother. When you're idealized by the narcissists, you feel like a baby again. You feel like you are being loved by a mother figure the way you should have been loved unconditionally, idealized, perfect, amazing entity, fascinating.

And so this is intoxicating, this is addictive, because you are given the chance to love yourself finally like a mother. You are given the chance to mother yourself, to parent yourself.

It's a reparenting opportunity or self-parenting opportunity through the narcissist's gaze.

So you depend on the narcissist. You can't do this alone. You have to look into the narcissist's eyes when he's idealizing you. Then you see your reflection, sometimes physical reflection, in the eyes. And that's it, you forget everything else. You can withstand any abuse and anything.

Because this experience of self-infatuation, self-limerance, is super powerful.

This is the secret of the narcissist, how he holds you so strongly and why it's so difficult to break the bond.

The trauma that the narcissist inflicts on you is coupled with unconditional, extreme, unmitigated love.

You learn to associate with the relationship, you learn to associate trauma with love. And so you bond.

This is known as trauma bonding.

The whole process is in clinical literature is called intermittent reinforcement. There's intermittent reinforcement. The narcissist loves you, hates you, attacks you, hugs you, criticizes you, praises you. You never know what to expect. Negative positive, black, white, hot, cold. This is intermittent reinforcement.

But at the foundation of intermittent reinforcement, there is a message. There's amessage: I love you unconditionally because you are perfect. That's why you deserve unconditional love. And now I give you permission to love yourself exactly the same way and you can do that through me.

If you have any doubts, whether you deserve unconditional love. If you doubt, if you suspect that you may not be perfect, that maybe you are not ideal, all you have to do is look into my eyes. And you will see that you are. And that's the end of the story.

This is a form of extreme trauma bonding because it involves conflicting signals, mixed signals.

And so there's a double bind here. There's a situation where the signals don't match. And you become dependent on the source of the signal to obtain the positive signal.

Because this person is capable of giving you negative signal, you become dependent on him for the positive signal. And this is how intermittent reinforcement works.

So one last thing, I promise. But I've been promising it a long time, so I don't know where you trust me. It's because I'm idealizing you. I know you're perfect.

One last thing is a distinction between covert and overt narcissism. This distinction, by the way, you need to know is being seriously doubted and questioned nowadays. Seriously doubted and questioned nowadays.

Until a few years ago, we made a distinction between overt, grandiose narcissists, and not to go now into half an hour of explanation what is an overt grandiose narcissist, he is Donald Trump. All right? Imagine Donald Trump, that's an overt grandiose narcissist.

And covert narcissist. Covert narcissist is a shy, vulnerable, fragilenarcissist who fails to obtain attention. Someone who fails to obtain attention.

So we call it collapsed narcissist. It's someone who wants to be a narcissist but doesn't know how.

To cut a long story short.

So that's a covert narcissist and overt.

But today we are beginning to change our minds a bit in the profession. I contributed a little to this. We are beginning to think that overt grandiose narcissists are actually a type, a variant of psychopathy, of psychopathic. Whereas the covert narcissist is the only real type of narcissists.

So we are beginning to focus on the covert narcissists. Now the emphasis in academia is on the covert narcissists because we are beginning more and more to believe that this is the real narcissists.

Why? Because he compensates. The covertist compensates. It's a compensatory structure.

Whereas in overt, grandiose narcissism, we find narcissists who actually fully believe their delusions, their grandiosity, their fantasies, and we fail to find what they're compensating for.

So we're beginning to think that these are psychopaths. Anyhow, this distinction is still valid, covert versus overt. We still find it in the diagnostic and statistical manual, although they do not use these words. They don't use covert and overt.

But they describe the two types.

And what I want to focus on is what is known as primitive defense mechanisms.

And this will be the end of the lecture, and you can all go home unless you have questions. You have been held hostage if you didn't notice.

So, I want to discuss primitive infantile defenses.

Again, remember the main lesson of this lecture? A narcissist is a child.

As a child, the narcissist has what is known as primitive or infantile defenses, defense mechanisms. These are defense mechanisms that develop in early childhood.

Now what is a defense mechanism?

Initially, another Jew, Zygmunt Freud, came up with the definition of defense mechanism, which was that defense mechanism is an attempt to redirect or reframe or suppress, repress, I'm sorry, or alter or change a drive or an urge that is not acceptable.

So we have some urge, some drive, sexual for example, is not acceptable, I have no idea why, is not acceptable, and then we transform it somehow.

So there are many ways to transform this urge or this drive so that it's not recognizable. It's transformed in a way that consciousness doesn't recognize it.

Because if it does recognize it, it creates dissonance. It creates conflict, internal conflict.

We cannot admit that we are animals who want to have sex. Well, most of us cannot.

So in this case, the sexuality or the sex drive will be converted in a way that we will not recognize that it takes.

Example is sublimation.

Sublimation is a defense mechanism where the sexuality is converted into socially acceptable activities and energy.

So if I write many, many books, it's because I'm not getting enough sex, etc.

So this is sublimation.

But there are many other types of defense mechanisms.

Okay, so this was the initial definition.

Today we have a different approach to defense mechanisms.

Actually in between there was another definition, another school it was known as the object relation school, Melanie Klein and so on and forth. I'm not going to it.

Today we have another approach to defense mechanisms.

We think the main role of defense mechanisms today is to make reality acceptable to us.

Not to make internal reality acceptable to us, but to make external reality acceptable to us.

So, and I think we should combine.

So I think what happens is internal reality determines external reality.

I have a drive, then I act, I do something, then I don't feel good about what I did, so I use defenses, or I don't feel good about how I felt, I don't feel good about my motivation, so I use defenses.

I think it's all mixed.

Clearly, it's about falsifying reality.

Simply put, falsifying internal reality, falsifying external reality.

Falsify reality, that's defenses.

The child falsifies reality literally from age four or five weeks.

Why?

Think about it.

You are five or six weeks old.

If you can think about it.

And you want access to mummy's breast.

You're not the only one who want access to mommy's breast, but other people want access to mommy's breast.

You're not the only one who want access to mommy's breast, but other people want access to mommy's breast for different reasons.

You want access to mommy's breast to eat. You need to eat.

Sometimes, mommy, exactly like in relationship with father, sometimes mommy's breast is available, sometimes mommy's breast is not available.

So, sometimes the baby is gratified and happy. Sometimes the baby is frustrated and angry, right? By definition.

Sometimes mommy is in the room, sometimes she leaves the room.

So, immediately the world splits. The world breaks.

There's a world that is all happiness and all joy and all pleasure and all gratification, and there's a world that is all frustration and all anger, so the world breaks.

This break, this chasm, this breaking of the world, this schism, is known as splitting. This is the splitting defense mechanism.

The baby says, there is a mummy that won't let me eat. That a bad mummy and there's a mummy that lets me eat there's a good mummy so there's good and bad the concepts of good and bad emerge later of the baby internalizes it's the baby says mommy is all good I'm all bad we're not going to it right now but this is splitting.

Narcissists are stuck not at age four, five, six weeks, but they're stuck at age two.

Splitting is active at age two, very.

So they split.

That's why in a relationship with you, initially you're all good. And at the end, you're all bad.

That's why they say either you're with me or you're against me. Black and white, evil versus good. It's always divided into two mutually exclusive groups, nothing in between, no grey zones, no nuances, nothing.

And this is known as splitting. It's very common in narcissism, it's very common in borderlinepersonality disorder.

The next defense is projection.

Projection is when you have something inside that you cannot accept.

For example, deep inside, you know that you're weak, or even worse, deep inside you know that you're stupid. And you cannot accept it.

So what you do, you take these parts in you that are not acceptable to you, that are egodystonic, that are not acceptable to you, that you don't feel comfortable with, that you reject, that you hate the parts of you, and you throw them on someone else. You just throw them.

This is why it's called projection. You project them.

So if you're weak, you would say, you're weak. I'm strong. You're weak. I'm generous. You're stingy. So you project these parts.

This is known as projection.

By the way, there's a very interesting defense mechanism, not connected to this. There's a very interesting defense mechanism known as reaction formation.

Reaction formation is when there is something I hate about myself and then I behave in a way that proves that I don't have it.

Let's take an example.

Imagine that I'm a latent homosexual. I'm gay. But I hate it. I don't want to be gay. I don't want to be homosexual. I find it unacceptable for cultural reasons, social reasons, religious reasons. I know. I hate the fact that actually I'm gay.

So what do I do? I prosecute gays. I become homophobic. I begin to attack gays, physically maybe. I make propaganda against gays.

That way I prove to the world, and especially to myself, that I'm not gay.

So this is reaction formation. It's a way to project the part and then behave in a certain way.

Anyhow, projective identification is even more interesting.

Projective identification is there something in me that I hate.

Imagine, for example, I'm stingy. For example. So I hate it. I don't want to be stingy. I want to be generous, but I cannot. I cannot be generous. I'm stingy.

So what I do is I attribute this to, for example, my wife. So my wife is stingy. I'm not so generous, but it's because of my wife that I have to be stingy.

So this is projection.

And then there is projective identification. My wife loves me, so she behaves as a stingy person, just to make me happy. She knows that I am saying about her that she is stingy. She loves me. She wants me to be pleased and gratified and satisfied. So she adopts the projected part. She begins to behave like a stingy person.

And this is projective identification.

We find it a lot with domestic abuse, domestic violence. Studies have shown that women who grew up in a household with domestic violence, seek partners who would be violent with them, partners who would abuse them. They seek them out. They filter them. I mean, nice guys are not interesting. They look for abusers. They look for people who would beat them up.

Why? That's projective identification. These women who have been exposed to domestic violence, they seek a man who would fulfill the role of abuser. So they project the part on him and he accepts it. And he begins to abuse.

And this is, we'll come to it. This is a projective identification.

Bear in mind your question. Don't forget it.

Last one is rationalization.

For example, you're sitting here and you're saying, why on earth did I come here? It was such a mistake. This is horrible.

And then you say, but well, I'm learning something. It's, you know, this is rationalization.

Rationalization is when you invent some story or some narrative where your actions, your emotions, your cognitions, makes sense not only to you, but would make sense to other people.

Rationalization, of course, is very self-serving and very self-deceiving. Very often we rationalize the most horrible behaviors. I had no choice, or I'm doing this because I love you. I'm abusing you because I love you. This is rationalization.

All these mechanisms are infantile, the mechanisms of kids, not adults. Children have this mechanism.

So the narcissist is a child and he has all these behaviors within any type of interpersonal relationships with intimate partners, with his own children, with colleagues, he would have all this.

I've described to you someone who is a very difficult person.

In medicine we have the concept of difficult patient. Many difficult patients are actually narcissists. We have difficult colleagues, we have difficult spouses, we have difficult children, we have difficult, you know, difficult children.

We have difficult, you know, so difficult people. Many, many of these difficult people are actually narcissists.

Psychopaths are goal oriented. The psychopath wants something. He wants sex, he wants money, he wants access, he wants power. And he will stop at nothing. He has no inhibitions. And he will stop at nothing. And he will accomplish what he set out to do.

Narcissists want attention. They're children. They just want attention. And they just want a mother.

And when the narcissist tests you for his mother, he focuses on four things, and I call them the four S's. Sex, supply, attention, services, and safety.

You give him two of these four S's, he's yours, as any child would be.

Psychopath is not built this way.

A psychopath is a machine. It optimizes the direction to obtaining something, regardless of the cost to you or sometimes to himself.

Psychopaths in this sense are both much simpler than narcissists. It's a much, much simpler construct than narcissists, much simpler personality. That's why many, many criminals are actually psychopaths. Because they're simple people. These are simple people.

On the one hand, and on the other hand, psychopaths in my view, psychopathy, anti-social personality disorder, should not be a mental illness, in my view. It's not a clinical entity.

A psychopath is someone who refuses to play by the rules. Simple. He doesn't play by the rules. He doesn't accept the law. He doesn't accept norms. He's not normative. He doesn't accept the law. He doesn't accept no as an answer. He must have yes. He is goal-oriented.

A psychopath is you exaggerated. You all want sex? He wants more. You all love money? He wants more. We all want access and power? He wants more. It's more. It's a caricature, an exaggeration of a human being.

The narcissist is not an exaggeration of a human being. It's debatable, as I said at the very beginning, if it is a human being.

The narcissist is a disruption in the formation of the self, to the point that there's no self.

And so, whereas the psychopath is immediately recognizable, and we can disagree with the psychopath. We can say, wow, that's horrible what he's doing, you know, is this, is that.

But it's recognizable to us. We resonate with the psychopath. We understand. We're all psychopaths sometimes, you know. There are situations where we're all a bit psychopathic, all a bit criminalized, all a bit antisocial. It's normal.

But if you are a healthy person, there are no situations where you are, for example, grandiose, or where you are totally in fantasy, totally unaware of reality or renounce reality.

These are not exaggerations of a human type. That's another human type. Narcissism is another human type.

That's why I focused in today's lecture on narcissism, not on psychopathy.

I personally find psychopathy boring. I find it boring because it's such a simple construct with such simple psychodynamics. It's perfectly understandable.

Even serial killers essentially are perfectly understandable. I just collaborated with the FBI profiler on serial killing case. There's an interview on my YouTube channel if you want to see, but I found it non-challenging, in effect. Non-challenging.

It's about power, it's about sex, it's about... Yeah, but I understand a serial killer.

So can you. If you're honest with yourselves, you can understand a serial killer. You cannot, you will never do it. You will never engage in this kind of behavior.

But have you never engaged in a power play? In a mind game? Have you never wished someone dead?

These are human impulses.

The narcissist is divorced, chose to be divorced as a child from humanity and from reality, developed his own fantasy world and emigrated there, moved to live there.

And if you don't have access to this paracosm, this fantasy specifically, you cannot understand the narcissist by extrapolating who you are. You cannot understand the narcissist by saying okay let me look inside myself and see if I resonate.

You cannot resonate, there's no resonance with the narcissist, while with the psychopath there is.

Of course there is.

Okay, you have suffered long enough. You're all traumatized and abused beyond the point of endurance. You have become narcissistic, I'm sure, many of you by now.

Yes.

I have a question.

Does the projectification has to do with the attachment of the past trauma?

There is something called attachmentstyle. There's a theory of attachment styles that started with Bowlby and others later. And most narcissists have what is known as insecure attachment style. In most cases, dismissive avoidant attachment style.

But attachment style can be typical of a totally healthy person. Attachment style is when you experience a certain type of relationship with parental figures, peers, role models in early childhood, and you created something known as the internal working model.

The internal working model is a model in your mind that tells you how relationships should look. And then you behave in relationships according to the internal working model.

It has nothing to do with narcissism. It so happens that narcissists are dismissive avoidant because they need to re-enact the early childhood trauma, but it's not like with healthy people. Healthy people are dismissive avoidant or insecure because they were never exposed to a good relationship in their family of origin.

I hope I answered your question.

How do narcissists and psychopaths get trauma-bonded by their partners?

They don't get trauma-bonded, but they trauma bond. They trauma-bond the partner.

I thought I explained it. They trauma bond by behaving unpredictably.

Because they behave unpredictably, hot and cold and I love you, I hate you, and so on. They create a dependency on the source of the behavior.

I understood that far, but I understand. How do they go through that process?

Because they can't discard at the beginning.

You're not my mom.

They can't discard.

They can't discard just a person.

The narcissist needs to discard a mother. He cannot discard just anyone.

He needs to discard a mother. He cannot discard just anyone. He needs to discard a mother figure.

So to become a mother figure, he needs first to idealize you.

He must go through this. This is an inexorable mechanism, process, conveyor belt. He cannot exit this. He is compelled.

That's why we call it repetition, compulsion. He is compelled to go through these stages. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

A million relationships, all of them identical. He has to go through this.

He cannot just be with you and then say, okay, I discard you. You're not interesting.

He cannot devalue you from the beginning. He has to idealize you in order to devalue you.

So he's a prisoner. He's a prisoner of what is known as a schema. He's a prisoner of a scheme.

And he must re-enact it all the time. It's like a hamster. You know what is a hamster? On the wheel? It's a hamster on the wheel.

That's a narcissist.

I hope I understood your question.

Any other questions?

Oh, sorry.

I was thinking regarding the choice to be in a relationship with a narcissist. And to explain this if I understood you correctly as a mutual gratification, intermittent supplier, I don't know about the expression.

But then, since no choice is accidental, unconsciously we choose people with whom we want to be in a relationship.

But let's put it aside.

It made me think that practically the ones who choose to be in a relationship with a narcissist are themselves also a narcissist in a way.

No, not narcissists, but they have some problems.

They definitely have, for example, a deficit in self-love, these people. They would have a mismanagement of the self-love economy.

They are either unable to love themselves except through the agency of someone else, so they can love themselves only through someone else's gaze, or they have what we call an internalized bad object.

Internalized bad object used to be known as primitive superego. Internalized bad object is a set of voices, internal voices, that tell you that you're unworthy, your bad, you're inadequate, you're ugly, you're stupid, these internal voices.

So when you come across someone who is telling you exactly the opposite, it's addictive.

So many of them have internalized bad object.

Some of them are narcissists, is true, but I think the vast majority are more likely to be borderlines, codependents, or have a deficit in self-love, or something like that.

Attachment styles which are problematic, like insecure attachment style, and so on.

I think we should focus more on this rather than narcissism.

Yes, please.

Two questions?

I'll give you a discount. Yeah?

You said that the narcissist when entering a relationship, he is with the abusive behavior.

When he tests with the abusive behavior.

I have a problem with hearing, so I'll come near you.

When he enters a relationship, yeah?

He tests the mother with the abusive behavior.

Don't you think that maybe he's doing the same with all the relationship?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. I said that I give intimate relationship, romantic relationship, the same with all the relationships, friends, yes, yes, yes.

I said that I give intimate relationship, romantic relationship as example, but all interpersonal relationships are identical. They all involve shared fantasy.

My second question is, what do you think about the movers in the workplace, the people who are doing moving? Do they have narcissistic part?

The lady asked about the mobbing, mobbing in the workplace.

Another phenomenon is gang-stalking and so on.

Ironically, the few studies on mobbing and gangstalking fail to find a preponderance of personality disorders in these groups.

However, starting in 2020, as I mentioned, studies by Gabai, if you're interested to read online, studies by Gabai and others, in British Columbia as well, China and so on, Gabai conducted four studies in Israel, of all places, before October 7th.

In 2020, she conducted four studies.

And they found that narcissists and psychopaths are much more likely to be found in victimhood movements than in aggressive movements.

They studied aggression versus victimhood. And they found that in aggressive movements, so these would be gangs, for example, street gangs. There are many studies on narcissism in street gangs. These would be paramilitary formations and militias. This would be supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, these kind of people, they failed to find an incidence of narcissism and psychopathy, sorry, incidents of narcissism that is higher than the general population.

They did find a higher incidence of psychopathy in these groups, but it was lower than the level of psychopathy among chief executive officers of big companies in the United States.

I'm not kidding. These are studies by Hare, Robert Hare and Babiak studies.

So psychopaths gravitate not so much to violence.

We have this image of psychopath as someone with a knife, you know, stalking, killing people, women mostly. Serial killer, rapists, these are not psychopaths.

I mean, some of them are psychopaths, but that's a stereotype.

The overwhelming vast majority ofpsychopaths appear to be normal.

There was a scholar by the name of Hervey Cleckley. And Hervey Cleckley wrote a stunning masterpiece. It's titled The Mask of Sanity. The Mask of Sanity. It's available free online. You can download it.

And in the Mask of Sanity, he makes a claim that psychopaths are wearing the mask of sanity. They appear to be sane. They appear to be completely normal, but they're mentally ill. That's Cleckley's view. It's not my view.

And he is right about the first part. The overwhelming vast majority of psychopaths are neighbors next door, your colleagues, your friends, your...

That's the overwhelming vast majority.

Martha Stout wrote a book called The Sociopath Next Door, about this phenomenon.

And so these psychopaths gravitate to the top. They end up being top doctors, top chief executive offices, top politicians, top. They reached the top.

There were studies that the incidence of severe psychopathy among surgeons, medical doctors who are surgeons is much higher than the general population.

No offense, you of course, normal. No, no, no, apologize. You are the only exception. Only exception. With my stamp of authority, you're the exception.

But it's a fact that among surgeons, actually, the world's most famous psychopath is a neurosurgeon. James Fallon is the most famous psychopath.

So I think we are confusing psychopaths with narcissists because they are both aggressive. Both types are aggressive. Both types are noxious. Both types want something from us. Both parties are Machiavellian. Machiavellian means manipulative.

And so we say that the same. They're not the same.

Of course, completely not the same.

Psychopaths are goal-oriented. There's money, they're there. There's power. They're there. It could be power over life. It's in a medical profession. It could be power over people. Politics. Could be power over company.

They're power hungry.

That's why, for example, the incidence of rape among psychopaths is much higher than among narcissists.

Narcissists don't care about power.

That's the irony.

When you read online, when you read online and so on and forth, all these self-styled experts and journalists that don't know quite what they're talking about, they say that narcissists want power, they want money, they want...

No, these are psychopaths.

Narcissists wants attention.

When the narcissist becomes rich, he gets attention, so that's why he becomes rich. It's means to an end. When the narcissist becomes powerful president of the United States, he gets attention. So it's about attention.

Whereas the psychopath avoids attention. Psychopath is exactly the opposite.

Psychopath doesn't care less what you think and what you don't think. As far as the psychopath is concerned, you're all instruments, you're all tools, you're all objects. He moves you around like in chess, you know. He couldn't care less what you say or you don't say if you notice.

And most psychopaths like to fly under the radar. They like to not attract attention. And if they attract attention, it's not like psychopaths. They will attract attention like, you know, pillars of the community and so now it's a very the question raised an issue that I did not mention.

Listen I've been doing this for 30 years so the lecture would be 30 hours for compressing no but seriously there are so many topics and sub topics and I can talk forever and talk forever, and I do talk forever, I have a YouTube channel.

But one last thing about your question.

There is a variant of narcissists, the type of narcissist is known as the pro-social or communal narcissists.

That is a narcissist who is very proud that he is moralistic, that he is ethical, that is altruistic, that is charitable, he gives to charity, that he is a saint.

So I don't know, someone like Mother Teresa maybe, you know, they are proud of being good people, but their goodness is performative.

It's a performance. It's a show. They're ostentatious. If they give you charity, there will be a camera there, documenting the charity. If they're being good, there will be a newspaper article tomorrow. And they are all the time moral. They are the standard of morality.

So this is a type of narcissists that is deceiving people, misleading people.

Many gurus, many saints, many priests, in religion this is very common. Many such people are actually narcissists.

And their grandiosity is in how good they are.

They reject the bad object because all narcissists have a bad object, and they say, I don't have an internalized bad object because I'm a good person. I'm a good object.

But of course there's nothing there. It's an absence all the same. It's performance.

I would say that narcissism is performative, exactly like gender, by the way.

When we say men, woman, it's a performance. There's no biological foundation to men, women. There's a lot of biological foundation for male, female. Male and female, of course. They're biologically determined to some extent.

But men, women is not biologically determined. It's a social, cultural construct.

And we are performing the role.

From very small age, we are taught how to be a man. And we are told how to be a woman. And we are playing these roles all our lives.

Same with narcissism. Same with narcissism.

They play a role. It's a role play. It's a performance. It's all a giant theater, like Shakespeare said. It's a role play. It's a performance. It's all a giant theater like Shakespeare said. It's a stage.

But when you go behind the scenes, there's nothing. Nothing behind the scenes. Not even dressing rooms. Not even a mirror. Nothing. When you go behind the scenes, you fall off the edge of the earth. There's deep space behind the scenes.

So even the theater is fake. Even the theater is fake.

Because there's no back, backstage. It's all fake. Completely. It's all... Audience completely. It's all audience. Audience.

Yes, it's attention seeking and nothing will stop the narcissist to obtain attention.

He will be what you want him to be, at any minute, at any environment, at any circumstance. It's all fake, completely. It's all audience.

Yes, it's attention seeking and nothing will stop the narcissist to obtain attention.

He will be what you want him to be, at any minute, at any environment, at any circumstances.

By the way, those of you want to go...

Unfortunately, here we can see this on MRI. Yet. Yet. Yet.

Yes.

But I trust you.

Thank you for coming. Thank you.