Hidden Worlds of Cerebral, Somatic Narcissists (Compilation)

So subjected to the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy, most women react in one of two ways.

I would say 99% of women react in one of two ways.

There are those women who withdraw. They are pushed away. They actually effectively, emotionally, exit the shared fantasy.

Some of them, not all of them, some of them cheat, and they cheat discreetly because they don't want to hurt the narcissists. They still regard the narcissist as a wounded child. They understand the narcissists in some way.

And so they don't want to cause unnecessary pain, but they want to gratify their unmet needs. They have needs. And so they want to meet these needs.

And so if they cheat, they cheat discreetly. If they betray, they betray incrementally and mildly. And they withdraw only usually emotionally.

When the narcissist spots this, remember, he has this scanner, he has this radar called empathy. He gets you before you get yourself. He can anticipate every move you make. You can never fool the narcissists. Don't fool yourself that you had ever full the narcissist.

He is extremely unlikely to show you that he knows, that he understands, that he anticipates you, that he has every detail about everything you have done with anyone. He will never show you this because it's a vulnerability. It proves his weakness. Spying on you is a weakness, etc.

But he knows everything. You take it as a working hypothesis. Your narcissistic partner knows absolutely everything you've ever done with anyone. And your innermost thoughts and so on. Cold empathy is the most powerful tool I know to penetrate other people's minds. Most powerful.

So he gets you, he realizes, he picks up the tremors like a seismograph. He knows the earthquake is coming.

And so he begins to stalk you. If you choose this solution, emotional absenteeism, having it on the side, double timing, you know, he begins to stalk you, erotomaniac stalking.

And in a way it's becoming even a more pronounced case of approach avoidance. You know, he approaches you with the stalking and then he avoids you with the abuse. It becomes really bad.

Other women, remember there are two solutions. There are two solutions to the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy.

Other women choose to bargain. They bargain with the narcissists.

They pose demands. They remind him of his promises. They ask for his commitment. They suggest some arrangements. They try to spice up the sex life. They insist on going to couple therapy, marital counseling, etc. They try somehow to bargain their way into a better improved relationship.

And this provokes the second type of narcissistic abuse.

And the sole, the only goal of this second type of narcissistic abuse is to jettison the partner, to get rid of the partner once and for all.

So while in the first case of narcissistic abuse and stalking, they avoid and they avoid a new approach, in this case, sorry, in the first case, the first solution, you chose to withdraw, you chose to cheat discreetly, you choose to emotionally absent yourself of the relationship.

So you are the one who is avoiding. You are the one who is developing avoidant strategies and behaviors.

And then they approach stalking.

So in the first case, you avoid their approach.

In the second case, you approach. you're trying to bargain, you're trying to restore the relationship, you are trying to make things better, you approach, and now it's their turn to avoid, they push you away.

So the stalking, which is behavior number one, solution number one provokes stalking.

Or the type 2 abuse.

Type 2 narcissistic abuse is the sort of abuse that happens in the bargaining phase.

Whether you're stalked or whether you're abused, majority of women end up abandoning the narcissist.

Now, some of them abandon dysfunctionally by cheating on the narcissist and betraying the narcissist ostentatiously, or by engaging in a smear campaign, or by taking revenge, or by just abandoning overtly and conspicuously.

So these are the dramatic personalities among you.

If you yourself have mental health issue, like if you're borderline or codependent, you're likely to engage in a dramatic exit.

But the majority of intimate partners of the narcissists, they just walk away. Simply, they pack their things and walk away. Heartbroken. They hit up and they just walk away.

So then the narcissist starts to reframe his internal mortification, the hidden implicit knowledge that he had made all this happen, that he is the one who had destroyed the relationship.

So he's beginning to convert it to external mortification. He's beginning to say what it was her fault. She misbehaved. She abused me. She cheated on me. She abandoned me.

So this is from internal to external. And then it doesn't work very well. And there's a pendulum movement from internal to external, from external to internal.

And the reason for this vacillation is that the shared fantasy is egosyntonic. The narcissist feels good in the shared fantasy.

And when you exit the shared fantasy, he feels wronged. He feels that you had misbehaved. He feels that you had abused him. He feels like a victim.

While the bargaining phase is egodystonic, the narcissist doesn't feel comfortable with the bargaining phase. He hates it. He wants out.

And so he feels that he's in control when he pushes you away. When he narcissistically abused you in the bargaining phase, he knows what he's doing. And he knows that in a way it's wrong to abuse people. So he has internal mortification.

The thing with the Mini, all I could get from her was coffee. She didn't give me this buzz of intoxication, passion, and desire. You know what I mean? I've been with her for too long.

Okay, kiddos and kydes.

The same cycle with the very same steps, with the very same dynamics, apply in all the narcissist's relationship, romantic relationships, one night stands, business in the workplace, in church with neighbors.

Take this model with all its steps, all its dynamics, all its behaviors and misbehaviors, avoidance, approach, all this, and you will see that it applies to the way the narcissist performs his job in the workplace, to his relationships with his colleagues, and with his boss of course, to a prolonged interaction with a specific neighbor, you know, enmity between neighbors, to the way he functions in church and to his relationship with the children.

This is the universal schema, the universal framework, the template of all the narcissists relationships.

Okay, that's been a heavy video, so I'll finish with two tidbits, just to gratify you and edify.

We're all under curfew and we are all in quarantine. Or many of us are in quarantine, some of us are under curfew and so forth.

Now lockdown is a relatively new word and so it doesn't have a very illustrious history.

The history and the roots of words, it's a discipline called etymology. The etymology is a study of the roots of words.

So, but curfew and quarantine are old words. They're like hundreds of years old. And they have a very long and varied and colorful history, very similar to some narcissists.

Curfew is a contraction, portmanteau, contract of the original French. In French it was called couvre-feu. Means cover the fire.

You see, in the Middle Ages in Europe there was a bell and the bell was rung, they were ringing the bell at a certain hour in the evening, usually it was about 8 o'clock depending on the location, depending on the sun, and so usually it was 8. And when the bell was rung, everyone had to put up fires, domestic fires, outside fires, all fire had to be, all fires had to be extinguished.

And the reason was that if we didn't extinguish the fires, they tended to spread.

So very small domestic fires sometimes destroyed a whole city, like the great fire of London, which started in a bakery, in a tiny, and of course in Chicago.

So domestic fires were very, very dangerous. They burned down whole towns, whole cities, all villages.

So when the bell was run, couvre feu, cover the fire. Curfew. They borrowed the term to refer to a restriction on anything, not only on fire, on citizens' movements, but after dark.

So until very, very recently, they were ringing the church bells when there was curfew. Until very recently.

No one, actually, no one really knew why. They just knew there's a curfew and we have to ring the bells, but no one remembered why. What was the original purpose?

I refer you to the poem, Grace Elegy, written in a country churchyard. And it's a sentence there. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. It's an echo of this thing.

Now, quarantine. Quarantine has to do with narcissism, believe it or not.

Originally, the word quarantine meant a period of 40 days in which a widow had the right to remain in her dead husband's house. We find the first mention of this type of quarantine in the early 16th century.

And so quarantine had to do with the relationships between men and women. When the narcissist dies, his widow can remain in his house for 40 days.

Another use of quarantine, it was pronounced calentine. Another use was the desert in which Christ fasted for 40 days. So the desert itself was called carantime. It was borrowed from the Latin word quadlaginta, 40.

Okay, the current thing, the way we use it today, is an earlier word. It's actually started, I read online things which are completely wrong. They attribute the word to Italy.

Didn't start in Italy. It started in Croatia. In a city known today as Dubrovnik, an amazing place, by the way. It's like medieval life come alive. It's a fort and a port put together. It's a stunning place.

Once the pandemic is over, promise yourselves to go and see Dubrovnik. You've never seen something like this. It's on the sea. It's like someone took a fairy castle, put it on the sea.

Anyhow, it wasn't called Dubrovnik at the time. It was called Ragusa. And they passed a law, and the original law was not 40 days, it was actually 30 days. And it was not called quarantine, it was called Trentino.

And it was like every ship arriving from any part of the world where there was a disease of some kind, that ship had to be isolated, the sailors had to be isolated, and the goods, by the way, had to be isolated for 30 days.

So no one from Ragusa, Dubrovnik of today, was allowed to visit the ships during the Trentino. And if someone broke the law, they joined the ship crew. I mean, they had to remain on the ship for the mandatory 30 days.

And so for close to 100 years, 80 years, 100 years, many, many cities in Europe, port cities, with harbors, they adopted this Trentino.

So Marseille had a Trentino, Pisa had Trentino, and many, many other cities.

So something happened after eight years, no one is quite sure what. Something happened after eight years, and they extended the period from 30 days to 40 days, and they renamed the Trentino and called it Carantino, which is the root of the word quarantine that we use today.

A little entertainment after a very heavy and difficult video. So I need a drink.

Vaknin, why no? Let the people go.

Let my people go. Okay, okay, got it. Okay, this was it for today.

We discuss a cerebral narcissist. There will be a video. I'm threatening you. There will be a video dedicated to the somatic narcissists. Now, that will be real fun. This is what goes on the mind, the somatic narcissist. And the way he deceives you is amazing. He's a con artist.

While the cerebral is an alien, a form of artificial intelligence. The somatic is simply a con artist, but a delightful con artist.

You know, many women say, maybe he's somatic, maybe he's a narcissist, but it was worth it.

So, we'll talk about it, I promise.

This is the good thing about living and teaching in parts of Eastern Europe that adhere to Orthodox and Proslav Christianity. They celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January.

Happy me!

Today we are going to discuss another type of fantasy, and that is the narcissist's shared fantasy.

So I felt judging by your questions and queries and doubts and misunderstandings and so on so forth, in short, judging by your feedback, I think I should clarify a few points about the shared fantasy.

Many of you have asked, why does shared fantasy lead to sexlessness?

That has to do with Freud's Madonna-Hore complex.

The narcissist is unable to have sex or to maintain long-term, a long-term sexual relationship or liaison, with women who he deems to be Madonna's, women who are like his mother, women who he parentifies, renders them mothers or mother figures or maternal figures.

Obviously, that creates in him a dissonance, because to sleep with mother is to commit incest and no no taboo, even among narcissists.

So the Madonna Horr Complex is an excellent explanation of the inner dynamics of the shared fantasy with an intimate partner of so-called significant other.

In the case of the narcissist, the insignificant other.

The narcissist simply divides all potential mates into sluttish, promiscuous, whoreish, and Madonna-like, nurturing service providers.

And he doesn't have sex with the latter.

Ultimately, most narcissists settle for the sexless, celibate solution, because mothering and services are much more important to them than having sex.

The narcissist does not have a sex drive, not the somatic and not the cerebral.

Narcissists use sex to control.

They use sex to torture and torment if they have a sadistic streak.

They use sex to capture and captivate during the grooming and love bombing phases, but they don't have an autonomous, independent, adult, mature, and reciprocal or reciprocating sex drive.

They are children, remember.

But it's important to understand that the narcissist's shared fantasy is a general way, a general modus, a general method of relating to the world, not only in intimate, romantic settings, not only in a couple or a dyad, not only with a mate via the mate selection process, but shared fantasy is the way the narcissist collaborates with other people.

It occurs with any type of source, of any kind of supply, primary supply, or secondary supply, narcissistic supply, or sadistic supply. They all have to be embedded in a shared fantasy.

The narcissist has shared fantasies with friends, with family, with business associates, with intimate partners.

The whole concept of pathological narcissistic space is a shared fantasy embedded in a physical or in a cyber location.

And so the shared fantasy has very important psychodynamic functions.

It fulfills, it caters to many of the narcissists' psychological needs, but as important, it modifies, it modulates and regulates the narcissist moods, renders him less labile.

The narcissist's negative emotionality renders these emotions less dysregulated, less impulsive, so it provides him with impulse control, and it transforms the way he consumes narcissistic supplies.

So shared fantasy is a critical, psychological component in the makeup of the narcissists.

Consider, for example, grandiose narcissists. Most grandiose narcissists tend to end up as cerebral narcissists. The dominant type of grandiose narcissists is cerebral. They leverage their intellect, their intelligence, their erudition, their knowledge in order to obtain narcissistic supply from potential sources.

Grandiose narcissists react to any hint of animosity, any display of contempt, any overture of hostility by disengaging from the offender.

So if they are online, they ban or block. If it's an offline relationship, they quit responding, they ghost.

These are reactions to what is perceived as narcissistic injury with a potential for mortification.

Narcissists just walk away, the grandiose one.

But this behavior changes dramatically within the shared fantasy.

If the narcissist comes across animosity, disdain, hostility, enmity, within a shared fantasy, instead of walking away, instead of detaching and disengaging, what they do is they attempt to stalk.

Instead of avoidance, there is extreme approach, delusional approach. They become erotomanic, they stalk the perceived transgressor, they try to hoover her, and only when they fail with the stalking or when they fail with the hoovering or when they are subjected to law enforcement, they relent and then they disengage.

So we see an example of how a behavior that is very typical of a grandiose narcissist, detaching or putting distance or firewalling narcissistic injuries, reverses itself within the shared fantasy.

Within the shared fantasy, the narcissist seeks additional injuries and plays, of course, mortification. He stalks, he hovers with the express and clear risk of being rejected once again.

When the narcissist hovers you, he's taking a risk. He's taking a risk of being rejected once again. When the narcissist hovers you, he's taking a risk. He's taking a risk of being rejected. He's taking a risk of being humiliated, injured.

So it's a risk-taking behavior.

Grandiose narcissists outside shared fantasies are risk-averse. The grandiose narcissists inside shared fantasies are risk seekers.

So we see that narcissists within shared fantasies actually become more antisocial, more psychopathic, because risk-seeking, novelty seeking, and lack of impulse control. Stalking, for example, implies a lack of impulse control. Hoovering. Hoovering is an impulse.

The narcissist had been injured by the person he seeks to hoover, and yet he can't help it. He can't help it. He can't control his impulses.

So impulsivity, novelty seeking, risk-seeking behaviors, these are all typical psychopathic traits.

And so the narcissist seems to become more psychopathic, more antisocial within a shared fantasy.

And the same subspecies of narcissists react with animosity, with contempt and hostility and enmity to any act of friendliness, mindless adulation, offered empathy, support, succor, or advice, when they are outside the shared fantasies.

I repeat this, it's very counterintuitive, but if you assimilate this insight, you will suddenly understand 99% of the behaviors of the narcissists around you.

I repeat, grandiose narcissists react with enmity, aggression, animosity, contempt, hostility, to any act of friendliness, mindless adulation, attempt to approach, offered empathy, support, succor, or advice. They react the same way to any attempt at intimacy, including sexual advances.

How many of you have been rebuffed brutally, cruelly by a narcissist?

Narcissists regard such overtures, such gestures, such attempts to approach and be intimate. They regard all these as presumptuous, narcissistically injurious, impertinent imposition intrusions.

So this is outside the shared fantasy, but take the same narcissists and place him within the shared fantasy, and his behavior changes dramatically.

He suddenly seeks to elicit friendly acts, mindless adulation. He seeks to leverage your empathy, to garner your support and support within the shared fantasy, especially the love bombing and grooming phases.

At a certain stage, he reverts to form, That's the bargaining stage. He reverts to form, but this is in order to simply terminate the shared fantasy.

So we see again a change, a reversal. Again, this is psychopathic.

The narcissist within the shared fantasy becomes goal-oriented. He suffers from abandonment anxiety. He wants to secure your presence within the shared fantasy. He doesn't want you to just walk away or abandon him. He's goal-oriented.

Because he's goal-oriented, he encourages in you behaviors that he knows are egosyntonic, behaviors he knows you like.

Lidia Gengelovska calls it the need to be needed. He fosters in you maternal behavior. He kind of triggers maternal instincts in you.

And then he uses these to obtain the goal of object constancy, to make sure that you remain within the shared fantasy. Never mind how bad it gets.

It's again psychopathic feature.

The ideal narcissistic supply source is actually commoditized and anonymous. If you ask any narcissist outside the shared fantasy, they would tell you that they prefer faceless audiences in lectures and seminars, for example, or views on videos. These are anonymous, faceless, commoditized, commodified streams of narcissistic supply. They have no name, they have no personality, they have no face their numbers.

This is the ideal narcissistic supply source.

And the ideal sadistic supply source is a victim.

Some narcissists are sadistic, so they also need sadistic supply.

But sadistic supply is the opposite of narcissistic supply.

This ideal sadistic supply source, the ideal victim of sadistic conduct, humiliation, degradation, despoiling, etc. is personal, is intimate.

So most narcissists need two types of narcissistic supply.

Anonymous, faceless, number game, commodified or commoditized, stream, flux and flow of supply, like a river, where each water molecule has no identity, on the one hand, and a highly identifiable, specific individual or individuals, victims, which they can then torment and humiliate and rape and degrade and demean and debase and torture and destroy etc. and they need both at all times.

This also changes within the shared fantasy.

What I've said until now is outside the shared fantasy.

This also changes within the shared fantasy.

It's within the shared fantasy.

In both cases, narcissistic supply and sadistic supply, the narcissist needs a specific collaborator, a specific individual, a specific mother figure, specific you.

So again we see that the shared fantasy transforms the typical classical behavior of a grandiose overt narcissist.

When the overt or classical narcissist is outside the shared fantasy, he prefers anonymous sources of narcissistic supply and individual sources of sadistic supply.

When he is inside the shared fantasy, he prefers identifiable, specific, individual, intimate partners, mates, which are the sources of both narcissistic supply and sadistic supply.

He can extract narcissistic supply from his insignificant others, and then let them know how insignificant they are as a form of inflicting pain or sadism.

Now, to be clear, very few narcissists are sadists, in the sense that very few narcissists subject other people to sadistic behavior, hurt other people, cause pain in other people, and enjoy the very act of inflicting pain. That's classical sadism.

But narcissists hurt other people, either because they are goal-oriented. In this case, within the shared fantasy, the goal is to secure your presence, your object consistency, or because it's a byproduct, an inevitable by-product of their need to extract narcissistic supply.

And so sadism is a feature of narcissism, but not in the classical psychological sense. Very few narcissists that actually sadists derive pleasure from the sadistic act.

Now, people ask me about collapsed narcissists. They understood the concept of collapsed cerebral narcissists.

Collapsed cerebral narcissist is someone whose intellect or intelligence or knowledge or erudition, intellectual paratechatics are insufficient to induce awe or admiration or adulation. He is not that intelligent, he is not that much of an intellectual. He fails to attain a guru status, even among a limited set of people around him.

So the collapsed cerebral narcissist is an understandable proposition. It's someone who tries very much to sound like a guru or like a genius and doesn't have what it takes. So he keeps failing at eliciting supply when he presents this false self, when he presents this facade of the Wundekind, the genius child.

But what about the collapsed somatic narcissists? What on earth does that mean? What is a collapsed somatic narcissist?

The collapsed somatic narcissist is incapable for some reason of leveraging his good looks, his sculpted musculature, his sexual prowess to obtain narcissistic supply.

If he is endowed with intelligence, such a collapsed somatic narcissist tries desperately to become cerebral. He switches to the cerebral mode.

Remember, there's no type consistency. All cerebrals have somatic periods and all somatic narcissists try to be cerebral or present themselves as geniuses. So there's not a constant but there's a dominant type.

When the dominant type is somatic, and the somatic for some reason fails to obtain supply using his body, his looks, his muscles, I don't know what, then he tries to become cerebral if he has even a modicum of intelligence.

But if he is seriously dumb and doesn't have what he takes to obtain supply via his intellect, he becomes covert.

So collapsed somatic narcissists are a reservoir of potential covert narcissists.

And many, many covert narcissists and many many covert narcissists are actually somatic not cerebral.

The etiology, the reason, the psychological reason for such a failure in trying to be a somatic narcissist is very complex.

The somatic narcissist may feel that he's engaging in a forbidden competition with a dominant parental figure. So he may be competing with a somatic father figure in his life.

That is an insight provided by Lydia Rangelovs in one of her conversations.

When a somatic narcissist constantly competes with an overshadowing dominant paternal figure, father, who used to be, or is a somatic narcissist and sometimes competes directly with his son for the favors of women.

This creates a forbidden competition. It's a taboo competition. You should never overpower, overwhelm your father. You should never win. If you win, you're going to lose your father.

So this parental figure suppresses the somatic's self-efficacy, the somatic's ability to secure favorable outcomes and to elicit narcissistic supply.

Or the somatic narcissist as a child in childhood may have been rewarded for intellectual accomplishments. Whenever he came back with good marks from school, or whenever he started to read, or whenever he said something clever, he was rewarded.

But whenever he displayed his body, whenever he tried to talk about sex, whenever he asks questions about sexuality and all the other sex or whatever, his sex was decried as dirty.

Gradually such child learns that the body is filthy, that sex is dirty, and that should both be avoided.

And so even if the narcissist's initial, rudimentary, primitive, basic tendency to become somatic, this constant messaging converts him gradually into cerebral, but this creates a dissonance by constitution. This kind of narcissist is better equipped and much prefers to be somatic.

And yet the messaging in early childhood was the intellect is a pure, elevated, morally upright, correct thing, beautiful thing. You should aspire to be an intellectual. Sex, body, body functions, body excretions, they are all filthy, dirty, animalistic, bestial, primitive.

So this creates in him a dissonance and again impacts, impairs and reduces his ability to leverage his body to obtain supply.

In most cases though, in most cases, the failure of the somatic narcissist to use his body to obtain supply is because of gender differentiation or to be more precise a lack of gender differentiation.

The collapsed somatic narcissist is ahomosexual or he has fluid psychosexuality for example is bisexual but he cannot admit it. He has something we call reaction formation.

He becomes, for example, he's bisexual but he cannot admit it he has something we call reaction formation. He becomes, for example, homophobic or against transgender people.

So he denies this part in himself he projects it onto others and then he despises them and holds them in contempt and even may become aggressive and violent.

And then this creates an enormous internal dissonance, tension, conflict between the suppressed sexuality, which is the real sexuality of that specific narcissists, and the overt sexual behavior and the overt sexual traits and preferences, which are geared towards obtaining narcissistic supply.

To put it in layman's terms, the collapsed somatic narcissists tries to act as a lady's men, a womanizer, the irresistible parable, a Casanova, a modern-day Casanova, or Don Juan.

But in reality, he is a latent homosexual, or bisexual, or even transgender.

And this creates in him enormous conflict dissonance and tension, and of course reduces his ability to secure the supply.

And so one possible outcome of this huge conflict is celibacy or sexlessness within a relationship.

Another solution is exactly opposite.

Promiscuity, usually coupled with substance abuse.

So we see these somatic narcissists when they get married, when they have a girlfriend, when they have a regular lover, they suddenly become sexless. The transition is mind-blowing and mind-shattering.

During the love-bombing and grooming phase, this somatic narcissist is insatiable. Insatiable his sexual prowess is amazing, his pyrotechnics are.

And then, once the relationship is established, he transitions abruptly to total sexlessness.

This is one solution.

The other solution is exactly the opposite.

Promiscuity and cheating, this kind of somatic narcissist becomes a sex addict.

And in order to disinhibit himself and to resolve cognitive and axiological dissonances, he drinks or he does drugs.

You must understand that the inner conflict is not only an issue of, you know, sex is dirty, but I want sex, but I'm homosexual, but I should never show it. It's not only this very basic conflict.

The conflict is much deeper, because the narcissist has a view of himself, is morally a pride, is a good person, and a socially conforming person.

Now remember, narcissists are not psychopaths. They're pro-social.

Psychopaths are antisocial. Narcissists are pro-social.

The grandiose cerebral somatic narcissists who are not psychopathic narcissists are actually communal. They're pro-social.

And when their behavior, for example, promiscuity, conflicts with these social values, it's yet another layer of conflict.

If such a narcissist fails as a somatic narcissist and then fails as a cerebral narcissist, he undergoes mortification, narcissistic mortification, and he becomes covert.

It's one of the main psychodynamic paths, psychopathological paths, roots to becoming covert.

Many coverts are actually collapsed narcissists, collapsed cerebral narcissists and collapsed somatic narcissists, who had undergone narcissistic mortification.

There's a video of mine which discusses how the types change. How somatic becomes cerebral, cerebral becomes somatic, cerebral and somatic become covert, covert become psychopathic.

How the types transition fluidly into each other via the bridge of collapse and mortification.

There's a whole video dedicated to it, which I encourage you to join.

And if such a narcissist has strong histrionic or borderline features, if such a collapsed somatic narcissist is also histrionic or borderline. In other words, if he has access to emotions and a modicum of empathy, he is likely to become a psychopath, a secondary psychopath, or even a primary psychopath if he is a covert borderline.

So you see that when the somatic narcissist fails, he first tries to become cerebral. Then if he fails, he becomes covert. And then if in addition to that, he has borderline or histrionic features, he becomes a secondary cyclone. And if he is a covert borderline, he becomes a primary psychopath.

Covert narcissists and psychopaths, these are the two end reservoirs of failed narcissism.

That's not me. That's Grothstein. Grotsstein has observed in the 90s that people who have borderline personality disorder are people who had failed to develop narcissism. He calls borderlines failed narcissists. So does Kernberg, by the way, in the 70s. This is a very old insight.

So when somatics and cerebrals fail, they fluidly transition into each other and then this fails as a solution. They become covert or psychopaths.

There is a good reason to argue the psychopathy and covert narcissism and all the covert forms are actually failures, collapses, and results of failure of much more adaptive strategies, much more self-efficacious strategies, which uphold the person's agency and buttress his autonomy, self-autonomy, via grandiosity.

Consider, for example, the cerebral narcissist. And what happens to the cerebral narcissist when he fails, when he collapses, what happens to the collapsed cerebral narcissist when he fails to secure supply?

He becomes, we just said, he can become a somatic, and then if he fails, he becomes covert.

But we also said that he becomes somatic and if he fails, he becomes psychopath.

What happens? How does the collapsed cerebral narcissist look when he had become a psychopath?

The path is: cerebral narcissist, failure, collapse, mortification, attempt to become somatic. Failure, collapse, mortification, attempt to become covert. Failure, collapse, collapse, psychopathy.

So it's a very long circuitous route.

And old-age psychopaths, real psychopaths, primary psychopaths, with brain dysfunctions and the proper genetics and physiology.

Because psychopaths have a special physiology, they don't have your physiology. The physiology of their body is very different, their brain functions very differently, they have brain abnormalities and so.

These kind of psychopaths, congenital psychopaths, they lose their psychopathy when they grow old.

Mature psychopaths lose their antisocial features when they grow old.

So if you see an old psychopath, someone who is in his 40s, in his 50s, in his 60s, and he's clearly a psychopath, he started off as a narcissist and he kept failing at every solution until he ended up a psychopath.

And then this kind of psychopath in his forties, let's say, this kind of psychopath is going to be totally antisocial.

Consider, for example, the cerebral narcissist who had become a psychopath. He's likely to plagiarize, he's likely to steal other people's work. It's likely to abscond with other people's ideas and life's work. I call it idearism. ID plagiarism. It's rampant on the internet. Rampant.

All kinds of self-styled coaches and gurus and experts and so on, they steal other people's work and ideas, mine included. It's a very common practice.

These are actually collapsed narcissists. Narcissists who had collapsed in all previous attempts, and this is their last resort: result stealing other people's work and pretending it's their own as a way to obtain supply, however fallacious, however fake.

But of course, even when the covert narcissist or even when the cerebral narcissist collapses and after a few permutations becomes a psychopath, he is still essentially a cerebral narcissist.

It creates a cognitive axiological dissonance because counterfactually, the narcissist considers himself to be a good, morally upright person.

That's, by the way, another telltale sign.

When you talk to a real psychopath, a congenital psychopath, a Harvey Cleckley psychopath, they are likely to admit that they are no good, that they are broken, damaged goods, evil, wicked, vicious. They're likely to admit it freely.

When you talk to a psychopath who used to be a narcissist, used to be a collapsed narcissist, and then gradually became more and more psychopathic, more and more antisocial, when you talk to such a person, he says, no, I'm a good person, I'm morally upright person. I have my values and my rules of conduct. I help people. I'm charitable. I'm altruistic, etc.

That's a telltale sign between the two etiologies of psychopathy.

So the narcissist who had become a psychopath via collapse and via mortification, the narcissist who now engages in antisocial behavior like plagiarizing, idealizing, stealing from people, this kind of narcissist believes himself to be a good person, and it creates a dissonance, cognitive dissonance, and axiological dissonance.

Axiological dissonance is a clash between values.

An intelligent narcissist resolves this dissonance by confabulating and reframing.

He convinceses himself that the stolen goods, stolen ideas, were his to start with. He came up with his ideas independently and long before anybody else did. The goods that he had stolen, other people's life's work, plagiarism, it's his by right, one way or another. He confabulates, he reframes, and this alternative history, alternative facts, makes him eligible for the fruits of labor that is not his.

This kind of narcissist convinceses himself that his manufactured lies are the only true reality and that anyone who criticizes this fantasy, this lies, this confabulation, is envious of him. Envious people are out to deprive him, to disenfranchise him, to steal what is his, to abscond with these ideas.

He forgets completely that he stole these material goods, ideas, life work from other people. He would deny vehemently that he had these material goods, ideas, life work, from other people. He would deny vehemently that he had plagiarized. He would reverse the time arrow. He would say that, yeah, he came after, but still it was his idea.

But all this can work only if you're intelligent.

The psychopathic antisocial solution of the cerebral narcissist crucially depends on having minimum intelligence.

Dumb narcissists, stupid narcissists, buffoon clownish narcissists, they know deep inside that they are less than stellar intellectually, that they are not the brightest stars in any galaxy.

And this egodystonic realization makes it impossible for them to recast their misbehavior, their misdeeds, as merely reclaiming what is theirs.

You see, when you tell yourself, this idea that I had stolen from someone was actually mine. I came up with it first.

You have to believe in your own intelligence. You have to believe that you are capable of coming up with such ideas to start with.

If you think you're an idiot, if you think you're dumb, if you know you're dumb, you know you're dumb, you can't really tell yourself this idea was mine. It would bring hollow, it wouldn't convince even you.

Intelligence, therefore, is a critical factor in the psychopathic antisocial choices of collapsed narcissists. If they have intelligence, they tend to gravitate towards intellectual pursuits. They tend to direct the psychopathic, antisocial, and even criminal acts at intellectual goods, like ideas, like texts.

So they would steal a book, they would steal the content of a book, they would steal an idea, they would become gurus and coaches and experts by appropriating and expropriating other people's production.

But this they can do only if they have a minimal level of intelligence.

And if they don't, their psychopathy and antisocial impulses become more and more criminalized, more and more aggressive and violent, body-oriented.

So these kind of narcissists who don't have the minimal intelligence to claim that what they had stolen or appropriated or expropriated or plagiarized or idealized is theirs, they resort to aggression. They resort to suppressing the truth.

In the process, they deploy a host of primitive defense mechanisms, such as splitting, devaluing others, projection, magical thinking, and denial.

They are inexorably transformed by their own antisocial acts into primary, dangerous, violent psychopaths.

And this goes hand in hand with substance abuse.

I want to read to you a segment from the amazing life-transforming book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks, the book that had transformed me from a physicist and an economist and a philosopher into a psychologist.

Here's a segment from the book about the connection between substance abuse and narcissistic psychopathic behaviors.

To be ourselves, we must have ourselves. We must possess, if need be, repossess our life stories. We must recollect ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative of ourselves.

A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, himself.

The narrative need, perhaps, is the clue to Mr. Thompson's desperate tale-telling, his verbosity, deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous inner narrative.

Mr. Thompson is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy, hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania, unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world.

Mr. Thompson is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives in a pseudo-continuity, pseudo-worlds, peopleed by pseudo-people, phantoms.

Mr. Thompson has Korsakoff syndrome, the late stage, the last stage, of extreme alcoholism. He's an alcoholic whose brain had been damaged.

What is it like for Mr. Thompson?

Superficially, he comes over as an ebullient comic. People sayhe is a riot.

And there is muchthat is farcical in such a situation which might form the basis of a comic novel.

It is comic, but not just comic. It is terrible as well.

For here is a man who in some sense is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing, and he must seek meaning, make meaning in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that you own continually beneath him.

But does Mr. Thompson himself know this? Does he feel this?

After finding him a riot, a laugh, loads of fun, people are disquieted, even terrified, by something in him.

He never stops, they say. He's like a man in a race, a man trying to catch something which always eludes him.

And indeed, Mr. Thompson can never stop running.

For the breaching memory in existence, in meaning, today we call it dissociation, is never healed, but has to be bridged, to be patched every second.

And the bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance, fail to work, because they are confabulations, fictions which cannot do service for reality, while also failing to correspond with reality.

Does Mr. Thompson feel this? Or again, what is his feeling of reality? Is he in a torment, the torment of a man lost in unreality, struggling to rescue himself, but seeking himself by ceaseless inventions, illusions, themselves quite unreal?

It is certain that Mr. Thompson is not at ease.

There is a tense, taut look on his face all the while, as of a man under ceaseless inner pressure, and occasionally, not too often, or masked, if present, a look of open, naked, pathetic bewilderment.

What saves Mr. Thompson in a sense, and in another sense dams him, is the forced or defensive superficiality of his life, the way in which it is in effect reduced to a surface.

Brilliant, shimmering, iridescent, ever-changing, but for all that, a surface, a mass of illusions, a delirium without depth.

And with this, no feeling that he has lost feeling, for feeling he has lost, no feeling that he had lost the depth.

That unfathomable, mysterious, myriad level depth, which somehow defines identity or reality.

And this strikes everyone who has been in contact with Mr. Thompson for any time, that under his fluency, even his frenzy, is a strange load of feeling.

That feeling or judgment, which distinguishes between real and unreal, true and untrue, one cannot speak of lies here, only of non-truth.

And there's another vignette about another patient, William. Again, same syndrome, late onset alcoholic damage to the brain.

But for William, with his brilliant brassy surface, the unending joke which he substitutes for the world, which if it covers over a desperation, is a desperation he does not feel.

For William, with his manifest indifference to relation and reality, caught in an unending verbosity, there may be nothing redeeming at all. His confabulations, his apparitions, his frantic search for meanings, being the ultimate barrier to any meaning.

Paradoxically then, William's greatest gift for confabulation, which has been called out to leap continually over the ever-opening abyss of amnesia, William's greatest gift of confabulation is also his damnation.

If only he could be quiet, one feels, for an instant. If only he could stop the ceaseless chatter and jabber, if only he could relinquish the deceiving surface of illusions, then, reality might somehow seep in. Something genuine, something deep, something true, something felt could enter his soul.

For it is not memory which is the final existential casualty, although his memory is wholly devastated. It is not memory only which has been so altered in him, but some ultimate capacity for feeling which is gone.

And this is the sense in which he is desouled.

Our efforts to reconnect William all fail, even increase his confabulatory pressure.

But when we abdicate our efforts and let him be, William sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the home.

And there, in its quietness, William recovers his own quiet.

The presence of others, other people, excite and rattle him, force him into an endless frenzied social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and seeking, the presence of plants, of a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity delirium to relax, to subside, and by their quiet, non-human self-sufficiency and completeness, allow William a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering beneath or beyond all merely human identities and relations, a deep, wordless, communion with nature itself, and with this, the restored sense of being in the world of being real.

Thank you for listening.

I have breaking news for you. This is going to be a shorter video.

Yay!

Okay!

Today we are going to discuss schizoid and cerebral narcissist.

And we are going to discuss something that bothers you a lot, that you can't wrap your heads around, that you keep quizzically trying to decipher to no avail.

How come the schizoid or the cerebral narcissists lets his partner cheat on him consensually? How come he allows his partner to be, if he's a heterosexual male, how come he allows his partner to be with other men? Isn't this narcissistic injury? Why does he sometimes push her to be with other men? Isn't it a challenge to his grandiosity?

Well, a challenge to grandiosity, narcissistic injury, and even mortification, depend crucially on the locus of the grandiosity, where the grandiosity resides.

If you think you're a genius and someone challenges your intellect or your intellectual capability and accomplishments, that would be narcissistic injury.

But if you don't care about love, you don't understand or never experienced intimacy, and you don't particularly like sex, or you like sex, but, you know, like people, like other people like caviar once in five years, then it doesn't matter to you.

If your partner misbehaves with other men, that's not a challenge to your grandiosity.

Somatic narcissists on the other hand are going to react very badly to the very same behavior or misbehavior by their intimate partners because the locus of grandiosity of the somatic narcissists is between his legs and his sexual prowess, conquests, his body.

So somatic narcissists are bodybuilders. They hone and nurture their bodies as weapons, instruments of war.

And so the schizoid and cerebral narcissists honestly don't care if their partners end up sleeping around or having long-term love affairs, or casual one-night stands. It simply is not within the remit of their grandiosity, and the most precious thing to the narcissist is to buttress, protect, preserve his grandiosity.

That is his life. That's where he comes alive, when his grandiosity somehow manifests or, on the other hand, is challenged.

Got it, Bonbonim?

Now, of course, as usual, I'm going to go into details, but not before I drink from my mini.

You see, Minnie cheats on me with other mugs. I found her in flagrante.

Now, whatever I'm going to say to you in this video lecture is based on my famous by now database of 1,912 people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

To be included in my database, you have to provide a letter from your therapist, from the diagnostician, confirming that you had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and no other comorbidities.

And then you are subjected to a questionnaire of close to 700 questions.

The answers to these questions are put in a database and once a year you are supposed to respond to follow up questions.

This is by far the largest database in the universe of narcissists.

Just to give you a benchmark, most studies of narcissists involve an average of, hold your breath, four people. A study with 20 narcissists is considered to be ginormous.

And I have a database with well over 1.1 billion data points, that's billion, not million, data points involving almost 2,000 certifiable narcissists, kosher narcissists.

So whatever I'm going to tell you right now is based on a follow-up questionnaire that I had sent to 120 self-described schizoid narcissists.

Of these, 89 had answered.

I've amalgamated the questions and the answers.

Additionally, I myself am a schizoid cerebral narcissist, so I was able to vet the answers. I was able to see where the answers deviated from what I happened to know from personal experience and I was able to add my personal experience into the mix.

But what you're about to hear is not autobiographical only. It is based on a relatively large sample of schizoid cerebral analysis from well over 34 countries.

And of course, different cultures and different societies.

So stay tuned. This is a trip in every sense of the word. This is entering the Twilight Zone.

I mean, the reasons we give, the logic, the reasoning, I mean, it's inhuman, it's transhuman, it's I don't know what to call it anymore.

You have never come across people like this. I mean, your initial response would be to say, well, they're psychos.

It's not the question of being a psycho. There is rhyme and reason to all this.

And I'm about to insert the key, turn it, and open the door for you.

So, enjoy the show.

Cheating. Why I allow my partners to cheat on me?

First of all, we need to go back to the topic of shared fantasy.

The narcissist's ability to engage in a shared fantasy rests on three pillars. There are three conditions.

Environment, circumstances, the right partner.

Start with the environment.

The environment has to be rootless. It has to be an environment where the narcissist is not attached. He's not bonded to the environment. An environment that is easy to discard.

It has to be fantastic. It has to be dreamlike in order to uphold this grandiosity.

The environment has to be timeless and eternal present so that actions do not bear consequences.

When you don't have a future, nothing you do right now will have consequences because there's no future.

So it's a license, it's a liberating license to misbehave or behave or do whatever you want to do. Because there's not tomorrow, carpe diem.

And finally the environment has to be boundless. There should be no limit to what can be done and what can be accomplished.

Circumstances ought to be right. When you have the right environment, the right circumstances, the right partner, you can put them together and create a shared fantasy.

The shared fantasy, to remind you, is not my invention. Shared fantasy is a clinically accepted entity, clinically accepted construct. First described by F. Sander in 1989. Watch my previous videos.

So the circumstances have to be right. They have to be conducive to grandiose fantasies by yielding lots of money, lots of sex, lots of power, lots of access, lots of fame, celebrity, notoriety, and all this has to be accomplished effortlessly with no commensurate investment or commitment.

Think Harvey Weinstein.

The partner in the shared fantasy has to be present. In order to avoid abandonment anxiety, she has to be present all the time. Not physically, necessarily, but definitely emotionally and mentally.

She has to be submissive. She has to be fawning, adulating. She has to be playful. She has to be a bit childlike, immature.

And finally, and most importantly, by far, she has to be mothering.

The narcissist parentifies the intimate partner within the shared fantasy. She has to be mothering. If it's business or friendship, the other party should be fathering.

So it's a parental figure. The intimate partner should be mothering. She should provide the narcissist with a good enough mother, which he didn't have in his childhood. She should not be a dead mother.

Finally, she should be addicted to the narcissist, unable to break loose.

So my experience, corroborated by well over 89 cases that had bothered to respond to the questionnaire, cases in my database, as well as the literature.

Because the literature is very clear on schizoid attachment style, on issues of infidelity, on intimate relationships. I refer to literature by Fairbairn, Gantry, Seinfeld, Winnicott, you name it.

So everything I'm about to say is very, very well substantiated, although it's mind-boggling. It's absolutely mind-boggling. It defies belief.

So in all his relationships, the schizoid narcissist or the cerebral narcissist, and the vast majority of schizoid narcissists are actually cerebral narcissists.

So in all the relationship, the schizoid cerebral, so for now I'm going to say schizoid cerebral narcissist, okay, in all the relationship, the schizoid cerebral, so for now I'm going to say schizoid cerebral narcissist, okay?

In all his relationship, the schizoid cerebral narcissist allows his intimate partners to be with others as sexual or even long-term romantic partners.

Now, I'm going to use from here on, I'm going to use he for the narcissist and she for his intimate partner.

But of course there are numerous combinations, they're homosexual couples, lesbian couples. There's a situation where the woman, the feminine side, the female side is the narcissist, and the male side is actually the other party.

So I'm going to use it for convenience sake, but it applies to all possible combinations.

In all his relationships, the schizoid cerebral narcissists allows his partners and sometimes encourages them to be with other men as sexual or even long-term romantic partners.

He, on the other hand, is forbidden to have any contact whatsoever with women unless his partner is present and she could terminate the meeting at any time.

So his partner maintains full control over his access to potential intimate partners. He gives up his sex life, his contact with women, even his social life.

His partner is given a free hand. She can do anything she wants. She can screw around, she can sleep around, she can disappear for days, she can come back in the morning, she can do absolutely anything she wants. What kind of arrangement is this?

It's a very lopsided, dormant arrangement. It's a total suspension of boundaries. These narcissists are unboundaried. They don't have boundaries.

Why do they agree to such a deal where the partner has full liberty to misbehave? This is no other word. To misbehave in any way she sees fit.

And the narcissist actually in this equation has no right, no right to be in touch with people, let alone women. He is a prisoner, in effect. He's a hostage. It's a hostage situation.

Why would anyone agree to this?

Now, mind you, this is not the overt narcissist. This is not the covert narcissist. This is a highly specific sub-sub-sub-type. The schizoid cerebral narcissist. A loner. A loner who sits alone at home, reads books, surfs the internet, watches movies, eats and goes to sleep. Rarely talks to other people, never socializes, never communicates with women because his wife or his girlfriend or his lover forbids it.

And she forbids it even as she is having long-term affairs, even as she is having one night stands, and even she comes back home at five or seven o'clock in the morning, having had a night out with the men, often, often ostentatiously in the presence of the narcissists.

Why would anyone agree to such a manifestly sick arrangement?

Well, because he's sick.

Let me give you the reasons enumerated by these individuals who had answered the questionnaire, and supported fully by my own experience and all my relationships, all my women I've had this arrangement with, all my women and all the women in my life, intimate partners in my life had slept with other men and had affairs with other men and had misbehaved with other men in a variety of other ways. And I fully accepted it, and at the same time, I accepted restrictions and limitations and prohibitions on my own behavior.

For example, I was not allowed to be in touch with women in any way, shape or form, unless my intimate partner was present and was able to terminate the interaction.

So I'm one of these cases.

Okay, here are the reasons that people gave and that I concur with and support from my personal experience.

Number one, in order to persevere and survive within the narcissist increasingly more sexless fantasy, the woman has to meet her sexual and emotional needs with men. Real men.

The narcissist is not a real man by any extension of the word, by any definition and by any interpretation of this word, the narcissist is not it. He is not a man. He is intermittently a child. He sometimes is a guru and sometimes he's a father figure, he's never an adult man.

So the woman finds herself trapped with a child, most of the time with a child, sometime with a very harsh and disciplinarian father guru figure, and she needs a man, she wants a man, she craves what a man can give physically and emotionally.

So the schizoid cerebral narcissist realizes his deficiencies and allows this partner to outsource her needs, to go outside the marriage, to gratify the needs that he cannot never ever provide: love, intimacy, sex, attention, companionship, acceptance, warmth, compassion, affection.

Okay, number two, as long as there are no indications of imminent abandonment, the schizoid cerebral narcissist doesn't care if his intimate partner is with other men.

But she, the intimate partner, does feel hurt, does feel insecure if the schizoid cerebral narcissist were to have any interaction with other women. It's like the schizoid cerebral anesthesi were to have any interaction with other women.

It's like the schizoid cerebral narcissist says, I don't care if she's with other men, but she cares if I'm with other women. So, you know, I will not be with other women. I will not hurt her. I will not hurt her feelings, and I will not make her feel insecure. When she misbehaved with other men, it's okay with me.

And now signs of imminent abandonment include usually changing behavior. They're warning signs. They're usually red flags which precede the actual abandonment or actual breakup.

So changes in attitude, changes in mood, changes in behaviors.

So suddenly the intimate partner becomes indifferent or disrespectful or deceptive.

I will discuss all this later.

The third reason why a cerebral schizoid narcissist would allow his wife, for example, to be with other men, is that he feels that he should be grateful to her for any time she spends with him, for any dedication of resources to his needs.

He feels that he is so broken, so damaged, so inadequate, that her very presence, the very presence of the intimate partner in his life is a sacrifice on her part. She's sacrificing a lot by being with him. She's doing him a huge favor.

So he has no right and is not in a position to establish boundaries or rules and then to enforce them.

You know, you don't check a gift horse in the mouth or anywhere else for that matter. Don't try it at home.

Reason number four.

She is an adult and the cerebral schizoid narcissist is not an adult.

So she needs mature, conventional, reciprocal, and regular sex and intimacy.

The schizoid cerebral narcissist does not need intimacy and sex of any kind.

The intimate partners of the schizoid cerebral narcissists are actually single. They are what I call virtual singles. And they are ensconced, they are cocooned, they are trapped with a petulant child or with a stern father at home.

And so dating others is the only outlet and the only escape for these women.

Because what's the alternative? A child at home? A father?

Having sex with a child or a father is insidious. It's out of the question. These women are very sex-averse. They can't even imagine touching the schizoid narcissist, let alone sleeping with him.

They cut off the sex when the shared fantasy starts. They refuse to sleep with a schizoid cerebral narcissist because it's disgusting. He is disgusting. He's not a man in any sense. He's kind of an alien entity, if you wish, a reptile.

The fifth reason is that the schizoid cerebral narcissist can have sex, initially at least, only within a shared fantasy.

So if he were to have sex, if he were to seek intimacy, he would need to go out of the marriage, out of the relationship, and establish a new relationship.

The intimate partner of the schizoid cerebral narcissists usually can compartmentalize. Compartmentalize means she can have sex with other men, she can have love affairs with other men, that could be even long and serious and intimate and deep.

But she will never abandon this schizoid cerebral narcissist as a child, for example. She would always cater to his needs. She would always be there for him. Out of pity, out of compassion, out of attachment, out of addiction, never mind for what reason.

As long as a cerebral somatic narcissist is convinced that she will never leave him, he is content to let her have a parallel double life with another man, to gratify her needs for a male presence and anything and everything a man can give a woman elsewhere because he can't and actuallyhe doesn't want to, even if he could he wouldn't, he wouldn't want to.

So if he were to decide to become normal, so to speak, and have sex and intimacy, he would need to have a new relationship.

And she doesn't have to have a new relationship, or if she does have a new relationship, she would still come back to cater to the needs of the schizoid cerebral narcissist.

And anyhow, if this schizoid cerebral narcissist were to go and seek a new relationship, a new shared fantasy, what good would it do? What would it do?

Any new shared fantasy will end the same way. Any new shared fantasy will end the very same way the previous shared fantasies had ended, with sexlessness, with cheating, with acrimony.

So why bother? Why bother to have a new shared fantasy when the narcissist already has a shared fantasy?

Yes, within this existing shared fantasy, he has no sex, he has no intimacy, and really he has no love. At least not as a man, had he been a man.

And his intimate partner, his spouse, his girlfriend, his lover, is all over the place with other men.

And it's humiliating. It's humiliating. It's shameful. It's shaming. It's a hard thing to countenance.

But what's the alternative?

Exit the existing shared fantasy, start a new shared fantasy, and find yourself in the same situation, three years down the road, usually three months down the road.

What's the point in this?

As long as the narcissist is getting supply, as long as he is getting services, however grudgingly, however meager, better stay put. Better to forget everything about sex and intimacy and love.

Because they're out of reach. They're unattainable. They're just a pipe dream.

The next reason is that only mentally ill, broken, damaged and traumatized women are likely to be attracted to the schizoid cerebral narcissist. Only these kind of women are likely to enter a new shared fantasy.

And such women pose serious risks. They are dysregulated, they're labile. They're impulsive. They're reckless. There's a risk of exposure. There's a risk of blackmail. There's a risk of suicide. There's a risk of criminal liability.

Who needs this? Who needs all this?

At least the existing shared fantasy is safe. It's secure. It's firewalled.

The world out there is threatening and menacing, which is one of the main reasons schizoid are loners and stay at home. They're afraid of the world. They're afraid of the pain and hurtthe world can inflict upon them.

The typical schizoid cerebral narcissist sublimates his auto-erotic, sadistic, kinky sex drive.

Let me explain. Sublimation is a word coined by Freud to describe the conversion of an urge or a drive into socially acceptable forms.

So you want to do something, it's not done, you shouldn't do it, consequences will be bad, you take this energy and you change it into something socially acceptable.

For example, you want to have sex and instead of having sex, you write a book. Instead of having sex, you engage in politics. That's sublimation.

There's a lot of energy, this energy goes into something else. Forget sex. Forget women, forget everything.

So the cerebral schizoid narcissist successfully sublimates his sex drive. He really, really, honestly, prefers to learn things, to read books, to surf the internet, to tend to his collections, or to watch movies.

He finds these things much more gratifying and interesting than being with a woman or having sex.

He's usually also bored. People bore the typical schizoid cerebral narcissist, because schizoid cerebral narcissists have a very high IQ and they find people dull and boring and excruciatingly stupid.

So gradually they gravitate into this solitary solipsistic position and they find solitary activities to be the name of the game. They love them. They love to do things by their own. They love to control time and space, totally.

And what about the biological drive?

Well, the biological drive is satisfied with porn and masturbation.

The psychosexual kink, or even sadism that characterizes schizoid cerebral narcissists does require a live body.

But the schizoid cerebral narcissist makes a calculus of pros and cons and reaches a conclusion that the price of kinky sex is not worth the price of pursuing women and then ending up in a shared fantasy exactly in the place, in the same place, in square one, in ground zero.

So what schizoid cerebral narcissists do, they suppress the sex drive. They suppress the urge for intimacy and the overwhelming need for love. They suppress all this.

And exactly like pedophiliacs, for example, practitioners of some paraphilias, they simply tend to bury their drive.

But they bury also the emotional concomitance of the drive.

So they bury not only their psychosexuality, they bury also love, the potential for love or the potential for intimacy. Their lives are lonely and barren like a huge, I call it, intimacy desert.

And finally, the last point, why schizoid cerebral narcissists allow cheating, legitimize, consensually cheating within their relationships. Actually sometimes push the partner to cheat in collusive infidelity.

Why they do this, allowing the partner to cheat restores their delusion of being in control.

Yes, she's cheating, but I told her to cheat. Yes, she's cheating, but she tells me everything about it. Yes, she's cheating, but I'm in control. Yes, she's cheating, but I told her to cheat. Yes, she is cheating, but she tells me everything about it. Yes, she's cheating, but I'm in control. Yes, she's cheating, but I drove her.

It restores grandiosity.

Anyhow, the intimate partner of a schizoid cerebral narcissist will end up cheating. Cheating is inevitable and overwhelmingly abundant and prevalent in relationships with schizoid cerebral narcissists.

So why not to put the base face on it? Why not to initiate it? Why not to preempt it?

So that you can tell yourself, convince, lie to yourself convincingly, that you were the one who had started it all. That she would not have cheated had it not been for you.

So you are still the master. You're still in control.

Cerebral schizoid narcissists are therefore, as I said before, unboundaried. They never set boundaries in any of their relationships, by the way, not only romantic relationships.

They let their partners behave and misbehave in every which way. They afford the partnersunmitigated, unmarking freedoms and a complete lack of scrutiny.

Even when all the partners had abused these privileges with ostentatious and egregious serial cheating, for example, the schizoid cerebral narcissists never protests, never restrains them.

Girlfriends, spouses, mates find this state of things absolutely beyond the pale. They don't know how to cope with it. They don't even know how to understand it. They resent this benign neglect.

It feels like indifference. It feels like the schizoid cerebral narcissist doesn't care, doesn't mind. It doesn't feel like the schizoid cerebral narcissist is giving them any special liberty or is interested in their well-being and welfare.

It doesn't feel like that. It feels like he simply doesn't care where they are, who they are with, and what they're doing.

And so they can't get a rise. They can't get even a modicum of attention out of the narcissists, no matter how bad their escalated misconduct becomes.

Schizoid cerebral narcissists are infuriating in their unflappability and sangfroid.

This unflappable and implacable posture engenders a lot of uncertainty in the tortured minds of the schizoid cerebral narcissists' ostensible intimates.

They asked themselves, could he truly love me? Does he truly love me?

Because if he had loved me, he would have never let me pick up a man in front of him and go out into the night.

It seems like he doesn't care. He doesn't love me. And if he does love me, why does he never set rules? Why does he never intervene? Why does he never protest? Why does he never fight with me? Why does he never restrain me? Never mind to what extent I disrespect him in private or even in public, he is unmovable, unshakable. A sphinx, a stone.

Is it apathy? Is he apathetic? Is it really indifferent? Or is it actually a form of passive aggression?

They don't know what to make of it.

Gradually, the intimate partner of the schizoid cerebral narcissists no longer can regard this type of narcissists as a man.

Real men are somewhat possessive, somewhat romantically jealous. I mean, taken to extreme, it's a pathology, but some grain of possessiveness, some grain of romantic jealousy goes hand in hand with sexual exclusivity in a typical relationship. Real men are like that. And real men are definitely boundaried.

But the cerebral schizoid narcissist is not possessive. He's never romantically jealous. He's spineless. He's also genderless. He's like a total doormat. He lacks all the features of anything remotely resembling a man.

So they gradually can't see him as a man. His obsequiousness repels them. They're disgusted by his obsequiousness, spinelessness. They get angry at his avoidance.

The intimate partners of the schizoid cerebral narcissists become extremely sex adverse. They cut off all sex with the schizoid cerebral narcissists. They start to sleep around in order to cater to the most basic of their unmet needs, intimacy, love, emotionality, sex with a man. Any man, just a man. They are men hungry. They crave a man after three years with a schizoid cerebral narcissist or even three months.

Living with a schizoid cerebral narcissist is not like being in a romantic dyad or in a couple. It's like being with a nothingness, with a non-entity, with an emptiness, with a void. It's harrowing. It's absolutely, I've heard descriptions from victims that are, you know, they're speechless, simply.

So the partners of the schizoid cerebral narcissists are not choosing other men, because it's not a man. They're not choosing other men because it's not a man. They're not choosing other men over the men that they had committed to. It's not like they had committed to this rebel Schizoid cerebral narcissist and now they're choosing another man.

It's not men versus men. It's men versus nothing. They're not choosing another man. They're choosing a man. They choose actual virility over nothingness. They choose actual masculinity over absence. The entity back home, which is neither a man nor frankly human.

These intimate partners, crying usually in very bad shape, they don't do it willingly. Their dreams are shattered. Their illusions are broken. Their fantasies are dead. They're in horrible shape.

But they're compelled to choose presence over absence. Actual throbbing life over a pallid simulacrum and warm, pulsating bodies of men over the dead flesh of the schizoid cerebral narcissists.

The schizoid cerebral narcissists plays two adult roles, but they are fake adult roles. One is a father and one is a guru.

And he plays these roles in order to secure the shared fantasy.

But these roles are brief. They're context dependent. They're triggered by explicit requests. They're devoid of any true responsibilities, chores or commitment.

The investment in these roles is proportional to the expectations and the benefits that the narcissist derives.

He's going to play the father, he's going to play the guru ifthere's something in it for him. You know, he's asking what's in it for me?

He doesn't do future faking because he really believes in his own fantasies, but it comes very close and it's a small part of the manipulative ploy, which also includes delusional roleplay by everyone involved.

As the narcissist woman, as his intimate partner, begins to have emotional and sexual affairs and casual sex with other men, the narcissist, schizoid cerebral narcissist, does not experience, shockingly, any romantic jealousy, actually doesn't experience any emotion.

If you interrogate these schizoid cerebral narcissists, myself included, I would tell you, they would tell you, that the only sensation is relief. A sense of relief.

Now I don't have to cater to her demands as a woman. Now she is someone else's problem. She has outsourced the potentially phony and threatening issue, and she had stopped becoming a nuisance.

I want to be alone and I want to play because I'm a child and because I'm a schizoid.

With the woman gone imposing on another man's time and another man's resources, the schizoid cerebral narcissist have now a regained mastery of his life.

He feels euphoric. He feels liberated. You know, like the movie, Home Alone, when the child is home alone, when the nagging adults are all gone, that's how he feels when his wife is sleeping with another man, when his girlfriend is dating another man. When they're both absent all night and come back drunk in the morning, he feels elated, he feels relieved, he feels liberated. It's not his problem anymore. Nuisance is busy elsewhere.

I am left to my pleasurable devices and time-consuming vocations or avocations. I can finally be a child and play in the sandbox, unperturbed, unencumbered, and above all, unsupervised.

The natural state of the schizoid cerebral narcissist, naturally, is schizoid. When he is successful, he feels empowered, he feels self-sufficient, and then he feels a bit sadistic.

And when he fails, he withdraws in order to avoid narcissistic injuries and mortifications.

But he is always, whether a success or a failure, is always solitary, he's always introverted and generates a constant stream of intellectual self-arousal and self-stimulation. He's alone with his books, in his library, in his study, with his collections, and he is the happiest ever. He is happy as a lark. He doesn't need anyone. He doesn't need the intrusion. He doesn't need the imposition.

And he fulfills the guru or father role only when the woman seeks advice or asks for money. He gives money freely and a lot to buy her off, to bribe her into staying.

And so most of these women are transformed willy-nilly, inadvertently and unwillingly, are transformed into effective gold-diggers because they're there for the money. They provide services, they get money.

And then they finish the day, finish the day's work. They titivate, put makeup, dress provocatively and go out to hunt for men, for real men. They don't have one at home.

I said that all this is true unless and until the schizoid cerebral narcissist detects signs of imminent hurtful abandonment.

And these signs include deception, and he is very good, because he has cold empathy. He's very good at spotting, detecting and ferreting out lies. You can't pull the wool over the schizoid cerebral narcissist's eyes. You can't. He knows everything. He knows everything.

He often pretends that he doesn't. He often is silent about it because he doesn't care.

But trust me, he knows absolutely everything. Much more than you think that he knows. And without spying on you, he's a great mind reader.

So when he spots detection, when he spots indifference, overt disrespect, hatred, spite, vindictiveness, impulsivity, recklessness, malice in his intimate partner, he knows she's about to bail out, she's about to abandon ship, she's about to break up with him. She's about to abandon him.

And then he enters panic mode. He catastrophizes and he reacts with rage and very rigid, possessive boundary setting. Usually way too late, but he does.

What is the role of deception or deceptiveness in all this?

Deception includes all the famous acts, secret assignations, lies, counterfactual claims of love and amity, abrupt and incomprehensible behavior alterations, clandestine communication, denial of access to information, secretiveness. These are all hallmarks of deception.

And when the narcissist, the schizoid cerebral narcissist becomes convinced that abandonment is imminent, he enters a period of grieving, period of mourning, going through the famous five stages of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, denial, depression, anger.

He mourns the demise of the shared fantasy, which was founded on total trust in the mother, and now this trust is irretrievably lost.

Mind you, he's not mourning you. He's not mourning the fact that you will be out of his life, gone forever. You will never hear from you again. That's not what he's mourning.

He is mourning the shared fantasy. He is mourning the fact that he was so good while it lasted, and now he doesn't lost.

And he catastrophizes the future deleterious intentions and actions of his intimate partner.

Now she becomes a persecutory object. An internalized enemy. Her snapshot is converted, and he demonizes her, devalues her, and anticipates the worst.

And he becomes paranoid and very, very defensive, and he begins to do crazy things. And he also becomes very angry. He regards any attempt to lie to him or to deceive him as a challenge to his grandiose omniscience, and a sign that he is not as feared, admired, respected and held in awe as he had imagined himself to be.

And when the deceptiveness is evident, even if the intimate partner is deceptive towards others, for example, lies to her lover about him, or lies about her past, he similarly reacts with anxiety and catastrophizes.

If she did it to other men, she would do it to me. If she had cheated with me, she will cheat with others etc.

Possessiveness thensets in. That's a reaction, not romantic jealousy.

Listen well, the schizoid cerebral narcissist is never ever romantically jealous. But he does become possessive. Possessiveness is driven by terror.

Mortification leads to introspection and romantic jealousy is pain, which results in withdrawal and aversion. These are different things.

Possessiveness is abandonment, separation, anxiety, and fear of loss. It's the way the schizoid cerebral narcissist experiences the anticipated rejection and abandonment and breakup. He is terrified of being separated, of being abandoned because he's a kid. He's two years old. He is before. His mental age, his emotional age is before the separation individuation phase. It's like being abandoned by mother.

As long as object constancy is maintained, he doesn't mind if his intimate partner outsources all her sexual and emotional needs.

In other words, he doesn't mind if his intimate partner sleeps around with hundreds of men. He doesn't care. He doesn't mind if she has another man with whom she has a very long and very deep and very involved love affair. And she loves that other man and his intimacy with him much more than she loves the narcissist and his intimacy with him. He doesn't care. None of this matters as long as she is there present physically and mentally.

He needs her to not separate. He's terrified of losing her.

And the partner reacts with aggressive defiance to his attempts to hover her, to reel her in, and to set boundaries, rigid boundaries, when she reacts with derision and mockery, when he tries to take possession of her, to reclaim her.

She says, now you're trying to reclaim me, now you're trying to set rules and, I mean, the hell with you. I have my own life by now. And I have a man, another man. I love him and, you know, I want to be with him. I'm not going to abandon you I'm going to come here and I'm going to service you but forget about it and you can't limit my freedom you can't tell me what to do anymore I'm a free agent I'm single.

And then when this becomes totally clear, the schizoid cerebral narcissist becomes avoidant and dysphoric, and then he is driven to look for a new shared fantasy because nothing is left. Absolutely nothing is left. Not even common decency.

The disrespect that the intimate partner shows the schizoid cerebral narcissists at this stage is so profound, so intractable that he understands that he had lost her, and he has to go looking for the next partner in the shared fantasy and give her the same, afford her, the same liberties that he had afforded.

What about cerebral narcissists? Why do cerebral narcissists choose women who have normal sexuality? Why do they go after women who are hypersexual have a very strong sex drive. Why do they court and flirt and groom and love bomb promiscuous women like my mini? Why in other words do cerebral narcissists choose manifestly and patently wrong partners for them, sexually incompatible partners?

It's not only a question of promiscuity. It's not only a question of being histrionic. It's not only a question of going after flirtatious and seductive women, going after somatic narcissistic women, or even going after borderline and psychopathic women, which cerebrals do habitually.

Even when they court, even when they try to team up with a sexually healthy woman, they are courting not the woman, but they are courting disaster.

Because it's going to end badly. The mismatch between the cerebral's absent sex drive and the healthy woman's sex drive is likely to end in pain, hurt, cheating, betrayal and catastrophe.

Cerebral narcissists are known for their cerebral power. That's why they are called cerebrals. They are highly intelligent. Some of them are even professors of psychology. They know everything. They know how it's going to end.

Why do they keep pursuing the same thing? What is this repetition compulsion? What do they hope to accomplish?

There is a saying that madness is trying to do the same thing over and over and over again, hoping for a different outcome.

But here's the crux. Here's the gist of it. The cerebral narcissist is not expecting a different outcome. He expects the very same outcome, and he is courting this outcome.

And we're going to discuss it shortly.

I'm going to give you six reasons why the cerebral narcissist had chosen you as his intimate partner.

Six reasons because Sam Vaknin never leaves any stone unturned and any woman unstoned.

Okay, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a host of other books and e-books and videos and you name it, on narcissism and other personality disorders. I'm also a professor of psychology as I've already mentioned six times in this video, talking about grandiosity.

Okay, Shuvavim, cool it, chill, take a smoke, take a joint, and watch this video.

The cerebral narcissist is aware, fully aware, of his essential asexuality.

Why do I say that the cerebral narcissist is asexual?

After all, for example, he consumes porn. Pornography. He masturbates.

Yes, but he consumes pornography and masturbates precisely because they are not real sex. They provide physiological release and they avoid the concomitance of sex. They avoid intimacy.

Pornography is the opposite of intimacy. It's impersonal. It's disembodied.

And so pornography and masturbation provide him with a full solution for his auto-erotic sex drive without the risks and threats of intimacy and the demands that intimacy poses.

So this is not real sexuality. I mean, technically it is psychosexuality, but it's not full adult, mature, reciprocated sexuality.

The cerebral narcissist is being cerebral and therefore highly intelligent and intellectual and learned and educated knows very well that he is asexual in the sense that his sexuality is not other directed. He has no object relations of any kind, let alone sexual.

Every cerebral narcissist goes through sexual phases. Every cerebral narcissist sometimes becomes somatic.

But he becomes somatic. He engages in sex and he enjoys sex. He loves sex as a somatic narcissist, only when he is grooming a new partner, a new partner for an emerging shared fantasy.

So when the cerebral narcissists had lost his previous shared fantasy, had been abandoned, had been betrayed, had been cheated on, had been dumped, is no longer adulated, does not receive the services that he had come to expect.

When the shared fantasy crumbles and is no longer functional, it is then that the cerebral becomes somatic.

And he becomes somatic for one purpose only, to captivate, to groom, to acquire a new intimate partner, a new insignificant other.

It's like false advertising. The cerebral narcissist is turned somatic, is now sexually active, sexually imaginative and creative and amazing, a bit kinky, sometimes a bit sadistic, but at all times fascinating, orgasmic, and this is the facade that he presents to potential partners.

He is actually telling them, this is the way I am. When deep his side, he knows that this is not true. He knows he's lying. He is not like that. He is like that for a short period of time until it had secured the new shared fantasy.

The pandemic had provided me and other scholars of narcissism with a unique opportunity because during the pandemic many cerebral narcissists had lost their shared fantasies. They had been abandoned and dumped by intimate partners, spouses, significant others, and so on.

So many cerebral narcissists were left all alone.

Now, cerebral narcissists cannot survive, cannot survive, without a shared fantasy. Under normal circumstances, all these cerebral narcissists who had lost the shared fantasies would have become somatics and would have gone out hunting for new intimate partners, preying upon gullible, naive, willing and lonely women, broken or damaged or otherwise.

So, every cerebral narcissist who had lost his shared fantasy would have become somatic.

But during the pandemic, owing to restrictions on movement, restrictions on meetings, meeting other people, restrictions on sex, restrictions on bodily contact, etc.

It is very difficult to find a new intimate partner and to groom her in an effective manner, especially using sex.

So we have seen a phenomenon, a phenomenon never seen before.

During the pandemic, we have seen the cerebral narcissists who had lost the shared fantasy, had lost the intimate partner, had actually remained cerebral.

They are not interested in women. They are not interested in sexting. They are not interested in exchanging sexually explicit material with willingwomen, all over the world. They are not interested in engaging in sexual chats. They don't initiate any kind of sex, virtual or real.

Why?

Because sex in this case, sexting, would not lead to a new intimate partner.

This is proof positive that the cerebral narcissist psychosexuality is instrumentalized. It's weaponized. It's a tool of war. It's an instrument of predation.

The cerebral narcissist who is capable of hunting a new intimate partner suddenly become somatic and full of sex, and sexy, and sexual, and hypersex, and maybe even a sex addict.

The cerebral narcissist, who for some reason, cannot secure a new intimate partner is totally not interested in sex, even when he is alone and not in a shared fantasy. So in prisons, during pandemics, in hospitals, in armies, in total institutions, we see that cerebral narcissists never become somatic. They never become somatic also when they are alone and not in a shared fantasy. So we now know for sure that cerebral narcissists engage in sex only in order to fence in, to bring in, to gather intimate partners, to embed them in a shared fantasy, in a new shirt fantasy. But this still doesn't solve the problem. Why go through the inevitable deception, the heartbreaking and heartrending and heart wrenching betrayal and cheating, the acrimony in the wake of the in the lackable sexlessness of a relationship with the cerebral.

In other words, the cerebral knows that if his partner has a normal sex drive, let alone if his partner has a strong sex drive, or is promiscuous, or is histrionic, he knows that he will not be able to gratify her sexual needs. So why choose such partners in the first place? Well, there are six reasons. Number one, the cerebral narcissist wants to convert his partner into a bed per secretary object. This way he can justify and perpetuate his morally superior victim stance. In other words, the cerebral narcissist wants to feel that he is a victim, believes himself to be a victim, and convinced himself that he's a victim, and is emotionally invested in his victimhood. He feels good when he's a victim, because it means that he is morally superior. It means that he is good. It's a morality play. He is good. All the others are evil. It caters to his persecutary and paranoid streak.

So it fulfills many psychological, important psychological functions being a victim.

And so cerebral narcissists try to maintain and preserve and buttress and sustain the victim mentality and the victim stance at all times. And they need a partner who would victimize them. They need a partner to cheat on them. They need a partner to abuse them. They need a partner who would betray them and they inexorably push this partner into these, into these behaviors.

They engage in what we call projective identification. They force the partner. They force the partner to compromise her values, her self-respect, her dignity. They force her to become a cheater, a deceiver, a betrayer, so as to feel that they are morally superior victims. And this is called tendency for interpersonal victimhood. TIV and the process of pushing someone to engage in infidelity is known as collusive infidelity.

I have videos on all these topics. I recommend that you go and watch them because I need more views. Right. No, because it will be helpful to you. Right. Okay. Reason number two.

To remind you, what's the question? The question is, why does the cerebral choose inappropriate, incompatible partners as far as sexuality? He is asexual, or his sex drive is mutated, it's autoerotic, it's not other directed. So if he is an immature infantile sex drive, why does he choose mature, sexed, hypersexed, promiscuous, histrionic, or simply healthy, sexually healthy women? Why does he make this choice? Number two, to test his partner's unconditional love and allegiance. He pushes her to the limits. He puts her in the corner. He is testing her metal. He's testing her commitment to him. He wants to see how far can he go before she breaks down. How far can he go before she breaks up? And how far can he go before she cheats on him?

It's a test. And inevitably, everyone fails this test.

And this gratifies the narcissists. No end. Because it means that he is omnipotent. He knows everything and omniscient. So by pushing his partner to behave in ways that the cerebral narcissus had anticipated, it gratifies his grandiosity because it means that he has control over the partner. He can make her do things.

This is called internal mortification. He can make her do things and it also means that he's a genius because he had predicted and he had known full well that she's going to cheat on him. And here she's cheating on him. Proof he's a victim. He's a genius.

So the narcissist's grandiosity benefits from the misconduct of his intimate partner, so he pushes her to misbehave.

Number three, he wants to control his partner. He wants to control her by making her feel guilty, by making her feel ashamed.

He controls her via her guilt and shame over her inevitable misbehavior with men.

She simply seeks to cater to the most basic of human needs. She wants love. She wants intimacy. She wants sex.

The cerebral narcissists withholds all these from her, intentionally, deliberately. And he withholds all these from her because he wants her to misbehave.

The minute she had misbehaved, she would feel guilty. She would feel ashamed and self-deprecating.

At that moment the cerebral steps in and he is in full control of her. He's in full control of her because he can guilt her, treat her. He can shame her into submission.

Number four, the partners' misbehavior, and when I say cheating, I don't only mean physical cheating, infidelity, adultery, betrayal of all kinds, emotional affairs, betrayal in business, financial or legal betrayal. So betrayal of all kinds.

When the partner, the intimate partner, the cerebral narcissists, intimate partner misbehaves, when she betrays him, stabs him in the back, it legitimizes his defiance and his contempt for his partner.

Because this is the ground, this is the base emotion.

Cerebral narcissists are contemptuous. They're contemptuous towards one and sundry, everyone is held in contempt. Either because they're intellectually inferior, or because they are emotionally vulnerable, or because they're weak, or because they're sick, or because they're stupid. I mean, one way or the other, the cerebral narcissist holds everyone in the most profound, deepest contempt imaginable, to the point of dehumanizing.

So, he holds his partner in contempt, but he depends on her for a variety of services, for adulation, secondary narcissistic supply, and he resents this dependence.

So he wants to defy this dependence. He is counterdependent.

And so when he forces his partner to misbehave, when he forces his partner to cheat on him, sexually, to betray him in some other way, this restores his sense of equilibrium. This means that he has had the upper hand. He is morally superior. His grandiosity is restored.

She has to answer for her misdeeds. She has to deceive. She has to pretend. She has to act. She is to fake. And he stands aside and he watches, he observes her pitiful squirming. He delights in her delectable suffering. He smugly grins behind, you know.

And then, when it's all over, when she's prostrate, when she's a carpet, when she had been rendered a doormat, when she had compromised and sacrificed, every figment of her self-respect, when she had prostituted herself to strangers, when she had drunk herself to oblivion, when she had misbehaved in every conceivable way, when she is ashamed mainly of herself, unable to look at herself in the mirror.

It restores equilibrium. He is a forgiving God, a Christian God. And she is the wayward nation of Israel.

Number six.

The cerebral narcissist teams up with sexually incompatible women. She has a sex drive. He doesn't have a sex drive.

Why does he team up with her? Because it allows him to give his partner total freedom.

He says again, magnanimously, benevolently, benignly, he says, listen, I know you have a sex right. I don't have a sex right. I know I want a sex right. I know I want to have sex. I don't want to have sex.

So go ahead. Find others. Have sex with them. Same with intimacy. Same with love. I'm incapable of giving you any of these things. Nor do I wish to. So outsource them. Go out and find him.

He gives you total freedom. And this freedom is manifested as indifference. He's disguised as indifference. He seems to be, he seems to not to care, not to mind. He seems totally indifferent.

It's of course a facade. It's a charade. Deep inside he is seething with rage and vengeance and negative emotionality, because he feels slighted and challenged and humiliated and shamed by her.

But he pretends not to care.

So he is showing a facade of indifference, and he gives her total freedom. Don't ask, don't tell. He never asked any questions. He doesn't care. He doesn't bother.

But having given her this freedom, he accepts reciprocity. The freedom that he had given her guarantees that she will stay out of the cerebral affairs. She will not bother him. She will let him be. She will let him delight in solitary pursuits within his solipsistic black hole.

And this is known as schizoid style.

So the cerebral narcissist is a schizoid. He is most it is and he's most pleased and he's most gratified and his most egosyntonic. In other words, he's most happy when he's totally alone. He likes to pursue his hobbies, his thoughts, he likes to do things, solitary things, and he regards everyone as an intruder, and every attempt to communicate with him as intrusion, and of course every attempt to love him is gross violation of his boundaries.

Now, I'm not saying that cerebral narcissists don't have a social life. And I'm not saying that they avoid people.

They do have a social life, and they do interact and communicate with people.

But this is goal-oriented. They do this only when they need something. They want to make money so they have business associates. They seek celebrity and fame, so they socialize and become gregarious.

It's all goal-oriented.

At the core, narcissists detest human contact. Their ideal utopia is a world with no human beings, a post-nuclear apocalypse, where they have access to huge libraries and whole cities with not a living soul.

That is the cerebral narcissist. Cerebral narcissists are schizoid. The schizoid empty core is at the base and foundation of narcissists.

And so by pushing away his partner, by liberating her, by allowing her to do whatever she wants with whoever she wants for as long as she wants. Actually, the cerebral narcissists is guaranteeing freedom to himself, not to her.

I've said that most cerebrals are also schizoids.

A cerebral narcissist detests his body. He resents his body because his body is an encumbrance and a maintenance chore.

The cerebral narcissist neglects his body egregiously.

Most cerebrals are also schizoids, so they derive no pleasure from any physical activity, including sex.

Everything the cerebral does is colored by this corporeal self-disavowal. Everything he does is imbued with this self-rejection of the body.

The cerebral narcissist reverts to the somatic type and actually revels in profuse and imaginative sex only when he is hunting for a new intimate partner to embed in a nascent shared fantasy.

Mission accomplished? Shared fantasy established, the cerebral narcissist reverts from somatic to cerebral to celibate hibernation.

Similarly, if the cerebral narcissist is a sadist, his sadism is likely to be psychological, not physical.

Only in the somatic grooming phase, the sex of the cerebral narcissist is sadistic.

So when the cerebral is cerebral, in the cerebral phase, which is the dominant phase, he is sexless, and his sadism is psychological. He tortures and humiliates and torments people, especially in public. He bullies them.

When he reverts from cerebral to somatic in order to hunt for a new partner, his sadism is both psychological and sexual.

When he had secured the partner and he has a new share of fantasy, so he can go back to being a cerebral, his sadism becomes psychological again.

The cerebral narcissist is repelled by physical pain and by suffering, is revolted by anything bodily, body fluids, body, organs, everything disgusting. Bodies generally disgusting.

So I've tried to explain to you why the cerebral narcissist insists on having promiscuous, dysregulated, hypersex women or women with a healthy sex drive, as his intimate partners.

Why doesn't he target asexual women? Why doesn't he target asexual women? Why doesn't he target cerebral narcissists who are women and also don't want sex? Why doesn't he target sex-averse women?

They are women who gave up on sex, having been sexually abused, for example, or raped, or having gone through extreme complex trauma. These women usually give up on sex.

So there's a whole pool, huge pool of women who are sexless by nature and inclination and choice and proclivity. Why doesn't the cerebral narcissist target these women?

I gave you six reasons. Why not?

The cerebral narcissist uses women as intimate partners in order to regulate his grandiosity in a variety of ways, his sense of moral superiority, and also in order to control the intimate partner via guilt and shame.

You have been forewarned.

Yes, that's how I look after a sleepless night. Don't ask, and I will not tell.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the blue professor of psychology, the most handsome one on this channel. This you cannot dispute.

And today we're going to discuss what else? Sexuality. Why does the narcissist transition from being a sexless cerebral to being a somatic sex addict. What pushes the narcissist to change his entire psychosexuality, his entire personality, in effect. Is this a form of identity disturbance or is something much more pernicious at play for those of you who are conspiracy minded.

Tomorrow, by the way, there's a bonus for all of you. The Toxic Family Holidays Reunion Guide. Yes, everything you wanted to know about seriously sick, dysfunctional families. In other words, your family.

Okay, Shoshanim. My name is still Sam Vaknin. Last time I checked, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the book that keeps giving and sometimes taking.

Onward Christian soldiers and in my case Jewish soldiers to discuss cerebral narcissism. Cerebral narcissism is a relatively stable construct across the lifespan. In other words, the cerebral remains cerebral, remains cerebral until he dies.

There are periods in the cerebral's life when he becomes briefly somatic. These periods never last more than a few years and usually they last a few months.

Why is cerebral narcissism so stable? Why doesn't it fluctuate?

Narcissists, to some extent, have identity disturbance. Borderlines have much more than narcissists. But narcissists also morph and shape-shift.

Why don't they change the sexual preferences?

And so the reason that cerebral narcissism is a fixture, a piece of unmovable, immutable furniture in the narcissist's mind, is because it starts very early on in life. It can start even at age two, sometimes earlier.

It involves what we call sublimation. Sublimation is when the sex drive is converted into other types of activities which do not involve sex and have no sexual nature at all.

Freud gave the example of writing a book. Instead of having sex, you write a book, you're so depleted and spent by the end of the day that you don't have a mind for having sex.

So it's this mental energy, there's a law of conservation of mental energy, there's just a limited quantity, and this limited quantity transmutes and shifts from one activity to another.

If you invested in writing a book or making a political speech or appearing on television or what have you, usually you have no energy left to do other unspeakable things to your girlfriend. And so this is called sublimation.

Sublimation means converting drives, urges, instincts into socially acceptable activities that consume the energy that should have gone to these drives, urges and instincts.

So cerebral narcissism involves very early life sublimation.

The child, sometimes age 2, learns to convert libido, convert eros, the sex drive, the component of libido that has to do with sex.

The child learns to convert this into activities that gratify the adults around the child.

The child learns to manipulate adults, the child learns to extract narcissistic supply from adults, by emphasizing his intelligence, by displaying her intellect, by solving problems in mathematics, by reading aloud the daily paper when you are four years old.

And so the child learns that displays or pyrotechnics of the mind are even more efficacious, more efficient at manipulating adults than sexuality.

Normal healthy children, especially girls. As they grow up, they learn that sex is a form of energy. Sex is power. Young girls learn to give sex or to at least insinuate that they're available to have sex in order to manipulate boys and adults around them.

Similarly, boys learn to leverage secondary sex characteristics and sexual behavior in order to attract girls and to manipulate, for example, the favorite female teacher.

Sex is a manipulative force and watch my previous video about reverse engineering.

But cerebral narcissists from a very early age have learned the power of something a lot more potent and a lot more mighty than sex.

The mind, words, intellect, intelligence.

Cerebral narcissists find out the secret of manipulating people via speech, via writing and via reading.

And they have learned that this kind of manipulation is much longer lasting, much more ubiquitous, much more profound than anything sex can accomplish.

So they drop sex altogether. They don't develop asexuality. They redirect their entire libido and eros into intellectual pursuits. They leverage their brain as an instrument and a tool to obtain supply and as a venue or conduit or vector of self-efficacy and agency.

In other words, they use their mind, they use their intellect, they use their intelligence to secure favorable outcomes from the environment.

Having learned this trick at age 2 or 4 or 6, the child has no incentive to develop sexually.

The sublimation is so massive. The sublimation is so all pervasive that it renders the cerebral narcissists asexual. It destroys, it eradicates his sex drive. He grows up without a sex drive, in effect. You could call it arrested sexual development.

And so when the cerebral starts to interact with peers, he is already abnormal. He is already misshaped.

While all his peers engage in the twin or dual tracks of intellectual development and psychosexual development, he is one-track-minded. He is focused only on the intellect.

And while all his peers grow up to be adults, mature, sexually ripe, and intellectually capable to a large extent, he is lopsided. He grows up only in one direction.

He's like a hunchback or a stalactite or a stalagmite or like a laser beam rather than a diffused light. He's totally focused. He is point-like.

And so the peers of the cerebral narcissists sense his abnormality and potential sex partners shun the cerebral narcissist because they regard him as creepy and robotic.

In return, the cerebral narcissist, injured, hurt, wounded and damaged by this rejection, conjures up a defensive ideology. He says, I don't really need sex. I don't really want sex. It is I who choose, I who chooses to not have sex.

This is known as cognitive dissonance. He's trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance by discarding one part, one horn of the dilemma.

It's not that I want sex and I cannot have it, which is an intolerable thought. I actually don't want sex.

And celibacy, says the cerebral narcissist, is evidence of superior strength and self-control.

Women are contemptible if he is heterosexual. Women are contemptible and should be avoided.

This is the ideology of the cerebral. It acts as an exoskeleton, as a shell. It ossifies and rigidifies and fossilizes until the cerebral narcissist resembles a very ancient Egyptian mummy still entombed.

So how can someone like that suddenly love sex, seeks sex, adore sex, and spend most of his time pursuing sex? What brings on this amazing transformation?

Cerebrals become somatic usually, in the vast majority of cases, following something known as narcissistic collapse.

A collapsed narcissist is not a failed narcissist. It's a common mistake among YouTube's self-style experts and their dogs.

A failed narcissism is a phase in the development of borderline. A collapsed narcissist is a narcissist who cannot secure narcissistic supply for whatever reason.

When the cerebral narcissist collapses, he can no longer garner a supply by placing his intellect on public display.

And so this is one reason why cerebrals transition and become somatic, because they can no longer obtain supply in the classical traditional habituated ways, the ways they are used to.

So they switch to another strategy. It's a narcissistic supply strategy being somatic.

This is one reason.

The second reason, the second possibility, is when the cerebral is offered the opportunity to obtain a quick fix of narcissistic supply via sex.

Now this happens extremely rarely. Remember what I said before, the cerebral is highly abnormal. He lacks a critical dimension of humanity. Not only he lacks empathy, which renders him half human, he also lacks sexuality.

The cerebral is nothing but a brain, just a brain in a vat, so he is not perceived by human as human by others. There's what we call an uncanny valley reaction. Look it up on my channel. There's a video dedicated to the uncanny valley.

People feel uncomfortable with the cerebral narcissist. They feel under scrutiny as if they were in a laboratory and their mice. They feel very threatened. They become hypervigilant.

And so people shun the cerebral narcissists. They avoid him. As I said, they regard him as creepy.

So it's extremely rare for the cerebral narcissists to come across a sexual opportunity. And especially a sexual opportunity which would elevate his self-esteem, buttress his grandiosity and thereby constitute narcissistic supply.

But when this rarity happens, when this singularity, singular event happens, the cerebral narcissist becomes somatic, just in order to take advantage of this opportunity.

When the cerebral narcissist becomes a somatic narcissist, when he metamorphosizes and transitions, he resembles very much a sex addict.

He is incapable of empathy or attachment or bonding or even perceiving external objects. He'san anhedonist, remember.

So instead he uses bodies, he increases his body count. He uses body count as kind of meter of success. Body count becomes the narcissistic supply.

Finally, there's another reason for such a startling transformation.

Age, looming death.

The cerebral attempts to deny his age. He attempts to fend off his ineluctable demise. He regards himself as immortal because the mind and thoughts and philosophy and physics, they are all immortal.

And so he must be immortal because he's producing them.

But when age encroaches upon the narcissist, when he starts to see, to his great horror, his body crumbling and falling apart, disintegrating in front of his terrified eyes, when he realizes the proximity of death, when he gets sick, chronically ill, or otherwise, he tries to deny.

He tries to deny, he tries to refrain, and he tries to substitute life for death by having sex.

Sex is the force of life. Remember, eros is an integral part of libido, which is the force of life.

And so by leveraging his libido and his eros, by finally unleashing what he's left of his sex drive, by regaining access to those parts of him which have been suppressed or repressed for decades, the narcissist feels alive again.

And this is a way of pretending that he will never die.

Usually he chooses much younger sex partners because their youth kind of rubs off on him, reflects on him. It's like King David or Mahatma Gandhi, who used to sleep with very, very young girls.

But the cerebral is a narcissist. Don't forget this. He has now transitioned to the somatic type. He is now a sex addict.

But his sex is still compulsive, a little coercive, and always auto-erotic, masturbatory.

Narcissus uses other people's bodies as animated dildos or sex dolls. The partners are fungible and forgettable to a large extent.

There is one exception to this, and it is when the partner is actually mentally ill, when the partner is unhealthy. When the partner is, for example, borderline, it caters to the narcissist's grandiosity as a healer or a fixer.

And so this is the only case where the partner would not be considered dispensable or replaceable or interchangeable.

More or less healthy partners would be forgotten soon enough, immediately after the sex.

But when the narcissist comes across someone who needs help, someone who is damaged and broken, it provokes in him the guru instinct, the Messiah complex, the savior, fixer healing complex.

And so it caters to his grandiosity and he is likely to bond or attach to this kind of partners.

The younger they are, the better, because as I said, it imbues him with a new sense of life.

Narcissus, cerebral and somatic, offer their partners, including sex partners, shared fantasy, a shared fantasy of some kind.

The shared fantasy could be, I'm safe, you're secure, I'm stable, I'm a calming influence of you, I'll always be there for you, will help you, I care about you. That's a shared fantasy in some way.

Another type of shared fantasies, we're going to have a family, we're going to get married, you're going to have children.

So there's always a shared fantasy. And these shared fantasies usually incorporate a fresh start.

Because remember, in this third possibility, in this third case, the cerebral transitions to somatic because he wants to forget about aging and about death.

The only way to do this is to team up with a young partner and have sex with her, which is a force of life, then offer her a fresh start, which is typical of a much younger age.

Relocation, marriage, children, incessant travel, or long-term relationships. These are hallmarks of people in their 20s and 30s, rarely older.

So the narcissist actually regresses. The transition from cerebral narcissism to somatic narcissism is a form of infantile regression.

The cerebral narcissists turn somatic, frantically thrashes about, trying to make up for lost time and missed sexual and romantic opportunities.

His eyes are open. He suddenly sees what he had sacrificed over the years, what he has given up on, what could have been his.

And so he's very mournful, he's grieving, is furious, sometimes he's even suicidal.

The transition from cerebral narcissism to somatic narcissism is very destabilizing for the narcissists, because he gets to see the other part of him that had always been denied and neglected and atrophied he gets to realize the bad decisions that he has made about himself how he had killed a part of himself, crucial part of himself.

This is both infuriating and very sad.

And so the cerebral to somatic is a sex addict because he is compulsive about the pursuit of sex. He self-medicates with sex. He reduces his anxiety and his fear of death and his terror of age and aging.

And so as the cerebral narcissist inexorably declines, it becomes harder and harder for him to maintain this delusional self-deception.

The cerebral finally has to confront his mortality. The day of judgment is upon him, and he ends up, often alone, in a degenerative schizoid state, self-sufficient, but also dead, both internally and finally externally.

Thank you for listening to this cheerful video for a change.

Vaknin, Shalom, Sababa El Nur, Doberman, or do brivutro.

And of course, not to forget, Guten Morgan, which sounds like I'm going to execute you in your entire family. Something like that.

Okay, having proven to you that I know and speak many languages, let us proceed to the next piece of bragging online.

My name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I am a former visiting professor of psychology and still currently on the Faculty of CIAPS, Centre for International Advanced Professional Studies in several countries all over this thriving, cool globe. Cooler by the day, may I add.

And today we are going to discuss a new phenomenon which I dub narcissistic tunneling.

It's a fascinating phenomenon, narcissistic tunneling.

I will not say anything further before we get to it, but you're well advised to listen to the entire video and try to make it as short as possible.

But before I go there, a comment about yesterday's video, peer rejection and how peer rejection creates narcissists, covert narcissists.

Well, of course, not all rejected idiosyncratic children. Not all children who are rejected by their peers become covert narcissists.

Obese children, autistic children, gifted children, immigrant children, generally children who are shunned and mocked and ridiculed and avoided by their peers, only a small minority of them become covert narcissists.

Similarly, only a small percentage of children who are abused and traumatized by their parents become overt narcissists.

Generally, only a tiny percentage of children who are abused and traumatized in a variety of ways by parents, role models, teachers, peers, you name it, only a small, a tiny percentage, end up having or suffering from narcissistic personality disorder.

I hope I've cleared this up and I apologize for any misunderstanding owing to yesterday's hasty video after having traveled all night.

Okay, today we're going to discuss, as I said, tunneling.

Now this video borrows concepts from biology or precisely genetics and from computer science, and from physics.

I know you like these salads, and they are not word salads. They are what is called multidisciplinary.

We need to borrow concepts from other fields, sometimes in order to elucidate, throw light, on some issue in our own field. And this is a very, very useful practice.

So start with recessive and dominant.

An allele of a gene is said to be dominant when it effectively overrules a recessive allele.

So every gene in the human body, every gene period, has two alleles. One of them dominates and one of them is dominated, submissive, recessive.

Remember this, recessive, dominant. Eye color, for example, and blood groups are both examples of dominant alleles and recessive alleles within genes.

So you could have a recessive eye color or a recessive blood group or a dominant one.

No, dominant is not good, recessive is not bad, it's just a matter of statistics.

Okay, that's concept number one, bear it in mind as we proceed to discuss narcissism.

Concept number two, tunneling, also known as quantum tunneling in physics.

It's a penetration of a barrier. It's a mechanical phenomenon in which an object such as an electron or an atom passes through a potential barrier, potential energy barrier or even rear barrier.

According to classical mechanics, the object does not have sufficient energy to enter the barrier, penetrate it, and exit the other side, or even to surmount it somehow.

And yet, it happens. Atomic particles, especially atomic particles, disappear in one location and appear in another, having crossed a barrier inexplicably. And this is known as quantum tunneling.

Now tunneling is also a concept in computer networking, in network theory. It's a way to move packets, packets of information, packets of data, from one network to another network.

And tunneling works through encapsulation. A packet is wrapped inside another packet.

So there's a disguise here. One packet is disguised by another packet, inhabits it, colonizes it, is parasitic on another packet. And this way it crosses the network and appears on another network.

So remember these three concepts. Recessive and dominant.

Tunneling in quantum physics, surmounting a barrier and appearing mysteriously where you should not have appeared, and tunneling in computer networks where packets are disguised inside other packets, and that way they cross networks.

Now, to narcissism.

Each and every narcissist alive, probably many dead ones, I'm not quite sure what's the difference. Each and every narcissist has a dominant type and a recessive type.

So for example, a cerebral narcissist would have a dominant type, cerebral and recessive type somatic. A covert narcissist would have a dominant type covert, shy, vulnerable, fragile and a recessive type overt.

Each and every narcissist has a hidden type, a suppressed type, a recessive type, a submissive type, but there is not type constancy.

A cerebral can and does become somatic. A somatic attempts to become cerebral, laughably, as we will see a bit later. Covert sometimes becomes overt or grandiose and overt. Having been injured, for example, or mortified, tends to become covert and schizoid.

So there's not type constancy. It's all in flux and the various types are reactive to the environment. They are cued by the environment.

That's why I describe types of narcissists as self-states triggered by circumstances, cues from the environment, social cues, sexual cues, and so on.

The recessive type in the narcissist, the traits of the recessive type are expressed, they manifest only obliquely, only indirectly, only in disguised and camouflaged form.

And this is the equivalent of what is called a hidden text.

You know a palimpsest? A palimpsest is a piece of parchment used to write on repeatedly different texts. Each time the palimpsest is scratch clean, scrubbed, and a new text is written on it, but the previous text is still somehow visible. For example, with X-ray.

So the narcissist is a palimpsist. There is a hidden previous text which is suppressed invisible, and there is a dominant text which is overt text, readable, visible to the naked eye.

But the underlying text, the hidden text is a dynamic of its own.

And this recessive type, this hidden type, this captured type, it's like a hostage, it's like someone held in a cell like the men in the iron mask, this hidden type manifests itself, expresses itself via the process of narcissistic tunneling.

It crosses the barrier of the dominant type disguised. So it is disguised. It disguises itself and then crosses the barrier of the dominant type.

Suddenly we see the narcissist doing something which is atypical to his type.

We see a cerebral narcissist, I don't know, exercising. We see a somatic narcissist reading a book or talking about philosophy. We see a covert narcissist suddenly becoming assertive and demanding narcissistic supply coercibly. We see an overt or grandiose narcissist suddenly being subdued and shy.

Now let me give you examples, private cases, of this larger phenomenon which I dubbed narcissistic tunneling, and I hope it will make things clear or clearer.

Take for example covert narcissists.

Covert narcissists are passive aggressive. They're envious. They're a bit malicious, inadvertently at least. Covert narcissists seethe with fury at their own collapse, at their inability to secure narcissistic supply.

And yet, some covert narcissists are people pleasers. They are YouTubers who are self-styled moral crusaders, heroes, rescuers, savers, healers and fixers.

These are examples of covert narcissists who essentially people-pleasers.

Now people pleasing is a codependent trait.

These are covert narcissists whose dominant type is covert narcissism and latent type, hidden type, recessive type is codependent.

That's why many covert narcissists masquerade as co-dependence are easily mistaken for co-dependence and are misdiagnosed with dependent personality disorder.

It's because of the latent type, the hidden, the repressed type.

So that's one example.

Another example. Some covert narcissists are perennial and competitive victims. They can never do wrong. They are always wronged. They're always victimized. Always tortured. They are always put upon. They are always in the right. Always right.

And that is an expression of their covert narcissism.

Because narcissists are always right. But they are right by attaining the high moral ground they are right by becoming victims.

So these are YouTubers who self-identify as victims and co-dependence. Indeed, these covert narcissists, the dominant type is covert narcissists, the latent type is codependent.

I have given you two examples now of covert narcissists.

That's the exact opposite. The flip side of this coin, these are YouTubers who out themselves as narcissists.

By the way, for the historical record, I was the first person ever to out himself as a narcissist in 1995.

So now there's a new crop of YouTubers who out themselves as narcissists.

But these narcissists claim to be on a healing trajectory, recovering or recovered in treatment.

These are of course either lies, manipulative lies, or forms of extreme self-deception.

So the dominant type here is overt, grandiose narcissists. And the hidden type would be psychopathic narcissists, manipulative, lies in order to accomplish goals, for example, views or to make money on YouTube via advertising.

These are narcissists who claim to be healing and changing and recovering and transforming and give false hope to their viewers.

So this is completely psychopathic.

So the latent type here is psychopath.

The alternative is that they really believe their own BS. They really believe this fantasy, that they are somehow being transformed from narcissists to moral agents, healers, helpers, rescuers, and so on and so forth.

And then we are talking about manipulative codependency, also known as control from the bottom.

And then we would have an overt narcissist as a dominant type and a codependent as a latent type.

Actually, recently there has been a study published which tends to substantiate my claim that empaths, people who claim to be empaths, may well be covert narcissists.

You can go to the description and look for the link to this study.

I just want to read to you something, the kind of summary of the study, and then you can go and find the study all on your own, and read it and form your own opinion.

The study is titled Signaling High Sensitivity to Influence Others: Initial evidence for the roles of reinforcement sensitivity, sensory processing sensitivity, and the dark triad.

It was authored by Maotina Kaigik and Maltzian Moron.

And they're not morons, trust me.

The study is very fascinating, it's constructed very well in my view.

They found, among other things, I must say, this is not the only conclusion, nor is it the dominant conclusion, but they found among other things, that individuals with higher scores on dark personality traits, specifically narcissism and psychopathy, are more likely to engage in signaling high sensitivity.

Empaths.

Yes, empaths have been saying for years that empaths are covert narcissists.

The authors continue.

They signal high sensitivity in order to influence others, these narcissists and psychopaths.

And this finding supports the deceptive signaling hypothesis, indicating that the expression of high sensitivity can be a manipulative, interpersonal strategy employed by grandiose and callous individuals to gain advantage in social interactions.

Again, empaths.

So, empaths are perfect examples of covert narcissists as the dominant type, but with a recessive type of codependent or psychopathy.

Now these people disguise themselves, of course, and this leads me to think that they are more psychopathic than codependent.

Similarly, a borderline would have a dominant type as a borderline and a covert, sorry, a latent type or a hidden type or a recessive type as a secondary psychopath, but this only in extreme stress-related situations when the borderline is abandoned or rejected, and she decompensates and acts out as a secondary cycle.

Let's proceed.

A cerebral narcissist. Cerebral narcissists are divorced from their own bodies. They hate their bodies. They don't want to invest anything in their bodies. They don't exercise, they're not fit. They rarely take care of their medical problems, they neglect themselves, and so on so forth.

Because cerebrals value only their brains.

They obtain and secure narcissistic supply by deploying their intellectual gifts.

But there are cerebrals who enjoy food.

The enjoyment of food, being a gourmet, dedicating a lot of time to cooking and eating and savoring the various tastes, that's not only a form of self-soothing. That is a manifestation and an expression of the latent, hidden, recessive type of somatic.

So the dominant type is cerebral narcissists. The cerebral narcissist rejects and loathes and hates his body.

But then there is a recessive type, a hidden type, a latent type of a somatic.

And the somatic enjoys food, which is essentially a sensory experience involving almost exclusively the body.

Similarly, cerebral narcissists may have somatoform disorders. They may have a distorted body image, negative or positive. They may develop hypochondriasis, anxiety related to illness. They may have an eating disorder. Or they may be autoerotic and masturbate compulsively. They derive pleasure from masturbating and from redirecting the sex drive at themselves as a sex object.

That is a somatic thing. That's not a cerebral thing.

So a cerebral who masturbates compulsively has a dominant type, cerebral and a somatic type.

And the somatic type, which is latent and hidden and recessive, eras, comes to the surface, surfaces, by masturbating, eating, or by having an imperfect body image or an eating disorder.

So it's an example of narcissistic tunneling.

Another example of narcissistic tunneling is a somatic narcissist.

Now, somatic narcissists have become somatic because they are not very endowed intellectually.

They may be eloquent, they may be able to put words together in a very impressive way, but they are not original and they are not creative and they are not truly very intelligent. They are just mimics. They know how to imitate intelligent people, effectively and efficaciously.

So a somatic is someone who gave up on his intellect as a way to secure narcissistic supply and has cultivated and nurtured his body and his body functions as ways to obtain supply.

And yet every somatic has a recessive, latent, hidden type as a cerebral. Every cerebral is a somatic. Every somatic is a cerebral. It's a dominant type and a recessive type.

The somatic recessive type is the cerebral.

So we can find these somatic narcissists or covert somatic narcissists philosophizing, engaging in philosophy, or creating an ideology around sexual conquests, around dating, around gender issues, around relationships, around martial arts, around bodybuilding, around exercise. We can find these covert somatics or somatics becoming health nuts or amateur medical doctors or wannabe therapists or coaches or what have you.

These are all cerebral pursuits. This is the way the cerebral recessive latent hidden type expresses or manifests itself via the barrier of the somatic dominant type. This is the way the cerebral latent type tunnels through the somatic barrier, the somatic dominant type.

Similarly, a covert may volunteer in high visibility projects or campaigns, virtue signaling in victimhood movements. He may initiate personal heroic morality crusades. He may join narcissistic, overtly grandiose narcissistic institutions or collectives.

These are all acts which are far more typical of the grandiose, overt narcissists.

And so the dominant type is a grandiose overt narcissist, but the covert expresses itself, manifests through the layer of dominant grandiosity by acting in ways which signal morality, virtue and victimhood.

Another last example, an overt narcissist, the grandiose narcissist, may suddenly act shy or insecure, or passive aggressive rather than in your face aggressive and defiant, or pseudo-humble in certain situations.

And he's always envious. All these are typical covert attributes. They are not typical of covert, they're not typical of overt, grandiose narcissists. These are covert attributes.

The covert is shy, insecure, passive aggressive, pseudo-humble, always envious and so on. That's a covert thing but the covert expresses, manifests itself via narcissistic tunneling and so suddenly the overt of grandiose narcissist appears for a day or an hour or a month or a week to be covert.

Narcissistic tunneling teaches us that there is an ongoing power play in competition between the dominant type and the recessive type. And that sometimes a recessive type has the upper hand and manifest and expresses itself via narcissistic tunneling.

So we can never look at a narcissist and say that's a pure case of covert narcissism or overt narcissism or somatic narcissism or cerebral narcissism. We can never say this.

Narcissists always surprise us by displaying behavior. or cerebral narcissism. We can never say this.

Narcissists always surprise us by displaying behaviors and traits, which are much more typical of the recessive type.

Somatic becomes suddenly cerebral. It's laughable, of course.

Somatics cannot be effective or efficacious cerebrals. They are wannabe cerebral. It's laughable, of course.

Somatics cannot be effective or efficacious cerebrals. They are wannabe cerebrals. They look like clowns.

But still, they do attempt to become cerebral.

Similarly, cerebral narcissists suddenly become somatic. They regard themselves sexually irresistible and what have you, and that's equally laughable.

And the same goes for covert narcissists and covert narcissist and so on and so for narcissistic tunneling.

In my view, is a very important concept because it describes dynamic pathways between hidden layers of narcissism that have been suppressed owing to circumstances, environments, and the expectations of society, parental figures, the socialization process, and peer rejection.

So there's always a hidden layer, a buried layer, a denied layer, a repressed layer, but it never goes to sleep.

Exactly as Freud had predicted with his abreaction, these layers have energy, they possess energy, they have a dynamic of their own. They are like hidden volcanoes, magma, lava, you know, and so the magma there erupts and becomes lava.

There are always these volcanic eruptions of the recessive type within the dominant barrier or firewall.

One could even conceive of the dominant type to be a kind of protective barrier, a kind of defense against the recessive type.

Very often in the etiology or the pathoethology of narcissism, in the developmental trajectory of narcissism, the narcissist develops a protective layer, a protective set of functions to deny and to repress and to ignore the recessive type.

Because something in the recessive type threatens the narcissist, challenges the narcissist's cognitive distortions and grandiosity, the narcissist's narrative, something there doesn't fit.

For example, if the narcissist has a self-image as a good, moral, helpful, loving, compassionate, caring, empathic person, this kind of narcissists would try to deny his covert narcissism. He would try to pretend to be a codependent or a victim of narcissistic abuse or an empath. But he would try to deny his covert narcissism.

Similarly, an overt, grandiose narcissist would try to deny his codependency because it's humiliating to be dependent on other people. It flies in the face of his self-perception as godlike and omnipotent and omniscient.

The dominant type definitely can be conceptualized as a massive, rigid defense against the true type which had become suppressed, latent, hidden and recessive, until it is brought to light, surfaces and erupts when the right circumstances and the appropriate environment provide for it.

This is an ongoing dissonance, it's an ongoing battle between dominant type and recessive type.

Everything we see online, all those YouTubers and coaches and victims, and you name it, and empaths, they are just enacting for us, this inner conflict between recessive and dominant type.

They're all narcissists. No exception in my kingdom. But they are just enacting, this amazing process of narcissistic tunneling.