How Psychopath Sees YOU, Experiences Others

Online experts who claim that all psychopaths are narcissists need to go back to school regardless of their academic degrees. Only a small portion are also narcissists.

But it is true that both narcissists and psychopaths are grandiose.

And whereas the locus of the narcissists' grandiosity can be anything, even victimhood, you know, I'm the ultimate victim, or in the ultimate genius, or whatever, the locus of the psychopath's grandiosity has to do usually with power. Power granted to him by money, power granted to him by sex, power.

And he cannot countenance and survive instances and reminiscences of disempowerment. He cannot cope with the realization that he is not as powerful as he wants to believe that he is.

And your transition from instrument to obstacle does this to him, reminds him of his limitations and incapacity, so he needs to eliminate.

Accomplishment of goals I mentioned yields gratification. It also upholds and buttresses the psychopath's grandiosity, but much more than that, it's a pleasure.

Whereas healthy people, normal people experience pleasure in a variety of ways, hundreds of ways, the psychopath experiences pleasure only when he has accomplished his goals.

Actually, the goals sometimes are not that important. It's the accomplishment of the goals, the attainment of the goals, having proven to himself that he is able to transcend all obstacles, the perseverance, the stamina that generate the gratification, the sense of unmitigated power over circumstances, over environments, over other people.

And it's the kind of power that is essential power. It's not power that the psychopath doesn't perceive his or her power as external, something that he has acquired. He perceives it as emanating from who he is.

Psychopath is power. You know, l'etat c'est moi, the state is I and the state. So the psychopath is his own power.

In this sense, the psychopath is self-generating. Everything comes from the inside, is innate, which is of course a godlike quality.

The psychopath's addiction to money or to sex is all about power.

And even the psychopath's addiction to power in many ways is secondary.

Attaining power, securing power, exercising power is a kind of self-affirmation.

The gratification is embedded or is the outcome of the psychopath's self-affirmation.

So when the psychopath has power, when he exercises power, when power is evident and the outcomes of power are discernible, the psychopath says, everything I think about myself must be true.

So power confirms to the psychopath that his self-perception and self-image are correct.

And all this emanates from anxiety.

Today we know recent studies have demonstrated and are demonstrating that psychopathy may be a compensatory reaction to anxiety.

Exactly like narcissism. Narcissism is a compensatory reaction to shame.

Psychopathy is a compensatory reaction to insecurity, a sense of lack of safety, dread, angst, anxiety.

The psychopath fears that he is on an alien, hostile, menacing planet.

And the only way to calm himself down, the only anxiolytic solution, anxiety-reducing solution, is to demonstrate to himself how powerful he is.

Because if he is infinitely powerful, he is finally safe. He is finally secure. He doesn't need to worry. He doesn't need to wake up at night, drenched in sweat. He doesn't need all this.

Now, the myth that psychopaths are fearless is a myth. They're not fearless. They're actually anxious.

It is true, though, that the bodies react differently to fear.

We don't know whether this is the outcome of some innate hereditary genetic template, or whether actually the psychopaths need to cope with threatening, traumatizing, abusive, dangerous environments has caused his brain to rewire and his body to change physiologically. We don't know what preceded what.

But it is a fact. The psychopath does not experience his anxiety, and does not experience his fear.

What he experiences when he's afraid, what he experiences when he's afraid, what he experiences when he's anxious is a surge of adrenaline.

The need to conquer, the need to assert control, the need to drive towards a goal and to occupy it, and to if necessary consume it and subsume it, to obliterate it or eradicate it, whatever the case may be, whatever the goal is defined, destructive or constructive.

It is the attainment of the goal that empowers the psychopath and it is this empowerment that calms him down, reduces his underlying generalized anxiety, and he experiences this as gratification.

We have a concept called object of instinct.

Object of instinct in classical psychoanalytic theory, it's an object which is sought in order to achieve satisfaction.

The object could be a person, a real inanimate object, a possession, it could be a behavior, it could be a goal, it could be a narrative, it could be anything.

So it's an object that is sought, that is pursued, that is conquered in order to achieve satisfaction.

This is called the internal aim.

So there's an external aim, which is the object to be taken over, the object to be secured, the object to be actualized and realized.

As I said, the object would be a project or a plan or an ID or a behavior or a person or a possession. Could be anything. Object is simply anything outside the self.

So this is the external aim.

And when the psychopath acquires this external aim, he achieves the internal aim, which is on the surface gratification and satisfaction, but in reality a reduction in generalized, all-consuming, underlying anxiety.

The aim of the instinct in psychoanalytic theory is the activity through which an instinct is gratified, resulting in the release of internal tension, anxiety.

And this is the instinctual aim. This is the mechanism which underlies psychopathy.

The psychopaths consequently cathects, or cathects, the cathexis is in goals.

Cathexis in the power to obtain goals, actually, to be more precise, not in the goals, but the cathexis is in the power to obtain goals.

Because this kind of power proves to the psychopath that he needsnot be afraid, he needs not be anxious, he need not be wary, he need not be hypervigilant, because the world is under control. This hostile, horrible, jungle, Darwinian landscape is under control. This alien, Martian soil is under his feet. He is in charge.

So the psychopath cathects the power that allows him to obtain goals, never people. He never cathects people.

What he does with people is known as reification or in colloquial terms objectification.

Reification is when you treat something outside yourself, could be another person, could be a possession, could be an abstraction, an ID, a concept, could be a formulation, could be a plan, could be a goal.

When you treat something outside yourselfas if it were an object, a material thing, you reify it.

So you take it literally. So reification is a fallacy of course.

And this is the process of objectification, converting living, breathing human beings into objects, inanimate objects, via reification.

But in the case of the psychopath, reification extends not only to people.

The psychopath reifies his goals. He objectifies them. He regards his goals the same way you and I would regard a shining new device. He reifies the power that he accumulates and exercises on the way to obtaining his goal. It becomes an object. Again, a shining new device.

The psychopath covets. It becomes an object, again, a shining new device.

The psychopath covets power. He craves power. He is addicted to power. He salivates over power because power is the only thing that can restore his inner equilibrium, his peace of mind, his homeostasis.

It is when he exercises power that it experiences elation, narcissistic elation.

Freud called it oceanic feeling. The merger with a symbolic, atavistic primordial mother. He mothers himself.

The psychopath becomes his own maternal figure, a secure base, a safe haven, when he acquires power. The power is his mother.

He perceives power as maternal, and then it allows him to take on the world.

In other words, to separate and individuate in effect.

You see, beginning to see the similarities with a shared fantasy in narcissism, and indeed the psychopath develops a shared fantasy with his goals, not with people.

There, he is distinct from the narcissist.

The narcissist develops a shared fantasy with people. People as props, people as actors in his shared fantasy, but people all the same.

The psychopath develops a shared fantasy with his goals, or much more precisely, the psychopath develops a shared fantasy with his power.

Whereas in the narcissist's shared fantasy, the intimate partner is the maternal figure, the new maternal figure.

In the psychopath's shared fantasy, power is the maternal figure.

Power is the psychopath's wet dream, literally. It's incestuous. There's an incestdynamic going on.

I keep saying object, object, object. Let's go back to basics.

An object, when we talk about people, an object is the other. That is, any person or symbolic representation of a person, that is not the self.

So when you have a human being, when you have a person outside of yourself, and you recognize that this person is not you, you recognize the boundaries, I end here, and this person begins, this person is not you. You recognize the boundaries. I end here and this person begins, this person ends here and I begin.

So when you recognize the externality and separateness of that other person, and you realize that this other person is the same as you via the mechanism of empathy.

When this happens, the other person ironically becomes an object.

And your behaviors, object I mean in psychological parlance, in psychological lingo.

When we say object in psychology, we mean a person outside yourselfand we mean that you recognize this person's externality and separateness. You recognize that this person is exactly like you. So then we call this kind of person an object in psychology, which tells you a lot about psychology. Anyhow, at that moment when you recognize the externality and separateness and equality of that other person, your behavior changes, you develop cognitions, develop emotions, you develop effects. The information about that other person changes you and affects your behavior, modifies, your behavior. And this is what we call object relations. We'll come to it in a minute. Psychoanalytic theory. There's a more expansive definition of object. Object as I've described now is a common definition in object relations theories. But in classical psychoanalytic theory and current psychoanalytic theory, when we use the word object, we mean something a lot more expansive. Object is anything in psychoanalytic theory. Object is anything. Person, thing, part of a body, symbol, plan, ID, I mean, you name it. Object is anything through which an instinct can achieve its aim of gratification. Period. Anything external to you and anything internal to you, which grants or guarantees gratification, instinctual gratification, is an object. So, in the case of the psychopath, this second definition pertains, not the first, because the psychopath regards everything as an object, not only everyone, but everything. Everything, the psychopath objectifies everything, including his sense of power, including himself, including other people, including plans and goals and objectives, and everything immediately, the psychopath immediately converts into an object, reifies everything. Whereas the narcissist reifies and objectifies, mostly people, the psychopath's reification or objectification is out of control. It's totally wild. The psychopath regards everything himself included as some kind of object. That's why psychopaths don't react the way you do to being wounded, physically wounded. They don't react the way you do to threats. Because the psychopath has objectified himself. He is one step removed. It's a kind of dissociation. The psychopath's tendency to reify and objectify everything, humans, abstracts, concepts, possessions, himself, you name it. This tendency is a kind of defensive dissociation. If the world is so horrible, if it's survival of the fittest, if it's nature red in tooth and claw, you know, if the world is a dystopian kind of environment, to dissociate yourself from the world, to remove yourself from the world, is a great idea, actually. And this is what the psychopath does. He cuts himself off the world. He no longer exists by becoming a rock, by becoming a stone. You know the famous horror movies and documentaries where psychopaths are described as stone-like? Or non-human in the inanimate sense. They're not animated. And that's because they have removed themselves from the scene. They're not there. And not only are they not there, there is no self which has been removed.

I mean, the psychopaths do possess. I want to be clear. Psychopards do possess a self, a fully constellated and integrated self. The formation of self-of-the-self or the ego in psychopathy is much less disrupted than in borderline and in narcissism. And in this sense, psychopathy ironically, psychopaths ironically, are much healthier, mentally healthier than narcissists and borderline.

But when the psychopath dissociates, because he needs to objectify himself, he removes even his self from the sin. He ceases to exist, kind of astral, astral trip. He just is not there. He's not there. And this imbues him with a sense of security, safety, enhances his power. So the source of the psychopath's power is his invalorability, impermeability, untouchability. Psychopath says, psychopath's message is, you can't do anything to me because I'm not here. And yes, this is very reminiscent of depersonalization and de-realization, essentially dissociative mechanisms. I've dedicated a video to this. You can watch it.

Taking yourself and de-realization, essentially dissociative mechanisms. I've dedicated a video to this. You can watch it.

It's taking yourself out of reality. It's telling yourself, this is not happening to me. Depersonalization. And, or this is not real. It's just a fantasy. Derealization.

The psychopath says, you have no power over me, and I have all the power over you, because there's nothing you can do to me, and I can do everything and anything to you. And you can do nothing to me because I'm not here. My body may be here, but nothing else, and nothing much more.

So I'm not here. My body may be here, but nothing else and nothing much more.

So I'm untouchable. I'm impermeable. I'm invulnerable. In short, I'm godlike.

There is a direct correlation between the level of dissociation in psychopathy and the level of perceived self-empowerment.

The higher, more pervasive, more profound the dissociation, the more the psychopath feels empowered. The more he feels present ironically, the more he feels in control and in charge, he is the boss, he's Godlike. He determines the faiths of everyone and everything around him.

You talk to any psychopath and they will describe this out-of-body experience. They will describe that when they were at the height of their power as they have perceived it, when they were killing someone, when they've accomplished a heist or a scam, when they were doing something which flew in the face of social mores and norms and the law and broke every rule and when they were defiant and when they were contumacious rejecting authority and when they were you know gung-ho super men powered whatever at that point they will tell you psychopaths will tell you that they felt they were not there. They felt as if they were observing something, watching something, moving, kind of.

It's a dissociation power equation in psychopathy.

Object relations in narcissism is mediated through the shared fantasy, and the narcissist has internal object relations. The narcissist's object relations with objects is with representations of external objects in his mind.

So, whereas healthy normal people have external object relations, they fall in love with someone out there, the narcissist has internal object relations. He falls in love with a representation of someone out there in his mind.

The psychopath's object relation is highly complex.

As I said, the psychopath is capable of perceiving the existence, the functioning, the separateness of external objects, unlike the narcissists.

Psychopath's reality testing is not impaired, it's intact, while the narcissist's reality testing is shot, is destroyed.

In other words, the narcissist is delusional and embedded in a fantasy defense, whereas the psychopath is not.

So the psychopath is capable of perceiving external objects and relating to that if they are instruments or obstacles.

And so in principle, the psychopath should be able to maintain object relations. He should be able to be responsive to the external existence of objects.

Object relations is an individual's relationship to their entire external world with emphasis of people.

In psychoanalysis, object relations is an individual's relationships to their objects, real or imagined, persons, activities, things that function as sources of connection, as well as libidinal or aggressive gratification.

In the case of the psychopath, there is a problem.

There is a problem because the psychopath is fully interactive with and responsive to the external world, including people in the external world.

But his relationship with people is premised on utility. What can people do for him or in which way they endanger and undermine his agenda.

So this inability to relate to people except insofar as they fit into a cunning scheme or project or a plan renders the psychopath's object relations very impoverished in one-dimensional and yet whereas the narcissism has object relations only with internal objects and whereas the borderline has object relations only with external objects, the psychopath has object relations with external objects, having reduced them to their utility, to a pinpoint-like entity.

Remember how we started the lecture?

This has to do a lot with object cathexis, the investment of libido, the investment of psychic energy, emotional energy, cognitive energyin objects outside the self.

A person, God, ID, activity, plan, goal, they're all outside the selfand you invest energy in these things.

When you love someone, invest energy in them. When you have a plan, you pursue it, you invest energy in it.

This process is called cathexis.

There is a problem with object cathexis in psychopathyand it underlies, gives rise to the problem in object relations.

The psychopath does not cathect the object.

He cathects what the object can give him. He cathects how the object can promote his agenda. He cathects the goal. He collects the power that he has over the object, over the person.

So he doesn't cathect people. He cathects the interaction with people and much more precisely he cathects his side of the interaction with people.

So the psychopath is self-cathecting.

The psychopath perceives other people as external, but as one would perceive pawns on a chessboard.

The psychopath is emotionally invested in his power over people, on what people can give him, on what people, how they can promote his accomplishments, guarantee them, or how can they obstruct and hinder his progress.

He's cathected in all these, but not in the people themselves.

The same way a chess player is emotionally invested in the game and in winning or even in the adversary but the chess player is never emotionally invested in the pieces in the pieces of chess is not emotionally invested in the pawn or the knight or the queen of the king they're mere instruments and sometimes they're obstacles.

You could perceive, you could visualize or you could conceptualize and definitely verbalize the psychopath's internal world is an infinite chess game where all people are pieces on a board, that would be getting very close to the psychology of the psychopath.

Psychopath has a problem with people, but not the same problem that a narcissist or a borderline has.

If we want to delve deeper and understand why psychopaths end up the way they do something, an exploration which I did with narcissists and borderlines, I will give you a hint because I'll dedicate a video to it much further down the road, but I will give you a hint.

But before I give you this hint, we need to define a concept known as object constancy.

In object relations theory, an object constancy is an infantile feature, feature of infancy, early childhood.

It is the ability of the infant to maintain an attachment, attachment that is relatively independent of gratification or frustration, based on a cognitive capacity to conceive of a mother who exists when she is out of sight, and a mother who has positive attributes, even when she is frustrating, rejecting and unsatisfying.

In other words, object consistency relies on two psychological processes, two psychological dynamics.

The ability to retain an image of a person who is not physically present.

Mother left the room, but she is still in my head, says the infant, I can still see her in my mind's eye.

And the second mechanism of process or dynamic is the ability to integrate the negative and positive features of a person into a single unified vision.

In other words, to countermand splitting.

When you put these two together, you get object constancy.

The infant becomes attached to the mother herself, rather than to her attention reducing administrations.

So he gets attached to the mother, not to the functions of the mother. He gets attached to mother, not to what mother does for the child, for the infant. The infant gets attached to mother, not to how she comports or herself or behaves.

So the mother comes to exist continuously for the infant, not only when the infant needs her, not only when she satisfies the infant's needs, not only when she frustrates the infant, she's there, a continuous presence.

It is an investment by the infant in a specific libidinal object.

And this also means that mother becomes unique. She is no longer interchangeable with someone else. The infant has fixated her. The infant has created a fixed image of her, an internal object, an imago, an introject of her, in the infant's mind, in his or her mind.

And so from that moment on, she is recognizable in the infant's mind, in his or her mind. And so from that moment on, she is recognizable. She cannot be confused or conflated with anyone else.

So this is object constancy.

And remember this when we discuss psychopathy.

There's also a concept of object loss.

In psychoanalytic theory, the actual loss of a person who served as a good object is known as object loss. A good mother, for example, or good enough mother. The child is afraid to lose her.

So what the child does, he interjects her. He creates a snapshot of her, an internal object, a photograph of her, and he internalizes it. He puts this in his mind.

From that moment on, the infant has a representation of the good object in his or her mind, and this reduces the separation anxiety. The anxiety about the possible loss of a good object begins with panic. The infant panics about being separated, being abandoned, being rejected. It's known clinically as separation insecurity.

So what's the solution?

You make a photograph of mommy, you place it in your mind and you're safe because mommy now is always there.

Adult grief and mourning are examples of object loss and separation anxiety. Adult grief and mourning trigger infantile separation anxiety and infantile object loss anxiety in infancy and childhood.

And this complicates of course the grief reaction.

Okay. Object consistency, object loss. If you have difficulty to retain this information in your head, go back, listen to it again, make notes. Be good students. All right?

And I will now discuss object permanence.

In the wake of all these concepts, we put them together, and I'll attempt to explain the dynamics inside the psychopath's mind.

But we need to get acquainted with these concepts. Otherwise, whatever it is that I have to say will sound nonsensical. It usually sounds nonsensical, but I'm trying to reduce this.

Okay, Shoshanim.

Object permanence was first described by Jean Piaget, the eminent child psychologist. I still haven't decided who was number one child psychologist. Winnicott, Piaget, Mahler, and so I think Piaget is a claim.

So object permanence is the knowledge of the continued existence of objects even when they are not directly perceived, even when they are not physically present.

According to Jean-Piaget, object permanence develops gradually in infants during what he called the sensory motor stage of cognitive development.

And there are milestones that indicate the acquisition of object permanence. Piaget was very like Mahler. Piaget was very meticulous in documenting his observations of children.

And so he broke it down to stages. The same way Erickson broke down life, the lifespan, into stages. Piaget did the same with childhood.

He said that if we observe children, we can see the moment or the time or the period when they begin to develop object permanence.

When the child reaches for and retrieves a covered object, the object is covered, but the child knows that under the cover there's an object. It's an example of object permanence, and this happens between ages 8 and 12 months.

Or when a child retrieves an object at location B, even though it was previously hidden several times in location A. Again, the same time frame, 8 to 12 months. The child can conceptualize that the object is the same, never mind that the location has changed. This is known by the way as the A not B task.

Or when the child removes a series of covers to retrieve an object, even though the infant only witnessed the object being hidden under the outermost cover. This is known as invisible displacement. It happens usually between the ages of 18 and 24 months.

So, these are the reaching tasks when the child reaches out to an object, even though there's no hint of the object's physical presence. It's covered or relocated or something, dislocated.

Now, more recent research using non-reaching tasks suggest that infants display some knowledge of object permanence at a much earlier stage than suggested by Piaget.

And this sits well with the work of Fairbairn about ego.

Fairbairn and Melanie Klein claim the children are born with an ego. They don't develop it, they don't constantly integrate it, but they're born with it.

Okay, I will not get to go into it right now.

Let's go back to the psychopath.

Remember that psychopaths are probably born. There's a strong hereditary component in psychopathy, genetic component.

There are brain abnormalities in psychopathy, pronounced brain abnormalities, amygdala, grey matter, you name.

And there is a difference between the physiological reactions of the psychopath's body and the physiological reaction of a normal body.

For example, psychopaths sweat much less. Their pupils don't dilate when they are exposed to horror, pictures of horror, photographs of horror, and so on.

So we know that psychopaths are different, even kind of a species unto their own, an alien species.

But never forget that every genetic and hereditary predisposition is triggered by the environment.

You could be born for a predisposition for narcissism, but it would remain dormant and latent if the environment is loving and compassionate and containing and holding.

Psychopaths grow up in abusive, traumatizing, violent, aggressive, shocking, terrifying, terrorizing families. That has been proven in umpteen studies.

The incidence and prevalence of adverse childhood experiences among psychopaths is much higher by multiples than the incidence of prevalence of such bad experiences among more normal or healthy people.

Psychopaths have been exposed to a terrible childhood in dysfunctional families. Anything from substance and drug abuse to beatings to, I mean, you name it.

So, psychopaths were not exposed to a good object.

Psychopaths were not exposed to loving parents, holding parents, understanding and accepting parents. They were exposed to animals. They were exposed to bestial criminals. They were exposed to the most horrific torture.

And so they did not have a good object outside. They didn't have a mother or a father. They could consider to be good objects.

Because they had only a bad, external bad object, they never experienced object loss.

I mean, if your father or your mother keeps beating you up to pulp, almost killing you in the process day in and day out, you're not likely to regard them as good objects and you're not likely to grieve if they were to die. You're not likely to experience the terror or the anxiety of object loss. And you're not likely to feel the need to interject them.

Why would you interject an abusive, traumatizing mother, for example? You wouldn't.

I mean, there's another process known as the primitive superego, the internalization of a bad object. That is an unconscious process.

But classical interjection fails in psychopathy.

Because classical interjection fails, psychopaths have no object constancy, and that is similar to narcissists.

Both psychopaths and narcissists have been exposed to horrendous parenting, to dead mothers, to evil parents.

And so both of them did not experienceobject loss, and both of them failed to introject in some ways.

So like the narcissist, the psychopath has no object consistency.

But the psychopath also doesn't have introject consistency because of the failure to introject.

So the psychopath is a combination of narcissists and borderline.

You remember the narcissist has object in constancy and introject constancy.

The borderline has object constancy and introject inconstancy.

The psychopath has object in constancy and introject inconstancy.

The psychopath has object in constancy and introject inconstancy.

So the psychopath is unable to relate to you not only when you are out there as external objects, he is unable to relate even to internal objects that represent you in his mind because he doesn't form them. He doesn't create them.

His reality testing is intact.

So he is able to tell that you're out there. He's able to perceive and recognize and accept your externality and separateness, but there is no emotional resonance to it.

It's as if this were some kind of objective knowledge.

I don't know, the distance to the sun is 150 million miles or kilometers, whatever it is.

So, you know, okay, so what? There's a so what thing with psychopaths.

You're out there, you're externally, you separate, you have wishes, you have dreams, you have fantasies, you have hopes, you're afraid, you have cognition, you have emotions, so what?

And there is no internal object inside the psychopath with which the psychopath could continue the interaction, or which the psychopath could use to try to understand you out there.

No, nothing.

You are there, you're out there, so what, and you're not in here, so what, and you're a so what attitude.

Whereas the narcissist internalizes you and continues to interact with the internal object.

So at least there's a tenuous connection to you somehow.

Maybe not to you, but to your representation in the narcissist's mind, to the memory of you in the narcissist's mind, to this snapshot, a moment in time, frozen, but at least this.

The same with the borderline.

She cannot maintain an internal object in her mind, which represents you, but when you're there, she's all over you. She's intensely interacting.

The psychopath is like a totally disinterested board observer.

You're out there, okay. You're not in here. Okay. Who cares? Why would I waste my time, energy, emotions on this? I have better things to do.

You do exist out there, but this existence doesn't resonate with the psychopath.

It doesn't provoke any emotional reactions, cognitions, nothing.

It's as if you did not exist.

It's same like knowing that atoms are comprised of neutrons, I mean the nucleus of atoms is comprised of neutrons and protons.

So, okay, so you know they're out there, but do they have any impact on you, in any way, shape or form?

No. This knowledge has zero impact on you.

The knowledge of your existence has zero impact on the psychopath.

I think the distinguishing feature of psychopathy is extreme apathy, extreme indifference, bordering on affective paralysis, flat affect, flat attachment, flat everything.

The psychopath is a reified flat line.

In this sense, he's dead. It's totally dead, externally and internal.

Whereas in the narcissists, there are still some dynamics going on.

In the borderline, there's drama.

With a psychopath, there is just the dead stare of a dead fish.

And it's a fish.

The dead stare of a dead shark.

And it's a shark who is after your blood.

Because as far as a psychopath is concerned, your externality, your external reality is exactly like blood in the water for a shark.

I hope I succeeded to capture and to convey some of this utterly surreal existence, experience.

Another problem with psychopaths is known as object of consciousness issue.

Object of consciousness is a clinical term, a concept.

Perceived object is distinct from the perceiver.

The separation of observer and observed is a contentious issue in philosophy.

And there are some philosophies, philosophical schools, like phenomenology, which contest this.

They say this distinction, this cousin, this breaking of the world, the universe, breaking of the universe into observed and observer is artificial and new developments in quantum mechanics a hundred years ago tended to somehow substantiate this perception that observer and observed a one and so on so forth.

But in psychology, we do make the distinction between the perceived object and the perceiver, the distinction between the perceived object and the perceiver is not illusory, this is not Buddhism, this is not Vedanta philosophy, we do make this distinction in psychology and we say that object of consciousness is anything of which the mind is conscious, including perceptions, mental images, internal objects, external objects, emotions, anything the mind becomes aware of is an object of consciousness.

And it involves an observing eye.

Someone is doing the observing, some ego, some eye, some call it as you wish.

But there is an observer, definitely.

And this is, the observer is the subject of consciousness.

It's subjective.

This observing ego, observing I, this is the subject.

This is the subject and the subject observes the object.

This is how we perceive.

Of course, with the psychopath, there is a problem here.

Because of the aforementioned issue with objects, with object constancy and introject constancy, there is an inability to maintain the process of observation based on this separation between observer and observed.

Again, don't confuse this with the ability to externalize.

The psychopath recognizes your externality.

But this is just a fact. It's just a fact. Something taken out of Wikipedia. The sun exists and you exist. Okay, existence. You know?

It doesn't resonate with the psychopath. It doesn't change the psychopath in any way, emotionally, cognitively, affectively, behaviorally, is not change.

And because you don't change the psychopath, for all practical purposes, you don't exist.

And so, the psychopath has difficulty to distinguish the process of observation from the process of occupation, or the process of acquisition, or the process of overpowering, or the process of conquering.

The only way the psychopath observes you as an object of consciousness is when he appropriates you, annexes you, takes over you, usually in a hostile manner, makes what's yours is.

So it is the process of acquisition.

This interaction of essentially merger and fusion by force, coerced merger and fusion, that brings your external existence to the psychopath's attention and awareness.

So the psychopaths actually accepts your externality and separateness as challenges, as triggers.

They provoke him the need to eliminate you.

Either eliminate you via incorporation by becoming one with you, or taking over you, or eliminate you by killing you, destroying you.

In the psychopath's world, eradication, obliteration, destruction are the only modes of communicating with reality. You included.

Because they are the only ones which guarantee safety and security in a hostile, dangerous, menacing world.

And because the psychopath doesn't have object constancy and doesn't have introject consistency, he has no problem, moral, or otherwise, to destroy you, or to assimilate you, or to consume you, or to obliterate you, because by doing this to you, he is not reverting from object constancy to object inconstancy.

It doesn't trigger in him any sense of loss, any anxiety, any fear.

And also, it doesn't change the internal balance and furniture in his mind.

You don't exist in his mind. There's no introject there.

The narcissist, when he devalues you and discards you, this has a massive impact on the narcissism because it transforms the internal object into a persecutory object, into an enemy.

This is not the case with the psychopath. There's no internal object there. Well, no meaningful or stable internal object.

So, using you and getting rid of you, this is done as an afterthought, off-handedly. It's part of a scheme, part of a plan, part of an agenda. You just happen to be there. Your collateral damage, so to speak. You're faceless. You're not humanized, you're dehumanized.

And remember the metaphor or the simile of the chessboard, it's being moved on the board.

There is a theory about the functions of the self and so forth, it was first proposed by William James, it's one of my favorites, I mentioned it before in some of my videos.

William James said that there are various kinds of functions of the self. There is the self as the observer, the self that has access to conscious experience and knowledge, including knowledge of the self.

William James contrasted this with the self as known, and it is synonymous with the nominative self, the I.

And he said that the self as known is the self that is known through reflection. It's very similar to the empirical self. It contrasts with the self as observer or knower. And it's synonymous with the me.

So we're beginning to see the structure. There's a self as known, I know myself, I know me. There's a self as an observer, I'm observing others, I'm observing also myself.

The nominative self is the self as knower of the self rather than the self so known.

In the psychology of William James, the nominative self or the I is contrasted with the empirical self or the me, the self that is known by the self rather than the self as nowhere.

So there's one self as the self who knows, and one self as the self who is known by the self who knows.

In the psychology of William James, the empirical self is held to consist of the material self, everything material that can be seen as belonging to the self, the social self, the self as perceived by others, and the spiritual self, the self that is closest to one's core subjective experience of oneself.

So the empirical self, the me, is not the nominative self, the I, the observer.

Now the social self, this is a combination or compilation of aspects of one's identity or self-concept that are important to or influenced by interpersonal relationships and the reactions to other people.

So the social self also includes characteristic behaviors in social situations and the persona, the mask, the facade that an individual exhibits when they are in contact with other people as contrasted with their real self.

Self as agent is a self that has goals, plans and control over voluntary actions.

Gordon Allport and others considered this term self as agent to be similar in meaning to the I or the nominative self, the self observer.

So the aspect of the self that has agency, the aspect of the self that plays a role in a psychic process or in anything, in goal accomplishment, is closer to the me, to the empirical self.

Okay, why did I mention all this?

Because the psychopath doesn't have a self as an observer. He doesn't have the self as an observer because he has no internal object or no capacity to introject.

These internal objects always include a representation of the self. They include a representation of an external object or someone out there, combined with a representation of the self.

When you don't have introjection, or the interjection process is disrupted, there is a problem with the perception of the self.

And this, of course, disrupts the ability to observe oneself.

So psychopaths are not self-aware.

And, much more importantly, it destroys the capacity to develop a social self so psychopaths are not influenced by interpersonal relationships by reactions of other people.

They are divorced, they are, as I said, impervious, impenetrable, untouchable.

You could say anything to them. You can punish them.

They are unchanged, immutable, like a stone.

Because they don't have this rich internal world that even the narcissists have.

Internally, it's a wasteland. There are no internal objects here.

Of course there are internal objects, but they are not like the kind of internal objects that we usually discuss when we discuss pathologies of the self.

There is nothing there except an extremely primitive self, nuclear self, that strives for mastery and control of the environment because it catastrophizes and anticipates the worst and regards other people as tools, instruments or obstacles in a chess game that never ends where the adversary is the devil himself.