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How Self Mediates External and Internal Realities

Uploaded 2/5/2025, approx. 13 minute read

In a dreamy previous video that I posted this week, I try to substantiate the claim that what we call the self is actually a dream state.

And that when we are awake, in a state of wakefulness, the dream state of the self tries to somehow convert reality into a dream-like simulation.

And there's a lot of analysis in that video, citations of scholarly literature and scholars' opinions and so forth. It's a very deep, not to say, profound video.

And today I would like to extend it a bit and discuss the role of the self in mental health and mental illness.

And apropos mental illness, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. And apropos mental illness, my name is Sam Vaknin and the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and a professor of psychology. Poor students.

Okay.

There is no question that the self somehow mediates between external reality and internal reality, between external states and internal states, between the internal environment and the external environment.

It would seem that the self is some kind of interface and that the distinction between external and internal is crucial to the emergence formation constellation and integration of the self.

The self has boundaries. The self is self- contained and self-referential.

The self, therefore, can be perceived as a kind of dictionary, translating information and stimuli coming from out there into information and stimuli which are innate.

And this dictionary does not pretend to be neutral or objective or scientific or observation or merely observation.

The self is a set of beliefs and preferences and values and predilections and proclivities and dispositions.

So the self is a highly biased structure, something that Freud and his daughter later Anna Freud called defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms actually falsify reality in order to render it more acceptable and palatable, less injurious and less disillant.

And the self makes use of defense mechanisms.

Now all this is part and parcel of my model of personality, the intrapsychic activation model, and there's a whole playlist dedicated to it on this channel.


But I would like today to take another path, another branch in the road, another fork, and to discuss the role of self in what we call mental illness.

So let's retrace.

The self mediates between external reality and internal reality. And the self does this by converting external reality into the language of internal reality in a way that does not destroy or adversely affect internal reality.

So the translation is highly goal-oriented, highly prejudiced.

Translation from the reality of the environment, the facts, the stimuli in the environment, the translation of the world into our minds, this translation is heavily influenced by self-interest, by the self-interest to maintain equilibrium and homeostasis internally and to allow for proper and smooth functioning in other.

The self gathers information from the environment and then converts it, translates it, changes it sometimes unrecognizably, so that it fits in with the internal narrative that governs our psychological processes and dynamics.

I call this rendering.

The self renders reality, like in a computer, you know, it renders reality.

We don't have direct access to reality as it is, but we have access to reality as it is mediated, translated, converted, mapped out, and so on, interfered with, and processed by the self.

Okay, so there is a process of rendering. and processed by the self.

Okay.

So there is a process of rendering.

But rendering requires huge amount of mental resources. It's a full-time job.

With the exception of sleep, and even this is debatable, because when we sleep, we dream.

The self is always on the alert. The self uses dollops of energy and time and emotions and cognitions and other resources and psychodynamics. The self mobilizes and recruits everything and everyone inside the internal space, every internal object, every introject, everything, absolutely everything. Self-mobilizes this army in order to somehow cope with the tsunami, the avalanche of information from the environment.

The self-filters out, 95% more or less, of this information, and then tries to tackle the remaining 5%, which in themselves, this percentage in itself, is overwhelming.

So there's a huge amount of investment and commitment and a huge amount of work behind the scenes.

The self therefore needs to be fully equipped to leverage the internal resources of the individual. Self needs to be unencumbered by any constraints and any extraneous demands. The self needs to be dedicated 100% to this task of somehow mediating reality.

When the self is depleted owing to stress in a state of crisis, internal or external, when the self needs to use energy or required to use energy in order to restore the inner balance, the inner peace, and the functioning of the individual, then there is a deficit of energy.

Energy that is used in order to somehow reduce anxiety or cope with depression or manage an inflated or buttress support, an inflated, fantastic, grandiose self-image, self-concept.

This energy consumption leaves the self with a suboptimal level of energy needed to cope with reality.

It's as if there's a law of conservation of energy.

You have only 100 energy units. Yourself can use these energy units, these 100 units, in order to somehow render reality livable tolerable bearable in order to allow you somehow to function in reality in a self-efficacious manner to guarantee reasonably favorable outcomes.

So 100 units the self needs these 100 units of energy and that's all you have you can't generate energy out of nowhere if you use 40 of these units for internal purposes which have nothing to do with reality.

The management of your internal environment, your internal objects, your interjections, your affects, your cognitions, cognitive distortions, if you need 40 units for processes that have nothing to do with reality, then it leaves the self with access to the remaining 60 units.

40 units are already consumed, 60 units are left, and 60 units are not enough.

Reality demands the full commitment and investment of 100 units if you have only 60 units at your disposal because you are stressed, you're in a crisis, you are broken, you are damaged, you are sad, you are depressed, you are consumed by emotions, you're emotionally dysregulated, whatever the case may be.

If 40 units are missing, then the self is faced with a conundrum, with a dilemma.

If the self were to try to cope with reality, equipped with 60 soldiers, 60 units, the 60 remaining units, reality would overwhelm you.

So what the self does, it shuts off either external reality or internal reality depending on the locus of the stressor.

The stress is coming from somewhere. The stress may be coming from the external reality. There's some threat. There is some disagreement. There's some problem. It's external. It be coming from the external reality, there's some threat, there is some disagreement, there's some problem, it's external, it's coming from out there, or the stress may be coming from the inside. You're emotionally dysregulated, you're depressed, you're anxious, you're fearful, some internal process is generating the stress.

So there's a locus of stress where the stressor is.

The self identifies the locus of stress and then it shuts it off.

The way to shut off the stress is to shut off access to the reality which gives rise to the stress.

So if the stress is emanating from the outside, your self will shut off the outside.

If the stress is emanating from the inside, your self will disable or deactivate your internal reality, your inside.

Something has to give.

Either the self denies, represses, avoids, ignores, withdraws from external reality because it's stressful and it taxes the resources, the scarce and limited resources of the individual.

So the self cuts the individual off from the source of the stress, of the ongoing stress.

Or the stress is coming from the inside.

And similarly, theself cuts the individual from the internal environment so as to mitigate or eliminate the stress altogether.

But of course this choice, which is pretty automatic, it's not a premeditated conscious process of reasoning, but it's like an automatic kind of lever or liver or level or something, you know, something mechanical almost.


But there are costs to these strategies, shutting off the external environment or shutting off the internal environment.

These are strategies of coping with stress because of the depletion of the energy needed to mediate the external environment and translate it into the language of the internal environment.

But there is a cost to these choices or these strategies.

When external reality is shut off, internal reality remains unadulterated.

In other words, when the external reality is eliminated, what remains is the authentic internal reality.

And ironically, that's exactly what we call mental illness.

In narcissism and psychosis, for example, there is no external reality.

The self has made a choice to focus inwards.

And so there's only an internal space populated with exclusively internal objects.

There is a confusion in narcissism and psychosis between internal and external, but the whole psychodynamics of the narcissist and or the psychotic is internal.

Both these types have no access to external reality.

And this applies to a large extent to many other disorders, mental health disorders.

We could generalize and say that when you cut off reality, when you divorce it, when you get detached from it, for whatever reason, you're mentally ill.

And yet, when you're not under the influence of external reality, when you are not bombarded by the translated messages of the self, as it tries desperately to render reality acceptable to you and palatable and helpful and desirable, when the self no longer mediates external reality, when you're all immersed in your inside yourself, solipsistically, that's mental illness.

And yet at that point who you truly are is not influenced by the environment. The environment has not say in determining who you are.

At that point, you are maximally authentic.

And maybe that's why in primitive societies and in ancient history, people with mental illness were considered to be the closest to God. They were considered to have privileged access to the truth or even to some magic or power because they were really authentic.

When you take away the external environment, what remains is the authenticity of the internal environment.

And then the self is preoccupied in maintaining this authenticity and ignoring the demands and the intrusions and the incursions of external reality.

So this is the cost of giving up on external reality.


What is the cost of giving up on internal reality when the stress emanates from the inside?

When you give up on internal reality, the results are known as dissociation or numbing.

So these are the options.

You dissociate external reality, and by dissociating external reality, you impoverish the internal reality.

For example, you have memory gaps, or you don't feel that you exist, depersonalization, or you don't feel that you exist depersonalization or you don't feel that reality is real de-realization.

In any case, at any rate, you disappear. It's an act of self-disappearance or self-disappearing.

Similarly, emotional numbing and reduced affect display, these are also strategies of coping with the switching off of the internal environment.

In short, when energy, mental, psychological energy, what came to be known as cathexis, when mental or psychic energy is consumed by internally generated stresses, the self disables the access to the external environment because it needs all the resources to cope with the internal crisis.

At that point, we have mental illness and simultaneously with the mental illness, we have a highly authentic, unadulterated, true picture of one's essence, of who you are.

Mental illness is you without social constraints, without social intervention, without socialization, without scripts, without outside influences.

Similarly, oradversely, when the self is forced to shut off internal reality, because this is where the stress is coming from, you die, essentially, psychologically speaking, you begin to dissociate.

The lack of continuous memory, the memory gaps, this lack undermines your core identity.

You gradually vanish for all intents and purposes.

Emotional numbing and reduced affect display have the same effect, basically.

You can either turn off reality or you can turn off yourself, and it is a choice made by the self.

This interface, this dictionary, this intermediary between the external and the internal.

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