Pathological narcissism was first described in 1897, if my memory doesn't fail me, by Havelock Ellis.
And then, in 1914, Sigmund Freud embedded the idea of pathological versus healthy narcissism in a clinical framework which is highly debatable and currently is being depreciated and devalued and we'll leave all that aside.
In the late 1980s I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse and coin a new language, a new vocabulary to deal with this phenomenon, which is still in use today.
And yet, narcissism, pathological narcissism is, of course, not a new phenomenon.
From time immemorial, we have had narcissists among us, and these narcissists have behaved exactly the same way they do today.
Narcissism mentioned very clearly in the Bible, especially the New Testament. Narcissism is mentioned in numerous scriptures, early writings of the Greeks, medieval era, and so on so forth.
Nothing new about narcissism.
And throughout the ages, throughout these periods in history, narcissism had other names.
Megalomania, hubris, egotism, self-centeredness, the Peter Pan syndrome, Puer Aeternus, the eternal adolescent, and so on and so forth.
And yet the question remains, these other terms, non-clinical terms, are they synonymous with pathological narcissism, or do they designate something completely different known as narcissistic style?
To which extent these two phenomena, pathological narcissism and for example hubris, are co- and equal.
And so this is the topic of today's video.
My name is Sam Vaknin I'm the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited and a professor of psychology.
No one disputes the fact that exposure to life circumstances, adverse childhood experiences, trauma, abuse, mishaps, no one disputes the fact that when you're exposed to these kind of adverse life experiences, this gives rise to emerging narcissistic behaviors, narcissistic traits, and even one could say narcissistic cognitions and affects or lack of affects.
For example, CPTSD, complex trauma, leads to the emergence of a kind of clinical syndrome that can be indistinguishable from covert narcissism.
When you're exposed to complex trauma over many years, you are likely to change. There's a transformation in the victim.
And the person who endures complex trauma becomes more and more narcissistic, more and more psychopathic, behaves differently, develops new traits and becomes a replica or a simulation of the source of the abuse of the abuser.
However, complex trauma leads to the emergence of covert narcissism, while acquiring fame and riches result in overt narcissism.
That is a very important distinction.
If you are exposed to adverse life experiences, you are likely to develop covert, defensive, fragile, vulnerable narcissism.
If you're exposed to life circumstances and an environment which is enhancing or self-enhancing, environments which endows you with fame and celebrity and riches and access and power, this kind of environment is also likely to change you into the equivalent of a narcissist, but your narcissism, your emergent late onset adulthood narcissism would be overt.
Now both overt and covert narcissism involve grandiosity, but the overt type is usually also antisocial, a bit or a lot, psychopathic.
I'm going to focus today on hubris. Hubris has to do with the second type.
Many people experience pride in their accomplishments, but pride can segue quite easily into arrogance and haughtiness and a lack of humility.
Power and success are incentives to behave in ways which are indistinguishable from pathological narcissism.
And this is what is known colloquially as the hubris syndrome, supposedly a psychiatric disorder that is increasingly widespread in today's society, narcissism being a kind of positive adaptation.
Narcissism pays. Narcissism is a winning strategy.
The term hubris syndrome was coined by David Owen, a British neurologist. He wrote a book titled In Sickness and in Health: The Politics of Medicine, back in 2008.
There's nothing new about this alleged syndrome. It's an example of renaming and rebranding previous work, just possibly in order to gain celebrity and money.
Be that as it may, David Owen analyzed the behavior of well-known political figures and he diagnosed them with this hubris syndrome or hubris disorder which he defined as acquired and irreversible. Again, this was just a renaming and rebranding of previous work done in Harvard University and what is known as acquired situational narcissism.
I'll come to it a bit later, the work of Dr. Millman.
Now, the hubris syndrome involves vanity, pride that is essentially arrogant in the sense that it is incommensurate with real-life accomplishments. It exceeds the credit that one should get for one's accomplishments.
Pride that in other words is fantasy-based, unrealistic, not grounded, a lack of humility and difficulty accepting criticism.
All these reduce empathy. When you feel prideful, you also feel contemptuous toward people who you perceive as inferior to you. There's a superiority complex. The inability to accept feedback from the environment, which is critical, it hampers the capacity to learn.
And so all this reduces empathy.
And gradually, this kind of person who is exposed to inordinate riches, a lot of power, access, fame, celebrity, adulation, admiration, this kind of person begins to disregard the opinions, the needs of others, begins to develop eccentric behavior, which is sometimes highly sadistic or contemptuous or abusive, and begins to internalize, introject other people, begins to disregard other people's separateness, externality, personal autonomy, agency, independence, wishes, needs, emotions, priorities and dreams. Other people become mere instruments or extensions.
I've just watched yesterday the new film with Adrian Brody, The Brutalist, wonderful movie, which is about the hubris syndrome, actually.
And so it would stand to reason that the hubris syndrome, such as it it's not a clinical entity it's just another name, it stands to reason that this kind of complex of behaviors and traits and cognitions and emotions, this reactive complex, it's a form ofance, it stands to reason that it would characterize people who are in the public eye, most notably perhaps politicians.
In his research, Owen had the help of Jonathan Davidson, psychiatrist and a professor at Duke University in the United States.
They created psychological profiles of several former leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom and analyzed them.
And they asked the basic question, who among these leaders exhibited the hubris syndrome?
What they've concluded is, was that several of these leaders, at the time, George W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, among others, I think they should have included Winston Churchill, definitely.
They concluded that these people suffered from this disorder, since they showed evidence signs of arrogance in their personality.
But limiting the sample to politicians would be wrong.
The same behaviors emerge among military personnel, businessmen, show business and media figures in the entertainment field, and so.
Historically, this type of behavior is closely linked both to power and to exposure.
And the focus should always be on people who combine the two.
They have some kind of leverage over other people or society at large, and they are exposed to the public eye, to the public gaze. They're constantly on display, rendering themselves more and more exhibitionistic and ostentatious, powerful groups in society, such as the military, religious figures, businessmen, company executives, and the list is long.
Even, for example, surgeons, medical doctors, and so on so forth, there have been studies that demonstrated that the preponderance or prevalence of psychopathy among chief executive offices of major companies and surgeons is very high or higher than the general population, about five times higher.
Now we cannot ignore the role of technology in all this.
The political class continues to be a great point of reference, of course, and good examples can be found among other spheres of human activities, such as business, or very rich people, people with multi-million or multi-billion dollar fortunes, whether inherited or made, and the role of inheritance is much neglected as Thomas Piketty has taught us.
But it seems that all of us are becoming mini-celebrities. All of us are gaining access. All of us are getting exposed. All of us are developing a modicum of power through narrow casting.
We all have followers and fans and subscribers and what have you. Anywhere from 400 to 400,000.
So it seems that the digital world, technologies, especially modern technologies, create this simulacrum, the simulacra of power for many, many people, for a huge part of a population who have never experienced it before.
People who have never had access, who have never had power, who've never had follow sheep, and so on, suddenly do through Instagram or through TikTok or through you name it.
And they are not used to it. They don't have the tools to cope with it. Their psychology is massively affected.
Actually, one often, oft-cited example is Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, SpaceX and the undeclared Tsar of Dodge.
Musk has been widely criticized for bullying behavior, arrogance, aligning himself with misinformation and worse, lack of empathy, which is highly evident and so and so forth.
There are good grounds to assume that Elon Musk has a sadistic narcissistic personality disorder.
Of course, he attributed to himself autism. He self-diagnosed, being a narcissist, he didn't need anyone to diagnose him. He is the ultimate authority on autism spectrum disorder and he diagnosed himself with autism but this is evidently untrue.
In my opinion, Elon Musk doesn't have a trace or a shred of autism and he has a lot of malignant sadistic narcissism in him.
And so the question arises, did he develop it as a result of his increasing power, riches and exposure? Or was he somehow born with malignant sadistic narcissism? Or his early childhood environment and experiences have created, have made, have converted him into a pathological narcissism.
It's a nurture versus nature debate.
But even within the nurture sphere, the question is, is Elon Musk's sadistic, malignant narcissism, psychopathic narcissism, the outcome of adverse early childhood experiences, or is it a late onset phenomenon, brought on by his ascendance, meteoric ascendance, stratospheric ascendance.
There are other billionaires which we can compare Musk to the late Stephen Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and they all show symptoms of the hubris syndrome.
They're obsessed with, or where in the case of Stephen Jobs, obsessed with control. They are arrogant, lack empathy, self-centered. They treat employees seriously badly.
And again, what we fail to kind of disentangle is where did it all start? Were they born like that? Where they brought up to become narcissists, having been exposed to trauma and abuse?
We know that Elon Musk has been exposed to what he describes as a highly traumatizing father figure, and a mother who in her own right seems to be extremely highly narcissistic.
So was it that or was it something that developed later on?
In recent times the problem is not limited to multibillionaires. It has spread to huge population groups.
Influencers, gamers on YouTube, other YouTubers. People make a lot of money, sometimes quickly and easily, or they gain exposure to huge groups or followers, or they become influential somehow.
And this leads them to ostentatiousness. They begin to display, like Andrew Tate for example, begin to display their lifestyle and their winnings and their access and their power. So there's a lot of exhibitionism involved.
Some would say that people like Andrew Tate and Elon Musk were narcissists long before their success and their success only served to amplify and augment their pathological narcissism
Others would say that people like, for example, Bill Gates or perhaps Steve Jobs and so on, or Mark Zuckerberg, became narcissists owing to their success
It's an open question
But what is becoming clear is that the Hubris syndrome is not limited to elites. It is far more common than we think. It affects anyone or can affect anyone who reaches certain levels of power and exposure, even on a small scale within a work or a social context
Power, access, riches, fame, within a work or a social context. Power, access, riches, fame, celebrity. They seem to corrupt
The ancients were right about this. Absolute power corrupts absolutely
There was a study carried out in the 1970s by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. At the time he was at Stanford University in the US
Zimbardo demonstrated how power can easily corrupt human beings. He created an artificial prison environment, a fictional prison in the university, and they locked up 24 young people
They divided these young people into jailers or wardens and inmates
A few days after the experiment began, it was already possible to observe how the jailers or the wardens, which were classmates of the inmates or the prisoners, how they began to show heirs of superiority, and how they began to severely mistreat the so-called prisoners, the power given to them, corrupted them, the power given to them, it rendered them psychopathic narcissists
And all these happened within a few days
There seem to be four phases, according to Owen and Davidson. They claim in their studies that people who end up suffering from the Hubris syndrome go through a series of stages that starts with self-confidence when things go really, really well consistently
This leads to flattery. Everyone around them has an agenda. People flatter them and cajole them and so on in order to get a piece of the pie
Success is achieved and these people are beginning to be socially isolated. They surround themselves with flatterers and yes men and sycophants and acolytes and they lose touch with reality, with humanity at large, with the environment
This ends up leading to arrogance and finally paranoia
Paranoid ideation, as I've been saying, for many, many decades, it's just a form of narcissism. The paranoid believes that he or she is at the center of some kind of malign or malevolent attention, and this is a self-aggrandizing notion
How could we tell if someone suffers from the hubris syndrome? I'm not sure suffering is the right word in this case, but how can we tell if someone is afflicted by the hubris syndrome?
So there's a series of symptoms that identify the hubris syndrome, seeing the world as the ideal space to achieve power and glory
This is what I call pathological narcissistic space
Carrying out actions that are self-enhancing, a lot of self-enhancement, and rejecting any information to the contrary, rejected for example, criticism or disagreement, an obsessive quality to all this
And once power is achieved, it is used mostly for self-glorification rather than in order to accomplish whatever goals may be
So people with the hubris syndrome are essentially in pursuit on the quest for narcissistic supply, money, power, fame, celebrity, access, they all means to an end
And the end is self-glamourization, self-glorification, self-enhancement
This fantasy of an inflated, grandiose self-concept that needs to be constantly buttressed and constantly fed. It's a voracious fantasy
And so this is the hallmark of the Hubris syndrome
The psychopath, when he obtains power, and majority of psychopaths are men, when he obtains power, the psychopath uses this power to accomplish something, to achieve something, to appropriate something, to expropriate something, to own and to possess something
It could be sex, it could be money, it could be, you name it. Psychopaths are goal-oriented and they have many possible goals.
Narcissists, everything they do is about obtaining supply. This is a key feature of the Hubris syndrome.
Narcissists, of course, believe that they are vastly superior to everyone else. They hold everyone, everybody in contempt. They're above everybody. So they're very self-confident.
Indeed, there is something called the self-confident style described by Oldham and others. And self-confident style is a bit indistinguishable from what came to be known as the narcissistic style, so self-confidence is an indicator of the hubris syndrome.
It's a self-confidence door that is highly, I would even say counterintuitive, counterfactual definitely, but counterintuitive. It is the kind of self-confidence that impairs reality testing.
These people lose touch with reality. They tend to speak of themselves in the third person. They consider themselves rescuers or saviors or fixers or healers or messiahs or kings.
And it is with this conviction that they develop the presumption, that they answer to no one and to no law. They're above the law. They're above the any impediments and obstacles that are posed or presented or introduced by the Hoi Poloi, by the masses. They're above all these.
They can't admit that they are wrong.
Owen points out in the aforementioned book that there comes a time when these types of people stop listening. They become reckless, make decisions on their own. They don't consult anyone before making the decision or before making a choice because they think that only their ideas are correct and they are the ultimate geniuses that can never be wrong.
They will never admit even when proven wrong that they had been wrong. They would accuse someone. They have alloplastic defenses. They would accuse the deep state or the environment or history or anyone or anything but themselves.
The Hubris syndrome therefore comes perilously close to what we know is narcissistic personality disorder. And it combines antisocial, histrionic, and narcissistic elements.
In our current society, our contemporary civilization, there's a fertile ground for the Hubris syndrome, the unjust ways in which the world is currently structured, anything from income and wealth inequalities, down to injustice, pure injustice. This generates power asymmetries that can result in the Hubris syndrome.
But, as I said, the Hubris syndrome is just another name for what much earlier has been defined by Millman and others and came to be known as acquired situational narcissism and in my work in the 1980s, late onset narcissism.
Narcissistic personality disorder is a systemic or pervasive condition, very much like pregnancy. Either you have it or you don't. I'm talking about the personality disorder, not the style.
Once you have narcissistic personality disorder, you have it all the time, day and night. It is an inseparable part of the personality. It's actually the personality. And it's a recurrent set of behavioral patterns.
As early as 1996, Ronningstam and others suggested that there's a condition which might be called transient or temporary or short-term narcissism as opposed to the full-fledged version.
And even prior to the discovery, there was definitely a study of reactive narcissistic regression. It was well known and featured in a lot of the literature. The clinical literature has documented cases where people regress to a transient narcissistic phase in response to a major life crisis or complex trauma and this threaten their mental composure. Reactive or transient narcissism may also be triggered by medical or organic conditions such as brain trauma and injury. Brain injuries have been known to induce narcissistic and antisocial traits and behaviors throughout the lifespan, lifelong.
But can narcissism be learned? Can it be an acquired system of behaviors, cognitions, and effects? Can it be provoked by certain well-defined situations?
So as I said, Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at New York Hospital Cornell Medical School at the time suggested that it could. Millman proposed to reverse the accepted chronology.
According to Milman, pathological narcissism can be induced in adulthood by exposure to celebrity, wealth, fame, access, power.
Lidia Gengelowska suggested that it can only form an integral part of CPTSD in victims of traumatic narcissistic abuse.
The victims of complex trauma indeed display increasingly more narcissistic traits and behaviors.
Back to acquired situational narcissism, Millman's work.
According to him, the victims, billionaire tycoons, movie stars, renowned authors, rock stars, politicians, authority figures, all these people develop grandiose fantasies, lose their erstwhile ability to empathize, react with rage to slights, real and imagined, so they're hypervigilant, and in general act like textbook narcissists.
He said that it is a form of late onset, adult secondary narcissism.
But is the occurrence of acquired situational narcissism inevitable and universal, or are only certain people prone to it?
It is likely that acquired situational narcissism is merely an amplification of earlier narcissistic conduct traits, style, tendencies, and even genetic predisposition or brain abnormalities.
Celebrities with the acquired situational narcissism already have a narcissistic personality or narcissistic style or something and they have acquired it long before it erupted in the full-fledged form.
Being famous, being powerful, being rich only legitimized and conferred immunity from social sanction on the unbridled manifestations of a pre-existing disorder, a premorbidity.
That's my view, at least.
Indeed, narcissists tend to gravitate to professions and settings, which guarantee these fame, celebrity, power, and wealth.
It's a bit of a tautology here. When we study famous people, rich people, celebrities and so on so forth, powerful people, we find that they are narcissistic.
But they're narcissistic because narcissists gravitate to this profession.
As Millman correctly notes, the celebrity's life is abnormal. The adulation is often justified and plentiful. The feedback is biased and filtered. The criticism is muted and belated, social control either lacking or excessive and vitrioling.
And such vicissitudinal existence, such exigencies and vagaries, are not conducive to mental health, even in a perfectly balanced person.
The confluence of a person's narcissistic predisposition and a person's pathological life circumstances inevitably give rise to acquired situational narcissism.
And acquired situational narcissism borrows elements from both classic narcissistic personality disorder, ingrained or pervasive and all that, and transient and reactive narcissism, which we have discussed earlier.
Celebrities are therefore unlikely to heal once their fame or wealth or might are gone.
Instead, their basic narcissism merely changes form. It continues unabated, as insidious as ever, but it is modified by life's ups and downs.
In a way, all narcissistic disturbances are acquired.
Patients acquire their pathological narcissism from abusive or overbearing, overprotective parents, from peers and from role models.
Narcissism is a defense mechanism. It's compensatory, it's designed to fend offhurtand danger and challenge to self-concept brought on by circumstances.
Celebrity could be one of these sets of circumstances, beyond the person's control, and kind of abusive.
Social expectations play a role as well.
Celebrities try to conform to the stereotype of the creative, but spoiled, self-centered, monomaniacal, emotive and slightly crazy, slightly mad individual.
This is the stereotype of the creative artists, and celebrities try to conform to this a tacit trade takes place we offer the famous and the powerful all the narcissistic supply they crave and they in turn act the consummate, albeit repulsive narcissists.
But acquired situational narcissism may occur in a variety of other situations.
For example, codependents aiming to fend off knowing abandonment anxiety, same with borderlines, can resort to and evolve narcissistic and even psychopathic behaviors and traits in order to cater to the whims of their loved ones, the external regulator.
In anomic societies, in depraved cultures, in religious settings, people with a conformist bend tend to adopt antisocial modes of conduct andstyle so as to fit in and belong.
Narcissism has a pronounced societal and cultural component and determinant. This cannot be ignored.
Even when narcissism, pathological narcissism, is induced in early childhood, it is induced partly by the failure of the parental figures to introduce the child into reality and into society. Process of socialization, acculturation and separation and individuation. They all fail in dysfunctional families. And all of them are, of course, offshoot of societal and cultural expectations and ambiances.