Narcissism: What's Left to Learn? (with Peter Kolakowski, Deutschlandfunk Kultur)

Okay. We are good to go.

Okay, thank you for visiting the German National Radio High Series program of Deutschland and Deutschland Funk Culture. We introduced the famous professor of psychology and expert in narcissistic personal disorder and other personal disorders like borderline and psychopathic and histrionic and somatic and so on. I don't want to count them all.

So Sam, I watched many of your lectures in the internet, so I have some specific questions about NPD. Let's concentrate on NPD first.

In one lecture you said, these people with NPD, they have no NPD, they are the NPD. What do you mean with that?

Well, the diagnostic and statistical manual itself uses the phrase all-pervasive. All-pervasive means that every cell of the being, every molecule, every atom of existence, is permeated by the disorder.

So if everything is permeated by the disorder, if it's all pervasive, if it's ubiquitous, if it defines the individual in effect, then it is the identity of the individual, take away the narcissistic personality disorder, and nothing is left behind.

But sometimes the narcissists feel that they are lying to themselves. How is that feeling? How does that feeling come? Is there a single thing of cautious or consciousness that you are defective?

Sometimes they know, sometimes they don't know.

They know extremely rarely and only when they experience narcissistic mortification. Only. That's the exclusive situation where a narcissist comes face to face with who it truly is, or more precisely with who he truly isn't.

So the narcissist comes face to face with his own absence, his own emptiness, the fact that he's a fraud and an imposter, the pretensions, the deceptions, especially the self-deception, the narratives which are cognitively distorted, the fantasy which is all encompassing and in which the narcissist is immersed, when all these veils and all these defenses, when all these firewalls are removed in the process of narcissistic mortification, the narcissist comes face to face with his own or her own shame.

The primordial shame of early childhood when the narcissist was a child, an infant, helpless, and consequently at the mercy of another individual.

And this is something the narcissists cannot tolerate. The narcissistic mortification is brief. It resembles borderline personality disorder. There's emotional dysregulation, and suicidal ideation, and almost immediately the narcissist tries to restore his or her own grandiosity by again creating a fantastic narrative, an inflated self-concept which have nothing to do with reality.

So it's a brief window, and it's not even a window of opportunity, because it triggers immediately all the defenses.

You described narcissistic mortification compared to narcissistic injury. There are three conditions for mortifications. What are they?

Narcissistic mortification has been described in the 1950s and the predominant scholar on narcissistic mortification is Libby, an academic by the name of Libby. So she prescribed three conditions, and one of them is humiliation, shaming.

So the injury has to contain an element of denigration, of biting criticism which cannot be denied, of an intrusion of reality which can no longer be repressed or ignored.

So this is element number one and this induces shame and humiliation in the narcissists, which essentially, as I said, the primordial atavistic shame of having been at the mercy of another individual as an infant, and a bad individual, not a good individual, not a loving individual, not a compassionate or empathic or embracing or hugging or accepting individual, but an individual who rejected the child, who frustrated the child, who ignored the child and neglected the child and so on.

So this is condition number one.

Condition number two is that it is sudden, it is abrupt.

Narcissistic injury is also sudden and abrupt, but usually it emerges within some type of context, for example, a dialogue, or a debate, or a job interview, or a competition.

So narcissistic injury is contextual, while narcissistic mortification comes completely out of the blue. It's like a thunderbolt. It's utterly unexpected.

And of course, it destabilizes the narcissist, discombobulates the narcissist.

Or in clinical terms, it creates a process known as decompensation. Decompensation is when all the psychological defense mechanisms are disabled simultaneously.

And the narcissist remains defenseless and in direct contact with reality. He has no skin to protect him.

And so he becomes essentially, clinically, a borderline.

The third condition is that the humiliation or the shaming or the denigration or the mortification that are sudden and abrupt are committed in front of people that the narcissist somehow values or looks up to or wishes to emulate or, above all, wants to impress.

So it could be the narcissist's peers, could be his boss, could be his colleagues, could be family.

So these need to be people that the narcissist idealizes at the moment of mortification.

And then this is the third condition that it is public.

So if you argue with the narcissist and out of the blue you do something horrible and there's no witness to this, usually this would constitute narcissistic injury.

But if in front of a crowd, in front of a public or in front of his family or in the court, you expose the narcissist for who he is, a fraud, an imposter, a pretension, a fake. And you do it in an abrupt and totally unexpected manner. This would result in mortification in the vast majority of cases.

At that moment, narcissistic defenses are totally disabled. The false self is finished, deactivated, and the narcissist for all intents and purposes becomes a borderline, someone with borderline personality.

But he has not the instruments like the borderline.

So what is he doing? Is he switching to a primary psychopath or what?

Borderlines actually don't have instruments. That's precisely the difference between borderlines and narcissists.

Narcissists have defenses that are much stronger, much more resilient than the borderlines.

Grotschstein, who was a famous psychoanalyst, said that borderlines are failed narcissists. They tried to become narcissists and they failed.

So what happens is exactly the opposite. The narcissist remains defenseless, and that's why he becomes a borderline.

So at that moment, as I said, he emotionally dysregulates and so on.

And then I think we discussed it last time.

There are two solutions to mortification, internal and external.

I'm not sure if I discussed it with you. I give so many interviews.

I read you. I saw your lecture on this. I can put it in the text. It's okay. I know.

So internal solution is, I made it happen. I'm in control. I'm the puppet master. Everything that has happened, I orchestrated. I'm the choreographer, and I'm godlike. They are my extensions.

That's internal solution to mortification. It restores the grandiosity and the sense of control.

And the external solution is I'm a victim. These people are evil. Whatever they've done to me is malevolent. It's a malicious conspiracy.

That's the external solution.

In both situations, the grandiosity is restored, restored as a puppet master or restored as a victim.

And at that point, all the narcissistic defenses come back online and the false self is re-activated, rebooted in effect.

And there you have the narcissist all over again, as if nothing has happened.

Even he invents himself new as a new person, right?

Yes, the narrative that he has to create in order to cope with the mortification involves extreme denial and repression of the information that he has been exposed to during the mortification.

So he has to deny and repress and reframe this information.

And so he does create a new narrative where there are bad guys and he is all good, that's a splitting narrative.

The people who subjected him to the mortification, the people who exposed him, humiliated him, shamed him, criticized him, denigrated him, etc. These are evil people and he is all good consequently. And he's also a victim. So he enters a period of victimhood identity where he explains everything. He makes sense of everything that has happened as a victim.

Alternatively, I'm telling you that it's exactly the opposite.

Alternatively, he is the evil genius, the puppet master who is cunning and scheming and in hyper-intelligence motivates everyone around him.

They think that they have shamed him and humiliated him, that they believe that they have betrayed him, but actually he made it all happen. He caused them to behave this way. He owns their minds. He controls their brains. It's Dr. Strangelove kind of thing.

Both solutions are counterfactual, of course, but they restore the grandiosity, which by definition is delusional and counterfactual, and the narcissist is born again.

There is a short window, it could be up to a few weeks, there is a short window where the narcissist is, as I said, clinically a borderline.

And theoretically, if you catch the narcissist immediately after the mortification, as a clinician, you could intervene because the person opposite you is devoid of all narcissistic defenses.

It's exactly the outcome in cold therapy, by the way. Cold therapy is controlled mortification, in effect.

So then there is borderline and we know what to do with borderlines. We have dialectic behavior therapy, we have other modalities which are very effective with borderline, for example, schema therapy and so on. So borderlines are more accessible as far as therapy. The outcomes are much better. The prognosis is much better.

So we have a window of opportunity, but the defenses are fighting back. The resistance is enormous, even in mortification.

So I'm not very hopeful. Even with this, I'm not very hopeful.

In one lecture you say, narcissists are happy like they are, and in another you say life as a narcissist is a nightmare. So what is right?

Both.

I mentioned that pathological narcissism is compensatory. At least that's what we are beginning to believe nowadays.

There was a big debate for decades. If this is true or not, if the narcissists is happy or lucky, if the narcissist loves himself as he is, and so on.

Today we believe that true narcissists, not ersatz narcissists, but ex-narcissus are actually compensatory. They actually covert in many ways.

So this means that you have a duality. You have an internalized bad object that keeps informing you that you're unworthy, you're bad, you're inadequate, you're a failure, you're stupid, you're ugly, you're this with that.

And you have a compensatory object external. You perceive it as internal, but actually it's fictitious, and that's the false self.

And this compensatory object informs you exactly the opposite, that you're perfect, that you're amazing, that you're unprecedented, that you're godlike, that you are, you know.

And so narcissism is about a discrepancy between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem.

Narcissus is what we call an ego-discrepant behavior.

Simultaneously, you have egosyntony and egodystony. The narcissist cycles between these conditions. The narcissist cycles between being proud of himself, loving himself, adoring his grandiose self-concept and so on, and then doubting himself, torturing himself with all kinds of second-guessing, criticizing himself harshly, sadistically even, and so on.

However, for the narcissist to get in touch with his shame, with his doubt, with his fears, with his imposter syndrome. For this to happen, the narcissist needs to be narcissistically injured or narcissistically mortified.

Otherwise, the defenses are perfect. They're impeccable. And they would not let the narcissist get in touch with his internal reality, whatever that may be.

So the narcissist does cycle, but it's wrong to think that the narcissist cycles the way of bipolar cycles. That's not true.

If the narcissist is embedded in an environment, which is conducive and supportive of the fantasy, environment that never challenges the fantasy, environment that tells the narcissist that the false self is true, not false, that his self-concept is correct, that there is no reality, only the fantasy is the reality.

If you keep getting this feedback as a narcissist, you will never experience egodystony. You will never experience, have a bad experience, internal experience.

Take for example Stalin, or Hitler. Who dare to tell them you're wrong, you're stupid, you're ignorant? No one. The input they got constantly was you're godlike, you're divine, you're amazing.

So they never had a moment of ego discrepancy or ego dystony. Only their alloplastic defenses were in action. Whenever anything went wrong, it was someone else's fault, or the gods, or history, or, you know, evil people or whatever.

So in other words, the egodystony or the egosyntony of the narcissists are situational. The discrepancy is situational, not structural.

And this is the mistake in many scholarly textbooks, including in the work of giants, real authorities like Keith Campbell, where he gets it wrong. He says that the discrepancy is structural. It's not structural. It is triggered in highly specific circumstances and situations, it's situational.

But he never loses touch of reality, the narcissists. No, no.

The narcissist never loses.

Somebody, some people say he's living only in his fantasy world. He prefers to live in the fantasy world, but he needs the reality, though.

No, I would disagree. But he needs the reality, though. No, I would disagree.

Why does he need the reality to get narcissistic?

I would disagree that he needs a reality.

I think you're describing a psychopath. Psychopath is able to tell apart fantasy in reality and makes good use of this.

Because he is always in reality. He's able to push people into fantasy and then manipulate them inside the fantasy to obtain outcomes in reality. That's the psychopath.

The narcissist indeed is a fantasy defense. This is how the diagnostic and statistical manual, for example, describes narcissism as a fantasy defense. This is how the diagnostic and statistical manual, for example, describes narcissism as a fantasy defense, and it is.

So the narcissist is immersed in fantasy all the time. However, there is no fantasy that is not triggered by elements in reality, except psychosis.

That's what I meant, yes, yes. Except psychosis.

So when you have hallucinations, they are totally internal. They are projections of an internal state. They are what we call hyper-reflexivity.

The psychotic does not need reality at all because his triggering is totally internal.

However, the narcissist is triggered from the outside. External objects trigger the narcissist's internal objects.

So when, for example, when the external object dumps the narcissist, when the narcissist breaks up with an external object, the internal object that represents this external object goes dead, becomes disabled.

It needs the constant triggering from the environment. However, the input from the environment is immediately adapted to a delusional, counterfactual, fantastic narrative.

So there is no self-efficacy within reality. There is self-efficacy in the ability to conceive of reality and perceive reality as fantasy.

You had a question that provoked some people, should we envy the narcissist?

He has no borders, he has no empathy, he does what he wants, he looks only for his advantages.

What makes it so interesting?

What makes the Nazis so interesting?

It's a bit of a complex answer.

I mean, ostensibly, I should have told you immediately, no, you should not envy the Nazis. It's a horrible condition, it's bad, is it?

But that's not the answer. That not envy the Nazis. It's a horrible condition, it's bad, is it? But that's not the answer. That's not the answer.

I think that's not the answer.

First reason, because we live in a narcissistic civilization, where narcissism is actually a positive adaptation.

I mean, just look at Donald Trump. Donald Trump is definitely an overt narcissist. I don't know if he's malignant, but he's an overt narcissist. No question about it.

It's not my view, by the way. It's a view of hundreds of professionals in the United States.

So that's an overt narcissist and he's doing pretty well. Last time I had a look, you know.

In a narcissistic civilization, pathological narcissism is a positive adaptation, not a maladaptation.

So yes, we should envy narcissists. They rise to the top in all the professions and so on so forth because their particular set of traits kind of condition them or allow them to fit better into the changing environment which had become a lot more narcissistic, and even I would say psychopathic.

On the one hand, on the other hand, narcissists who are collapsed narcissists, in other words, narcissists who are not self-amplifications, not like Donald Trump, narcissists who don't know to build coalitions, narcissists who are too arrogant, narcissists who are envious to the point that it paralyzes them.

In other words, collapsed narcissists are narcissists who are not able to secure a regular flow of narcissistic supply for a variety of reasons.

And the vast majority of narcissists are collapsed narcissists, actually. Not all narcissists are Donald Trump. The overwhelming vast majority.

So they end up badly. They end up destroying everything they've ever created. They end up divorcing multiple. They end up shunned socially. They end up dying alone.

The bulk of narcissists, like 99% I would say, end up really badly. They're very self-destructive. They don't know how to read other people's emotions. They don't have empathy. They're totally clueless and disoriented, exactly like autistic people. They get everything wrong, they misread situations. They are not efficacious at all, at all.

So they end up, you know, with negative outcomes.

I want to add, as you said, narcissism is rising. We even have books here from psychologists here in Germany titled Me, The Power of Narcissism.

So narcissism is a skill, a positive skill for more and more people.

When I look on Instagram or YouTube, there are recovered or even healed narcissists who are now healing the victims.

And I am very, very suspicious about this development.

And you even say, you describe even a dystopia. You said, we have to be very aware what's happening when the narcissism is rising in society.

Why?

Before maybe I answer the question directly, I want to make clear that in psychology, or clinical psychology, at least, there is not such thing as good and good and bad or right and wrong.

For example, if you were an inmate in Auschwitz and you were happy-go-lucky, you were joyful all the time, cheerful all the time, that means you're probably mentally ill. The correct healthy response in Auschwitz would have been depression.

So as you see, or suicides. Yes, depression is context. In Auschwitz it's a healthy thing. Outside Auschwitz, it's not a healthy thing. But it definitely depends on the context.

Similarly, narcissism is not in itself bad or in itself good. It depends on the context.

In a civilization like ours, narcissism definitely is a positive adaptation.

In July 2016, the prestigious magazine, New Scientist, had a cover story. Parents teach your children to be narcissists.

And there are many academics who discuss the concept of high functioning narcissists.

They say that narcissists and psychopaths are the next stage in evolution, and they're actually the supreme adaptations, and we all need psychopaths and narcissists to lead us because they are great leaders and so on.

There are academics whose whole career is based on glamorizing and glorifying narcissism and psychopathy, elevating them into a kind of thing you should try to emulate.

So why do I think it's a dystopia after all?

Because narcissists are not self-efficacious.

That's not true. That's totally counterfactual.

As I said, 99% of narcissists end very badly for themselves and for everyone around them.

And I don't think Trump is an exception. I don't think the end of his first term in office was not a disaster. I think it was a disaster for himself and for everyone around him.

So Trump, even Trump is not an exception.

That he was re-elected is because people believe that narcissism and psychopathy are the only solutions in the narcissistic and psychopathic world.

That's why they elected him. They think is uniquely qualified by being a psychopath and a narcissist, or at least a narcissist, is uniquely qualified to cope with other psychopaths and narcissists who are leaders and so on.

So that's the only reason he was re-elected. He had a dismal record in the last year of his term in office, and he almost destroyed the United States with the COVID pandemic and so on.

So narcissists don't end well and that is my beef, that is my argument.

My argument is not moral.

Narcissism is bad, you should not promote narcissism.

Narcism doesn't work. Not in the long run. Anyone who says otherwise has very little knowledge, is very ignorant of narcissism.

You even had a lecture about demons and narcissism. Very interesting subject. Why you did that? Because now you say they are not bad, they are not good. These are moral characteristics. They do what they want for their self-esteem. Why do you made a lecture about demons and narcissists?

Because starting with Scott Peck, Scott Peck wrote a book called People of the Lie. And he suggested that narcissism is just a modern word for what used to be called evil.

So we used to use the word evil and then Freud came and now we say narcissism.

And of course there's no place for evil and good and moral judgments and so on in psychology, clinical psychology. Clinical psychology is observational, phenomenological and descriptive. It doesn't make value judgments. It's not good or bad that the bee goes to the flower. It's this is science. It's just the bee goes to the flower. End of story. And there's not a theology. It's not the bee goes to the flower to make honey. No.

So these are common mistakes in scientific thinking.

So, it is true that prior to clinical psychology, we had another language. And that language was religion. So when we wanted to describe someone who was mentally ill, we would say that he was demon-possessed because that was the language in use at that time.

And it is true that there are many parallels and equivalence between what used to be called demon possession and some mental health issues, some mental illnesses such as, for example, psychotic disorders. And so you could argue that we have just replaced one language with another.

But this argument would be wrong.

Because demon possession was not only a language. There was the assumptions that demons really exist and that they did inhabit people and had an impact on their minds and bodies.

And that is, of course, where the language of religion divorces completely from the language of psychology.

You even talk about Timothy 3.

I read that. And very interesting, they describe narcissism in detail.

Yes, I think that's the best description of narcissism ever written actually.

Narcissists have existed since time immemorial among the Neanderthals, I assume, there were narcissists. I mean, narcissism is not a new phenomenon.

To assume that we are the first to have observed narcissism, it's ridiculous, of course.

Narcissism was even described before Sigmund Freud by Havelock Ellis and others.

But this is the descriptive part.

It doesn't say in the text that these people are demon possessed. It just described them as people who are essentially anti-social.

And as far as that goes, it's a great description. I think should open any textbook on narcissism.

But I dealt with demon possession because people online are reducing the issue of narcissism to a morality play.

Good versus evil. Satan versus God. Jezebel spirit versus healthy people.

And then they're elevating themselves. They say we are angelic. We are empaths. We are flawless.

You know, so there is self-aggrandizement involved in this morality play. We are all good. It's a splitting defense. It's a narcissistic thing.

That's why I'm dead set against it.

Number one, they are not demons. Number two, all good and all bad are actually the way the narcissists see the world.

So if you say it that way, the narcissist is all bad and I'm all good, you're a narcissist as well.

Okay, let's put the morality good, bad aside. But you said narcissists are not really human. They are alien because they lack skills, crucial human skills like love, empathy, and so on.

You know all these skills. Why do you say these are non-human beings?

I'm not the only one. Robert Hare, who is the godfather of the study of psychopathy, basically says the same.

If you ever came across a serial killer, and I have, if you ever came across a psychopath and you spend time with them, you come out of the meeting with a distinct impression that whatever it was that has spoken to you was not human, whatever entity was there was not human, which I think gives rise to these ideas of demon possession and all the nonsensical ideas.

When I say they're not human, actually to be more precise, I say that they are not full-fledged human.

How do I say that they are not full-fledged human, I mean that we have a definition of humanity. And this definition must include certain basic modules.

If you take away these basic modules at some point, you take away humanity. There is some critical threshold beyond which the person you are dealing with is no longer qualifies for the label, human.

So someone who doesn't possess empathy or possesses only predatory empathy, someone who has no access to positive emotions, only to negative emotion, he is missing, or she is missing, such a vast part, such an enormous part, of the human experience that they have nothing in common anymore with normal, relatively normal, relatively healthy people.

If you have never experienced love and are constitutionally incapable of experiencing love, you will never ever experience love, period, no matter what you do, then there is a very important element of the human experience that you are lacking.

If you never experience empathy means that you're totally solipsistic. Your only experience of being human is your experience of yourself, and you don't even have a self.

So you don't have empathy, you don't have a self, you don't have positive emotions.

In which way are you human? You tell me, you have two legs and two arms. Chimpanzees have this.

In which way are you, is the narcissist human?

I stand fully behind my statement that this is a form of, I think, to artificial intelligence, maybe. I don't know aliens. I never met an alien. I don't know if they're going to look. They may be pure energy.

So I thinkgoing to look. There may be pure energy.

So I think alien was a bad metaphor on my part, bad simile. But I can compare definitely a narcissist to artificial intelligence. Definitely.

You even said that artificial intelligence could learn from narcissists.

Artificial intelligence is narcissistic. Artificial intelligence is narcissistic and is psychopathic.

I have been saying this for well over seven years. What am I talking about? 20, 20 something years.

My first video ever on YouTube was about this, that narcissists are aliens and artificial intelligence.

And 15 years later, my first video was 15 years ago. There was no artificial intelligence at the time, I mean no accessible artificial intelligence.

15 years later we have chat GPT and other forms of accessible general artificial intelligence.

And now we see the similarities, the amazing similarity, the ability to simulate, the lack of empathy, the lack of positive emotions, the heightened intellectual awareness, the incapacity, the hallucinations, artificial intelligence has hallucinations. Artificial intelligence fabricates and lies along.

These models lie a lot. They fabricate. It's called AI hallucinations. So they live in fantasy.

Artificial intelligence is embedded in a fantastic bubble, in effect.

And so on. The similarities are unnerving.

And they were predicted.

These similarities were predicted long before me by Masahiro Mori.

Masahiro Mori was a Japanese roboticist. And he said that there will come a point where robots will be indistinguishable from human beings.

In other words, they will be able to pass the Turing test on all levels. So they will be indistinguishable for human beings.

But he said, even then, when we come across something, an android, when we come across a robot who is indistinguishable from human being, we would feel highly uncomfortable.

There would be some, and this is known as the Uncanny Valley.

He said there will be an uncanny valley reaction.

We would feel something wrong, something missing, something off-key, something fake, something not put together well. And this is exactly the emanation that the narcissist gives. We have this with the narcissists and we will have this with Android robots. But he was the first to describe this reaction.

So Sam, why is it even though so difficult to part from a narcissist?

I am talking about psychosis, about shared fantasy and so on.

For me, I had the experience to part to abandon a narcissist guy. It was even that I knew that he is only interested in himself and not in me, only as a function, as a cardboard cut out. Now I know that I was running after an illusion, after a fantasy.

But even then it's so difficult to part to abandon a narcissist in training, brainwashing, that's the way they do it.

Is that the way why that they hold their victimized people back not to go away?

We have to disconnect now and then I will answer your question. But wait five minutes please.

Okay, sure.

I call you then. We has to save the file. Okay, sure, sure. We take some more ten minutes, then we are finished.

No, no, but wait five minutes before you click again, because it has to save the file.

Okay, okay.