Last month, I gave a lecture in Zagreb, in Croatia, to a group of clinicians, psychotherapists and psychologists from various disciplines. You are about to watch bootleg snippets taken during the lecture. If you wish to organise a lecture for the wider public or a lecture to clinicians and mental health practitioners and professionals in North Macedonia, please contact me at samvaknin@gmail.com. I'll be delighted to give a lecture to the wider audience or to mental health practitioners, professionals and clinicians in Macedonia and it's free of charge. You will have, however, to pay the costs of the lecture hall and the costs of a cameraman to record the event so that I can upload it later to my YouTube channel.
So if you're in Macedonia and you're interested to organise such an event and you believe you can find the audience, then I'm here, samvaknin@gmail.com. If you live in other countries in Europe and wish to organise a lecture or seminar with me, get in touch. My lectures are usually free of charge. Seminars, however, cost money. So get in touch, you have the email address, join the rest of the show.
Snippets taken secretly, bootleg, smartphone, during my lecture in Zagreb, Croatia, March 2024.
And we know, for example, that this happens. We know that there is no object libido in such cases because of something, because there are many indications and one of them is known as autoerotism.
Autoerotism is when you are sexually attracted to your own body, when you are your own sex object, when you are your own love object. In classical terms, when the eros part of the libido is directed at the self.
So autoerotism has been observed and absolutely documented in laboratories that reject for it. Laboratories that reject all this, anything before 1980, still documented autoerotism.
So we know that there is a redirection of energy at the self that has a sexual component, but also a kind of mother component.
In other words, emotional investment. So it's sexual and emotional.
Because of this, because the energy which should have been given to mother as a gift, the gift of being one with mother, the gift of what we call secure base, mother is a secure base, safe environment.
Instead of this, we get a child who is essentially abandoned, neglected, terrified.
And then the child lies to itself, deceives itself and says it's okay, I'm here. I don't need mother, I'm here. I'm my own secure base. I'm my own sex object. I'm my own love object. I can love myself and that's sufficient. I don't need to love anyone else.
And this kind of child fails in two functions. He fails to develop what we call internal working model. He fails to develop a model of the world and how he operates in the world and how other people operate in the world.
Why? Because his energy goes inward. It does not go outwards. He does not at this stage, at least he has no access to the outside world. And he fails to develop this model, which is super critical model for functioning later in life.
Another task, another function that he fails is called mentalization, the ability to perceive or speculate about how other people's mind in psychosis, there is confusion of internal objects as external. The psychotic has a voice. He thinks the voice is coming from there. Yes.
So internal object is misidentified and introject is misidentified as external in narcissism. An external object is misidentified as internal.
So narcissism is the mirror image of psychosis, the left hand and right hand of psychosis in effect.
And like in psychosis, this trauma, this dissociation, there's another thing called hyper reflexivity.
Hyper reflexivity is expanding outwards to include the world. So digesting the world, assimilating the world, so to speak.
I will not go into this. The self states in cluster B situations, they're self states. If you want to read more about self states, the guy who came up with the idea is called Philip Bromberg. Philip Bromberg.
And I built on his work. I adopted his work to pathological narcissism.
If you go on my channel, YouTube channel, you will find many, many videos about self states, pseudo identities, ego states, sub personalities, and so on and so forth. You'll find many videos. I'm also publishing a book soon about all this.
So they all have self states. Self states is simply when you switch from one type of identity to another.
And of course, if you don't have an identity, then you have only self states.
And in both borderline and narcissism, there is something called identity disturbance or identity diffusion.
No stable identity, because it's empty. If it's empty, you can pour wine, you can pour milk, you can pour water. It's empty.
So one day you're a milk, one day you're wine, one day you're water. One day the borderline believes that being cheated the partner, being engaging in infidelity is horrible. And the next day she does it. And one day the narcissist believes that he's going to be a great writer. And the next day he's a businessman. There's no constancy of goals, beliefs, values, and so on because there's no identity.
Similarly, there is no constancy of minimum for posterity.
Okay. We are now going to discuss the narcissist interpersonal relationships. In other words, with other people.
I mentioned before, hopefully some of you remember, if you're not dissociating throughout this lecture, which I wouldn't blame you, that the narcissist uses the same methodology, the same structures, the same dynamics, and the same techniques in all relationships, whenever external objects are involved that are internalized.
So could be anything from colleague to intimate partner and so on.
And the shocking thing for all of you perhaps is that the narcissist does not see a difference between an intimate partner and a colleague, a boss and a child, none. Therefore, the narcissist does not choose you as his intimate partner.
There's no choice involved here. You're all dispensable, interchangeable, commoditized. You're like so many grains of rice.
The narcissist doesn't care if you are empathic because he doesn't do empathy. He doesn't care if you're kind and nice. He doesn't care about any of these things that you see online when victims self aggrandize.
The narcissist chose me because I'm amazingly empathic. I'm super galactic empathic, supernova empath. These are all nonsense. The narcissist is interested in four things. They are known, I call them the four S's.
Four S's are sex, of course, services, safety and supply. The two types of supply, narcissistic supply and sadistic supply. A small minority of narcissists are sadists. So they derive pleasure from inflicting pain.
And this is a form of supply, not sadistic supply. These are the four S's.
If you provide two of the four S's, two, any two, you qualify.
So if you provide sex and services, it goes, you got the job. If you provide services and safety, you got the job, et cetera.
So it's also not true that the narcissist insists on the totality of the package, all the four. Nastis is therefore is in decent antisocial. He is goal oriented, exactly like the psychopath. Now he's converting you into an enemy.
What does it mean? He has been wrong about you. He's been wrong. If you're an enemy, then you should not have been idealized in the first place. There's a mistake here.
And one thing narcissists never do, especially me, is admit to a mistake. They are never wrong.
What we call infallible. They're like the Pope, only worse. They're infallible.
So the narcissist cannot admit that he has made a mistake in having idealized you. So this creates internal narcissistic injury. The narcissist is wounded by his own machinations. He cannot reconcile there. He doesn't know how to explain how did he make this, this mistake.
And so in order to explain this to himself and to restore his grandiosity, because the narcissistic injury is a challenge to the grandiosity, my grandiosity for you to understand is a cognitive distortion. It's a misperception of reality. It's an impairment in reality testing.
So am I going too fast? A little too fast?
Okay. So you understand that when he idealizes you, it presents a problem because it means he has made a mistake.
So to solve this, to solve this, to restore his grandiosity, he has to devalue you. He has to convince himself that you have been like that. Uh, you've been, I'm sorry. You've been, when he idealized you, you have been like that, but something happened.
For example, you were under the influence of bed friends or something biological happened to you. Some disease. You're, you're having some brain disease or something, or, uh, your mother died and it affected you in ways that change your cycle. You have changed. You're not the same. The person you idealized is not the person that is now a per secretary or she, she has changed.
He does not change the fighting with gold. Jacob Broker, God's army. There's a lot of kind of a topomorphism. Nastyism is a private primitive religion invented by a child. That is what Nastyism is. And because it's a private religion and because it's a primitive religion and because this religion was invented by a child, the Nastyis is missionary is trying to convert everyone into this religion.
And so how to convert you to this religion?
He makes promises. Is it different to classical religion? Of course not. God makes you promises. If you believe in him, if you obey the commandments, if you engage in some rituals and ceremonies and so on and so forth, there are some promises. There's a contract here.
Now religion is a shared fantasy, absolutely shared fantasy. And it's no wonder that God, all gods are described in narcissistic terms. The Nastis is the avada, the narcissist, Allah is a narcissist. They're all narcissists. I'm sorry to say the prophets are psychotic, but the gods are nasty. It's a shared fantasy.
So, and the narcissist is a private religion. Now Nastisism is threatening to become the biggest global religion. Why? Because unlike other religions, actually unlike most religions, it's distributed. It's a distributed religion. It's like network religion, the internet religion, because you have one God and one worshipper, one God and one worshipper, one God and one worshipper, or one God and 10 worshippers, or one God and 10 million worshippers. But it's always separate.
These are called nodes. These are network nodes. But the religion is common. The belief in the false self and the shared fantasy, the rituals and ceremonies of this religion are the same.
So it's a distributed religion. There's only one other religion like this, Islam. Islam does not have a central authority. No central authority in Islam, unlike the Vatican and Catholicism. Islam is a distributed religion. That's the source of its power. That's why it's the biggest growing religion nowadays.
Nasticism is growing like mushrooms and Islam is growing like mushrooms.
I leave it up to you to make the connection. I'll probably be assassinated if I upload it to YouTube.
Good object. And there is idealized object. Idealized object is when you believe or when the voices tell you that you are totally perfect, that you are amazing, that you are God like.
This usually comes from parental figures. Parental figures that idolize the child, idealize the child, place the child on the pedestal, tell the child that he can do no wrong in his perfection and everyone else is wrong.
The teachers are wrong. The peers are wrong. So these messages accumulate, accrue and they create idealized object.
Narcissists have one of two objects. They never have a good object. Narcissists are not grounded in reality. Remember, they don't have a reality testing. Intact reality testing.
So they cannot have a good object. But what they do have, many of them have a bad object and many of them have an idealized object, a God like object.
The narcissists who have a bad object compensate for this bad object because these voices are intolerable.
Imagine that you have someone who keeps criticizing you, telling you that you are wrong and so on.
In short, imagine your marriage.
So, you know, it's unbearable. It's intolerable. So the narcissist compensates for this and he compensates for this by pretending to be everything opposite to the bad object.
Everything in the bad object, he tells him, he sends the opposite. So the bad object tells him, I'm not. He has to be. He says, no, I'm a genius. This is a compensatory mechanism and this is known as the false self.
The false self is a term developed, not invented, but developed by a miracle. So the false self is actually a kind of compensation for the bad object or the idealized object.
If the narcissist has an idealized object, then there's no compensation. The narcissist believes that he's a good like, you know, it's not made for compensation.
Then we get typically overt, grandiose narcissist. If the narcissist is a bad object and compensates for it by pretending to be God like and lying to himself, he's sitting in certain others that he is wrong.
Then we get typically, not always, a covert narcissist, vulnerable, fragile, shy, narcissist with all the names.
So these are two types of narcissist and their etiology is very different because the bad object narcissist was raised by parents who were critical, who were harsh, who were disciplinary, and the idealized object narcissist was raised by parents who spoiled him, pampered him, worshiped him, admired him, told him he could do no wrong, and he's better, and so on and so forth.
So this is the sort of clinical background and when some of you come back, those of you who are brave enough, the narcissist is not human. But if you don't have empathy, and you don't have unconscious, and you don't have emotions, and you don't have the ability to distinguish other people as external, and you don't have the separation, what do you have? It's a drive machine. It's Freud's ideal drive machine.
Like Freud at the beginning, early Freud, he later regretted it, changed it, never. But early, early Freud said that we are all machines, devices driven by drives, and we need to find these drives and control them and so on. This destroys drive machines.
So yeah, of course biologically it's human. It has a heart, it has kidneys, liver, someone that brings, but you know, that's not what defines a human being.
As we will discover in 200 years, we will have androids with all these organs, and they will not be human beings. That's how it defines human beings. They are sentient, many of them are intelligent, but so is artificially intelligent. I have serious doubts whether we are talking about human beings. I think it is possible to frustrate or thwart or distort the developmental pathway in early childhood so as to produce, I don't know, a mutant, I don't know to explain, not a human being.
Something that is so divorced from what makes a human being so alien, that maybe we should not use this term anymore.
And this won't be a lot of criticism, maybe. Patriot is not us. But there is a big debate in psychology about the unconscious.
The Freudian approach, and later his daughter and many others, this school, says that the unconscious is the seat of repressed wishes and drives and urges, un-simplified, of course, but generally speaking.
It's the seat of repression.
And there's another school, and that other school says that the unconscious is the internalization of other people, is the sum total of interactions with other people, is the relational unconscious.
I mentioned Lacan, Lacan regards the unconscious as relational. But there are others, for example, Harry Stack Sullivan, who was the father of interpersonal psychology.
So the unconscious is the sum total of interactions with other people. Imagine what it says about the narcissist.
The narcissist is incapable of interactions with other people because the narcissist is incapable of perceiving the existence of other people. There's no externality and no separateness.
So according to Lacan, the narcissist is possibly the only creature without an unconscious, the only creature which is totally conscious.
What you see is what you get. A mirror reflection. This deep, you know, nanometer deep. It's not that because they are not, according to Sullivan also, they are not interpersonal relationships which create the unconscious.
Lacan said that this is mediated through the language. I don't want to mislead you. It's other people speak to the individual and then the language is internalized. What they say is internalized, and the language shapes their consciousness.
Never mind all that. When you don't recognize the existence of other people according to many major scholars, you cannot have an unconscious.
We have here a human being allegedly with only with a conscious. The narcissist disregulates everyone around him. The narcissist wreaks havoc and chaos wherever he goes. And it is by observing other people's reactions actually that we can safely diagnose narcissism.
Because if you try to diagnose narcissism via tests and structures, that's nonsense. There's no one to talk to.
Also, I think it's a major mistake to try to treat narcissists with adult psychology or adult psychotherapy. They're not adults. You need to use child psychology and child psychotherapies combined with trauma therapies.
So today we're making big mistakes when we are trying to, for example, strike a therapeutic alliance with the narcissist or agree on treatment goals. It's ridiculous. It's a three year old. At some point, he will throw a temper tantrum and throw him and leave the clinic.
I'll tell you to f off. That's what you're doing. Become social creatures. We know how to function in society. We have sexual traits, social traits, and so on, so forth.
Morays, knowns, and so on.
One of the main ways is known as socialization. There's a process of socialization.
Now there are socialization agents, mother and father, mainly father language, is a socialization agent. They teach us to be social creatures.
But there is another process equally important.
So there's socialization and another one. The other one is known as modeling. It was first addressed by Bandura in social learning theory.
Modeling. But narcissists as a child cannot model because to model, to adopt a model, to emulate father, to imitate mother.
Yeah. This process was first described in depth by Edith Jekyllson.
So to do this, to accomplish this, you need to recognize that mother and father are external. Imitation is a form of internalization of an external object.
And if you're incapable of accepting that other people are outside you, you cannot model.
There's a modeling failure. This is, this is catastrophic consequences in the life of the narcissist.
And it was short. Thanks God. Because I ran away, but I agreed for two or three years. I want to ask something.
It was almost clear to me what is happening, but I was in desperate feelings and situation before I met him. For three, four years, it was my business relationship between people. I was really desperate. I wanted to run away from that situation and to run away from my body. It was so strong, we should run away from that situation.
So I run away straight to his arms and all happened, all this addictive idea, everything, everything that you mentioned. So I was questioning myself how this happened to me.
But now when I said this loneliness and this, before this situation, before I met him was really hard for me for years.
The Scheid fantasy is a promise that you no longer need to be in reality, not in order to obtain outcomes. So you can be self efficacious even when you're not in reality.
And it's a promise that all options and alternatives and possibilities will materialize. So like endless promise, whatever you wish, whatever you dream of, whatever you even have, there's a guarantee by the narcissist that it will happen.
Narcissistbecause he feels godlike, projects to you or somehow convinces you that he has the capacity to make anything happen and everything happen. It's like land of infinite possibilities. You enter a land of infinite possibilities that is not grounded in reality. You don't have to pay the cost on the advantage.
And it's very, very captivating. It's because who wants to be in reality and who doesn't want to be with someone who can instantly realize all the wishes and dreams.
This helps for share something, it helps a lot. I really wanted to run away and it happened that I ran away from Croatia to other countries. So this share fantasy, my part was very strong that I really wanted to run away into this, of course, fantasy and the rest of the story.
I think people who find themselves in the share fantasy of narcissism, I think that's speculation because there's no more studies left. I think.
I think. Yes, all the dynamics of narcissism, as I said in the very beginning, all the dynamics of narcissism are built on splitting and another mechanism called projection.
Yeah, but also splitting the group from the bag.
Yes, you're right. It's a false treaty.
But all interactions about the narcissism, all the dynamics of narcissism are based on splitting and projection.
So for example, it involves not only splitting, but also projection.
This narcissist makes you all bad. And by implication, he makes himself all good. But he makes you all bad because he's all bad. He projects onto you the parts of him that he rejects, the parts of him that he's ashamed of.
So it is the narcissist who wants to be aggressive with you. He wants to discard you. He wants to get rid of you. It is he who is planning to do something bad to you, but he cannot admit it. So he projects it onto you. He says, you're the one who is planning to do something bad to me. You're evil.
One actually is the one who's planning to. So this projection is speaking.
Okay, so I want to ask a question about grief after a relationship. If it was such an abusive relationship, then what would you say that people or abused one is grieving about?
You are not in love with him. You are not in a relationship with yourself. What you are grieving is yourself. You are grieving the lost self-love, the lost capacity to self-love. You're grieving, of course, the shared fantasy. You are grieving the child, like a mother who lost her child. You are grieving a mother who lost a mother.
So grief after narcissistic abuse is not typical grief. It's what we call prolonged grief disorder. It's not typical grief, but it's four layers of grief, like a wedding cake.
Four layers of grief, and each one of them is very powerful. Is there anything more powerful than losing your child?
And now this gradually becomes more and more your child. And when you lose this child, it's horrible. And then you also lost a mother because initially he acted, he truly acted as a mother. And it was a shared fantasy, which was a refuge, an escape from reality if you hate reality.
And you lost yourself. Finally feeling not with yourself, learn to love yourself. And then it was taken away from you because you can love yourself only through the analysis's gaze and all of mirrors. It's not that the analysis teaches you how to love yourself independently.
On the very contrary, it makes you addicted to his gaze so that whenever you want to fix, when you want to inject you, you know, intoxication of I'm perfect, I'm amazing, I'm ideal, I'm gorgeous, you go to him, he will tell you. He'll tell you what you want to hear about yourself. Then you are living in fantasy because you're only living in fantasy.
Every time you open the television, you're in fantasy. Actually watching a movie, believe it or not, involves extreme dissociation. Do you know why you jump in a horror movie? Because you're inside the horror movie. You're dissociating.
And fantasy in today's world was not the case, let's say, 100 years ago, 150, but today's world fantasy definitely has replaced reality in many ways.
So we have a general situation of heterological fantasy.
Now, the shared fantasy between the narcissist and this intimate partner, I'm taking this as an example. Yes, the shared fantasy between narcissist and intimate partner is first of all shared. We all tend to ignore the shared part because the victims of narcissistic abuse, the survivors of such relationships and so on, they want to exonerate themselves. They want to say, I am not guilty. I didn't do anything wrong. I was the passive recipient of evil intentions and evil actions. It's not my fault. I did not contribute anything to my predicament.
And that's of course counterfactual. It's actually a fantasy. It's a fantasy defense.
The shared fantasy is a full fledged fullscape collaboration between the narcissist, intimate partner and the narcissist, each for their own reasons, each for their own reasons. And each couple, each diet requires a different as a highly specific and idiosyncratic analysis.
So we can all generalize. But the rule is that the partner collaborates with the narcissist, colludes with the narcissist, conspires with the narcissist to create a common fantasy.
What is this reminiscent of? A cult. It's equivalent of a cult. This fantasy is inward looking. It excludes the world and it has its own narratives which are counterfactual, that define the facts and narratives which are very often paranoid and narratives that are grandiose in majority of the faces.
And the partner of the narcissist fully collaborates with all this.
For example, she encourages the narcissist to be grandiose. She enhances the narcissist's grandiosity. She colludes with the narcissist in excluding all others or criticizing all others or demeaning and depasing all others. She conspires with the narcissist to adopt unrealistic goals about, I don't know, marriage or children or financial plans or business plans or whatever.
So there's a lot of collaboration and confusion.
And when victims will tell you I've been deceived, the narcissist is a great actor. I didn't know what was happening. I did the last moment.
And when I discovered the exit, whatever it was, that's unfortunately untrue. Actually we have studies that showed that when you're in the presence of a narcissist within minutes, you develop something known as uncanny value reaction. It's a sense of discomfort. And even it is as if the person you're with who happens to be the narcissist is not fully human. Something wrong, something off key, something put together wrong, wrong manufacturing.
Now, the uncanny value reaction was first described, of course, by a Japanese in 1970, Masahiro Mori, a roboticist. Masahiro Mori said, "As robots will become more and more human, we're going to begin to feel more and more discomfort, more and more ill at ease. The more the robot resembles humans, the worse we will feel in the presence of the robot."
And this is the uncanny value reaction.
And everyone has it in the presence of narcissists. So why do many people claim to have been deceived? Because they suppress it. They demand. They don't recognize it.
For example, if you're very, very lonely, then you would tell yourself all kinds of stories about the narcissist. You say, "Ah, it's nothing. Otherwise, it's a great guy. Yeah, he's misbegging here, but otherwise, it's a great guy." You will convince yourself. You create narratives to push yourself into the company.
So it's a collusion. It's a collaboration. Don't let anyone turn you other way.