There is nothing more alien, monstrous, and ultimately terrifying, than sexual sadism.
Even when the partner is submissive and consenting, enthusiastically consenting, and initiating, an unwilling participant, even then, there's something in sexual sadism that excludes it from the remit of humanity, renders it inhuman in many respects.
And I think one of the issues is that sexual sadists are auto-sexual, auto-erotic. They're attracted to themselves. They regard themselves as the sole exclusive erotic sexual object.
Many of them are sometimes asexual.
At any rate, sexual sadists are not attracted to or sexually aroused by the partner, regardless of the sex of the partner.
They use the partner's body to masturbate with.
The partner's submission, the partner's willing participation in her own defilement and degradation, the partner's voluntaryremission, self-negation, all these enhance the sexual sadist sense of perceived irresistibility.
The sexual sadist feels sexy, he feels attractive, he feels irresistible, and then he redirects this arousal, this sexual energy at himself as the exclusive recipient and sexual object of his attentions.
And so it's a solipsistic endeavor. The sexual sadist is always alone in his exploits and in the bedroom.
And his sole purpose is pantomime, a kabuki theater, a kind of performative act where the partner, so if we can call the other person a partner, a collaborator, simply affirms and buttresses the sexual sadist's perception of himself as the ultimate, drop-dead gorgeous, irresistible, sexy object.
And then what ensues is essentially masturbation.
Sexual sadists degrade and defile. A very small minority of them are violent, and very, very few of them are non-consensual.
They use the partner's consent, expressed, enthusiastic, clear, repeated, fantastic. They use fantasies as well, in order to reaffirm and support the self-perception and self-image.
And so it is a collusion, a collaboration that is extremely mentally ill and pathologized.
This is not BDSM. This is not BDSM.
BDSM is ritualized, rigid, structured, all the parties have roles and so and so forth.
The sexual sadist uses this intimate partner as raw material, as something to be processed, as input, to be digested, consumed, and then spat out when no longer necessary, when climax had arrived.
The vast majority of sexual sadists, as you've understood by now, as you've gathered by now, are men, and of course, the vast majority of these are heterosexuals, although the use of the word heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual is wrong in this context.
The sexual sadist has only one partner, himself, or in rare occasions herself.
Stay with the Emmy to watch an interview I granted to Yves Tauffik, the British journalist.
But first, a few words of introduction to the interview.
You're about to watch the first part of my interview with the British journalist, Ive Tawfiq.
You can watch the second part by clicking on the link in the description.
The interview with Yves Tauffik is very unsettling. It touches upon very controversial topics in a way which you may disagree with, but it is founded on the recent bleeding edge, cutting edge research on psychopaths and narcissists.
And so I would like to emphasize one theme in the interview with her, and that is the issue of overcoming resistance.
The narcissist and the psychopath, they're defiant. They're contumacious. They reject authority. they're reckless, they're in your face, they are a law unto themselves, they don't obey, laws, regulations, mores, and norms, societal or otherwise.
Because they're like that, they assume that everyone is like that.
This is a psychological defense mechanism known as projection.
So narcissists and psychopaths assume that everybody is defiant. Everybody is aggressive. Everybody hates authority. Everybody is in your face. Everybody has no boundaries when it comes to externalizing aggression.
There's a hidden assumption that all people are prone, in other words, to resistance.
And resistance is the core construct with which the narcissist and the psychopath makes sense of other people.
Resistance is the key feature of the narcissists and psychopaths mentalization or theory of mind.
Consequently, the ruling motto in the narcissists and psychopaths world is resistance is futile.
By overcoming other people's resistance, by securing, for example, the consent of other people or the cooperation of other people, or the submission of other people, the narcissists and psychopaths feel elevated. It's proof of irresistibility and godlike power.
When you overcome someone's resistance, you conquer them. They're yours. They're your property. They belong to you. They're your extension, you own them.
And so resistance has many forms and overcoming resistance is multifarious in the narcissistic and psychopathic pathology.
Penetrating the mind of another person is a form of overcoming resistance, gaining eerily accurate insight as to what makes people tick. That's a form of overcoming their defenses, their firewall, their boundaries, and their resistance.
Modifying someone's behavior is a form of overcoming resistance. Changing someone's values or beliefs is another way to overcome their resistance. Altering, changing someone's relationships with others is a form of overcoming resistance.
The target, the victim, the mark, the partner, the insignificant other, they're all there to be overcome, conquered, consumed, invaded, subsumed, digested.
Overcoming resistance, therefore, is the main effect, or at least generates the main effect in the narcissistic and psychopathic pathology and the narcissists and psychopaths relationship with other people, including the sexual dimension of their relationship, is therefore about overcoming resistance, rendering the other party, consensually submissive, subjugated, dominating the other party.
And this is the topic of the first part of my interview with Eve Torfick.
Hello, Eve, good to see you again. Long time, no seeing.
Yep, long time. I've missed you. Although I have kept up to date with your latest work, as always. So it's always interesting.
My condolences and apologies.
It's very, you know, before bed listening to your voice, it's very soothing.
Many people tell me that they fall asleep in my voice, which I consider to be a major narcissistic injury. But yeah, I acknowledge the phenomenon.
You should, you know how they have the lamps that help people sleep? No. You have the option of rainfall, jungle sounds. I think you would make a nice addition to that.
Yes, I'm very incandescent. Yeah, it's very true. I'm very lamp-like.
So today, for those who don't know me, I'm journalist Eve Torfick, I'm based in the UK, and I'm here to talk to the expert, Dr. Sam Vaknin, about psychopathy, not so much narcissism today, although I'm sure the topic of narcissism will naturally find its way into the discussion.
How are you, Sam? How are you doing?
Well, since we're about to discuss psychopathy, I'm elated. Nothing short of elated.
I'm glad to hear it.
So just quickly, just a rundown, in terms of psychopathy and relationships, what would you say is the stark difference between that and narcissistic relationships?
If you could pinpoint, you know, that if you were to put the two into a column which would be you know the tail as it were.
Well I'm a big fan of science fiction and there we would be discussing right now pure psychopaths and pure narcissists, which are of course non-existent. These are ideal types.
There is comorbidity, very frequent comorbidity between narcissists and psychopaths. In other words, many psychopaths are also diagnosed with narcissism, and many narcissists are diagnosed with psychopathy, although not all psychopaths are narcissists. Still, most psychopaths are grandiose. So we could generalize and say that things that apply to narcissists sometimes apply to psychopaths and vice versa.
And there's a whole class of people known as malignant narcissists. There's a combination, a delectable combination of narcissists, psychopaths and sadists. And of course everything we will be discussing applies to them as well.
However, should we be unfortunate enough to come across the ideal types, then these are the differences.
The psychopath has no need for fantasy. Psychopath is grounded in reality. He has an intact reality testing.
While the narcissist, his reality testing is shattered. And when I say he's her, half of all narcissists are women.
So in the case of narcissism, reality testing is shattered. The narcissist self-gaslights in a way.
And so the narcissist needs to be embedded in order to relate to other people, in order to possess something called object relations.
The narcissist needs to concoct a fantasy and then to introduce you into the fantasy as a participant in a kind of unfolding unfurling on the fly script.
And so this is the first difference, shared fantasy in the case of narcissism, no fantasy in the case of psychopaths.
The second thing is that the narcissist is auto-erotic.
In other words, the narcissist's exclusive sexual object is himself. Narcissists are unable to relate to other people sexually or psychosexually.
Whereas the psychopath is, again, healthier in this sense, the psychopath has a sex drive.
The problem with the psychopath is that the psychopath's sex drive is coupled with power, with the addiction or the hunger for power.
So very often the psychopath's sexuality devolves into some kind of sadism.
Sorry, that's just maybe think, if you were to look in circles of people who have extreme BDSM fantasies or indeed rape fantasies or along those lines, you know, there's certain levels to this as a hierarchy, you know, it starts off with your sort of commonplace, almost garden variety, 50 shades of grey BDSM, sort of whips and chains and what have you. And then you've got, you know, the humiliation, drowning and, you know, rape fantasies.
In those circles, would you say you're more likely to find somebody who is psychopathic or has psychopathic tendencies? Are those the kind of power plays during sex that you're referring to?
No.
Is it deeper than that?
No. BDSM is in the vast majority of cases, highly consensual.
Actually, the sub-part, the submissive part, of the dyad or the group, the submissives actually control the action.
And there are many safety guards built in to the process. And it's highly negotiated, it's a compromise, represents, compromises, and psychopaths are incapable of any of this.
Psychopaths are addicted to power and control and domination, which are unmitigated by anyone else's involvement.
In other words, psychopaths do seek consensus and they do seek consent and they do seek enthusiastic submission and so on so forth.
But this is for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.
It's not because they see the other person as an equal. It's not because they think everything has to be agreed upon and so on.
It's because if you are enthusiastically consenting, it means that the psychopath is irresistible.
There's a confirmation of irresistibility. Your enthusiasm, your participation, your initiative, your involvement, your inability to extricate yourself, your addiction to the sex, and so on so forth, however degrading, however humiliating, however painful is an indication and proof positive of the psychopath's irresistibility.
So the psychopath would act consensually, actually, but it's not the same type of consent as in BDSM.
In BDSM, there's a recognition of equality, a recognition of mutual bargaining and so on, not so with the psychopath.
And there's a...
Yeah.
Sorry, carry on.
The psychopath craves your submission as proof of his virility, if he's a man, femininity, if she's a woman, and definitely irresistibility.
So that's part of the grandiosity of the psychopath.
So in terms of BDSM and consent, and there's a suggestion that people who gravitate towards these fetishes, there may be some, you know, I think it's quite an old-fashioned concept, that people who gravitate towards these kind of violent sexual acts have an issue within themselves.
Would that be a separate issue then?
Definitely.
The consensus, the professional consensus is that BDSM is aptly named. It involves sadism and masochism manifestations or expressions of sadism and masochism which are highly ritualized, highly consensual, and in this sense, they're performance art.
And indeed, in a lot of BDSM, there's no penetration, there's no ejaculation even, no orgasm.
It's about the theater performance, it's a theater.
And so it's an enactment of internal masochism or sadism.
And anyone who has been in the BDSM scene knows that sometimes you're sub and sometimes you're dom. Sometimes you're submissive, sometimes you're dominant. The roles are not cast in stone. It's not like if you're dominant, you're dominant forever. You are sometimes likely to come across a partner who would render you submissive.
So, masochism and sadism are flip sides of the same coin, but it's the same coin.
And anyone who is sadistic is likely also to be masochistic and vice versa.
The difference is how do you externalize your sadistic tendencies?
So normal people, healthy people, and people who engage in BDSM are healthy.
This has been the consensus of the DSM-5 committee.
So normal healthy people engage in the externalization of sadism and masochism by finding other people who would like to do the same and have fun.
Psychopaths externalize the sadism, and by the way masochism, but mostly sadism, by kind of feeding off your enthusiastic consent and submission.
Ah, okay.
They do find partners who are consensual, partners who are enthusiastic, partners were submissive, partners who are highly masochistic, and they feed off this energy. It elevates them.
This is known as narcissistic elation. It gives them a kind of high or euphoria.
And that's the difference.
So with a psychopath, say I'm unknowingly in a relationship with a psychopathic man. And my enjoyment of the sex to a certain level would spur him on.
That was, it was, you know, as usual, when you have consensual sex with someone you're in a relationship with, obviously enjoying it as a huge part of it and it becomes, you know, mutually enjoying it as well.
But if it's someone who is a psychopath, they're enjoying that in a different way, not the healthy way that most people do.
It's more, it's a, so they feel omnipotent and as if they're in complete control of the situation. And you're in a way submitting without knowing it. Does that make sense?
To start with, the partner's enjoyment is a turn on as far as healthy people go.
Yeah, exactly. It is also a turn on with a psychopath, but not because he cares about your well-being or enjoyment or whatever, but because it's proof of his capacity to perform, of his superiority as a performer.
The psychopath is likely to be very concerned with the question, is he the best you've ever had? Or how many times have you orgasmed?
It's like the psychopath keeps statistics of the sex and constantly the bottom line. It's a bottom line approach. Did I max the profits or whatever?
So your enjoyment is proxy for his ability to induce in you enjoyment. So it is his power over you that he has the power to alter your mood or to alter your bodily reactions. This power gives the narcissist, the psychopath, his moment of euphoria and elation.
So, not your enjoyment, but what your enjoyment proves to him.
Now your submissiveness and your enthusiastic consent and even your initiative, psychopaths are open to the partner initiative.
They all have to revolve around your degradation and humiliation.
So it's not normal subsidence.
In BDSM, the sub or the submissive partner, ritualizes, it's a kind of ceremony. There's no real humiliation or real. It's all kind of a performance art, as I said.
But the narcissists and the psychopath, especially the psychopath, insist on actual degradation and humiliation.
So a psychopath, for example, is likely to push you to engage in group sex because he wants to reduce you to being a slut. He wants you to breach your own boundaries and morals and then feel bad about you and feel ashamed and guilty.
A psychopath is likely to, I don't know, physically act in ways which kind of symbolize your annihilation and objectification. Okay. You take you as an object. your annihilation and objectification.
Okay.
You're like you as an object.
So there's a lot of degradation and humiliation built into the psychopathic sex act.
Wow.
I mean, so if you were to react in a way that, say if I wasn't enjoying sex with a psychopath or I didn't react or I didn't show enthusiasm what how would that then play out with him or her how would this then unfold in the bedroom or if it happened over a long period of time or something like that, what would their reaction be? Would they then become violent in other manners or seek to see that control in other areas instead or escalate it? How would that happen?
Well, here there's a major difference between narcissists and even psychopathic narcissists and a pure psychopath.
A narcissist or a psychopathic narcissist with a first sign of resistance, first sign of lack of enjoyment, first sign of disillusionment and so on, and narcissists would immediately stop having sex. And so would psychopathic narcissists.
Because as I said, narcissists regard sex as the affirmation of their own irresistibility.
And they need to feel irresistible in order to feel that they are sexy. And they need to feel sexy because they make love to themselves.
When the narcissist is with you and you find the narcissist attractive, the narcissist is flattered, but not for the reasons that you think.
When you find the narcissists attractive, it allows the narcissist to find himself attractive and then to have sex with himself.
The narcissist needs external confirmation that he is attractive, that he is irresistible, to allow him to find himself attractive and irresistible. This is the concept of narcissistic supply.
The narcissist sense of self-worth, self-perception, self-image, self-appraisal, self-evaluation, all ego functions, all self-related functions, they come from the outside.
So now the narcissist is horny and he wants to have sex. There's only one qualified partner, the narcissist himself, because the narcissist is auto-erotic.
But then the narcissist says, am I truly attractive? Am I truly sexy? Am I truly irresistible? Am I a worthy sexual partner to myself?
And so he resorts to you, to your judgment, to the way you see him. He sees himself through your gaze, through your eyes.
And if you do find him attractive and irresistible, so does he. And then he can have sex with himself. Through you, he can use your body to masturbate with.
Yeah, that's what I was just thinking. As you were saying it. I was like, so you essentially become a chute.
A dildo, a dildo.
Yeah, something just...
An animated sex doll.
Yeah, absolutely.
Narcissists have sex only with themselves.
This is called auto-erotism. It's a well-documented phenomenon.
They're incapable of perceiving external objects. So they cannot have sex with another person because in their distorted minds, there's no such thing as another person. No one exists outside the narcissist mind.
This is very, it brings to mindsex with another person because in their distorted minds, there's no such thing as another person. No one exists outside the narcissist mind.
This is very, it brings to mind, you know, probably you've heard this a thousand times, the very stereotypical scene in American Psycho, where he's having sex with a woman and looking at himself in the mirror while he does it.
And narcissists very commonly, for example, masturbate during the sex act.
Actually, the vast majority of narcissists come or orgasm owing to masturbation, not to the actual penetration or any other sex. They end up masturbating.
What, like at the end or just...
Yeah, at the end or just at any point.
At the end, they have sex with you, they lose erection very frequently. Erectile dysfunction is very common among narcissists.
And then they withdraw from you aside and they masturbate and then they orgasm. They're having finally sex with themselves, you know.
It's different to the psychopath because you asked me about the psychopath. And as usual, I ignored your question and I answered mine.
No, no. No, no, I'm kidding. I want to sustain my narcissists credentials so that's very different to the psychopath because the psychopath is in it for the power it's a power play.
Psychopaths are more likely to rape than narcissists, for example.
Psychopaths are really focused on power. Your attraction to the psychopath gives the psychopath power over you.
And he's turned on sexually by the fact that he has acquired power over you, not by the fact that you're sexy or you're attracted to him. You're irrelevant.
It's just your proof, walking, talking proof that he has power, that he's powerful.
And so if you negate this, if you were to refuse, if you were to, you know, cut it off in the middle, if you were to criticize this performance or whatever, if you were to demonstrate independence, personal autonomy, agency, that challenges the psychopath, reduces his enjoyment or eliminates it all altogether because it's about power and so about you.
And then yes, some psychopaths, although not a majority, but a small minority could become violent. Definitely. Could become violent and this would end up in a sexual assault or rape or something similar.
However, it is much less common than people say or think. There's a lot of stereotyping going on.
Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to ask you.
There seems to be this, you know, the psychopath in a suit, and then you've got the, you know, prison inmates who are savages and serial killers. It seems there's very little in between. They're either this genius CEO who's, you know, ruining the world via the economy or it's or you've got some sadistic killer.
Yeah and the overwhelming vast majority of psychopaths are run-of-the-mill next-door neighbor types you know and pillars of the community very often and so on and so forth.
Psychopaths are goal oriented. The narcissist only goal, period, is narcissistic supply.
Narcissus couldn't care less about money or power or sex.
Narcissists make money because being rich garners narcissistic supply.
When you are rich, people notice you.
So it's a way to obtain supply. Narcissists get elected to public office because then the media covers them and so they get supply.
It's all about supply. Sex is also about supply with the narcissists. The narcissists needs to feel irresistible, super attractive, unprecedented in terms of performance because it's part of these grandiose inflated fantastic self-image.
And your role is to uphold and buttress this self-image.
Sadism, which is much more common among psychopaths, has nothing to do with any of this.
The overwhelming vast majority of narcissists are not sadists.
Narcissists will never coerce you to have sex with him. Never. Because that means that he is repulsive. There is injury. You're giving that narcissistic injury if I need to coerce you to have sex with me it means I'm not attractive it means I'm not irresistible.
And narcissists would never rape never coerce you to have sex.
Narcissist needs you to melt. Narcissist needs you to lose control over yourself. Narcissist needs you to go wild. Narcissist needs you to, you know, wow. He needs this show of irresistibility.
That's really interesting. If you hadn't have said that just now, I would never have guessed that a narcissist wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't coerce or attempt to persuade you in some way or, you know.
Sadistic psychopaths would, which is a fraction and not a very big fraction of psychopaths.
So people take the most extreme outlier cases and they generalize like serial killers. How many serial killers are there? A few hundreds. How many psychopaths are there? A few tens of millions.
So, you know, we tend to generalize from a non-representative self-selecting group because self-selecting, because you choose to be a serial killer. It's a self-selection. It's a non-representative sample.
Psychopaths may end up raping or being coercive, especially when rejected, especially when humiliated while being rejected.
But this would only be a sub-species or subgroup of psychopaths known as sadistic psychopaths. Or sexual sadists, that's a common term. There are very few psychopaths who are goal oriented. I started to say the goal oriented the narcissists is narcissistic applies.
So you need to demonstrate to the narcissist that he is the one and only.
The psychopath's goal is power. Psychopaths are obsessed with power. So you need to demonstrate to the psychopath that he has power over you.
For example, chasing you and conquering you. That's power. So psychopaths are very much into chasing and conquering sexual conquests.
Narcissists are not, a narcissist would feel humiliated if he were compelled to chase you and to conquer you because this means he is not automatically, instantaneously irresistible.
If you ask the narcissist to invest some effort in flirting with you, in courting you, in going after you, in conquering you, in convincing you, and in cajoling you, this is narcissistic injury. It's inconceivable to the narcissists that he has to invest any effort whatsoever in obtaining anything. This is known as entitlement.
The narcissist thinks that the minute you see him, a mission accomplished. He is so drop dead gorgeous and profoundly irresistible that he doesn't need to work hard to get you.
So he is the most handsome.
Yes, he is the most. He's the most most.
He's the man that walks into a room and because I know a couple of men like this. I'm not going to name names on here. You have a lot of followers. I know a few men who will say, oh, you know, I walk down the street and such and such. All the women are looking at me or I'm the most handsome or I go into a restaurant and, yeah, other people's wives are looking at me actually as well and they're not necessarily unattractive males.
It's just, I personally don't go around my day and notice these kinds of things to such an extent and then not only notice them but to tell everybody as the story as well. That's a very, to me, it's quite funny.
So this is a very critical distinction between narcissists and psychopaths.
A psychopath cherishes the chase and the conquest because it's proof positive of his power to convert you. You didn't want him or something and then he made you. He forced you in a positive way. He like, he brought you to his point of view. He made you see him and then he became irresistible to you.
So a psychopath would court, would flirt, would chase, would romance you, and so on so on all, but not because you're special or you are, but because he needs to convert you to the cause. It's a missionary thing.
And then having done that, that proves his power. Then the psychopath would say, no woman, I haven't met a woman who said not to me.
And a narcissist would find this highly humiliating.
I need to flirt with you. I need to court you. Don't you see how superior, supreme, gorgeous, amazing, hyper-intelligent, incredible thing I am? I mean, why do I need to convince you of that?
So that proves you're stupid. And so you're not worthy of my attention.
So the narcissist, when rejected, does not coerce, he devalues. When the narcissist is rejected, the narcissist devalues. He said, okay, forget her. She's evidently too stupid to realize the treasure that I am, the gift to humanity that I am.
A psychopath would become frustrated because the power play has failed. And frustration, we know, leads to aggression. That's the frustrationaggressionhypothesis.
So all psychopaths are likely to become aggressive, but the overwhelming vast majority would simply be verbally abusive. Only a tiny, tiny minority would resort to sexual assault and rape and so.
These are very crucial differences and people keep mixing everything up and they're making a bloody mess of it, do you know?
Well, with the abusive love bombing behavior in that case, are you more likely to see that from a psychopath instead of a narcissist?
What do you mean by abusive love bombing?
Well, I feel like all love bombing is abusive to an extent, but it's the flowers, the chocolates, the chasing, the overcoming objections.
I've got a few examples.
That's actually psychopathic behavior.
Of course a narcissist would approach you and give you some flowers, secondhand probably. A narcissist would do something. He would do the token things. It would take you out on a date.
But this is precisely why a narcissist would offer your marriage on the second date. Because that's it. His investment is over. He took you out on a date. Isn't that enough?
Yeah. Isn't that enough?
Yeah, exactly.
So on the second date, a narcissist would offer your marriage. On the third date you should move in with him. On the fourth day, you're planning how many children you're going to have. And of course, you need to drop your job, your day job. It's a full-time job to be with the narcissist.
So the alacrity of the narcissist, the speed, the incredible speed with which narcissists move is because within their demented mind, within the shared fantasy, having been exposed to them for one hour is enough to convince you that this is the perfect specimen and you should never let go. So one hour is enough, one date is enough. There's no need for further investment.
Anyone who goes after you on a protracted, regular basis, gives you flowers, flirts with you, courts you, takes you out, one day, 10 days, five days, I don't know, anyone who is persistent in a creepy way. I'm not talking about you. Healthy people do it too.
But everyone who is persistent and the focus is on having power over you somehow, that's a psychopath, not a narcissist.
A narcissist would find it extremely humiliating if he has to date you more than three times before you have sex and before you consent to become a couple, that's a failure. That's narcissic injury. That's unthinkable. You must be an idiot for having rejected this incredible awful.
So he will devalue you. Narcissist will devalue you.