Personality Disorders: Not What They Seem! (ENGLISH): BOOTLEG Lecture, Corvinus University, Budapest

Hello everyone, thank you for choosing me for my next race.

[LAUGH] I hope you won't regret it by the time I finish.

Today we're going to discuss seriously disturbed people, people with personality disorders.

And within personality disorders, we have a group called the Heart Group known as Cluster B.

Cluster B has another name, it's also known as the erratic personality disorders. It even has another name, it's known as the dramatic personality disorder.

And the reason it has all these names is because people with Cluster B personality disorders are shockingly erratic and dramatic.

So there are four personality disorders in this cluster, but before we go there, what is a personality disorder?

The very phrase personality disorder makes two underlying assumptions.

One, that there is such a thing as personality.

And second thing is that this thing, personality, can somehow be disordered.

As if all personalities are ordered and structured, and some people are disordered and chaotic and probably in politics.

So personality disorders are patterns, patterns of dysfunction across the lifespan that are rigid.

They cannot be modified, but they are not amenable to qualification or intervention.

There are two books, two books that help us diagnose people and make a lot of money.

The first one is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association.

The second one is the International Classification of Diseases, published by WHO, the WHO, the World Health Organization, an arm of the United Nations and the Illuminati.

I'm joking. It's not Illuminati.

So I'm taking this seriously. I'm joking a lot, but I'm going to throw out my lectures. So you need to be really on your toes to see when I'm serious and when I'm not. Sometimes even I don't know.

Okay.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was first written in 1952 at the request of the insurance industry in the United States.

A pharmaceutical company, the insurance industry, insisted on classifying mental health disorders, creating lists of criteria so that they can reimburse therapists, psychologists and other gists.

So that was the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it was a hefty 100 pages.

Today's edition, a mere seven years later, today's edition has well over 1,000 pages.

Either we all became ten times more mentally sick, or there's a game going on.

Now, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 5, text revision, which was published a few weeks ago, actually, is a curious hybrid.

It copies verbatim the fourth edition, and yet, at the very, very end, where no one is likely to ever go, it says, "Actually, the DSM-4, the fourth edition, is wrong. We should think, we should reconceive of personality disorders as something on a spectrum, or a dimension, not categorical, not according to lists, but something that can go from zero to hero, on some kind of a line."

So this is called the alternative model.

And here's the problem.

The alternative model of personality disorders has nothing to do with the diagnostic criteria in Edition 4, which are copied into Edition 5.

Consequently, for many personality disorders, we have two ways to diagnose, according to the DSM, we have two ways to diagnose, which have nothing to do with each other, absolutely nothing.

The ICD is much more advanced, because it is not subject to special interests and to money.

And so the ICD, actually, Edition 11, Edition 11, which theoretically should be published next year, but actually has been already published in 2019, Edition 11 actually unifies all personality disorders, something that I've been advocating for well over 30 years, unifies all personality disorders into essentially a single clinical entity with emphasis.

So you'll be diagnosed with a personality disorder with narcissistic emphasis or antisocial emphasis.

That is exactly the reality in therapy. I treat people.

When you're in clinical settings, this is exactly what's happening.

No one is pure. There's no pure case. And people switch between various personality disorders in the same volume.

So you don't have a pure narcissist. Usually you have a narcissist who is also antisocial, a psychopathic narcissist or a liberal narcissist. Or you would have a narcissist who is a bit dysregulated, so there will be a comorbidity of narcissism and borderline.

It's always a mixture of something. It's always very solid. And there's transitions, there are transitions between the various personalities.

So you could start off working with a narcissist and then under stress or pressure, next time you meet him, he is literally a borderline. It's extremely common, any practitioner would tell you.

So there are four personality disorders in Cluster B. But remember, these differential diagnoses, these distinctions are very artificial. They're counterfactual. They're useless to a large extent. Even I would say extremely misleading.

Now the four personality disorders in Cluster B are according to order of grandiosity and megalomania: narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder.

The extreme form of antisocial personality disorder is colloquially known, colloquially known, not professionally, as a psychopath. A psychopath is not a clinical term, despite what you were led to believe. It's not accepted by the Committee of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, let alone a sociopath, which is totally a good fight.

Okay, but there are extreme antisocial, and we would call them from now on, "psychological" because it's easy, everyone knows the word, and because it sounds very frightening, narcissian or not, who's the one? And because I promise you the equivalent of Netflix, so...

I would like to focus on two of these, and I'll explain to you in a minute why.

The reason I'm going to focus on narcissistic and borderline personality disorders is because I don't think the other two are actually disorders.

I don't think antisocial personality disorder is a mental illness at all. I think it's a tendency to defy society, contumaciousness, resentment or rejection of authority, defiance, reactance, in your face, my way or the highway, you know?

But that's a character, what used to be called character, before psychology attempted to become science.

Psychology is pseudoscience, though, don't tell anyone.

So before psychology attempted to pose as a science, we have words like character and temperament that can find you in all textbooks. Character, temperament. Yeah, it's a character.

It's just a guy, usually. Usually it's a guy. Who doesn't like the way things are.

He is a law unto himself. He doesn't listen to anyone. He disobeys, he's reactant, in other words, he defies, he's reckless.

All this is very bad, especially for the psychopath, but it's not a mental illness. It's what we want to have, a culture-bound syndrome. Syndrome that society rejects.

We can even think of settings where psychology is advantageous. For example, the military, or maybe policing. Not to mention politics, of course. Or surgeons, there's an overrepresentation of psychopaths among medical surgeons. Among chief executive officers of Forbes 500, 5% are psychopaths. That's the famous study by Hare and Babiak. 5%, that's five times the incidence in the general population.

So it seems that psychopathy is an adaptation, often negative adaptation. These people end up in prison. Or positive adaptation in certain settings, but it is an adaptation, in my view. Not a mental illness.

Similarly, histrionic personality disorder. Histrionic personality disorder, I think, was invented by a group of Victorian maids, Victorian white maids, who really dislike it when a woman flirts and is a bit pro-cate-ish and seeks attention and so on and so forth. They really don't like that, because they feel it's threatening.

So they created the diagnosis of histrionic personality disorder. Give me a histrionic, any kind of a name.

So I'm excluding these two soft-ball based disorders, because I think they should be hotly contested. They do not remind me of a consequential illness or a clinical entity in any sense of way, that I know.

That leads us to narcissistic and borderline personality disorder.

Now, you want to go online and find a million videos and two million pages about it.

When I started, I was at the On-Diverse, 1995, when I was in dinosaurs and put up it. I had the first website on narcissism, and for 10 years I had the only website.

But now, there's an explosion. Everyone in this dog is an expert on that too. And especially the dog.

So it's not a big problem to go online and find all the information that you want, and that's not what I'm going to do today.

I'm not going to give you a list of criteria. I'm just going to introduce you to some new thinking about this disorder.

So narcissist is, I don't know if it's acceptable in good company, in Budapest, but narcissist is a glorified way of saying asshole. It's a joke.

A borderline is essentially emotionally dysregulated, and we are thinking of replacing the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder with emotional dysregulation disorder.

The key feature of a borderline is emotional dysregulation. She is unable.

She, because in a few reasons, the majority of people diagnose the borderline personality disorder, where women are diagnosed, of course, by men.

And so I'm not going to give you a sheet, but today it's 50/50. 50% of diagnosis today are male and 50% female, maybe because majority of psychotherapists today are female.

So the borderline is often overwhelmed by her emotions. Her emotions are like a tsunami. She's carried away by these emotions.

Consequently, she can't control her behavior. She has no impulse control. She acts recklessly.

Her process is not always acting out. She decompensates her defenses for life, including internal defenses, against this wave that she can't surf. She can't surf this way. She drowns in the way.

So this is emotional dysregulation. It's a key feature of borderline.

We'll discuss borderline a bit later. And in your questions, you can ask about borderline. It's my favorite topic.

Now, I'm going to introduce you to some new ways of looking at things. And a lot of it is my work, but a lot of it became mainstream over the decades because I talk a lot, and people get so bored that they say, "Okay, you're right." And it goes mainstream.

So, with narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder are the outcomes of early childhood trauma, early childhood trauma abuse.

We know this because we have correlation studies. For example, the famous ACE study, Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which is the biggest in history.

So we know that there's a strong correlation between early childhood abuse and trauma and later in life development of narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder.

Now, BPD for short, otherwise it will actually be six hours, BPD for short can develop as early as age 12 and can be diagnosed as early as age 12.

NPD should not be diagnosed prior to age 18, and that's because there is a phase in adolescence which involves very marked grandiosity and a decline in empathy.

In other words, adolescence very often resembles narcissism.

So we should never diagnose someone before the age of 18. And the new revision would say that we should never diagnose someone with NPD before the age of 21.

So it's okay, I qualify.

If we have a common etiology, etiology is called causation, that's the cause. If we have a common etiology and it is so overwhelming because we can find nothing else by will, it's the sole factor that appears in all the cases, almost all the cases, the sole factor.

We do have a genetic component in borderline. There is a genetic difference in borderline. If you have the borderline relative of the first or second degree, the chances of developing borderline are five times higher.

So there seems to be a genetic component. There is brain abnormality in borderline, brain abnormalities, they have been well documented.

So it seems that there are other factors that influence borderline, but the only factor that is common to all borderline without exception is childhood abuse. And especially actually sexual abuse in childhood, about 40% of the cases.

So if this is the case, why insist that these are personality disorders? They resemble, to my mind, a lot post-traumatic conditions.

So I started about 25 years ago, I started to look at these disorders as the outcomes of trauma, ostracotic conditions.

And then there was a woman, Judith Herman, and she came up with the concept of CPTSD, complex trauma. Complex trauma is a trauma that is the outcome of repeated exposure.

PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is when you're exposed to a single event, an airplane crashing, a lecture by Sam Vaknin, you know, these are traumatic events, and very few people recover. So this is PTSD.

But complex trauma is if I were a professor, and you would have heard many lectures, that would have been complex trauma.

So Judith Herman, the mother of the field of complex trauma, is now advocating openly to eliminate the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and to replace it with complex trauma.

I've been saying it long before Judith Herman, but it doesn't matter. All good ends up.

So, yes, I agree. I think these are post-traumatic conditions.

Why is this important for the semantics, speaking here? What is the matter, how we call it? Personality disorder.

The reason is very simple. We don't know how to treat personality disorders. That's the dirty secret of psychology.

Weare actually extremely bad at treating personality disorders. There's very few exceptions.

Now, ironically, one of the exceptions is borderline personality disorders, where we have DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, which is very efficacious.

But otherwise, we suck at treating personality disorders.

Not so with trauma. We are very good at treating trauma. Prognosis for treatments of trauma, therapies of trauma. Prognosis is excellent, actually.

So if we change the way we think about narcissism and borderline, and we begin to pay attention to the trauma aspects, maybe we can help these people.

It's not semantic. It's not a semantic argument. It's a very crucial argument.

And should we make this switch, I think we'll be able to help a lot more people than we're doing nowadays.

When I say that these conditions are post-traumatic, I'm talking in effect about three aspects of trauma.

I am a scholar. I'm talking about three aspects of trauma.

The first one is known as dissociation.

The second one is known as attachment style problems with attachment.

And the third one is known as dysregulation.

These are the three aspects, I mean, there are many other aspects. But within the context of NPD and BPD, these are the three critical aspects.

I don't know if you each and every one of them, even if you don't want to.

And then we move forward.

Let's start with dysregulation.

Dysregulation is the most visible aspect.

When you come across a borderline, she is likely to display dysregulation even in daily interactions.

You may misinterpret this as anxiety, and very often people with borderline personality disorders are also diagnosed with anxiety disorders.

But a lot of the sort of anxiety that the borderline shows, in day-to-day interactions, you want coffee? A lot of this is actually not anxiety. It's kindof emotional dysregulation.

Borderlines, for example, are triggered by words, locations, smells. Very much like Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. You know, on the good starts? He walks across a house, and there's a wafting smell of cookies, mandelang cookies, and the gates of memory open.

This is borderline.

By the way, it was a very interesting case. It was fizzling. It stayed at home on his life. It was thin, and so on and so forth.

But if you read his work, he strikes me a lot like there's a borderline.

Anyhow, so, borderline is a tripwire, a fact. It doesn't take much to trigger a borderline.

Dysregulation is a permanent feature of borderline.

Now, dysregulation pushes the borderline. And when I say borderline, it's also the narcissist. But it's a bit of a different story. The narcissist is also dysregulation.

The difference between the narcissist and the borderline is the coping strategy. How the borderline copes with emotional dysregulation, and how the narcissist copes with emotional dysregulation is different.

This difference in coping strategy defines the disorder.

Another reason to think that these are not actually personality disorders, but different reactant modes to trauma.

Okay, we come to it in a minute.

So, when it is straight away to the borderline, you have two options.

One option is to harm yourself. And I'm kidding, I'm not joking. One option is to harm yourself.

So, in borderline, for example, with a phenomenon like self-mutilation, suicide like the Asian, suicidal actions, 11% of people with borderline personality disorder successfully commit suicide. 11%. So, I'll rub it.

What is the reason to self-harm or self-mutilate?

Several reasons. One of the most important of which is to drown out the dysregulation.

It's like the famous torture method in the Turkish Ottoman police. Those of you who have never been to the Turkish Ottoman police.

So, what's the way to cure a headache is...

So, the borderline, self-mutilation, self-harm, in a variety of ways, whether it's sexual, self-trashing, for example, which is very common in borderline, is a form of self-harm.

Even, I would say, teaming up with a narcissist is a form of self-harm. Even, I would say, an extremely common type of couple, first described by my good late friend John Moscovitch.

So, there's a lot of self-harm. The self-harm drowns the dysregulation.

You know, if you have a headache and you beat your head with a hammer, for a minute you will forget the headache. Try it at home.

So, that's function number one.

Function number two is inner life.

The borderline feels dead. Narcissist also feels dead. There's an emptiness inside, first described by Otto Kernberg and others.

Later, because normally in the object relations school in the United Kingdom, they called it the "empty, schizoid core".

Country and others, yes.

So, there's an emptiness. There's a black hole. There's a void in narcissist and borderline.

And so, when the borderline self-harms, the self-mutilate, she comes alive. She suddenly feels alive.

And there are other reasons.

So, this is one option, how to cope with dysregulation.

The second option is to outsource the regulation. We call it external regulation.

The borderline says, "You're my internet partner. You will stabilize my moods. You will regulate my emotions. You are my stable walk. You will never abandon me."

So, this is externalizing the regulation, outsourcing it.

In a minute we will see that it leads not only to favorable outcomes, but this is a solution.

So, we have internal regulation and external regulation. We have internal regulation by self-harm, external regulation by outsourcing of the inner functionssound lucky.

Sorry.

Your apologies. You're temporarily accepted. We shall see about later.

So, the narcissist alsopursues the same solution.

Narcissists are very self-destructive. They are narcissistic in many instances. They self-sabotage.

It's one moment you give a country to a narcissist, it will end up with a pandemic and an attack on the capital.

So, narcissistic stories end badly, and they end badly because narcissists are self-defeating. It's a form of self-harm.

Similarly, the narcissist outsources regulation.

The narcissist wants or seeks attention from other people. He wants narcissistic supply.

This attention is used to regulate the internal environment of the narcissist, especially his sense of self-worth.

So, both the borderline and the narcissist are doing exactly the same.

They internally regulate via self-harm, and they externally regulate by outsourcing regulatory functions.

The narcissist, by seeking attention, the borderline by seeking a stable presence in life, who will never abandon them.

However, this produces anxiety.

Why?

Whenever you are dependent on something or someone, you are anxious, even if you don't feel it.

If you are dependent on the government, you are anxious. If you are dependent on your spouse, you are anxious. Any dependency creates anxiety. End of story.

Now, the twin mechanisms of regulation create twin anxieties.

One of them is known as separation insecurity. Separation insecurity is commonly known by self-starved experts on YouTube as abandonment anxiety. That's not the clinical term. The clinical term is separation insecurity, but it's also known as abandonment anxiety or separation anxiety.

Second anxiety is known as engulfment anxiety.

So, we have twin anxieties, which correspond to the twin ways of regulating the internal environment.

What is abandonment anxiety? The fear of being abandoned.

Engulfment anxiety is when the borderline, for example, feels that she is merging with her partner. Her partner is digesting her, assimilating her, consuming her, subsuming her, and that she is gradually vanishing into her partner without a trace. This is an engulfment anxiety.

So, the borderline constantly pendulates, she is like a pendulum, constantly pendulates between approach and avoidance.

Because when she approaches an intimate partner, her abandonment anxiety goes down. But then, the partner reacts, is loving, is caring, is all over her, and she feels engulfed, she feels enmeshed, and she wants to run away.

And this is avoidance, approach avoidance. We'll talk about it a bit later.

Twin anxieties exist also in narcissism, of course.

Everything I'm saying in this lecture lies in narcissism and borderline, but in different forms, in different forms. It's like zebra and horse or manose.

Yes, but one of them describes what's going on.

So, the twin anxieties reflect a reality, and now, really, it's a different part.

So, try to focus. I will give you a cue with me to check.

The twin anxieties produce, they reflect a very interesting reality, which I take credit for, as I described.

And this reality is this, object constancy versus introject constancy.

I'll try to explain. Object is human.

It says a lot about psychology, that people in psychology are called objects.

Object relations.

Okay, because they're nice people.

So, object constancy is the ability to maintain a stable representation of someone in your mind when they are awake, when they are absent.

We develop object constancy as babies, if mother is a good enough mother in the language of Winnicott.

So, if mother is good enough, we would tend to trust that mother would be there even when she leaves the room.

At the beginning, we want, and we cry a lot, as babies, those of you who are in other.

And then, gradually, we learn that mother leaves the room, but she also re-enters the room, unfortunately for me, in my case.

So, we develop object constancy. We learn to create a representation of other people in our minds, and when they are awake, we interact with this representation. We feel safe.

This concept is called a secure base. We have a secure base in our mind. This representation of another person in your mind is known as an internal object.

Now, we have various types of internal object, the most important of which is the introject.

The introject is the outcome of a twin process known as internalization, interjection, or together identification.

So, an introject is simply, how to put it, a voice. The voice of mother, the voice of father, important peers, role models, teachers, gurus, etc.

These voices are in your mind. They speak to you all the time, and they stand in for these people, even when these people are not dead, for example.

So, many of you still carry arguments with your dead mother. It's very common.

Now, object constancy is a precondition for appropriate attachment. We come to it in a way.

My contribution was to suggest that while there is object constancy and object inconstancy, object inconstancy is when the mother is not good. She is what Andre Green called dead mother.

Not really dead, but emotionally dead. So, she is depressive, she is absent, she is selfish, she is narcissistic, she is withholding, she is avoidant, she is this kind of mother.

The baby cannot develop object constancy, because mother is unpredictable. Mother is nutritious, mother is arbitrary. So, the baby doesn't develop.

This is known as object inconstancy.

So, we have object constancy in healthy people and object inconstancy.

My contribution was to suggest that the exact same thing happens with introject.

We have introject constancy and introject inconstancy.

And I proposed that what happens in borderlines is that they are unable to maintain introject constancy.

When the other person is away, the introject of that person inside the borderlines mind fades, disappears.

That's why borderlines are very hysterical when it comes to the physical presence of their intimate partners.

The borderlines insist on the physical presence of the internet partner. And when the partner is away, on a different street, stalking on the phone, shows interest in another person, made of image, doesn't matter.

The borderline falls apart because she cannot maintain a stable representation of the internet partner inside her mind.

Her introjects are unstable, not constant. So, they fade.

Every therapist will tell you that when you work with borderlines, you tell them, "Take something of your husband if she is married. Take something of your husband. Take a kerchief. Take, I don't know, his IBLAS case. Take something of him when you go out."

And when this introject begins to fade, touch it. Just touch it as a stand-in for the partner.

Because we've come across cases, I'm sorry to say, where borderlines ended up having sex with strangers.

Because they could not maintain a stable introject of the husband. They simply could not remember the husband at that moment. They struggled to recall the face.

And I'm not talking after two years of separation. I'm talking after two hours of separation. Is that better?

So, in borderlines there's introject inconstancy.

In narcissism there is object inconstancy. And there are mirror images in this sense.

I mentioned the approach avoidance.

Borderline approaches, then she avoids. I hate you, don't leave me. And the borderline sentence.

And I mentioned that this is the outcome of ambivalence. Abidement is an argument of anxiety.

This is known in psychology as a repetition compulsion. It's repeating a pattern of behavior that is dysfunctional, leads to better outcomes, but you can't stop yourself from doing it again and again.

So approach avoidance is a repetition compulsion, which is very common in the borderline.

And in both borderlines and narcissists, finally acknowledged by the DSM after decades of debate, there is a deficit of empathy.

We used to think erroneously that borderlines have a lot of empathy, and narcissists have not empathy. We now know better.

I was the first to describe empathy in narcissists. I call it the phrase cold empathy.

Narcissists do have empathy, but they have no emotional resonance with the empathy. They have no emotional correlation.

Narcissists and psychopaths must have empathy because otherwise how will they abuse people? How will they calm people? How will they cheat people and deceive them if you don't have empathy?

You need to really read people well to do this, but at the same time you need to have zero emotional reaction to it.

So that's narcissists and psychopaths.

Others have been claiming, not before a change, have been claiming that borderlines are the same. They don't have empathy. Or they've reduced empathy.

And for many decades there was a raging debate, and now the DSM accepted this, that there is a reduction in empathy, in borderlines.

And another reason to think that all these disorders are actually one and the same, only with different coping strategies. That's all.

Now, when you put everything together, approach avoidance, introjecting constancy, objecting constancy, etc., lack of empathy, when you put all this together, it's clear that in inter-mature relationships, there will be massive problems with attachment.

Borderlines and narcissists have insecure attachment style.

We distinguish between secure attachment and insecure attachment.

Secure attachment, I think there are three people in the world that have it, and they all live in Kalmandu. The rest of the population has insecure attachment, my practice at least.

And they are not statistically, actually, strangely.

Insecure attachment is fear of intimacy, another name for fear of intimacy.

So you could be fearful, you could have a fearful attachment style, you could have an avoidant attachment style, you could have a dismissive attachment style, which is to be rude and reject people and so on.

There are numerous types of insecure attachment styles. There are actually four basic ones, but you can combine them.

So permutations are about 16 or 20. Insecure attachment styles.

And borderlines and narcissists have insecure attachment styles, because they don't have the first supplement of attachment.

They don't have what it takes. They don't even have one out of four or one out of six elements. They have nothing like zero, so they cannot attach.

Now, a narcissist compensates for a lack of attachment with a fantasy defense.

Narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a fantasy defense.

The diagnostic criteria are open with the word, the pattern of fantasy. It's a fantasy defense.

Fantasy is a defense mechanism, first described by Furtress, where is it? Fantasy is a defense mechanism.

And what the narcissist does, he uses fantasy in everything, and especially in his intimate relationships.

He creates a shared fantasy, and he invites the department into the shared fantasy.

You are very wise to live now, and for invited to my show.

So the narcissist compensates for insecure attachment by offering the intimate partner a fantasy, inviting her into the fantasy, and then inhabiting the fantasy together.

And within the fantasy, the intimate partner is being transformed dramatically, very dramatically,

The borderline solution is also a shared fantasy.

But while the narcissist's shared fantasy is a type of cult, we against the world, I don't have a fantasy.

The borderline fantasy is, we are one. I'm one with my intimate partner. He has no daylight between us. We have a single organism with two heads.

And the narcissist fantasy is, it's just you and me, because we are so special, both of us. We are so special.

So it's just you and me, against the world, that is hostile, doesn't understand us, and so on.

That's the essence of the narcissist shared fantasy.

I mentioned dissociation. Dissociation, and you see that I don't have time to touch on these topics at length.

But each and every one of these topics, if you go on my YouTube channel, and make me the richer, on this channel, each and every single thing I've mentioned is like two or three or four videos, a total of anywhere between four and ten hours.

And now this is a song. And the reason the video is a song is that I'd love to hear my voice. I've been totally honest with you. I think you don't appreciate that.

Dissociation, these three forms, one is called depersonalization, the feeling that whoever is performing actions or acts is not you.

Autopilot, observing yourself from outside, as though you're an observer. Movie, there's a movie with you as an actress, who's watching.

Derealization, which is the third form of dissociation, is when the whole environment is perceived as unreal. Whatever is happening is perceived as unreal. Dreamlike, like marriage, fantasy life, and so on and so forth.

Dissociation is a classic outcome of trauma.

And so if I'm right and others are right, and narcissism and borderline are post-traumatic states, we should find a lot of dissociation.

And indeed, one of the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder is dissociation.

Similarly, narcissists dissociate alone. They cover up for the dissociation with something called confabulation.

Confabulation looks a lot like lying, but it's not lying, because the narcissist believes in it.

It's just the narcissist trying to make sense of the memory gaps.

And says, "Well, I must have done this. It stands to reason that I've done this. It probably happened this way."

And then he repeats the story, and then he begins to believe the story.

And then he would fight you with tooth-nailing claw if you tried to challenge the story.

And then I would be able to say, "Namaste, this is a liar." It's not a liar. It's a desperate attempt to paper over the memory gaps.

Both these disorders are highly, highly discontinuous.

Now, I've developed a model called the self-state model. It's based on the work of Philip Bromberg.

And I'm not going to it right now. Whew! Thank you. I'm not going to it right now.

I similarly developed a second model called IPAN, intra-psychic activation model.

Those of you who want to learn more about the self-state model and the IPAN, the psychic activation model, just go on my channel, find the humans, and you will receive an advertisement for code. I think. If you're lucky.

I'm already not going to it right now, but it's critical for the understanding of it.

I will finish on Philip's questions by describing...

I developed three models. Two I've just mentioned.

The third one that I've developed combines all being for all the knowledge we have of personality disorders and allows us to predict new personality disorders, or states that resemble personality disorders.

So in my model, I distinguish between overt, covert, and collapsed states.

We have an overt narcissist that's not on trial. We have a covert narcissist, which will remain on me, and we have a collapsed narcissist.

That's a narcissist who fails to intensify. He cannot intensify.

So he collapses. He falls apart.

So there are these three states. There are two affects in my model.

One is shame and one is envy.

There are two reality principles. People who confuse internal objects with external objects and people who confuse external objects with internal.

This I will explain a bit. I will dwell on it because it's very important.

A psychotic state involves a principle of action, a mechanic of the soul, known as hyperreflexivity or hyperreflection.

Hyperreflexivity is that the psychotic mind expands outwards and becomes the world.

Because the psychotic has no boundaries, no limits, the psychotic doesn't know where he ends and the world begins. He doesn't know actually that he ends and the world begins. He doesn't make these distinctions.

So as the psychotic expands outwards, a little like the deep end, it creates a universe.

At that moment, psychotic is unable to tell the difference between objects inside his mind, internal objects and objects out there, external objects.

Because the distinction is meaningless if, as the song says, we are the world. If you are the world, what's the meaning of internal-external? There's no such thing.

Because I said so.

From that moment on, the psychotic confuses internal and external.

So he has a voice in his head, it's coming from the ceiling. He sees something in his mind, it's standing in the corner.

He doesn't make this. So this is an extreme case.

The narcissist is not very far from it, shockingly.

That's not some button, that's autogynephilia.

The narcissist is not very far from it.

The narcissist confuses external objects with internal objects.

It's like mirror psychosis, reverse psychosis.

I remind you, the psychotic confuses internal objects and thinks that they are external. The narcissist thinks that external objects are actually internal.

So for example, when the narcissist comes across a potential internal object, let's say he would look at that. He would take a snapshot of that. Take a photo of that. Literally, snapshot.

And then he would internalize the snapshot. It would become an internal object.

That means the snapshot becomes an internal object.

From the moment the internal object is created, the narcissist continues to interact only with the internal object, not with the external object.

All interactions, henceforth, are with the internal object.

But he is confused. He thinks the internal object actually stands in for the external object.

He believes, in other words, that the external object is actually internal.

So when the external object begins to behave independently, challenge the narcissist, disagree with him, travel, start to study, go to university, have new friends.

When this happens, there's a gap opening between the snapshot and the partner.

She becomes independent and she changes.

But this snapshot is stable.

So there's a gap opening. This creates huge anxiety in the narcissist. Enormous anxiety.

And then he has to devalue the partner in order to regain omnor status.

But it's important to understand that narcissism is a form of psychosis. It's reverse psychosis, simply.

Psychosis is internal, external. Narcissism is external, internal.

With a borderline, the situation is even more complicated.

Again, that's not somebody. That's what I'm going to do.

That's why it's called borderline. Border. On the border between psychosis and neurosis.

So with a borderline situation, it's even more complex.

Remember that the narcissist can create a snapshot and internalize you. And then you are at least forever for you.

But the borderline is incapable of doing even this.

You'll remember when you were much younger and told you about introjecting constancy.

You find introjecting constancy funny?

No, I find that like half an hour ago I was in much longer.

You'll remember.

So, while the narcissist has refuge, you can find refuge in a stable pattern if you wish, a stable representation of internal objects.

If he's safe among these internal objects, he knows how to manipulate them. He can interact with them. They can give him solace and presence and so on.

The borderline can't do even this. She can't do even this.

Her only, the only way for the borderline to feel safe, regulated and so on, where the secure base, is to literally maintain the physical presence of her internal apartment.

She needs him captive, absolute prisoner, 24/7, every second, dead or alive, asleep or away. She needs him by her side.

So her dependency on the internal apartment is total. Total, because if he's gone, not only is he gone, but her mind is gone. He's taking her mind with him. She doesn't have a representation of him in her life.

So, she is terrible, is absolutely terrible about this presence. And she reacts even to imaginary abandonment, even to anticipated abandonment, even to, she interprets many things, misinterprets many things, many behaviors as abandonment.

Because for her abandonment means dying, dying literally, becoming mindless without a mind.

You could say that the borderline outsources her mind to her intimate partner, and he can obscure with it, he can just walk away with it. Imagine how terrifying this is.

What the narcissist does, he internalizes you. He converts you into an avatar, character action figure in his mind. And then he doesn't care about you anymore. He plays video games with you in his mind. He shoots a cue and say, "So the narcissist has it more easy, more easy than the borderline."

And these are gradations, of course. There's the borderline, then there's the narcissist, these are gradations.

And the psychotic catalyze them all.

That is why Gert said, "In some pseudo-psychotic state, they are near-psychotic." He was absolutely right about it.

So, these are the two reality principles, confusing externally, internal, internal, and external.

I have two traumatic bridges in my mind. This is my third one.

The two I didn't discuss, discussed in the last one.

The two traumatic bridges are collapse and mortification.

Collapse, I mentioned, is when the narcissist cannot obtain supply, or when the borderline cannot ensure the continued presence of her intimate partner.

It is a collapse state.

When there is a collapse, there is a transition from one type to another.

So, when the narcissist collapses, he switches from overt to covert. And back, from covert to overt. He can also switch from somatic to surrogate.

When the borderline collapses, she will also switch between states of borderline, which I was the first to describe, covert, borderline, and so on.

So, this switching between types.

Mortification is much, much more stable, much more difficult.

In the case of the narcissist, mortification is public humiliation in front of peers, or significant others, that is sudden, unexpected, and that involves the destruction of shared fantasy.

So, the destruction of shared fantasy in public, in front of meaningful others, and which involves shame and humiliation.

Mortification, while the system of mortification was first described, my memory doesn't fit me in 1957.

And it is, the narcissist is like dying, as close as I can describe it. It feels like dying, and it is very life-free, very life-free.

The borderline goes through mortification, but the borderline's mortification is private.

It is the outcome of abandonment that is final, intentional, with intention, malicious, final, and abandonment that kind of takes away her ability to find another internal body.

So, this would be mortification in the borderline.

Mortification states lead to paralysis. Collapse states lead to transition from type to type. Mortification states paralyze completely.

Why? Because all the defenses are disabled.

The narcissist's false self and the borderline's false self, they both have false self, right? The false self of the narcissist and the borderline are disabled by mortification.

He has no defenses left. Both of them, then, the narcissist becomes actually borderline.

Mortification renders the narcissist borderline, because he has no defenses, a process called decompensation.

The narcissist decompensates. He has no defenses, and he begins to dysregulate heavily. He becomes borderline.

When the borderline is subject to mortification, she becomes a secondary cyclothymic. That's the most recent for the cutting-edge research. She becomes a secondary cyclothymic, a factor two cyclothymic. That's a cyclothymic with a modicum of empathy and a lot of logic.

So, in both cases, there is a massive transformation.

Now, there was a guy called Georgetown, a psychoanalyst, who said that "bordernoids are failed narcissists. The child, exposure, abuse, and trauma, the child attempts to become a narcissist. But when the child fails, the child remains a borderline, right from borderline."

So, obviously, if the narcissist is regressed by modification, he will regress to the previous stage, which is borderline.

So, it's like abuse, borderline, narcissist, and bear, narcissist, borderline, because of abuse, de-modification.

This constant back-and-forth regression between developmental stages, it happens to the narcissist and the borderline dozens of times in a lifetime. Dozens of times.

So, these bridges are very important, because they facilitate change and transformation and so on.

And finally, in my model, there are three cognitive distortions.

Cognitive distortions are not cognitive deficiencies.

Cognitive deficit is a problem with cognition, usually organic problem, with condition. A cognition, I'm sorry, problem with thinking, a systemic problem.

Cognitive distortion is not, there's no problem with cognition, but there's a filter that changes the information that's coming in, in a highly specific way.

So, grandiosity is a cognitive, it's kind of a filter on memory. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion.

The narcissist will take all the information and then fit it into a grandiose fantastic narrative.

So, this is, you will distort it, fit it into the narrative. It's a kind of reframing.

Grandiosity and then dissociation is a cognitive distortion.

And paranoia, someone asked about paranoia, who has a paranoia here? You? Right.

Paranoia is a cognitive distortion.

And why do I mention paranoia in the context of narcissism and borderline?

First of all, you should know that all the lines are grandiose, exactly like narcissism. They both are grandiose.

I'm mentioning paranoia because paranoia is narcissism.

What does a paranoia say? Paranoid say?

It says, I'm the center of conspiracy. That ought to get me.

I'm sufficiently important to warrant the attention of the CIA, you know?

So, it is a self-aggrandizing narrative.

Otherwise, how can you be a paradigm? Paranoid means, they ought to get me, me, how to get me. Because I'm substantial and consequential.

So, it's a form of narcissism, actually. That's why I'm mentioning paranoia as a cognitive distortion.

I try to give you, really, because the field is vast, and I talk for several days.

I do actually talk for several days. People, you know, they have tents and camper vans, and catering services go by, popcorn and this kind of thing.

I have seminars that last eight hours, eight days, up to 60,000.

So, I warn you, I can talk about it.

But having frightened me this way, I try to give you a forte that kind of, you know, something, or what's going on today in the field.

The debates we're having, the arguments, what we agree on, what we don't agree on.

Of course, I've over-emphasized my contributions, because without saying, and so on.

But the field is in ferment. There is a lot going on today. There is a dispute in the very concept of personality, the very concept of identity, or identity.

And that is my model, the IPAR model, the inter-cyclic activation model, actually disputes this concept, the counterfactual, and this model.

So, there's a lot going on.

Psychology is a very exciting field now.

If you try to turn on...

Start with chairs, you know, then...

Psychology is a very exciting field now.

I think more than ever, actually. I've been with this field for three decades. And I know the field intimately from the beginning. I've read a lot, and so I think this is possibly the most exciting period that's ever been in psychology.

I regret that the psychologists are trying to be physicists, and the physicists also.

So, I think compared to...

I regret that they're trying to be physicists. It cuts them not in a good way.

And the more they try to be physicists, the more pseudo-scientists they become.

And that's very regrettable.

But there's always a hardcore life-saving who try to get rid of the pretensions of science and just focus on human beings and how they operate and what can we learn from them and how we can observe them without effecting. And so on and so forth.

So, psychology is a branch of literature. Dostoevsky was a great psychologist, possibly the greatest ever. He had as great as Freud, therefore.

Freud was a literary genius, not exactly a rigorous scientist, despite his training as a neurologist.

Seven of the ten most important psychologists until the end of the 1960s were not psychologists at all.

Melanie Klein did not have any degree in psychology. Winnicott was a pediatrician. Freud was a neurologist.

So, psychology was a much more open field because he did not pretend to be a scientist.

And consequently, until the 1960s, there was a flourishing of psychology, the likes of which has never happened since.

What we have been doing since then is narrowing psychology, narrowing the statistics and laboratories and white coats.

Money has a lot to do with it because if you look like a physicist, you pretend to be a physicist and you use mathematics that no congressman can understand, you get money. You'll take money for crimes and research.

But that's not psychology.

It's unconscionable that in many universities, including in Europe recently, statistics is about 40% of the curriculum.

It's extremely rare. I happen to be a physicist with specific training in mathematics. I can tell you statistics is what you want it to be.

So, I wouldn't have chosen statistics as the tool if I were forced to choose any branch of mathematics. I'm not sure I would have chosen statistics.

It's a mess. It's simply a mess.

And those of us who are trying to reintroduce a human dimension and literary aspiration into the field, we are rebuffed. We are considered clowns because we don't count the statistics or numbers or whatever.

And that is bad news for society.

They discovered the baby with bath water, with a bathtub, with a bathroom, and department with entire building and with two cities to go.

So, nothing much is left.

Today, it's forbidden to teach anything before 90 degrees. And you can't teach for example, object relations here.

Anyway, simply forbidden. Of course you can't mention Freud. You mention Freud, you're out. You just can't mention it.

And that's the matter.

I treat him because I know statistics and mathematics. I teach in the outreach program of Princeton, Yale, so okay, I survive.

But I survive against my will. I am so disheartened by this that I'm seriously thinking of doing the field.

This is really...

On the other hand, there's a lot of creative thinking going on. So, maybe it's fight by fighting for those of you whose age is not traditional, like me.

Okay, ladies and some gentlemen, if you have any questions, if you have any answers, I'll be happy to question.

Someone sent me a list of questions. Where are you? Who asked this question? You asked all these questions?

No, I asked some. Did any of you have questions that she replicated, she copied? I got it from other ladies. From other? Those who were clever enough, not with any.

I have one question.

Sometimes the analysis is used as silent treatment and silent treatment. And what is the reason?

Another question is also part of the process of the meeting of the enforcement.

The meeting of the enforcement is part and part, not paid.

The meeting of the enforcement creates dependency on the source of the re-treatment.

So if someone is cold and cruel with you, when he's cold, you would wait for the hope, for the hope.

It becomes the sole source for the hope.

So silent treatment is part of this cycle, and it's a form of aggression. It is intended to communicate via silence, coded messages. It's supposed to modify your behavior. It's supposed to question and cause you to question your reality.

So it's an integral part of the gas light, questioning your reality. It's supposed to affect you, regulate your moods and emotions in a way that will create dependency by the enforcement.

So it has multiple functions. It's a very cruel thing. I think it's one of the most cruel forms of abuse because your imagination is doing their use.

There's nothing out there. It's your imagination that is trying to...

What is it doing? What did I do to it? What did I do wrong? What could I do differently?

So it's self-torture, provokes self-torture. That's very cruel.

Are they aware of this?

Like this problem called money?

Narcissists are aware of their behaviors mostly.

They just don't see it as a pathology. They don't think it's seen.

And most of them are proud. They're proud that they're on them.

They reframe their behaviors as something to be proud of.

So they say, for example, "I'm tough." I'm the next stage in evolution, people are inferior. If everyone was like me, it would be much better.

And so suppose they affect, they invest emotional energy in their disorder.

They fall in love with their disorder. They get attached to it. They idealize it because narcissists idealize everything.

Narcissists idealize themselves.

It's an apartment. It's work. It's government. It's football club.

So he idealizes his disorder also.

And idealization is a natural reaction of narcissism because a narcissist is a fantasy defense.

To be able to have a fantasy, you need first to idealize the participants of the fantasy.

As you come to the fantasy with people who are imperfect, flawed, stupid, ugly, you need to find a position to be perfect.

It's a fantasy about perfection.

So the narcissist idealizes everyone and everything.

For a while. Because after a while, they do this idealize the other person.

Yes, there are other dynamics.

In romantic relationships, in internet relationships, the narcissist's partner is a mother figure.

So he needs to get rid of his mother. He didn't complete the separation of his original mother. He wants to completely quit the mother substitute.

And then he needs to devalue her. And he needs to discount her. This is symbolic separation.

So he is doing it to symbolize the separation.

But he idealizes everything.

And yes, he tends to devalue and restart the things that he's idealizing.

He moves on. But it's always a fantasy. Always this fantasy.

Narcissists don't even rely on people. They're not irrelevant.

And very often, narcissist fantasies appeal to so many people.

They take outwards of political leaders.

Because they are able to create a shared fantasy for millions.

Fantasy is very appealing because reality sucks.

Otherwise, you'll probably be noticed.

But reality seems to be very induced for some amount of reasons.

So fantasy is very attractive. Very appealing proposition.

Narcissists are masters of fantasy. Who can resist them?

They're not there.

So we are living in an increasingly more narcissistic civilization.

Society, because reality is becoming less and less variable.

And what content do we have?

We can commit suicide.

Suicide rates are there now, alongside the age groups.

We can kill ourselves while we're being alive.

So substance abuse is stylometry. We can kill ourselves mentally.

So depression is up five times. And anxiety is always up three times than for Israel.

We can isolate ourselves so we are as good as they because we don't see anyone and no one sees us.

In 1980, a typical person in the United States had 10.1 good friends. I don't know why this is zero. 10.1 good friends. I don't want to speculate. If it's a name, I know.

So, yes. I have been very moved to jail. So I know you want to. I can see you.

So in 1980, a typical person in the United States had 10.1 friends. In 2018, 0.9.

It's a form of that. You isolate yourself from two kids in one bedroom so two nephews in one bedroom. And you essentially live for all intents and purposes.

If at the same time you also abuse substances, and so on and so forth, then of course, it's more suicide.

Not everyone has a willpower or the courage to go into suicide on a track, but in numerous ways. And they're becoming more and more and more prevalent in the basic society.

The society, reality is such that fantasy has become irresistible and already fighting technology.

So we have fantasy-based technologies today. They're all fantasy-based.

We are bound to have the metaverse. The metaverse is 100% fantasy.

It's like you're going to disappear into a computer screen and never exit, literally never exit, because you could order food, you could work, you could, excuse the expression, sex, you could do anything within the metaverse. You would never exit.

That's top-up fantasy. And of course, it's reminiscent of the Matrix. Matrix is a fantasy system.

Is it bad?

There are people like, for example, the philosopher David Chalmers who says that, no, it's not bad. If we can survive in fantasy or in simulation, what is the distinction between this and reality? Why does reality have a privilege status?

He says, why should it have a privilege status? If you spend all your life attached to a computer screen or in a Matrix, then you die. You won't even know that it's not real. You will think it's real. Simulation will be convincing. It will be overwhelming, all powerful.

So what's the big deal? What you have to be based in reality, asks David Chalmers.

The answer is that, first of all, if you're not in reality, you're not efficacious. Some of the outcomes you go against will not succeed to obtain results. Some, not all.

But much more importantly, a fantasy defense always leads to nonsense. When a fantasy defense becomes exaggerated, it always invariably results in narcissism.

End of story, there's no other outcome. That's why studies by Twenge and Campbell show that the incidence of narcissism, pathologic narcissism, among college students is up by almost 500%.

In other words, pathologic narcissism among college students has quintupled in less than four decades.

Why?

Because there's much more that's going to affect it.

Because of parents.

Parents?

Parents' upbringing doesn't often actually result in narcissism.

But narcissism, when you react to parents, when you're found as a defense, then you become narcissism.

And we are creating a narcissistic civilization because we are placing new genoceses and a lot of money on fantasy. That's where we're going to end in.

And narcissism is shared fantasy. Believe me, it's the worst place imaginable to be. It's hell. It's absolute hell.

So, yes. I'm somewhat familiar with your work and really resonates with me for a reason.

But I wanted to ask, so you talked a lot about what leads to narcissism.

Do you personally know anyone, or maybe not personally, and I can't tell this time with me, who has ever overcome narcissism in a way that is not just that they are functional or they act kinder, but that they genuinely feel different? Or maybe have you overcome your own narcissism ever?

No.

Because it's no effect if you've always been too talented.

I'm very tempted to say it. But I promise to be fruitful.

You see, this leads to a problem known as the intersubjectivity problem.

Do we really have access to another person's mind?

Of course we do. We have to rely 100% on self-reporting.

If you cry, I ask you why do you cry?

The obvious answer, you've been listening to me for two hours. Very well-listened to me.

But it could be that you're sad or something.

I have to rely on self-report. I have to rely on what you tell me. There is no other way to do it.

So if you are a truthful person, and even there I have to rely on you, how do I know if you're truthful?

And ultimately it all relies on self-report, because if I ask your friend, is she truthful, they also rely on her self-report. There's no entrance.

This is called the intersubjectivity problem. We cannot access another person's mind, so what we do, we lie. We create a big lie. We pretend.

We pretend that because we share the same physiology, we also share the same structure of mind and processes of mind and so on and so forth.

There is no way to prove it.

Consequently, there's no way for me to answer your question. I don't know what is happening inside the narcissist's mind.

I have to rely on his self-reporting, which is a practice I strongly discourage in the case of narcissism.

One of the biggest criticism, it is a test for psychopathy. It's called PCLR. The main test for psychopathy is called PCLR.

The PCLR has two parts. One of them is asking the psychopath questions. The second part is asking the psychopath's wife and children questions.

How it goes.

The psychopath, we all know, is one of the most truthful people on earth. He would never lie. He would never misrepresent himself.

The psychopaths are very truthful.

So the first part of the test is to ask the psychopath, "Did you ever torture animals?" "Me?" "No." "I never." "Did you ever steal something from another person?" "No." "I'm very moral." "I never do."

And then you ask his wife, who is probably terrified of him, "Is he a good man?" "Oh, he's a good man. He's great. He's the best man ever."

And you ask his children, "Who he beats twice a day?"

This is a test. I'm kidding, you're not. That's the main test for psychopathy.

So we have to rely on psychopathy.

So the answer to the first part of the question is, there's no way of knowing.

If there's been any real transformation, anyone let alone the narcissist.

However, because they modify their behaviors.

They want to be more self-effecious.

The only reason a narcissist goes to therapy is because he thinks he can maximize the out-life. He is not doing it well enough.

He actually comes to therapy to learn how to beat a more efficient narcissist. He wants the therapist to take away the things that affect his function and performance.

So, yes, we do know how to modify the behaviors of narcissism.

Not modify the behaviors. We know how to win the narcissist.

Less antisocial. Less abrasive. Less unpleasant. Easier to live with.

We know how to teach narcissists to do this.

Sometimes we use their grandiosity. We challenge them. Let's see if we can do it. And so on.

Without a good end result, it's successful.

But the core issues absolutely are untouched.

Shared family security. I'm a 6'2" professor of psychology at the State of the University. I contributed to the field.

And I repeat the same pattern with everyone I meet. Shared family.

And then she abounds me. She cheats on me. I'm mortified. I want to die. TakeTakes six months. I recover.

Having learned all my lessons, I repeat everything I do.

It's not learning the narcissist.

So, this is the thing we face.

We can modify the behaviors.

I invented a new treatment model, Cold Therapy.

Cold Therapy allows me to destroy some parts of the apparatus. Some parts of the machinery of narcissists.

Mainly the false self.

To destroy the false self, there's no need for narcissistic supply. And the grandiosity is gone.

But these are not the core issues of narcissists. These are issues that bother society.

But the emptiness, it doesn't go away. Emptiness doesn't go away.

The need for fantasy, the fantasy defense doesn't go away. The lack of empathy doesn't go away.

The damage done to each other's partners doesn't go away. None of these are good.

So, who more is there to treat narcissists or borderline?

The borderline is more prone to asking down and promiscuity. Reckless behavior is not under responsibility. Drinking and so on.

So, there are no statistics. But the borderline overall is more likely than the narcissist.

Narcissists also, as opposed to what you watch online, narcissists have an island of stability.

So, usually you have a narcissist who has been married for 40 years and has kids and grandkids and so on. But he has changed 20 jobs.

Or you have a guy who is working in the same company since he was 16. And he is now the chief executive officer 57 years later.

But in the meantime, he got married, remarried and divorced my son.

So, it's an island of stability surrounded by a devotion of kids.

This is a simple description of the openness.

Maybe you could read the questions.

Yes. I have another question. It was on the list that some of those people have very shallow affect and emotions, or most of them. And is it connected to the lack of consciousness they have? Or conscience or remorse they feel?

So, how remorse is connected to feelings?

Because maybe we think it's a moral issue. But these people cannot really feel deep and cannot attach to people. So, that's why it's hard for them to feel remorse. Is it connected or it's just...

Some morality and feelings are connected or not?

Shallow affect is much more typical of the psychopathic.

And even I suggested that psychopaths have flat affect.

Shallow affect is also linked to something called reduced affect display.

The reduced affect display is not showing emotions, or a face, not reacting emotionally to any changes in the environment.

This is typical of psychopaths, not narcissists.

Narcissists can and often are very animated. They imitate or mimic emotions very much. They don't experience positive emotions.

Narcissists have no access to positive emotions of any kind. So, they cannot love, for example.

But they do have access to negative affectivity. Negative affectivity are negative emotions, like envy, anger, rage. They have access to it and they experience these emotions very powerfully.

So, it's not true to say that narcissists have a shallow affect. They have what we call negative affectivity. Negative affectivity is half the spectrum of emotions. It's felt very powerfully, very strongly. Overwhelmingly, actually.

So, in this sense, they are like negative border lines. They are like border lines, but they are overwhelmed only by negative emotions.

A border line can be overwhelmed by love, for example. What she thinks is wrong.

But a narcissist will never be overwhelmed by love because he does not experience love. But he will be overwhelmed by anger. And he will do crazy things. He will lose impulse control. He will be reckless. He will destroy himself and everyone around him.

So, in this sense, he is like a negative border line.

Remorse and regret, they are linked to undermine emotions. Shame and guilt.

I refer you to thewords of Master Soseh. It depends on you.

Narcissism, many scholars believe that narcissism is a shame reaction. The child was shamed by the parent. The child felt ashamed. He is unable to cope with the parent.

And so, to compensate for this shame, the child became a narcissist.

But the narcissist does not dare to touch his shame.

In the mortification, the narcissist is humiliated, ashamed. So, he gets in touch with his shame.

That is why he becomes borderline suicidal, because he is in touch with the shame.

I have been mortified several times in my life, twice in the last three years. So, I went through mortification twice in the last three years.

I am clinically mortified, as I speak to you right now. I am in a mortified state, right now, as I speak.

So, it is a little like, it is a lot like, a lot like dying, a lot like falling apart, disintegrating.

And it is because I got in touch with the underlying reservoir of shame that gave rise to the narcissist.

It is as if I lost my narcissism defense. And I became a child all over again.

And a child who experiences the full power of the shame that is inside me.

Child is defenseless, of course, against the shame.

That is why there is suicidal ideation in this answer.

So, shame and guilt.

The narcissist does not dare to experience shame and guilt because it will be life-threatening.

Consequently, he is incapable of remorse and regret.

But everything you said is multiplicative of psychopaths, actually.

That is another question, yes.

Sorry, in your time, I was after survival of mortification.

The narcissist reacts to mortification by becoming a mortiline, I think.

That is suicidal mortiline, to be honest. That is suicidal mortiline.

And then he begins to, there are two ways to react.

One is called external, and one is called internal.

External reaction to mortification is to say, these people are evil. They wanted to get me. The horrible people. I was a victim, and so on.

And internal reaction to mortification is, I made it happen. I pushed them to do it. I engineered the whole thing. I was the puppet master. I was in control.

So this restores the grandiose. In both cases, it restores the grandiose.

Because in the external mortification, you are a victim. So you are the good guy. You are morally deprived. So in grandiose, no peace is in no morality or victim.

And in the other solution, you are the go-bun. You are the puppet master. You make the do.

So these are the two solutions.

So mortification, it takes time, these narratives, because they are not very convincing.

So you have to deceive yourself. It's an asset. You have to deceive yourself into believing you.

Now, if you are not highly intelligent, it takes a shorter period of time.

But if you are highly analytic, like me, highly analytic, I have enormous difficulty to accept either of the two solutions, because I know they don't sit well with all the facts.

So I'm struggling with mortification much longer than the typical narcissist, and the risk to my life is much enhanced than the typical narcissist, because of my intelligence and my political skills.

So intelligence is not always an asset in the narcissist.

And is this something that co-therapy can help to...

Co-therapy creates mortification. Co-therapy is a process of creating artificial mortification, controlled mortification.

And then through the mortification, bring the narcissist out with it.

So in the first few days of co-therapy, there is extreme suicidal ideation. And I need to be with the patient in the same room, or the same apartment. If the patient is looking, I'm happy. I'm not asking. I'm never doing that. I'm not looking.

So it's simulated mortification.

So I came to this insight co-therapy because I demortified it before, and I realized the only window change is mortification. All the defenses are down. There's a risk of suicide. The narcissist is terrified. He's like a child again.

And in the community, developmentally, the narcissist is about two years old when he's in mortification.

So talking to him now is a true role. You know that?

Generally, by the way, even in normal life, the narcissist is about two years old. As far as emotional literacy, emotional intelligence, ability to interact as a narcissist.

Narcissism is a form of arresting development. It's a regressive state.

That's correct. That's not right. It's a regressive state.

And so narcissists are children.

Absolutely.

And they are more or less, in some respects, two years old, in other respects, six years old, to very developed narcissists, the least affected by the use of that.

But you would never findany narcissist who's about magnitude.

And the vast majority are not good.

Now, they usually use narcissism because they have skills, they have education, they have a loose letter, you know, they have no artistic schedule.

But under conditions of extreme stress, decompensation, mortification, the loose letter falls, many other things.

And what is left is a terrifying two-year-old.

It has to go head on with a replaying, a reenactment of the original trauma with this mother and the shame attached to the trauma, the helplessness, the helplessness about you.

Helplessness provoked shame.

When your head was very shameful, it's immediate. It's immediate.

So imagine you're my age, but you're experiencing the emotions of a two-year-old who is terrified, humiliated, ashamed, who totally values it. Of course it pushes to suit himself. It's a very dangerous thing.

Similarly.

Many shared fantasies end in mortification.

Many shared fantasiesend in mortification because the narcissist, if the narcissist chooses the wrong interdepart, the interplay of the pathologies leads to defiance.

The other department defies the narcissist, and then she wants to hurt the narcissist.

So for example, if the narcissist teams up with a psychopath, his partner, his idiom of partner is a psychopath, or even a borderline who is very frequently in the psychobatic state.

Now there are new studies, relatively new studies, that show that they are all borderline become psychobotic when they are exposed to abandonment and rejection.

But some of the lives are way more psychobotic than other governments. They are comotic, so there is a co-properter in the body.

This is a typical partner of the narcissist. A narcissist goes for psychopathic polyline. At least this narcissist, you see. Goes to psychobatic borderline, and then the potential for mortification is an opposite because she would reject and resent being transformed into a figment of a fantasy.

She would insist on her autonomy and defiance. She would be defiant.

And finally, she would create what we call the persecutory object. She would begin to see the narcissist as an enemy, and she would want to attack the narcissist. She would want to hurt the narcissist.

And very often, the way she does it, is that we cheat on him with another guy, in full view, humiliating in public, like you do.

So it ends badly if there is a wrong mate's reaction.

Not all narcissists choose to respect partners, but many of them do.

Mortification is most common after the disintegration of an inter-menture fight, mostly.

Like I did in "The Minute of the Sumpers." I'm tricking narcissists with quantification.

And from the outside, it's...

Wow. So the ultimate condition is...

I would compare it to schizophrenia, but it's really terrifying to be old.

How is it?

It was a question.

How can I survive living with a narcissistic person? How can I survive?

Why would youwant to survive with a narcissist?

The only thing with a narcissist is all the way.

What if you can't walk away?

I never bought this. I can't walk away because I am the narcissist.

The narcissist, the question should be phrased differently. How can I survive as a narcissist? Not with a narcissist.

There is no situation where you cannot walk away. I don't buy the news. I can't walk away because she's my mother.

So I haven't spoken to my mother in 26 years. I haven't seen her in 26 years.

So I can't walk away because she's my son. So I can't walk away because we are children.

You also have an attorney and an accountant. You have an attorney and an accountant.

There is no situation where you cannot walk away. It's bullshit.

It's because you want to remain in touch with a narcissist somehow.

Because there's a vestige of the shared fantasist in the video. You hope maybe that he will hurry one day, take you back.

The reasons for staying in touch with a narcissist are unholy reasons. All of them.

So the only solution is no contact.

Of course you can manage your life with a narcissist if you insist.

But why would you insist? It's simple. It's not a logic.

What would happen?

Which type of person can be this narcissist? Which type of personality can be this narcissist?

Anyone can be a narcissist. A narcissist doesn't care. He wants a narcissist to survive.

So a narcissist wants four things. They want sex. They want supply.

A narcissist because they speak. They want services. They want safety.

If you give them two out of four, then you are in a different partner.

But the narcissist prefers as preference for certain types because they fit much more easily into the shared fantasist.

It's a lot less work to get them to be in the fantasy.

So if I interact with a healthy woman, I would have to work very hard to convince her to enter my fantasy and never exit.

This is not easy.

But if you're borderline, you are already in a fantasy state. You're in a fantasy about me, actually.

If you're borderline, you're fantasizing about me because your fantasy is intimate partner centered around the intimate partner.

So it's much easier for me to recruit you, to convert you into my fantasy.

So for you, of course. Same with codependents.

All these mental health disorders, they are one step removed from the narcissist fantasy.

While nothing will go a ten-step shoe, I can get any person to be in my fantasy.

In fact, I've done it. But it's a lot more work with a healthy woman.

What would they do?

You're saying, I think, that there is a self-aware narcissist, they should reject and avoid all the relationships.

They should avoid something.

That's not a self-aware narcissist. That's a moral narcissist.

Which is a bit like honest meditation.

The decision to abstain from having relationships is a moral decision. It's about not treating other people.

It's not even a separation of any narcissist's retirement.

However, in my case, for example, I decided to be childish. I decided to not treat people.

I think it's a moral... I'm trying to convince myself it's a moral decision, but hopefully I just want to do trouble a lot too.

And, you know, children are serious inconvenience.

But narcissists don't make this kind of a risk. They never need. They're hungry. They're predators. They're hungry animals. They don't make this kind of a risk.

Like, I've been mortified now. I'm in great need of a need in the public right now.

It's a compulsion. I'm compelled to do it. I don't see...

Let me listen to a lecture by Sam Vaknin about shared fantasy. And see if it's okay to recruit an Indian farmer. No. I'm hunting. I'm hunting a predator, and I need my Indian farmer. I need an Indian farmer, because I need to recover from the mortification. I need to put myself together again.

So the best thing to describe it is a compulsion. Not something that the narcissist can control. It's not a control.

After walking away from a narcissist, how many years he tries to move on?

It depends on you. If you re-multiply the narcissist, you will never do it. If you do not multiply the narcissist, you'll remain with your introject. Your introject is in his mind.

And the introject is always idealized. That's the problem. If he values you, and he discounts you, the introject remains here idealized.

This creates a dissonance. There's a dissonance, because the introject is here, it's active, you're gone.

So he needs to put you back together with the introject. This process is called real idealization. He real idealizes you.

Or in clinical terms, he real affects you. He invests in your emotion.

So he real idealizes you to make you match the introject, make you match the structure. And then his dissonance goes down, and he's excited to go down.

When you're gone, having you started him and you valued him, when you're gone, his introjects are active, and they demand the correspondence with the outer world. And when he doesn't have this, he feels very anxious.

So he's going to pay and he'll ask you. So hoovering is very common for this reason. He real idealizes you and he psychostands you. So he's going to pay and he'll ask you.

Master, he will idealize you and hoover you.

At any moment where there are no other introjects active, so he doesn't have another introject, and if your introject is dominant and active, then your introject is still active and you need to make the match.

That's why narcissists are covered in between the relationships.

Very good. And they're out of the intuition.

This has been described long before, of course. This has been described by what the theories have done in life.

This dynamic, country, many others. This dynamic, so the economy of internal objects, is very fascinating because it is very big in explanatory power. It explains a lot.

So I took it and applied it to my system. And I thinkit's very strong.

Hoovering is an attempt to silence the introject by matching it up with an external object. So external object is you.

It is idealizing. It is not going to be true. It is not.

The other question was already mentioned that how can someone overcome being a narcissist?

How can someone overcome being a narcissist?

There's your question. I didn't submit it, but someone else also had to say it.

A narcissist is the reason. It's not a common cold. You don't overcome being a narcissist.

Can you hear? Or a narcissist is the wound?

Is it possible to overcome the trauma that you were talking about in the beginning to overcome the trauma? The childhood trauma?

Yeah, that is at the center of it. Because the childhood trauma is a childhood trauma.

It's what we call the foma, people. It's one of the forms of the shapes.

It's not possible to eliminate this or eliminate it. You are this one. You are this one.

So that's not the way to go about it.

How can someone be a narcissist?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's a sentence. It's a life sentence.

Narcissism is a total solution.

While, for example, other disorders are highly specific, narcissism is what the DSM calls "the basic". It's primarily systemic.

Narcissism affects everything. Every dimension of your life, every field, every area, every type of function, your cognition, your emotionsyour energy, your soul, your vision.

In short, narcissism is you.

While normally it's not good to say that the disorder is the person. It's not good to say that's not true. The disorder is the person.

In some cases, the disorder is the person.

So in both borderline and narcissism, the disorder is the person.

And there's no meaning to asking the question "How can I not be a narcissist?" It's like asking "How can I not be?"

So you learn to modify the behaviors, the concept of learning.

If some narcissist decides that being moral is their grandiose. They're grandiose by being moral. This is called communal or social narcissism. It's a narcissist who is proud of being moral.

So that's his claim to fame. That's his grandiose.

So if you're like that, then yeah, you will not get married, you will not have a relationship, you will not have children, and so on and so forth.

And you would publicize this. It would be ostentatious. You would let everyone know what a great person you are. You may discuss some sacrifices because you realize that you're a narcissist.

And this would be all narcissism to be supplied.

It's possible to reframe yourself this way. It's possible to program yourself this way.

People think that grandiosity is about being the best or being the most.

That's not true. Grandiosity is about being unique.

So for example, you can say "I'm a unique victim. I'm an amazing loser. Nobody is a loser like me."

When my company failed, it was the biggest bankruptcy in the history of the United States.

So grandiosity can be about failure and be about anything.

So grandiosity is malleable. It's like acting. You can play with it.

So you can convince yourself, you can program yourself, to be grandiose by being altruistic, uncharitable, and moral.

And then you'll be famous for being moral. You'll be famous for being human.

So I, for example, my grandiosity is that I teach people about narcissism.

And many people make a mistake. If you don't feel good in it, go and see comments on my video.

People say "You can't be a narcissist. You know way you're a narcissist. Look. You love people. Teach them. You kill them."

I'm not even talking about this.

I leverage my grandiosity. I sublimate it.

Sublimation is converting a drive or an urge into a socially acceptable form.

I sublimated my narcissism, which is pathology, anti-social pathology. I sublimated it into socially acceptable form.

And now the locus of my grandiosity, I'm the great teacher. I'm the great teacher because I stopped the moment.

And all the others were teenagers, when I started.

So I'm the great teacher. That's my grandiosity.

So it's a win-win. You win. I win. We're all win. We're all win. We're all win. We're all win. We're all win.

You can find a win-win formula.

But you will never get treated for wrong.

Anything else?

Yes. Are these percentage disorders determined?

How they're determined?

How they're determined.

Now just to clarify what I mean by abuse and trauma.

When I say abuse and trauma, you see a mother beating up a child in the room. Or a room beating up the mother with the child.

So abuse and trauma are any form, any behavior, that violates the child's boundaries and allows the child to separate from the parent and become an individual.

So, of course, physical abuse violates the child's bodily boundaries. So it's abuse. Sexual abuse violates the child's physical bodily boundaries. Of course it's abuse.

But spoiling the child, hampering the child, idolizing the child, pedestalizing the child, they also form some of this because the parent doesn't allow the child to be in touch with reality.

When you spoil the child or temper the child, isolatingchild from reality and from the consequences of the child's actions.

So you're not allowing the child to grow up.

People grow up by having friction with reality and by experiencing losses.

If you prevent this, you don't allow the child to do this, then you're abusing the child.

If you're correcting the child, you're forcing the child to be a parent figure. That's abusing.

If you're using the child as an instrument, that's abusing.

So we're very positive.

Any other questions?

The fear for borderline includes emotional dysregulation.

Their lines include emotional dysregulation, self-harm, recklessness, impulsivity.

But narcissists also can't find the right.

Narcissists don't self-harm in the same way, physically.

Motorizedself-harm physically, the body.

Narcissists don't act out, they don't lose it. They're not impulsive. Motorized do.

They act out and then they are reckless. They don't protect themselves.

So it could be unprotected sex, it could be driving under the influence, it could be steady money, motor savings in one day.

So they're reckless. Impulsivity issues, they're borderline and so on.

So if I define the criteria, this is the main one that I just mentioned.

Okay, you traumatized enough?

Okay. If no other questions, then thank you for suffering me. And good night if you can, after this. And if not, my services are here. Thank you.

Thank you very much.