Recording in progress, that's us.
Welcome, Sam.
Thank you, Jane.
I welcome everyone.
I'm Jackie Yates, your host and guide for today's conversation. I am a therapist with years of experience, facilitating group therapy and including support groups for circles. Circles is a leading platform providing safe and supportive group therapy spaces for those navigating narcissistic abuse. I am thrilled and honored to have Professor Sam Vaknin with me again today. Sam is a renowned expert in the field of narcissism and narcissistic abuse.
So Sam, I am thrilled to have you to share your deep insights into our discussion today around narcissistic patterns and tactics in relationships.
Thank you for your courage and patience in having me again. I'm happy to be here with you. That's an honor.
So I thought Sam, just before we go, you know, into the patterns and tactics, I thought just looking at differentiating or distinguishing between narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, briefly.
I thought that, you know, for me, narcissism is more of a personality trait that most people live with to some degree. And like any trait, it exists on a spectrum. So, you know, on one end, you can have a healthy narcissism where a person has a positive sense of themselves. And then on the other end, there's a pathological or maladaptive narcissism where you would have a negative impact on how you view yourself and relationships, and all the world.
And then I think NPD or narcissistic personality disorder would be a more extreme and inflexible pattern of behavior that would significantly impair interpersonal relationships and functioning.
And that, I don't know if you would like to give your opinion and how you view it.
Well, I'm a professor of clinical psychology, and so we frown on opinions. We try to stick to studies and what we can learn by observing people and working with them and so and so forth.
Today we tend to, in contemporary literature, we tend to distinguish between narcissistic style, narcissistic disorder, and narcissistic trait domains.
So to start with, you are right that there have been many prominent scholars, such as Heinz Kohut and others. Jung is one of them who suggested that there is such a thing as healthy narcissism, and that healthy narcissism underlies what we call self-esteem and self-confidence and an integrated self-concept.
In other words, a view of oneself as continuous in time and as cohesive. This view of oneself, this me or I, this relies crucially on healthy narcissism.
However, we deal mostly with pathological narcissism, and we tend to generalize and say that narcissism in adulthood is mostly pathological.
And then we distinguish between, as I said, three manifestations of pathological narcissism.
One is the narcissistic style, first described by Lammers Perry. And the narcissistic style is simply what we call obnoxious or a-holes. Very, very unpleasant peopleto be around, to interact with, to share a life with, to collaborate with, and so on. People who are impossible, dysempathic, exploitative, full of themselves, etc.
However, this is not necessarily a pathology. It's more of a temperament or a character or a... It's a style. That's why we call it a style.
Then we have narcissistic trait domains. Trait domains, for example, anankastia. Anankastia is obsessive-compulsive features. We have, for example, desociality, also known in America as antisociality. So psychopathic features of narcissism. Then we have antagonism.
Narcissists are conflict-prone because they're very fragile internally. They tend to be defensive about who they are and how they are perceived by others. So that creates a lot of antagonism and conflict.
So these are traits. And we divide all these traits into domains. And there you are right, the traits lie on a spectrum. There is a continuum. The trait could be emphasized, the trait could be latent, the trait could be mild, the trait could be extreme.
But this applies only to traits.
And then we have narcissistic personality disorder.
And that's very misleading because we tend to associate narcissistic personality disorder with trait domains or with the personality style, and it is not or should not be associated with these things.
Narcissistic personality disorder was first described by Heinz Kohut, the aforementioned Kohut in the 70s, and it is a severe mental illness that involves psychological dynamics and types of constructs, personality constructs, which are extremely malformed and maladaptive and rigid and problematic and so on.
So in contemporary thinking, we do not regard narcissistic personality disorder as lying on the same spectrum as narcissistic style or narcissistic traits. We don't at all. We believe that narcissistic personality disorder is its own clinical entity. And it doesn't lie on a spectrum. Either you have narcissistic personality disorder or you don't. It's like pregnancy.
So this is the background, generally speaking, but it creates a lot of confusion.
Now, segwing into our topic, it creates a lot of confusion because we will come across other people with personality styles, other people with narcissistic personalities and say, that's a narcissistic, or they come across people with narcissistic traits, such as antagonism or antisociality or dissociality. They're a narcissists, and these people are not narcissists. They're obnoxious. They're jerks. They're a-holes. I mean, use any epithet. But they're not narcissists. They are not and cannot be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.
In the most extreme cases, we call them subclinical narcissists. So in dark triad personalities and dark tetral personalities, there is subclinical narcissism, narcissistic traits and narcissistic style that cannot be diagnosed as narcissistic personality disorder.
That was a very long answer to a very short question, which is a problem with me.
Not, but very, very, very important, because a lot of the time in the groups, you know, people.