Warning. At some points during this video, I'm going to take my glasses off. So, if I don't take a haircut soon, I'm going to look like Clarence, the cross-eyed lion from the television series Dactari.
And now that you know which television series I used to consume as a child, you can calculate my triple-digit age.
But as alien reptiles go, or reptilians, I'm pretty youthful. My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
And today we are going to discuss my favorite topic on Earth, inflicting pain on others, sadism, sadistic personality disorder, the narcissist as a sadist, and why the narcissist actually loves to be hated, and basques in the glory and cheer of hurting other people.
Not always, there are qualifications. So, unfortunately, you will have to listen to this video to its very end, which I hope is going to be easy on you.
Sadistic personality disorder made its last appearance in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 3, Edition 3, text revision. That was long before any of you were gone, I hope. It was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 4, and from its text revision. And then it makes no appearance in the last fifth edition, 2013.
Some scholars, notably Theodore Millon, regard the removal of sadistic personality disorder as a mistake. And of course, all sadists are very pissed off about it. Millon and other scholars lobby for his reinstatement in future editions of the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
But I don't think they're going to be very successful, because there is this perception that if you pathologize sadism, you somehow remove responsibility, you somehow justify it.
The sadists can say it's not my fault, I'm a sadist.
Sadistic personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression, and demeaning behavior, which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy.
Some sadists are utilitarian. They leverage their explosive violence to establish a position of unchallenged dominance within a relationship.
Unlike psychopaths, though, sadists rarely use physical force in the commission of crimes. Rather, their aggressiveness is embedded in an interpersonal context and is expressed in social settings, such as the family or the workplace. It's a very fancy and long way of saying that a sadist would prefer to humiliate you in public rather than, for example, to beat the shit out of you.
The narcissistic need for an audience manifests itself in other circumstances. Sadists strive to humiliate people in front of witnesses, as I just said. This makes them feel omnipotent.
So there's an element of narcissism in all sadists, and we're going to discuss it, expound upon it a bit later.
Power plays are very important to sadists. They are likely to treat people under their control or entrusted to their care harshly. A subordinate, a child, a student, a prisoner, a patient, or a spouse, they are all liable to suffer the consequences of the sadist's control, frictory, and exacting disciplinary measures.
My favorite psychologist of all time is a deceased woman. Karen Honeigh. Honeigh was a psychoanalyst, but don't hold it against her. She was also a very common sensical woman who very often went against Freud, actually. In 1945, she suggested that there is a discontinuity between aggression and sadism. She said that sadism is an active, though unconscious, impulse to thwart others, to kill their joy, to disappoint their expectations.
By anticipating the desires of their partner, sadists are able to produce disappointment by bringing about the opposite, by being sensitive to the weaknesses and faults of others, what I call cold empathy.
The sadist is able to point them out, these weaknesses and vulnerabilities and mistakes and failures. So the sadist points them out, makes them visible and explicit, often publicly for humiliating effects.
I'm actually quoting Theodore Millon paraphrasing Karen Honeigh.
Sadist interest in enslaving and controlling others according to Honeigh is often more captivating than their own quality of life.
So, for example, a sadist would prefer to sexually frustrate a woman who is eager to sleep with him rather than actually sleep with her. He compromises his quality of life. He doesn't get laid, but he derives enormous pleasure and gratification from the fact that he had frustrated her, that he had humiliated her, that he had hurt her by rejecting her sexually. That's an extreme example, but very common.
This is a foundational reason for sexual withholding, by the way.
Sadists may isolate their partners from others in order to restrict their independence and support.
Moreover, sadists play the emotions of others like an instrument. They make exploitation a passion.
Sadists hate life, according to Honeigh, and abuse others out of a grudging envy, feeling that their own life has been futile and meaningless.
Cruelty, Honeigh states, gives the sadist compensatory feelings of superiority and omnipotence, where the narcissism comes in, strength and pride, where the psychopathy comes in, expressed more sharply in the feeling of vindictive triumph.
This was Karen Honeigh.
Sadists like to inflict pain because they find suffering, both corporeal bodily suffering and psychological suffering, actually great fun, amusing. Sadists torture animals if they are psychopathic, and they torture people if they are run-of-the-mill sadists, because to the sadists, to the sadists, the sights and sound of a creature, of an entity, of a human being, writhing in agony, being hurt to the quick.
These sights and sounds are hilarious. They are pleasurable. They are funny, fun and funny.
Sadists go to great lengths to hurt others. They lie, they deceive, they commit crimes, they even make personal sacrifices, nearly so as to enjoy the cathartic moment of witnessing someone else's misery.
And so sadists are masters of abuse by proxy and ambient abuse. They terrorize and intimidate even their nearest and dearest into doing their bidding. They create an aura, an atmosphere of unmitigated, yet diffuse dread and consternation, ambient horror, ambient terror.
And they achieve this by promulgating complex rules of the house that restrict the autonomy of their dependents.
So their spouse, their children, their employees, their patients, their doctors, their clients, all of these have to conform to very rigid and usually very strange outlandish rules.
Sadists have the final word. They are the ultimate law and arbiters. Sadists must be obeyed.
There was a famous British series of books, an attorney, and he had a wife, a bit sadistic, a faintly sadistic one, and he called her, she who must be obeyed. And no matter how arbitrary and senseless the rules are, no matter how crazy, irrational, counterfactual, the rulings and decisions, you must abide or else.
Most sadists are fascinated by war and violence. They are vicarious serial killers. They channel their homicidal urges in socially acceptable ways by, for example, studying and admiring historical figures such as Stalin or Hitler. They love guns. They know everything about weapons. They're fascinated by wars, death, torture, martial arts, etc.
This is how they sublimate their sadism. They convert it into socially acceptable pursuits.
There is something I call the monk sadist. In broad strokes, there are two types of sadists, the monster sadist and the monk sadist.
We are all acquainted with the first type. That's the monster sadist. I'm going to put my eyeglasses back. I put my eyeglasses back.
So we are all acquainted with the first type, the monster sadist, the habitue protagonist of horror films, as described above.
Far less known and acknowledged is the monk sadist. The monksadist.
The monk sadist tortures people by confronting them with a personal example of unparalleled and unsurpassed morality, righteousness, rectitude, virtue, asceticism. So he behaves like a monk. He behaves like a saint. And by behaving like a saint, he actually is criticizing, he's saintly conduct. He's intended solely to criticize others by example, to inflict pain by allowing him to berate and chastise from a position of high moral ground.
The monk sadist soapbox is his weapon as he poses and imposes impossible demands and untenable standards of behavior, setting up his victims for failure and humiliation.
And I always say, in an interpersonal relationship, if you are giving 100%, you're setting up your partner for failure because no one can give 100% consistently. If you demand unconditional love, if you give everything of yourself, and when I say everything, I mean everything, 100%, not 99, you are doing this because you are sadist. You want your partner to fail in reciprocating. Your partner can't meet this high standard. It's inhuman standard.
And having thus secured their fall from grace, the fall from grace of other people, the monk sadist then proceeds to harp on their shortcomings, errors, pecadillos, vulnerabilities. He labels other people's behavior, moral turpitude and decadence, corruptionand misconduct. He dispenses punishment with relish, and he basks in the agony and writhing of his flock, charges, or interlocutors.
We know many judges, judges were like that. We know many schoolmasters, teachers, deans in universities, policemen.
One of the most misunderstood types of sadists is the sexual sadist. There is an almighty confusion, even among mental health practitioners and in diagnostic bibles, such as the ICD-10, the International Classification of Disease, Edition 10. So there's an enormous confusion between the Dom dominant in BDSM. It's called hyperdominant sexuality.
So the Dom and the sexual sadist. The Dom, also known as Toph, seeks to please his submissive bottom partner. His aim is to please by subjecting her to pain, humiliation, and degradation, because that's what she likes. She enjoys, she is aroused, she has orgasms only when she is subjected to pain, physical pain, or humiliation and degradation, psychological. So he gives it to her because he wants to please her. He cares about her. His arousal crucially depends on the power that the Dom exercises over his sub and on the sub's overt excitation at the wielding of his dominance. It's not the same with the sadist. The sadist is turned on only by the evident suffering and repulsion of his counterparty during the sexual intercourse.
So where the actions may look identical from the outside, the motivation is utterly disparate. The Dom wants to please. The sadist wants to hurt. The Dom is aroused by his partner's pleasure. The sadist is aroused by his partner's anguish.
BDSM is consensual and often compassionate and considerate. Sadism in bed is exercised either without consent, so does rape, or with coerced consent, which is extorted reluctantly and usually under explicit or implicit threat of abandonment.
So the sadist says, if you don't do this, it's the last you see of me, and you do this. The sadist dehumanizes his partner, reduces her to body parts, reduces her to her anatomy, and it's not the same like in pornography. Pornography also reduces people, especially women, to their body parts, to their anatomy.
But in pornography, it's all about pleasure. It's clear. There is a niche of pornography where pain is a prerequisite for pleasure. But even there, pain is a prerequisite for pleasure. It's not that the pain itself is the pleasure. That's extremely rare, even in pornography.
So the sadist dehumanizes his partner, reduces her to body parts in order to cause her pain.
To him, she's not a human being. She's not a woman. She's not even a sexual entity.
He's out to spoil her, to dismantle her, to corrupt her, to break her apart.
He treats his partner as children treat sometimes toys when they break them.
His main desire is to witness her unbelieving horror at what is being done to her, at her psychological or physical mutilation, and at the cheer and gratification on her tormentor's face as he proceeds with his gruesome business.
Her nauseating disgust, her extreme discomfort, her palpable hurt, her debasement, her agony, her humiliation, these are the sadist aphrodisiacs.
And so when you offer it to a sadist to have vanilla sex, it actually turns him off.
And so BDSM bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, masochism, it's a sexual preference. It's a lifestyle.
And many monogamous couples are into BDSM. It requires a lot of trust in the partner, good communication skills to negotiate pitfalls and preferences.
And above all, a lot of compassion and empathy.
And one common mistake is that the submissive or bottom partner is a masochist. It is utter nonsense. It's engendered by grossly inaccurate renditions of the scene by the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey and other such nonsense.
BDSM is actually a very, very companionable and very intimate experience.
In reality, many submissive are also dominant. This process is called switching. They're dominant with other people, different circumstances.
So this is not sadism in a classic sense, in the sense that Kraft Ebbing defined it in the late 19th century.
Masochism revolves around self-sabotage, self-destruction. This doesn't exist in BDSM.
What about the narcissist? Is the narcissist a sadist?
Let us refer to an authority. I can't see the camera, so I hope it's getting the book.
This is my favorite introduction to personality disorders. It's called personality disorders in modern life. It was authored mainly by a granddaddy of a profession, Theodore Millon, together with Roger Degas. And so Millon, and by the way, by far, still by far, the best book about personality disorders.
And so Millon describes the confluence between sadism and narcissism.
Before I delve into it, I would like to give him, to give you his overview, because he is incomparable. He is even better than me.
The last personality with which the narcissist shares some resemblance is the sadistic.
The passive exploitation of the narcissist is often mistaken for the active exploitation of the sadist.
In the narcissist, however, exploitation is incidental to egocentricity.
I am, therefore, thou shalt honor me with thy toil, says the narcissist.
In contrast, the sadist dominates others self-consciously and deliberately, and he constructs scenarios that demean others in order to force their inferior status to consciousness.
The narcissist wants your worship. The sadist wants to inflict impotence on others and to be hated thereby, will come to this issue of loving to be hated.
Further, says Millon, whereas the sadistic personality is characteristically destructive and cruel and enjoys watching others suffer, narcissists become rageful only when their sense of specialness has been slighted.
Do you remember the mortification of narcissistic injury?
Otherwise, says Millon, narcissists are content to go forth with benign insouciance, surveying their dominion and soaking up the tribute and comfort their regal majesty inspires among the common people.
So this is a very important distinction between narcissists and sadists.
And as usual online, there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation, especially by numerous self-imputed experts, whose acquaintance with narcissism started with their first YouTube video.
So let's clarify a bit this picture.
First, let me quote narcissist's own words.
The narcissist writes, whenever I mean a nasty, which is often, someone writes with an air of knowing sympathy, what did you expect?
He's a narcissist. And this nonsensical type of commentary just serves to show to what extent the field has been corrupted by a tsunami of trashy misinformation promulgated by self-style narcissistic abuse experts flying by the seat of their badly frayed pants. I'm nasty and mean, not because I'm a narcissist, but because I'm a sadist. I enjoy it orgasmically when I make other people squirm and writhe in extreme discomfort, bordering on agony. I am brutally unflinchingly honest and I give my interlocutors no hope and no quarter.
Words are my favorite torture implements. I hone words religiously.
This is also why I'm into non-violent BDSM, sadomasochism and group sex. I derive sexual gratification from mildly hurting my intimate partner ritualistically and from humiliating and objectifying or watching her being violated by others.
By and large, narcissists are not sadists. Though, of course, some narcissists are sadists and some sadists are narcissists.
But as Millon says, exactly, most narcissists are actually not sadists at all. They do not derive pleasure from the pain and discomfort that they cause others. They cause pain. They cause anguish. They hurt people all the time, but that's not their aim. It's a byproduct. It's a side effect.
They do not attempt to torture or hurt anyone for the sake of doing so. They're goal-oriented, like psychopaths.
They seek narcissistic supply. Whoever gets in the way and frustrates or obstructs them in this sempiternal quest gets trampled on.
But they don't trample on people with glee. They don't gloat. There's no joy there or cheer. They destroy people with rage or more likely absentmindedly and offhandedly as an afterthought.
So pain and the infliction of pain are not very important in the narcissist's psychology, in the constellation that is his mind.
And so that narcissist continues.
I get the highlight crush from rejecting the sexual advances of women or from teasing them to the point of agonizing distraction. Shocking women this way so potent that they prefer it to actual sex.
The gratification I get from frustrating women, wounding them to the quick, disempowering them, and hurtfully undermining the self-esteem is more than orgasmic.
Richard Gratz von Ebbing was the first to suggest in his seminal tome Syrophilia Sexualis. It was published in 1886.
So he suggested in that book that sadism amounts to deviant sexuality. There is sadomasochism as a sexual practice, he said.
But as I've explained earlier in the video, that's wrong.
This narcissist continues.
In actual sex, I'm mostly a sadist, though I avoid any physical injury to my female partner. I just force her to perform humiliating and disgusting acts, thus objectifying here maximally.
But sadism can also be a form of sublimated, socially acceptable, diverted and channeled psychosexuality. Devastating women by rejecting them is both sadistic and erotic, and on the surface at least conforms to social behavioral conventions and mores.
The sadists can say, what do you want? I have a right to reject. I don't have to be attracted to everyone.
According to a recent mega study, titled A Billion Wicked Thoughts: A Book I Cannot Recommend Enough, according to this mega study, women with one billion data points, women cannot resist men who find them irresistible, and they cannot resist men who treat them with affection, regardless of any other quality in the men, or lack of quality.
A man can be an ugly, junky, loser, dimwit, and still bed a woman, still go to bed to sleep with her, if he treats her as a princess, and perseveres in passionate coaching.
So this narcissist continues. I make sure to deny women precisely these elements, and then I observe the disintegration, the compensation, and acting out with unmitigated sex-like pleasure.
And this is very important, that the sadist derives two types of pleasure from his sadism, sex-like pleasure, which was identified originally by Krafft Ebbing 150 years ago, but also narcissistic pleasure, because it's a power treat, it's an ego treat.
And this narcissist continues. I do the same to men, and I get the same hype out of it, but being heterosexual, with men, it is merely a power treat.
My ability to deny these men's most fervent wishes and humiliate them in the process, it buffers as my grandiose omnipotence.
It is true that all narcissists are formed by not good enough mother, to invert Winnicott's turn. It's a mother who is selfish, immature, rigidly immature, narcissistic, and sometimes sadistic.
So narcissists are the products of sadism, products of abuse, and the male narcissist seeks to recreate this nefarious maternal presence in all these future relationships. He coerces his women to become these pernicious mother figures.
But the narcissist doesn't seek unconditional love from the women in his life. He is not trying to resolve childhood conflicts through them, or to fix their brokenness and ameliorate their pains. He is not intent on saving, up to a point.
When he starts the process, he enters a shared fantasy, as you remember. He enters a shared fantasy with a woman, and he wants her as a fan, as an admirer, a source of narcissistic supply, and then he wants her as a playmate, someone to have adventures with, someone to have fun with, someone to play with, very, very infantile.
And so at the beginning, he wants to do to women what his mother did to him. He wants to abuse them sadistically. He wants to reject them by upsetting himself and by withholding in every manner conceivable.
And when he does have sex with his female partner, it is exceedingly humiliating and excruciatingly painful to her. Even when the sex is good, it's painful, because the narcissist uses her body to masturbate.
I'm talking about the first two phases, the shared fantasy, the first phase, I'm sorry, the shared fantasy.
Aware of his maltreatment and of his transgressions, the narcissist fully expects his women to hurt him and to abandon him, usually by cheating on him with other men, egregiously and conspicuously.
Incidentally, this also cements his view that all women are innately slutish and cruel.
So there's a combination of psychodynamic motivations that is very powerful and hard to resist in the narcissist.
But as you see, it is not real sadism. The pain and the hurt that the narcissist inflicts on the woman, usually in the shared fantasy phase, they are not for the sake of hurting her. He doesn't derive pleasure from the pain, from her anguish. That's not the main thing. He hurts her, he tortures her, humiliates her, he abuses her, I don't know, to get back at his mother, to test her.
Or because he anticipates abandonment and is preemptively abandoned. It's all very functional, very functional.
And in some respects, psychopathic. There's no sadism there.
When he anticipates the ineluctable punitive backlash from his partner, when he realizes that his abuse and misbehavior and torture and pain, they're going to push her away and she's going to abandon him. It renders him anxious.
And he wants to avoid the unbearable agony in store, so he withdraws. He withdraws coldly. He detaches emotionally from this one. Or he pushes his women to cheat so as to get it over with. The other should draw.
But none of this has to do with sadism. These are painful acts. These are hurtful acts. They cause a lot of anguish and agony, but they're not sadistic.
Narcissists rarely enjoy inflicting pain for no reason, as sexual sadists do. Narcissists act sadistically. When behaving sadistically, it generates or yields narcissistic supply, and only then, or in order to punish sources of narcissistic supply who are perceived by the narcissist to be intentionally frustrating or withholding.
At any rate, it's all around narcissistic supply.
And so people ask me, you mentioned three different types of victims of narcissists. What things would cause a narcissist to victimize a significant other sadistically versus just discarding them when no longer useful?
In other words, in which case will the narcissist linger on to punish and torture a significant other once he had already devalued them and before the discard? And in which cases, he would simply smoothly transition from devaluation to discard.
So the narcissist simply discards people when he becomes convinced that they can no longer provide him with narcissistic supply. It's a simple truth.
Narcissists discard people, not because they hate them. Narcissists discard his spouse or his intimate partner, not because he wants to hurt her, not because he's demonic, not because he's sadistic, but simply she is no longer useful. She is not functioning anymore. She doesn't provide him with the three S's, supply, sex, and the needs that supply and sex and services provide.
So this conviction, subjective and emotionally charged, the conviction that his partner is no longer useful, he doesn't have to be grounded in reality. Suddenly, because I don't know, he's bored or because there's been a disagreement or because she criticizes, there's been some disillusionment, doesn't fight, she did something that he considers to be misconduct or violation of rules, or she did not do something that he had expected her to do, or he has a mood disorder.
Suddenly, the narcissist wildly swings from idealization to devaluation to discard to replacement. The narcissist then detaches immediately. He needs all the energy he can master to obtain new sources of narcissistic supply, and he would rather not spend these scarce resources over what he regards as human refuse, the waste left after the extraction of narcissistic supply, the shell.
A narcissist would tend to display the sadistic aspect of his personality in one of two cases, actually.
Case number one, if the acts, the very acts of sadism, generate narcissistic supply that he can consume, in other words, I inflict pain, therefore I'm superior, therefore I'm all powerful, therefore it gives me supply, so then he will inflict pain.
Some narcissists can't get supply any other way, they can't get laid, they are not sufficiently intelligent to be cerebral and so on, so the only way they can get obtained supply is by hurting other people, by becoming Buddhists, by becoming debt collectors, criminals, I know one.
So here's a kind of enhancement of the antisocial and psychopathic aspects of narcissism.
And the second case where a narcissist would become a career sadist is that the victims of his sadism are still his only or major sources of narcissistic supply, but are perceived by him to be intentionally frustrating and withholding.
So here she is, she's my source of supply but she won't give it to me. And then sadistic acts are his way of punishing this wayward, this obstructive, this passive-aggressive sources of supply. The sources who own the supply and won't give it to him and he needs to punish them for not being docile, obedient, admiring and adoring as he expects them to be in view of his, of course, glamorous uniqueness, cosmic significance and special entitlement. Then he can become a sadist.
The narcissist is not a full-fledged sadist masochisto-paranoiac. Theodore Millon makes it very clear in his books and others, he does not, a narcissist doesn't enjoy hurting his victims, he doesn't believe firmly that he is the focal point of persecution and the target of conspiracies like the paranoia. But the narcissist does enjoy punishing himself when he provides him with a sense of relief, exoneration, validation and this is his masochistic strength.
Because of his lack of empathy and his rigid personality, the narcissist often inflicts great physical or mental pain on meaningful others in his life and he enjoys the arriving and suffering and in this restricted sense he is a sadist.
But this happens very rarely. This happens rarely, as I said. He is much more likely to inflict pain in order to manipulate, in order to obtain favorable outcomes.
Sadism in the case of the narcissist is a self-efficacious strategy. It's a part of his agency and personal autonomy. He acts upon the world, he acts upon the world with a variety of tools in his arsenal, with a toolkit.
One tool is pain. The sadist acts upon the world as an artist would. Sadist paints with pain. He has a canvas which is other people, and he paints these other people with agony, with excruciating anguish, and he enjoys his work. He's proud of his oeuvre, of his creations, of his opera, of his delights in the works of art that he generates, in the destruction that he wreaks upon other people.
To support his sense of uniqueness, greatness, and cosmic significance, the narcissist is often hypervigilant. If he falls from grace, he attributes it to dark forces out to destroy him, because he has an external locus of control. If his sense of entitlement is not satisfied and he is ignored by others, he attributes this to the fear and inferiority that he provokes in other people. He says, they are jealous, they are envious of me. That's why they're ignoring.
So to some extent he's a paramount.
You see, in narcissism you have, narcissism is a smorgasbord, it's everything. The narcissist is paramount, he's a sadist, but it's all instrumental.
Whereas the paranoid is paranoid, because that's the way he conceives of the world, and then he sets rigid boundaries to protect himself. The narcissist is paranoid, reactively, and as a way to obtain better favorable outcomes.
Whereas the sadist uses pain as his form of creativity. The narcissist uses pain instrumentally to punish, to motivate, to manipulate. The narcissist is as much an artist of pain as any sadist, of course.
When he does inflict pain, he does it creatively.
But the difference between them lies in their motivation. The narcissist tortures and abuses as means to an end in order to punish, to reassert superiority, omnipotence, grandiosity, buttress grandiosity.
The sadist inflicts pain for pure, usually sexually tinged pleasure.
Both sadist and narcissists are adept at finding the chinks in people's armors, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, penetration, and intrusion points. They know how to get you, they know how to push your buttons. Both are ruthless, venomous in the pursuit of their prey. Both have cold empathy. Both are unable to empathize with their victims. They are self-centered. Both are rigid.
The narcissist abuses his victim verbally, mentally, or physically, often in all three ways.
Narcissist infiltrates the victim's defenses, shatters her self-confidence and self-esteem, confuses and confounds her, demeans and debases her.
Or true. He invades her territory. He abuses her confidence. He exhausts her resources. He hurts her loved ones. He threatens her stability and security. He isolates her from her social support network and enmeshes her in his shared psychosis, in his paranoid state of mind, in a cult-like setting or in a shared fantasy. He frightens her out of her wits. He withholds love and sex from her. He prevents satisfaction and causes frustration. He humiliates and insults her privately and in public. He points out her shortcomings. He criticizes her profusely and in a kind of scientific and objective manner, it's for your own good. I'm just trying to help you.
And this is a partial list. There's no end to the ways that the narcissist acts sadistically.
But to act sadistically does not a sadist make.
Very often, the narcissist's sadistic acts are disguised as an enlightened interest in the welfare of his victim. He plays the psychiatrist to her psychopathology, totally dreamt up by him.
He acts the guru, the avantila of other figure, the teacher, the only true friend, the old and the experienced. And all this charade, in order to weaken her defenses and to lay siege to her disintegrating nerves, so subtle and poisonous is the narcissistic variant of sadism that it might well be regarded as the most dangerous of all.
But still, it's not sadism in any sense, because it's not focused on the pain. It's focused on manipulation.
In this sense, the narcissist's sadism is psychopathic and is very, very close to the psychopathic sadist.
Luckily, the narcissist's attention span is short. His resources and energy limited in constant effort consuming and attention diverted, pursuit of narcissistic supply. The narcissist lets his victims go usually before the victim had suffered irreversible damage.
The victim is then free to rebuild her life, albeit from ruins. It's not an easy undertaking this, but it's far better than the total obliteration which await the victims of a true sadist.
Again to the narcissist and what he had written, I'm quoting. If I had to distill my quotidian existence in two pithy sentences, I would say, I love to be hated, I hate to be loved. Hate is the complement of fear and I like being feared. It imbues me with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence. I'm veritably inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces.
They know that I'm capable of anything godlike and ruthless and devoid of scribbles and capricious unfathomable, motionless, asexual, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict. I nurture my ill repute, stalking it and fanning the flames of gossip. It is an enduring asset and this is of course a description of a sadist. It announces it who is also a sadist as he had admitted in the beginning of the text.
It's not a pure narcissist. It's not even a narcissist with other comorbidities. It's a narcissist who also has sadism.
The English pediatrician, psychoanalyst, Donald Winnigold suggested that abused children need to hate and to be hated. It's a defense against the false hope of ever being loved.
The abuse chances have never been loved. I will never be loved. I'm unlovable. There's no way anyone will ever love me. So at least I need to let me be hated. If I cannot be loved, let me be hated. And let me hate and return.
Such abused children not only act out antisocially but also seek to provoke hatred in parents, caregivers and authority figures.
At least in this comfort zone of mutual antagonism, there is no risk of being shattered by the disappointment and frustration that are the inlactable outcomes of hope.
Of course, he who loves to be hated and hates to be loved also loves to hate and hates to love. In other words, he's afraid of intimacy.
The narcissist's emotional complexity, his ambivalence towards significant others is notorious. Hate love. His love often comes laced with bouts of vitriolic or even violent diatrides, abuse and aggression. That's not the way to love. That's hate. The narcissist cannot love without hate.
Cannot hate without love. And it's not really love actually. It's a form of dependence. There's a lot of mislabeling going on.
But the narcissist's hatred is atypical.
Ramble and Barry suggested in 2005 that hate is a stable experiential state, that it is an emotion and that it involves the goal-driven motivation to diminish or utterly eradicate the well-being of the target of hate.
In cultural distinction, the narcissist's hatred is not stable. It is a transformation of resentment, therefore an aggressive reaction to frustration. And the narcissist does not care about his victim's well-being, one way or the other. He just wishes to remove the fount of frustration altogether and expediently. Out of sight, out of mind, no object consistency.
So by the lights of Ramble and Barry, the narcissist's hatred doesn't qualify as hate at all. It's more like scratching a wound, an irritation that you want gone.
The narcissist resents his object dependence on his sources of narcissistic supply. And by reading himself of their constant presence, he seeks to ameliorate the irritation that they're causing.
Of course, even as the narcissist hatefully acts against his sources of supply, he's terrified of losing them. And so he attempts to placate and bribe these sources into staying and fulfilling their functions.
So we call this, we call thisapproach avoidance, repetition, compulsion, approaching the source of supply. Please be mine. Please be here. Please function. Please provide me with the three S's, sex supply services. And then I'm dependent on you. I hate you for being dependent on you. I'm avoiding and withdrawing and upsetting myself and punishing me. Hate and fear are also sure generators of attention.
Remember with the narcissist, there's only narcissistic supply.
Believe nothing else you read, not on or hear or watch.
Narcissists have to do, are concerned with, only with narcissistic supply. The drug which narcissists consume and which consumes the narcissist in return.
So narcissists attack, statistically, authority figures, institutions, narcissists, the hosts, they make sure that everyone knows about their eruptions.
I will continue to quote from these narcissists. I purvey, but remember that that's not an unadulterated narcissist. That's a hybrid narcissist sadist.
And he says, I purvey only the truth and nothing but the truth, but I tell it bluntly in an orgy of evocative Baroque English.
The blind rage that this induces in the targets of my vitriolic diatribes provokes in me a surge of satisfaction and inner tranquility, not obtainable by any other means.
In other words, he uses brutal honesty as a form of sadism.
He says, I like to think about their pain, of course, but that is the lesser part of the equation. It is my horrid future and inescapable punishment that carries the irresistible appeal.
It's like some strain of alien virus. It infects my better judgment and I succumb.
In general, he says, my weapon is the truth and human propensity to avoid it.
In tactless bridging of every etiquette, I chastise and berate and snub and offer opprobrium.
Self-proclaimed Jeremiah, I hectare and haram from my many self-made puppets.
I understand the prophets. I understand Tokwimada, the inquisitor. I bask in the incomparable pleasure of being right. I derive my grandiose superiority from the contrast between my righteousness and the feeble humanness of others.
But it is not that simple. It never is with narcissists.
Fostering public revolt and the inevitable ensuing social sanctions fulfill two other psychodynamic goals.
The first one I alluded to, it is the burning desire I would say we need to be punished. It's a masochistic streak there.
In the protest mind of a narcissist, his punishment is equally his vindication. By being permanently on trial, like in Kafka's book, the narcissist claims high moral ground in the position of the martyr. He is a martyr, misunderstood, discriminated against, unjustly roughed, outcast by his very towering genius or other outstanding qualities.
To conform to the cultural stereotype of the tormented artist, the romantic stereotype, the narcissist provokes his own suffering. He is thus validated, he is proud of his own self-destruction. His self-destruction becomes his modus vivendi and his work of art. His grandiose fantasies acquire a modicum of substance. If I were not so special, they wouldn't have persecuted me.
And in this sense, of course, paranoid ideation is narcissistic ideation.
Because if you're worthy of persecution, you're worthy, end of story. Something in you provokes other people, his power over other people.
The persecution of the narcissist is his uniqueness. He must be different, for better or worse. The streak of paranoia embedded in the narcissist makes He's in constant conflict with lesser beings, mortal beings, his mouth, his shrink, his boss, his colleagues. He is forced to stoop to their intellectual level.
The narcissist feels like Galiver, a giant strapped by Lily Pushins. His life is a constant struggle against the self-contented mediocrity of his surroundings, not to say idiocy. This is his fate, which he accepts, though never stoically.
It is a calling, a mission, and a recurrence in his stormy life.
Indeed, the vast majority of prophets who established religions were raging, raging grandiose narcissists, some of them psychotic.
Deeper still, deeper still, the narcissist has an image of himself as a worthless, bad, and dysfunctional extension of others. That's what his mother told him when he was a child.
So he's in constant need of narcissistic supply in order to counter this feeling of void and worthlessness. And he feels humiliated by this need, by this dependence.
The contrast between his cosmic fantasies, grandiose, inflated view of himself, and the reality of his dependence, neediness, and often failure, this contrast, I call it the grandiosity gap, and it is an emotionally harrowing experience. It is a constant reminder and background noise of devilish, demeaning laughter. It's like in hell, you know, where the demons are laughing. The voices say, you are fraud. You are zero. You deserve nothing. If only they knew who you are, how worthless you are.
And the narcissist attempts to silence these tormenting voices, not by fighting them, but actually by agreeing with them unconsciously and sometimes consciously.
The narcissist says to these voices, I do agree with you. I'm bad. I'm worthless. I'm deserving of the most severe punishment for my rotten character, my bad habits, my addiction, the constant fraud that is my life. So I will go out. I will seek my doom. I will trash myself. I will destroy myself. Now that I've complied, will you leave me be? Will you let me be alone? Will you leave me alone?
And of course they never do these voices. They're always there, inner critics, sadistic super egos.
So most narcissists enjoy an irrational and brief burst of relief after having suffered emotionally, after having sustained a narcissistic injury or a mortification. I mentioned it in my previous videos, how mortification brings a lot of pain on the one hand, but also a huge sense of liberation.
Having sustained a loss, the narcissist feels relieved. It is a sense of freedom, which comes with being unshackled.
Having lost everything, the narcissist often feels that he has found himself, that he has been reborn, that he has been charged with natal energy, able to take on new challenges and to explore new territories.
And this elation is so addictive that the narcissist often seeks pain. He wants to be humiliated, punished, scorned. He wants to be the subject to contempt as long as they are public, as long as they involve the attention of peers and superiors, being punished this way, accords with the tormenting inner voices of the narcissist, which keep telling him that he's bad, corrupt, and worthy of penalty, as you remember.
And so, as I said in my previous videos, narcissists inexorably lead to and actually initiate mortification.
And this is the masochistic streak of the narcissist.
But the narcissist also has a sadistic streak, albeit an unusual one. The narcissist inflicts pain and abuse on others.
We all agree. He devalues sources of supply, callously and offhandedly abandons them, discards people, places, partnerships, friendships.
Uninstantly, some narcissists, though by no means the majority, actually enjoy abusing, taunting, tormenting, and freakishly controlling others, gaslighting.
But the majority, vast majority of narcissists, they do all these things absentmindedly, automatically, often without good reason.
Collectly in his book, The Mask of Sanity, he keeps being amazed. He keeps saying, why are they doing this? no reason for this, not even pleasure.
What is unusual about the narcissist's sadistic behaviors? Is that his sadistic measures are goal-oriented? Pure sadists have no goal in mind, except the pursuit of pleasure. Pain is an art form. Remember the Malki Desai in his books? He elevated pain to an art form. Good literature man is a great writer. He's a great writer. He's a great writer. Good literature man is a great writer.
The narcissist on the other hand holds and hunts his victims for a reason. He wants them to reflect his inner state. He wants them to give him supply or search or services.
And in this sense, this goal orientation is highly psychopathic. It is all part of the mechanism called projective identification, where he forces and coerces people. His sadism is part of projective identification. He forces people, coerces them to behave in a certain way.
And when the narcissist is angry, unhappy, disappointed, injured or hurt, he feels unable to express his emotions sincerely and openly, since to do so would be to admit his frailty, his weakness, his neediness. He deplores, narcissist deplores his own humanity. He hates the fact that he has emotions, vulnerabilities, susceptibility, gullibility, inadequacies, failures. So he makes use of other people to express his pain and frustration. He spent up anger and aggression. This is called projection and then projective identification. He achieves this by mentally torturing other people to the point of madness, by driving them to violence, by reducing them to scar tissue in search of an outlet, closure and sometimes revenge. He forces people to lose their own character traits. He diffuses their identity and instead they adopt his identity, his character traits.
In other words, his narcissism. Narcissism in this sense is like a virus. He invades the other human, takes over the other human and then uses the other human to replicate within that other human. It's a pandemic.
In reaction to his constant and well-targeted abuse, his victims become abusive, vengeful, ruthless, lacking in empathy, obsessed, aggressive, exactly like him. The victims mirror the narcissist faithfully and thus relieve the narcissist of the need to express himself directly. They become, truly become his extensions.
Having constructed this writhing hole of human mirrors, the narcissist withdraws. The goal had been achieved and he lets go.
As opposed to the sadist, he is not in it indefinitely for the pleasure of it. He abuses and traumatizes, relates and abandons, discards and ignores, insults and provokes, but only for the purpose of purging his inner demons.
By possessing others, he purifies himself cathartically. He exercises his demented false error.
This accomplished? The narcissist acts almost with remorse and contrition.
An episode of extreme abuse is followed by an act of great care and by maleficent apologies.
The narcissistic pendulum swings between the extremes of torturing others and empathically soothing the resulting wounds, the incongruous behavior, these sudden shifts between sadism and altruism, abuse and love, ignoring and caring, abandoning and clinging, viciousness and remorse, harsh and tender, withholding and providing.
These swings are perhaps the most difficult to comprehend and to accept.
The producing people around the narcissist, emotional insecurity, intermittent reinforcement, their sense of self-worth is eroded, they experience fear, stress, anxiety, they walk on actions. Gradually, emotional paralysis sets in and soothes and the victims come to occupy the same emotional wasteland inhabited by the narcissist.
They become his prisoners, his hostages in more ways than one and even when he's long out of their lives, you can take the narcissist out of your life but you can't take your life out of the narcissist.
And so this narcissist whose words I've been quoting ends up by saying, I find it difficult to accept that I'm irredeemably evil, that I statically almost ogasmically enjoy hurting people and that I actively seek to inflict pain on others.
I remind you it's a hybrid narcissist sadist. Only a tiny minority of narcissists are like these narcissists.
And he continues, it runs so contrary to my long cultivated and tenderly nurtured self-image as a benefactor, sensitive intellectual, a harmless hermit.
In truth, my sadism meshes well and synergetically with two other behavior patterns, my relentless pursuit of narcissistic supply and my self-destructive self-defeating and therefore masochistic streak.
The process of torturing, humiliating and offending people provides proof of my omnipotence, nourishes my grandiose fantasies, buttresses my false self.
The victim's distress and dismay constitute narcissist's supply of a purest great.
It also alienates them and turns them into hostile witnesses or even enemies and stalkers.
Thus, through the agency of my helpless and helpless victims, I bring upon my head recurrent torrents of wrath and punishment.
This animosity guarantees my unraveling, my failure, outcomes which I avidly seek in order to placate my inner chastising and castigating voices, which Freud called sadistic superego.
Similarly, this narcissist continues, I am fiercely, a fiercely independent person and this is known in psychological jargon as counterdependent.
But my independence is a pathological variant of personal autonomy.
I want to be free in order to frustrate myself, sorry, I want to be free to frustrate myself by inflicting mental havoc on my human environment, including and especially, my nearest and dearest, in this way securing and incurring their inevitable ire.
Getting attached to or becoming dependent on someone in any way, emotionally, financially, hierarchically, politically, religiously or intellectually, this means surrendering my ability to indulge my own consuming urges and my own consuming urges are to torment, to feel like God, to be ruined by the consequences of my own evil actions.
So this is a glimpse into the inner world and inner landscape of a sadistic narcissist.
And now I want to read to you notes from a therapy session with Jared and pseudonym, Jared, the male, 43, diagnosed with sadistic personality disorder.
He says, Jared says, a little discipline never hurt anybody. He says it clearly amused, beating a three-year-old and letting her freeze to near death on your doorstep in sub-zero temperatures.
He says, is this his idea of discipline? I ask.
Well, he says, it's one way of getting the message across. He laughs heartily and then composes himself.
Listen, Doc, I'm as merciful and compassionate as they come, believe you me, but what I cannot stand is cry babies, weaklings, and whining bitches.
Besides, it's fun to see how a little ice does wonders to their sirens.
Why did Jared force the mother to dumb her by now limp and profusely bleeding infant daughter outside the door? If she were a proper caretaker, none of this would have happened, he says.
So he blames her. He says she was not a proper caretaker.
He says, I just wanted to show her wretched family, who is the only boss in the house. They were getting on my nurses, her mother, her sister.
They needed some reeducation, like in the Chinese camps, he chuckles.
The family member all claimed to be terrified of him and intimidated by his capricious and violent behavior.
I tell him that. He says, I sure hope so, and smarts.
The three-year-old kid said that you pinched her repeatedly, and that's why she cried. I was just kidding with her, he says.
But pinching hurts. Well, it sure does. He roars and slaps my shoulder across the desk.
I like you, Doc.
The slap hurt, too.
I ask him, could you please refrain from doing it in the future?
And he accepts my interdict jovially. Whatever turns you on, Ashlee.
The mother of the child says that about a year ago, you beat the same child up and you caused her grave injuries because she wouldn't cry when you pinched her and kicked her around. You kept yelling at the child. Cry, you bitch, cry. Then you mauled her because she wouldn't cry.
And now, I don't understand, now you specked her and left her to die in the cold because she did cry.
Well, he says, Jara dances. She has to make up her mind and stick to it. I respect that. But she can't change her behavior every time I pinch her. That's why I disciplined her.
I wanted to have a spine. I wanted to have a spine. It's a common sadist refrain. As a psychologist, it seems to me that he is the one who keeps changing the rules.
His face darkens when I say this. He leans forward and he whispers hoarsely. Listen, Doc, I like you at all, but don't cross the line here or you may get a taste of the same medicine yourself.
Is this a threat? I'm asking him. He merely glorifies me malevolently.
I ask him, don't you like me anymore? Then he says, F of expletive deleted.