Ah, red wine, a man's best friend.
I just got rid of one, not wine, a fake friend, fake former best friend.
Okay, today's topic has nothing to do with him.
Of course, I'm going to discuss somatic narcissists.
In 1995, I coined the phrases somatic narcissists and cerebral narcissists to describe two types of narcissists.
The somatic narcissist derives narcissistic supply from his looks and the way he uses his body. For example, sexual conquests.
The cerebral narcissist derives narcissistic supply from intellectual pyrotechnics, from his intelligence, from the way he uses ten dollar words, rings a bell.
Okay, Shoshanim, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I am also, yes, a professor of psychology at several universities, most notably, CIAPS, Centre for International Advanced Professional Studies, the Outreach Program of the SIAS Consortium of Universities.
And today we are going to discuss somatic narcissists who pretend to be cerebral narcissists, the worst conceivable kind, snakes in the grass.
Clinically, a narcissist who pretends to be of the wrong type is a covert narcissist.
So a somatic narcissist who pretends to be cerebral is clinically a covert narcissist, covert because his true nature is hidden. He's lying about who he is.
Sometimes he's lying even to himself about who he is, a form of self-deception.
But in most cases, he knows very well that he's deceiving people.
Somatic narcissists who pretend to be cerebral are a serious threat because they claim intelligence, wisdom, sagacity, knowledge that they don't have. That they don't have. They appear to have it, but they actually don't have it.
In other words, they are con artists.
Okay, let's delve right in.
They are grotesque caricatures of masculinity, buff, deformed, veined, musculature, you know the type. They are like tightly packed meat packages. They have slicked, gel oozing hair, ostentatious tattoos, and pants too tight so as to emphasize the crotch.
This is a typical, not stereotypical, but typical picture of the kind of somatic narcissist that I'm talking about.
The internet gave rise to a new breed of gurus, coaches, self-help advisors, and self-styled experts. These mostly men spend more time in the gym and in nightclubs than they ever spend in libraries and museums. Actually, I doubt that they ever frequent libraries and museums.
Their natural habitats are gyms, where they spend hours a day honing their bodies into perfect weapons. They weaponize their bodies. And they spend hours in the evening, snorting coke or doing worse in nightclubs.
These are covert somatic narcissists who often pose as empathic. They pretend to be co-dependent victims, saviors, healers. All this is intended, bottom line, to lure women to engage in sex and then cruelly dispatch them on their way, sometimes in the middle of the night.
But you could ask, all a somatic narcissist needs is sexual conquest.
Yes, but this particular type of somatic narcissist is envious of the intelligence and intellect of the cerebral narcissist. He wants to have it all. He wants to have a perfect body, sexual conquests, and to be considered a public intellectual.
Sexual conquests are not enough for these delusional and vainglorious megalomaniacs.
These somatic narcissists also posture and pose as sages and visionaries.
These cerebral wannabes pontificate, they spew half-baked and ill-informed conspiracy theories, impromptu analysis, inane observations and stupid opinions in fields as diverse as philosophy and science and without any qualifications to do so, formal or informal.
Con artists, didn't I say?
These people, these somatic covert narcissists wannabes cerebrals, they get most of the information disastrously wrong because they don't have the tools to get it right.
And if they don't have information, they just make it up as they go along, as they self-importantly aspire to pretend that brain and brawn are interchangeable, which they are not.
These somatic covert narcissists have a dream. Their dream is to be cerebral.
What they do, they often team up with intellectually superior cerebral narcissists, and then they appropriate, they plagiarize, they steal the work of these intellectuals, of these intellects, of these intelligent cerebral narcissists. They simply steal it, and they bask in the purloined glory, or they attribute to themselves this work.
That's what they do. They are like cuckoo, cuckoo birds.
They stumble only when they are on their own, when they are not in the presence or together with the cerebral narcissists.
Because when they are on their own, they are incapable of generating a single original idea. It's all about stealing other people's work.
They are never creative. They are never original. They don't truly comprehend even the material that they have stolen. They just parrot. They just mimic. They just imitate. It's all mimicry.
Some of these somatic cerebral narcissists are smooth talkers. Some of them disguise their essential vacuity and endless stream of nonsense effectively, because they know how to put together resounding sound bites, verbiage, pronouncing words like dissociation wrongly and awash in malapropisms, but still palatable to the layman's ear.
Other somatic overt narcissists engage in displays of aggression or nauseating eroticism. They are creepy to the last.
Most of them are psychopaths cloaking themselves in the mantle of saviors and healers. They are a serious danger to society and to everyone who crosses their path.
It's about time. We should expose them, point fingers at them.
You've all seen them on YouTube. You've all seen that they're puffed up chests as they brainwash gullible and malleable people into submission as they form cults around themselves.