Visit Arid Planet Narcissism (with Peter Kolakowski, Deutschlandfunk Kultur)

The dual mothership means that my narcissist acted as a mother also for me. I fell in love with myself, not with the narcissist at first, but in love with myself. That means the dual mothership.

Yes, when the narcissists comes across another person, and again, it's very crucial to emphasize, the only way the narcissists interacts with other people, the only way the narcissists has interpersonal relationships is via the shared fantasy framework.

It does not matter if you're intimate partner, colleague, friend, whatever.

So he comes across you and he says to himself, oh, this guy can play a significant role. This guy can participate, can become meaningful in a shared fantasy.

So you need to pass a few tests. He tests you at first. Then you pass these tests.

And he says, okay, he passed the test. He can be an actor.

It's exactly like auditioning. You're auditioning, you know? Or he auditions you. And then you pass the audition and now you can be an actor.

At that point, the narcissist converts you in his mind into an internal object. That internal object initially is a maternal figure. The narcissist becomes your mother. You're a child.

The narcissist regresses you, infantilizes you, coerces you actually to regress if you refuse, makes you more helpless, more dependent, more less opinionated, exposes your ignorance, plays on your vulnerabilities, reduces you, demeans you, degrades you, until you become really an infant, totally dependent on the narcissist, for regulation, for happiness, for love.

And so the narcissist makes you a baby, an infant, and becomes your mother.

At the same time, the narcissist expects you to be a maternal figure. You are supposed to be the narcissist mother.

So the narcissist is with you, he regresses and infantilizes himself. You experience this process as self-love. The narcissist idealizes you as a maternal figure.

In order to be a maternal figure, you need to be ideal mother. So narcissist idealizes you as a maternal figure. In order to be a maternal figure, you need to be ideal mother.

So narcissist idealizes you, and then the narcissist gives you access to two things.

To your idealized image in his mind, in other words, you see yourself as an ideal perfect entity through the narcissist's gaze. It's very intoxicating. It's very addictive.

Absolutely. For the first time you see yourself as a perfect being.

That's exactly what a mother does with her newborn baby. You know, narcissists idealizes you as a mother would idealize her child. That's one thing.

The second thing, the narcissist gives you access to his inner child, to his what remains of his true self, and triggers in you the maternal instinct.

So simultaneously, you become a beloved child, idealized, perfect, amazing, hyper-intelligent, drop-dead gorgeous, flawless, it's irresistible. You want more. You want more of this. You want this laser focus of attention. You want this addiction. You want it's a drug. It's a drug. And you become a junkie.

And this is what I call the hall of mirror because you see yourself multiplied in a million mirrors inside the narcissist's mind.

You don't fall in love with the narcissist. You fall in love with the way the narcissist sees you. You fall in love with your idealized image, idealized version via the narcissus gaze.

At the same time, you love the narcissist's inner child the way a mother would.

So it's a bond that is impossible to break because simultaneously you're a baby who is loved unconditionally and at the same time you're a mother who loves unconditionally another baby, the narcissist.

This is the beauty of it.

But when you said, I see in the narcissist the inner child, in one of your lectures, you said, even being a child is an act by the narcissist to manipulate the people.

It's not the real child I see. It's a movie, I see. And that makes it also so addictive because that was what happened really to me.

He was changing from an adult, mature man to a child and that touched my heart, that touched my feelings very, very deeply.

And sometimes I thought I have to deal with a three, four, five year old child. I wanted to hug, I wanted to care of.

And in one of a lectures you said, it's also a movie, a play to manipulate, to exploit people?

The narcissist's self has never formed, never integrated, never consolidated. It's a disrupted process.

And so the narcissist has to simulate everything. Everything is mimicry. The adult also. The adult is a simulation. The child is a simulation. The grandiosity is simulated. The fantasy is all stimulation.

You said the narcissists are the best actors ever.

It's not even acting, because the actor knows the difference between the role and himself. The actor is able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, the movie and life.

The narcissist is incapable of this for the very simple reason the narcissist doesn't exist.

The actor exists to some extent. A very good actor minimizes his existence. It's true. But it's never zero.

The narcissist is zero. There's nobody there. There was a psychologist, Thirsting, and she said that it's a black hole. So there's nobody there.

And instead what you have is a set, a repertory of super-sophisticated simulations that are very misleading and resemble reality to a huge extent. That's why artificial intelligence is very worrying.

And so these simulations draw you in and where there are discrepancies, you fill in the blanks.

All people react to narcissists and to some extent psychopaths. All people react with what is known as the uncanny valley reaction. All people from the first, second, react with some type of doubt, discomfort.

There's something off.

Something doesn't fit.

It's like this human being has not been put together appropriately. Or the manufacturing process was disrupted in the middle. It's not full-fledged, it's half-baked.

We react with uncanny valley, but we deceive ourselves because we are lonely, because we give the benefit of the doubt, because we assume that all people are essentially good, or maybe had a bad day or whatever.

We invent all kinds of excuses. And so we suppress this uncanny valley reaction, this gut feeling, this intuition.

And it's very wrong to do, very wrong to suppress it because it's a good guy, good counselor, good friend. And we fall for it. And we fall for these simulations because they're highly detailed.

What the narcissist does from a very early age, he creates what I call emotional resonance tables.

These are huge tables correlating explicit observable behavior with alleged internal mental states as reported by participants.

So he would talk to people and people would say, I'm crying, I'm sad. And then he would write it down in the database. He would say, when people cry, the internal mental state is sadness. And this is how to do it. You must crunch your face, you must have, and he will do it. He will imitate.

So it's mimicry. It's not actually acting. It's like mimicry in nature when an insect pretends to be a leaf. You know, it's much, much closer to mimicry in nature.

That means I can deal with another person every second.

Because there is nobody.

It's a predator which shapeshifts and uses mimicry. And it's not a person. It's a simulation. There's no person there. There's no self, no personhood, not even ego. That's the irony.

Everyone says the narcissist is an egotist. There's no ego there.

Ego has many functions. One of them, perhaps the major one, is reality testing. Ego tells you what is real, what is not.

And narcissists doesn't have this. Narcissists cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

So clearly, there's no functioning ego there.

You could call them even aliens, automata programmed robots.

I'm looking for metaphors.

You know, these are metaphors. Of course they are not alien. But these are metaphors, yeah. I'm looking for metaphors. These are metaphors. Of course they are not alien. These are metaphors, yeah.

I think to presume or to assume that aliens will possess the same emotional equipment in the same capacity to empathize as we do is a long shot.

And if aliens do possess empathy, they would find it very difficult to empathize with us. They would empathize with other aliens, but not with us.

So it's a metaphor. And aliens probably, like everyone else, would use a persona, would use a mask initially when they interact with us.

Everyone on the first encounter uses a mask. This was described by Jung, by Goffman, by many others.

All the time, when we on the first meetings, first date, first job interview, we use a mask. It's not us, it's a mask.

The difference with the narcissist, there's only the mask. There's no one behind the mask, and the mask is forever.

So how does narcissists perceive love? Is it when he's under control of another person and that for him is love because he feels comfortable, has no anxiety, because he cannot feel love, he cannot give love. What is love for the narcissist then?

Everything in the narcissists is self-referential. And because narcissists have a strong component of dissociality or antisociality, everything is a bit psychopathic.

So what the narcissist would perceive as being loved is catering to his needs. That is being loved.

What the narcissists perceive as loving another person is, she is giving me the things that I need.

So I have emotional investment in her. I'm saying she, half of all narcissists are women.

So it's about give and take. It's an interpretation of the interpersonal interactions in terms of benefits or outcomes, which is the psychopathic side of narcissists.

But the psychopath knows the difference between fantasy and reality. So the psychopath will focus on the goals. He would take what you have to give and would walk away. And he would have no emotional reaction to the fact that you gave him anything.

While the narcissist would take what you have to give and then he would create a narrative that is magical and enchanted and Disney-like as to why you gave him and how he felt when you gave him and all kinds of nonsense that have no bearing on reality. So he would force you into the fantasy. This is the difference.

And the narcissist would say, would tell you that they are capable of loving, even intensely. And they would tell you that they identify love in other people, or when they're being loved, or so on.

But this is total mislabeling. This is about self-gratification, catering to very primitive needs, infantile needs, and so on.

I would say this is how narcissists experience, the way I think a baby experiences the mother's love, a baby experiences the mother's love because she breastfeeds him or because he has skin to skin contact, the contact, the gratification.

Similarly, sex, for example. For the narcissist, sex is auto-erotic. For the narcissist, sex is with himself. It could be mediated via another person's body.

And then when that other person gratifies the narcissist, allows the narcissist to masturbate with her body, the narcissist would say that he has had great sex.

But it's all about the narcissists. The narcissist sees himself reflected in the lover's eyes, in her gaze, and it turns him on.

When the partner, when the lover finds a narcissist irresistible or attractive, the narcissist then has confirmation that he is sexy. And then he is aroused not with a partner, with himself.

It's like the narcissist says, my lover finds me attractive. That means I'm attractive. And that means I can be safely attracted to myself. I'm not deluding myself. I'm not lying to myself. I am attractive.

So now I can have sex with myself. Now I can be attracted to myself.

Also to mitigate, to ameliorate the bad voice, the bad inner voice, because you said that the narcissist, you never experienced such a pernicious and insidious self-hate like in the narcissist.

So narcissist uses the sex for feeling better and silent the bad voices, the bad object inside him.

Not only the sex. Narcissists use everything. Literally everything. Narcissistics applied, the fantasy, the sex, the illusion of love, everything.

In order to somehow survive the internal onslaught, the internal attack, the internal October 7, by these group or coalition of voices.

Now there's a big debate in psychology today, as we speak. Some psychologists say that the narcissist does not have an internalized bad object, on the very contrary, it has an idealized, grandiose, fantastic internal object, and therefore the narcissist is egosyntonic.

The narcissist feels comfortable with himself, is a happy go lucky, he experiences pleasure with his own being. And so is his best friend, so to speak. And he says nothing wrong with himself.

And so this is one school.

And the other school, which is now becoming definitely the dominant school, and to which I have belonged from the very beginning, is that narcissism, pathological narcissism, is compensatory. It compensates for something.

And what it compensates for is the absence of a self.

So there is the false self. It's a compensation for the absence of a self.

And the characteristics of the false self are everything the child is not.

The false self knows everything and can predict behavior of people. The child cannot.

The false self is omnipotent, all-powerful. The child is helpless.

So clearly the false self is compensatory because it is created in early childhood. We all agree. All psychologists agree of this.

It's created in early childhood, but it has dominant compensatory elements, clearly, because it's everything the child is not. It's godlike.

And then we ask the question, what is a child compensating for?

Well maybe lack of love or neglect or being instrumentalized or parentified or being abused or traumatized.

Yeah, the child is compensating for this.

The false self is an imaginary friend which is very protective of the child.

Enteres the false self.

When we study the compensatory typology, the attributes and characteristics of a false self, we understand what's happening inside the child.

The child is compensating for something that is happening internally.

Clearly the child regards itself as unlovable, unworthy, helpless, unwise, or even stupid and so on.

And this is what the false self is compensating for.

Gradually the child creates a divinity, a godlike entity, and the rudiments of a primitive religion.

The relationship with the false self is like the relationship between ancient primitive peoples and their divinities and deities like the moloch.

The child relies on the false self for protection, protection from abuse, from pain, from trauma.

And so the child strikes a Faustian deal with the false self.

Child says, I will give you my soul. I'll sacrifice myself, human sacrifice to you.

And in return, you, the false self, will make me godlike, protected, impregnable, invincible, untouchable, incapable of being hurt, invulnerable.

And this is the deal that extends to the last days of the narcissist throughout the lifespan.

And this is the core of the relationship between the narcissist and his grandiosity, his need for supply, and the false self.

An adult, but they are dealing.

And that what makes therapists do wrong, they think they are dealing with an adult, but they're actually dealing with a two-year-old child who has an, you say, arrested development, stuck in the development of emotional habits, of separation, everything that makes us grow.

So how must therapists deal with narcissists, if they ever come to a therapy?

They have to work with a child.

They cannot make any contracts or any promises.

They have to be aware that the narcissist is lying to them. They have to be aware that the narcissist is comparing with them.

They get in a discussion with them. The narcissist is better.

So it's very difficult to work with a narcissist because they are stuck in childhood, in early childhood.

Yes. So we have to accept that this is a traumatized child, a child who is in a post-traumatic condition.

And we have to work with the tools that we have.

We have quite a few tools with child therapy, and we definitely have very powerful tools when it comes to trauma therapy.

The only problem is we never use these tools when we deal with narcissists.

Because we regard narcissists as well or relatively well-adjusted adults.

They have the whole jobs, they make a lot of money, some of them are famous and accomplished, and we say, well, you know, they know their way around life and around society. And they're adults.

So therapists deal with narcissists as they would deal with any other adult with temporary difficulties in relationships.

Or that's not true. That's a child, and it's not only a child, but a child in a post-traumatic condition, emotionally speaking.

Cognitively, the narcissist is able to become a pillar of the community, to be very accomplished and so on.

Similarly, the narcissist has only one type of working memory. He has some semantic memory.

The narcissist is able to learn skills and memorize these skills and use the memory later.

So professionally, the narcissist can become very accomplished using semantic memory.

But the narcissist doesn't have episodic memory, doesn't have autobiographical memory.

Narcissus has huge memory gaps when it comes to his or her own personal biography.

We need to take all these things into account, and we don't, not even remotely.

So therapists try to question the narcissist about events in his or her life. Therapists make therapeutic alliances and agreements with the narcissists, they reason with the narcissist.

This is ridiculous. Of course it doesn't get anywhere. Of course, it's constant failure when we deal with narcissists.

The psychopath is a different story.

Psychopath is an adult. It's a goal-oriented adult.

And the psychopath disagrees with you about the role of society.

That's why I do not think that psychopathy is a mental illness.

Psychopathy is a social aberration, social problem. It's not mental at all.

There's nothing wrong with the psychopath mentally. Nothing.

He was born with a different brain. There's a brain abnormality, definitely. There's a genetic, a regulatory component.

But what this brain, and I'm not quite sure that the brain is not the outcome of the psychopathy.

We don't quite know if the brain is abnormal and then there is psychopathy or vice versa.

At any rate, there's nothing wrong with the psychopath. Not emotionally. His reality testing is intact, everything.

The psychopath just thinks that if there is a goal, the means justify the end and he can do anything he wants to accomplish the goal.

And he lives in reality, the psychopaths.

Yes, he's embedded in reality, he's goal oriented. He's capable of emotions.

It's nothing wrong with the psychopath. Nothing.

Let's talk about splitting. It's very interesting.

The narcissist world is divided in two spaces, the good and the bad. And between there is nothing and he never develops a different view on people on the world.

So that's why it comes to devaluation and to discard concerning people and concerning the world in general, which is for him, is a hostile place.

The narcissist inhabits perpetual morality.

So in this morality, there's a devil and there are angels. People are all good or all bad.

And there are many people who are not narcissists and not even mentally ill, who regard reality this way.

For example, religious people. They regard reality the same way. It's a morality play. There's God and the devil and they're fighting for the souls of people and so on.

The problem with the narcissist is the inconstancy, whereas religious people would agree that the devil is the devil and God is God.

In the narcissist world, God can become the devil and the devil can become God on Monday and the next day it will be Monday and the next day it will be reversed and the fourth day it will be again reversed.

There's no constancy of objects and there's no constancy of the attributes of objects.

So when he splits, when he says all good, all bad, the same person can be all good at the beginning of the week and all bad at the end of the week.

And that's the problem with narcissism.

That means the narcissist has introject constancy.

And does he keep all his introjects all his life like a big library of people and he never will lose them and when he needs them he takes it out of his shelf and plays with it or interacts with it.

He would then re-idealize someone, for example.

So he discarded someone, he devalued someone.

The introject remains. The introject now is a persecutory object. The interject is all bad, evil, threatening, menacing, and so on.

So it's deactivated. In order not to create internal dissonance, the introject is deactivated, because it has negative vibes or negative energy.

But then at some point, the narcissist can take this very introject and re-idealize it. The clinical term is re-cathexis. Re-cathect it, re-idealize it.

And then this is the basis of hoovering.

The narcissist re-idealizes someone he has discarded and then wants to restart the shared fantasy from the point that it ended, like nothing happened in between.

So the narcissist don't have a time perception as well.

There's no time perception.

All people in the narcissist's world are frozen, absolutely frozen in a macabre theater, and they're frozen on stage.

And then he animates them by touching them, like magic touch, you know. He animates them, some of them. He animates you and then he freezes you. He animates another person. He may come back to you and reanimate you with his touch.

This is how narcissists deceive people.

But you said the second time, when he hovers, the second time gets even more tragic.

Because in the first time he has a goal, in the first making contact, first snapshot, but the second thing, he doesn't have a goal, and that makes him very confused.

Why is that so?

Alassadiv would hover you or re-idealize you or reactivate the introject because he has no choice.

It's usually he would try to avoid this.

And so he had no choice. He tried with others. He failed or some other, he tried to re-idealize other introjects and he failed.

It's a failure. It's a consequence of failure.

So the second idealization is associated with what we call narcissistic collapse. There's been a failure at the foundation of this.

This constant reminder of failure dooms the second relationship and also disrupts massively the ability to, for example, idealize the partner fully as a maternal figure.

So the second round is more difficult, more fraught, requires a lot more self-deception and self-denial, a lot more imagination, if you wish, a lot more fantasy, is much more removed from reality, much more cult-like.

And the outcomes are egregious and much more pronounced, much more intense and eruptive and dynamic and so. Because even more aggressive.

And even more aggressive most of the time.

Yes, because it starts with the failure.

The narcissist needs to deny the failure somehow. But he cannot because you're there, your reminder that he failed. Otherwise, why is he back with you? He's back with you because he failed.

Okay, let's come to the haunting places.

Wow.

I'm sorry. I have a client.

Okay. I have a client.

I suggest the following.

I'm available to continue this conversation if you wish.

Yes.

Yes, sure. Either today if you're free, you're on 4.15.

Okay, okay.

And if you're not free, we can talk about the time.

I must run. I have a client.

No, we can continue at 4.15. When you're available, we make it like that. You drop me an email when you are ready. I'm waiting for you. So if it's later, it's okay.

No, it will not be later. It will be 4.15.

No, okay. I'm waiting for you. Thank you very much. I have to run. I apologize. Bye, bye.

Sure, sure. Bye. Bye.

I just want to remind on the work of Melanie Klein. Her work was very, very famous and she was really very good in her subject.

And she, talking about dichotomy thinking, splitting. She said there is a good breast, there is a bad breast.

And the bad breast, the child, attacks the bad breast with his urine or with his shit.

And that I find in sexuality of somatic narcissists, that they are addicted to see shit on vagina or on an ass.

For me, it sounds like the narcissist again reminds himself on his early childhood what he experienced and is stuck in it. Is that right, my interpretation?

Well, Melanie Klein used the terms bad breast and good breast to describe the various aspects of the mother when the child cannot reconcile the fact that the mother is sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes gives him food and sometimes doesn't give it food, sometimes he's in the room, sometimes leaves the room, sometimes is accommodating and sometimes it's frustrating.

So the child creates two images of mother, the bad mother and the good mother. And Melanie Klein called it bad breast and good breast.

Initially the child is unable to integrate the two pictures, unable to create an image of mother that is nuanced, with nuance that has grey zones and so on.

So Melanie Klein said that the child splits. The child says, for example, mother is all bad, I'm all good, or vice versa.

And later on, other scholars, such as Winnicott and others, suggested what is known as the moral default.

The moral default is when the child says, mother cannot be bad.

Because if mother is all bad, that's very frightening. It means I will not survive.

Remember, the child depends on mother for food, for shelter, for caring. So if mother is all bad, it is life-threatening.

So the child says, okay, mother cannot be bad because it's too terrifying. I am all bad. I'm the one who is all bad. And I deserve. I deserve to be punished, I deserve to be, you know, mistreated, abused and so on.

So this is the initial formation of the internalized bad object.

This is how the narcissist actually develops because there is an internal bad object that says, I'm all bad, mother is all good.

Gradually healthy people integrate the pictures of mother, the good and they don't need to split anymore, and consequently, the internalized bad object, which is also known as primitive superego, the internalized bad object dies because there's no need for it anymore.

The narcissist never reaches this stage. The narcissist is never able to integrate bad and good aspects of people starting with mother.

So the narcissists remain stuck with the internalized bad object, which says, I'm all bad. Mother is all good.

Now, remember that in the narcissist's life, every woman is a mother. So instantaneously, the narcissist splits and the narcissist says, I'm all bad. Initially, my partner is all good.

And that is indeed the idealization phase. That's why narcissists idealize. That's the love bombing.

Because at that stage, a narcissist says, mother is all good, my partner, who is a maternal figure, is all good, I am all bad.

At that point, the narcissist acts out, acts out the internalized bad objects. In order to convince himself that he is all bad and mother is all good, he seeks to behave in ways which are all bad.

So this could include sexual practices, obviously, where he is all bad, and the mother is all good, and he is the one who degrades the mother, humiliates the mother, attacks the mother somehow.

But there is a very important caveat.

Narcissists need the mother to love them. They need the mother to tell them how irresistible they are. How super attractive, how perfect, how...

So a narcissist would never engage in practices which are non-consensual. That's a psychopath. Psychopath would do that. But a narcissist would never do that.

Because if the narcissist has to force the partner to participate in whatever the practice is, never mind how kinky, how crazy, how sadomasochistic, if the partner is not consenting, then it shows the narcissist that he is not attractive, that he is not irresistible.

Rape is not his thing.

No.

No, of course not, because rape means I am not attractive. I am not irresistible. I have to use force.

While the narcissist needs to feel that theanything even, would just because she cannot resist him, just because she must have him, she's obsessed with him. He's super attractive. And a woman would do anything to be with him.

And so the consent in narcissism is super crucial, very crucial. The consent, not only just any consent, enthusiastic consent, initiative, going crazy over the narcissists. He needs this, especially somatic but also cerebral. He needs this.

The psychopath, on the other hand, objectifies the potential partner, and if she refuses to comply, the psychopath could become violent because here there is no investment in grandiosity. The psychopath just want to use the woman's body and if she refuses, like everything else the psychopath would go for it you.

But not the narcissist, not even malignant narcissists.

A malignant narcissist is a combination of narcissists, psychopath and sadist.

But the malignant narcissist is, as the name implies, at the core, a narcissist.

So even the malignant narcissist, who is psychopathic, who is sadistic, would exercise this kind of practices, sexual practices, only when the partner cannot resist. He's begging him to behave in this way, because he is super irresistible and she must have him and she cannot hold herself, she cannot control herself.

He needs this drama, he needs this visible ostentatious signs of how he is supreme also sexually.

So this is a distinction that few people make and there are many mistakes about it online.

In my experience with my narcissist, I had to face that the narcissist was very indifferent to gender.

First he told me he's gay because I'm gay too. Then he told me he's bisexual. Then he told me he's gay because I'm gay too then he told me he's bisexual then he told me he's heterosexual and I found out that he makes no difference between men between women between transgender he even told me that the perfect love for him would be a transsexual because the perfect love is to unite with a female. So he's a male and a female. You talked about you, you wrote about it in your book.

So sometimes I think the narcissist gives sex to anybody who provides him with narcissistic supply and gives him the autoerotic motivation to love himself at last in the sexual act.

Indeed.

The partner is irrelevant. Completely irrelevant.

The partner needs to provide two things. He needs to inform the narcissist in no uncertain terms, in enthusiastic terms, in out-of-control terms, he needs to inform the narcissist that he is attractive and irresistible, thereby allowing the narcissist to make love with himself, or to himself, auto-erotically.

Whether this partner who is enabling and facilitating the auto-erotic sex is male, female, or even non-human is a little besides the point.

So another thing is that narcissism, as I said, is a disruption in the formation of the self.

Gender identity, gender sexual orientation, they are all critical facets of the self.

If you don't have a self, you cannot have a fixed sexual orientation. You cannot have gender identity, which is essentially a social role.

So you are very fluid.

Ironically, narcissists are super fluid, very fluid in this sense.

But ultimately, the preferred sexual act of the narcissist is masturbation. The preferred sexual act.

Yes, yes, yes.

So they don't feel, when they don't have a sexual partner, it's not a big deal because they can make love to themselves. And they are their only real sexual partner.

And so when the partner is there, it helps because the partner affirms the false self. The partner says, you are irresistible, you're sexually super attractive, you're these, you're there.

So it helps.

But it's a sufficient condition, but not necessary one. Narcissists can do very well without.

When we know that narcissists have no conscious, no remorse, no ethical standards, on the other side, you said that narcissists can divide between bad or good, but they just don't care.

So why is that so?

Remember what we said, that everything the narcissist does is a simulation.

So narcissists can simulate morality and ethics to a very convincing and high degree.

These are known as pro-social narcissists or communal narcissists. These are narcissists whose locus of grandiosity is that they are super moral, righteous, amazingly ethical, reliable.

But these are narcissists. It's all a simulation. It's all intended to obtain narcissistic supply by being ostentatiously charitable or moral.

So yes, as you immediately see, you cannot be a pro-social narcissist without being able to tell the difference between right and wrong. All narcissists are capable of this.

But what they lack is the identification of right with good and wrong with evil. They don't do this distinction of good and evil.

In this sense, they are dissocial, antisocial, they're psychopathic. They ask, what's in it for me? Is it good to obtain the goal?

So it's right and wrong, but that distinction is not relevant. What is relevant, it works, it doesn't work.

So they are not immoral. They are amoral. Amoral.

Whereas the psychopath is very often immoral.

But they are not evil in the sense self-style expert, tell all time on YouTube, for instance, these are evil people.

No. They just do their things to get narcissistic supply.

Yes.

They are no more evil than viruses, let's say.

It is true that viruses cannot tell the difference between right and wrong and cannot modify their behaviors. That part is true.

But the narcissists view of right and wrong is not a motivational or attitudinal view.

In other words, it would not alter or yield behavior. And the pursuit of narcissistic supply is definitely compulsive.

That means exactly like a virus. The narcissist cannot help it. It's addictive. It's a junkie. He's addicted to the drug.

So the similarities with viruses are considerable.

Evil requires premeditation, intent.

Even in law, you have mens rea. You have the criminal intent. And without mens rea, without criminal intent, you will not be convicted. You will not be sent to prison.

So it's crucial to have intent.

Narcissists don't intend to be evil. They don't intend to be good, because they don't do good or evil. They don't intend, they intend to do only one thing, obtain supply.

And you said they always feel like they are going to a trial, like in Franz Kafka's The Process. So they feel that they or they recognize or whatever that they do something wrong, but can they grasp what they do wrong with other people?

The trial is not about being right or wrong or about being good or bad. That's not the trial.

The trial is, do I meet the standards? Do I perform? Am I deserving of supply? What is the judgment from the outside of my...

So narcissism is a performative act, a performative state. And like an actor in a theater, the actor is on trial.

Because if the audience doesn't like the play and doesn't like the acting, you know, that's humiliating, that's horrible, that's heartbreaking.

So it's the same with an artist. He's on trial in the sense that what would his audience think and how would his audience react?

Because he relies on the input from the audience, the feedback, to regulate his internal environment.

And he's terrified of falling apart. He's terrified of falling apart. He's terrified of what we call narcissistic mortification or narcissistic injury.

It's a very brittle, very fragile construct. The internal space of the narcissist is very, very, it's kaleidoscopic, but it's also very fragile.

And so it can be broken like this.

And it's always about, yes, it is always about performance, never about reputation.

You said it in one lecture.

No, reputation. They don't care. They don't care about reputation.

No. What they want is attention and adulation.

The key commodity, what is monetized in the narcissistic space is attention. Attention could be positive, could be negative.

So if the narcissist cannot be loved, and then he prefers to be feared or hated, even hated.

There's another thing which you give me the opportunity to mention.

And that is the fact that people think that narcissists' grandiosity is about being the best, being the greatest, being the richest, being the most famous, no.

The narcissist's grandiosity is about being unique.

So, for example, a narcissist can be very proud of his victimhood. He can say there's never been a victim like me, I'm unique.

Or a narcissist can be very proud of his failures. He can say no one failed like me. The bankruptcy of my company was the biggest in history. That makes me unique.

So it's uniqueness. So the two key features are attention, negative or positive, and uniqueness.

There is no valence, no valence, you know, it's not, there is no value here.

As you say, I love to be hated or I hate to and I hate to be loved.

Yes, any type of attention is utterly acceptable.

And utterly interchangeable.

Let me ask you at last two questions, if you allow, about social media.

You say social media is not social. Why?

Social media is constructed intentionally to encourage competition between people and negative emotions that are the outcome of failure in obtaining attention.

So it is an attention-based platform. And the failure to obtain attention is penalized. And it's penalized via a mechanism known as relative positioning.

Relative positioning is when you compare yourself to other people. The platforms encourage comparisons. They encourage you to compare how many likes did you receive? How many views did you receive?

The algorithm is built this way to expose you to the accomplishments of other people and in essence to humiliate you, to motivate you via humiliation and envy.

These are the key emotions in social media, humiliation and envy, and it's public, it's ostentatious.

In a way, it's narcissistic modification. They cater to your narcissistic side, and they encourage competition.

Now, competition, envy, etc. triggers aggression because we know since 1939, the work of Dollard, we know that frustration translates to aggression.

If I fail to get the same number of likes like you, if I fail to get the same number of views like you, I will envy you. I will be frustrated and inevitably I will become aggressive.

I can aggress against you or I can be just generally aggressive, which is what we see on social media.

And that is great for monetizing eyeballs because it brings people back again and again. It's addictive. This process is addictive.

Of course it's not social. It's not only a social, it's anti-social. It's a totally psychopathic construct from A to Z. And if you want to go into religion or morality, it's evil. It's evil. Simply.

But it could be a wonderful space for narcissistic hunting for new victims. It's anonymous. You have no intimacy, no real intimacy, that narcissists threatens.

And on the other hand, you said that victims are more aware, getting more aware, but they make a move that they are the victims, the hypersensitive, the hyper-empathetic people.

That's all not true.

So what is the victim, like in social media, is it maybe a narcissist too?

Yes, I believe that ostentatious victim, public facing victims, victims whose identity is victimhood. That's who they are. They're only victims. They are nothing else, just victims. And leverage the victimhood to obtain benefits. Could be attention, could be money, could be, you know.

These people, of course, are covert narcissists, or even in many cases, psychopaths. They're just pretending to be victims.

Now, some of them have convinced themselves that they're victims because narcissists often claim victim. It's a normal process.

This is called alloplastic defenses. They blame other people.

So it's natural for these people to be in the position of a victim and they feel comfortable. They don't feel they're deceiving anyone. They really believe they're victims, you know.

And it's a great space because they get attention, they get companionship, they get empathy, they get money a lot. There's a lot of money in victimhood. And they get benefits.

They impose obligations and duties on other people by virtue of being victims. They emotionally blackmail and guilt-trip other people. And so on. It's a totally narcissistic space. Totally narcissistic space.

This movement of empaths, for example, empath is a self-aggrandizing claim. It's a claim that you possess empathy more than other people, that you are special. It's a claim that you're special. Not only special, you're unique.

There is even gradations of empath. There is super novel empath. There is a yokey empaths that all kinds of bullshit about all types of empaths and so on.

And they are competing. It's what we call competitive victim. They are competing.

My narcissists was much worse than your narcissist. No, I was a much bigger victim than you. I am empathic. You are nothing compared to me. I'm much more empathic. I'm galactic empathic. I'm a yuka empathic. I mean, it's nauseating.

And these people, and I visited their forums, I visited their forums on a regular basis, these people are the least empathetic people I've ever met in my life.

Many of them shame the narcissists. Narcissus compared to them has empathy.

They're violent. They're verbally abusing. They are exclusionary. They are aggressive. They're horrible people. Simply horrible people.

Frankly, if these are the victims of narcissists, I am happy that they've been victimized.

Yes, I made the same experience when I was victimized and starting to heal also with your lectures.

I went to a self-help group online and I said, well, it was for me, the meeting with the narcissist was one of the best therapies for me to clear up my family history and so on.

And I said to them, if you want to heal, you have to do this and this and this. And then you also can forgive, forgive not only you, but also the narcissist.

And the reaction against me was really horrible. And I thought to myself, they want, I thought they want to stay in their victimhood and don't want to develop.

It's splitting.

Yeah.

It's a splitting defense.

They say that they are all bad, I'm all good. They're all good.

They're splitting.

Exactly what narcissists do. They split.

Okay. Let's go to the last question I have right now.

Let's talk a little bit about cold therapy.

As we know, narcissistic personal disorder cannot be healed, cannot be treated with medicaments, with pharmaceutical medicaments.

What can we do?

We can modify behavior to make it more easier for the environment to deal with a narcissist. That's your intention and your invention about cold therapy.

What are you doing in cold therapy? What makes it maybe dangerous?

Because when you modify a narcissist, I did that. They switch to first borderline and they have not the tools to work with borderline and then they go to the primary psychopath and as you said yourself, the only goal for the primary psychopath is to destroy you.

So how do you work? You stay with the people then and how do you deal with them when they are switching from one personal disorder to another personal disorder?

Yeah, well, first of all, many existing treatment modalities, existing therapies, are successful at modifying the behaviors of narcissists.

So we have schema therapy, we have others, and they're successful. Some abrasive and antisocial behaviors can ameliorate, can be reduced.

So this was not the aim of cold therapy. The aim of cold therapy was to get rid of the false self. That's the target of cold therapy.

And when you get rid of the false self, you get rid of it, multiply as a side effect or bonus, you get rid of the fantasy defense, you get rid of grandiosity as a cognitive distortion. you get rid of all the attributes of the false self.

But the false self is only one element in narcissism, an important element, but only one.

So, for example, the narcissist doesn't develop empathy after cold therapy. He remains a narcissist. He's exploitative. He's dyssopathic. He's psychopathic a bit. None of these changes.

I've been in the middle of training and certifying therapies and mental health practitioners, clinicians. I've been in the middle when the pandemic struck. And we've had training workshops and so on so forth in multiple cities all around the world from Brazil to Hungary and so on and then the pandemic struck and we had to stop. And we will restart our efforts soon.

But I can say the following.

Since cold therapy uses a process known as re-traumatization, which was not invented by me, it was invented in the 80s by FOA and others. Retraumatization is a recreation of the trauma, not verbally, not symbolically, but in real terms.

Of course, there's no physical contact of any kind. There's no beating. There's no physical contact is prohibited because physical contact is comforting.

But what is created is an environment which is hostile, non-containing. Therapy is not your friend. Therapy's perceived as a persecutory object, as an enemy.

And then this triggers severe transference and counter-transference. That means that the patient starts to see you as the abusive figure in the past, abusive mother, abusive father, whatever.

And you don't mitigate this. You encourage it by counter transference. You behave in a way, which encourages the transference until there is what we call vividness or reviviveness the patient lives through the trauma again.

I emphasize there's no physical contact of any kind if the trauma for example was physical beatings, the trauma was sexual. Sexual abuse. No, of course. No reenactment of this.

But the object, the person that did these things, we reenact the emotions and the cognitions that had to do with that person. It's a little like what used to be called, so it's known as vividness.

These are techniques that are well known. They're not, you know.

The problem with this is exactly what you said, that when the defenses are crumbled, when the defenses are taken out, when we create artificial decompensation, artificial decompensation via re-traumatization, the patient remains defenseless without the skin, and this causes tremendous emotional dysregulation and suicidal ideation, which is exactly what happens in borderline personality disorder.

So the patient becomes borderline. At that stage, of course, the therapist needs to step in and begin treatments, which are essentially treatments for borderline, like dialectical behavior therapy and so on.

So the patient is not abandoned after the false self is dismantled. The patient is not abandoned. It transitions to phase two.

There are three phases in cold therapy. And the second phase is treatments for borderline, in essence, and coupled with treatments for trauma.

And then the third phase is reframing, essentially cognitive behavior therapy. Reframing and so.

So the patient emerges the same, only without the need for narcissistic supply, without grandiose, fantastic, inflated self-perceptions, cognitive distortion, and without identifiable false self. There's no false self. There's much more realistic self-assessment, self-awareness, so the patient is much closer to himself. There's not false self in the middle. And interaction with reality are much better.

But when you say there is no core, there is an absence, and you take away the false self, what is there then? Can it be filled?

The emptiness is there?

There, yeah.

Nothing changes.

Nothing.

Just the need for supply, this addiction.

Think of it as rehab. It's a kind of rehab. It's addiction. This addiction was created by exposure to trauma and misguided dysfunctional attempts to cope with the trauma.

So what we do, we take the patient back to the trauma and misguided dysfunctional attempts to cope with the trauma.

So what we do, we take the patient back to the trauma, and we teach the patient how to cope with trauma in a more functional way, without grandiosity, without supply, without false self.

So it's a post-trauma, post-traumatic therapy, in effect.

It's a trauma therapy. I have nothing to do with narcissism, actually. It's a post-trauma, post-traumatic therapy, in effect. It's a trauma therapy. I have nothing to do with narcissism, actually. It's a trauma therapy.

And then the rest is the same.

The emptiness, the depression if there is depression, the lack of empathy, the exploitativeness. It's all the same.

Inability to access positive emotions. It's all the same. Nothing changes.

How long do you need for this process when you retramal...

We evaluate.

We evaluate. Licensed therapists haven't given, haven't yet practiced it.

Although there are a few licensed therapists that are already working with it.

They haven't practiced it in a way that I consider rigorous, not under clinical supervision, not in laboratory, so I can't, but they claim this therapist.

There are therapists in Europe, in America and so, in Brazil. They claim that it takes about six months. That's what they claim.

Okay. So last question. I don't know if it's true. I must clarify.

I don't know if it's true.

Very last question now. You founded a foundation I read in the internet and what are you doing?

Informing colleagues, psychology students about personality disorders because I see in...

No, the foundation, because we have one minute left, I try to answer your question.

The foundation gives three scholarships, one in physics, one in psychology, one in economics, to people who are willing to study my work in these fields and continue the world. That's a legacy kind of thing.

Because I entered psychology very late in life. Prior to that, I was an economist of some standing, I would say. And a physician.

And... Physician too, yeah? Prior to that I was a economist of some standing, I would say.

And a physician.

Prior to that I was a physicist.

So I've had several lives. I'm old enough for that.

So this is the foundation to continue my work long after I'm gone.

Okay, fine.

So we will meet again mid-November.

I have some more questions because I read all your books. I saw most of your lectures. I learned very much. I could heal myself. And I want to thank you, really thank you.

Thank you for having me.

My pleasure.

You make really wonderful work. You help many people. And if it's the supply, I can give you. I will give you by my whole heart. And I hope we will meet again here.

Auf Wiedersehen.

Auf Wiedersehen.

Thank you.

Ciao.