He remembered the coke sniffing Zygmunt Freud.
He came up on one of his trips, he came up with the trilateral model of the psyche.
There's the id, there's the ego, and there's the superego.
But what people don't know, especially self-styled experts, is that the superego is a part of the ego.
Now the main role of the ego, it has many functions, but one of the main roles is reality testing.
The ego tells you, "Don't do this.
The consequences will be dire.
You will have to watch some Wagner videos for the rest of your life." And then you recoil.
And the superego's role is to bring society's mores, conventions and norms into your mind.
It's the outcome of socialization.
So the superego is what we know colloquially is our conscience.
The conscience.
But what happens when there's no ego and no superego?
By the way, you can't have a superego if you don't have an ego.
Announcement to all self-styled experts.
Superego injunctions are not possible in the absence of an ego.
Okay?
When you don't have an ego and you don't have a superego, many, many things happen.
And all of them are bad.
But one of them is that you lose reality testing.
You lose the ability to tell apart fantasy from reality.
And the other thing is that you act on your drives and urges and impulses without consideration for the consequences.
To cut a long story short, take away the ego and the superego and what is left is an animal, a bestial person driven by the most base desires.
Also known as narcissist or psychopath.
And a proposed base desires and narcissists and psychopaths.
My name is Sam Baknin.
I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology.
And currently I'm a professor of clinical psychology and business management at the CEOPS Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom, yes.
So you say, take away the ego and the superego and what's left is very good sex.
I agree.
But the problem is that in the vast majority of cases, if the ego is disrupted, if ego formation is disrupted and there's no functioning ego and consequently there's no superego to whisper in your ear, you know what you're doing is wrong.
Don't do it.
Stop.
Think twice, etc.
If this critical structure, the interface with reality and with morality and with society, if it's missing and what is left behind is only the id, which is essentially, if you wish, reptilian, so to speak.
Then yeah, you're likely to have good sex.
You're likely to be good at sex, but much more likely you will be, you become antisocial, become antisocial.
You become a slave to your own drives and urges.
You act on impulses without consideration for the wellbeing of other people.
It's very difficult to develop empathy in the absence of an interface with reality.
And so people whose ego is disrupted, whose superego is essentially deactivated or non-existent, these people, narcissists and psychopaths have a major problem with social functioning.
They are antisocial and asocial, but never appropriately socialized.
And this is the topic of today's video, YOLO Psychopaths versus Wolf Narcissist.
YOLO is You Only Live Once.
It's a famous acronym in texting.
Wolf is a new acronym that I'm proposing.
We only live forever.
Notice the differences.
YOLO, you only live once.
The psychopath is an individualistic person.
The psychopath pays attention only to himself.
Wolf is We Only Live Forever because the narcissist is essentially pro-social.
The narcissist is embedded in a group of fans or acolytes or psychophans.
The narcissist regards himself as a one-man collective, which is a great definition of a cult.
And so we only live forever.
Of course, the narcissist perceives himself as immortal, as divine, as god-like, and therefore not subject to the laws of men and even to some extent the laws of nature.
No ego, no superego, only in a perception of eternal life or a perception of co-opidium sees the day.
The problem with both types, the narcissist and the psychopath, is that they have no horizon.
In other words, they cannot perceive the future consequences of present actions.
I call it malignant mindfulness.
Ironically, the psychopath and the narcissist are fully embedded in the present.
They have no past because the narcissist, at least, is highly dissociative and the psychopath pays no attention to the past.
It's gone, it's done.
Why waste time on it?
Narcissists, psychopaths are goal-oriented.
So they pay no attention to the past.
And they cannot for the life of them imagine the future.
They have a future aphantasia.
So they have a people aphantasia because they lack empathy, but they also have a future aphantasia.
They cannot imagine, conceive, delineate the future.
They cannot inhabit the future in their minds.
The very bad sci-fi authors.
So there are no future consequences to present actions because there's only the present and there's no future.
There's a sense of impunity, of immunity.
I will always get away with it because I always did get away with it.
And of course, this leads to reckless, risky, thrill-seeking and dangerous behaviors.
Part of the problem is the relationship that psychopaths and narcissists have with time.
They perceive time as a drone, as a boring continuum, as a river without a scenery.
Something that is so humdrum, pedestrian, regular, that is mind-numbing.
That's why psychopaths and narcissists are always bored.
They always seek drama and thrills and excitement and risk because of this, the perception of time.
And so any opportunity, when they're presented with an opportunity, they perceive it as a malfunction of reality, as a kind of disequilibrium.
Something is out of whack.
And so they regard opportunities as portals.
You know, science fiction movies, time warp speed, warp speed portals.
So they regard opportunities as portals that can transport them or teleport them from their drab, dreary existence into a fantasy that is delicious, invigorating, reverberating.
A fantasy that essentially fulfills all or caters to most of their emotional needs in the case of the narcissist and goal orientation in the case of the psychopath.
So this is the sequence.
The psychopath or the narcissist are bored.
They're bored.
They need drama.
They need excitement.
They need thrills.
Then they see an opportunity.
The opportunity is like a door, a jar.
It's like an open door, like a portal.
And then they seek to pass through this portal, through this door, into a fantastic space, into a paracosm.
And within this fantastic space, all the goals of the psychopath come true in his mind.
And within this fantastic space, the narcissist needs are catered to, especially and including the need for a regular flow of high grade narcissistic supply.
Opportunities are malfunctions of reality.
They are kind of disequilibrium.
They are a rend, a tear in the fabric of space time.
And they must be seized regardless of cost, regardless of consequence.
Whenever there's an opportunity, it must be seized, a carpe diem mentality taken to the extreme ad absurdum.
The three phenomena, psychological phenomena involved in the narcissist and psychopath's opportunism.
I would say even addiction to opportunities.
They seek opportunities.
They generate opportunities with chaotic behavior or manipulation.
They induce and introduce drama into their lives.
They seek risks and dangers.
They're reckless.
They're defined.
They're consummation, etc, etc.
But all these boils down to three psychological phenomena.
Number one, a lack of impulse control.
Number two, disinhibition.
Number three, attentional narrowing.
I've discussed attentional narrowing in another video a few days ago.
I've discussed everything in another video.
There are 1,500 of them on this channel alone and another 1,000 on other channels.
So there's no stone left unturned.
It's a sunbakni encyclopedia.
Okay, Shoshanim.
Impulse control, disinhibition, attentional narrowing.
Let's break them down.
What is an impulse?
An impulse is a sudden and compelling urge to act, often resulting in action without deliberation.
Even I would say without premeditation.
This is clinically known as impulsion.
In psychoanalytic theory, impulses are the expressions of psychic energy, cathartic energy.
From instinctual drives, sex, hunger, they possess energy.
This energy is expressed via an impulse, an impulse to eat, an impulse to mate, and so on and so forth.
So what is impulse control?
It's the ability to resist such an impulse or desire to withstand temptation and seduction, to avoid the pitfalls and traps of acting without thinking, of emotional thinking, of rushing in without analysis, forethought or planning, not even daydreaming, of succumbing to fantasy rather than reality, of possessing a sense of impunity and immunity to the consequences of your actions, however adverse they may be.
So the ability to resist all this and to regulate the translation of impulse to action, that is known as impulse control, of course narcissists and psychopaths lack impulse control.
I would even say that narcissists and psychopaths have impulse control disorders.
An impulse control disorder is characterized by the failure to resist impulses, drives, temptations, seductions and opportunities.
When you commit acts that are harmful to yourself and to others, you're likely to suffer from an impulse control disorder.
Intermittent explosive disorder, for example, is an impulse control disorder.
So is kleptomania, pathological gambling, pyromania.
And so we are beginning to see the connection between addiction and compulsion, being compelled.
Because these compulsions are repetitive, what Freud called repetition compulsion in other contexts, but these compulsions are repetitive, they resemble very much addiction also because they are irresistible.
Now many mental health issues and problems and disorders involve problems of impulse control.
The lack of impulse control characterizes many other types of mental health issues.
For example, in bipolar disorder in the manic phase, someone with bipolar in the manic phase cannot control his or her impulses, substance use disorders, sexual paraphilias, contact disorders, mood disorders, all of them involve a lack of impulse control.
On the deeper level, a lack of impulse control goes hand in hand with another phenomenon known as disinhibition.
In is a reduction in or a diminution or loss, total loss of the normal control exerted by the brain.
When you're poorly controlled, when your emotions or actions are poorly restrained, probably you're being disinhibited.
When you drink alcohol, when you do drugs, when you have a traumatic brain injury, especially to the frontal lobes, you become disinhibited.
But disinhibition is often the outcome of adverse childhood experiences such as sexual abuse.
People become, people who have been abused sexually as children, as children they become promiscuous later in life, which promiscuity involves disinhibition.
So disinhibition is intimately linked to reckless behaviors, behaviors without forethought, foresight and self-restraint or self-constrain.
In conditioning experiments, the reappearance of responding which has stopped occurring as a result of exposure to extinction, this is also called disinhibition.
We're going to discuss it in some other video.
So when there's a new stimulus, suddenly the response to this new stimulus is reawakened even though it has stopped previous to that owing to exposure to extinction.
But we'll talk about this later.
Okay, now, very interesting.
I find it interesting because it's my idea.
That's why it's interesting.
Very interesting idea.
I think we can link all this psychopathy, narcissism, disinhibition, impulse control disorder, think we can link all this in one basket or one quill, quilt or embroidery, reactive attachment disorder.
In the DSM, reactive attachment disorder is a disorder of infancy and early childhood characterized by disturbed and developmentally inappropriate patterns of social relating that are not due to intellectual disability or pervasive developmental disorder.
So reactive attachment disorder is evidenced by a persistent failure to initiate or to respond appropriately in social interactions.
And this is known as the inhibited type of reactive attachment disorder.
But there's a second type and that is indiscriminate sociability without appropriate selective attachments.
This is known as a disinhibited type of reactive attachment disorder.
Both of these characterize phases in the narcissistic cycle and subtypes of psychopaths.
In the vast majority of cases, there is evidence of reactive attachment disorder.
There's evidence of inadequate care.
The child has been neglected physically or emotionally.
The child's needs have not been met.
The child has been ignored.
There were frequent changes in the primary caregiver from one foster family to another.
And this might be the background for the emergence of reactive attachment disorder.
But I think this disinhibited social engagement disorder, which is a variant of reactive attachment disorder, is just another name for narcissism and psychopathy.
Okay, so we discussed impulse control.
We discussed disinhibition.
There's a third element, if you remember when we were much younger, I mentioned it, attentional narrowing.
Attentional narrowing is the restricting of attention in high stress situations to a small set of information sources with a potential omission of critical task relevant information.
So I've discussed it in another video.
So now let's put all three together and let me lead you, let me introduce to you the internal turmoil and come out within the narcissist and the psychopath when they come across an opportunity.
Now here's an example of seize the day opportunism.
I just had to break the recording, get me a glass of wine and have a sip.
So I could not control my impulse to drink wine. I became disinhibited.
I'm drinking in public and attentional narrowing.
I'm paying much more attention to the wine than to you.
But then there's nothing new. I never paid attention to you.
Okay, having finished insulting you, let's discuss the internal world.
How does it look from the inside?
When the narcissist and psychopath presented with an opportunity.
I think it's the same as when a very hungry person is presented with a lavish delectable dinner.
You know, you salivate. You can't control yourself. You must have it now. Whatever the social cost, whatever the consequences of such misbehavior, you're hungry. And the hunger takes over. There's no premeditation, no analysis, no deliberation. There's no care in the world as to appearances, what might other people say, and so on and so forth. It's delicious. You must have it. It's succulent. You must chew on it. It's attractive. You must have sex with it. It's glittering. You must still it. The impulse is stronger than you. The impulse becomes you.
The narcissist and psychopath are exposed to an opportunity. They become impulsive. There is impulsion. The impulse takes over. And it takes over because essentially they're disinhibited to start with. They don't have very strong injunctions or edicts or norms or conventions or mores. They are highly primitive in this sense. There's no ego there. There's no super ego. There's no conscience. There's no morality.
Narcissists are asocial and amoral. Psychopaths are antisocial and immoral.
There is no barrier, no fence, no protection from their own drives and impulses and urges. And so they give in and succumb. And at that moment, there's a tunnel vision. They become laser focused on the goal. The goal could be narcissistic supply in the case of the narcissist. It could be sex, money, power, access in the case of the psychopath. But there's always a goal. There's attentional nary.
All the attention, 100% of the attention is focused on the goal.
And this is a huge problem because a lot of the information that emanates from the environment gets lost.
The narcissist and the psychopath do not pay attention to highly critical, mission critical information.
And they get things wrong very often and they end up in dire straits because of this.
Because all their focus, this is known as hyper focus, because all their focus is on the target.
They are devoid of the ability to process the environment and they become very vulnerable at that moment in time.
In the misjudged reality, they act inappropriately in the vast majority of cases or even criminally.
And as I said, they have to face the music at some point in the future.
Narcissism and psychopathy are now not merely clinical entities.
They're not merely diagnoses.
They have become organizing principles of postmodern civilization everywhere in China and India as much as in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The rise of narcissism in modern civilization renders other people, objects, objectifies other people, commodifies them.
And they become a burden.
And because other people are equally narcissistic and psychopathic, they're not only a burden, but they are dangerous, positively dangerous.
Narcissists and psychopaths are overrepresented in life critical professions, such as law enforcement, the medical professions, the healing professions, the judicial system, and so on and so forth, education.
So this infestation is a major problem.
When you have a narcissist or a psychopath in the family or among your friends, when you date a narcissist or a psychopath or have to work with one, collaborate with one in the workplace, this is an ordinary, super difficult condition or situation to cope with, precisely because they lack impulse control.
They are disinhibited.
Their attention is focused on goals and they see nothing else.
They are socially illiterate.
They lack empathy, basic social skills, or even the willingness to fake it or to acquire social skills.
I mean, they don't even bother to fake empathy or to fake good manners or to fake they consider themselves psychopaths and narcissists, consider themselves so vastly superior.
They hold everyone in such profound contempt that they don't even bother to fake.
And so many people resort to isolation, self-sufficient atomization, solitude.
These have become survival strategies in modern society.
Usually you are faced with one choice between two alternatives.
You can either become a narcissist or a schizophrenic.
You can either become a narcissist and function in society by preying on others, by becoming a predator, definitely if you're a psychopath, or you can avoid society altogether, the schizophrenic position.
So if you abjure narcissism, what's left?
Alone at home with your keto dog in Netflix, with deliveries and minimizing social interaction.
As this trend of rising, growing narcissism, exploding psychopathy and the withdrawal of the large masses, the people who are not psychopaths and narcissists, the victims and targets of narcissists or psychopaths, they withdraw.
They begin to avoid society, social interactions, sex, intimate relationships.
They begin to avoid all this.
This is the risk became exponentially larger, the risk of coming across a narcissist or a psychopath.
As this happened, schizoid men, men, not women, saw the business opportunity in such social trends.
They developed technologies that encourage a-sociality, encouraging to be a-social, even a-sexual, mislabeling these technologies as social, social media, for example.
All this is the collective society-wide outcome of the rising tide of psychopathy and narcissism as we have legitimized a lack of impulse control, disinhibition as forms of authenticity.
If you lack impulse control and you're disinhibited, you're a cool guy.
These misbehaviors and pathological traits are glorified in today's civilization.
Even attentional narrowing is glamorized.
Autistic features, autistic elements are glamorized.
If you have hyper-focus, you're a genius.
So we have legitimized these core features of narcissism and psychopathy.
And now that we are paying the price, or victims and targets are paying the price, they cry out for help or they complain or they have grievances.
It's too late because narcissism and psychopathy are baked into the system.
They constitute an integral part of the ethos.
And within narcissism and psychopathy, a lack of impulse control, disinhibition and attentional awareness are the key and the core features that lead the psychopath to cease the day you live only once and lead the narcissist to create cults within which he can kind of embed a shared fantasy and let it thrive and flourish.
We only live forever.
The other psychopath versus the wolf narcissist.