Good morning, evening night, everyone.
This playlist contains the five parts of the one-day seminar that I gave in Zagreb, mostly to clinicians. When you watch the five parts together, it's as if you have been present in the seminar in Zagreb.
Now, the video you're about to watch is a recap of all the concepts that are mentioned in the seminar. This will allow you to take notes and then explore my YouTube channel for additional videos about each and every one of these concepts.
Also in the description, you would find a PDF file that includes all the notes for the seminar.
So this video is a study aid which allows you basically to rehash and rehearse the ideas the beliefs the schools in psychology and the recent discoveries in the field of Cluster B personality disorders.
Just to remind you, my lectures and seminars are free of charge. I give two to three hour lectures, one day seminars, three day seminars, five day seminars, and a mega seminar of eight days. All these are completely free of charge.
You can organize a seminar in your location. You need to pay, of course, for the lecture hall. You need to pay for a professional cameraman to document the seminar, but that's where your expenses end. You don't have to pay me. My presence, my teaching, everything is free of charge.
Examples of other seminars which I offer. Supply, self-supply, sadistic supply and narcissistic supply, other and othering, contemporary sexuality, borderline personality disorder revisited, and trauma and dissociation.
I've given recently seminars everywhere from London to Sao Paulo. So I'm available to travel. I travel at my expense. You don't pay my expenses. And I don't charge for my seminars and lectures.
An opportunity, perhaps, or maybe a threat.
Okay, Shoshanim.
Let's delve right into the skeleton, the bones and the sinews, and the tissue of the seminar in Zagreb.
Etiology and psychodynamics.
This was the first part of the seminar. I explained the difference in models, in various models of personality disorders.
So there's the categorical model in the DSM-4, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 4. There's the dimensional model which finds its place in the alternative models of personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 takes revision.
So in the DSM 5, we have two diagnostic structures, two diagnostic alternatives. For example, for narcissistic personality disorder, for borderline personality disorder. We have the classical DSM-4, bullet points, list of diagnostic criteria, and we have an alternative model, which is dimensional and more literary.
And then the last model is the trait domains model in the ICD 11th edition, international classification of diseases.
The ICD has a Lego approach. You have traits, you combine them, and you get highly customizable diagnosis specific to each and every individual. Just by putting the traits together, the way you would put together Lego bricks.
Pathological narcissism is the core of all personality disorders especially cluster B.
Metaphors of pathological narcissism as a private missionary religion, a cult or a private language I explained in the seminar each and every one of these metaphors.
For example, a private missionary religion, when the child, the child who is exposed to abuse and to trauma, creates an imaginary friend, the false self, and this imaginary friend is godlike. And then the child sacrifices itself to this divinity, this moloch, this human sacrifice. And it's a proto-religion, a primitive type of religion.
That's one metaphor for narcissism.
I discuss in the seminar relational versus individual disorders.
Relational disorders are defined as dysfunctions that emanate from or emerge from relationships, interpersonal relationships with other people.
Individual disorders are disorders that are innate, they are not dependent upon interactions with other people, they can be diagnosed in seclusion. They have nothing to do with relationships.
I mentioned the trauma model of personality disorders, calling Ross and developmental trauma disorders, such as reactive attachment disorder or DTD and so.
I quote Hazen and McFarland in 2010 when they have written, when alarmed, the child seeks proximity to a caregiver, safe base, but proximity to a frightening caregiver only increases the alarm.
And then I end by discussing the question of hereditary contribution to cluster B personality disorders and brain abnormalities in psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder. Both elements are present. There's a strong hereditary component and brain abnormalities.
It's a similar situation in borderline personality disorder.
However, hitherto, we have failed to isolate or to find specific genes or gene arrays or gene expressions that are unique to narcissism or correlated with narcissism. At least they are not convincing rigorous studies with representative samples.
Similarly, we fail to find consistent brain abnormalities in the population of people with narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis.
The problem is that many of these studies actually don't deal with narcissistic personality disorder.
The participants in the studies are either self-diagnosed or they are actually people with dark triad personalities. Dark triad and dark tetranities are subclinical narcissists.
In other words, they may have a narcissistic style or even a narcissistic personality, but they cannot be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.
And then I proceed in the seminar to provide an overview of psychodynamic features which are common to all cluster B personality disorders.
Now there's a distinction between psychodynamic features, process features, and clinical features or presenting signs. These are three separate areas.
The psychodynamic features involve dynamics, processes inside the individual, or processes that are evoked and elicited by interacting with other people.
So I identify the following psychodynamic features which are common, as I said, to all Cluster B personality disorders.
Lack of a functioning self, identity diffusion or identity disturbance.
Orson Welles met Adolf Hitler on a hiking trip. And this is how he described Adolf Hitler.
No personality whatsoever. I think there was nothing there. Very observant.
Next is an external locus of control. Alloplastic defenses, the tendency to blame other people, or situations, or institutions, or history, or whatever, the environment for one's own failures, defeats, and bad choices.
Pro-social communal variants, where the locus of grandiosity is in ethical, moral and charitable and altruistic conduct.
Pseudo-psychosis and hyper-reflexivity, the inability to tell internal from external, introjection versus object relations.
Ego discrepancy and ego incongruence.
An example is the gap, the abyss between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem in pathological narcissism, where the implicit self-esteem is very low, what Adler would have called inferiority complex, whereas the explicit self-esteem, the visible, the ostentatious self-esteem is inordinately, fantastically, and delusionally high.
Compensatory mechanisms are in action in all cluster B personality disorders.
There's an external regulation in order to moderate, temper or somehow control lability, this regulation.
There are schizoid features when there is collapse. In other words, when the strategies embedded in the personality disorder fail or when the role play fails.
So that's a state of collapse. And then usually the person withdraws or avoids. So schizoid features are very common in cluster B personality disorders.
There's pain aversion or hurt aversion, paranoid, persecutory ideation, anticipatory anxiety, catastrophizing, hypervigilance, and alexithymia, inability to identify emotions and communicate them.
In all Cluster B personality disorders, there are primitive infantile defense mechanisms, an internalized active object, whether idealized or persecutory.
The object, the internalized object could be a bad objector could be an idealized object as well.
There's subjective time fluidity, misperception of time, and there is separation insecurity, control, and introjection as interjection as a self-soothing solution forabandonment anxiety.
There's object and introject inconstancy's impermanence, impaired reality testing, cognitive distortions owing to dissociation and ontological insecurity, Giddens, the idea of Giddens, magical thinking, recklessness, pseudo-artifacts, so pseudo-stupidity, pseudo-humility, victimhood, conspiracyism.
There is in some disorders, for example, narcissistic personality disorders, there's emphasis on the mind and the intellect, the cerebral or intellectual narcissist, or emphasis on the body, and that would be the somatic narcissist.
There's paradoxical thinking, Bateson's double bind, incompleteness.
There's cold empathy, reflexive and cognitive, but not affective and emotional.
There are attachment disorders or injuries, addictions, fantasy defenses, idealization, devaluation, discard, replacement and hoovering cycles, intermittent reinforcement, approach avoidance, repetition compulsion, decompensation acting out, and finally, most people react to patients with Cluster B personality disorder with extreme discomfort.
When people come across narcissists or psychopaths or even borderlines, they feel unpleasant and uncomfortable. They feel that something is wrong, something is awry, something is off-key.
This is known as the uncanny valley reaction, first described by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970.
I then segue to the issue of trauma and dissociation in the seminar.
I define abuse and trauma, adverse childhood experiences.
Abuse and trauma don't have to be physical or sexual or verbal, smothering the child, tampering the child, idolizing, pedestalizing, instrumentalizing, parenting the child, all these forms of abuse because they deny the child the possibility to separate and create boundaries. They prevent the formation and emergence of a constellated integrated self and they isolate the child from peer interactions and from reality, kind of overprotectiveness.
This of course stands the growth of the child. There's no personal development and there's no separation individuation.
I describe personality disorders, therefore, as post-traumatic conditions with dissociated self-state. It's a kind of schizotopy or neoteny.
I mentioned Bromberg, Philip Bromberg's work, Jung's complexes, subpersonalities, internal family system, transactional analysis, ego state therapy, dynamics, self-regulatory processing model, etc.
Dissociation was initially described, originally described as a defense mechanism by the likes of Anna Freud and others. Today we think of it more as an integrative synthetic deficit.
It yields psychoform and somatoform symptoms. Integration synthesis depend on personification and presentification.
In other words, the ability to experience oneself as a continuous unitary entity, an eye, and the ability to ground oneself in one's reality, especially in the present.
Depersonalization, therefore, is a failure at personification. The semantic memory present, but not episodic memory.
Derealization is a failure at presentification, and amnesia is a failure of both.
Amnesia, depersonalization, and de-realization are all known as dissociative disorders.
Trauma reduces integrative capacity in premorbid personalities with low integrative capacity, trauma may lead to dissociation.
Charles Samuel Myers model of structural dissociation is used in my work.
I described the various action systems. Action system one is linked to apparently normal parts, ANP. Action system two is linked to emotional parts of the personality.
Myers originally called them personalities. Today we call them parts.
The emotional parts contain vivid trauma recall, vividness or flashbacks, and vehement negative emotionality and affectivity, fear, horror, helplessness, anger, guilt, shame, or being listless, non-responsive and submissive, or dissociative states, or being derealized and depersonalized.
All these are associated with EP, the emotional parts.
They are linked to body dysmorphia and a separate sense of self.
The ANP, the apparently normal parts, repress traumatic memories and avoid triggers via amnesia, sensory anesthesia, restricted emotions, numbness and depersonalization.
There is what is known as reduced affect display.
Narcissists, borderlines, paranoids, all of these have both an empty schizoid core and phases of schizoid behavior. These phases are reactive to deficient narcissistic supply and collapse, in the case of narcissism, abandonment and engulfment, in the case of the borderline, an overwhelming paranoid ideation in case of paranoid personality disorder.
Here, we should mention confabulation. Confabulation is the falsification of memory in which gaps in recall, dissociative gaps, are filled by fabrications that the individual accepts as fact. It is not typically considered to be a conscious attempt to deceive other people. Confabulation occurs most frequently in Korsakoff syndrome, in psychosis, and so on, and to a lesser extent in other conditions associated with neurologically based amnesia, for example, Alzheimer's disease.
In forensic contexts, eyewitnesses may resort to confabulation if they feel pressured to recall more information than they can remember.
We are beginning to see a picture, an emerging picture, of vast emptiness, which is the outcome of extreme and repeated dissociation, compensatory mechanism for this dissociation, one of which is confabulation.
And so the first time the idea or the simile of Black Hole was suggested was by Frances Tustin in 1972. She said that autistic children have a black hole.
Today, we don't think this way. We know that autism spectrum disorders are all neurodevelopmentally determined.
We are all born with an empty schizoid core to some extent and we compensate by introjecting initially mother. This is symbiosis. This is primary narcissism.
The borderlines introjection failure and consequent introject inconstancy is what gives rise to the borderline sense of emptiness as described by the likes of Otto Kernberg.
The borderline compensates by over-reliance on external objects. She or he has anaclytic personality.
Narcissism, on the other hand, is compensatory and infantile. There's object in constancy, not introject in constancy.
Narcissus is very good at introjection. There is ceaseless introjection, actually, and incorporation of internal objects.
And this constant activity masks the emptiness, compensates for it.
And therefore, the narcissist has an interjective personality, not an anaclytic one.
It's a bit like supernova.
The empty schizoid core is the seat of persistent pathologies and addictions, which substitute for and are misidentified as a core identity.
The hallow personality, the periphery of void, remnant of a supernova, comprises what in healthy people constitutes identity or personality, beliefs, values, traits, cognitions, emotions.
But because all this is founded on dissociation, there is no identity stability. There's identity diffusion, identity disturbance. One could say identity inconstancy.
The hollow personality elicits external regulation and generates a hive mind, an attempt to become. It attempts to become.
Let's talk a bit about the formation of the empty schizoid core.
There's a critical period hypothesis during this critical period the infant seeks a secure base a sensitive responsive parental figure which meets the needs of the child.
The child refers to her to reduce anxiety and upset. I say here because initially it's the mother's role. The child becomes through the mother's gaze.
And of course, this creates a trauma of schism. There's the emergence of the world necessitates also the breakdown of the world. The unitary perception of the world disintegrates when the child understands that mother is separate, mother is external, and so is the universe, so is reality.
The child initially reacts by rejecting the traumatizing maternal gaze, and by doing so he realizes the mother's externality in separateness. This very act of rejecting the mother's externality and separateness brings it on.
Lacan's perception of self-objectification and ambivalent self alienation comes to mind. Lacan's perception.
Lacan suggested that the unconscious, the seat of repressed traumas, is a compendium of other people's gazes.
And so the mother's gaze is the cause of the formation of the unconscious. It's nucleus.
And it is this primal trauma of being seen that gives rise to the unconscious. The unconscious emerges in order to resolve the existential dissonance between the survival need to be seen and the repressed trauma of being seen, the horror, the terror of being seen.
Kohut suggested what he called narcissistic transferences: narcissistic mirroring, idealizing, and twinship. They fit well into my model.
The child objectifies and instrumentalizes mother as its first mirror.
Primary narcissism involves mother, a mother which actively reflects the child to itself, idealizes the child, aggrandizes the child, and creates a kind of hall of mirrors effect, which I'll discuss a bit later.
So the aggrandized child takes the world and affects it. The mother is a secure base with secure attachment. This is what Erickson calls the basic trust.
The mother's gaze engenders mentalizing, phantasy. And the mother's gaze also creates the first prototypical object relations, which is founded on separateness of external objects.
Andre Green, psychoanalyst, came up with the dead mother. Guntrip called her the rejecting frustrating mother.
The dead mother is a mother who is absent for some reason. She's maybe depressing, selfish, insecure, absent, physically. Be that as it may, she does not provide the necessary transference and mirroring functions.
And this dead mother disrupts the transition from symbiotic phase to separation individuation.
It's a modeling failure if we want to use another concept from social learning theory or social cognitive theory.
Such a child exposed to a dead mother is incapable of mentalizing, remains stuck in solipsistic narcissism.
The hall of mirror effect creates grandiose cathexis, regressive, infantile, re-traumatization, and nothing else.
To a child like that who grows up and grows up physically and becomes an adult, the partner, an intimate partner, a friend, an external object is dead, frustrating, withholding. It's a betraying mother who mirrors herself and the world rather than the narcissistic adult.
And so this undermines the shared fantasy and converts the internal object that represents the intimate partner in the narcissist's mind into a persecutory object.
Hegel had this dialectic of negation and then negation of the negation.
This child, negated child, negated, a child.
By negation of the negation, there's child, negated child, negated, negated child. By negating the negation, the child becomes.
The dead mother disrupts this Hegelian dialectic. There's no negation of the negation. The disruption in ego formation or self-formation.
As this kind of person, the kind of child, evolves, grows up to become an adult, there's no boundaries, there's no perception of internal and external. There are no ego functions, reality testing, self-regulation of impulses, object relations, non-primitive defenses, synthetic integrity functions, all of them are missing.
The infant is unable to transition from pre-verbal non-conceptual mental content, Bowlby's unthought known or the unconscious, to the conceptual linguistic phase. There's a linguistic disruption as well.
The child fails to recognize the externality and separateness of objects, fails to generate theories of mind, fails to mentalize, and also fails to create theories about relationships, Bowlby's internal working models, and about reality.
This kind of child is stuck in apprehensive knowing, non-verbal knowing, versus comprehensive knowing, concepts borrowed from systems therapy.
The non-emergence of a continuous and cohesive core identity generates a non-identity problem in the dissociative, non-conceptual, non-individual.
It is an inability to conceive and imagine future selves and to act to safeguard and enhance the welfare and well-being of these future selves.
There's an othering failure, an inability to perceive external objects as others.
Instead, this kind of child resorts, or later adult, results to introjection, snapshotting the external object, and converting it immediately into an internal object.
In all this vast landscape of dysfunctions, this wasteland of these functions, the role of shame and the role of prolonged grief is critical.
There's fragility, vulnerability, there's compensation, there's fantasy, paracosm, external regulation, and cognitive distortions such as grandiosity.
Initially, the child who is at the mercy of a dead mother can adopt one of two hermeneutic principles, one or two organizing principles that make sense of the world.
The child can say I'mall bad, or the child can say mother is all good and I'm all bad.
It's a splitting defense, Fairburn called it the moral defense.
It's a kind of internalized bad object, a primitive superego.
The good breast, the mother is all good, the child is all bad.
And the other option is the splitting of mother, making mother all bad, the bad breast.
There's an internalized, idealized object, and no ego or superego.
These are the two solutions.
Aggression towards frustrating rejecting mother is displaced onto mother's substitutes in the future.
There's a repetition compulsion in future relationships.
Everyone becomes a maternal substitute, a maternal figure, and there are attempts to re-enact early childhood dynamics and to accomplish closure, separation, individuation vicariously within a shared fantasy.
This involves regression and infantilization of both participants in the shared fantasy, the concept of dual mothership.
And now we can transition to phenomenology.
I mentioned that in all Cluster B personality disorders, there are overt states and covert states, and they're mediated via collapse, via decompensation, and via mortification.
Libby has studied mortification and suggested that there are two solutions to it, internal and external.
They roughly correspond to overt and covert states.
All Cluster B personality disorder rely heavily on primitive infantile defense mechanisms, splitting, projection, projective identification and rationalization.
They all involve externalizing solutions.
In the case of the narcissist, narcissistic rage.
Dollard's frustration aggression hypothesis, 1939, suggests that frustration is automatically converted into aggression, and the narcissist is no exception.
Only the aggression in this case is extreme and diffuse.
Narcissistic rage could be either explosive or pernicious and passive aggressive.
Explosive, the narcissist flares up, attacks everyone in his immediate vicinity, causes damage to objects and people, and is verbally and psychologically abusive.
Pernicious, passive-aggressive, narcissistic rage involves sulking, giving the silent treatment, and plotting how to punish the transgressor and put him or her in their proper place.
Narcissists are vindictive, and some of them become stalkers. They harass, they haunt the objects of their frustration. They sabotage and damage the work and possessions of people who they regard to have been the sources of their mounting wrath.
These are the externalizing solutions, but they are also internalizing solutions.
One of them is autoerotism.
Autoerotism means that the dysfunctional individual perceives himself or herself as a sexual object exclusively.
In other words, there's no other sexual object.
Schizoid states of self-supply are also forms of internalized solutions.
Now self-supply involves multiple techniques, future orientation, exclusive privilege or superior reference, self-referential transcendence, and so on and so forth.
And I refer you to the videos I've made on self-supply, where I go deeply into this highly common mechanism in Cluster B personality disorders.
What about the fantasy defense, the paracosm, the shared fantasy?
Bella Grunberger came up with the idea of narcissistic elation, the oceanic feeling of symbiotic merger with the mother.
It's a regressive driving force behind the narcissistic elation is undermined by mother as a frustrating object and is the precursor of separation individuation in healthy adults.
This doesn't happen with children who later develop into adults with cluster B personality disorders.
When people have early childhoods with parents who are dysfunctional and traumatizing and abusive in a variety of ways, these people usually resort to fantasy.
Fantasy fulfills multiple functions. It's not only a defense.
Fantasy is counterfactual. It's often delusional and coercive. It's a narrative. It's a coercive. It's a narrative. It's a regulatory mechanism. It's a form of self-supply. It's a defense against fragility and vulnerability. It's a time machine because it allows the individual to regress to symbiosis in the womb.
It is a fake good object. It is a cognitive distortion, and fantasy is a pseudo-emotion.
Euphoria, not elation and dysphoria, not depletion, but the opposite.
Fantasies of narcissism, borderlines, admittedly, are different.
The borderlines fantasy is object-centered. In other words, it refers to a specific person.
The narcissist's fantasy is process-centered. It revolves around a unifying narrative which incorporates the narcissist's grandiosity and other elements.
The shared fantasy is seven stages.
Stage one. Co-idealization through not bombing.
The interjected partner is idealized and the narcissist is all good because he is the owner of an ideal all-good object.
Phase two, dual mothership in a shared fantasy, a recreation of early childhood by converting both partners into maternal figures, unconditionally accepting and loving each other.
The partner regresses and as an infant falls in love with her own idealized image via the narcissist's gaze. This is the whole of mirror effect.
Number three, the need to reenact the failed separation in the narcissistic childhood leads the narcissist to a mental discard.
This mental discard results in a narcissistic injury, as it implies that the narcissist is not omniscient, because his judgment of the erstwhile partner as ideal must have been wrong.
Number four, devaluation of the external object in order to restore the narcissist's grandiosity, in order to make an ego-congruent sense of the discard of a hitherto idealized object.
Number five, devaluation of the partner's introject via the splitting defense.
The introject is now all bad. The narcissist is grandiosely, all good. The introject is now all bad. The narcissist is grandioselyall good. The introject is persecutory and enemy.
Number six, a real-life discard, the projection of the introject onto the partner in an attempt to integrate it with the external object.
This attempted projection integration fails owing to abandonment anxiety triggered by the partner's introject inconstancy and the refusal to own a split all-bad introject.
And so the devalued split all-bad introject remains as an internal object in the narcissist's mind and creates dissonance. This creates anxiety as well.
Owing to the internalization, introjection of a bad object, which represents a partner. It's terrifying to have a bad object in your mind, a persecutory, enemy object.
Number seven, the only way to reintegrate this internal object and reduce anxiety is by re-idealizing, re-idealizing an external object, the original external object, or a substitute, and the corresponding introject.
This is impossible to accomplish if the narcissist has been mortified. He then departs from his previous version and reinvents himself, which allows for self-idealization and self-supply and a grandiosity restored.
The false self, by the way, exists in both narcissism and borderline states. The false self is a primitive, savage, parental deity that demands and expects human sacrifice, starting with the narcissist's true self.
Narcissism is therefore a private missionary religion. The narcissist attempts to convert others into his or her creed and then sacrifice them to the insatiable, voracious, shared fantasy around the false self.
The false self is a parental figure. It is how a child views his or her parents, godlike, infallible, omnipotent and omniscient.
At the beginning of the shared fantasy, the narcissist converts you into maternal figure.
And this creates competition, dissonance between you and the false self.
The same thing happens in therapy. One of you has to go. There cannot be two god-like entities, perfect entities, parental entities. There's competition. And since the narcissist identifies himself or herself with a false self. There's no real consolidated self. To counter it, the narcissist sacrifices you.
This process is one of the main engines of the attempted reenactment of the failed early childhood separation individuation, which leads to devaluation and discard.
But having discarded you, the narcissist still remains stuck with your maternal introject, the persecutory object, and with his parental false self.
And this dissonance, therefore, is never resolved.
Let us discuss now 10 clinical features, presenting symptoms, and trait domains of Cluster B personality disorders.
I'm quoting from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 5 text revision published in 2022.
A general description of personality disorders.
The above enumerated impairments should be stable across time and consistent across situations, not better understood as normative for the individual's developmental stage or socio-cultural environment, are not solely due to the direct physiological effects of a substance, drug abuse or medication, or a general medical condition such a severe head trauma.
So let us delve into the characteristics and the typology of Cluster B personality disorders.
All of them have a lack of affective emotional empathy, impaired ability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of other people.
These Cluster B personality disorders are excessively attuned to the reactions of others. That's called empathy, but only if these reactions are perceived as relevant to the self.
Over or underestimation of one's own effects on others is very common.
Number two, fear of intimacy, insecure, usually dismissive avoidant attachment style. Relationships largely superficial exist to serve self-esteem regulation. Mutuality is constrained by little genuine interest in others' experiences and the predominance of a need for personal gain.
Number three, disturbed or diffuse identity.
Excessive reference to others for self-definition and self-esteem regulation. Narcissistic supply.
Exaggerated self-appraisal, inflated or deflated or vacillating between extremes. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion as you recall. Emotional regulation mirrors fluctuations in self-esteem.
Attention-seeking behaviors, that's number four, narcissistic supply or self-supply in my work.
Excessive attempts to attract and be the center of attention of other people.
Admiration seeking. Goal setting based on gaining approval from other people. Personal standards unreasonably high in order to see oneself as exceptional. Or too low based on a sense of entitlement, often unaware of one's own motivations.
Next is grandiosity, cognitive distortion and entitlement.
Feelings of entitlement, either overt or covert, self-centeredness, firmly holding to the belief that one is better than others condescension towards others. These are all DSM characteristics.
Now we revert to the trait domains in ICD in the Classification of Diseases, 11th edition.
The first trait domain is Anankastia.
Anankastia is perfectionism, perseverance, emotional and behavioral constraint, stubbornness, deliberativeness, orderliness and concern with following rules and meeting obligations.
Next is negative affectivity including fragility, negative emotions and a poor self-concept. Anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear and nervousness.
And finally, desociality, antisocial behaviors, traits of impulsivity, high negativeemotionality, low conscientiousness, and associated behaviors, including irresponsible and exploitative behavior, recklessness and deceitfulness.
And what is common to both diagnostic manuals is antagonism.
In psychopathy, it defines contumaciousness.
Antagonism. The low end of agreeableness.
References traits related to immorality, combativeness, grandiosity, callousness and distrustfulness.
It is a robust correlate of externalizing behaviors such as antisocial behavior, aggression, and substance use.
All cluster B personality disorders involve external regulation, affective dysregulation, impulsivity, reactance and impulsivity.
Impulsivity is a tendency to act on a whim displaying behavior characterized by little or no forethought, reflection or consideration of the consequences. Impulsive actions are typically poorly conceived, prematurely expressed, unduly risky or inappropriate to the situation that often result in undesirable consequences.
Reactance is a motivational state, characterized by distress, anxiety, resistance, the desire to restore freedom. It was first described in 1966 by Jack Brehm.
Finally, lability is a sudden, unpredictable, rapid change in mood or some other affect.
Only the last three traits mellow with age, and probably for biological reason.
The same mellowing is observed in psychopaths, in borderlines, and to some extent in narcissists.
So this was a seminar, the one day seminar in Zagreb. It's a condensation of the five-day seminar on cluster B personality disorders.
Again, I remind you, I'm open to come and give a seminar or a lecture at whatever length of your choice. I pay all my expenses. I don't charge you for the seminar or for the lecture. On your end, you need to finance the lecture hall and a professional cameraman. So feel free to reach out to me. And I'll be happy to discuss possibilities with you.