 Dear colleagues, thank you for the previous presentations. I was fascinated to learn about new treatments for trauma and stress and all the other topics, most of which are directly related to the pandemics. A study published two weeks ago had shown that one third, a whopping one third, 34% of the adult population in the United States now suffer diagnosable clinical depression, major depressive episode. And in two thirds of these cases, it's coupled with anxiety disorders. There's a tsunami coming our way, a tsunami of mental health issues. But my thesis in this presentation is that depression and anxiety are the tip of an iceberg and that there are much more fundamental psychodynamics are happening under the surface. And these are long-term irreparable, irretractable and irreversible. If I'm right, the very composition of human psychology and the attendant mental health phenomenon is going to change at least for a few years, if not for an entire generation. So my name is Sam Vakny. I'm a professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don in Russia and a professor of finance and a professor of psychology in the outreach program of CIAPS, Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies. Apologies for the self-promotion and let's get straight to the point. My presentation deals with a much neglected aspect of the pandemic and that is the issue of habituation and habit-forming during the pandemic and how it affects other dimensions and aspects of mental health. We all form memories, but we tend to form more resilient and long-term memories. Memories that resonate with us internally in schema. Memories that interact with cognitions, memories that affects our moods, regulate our emotions. So more important memories, more psychodynamically functional memories are formed in familiar settings. The brain tends to compartmentalize. It takes in new sites, new sounds, new smells, new people, new places, compares them to previous experiences and then catalogues them in a sort of taxonomic system. When the familiar environment is severely disrupted, as is the case in this pandemic, we have a problem with memory formation. Memories also go hand-in-hand with habits. Memories, our memory, is a daisy chain. It incorporates schema. Each memory goes with an attendant emotion, with a cognition and with values and beliefs about the world. Often values and beliefs that subtly alter our perception of reality, what the early psychoanalysts called psychological defense mechanisms. So the pandemic disrupted both. It disrupted our habits and it disrupted the settings within which we had been operating all our lives. It disrupted familiarity. I will come to it in a minute. When we are deprived of the familiar, when we no longer can go to the corner pub, to our favorite library, those of us who still read books, when we no longer can see the people we love and the people we have interacted with regularly for years, for months, for decades. When the familiar is disrupted to this extent, when we are deprived, when there is experiential deprivation, like in a deprivation tank, you know, when this happens, we compensate. And there are various ways to compensate. First of all, we compensate by dissociating. We numb ourselves. We anesthetize ourselves. We put ourselves into a comatose suspended animation state. It's like living inside a movie, like observing ourselves from the outside. And we will come to it a bit later. It's a form of dissociation, which is commonly known as depersonalization or derealization. And it's usually coupled with dissociative amnesia. So we tend to lose time. We tend to lose time. We tend to feel increasingly more unreal. And we tend to feel that we are losing our personality, our uniqueness, our boundaries are diffusing. And we kind of disappear into a cloud of molecules. Another typical response is freeze. We freeze. It's one of the four typical responses, fight, flight, freeze and form. So we freeze. Losing all familiar objects, all familiar places, and all familiar people, within a set of disorienting circumstances, such as the pandemic, faced with utter unmitigated uncertainty and an implacable invisible enemy. That's a combination that's enough to make one freeze. It's a threat. It's perceived as a ubiquitous threat, existential threat. It's not very different to the experience that people had when they had reached Auschwitz, the extermination camp. And so we freeze. We deny, we shut out reality. We shut out external reality, but we equally shut out our internal reality. We numb ourselves. We disappear. And then the last type of response, which comes a bit later, is we attempt to form new familiarity. We try to create new habits. We reorganize our physical space in ways which would remind us of things. We go through old records, old documents, old family photographs. We try to cling to the vestiges, the remainders, and relics of a past now gone in its entirety. And these are the three typical responses, dissociation, freezing, or habituation, new habit for me. But that presents a problem because new familiarity, the new familiarity, the new habits, the new spatial organization, harking back to the past via the mediation of objects such as old family photographs, old home videos. All this makes the world narrow. We call this process in clinical terms, constriction. It constricts the world. It makes it more narrow. And the reason it makes it more narrow is that when you form a new habit, you tend to latch on to a single object or two. You don't immediately take in everything. You tend to act more like a laser beam than like a light bulb. You focus on something. You are pinpointed. And so when we, in the process of habituation, the initial phase is actually shutting out the world, shutting out the majority of reality, focusing goal orientation, goal focusing on a single object, a single aim, a single goal, a single activity, a single person, a single place. And this constricts the world. If you take into account lockdown restrictions and the time it takes to construct new habits and the initial space and number of objects incorporated in it, all this is very limited. And all this raises a serious question with regards to the ability of people to habituate effectively. And so this is the first effect. We narrow down. Suddenly, we develop a tunnel vision. Suddenly, making coffee becomes our entire world. We are emotionally invested in these new habits and processes. However, tiny, minor, frivolous, tangential and fringe, they are. It's a process of catexis, emotional redirection of emotional, what Freud called and you called libido, the life force. So again, making coffee. I don't know, watching a movie at precisely four o'clock, your glass of wine at the end of the day. Now, all these things exist in normal day-to-day function. But they acquire disproportional importance when they are the only habits in the world. When actually you are denied access to familiar objects, familiar places and familiar people. And you have to develop new familiarity, which essentially mostly involves only you. It's a solipsistic, autistic activity. And so there is a drop in self-efficacy. The fewer the objects we interact with, the fewer the people we chat with, we sleep with, we talk to, the fewer the social interactions, the fewer the challenges of the unpredictable and unexpected and the less self-efficacious we are. Self-efficacy is a muscle. It's a use it or lose it. And so if you don't do new things, if you don't develop yourself, you don't challenge yourself, usually through the agency of other people. Other people are the agents of change. If you don't do any of this, your self-efficacy drops and you feel it. You feel that you are less self-efficacious. You feel that your goals are becoming smaller and smaller. You feel that you are, you feel this narrowing tunnel vision down thing. You feel that you are becoming microscopic rather than macroscopic. You in a way become your own object, manageable object. And so there's a drop in self-efficacy. And there's an increase in dissociation, which I mentioned before. Depersonalization, derealization, dissociative amnesia. And the combination of these two create a disjointedness, a discontinuity in existence. You feel discontinuous. You feel that, I don't know, from 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock was a different person than from 4 o'clock to 6 o'clock in the afternoon. You feel you are not your self, what you called the constellated self. You feel that there's no thread, there's no thin line connecting who you were in the morning to who you are in the evening to who you're going to be at night. And you're beginning to feel like an assemblage of people. You're beginning to feel like a hive person or swarm person. Very similar to swarm of bees or locusts or ants. You're insecticized in a way. And so you're trying to compensate for this. And one way to compensate for this is confabulation. Because disjointedness and discontinuity, personal discontinuity, we come to it in a minute, is a part of a larger clinical phenomenon known as hyperreflexivity. But because they make you feel that you are not one, they disrupt your unitary mindness, your epsity. So because they are like that, what people try to do, they try to bridge the lost time and the lost identity. People with borderline, patients with borderline personality disorder, describe this all the time. They say it wasn't me. I was on autopilot. I was observing myself from the outside. It felt unreal. And they don't maintain the same values from day to day. They don't maintain the same decisions, same opinions. They don't maintain sameness. And in technical terms, this is known as identity in clinical terms. This is known as identity disturbance or identity diffusion. It's actually a diagnostic criterion in the alternate model of borderline personality disorder in the fifth iteration of the diagnostic and statistical manual published in 2013. So identity disturbance and identity diffusion are reactions to external shocks, external shocks to the system. By the way, not only in individuals, in collectives as well. Look what's happening to the United States. So it's grappling with its identity now, racial identity, other identity, the questions of freedom, question of constitutionality. I mean, such external, massive external systemic shocks create identity disturbance and identity diffusion. And one of the main tools to cope with this is confabulation. Trying to bridge the breaks and the schism and the fractures and the fault lines of personality and the identity is often done by inventing narratives, concocting, conjuring up stories, storylines, scripts, movie scripts. Confabulations are not lies. Confabulations are speculations as to what could have been reasonably. What is plausible, what is probable. For example, if you suddenly missed half an hour, the last thing you remember was half an hour. And then you suddenly kind of woke up half an hour later. You're bound to ask yourself, what has happened in this half an hour? And so what you would tend to do normally is confabulate. You would say, well, I find myself in the kitchen half an hour later, probably I wanted to make coffee. This probably I wanted to make coffee is a confabulation, of course. It's speculation. You can't prove that you went to the kitchen to make coffee. Or maybe you went to the kitchen because you heard a noise. Or maybe you went to the kitchen because you were under a wasp. But you confabulate. People confabulate when they are faced with a fracturing fragmentation or in this case, I would say implosion of identity. Now, everything I'm describing, everything I've just described, these are crucial elements in psychotic disorder. I have been describing here the rudiments of psychosis. Psychosis is about confusion between internal and external objects. That's one aspect and one element. But psychosis mainly is about hyperreflexivity or hyperreflection depending which text you adopt. And hyperreflexivity and hyperreflection involve all these. Dissociation, disjointedness, discontinuity, confabulation, dropping self-efficacy and so on. So in a way, my thesis in this presentation is that the pandemic is pushing all of us to become more and more technically, clinically speaking, psychotic. Let's talk a bit more about discontinuity, hyperreflexivity and dissociation. They are not only at the core of psychotic disorder. They are also defining or marks dimensions, aspects and features of several personality disorders, mainly narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. Both narcissists and borderlines feel discontinuous. They don't feel that they have a single unitary life. They feel that they stumble from one episode and anecdote to another in a totally incomprehensible universe. They have an external locus of control. In the case of the borderline, the locus of control depends crucially on issues of rejection, humiliation, abandonment and so on. In the case of the narcissists, the external locus of control depends crucially on narcissistic supply, the regulation of fantastic grandiosity. But both of them feel discontinuous. And they are discontinuous, of course, precisely because they depend on external input on feedback from the outside, from other people in order to regulate their internal environment. For the borderline and the narcissists to feel continuous, they need to continuously interact with people, but not just with any person. They need to interact with someone who is willing to help them to regulate their internal environment. Again, in clinical jargon, clinical language, we would say that this kind of person is performing ego functions. So the narcissists in borderline outsource their ego functions from the outside. In the absence of an external environment, they cease to exist in the most profound sense of the word. They don't exist. They are not there. Their existence becomes an absence. When what they experience is their own absence, can you imagine how terrifying this is? And this is exactly why I suggest that narcissistic personality disorder and to a large extent borderline personality disorder is an attenuated form of dissociative identity disorder and that it borders on psychosis. Where I differ from Kernberg and others is that because borderline personality disorder is now widely perceived to be a failed attempt to create pathological narcissism or to leverage pathological narcissism because borderlines are failed narcissists. At the early development as children, they tried to become narcissists and they failed. So they remain borderline. They have their grandiosity, but they also have empathy. They also have emotions. They are very vulnerable. Consequently, they are dysregulated and labile as far as moods and emotions. The narcissist succeeded to create the firewall of grandiose narcissism, whether it's compensatory or not, egocintonic, doesn't matter. But he succeeded to create a mode, a fortress, a firewall, use any metaphor you want. He succeeded to isolate himself both from his external environment and from his internal environment. So he's not triggered like the borderline. The borderline is a failed narcissist. But if the borderline is a failed narcissist, then the borderline is further from psychosis, not nearer psychosis. It's the narcissist. The narcissist is the one who is close to psychosis. The distinction, difference between narcissism and psychosis is very fuzzy, very blurred because they share so many features. And I would like to focus in this presentation on one of these features, which is crucial in habit formation and habituation. And I will quote a length, expansively, from an article which summarizes well the issue of hyperreflexivity, hyperreflection. By the way, hyperreflection is a medical term. So I prefer hyperreflexivity. So American Journal of Psychotherapy, Volume 67, Number 3, 2013. The article is titled Psychotherapeutic Implications of Self-Disorders in Schizophrenia. It was written by Leonor Iyara Zaval, apologies if I mispronounced, and I'm quoting from the section about hyperreflexivity. He mentions that hyperreflexivity is often conflated and sometimes confused with self-consciousness, rumination, metacognition and even self-focused attention or mindfulness. But he begs to differ, and I fully agree with you. I'm quoting. Hyperreflexivity is a disorder of ipsaity or pre-reflective self-awareness. ipsaity, which derives from ipsa, Latin for self or its-elf. ipsaity refers to a crucial sense of self-saineness and of existing as a subject of experience that is normally implicit in each act of awareness. The central phenomenon of the Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders is a disturbance of the very mindedness or first-person perspective that characterizes any experience. What he is saying is that when you experience life, when you go through anything, day-to-day, when you do things, when people talk to you, when you make coffee, whatever you do, it's always you that is doing it. And somewhere in the back of your mind there is this sameness, this mindedness, this eyeness, this continuity and unitary core or carinel or experience that underlies, envelopes, glues together, comprises and is the backbone and spine of life itself or experiencing life. It's the experiential engine, the operating system, so to speak. These are my words, not his. Continuing with the article, SAS, Parnas and Zahavi in 2011 have recently made clear that hyper-reflexivity is not at its core an intellectual, volitional or reflective kind of self-consciousness. It's not something you control, it just happens to you. The authors explain that it occurs in an automatic fashion and has the effect of disrupting awareness and action by means of an automatic popping up or popping out of phenomenon processes that would normally remain in the background of awareness. All of us have experienced this. We suddenly kind of wake up. It's like we move to a meta, a level of meta-existence and we look at ourselves and say, I am doing this. My God, did I just say this? You know, you have this. Especially if you do something which is ego-dystonic or ego-discrepent or ego-incongruous, then you're kind of a shock. Back to the article. Reflectivity implies a stance towards oneself within an articulation of the subjective experience, similar to that which takes place in a psychotherapy context. In this way, the reflecting subject gets closer to his subjective experience. On the contrary, the person, just before we proceed with the article, what he's saying is making a distinction between hyperreflexivity and reflectivity. Reflectivity is controlled and it's an attempt to see yourself from the outside. It's an attempt to articulate, to put into words, usually, a subjective experience. It's a kind of scientific study of yourself. And this is, of course, the essence of psychotherapy. And now about hyperreflexivity. Continuing with the article. This is schizophrenia. Instead of articulating implicit processes, views his own subjective experience as something concrete, takes an external observational point of view, objectivizing the experience. Self-observation from the external point of view makes the individual a mere spectator of his experience, which then loses its first-person mode of representation that is from within, to quote, Pagnas. So it's a very important distinction. In reflectivity, we do stand, we do observe ourselves, but we observe ourselves. We experience this, even this process of observation as subjective. We don't create a break or a schism or a divide or a gap between the observer and the observed. We don't become Cartesian. We don't adhere to the cart. We don't break the world. But in schizophrenia, we do. People with schizophrenia do. They have hyperreflexivity. So they kind of stand outside, stand aside, and they observe themselves as though they were some kind of object. As though it was a scientific experiment. As though they were, I don't know, a particle or a planet or a star or some insect. And they study themselves dispassionately and, you know, with no emotions or investment of any kind. And they are the mere spectators and they talk about themselves in the third-body singular, usually. And I want to tell you that this is very common among narcissists. This is precisely how narcissists experience themselves. They experience themselves as objects, not as subjects. They are out hunting and gathering narcissistic supply to feed this external experiential entity, this construct known as the false self. And this is precisely why I often compare narcissism to religion. It's like the false self is some deity, some divinity that is outside the narcissist. And the narcissist is a servant and adherent, a worshipper. The narcissist has to make daily sacrifices to this god, to this idol, the false self starting with the most profound fundamental sacrifice, himself. The narcissist sacrifices his true self to the false self. This is how narcissism is born and created. And then he continues to sacrifice narcissistic supply and it's a demanding Old Testament deity, the false self. It's very sadistic. It's allied with the super ego, with inner critic. So the narcissist does not dare defy the false self. The false self also provides a narcissist with rewards and gratifications like experience of grandiosity, experience of being superior and so on. But it's crucial to see the similarities between schizophrenia, which is essentially a psychotic disorder and pathological narcissism which only serves to substantiate because the experience in both cases is identical. It's tends to reason that the psychodynamics and the constructs and the structures probably are the same. The line is very thin. Narcissists are most of the time I venture to claim psychotic. It is possible to argue that no reflectivity takes place in the initial stages of perplexity, says the author. The realization that something is going wrong. He says that initial stages, when the schizophrenia for example realizes something is going wrong, there is no reflectivity. There's a confusion about meanings as often occurs in the preliminary states of psychosis. The author says this self-objectification leads neither to self-regulation nor to self-understanding as reflectivity would certainly do. It leads to distress. It leads to anxious feelings of depersonalization until the psychotic breakdown occurs and this process of objectification finally results in pathological attributions or explications of the implicit. Fuchs, 2001. So I postulate and I couldn't find any equivalents in the literature, but so probably it's a new suggestion. I postulate that there is a continuum, there's a spectrum. The borderline try to become narcissists and failed. Narcissist is on the verge of psychosis but never crosses the boundary, never becomes fully psychotic. There's never a full psychotic breakdown but the narcissist always teeters on the verge. Indeed, any psychiatrist will tell you that people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder often experience psychotic breaks and psychotic micro-episodes and distress, including the stress of therapy. This is also common among borderlines, but the nature of the psychotic breakdown is very different. With a borderline the psychotic breakdown has subjective content, subjective views. The borderline experiences the psychosis not as ego-alien not as something external to her. She experiences the psychosis as a continuation of inexorable processes which preceded the psychosis. Not so with the narcissists. The narcissist in this sense has what is collectively called at the time schizoid personality. Schizophrenic personality is very much psychotic, classic psychotic. As a narcissist experiences the psychotic break is ego-alien. As something that came out of nowhere is going to vanish into nowhere into deep space. Has no reason and rhyme and is connected to nothing inside himself, to no psychodynamic process. Narciss experiences the psychotic break as though it's happening to someone else. In this sense I would say that the borderline psychotic break is closely allied to her dysregulated emotions. It's a kind of dysregulated emotional psychotic break or psychotic break induced by dysregulated emotions. While with the narcissists the psychotic break is much more cognitive and it's much more dissociative. Ironically one of the diagnostic criteria of borderline personality disorder is dissociation and I think it's a big miss a big lacuna, a big deficit in the diagnostic and statistical model that they fail to recognize. Dissociation is much more severe, much, much more severe with narcissists. It's an all pervasive, ubiquitous process, background process, foreground process and finally ultimately psychotic process. The article continues normally when one deliberately observes one's experience it appears as separated discrete content or episodes although it retains a sense of continuity as being mine. It is just this tacit sense of continuity of experience in Husserl's terminology implicit synthesis of inner time consciousness. This is what is lost in schizophrenia. Fuchs said it in 2010. Since this implicit synthesis is necessary to form meaningful patterns known in German as gestalten the patient's subjective experience will appear not only disintegrated or fragmented but ultimately meaningless as a whole. Ask any narcissists that will tell you that this is precisely precisely how the experience lies as a meaningless sequence meaningless sequence of disjointed moments that have nothing to do with each other. The world starts afresh every minute like Alzheimer. It's like dementia in a way and continuing to quote from the article therefore hyper reflection relates to a circuit of self observation that is not reflective but rather is a process of self observation, monitoring and pay attention to oneself in an automatic manner. The subject experience becomes a pervasive object of attention from an external perspective, losing its first person mode of presentation. The schizophrenia is alienated from his self. He is observing it like some kind of scientific experiment. There's no first person involvement because there's no first person. Same with the narcissist. Same with the narcissist, I cannot emphasize this enough. The narcissist has no ego no first person experience. There's no one there. Nobody is there. It's a whole of mirrors, kaleidoscope. There's an observer but this observer is detached, distinct, separated, alienated and has nothing to do with analysis. The article continues the self experience becomes explicit with an unfamiliar object like quality. Yes from this viewpoint hyper reflexivity could be better understood as a hyper objectification or self objectification. What in this context says the author? What in this context has been called disembodiment and hyper reflexivity in the two forms of conceptualization mentioned above? He says might together be defined as a characteristic process of reification which culminates in the psychotic episode of schizophrenia. Fuchs 2006, Hylviak and Fuchs 2010. He says, I'm sorry to interject all of that because the language is very complex and very clinical and all of you are professionals not all of you are involved precisely in these fields. So again please accept my apologies if I'm perceived as condescending. I'm not just trying to be helpful. So what the author says is that some scholars relate to all this thing as disembodiment and some scholars relate to all this thing as hyper reflexivity but in the two forms of conceptualization understand that there is a break between an objective observer and a subjective self and that in the case of schizophrenia there was no constellation of the self there was no unitary self inside. So the observation is ongoing and has more kind of features of a scientific study but the author suggests another way of looking is that maybe all this is reification and maybe this reification leads to a psychotic episode of schizophrenia. In other words maybe reification is a precursor to psychosis and then he explains, I'm continuing from the article the word reification which stems like many other things by the way from the German Verdinglichruck Verdinglichruck reification means making an idea abstract idea into a thing converting an abstract into a concrete separating something from the original context in which it occurs and here it refers to the conversion of an experience that is turned into a thing treating that which is implicit as something tangible as if it were a separate object when it is not the case of course. So this was the article which I strongly strongly recommend let's go back to our daily life, to the pandemic and the effects of the pandemic the topic of this presentation I suggest that this disorientation, this dislocation the reactions to this external massive ubiquitous all pervasive external shock the uncertainty the fear mortal fear the stress so enormous that it should lead to the triggering of extreme narcissistic defenses and then I suggest that should the narcissistic defenses be strong enough it would lead to a transient form of narcissism or what was called by Milman a quiet situation of narcissism and then I suggest that pathological narcissism is actually a form of psychosis a form of psychotic disorder so to cut the long story short I'm proposing that the pandemic pandemic's external or pervasive multi-dimensional multifaceted multifarious shock created a cascade which started with disorientation and is going to end in severe narcissistic psychosis founded on narcissistic defenses and of course the accompanying features the tip of the iceberg are depression and anxiety because the patient feels her own disintegration she feels the reduction in herself efficacy she experiences the constriction of her world the narrowing down she is vanishing the lockdown the pandemic made us all feel so helpless that we started to feel that we are vanishing of course depression and anxiety are erupting I suggest that the next wave will be self-destructive to self-destruct because how long can you survive feeling your own disappearance how long can you survive experiencing your own vanishing your own disintegration we have this we have this typical cascade of reactions in people with terminal cancer stage 4 and 5 cancer the Kubler-Ross cycle of 5 stages of grief coupled with severe depression anxiety and finally self-destructive tendencies many of these patients ask for euthanasia or just stop taking the medications or try to commit suicide if they can and all this is all this has to do with habits habit formation, habituation as I said I started my presentation let me see just the time I still have a few minutes on the side of my presentation these are the crucial pillars and foundations of memory and identity there was a famous experiment where students were asked to take a lemon lemon yellow, small, round and to get used to the lemon to caress the lemon to hug the lemon to talk to the lemon and to do other unmentionable things to the lemon three days later these students were able to single out their lemon from a pile of almost identical lemons the students seem to have bonded with the lemon is this the true meaning of love bonding and coupling do we simply get used to other human beings to pets, to objects think as that habit forming in humans is reflexive we change ourselves in our environment in maximum comfort and well-being it is the effort that goes into these adaptive processes that form the habit it's what we call sunk cost it's the investment informing the habit which actually cements the habit ossifies it, makes it a rigid reactive pattern the habit is intended to prevent us from constant experimenting which is wasteful it intends to shield us from risk-taking the greater our well-being the better we function the longer we survive habits can be thought of as obsessive-compulsive rituals intended to reduce and to fend off anxiety and to provide cognitive closure they also have a pronounced social function they foster bonding attachment, group interdependence actually when we get used to something or someone we get used to ourselves in the object of our habit we see a part of our history all the time all the effort that we put into this person into this place all the things that have happened to us in this pub and in this restaurant in this trip we are everywhere we are like a cloud, a diffuse cloud we subsume and consume and assimilate everything into us and we in turn get assimilated by others and so habits are us it is an encapsulated version of our acts, intentions, emotions, reactions sense up sensory input it is a mirror reflecting that part of us which formed the habit in the first place hence the feeling of comfort we really feel comfortable with our own selves through the agency of our habits and habitual objects and places and people because of this we tend to confuse habits with identity habits lead to identity form identity and gender identity it is not possible to have an identity without habits just observe any dementia patient will see that it is true no habits, no identity so yes, there is a close linkage between habits and identity but then all the same but people confuse them and this is the danger in this pandemic because we are taking away from people their habits and they confuse habits with identity so they are feeling that they feel that we are taking away from them their identity look at the reactions to the lockdown the protests people are protesting not that they can't go to the pub not that they can't travel on vacation or staycation people are protesting because they feel their identity had been taken away from them when we ask people who are you most people resort to communicating their habits ask anyone who are you they will tell you about their work about their loved ones about their pets, their affiliations, their friendships their hobbies, the place of residence the biography, accomplishments material possessions this is who they are they think and Sartre called this propensity to conflate and confuse what you have with who you are he called it bad faith in other words to their derivative or secondary identity rather than to their primary or autonomous identity the stable sense of one's kernel one's core of the self one's self-worth and surely all these externalia, paraphernalia they don't constitute identity but people emotionally react as though they do removing this object doesn't change who you are but you feel changed all the same removing these places removing familiar people from your life make you feel that you have you have lost you have lost track of who you are that's the disorientation that happens for example after divorce or after you had discovered that your spouse had cheated on you committed adultery the spouse suddenly becomes not familiar removing familiarity removes counter factually but intuitively removes identity habits make people comfortable and relaxed but they are not part of one's identity in the truest deepest sense still people feel that they are the question is is it really important if they are is it important if habits are identity or if habits are not identity whatever one will tell you that habits they feel that habits are identity I think it doesn't matter I think this nitpicking clinical nitpicking academic theoretical nitpicking identity habits it doesn't matter people feel that who they are is what they do what they do on a daily basis is who they are where they go regularly is who they are who they meet regularly is who they are their family is who they are take away these elements and they don't feel who they are they don't feel the same they don't have sameness they become hyper reflexive they have a psychotic reaction it's precisely the thesis of my presentation pandemic is going to do this to people it is this simple mechanism of deception that binds people together take for example the most basic allegedly basic ostensibly basic totally fallacious but still we think it exists motherhood is also a shame it's a total invention of the 18th and 19th century like childhood also an invention of the late 19th century these are social constructs that don't have any foundation biological or otherwise but motherhood a mother feels that her offspring are part of her identity because she is so used to her children that her well-being depends on the children's existence on the children's availability on their health, on their happiness and so any threat to her children is perceived by the mother as a threat to her own self in other words she conflates and confuses her children with who she is with herself, with her identity she constellates to use Jungian to she constellates them into herself her reaction the mother's reaction is therefore very strong and enduring it can be recurrently elicited by threatening her children the truth of course is that her children are a part of the mother's identity but in a superficial manner removing the children will make her a different person no one is disputing this but it will make her a different person in the shallow phenomenological sense of the word her deep set true identity true nature, true character temperament whatever you want to call it this will not change if her children were to die tomorrow in a horrendous accident or in the pandemic children do die at times the mother goes on living essentially unchanged the quiddity is not touched but what is this quiddity what is this kernel of identity that I'm referring to what is this immutable core this immutable entity which is who we are what we are which ostensibly is not influenced by the death of a loved one for example or pandemic or inability to go out what can resist the breakdown of habits that die hard it is what we call our personality personality this illusive loosely interconnected interacting pattern of reactions to our changing environment it's like the brain neuroplastic it's difficult to define difficult to capture like the soul many believe that it does not exist that it is a fictitious convenient conventional idealization yet we know that we do have something a steering and we call it personality we feel it we experience it it sometimes encourages us to do things at other times our personality prevents us from doing it can be subtle, it can be rigid it can be benign, malignant, open, closed there are many possibilities its power and the power of the personality lies exactly in its looseness, fuzziness it is able to combine recombine and permute in hundreds of unforeseeable ways reactively usually it metamorphoses and the constancy of these changes is what gives us a sense of identity change gives us a sense of identity actually when the personality is rigid to the point of being unable to change in reaction to shifting circumstances is when we say that the personality is disordered rigidness inability to react to change is disorder one has a personality disorder when one's habits substitute for one's identity compulsive obsessive disorder rituals ceremonies which substitute for self or self functioning narcissism supply, supply, supply, no one there such a person with personality disorder identifies himself with his environment taking behavioural, emotional and cognitive cues exclusively from outside not from inside is inner world, so to speak, vacated there's nobody there his true self is an apparition a convention a theorized a figment of theory there's not really there psychodynamically has no effect, cannot be observed a person with personality disorder is incapable of loving incapable of living is incapable of loving because to love another person one must first love oneself and in the absence of a self that is impossible and in the long term such a person is incapable of living as life is a struggle towards multiple goals a striving a drive at something in other words life is change life is permutation and he who cannot change cannot live and this is where the pandemic is driving us to become more and more narcissistic our narcissistic defenses are triggered so badly dissociation and associative associated features that we may end up having a pandemic of psychotic disorders and psychotic like disorders characterised by narcissistic features such as grandiosity reality test depression anxiety, there are features of narcissism there are even features of psychopathy this is where we are going depression and anxiety are like fever and cough in covid 19 they are the symptoms they are not the disease the disease is yet to come thank you very much for listening and now I am open to questions