 Okay, I want to read to you a segment, an excerpt from the new edition, a book titled from dissociation and dissociative disorders past, present and future. The book was published in 2023, so it's very new. I want to read to you what they have to say. Depersonalization describes a disrupted integration of self perceptions with a sense of self, so that individuals experiencing depersonalization are in a subjective state of feeling estranged, detached or disconnected from their own being. The following are common descriptions of depersonalization experiences. They are actually quoting from an article by Sierra Bevios 23 years ago. Feeling strange as if not real or as if being cut off from the world. Feeling as if parts of one's own body do not belong to oneself. Having the feeling of being detached, a detached observer of oneself including the feeling of being outside of one's body or watching oneself from a distance. Perceiving the body as very light as if floating on air. Perceiving one's own voice as remote and unreal. Feeling detached from autobiographical memories as if not having been involved in them. Not feeling any affection towards family or close friends. Feeling as if not in charge of movements as if moving automatically or like a robot. Perceiving one's own image in the mirror as strange and unreal. Feeling the need to touch oneself to make sure that one's body is real and it does exist. Feeling disconnected from one's own thoughts and feelings. Depersonalization, say the authors, is frequently accompanied by derealization. A sense of unfamiliarity, alteration or detachment from one's own surroundings from other people or from objects. The following are common descriptions of derealization. Seeing the surrounding as flat or lifeless as if looking at a picture. Feeling detached from surroundings or perceiving them as unreal as if there is a veil between the person and the outside world. Impression that objects seem to look smaller or further away. Experience of familiar places looking unfamiliar as never seen before. Notably all the above experiences are as if experiences. Meaning that an individual with depersonalization, derealization, has intact reality testing. This point is crucial to the differentiation between dissociation and psychosis. You come across someone who is confused. They don't know where they are. They don't know who they are. They don't know why they are. They don't know that they are. And you say knowingly, because you're all self-styled experts of course. You say knowingly, he has or she has dementia. Alzheimer's had struck again. But you would be wrong actually in the vast majority of cases. Because what you would be facing is known as depersonalization, derealization disorder. Now it's a misnomer. It's actually not a disorder. It's a syndrome. It's a combination of cognitive, emotional processes, behaviors that together constitute an amalgam. Constellation, we call this a syndrome. It includes some traits as well, predispositions, reactivity, and so on and so forth. And this is known as a syndrome. Now the DSM, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, misnamed it or mislabeled it. A disorder. Depersonalization and derealization has been described in literature starting with psychoanalytic literature well over 120 years. And at first it was conceived as a defense. Defense against unbearable, intolerable reality. A defense against some Wagner's videos. And then as we evolved from monkey, from ape to human, we realized that there's a lot more to depersonalization and derealization than meets the eye. And today I'm going to discuss depersonalization and derealization in narcissistic personality disorder versus borderline personality disorder. With the untrained eye, it would seem that both borderlines and narcissists display dissociative symptoms such as amnesia, depersonalization and derealization. These are the three major dissociative disorders. Amnesia simply means to forget. Depersonalization and derealization are the topic of today's video. But it's very common. Even by practitioners, even scholars tend to confuse and conflate and confute the these syndromes in a variety of personality disorders and I'm here. I am here to the rescue. I am here to salvage the flailing professionals who can't get it right, let alone the self-styled experts who seem all to suffer from constant amnesia depersonalization and derealization on camera. And who the heck am I? I am the self-assigned messiah, rescuer and savior. I am the one and only Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignum and Sam Flan, narcissism, revisited a former visiting professor of psychology who is no longer visiting and currently and for a long time now on the faculty of CIAPS. I am here at the Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, Toronto, Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom and the nonetheless illustrious Lagos, Nigeria. Okay, Shvan Panim, Shoshanin, Shovavim and every other designation. Tune in to the next few minutes and try not to depersonalize, not to be realized during this video and try not to develop instant amnesia of what I'm about to tell you. Now, the first major difference between borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder is that the borderline maintains intact reality testing. She can always tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Now I say she, it can be a he, a he can be a she, give me a break. Gender pronouns are interchangeable in a world where everyone has become a man, everyone is masculine, regardless of genitalia. So, the BPD maintains intact reality testing, not so the narcissist. The narcissist's reality testing is impaired, it's shot. The narcissist is unable to tell the difference between fantasy, dream state, reality. He cannot. He believes his own confabulations, his own narratives, his own conjured, convoluted fiction. And so, that's one major difference between BPD and NPD and that's why I tend to think that narcissists are much closer to psychosis than borderlines are. In contrast to Kernberg's view, I think that narcissism is actually a much more severe mental illness than borderline personality disorder. These people, narcissists, they're no longer with us. They are utterly, utterly derealised. Okay, next thing, derealisation and depersonalisation in borderline personality disorder are reactions to stress or to substance abuse. In narcissism, these dissociative disorders, these dissociative defences or phenomena, they are a reaction to deficient narcissistic supply, to injury, narcissistic injury, and of course, to narcissistic modification. That's another major difference, because it means that amnesia, depersonalisation and derealisation are going to be much more common, much more frequent in borderline than in narcissism and that's exactly the case. That's why one of the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-4, one of the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder is indeed dissociation, especially amnesia but not only. So, next, what is depersonalisation and derealisation that I keep talking about? Isn't it time to define and to elucidate and enlighten you, lowly layman? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I will do it gratuitously and gratefully. Now, depersonalisation and derealisation is simply a situation where you cannot integrate your perceptions of the environment, your perceptions of the world, of reality with yourself. This is derealisation. It's because the self includes reality testing. One of the major functions of the ego is reality testing. The self is expansive. In this sense, every child goes to a psychotic state, hyperreflexivity. Hyperreflexivity means the child expands outwards. As the child explores the world, the child incorporates the world via representations known as internal objects. The world is here in our minds. That's in healthy people. So, when you can no longer integrate the world with your sense of self, that is derealisation. There's you and there's the world. It's not that there is a boundary between you and the world. That's healthy. It's that you can never cross this boundary. You can never go out, venture out into the world and bring it into you. You can never assimilate the world. You can never digest or incorporate information from the world within your internal working model, within the algorithms and mathematical models in your brain. It's as if you were catapulted away from reality. Now you are absolutely on your own, floating and drifting without any umbilical cord in outer deep space. So this is derealisation. Similarly, deep personalisation is when you fail to integrate your perception of yourself, your self-perception with your sense of self. It's as if you observe yourself from the outside. You come up with all kinds of data, information about yourself, but you don't feel that you belong there. You don't feel this information is about you. And this is known clinically as estrangement. So deep personalisation is a variant of estrangement. In borderline personality disorder, these disruptions in integration, these integrative deficits, they are situational. They are reactive. When the borderline is threatened with humiliation or rejection or abandonment, definitely when she goes through humiliation and rejection and abandonment, she tends to realise and depersonalise, she tends to dissociate, she also tends to develop amnesia. So in the borderline, this has to be triggered. It's a triggered reaction to stress. It's a stress response, a trauma response. In the narcissist, this is a constant state. It's not triggered by anything. It's background radiation, so to speak. This is the narcissist. The narcissist's core is his absence. The empty schizoid core, which in the borderline is distinct from the borderline. In the narcissist is the narcissist. So both the borderline and the narcissist have this emptiness inside, this black hole that is consuming not only outsiders, but it's cannibalising the borderline, cannibalising the narcissist. This black hole here in the narcissist's chest, in the borderline's chest, is consuming them from within and also consumes everyone out there. But in the narcissist's case, it's constant, not the emptiness, but the reactivity to the emptiness, the depersonalisation, the derealisation, the dissociation, it's constant. In the borderline's case, it's triggered. It's reactant. It's a reaction. This sense of borderline is much closer to the psychopath than to the narcissist. Okay, both the borderline and the narcissist are capable of watching themselves from a distance. As if in a movie, there's a feeling of existence one step removed beyond a glass, darkly, beyond a veil. So, watching yourself from a distance, from out there, from some vantage point that is far removed is common to both borderline and narcissist, and they have this feeling that they are somehow participating in some kind of theatre production, some kind of movie. As if they were actors, given a script that is not their own. They don't own these scripts. They hand it to them, somehow. So, this is common to both. But in the case of the borderline, this sometimes translates to out of body experiences and mystical experiences. And it never happens with the narcissist. So, the narcissist is perceived erroneously, by the way, as more rational, more grounded, more centered than the borderline. But that's of course not the case. The narcissist is unmeshed and embedded and entangled in a fantasy of his own making. The borderline similarly interacts with the fantasy state, but this fantasy state is more sublimated, more socially acceptable. So, she could be religious or she could be mystical. She could read the tarot, so be into astrology or whatever. She could experience out of body astral projections. She could be a medium, a spiritist medium or whatever. So, the borderline sublimates this. She transitions into socially acceptable practices, however deluded and delusional. The narcissist places his own fantasy over and above the delusional disorders and the fantasies of society. It's as if the narcissist says, if I have to engage in fantasy, I'll engage in my own fantasy. The borderline says, if I have to engage in fantasy, let me borrow the Bible or the Quran or I don't know, let me borrow something. Spiritual, become a spiritual medium or a tarot card reader or whatever. So, this is another difference between them. Now, both borderlines and narcissists report situations where they have felt that they were going through the motions, automatism, as if they were robots, as if they were on autopilot. Borderlines and narcissists report extreme conditions of stress or trauma or challenge in the case of the narcissist or rejection and abandonment in the case of the borderline or humiliation and public shaming in the case of narcissistic modification. Both report that they suddenly disengage and some autopilot takes over. It's as if they remove themselves from their own bodies. I am no longer inside my body. This body that is having promiscuous sex with strangers is not me. It's mine the same way a smartphone is mine, the same way a car is mine, the same way a laptop is mine. I own this body but it's not me inside this body. The same, the narcissist would describe automatism. Narcissists would describe the immediate wake of a major narcissistic injury or modification or after a long period of deficient narcissistic supply, inability to secure supply. The narcissists would describe a kind of depressive automatism as if he were just going through the dragging himself through the motions like a badly programmed robot until he crushes in bed at the end of the day. Many people mistake this, many people including diagnosticians and therapists and so on, mistake this for depression. It's not depression, it's a dissociative reaction to unbearable trauma, injury, pain, hurt, shame and other egotistonic emotions, even guilt. So the narcissist slices himself off, splits himself away from, dissociates himself from conditions that he finds threatening, intolerable, disintegrative, the compensatory. The borderline does the same but she does it as a trauma response. So she goes into autopilot because for example she needs to act out. That's her outlet, she needs to act out and she feels guilty, she feels ashamed of her own misbehavior and to not experience this she goes on autopilot, she dissociates. So both of them actually have the same motivation to go on autopilot, the intolerable shame and guilt involved in being themselves. The borderline because she is rejected and abandoned, the narcissist because he's exposed and humiliated. Both of them, when they enter dissociative state, when they depersonalize or they realize both the borderline and the narcissist feel as if they split in the middle, there's a part of them that is acting and another part that is observing. Suddenly there's an observer there, it's very reminiscent of Freud's censor. So the narcissist and the borderline become dichotomous, not unitary. It's as if they fragment, they're fractured under stress or trauma or rejection or abandonment in the case of the borderline, humiliation and shame in the case of the narcissist, they fracture, they break in the middle. It is this distinction between acting self and observing self, essentially a hint of dissociative identity disorder. This distinction is the borderline's way of coping with her bed object. By distancing herself from herself, she is no longer identifiable with a bed object, the bed object that is worthy of humiliation, abandonment and rejection, the bed object that is acting out, the bed object that is misbehaving, the bed object that is self-trashing, self-defeating, self-destructive. The borderline puts distance between herself and the bed object, that's the acting versus observing dissociative mechanism. Similarly, the narcissist creates this rift, this gulf, this abyss between acting and observing selves as a way to generate audience. It's a form of self-audience scene. Self-audience scene is a critical component of self-supply. When the narcissist can no longer generate supply in a reliable, regular manner, the narcissist breaks himself in two. He acts and then he observes his own actions, serving in the process as an admiring, adulating, confirming and affirming audience. So his self- audiences, he becomes his own audience, thereby supplying himself, providing himself with narcissistic supply. So the dissociative mechanisms of depersonalization, derealization in narcissism are integrated critical parts of self-supply and self-audience. This is precisely why in narcissism, in pathological narcissism, dissociative disorders are indistinguishable from the narcissistic libido, from narcissistic defenses. Narcissism is permanent dissociation. Narcissism is permanent impaired reality testing. Narcissism is constant fantasy, no reality. The narcissist dissociates, depersonalizes, derealizes always, always and only at the service of garnering and generating narcissistic supply, period. With the borderline, this split between the observing self and the acting self, this is a defensive split against the bad object. In narcissism, this split is actually a way to increase supply, to generate supply, to solve the injury, to cure the wound, to fend off modification. So in narcissism, dissociation is a positive adaptation, a survival strategy. In borderline, it is indeed a syndrome, indeed a kind of disorder. It's not good. Now, when in the throes of dissociative reactions, both the narcissist and the borderline describe a dream state, mental fog. This is a trauma response in the borderline. The borderline's mind is foggy, misty. She loses it. She loses the ability to see clearly through. It becomes a nightmarish dream-like state, surrealistic. That's as far as the borderline is concerned. But in the narcissist, the dream-like foggy state is the only state. The narcissist never emerges from the dream-like fog-like, fogged state. The narcissist is always there among the mists and the miasmas of his fantasy defense. The narcissist is trapped, trapped in fantasy land. There's no way back. The narcissist can never hark back or return to reality or revert to it. There's no way. He's doomed to wander the lands of fantasy till the day he dies. And therefore, the dream-like state, the dreamscape, the parkour zone, the surrealistic space that the borderline visits. Occasionally, intermittently, is the narcissist's permanent abode that is home. And when the narcissist invites you into shared fantasy, he's inviting you into the moors, you know, like in Sherlock Holmes. He's inviting you into the swamp that he inhabits, the quicksand of his absence. I wax poetic when I talk about narcissism. Now, both borderlines and narcissists report body dysmorphia. They misperceive their bodies. The somatic narcissist misperceives this body as irresistible and amazing. The cerebral narcissist misperceives this body the way incels do, as repulsive and disgusting and so on. The borderline misperceives the body. She usually thinks she's too fat or too something. Her body dysmorphia reflects her bed-object. And they are unable to fully identify with their image in a mirror. Lacan would be thrilled. They, when a narcissist sees himself in the mirror, there's a feeling that it's not really he. He regards the image in the mirror, a bit suspiciously. He poses. He moves to the left, moves to the right, tries to capture, to entrap the image in the mirror to prove that it's not him. It's very childlike, extremely childlike. It's like very early developmental stage. And of course, all this is a form of arrested development. We'll discuss this in the video tomorrow. But the borderline similarly has problems with her body. Both of them experience detachment from the mirror image, but also they are estranged, alienated from their own organs, body parts, the entire body. And that's especially true in the case of the cerebral narcissist. Both the borderline and the narcissist have a very conflicted relationship with their bodies, very. The borderline tends to, and the somatic narcissist, they tend to instrumentalize their bodies. The cerebral tends to regard the body as a burden, as an abomination to be rid of on the first opportunity. Now, both borderlines and narcissists report, and everything I'm describing, these are symptoms of depersonalization. Everything I've just described, all of these are symptoms of the syndrome. Similarly, both the borderline, the borderline reports sometimes that she feels that she's out of control of her speech. And also, does not fully control her locomotion. It's as if her body is a mind of its own, and her speech acts are not fully autonomous or agentic. It's as if she's possessed by some alien entity that's taken over, mind snatched her and body snatched her. Borderlines often describe themselves as a ventriloquist dummy. Now, in the case of the borderline, this estrangement from her speech and her locomotion, that's a problem. She doesn't like that. She would like to restore full control. But in the case of the narcissist, like everything else, the narcissist converts this definite deficiency. He converts it into an element of his grandiosity. So he would say, my speech is inspired by a higher power and channeling big minds. He would say, I am not in control of my locomotion because my body has a wisdom of its own. I'm an instinctual dancer. I'm an amazing, I don't know, soldier. So the narcissist would take this issue, problem, and convert it into a statement of grandiosity. He would cognitively distort, he would defend against the fact that he is not fully a master of his own illocution and locomotion. Now, we are proceeding with deep personalization. The next symptom is alien or intrusive thoughts. These are thoughts that keep recurring, cannot be controlled, or suppressed, or repressed, or eliminated, or reframed, or they just keep flooding the mind, the brain. This is the intrusive part. And they also feel alien as if they come from outside, from an outside source that is unfamiliar, unrecognizable and cannot be pinpointed. This alien element in the intrusive thoughts is very common in BPD, borderline. It occurs in narcissists, but only after injury or modification. As you can see, narcissists are in a constant state of dissociative fantasy, but deep personalization and derealization in the case of the narcissist erupt volcanically after injury or modification or any challenge or undermining of the cognitive distortion known as grandiose. Both borderlines and narcissists have problems with memory. They cannot retrieve memory well. They have memories that feel like alien. These memories don't belong to them. They haven't lived through this. Where are these memories coming from? They have a lot of memory gaps. The narcissist tends to confabulate, to bridge over these memory gaps with narratives that are plausible, plausible, likely. The borderline simply learns to live with her memory retrieval issues and with the constant knowing feeling that these memories are not hers somehow. That she is not in full possession of her life and therefore doesn't have a core identity, which is a problem in narcissism as well. I think dissociation explains the emptiness that the borderline and the narcissist report. The so-called empty schizoid core or Kernberg's emptiness, I think this reflects the fact that no one can form a continuous identity, a core identity, without contiguous continuous memories. If your memory is disjointed, is short, is fragmented, is all over the place, if you have huge gaps, you don't have a sense of who you are. You don't have continuous identity. That of course makes you feel very empty, as if you're non-existent, as if absence is your only presence. Now both narcissists and borderlines, believe it or not, report numbing, numbed emotions, repressed or subdued emotions, coupled with something known as reduced affectively. But in the borderline this is intermittent and defensive. Most of her life, the borderline is actually hyper-emotional. Her emotions are too strong, they overwhelm her, they drown her. She reacts with extreme emotionality to the slightest stimuli, and she is also usually highly sensitive. So in the borderline's case, emotional numbing is a rare reaction to extreme trauma. It is also defensive. It's reactive and defensive. In the narcissists, emotional numbing is all the time. Narcissists, exactly like psychopaths, they have no access to positive emotions, and the only emotions they do show are negative, envy, rage, fear, hatred. So the negative affectivity of the narcissist is not affected by emotional numbing. But his positive affect, his positive emotions, love for example, they are constantly numb. They are in a slip state, they are catatonic, they are disabled. The borderline is absolutely not like that. Now emotional numbing is part and parcel of depersonalization. So you are beginning to see that the borderline's personalization is nothing like the narcissist's personalization. And that the narcissist's personalization is much more severe than the borderline. Because the borderline has long periods of time where she is essentially non-dissociative. Dissociation is reactive, defensive, punctuated, intermittent. When the narcissist, it is his narcissism. Dissociation is the narcissist's dissociation. Both borderlines and narcissists report unfamiliarity or detachment from surroundings, from people, from objects, from time itself. This is known as derealization. But again, this happens in borderline only after rejection and abandonment. With the narcissist, this sense of derealization occurs all the time in the devaluation and discard phase of the shared fantasy. When the narcissist ineluctably, inexorably transitions to the devaluation and discard phase of the shared fantasy, he always derealizes and often depersonalizes. A narcissist dissociates as a way to separate from a maternal figure. Dissociation with a narcissist is instrumentalized. It's like saying, I'm going to forget about you. And I'm going to forget about you, my intimate partner, because I need to separate from you. And I need to separate from you because you are my enemy. I'm devaluing you. And I need to do all this to accomplish all this. I need to forget about you and I need to not be. If I don't exist, if I depersonalize, then it's okay to devalue and discard you. I'm not the one doing it. And if I derealize, if all this is not real, if all this is just a game or a story or a narrative. You know, so it's not a big deal. I can do it. It's a way to restore ego-syntony and to avoid emotions such as shame and guilt. So emotions are a very critical part in depersonalization and derealization. The narcissist is hyper-emotional, experiences frequently unreality and unfamiliarity. The borderline is hyper-emotional and experiences derealization, unreality and unfamiliarity, but reactively and defensively and therefore not all the time, defensively. Only in cases of abandonment and rejection.