 All set? Warning. At some points during this video, I'm gonna take my glasses off. So, if I don't take a haircut soon, I'm going to look like Clarence, the cross-eyed lion from the television series, Daktari. And now that you know which television series I used to consume as a child, you can calculate my triple digit age. But as alien reptiles go, or reptilians, I'm pretty youthful. My name is Sandvaknin, and I'm the author of Malignan self-love, Narcissism Revisited. And today we are going to discuss my favorite topic on earth, inflicting pain on others. Sadism. Sadistic Personality Disorder. The Narcissist as a Sadist. And why the Narcissist actually loves to be hated in busks, in the glory and cheer of hurting other people. Not always. They are qualifications. So, unfortunately, you will have to listen to this video to its very end, which I hope is going to be easy on you. Sadistic Personality Disorder made its last appearance. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 3, Edition 3, Text Revision. That was long before any of you were born, I hope. It was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 4, and from its text revision. And then it makes no appearance in the last fifth edition, 2013. Some scholars, notably Theodore Millan, regard the removal of Sadistic Personality Disorder as a mistake. And of course, all sadists are very pissed off about it. Millan and other scholars lobby for its reinstatements in future editions of the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, but I don't think they're going to be very successful, because there is this perception that if you pathologize sadism, you somehow remove responsibility, you somehow justify it. The sadist can say it's not my fault, I'm a sadist. Sadistic Personality Disorder is characterized by a pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression and demeaning behavior, which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy. Some sadists are utilitarian. They leverage their explosive violence to establish a position of unchallenged dominance within a relationship. Unlike psychopaths, though, sadists rarely use physical force in the commission of crimes. Rather, their aggressiveness is embedded in an interpersonal context and is expressed in social settings, such as the family or the workplace. It's a very fancy and long way of saying that a sadist would prefer to humiliate you in public, rather than, for example, to beat the shit out of you. The narcissistic need for an audience manifests itself in other circumstances. Sadists strive to humiliate people in front of witnesses, as I just said. This makes them feel omnipotent. So there's an element of narcissism in all sadists. And we're going to discuss it, expound upon it a bit later. Power plays a very important to sadists. They are likely to treat people under their control or entrusted to their care harshly. Subordinate, a child, a student, a prisoner, a patient or a spouse, they are all liable to suffer the consequences of the sadist's control, freakery and exacting disciplinary measures. My favorite psychologist of all time is a now-deceased woman, Karen. Here, I took off my glasses. I gave you a fair warning. Deceased psychologist, her name was Karen Hornei. Hornei was a psychoanalyst, but don't hold it against her. She was also a very common sensical woman who very often went against Freud, actually. In 1945, she suggested that there is a discontinuity between aggression and sadism. She said that sadism is an active though unconscious impulse to thwart others, to kill their joy, to disappoint their expectations. By anticipating the desires of their partner, sadists are able to produce disappointment by bringing about the opposite, by being sensitive to the weaknesses and faults of others, what I call cold empathy. The sadist is able to point them out, these weaknesses and vulnerabilities and mistakes and failures. So the sadist points them out, makes them visible and explicit, often publicly, for humiliating effects. I'm actually quoting Theodore Millen, paraphrasing Karen Hornei. Sadist's interest in enslaving and controlling others according to Hornei is often more captivating than their own quality of life. So for example, a sadist would prefer to sexually frustrate a woman who is eager to sleep with him, rather than actually sleep with her. He compromises his quality of life, he doesn't get laid, but he derives enormous pleasure and gratification from the fact that he had frustrated her, that he had humiliated her, that he had hurt her by rejecting her sexually. That's an extreme example, but very common. This is a foundational reason for sexual withholding, by the way. Sadists may isolate their partners from others in order to restrict their independence and support. Moreover, sadists play the emotions of others like an instrument. They make exploitation a passion. Sadists hate life according to Hornei and abuse others out of a grudging envy, feeling that their own life has been futile and meaningless. Cruelty, Hornei states, gives the sadist compensatory feelings of superiority and omnipotence where the narcissism comes in, strength and pride, where the psychopathy comes in, express more sharply in the feeling of vindictive triumph. This was Karen Hornei. Sadists like to inflict pain because they find suffering, both corporeal bodily suffering and psychological suffering, actually great fun, amusing. Sadists torture animals if they are psychopathic, and they torture people if they are run-of-the-mill sadists. Because to them, to the sadists, the sights and sound of a creature, of an entity, of a human being, writhing in agony, being hurt to the quick, these sights and sounds are hilarious. They are pleasurable, they are funny and funny. Sadists go to great lengths to hurt others. They lie, they deceive, they commit crimes, they even make personal sacrifices, merely so as to enjoy the cathartic moment of witnessing someone else's misery. And so, Sadists are masters of abuse by proxy and ambient abuse. They terrorize and intimidate even their nearest and dearest into doing their bidding. They create an aura, an atmosphere of unmitigated, yet diffuse, dread and consternation, ambient horror, ambient terror. And they achieve this by promulgating complex rules of the house that restrict the autonomy of their dependence. So their spouse, their children, their employees, their patients, their doctors, their clients, all of these have to conform to very rigid, obstruous and usually very strange, bizarre, outlandish rules. Sadists have the final word. They are the ultimate law and arbiters. Sadists must be obeyed. There was a famous British series of books, an attorney, and he had a wife, a bit sadistic, a faintly sadistic one, and he called her, she who must be obeyed. And no matter how arbitrary and senseless the rules are, no matter how crazy, irrational, counterfactual the rulings and decisions you must abide or else. Most sadists are fascinated by gore and violence. They are vicarious serial killers. They channel their homicidal urges in socially acceptable ways by, for example, studying and admiring historical figures such as Stalin and Hitler. They love guns, I don't know. They know everything about weapons. They're fascinated by wars, death, torture, martial arts, etc., etc. This is how they sublimate their sadism. They convert it into socially acceptable pursuits. There is something I call the monk sadist. In broad strokes, there are two types of sadists. The monster sadist and the monk sadist. We are all acquainted with the first type. That's the monster sadist. I'm going to put my eyeglasses back. I put my eyeglasses back. So we are all acquainted with the first type, the monster sadist. The habitué protagonist of horror films, as described above. Far less known and acknowledged is the monk sadist. The monk sadist tortures people by confronting them with a personal example of unparalleled and unsurpassed morality, righteousness, rectitude, virtue, asceticism. So he behaves like a monk, he behaves like a saint. And by behaving like a saint, he actually is criticizing, he's saintly conduct. He's intended solely to criticize others, by example, to inflict pain by allowing him to be raped and chastised from a position of high moral ground. The sadist, the monk sadist soapbox is his weapon, as he poses and imposes impossible demands and untenable standards of behavior, setting up his victims for failure and humiliation. And I always say, in an interpersonal relationship, if you are giving 100%, you are setting up your partner for failure because no one can give 100% consistently. If you demand unconditional love, if you give everything of yourself and when I say everything, I mean everything. 100%, not 99%. You are doing this because you are sadist. You want your partner to fail in reciprocating. Your partner can't meet this high standard. It's a human standard. And having thus secured their fall from grace, the fall from grace of other people, the monk sadist then proceeds to harp on their shortcomings, errors, pecadels, vulnerabilities. He labors other people's behavior, moral turpitude and decadence, corruption and misconduct. He dispenses punishment with relish and he mosques in the agony and writhing of his flock, charges or interlocutors. We know many judges who are like that. We know many schoolmasters, teachers, deans in universities, policemen. One of the most misunderstood types of sadist is the sexual sadist. There is an almighty confusion even among mental health practitioners and in diagnostic bibles such as the ICD-10, the International Classification of Disease Edition 10. So there's a enormous confusion between the DOM dominant in BDSM. It's called hyperdominantly sexual, hyperdominant sexuality. So the DOM and the sexual sadist. The DOM, also known as top, seeks to please his submissive bottom part. His aim is to please by subjecting her to pain, humiliation and degradation because that's what she likes. She enjoys, she is aroused, she has orgasms only when she is subjected to pain, physical pain or humiliation and degradation. Psychological. So he gets it to her because he wants to please her. He cares about her. His arousal crucially depends on the power that the DOM exercises over his sub and on the sub's overt excitation at the wielding of his dominance. It's not the same with the sadist. The sadist is turned on only by the evident suffering and repulsion of his counterparty during the sexual intercourse. So where the actions may look identical from the outside, the motivation is utterly disparate. The DOM wants to please and the sadist wants to hurt. The DOM is aroused by his partner's pleasure. The sadist is aroused by his partner's anguish. BDSM is consensual and often compassionate and considerate. Sadism in bed is exercised either without consent, so there's rape, or with coerced consent, which is extorted reluctantly and usually under explicit or implicit threat of abandonment. So the sadist says, if you don't do this, it's the loss you see of me. And you do this. The sadist dehumanizes his partner, reduces his partner to body parts, reduces her to her anatomy. And it's not the same like in pornography. Photography also reduces people, especially women, to their body parts, to their anatomy. But in pornography it's all about pleasure, it's clear. There is a niche of pornography where pain is a prerequisite for pleasure. But even there, pain is a prerequisite for pleasure. It's not that the pain itself is a pleasure. That's extremely rare, even in pornography. So the sadist dehumanizes his partner, reduces her to body parts in order to cause her pain. To him she's not a human being, she's not a woman, she's not even a sexual entity. He's out to spoil her, to dismantle her, to corrupt her, to break her apart. He treats his partner as children treat sometimes toys when they break them. His main desire is to witness her unbelieving horror at what is being done to her, at her psychological or physical mutilation and at the cheer and gratification on her tormentor's face as he proceeds with his gruesome business. Her nauseating disgust, her extreme discomfort, her palpable hurt, her debasement, her agony, her humiliation, these are the sadists of Rhodesiax. And so when you offer it to a sadist to have vanilla sex, it actually turns him off. And so BDSM, bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, masochism, it's a sexual preference, it's a lifestyle. And many monogamous couples are into BDSM. It requires a lot of trust in the partner. It requires communication skills to negotiate pitfalls and preferences and above all, a lot of compassion and empathy. And one common mistake is that the submissive or bottom partner is a masochist. It is utter nonsense. It's engendered by grossly inaccurate renditions of the scene by the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey and other such nonsense. BDSM is actually a very, very companionable and very intimate experience. In reality, many submissive are also dominant. This process called switching. They're dominant with other different circumstances. So this is not sadism in a classic sense, in the sense that craft ebbing defined it in the late 19th century. Masochism revolves around self-sabotage, self-destruction. This doesn't exist in BDSM. What about the narcissist? Is the narcissist a sadist? Let us refer to an authority. I can't see the camera, so I hope it's getting the book. This is my favorite introduction to personality disorders. It's called personality disorders in modern life. It was offered mainly by a grand idea of a profession, Theodore Millen together with Roger Davis. And so Millen, and by the way, by far, still by far, the best book about personality disorders. And so Millen explains, Millen describes the confluence between sadism and narcissism. Before I delve into it, I would like to give him, to give you his overview, because he is incomparable. He's even better than me. The last personality with which Millen, Theodore Millen says, the last personality with which the narcissist shares some resemblance is the sadistic. The passive exploitation of the narcissist is often mistaken for the active exploitation of the sadist. In the narcissist, however, exploitation is incidental, incidental to egocentricity. I am, therefore, thou shalt honor me with thy toil, says the narcissist. In contrast, the sadist dominates others self-consciously and deliberately. And he constructs scenarios that demean others in order to force their inferior status to consciousness. The narcissist wants your worship. The sadist wants to inflict impotence on others and to be hated thereby. We'll come to this issue of loving to be hated. Further says Millen, whereas the sadistic personality is characteristically destructive and cruel and enjoys watching others suffer, narcissists become rageful only when their sense of specialness has been slighted. You remember modification, narcissistic injury? Otherwise, says Millen, narcissists are content to go forth with benign insouciance, surveying their dominion and soaking up the tribute and comfort their legal majesty inspires among the common people. So this is a very important distinction between narcissists and sadists. And as usual, online, there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation, especially by numerous self-imputed expents whose acquaintance with narcissism started with their first YouTube video. So let's clarify a bit this picture. First, let me quote a narcissist onwards. The narcissist writes, Whenever I mean a nasty, which is often, someone writes with an air of knowing sympathy. What did you expect? This is a narcissist. And this nonsensical type of commentary just serves to show to what extent the field has been corrupted by a tsunami of trashy misinformation formulated by self-style narcissistic abuse experts flying by the seat of their badly frayed pants. I'm nasty and mean, not because I'm a narcissist, not because I'm a sadist. I enjoy it orgasmically when I make other people squirm and drive in extreme discomfort bordering on agony. I am brutally, unflinchingly honest and I give my interlocutors no hope and no quarter. Words are my favorite torture implements. I hone words religiously. This is also why I'm into nonviolent BDSM, sadomaso and group sex. I derive sexual gratification from mildly hurting my intimate partner, ritualistically and from humiliating and objectifying or watching her being violated by others. By and large, narcissists are not sadists. Though of course some narcissists are sadists and some sadists are narcissists. But as Milen says exactly, most narcissists are actually not sadists at all. They do not derive pleasure from the pain and discomforture that they cause others. They cause pain, they cause anguish. They hurt people all the time. But that's not their aim. It's a by-product. It's a side effect. They do not attempt to torture or hurt anyone for the sake of doing so. They're goal-oriented like psychopaths. They seek narcissistic supply. Whoever gets in the way and frustrates or obstructs them in this sempitonal quest gets trampled on. But they don't trample on people with glee. They don't gloat. There's no joy there or cheer. They destroy people with rage or more likely absent-mindedly and off-handedly as an afterthought. So pain and the infliction of pain are not very important in the narcissistic psychology. In the constellation that is his mind. And so that narcissism continues. I get a highlight crush from rejecting the sexual advances of women or from teasing them to the point of agonizing distraction. Shocking women this way so potent that they prefer it to actual sex. The gratification I get from frustrating women wounding them to the quick, disempowering them and hurtfully undermining their self-esteem is more than orgasmic. Richard Kraft von Ebbing was the first to suggest in his seminal tome, Psychopathia Sexualis. It was published in 1886. So he suggested in that book that sadism amounts to deviant sexuality. There is sadomasochism. There's a sexual practice, he said. But as I've explained earlier in the video, that's wrong. This narcissism continues. In actual sex I'm mostly a sadist though I avoid any physical injury to my female part. This forces her to perform humiliating and disgusting acts, thus objectifying her maximally. But sadism can also be a form of sublimated, socially acceptable, diverted and channeled psychosexuality. Devastating women by rejecting them is both sadistic and erotic and on the surface at least conforms to social behavioral conventions and moreings. The sadists can say, what do you want von Ebbing? Is there a right to reject? I don't have to be attracted to everyone. According to a recent mega-study titled A Billion Wicked Thoughts, a book I cannot recommend enough. According to this mega-study, women with one billion, one billion data points, women cannot resist men who find them irresistible and they cannot resist men who treat them with affection regardless of any other quality in the men or lack of quality. A man can be an ugly junkie loser dimwit and still bed a woman, still go to bed to sleep with her if he treats her as a princess and perseveres in passionate courtship. So this analysis continues. I make sure to deny women precisely these elements and then I observe the disintegration, decompensation and acting out with unmitigated sex-like pleasure. And this is very important that the sadist derives two types of pleasure from his sadism. Sex-like pleasure which was identified originally by Kraft Ebbing 150 years ago, but also narcissistic pleasure because it's a power trick. It's an ego trick. And this analysis continues. I do the same to men and I get the same hype out of it. But being heterosexual with men it is merely a power trick. My ability to deny men's most fervent wishes and humiliate them in the process it buttresses my grandiose omnipotence. It is true that all narcissists are formed by not good enough mother to invert Winnicott's term. It's a mother who is selfish, immature, rigidly immature, narcissistic and sometimes sadistic. So narcissists are the products of sadism, products of abuse. The male narcissists seeks to recreate this nefarious maternal presence in all his future relationships. He coerces his women to become these pernicious mother figures. But the narcissist doesn't seek unconditional love from the women in his life. He is not trying to resolve this through them or to fix their brokenness and ameliorate their pains. He is not intent on saving up to a point. When he starts the process he enters a shared fantasy as you remember. He enters a shared fantasy with a woman and he wants her as a fan as an admirer a source of narcissistic supply and then he wants her as a playmate someone to have adventures with someone to have fun with a very very infantile. And so at the beginning he wants to do to women what his mother did to him. He wants to abuse them sadistically. He wants to reject them by absenting himself and by withholding in every manner conceivable. And when he does have sex with his female father it is exceedingly humiliating and excruciatingly painful to her. Even when the sex is good it's painful because the narcissist uses her body to masturbate. I'm talking about the first two phases the first phase the shared fantasy. Aware of his maltreatment and of his transgressions the narcissist fully expects his women to hurt him and to abandon him usually by cheating on him with other men egregiously and conspicuously Incidentally this also cements his view that all women are innately sluttish and cruel. So there's a combination of psychodynamic motivations that is very powerful and hard to resist in the narcissist. But as you see there's no real sadism the pain and the hurt that the narcissist inflicts on the woman usually in the shared fantasy phase they are not for the sake of hurting her he doesn't derive pleasure from the pain from her anguish that's not the main thing he hurts her he tortures her humiliates her he abuses her I don't know to get back at his mother to test her or because he anticipates abandonment and is preemptively abandoned it's all very functional very functional and in some respects psychopathic there's no sadism there when he anticipates the ineluctable punitive backlash from his partner when he when he realizes that his abuse and misbehavior and torture and pain and they're going to push her away and she's going to abandon it it renders him anxious and he wants to avoid the unbearable agony in store so he withdraws he withdraws coldly he detaches emotionally from this one or he pushes his women to cheat so as to get it over with and let the other should draw but none of this has to do with sadism these are painful acts these are hurtful acts they cause a lot of anguish and agony but they're not sadistic narcissists rarely enjoy inflicting pain for no reason as sexual sadists do narcissists act sadistically when behaving sadistically it's narcissistic supply and only then or in order to punish sources of narcissistic supply who are perceived by the narcissists to be intentionally frustrating or withholding at any rate it's all around narcissistic supply so people ask me you mentioned three different types of victims of narcissists what things would cause a narcissist to victimize a significant other sadistically versus just discarding them when no longer useful in other words until the narcissists linger on to punish and torture a significant other once he had already devalued and before the discard and in which cases he would simply smoothly transition from devaluation to discard so the narcissist simply discards people when he becomes convinced that they can no longer provide him with narcissistic supply it's a simple truth narcissists discard people they hate them narcissists can't dispose of his intimate partner because he wants to hurt her not because he is demonic not because he is sadistic simply she is no longer useful she is not functioning anymore she doesn't provide him with the three essence supply, sex and the needs that supply and sex and services provide so this conviction subjective and emotionally charged the conviction that his partner is no longer useful he doesn't have to be grounded in reality suddenly because I don't know, he is bored or because there has been a disagreement or because he criticizes it there has been some disillusionment she did something that he considers to be miscontact of violation of rules or she did not do something that he had expected her to do or he has a mood disorder suddenly the narcissist wildly swings from idealization to devaluation to discard to replacement the narcissist then detaches immediately he needs all the energy he can master to obtain new sources of narcissistic supply and he would rather not spend these scarce resources over what he regards as human refuse the waste left after the extraction of narcissistic supply, the shell a narcissist would tend to display the sadistic aspect of his personality I in one of two cases actually case number one if the acts, the very acts of sadism generate narcissistic supply that he can consume in other words I inflict pain therefore I am superior therefore I am all powerful therefore it gives me supply so then he will inflict pain some narcissists can't get supply any other way they can't get laid they are not sufficiently intelligent to be cerebral so the only way they can obtain supply is by hurting other people by becoming bullies by becoming debt collectors, criminals, I don't know so here is a kind of enhancement of the antisocial and psychopathic aspects of narcissism and the second case where a narcissist would become a career sadist is that the victims of his sadism are still strongly or major sources of narcissistic supply but are perceived by him to be intentionally frustrating and withholding so here she is she is my source of supply but she won't give it to me and then sadistic acts are his way of punishing this wayward this obstructive this passive aggressive sources of supply the sources who own the supply and won't give it to him and he needs to punish him for not being docile, obedient admiring and adoring as he expects him to be in view of his, of course glamorous uniqueness, cosmic significance and special entitlement then he can become a sadist the narcissist is not a full-fledged sadist masochist or paranoiac Theodore Millen makes it very clear in his books and others the narcissist doesn't enjoy hurting his victims, he doesn't believe firmly that he is the focal point of persecution and the target of conspiracies like the paranoia but the narcissist does enjoy punishing himself when he provides him with a sense of relief exoneration, validation and this is his masochistic strength because of his lack of empathy and his rigid personality the narcissist often inflicts great physical or mental pain on meaningful others in his life and he enjoys the arriving and suffering and in this restricted sense he's a sadist but this happens very rarely this happens rarely as I said, he is much more likely to inflict pain in order to manipulate in order to obtain favorable outcomes Sadism in the case of the narcissist is a self-efficacious strategy it's a part of his agency and personal autonomy, he acts upon the world with a variety of tools in his arsenal, with a toolkit one tool is pain the sadist acts upon the world as an artist would sadist paints with pain he is a canvas which is other people and he paints these other people with agony with excruciating anguish and he enjoys his work without of his creations of his opera he delights in the works of art that he generates in the destruction that he wreaks upon other people to support his sense of uniqueness greatness and cosmic significance the narcissist is often hyper-vigilant if he falls from grace he attributes it to dark forces out to destroy him if his sense of entitlement is not satisfied and he is ignored by others he attributes this to the fear and inferiority that he provokes in other people, he says they are jealous, they are envious of me that's why they are ignoring so to some extent he is a paranoid you see, in narcissism you have narcissism is a smog as more it's everything but it's all instrumental whereas the paranoid is paranoid because that's the way he conceives of the world and then he sets rigid boundaries to protect himself the narcissist is paranoid reactively and as a way to obtain better favorable outcomes whereas the sadist uses pain as his form of creativity the narcissist uses pain instrumentally to punish to motivate, to manipulate the narcissist uses much an artist of pain knows as any sadist of course, when he does inflict pain, he does it creatively but the difference between them lies in their motivation the narcissist tortures and abuses as means to an end in order to punish, to reassert superiority, omnipotence, grandiosity buttress grandiosity the sadist inflicts pain for pure, usually sexually tinged pleasure both sadists and narcissists are adept at finding the chinks in people's armors vulnerabilities, weaknesses penetration and intrusion points they know how to get you they know how to push your bounds both are ruthless, venomous in the pursuit of their prey both have cold empathy both are unable to empathize with their victims they are self-centered both are rigid the narcissist abuses his victim mentally or physically often in all three ways narcissists infiltrates the victim's defenses shatters her self-confidence and self-esteem confuses and confounds her demeans and debases her or true, he invades her territory he abuses her confidence he exhausts her resources he hurts her loved ones he threatens her stability and security he isolates her from her and meshes her in his shared psychosis in his paranoid state of mind in a cult-like setting or in a shared fantasy he frightens her out of her wits he withholds love and sex from her he prevents satisfaction and causes frustration humiliates and insults her privately and in public he points out her shortcomings he criticizes her profusely and in a kind of scientific and objective manner it's for your own good I'm just trying to help you and this is a partial list there's no end to the ways that the narcissist acts sadistically but to act sadistically does not a sadist make very often the narcissist's sadistic acts are disguised as an enlightened interest in the welfare of his victim he plays the psychiatrist the psychopathology totally dreamt up again he acts the guru the avuncular or father figure the teacher, the only true friend the old and the experienced and all this all this sharing in order to weaken her defenses and to lay siege to her disintegrating nerves so subtle and poisonous is the narcissistic variant of sadism that it might well be regarded as the most dangerous war but still it's not sadism in any sense because it's not focused on the pain it's focused on manipulation in this sense the narcissist's sadism is psychopathic and he's very very close to the psychopathic sadist luckily the narcissist's attention span is short, his resources and energy limited in constant effort consuming and attention diverting pursuit the narcissist lets his victims go usually before the victim had suffered irreversible damage the victim is then free to rebuild her life albeit from ruins it's not an easy undertaking this but it's far better than the total obliteration which await the victims of a true sadist again to that narcissist and what he had written unquoting if I had to distill my quotidian existence in two pithy sentences I would say I love to be hated and I hate to be loved hate is the complement of fear and I lack being feared it imbues me with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence I mean I'm veritably inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces they know that I'm capable of anything godlike devoid of scruples capricious unfathomable asexual plague devastation I nurture my ill repute stalking it and fanning the flames it is an enduring asset and this is of course the description of a sadist it's a narcissist who is also a sadist as he had admitted in the beginning of the text it's not your narcissist it's not even a narcissist with other comorbidities it's a narcissist who also has sadism the English pediatrician, psychoanalyst Donald Winigold suggested that abused children need to hate and to be hated as a defense against the false hope of ever being loved the abyss child says I've never been loved I will never be loved I'm unlovable, there's no way anyone will ever love me so at least let me be hated if I cannot be loved let me be hated and let me hate in return such abused children not only act out antisocialy but also seek to provoke hatred in parents, caregivers and authority figures at least in this comfort zone of mutual antagonism there is no risk of being shattered by the disappointment and frustration that are the inluctable outcomes of hope of course he who loves to be hated and hates to be loved also loves to hate and hates to love in other words he's afraid of intimacy the narcissist's emotional complexity his ambivalence towards significant others is notorious hate love his love often comes laced with bouts of vitriolic or even violent diatribe abuse and aggression that's not the way to love, let's hate the narcissist cannot love without hate cannot hate without love and it's not really love actually it's a form of dependence there's a lot of mislabelling going on but the narcissist's hatred is atypical Rampel and Barris suggested in 2005 that hate is a stable experiential state that it is an emotion and that it involves a goal-driven motivation to diminish or utterly eradicate the well-being of the target of hate in cultural distinction the narcissist's hatred is not stable it is a transformation of resentment therefore an aggressive reaction to frustration and the narcissist does not care about his victims well-being one way or the other he just wishes to remove the found frustration altogether and expediently out of sight, out of mind no object consistency so by the likes of Rampel and Barris the narcissist's hatred doesn't qualify as hate at all it's more like scratching a wound an irritation that you want gone the narcissist resents his object dependence on his sources of narcissistic supply and by reading himself of their constant presence he seeks to ameliorate the irritation that they're causing of course even as the narcissist hatefully acts against his sources of supply he's terrified of losing them he just wants to placate and bribe these sources into staying and fulfilling their functions so there's a, we call this I mean Freud called this approach avoidance repetition compulsion approaching the the source of supply please be mine, please be here please function, please provide me with the 3S's sex supply services and then I'm dependent on you I hate you for being dependent on you I'm avoiding and withdrawing I'm absenting myself and punishing you hate and fear are also short generators of attention remember with the narcissist there's only narcissistic supply believe nothing else you read now or here or watch narcissists have to do are concerned with only with narcissistic supply the drug which narcissists consume and which consumes the narcissist in return so narcissists attack sadistically authority figures institutions, they're hosts they make sure that everyone knows about their eruptions I will continue to quote from these narcissists I purvey, but remember that's not an adulterated narcissists, that's a hybrid narcissists say this and he says I purvey only the truth and nothing but the truth but I tell it bluntly in an orgy of evocative Baroque English the blind rage that this induces in the targets of my vitriolic diatribes provokes in me a surge of satisfaction and inert tranquility not obtainable by any other means in other words he uses brutal honesty as a form of sadism he says I like to think about their pain of course but that is the lesser part of the equation it is my horrid future an inescapable punishment that carries the irresistible appeal it's like some strain of alien virus it infects my better judgement and I succumb in general he says my weapon is the truth and human propensity to avoid it intactless bridging of every etiquette I chastise and berate and snub and offer oprogram a self-proclaimed Jeremiah I hector and harang from my many self-made puppets I understand the prophets I understand to talk with mother the inquisitor I bask in the incomparable pleasure of being right I derive my grandiose superiority from the contrast between my righteousness and the feeble humanness of others but it is not that simple it never is with narcissists fostering public revolt and the inevitable ensuing social sanctions fulfill two other psycho-dynamic goals the first one I alluded to it is the burning desire I would say even need to be punished it's a masochistic streak there in the protest mind of a narcissist his punishment is equally his vindication by being permanently on trial like in Kafka's book the narcissist claims high moral ground and the position of the martyr he's a martyr discriminated against unjustly roughed outcast by his very towering genius or other outstanding politics to conform to the cultural stereotype of the tormented artist the narcissistic, the romantic stereotype the narcissistic provokes his own suffering he is thus validated he is proud of his own self-destruction his self-destruction becomes his modus vivendi and his work of art his grandiose fantasies acquire a modicum of substance if I were not so special they wouldn't have persecuted me in this sense of course paranoid ideation is narcissistic ideation because if you're worthy of persecution you're worthy end of story something in you provokes other people has power over other people the persecution of the narcissist is his uniqueness he must be different for better or worse the streak of paranoia embedded in the narcissists makes the outcome inevitable he is in constant conflict with lesser beings mortal beings, his spouse his shrink, his boss, his colleagues he is forced to stoop to their intellectual level narcissists feels like Galliva a giant strapped by lily-pushins his life is a constant struggle against the self-contented mediocrity of his surroundings not to say idiocy this is his fate which he accepts though never stoically it is a calling, a mission and a recurrence in his stormy life indeed the vast majority of prophets who established religions were raging raging grandiose narcissists some of them psychotic deeper still deeper still the narcissist has an image of himself as a worthless, bad and dysfunctional extension of others that's what his mother told him when he was a child so he is in constant need of narcissistic supply in order to counter this feeling of void and whetlessness and he feels humiliated by this need, by this dependence the contrast between his cosmic fantasies grandiose inflated view of himself and the reality of his dependence neediness and often failure this contrast I call it the grandiosity gap and it is an emotionally harrowing experience it is a constant reminder and background noise of devilish demeaning laughter it's like in hell you know where the demons are laughing the voices say you are fraught you are zero you deserve nothing if only they knew who you are how worthless you are and the narcissist attempts to silence his tormenting voices not by fighting them but actually by agreeing with them unconsciously and sometimes consciously the narcissist says to these voices I do agree with you I am bad I am worthless I am deserving of the most severe punishment for my rotten character my bad habits my addiction in the constant fraud that is my life so I will go out I will sick my doom I will trash myself now that I have complied will you leave me be will you let me be alone will you leave me alone and of course they never do these voices they are always there inner critics sadistic super egos so most narcissists enjoy an irrational brief burst of relief after having suffered emotionality after having sustained a narcissistic injury or a mortification I mentioned it in my previous videos how mortification brings a normal spain on the one hand but also a huge sense of liberation having sustained a loss the narcissist feels relieved it is a sense of freedom which comes with being unchecked having lost everything the narcissist often feels that he has found himself that he has been reborn that he has been charged with natal energy able to take on new challenges and to explore new territories and this elation is so addictive that the narcissist often seeks pain he wants to be humiliated punished scorned he wants to be subjected to contempt as long as they are public as long as they involve the attention of peers and superiors being punished this way accords with the tormenting inner voices of the narcissist which keep telling him that he is bad corrupt and worthy of penalty as you remember and so as I said in my previous videos these inexorably lead to and actually initiate modification and this is the masochistic streak of the narcissist but the narcissist also has a sadistic streak or be eaten unusual the narcissist inflicts pain and abuse on others we all agree he devalues sources of supply callously and offendedly abandons them discards people places, partnerships, friendships unhesitatingly some narcissist though by no means the majority actually enjoy abusing taunting, tormenting and freakishly controlling others gaslighting but the majority vast majority of narcissists they do all these things absurd-mindedly, automatically often without good reason collectively in his book the mask of sanity keeps being amazed he keeps saying why are they doing this there's no reason for this not even pleasure what is unusual about the narcissist's sadistic behaviors free meditated acts of tormenting others while enjoying their anguish reactions is that his sadistic measures are goal-oriented pure sadists have no goal in mind except the pursuit of pleasure pain is an art form remember the Malki Desa in his books he elevated pain to an art form literature good literature but he is a great writer the narcissist on the other hand haunts and hunts his victims for a reason he wants them to reflect his inner state he wants them to give him supply of sex or services and in this sense it's this goal orientation is highly psychopathic it is all part of the mechanism called projective identification where he forces and coerces people his sadism is part of projective identification he forces people he forces them to behave in a certain way and when the narcissist is angry unhappy, disappointed injured or hurt he feels unable to express his emotions sincerely and openly since to do so would be to admit his frailty, his weakness his neediness he deplores, the narcissist deplores his own humanity he hates the fact that he has emotions vulnerabilities, susceptibility gullibility, inadequacies failures he makes use of other people to express his pain and frustration he spent up anger and aggression this is called projection and then projective identification he achieves this by mentally torturing other people to the point of madness by driving them to violence by reducing them to scar tissue in search of an outlet, closure and sometimes revenge he forces people to lose their own character traits he diffuses their identity and instead they adopt his identity his character traits in other words his narcissism narcissism in this sense is like a virus he invades the other human takes over the other human and then uses the other human to replicate within that other human it's a pandemic in reaction to his constant and well targeted abuse his victims become abusive vengeful, ruthless like in an empathy, obsessed, aggressive exactly like him the victims mirror the narcissist faithfully and thus relieve the narcissist of the need to express himself directly they truly become his extensions having constructed this writhing whole of human mirrors the narcissist withdraws the gull had been achieved and he lets go as opposed to the sadist he is not in it indefinitely for the pleasure of it he abuses and traumatizes will eats and abandons, discards and ignores insults and provokes but only for the purpose of purging his inner demons by processing others he purifies himself cathartically he exorcises his demented false self this accomplished the narcissist acts almost with remorse and contrition an episode of extreme abuse is followed by an act of great care and by malicious apologies the narcissistic pendulum swings between the extremes of torturing others and empathically soothing the resulting wounds the incongruous behavior this incongruous behavior these sudden shifts between sadism and altruism abuse and love ignoring and caring, abandoning and clinging viciousness and remorse harsh and tender, withholding and providing these swings are perhaps the most difficult to comprehend and to accept the producing people around the narcissist emotional insecurity, intermittent reinforcement their sense of self-worth is eroded they experience fear, stress, anxiety they walk connections gradually emotional paralysis sets in and soothes and the victims come to occupy the same emotional wasteland inhabited by the narcissist they become his prisoners, his hostages and even when he is long out of their lives you can take the narcissist out of your life, but you can't take your life out of the narcissist and so this narcissist whose words I've been quoting ends up by saying I find it difficult to accept that I am redeemably evil that I statically, almost orgasmically enjoy hurting people and that I actively seek to inflict pain on others, I remind you it's a hybrid, narcissist, sadist only a tiny minority of narcissists are like these narcissists and it continues it runs so contrary to my long cultivated and tenderly nurtured self-image as a benefactor sensitive intellectual a harmless hermit in truth, my sadism meshes well and synergetically with two other behavior patterns my relentless pursuit of narcissistic supply and my self-destructive self-defeating reformer's acoustic streak the process he says the process of torturing humiliating and offending people provides proof of my omnipotence nourishes my grandiose fantasies buttresses my false self the victims distress and dismay constitute narcissistic supply of a purest great it also alienates them and turns them into hostile witnesses or even enemies and stalkers thus, through the agency of my helpless and helpless victims I bring upon my head recurrent torrents of wrath and punishment this animosity guarantees my unrevelling my failure outcomes which I avidly seek in order to placate my inner chastising and castigating voices which Freud called sadistic super ego similarly this narcissist continues I am fiercely a fiercely independent person and this is known in psychological drama as counter dependent but my independence is a pathological variant of personal autonomy I want to be free in order to frustrate myself I want to be free to frustrate myself by inflicting mental havoc on my human environment including and especially my nearest endears in this way securing and incurring their inevitable ire getting attached to or becoming dependent on someone in any way emotionally, financially, hierarchically politically, religiously or intellectually this means surrendering my ability to indulge my all consuming urges and my all consuming urges are to torment to feel like God to be ruined by the consequences of my own evil actions so this is a glimpse into the inner world and inner landscape of a sadistic narcissist and now I want to read to you notes from a therapy session with Jared pseudonym, Jared male 43 diagnosed with sadistic personality disorder he says Jared says a little discipline never hurt anybody he says it clearly amused beating a three year old and letting her freeze to near death in subzero temperatures is this his idea of discipline I ask well he says it's one way of getting the message across he laughs heartily and then composes himself listen doc I am as merciful and compassionate as they come believe you me but what I cannot stand is crybabies, weaklings and whining bitches besides it's fun to see little ice does wonders to their sirens why did Jared force the mother to dump her by now limp and profusely bleeding infant daughter outside the door if she were a proper caretaker none of this would have happened he says he blames her he says she was not a proper caretaker he says I just wanted to show her wretched family who is the only boss in the household I am getting on my nerves he says her mother and her sister they needed some re-education like in the chinese caps he chuckles the family member all claimed to be terrified of him and intimidated by his capricious and violent behavior I tell him that he says I sure hope so and smirks the three year old kid said that you pinched her repeatedly and that's why she cried I was just kidding with her but pinching hurts well it sure does he roars and slaps my shoulder across the nest I like you dog the slap hurt too I ask him could you please refrain from doing it in the future and he accepts my interdict jovially whatever turns you on mushroom the mother says the mother of the child says that about a year ago you beat the same child up and you caused her grave injuries because she wouldn't cry when you pinched her and kicked her around you kept yelling at the child cry you bitch cry then you mauled her because she wouldn't cry and now I don't understand now you spacked her and left her to die in the cold because she did cry well he says jarred dances she has to make up her mind and stick to it I respect that but she can't change her behaviour every time I pinch her that's why I discipline her I wanted to have a spine I wanted to have a spine it's a common sadist refrain as a psychologist it seems to me that he is the one who keeps changing the rules his face darken when I say this he leans forward and he whispers hoarsely listen doc I like you and all but don't cross the line here or you may get a taste of the same medicine yourself is this a threat I'm asking him he merely glories at me malevolently he asks I ask him don't you like me anymore then he says f off expletive deleted hello madanim pasosim look it up I'm going to phrase sadistic supply to describe a form of empowerment that caters to a highly specific type of grandiosity sadistic personality disorder has been removed from the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 4 to the great chagrin and resentment of the likes of Theodor Millen into a much lesser extent myself yes I think there is such a thing as sadistic personality disorder and there are sadists sadists are people who derive pleasure from the pain discomfort and humiliation of others and when sadism is coupled with narcissism for example in dark tetrad personalities this pain discomfort, humiliation shame of other people serves as narcissistic gratification it serves a narcissistic purpose but introducing the concept of sadistic supply created a bit of confusion exactly like narcissistic supply sadistic supply upholds a self-image grandiose inflated fantastic self-perception the sadistic the sadist perceives himself as godlike with power over others sometimes sadists are moralizing and so they say I'm not being a sadist I justly punish the wayward I am on a crusade I'm on a campaign many social activists and many people in victimhood movements are actually sadists they like to inflict pain and discomfort and humiliation and shame of their opponents under the guise of attaining the high moral ground promoting some social cause or writing some wrong we should distinguish however between sadistic supply and narcissistic supply and this is the topic of today's mini lecture my name is Sam Baknin I'm the author of Malignan self-lab narcissism revisited and I'm a former visiting professor of psychology so let's delve writing there are two forms of supply narcissistic and sadistic they both serve a mattress, a pole support, a firm and confirm, grandiosity grandiosity is a cognitive distortion and any attention that comes from the outside, from external sources regulates the sense of self-worth so that it conforms to the fantastic grandiose self-image of the narcissists so sadistic supply and narcissistic supply are two types of supply consumed by narcissists in order to regulate their internal environment and in this sense supply is a form of external regulation in any given set of circumstances in any given environment with any given set of people the narcissists feeds off either narcissistic supply or sadistic supply and this is a very important point never both never both if the narcissist is addicted to narcissistic supply he will rarely if ever resort to sadistic supply and if the narcissist is also a sadist and he feeds off sadistic supply is going to shun, is likely to shun narcissistic supply when you see a narcissist who is overt in your face grandiose or self-adgrandizing bragging boastful delusional initiator of shared fantasies and so on and so forth this is a narcissist who is addicted to narcissistic supply it's not it's not a sadistic narcissist and he does not feed off sadistic supply when the locus of grandiosity is narcissistic where the locus of grandiosity is histrionic sadistic supply is actually perceived as negative and results very often in narcissistic injury I'm going to explain this because it's very counter-intuitive imagine a narcissist who says I'm the best father ever I'm an amazing husband I'm a great boss I manage people well I make them loyal to me I make them love me these are of course grandiose statements and these statements require doses and influx of narcissistic supply in order to be sustained in the face of counter-veiling contradictory reality the grandiosity gap so this kind of narcissist who considers himself to be the best ever the best ever anything especially morally you know I'm the most honest person I know justice means everything to me I never commit crimes I am pro-social I am communal not anti-social this kind of narcissism they would never result to sadistic supply because sadistic supply would create dissonance in them unable to deny what the reactions of their victims unable to ignore the pushback and sometimes the reactive abuse emanating from their victims this would create in them dissonance and anxiety if I say if the word grandiose narcissists says I am the best husband ever and then he egregiously sadistically horribly abuses his wife she's likely to push back she's likely to resist argue, criticize attack him reactively so this would constitute a conflicting message internally the narcissists message is the narcissists self-message is I'm the best husband ever but all the information coming from the environment from his wife says otherwise and this creates internal dissonance which is a very uncomfortable situation and generates anxiety so grandiose narcissists would never be sadistic they would never torture humiliate, shame attack abuse, coerce they would never do this because they would be terrified of being exposed to signals and messages from their victims which would undermine their own grandiose self-perception and self-image in short with the grandiose overt narcissists sadistic supply expands the grandiosity gap and the grandiosity gap creates dissonance in a conflict an anxiety which the overt grandiose narcissists the classic narcissists wants to avoid these narcissists they are likely to be fake pretending unctuous they are likely to play act they are likely to have thespian skills they are likely to manage everything as a theater play removing within which they are the virtuous sanctimonious protagonist and they are likely to abstain from overt hurtful abuse because this would generate information this would generate reactions from their victims which would undermine the entire edifice of their grandiosity similarly histrionics histrionics are after attention these are people who are addicted to attention men and women histrionics would never engage in sadism as a sick sadistic supply because both the overt grandiose narcissists and the histrionic have an image of themselves a perception of themselves as essentially good people this is a compensatory perception internally they have a bad object internally they feel inferior they feel unworthy bad, stupid failures, losers etc and they compensate for this by generating creating a false self which is the exact opposite perfect perfectly good as well sadistic behavior and the ensuing sadistic supply however uplifting because sadistic supply to the sadist is uplifting but with the classic overt narcissists who is after narcissistic supply sadistic supply is precluded that is not to say of course that narcissists don't abuse they are highly abusive I was the first to say this in 1995 I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse but their abuse is not sadistic the narcissists abuse is instrumental it is intended to accomplish certain goals for example to separate from the partner to test the partner etc etc the narcissists abuse the overt grandiose narcissists abuse has nothing to do with inflicting pain or hurt on his victims it has everything to do with regulating the narcissists internal environment he uses abuse he mistreats his insignificant others everyone around him friends intimate partners you name it he mistreats people not because he wants them to be uncomfortable or humiliated or ashamed or disgraced that has nothing to do with it the narcissists misbehaves this way because he needs to obtain certain signals and messages from the environment which will allow him to keep his house in order internally to maintain the precarious balance of his chaotic personality in short the narcissists abuse however egregious is a regulatory function it's a form of external regulation they say this abuse is a form of gratification that is a giant difference between these two types and one should not conflate or confuse them as all or most self-styled experts do they attribute to the narcissists malevolence they mistake the narcissists for a sadist when actually is not not in the remotest of course there are some narcissists who are sadists and they are sadists who are narcissists but the vast majority of narcissists hurt people because this is the way for them to regulate themselves borderlines do the same in effect, we'll come to it in a minute and the vast majority of sadists or all sadists hurt people because it's bloody fun okay psychopaths are also also damaged people hurt people harm people they do it with tremeditation and intention the goal oriented some psychopaths are sadistic psychopaths who are also sadistic and sadists people with an out discarded diagnosis of sadistic personalities so these two types the sadistic psychopath and the sadist they seek only sadistic supply, they are not interested in narcissistic supply they actually want to fly under the radar they want to remain hidden these people derive sustenance for their own grandiosity from the very fact that they have the power to hurt other people that they are in the position to force other people to disintegrate to make them ashamed make them feel ashamed or humiliate them especially in public but this is not a narcissistic thing that's where the confusion online is enormous and you are being misled this is not a narcissistic thing this is a psychopathic a sadistic psychopathic thing or a sadistic thing narcissists generally are interested only in one thing and that is narcissistic supply they couldn't care less if when obtaining narcissistic supply while obtaining narcissistic supply they are hurting other people hurting other people is a byproduct it's a side effect with narcissists it's not a goal it's not an aim, it's not what the narcissists strives for the narcissists doesn't derive any gratification and it's not invested emotionally it's not affected in sadism in hurting people in damaging people in ruining people narcissists don't care about any of this because they don't care about people sadistic psychopaths and sadists regard people as raw material they play with people they were children they dismantled them they want to see the inner workings of people it's a pastime it's a hobby it's an avocation for the sadistic psychopath and the sadists the narcissists would have none of this if you see someone in pursuit of fame and glory and recognition that's a narcissism that's a narcissism very unlikely to engage in sadistic behaviors he is likely because he is a narcissist to hurt people but that's an afterthought it's done absentmindedly and offended and finally borderlines alternate between these two types of supply narcissistic and sadistic they are capable of both and they pursue both types of supply depending on the self state when the borderline is in a secondary psychopathic self state she is usually or he is usually very cruel to the point of sadism the borderline enjoys inflicting pain because she regards it as retribution redressing evil restoring justice that is how she mislabels her sadism remember previous video I explained to you that the borderline is goal oriented but she dresses up her goals with emotions she mislabels her goals she mistakes her goals for emotional states that is a form of resolving cognitive dissonance the borderline feels uncomfortable with what she is doing so by relabeling it or mislabeling it she restores her inner balance and her anxiety level is reduced the borderline is capable of great sadism any partner of borderline would tell you that many borderlines are vindictive and aggressive to the point of violence that is in the secondary psychopathic self state in their normal state in the classic borderline state borderlines seek supply which is not narcissistic but from a particular source usually an intimate partner so like narcissists borderlines are fantasy pro they are grandiose they seek narcissistic supply but unlike narcissists they are capable of switching to another self state where they could become exceedingly exceedingly sadistic and dangerous and the author of malignant self-love narcissism revisits most narcissists enjoy an irrational and brief burst of relief after having suffered emotionally after having endured a narcissistic injury or after having sustained a loss it's a strange reaction one doesn't usually react with relief or with elation but narcissists do it is a sense of freedom with being unshackled having lost everything the narcissist often feels that he has found himself that he has been reborn that he has been charged with natal energy able to take on new challenges and to explore new territories this elation is so addictive that the narcissist often seeks pain, humiliation, punishment scorn content as long as they are public and involve the attention of peers and superiors being punished accords with the tormenting inner voices of the narcissist which keep telling him that he is bad corrupt and worthy of penalty and this is the masochistic streak in the narcissist but the narcissist as we well know is also a saint or we eat a bit of an unusual saint the narcissist inflicts pain and abuse on others abuse sources of supply callously and offhandedly the abandonism, discards people places, partnerships and friendships unhesitatingly some narcissists though by no means the majority actually enjoy abusing tormenting and freakishly controlling others phenomenon known as gaslighting but most of the narcissists most of them do these things absentmindedly, offhandedly and often even without good reason what is unusual about the narcissists sadistic behaviors premeditated acts of tormenting others while enjoying their anguished reactions is that they are goal orientated pure sadists non-narcissists have no goal in mind except the pursuit of pleasure pain to them is an art form remember the Marquis de Sainte narcissist on the other hand haunts and hunts his victims for a reason he wants them to reflect his inner state it is all a part of a mechanism called projective identifications narcissists torture and torment in order to yield results once these results are secure the narcissist usually seizes not so the classic sadist when the narcissist is angry disappointed, injured or hurt he feels unable to express his emotions sincerely, directly and openly since to do so would be to admit his frailty his neediness and his weakness, which he would never do he deplores narcissists deplores his own humanity he hates the fact that he has emotions that he has vulnerabilities that he is susceptible, gullible he resents and rejects his own inadequacies and failures so what he does, he makes use of other people to express his pain and his frustration, his pent-up anger and his aggression he achieves this by mentally torturing other people to the point of madness by driving them to violence by reducing them to scar tissue in search of outlet closure sometimes revenge he forces people to lose his own character traits and adopt his own instead in reaction to his constant, well targeted abuse his victims become abusive, vengeful ruthless lacking in empathy, obsessed and aggressive they, in other words mirror the narcissist faithfully and thus relieve him of the need to express himself directly having constructed this writhing hall of human mirrors the narcissist withdraws the goal achieved, he lets go as opposed to the classical sadist the narcissist is not in it indefinitely for the pleasure of it he abuses and traumatizes humiliates and abandons, discards and ignores insults and provokes only for the purpose of purging his inner demons by possessing others the narcissist purifies himself cathartically and exercises his demented self yet, when this is accomplished, the narcissist acts almost with remorse an episode of extreme abuse is usually followed by an act of great care and by mellifluous apologies the narcissist pendulum swings between the extremes of torturing others and then empathically soothing the resulting pain this incongruous behavior these sudden shifts between sadism and altruism abuse and love ignoring and caring abandoning and clinging viciousness and remorse harsh and detender these are perhaps the most difficult to comprehend and to accept these swings producing people around the narcissist emotional insecurity an eroded sense of self-worth fear, stress and anxiety this is called talking on eggshells you never know when the next eruption will occur gradually emotional paralysis ensues and the narcissist victims come to occupy this same emotional wasteland inhabited by the narcissist himself they become his prisoners and hostages in more than one way and even when he is long out of their lives talking to the narcissist about all the violence and violence I think this is the reason for this in his life sadist and masochist and when and in which people often confuse masochism with self-destructiveness masochism is not self-destructiveness masochism is opposite of self-destructiveness masochism is self-love masochism causes you pleasure because you love yourself you're masochistic it's the way to get pleasure so masochism is a form of self-love narcissist doesn't love himself because first of all there's no self and he had been taught from early age that he is not lovable he doesn't deserve to be loved so he also doesn't love himself and therefore by definition the narcissist can never be a masochist masochists are people who seek pleasure via pain but they seek pleasure they want to have fun and the narcissist hates himself or at least doesn't love himself enough to seek pleasure in any way the narcissist sadism and masochism appear from the outside are actually instrumental and functional one of them is to control people, motivate them control them and so on it's nothing to do with classic sadism there's no joy from the pain the pain doesn't give pleasure it's just a way of asserting control establishing social order obtaining results and in sexual settings the sadism is part of the power play that the narcissist plays in every field of his life and it's therefore not sadism sadism must have a component of emotion the sadist loves to hurt people he loves to cause pain gives him pleasure to cause pain, that's not the case with narcissist narcissist doesn't derive pleasure from causing pain he derives pleasure with what he can make people do using pain pain is an instrument and he derives pleasure and makes people do with his money also he doesn't love money masochists don't love money they love what money can allow them to do to people and they don't love pain or enjoy pain or inflicting pain they love how they can use pain to motivate people it's about the narcissistic supply these are tools sadism is a tool money is a tool being feared is a tool these are all tools to obtain narcissistic supply it's not sagas any psychological definition and it's not a masochist but he's self-destructive not all narcissists vast majority are self-destructive and it appears from outside like masochism when the narcissists will seek masochism in sex or in discipline or when the narcissists will seek pain or hurt wherever it is it has nothing to do with masochism it has to do again with obtaining goals or fulfilling functions so discipline will remind him of love and intimacy if he's masochistic in a relationship with a woman it will fulfill other functions maybe the woman wants it goal-oriented or functional or instrumental it's never pleasure for the sake of pleasure there's no such thing with the narcissists by the way in anything not only sex so I think the correct terms for the narcissists are instrumental instrumental pain and self-destructiveness and they move between these when are they this self-destructive when they are collapsed when they cannot obtain narcissistic supply they want to self-destruct the main reason they want to self-destruct has to do something with punishment of course because it confirms that they are bad and unworthy and so on they deserve to be destroyed but I think on a much deeper level when the narcissists does not obtain supply he feels that he does not exist and self-destructiveness is exactly like self-mutilation like cutting it's a way to prove to himself that he is alive so if you do something really self-destructive and you end up in prison trust me you feel very alive in prison if you do something and you contract if you have unprotected sex from that moment you are very alive it's this threat this challenge this horror this destruction that wakes you up narcissists needs to wake up when he doesn't have supply he is gradually like the battery is running down he is gradually all the functions are like this and he is like like these dolls that run out of battery and he needs to charge a battery and a way to charge a battery is self-destructiveness if he failed he cannot get supply there is only other way left he self-destructiveness he self-destructs he feels sufficiently animated and he feels again alive ironically after self-destruction is when the narcissists is more productive I wrote 8 books in prison in 11 months I went to prison when I felt dead I needed prison to wake me up I was in prison I wrote 8 books I wrote my ligament self-love in prison among other books this was my period of my maximal productivity never before, never after and it's very common with narcissists for example I tell myself that the dominant narcissistic who takes care of his family or works in prison and he directs everything how can it be seen that someone who is a servant who talks to the boss talks to the boss talks to him and he still fights he takes care of the vices he stays in prison he doesn't have a solution he doesn't have a right he gets different jobs he is a master he is a slave he is a master he is a slave he is a slave he is a slave he is a slave The narcissist experiences a part of himself that he has no access to and that he denies and that he represses via someone else in a safe environment. Ultimately, it's safe by not existing. In these settings, the narcissist stops to exist. Someone else has the will, someone else dictates, someone else decides. The narcissist finally can rest. To be a narcissist is very energy depleting. It's very energy consuming. And you need to control everything, especially yourself, but also the world and everyone around you. Everything is a threat, everything is frightening. It's very tiring. At some point you want to rest. But to really rest, you need to have trust. And the narcissist is paranoid. He doesn't have trust. So he needs a second in command. He needs a co-pilot. He needs to say, listen, I have to have a shot. I have to sleep for 20 minutes. In these 20 minutes, would you mind to take control of the airplane? So he transfers the control. He transfers the wheel and he can now relax. He can rest. He can sleep in a way, mentally sleep for these 20 minutes. But if he doesn't transfer total control, then the whole exercise is undermined. It's sabotaged. He needs to really sleep mentally. When we sleep, we don't exist. We don't control the environment. We don't make decisions when we sleep. It's a state very similar to sleep. And in order to sleep, he needs to transfer all functions and all decision making powers. If he transfers only some functions and some decision making power, then he needs to stay awake to control the rest. It's binary state. It's total. It's either or. Or zero or hero. Nothing in between. And so when he finds someone he can trust, it may not be anyone that he can trust, he engineers a situation with zero risk in effect. The situation is safe. It's a zero risk situation, but still allows him to go to sleep. He cannot go to sleep in the corporate headquarters when he's with the board of directors. He cannot go to sleep. He cannot say, for example, in the board of directors, John, would you mind taking over? I want to sleep for 20 minutes. He cannot do this. He cannot do this with his wife. He needs to control all the time what she's doing, what she's not doing, because love is pain. Pain is threat. Threat is paranoia. So he needs all the time to be in control. All the time to be monitoring. All the time to be, is she cheating on me? Is she stealing from me? And then he needs to manipulate her. And then he needs to obtain supply from her. And then he needs to, you know, so he cannot sleep. And indeed narcissists suffer, majority of them suffer from extreme insomnia and so on. They have sleep disorders. It's very well known. So he cannot really sleep. He needs a space where there will be an activity, life will go on, but in a totally safe, secure manner, and something that doesn't matter to him really much. He's not going to lose a lot of money, like in the board of directors. He's not going to lose his wife. You know, what can he lose? Nothing. So he comes to the domain of weeks and he says, I want to sleep. Now you take over. Take over the world for 20 minutes. And he knows that when he wakes up after 20 minutes, nothing has happened. There's no damage, no race, no cost. It's cost-free, except a few euros. It's cost-free. It's a cost-free situation that allows him to... So he creates this haven, this enclave. Now, many people do this. Not only narcissists, healthy people. So you have, for example, in very busy cities, people who suddenly go to a temple, a Buddhist temple. And all they do is they sit on the floor and meditate for 20 minutes. And that's their safe environment. And these people run mega corporations, major banks, government agencies and so on. But they need these 20 minutes of going to a safe space where they can hand over control, rest, sleep, relax, knowing that nothing bad will happen. And then 20 minutes later, they go back to being whatever the tyrants, as you call them. This is essentially, this part is kind of meditation, yoga, relaxation technique. Today, I'm going to discuss my two favorite topics, cruelty, and you got it right, sadism. Why? Because my name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Russia. And I am on the faculty of CEAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, Outreach Campus in Lagos, Nigeria. So let's delve right into these delightful topics. Hamas has committed blood curdling, spine-chilling atrocities when it entered the territory of Israel on October 7th. I will not go into details, they're available online. The Israeli government has provided the foreign press with a 43-minute video of some of these indescribable acts and bragging about the acts by the perpetrators. However, Hamas is only the latest in an uninterrupted series of atrocities in the modern age in the last 100 years. We don't need to mention, of course, the Nazis everywhere, especially in concentration camps, but also in the Soviet Union, the USSR. The Allies in the Second World War and I say Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The wars in Yugoslavia, marked by the inhuman cruelty of the Croats and the no less murderous sprees of Serbs. Kosovo, Rwanda in 1994, Ukraine currently, and atrocities against civilians are an inevitable part of what is known as total warfare. In total warfare, there is no distinction between civilians and fighters because a civilian population can become a fighting force on this part of the moment, reservists and so on and so forth are civilians when they are not in the army. And so this distinction has been eroded to the point that today it is considered acceptable and legitimate, albeit criminal. It's a crime against humanity and a crime according to the law of war. But still, it's totally done. The United States has committed such crimes in Vietnam, in Iraq, numerous other locations of Afghanistan lately. This is done and we need to live with it. This is a fact of life. And all these acts, all these atrocities are cruel. But other is sadistic. And here I am, your favorite blue professor of psychology to the rescue and to the bridge. No, cruelty is not the same as sadism. Sadism is an art form. It is the art of pain. It involves creativity. It involves premeditation. Imagining the acts before they are committed. Gratification, pleasure in inflicting exquisite pain on another human being or group of human beings. Sadism is often coupled with masochism, which is self punitive. It is a way to purge a bad object or inner demons, if you wish, sadomasochism. So sadomasochism is a mental pathology, mental health pathology. It's been first described at the end of the 19th century. And sadism has to do with conflating pain, hurt, blood, body parts, torture with pleasure. Deriving pleasure by denying someone else pleasure. Deriving pleasure also by humiliating and shaming someone else. Deriving pleasure by hurting someone else, not necessarily only physically. Sadism can be physical. And as we came to understand, in the second half of the 20th century, sadism definitely can be also emotional, social. Social, shunning and ostracism are a form of sadism. Sadism is perpetrated today via social media networks. And so sadism is about designing a strategy, a plan of action that drives another person to experience intolerable, unbearable, torturous pain and then witnessing this pain with gratification, satisfaction, pleasure. In other words, sadism is a form of hedonism. It's hedonic, not unhedonic. Cruelty is something completely different. Cruelty is self-regulatory. Cruelty is a figment of narcissism. Cruelty is the infliction of excessive pain on another person. The pain could be against psychological, could be social, could be physical. And so superficially, cruelty looks a lot like sadism. And we often say this guy is sadistic when actually this guy is not sadistic. He's just being cruel. Cruelty is internal. Cruelty is for internal consumption. While sadism is about pleasure and similar to, for example, eating good food or drinking good wine or watching a great movie or great performance, it's performative. While sadism is performative, therefore outward-oriented, the sadist definitely perceives the other person as an external object and intends to annihilate the other person, to eliminate the other person's capacity to survive. That's sadism. The recognition of externality and separateness, cruelty on the other hand, involves internalization of external objects in this sense it's highly narcissistic. Let me explain. Most acts of cruelty follow modification. They are in the wake of some public shaming or public humiliation. We become very cruel, having been humiliated and shamed and mortified and disgraced and shunned and attacked and criticized in public. Not all of us, of course, but many of us. And the vast majority of us engage in revenge fantasies, which, coming to the bottom of it, is a form of cruelty. It's imagined cruelty, it's fantastic cruelty, it's cruelty that's never carried out, never translated into actions in real life, but it's still a form of cruelty. And so revenge fantasies are very, very common. I would say that possibly everyone has experienced revenge fantasies, having been humiliated and shamed and attacked and criticized and so on. So here's the first linkage. Cruelty is reactive. Cruelty is an external solution to modification. And I encourage you to watch my videos on modification, especially the work of Libby. Because cruelty is a reaction to modification, it could be described as a translation, a transformation of a narcissistic defense. The sequence is this. You're mortified, you're attacked, you're criticized, you're shamed, you're disgraced, you're exposed, you're mortified. And then your narcissistic defenses kick in and your narcissistic defenses push you to become cruel. Cruelty is intended to restore the grandiose, inflated self-perception that the narcissist, for example, has the same with the psychopath, same with the borderline. So cruel people most likely have exaggerated narcissistic defenses and they would tend to be antisocial. Another type of cruel person is the labile, the dysregulated cruel person. Borderlines can be very cruel when they act out, when they decompensate. Some of them become violent and aggressive. All these forms of cruelty are intended to restore grandiosity to its rightful place. The cruel person has an inflated self-image, he regards himself as godlike or at least as chosen, special with exclusive access to the truth. So we find many cruel people who are moral, righteous, religious or ideological because they believe, they're firmly convinced that they possess the monopoly on the truth. Morality is a weapon. It can be weaponized by narcissists and psychopaths. That's why narcissists and psychopaths are overrepresented in social justice, activism and so-called woke movements and so on. Morality is a wonderful opportunity for the narcissist and psychopath to act or to misbehave with impunity. And so moral people, fundamentalist religious people, ideologues, people who are committed to ideologies such as, I don't know, Marxism, Nazism. These kind of people are grandiose because they consider themselves to be members of a select group, a chosen group, a group which is privy to some arcane, unique, amazing key to the universe. They are masters of the universe in this sense. Same goes for example for certain professions, medical doctors, psychiatrists, people in finance. They're the same. It's the same dynamic exactly. There is grandiosities that is the derivative of being a member of a collective, a club, being chosen, being selected, being again privy to information that no one else shares. We find the same attitude among conspiracy theories. And so when this grandiosity is undermined, challenged, let alone destroyed in the process of modification, there is an urgent need to restore it because this grandiosity becomes intertwined with identity, belonging, affiliation, allegiance, adherence to certain persons, certain ideologies, certain religions, certain values, certain types of morality, certain codes of conduct. This becomes your identity. When you're modified, it takes your identity away from you to restore this grandiosity and identity. You become cruel. Cruelty is unnecessary. It involves excess. It's going beyond the pay, beyond the call of duty, beyond justice. That's what makes it cruel. And so it is a choice. It is a decision. It is a selection. You choose to be cruel. You don't have to. There's no need to be. So by exercising your capacity to be cruel, you're expressing dominance and control. You're being coercive. It causes what Grunberger called elation, narcissistic elation, but not pleasure. Do not conflate and confuse narcissistic elation with narcissistic pleasure, with pleasure. I'm sorry. Narcissistic elation is what you feel when you passed an exam with flying colors. When you went to a job interview and got the job. When your girlfriend agreed to marry you. That's narcissistic elation. It's triumphal. It's victorious. It's restorative. It restores you. Pleasure is something completely different, as you know. Because we all experience pleasure. Pleasure has nothing to do with who you are with your identity. Pleasure is external. It's added. It's a veneer. It's not your essence. Narcissistic elation is essential because it starts in childhood according to Grunberger, the famous psychoanalyst. And so cruelty causes elation because it restores previous, previous grandiose identity. And this identity relied on a sense of superiority, which is the derivative of the belief that you're somehow chosen, select, privileged with access, denied to others. So for example, if you're religious, you're likely to believe that your religion and only your religion is the truth. All other religions are either partial or mistaken. If you adhere to an ideology, your ideology is the final solution to the problems of humanity and all other ideologies standing the way and need to be eradicated and exterminated. If you are a racist, you believe that other races are inferior and so on and so forth. And you would engage in cruelty to demonstrate your hegemony, your dominance, your superiority. Coercion is a way to communicate your privileged position in the hierarchy of being, in the chain of being. And so cruelty sustains a narrative. The narrative is two-fold. One, I'm in a moral position to exact retribution, to restore justice, retributive justice. I am endowed with the kind of values, information and language that empower me and legitimate my decision-making as regards to your fate, your life and your well-being. I'm in charge of you because I'm superior to you and I'm superior to you because I know the truth and you don't. You're misguided, you're misled, you're evil, consequently. It is my role to either wake you up, elevate you, enlighten you somehow, to punish you and end or to exterminate and eradicate you because you are an obstacle on the way to progress. And it is retributive justice. Your very being is an affront to me, an obstacle, a hindrance. I suffer because of you. The cruel person says, I suffer because of my victims. My victims make me suffer. They damage me. They hurt me. They destroy me or they seek to destroy me. There's a lot of conspiracy, paranoid ideation going on here, conspiracism. So they are my enemies. They are my post-secretary objects. I owe it to myself. I owe it to cosmic justice. I owe it to my moral adherence, to my religion, to my ideology, to my value system. I owe it to humanity to confront my victimizers, my abusers, the perpetrators, and to right the wrong, to rectify the structure and order of the universe as I know it should be. And how do I know how the universe should be? Because I've been told by God. I've been told by prophets. I've been told by philosophers. I know. I know. You don't know, says the cruel person. My cruelty is justified. All I'm doing is for the greater good. I'm making the world a better place. And yes, it involves great pro quo. An eye for an eye. Lex Talionis. It's a victimhood. It's a narrative that is not only about retributive justice. It's not about only about competitive grandiose entitled victimhood. It's about a restoration of the world as the Kabbalah says, fixing the broken vessels. It's an act of redemption. Cruelty is a form of absolution. It's good for the cruel person, for the soul of the cruel person, but it's also good for the soul of the victim. Members of the Inquisition, the witch trials in Salem in the 17th century, these people believed that they were redeeming and salvaging the souls of the poor witches or the poor converted Jews that they have executed and tortured in indescribable ways. So it's about helping everyone. Cruelty is about helping everyone and about making the universe a better place by reverting it to its pristine, virginal primary state. It's a cleansing. Cruelty is about cleansing. You can immediately see that it is very little to do with sadism because very often the cruel person suffers along with the victim. I know this sounds crazy, but this is a fact. Many cruel people, not all sadistic cruel people don't, but many cruel people do what they do because they feel compelled to do it. They feel there's no other choice. They feel the alternative is decay and decadence and decomposition and degeneration. They feel that they need to save the world, to save others, to save even their own victims, and above all, of course, to save themselves. It's an act of salvation, salvato. So the cruel person may even experience guilt and shame over his cruel actions. May even feel ego-dystonic about it. This uncomfortable, tormented. We have the famous speech by Hania Echimla, the head of the Gestapo, the rice fear of the SS, telling his subordinates what you're doing is horrible. I know it torments you and haunts you. I know it's, but it is a sacrifice you are making for humanity because we need to cleanse the Jews. We need to cleanse humanity. We need to save humanity from the Jews. It's a holy, holy work for which it's a thankless work because it will never become public, never be known and you are in effect crusaders, your saviors and rescuers of humanity. Similarly, we have confessions of executioners throughout the ages, including very modern executioners using the electric chair or drip injections. We have confessions of executioners who are like haunted and tormented and traumatized for life, but they say it's my obligation to execute people. It's my obligation to sanitize this wound. It's my obligation to destroy and kill. It's like necrotic tissue that needs to be removed. Similarly, if you were to talk to Hamas activists or to former Nazis or they all justify their actions using the argument of the greater good, they are all what we know in philosophy as utilitarians and they all employ the lex talionis. They all say, you started it first. You provoke me to do it. This is reactive abuse. But of course, there's no excuse for abuse. Reactive abuse is abuse, period. It is as reprehensible. As reprehensible, as condemnable, as horrible, as any type of abuse. Who started first means nothing. Your decision and choice to engage in abuse renders you an abuser as bad morally, as evil morally, as your abuser. And finally, cruelty requires the cooperation of the victim, an admission of vulnerability, of failure, of defeat, of hurt, of damage, of pain. In this sense, cruelty is a form of shared fantasy. If you are cruel to someone and they are indifferent, they couldn't care less. The cruelty fails. For cruelty to succeed and be recognized as cruelty, it is the victim that should ascertain that it is feeling bad. The victim should say, I am feeling subject to cruel and inhuman treatment. If the victim says, what? No, I didn't notice this. I don't care. I haven't been paying attention. Then there's no cruelty involved. Cruelty is a combined state of mind. It's a symbiosis, symbiotic state of mind of the cruel inflictor of punishment and the victim of the cruelty. They collude and collaborate and they agree upon the cruelty. They say the cruel person, the tormentor, the punisher says, yes, I have been cruel because I have had no choice. I have been cruel because it's payback time. I have been cruel because I'm committed to justice and retribution. I have been cruel because it's a way to make the world a better place. And the victim of cruelty says, I have been subjected to cruelty. I recognize this as cruelty and it has had effects on me. It has had an impact on me. I'm devastated. I'm traumatized. I feel and so cruelty often provokes counter cruelty. It's an arms race of cruelty who would prevail ultimately. This doesn't happen in sadism. Sadism doesn't provoke counter-sadism. Sadism doesn't depend on the other person's collusion, admission, confession, or collaboration. Sadism is focused 100% on pleasure. Sadism is a form of self-gratification via an external object whose externality and separateness are the source of the pleasure. Cruelty, on the other hand, is an internalized construct. Something internal. The cruel person feels that something is a miss. A miss. Something is gone or right. Something is wrong. And he needs, if he is compelled or she feels compelled to rectify it, to set it right, to restore it, to redeem it, it's almost a religious experience, cruelty. And so in matters of public affairs and politics, we usually witness cruelty, not sadism, and that's why it's easy to stop it. Sadism can never be stopped. Sadism is a character trait. You're a sadist until the day you die. But cruelty is situational. And when the situation is perceived to have been resolved either via defeat or via triumph, then the cruelty stops. And the cruel person and his victim can then coexist, so of course, survive and even collaborate. This would never happen between the sadist and his victim. His victim is an eternal victim. The sadist is an eternal sadist. Okay, I hope I succeeded to cruely clarify the distinctions between cruelty and sadism. And I wish you a non-sadistic, not cruel day, wherever you may be.