 My name is Sam Bakhnid. I am the author of Malignance and Flava, Narcissism Revisited. Patients with Schizoid Personality Disorder, or Schizoids for short, enjoy nothing. They seemingly never experience pleasure. This is known as anhedonia. Even their nearest and dearest describe them as automata, robots, or machines. But the Schizoid is not depressed or dysphoric. It is merely indifferent. Schizoids are uninterested in social relationships, and they are bored and puzzled by interpersonal reactions and interactions. They are incapable of intimacy, and they have a very limited range of emotions and effect. Rarely does the Schizoid express feelings, either negative, such as anger, or positive, such as happiness. Schizoids never pursue an opportunity to develop a close relationship. Schizoids are mostly aid sexual. They are not interested in sex. Consequently, they appear to be called aloof, bland, stunted, flat, and zombie-like. Sexually, they are neuters. They derive no satisfaction from belonging to a close-need group, a family, church, workplace, neighborhood, or nation. They rarely marry or have children. Schizoids are loners. Given the option, they invariably pursue solitary activities or hobbies. Inevitably, they prefer mechanical or abstract tasks and jobs that require subskills and grounded beloneliness in the isolation that they seek. Many computer hackers, crackers, and programmers are Schizoids, for instance, as are some mathematicians and theoretical physicists. Schizoids are inflexible in their reactions to changing life circumstances and developments, both adverse and opportune. Faced with stress, Schizoids may disintegrate, decompensate, and experience brief psychotic episodes, or even a depressive illness. Schizoids have few friends or confidants. They trust only first-degree relatives, but even so, they maintain no close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. Schizoids pretend to be indifferent to praise, criticism, disagreement, and corrective advice, though deep inside, they are not. Schizoids are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable, and narrowly restricted routines and schedules. From the outside, the Schizoids' life looks rudderless and adrift. Like people with Asperger's syndrome, Schizoids fail to respond appropriately to social cues and rarely reciprocate gestures or facial expressions such as smiles. As a diagnostic and statistical manual puts it, Schizoids seem socially inept or superficial and self-absorbed. Be sure to watch the video which compares narcissists to Schizoids. It is available in my channel. My name is Sam Battening. I am the author of Malignant Self-Lug, Narcissism Revisited. Narcissistic personality disorder is often diagnosed with other mental health disorders. Other personality disorders such as borderline, is trionic or antisocial. This phenomenon of multiple diagnosis in the same patient is called co-morbidity. It is also often accompanied by substance abuse and other reckless and impulsive behaviors, and this is called dual diagnosis. Narcissists are often paranoid. Some of them are Schizoid. They avoid contact with other people. The basic dynamic of this particular brand of co-morbidity goes like this. The narcissist feels superior, unique, entitled, and better than his fellow men. He thus tends to despise other people, to hold them in contempt and to regard them as lowly and subservient beings. The narcissist feels that his time is invaluable. His mission is of cosmic importance. His contributions to humanity are priceless. He therefore demands total obedience and catering to his ever-changing needs. Any demands on his time and resources is deemed to be both humiliating and wasteful. But the narcissist is dependent on input from other people for the performance of certain ego functions, such as the regulation of his sense of self-worth. Without narcissistic supply, without adoration or attention from other people, the narcissist shrivels, crumbles, and withers, and becomes dysphoric, or in other words depressed. So on the one hand, he despises other people and holds them in contempt and regards them as inferior, but on the other hand, he is completely and utterly dependent on them. The narcissist resents this dependence. He is furious at himself for his own neediness and clinging. And in a typical narcissistic maneuver, which is called alloplastic defense, the narcissist blames other people for his own anger and fury. He displaces his rage and its roots. Many narcissists are paranoid. This means that they are afraid of people and of what people might do to them. Wouldn't you be scared and paranoid if your very life depended continually on the good will of others? The narcissist's very life depends on others providing him with narcissistic supply. He becomes suicidal if they stop doing it. In the absence of narcissistic supply, the narcissist dies either mentally or physically. So this dependence on others creates paranoia. Will they cease? Will they stop supplying him with the narcissistic supply? Will they doom? Will they judge him? Will they condemn him to death? To counter this overwhelming feeling of helplessness, dependence on narcissistic supply, the narcissist becomes a control freak. He statistically manipulates others to satisfy his own needs. He derives pleasure from the utter subjugation of his human environment. Pleasure and relief from anxiety. Finally, the narcissist is a latent masochist. He seeks punishment, castigation and excommunication. This self-destruction is the only way to validate powerful voices that he had internalized as a child. His parents told him, you're bad, rotten, hopeless. You are an evil child. And so these voices inside him still go on and they go on in the form of what we call a satistic superego. He wants to satisfy the superego and so he punishes himself, self-destructs and self-defeats. The narcissistic landscape is therefore fraught with contradictions. The narcissist depends on people but hates them and despises them. He wants to control people unconditionally but is also looking to punish himself savagely. He is terrified of persecution he has per-secretary anxiety but he seeks the company of his own persecutors compulsively. The narcissist is the victim of incompatible inner dynamics ruled by numerous vicious circles pushed and pulled simultaneously by irresistible forces and urges. A minority of narcissists choose the schizoid solution. They choose, in effect, to disengage both emotionally and socially. They become recluses and hermits. They are no more in the social sense and even in the psychological sense. My name is Sandvagny and I'm the author of Malignac's Love, Narcissism Revisit. Narcissistic personality disorder is often diagnosed with other mental health disorders such as borderline, histrionic or antisocial psychopathic personality disorder. And this phenomenon is called comorbidity. Narcissism is often also accompanied by substance abuse and other reckless and impulsive behaviors, and this we call dual diagnosis. There is one curious match, one logic-defying appearance or co-appearance of mental health disorders. Narcissism, together with schizoid personality disorder. The basic dynamic of this improbable duo of this particular brand of comorbidity goes like this. The narcissist feels superior, unique, entitled and better than his fellow man. He thus tends to despise people, to hold them in contempt and to regard them as lowly inferior and subservient beings. The narcissist feels that his time is invaluable, his mission of cosmic importance, his contributions to humanity priceless. The narcissist therefore demands total obedience and catering to his ever-changing and ever-increasing list of needs. Any demands on the narcissist's time and resources is deemed to be both humiliating and wasteful. But the narcissist falls his braggadature away and swagger. The narcissist is dependent on input from other people for the performance of certain ego functions. For instance, the narcissist needs other people to tell you that he is perfect, brilliant, unique, special, etc., to regulate his sense of self-worth. Without narcissistic supply, without adulation, adoration, admiration, attention, the narcissist shrivels with us and becomes dysphoric, depressed. The narcissist resents this dependence. He is furious at himself for his neediness and in typical narcissistic fashion and maneuver, he blames other people for his own anger and his own dependence on their narcissistic supply. He displaces his rage and his roots. Many narcissists are paranoid. This means that they are afraid of people and what people might do to them. Consider this. Wouldn't you be scared and paranoid if your very life depended continually on the good will of others? You would. And so is the narcissist. The narcissist's very life depends on other people providing him with narcissistic supply day in and day out, minute in and minute out. The narcissist becomes suicidal if they, other people, stop providing him with supply. And to encounter this overwhelming sense of helplessness, this all-devouring dependence on narcissistic supply, the narcissist becomes a controlled freak. The narcissist statistically manipulates other people to do his bidding and to cater to his needs. He drives pleasure and derives pleasure from the utter subjugation of his human environment. Finally, the narcissist is also a latent masochist. The narcissist seeks punishment, constigation and excommunication. And this self-destruction, this strand of self-defeating behaviors, is the only way to validate powerful voices that he had internalised as a child. Voices that keep telling him, your bed, your rotten, your worthless, your bookless. As you can easily see, the narcissistic landscape is short with contradictions. The narcissist depends on people, but hates and despises them. He wants to control people unconditionally, but is also looking to punish himself savagely. He is terrified of persecution, of secretary delusions, but he seeks the company of his own persecutors compulsively. The narcissist is a victim of incompatible inner dynamics, ruled by numerous vicious circles, pushed and pulled simultaneously by irresistible forces. A minority of narcissists, therefore, choose the schizoid solution. They choose to disengage, to detach both emotionally and socially. They withdraw behind the ramparts. They pull back the drawbridge. They vanish. In isolation, their fantasy life develops. The delusions increase until they are completely consumed. I'm Sam Bachman and I'm the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisit. In the Review of General Psychiatry 1995, it says, The person with schizoid personality disorder sustains fragile emotional equilibrium by avoiding intimate personal contact and thereby minimising conflict that is poorly tolerated. Schizoids are often described, given by their nearest and dearest, in terms of automata, robots. They are uninterested in social relationships or interactions and have a very limited emotional repertoire. It is not that they do not have motions, but they express them poorly and intermittently. Schizoids appear cold and stunted, flat and zombie-like. Consequently, patients with schizoid personality disorder are loners. They confide only in first-degree relatives, but maintain no close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. Naturally, they gravitate into solitary activities and find solace and safety in being constantly alone. But sexual experiences are sporadic and limited, and finally, they cease altogether. Schizoids are unhedonic. They find nothing pleasurable or attractive. But they are not necessarily dysphoric, sad or depressed. Some schizoids are asexual and resemble the cerebral narcissists. They pretend to be indifferent to praise, to criticism, to disagreement, and to corrective advice. But if inside, they are not. They are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable and narrowly restricted routines. Intuitively, a connection between schizoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder seems plausible. After all, narcissists are people who self-sufficiently withdraw from others. They love themselves in lieu of loving others. Lacking in empathy, they regard others as mere instruments, objectified sources of narcissistic supply. But a distinction must be made between social interactions and social relationships. The schizoid, the narcissist and the inverted narcissist, they all interact socially. But they all fail to form human and social relationships. All three types fail to bond. Schizoid is uninterested in bonding. The narcissist is both uninterested and incapable due to his lack of empathy, a vasive sense of grandiosity and abhorrence of intimacy. The psychologist Ellen Deutsch first suggested the construct of as-if personality in the context of schizoid patients. A decade later, in the 50s, Winnicott named the very same idea as the false self personality. The false self has thus been established as a driving engine of both pathological narcissism and pathological schizoid states. Both Klöninger and McWilliams observed the faintly contemptuous attitude and isolated superiority of the schizoid. But these are narcissistic traits, so schizoidists are in a way narcissistic. Theodore Millen and Roger Davis summed it up in their seminal term, personality disorders in modern life. They say, where withdrawal is an arrogant or oppositional quality, fantasy in a schizoid-like person sometimes betrays the presence of a secret grandiose self that longs for respect and recognition while offsetting fears that the person is really an iconoclastic freak. These individuals combine aspects of the compensating narcissist with the autistic isolation of the schizoid, while lacking the asocial and unhedomic qualities of the pure prototype. Both the narcissist and the schizoid are examples of development arrested in early childhood and early adolescence due to envy and other transformations of aggression. Greenberg and Mitchell, in their famous book Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, wrote, The term narcissism tends to be employed diagnostically by those proclaiming loyalty to the drive model, Otto Kernberg, and Edith Jacobson, for instance. Mixed model theorists, such as Kobut, who are interested in preserving a tie-to-drive theory, also use this term narcissism. The term schizoid tends to be employed diagnostically by adherents of relational models, such as Fairburn and Guntrick, who are interested in articulating their break with drive theory. These two differing diagnoses and accompanying formulations are applied to patients who are essentially similar by theorists who start with very different conceptual premises and ideological affiliations. What Greenberg and Mitchell are saying is that schizoid is a narcissist by another name. United States psychologist theorists and UK psychological theorists simply use different terms to describe the same mental health disorder. Kernberg regards mature narcissism, as espoused by new Freudians, such as Rünberger and Scherzüglitz-Miergerl. He regards the very term mature narcissism, or healthy narcissism, as a contradiction in terms of oxymoron. Kernberg observes that narcissists are already grandiose and schizoid, detached, called aloof and asocial at a very early age. He even ventures to say that when they are three years old, their narcissistic traits are discernible. Like Klein, Melanie Klein, Kernberg believes that narcissism is a last-ditch effort, a defense to halt the emergence of the paranoid schizoid position. In an adult, such an emergence is known as psychosis, and this is why Kernberg classifies narcissists as borderline, almost psychotics. Even Kohut, who is an opponent of Kernberg's classification, uses Eugene O'Neill's famous sentence in The Great God Brown, Man is born broken, he lives by mending, the grace of God is the glue. Kernberg himself sees a clear connection between schizoid phenomena, such as alienation in modern society and subsequently draw from social contact. Between this phenomena and narcissistic phenomena, for instance the inability to form relationships or to make commitments or to empathize. Fred Orford, in his book, Narcissism, Socrates, the Frankfurt School of Psychoanalytic Theory, summed it up nicely. He says, It is Greenberg and Mitchell, in object relations and psychoanalytic theory, who established the relevance of failure in their country. By pointing out that what American analysts label narcissism, British analysts tend to call schizoid personality disorder. This insight allows us to connect the symptomatology of narcissism, feelings of the emptiness and reality, alienation and emotional withdrawal with a theory that sees such symptoms as an accurate reflection of the experience of being split off from a part of oneself. That narcissism is such a confusing category is in large part because its dry theoretic definition, the libidinal catexes of the self, in word, self-love, seems far removed from the experience of narcissism as characterized by a loss or split in the self. Fairburns and Gantriff's view of narcissism as an excessive attachment of the ego to internal objects, roughly analogous to Freud's narcissistic as opposed to object love, resulting in various splits in the ego necessary to maintain these attachments. This view allows us to penetrate this confusion. In other words, coming back to myself, in other words, narcissism is not about self-love. It's about a broken ego, a broken self. And narcissists withdraw from society exactly as schizoids do in order to protect this vulnerable, precariously balanced house of cards that they have constructed. They, in an attempt to shield themselves from any hurt or pain, they have actually isolated themselves in a glass house. And they are afraid of every occasional and random stone thrown at them, hence their aversion to criticism and disagreement. As usual, I love just a door to bash self-styled experts and so-called scholars online. Here's the rule of thumb, if they're online, they're not experts, they're not scholars. With one exception, of course, me, my name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. And today, I'm going to discuss the god-awful confusion between shyness, avoidant personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, introversion, social phobia, social anxiety and anxiety disorder, not to mention shyness. Yes, all these psychological constructs are very often confused and conflated to the point of an utter mayhem where people can't tell the difference between being shy, being avoidant, being introverted, being schizoid, and other things. Socially phobic, socially anxious, anxious, generally anxious, paranoid, and so on and so forth. So even mental health practitioners, even people with academic degrees in psychology and even psychiatry, can't tell the difference. And they can't tell the difference because they largely rely on observable phenomena when actually what differentiates these disorders from each other is not the outside, not the behavioral aspect, but the etiology and the psychodynamics. I can't focus on all these disorders simultaneously in one video because I never make videos longer than 10 hours. So I'm going to focus today on two of these constructs. One is schizoid or schizoidism or schizoid personality disorder compared to introversion. What's the difference between an introvert and a schizoid person? On the surface, they look the same. They avoid social interactions, but are they doing this for the same reasons? Absolutely not. And so let's plunge right in. As usual, everything I say is backed by scholarly research and studies. I will place a very short bibliography in the description of the video. You're well advised to follow up on it, but try to purchase these books if the topic for some oblivious reason is of interest to you. So welcome to the same vacuum, narcissism, horror show, and this time it's not about narcissism. Well, at least not directly. Maybe my own, and that's it. We start with introversion. The dictionary of the American Psychological Association defines introversion this way. Introversion, noun, orientation towards the internal private world of one's self and one's inner thoughts and feelings, rather than orientation toward the outer world of people and things. Introversion is a broad personality trait, and exactly like extroversion, it exists on a continuum of attitudes and behaviors. Introverts are relatively more withdrawn, retiring, reserved, quiet, and deliberate. They may tend to mute or guard expression of positive effect, adopt more skeptical views or positions, and prefer to work independently. The concept, of course, was originated by Carl Jung for the study of personality types. I recommend to you to watch the video I had made about Carl Jung's view of narcissism, because Carl Jung says that narcissism is actually a very healthy, a very healthy, as you heard it right, a very healthy investment in introversion. And he said that introversion is an inevitable and very important phase or stage in the development of what he called a constellated self. In other words, Jung believed that introversion is indispensable to the formation of a self. And if you lack introversion and if you lack narcissism in early childhood, you're going to end up being a selfless person. Ironically, you're going to end up being a narcissist. All this is explained in that video. But today we are focusing on the social manifestations and ecology of introversion. One thing that emerges immediately from this definition, and it's a very important distinction. Introverts are never, ever impulsive. They're deliberate, they're slow, they're guarded, they're paranoid, they're skeptical. Introverts are highly unlikely to find themselves in situations where they suddenly do something because they have an impulse to do it, or on a whim, or because they can control themselves, or because they're drunk. They never get drunk to the point of losing control. They never get drunk to the point of acting on an impulse. In this sense, they're very hyper vigilant. So if you see someone acting impulsively, recklessly, defiantly, even if that someone appears to be introverted and shy and avoidant, he is not. Introversion and impulsivity, introversion and defiance, introversion and recklessness, introversion and consumatiousness do not go together. To cut the long story short, a psychopath may well be shy. A psychopath may have anxiety disorder. A psychopath may be socially phobic or socially anxious, but a psychopath can never ever be an introvert. And introverts never find themselves in situations where they had lost control, or recklessly abandoned all safeguards, or act on an impulse, or get to the point of acting on an impulse, for example, but is inhibiting themselves with alcohol and drugs. That's not introversion. That is psychopathy, masquerading as introversion. If you were to acquire the wonderful, widely encyclopedia of personality published in 2020, you would find several mentions and a whole article about introversion and extroversion. And I would like to read to you the summary of this article. The extroversion introversion personality dimension is a robust and highly heritable personality dimension that is recognized around the world. Characterized by both interpersonal and temperamental characteristics, the key features of extroversion introversion are sociability and positive effect. The extroversion introversion are features, dimensions, when they became well established as a result of the biological basis and the lexical significance in cross-cultural language. Extroverts and compass approach behaviors rooted in the need for increased stimulation caused by cortical under-stimulation, while introverts demonstrate avoidance behaviors to inhibit over-stimulation. Similarly, extroverts are more likely to engage in approach behaviors commonly associated with impulsivity, while introverts are more likely to engage in avoidance behaviors commonly associated with anxiety. So here we're beginning to see the first very important distinctions. It seems that introversion is a result of dysregulation, sensory overload, over-stimulation, it's a defense. It's an attempt to wall yourself off the world to firewall yourself in order to avoid a collapse or a decompensation under consistent pressure of environmental stimuli. What does this remind you of? Yes, you're good students. It's reminiscent of autism spectrum disorders, and even more so, it's reminiscent of borderline personality disorder. Introversion therefore can be conceived of simply as another name for emotional dysregulation, or at least the observable reaction to emotional dysregulation, while extroversion is actually an attempt to compensate, attempt to compensate for a lack of environmental stimulation for under-stimulation, and therefore extroversion is much more likely to be associated with externalized personality disorders and personality traits and behaviors such as psychopathy. Again, impulsivity and anxiety, these are the keys. If you see someone who is anxious but then acts impulsively, that's a psychopath. If you see someone who is anxious and then withdraws or becomes paranoid or becomes deliberate, very slow and plodding, and then avoids life, situations, environments and people, that's an introvert. Anxiety plus impulsivity equals psychopathy. Anxiety plus avoidance equals introversion. And so here's a description from this encyclopedia of an extrovert. He enjoys attending all the class parties. He is known for having lots of friends and is open to seeking out new experiences that offer thrilling lifestyle. This person is energetic, a leader in most domains and is very happy with their life. And here's the introvert. The introvert tends to stay away from the class parties. He is instead happiest when quietly staying home with a good book. This second person, the introvert, may have a few close friends but tends to be more comfortable within their organized and routine lifestyle. So this sounds suspiciously like a schizoid. We would need to differentiate the introvert from the schizoid. We will do it a bit later in this video. At this stage, the distinction between the shy or quiet psychopath and the introvert rests on the pillar of impulsivity. Impulsivity distinct is the differential diagnosis between these two. What about shy and quiet borderlines? It's an unsensical construct. But borderlines do tend to become secondary psychopaths under stress, humiliation, rejection and abandonment. And when they do become secondary psychopaths, when they do make this transition, when they switch, impulsivity rains. So then we know these are not introverts but actually borderlines who had switched or transitioned to secondary psychopaths. But there is such a thing as a shy and anxious psychopath. Increasingly, we are beginning to realize this. We are even beginning to dispense with the old view that psychopaths are fearless. And I recommend that you watch the video The Myth of the Fearless Psychopath on my channel of course. Where else? The only channel with scientific proof and foundation. All right, enough self-promotion, Vaknim. You got your dose of grandiosity. Move on for pricing. Okay, I will. We are about to enter a much more fraught minefield, the distinctions, the delicate and subtle distinctions between extroversion, introversion and schizoid, schizoidism and schizoid personality disorder. But to do so, we need to delve a bit further into extroversion, introversion. Extroversion, as we said, has interpersonal and temperamental components. And the interpersonal characteristics of extroversion reflect the typical extroverted behaviors, sociability, assertiveness, etc. The stereotype in this case is quite true. The temperamental characteristics of extroversion reflect increased activity level and positive affect. And so when we consider extroversion, introversion dimension, an extrovert is someone who is outgoing, talkative, social, energized, exactly the stereotype. The introvert is the opposite, who is reserved, quiet, passive. And so Carl Jung, as we said, was the first to propose this dichotomy, the idea of extroversion. He conceptualized extroversion and introversion as two separate types of people. He identified extroverts as having a focus on the outer world, directing an outward flow of so-called personal energy to the social environment. And Jung said that introverts have a focus on the inner mental world, and they direct an inward flow of personal energy on internal factors, for example, internal objects and introjects. So extroversion, introversion started off as a classification, a taxonomy of personal styles, what we call today personality styles. But it had evolved and had become unrecognizable since Jung's time, luckily for us. Immediately after Jung, there were other scholars who entered the fray and had contributed greatly to the current understanding of introversion and extroversion. And possibly Hans Eisenk and Jeffrey Gray. Hans Eisenk in the 1980s, he conceptualized a hierarchical personality model with a hierarchy based on traits that Eisenk believed to be highly heritable. I want to make an intermezzo here. The idea that introversion and extroversion and other Eisenk types, the five-factor personality model, including, for example, agreeableness, which Jordan Peterson constantly mentions in each and every of his numerous lectures. The idea that all these five factors of personality, including introversion and extroversion, that they are based on genetics, on heritability, is just this, an idea. We do have some indications that, for example, introversion and extroversion run in families, sometimes skipping generations, but it's very weak and frail evidence. At this stage, it's a speculative hypothesis with very, very little foundation in studies and research, but for some reason, perhaps because it's invogue, perhaps because it's fashionable, we tend to believe that introversion and extroversion are somehow genetically determined. And all this goes back to Eisenk, because Eisenk was the one who said, without any studies to back up his claim in 1985, he was of us to say that introversion, extroversion is heritable and psychophysiologically rooted. Eisen theorized the concepts of excitation and inhibition in relation to personality and behavior, and he said that excitation and inhibition are actually biological determinants. In the model of personality of Eisenk, he focused on three dimensions of extroversion and introversion. The first dimension was sociability and so on, we'll come to it in a minute. Now, his original model had three dimensions, introversion, extroversion, neuroticism, emotional stability, and psychoticism. And so he began with these three broad brushstrokes at the top of the hierarchy, and then he went down, as I said, and within each one he found subunits or subsections, subsegments. And he narrowed down. So he started with these three enormous, with this canvas of three enormous dimensions, introversion, extroversion, neuroticism, psychoticism, and then he narrowed them down. He hacked, he sliced them into a highly specific list of characteristics. So for example, in the extroversion, he said that the traits are sociable, active, assertive, and sensation seeking. These are the elements of the factors of extroversion, loading into what he called the E factor, E extroversion. Eisenk then proceeded, he spent all of his career actually, breaking down extroversion, introversion, neuroticism, emotional stability, psychoticism, breaking them down into traits, and then breaking these traits into further traits, and then they're breaking these traits into further traits until we had the laundry list of every conceivable interpersonal and temperamental style elements. And on the third level of Eisenk's model, there is something called habitual acts. Someone who is extroverted is more likely to habitually attend many parties to seek out new adventures such as, I don't know, skydiving, traveling. And the habitual behaviors together load into a narrow second level characteristic of sociability and sensation seeking. So actually Eisenk's model is a grassroots model. Behaviors coalesce into traits, traits coalesce into dimensions on three levels. Raymond Cattel, C-A-T-T-E-L-L, expanded on Eisenk's three factor approach. He developed a list of 16 personality factors derived from modern factor analysis of lexical approaches. These 16 personality factors, five of them clustered together to form the higher order of extroversion including interpersonal warmth, impulsivity, and boldness. And so this, and I recommend that you watch my video on MBTI, but this created an enormous argument. The question was, could such a small number of factors include all the key elements of personality? Are we capturing everything there is to capture? Or do we need to continue to add to the list all the time? And one of the most common personality taxonomies is the five factor model of personality, referred to as the big five. It is derived from factor analysis of the most commonly used words in the English language. Five broad traits, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness. And within this model, extroversion is assumed to adopt a hierarchical structure with six lower order facets, warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking, and positive effects. So this is extroversion. Everything that's the opposite of extroversion is of course, by definition, introversion. There have been many studies which delved into the question of whether these characteristics and traits are heritable, nature versus nature. There was a huge study with 25,000 pairs of twins. There is the biggest study about ARAS, the ascending reticular activation system. So there are studies of this with introverts allegedly possessing a lower threshold for arousal compared to extroverts. I will not go into all of this. Isaac and Grace started this actually, these kind of studies. And then vehemently disagreed with Isaac's view of arousal as a conditioning behavior. So there's a huge row. I will not go into all this. Let's go back to personality. Extroversion, introversion is a robust personality dimension. It's robust in the sense that it's supported by numerous massive studies. It exists. It's real. It's not our imagination. It's not a figment. It's not an artifact of some other, for example, artifact of a test, a psychological test. It's real. It's a real personality dimension. It's dynamic. This is a spectrum. Extroversion and introversion don't exist in a vacuum. Extroversion interacts consistently with other personality correlates. And this provides implications for life outcomes and individual differences in behavior. There's substantial evidence that extroverts experience higher levels of positive affect, for example, compared to introverts who are usually prone to negative affect. And the relationship between extroversion and positive emotions has been replicated across cultures, regardless of personality disposition. So it seems that extroversion and introversion, while being personality dimensions, are not conditioned or dependent upon what personality type you have, or even whether you have a personality disorder. At its core, extroversion encompasses the core feature of positive affect. Extroverts react more positively when they are presented with positive stimuli, and the relationship between extroversion and positive affect is also explained by differences in behavioral tendencies. For example, sociability is a key feature of extroversion. Researchers propose that extroverts engage in a greater number of social activities, but they also reap more benefits when they engage in daily social behaviors compared to introverts. Introverts seem to fail in extracting benefits from social interactions. Extroverts are more likely to view their social interactions and the world in general positively. Research has examined the link between personality and psychopathology, and we found that extroversion is negatively related to anxiety and depression. So these mental health concerns usually lead or are characterized by social withdrawal. If you're anxious, if you're depressed all your life, you tend to withdraw socially. You tend to have, by definition, low levels of positive affect, and this would lead you to a low level of extroversion. In considering psychopathology as maladaptive extremes of some personality dispositions, some researchers have identified that very low level of extroversion, also known as introversion, introversion is linked with social isolation and with anhedonia, inability to experience pleasure. And very high levels of extroversion have been linked with maladaptive, reckless, risky, impulsive behaviors, such as sexual promiscuity and substance abuse. These concerns may be linked to the greater likelihood for extroverts to seek out and engage in rewarding and highly arousing activities. We're coming back full circle. You may be anxious, you may be depressed, but if you're abusing substances and thereby disinhibiting yourself, if you then engage in reckless behaviors such as sexual promiscuity and other reckless behaviors, such as extreme sports or especially if your reckless behaviors are intimately linked to your substance abuse, this rules out, precludes introversion. Introversion is about control. Introversion is a hyper-vigilant control reaction to internal dysregulation and overload, sensory overload, sensory overstimulation, highly sensitive persons, HSPs are introverts. So introverts don't go out and get drunk and sleep with strangers. They don't do this. Psychopaths do this. Introverts don't go out and do drugs and then drive recklessly and wreck their cars and their bodies. This is not an introverted behavior. Anything that leads via substance abuse usually to reckless behaviors is a strong indicator of psychopathy. Primary psychopathy, factor one or secondary psychopathy, factor two, borderline. Let me read to you something from another book written by Zelensky and Soboko, the Handbook of Solitude, published this year by Wiley. It's a summary of one of the chapters. In this chapter, say the authors, we review personality differences in propensities for solitude, focusing on the dimension of introversion, extroversion and its link with psychological well-being. Although extroversion is often linked with greater happiness, many scholars oppose this conclusion. We consider these objections and we examine their veracity with regard to empirical work. Although we ultimately conclude that introversion is indeed associated with lower levels of happiness, our review also provides a more nuanced view of disassociation, for example, how its magnitude can depend on measurement tools for culture or culture. Finally, we review and evaluate theoretical explanations for extroverts characteristically higher levels of happiness and we explore the potential of increasing happiness by increasing introversion. What the authors are saying very gingerly and very carefully is that extroverts may not actually be more happy than introverts. It's an artifact of testing and social and cultural conditioning and expectations. We are conditioned to feel happier when we interact socially, even if fundamentally we are actually not happier or even if we are hypervigilant and paranoid. We just told society kind of brainwashes us into feeling happier when we're with other people, which would explain why many of us drink and do drugs when we are with other people, because perhaps it's not such a pleasant experience after all. So, to summarize this first segment or first section of the video, introverts do not engage in psychopathic behaviors like substance abuse, like promiscuity, sexual and otherwise, reckless behaviors, defiance, consumatiousness and impulsivity. If you see these things, even if these things happen once a year, even if they happen once a decade, it's a powerful indication that the person is not an introvert, but a shy or anxious psychopath or a secondary psychopath, in other words, a borderline. End of chapter one of this video and we proceed now to schizoid personality disorder or schizoidism. Schizoids are exactly like introverts. They stay at home. They avoid social interactions. Mini is a schizoid. She never leaves home. I keep telling her, Mini, it's not good for you. You need to go out. You need to socialize with other mugs. You need to have a life. But she does want to. She stays at home. She says she's perfectly happy, hanging on. So, you know, I do what I can. What's the difference between schizoidism and introversion? Outwardly, as observers, we cannot tell the difference. They look identical. Both introverts and schizoids behave in ways which are indistinguishable from each other. They stay at home, avoid social interactions, hypervigilance and hedonia, depression and anxiety, the empty schizoid core. Both of them usually have grandiose defenses. It's very difficult to tell them apart. But let's try. We start by going again, reverting again to the American Psychological Association's dictionary. Schizoidism, noun, complex of behavioral traits that include seclusiveness, quietness, general introversion, indicating a separation by the person from his or her surroundings, the confining of psychic interests to the self, and in many cases a tendency towards schizophobia. It's also called schizoidia. Schizoidia was originally defined by Eugen Bloyler long before Freud, actually. Bloyler is a much, much neglected genius, which in some respects overshadowed Freud. I mean, even in my view, in many respects, more important than Freud. Bloyler, B-L-E-U-L-E-R. Knock yourself out. Let's define schizoidism, which is a personality trait. Let's define schizoid. Schizoid, the same dictionary, denoting characteristics resembling schizophrenia, but in a milder form, invoking lack of effect, social passivity and minimal introspection. These are beginning to be crucial differences between schizoids and introverts. Let me repeat, lack of effect. Introverts have effect. Sometimes they have inappropriate effect, but they always have effect, mostly negative effect. They're likely to show sadness, depression, anxiety, unhappiness, envy, anger. They have pronounced effect. They don't have. Introverts do not have lifelong or pervasive reduced effect display. Schizoids do. Schizoids are totally flat. They have exactly like psychopaths, flat effect. They never ever show emotions of any kind ever, like ever. That's the first difference. Second thing, social passivity. The schizoid is socially passive. In other words, he or she are likely to respond to social cues, for example, being invited somewhere, but are very unlikely to initiate social interactions. That's the schizoid. Introverts are different. They sometimes initiate social interactions with one or two good friends or family members. And finally, the schizoid has no introspection, is utterly incapable of introspecting, of seeing himself or herself as he is or she is. Schizoid has zero self-awareness. Schizoid would deny the most obvious facts about his or her life and personality. The introvert is exactly the opposite. The introvert spends an ordinate amount of time, actually most of his life or her life, introspecting. Introversion is another name for exaggerated, out-of-control, dysregulated introspection. The introvert spends 80% of her resources on studying herself, on minutely documenting every quirk, every dimension, every mishap and every happening within her soul. She is the chronicler of her own internal environment, including her internal objects and introverts. The introvert is focused like a laser beam on herself and does little else. The schizoid is exactly the opposite. Schizoid rejects self-knowledge and self-awareness, defends against them. Schizoid has alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control. Schizoid is unlikely to acknowledge shortcomings, failings, mistakes. Schizoid would defend ferociously against any attempt to define him or her, to describe him or her, to provide him or her with insight. Schizoids are against insight. They reject insight. They become almost psychopathic, almost defined when you try to introduce insight and self-awareness into their lives. Introvert welcomes insight and welcomes self-awareness. It's very common for an introvert to latch onto a therapist, for example, and over-attacks the therapist, become very clinging and demanding and needy, because the therapist can provide insight. The introvert's need for insight, the introvert's need for self-awareness, the introvert's need for self-knowledge is insatiable. There's no limit. And if you let the introvert, she will take over your life demanding minute responses and demanding repeated reassurances and analysis. The introvert over-thinks herself. Schizoid is the absolute exact opposite. He doesn't want to hear anything about himself. Schizoid is a surface phenomenon. The surface is he has no depth. Schizoid has no core. Its emptiness masquerading as presence. Schizoid is about absence. Introvert, introversion is about too much presence. The introvert is too present in her own life. And she sucks other people in like a black hole. But it's not a black hole. There's a lot there. She sucks them in because she wants additional insight. She wants input. She wants feedback. The schizoid is exactly the opposite. Schizoid pushes people away because he does not want to know anything about himself. He wants to remain on the surface because all he has is a surface. If anyone goes deep, they find a black hole, void, emptiness, howling winds. Schizoid personality disorder is defined in the dictionary of the American Psychological Association as a personality disorder characterized by long-term emotional coldness, absence of tender feelings for others, lack of desire for and enjoyment of close relationships, and indifference to praise or criticism and to the feelings of others. The eccentricities of speech, behavior or thought that are characteristics of schizotypal personality disorder are absent in those with schizoid personality disorder. Let's delve a bit deeper. Horat Goldman is the editor of Review of General Psychiatry, published by Prentice Hall. He says, the person with schizoid personality disorder sustains a fragile, emotional equilibrium by avoiding intimate personal contact, thereby by minimizing conflict that is poorly tolerated. Schizoids are often described even by the nearest and dearest in terms of automatons, robots. Schizoids are uninterested in social relationships. They are utterly turned off by interactions with other people. They have a very limited emotional repertory. It is not that they do not have emotions, but they express emotions poorly and intermittently they have poor effect or lack of effect or flat effect. Schizoids appear cold, appear to be stunted, flat, zombie-like, dead, dead inside. The most common phrase when people come across a schizoid, they are likely to say, she's dead inside. She had died a long time ago. She doesn't know it and doesn't realize it. Consequently, exactly like introverts, schizoids are loners. Schizoids confide only in first degree relatives, but maintain no other close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. They are not a single friend or a single family member, and that's just about it. Naturally, schizoids gravitate into solitary activities and they find solace and safety in being constantly alone. Their sexual experiences are sporadic and limited, if at all. Finally, they cease altogether. Schizoids are unhedonic. They find nothing pleasurable, nothing attractive, but they are not necessarily dysphoric, said or depressed. Some schizoids are asexual. They resemble the cerebral nostasis. Schizoids pretend to be indifferent to praise, criticism, disagreement and corrective advice, but deep inside, they are not. They get hurt. It's painful. Schizoids are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable and narrowly restricted routines. For example, they are very likely to travel. They are very likely to be afraid of traveling, because they feel unsafe. They feel at risk. Now, if you are an introvert, you are unlikely to engage in reckless behaviors, impulsive behaviors, unlikely to disinhibit yourself with substances. But if you are schizoid, you are likely to do all these. Schizoids have these bouts, especially if they are also psychopaths. You remember that the schizoid core is at the heart of narcissism, at the heart of psychopathy, and ultimately at the heart of borderline personality disorder, because it's a form of emotional dysregulation coupled with psychopathy. So the schizoid core is an engine. It's empty, but it's exactly like a black hole. It has a lot of energy. So it's like an engine. And sometimes with the schizoid, this core generates impulsive, reckless behavior, disinhibited behaviors, dysregulated, unboundary behaviors. It never, ever happens with an introvert. It's a crucial distinction. The introvert never engages in dysregulated, unboundary, impulsive, reckless, defined behaviors. Introversion is a state of being predominantly interested in one's own mental self, one's own personality, one's own psychosocial and psychobiological history. It's a preoccupation with the self. It's constant, obsessive, compulsive introspection. Introverts are perceived as reserved or reflective because they're busy. They're busy thinking about themselves. You could conceive of introversion as a dimension of extreme narcissism. Some psychologists characterize introverts as people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction. It's like Jung. Jung said the same, although he focused on what he called mental energy. Don't ask. Some modern conceptions of introversion disagree. They say that actually introverts find pleasure in solitary activities such as reading, writing, or meditating. An introvert enjoys time spent alone, finds less reward in time spent in large groups of people. You are very unlikely. Ever to find an introvert at a club or in a bar or in a party, an introvert would never do this. Ever. And if you see an introvert in this location, someone in these locations, and he looks shy and anxious and withdrawn and avoidant, that's not an introvert. That's someone with social anxiety or social phobia or it's someone who is a psychopath. So introverts are easily overwhelmed by too much stimulation from social gatherings and engagement. Introversion is about being quiet, being minimizing, stimulating external environment. Introverts absolutely avoid assiduously and religiously environments with multiple people. Introverts concentrate on a single activity at a time. They are likely to kind of observe situations before they participate in these situations. And they're very, very hypervigilant and very careful and very cautious and very paranoid and very reticent and very reluctant and so on. They're very analytical. Before they say anything, they analyze it like a thousand times and they analyze it in conjunction with and in respect to their perception of themselves. So kind of how would it reflect on me or does it reflect me accurately? Susan Cain had written the book Quiet, The Power of Introverts and she defines introversion and extroversion as preferences for different levels of stimulation. She said and she's correct, it's nothing to do with shyness. Shyness is a fear of social judgment, fear of humiliation and therefore it's a very close cousin to avoidance, avoidant personality disorder, for example. It has even affinity with covert narcissism. But introverts are not like that. When we mistake introversion for shyness, it's a common error. Introversion is not shyness, it's not avoidance. Introversion is a preference. It's a choice. Shyness stems from distress. Introversion leads to strength. Introverts prefer solitary to social activities, but they don't fear social encounters the same way that shy people do. They just don't want. They're overwhelmed. They're overstimulated so they avoid them. So Susan Cain argues that modern western culture misjudges the capabilities of introverted people and that it's very wasteful of talent, energy and happiness. Cain describes how society is biased against introverts and that people are taught from childhood that to be sociable is to be happy. We are conditioned. If you're in a group of people, you should be happy. If you're not happy, something's wrong with you. Introversion is now considered somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. And Cain says that introversion is not a second class trait, both introverts and extroverts and rich society. Back to Iseng, who is the father of all this and also the culprit, the perpetrator of most of our misunderstandings and nonsensical exceptions of introversion and extroversion. Iseng, to remind you, described extroversion, introversion as a degree to which a person is outgoing and interactive with other people. So Iseng's kind of three-tiered, three-tier personality structure is heavily dependent on observations. In other words, it's anecdotal. It's phenomenological if you wish to be charitable. Later iterations of Iseng's model were even less rigorous because they relied on dictionaries. I'm not kidding you're not. On words in dictionaries, in lexicals. These behavioral differences are presumed to be the result of some brain physiology which had never been demonstrated or proved. Iseng associated, for some oblivious reason, cortical inhibition and excitation with the ascending reticular activation system, a pathway located in the brain stem, mind you, the reptile part. Extroverts, he said, seek excitement and social activity in an effort to raise their naturally low arousal level, while introverts tend to avoid social situation in an effort to avoid raising their naturally high arousal level too far. So Iseng designated extroversion as one of his three major traits, as I said, there's the PEN model, psychoticism, extroversion and neuroticism. He originally suggested that extroversion is a combination of two major tendencies, impulsivity or impulsiveness and sociability. Later, Iseng added several other more specific traits, liveliness, activity level, excitability, etc. And these traits are further linked in his personality model to even more specific habitual responses such as parting. Iseng compared extroversion to the four temperaments of ancient medicine, with choleric and sanguine temperaments equating to extroversion and melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments equating to introversion. And today our view of introversion and extroversion is heavily influenced by Iseng's model and by his tendency to link it to some mysterious, hitherto to be proven dynamics in the brain which are supposedly genetically and hereditarily determined. Okay, what about shyness? Shyness is a tendency to feel awkward, to feel worried, concerned, tense during social encounters, especially with unfamiliar people. Severely shy people have physical symptoms, they blush, they sweat. Skin conductance changes, the heart pounds, blood pressure, upset stomach, you name it. They develop negative feelings about themselves, they develop worries about how other people view them and they tend to become avoidant. They have a tendency to withdraw from social interactions. The thing is that most people are shy all the time. Whenever you meet someone new, whenever in a new situation, someone you tend to be shy, shyness seems to be a reflexive and very common response. But when it is intense, dysregulated and takes over, that's when we begin to discuss a kind of pathology. So as the encyclopedia of psychology says, most people feel shy at least occasionally. Some people shyness is so intense, however, that it can keep them from interacting with others even when they want to or need to, leading to problems in relationships and at work. Shyness is a personality trait. It's most likely to occur, as we said, in unfamiliar setting, environments and situations. But it hinders, it obstructs, it's dysfunctional and it metastasizes. So it starts as a kind of hyper-vigilant response to unfamiliar settings, but it takes over. And then you begin to be shy in familiar situations and relationships. You begin to avoid objects. I mean, other people, you begin to be apprehensive. You begin to feel uncomfortable inept. You develop a low or fluctuating sense of self-worth, low self-esteem, negative self-image, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes cancerous. It becomes malignant. Shyness perpetuates and enhances itself. It's a self-reinforcing mechanism. Sometimes Shyness vanishes, fades away, but that's actually extremely rare. There's a lot of data in studies suggesting that three personality types, evident in infancy, easy, slow to warm up and difficult, tend to change as children mature. Extreme traits become less pronounced and personalities evolve in predictable patterns over time. But the tendency to internalize or externalize problems, this tendency remains pretty constant. And by the way, also attachment styles, they're pretty constant. So individuals who are shy, they are shy because they tend to internalize their problems. They dwell on problems internally instead of expressing problems, sharing, communicating their concerns. And this internalization leads to disorders like depression and anxiety. Humans experience shyness in different degrees and different areas. But it's all pervasive. If it permeates everything, ultimately you will end up developing depression and anxiety. So shyness is a form of discomfort. It's because, very often it's because the person feels clueless. The person misinterprets, social and sexual cues is bound and apt to misbehave, to react wrongly. So people with autism spectrum disorder, for example, also tend to develop shyness. It's the difficulty of knowing what to say, what to do in social situations. A crippling physical manifestation of uneasiness which can culminate in severe anxiety and panic attack. Shyness involves symptoms. It's quite devastating. The person feels that she's boring or that she's bizarre. Or then she attempts to overcompensate to try to create interest and this alienates people further. So she doesn't know when to smile, she doesn't know how to engage in conversation. When to assume a relaxed posture, when to make good eye contact. When to respond to sexual cues and which social cues to respond to and how to do that. So there's a lot of dysregulated and boundary sexual promiscuity. Shyness becomes not only a second nature, it becomes the first nature. It determines actually the manifestation and expression of all other personality dimensions, traits and it is behavioral determinant. It's also socially self-reinforced because people tend to perceive shy people negatively. People react very negatively to shy people, especially in cultures that are extroverted cultures. Like for example the West, United States, United Kingdom. Sociability is considered a sign of health, especially mental health. And if you avoid people, if you withdraw and so on, something's wrong with you. Shy individuals are distant, they are not conversational and other people form poor impressions of shy people. Consider them standoffish or snobbish or crazy or stupid or something. People who are not shy are a fraud. They may even be aggressive, but their perceived as okay. These are perceived as variations of a healthy theme, but everyone is critical towards shy people. Everyone is trying to get shy people out of their shells, kind of, motivate them to not become shy. When people try to draw out a shy person, even if they are kind, if they are well-intentioned, the exercise backfires because it focuses attention on the individual who is shy anyhow and increases self-consciousness, a sense of awkwardness and shyness. But what's the difference between shyness and introversion? Shyness actually captures a family of afflictions, a family of disorders, including timidity, a prehension emitting new people, bashfulness, diffidence, reluctance into assert oneself, a prehension and anticipation, dissipatory anxiety, general fear of potential interaction, intimidation, object of fear, not a low self-confidence but fear. So shyness is a catch-all umbrella term. But in some cases what appears to be shyness is actually reservation or introversion. It's a character trait which causes an individual to voluntarily avoid excessive social quota because of over-stimulation, causes an individual to be terse and abrupt in current in communication, but introverts avoid social contact, minimize communication, not because of discomfort, fear, anxiety, apprehension or lack of confidence. I repeat this because it's again a crucial differential diagnostic feature Introverts avoid people, not because they experience discomfort, not because they're apprehensive, not because they lack confidence, not because they hate people. Introverts avoid people because people over-stimulate them, so introverts are not shy, but they simply have a preference in order to avoid over-stimulation. Schizoids avoid people because they derive no benefit from social interactions, they find social interactions boring. So schizoids are boring, introverts are over-stimulated, shy people are anxious and fearful. Introversion is a personal preference, shyness is a form of distress. Bernardo Cauducci, professor of psychology, emphasizes that introverts choose to avoid social interactions because they are under pressure in social interactions owing to over-stimulation because they derive no reward, no other reward. So there's a surplus of sensory input, it's overwhelming, but they're getting nothing to compensate for it. Shy people are simply afraid, they're anxious. There's been a lot of research which had demonstrated that shyness overlaps with introversion and neuroticism, negative emotionality, but only very, very mildly, only in the fringes. In other words, these are not the same phenomena. Low societal acceptance of shyness or introversion reinforce shy or introverted behaviors owing to a lowering of self-confidence, but the etiology, the motivation, couldn't be more different. Schizoids are not introverts, introverts are not shy. Shyness and introversion outwardly manifest as social withdrawal. There's tendencies to avoid social situations, especially unfamiliar ones, but research is clear that shyness and introversion possess clearly distinct motivational forces, lead to uniquely different personal and peer reactions, and cannot be described as the same. Again, I refer you to Susan Cain's book, Quiet, published in 2012. Shyness introversion is involving being differently social, preferring one-on-one of small group interactions. The introvert is not antisocial or asocial, but simply has a preference for one-on-one. The introvert will never go to a party, the introvert will never go to a club, the introvert will never go to a bar, the introvert will try her best to not travel with big groups of people, organized tour. So, unique physiological responses are also attendant upon these states. What about social phobia? So, extreme shyness may amount to social phobia. Actually, in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 1980, they identified social phobia as a form of malignant shyness, extreme shyness. But when the DSM-4 was published 14 years later, 1994, it was converted to social anxiety disorder and they said it's little to do with shyness. But today, more recent studies demonstrate a very close correlation between shyness and social anxiety disorder. So it seems that social anxiety and social phobia are correlated with shyness, social inhibition, they are correlated with shyness. Back to introversion. Introversion is a basic personality trait. It's a preference for the inner life of the mind over the outer world of other people. One of the big five dimensions that define all personalities includes introversion. Introversion is a continuum. The opposite is extroversion. Compared to extroverts, introverts enjoy subdued and solitary experiences. Introverts do not fear others. Introverts do not dislike others. They are not shy. They are not plagued by loneliness. They never feel lonely. So introverts are going to avoid crowded situations, clubs, parties, bars, overcrowded workplaces. These are torture for introverts because of the overstimulation. They enjoy one-on-one engagement in calm environments. It's a nervous system issue, probably. Evidence suggests that the brains of introverts are a bit different as far as dopamine. But again, it's scant evidence. And so I hope that I made the distinctions clear. It's not easy to distinguish these. You need to be clinically adept. You need to be exposed to these various disorders. But the rules of thumb are pretty simple. Introverts avoid overstimulation and overstimulation environments. Schizoids avoid all environments with other people. Introverts avoid the environment. Introverts avoid other people, not because they don't like other people, not because they don't enjoy the company of other people, but because they need to take it one person at a time. Schizoids avoid other people. Because they don't enjoy the company of other people. Introverts are incapable of impulsive, reckless, defined behavior. Schizoids are. Schizoids are capable. Introverts cannot survive in an over-taxing, over-stimulating environment like a nightclub or a cruise. Schizoids can and often do. Actually, psychopaths seek such environments occasionally if they're shy, if they're anxious or depressed psychopaths. So the behaviors tell a part. The introvert is heavily invested emotionally, analytically, intellectually in analyzing herself all the time. That's her main preoccupation. The schizoid never does this, avoids it actively because there's nothing there. It's a surface phenomenon, a shimmering pond of no depth. The psychopath doesn't even understand what is introspection or self-awareness. He wouldn't understand it if you try to communicate. So the introverted person is a benign phenomenon, not a pathology. While psychopathy and schizoidism are extreme pathologies on the border of psychosis in some respects. Same goes for borderline personality disorder which combines the worst of both worlds, emotional dysregulation and psychopathy. The tendency to act psychopathically when she decompensates. Thank you for surviving this. Good day. During this winter semester we are going to discuss atypical presentations of narcissism. Sometimes it's difficult to identify a patient or client as a narcissist. It's an outlier. The characteristics, the traits and the behaviors don't amount to what we commonly perceive as narcissism, either overt or covert. What to do with these kind of people? If they have emphasized grandiosity they could as well be psychopaths or borderlines. How do we tell the differences? So the first two lectures are going to deal with a subtype of narcissist known as the schizoid narcissist. It's a very unusual, very bizarre concoction, cocktail of personality disorders. And this comorbidity misleads many diagnosticians and they misdiagnose this type as something else, avoiding personality disorder, a covert narcissist, et cetera, et cetera. I am often asked, narcissists are supposed to be gregarious. They are supposed to be sociable and excitable. They are supposed to garner narcissistic supply by acting pro-socially, by eliciting attention, affirmation, by mingling and mixing up with people. What about narcissists who avoid all social contact? Do not attend any social event. They stay at home, recluses, lone wolves, loners. Doesn't this behavior go against the grain of narcissism? Isn't it the antithesis of narcissism? My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. Some narcissists are also schizoids. There is a comorbidity between narcissistic personality disorder and schizoid personality disorder. Howard Goldman, in the review of General Psychiatry, puts it this way. The person with schizoid personality disorder sustains a fragile emotional equilibrium by avoiding intimate personal contact and thereby minimizing conflict that is poorly tolerated. The problem with schizoid narcissists is that they are often confused with and misdiagnosed as covert narcissists. Both types are shy. Both types are vulnerable and fragile. Both types are socially anxious and avoid social interactions. Both types appear to be at times lacking in effect and unemotional. So it's very easy for a diagnostician to mistake the schizoid narcissists for a covert narcissist. Here are some of the differences. The covert narcissist is likely to create an ideology around his social aversion, around his inability to elicit narcissistic supply directly. He is likely to believe that he is special exactly and precisely because he avoids the classic narcissist ways of obtaining supply. He is likely to consider himself elevated and superior. He is likely, in other words, to consider his social aversion, his social exclusion, his own avoidance as integral parts of his grandiosity. The schizoid narcissists would also do the same, but his ideology would be outward directed, whereas the covert narcissists would say, I don't mingle, I don't mix, I don't socialize, I don't ask people for attention and adulation and admiration and so on and so forth, because I'm beyond that. I don't need it. I am self-sufficient. I am self-contained. I am my own best trend in entertainment, etc. The schizoid narcissists is going to say that he is avoiding society and so on and so forth because people are not up to his standards. They don't appreciate him properly. They discriminate against him, they misjudge him. They don't treat him justly. So the schizoid narcissist ideology is going to be outward directed and alloplastic. He is going to attribute his aversive avoidant behavior to the environment, to deficiencies in the environment, to the misbehavior of other people, while the covert narcissist is going to attribute the very same behaviors to his makeup, to the way he is, to his essence, to his grandiose inflated view of himself. In this sense, the covert narcissist is actually much more autoplastic than alloplastic. So that's the first distinguishing feature, the ideology. Consequently, by the way, schizoid narcissists are in due time much more prone to antisocial psychopathic modes of action. We'll come to it in the second lecture. The second thing is emotional reactivity. Covert narcissists do react emotionally. Most of their emotional reactions are of course negative, envy, anger. So covert narcissists exactly like overt narcissists are unable to experience positive emotions, for example, love, true empathy, compassion, but they are able to experience negative emotions. The schizoid narcissist does not experience any emotions at all. He is totally unemotional. People describe him as robotic. And so all machine-like. So this is a major difference between the two. For example, when the covert narcissist is criticized, when he is humiliated, when he is slighted, the covert narcissist is actually very likely to react with rage. He is likely to act out. He is likely to become a psychopath, a primary psychopath. But when the schizoid narcissist is humiliated or criticized and so on, he's going to brush it off. He's going to devalue the source of the insult, the source of the criticism. And by devaluing the source, he's going to reduce the emotional potency of the narcissistic injury to the point that it's no longer injurious. These are two different mechanisms of coping with ego-distony. The covert narcissist copes with ego-distony by attacking aggressively the sources of discomfort. The schizoid narcissist copes with ego-distony by devaluing them and then easily ignoring them. He appears to be from the outside to observers. The schizoid narcissist appears to be indifferent, apathetic, impervious, unmovable. Next is the issue of sex and sexuality. Most narcissists, both overt and covert, use sex as an instrument. They instrumentalize, they weaponize sex. They leverage sex in order to obtain or acquire a potential partner in a shared fantasy. The shared fantasy could be cerebral. The shared fantasy could be somatic. But the shared fantasy is the organizing principle of classic narcissism, both overt and covert. The narcissist needs to establish a shared fantasy in order to avoid extreme ego-distony and potential modification. The environment is not conducive, is not helpful to the narcissist's inflated grandiose self-image. The environment, other people, circumstances, institutions, they countermand, they counterveil, they attack, they undermine, they sabotage. They challenge the narcissist's grandiosity all the time. The narcissist needs to establish a space, a mental space, coupled with a physical space, the pathological narcissistic space. But he needs to establish a mental space where he is what he believes himself to be. A genius, invincible, godlike, omniscient, omnipotent, etc., etc. And this space is the shared fantasy. But he needs at least one person within the shared fantasy to confirm to him, to affirm to him, to tell him that his false self is not false, that he is not delusional, that his grandiose-inflated self-image is not grandiose and not inflated, that it's all real. And this is the element of fantasy within the shared fantasy. But to acquire someone, to convert someone into a member of such a cult, because it's a cult in essence, to convert someone into becoming a member of such a cult, the narcissist needs to use everything at his disposal to get the other person addicted to create the equivalent of an addiction. And sex is by far the major instrument. So most narcissists go through periods of hyper-sexuality, being sexually hyperactive, creative, imaginative, excited about sex. And this is followed by periods of celibacy, asexuality and sexlessness in relationships. And yes, this applies also to somatic narcissists. They would seek sex but with external partners, outside the bond, outside the diet. On very rare occasions, and there are such occasions, the sex will continue within the diet, within the bond or within the couple, but this is usually because the narcissist is afraid of abandonment. He anticipates imminent abandonment all the time, possibly because he's a paranoid, for example. So such a narcissist will continue to provide sex to his partner, because he's afraid that she will abandon him. And this fear of abandonment, this abandonment anxiety and separation anxiety could be real, could be founded on real life facts, on intentions, on plans, on discoveries, or could be founded on paranoia and natural hypervigilance and suspiciousness. But these are rare occasions. In the vast majority of relationships with narcissists, it starts off with a sexual big bang. Great sex, kinky sex, even sadistic sex, followed later by utter drought, utter famine, total lack of sexuality once the partner had been acquired. Or if the narcissist decides for some reason that the potential partner is no longer potential and no longer a partner in the discard phase, for example. So sex characterizes, permeates, pervades, typifies the behaviors of narcissists. It could be hypersexuality, it could be hyposexuality, it could be asexuality, but sex is in the air. Sex is a major factor, a regulatory factor of the relationship. It serves to regulate the mood and the emotions and the bonding and the attachment and the functionality, operational functionality of the diet of the couple. The narcissist uses sex as a regulatory mechanism. This is not the case with the schizoid narcissist. So both covert and overt are like that. Now, the schizoid narcissist is distinct from the covert narcissist and of course is distinct from the classic narcissist. The schizoid narcissist genuinely has no interest in sex at all. Even in the love-bombing and grooming phases, the initial phases when the schizoid narcissist tries to acquire the partner, tries to convert the potential into an actual source of supply within a shared fantasy. Even in this very, very initial phase, the schizoid narcissist is likely to be hyposexual, is likely to be sexually inactive. Such a schizoid narcissist, for example, never initiates sex. His sex is totally reactive. He reacts when the partner initiates sex, but he would never initiate it himself. His sex is mechanical. It's routine. It lacks imagination and creativity simply because schizoid narcissists do not enjoy sex. There's no pleasure. They are sexually unhedonic. They find no pleasure in sex. But this is typical only of schizoid narcissists. Both overt classic narcissists and covert narcissists actually do enjoy sex. When they have sex, it's just that at a certain point when object constancy is established and abandonment anxiety is ameliorated and reduced, somehow their sex drive vanishes. It's not that their ability to find pleasure in sex vanishes. They still find pleasure in sex. They just don't seek it out. It's like someone who likes to ski. Someone who likes to ski wouldn't spend all his life skiing. He would go on a ski vacation once a year. It's the same with the classic and the covert narcissists, somatic and cerebral. They like sex when they do have it. But they don't pursue sex. They don't initiate sex. They don't regard sex as an integral dimension of a relationship. They place emphasis on other things within the relationship. For example, narcissistic supply, sadistic supply, service provision. Sex comes, sex is at the bottom of the list. With a schizoid narcissists, sex is not on the list at all because it doesn't give him pleasure. It's a chore. It's just something to do. It's a maintenance function. It's boring. It's dull. And very often, many schizoid narcissists report they find sex disgusting, the physical aspect. So here's another very important difference between covert and overt narcissists and the schizoid narcissists. When the schizoid narcissists does engage in sex, it's very crucial what type of schizoid narcissists we are talking about. As you will see, there are several types of schizoid narcissists. When the schizoid narcissists is a sadistic schizoid narcissists, and he does engage in sex, which is very rare, his sex would be kinky and sadistic. He would seek to despoil, degrade, humiliate the partner via the sex. There's a whiff of misogyny if he is a man, a heterosexual man. But it's not really misogyny because schizoid narcissists are unable to experience any emotion, even hatred. So they don't really hate women. It's just that possibly it's maybe resentment that they are forced to be having sex. Whatever the reason may be, it's a transformation of aggression. But that is typical only to the sadistic subtype of the schizoid narcissists. What about the schizoid somatic narcissists? After all, somatic narcissists rely on their bodies, on their sexual prowess, on their long-honed musculature, on their good looks to obtain supply. How does a somatic narcissist cope when he is also schizoid, when there is a comorbidity between somatic narcissism and schizoid personality disorder? In such a case, the somatic narcissists would tend to be autoerotic. He would tend to derive sexual gratification from his own body. He is likely to emphasize and prefer masturbation to actual sexual encounter. He is likely to be a porn consumer or a porn addict. And even when he is with a sexual partner, he is likely to be very egotistical, focus on himself and on his self gratification using the partner's body to masturbate with kind of an animated sex doll or an animated dildo, if that's a female. So the thing is that the overruling organizing principle, the dominant organizing principle of all types of narcissism, including schizoid narcissists, is the shared fantasy. And this creates extreme dissonance and conflict when there is a comorbidity of schizoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. The schizoid wants to avoid people. He doesn't like people. They don't give him pleasure. He doesn't have friends. He barely interacts with his family. He has no sex partners, sexual partners. He is an isolated, solipsistic atom. That's his need. That makes him happy. He is ecosyntonic only when he is solitary, alone. He is a lone wolf, not because he has no other choice, but because this is his choice. But the narcissist needs people. The narcissist is dependent on other people for internal regulation. For example, of his sense of self-worth. He needs people to provide him with supply. He is addicted to other people. He has to be pro-social. If a narcissist is isolated, sequestered, secluded, quarantined away from other people for an extended period of time, he crumbles. He goes through a process called decompensation. He falls apart. His defense mechanisms, including his false self, become disabled. So, narcissists need people. Schizoids avoid people. Schizoids are happy only when they are alone. Narcissists are happy only when they are with other people or at least get feedback from other people. How to reconcile these two? The shared fantasy is the way the narcissist incorporates sources of narcissistic supply within a fantastic space, which will not undermine and challenge his grandiosity. And he creates a shared fantasy with any type of supply of any kind. Narcissists have shared fantasies with friends, with family, with business associates, with intimate partners. Whether the supply is primary or secondary doesn't matter. Supply is obtained only via a shared fantasy. So, if we have a grandiose narcissist who is forced, coerced to establish a shared fantasy in order to obtain supply from other people, but at the same time he is also a schizoid. He has schizoid personality disorder. This kind of narcissist will have an interminable, enduring internal conflict, a dissonance, that they can never resolve. And they are likely to react with animosity, with contempt, with hostility. They are likely to try to disengage from people. In other words, they become approach avoidant. They approach people. That's the narcissistic part. But the minute they get in touch with people one way or another in order to obtain supply, the schizoid part takes over. And then they withdraw in haste and in aggression and rage and anger and contempt and hostility. They become even faintly sadistic within the shared fantasy, within the shared fantasy, with an intimate partner, with a friend, with a business associate. There is some kind of compromise. The schizoid narcissist trains, domesticates his partner, his friends, his business associates, to let him be, to give him his personal space, to leave him alone, to allow him his solitary universe. So within the shared fantasy, over time, the intimate partners of the schizoid narcissist, the business associate, his business associate, his friends, they learn to minimize contact. They understand that the schizoid narcissist has a huge need for solitude. That he is happy only, actually, when he is alone, pursuing his hobbies, reading, writing, watching films, whatever it is that he's doing. When such intimate partners, business associates, friends, family, never mind who, when they try to withdraw too much, because it's difficult to modulate, it's difficult to reach the right balance to get, within the shared fantasy, it's very difficult to get it right. How much should the intimate partner withdraw to what extent? A withdrawal can easily be misinterpreted as abandonment. When the schizoid narcissist is together with an intimate partner in a shared fantasy, and the intimate partner wants to give the schizoid narcissist personal space, personal time, wants to leave him alone to his own solitary devices, the schizoid narcissist very often interprets such behavior as abandonment. And so there are extreme approach behaviors, for example, stalking, hoovering. The relationships with schizoid narcissists are by far the most complex and most unmanageable, because on the one hand the schizoid narcissist pushes people in the shared fantasy away. He wants them gone, he wants to be alone, he's happy only when he's alone, but when they do go away, when they do maintain distance, his abandonment anxiety kicks in and he approaches them aggressively via stalking or hoovering. This is very confusing to the narcissist's human environment, because they don't know what to do, they are at a loss. These are mixed signals. One signal is, I need you, don't abandon me, don't leave me alone. The other signal is, you're bothering me, you're a nuisance, go away, I want to be alone. I'm not happy when you consume my time and impose on my existence. So this suspicious of narcissists reacts with animosity, contempt and hostility to any act of friendliness, to any mindless adulation, to any offered empathy, support, succor, advice even, any attempted intimacy, even sexual advances provoking such a narcissist extreme aggression and it's enormously confusing because it is the narcissist side of the schizoid narcissist who actually signals, come here, come here. I need you, I want you, I want you to give me sex, I want you to give me supply, I want you to give me attention. So he is the one who is interpolating, hailing the others. He is the one who opens the gates, he is the one who invites people into his ambit. And when they do come in, when they are attracted to him, for example, when they seek to have sex with him, talk to him, spend time with him, whatever, the schizoid narcissist then sends the exact opposite signal. What are you doing here? What are you doing here imposing on my time? He regards such overtures of intimacy, such gestures of closeness and attempted friendliness. He regards these as presumptuous, narcissistically injurious, impertinent in positions, encroachment on his personal turf and territory. The schizoid becomes seriously aggressive to the point of violence. The ideal narcissistic supply source of the schizoid narcissist is a commodity like so many grains of rice. The ideal source of narcissistic supply in the schizoid narcissist universe has no face, no identity, is anonymous. So for example, the schizoid narcissist would prefer an audience at a lecture, because an audience at a lecture has no identity or names or faces. He would prefer to have views on his videos. If he makes videos and uploads them to YouTube, he would prefer to have views, many views, but no comments, because comments are personalized. Comments have identity. Views are commoditized. They are anonymous. The ideal narcissistic supply of the schizoid narcissist is a non-existent entity, a number, an abstract, which could be somehow packaged and quantified. A statistic in effect, the highest quality of unadulterated narcissistic supply, in the case of the schizoid narcissist, is statistics. If the schizoid narcissist is also sadistic, the ideal sadistic supply, his victim of sadistic mistreatment, must be personal and intimate. So we see a double, a dual track in schizoid narcissists, sadistic schizoid narcissists. When it comes to narcissistic supply, they want anonymous, faceless, identity-less narcissistic supply, adulation, admiration, attention. But when it comes to sadistic supply, when it comes to the ability to derive gratification by inflicting pain, these kinds of narcissists prefer personal, intimate, identifiable people. So they reserve their intimacy to sadistic encounters. Their intimacy equals sadism. The reason is very simple. These people grew up as children, identifying attachment and bonding with pain and hurt. As far as they are concerned, any type of attachment, any type of bond, any type of relationship has to revolve around pain and hurt and disillusionment. And so they try to recreate this whenever they do have intimacy. They introduce pain, hurt, humiliation, rejection into the relationship to make it understandable, comprehensible. This is, in other words, their comfort zone. Now there are four types of schizoid narcissists. The first one I've mentioned, that's the sadistic schizoid narcissists. Now many schizoid narcissists end up being sadistic. Because the approach avoidance is so extreme and so frequent, they feel under siege. They feel that people will not let them be. They feel surrounded. So they have to become extremely aggressive and they resent people and they hate people. They hate them because they depend on them, but they also hate them because they respond to their signals. And so they are totally trapped and sadism is a way out of this trap. Because sadism allows the schizoid narcissists to recreate a form of intimacy, to actually experience intimacy while maintaining superiority and avoiding real intimacy. Because of course you can't have real intimacy in a sadistic relationship. Now the intimate partners of such sadistic schizoid narcissists, these intimate partners tell themselves, Okay, you know, everyone has his own specialties and eccentricities and flaws. I'm going to compromise. He wants kinky sex. I'm going to give him kinky sex. He wants group sex. I'm going to give him group sex. He wants to humiliate me, despoil me, degrade me. During sex, after sex, verbally, psychologically, in any other way. I will accept it. This is a compromise which is very common in relationships with sadistic schizoid narcissists. Not only by intimate partners, the friends of the schizoid narcissists, they react the same way. That's a first subtype. The second subtype is the paranoid schizoid narcissists. The paranoid schizoid narcissists becomes paranoid and hypervigilant over time. Precisely because of what I've described earlier, he feels that people are encroaching on him, that they are digesting him and gulfing him and meshing him, subsuming him. He feels that he's about to vanish to disappear. He's terrified. So he reacts with paranoia. He's hypervigilant. He scans. Is this person going to try to have sex with me? Is this person going to try to have intimacy with me? Is this person going to try to become my friend, God forbid? So this is the second subtype. The third subtype is the classic avoidant schizoid narcissists. The avoidant schizoid narcissists is a subtype where the narcissism is much stronger than the schizoid features. So this kind of schizoid narcissists would actually be much more sociable, much more pro-social. Would have a career, would be a good team worker, collaborate with other people, but then suddenly would have a period of solitude. He would pack up his things and disappear for a year. He would move to another address or to another country and not inform anyone. He would destroy a pathological narcissistic space and establish a new one, or he would divorce and create a new family. So he would need the break. This kind of avoidant schizoid narcissists is what I call the punctuated narcissism. He needs, he's a narcissist and he's 100% narcissist and then he's a pure schizoid. And then he's a pure narcissist, then he's a pure schizoid. And so actually it's a form of multiple personality disorder in a way. It's a form of dissociative identity disorder. It's a breakup, a breakup of the personality, of the coherence, integrity and cohesion of the personality. The person has in effect two fully functioning modes. One mode is narcissists and one mode is schizoid. They don't intermix, they don't intermingo. This is not approach avoidance. There is no repetition compulsion here. There is simply one personality vanishes and another personality suddenly appears full-fledged, fully fleshed, fully formed and takes over. It takes over for a period and then this personality disappears and the first one reappears. It could be described as extended fuse, but memory is intact and identity is intact. So this is not actually dissociation. I would like to expand a bit on what is a schizoid because I've been using the term schizoid and it would behoove all of you to get a bit deeper into the inner world of the schizoid. Now I'm about to describe the inner universe of the schizoid and in the next lecture I'm going to demonstrate that schizoid and narcissists have identical psychodynamics. That's why I've been advocating since 1995 to unify all the personality disorders into a single diagnosis, but that's the next lecture. Schizoids have very few friends or confidants. They trust only first-degree relatives, but even so schizoids maintain not close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. They pretend to be indifferent to praise criticism, disagreement and corrective advice, though deep inside some of them are not. Do you remember the subtypes? Schizoids are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable and narrowly restricted routines. From the outside, the schizoid's life looks rather less, the schizoid looks adrift, like there's no plan, no connecting thread, he's just floating in space. And exactly like people with autism spectrum disorder type 1 used to be known as Asperger's, exactly like these kind of people, schizoids fail to respond appropriately to social cues. They rarely reciprocate gestures or facial expressions. They rarely smile back. For example, the diagnostic and statistical manual says that they seem socially inept or superficial and self-absorbed. Of course, many narcissists are like that. These are the comorbid narcissists, schizoid and narcissists at the same time. Schizoids enjoy nothing. They seemingly never experience pleasure, they are anecdomic. Even the nearest and dearest often describe the schizoid as an automata, a robot or machine. But the schizoid is not depressed. Schizoid is not dysphoric, he's merely apathetic, indifferent, he's truly indifferent, he's not pretending. Schizoids are uninterested in social relationships, they're bored, they're puzzled by interpersonal interactions. They're incapable of intimacy, they have a very limited range of emotions and effect. Rarely does the schizoid express feelings, either negative or positive, anger, happiness, no way. Flat. I coined the phrase flat attachment and there is the phrase flat effect, and they have flat emotionality. Schizoids never pursue an opportunity to develop a close relationship. Schizoids are asexual, they're not interested in sex. They can engage in sexual activity, nothing's wrong with the machinery, but they don't enjoy it. They don't find pleasure in it, they are very befuddled and perplexed. Why do people pursue sex? What for? It's boring. Consequently, schizoids appear to be called aloof, bland, stunted, flat and zombie-like. They derive no satisfaction from belonging to a close-knit group. They don't like their families. They don't go to church, they don't socialize in the workplace, they don't meander around the neighborhood, they don't even belong to a nation or a club. They rarely get married, they almost never have children. Schizoids are loners. Given the option, they invariably pursue solitary activities or hobbies. Inevitably, schizoids prefer mechanical or abstract tasks or jobs that require such skills. Many coders, computer hackers, crackers and programmers, for example, are schizoids, some mathematicians, some theoretical physicists. They are schizoids. Schizoids are inflexible in their reactions to changing life circumstances and developments. Even if these developments are positive, opportune, they still don't know how to react or how to take advantage of them. And if the developments or life circumstances become adverse, bad, they're equally indifferent. Faced with stress, schizoids may disintegrate, decompensate and experience brief psychotic episodes of depressive illness. But it's going to be very brief. It's going to be reactive and it's going to leave no mark on the schizoid, barely a memory or a trace. Schizoids are often described, as I said, as robots. And I mentioned that they're uninterested in social relationships or interactions, they have a limited emotional repertory and so on. But it's important to emphasize, it's not that they do not have emotions. The problem is not with the underlying emotionality. Problem is, they can't express emotions. They express emotions poorly and intermittently. They appear cold, stunted, flat and zombie-like, but not because they are, but because their emotions never reach the surface. Now imagine this coupled with a narcissist. Narcissists don't have even this. Narcissists have no access to positive emotions, end of story. Many narcissists have access only to extreme negative emotions, so even the negative emotions have to be really, really powerful. So when you have a schizoid narcissist, the situation is really bad, because there, all emotionality is eradicated, eliminated totally, including negative emotionality. Many scholars say that schizoids are not human and that's the only case in clinical literature where people are described as not human by scholars, not by YouTube, not by YouTubers. So these people are loners. When they need to confide or to confess or to consult, they seek first-degree relatives. But even this doesn't create any bonding, any attachment. It's like there's no cumulative memory. Like every minute is a new minute, every start is a new day, and every day is a new start. And this is a typical dissociative feature where you don't, if you are the schizoid narcissist friend, you don't have credit. There's no deposits in the emotional bank. You start with the schizoid narcissist every day as though you have just met. He has no emotional, institutional memory. Your relationship is like a string of beads. Each bead is a totally separate moment. And each bead has a beginning and an end. And no bead is connected to any other bead except through this thin imaginary thread. But this extreme dissociation helps the schizoid narcissist to cut off intimacy, to disappear, to vanish, to extricate himself, to withdraw, to isolate, to firewall. Because where there's no attachment, and no bonding, and no love, and no affection, and no compassion, and no empathy, it's easy to walk away. And walking away is the schizoid narcissist number one and two and three coping strategy. Things get rough, intimacy threatens, sex is demanded, relationship is bargained. Someone makes his expectations, the schizoid narcissist walks away. To do that, he needs to be emotionally uninvolved, or in clinical terms, he needs to be de-affected. So they naturally gravitate to solitary activities. They find solace and safety in being constantly alone. And their sexual experiences such as they are, they are sporadic, limited. And finally, usually, they cease altogether. There is this issue of anhedonia. They find nothing pleasurable, nothing attractive. But don't confuse anhedonia with depression. They're not sad, they're not dysphoric, they're not depressed. Even their asexuality is very close to the asexuality of the cerebral narcissist. It's a bit of an ideology, like, you know, I'm as asexual because I'm special. The schizoid narcissist is in a way invested emotionally in his own asexuality. He glorifies it. He renders it, he transforms it into a religion or a ideology that makes him superior. Both schiz, classic schizoids and schizoid narcissists pretend to be indifferent. But they are indifferent not only to criticism and disagreement and corrective advice. They are indifferent also to praise. So whenever they get positive supply, they don't react. Whenever they get negative supply, they don't react. Whenever they criticize, they don't react, they don't react. This is coping strategy number two of the schizoid narcissists. And it sets the schizoid narcissists apart from the classic narcissists and even the covert narcissists. The classic narcissists and the covert narcissists react with extreme narcissistic injury and aggression, narcissistic rage to any attempt to criticize or disagree with them or to give them advice. They perceive this as aggression and they counter react with aggression that feel humiliated to the core. And in extreme cases, they may even decompensate and go through a process known as narcissistic modification. The schizoid narcissist is not like that at all. He does not respond, he does not react. He has poker face. He has flat, flat effect, flat face, monotone voice. He is really machine like. And so you can do anything you want. You can say anything you want to such a narcissist and you will not react. The only way, the only reason we know this person to be a schizoid narcissist is that as opposed to the typical schizoid. The schizoid narcissist has periods of approach. The schizoid narcissist has periods of time where he does try to attract people because he needs supply. And this is the only way we can tell apart real schizoids from schizoid narcissists because real schizoids never approach people. They don't want people end of story. They don't want supply. Thank you very much. They don't want people, I mean they want to be alone. Just leave me alone 100% of the time. The schizoid narcissist needs people, needs people from time to time to replenish the reservoir of narcissistic supply. Both of them are creatures of habit. Both of them are rigid. They have predictable, narrowly restricted routines, as I said. Now, I mentioned the avoidance subtype, the sadistic subtype, the paranoid hypervigilant or referential subtype. That's a subtype of schizoid narcissist who anticipates looming attack. The attack would be an attempt to create intimacy, attempt to have sex with him, attempt to befriend him, attempt to take away his time, his precious time, his precious invady space. So this kind of schizoid narcissist becomes very paranoid. He scans the environment all the time. Who is coming? Who is about to enter my territory? That's hypervigilance. And he's also referential. He tends to assume that people are conspiring and colluding and planning to impose on him intimacy, sex, friendship. Consequently, demands and expectations. So this is the third type. There's a fourth type and the fourth type is the schizo-tipo. The schizo-tipo schizoid narcissist. The schizo-tipo schizoid narcissist is, for example, a conspiracy theorist. Some of who believes in conspiracy theories or in UFOs or in reptilians or in Donald Trump's election victory. These are people who have divorced reality, have suspended reality testing totally and have replaced it with a totally fictitious narrative. A fictitious narrative that caters to very crucial psychological needs and fosters specific psychodynamics. The schizo-tipo schizoid narcissist is a solitary figure, totally alone. And he doesn't approach other people for narcissistic supply. He approaches himself. He has self-supply. His narcissistic supply is himself. He is self-referential. He is also extremely autoerotic. He derives sexual pleasure from his own body. In a variety of ways, including looking at himself in a mirror. So the schizo-tipo lives in an imaginary fictitious universe where things are dictated by theories of the world and theories of mind which have very little to do with reality. He renounces reality and he renounces and denounces and abrogates and gives up on everyone in reality. So not only reality but everyone, people in general. So this is a kind of schizoid narcissist who would go and live in a shed or in a hut, in a forest, all alone. Or he would be homeless. Or he would be in a shelter. And he would avoid people assiduously. And his only form of supply is derived from the inside via the narcissistic, via the conspiracy theory in effect. Via the piece of fiction that he adheres to. Now, this is the end of the first of three lectures. In the next lecture we're going to deal with solutions. Solutions adopted by narcissists in general and schizoid narcissists in particular when they run out of supply. The approach avoidant behavior gradually depletes the number of people, the reservoir of people available to the narcissist. The schizoid narcissist is sending mixed signals. He approaches people and then he avoids them. He solicits narcissistic supply and then he reacts aggressively. He has sex with a potential partner and then he goes asexual. Now gradually people get tired of such a narcissist, more particularly the schizoid narcissist. They get tired of the schizoid narcissist. And ultimately such a narcissist finds himself alone, unable to find alternative sources of supply. How does he cope with this? This is the next lecture. What do narcissists do when they run not only out of narcissistic supply, but when they run out of sources of narcissistic supply. When there's a dawning realization that they can never ever get supply again. What do they do faced with such an apocalypse, such a calamity? There are several solutions, several behavioral modes that they adopt. This is the second lecture. And the third lecture is about the theory, the various psychological theories that connect schizoid personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and schizophrenia. Because there is an affinity as Otto Kahnberg had observed. There is an affinity between narcissistic personality disorder and psychosis. And the schizoid behaviorally is indistinguishable from the psychotic, especially if it's a schizotypal schizoid. So we are beginning to see the connecting lines. We are beginning to realize that the disorders bleed into each other. Narcissists having been exposed to narcissistic injuries, humiliations, degradations, having been insulted, having been rejected and rebuffed. Many, many narcissists end life and their lives as schizoid. They avoid the world because the world is too painful. As they enter the schizoid phase, as they become schizoid narcissists, many of them reject reality to the point of psychosis. So there is an affinity, there's a strong link between schizophrenia, which is a psychotic disorder, narcissism and schizoid personality disorder. And this is the topic of the third lecture. Put together the three lectures constitute one credit for class-to-c personality disorders. And they belong to the psychology track in C.U.P.S. Thank you for listening. So many women are asking to interview me lately that I'm beginning to seriously consider the possibility that I'm actually a desirable man. Well, talk about delusional disorder. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of psychology. And today we are going to discuss a very intricate problem. For those of you who are my students, this is within the unit on presentation intake interviews and what was the last part? Presentation intake up and presenting signs and symptoms. Okay. So here's the question. Even skilled diagnosticians, even diagnosticians, therapists, psychologists with decades of experience in institutional settings find it very difficult to distinguish between psychopathy, autism, schizoid personality and PTSD. Or complex PTSD. Let me repeat. Psychopathy, the extreme form of antisocial personality disorder, autism spectrum disorder, schizoid personality and schizoid personality disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder or straight out post-traumatic stress disorder. These are, they present, the people with these problems present so identically that in the intake interview, the first time the therapist or the diagnostician comes across the patient or the client, it's very difficult to tell them apart. Now we already know that people with borderline personality disorder, emotional dysregulation disorder, people with this disorder are actually indistinguishable from secondary psychopaths when they are exposed to stress, humiliation and rejection. So there is a confluence, there is a confluence or a convergence between borderline personality disorder and secondary, factor 2, psychopathy. But we are talking about factor 1 psychopathy, the classic psychopath, the animal, the beast, the monster, in short, me. Factor 1 psychopathy, someone with autism spectrum disorder, mainly high functioning autism or formerly known as Asperger, level 1 autism, Asperger's disorder, schizoid personality and personality disorder and complex trauma. How do we tell them apart? All four conditions, all four conditions present the same. In all four conditions, there is extreme reduced effect display. Now reduced effect display is a fancy name because we psychologists will like fancy names. It gives us the illusion that psychology is a science. So reduced effect display simply means not showing emotions, flat effect, not displaying any emotional reaction to past events, to present occurrences, to future catastrophizing or speculations, no emotions, no display of emotion, a flat presentation of emotions and a flat presentation of personal experiences. These people describe the most harrowing, most traumatizing, most exceptional, most extreme situations and you don't see a hint of a flicker of anything resembling an emotion on their faces. This is a poker face. And there is reticent self-disclosure. It's like pulling teeth talking to these people. They refuse to kind of come clean. They refuse to share, confess, admit. They refuse to talk. It's very, very difficult to get these kind of people, these kind of patients or clients, to actually talk about their lives, what had happened, how they had felt, what led to these events and how did they extricate themselves and how do they feel about these occurrences nowadays. They absent themselves. They shut themselves off. You can see the curtain falling. You can see there's nobody there suddenly. When you try to talk to them about emotions, about personal experiences, when you try to kind of coerce them or convince them or cajole them into self-disclosure, they become reticent, reluctant and their body language changes. It becomes very defensive or very aggressive for both. And this is common to all four types, including survivors of trauma and including survivors of complex trauma, complex or traumatic stress disorder. So the first thing we see when such a patient or client enters the clinic, the first thing you see is the body language. And the body language is again very defensive and very aggressive, a bizarre mixture, kind of passive aggression. And the second thing you see is that when you try to talk to them, they shut off. They vanish. They absent themselves. And the third thing you see, they refuse to talk about emotions, personal experiences. They refuse to self-disclose and they refuse to attach emotions to anything they divulge on their personal histories. All four types of patients also use language in a highly idiosyncratic way, in a special way. Narcissists abuse language. Narcissists leverage language as a weapon. They use language to be fuddle, to confuse, to gaslight. So they abuse language, but psychopaths, people with autism spectrum disorder, schizoids and victims of trauma, use language not in order to obtain any goal or to score points, as the Narcissist does. They simply corrupt language. They undermine language. They render, it's like their language festers. It's like it became infested or infected with something. First of all, they are likely to use very vulgar, a very vulgar type of language. You know, with obscenities and profanities and so on. The language is likely to be patried, as though it's rotting from the inside. They're likely, whenever they try to communicate something, which is very rare, or if they have to respond to the therapist or the diagnostician or the psychologist, for example, in court mandated evaluations, they tend to play with language. They tend to become ambiguous and equivocal. If you ask them, did you do this and this? They're going to say, how do you define doing this and this? Or they're going to answer in a way which is essentially hair splitting and nitpicking, wiggling their way out, finagling their way out of conundrums and predicaments using language. Language is their exit strategy. They think that if they can redefine and reframe situations, behaviors and traits, they're scot-free, they're home-free. It's like monopoly game. They're playing a game all the time and you can feel it. Their language is a gambit like in chess, so it's very ambiguous and very equivocal and leaves place for vagueness and kind of finagling and wiggling. The language is non-committal. It's clinical. It's impersonal. They're likely to describe the most terrifying, traumatizing, horrific experiences in very, very impersonal and clinical terms as though they were talking about the third party at making clinical observation for some medical chart or some paper about to publish in an academic journal. They corrupt the language and they render it circumspect and cynical and cold and detached. And so this is the fourth thing you notice, the misuse of language. All four types of patients, the psychopath, the autism, the autist, the schizoid and the traumatized victim, trauma victim. All four types of patients are inaccessible. You feel that there's a kind of transparent partition that you cannot penetrate. They look at you. They're watching you and you're watching them through a glass, darkly. There's something standing between you and them. It's ethereal on one hand, but on the other hand it's very real and it tends to regenerate all the time. The more intimate the conversation becomes, the more the clinician tries to broach difficult topics, painful topics or threatening topics, the more the partition solidifies, becomes thicker. And so there is this membrane between the patient and the diagnostician or therapist. The patient is inaccessible. The client is sealed off from the world when you talk to a psychopath or trauma victim or schizoid or a autistic person. You feel that he is ensconced and cocooned in his own tiny bubble of a universe. Drifting away from you, never mind how desperately you're trying to reach out and hold on to them. They're out of grasp. They're like slimy goldfish. You can never get hold of them. You cannot nail them down. You cannot get them to commit even linguistically. And so they're sealed off and they are emotionally numb. They're incapable of true intimacy, true communication, let alone intimacy. You can never get anywhere with them because you keep getting the feeling that there is somebody there, but out of reach, out of reach. And they kind, you feel that you're being reduced by these patients into caricature, a two-dimensional icon avatar, a symbol. They don't relate these four types of patients, don't relate to the clinician or the therapist as another human being. They reduce him to a function and then they become very defensive and they try to isolate themselves from the situation and from the other person. That's the therapist. And so you have this eerie feeling that the temperature had dropped. The oxygen had been sucked out of the room and you're in the presence of someone who is suspending their humanity. These people, all four types, the psychopath, the schizoid, the trauma victim, the borderline which is a form of psychopath and the autist. Deep inside, we now know from multiple studies, starting in the 90s, we know that deep inside they harbor, they have the experience, self-loathing, self-hating. And so sometimes they act out. They act out by becoming self-defeating or self-destructive or self-trashing or aggressive or passive aggressive. And so even the schizoid who is utterly detached ostensibly from the outside world, happy in his own nest, in his own den, happy, thriving in his solitude. Even the schizoid actually has moments of rage and acting out and reaching out desperately, trying to connect. Actually, the prevailing theory of schizoid personality is that the schizoid defense is an attempt to maintain object relations, an attempt to maintain relationships with other people by somehow rejecting them, by somehow isolating them. Because even rejecting someone, even isolating yourself from someone, is a form of connection. So it's one step removed from psychosis or schizophrenia. That's why it's called schizoid, almost schizophrenia. So even the schizoid has these moments of rejecting others, sometimes aggressively rejecting others, especially when he feels uncomfortable or disconfident by the presence of others, when he feels overwhelmed. And so all these four patients are self-destructive, and all of them act out one way or another. The psychopath is defined and contumacious and reckless and impulsive, borderline of course, when she becomes a secondary psychopath. The trauma victim is disregulated, heavily dysregulated emotionally. She has typically modulability. And I'm saying she because majority of victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder are women. Not all, but a majority. Now one thing, so to summarize this part, as a clinician, as a diagnostician, as a therapist, there's a conundrum. How to tell this apart? Of course, you wouldn't treat a trauma victim as you would treat a psychopath. You wouldn't administer the same techniques to a borderline as you would to a autistic person. And definitely would not try to treat someone with autism spectrum disorder as you would someone with schizoid personality disorder. These are seriously different problems, issues in mental health. And they require totally different approaches. It's very dangerous to misdiagnose. And misdiagnosis is very common in clinical practice, precisely because all the presenting signs and symptoms on the face of it, and initially, sometimes for five sessions, ten sessions, they seem to be the same. Only when you delve deeper, you begin to discover differences. For example, attitude to sex and intimacy. The psychopath's attitude to sex and to sexuality, psychopath's psychosexuality, is very unique and is not typical of the schizoid of the trauma victim, the borderline, and definitely not of someone with autistic personality, autistic disorder. So the psychopath, first of all, makes a distinction between sex and intimacy. There's the Madonna-Hore complex, which also applies to narcissists. The psychopath is very likely to regard his sexual partner, even his long-term sexual partners, as intimate. He doesn't do intimacy at all, not with his sexual partners, not with anyone. So consequently, his sex is devoid of intimacy. Even when it looks outwardly as intimate, it's not. Psychopaths regard their bodies as dispensable, disposable objects. So they trash themselves, they self-trash. Sexually, it's very common for a psychopath to engage in very extreme sexual practices, reckless or not. Sexual practices which objectify his or her body. Sexual practices which trash the psychopath. Disrespect is boundaries, physical or otherwise. It is only in sex that the psychopath allows himself to be abused in effect by his sexual partners. So they regard their bodies as a kind of coin or commodity. They leverage their bodies, the psychopaths leverage their bodies and use them to obtain goals. The goals could be instant gratification, satisfaction of an impulse. Harvey Cleckley said in his famous Mask of Sanity, the masterpiece Mask of Sanity, Harvey Cleckley said that in 1942, that psychopaths, the sexual activities of psychopaths are like scratching your back. He said that psychopaths act on a whim. They rarely have any deep motivation to engage in sex. They engage in sex because they want to scratch their backs. It's just an impulse, an itch. They scratch the itch. So sex for them is utterly meaningless. Their bodies are utterly meaningless. Actually in the psychopath's life, everything is meaningless. And so it's very shocking, very unsettling. I would even say horrifying and gross to observe the sexual history of a psychopath. In the sexual history of a psychopath, he or she subjects herself to the most degrading and dispoiling treatment by others. She is likely to find herself in situations which are not healthy or normal person, not even a mentally ill person. Would find herself or himself. Psychopaths are unlikely to have sexual boundaries. They're unlikely to be sexually dysregulated. They're likely to engage in extreme and reckless sex from a very, very early age. It's very common in the history of psychopaths to engage, for example, in group sex in teenage years. Or to give a series of 100 blowjobs. On consecutive days to all the boys in the school. It's utterly, utterly normal occurrence in the sexual history of psychopaths. And the same people, psychopaths, usually develop comorbidities or dual diagnosis like eating disorders and some of them suffer from body dysmorphia. Although this is much more common in secondary psychopathy and therefore in borderline personality disorder. So attitude to body, attitude to sex, attitude to the bodies of other people. They're willingness to self-trash sexually. They're willingness to be objectified, degraded and dispoiled. Subjecting oneself to these situations, seeking them actually. This is a hallmark, a major hallmark by the way. According to Cleckley and many other authorities, it's a major hallmark of psychopathy. And it is a differential diagnosis in the sense that it does not exist. In trauma victims among people with autism, schizoids and narcissists. It is common among psychopaths all year long. And it's common among borderlines when they switch into a psychopathic state, secondary psychopathic state. So this is the first differentiating or differential sign. Now psychopaths are deceitful. They're deceitful, they're disloyal, they're unfaithful, they're manipulative, they're parasites. Psychopathic women are usually gold diggers. They're gold oriented. This is not, this is another differential diagnosis. This is not the case with schizoids, with borderlines, with people with autism spectrum disorder and with trauma victims. Only psychopaths are like this. So when you see a history of deceitfulness, cheating for example in multiple relationships, serial cheating, betrayal, a history of adultery and unfaithfulness, extramarital sex, non-concentral, extramarital sex, when you see a history of parasitism, when you see a history of antisocial even criminal activities, actions. When you see extreme gold orientation which is without scruples, without boundaries, without rules and without limits, which is reckless and callous and ruthless. When you see these things, this is a psychopath. Finally a psychopath is likely to be very devaluing and humiliating of others. Psychopaths hold everyone in disdain and contempt, which is not the case with the narcissist by the way. The narcissist does have role models. The narcissist tends to adopt public intellectuals, important politicians, footballers, you name it. He tends to adopt public figures and idealize them and idolize them. This is not the case with the psychopath. The psychopath holds everyone, and when I say everyone I mean everyone in disdain and contempt. So psychopaths are compelled, it's almost compulsive, they're compelled to devalue you, to humiliate you. And this is apparent and transparent in the therapy setting where the psychopath embarks almost immediately on doubting the therapist's credentials, experience, knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, etc. Devaluation and humiliation, degradation and dispoiling of other people are psychopathic acts when they are indiscriminate and when they don't target only specific individuals like intimate partners. Psychopaths are also very hyper-vigilant and very paranoid, much more so than trauma victims, much more so than trauma victims. So when we see someone who is viciously, viciously, contemptuous, disdainful, hatefully devaluing, totally hyper-vigilant and paranoid, that's likely to be a psychopath, not a trauma victim. The etiologies of this identical presentation, the etiologies couldn't be more different, and this is why it makes it crucial. It's crucial to apply the differential diagnosis, diagnostic signs and symptoms and criteria that I've just described, because if you get it wrong, you can, as a clinician, as a therapist, you can wreak havoc and create enormous damage. The etiologies of these four groups or classes of disorders is very different. The psychopath has no empathy. He has no positive emotions. The narcissist has no access to his positive emotions, but he does have positive emotions. The psychopath does not have positive emotions. There's nothing to access. Nothing there. He has no empathy. He has nothing to report. His self-reporting is denuded, minimal, or sometimes non-existent, not because he's playing mind games or not because it's a power play, although they're prone to both. It's because he has nothing to report. There's nothing there. So the psychopath is goal-oriented. He defines himself via his environment. He derives his identity from his actions and from his environment, and this is why his goal orientation is extreme. Psychopaths are primitive two-state devices, almost in animals, almost in an animalistic level. Feel good, feel bad. So there are two two-state devices. They mimic humans because they are great mimics. They have thespian skills, exactly like the narcissist, but it's mimicry. It's not real. The etiology of the psychopath is severe damage, probably cerebral, probably brain damage, to the ability to experience empathy or positive emotions. That's the root of psychopathy in effect. The autistic person is oblivious to social and sexual cues. He cannot read other people. He cannot read their body language. His thinking is concrete, so he is incapable of understanding and applying metaphors, similes, jokes. He has a problem with humor. So his language is very concrete and very simplified. It's a dictionary language. It's like it's a walking, talking lexicon or dictionary. So he doesn't understand other people. He doesn't get them. He has no clue. He's clueless, and this renders his reactions weird, even antisocial sometimes, unintentionally. The autistic person is reluctant or unable to verbalize his internal world, his inner world. And that is partly because this inner world overwhelms him, and partly because he's been rejected all his life, owing to anticipated rejection. He doesn't want to expose himself. He doesn't want to be mocked, shunned, ostracized, ignored, punished. The schizoid just wants to be left alone. That's all he wants. He is incapable of strong emotions. He is incapable of intense experiences. The schizoid flatlines into solitude. The schizoid's solitary confinement is his comfort zone. It defies belief because we're all social creatures, even narcissists, even psychopaths. But not the schizoid. He thrives when he's alone. And the survivor of trauma, she represses, she numbs her emotions because she finds her emotions and the memories that are attached to these emotions, threatening. She feels that she will be overwhelmed if she allows herself to directly touch upon and interact with what had happened to her, with her trauma. So she's reluctant to revisit her harrowing experiences, and she's triggered by any attempt to be intimate with her in any way. Though all four present identically in clinical settings, you need to dig deeper. You need to delve deeper. You need to ask yourself, how do they regard their bodies? How do they regard sex and intimacy? Are they deceitful and faithful, goal-oriented, parasitic, to the extreme? Are they immediately vicious in devaluing and humiliating other people? Are they hypervigilant to the point of paranoid ideation? And if the answer to all this is yes, that's a psychopath. And you did your job. Okay, survivors. This is the third in a series of three videos. I recommend that you watch the first two. And all three videos deal with a combined, combined construct of a schizoid narcissist. Ostensibly, an internal contradiction, mutually exclusive. The narcissist needs other people. His pro-social depends on other people for the regulation of his internal environment, especially his sense of self-worth. The schizoid avoids other people at all costs. He doesn't have sex. He doesn't have friends. He barely communicates with a single member of his family. He finds people boring. He finds sex dull and unpleasurable. He is confined to his own solitary existence as a monk would. So how do these two sit together? Perhaps before we come to this, to clarify something. In earlier videos, I said that trauma is not an objective event or certain circumstances. Trauma is a subjective experience. It is the way you react to external circumstances, to other people's behavior or misbehavior, to natural disasters, to man-made disasters. Trauma is the way you react. It's a reactive pattern. I can take ten people, subject them to exactly the same experience, replicated identically, and only two of them would be traumatized. The other eight would not be. But one thing I neglected to mention is that trauma could be endogenous or exogenous, internally generated or externally generated. Trauma could be a reaction to an experience that emanates from and is contained inside the mind, has no outside correlates. Consider for example chronic illness. Consider mental illness. Mental illness and chronic illness generate trauma. But they are not external events. They don't depend on anyone's misconduct. They are not derivatives of any external or outside disaster, catastrophe or calamity. Mental illness is essentially biological in most cases. It's a medical condition. So is chronic illness. People react with trauma to internal processes, to internal dynamics. This trauma generates loads of anxiety and depression. I would say that endogenous traumas, traumas which are reactions to internal processes, endogenous traumas are even more anxiety producing and more depression inducing than exogenous traumas. Because when the enemy is you, when you are your own enemy, when your brain and your mind are your worst foes, where would you run? Where would you escape to? You can escape an enemy. You can escape an adversary. You can escape adverse circumstances. You can escape the police. Where are you going to escape your mind to? Where are you going to go to? Your mind is with you at all times. Your body is with you at all times. Where are you going to flee your chronic condition? So endogenous traumas induce much more anxiety and depression than exogenous traumas. Gradually over time people try to develop strategies to cope with this permanent, all permeating ubiquitous anxiety and depression. Depression that is kind of a democless sword hanging in the balance about looming imminent, ambient depression and anxiety. People try to develop strategies, coping strategies and these coping strategies are what we call personality disorders. One coping strategy is to say I am fearless, I am resilient, I am strong, nothing and no one can break me, not even myself. That is the psychopathic reaction. It's defined, it's consummations, it's reckless, it lacks impulse control. Another solution is to say I'm God, nothing can touch me, I'm untouchable, I'm invulnerable. That is the narcissistic solution. As you see personality disorders are forms, are reactive patterns and one of the main roles of personality disorders is to ameliorate, to reduce and to regulate anxiety, depression, moods and emotions in the wake of trauma and that's why I'm trying to recast personality disorders as post-traumatic conditions. To the issue, how do we connect? How do we connect schizoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder? You remember that my philosophy is that there is only one condition, personality disorder. That has been my position since 1995. I think the ICD, the international classification of diseases, edition 11, is going to reflect this thinking and it's going to have a single personality disorder with dominant traits or emphasize traits, which is what I suggest. So in my dictionary, the very question of how can we reconcile schizoid and narcissistic personality disorders is meaningless because there's only one personality disorder with different emphasis. But we live in DSM land, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, it's latest edition in 2013, still rules the ban and we have to comply, we have to adapt and we have to discuss psychology and psychiatry in terms dictated by the consensus on the orthodoxy if we want to be understood, comprehended and communicated. So schizoid personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, intuitively a connection between these two actually seems plausible. What are narcissists? Narcissists are people who self-sufficiently withdraw from other people. Narcissists are self-contained. They are an ego system. They are self-sufficient. They are solipsistic. They are atomized. They do use and abuse other people, but the same way you eat food, they are creditors, like psychopaths. Narcissists love themselves in lieu of loving others. They are auto-erotic and auto-libidinal. Now this love, don't confuse this self-love with real self-love. They don't love themselves. They love their false selves. So they invent a new self, piece of fiction, a movie script called false self. And that false self is everything. The narcissist is not. The false self is omniscient. Omnipotent is perfect and brilliant, etc., etc. And the narcissist is emotionally invested in the false self. And he tries to uphold the grandiosity that underlies the false self. But still, this emotional investment is self-directed. That the self happens to be false? That's another issue. But it's self-directed. Narcissist has no object relations. He doesn't love other people. Same like the Schizoid. Lacking empathy? Narcissists regard others as mere instruments, objectified sources of narcissistic supply. Take, for example, the inverted narcissist, a subspecies of covert narcissists. It's a narcissist who projects her narcissism onto another narcissist. The mechanism of projective identification allows the inverted narcissist to experience her own narcissism vicariously through the agency of a classic narcissist. But the inverted narcissist is no less a narcissist than a classical narcissist. She is no less socially reclusive. So we must make, therefore, a distinction between social interactions and social relationships. The Schizoid, the narcissist, even the inverted narcissist, even the covert narcissist, they all interact socially. But they fail to form human and social relationships, bonds, attachment. They have the equivalent of flat attachment, the psychopath, of course. So while they interact, they never get attached, they never bond. The Schizoid is uninterested in bonding. And the narcissist is both uninterested and incapable, owing to his lack of empathy and pervasive sense of grandiosity. The psychologist H. Deutsch first suggested the construct of as-if personality in the context of Schizoid patients. It's an article published in 1942 titled Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and the Relationship to Schizophrenia. So the construct of a pretend personality, a substitute personality, a fake personality, this construct was first proposed, not in the context of narcissism, but in the context of schizophrenia and Schizoid patients. A decade after Deutsch, Donald Winnicott named the very same idea, gave it the name of false self-personality. That's how the false self was born. The false self has been established as a driving engine of both pathological narcissism and pathological schizoid states. From the very beginning, from the 1940s and 1950s, top eminent scholars saw the immediate connection between narcissism and schizoid states. And they used common psychological constructs to elucidate both. C. R. Cloninger and N. McWilliams. Cloninger, Cloninger and N. McWilliams. In 1994 they wrote the book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis. They observed the faintly contemptuous attitude and isolated superiority of, no, not of narcissism, of Schizoid. So when they described schizoids, they described schizoids in classic narcissistic terms, contempt, superiority. These were narcissistic traits which they had attributed actually not to narcissism, but to schizoids. Theodor Millen and Roger Davies summed it up in their seminal tone, Personality Disorders in Modern Life. My favorite book on Personality Disorders. And they had written, they wrote, Where withdrawal has an arrogant or oppositional quality, fantasy in the schizoid-like person sometimes betrays the presence of a secret grandiose self that longs for respect and recognition while offsetting fears that the person is really an iconoclastic freak. These individuals combine aspects of the compensating narcissists with the autistic isolation of the schizoid while lacking the asocial and unhedonic qualities of the pure prototype. So even Millen and Davies saw the commonalities between narcissists and schizoids. Before we proceed, many, including self-styled experts, real scholars, therapists, psychologists, many, confused the terms asocial and antisocial. Antisocial is a person who rejects society or in terms, in hearty, collected terms, rejects life. He is defiant, he defies also authority, he is contumacious, he is reckless, he is impulsive, he is aggressive, sometimes violent. Antisocial personalities tend to break the law or bend it or test it. Many of them become criminals. Asocial personalities are people who don't like to be with other people. They don't socialize, they don't blend in, they don't mingle, they don't talk to people, they don't communicate, they don't have sex, they don't get married, they don't have children, they don't confide in anyone. They're solitary figures, quite happy in their own isolated universe. That's asocial, asocial, antisocial. Okay. Is this not all connected somehow to culture? I refer you to my previous video I've made about Christopher Lash and the other video about Althusser. And there will be a forthcoming video about Debord and the French thinkers. But is this not all part of cultural expectations? I mean, we're expected to be social. And if we are not, we are freaks, we are outliers, we are outcasts. Something's wrong with us. It's a dysfunction or pathology. Is it not a culture bound thing? Is it not really, is it really not? Is it a clinical entity? Is it a disorder? Or is it just the current way of thinking about how people should behave? The mores of society and culture in our day and age, after all there have been periods in history where people were encouraged, encouraged to be schizoids. They were encouraged to go to the desert for 40 days, expecting epiphany and enlightenment. They were encouraged to spend their youth and life in monasteries and nunneries. Isolation, social isolation has been condoned, not condemned in previous periods of history. So why are we condemning it now? The ethnosychologist, Georges Devereux, in Basic Problems of Ethnosychiatry, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1980, proposed to divide the unconscious into the id, the part that is instinctual and unconscious, and the ethnic unconscious, the repressed material that was once conscious. The ethnic unconscious includes all the defense mechanisms and most of the superego. Culture dictates what is to be repressed. That's why he calls it the ethnic unconscious. Mental illness, he said, is either idiosyncratic, cultural directives are not followed and the individual is unique, eccentric or schizophrenic. Or mental illness is conformist, abides by the cultural dictates of what is allowed and disallowed. At any rate, culture and society seem to dictate what constitutes mental illness and what constitutes permissible mental illness. Or mental illness to be repressed and suppressed and so on. I refer you to the work of others, like laying and the father of the resilience movement and so on and so forth. Our culture, according to Christopher Lash, teaches us to withdraw inwards when we are confronted with stressful situations. It is a vicious cycle. One of the main stressors of modern society is loneliness, alienation and a pervasive sense of isolation. The solution our culture offers is to withdraw even further, to isolate ourselves even further, to become even more solitary and that only exacerbates the problem. You could say therefore, quite accurately, that Western culture and civilization, which is now regrettably the dominant cultural mode, you could say that it is dysfunctional in this sense. A culture and civilization whose solutions to mental health issues only make the issues worse is a culture and civilization which is doomed functionally, is dysfunctional. Richard Sennett expounded on this theme in The Fall of Public Men on the Social Psychology of Capitalism, Vintage Books, 1978. One of the chapters in Devereux aforementioned tome is entitled Schizophrenia and Ethnic Psychosis or Schizophrenia Without Tears. According to Devereux, the United States is afflicted by what came later to be called Schizoid Disorder. C. Fred Olford. Olford, A. L. F. O. R. D., in the book Narcissism, Socrates, The Frankfurt School and Psychoanalytic Theory, published by Yale University Press in 1988. Olford enumerates the symptoms. He says, the symptoms of Schizoid, the Schizoid syndrome. We draw emotional aloofness, hyporeactivity, emotional flatness, sex without emotional involvement, segmentation and partial involvement, lack of interest and commitment to things outside oneself, fixation on oral stage issues, regression, infantilism and depersonalization. These, of course, he says, are many of the same designations that lash employees to describe the culture of narcissism. Thus, it appears that it is not misleading to equate narcissism with Schizoid Disorder. Okay, this is a cultural background, but our psychodynamics react to our context. We react to the culture, we react to society, definitely to social expectations, as they are mediated and communicated via social agents and agents of socialization, peers, parents, teachers. What are the common psychodynamic roots of narcissistic personality disorder and Schizoid personality disorder? The first to seriously consider the similarity, if not outright identity, between the Schizoid and narcissistic disorders of the self was Melanie Klein. Melanie Klein broke ranks with Freud in that she believed that we are born with a fragile, brittle, weak and unintegrated ego. The most primordial human fear is the fear of disintegration, of death, according to Klein. And so the infant is forced to employ primitive defense mechanisms, such as splitting, projection and introjection, to cope with this fear, actually with the result of aggression generated by the ego. The ego splits and projects this part, death, disintegration, aggression, it projects it, it disowns it, this part becomes ego alien. It does the same with a life related constructive, constructive integrative part of itself. So actually it splits, it separates, breaks into the bad part, so to speak, and the good part. As a result of all these mechanics, the infant views the world as either good, satisfying, complying, responding, gratifying, or bad, frustrating. And Klein calls it the good and the bad breasts. The child then proceeds to introject, internalize, simulate the good object while keeping out, defending against the bad objects. The good object becomes the nucleus of the forming ego. The bad object is felt as fragmented, but it is not vanished. It is there, which is the cornerstone, the foundation of my work in psychology. I actually inverse or reverse Klein. I claim that the child actually internalizes the bad part, because he is afraid to attribute it to mother, which is the only other person he knows. But put that aside. Continue with Klein. The fact that the bad object is out there, says Klein. The fact that it's persecutory, threatening, gives rise to the first schizoid defense mechanisms. Foremost among these mechanisms is the mechanism of projective identification, which masses use very often because they are infantile, they are still children. The infant projects parts of himself, his organs, body parts, his behaviors, his traits. He projects these onto the bad object. And this is the famous Kleinian paranoid schizoid position. The ego is split. Of course, this must be harrowing and terrifying. It must be very traumatic. And it is. It's as traumatic as it sounds. But it allows the baby to make a clear distinction between the good object inside him and the bad object out there split away from him. If this phase is not transcended, the individual develops schizophrenia and a fragmentation of the self, says Klein. Around the third or fourth month of life, the infant realizes that the good and the bad objects are really facets, dimensions of one and the same object. He develops the depressive position. He's very depressed to discover that an object that he had thought to be totally good mother actually has bad aspects, bad parts. It's like, you know, after you're infatuated with someone, you idealize them and suddenly you begin to see the bad sides, the negative sides, the ugly, disgusting behaviors and traits and habits. It's depressing. So the baby equally becomes depressed when he integrates the good and the bad. When he realizes that no object is perfect, no object is all good, no person is all good, object in psychology is person. It depresses him and he becomes depressive, depressive position. This depression, Klein believes that the two positions continue throughout life, by the way. This depression is a reaction of fear and anxiety. Remember how we started this lecture? Trauma leads to anxiety and depression. The infant feels guilty at his own rage. He's guilty, he's raging, he's frustrated, his impulse is out of control, but he also feels very guilty. And he feels anxious, he's afraid that his aggression will harm the object and eliminate the source of good things. At this stage, the only object he knows, the primary object, is mother. The infant experiences the loss of his own omnipotence, since now the object is outside his self. The infant wishes to erase the results of his own aggression by making the object whole again. Make America great again. By recognizing the wholeness of the other objects, the infant comes to realize and to experience his own wholeness. The ego reintegrates. Ironically, this trauma of integrating good and bad in the same object, which leads to depression, also leads to reintegration. We need to go through this phase, traumatic as it may be, in order to become whole again. If the object out there is whole, good and bad, I am whole. Good and bad, I don't need to worry so much about the bad parts in me. If mommy is bad and good, I can be bad and good. No problem there. I can reintegrate. But the transition from the paranoid schizoid position to the depressive position is by no means smooth, nor is it assured. Excess anxiety and envy can delay this transition or prevent it altogether. Envy, what is envy? Envy seeks to destroy all the good objects so that other people don't have them. I cannot have her and you will not have her too, jealous husbands say, before they kill their wives. It therefore hinders, envy hinders, the split between the good and the bad breasts. Envy destroys the good object but leaves intact, untouched, deeper secretary, bad object. Moreover, envy does not allow reintegration, reparation, Klein calls it reparation. Envy doesn't allow reintegration to take place. The more whole the object, the more complete the object, the greater the destructive envy. Envy feeds on its own outcomes. The more envy, the less integrated the ego. The weaker and more inadequate the ego and the more reason for envy in the other object out there, envy other people. The more you envy, the less accomplished you are. The more you envy, the more damaged you are. The more envy, the more dysfunctional you are. The more envious you are, the less integrated you are, even as a child, even as a baby. And that's real reason to envy people, because they are okay, they are whole, they are complete, they are accomplished, they are integrated, you are not. You've been destroyed and consumed by your own envy, which is good reason to envy other people who had not been destroyed and consumed by their own envy. Both the narcissistic and schizoid are examples of development arrested owing to envy and other transformations of aggression. Let's consider pathological narcissism. Envy is one of the diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorder. It is the hallmark of narcissism. It's a prime source of what is known as narcissistic rage. The schizoid itself, fragmented, weak, primitive, is intimately connected with narcissism via envy. Narcissists prefer to destroy themselves and to deny themselves any pleasure rather than endure someone else's happiness, wholeness, and triumph. The narcissist fails his exams in order to frustrate the teacher that he both adores and envies. The narcissist aborts his therapy in order to not give the therapist a reason to feel gratified and superior. By self-defeating, self-trushing and self-destructing, narcissists deny the worth of other people. It's like a cheating wife who tells her husband, I cheated on you to devalue your property, me. I hurt you by hurting myself. I took away your prize possession. If the narcissist fails in therapy, it means his analyst is inept and no reason to envy him. If the narcissist destroys himself by consuming drugs, it means his parents are less than perfect, blameworthy, should feel guilty and bad, and there's no reason to envy them. One cannot exaggerate the importance of envy as a motivating power in the narcissist's life. The psychodynamic connection is obvious. Envy is a rage reaction, an aggressive reaction to not controlling, not owning, not possessing, not having, not engulfing, not enmeshing the good, desired object. Narcissists defend themselves against this assiduous, corroding sensation by pretending that they do control, they do possess, they do engulf and own the good object. It's a pretension, it's a piece of fiction, it's fame, it's a confabulation, not to say a lie. These are the narcissist's grandiose fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience. It's part of his grandiosity. He tries to avoid envy. He tries to avoid envy by subsuming the good object, making the good object a part of himself so he doesn't need to envy the good object, because he cannot stand envy. Envy kills him, destroys him, and drives him to self-destruction. It's a self-defense mechanism. When the narcissist snapshots you, when he internalizes you, when he consumes you, when he subsumes you, when he controls you, when you become his extension, he's doing this because he doesn't want to envy you. And he doesn't want to envy you because if he does envy you, he will destroy himself in order to destroy you, and he doesn't want to destroy himself. He wants to survive. But in doing this, in going through this act of merging and fusing with the potential object of envy, wine, red wine, the narcissist must deny the existence of any good outside himself. If there's something good outside the narcissist, he needs to envy it. He will envy it, so he needs to deny it. Nothing good outside me. The narcissist defends himself against the rage, against his all-consuming envy by solipsistically and counterfactually claiming to be the only good object in the world. This is an object that cannot be had by anyone except the narcissist, and therefore is immune to the narcissist threatening, annihilating envy. Put simply, narcissist is not likely to envy himself if he is the only good object in the world. In order to refrain from being owned by anyone, being consumed and subsumed by anyone, in order to refrain from, to avoid self-destruction in the hands of his own envy, the narcissist reduces other people to non-entities. That's the narcissistic solution, or he completely avoids all meaningful contact with other people, and that is the schizoid solution. The suppression of envy is at the core of the narcissist's being, being. If the narcissist fails to convince himself, his self, that he is the only good object in the universe, the narcissist is bound to be exposed to his own murderous envy. If there are others out there who are better than him, he envies them, he lashes out at them ferociously, uncontrollably, madly, hatefully, spitefully, he tries to eliminate them. If someone tries to get emotionally intimate with the narcissist, she threatens the grandiose belief that no one but the narcissist can possess the good object. And the good object is the narcissist. The inner dialogue of the narcissist is this, I'm the only good object in the world, and I'm the only owner of this good object. Am I not lucky? Ain't I the luckiest guy on earth? I own the only good object in the whole universe. And now she comes and she thinks presumptuously and impertinently that she can own this good object or that we can share ownership on this good object, which is me. She deserves to be punished for this impertinence. She deserves, I need to show her her mistake in a way that is unequivocal. Only the narcissist can own himself, only he can have access to himself, only he can possess himself. This is the only way to avoid seething envy and certain self annihilation. Perhaps it is clear now why narcissists react as raving madmen to anything, however minute, however remote, that seems to threaten their grandiose fantasies. Because their grandiose fantasies are the only protective barrier between themselves and their own lethal seething envy. And when you come to the narcissist and you love him and you try to be intimate with him, let alone if you pose any demands or you demand reciprocity, you are laying clean to the narcissist, the only good object in the world. It's like the famous race for Africa during colonial times. Everyone was trying to get a piece of Africa. A woman who gets close to the narcissist, she's trying to get a piece of the narcissist and this is going to provoke war. There is nothing new in trying to link narcissism to schizophrenia. Freud did it in his seminal essay on narcissism in 1914. Klein's contribution was the introduction of immediately postnatal internal objects. Schizophrenia, Klein proposed, was a narcissistic and intense relationship with internal objects such as fantasies or images, including fantasies of grandeur, of grandiosity. Klein proposed a new language in effect. Freud suggested a transition from primary, object-less narcissism, self-directed libido. There are no objects, just me, I love only myself. He suggested a transition from this phase to object relations, object-directed libido. Others do exist, I'm going to love them. Klein suggested a transition from internal objects to external objects and in this sense, of course, I'm a Kleinian. While Freud thought that the denominator common to narcissism and schizoid phenomena is a withdrawal of libido from the world, Klein suggested that it was a fixation on an early phase of relating only to internal objects. But is it a real difference or is it semantic? I'm going to read to you from Greenberg and Micho, Object Relations and Psychoanalytic Theory, Harvard University Press, 1983. The term narcissism tends to be employed diagnostically by those proclaiming loyalty to the drive model, Otto Kanberg, Edith Jacobson, for example. And by mixed model theories, such as Kobut, who are interested in preserving a time to drive theory. So narcissism is a term used by drive theorists, theoreticians, psychologists who believe in drives. Schizoid tends to be employed diagnostically by adherents of relational models, Fairbair, Guntrip, who are interested in articulating their break with drive theory. These two differing diagnoses and accompanying formulations are applied to patients who are essentially similar by theories who start with very different conceptual premises and ideological affiliations. What these people are saying, and mind you, they are top-level scholars, what they were saying is that narcissism is just another name for Schizoid, and Schizoid is another name for narcissism, depending which theory you start with. Klein in effect said that drives, example of the libido, drives are relational. They're relational flows, drives flow from you to someone or to something. A drive is the mode of relationship between an individual and his objects, internal objects or external objects. And so a retreat from the world, according to Freud, into internal objects, as postulated by object relations theories, the British school, Fairbair and Guntrip, this retreat from the world into internal objects, that is the drive. That's a good description of drive, because the libido is redirected at internal objects. That's a way to reconcile, as the British did, Fairbair and Guntrip and others. It's a way to reconcile drive and relational models by saying that a drive is simply the flow into objects, the flow from you to objects, internal or external. Drives are orientations to external or internal objects. Narcissism is an orientation, a preference even, that's why I keep saying that narcissism is in many ways a choice. It's a preference orientation towards internal objects. The very definition of Schizoid phenomena as well, and to some extent psychosis, hyperreflection will come to us. This is why narcissists feel empty, fragmented, unreal, diffuse. It is because their ego is still split, it's never been integrated. They had withdrawn from the world of external objects, they live only inside themselves, with internal objects. When they come across an external object, they immediately convert you into an internal object via the snapshotting process. Kernberg identifies these internal objects, with which the narcissist maintains a special relationship, with the idealized grandiose images of the narcissist's parents. He believes that the narcissist's very ego, his self-representation, had fused with the parental images, which are idealized, can do no wrong, perfectly good. Fairbairn's work, even more than Kernberg by the way, and not to mention Kohut's work, all these integrate all these insights into a coherent framework. Guntrip elaborated on this framework, and together they created one of the most impressive theoretical bodies in the history of psychology. Fairbairn internalized Klein's insights, that drives an object orientated, and their goal is the formation of relationships, and not primarily the attainment of pleasure. Pleasurable sensations are the means to achieve relationships. They encourage relationships, they provide you with an incentive of sorts to form relationships, but the core, the main goal is relationships. The ego does not seek to be stimulated, or to be pleased, and to find the right good-supporting object. To find the right good-supporting object is the main goal. So, yes, the ego can be stimulated, yes the ego can be pleased, but it is in order to find the right good-supporting object, and to establish a relationship with it. The infant is fused with his primary object, the mother. Life is not about using objects for pleasure under the supervision of the ego and superego, as Freud has suggested, before he himself had changed his mind, recanted in many ways. Life is about separate. Separate. It's about differentiating, individuating, and achieving independence from the primary object, mother, and the initial state of fusion with it. Dependence on internal objects is narcissism. Freud's post-nausicistic, anarchalitic phase of life can be either dependent, immature, or mature. The newborn's ego is looking for objects with which to form relationships. Inevitably some of these objects, some of these relationships, frustrate the infant, disappoint the infant. This is life, early on. The infant compensates for these setbacks, for this disillusionment, disappointment, and disenchantment by creating compensatory internal objects. The initially unitary ego fragments into a growing group of internal objects. Think about it this way. Every time there is a disappointment, every time there's a frustration, the infant generates an internal object which is not frustrating and not disappointing, as a way to balance the emotions. And so gradually, there are many, many, many internal objects where there used to be a single ego. It reminds me of the many-worlds theory in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every decision and every action you make creates a new separate universe with a copy of you. So it's the same with the infant, according to Klein at least, and some of the object-relation theories. You could say that reality breaks our hearts and minds, according to Ferber. The ego and its objects are twinned. The ego is split in three or four, according to Guntriff, who introduced the fourth ego. And so this leads to a schizoid state. The original Freudian libidinal ego is unitary, it's instinctual, it's needy, it's object-seeking. It then fragments as a result of three typical interactions with the mother, gratification, disappointment, deprivation. The central ego idealizes the good parents. It is conformist, it's obedient. The anti-libidinal ego is a reaction to frustrations. It is rejecting, harsh and satisfying, dead set against one's natural needs. The libidinal ego is the seat of cravings, desires and needs. It is active in that it keeps seeking objects to form relationships with. Guntriff added another ego, which he called the regressed ego, which is the true self in cold storage. The lost heart of the personal self. Ferber's definition of psychopathology is therefore quantitative. How much of the ego is dedicated to relationships with internal objects rather than external objects, like real people? In other words, how fragmented, how schizoid is the ego? To achieve a successful transition from focusing on internal objects to seeking external objects, the child needs to have the right parents. In Winnicott's parlance the good enough mother, not perfect, good enough. The child internalizes the bad aspects of his parents in the form of internal bad objects and then proceeds to suppress them together, twinned with portions of the ego. If the parent is dead, dead mother, like Andrei Green, the parent is withholding harsh, abusive, narcissistic, selfish, immature, parentifies the child, etc., etc. Breaches the child boundaries, does not allow the child to form his own boundaries, doesn't allow the child to separate to individuate, doesn't allow the child to explore the world, stunts the child's growth, personal autonomy, etc., etc., etc. If the parent is dysfunctional in any of these senses, the number of bad objects, bad internal objects, will outweigh the number of good internal objects. And we have a problem then, it's known as psychopathology. And so the parents become part of the child. It's a repressed part, but it's a critical part. The more bad objects, the bigger the number of bad objects repressed, the less ego is left for healthy relationships with external objects. According to Fairbent, the source of all psychological disturbances is in these schizoid phenomena, later developments such as the Edipus complex and whatever, they're less crucial. Fairbent and Guntrick think that if a person is too attached to his compensatory internal objects, he finds it hard to mature psychologically. Maturing is about letting go, by the way, generally, letting go of mummy, letting go of internal objects as well. Some people just don't want to mature, they don't want to grow up. They're reluctant to do so, they're ambivalent about it. They want to remain children forever, the Peter Pan syndrome. Puera a eternus. These reluctance, these withdrawal to an internal world of representations, internal objects, broken ego. This is narcissism. It's a good description of narcissism. Narcissists simply don't know how to beat themselves, because they don't have a self. Their self is broken, fragmented, disunitary, and big part of it is false and projected. They don't know how to be and act independent while managing their relationships with other people. Both Otto Kernberg and Franz Kohut contended that narcissism is somewhere between neurosis and psychosis. Kernberg thought that it was a borderline phenomenon on the verge of psychosis, where the ego is completely shattered. In this respect, Kernberg, more than Kohut, identifies narcissism with schizoid phenomena and with schizophrenia. This is not the only difference between them, but it's a crucial one. They also disagree on the developmental locus of narcissists. Kohut thinks that narcissism is an early phase of development, fossilized and doomed to be repeated, a repetition compulsion, while Kernberg maintains that the narcissistic self is pathological from its very inception, end of story. Take it or leave it. Kohut believes that the narcissists' parents failed to provide him with assurances that he does possess self. In his words, they failed to endow him with a self-object. They did not explicitly recognize the child's nascent self, the child's separate existence and boundaries. The child learned to have a schizoid split fragmented self rather than a coherent and integrated one. To Kohut, narcissism is really all-pervasive at the very core of being, whether in its mature form as self-love or in its regressive infantile form as a narcissistic disorder. Kernberg regards mature narcissism also espoused by Neofroidians like Grünberger and Schössglö-Schmürgel. So, Kernberg regards mature narcissism, which by the way Schössglö-Schmürgel has very interesting work and I'm going to focus on it in one of the next videos. Don't hold the name against it. So, mature narcissism, said Kernberg, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. And here he conflicts directly with Jung, who considered narcissism as a crucial part of the process of introversion. Kernberg observes that narcissists are already grandiose, they are already schizoid, detached, called aloof, asocial, at a very early age when they are three years old according to him. And like Klein, Kernberg believes that narcissism is the last ditch effort, a defense, to halt the emergence of the paranoid schizoid position described by Klein. In an adult, such an emergence is known as psychosis. And this is why Kernberg classifies narcissism as borderline, almost psychotics. We are beginning to see how everything fits into everything. And what we thought of as separate disorders, they are not, they are spectrum. Even Kohut, who is definitely an opponent of Kernberg's classification, uses Eugene O'Neill's famous sentence in The Great God Brown. Man is born broken, he lives by mending, the grace of God is gloom. Kernberg himself sees a clear connection between schizoid phenomena such as alienation in modern society, the subsequent withdrawal from society, you know, atomization and alienation in atomic societies. Kernberg sees this phenomena as narcissistic. He said these schizoid phenomena, they are actually narcissistic phenomena because they denote, they prove clearly an inability to form relationships or to make commitments or to empathize. Fred Olford in the aforementioned book, Narcissism, Socrates, Frankfurt School and Psychoanalytic Theory, he wrote, I quote, Fairburn and Guntrip represent the purest expression of object-relations theory, which is characterized by the insight that real relationships with real people build psychic structure. Although they rarely mention narcissism, they see a schizoid split in the self as characteristic of virtually all emotional disorder. It is Greenberg and Mitchell in object-relations and psychoanalytic theory who established the relevance of Fairburn and Guntrip by pointing out that what American analysts label narcissism, British analysts tend to call schizoid personality disorder. This insight allows us to connect the symptomatology of narcissism, feelings of emptiness and reality, alienation, emotional withdrawal, with a theory that sees such symptoms as an accurate reflection of the experience of being split off from a part of oneself. That narcissism is such a confusing category is in large part because its drive theoretic definition, the libidinal catechesis of the self, in a word self-love, seems far removed from the experience of narcissism as characterized by a loss of or split in the self. How can you have self-love if you have no self? Fairburn's and Guntrip's view of narcissism as an excessive attachment of the ego to internal objects resulting in various splits in the ego necessary to maintain these attachments. This view allows us to penetrate this confusion, although I must say that it is somewhat analogous to Freud's narcissistic as opposed to object-love. The new thinking here is not as new as it sounds. Okay, all of us know lone wolves, you know, recluses, hermits, asocial by inclination or asocial as an ideology and rejecting society and rejecting the world. But what about the lone wolf narcissist? The narcissist's false self requires constant doubts of narcissistic supply, attention. The narcissist's sense of entitlement, innate superiority, they collide painfully with his unmitigated dependence on other people for the regulation of his labile sense of self-worth and the maintenance of his grandiose fantasies. Narcissists who are also psychopaths, antisocial, narcissists who are also schizoids, they choose to avoid the constant hurt and injuries entailed by this conflict. And they do this by withdrawing from society, physically, as well as psychologically. They create a cocoon of self-delusion, confabulated narratives and vivid dreams of triumph and revenge, watch my previous video. This kind of narcissists become lone wolf narcissists. They prey their predators, they prey on society at large by indiscriminately victimizing, abusing and attacking any person unfortunate enough to cross the path, especially people who try to get close to them. Inevitably, the lone wolf narcissist is in a constant state of deficient narcissistic supply, very much like a junkie deprived of access to his drug of choice. And this overwhelming, unquenched, vampiric hunger coupled with a normal psychotic state, they render the lone wolf narcissist very dangerous to others. His aggression often turns into outright violence. His frustration to vindictive rage, his addiction to narcissistic supply drives him to coerce people, often randomly selected, to serve as sources of adulation, filmation and support. His detachment evolves into a loss of touch with reality, cognitive deficits and utter misjudgment of his environment and milieu. He seeks fame and celebrity by all means available to him, even by resorting to crime and terrorism. What is the schizoid existence like? Is solitude frowned upon in modern Western civilization? Is it actually a logical choice, especially now, given the recent developments? Rising anomy, disintegration of basic institutions like community and family, pandemics, crime, terrorism, isn't withdrawing and avoiding a very rational, logical, self-efficacious choice? Pure bread schizoids, you know, schizoids who are not comorbid with narcissism or any other disorder, they shrug off their disorder. They simply don't like being around people. End of story. People who are only schizoids, people who can be diagnosed only with schizoid personality disorder, resent the pathologizing of their lifestyle. They say it's a choice to remain aloof and alone and nothing wrong with it. They consider the diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder to be spurious, a mere reflection of current social coercive mores, a form of social control, culture-bound artifact. Narcissists, as usual, tend to rationalize and aggrandize their schizoid conduct. They propound the idea that being alone is the only logical choice in today's hostile, anomic and atomized world. They have an ideology. They weave an ideology around their lack of choice and lack of opportunity. So they become schizoid because they want to become schizoid. It's like pre-emptive abandonment. I'm abandoning the world before the world abandons me. The concept of individual exists only in the human species. Animals flock together or operate in colonies or herds. Each member of these aggregates is an extension of the organic whole. In contra-distinction, people band and socialize only for purposes of goal-oriented cooperation or the seeking of emotional bodily rewards, solace, love, sex, support. And yet in contemporary civilization, the accomplishment of most goals is outsourced to impersonal collectives such as a state or larger corporations. Everything from food production and distribution to education is now relegated to faceless, anonymous entities which require little or no social interaction using modern-day technologies. Additionally, these modern-day technologies, they empower the individual, they render the individual self-sufficient, profoundly independent of others. Social distancing started long before the virus. As they have grown in complexity and expectations, fed by the mass media, relationships have mutated to being emotionally unrewarding and narcissistically injurious to the point of becoming a perpetual fount of pain and unease. People enter relationships with dread. Relationships create anxiety and depression and heartbreak. Everyone knows this. No one wants it anymore. More formalized social interactions present a substantial financial and emotional risk as well. Close to half of all marriages, for instance, end in a divorce, inflicting enormous pecuniary and emotional damage, emotional deprivation on all the parties involved. The prevailing efforts of gender wars as reflected in the evolving legal milieu further serves to deter any residual predilection and propensity to team up and to bond. We have created an environment which not only is not conducive to relationships, it actively sabotages them, undermines relationships. This is an anti-relationship environment, perhaps because people make money from lonely people. If you are on social media, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube compete with your daughter and with your wife for attention. They don't want you to have a daughter or a wife. They want you to be all the time online. This is a vicious circle that is difficult to break. Traumatized by past encounters, past liaisons, past relationships, people tend to avoid future ones. Deeply wounded. Deeply wounded. We are all bleeding profusely. People are rendered less tolerant, more hyper-vigilant, more defensive, more aggressive, even I would say paranoid. These are traits that bode ill for the capacity of people to initiate, sustain and maintain relationships. The breakdown and dysfunction of societal structures and institutions, communities and social units is masked by technologies which provide very similitudes and confabulations of social contact. Social media is a social media. We all gravitate towards the delusional and fantastic universe of our own making as we find the real one. Too harsh and too hurtful to endure, modern life is so taxing, so onerous, it's so depletes the individual's scarce resources that little is left to accommodate the needs of social integrals. We don't have energy for other people. We hardly have enough energy for ourselves. Realities constructed, society and civilization have been constructed in a way that they consume the last drop of blood we have, leaving nothing to us, to ourselves and to our loved ones. People's energy, funds and were riddled has stretched to the breaking point by the often conflicting demands of mere survival in post-industrial, post-modern societies. Furthermore, the sublimation of instinctual urges to peer, libido, associate, urges to mingle and fraternize is both encouraged and rewarded, not the urges, their sublimation. We are encouraged to ignore our instincts, our intuitions, our drives, our urges. We are encouraged to substitute for them. Don't date, surf, don't talk to a real life person, talk to your Facebook friends. Substitutes exist for all social functions, including sex, pornography, including child rearing, single parenthood. And all these substitutes render social institutions obsolete and superfluous. Social give and take became awkward and highly inefficient. The individual, me, has emerged as the organizing principle in human affairs, supplanting the collective us, the idolatry of the individual inexorably, ineluctably results in the malignant forms of narcissism that are so prevalent, indeed, or pervasive, wherever we look. Our world is becoming more and more narcissistic, ironically, as it becomes more and more schizoid, for a very simple reason. These are two sides, two facets of the very, very same deleterious coin. It's a bad path we have chosen. Dear students, dear students, I know it's Monday, we're all groggy, psychology is the last thing on our mind, but life has to go on. Today's lecture is a unit in objects relations theory, and so your reading assignment is The ego evolves. There is a big debate whether when the baby is born, the baby has an ego. Or whether the baby develops an ego, evolves an ego, as he grows up. It's a big debate. Freud says one thing, Balanic line says another. The very concept of ego is very contentious and derided, actually, by modern psychology and modern psychiatry. It's no longer used in respectable circles and in universities, especially in the West, where there's an emphasis on experimentation, laboratories, white coats and pretensions to science. The ego evolves. It is molded. It is jump-started via external object relations. The baby forms the ego, develops it, begins to get in touch with it, senses it, emerging, only when the baby interacts with other people. Now of course the first person is mommy, she is the primary object. The mother is the first to provide the baby with a sense of externality, thus something out there. Initially the baby is immersed in this oceanic feeling. We are the world. He cannot make a distinction between himself and objects out there. And mommy is the first who provides him with this external internal dichotomy, which gives rise to the ego. As life progresses within the formative years, especially by the critical age of two, the baby had encountered other people, had accepted and realized that these people are not within himself. They are not part of himself, they are not extensions of himself, but they are autonomous, independent entities with agency. And this is a trauma of course, but he overcomes it. And an ego is born or an ego evolves. The ego derives strength and a sense of reality from these interactions with external objects. Of course, if the interactions are fraught with fear, with dread, with terror, with unpredictability, with absence, with rejection, with humiliation, with violence or aggression, with negative emotionality and affectivity. If the external objects do not provide the baby, later the toddler, with what he needs emotionally. Love, unconditional love, acceptance, warmth, receptivity, predictability, structure, order, justice. If the external objects are arbitrary, capricious, narcissistic, selfish, absent, dead mothers in Andre Green's term. If the external objects frustrate the child much more than they gratify the child. The child has a problem with his or her ego. It's not evolved. It remains stunted, stilted. It remains primitive. It remains fragmented. It does not integrate. Such a baby grows up, becomes an adolescent and then an adult without an ego. And we call these kind of people narcissists or schizies. One of the strategies that such a baby develops is a fear reaction, a flight reaction. It's very frightening. It's very threatening to be in touch with a non-responsive parent, with a parent who refuses to allow the child to emerge and become an individual, to separate, to set boundaries. A parent who parentifies the child, a parent who objectifies the child and uses the child for a variety of reasons. Instrumentalizes the child or a parent who abuses the child classically, sexually, beats up the child, stars the child, etc. Such a parent is an infinitely ominous figure. The child's dependence on the parent is total and absolute. The child cannot survive without the parent. And a bad parent is essentially a death verdict. Now, healthy children who are born, luckily for them, to healthy parents, they seek pleasure. There is a pleasure in interacting with the parental figures and later with role models, peers, etc., by extension. There's a pleasure in interacting with external objects. And Freud called it the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle later is regulated via the reality principle, which its seat is in the ego. The ego embodies the reality principle and controls the pleasure principle, which is the id. But such children would be pleasure seeking. Children who are born to dysfunctional, threatening, bad parents. Such children will prefer safety to pleasure. They have a flight reaction. And what's the only way open to them to be safe? Not being. They want to undo their being. They want to not be. They want to become absent. They want to become a void, an emptiness. Because a mother can abuse a child who is there, a child who is present, a child who is with her. A mother can never abuse an absence, an emptiness, a void, deep space. How do you abuse a non-being, a non-entity? You can't. So by undoing one's being, by becoming an absence, one actually defends against the fear, defends against the abuse, the mistreatment, the dread, and the terror and horror of being at the mercy of a hater. Being at the mercy of someone at the total mercy of someone who doesn't love you. So absence, emptiness, ironically, ego-death, they are very common among narcissists and schizorists. Because they are common among both narcissists and schizorists, there's been a god-awful confusion at the very beginning between the two. And in the 60s, narcissism was considered a schizoid manifestation, a subtype of schizoid phenomena or schizoid disorders. But narcissism is not a schizoid phenomenon, it's not a schizoid disorder. It's intimately connected with a schizoid disorder, intimately connected with a schizoid style, schizoid phenomena, schizoid lack of emotions or lack of access to emotions, schizoid absence, schizoid withdrawal and avoidance. They are all supremely intimately connected with narcissism, they are twins, but they are not identical to us. Narcissism is an attempt to avoid the schizoid solution. Not to remind you, the baby is tormented, tortured, horrified, terrorized by bad parents, absent parents, selfish parents, abusive parents. And he feels that his life is in danger, it's a life-threatening situation. So he chooses to undo his own birth, he chooses to go back to the womb, he wants to go back to the womb, he wants to say okay, I don't like this world, I don't like mommy, I don't like anyone here, they don't love me, they don't give me what I need. I'm terrified, I feel very frightened, I want to stop the world, I want to get off, I want to go back to mommy's tummy, I want to disappear, I want to go back to the womb, that's a schizoid solution. I don't want to have emotions, I don't want to have relationships, I don't want to acknowledge the existence of external objects. If they do exist, I feel threatened, I feel suffocated, I feel like they can kill me, I feel like dying. I don't want anything to do with other people, and I don't want anything to do with my internal world as well, both of them out. So this is the schizoid solution. Narcissism is an attempt to maintain object relations in the face of the schizoid solution. It's an attempt to avoid the schizoid solution because as you see, the schizoid solution is mental suicide and no one wants to die really. So narcissism is a kind of middle of the way home, kind of a compromise. We'll come to it in a minute and we'll come to your role in this compromise, your critical role as the narcissist intimate partner. And why the narcissist insists on having an intimate partner? Because without an intimate partner, he cannot implement the narcissistic compromise. So the narcissist is a child or an adolescent or an adult who feels threatened by the schizoid solution. Because the schizoid solution is psychological suicide, is cutting yourself off from the world, is having nothing to do with people, is not experiencing any kind of emotion. It's the undead, it's the living dead, it's to zombify yourself, mummify yourself. So narcissism is an attempt to avoid this. And how does the narcissist avoid the schizoid solution via grandiose fantasies of invulnerability, omnipotence and omniscience? Let me explain the logical sequence. The baby says, I'm terrified, I'm terrorized, I feel my life is in danger. My parents, my mother is a dead mother, she's a bad mother. She hates me, she does, or she doesn't love me, she doesn't hold me, she doesn't contain me, she doesn't support me, she doesn't allow me to separate or individuate. She objectifies me, instrumentalizes me, parentifies me, horrible. I can't live like that anymore. It hurts. It hurts a lot. This abuse hurts a lot. So I'm going to pretend that I am not vulnerable, that I cannot feel pain, that I am omnipotent like God, that I'm omniscient like God. I'm going to pretend that I'm God. And you know, you cannot hurt God, and you cannot intrude on God, and you cannot force God to do anything, and you cannot abuse God. So the narcissistic child or the child in the process of becoming a narcissist converts himself into a divinity, a God-like figure. It is a solution, because if you are God-like, if you are a divinity, if you are an Olympian God, you are untouchable, you are invulnerable, and you experience no pain, no hurt or no abuse. Problem solved. So there are two solutions now. One is to go back to the womb, to unborn yourself, to unborn yourself, to become the undead, to become a zombie. The second solution is to be born again. So to become another entity, you were born as a vulnerable, fragile, small child, totally dependent and in need of these parental figures who had let you down and frustrated you. So now you will be born again. This time, as the exact opposite of this child, you will be born as God-like, omnipotent, omniscient, invulnerable, et cetera, et cetera. You will be reborn as a God. It's a metamorphosis, like Kafka's metamorphosis, but this time you're not born as a cockroach, you're reborn as a God. So being reborn as a God is a solution, or being unborn and becoming undead is another solution. And one solution is fighting the other. Narcissism is an attempt to suppress the schizoid solution, to somehow remain alive, to somehow remain in touch with reality, to somehow have relationships with external objects. However, thwarted, deformed and dysfunctional these relationships are, they are better than nothing. They are better than the schizoid solution, where there are zero, no relationships. And this self-concocted, self-invented invulnerability, omnipotence, omniscience, the locus of these is the false self. The false self is a construct. But the false self, ironically again, paradoxically even, represents a compromise. It's a compromise. The child says to himself, I'm being abused, I'm being maltreated, I'm being mistreated, I'm being ignored, I'm being instrumentalized. I mean, I really feel bad. I'm really hurting. The pain is unbearable, intolerable, I'm overwhelmed. I have emotional dysregulation. Right. So, how to solve this? I don't want to die. I don't want to become a schizoid. I don't want to cut off from the world. I want to have contact with people. I want to go out. I want to experience some emotions. I want to see flowers. I want to see sunshine. I don't want to die. I don't want to go back to the womb. I know it's a solution. I know it's a perfect solution. If I absent myself, if I convert myself into an emptiness, avoid, it's a solution. Because no one can abuse torture and torment, avoid or an emptiness or an absence. So, schizoid solution is verifications, self-ifications. But I don't want that. The child says, I still want to be. I still want to have a modicum of life. 10% life. 20% life. I want to stay alive as much as I can under the circumstances. So, the false self is a compromise. Because the false self allows the child who had become a narcissist to maintain external object relations. But the external object relations are not with a person, not with a narcissist. The external object relations are with the false self. The external object relations are maintained, but they are one step removed. And they take place with the decoy, with the facade, with a construct, with a piece of fiction. The false self. So, anything bad that happens in external object relations, anything bad that happens in an intimate partnership, in a business transaction, with friends, anything bad that recreates the experience with the rejecting parental figures, is not happening to the narcissist. It's happening to the false self. The false self kind of attracts the fire. That's why I call it a decoy. So, the narcissist discarded the schizoid solution. Now, since it says I'm not going to become a schizoid, I'm not going to withdraw from the world, I am going to have relations with other people, external object relations. I'm going to experience emotions of some kind. I'm going to reach out to the world somehow. But because I'm terrified, because I'm traumatized, because I had been abused, because I can't tolerate this pain, should it happen again? I will not survive. What I'm going to do, I'm going to invent a piece of fiction. I'm going to invent a wizard of us. I'm going to invent an artificial creation. And I'm going to tell people, please interact with that thing, with this entity, with this self, not with me. Don't interact with me, because if you interact with me directly, you will cause me pain. You will cause me pain that I will not survive. Modification. This is known as modification. I don't want to be modified. It's life-threatening. I wanted to interact with my false self. I had created the false self for you to interact with. Please, love the false self, admire the false self, adulate the false self, serve the false self. Do everything with the false self. Leave me alone, leave me alone because I'm fragile. I'm vulnerable. I can die. I'm a victim. I am immunocompromised. I cannot protect myself against the virus of love. This love is pain. So please direct all this energy at the false self. He can take it. It can take it. And so, the false self is actually a combination. A compromise, because there is a facade, there is a firewall. There is an outward public-facing kind of visage, mirage, fantasy that maintains object relations, maintains touch with reality, however distorted. And behind this facade, behind this mirage, behind this stage set, there is a schizoid inner absence. The narcissist's combination, internal schizoid state, external object relations, one step removed. External object relations are maintained in narcissism, but not with the narcissist. They are maintained with the work of art, with his creative effort, known as the false self. And behind the false self, what the false self is shielding is a schizoid inner absence. It's an ego-less state. It's exactly like being unborn, where a real core should have been, there's nothing howling winds, empty corridors. It's an abandoned castle, an abandoned castle. And the fortifications of the false self, the enemy is going to attack the fortifications, the castle is secure. So the narcissism is a combination, schizoid state plus functional object relations, functional for the narcissist, dysfunctional for other people. And in a way, narcissism is a fantasy defense, fetishizes you, converts the intimate partner into a fetish. The fetishistic part, coupled with the narcissistic fantasy mediated by the false self, they provide a fantasy defense against the schizoid state, which is essentially death while alive, being buried alive, becoming undead, becoming zombie. We will discuss this, the fetishistic element, in the solution a bit later. When the narcissistic solution fails as well, you remember the narcissist rejects the schizoid solution, adopts the narcissistic solution, which is a compromise. Okay, I will become a schizoid, but I will maintain object relations via a false self. When this solution fails, there's modification, and then the narcissist becomes 100% schizoid. He withdraws, he avoids, he vanishes, he absents himself from himself. If he experiences firsthand what it is to not be, it's not a feeling of safety. Because for the narcissist, the schizoid state is threatening. For the classic schizoid, the schizoid state is safe. It's not egocintonic. The classic schizoid resents his schizoid incapacity, his schizoid disability, but he feels safe. The narcissist doesn't have even this. He resents the schizoid core, the schizoid nucleus, the absence, the emptiness inside himself. He resents it, and it doesn't make him feel safe. On the very contrary, it makes him feel like he's disappearing. Modification is the sensation of vanishing, evaporating into molecules. Like narcissism, paranoia and depression are also defenses against the schizoid state. If external object relations are too threatening, if contact with other people is hurtful or potentially hurtful, and if there is zero tolerance for pain and hurt, there's hurt aversion, pain aversion, because the inner structures are fragmented, they're dysregulated, they're labelled, there are numerous self-states. The whole thing is a precarious house of cards which is going to disintegrate. The whole edifice is going to crumble under the slightest pressure from an external object. So paranoia and depression are defenses against the schizoid state. The schizoid state is a defense against external object relations, so we have a defense against a defense. If external object relations are too threatening, you could choose to not have external object relations at all. That's of course possibly the psychotic state. But there are compromises. Narcissism is one such compromise. Paranoia and depression is another such compromise. It's the next best thing. You can have external object relations, but you can have internal object relations. In schizoid state there's no ego, there's no external object relations at all. In the paranoid, depressive, narcissistic states, there is object relations. There is object relations with external objects, but they are internalised. They are converted into internal objects in order to maintain full control, avoid abandonment, avoid persecution in the case of the paranoid, or avoid guilt in the case of the depressive, or avoid negative emotionality. So let's sum it up. A child who has been exposed to a bad, dead mother, bad, dead father, bad caregivers. A child who did not experience as a baby in a toddler did not experience proper, happy, loving object relations with external objects. Such a child will be terrified of having anything to do with other people or with the world. So such a child has several solutions available to him. Number one, such a child can become schizoid. He can cut off the world. He can disengage from all humanity. He can lock himself, withdraw, abandon everything and everyone. And this is actually to choose death, to become the undead, to become zombified, to go back to the womb, to be unborn. Solution number one. Solution number two. He can become a narcissist. He can become a paranoid. He can become depressive. These three solutions, what they have in common, is that object relations is maintained. There is the inner schizoid core. There is the inner emptiness. There is the absence. The person has been unborn. The person went back to the womb, is undead, is a zombie, but desperately tries to cling to the vestiges and remnants of a world. Desperately wants to be in touch with another human being. Wants to feel loved, wants to experience intimacy. Somehow, even if it's a mild, pale version of the original, a pale imitation, so be it. He wants it desperately. So he rejects the total schizoid solution. A narcissism, paranoia and depression, is when the narcissist creates a false self, allows people to interact with the false self, to love the false self, to be intimate with the false self, to adulate the false self, everything with the false self, not with the narcissist. And then internalizes these external objects who are interacting with the false self, internalizes them so that he can maintain full control over them, so that they don't betray him. They don't persecute him. They don't accuse him of anything. They don't cheat on him. They don't, by internalizing the external object, the narcissist makes sure that this object who used to be external and now is internal, will never abandon him, never betray him, never stab him in the back, never persecute him, will never hurt him, will never cause him pain, pain that he cannot tolerate, modification. So these are the two mechanisms and they are common in paranoia and they are common in depression as well. Internal objects can be persecutory, for example, the inner critic or the sadistic super ego, but the narcissist experiences these persecutory objects as external. Remember, the narcissist confuses internal with external. He internalizes external objects. He internalizes you, for example, but he still experiences you as an external object. Though you had become an internal object, though he is interacting exclusively with the internal object, his experience of this is internal object is wrong, erroneous. He never leaves this internal object to be external. Now, if the object is persecutory, it creates paranoia. Because even though it's an internal object that is persecutory, it is projected. It's experienced as external. And this creates paranoia. And paranoia creates aggression, defensive aggression. Similar with love, with emotions, the narcissist internalizes you, supposing you are his intimate partner. Supposing he is attracted to you, saturated with you, wants you, wants you in his shared fantasy. So, first of all, he directs you to the false sense. He redirects you to the false sense. That's a decoy, that's a protection, that's a firewall, that's a shield, no pain, no hurt. One, two, he internalizes you. He takes a snapshot, internalizes you. And from that moment on, he continues to interact with the internal object, but he experiences you as external. He mistakes the internal object for an external object. And gradually you can become the secretary object, in which case he will develop paranoia and he will seek to destroy you. This will provoke aggression, which will be directed at you. Even though it was the internal object that had generated the persecution, he will punish you because he mistakes the internal object for you and mistakes you for the internal object. He doesn't realize he has an internal object, he thinks it's you. And when the internal object engages in any dynamic, he attributes this dynamic to you. He projects it onto you. If he's persecuted by the internal object, he says, you are persecuting me. If he's accused by an internal object, if he feels guilty because he's accused by an accusatory internal object, he says, you're accusing me. He attributes it to you. He says, you're criticizing me all the time. You're accusing me all the time. If he is loved by an internal object, he similarly would attribute it to you. If he's idealized by an internal object, he would also say, you're idealizing whatever the internal object does within the narcissist because he mistakes it for you. He will attribute it to you via a process of projection. The schizoid chooses the safety of withdrawing, of avoiding reality, of denying access to external objects. But the schizoid also has no access to internal objects. For example, the internal object representing his mother. And his only solution is what Guntrip and Furnberg and others called identification. Identification, the other solution is incorporation. In other words, schizoids, because they don't have access to external objects, they cut all external object relations off. They're not in touch with people. They're solitary. They're lone wolves. Okay, they also don't have access to internal objects. So what they try to do, they try to merge, they try to fuse, they try to assimilate. They try to disappear. They already disappeared. They're absence, they're emptiness. So they try to integrate, to become one with an existing object. They are an absence in search of a presence, non-entity in search of an entity. And this is going back to the womb. Going back to the womb, for example, is assimilating the external object that his mother and the internal object that his mother, which are inaccessible. By going back to the womb, the schizoid becomes one with these objects again. And going back to the womb is, of course, an allegory, a metaphor, by withdrawing into confined spaces. This is the core function of the pathological narcissistic space. All confined spaces where the narcissist and the schizoid feel safe, they are womb substitutes. We'll come in a minute to the codependent and the borderline because they choose an identical solution. Merger, fusion, assimilation, going back to the womb. The narcissist chooses the pleasure, not the safety, but the pleasure of approach because approach allows him to master external objects via grandiosity, via exploitative entitlement and via internalization. So the schizoid chooses to, because he has no access to objects, internal or external, he chooses to become the object. If you have no access to objects, the next best strategy is to become the object because anyhow you don't exist. You have nothing to lose. You want to become the object. So the schizoid wants to become his mother by going back to the womb. The borderline and the codependent want to become the intimate partner. Merger and fusion and codependency, borderline, schizoid states, assimilation, they are all second best solutions. I can't have access to external objects because I'm terrified of what may happen. I'm afraid of the pain, abandonment. I'm afraid of abandonment and borderline personalities. So I don't want external objects. I don't want external objects. No, thank you. I don't have access to internal objects because everything there is disorganized, discombobulated, chaotic, fragmented. I don't have proper access to internal objects. So what I will do instead, I will merge with an object. I will fuse with an object. I will become another object. I will become my intimate partner. I will become my mother and that way I will get to live. I will get to survive and I will get to experience reality and even object relations safely, simply by vanishing and reappearing, born again. The narcissist is reborn, born again, as the grandiose false self. The borderline, the schizoid, the codependent are reborn, born again, via the agency of another person, usually an intimate partner, frequently an intimate partner that stands in for a parental figure, mother or father. All these solutions are regressive, of course. They're all infantile. They're all a child's solutions. But these people never grow up. All these people, narcissists, schizoids, borderlines, codependents, they never grow up. These are children coping with adult issues, with children's tools and instruments, with a child's capacity of comprehension, with a child's insights, almost nonexistent. So when you see these solutions, they are, of course, infantile and regressive. They are a child's solution. Codependency and borderline is exactly like the narcissist. They are composites. Remember, the narcissist solution is, I'm going to be schizoid, I'm going to disappear, I'm going to become an absence. But before I do that, I'm going to create a false self, and via the false self, by proxy, vicariously, secondhand, I'm going to experience reality, the world, and I'm going to experience external object relations. Borderlines and codependents have a similar compromise, a similar composite solution. Merger and fusion are actually a compromise. They are a composite solution because they allow the borderline and the codependent to feel both safe and pleasurable. They provide pleasure and they provide safety, and this is accomplished via pseudo-psychosis. That's why Kernbeck said that borderlines are borderline, they're on the border with psychosis. In codependency as well as in borderline, there's pseudo-psychosis because they do exactly the opposite of the narcissist. You see, all these three, actually all these five, the narcissist, the paranoid, the depressive, the borderline, the codependent, all five were faced with a grave, life-endangering threat, the schizoid state. All of them faced the possibility, the distinct possibility of self-inflicted extinction. Terrified, they all chose different solutions. The narcissist solution was to internalize external objects and thereby control them. That's a solution. What you control cannot hurt you. The borderline and codependent chose exactly the opposite solution. They externalize internal objects. The mother's womb, the schizoid wants to go back to, the codependent and borderline externalize the mother and her womb. They externalize internal objects and they mistake external objects for internal objects exactly like the narcissist. So it gives them a sense of safety and a sense of security and pleasure because they are inflationary. What the narcissist does, he takes the world and swallows it, like Kronos, you know, in Greek mythology. He swallows external objects and they become internal and he feels safe and he has the pleasure of interacting with external objects by other forces. The borderline and codependent expand themselves like the big bang. They go out. This is called hyperreflexivity. It's common in psychotic disorders as well. They externalize internal objects and then they get confused. They think that their internal objects are actually external exactly like the narcissist. So one of them swallows and assimilates the world. One of them is assimilated in the world. One of them renders everything external, internal, that's the narcissist, and the borderline and codependent render everything internal, external. They kind of disintegrate, evaporate and become one with the world. It's not the world, it's the intimate part. So the borderline and codependent solution is I'm going to disappear and reappear in my intimate partner's mind and body. I'm going to merge with my intimate partner. I'm going to fuse with my intimate partner. It's all very religious because there's a process of dying in resurrection. And this is probably the power of the biblical narrative. Because dying in resurrection are the core principles of mental illness, at least in cluster B personality disorder. But I think in many other situations like paranoia and depression. So attempting to cope with an impossible threatening environment, people, children come up with solutions that involve dying in one way to gratify the parent because the parent is rejecting. The parent's message is I want you dead. I want you to die. You're a nuisance. You are, I don't know what, you're disappointing, you're frustrated. I don't want you. I don't love you. I want you to die. So the child says, okay, mommy, I will die. I become schizoid. But I don't want to die. I want to be in touch with the world. I want to be in touch with. So they come up with these composite solutions, with these compromises and they become the world or the world becomes them. They confuse external and internal all in desperate attempts, desperate attempts to maintain hold on reality and interact with other people. And in this sense, being abandoned, abandonment is the equivalent of birth, auto rank suggested the concept of traumatic birth. And in the minds of these personalities, narcissistic, borderline, being abandoned is the equivalent of being born. But they don't want to be born. They want to be dead. They want to be the undead. They want to be dead but in touch. So the borderline is dead inside. The codependent is dead inside. But their solution is I will accept that I'm dead inside but I will live outside. And how will I do that? I will disappear and reappear, resurrect, be reborn as my intimate father. The narcissist solution is I'm dead inside. I accept it. It's painful but I accept it. I'm going to reappear. I'm going to resurrect as the false self. That way I'll be in touch with reality. But being abandoned, when these people are abandoned, the solution falls apart. And it's like they went back to the womb. They did. They went back to the womb. And now they have to exit again. They have to be born. They're forced into the world and into external object relations, not mediated via the solutions or compromises that they had come up with as children. This is the process of modification. Abandonment causes modification by eliminating the false self, by eliminating the persecutory object in paranoia, by eliminating the accusatory object in depression, by eliminating functional internal objects and replacing them with the same thing from recognizable external objects. So in the case of the depressive, the accusations come from a real life person, not from his inner object. In the case of a paranoid, he's really persecuted by a real person, conspired against, malice. In the case of the narcissist, he suffers narcissistic injury and humiliation at the end of a real life person. So abandonment is when these defenses are shattered in a process called this decompensation. All the defenses shut down and all the internal objects are demolished because they critically depend on the operation of these defenses. They are either demolished or inactivated. At that moment, the narcissist, for example, cannot operate any grandiose defense. His false self is shut off, you know? So he has no grandiose defenses. He's not got like anymore. He's a mere mortal, vulnerable, fragile. So the narcissist has no grandiose defenses and can no longer control, manipulate his internal objects because they are equally shut off or even destroyed. So he's absolutely back to the first months of life or the first two years of life when he had been terrified by a rejecting hateful dead mother. Because at that time, before he had come up with a narcissistic schizoid solution, during these years before he had invented the false self, it was raw terror, raw horror and abandonment or any other crisis like being cheated on or bankruptcy or divorce or what they do, they disable the defenses and they deactivate or destroy the internal objects. At that second, the narcissist feels that his world is spinning out of control. External objects are no longer internal. They cause him pain and he cannot master them, tell them what to do, control them and he falls apart. It's extreme anxiety, decompensation, acting out and in many cases there is a self-state, the protector self-state, usually a secondary or primary psychopathic self-state. And this self-state comes forward. It comes forward, for example, the borderline, when the borderline is subjected to rejection, abandonment, humiliation, real, imagined or anticipated, the borderline brings forward a self-state, a psychopathic self-state. It's a secondary psychopath, it's a psychopath with access to empathy and emotions, but it's still a psychopath. It's impulsive, reckless, etc. Disempathy, empathy is suspended. So the protector self-state takes over in such a case in order to avoid modification, but it usually doesn't work actually. Modification is only minimally delayed. A major object relations crisis, major crisis with an external object such as abandonment, cheating and so on, is bound to bring modification. So what are you there for? What's your role as the narcissist's intimate partner? You are there to facilitate this solution, the narcissistic solution. You are there to serve as the narcissist's womb, as his mother's womb. You are the womb. I want you to understand how critical, supremely critical your role is. Now, the narcissist would deny this because he is a schizoid, remember. At core, the core of the narcissist, the non-existent core is absence, schizoid absence. So if you interrogate the narcissist, they would tell you, she's interchangeable, she's dispensable, she's disposable, she's like a bus, they come and go every 10 minutes. But really, your function, your role in the narcissist's life is regulatory and life-sustaining. Let me put it this way. If you modify the narcissist, this is the closest that he comes to suicide because he becomes effectively a borderline. He's regulated emotions a little bit. All these defenses crumble. And we know that when these defenses crumble, narcissists develop borderline traits as do victims of complex trauma by the way. So you are there in the narcissist's life within his shared fantasy. Shared fantasy is a controlled space because the narcissist can't take chances with you. He can't have you improvising. He can't rely on your goodwill, judgment, moves, affects, cognition. No, no way. He's not going to trust you with anything ever. He's going to take you by the hand, he's going to convert you into internal object and he's going to embed you firmly in the ground of the shared fantasy. That way he feels safe. But within the shared fantasy, your main function is to be the womb of his mother. The place where he can go to when he is in the schizoid state. You are the womb. You are the found and source of the oceanic feeling of safety that he experiences when he is with you. Never mind how much he abuses you. Never mind how much he fights with you. Never mind how much he says he hates you and he does. Still, you are the womb. You are the safest, most holding, unconditionally accepting place where he can shed some of his narcissistic defenses and indulge in or experience fearlessly the schizoid state. You have another function, of course, secondary narcissistic supply. Another function is to affirm the reality and the veracity of the false self. You tell the narcissist the false self is not false. It's true, it's real. So you have two functions. The most important one, you are the safe zone. You're beyond the comfort zone. You're a safe zone. It's to you that he goes when he needs to let go and become a schizoid. You are his schizoid sanctuary. And the second thing is you uphold and buttress and support his grandiose false self because it's the only way that he can have any relationship with you. You're an external object. He has relationships with external objects only via the false self. It's not safe to have a relationship directly with you. It needs to be mediated, filtered, firewall, evaluated, assessed, accessed, reframed, whatever, via the false self and its grandiose fantasies. Remember that the narcissist misperceives you as an external object when actually he had internalized you already. In order to guarantee your functioning, in order to control you, manipulate you, prevent abandonment, the first thing the narcissist did was snapshot you, took a snapshot of you and internalized you. But he mistakes you for an external object. There's a confusion in his mind. He thinks you're external when actually he's interacting exclusively with your representation in his mind. But because you're external in his mind, because you're external in his mind, wrongly, you have the power to tell him, you have the power to report to him about reality. You are, in other words, the narcissist's reality testing. You're the gauge. He refers to you for reality testing. And the most critical question in his mind, in my nuts, my insane, is the false self real. And you are there to say, yes, dear, it is real. You are a genius. You are amazing. You sort of accumulate. You record past narcissistic glories and recount them to him. Sick transit. And that's easy to smoothie. Sick transit gloria. Now it's easy. Put it this way. So you are. Look how many critical functions you have. You are his safe. Refuge and sanctuary where he can be himself. Where he can be where he can be a non entity. Where he can be in absence. Himself means not self because he has no ego. Where he can vanish, knowing full well that he will rematerialize. It's like teleportation. You're the teleportation chamber. You are the one who confirms to him and assures him that the false self is not false, but real. You're his reality testing. Nothing is more important. You're the mother. You're the mother in this sense. You're the womb. The narcissist internalizes all external objects. They said so. So if we take this principle, you begin to understand that your existence in the narcissist mind is very, very bizarre and peculiar. Take, for example, the famous Madonna war complex. The Madonna war complex is not a splitting defense directed at external objects because narcissists don't interact with external objects. They internalize them. They interact only with internal objects. So it is meaningless to say that the narcissist regards some women as Madonna's and some women as wars. It's meaningless because it does not regard women. End of story. End of story. It regards representations of women. It interacts with internal objects that stands for women. But these internal objects are very little to do with you. They go through a process of idealization. It's a mess. It's not you. So what is the Madonna war complex? It's an internal splitting, not external splitting, because there's no external object relations with the narcissist. There's no contact with external objects. So it must be an internal splitting. As Gatric had observed, the self is split, the non-existent self. I mean, it's difficult to wrap your head around this. The processes, psychodynamic processes, they're split. The narcissist splits himself to all body and all mind, all mental. Semi-reminiscent of somatic and cerebral. So all body and all mental. The all body part interacts with horish women. It doesn't have anything to do with judging these women. It's not that the narcissist says, well, I'm going to look for horish women. It's that his body part interacts with women who are classified as horish internal objects. And his mind part interacts with women who are classified as Madonna internal objects. They're both internal objects. The narcissist is auto-erotic. He has sex. He loves, he's libidinally invested, he's emotionally infected. All the processes are auto-directed, self-directed. So he cannot have anything to do with women. Even during sex. But he splits himself. Internal splitting. That's an example of how bizarre the narcissist world is. Now you, I said that earlier, I said that you were fetish. To remind you, the sexual fetish is originally the same. The fetish is when the savage saw something as the embodiment of his God. So it could be an object. And the savage said, well, God is in this object. And that's a fetish. Freud discusses this in three contributions to the theory of sex. 1905. So when you have a propensity to regard or treat other people, caregivers, parents, intimate partners, as objects to objectify them. That's fetishism. When the narcissist converts you, objectifies you into an internal object. He's fetishizing you. He's treating you as a fetish. Now fetishism is an inevitable phase of personal development and growth. During the formative years, six months to three years, psychoanalysis and object relations theories teach us that we outgrow the fetishistic, immature way of relating to external objects to the human environment. Instead, what replaces fetishism is empathy. When we perceive others as human beings, full fledged human beings, not objects. And yet some people, narcissists, for example. But not only narcissists. I mentioned paranoics. I mentioned borderlines. I mentioned codependence. They're all the same. These people remain fixated in the fetishistic phase. They do not progress into full fledged adulthood. And arguably the most ostentatious manifestation of this retardation is sexual. There's a paraphernalia called fetishes. But there is mental or psychological fetishes. And it is equally rampant and equally egregious. In sexual fetishism, there are three types of fetishes. In animate object, body part, or reified trait. So classic fetishes, sexual fetishes, react to a specific object or specific body part or specific trait or quality of a person. The narcissist is exactly the same. He transforms you into an object and then he reacts to your traits, to your body parts. Anyone who has ever had sex with the narcissist will note the narcissist's inordinate focus on specific body parts. Feet, breasts. The narcissist reduces his intimate partner, his female intimate partner, or his intimate partner, into an assemblage of organs, assemblage of body parts. And then he chooses some of these body parts as erotic, erogenous zones. And he is aroused by these body parts actually, not by the totality. That is of course sexual fetishes. We have objective fetishes. These are people who fetishize objects. We have somatic fetishes who fetishize body parts. And we have abstract fetishes who fetishize a personality trait or a body trait. The same with psychological fetishes. The narcissist fetishizes your body parts, fetishizes you as an object, and fetishizes certain traits. This process of fetishizing the traits is what is called idealization. It's when you convert, when you invest emotionally, and according to Freud and many others, right? There's no difference between emotional energy and sexual energy. When you invest emotionally in a specific set of traits, this is idealization. When you elevate them emotionally to a privileged position, that's idealization. So people who prefer auto erotic, partialist, anonymous sex, they are also fetishes. With the fetish being their own bodies, or the organs of their sex partners. So the narcissist behaves this way in sex. He's focused on his gratification, his body. He uses your body parts. He masturbates with your body in effect. But also outside the bedroom. He uses you for gratification. He reduces you. He reduces you to a set of traits. One, two, three traits, four traits. And you have these traits. And he can do this because he is not interacting with you. He's interacting with an internal object. And he can design and redesign this internal object as he sees fit. He's in total control. So this is a pathological attachment to a fetish, but this is an internalized fetish. Because the narcissist is auto erotic, even his fetishism is directed inwards, not outwards. Normal fetishes direct their arousal, their sex drive outwards. Narcissistic fetishes direct everything inwards. So they're going to fetishize an internal object and the idealized traits of this internal object. And it's going to carry over to the sex as well. And so in the absence of the fetish, most fetishes are sexually dysfunctional. Same with the narcissists. In the absence of the fetishized, idealized internal object, he becomes dysfunctional. And the circumstances surrounding the fetishistic sexual encounter are not very material. And similarly, anyone can serve as an intimate partner or a source of supply. It's a kind of tunnel vision. Similar to the autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenic or somatophon disorders. It indicates an underlying mental health problem or trauma or process. Okay, the narcissist fetishizes you, internalizes you, reduces you to a set of traits and so on. And then he uses you. He uses you to uphold his false self, to establish reality testing and to become the safe zone where he can be himself. Him non-self. Excuse me. And this is actually your role. When you abandon the narcissist or threaten to abandon him. And when you cheat on him, when you betray him as he sees it and so on. Everything falls apart and he is modified. Same process in borderline. Same process in codependency. We can ask, okay, if it's the same process in all three, aren't these three one and the same? No, of course not. Massive differences. I suggest that you watch relevant videos. But this particular process, these defenses against the schizoid state, exist in all three disorders. But remember, the narcissist solution is the exact opposite, the diametrical opposite to the borderline codependent solution. All three fetishize the intimate partner. All three idealize the intimate partner. But the narcissist chooses to assimilate her, to swallow her, to convert her into an internal object. The borderline and codependent want the intimate partner to do it to them. They want to become an internal object inside the intimate partner. They want to go back to the womb, but to a specific womb, a functional womb, a womb which will provide external object relations. The narcissist wants to go back to the womb, but again, a specific womb, a womb that will uphold his view of himself, the false self, grandiosity. So they all want to go back to the womb because they are driven by the schizoid engine. They're driven by the schizoid core, but they resist this drive. They strike a compromise with the schizoid state. They say, please, we will become absent. We will disappear. We promise. We will not exist anymore. But please let us experience objects, relationships with objects, with other people. Please. And we will do it in a way that will satisfy you because we will disappear in the process of having a relationship with an external object. We will disappear by becoming the false self. We will disappear by merging and fusing with an intimate partner. And we will disappear by developing extreme dependence on an intimate partner. The disappearing act is the schizoid part. It's the sacrifice, the human sacrifice to the schizoid God, schizoid idol. What's left are the dysfunctional solutions that these children had found in desperate attempts to not disappear, to somehow remain rooted or planted in reality, to keep one foot in reality, somehow, somewhere with someone, have a flicking, ephemeral touch of contact, like a butterfly, simulated external relationships. These people crave, crave intimacy and love, crave other people. They just can't. They feel threatened. And they had become schizoids early on. And the borderline veneer, the codependency veneer, the narcissism veneer, these are all camouflages. They're all compromises struck with the schizoid core, allowing the person, the non-person, the non-entity, to pretend in a make-believe world that she or he is in touch with other people, is loved, is held, knowing deep inside that it's a doomed effort. A doomed effort, because ultimately, the schizoid wins. All narcissists end life, all narcissists end life, alone, decomposing, decaying, ruminating and brooding on past glories, pathetically trying to recapture them and recreate them. All narcissists, all borderlines, all codependence, end up losing the battle and becoming full-fledged schizoids. I want to monopolize your New Year's Eve, your New Year's Day and your entire New Year. So, I've created a five, almost six-hour video about a phenomenon much neglected in literature and even online, the schizoid personality. I know, I know, Americans should say schizoid, but of course it's the wrong pronunciation of the word. Never mind. Schizoid, schizoid, loners, people who either choose to spend their time alone enjoying their own company or not, or people who are compelled to behave this way because of some mental health pathologies. This is the topic of today's course, actually, seminar, six-hour seminar. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute, for Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, and Outreach Campus in Lagos, Nigeria. But before we deal with the issue of the loner's psychology, is it a Pandora's Box or a treasure chest? The mystery of the schizoid personality. Before we go there, it's important to emphasize the schizoid lifestyle, the choice to be alone as a way of life is possibly, arguably, debatably a rational choice in today's world, where people constitute at the very minimum a burden or an annoyance, and in many cases a threat. 63% of adult men and 34% of adult women choose to remain single at any given year. About half of them choose to remain single lifelong. So this is not some fringe phenomenon. This is not a deviation, an aberration, a perversion, if you wish. This is fast becoming the norm, the new normal, the schizoid lifestyle could be described easily as rational. And in many cases, it's ego-syntonic. In other words, people who live alone, people who spend all their time by themselves, people who don't bother to interact with others, even for the sake of sex, having sex. These people increasingly report being happy, ego-syntonic. I like being alone, they say. I like my own company. I've had a very bad experience with other people repeatedly, so I'm avoiding society, I'm avoiding socializing, I'm not going out, I'm not having an intimate relationship, an affair, a romance, I'm not even having sex. Indeed, the frequency of sex, the frequency of sexual acts, and the number of sexual partners have declined precipitously by more than 40% compared to previous generations. So boomers, for example, had almost 50% more sexual partners than millennials, Generation Z, not to mention alphas. And generally the frequency of sex has collapsed to such a degree that their whole countries, for example Japan, big parts of the United Kingdom, even Scandinavia, their whole countries where the majority, and sometimes the vast majority, of people under the age of 25 or under the age of 35, depending on the study, haven't had sex in the preceding year. It's very common to not have sex for 5 years, for 10 years. Celebrity, is becoming celebrated and becoming a lifestyle choice that is embraced by many. It's of course a schizoid choice. But as long as it is ego-syntonic, as long as people are happy, as long as a choice can be rationalized in a way that would appeal to independent, neutral observers, such as therapists, then this is not apathology. I want to repeat this. A schizoid lifestyle choice is not apathology. We should not pathologize people who elect and select to be alone. Now, aloneness is not the same as loneliness. Loneliness is an emotional reaction to an unwanted state of solitude. When you're solitary, and you don't like it, and you're unhappy about it, and it affects your functioning in some way, your mental health is deteriorating. You desperately attempt to connect with other people, even by, for example, compromising your moral standards in one-night stands, and so on and so forth, that is loneliness, not aloneness. So aloneness could be, and often is, a healthy lifestyle choice, while loneliness indicates that there is some problem bordering on apathology. Before I proceed to discuss the schizoid personality, a kind of introduction to the seminar, I would like to clarify something about yesterday's video, created a lot of confusion. The video deals only with sexual attraction, not romantic attraction. In other words, the video attempts to answer the question, why are you sexually attracted to narcissists? Why do you find them sexy and irresistible, charming? What is this aura or charisma that induces you to engage in sex acts with the narcissists? The video yesterday does not deal with the question, why are you romantically attracted to the narcissists? Why do you end up being in a couple with the narcissists? Why do you develop intimate romantic relationships with narcissists? That's not the topic of yesterday's video. I will deal with it in a future video, and the answer is very surprising. Now, I mentioned yesterday that covert and cerebral narcissists are craven, fearful, cowards. And I wasn't very clear, and I created a lot of confusion. I would like to disambiguate. Covert and cerebral narcissists are cowardly because they tend to catastrophize, they are paranoid to a large degree, and because they are collapsed narcissists, they have experienced repeatedly and regularly a state of failure. They fail to obtain narcissistic supply, for example. They fail to attract intimate or sexual partners if they are cerebral, and so on and so forth. So they are afraid to be humiliatingly rebuffed, mortified by their female partners. They don't feel that they have the right or the capacity to impose boundaries and rules on their intimate partners. Now, I'm saying female intimate partners because I'm giving the example of a heterosexual man, but of course it applies to same-sex relationships, it applies to women, and so on and so forth. Narcissism today is a global, genderless, non-gender discriminating phenomenon, and applies to all types of sexual orientations. And so, in the example of a heterosexual man, a heterosexual man would be terrified to confront his female partner, to try to impose boundaries, to try to establish ground rules, and to try to insist on them, or to somehow penalize her if she strays, because he would be afraid, because he perceives himself as inadequate. The covert and the cerebral narcissists perceive themselves as unable to satisfy the needs of a female partner, to gratify her, especially sexually, but also romantically, as far as intimacy, and so on and so forth. So, they would never, ever confront the female partner because they would be terrified that she would lash out, push back, and humiliate them, and motivate them in public, in front of the competition, the competition being other men who are out to poach the cerebral or covert narcissists' partner. So, they allow their female partners to misbehave, in public, with other men, and they don't dare to put their foot down, and to insist that the behavior should stop, because they're terrified that the female partner will turn around and say, F off, I'm going to do exactly what I want, you can't give me what I need, so I'm going to look for it elsewhere. She's going to say it in public, it's going to modify the narcissists. Equally, they're not protective of women in their lives, they're not protective of girlfriends, they're not protective of wives. When these women are approached by other men, when other men flirt with them, or even touch them in inappropriate ways, in public, or even when these women are preyed upon by predators, in the presence of the covert of the cerebral narcissists, the covert of the cerebral narcissists is going to pretend that he's oblivious to what's happening, and he's going to give his consent if his female partner asks to misbehave with the other men. He's going to say, go ahead, I have no problem with that, I don't care. And when the female partner of a covert or a cerebral narcissist is attacked by others, especially other men, criticised, mocked, ridiculed, humiliated and so on and so forth, the cerebral or covert narcissist would never protect her, would never confront the other men, because they seek approval of peers, their peer pleasants. So they end up doing, they gang up on their female partner, they gang up on the woman with these other men. They join them and attack the woman. I hope I made it clear. The cerebral and covert narcissists are not afraid of other men, they are afraid of their own partners rejecting them, humiliating them in public, if they try to establish boundaries and rules, and they seek the approval of peers of other men. And so they would sacrifice their own intimate partner in order to gain the approbation and the acceptance of their peers, their other men there. And also, and finally, there is of course a distinction between sexual and romantic attraction. You could be, for example, bisexual, but heteroromantic. You could be heterosexual and be romantic, sex only with the opposite sex, you can sleep only with the opposite sex, but have romantic affairs with both sexes and so on and so forth. So there's a divorce between these two issues and that's why I separated them in the video. Now everything I said about heterosexual male covert cerebral narcissists applies to a female covert or cerebral narcissists in a heterosexual relationship or in the same sex relationship. You can easily generalize it. Now that's what I've just mentioned. This craveness, this cowardice, this fear of humiliation, modification and rejection in public by one's intimate partner, even if she misbehaves, this inability to set rules and boundaries, to call her on her misconduct and actions, to confront her when she misbehaves, for example, with other men in public, in the presence of this cerebral or covert narcissist. This also applies to schizoids. Schizoids behave exactly this way. And this raises the possibility that the schizoid core is either empty, exactly like the narcissist, or essentially it's a bed object. We are beginning to see an affinity between narcissists of some type, cerebral ones. Cerebral narcissists, by the way, maintain a schizoid lifestyle. Covert narcissists, in the majority of cases, are also schizoid. So we're beginning to see some affinity, some common denominator, between people who are schizoid in the psychopathological sense, not as a lifestyle choice, and certain types of narcissists. And in the 90s, there was this discussion of the empty schizoid core. But I want to propose that there are two options. The empty schizoid core would lead to phenomena such as schizoid borderlines. But a bed object schizoid core, a schizoid core which renders the person inferior in his own eyes. So it's a schizoid core that keeps broadcasting your inferior, your inadequate, your bed, your unworthy, your stupid, your ugly, the bed object messages, the introjects, the voices that constellated together constitute a bed object and put you down. Someone who is in the possession of such a bed object or someone who is possessed by this kind of bed object would tend to withdraw from society, would tend to avoid other people. Because he would be terrified that they would somehow amplify, magnify and justify the bed object voices inside him. What I'm trying to say is that a bed object core is likely to be a schizoid core, is likely to lead to schizoid behaviors, avoidance of other people. And so we need to understand that there is an interface and there is an overlap between narcissistic phenomena of some types, covert, cerebral and schizoid phenomena. Now this is not my insight, this is the insight of the British object relations school in the 1960s, but I think it's a brilliant and correct insight. As you listen to the rest of this seminar, you will learn a lot more about the intersections between narcissism and schizoid phenomena and schizoid personalities. It's like Venn diagrams, it's a common shaded area, which is the schizoid narcissists. Consequently, because schizoid behave a lot like covert narcissists and like cerebral narcissists, schizoids are often mistakenly diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. Every narcissist goes through schizoid phases, these are reactive phases. When the narcissist is denied narcissistic supply on a long term basis, when the narcissist is mortified in public, when the narcissist experiences a variety, three types of depression and so forth, the narcissist tends to become schizoid. He withdraws and licks his wounds. So schizoid behavior is a typical reactive narcissistic behavior and a diagnostician who is not sufficiently astute and acute and trained and qualified and well read is liable to misdiagnose schizoid personality disorder or schizoid phenomena as narcissistic. And that, of course, would be a serious mistake. And I will explain why. A minute ago I said that narcissism and schizoid personality are more or less one and the same. Both of them share a core, a schizoid core, an empty schizoid core or a bad object schizoid core. That's what I said a few minutes ago. And here I am saying that schizoid personality is often misdiagnosis narcissism. So could I make up my mind? What is it that I'm saying? Here's what I'm saying. Both schizoids and narcissists have an identity problem. They have a core which is empty because of memory problems, other issues, the core is empty. Now, someone with a schizoid core, an empty schizoid core would develop borderline behaviors. And in extreme cases, borderline personality disorder. Someone with a schizoid core which comprises a bad object at the core of the core, there's a bad object. This kind of person would probably become a narcissist. Someone with a schizoid core that is not empty and not a bad object would develop schizoid personality disorder. I hope I made the taxonomy classification clear. Now, there is a substantial clinical difference between schizoids and narcissists. Schizoid personality or schizoids personality disorder in an extreme case, that's not a problem. They're sort of the same problem as narcissism. Both the schizoid person and the narcissist, both of them have a problem with object relations, with the ability to relate to people out there, to other people. Other people in psychology are called objects. So, object relations, relationships with objects with other people. So, the schizoid and the narcissists, they have disrupted object relations. They failed to develop mature, adult, regular, predictable, stable, safe object relations. Their relationships with other people are somehow massively disrupted. But there's a difference as to why, difference as to the etiology. With the narcissist, the problem is that the narcissist cannot perceive objects as external. He cannot digest or conceive of the externality and separateness of other people. So, this is the core problem. This is the issue with the narcissist's object relations. You can't have object relations if you don't recognize external objects. Consequently, the narcissist develops object relations with his internal objects. It's a kind of narcissistic libido. The narcissist does have object relations, but with internal objects that represent in his mind the objects out there. So, the narcissist will never have a relationship with you. He's going to have a relationship with your avatar in his mind, with your mental representation in his mind. He's going to interact, he's going to dialogue, he's going to fight with, he's going to try to modify, he's going to idealize, and ultimately he's going to devalue an internal object inside his mind, an introject, an icon inside his mind that stands in for you, the external object. And that is, of course, a massive problem in object relations. The schizoid also has a problem with object relations, but his problem is different. The schizoid person does recognize and can conceive and does conceive of the externality of an object. He does relate to other people out there externally to himself. He does understand fully and accept fully, and accept fully that other people are separate from him, that they're external to him, that they're not extension of him. So, the schizoid has no problem with external objects. He doesn't convert them into internal objects. He doesn't continue to interact with internal objects in his mind and so on and so forth. Of course, when I say he, it's a she, when I say he's, it's a her, etc. Gender pronouns are interchangeable. So what's the problem with the schizoid person? The problem is catexes. Whereas a narcissist cannot perceive the external object as external. The schizoid perceives the external object as external, but cannot invest emotionally in the external object. He has a problem with emotional investment, catexes. Catexes is a very, very complex and compound process, but in principle, it is object libido. It's the ability to invest energy, psychological energy, mental energy in things out there. These things could be people, could be ideas even, could be collectives, could be events, could be so. Whenever you get emotionally invested, emotionally attached, reactive emotionally, to something outside yourself, you are affecting it. You undergo a process called catexes. And if it is an object, another person, that would be object libido as distinct from narcissistic libido. The narcissist doesn't have object libido because he doesn't recognize objects. So the only thing the narcissist has is narcissistic libido invested in internal objects. The schizoid doesn't have object libido because he doesn't catect, he has a problem with catexes. Even though he recognizes the externality and separateness of other people, he has no problem with that. So this is the difference between narcissists and schizoid and why they should not be confused, even though both of them share the same schizoid core. And with a narcissist, there is usually a bad object as well. Now, the schizoid, exactly like the narcissist, is reactive to or develops paranoid ideation, dysphoria, anxiety, catastrophizing. These are the engines of schizoid behavior. If you're afraid of the future, if you catastrophize, if you believe the worst case scenario will always transpire, you're going to avoid the world, you're going to reject life, or in clinical terms, you're going to constrict life. If you're anxious all the time, if you're depressed all the time, what energy do you have left to tackle people or to tackle the world out there? And if you're paranoid, then you would protect yourself or defend yourself by shielding yourself from the environment, especially the human environment. So these are important engines of schizoid behavior. And in this sense, the schizoid is a close cousin of the schizotypal. It is not in vain that both disorders start with the word schizo, because they are one step removed from schizophrenia. And schizophrenia, of course, has a strong component of paranoia. From the outside, the schizoid is perceived as inscrutable. His avoidance, his withdrawal, are misinterpreted. There's shyness, for example, or gentleness, or kindness. But in any case, he is indecipherable. You cannot decode the schizoid, because he doesn't provide enough information about himself. And very often, his behavioral choices, his conduct is perceived as irrational, overreactive, perhaps catastrophizing, and so on and so forth. And so people feel a bit ill, it is a bit threatened in the presence of the schizoid, because he is so not like them. He is so, if you wish, abnormal. And this is an uncanny valley reaction, also common with narcissists and psychopaths. But with narcissists and psychopaths, the uncanny valley reaction has to do with the fact that narcissists and psychopaths are not full-fledged humans. They are much more akin to robots or artificial intelligence. So that creates a normal sense of ease. And in a bad intuition, a gut feeling of, I have to run away from them. So this is the uncanny valley. With the schizoid, the uncanny valley reaction is, wow, he's so weird, she's so weird. They're so bizarre. They are indecipherable, and it's impossible to explain their behavior. Why are they acting this way? This is so irrational, and so on and so forth. So it threatens the perception of order and structure in the universe, the ability to predict. The schizoid reifies an alternative relational model, an alternative model of existence. It's as if the schizoid's message is, you don't have to have relationships. You don't have to desire sex. You don't need to be in contact with other people. You can survive on your own and be self-sufficient and even content and maybe even happy. And this is threatening. It's a threatening message because it undermines the foundations of society, our social pact. We believe that our survival is contingent on collaboration and cooperation. And here comes the schizoid, and he's a survivor, and he's okay. And he doesn't invest all these efforts and energy in relationships. He has no costs. His costs are much lower. And it challenges the paradigm. And we're beginning to ask ourselves, maybe all these costs, some costs, investments that we make, maybe they are unnecessary. Maybe we're just being brainwashed by society. We are product of socialization. We have been told that we need to have relationships. Maybe it's not true. The schizoid raises existential issues. To which we don't have good answers. And in this sense, the schizoid threatens the social structure, social institutions. So schizoids are invariably perceived as either a treasure chest, if I just succeed to open him, if I just succeed to penetrate her, excuse the pun, if I just succeed to understand the schizoid, to glom him over to establish a channel of communication, I'm going to discover what a treasure he or she is. Schizoid is like a treasure hidden in a vault with the combination long having been lost. And you are on a quest to rediscover this combination or reconstitute it, recombine it so as to open the vault and enjoy the treasures inside. So that's the treasure chest perception of the schizoid. The alternative is the Pandora's box perception of the schizoid. Something is so wrong with this person that he's hiding it. He's suppressing it. He's concealing it. And even one would say deceptively so. So there's this eerie creepy feeling that the schizoid can erupt any minute, or that he's a kind of a hidden serial killer or something. That's the Pandora's box attitude to schizoids. But exactly this triggers in people grandiose defenses. It challenges them. The schizoid is a walking, talking, breathing challenge. Is he misunderstood? And if I were to understand him or if I were to convince him that he is being seen and is being understood, will he be mine? Can I possess him? It's a possession, but possessiveness. It's like I want to possess him. And I want to prove to myself that I can decipher, deconstruct and decode the schizoid. It's an intellectual challenge as well as an emotional one. So it's the schizoid by his mere existence, fleeting evasiveness, refusal to engage, avoidance and withdrawal. Without any discernible costs, any discernible adverse outcomes or impacts is happy go lucky. All by himself enjoying his own company, much preferring solitude and solitary pursuits to anything we have to offer. That's humiliating. That's insulting. So we want to force the schizoid to become normal. But how can we obtain this outcome by understanding the schizoid? By somehow entering the schizoid's mind and informing him that finally someone grasps what it is to be a schizoid. And of course in all these narcissistic defenses that the schizoid provokes in us, there are hidden assumptions. The schizoid, because of his refusal or her refusal to communicate, is a blank screen. And we can project and do project onto this screen. Fantasies, wishes, dreams, parts of ourselves that we either reject or either aspire to. The schizoid becomes a fulfillment of our internal space, a flourishing and blossoming of our internal space, externalized. The schizoid in other words provokes in us an outsourcing reaction. We outsource the nether areas and the recesses and the nooks and crannies, unvisited, cobwebbed areas of our mind. We outsource them and project them onto the schizoid. Because the schizoid doesn't push back, doesn't provide any input or any feedback. So the schizoid can be anything we want him to be. It's a blank screen to be projected on. At the same time the schizoid is perceived as a blank slate, as raw material. We can somehow mold the schizoid, we can somehow form the schizoid. His reticence, his taciturn reluctance to attach, to bond, to engage, to communicate, to discuss. His aloofness, his detachment are perceived as a primitive state of being. It is as if he lacks the skills to do all this. It's as if he is in a kind of primordial state, atavistic state. And now we can extricate him from this swamp, non-differentiated swamp, and extricate him from this primordial soup. And we can impose on him a psychological evolution. We can mold him, form him, change him, transform him, heal him, rescue him, save him, fix him. In other words, the schizoid provokes in us the rescuer-savier complex or reaction. We perceive the schizoid as in need of help. To become normal, to enjoy life, and above all, to enjoy us, human company, sex, love, romance, intimacy. Everything, cooperation, everything one person can offer another. And here is the poor schizoid denied all this. And we want to bring him into our paradise, where everyone is with everyone, happily ever after. It is through the schizoid that we seek to realize the fantasy of empathy and inter-human connectedness. These are fantasies, of course. There's no such thing. We're all alone. We're atoms. Empathy is an illusion, and even worse, it's a delusion. And yet we want to impose it on the schizoid, because he threatens his mere existence, his proof, that all our beliefs about interpersonal interactions are nonsense. And we need to eradicate him. We need to eliminate him as he is, kill him in effect, and then resurrect him. It's very religious. It's a little like Jesus, you know? Three days, and he will rise from the dead, no longer a schizoid, but one like us. And this is an adventure. This is a narrative. It's like a movie. It's thrilling. It's technicolor. The challenge of the schizoid poses kind of embellishes our lives. We come alive trying to convert and transform this schizoid. Spending time with a schizoid is often extremely, excruciatingly boring. The schizoid is not exactly a fun kind of person. And he much prefers to say at home, read a good book, watch a great movie, go to sleep, forget sex. He's not interested in sex. He doesn't turn him on. He's not around. And he regards any interactions with people as a burden, an annoyance, a nuisance. So it's very boring to be with a schizoid. But being invested in the project of approaching a schizoid, penetrating the schizoid's firewalls, entering the schizoid's mind, and then transforming the schizoid into a normal human being, that's a movie. That's wonderful. That's Hollywood. That's the stuff of Hollywood. And so it gives our lives meaning and makes sense of them, challenges us. The detachment of the schizoid is misconstrued. As a cry for help, schizoid is misperceived. As helpless and childish, when in reality the schizoid is actually highly self-sufficient, much more self-sufficient than anyone. And not in need of anyone or anything. With a schizoid, there's not threat of intimacy. And there's lots of personal space. And this tends to attract to the schizoid, other schizoids. Or people with insecure attachment styles, for example, avoidant attachment style. And people with mental health pathologies, such as, for example, narcissists and psychopaths, but especially borderlines. Why would borderlines be attracted to someone who offers no intimacy and insists on personal space and time which are exclusive, which exclude the partner? Why would the borderline insist on this? Because the borderline believes that if she were to convert the schizoid into a normal person, for example, if she were to introduce him to the magic of sex, then he would be hers. She would own him and possess him. And she would be able to use him for external regulation. Because the schizoid is stable, is safe. So he's a perfect partner. The only problem is he never exits his shell. It's like a turtle. So the borderline, when she comes across a schizoid, says to herself, wow, had he only been normal, he would have been my perfect partner, my rock, my world. And so she tries to convert him into a normal person. Because then he will be perfect for her. Borderlines get very attached to schizoids, to their detriment, of course, because the schizoid is unable to externally regulate the borderline. So in relationships between borderlines and schizoids, there is even more drama and emotional dysregulation than in relationships between borderlines and narcissists. While the schizoids' detachment, avoidance and withdrawal are misconstrued as helplessness and childishness, or even a cry for help, the schizoid's self-sufficiency is misinterpreted as strength. The borderline misinterprets this self-containment as strength. Wow, he's so strong, he doesn't need anyone. He's so fearless, he doesn't need anything. In all this, the schizoids' asexuality, the schizoids regard sex as a chore, and not a very pleasant one. The schizoids' essential asexuality in all this is a challenge and the main reason why relationships with schizoids break down. It's especially a challenge when the borderline is concerned, because one of her main weapons of addiction, main ways she gets her partner addicted to her, is sex, and it means nothing to the schizoid. Similarly, schizoids are likely to be intellectually challenged. If the potential partner is highly intelligent, intellectual, insightful, with a synoptic view, innovative, creative, schizoid is likely to be reactive to this. But his reactivity resembles very much the reactivity of the autistic person. He's going to react only to the segments or sections or elements which somehow resonate with his own hobbies or concerns or ideas or wishes or plans and so on. He's going to be highly selective and he's not going to resonate with the intellectual output of his partner as if it were an integral part of his partner. He's going to react to the intellectual output of the partner as if the intellectual output were the partner. He partners, he gets attached to, he interacts with the intellectual output, not with the source of the intellectual output, the partner. The partner is perceived as the cost of the intellectual stimulation, the intellectual arousal. Unfortunately, the stimulation, the arousal are coming from a human being and that's the cost I have to pay, I have to be in contact with the human being. Okay, so this is a general introduction to schizoid phenomena and schizoid personality and now on to the seminar. You don't have to watch the entire seminar all at once, it's divided to segments. Take your time, if the topic interests you, why not watch it over a whole week, an entire week? Schizoid phenomena, schizoid personality are fascinating because they constitute the bridge between psychotic disorders and personality disorders. And this is where narcissism comes in, narcissism is on the border of psychosis, exactly like borderline. And therefore, it seems that the foundational disorder, the basic disorder, the building block of all these disorders is schizoid, the schizoid personality. In its various permutations and mutations, it becomes narcissism, borderline or psychosis. Have fun.