 and the camera is rolling, and please always look to Andres Andersa. So hello Sam, it's an honor and a privilege to talk to you in Budapest, welcome. Thank you for having me, I feel welcome, thank you. So let's get this rolling. You have had an amazing and quite unusual life with a pretty difficult childhood and a very adventurous life. If you could tell us how your early beginnings were and how you became to be the number one professional on narcissism and cluster personality disorders. Like all other psychologists I started with my own mental health problems. It seems the whole profession is one mental asylum I think. I was born to a family of immigrants in Israel, they were not very highly educated, and they were ill-equipped to cope with the exigencies and demands of modern life, let alone with someone like me. When I was born I was an unusual child, I was a difficult child. At some point the authorities, the school authorities, thought that I'm retarded, that I'm intellectually challenged. So they sent me to a psychologist because I was very disruptive at school. I started to read at age four and I read encyclopedias and the equivalent of a Wall Street Journal approached it, usually every day between ages four and six and so on. School was a bit boring, so they sent me to a psychologist and the psychologist diagnosed me with at the time 180 IQ which was unusual, they didn't know what to do, so they sent me to university at age nine and I started to study at university at age nine. I ended up being a junk professor at age 17. My mother and father didn't know how to cope with any of this and I think my father as well were mentally ill, my mother severely mentally ill. So I was subjected to horrendous physical torture and verbal abuse for 12 years. Consequently of course this affected the formation of my identity and my personality. I ended up developing severe personality disorders and probably other mental health issues, probably a mood disorder as well and my life spiraled out of control. I was a high achiever, I made tens of millions of dollars, I was very famous in my country and so on so forth but I was sabotaging, I was self-destructing all the time, I was undermining my own success because deep inside I had what we call in psychology a bed-object, deep inside the message from my parents was you're not lovable, you're a freak, you're a weirdo, you don't deserve any appreciation or so. I kept confirming their view of me, children cannot dispute the parents, they cannot, it's very frightening. The child prefers to believe that something is wrong with him or with her than rather than to say something is wrong with mother or something is wrong with father because the child depends on mother and father for survival. And so the child internalizes the parental interjects, the messages from the parents and if the messages are, you know, you're inadequate, you're a loser, you're failure, you're unlovable and so on, that's lifelong. These messages are lifelong, they keep playing in your head all the time like tapes and so I sought to justify my parents, to validate them, to confirm the judgment of me by destroying myself time and again and again and finally because I'm very good at what I do, I was very good at destroying myself also and the destruction was over, I lost absolutely everything, I went to prison, I did time and it is in prison that I was diagnosed for the second time with narcissistic personality disorder and this time I listened and I organized a network of people to smuggle literature into the prison. At night by candlelight I wrote my findings, my results of my research and results of introspection. So gradually this became Malignan self-love, the book Malignan self-love was written in prison at night time with a candle and what I discovered in the literature is that there was no literature to sum it up, there was an essay 1914, there were some studies by Kohut in the 70s and in between there was almost nothing, almost nothing, Kernberg a little and that's it there was no website online there was no nothing online absolutely nothing no one has heard of narcissism it was so it was a desert the first thing I had to do is to understand myself but the second thing I had to do is to communicate my findings somehow so I had to invent a whole new language most of the words in use today were invented by me in that period that includes narcissistic abuse, cerebral narcissists, somatic narcissists, hovering you know all these words flying monkeys all these words I try to invent a new language ironically I invented the new language so that narcissists could describe their internal landscape and their inner experience but this language was appropriated almost immediately by victims of narcissists so they used this language to describe the experience of being with the narcissists although originally this language was invented for a totally different reason that's in a nutshell and then there was Malika Saflav and 10 years later there was a second website so for 10 years I had the only website and I had owned all the support for narcissism and then 10 years later I was joined by another person and now of course it's an avalanche, it's an omic talking about your narcissism can you please tell us how briefly how a narcissist is formed and what the main types are and perhaps how does it get chosen how what type of narcissist one will evolve to be pathological narcissism because there is healthy narcissism there is healthy narcissism it's also known as primary narcissism it's a kind of narcissism that allows you as a baby to take on the world because to take on the world you need to be very grandiose you need to feel that you're godlike you know when you're two years old you say goodbye to mommy and then you walk the first three steps away from her that's a major revolution it's also potentially traumatic if the mother is a wrong mother you know so you need to be very grandiose primary narcissism helps you to explore the world on the one hand and to explore yourself in a process known as introversion to explore yourself as well narcissism also has a very strong sexual component so we have something called narcissistic libido or libido it's when when your life force as exemplified by your sexuality is directed at yourself you love yourself why is this critical why is this healthy because by loving yourself you are finally loving an object you're loving something even if this something is you you are learning to love something so narcissism is extremely critical in proper healthy development however if it persists to an older age if it persists into adulthood then it's pathological it's pathological because grandiosity is a cognitive distortion grandiosity provides you with wrong information about reality and the world it's it impairs your your reality test so if you are left with grandiosity life long you would tend to misread people and situations and you would you would tend to make very bad decisions for yourself and for others similarly a sense of entitlement a lack of empathy a tendency to exploit people these are all integral parts of primary narcissism but in primary narcissism between the ages of 18 months and 36 months it's healthy after that it's a pathology i in this way i also answered essentially your question pathological narcissism is a fixation when you do not progress beyond a certain emotional age now why wouldn't you progress because you are getting the wrong signals and input from your mother people ask me only mother not father well maternal figure someone who functions as your mother now in the vast majority of cases mother functions as your mother so it's mother but yes it could be a father could be a grandmother could be a role model could be a neighbor anyone who functions as a mother as a maternal figure if the messages from the maternal figure are wrong you will remain stuck for life there is a personal process called separation individuation at some point you need to say goodbye to mommy because you're beginning to realize that she is external to you up to that point you are symbiotic you don't make a distinction between yourself and mommy you're one and the same but at that point of separation individuation you begin to realize that she is not you this is a critical moment because then you say wait a minute if she is not me there are other there are others who are not me and so for the first time you see the whole of humanity available to you and this is called object relations a mother who is what we call a dead mother not dead physically but a mother who is not available to you a mother who doesn't provide you with a sense of security and safety doesn't give you a secure base a mother who is selfish a mother who is depressed absent anxious rageful this kind of mother or a mother on the very contrary who is smothering and spoiling and pampering a mother who doesn't let you go because of her own inadequacies and insecurities this kind of mother would not allow you to separate from her and we would never become an individual you would never become an individual and this is a good description of narcissism narcissists are essentially two years old emotionally speaking including me and people confuse intellectual agility intelligence they confuse this with maturity the two has nothing to do with each other you can be super intelligent and at the same time extremely immature you can you could be you could be you could have a high accomplishments in any field politics science you name it but emotionally you're two years old because you've never separated from other we're not given the chance to become you to become something distinct and different and so who your mother is and how she responds to your attempts to walk away is is a critical phase in in development of narcissism ah you asked me another sorry you asked me another there was another pathologies you asked me how the child chooses the solution of narcissism it's a very good question because children have a variety of possible solutions when the parent is dysfunctional when the parent is non responsive the non reactive or the parent is dead absent depressed etc selfish instrumentalizes the child identifies the child etc etc the child is uh has a problem the child can say mommy is bad you know she wouldn't let me go she wouldn't let me play with my peers she wouldn't you know she's bad but no child will ever say this so the child says i'm bad but then the question is i'm bad in which way in which way am i bad so the child can say well i am bad because i'm abusing mommy i'm somehow an abuser that is a narcissistic solution the child can say i'm bad because i'm not pleasing mommy enough so that would be the codependent people pleasing solution the child can also say i am bad because there is no me i don't exist that that's in this sense i mean adequate and and i and that would be essentially the borderline solution the borderline is actually a huge emptiness avoid and this kind of child becomes emotionally dysregulated now something that few few people are aware of children progress all children typically start with the people pleasing codependent solution all children start with this when this doesn't work well they try to please mommy they give mommy little gifts they you know they have they sometimes they're crying crying is an attachment behavior it's like telling mommy i want you i need you you know so they try to draw attention when this fails they become dysregulated they can't control their emotions especially terror fear and almost fear so they become emotionally dysregulated so they transition to borderline some children at this point say my emotions are so terrifying and so frightening as i i would rather not have emotions and mommy is so right about me i would rather become the abuser so a minority of children at the borderline phase become narcissists majority try but fail so we say in in psycho analysis that narcissists are failed the borderlines are failed narcissists there's a children who fail to transition to the final stage ironically in the evolution of dysfunction narcissists are the elite they made it they are like the special forces you know the navy seals they made it they went through codependency they went through borderline they graduated and became narcissists i'm quoting you you say not all abusers are narcissists but all narcissists are abusers why is this so well to start with not all abusers are narcissists because of a variety of mental health conditions and states of mind can lead to abuse you don't have to be mentally ill or to abuse abuse for example in many societies and cultures it's a form of communication abuse in some in some periods of history and some societies and cultures is a way of saying i love you so in many societies if for example a husband and wife if the husband is not jealous not possess not doesn't react with aggression out of jealousy then it's proof that he doesn't love so they they misidentify abusers form of love abuses multiple functions it is simply the inability to communicate properly lack of communication skills that is why when we teach communication protocols to abusers most of the abuse disappears and never comes back again abuse is a form of miscommunication in majority of cases a small minority of abusers are driven to abuse by mental illness that's an entirely different issue in the first case where the abuser is not mentally ill the orientation is towards the abused the abuser wants to convey something communicate something to the abused the abuser wants to change modify the behavior of the abuse so this kind of abuse is outward oriented we call it object oriented abuse but the abuse of the mentally ill has nothing to do with the abused nothing to do with the victim or the target it's an internal process it's intended to satisfy the psychological needs of the abuser so anyone who happens to be there will be abused the identity of the specific person who is being abused is totally irrelevant the victims find it very difficult to accept they want to feel that they've been chosen they are special there was a reason for everything that happened they want to make sense of meaning of what had happened to them but the truth is they were victims of circumstance it's totally random the abuser abuses you just happen to be there and what what psychological needs am i am i talking about in the case of narcissists for example it's a reenactment it's a replay of early childhood conflicts narcissists had been abused as a child that's why i'm trying to convince my colleagues that narcissism is a post traumatic condition not a personality disorder so narcissists have been abused as a child and he it's the only form of love that he know of only form of attachment that he knows he doesn't know to separate so he never separates and he doesn't know to interact normally when he gets attached in a shared fantasy so he abused and there are the other reasons to abuse they're all internal in psychology you say that all personality types can be potential victims for narcissists you don't have to be dependent or but sometimes certain vulnerabilities help um what i would like to ask is who are the most prone and are these victims really helpless or do they have some kind of responsibility in these situations the fact is that the majority of victims of narcissistic abuse and narcissistic abuse is different to normal abuse narcissistic abuse is about is an attempt to eliminate the intimate partner as a separate as a separate entity to reduce the intimate partner to the level of a manipulable object it's a form of extreme objective objectification to take away the partner's life to deanimate the partner all other forms of abuse are limited to a dimension so you can have legal abuse financial abuse physical abuse verbal abuse but usually the abuse targets some aspect of you some dimension of you some behavior something trait or a circumstance or maybe your your assets your money your sex your power so this kind of abuse is directional it's limited it's more like a laser beam narcissistic abuse is more like a bulb like a light bulb is diffuse and the aim of narcissistic abuse is to deanimate you so that the narcissists can internalize you and then interact with the internal object only not challenged by you outside so the narcissist makes a snapshot of you takes a snapshot of you like a photo then he photoshopped the photo he idealizes it and then he continues to talk to the photo he has fights with the photo he talks to the photo he never notices your external existence because he's incapable of separating how can you accept that someone exists outside you if there is no outside if you're never separated okay but then you begin to act independently you have friends you go on trips you do business you are challenging the photo you're challenging the snapshot and you become you're becoming this way the narcissist's enemy so this is narcissistic abuse the the the the role of of the abuse in this case is to control the anxieties of the narcissist and this is the power of the narcissist over his victims narcissism is a post traumatic condition focused around the reduction of anxiety in other words the narcissist and his victim are the same identical borderline is exactly the same so the narcissist is the twin of his victims they both come from a traumatic abusive environment they understand each other's language they resonate the narcissist knows which buttons to push because he has the same set of buttons and so for take for example the borderline the borderline has two two types of anxiety twin anxieties one is one of them is called separation insecurity abandonment anxiety she's afraid to be rejected to be abandoned and so but she has another anxiety and it's called engulfment or enmeshment anxiety she is terrified to be subsumed to be absorbed by her intimate partner consequently she approaches the partner because she doesn't want to be abandoned but when the partner reciprocates when it becomes intimate she gets terrified she feels that she's disappearing so she runs away approach avoidance repetition compulsion so she needs a partner the ideal partner for a borderline is someone who when she approaches will love bomb her and idealize her and when she avoids will devalue and discard her and there's only one type who does this the narcissist that's why there's a perfect match between borderlines and narcissists similarly the codependent the codependent codependency is a nice way of of saying emotional blackmail codependence emotionally blackmail their partners they use their helplessness they use their dependency they use their sacrifice to blackmail the partner into a specific set of behaviors for example if you if you abandon me I will die or I sacrifice so much for you you owe me you know or I really need you I can't do this without you these are all codependent messages again the codependent is a perfect match with the narcissist because the codependent enhances the narcissist's grandiosity she tells him I can't do it without you you're godlike you're so perfect you're so amazing I need you so again you have a match between pathologies some types of pathologies enhance each other amplify each other and this would tend to attract however having said all this the main concern of the narcissist is narcissistic supply narcissistic reply actually has there are two types um the multiple types but okay two major types one is a grandiosity enhancing supply yes you are genius you're god handsome you are this you're that and the other is sadistic supply the narcissist needs to torture and inflict pain and hurt people because he's replaying or reenacting his early childhood trauma he also needs to separate the only way to separate from a maternal figure is to devalue her so you devalue and then you say well I'm justified to separate to discount so there's a lot of sadism in narcissism this is the only concern of the narcissist grandiosity enhancing supply and sadistic targets for sadism so anyone anyone fits a bit he would go for anyone you give him supply you become his intimate partner of course it's wonderful if the intimate partner also resonates with the narcissist's pathology so that's why narcissists would prefer borderlines I prefer borderlines for example absolutely five a choice between a borderline and a non borderline and they both provide me with supply and which is the borderline because she provides me with supply plus she gives me something extra perhaps now is the time to talk about the cycle of of the narcissist how they engage and what are the the stations of a relationship from love bombing to maybe hover and go power and sorry and if you can also include a little bit about trauma bonding and why that is such a difficult topic the narcissist operates through a mechanism called shared fantasy was first discovered in 1989 and described in 1989 so a shared fantasy is a fantastic space which guarantees the gratification of the psychological needs of the of the intimate partner one of the main aspects of the shared fantasy is idealization so narcissists the first stage is love bombing and idealizing the partner but the narcissist has a special twist many many many types of mentally ill people idealize for example borderlines idealize psychopaths actually idealize at some point but the narcissist idealization has a twist he idealizes you and then then he gives you access to your own idealized image he lets you see yourself through his eyes through his gaze you fall in love with yourself through the narcissist's gaze he in this sense he recreates for you the maternal experience you know the mother looks at the babies isn't he the most beautiful baby ever of course he's not he looks like a monkey but in her mind she idealizes him so the narcissist allows you to give you a second chance at a childhood with the mother who sees you in an idealized way and loves you unconditionally this is addictive this is totally addictive so he hooks you this way and then within I don't want now to go through there are seven phases of shared fantasies a very long thing and there is a video on my channel about the seven seven stages of shared fantasies but in a nutshell having done this the narcissist then converts you into a maternal figure so having hooked you by providing you the drug of maternal love in effect he then tries to convert you into his own mother it's like I call it dual mothership it's like I'll be your mother you'll be my mother and he wants you to love him as unconditionally as he loves you yes so he wants you to idealize him this is called core idealization he wants you to idealize him and then he wants you to love him unconditionally but he needs to test you how would he know that you do love him unconditionally don't forget that narcissists are paranoid they have persecutory delusions so he needs to test you this is the first stage of narcissistic abuse the first the the reason the narcissist starts to abuse you initially is to test you to see if you're really a good enough mother who would love him unconditionally he pushes the envelope he escalates he goes further and further all the time testing you will you stay will you love him will you accept him as he is will you absorb the abuse and still be there for him as a mother okay and then if you pass this test you become his maternal image uh figure then he begins to interact with you as a maternal figure the problem is this he wants you to be his mother because he wants to reenact or replay with you his original childhood he wants to get it right this time he got it wrong then now he wants to get it right so he wants you to be a mother and he wants to separate from you he wants to separate and become an individual individual to separate from you he needs to devalue you so then he must devalue you and discard you this is symbolic separation i got rid of my mother i i'm now a free man and now a person a person there's a person who no but there's a problem he gets rid of the external object he discards you he lets you go pushes you away but the internal object remains it's still there and it's still idealized this creates a tremendous dissonance in the narcissist and so he would need to bring you back and re-idealize you or create an alternative internal object that is even stronger than your internal object so some narcissists try another intimate partner and many narcissists would hover you bring you back and the cycle starts all over again it's Sisyphean work then synapses tries to separate an individual all his life and to his dying day he fails in the process he accumulates a library of introjects a library of internal objects each one of which represents a past intimate partner so he has this huge library of intimate partners 2030 you know inner partners all of them psychodynamically active they're all active all of them competing with each other and and this is the narcissist predicament that's his verdict this is punishment actually people want to punish the narcissist take revenge this there's no need there's absolutely no need he punishes himself what would be the the most significant difference between female and male narcissists is there any and it's just not psychologically but socially and culturally yes of course the genders the difference between a male and a female narcissist is is not psychological there is no psychological difference between the two however they fulfill different gender roles in other words the difference is socio-cultural in specific societies and cultures and periods in history women and men manifest or express their underlying psychology differently so in the 1950s and 60s and 70s a woman would have expressed her grandiosity via her home her domestic chores so she would say i'm the greatest housewife i'm the best mother you know and a man would say i'm i'm a great earner and a provider i make money i'm a winner it's today it's much more blood because we are transitioning to a uni gender we are actually becoming a single gender everyone is the same and so more and more women first of all a bigger number of women are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder while in the 60s and 70s only 25 percent of people diagnosed with npd were women today the number is 50 50 50 and the second thing is that more and more women manifest their narcissism almost identically to men for example cheating romantic cheating has exploded among women it has risen five times over the past 30 years women describe themselves in masculine terms predominantly and so the differences are disappearing shortly will be in a uni gender society where narcissism will be uh identically expressed across what used to be genders and narcissism will be will become a form of religion private religion but it's an alternative issue thank you um based on your evidence and and research you talk very openly about very difficult subjects incest parental abuse um certain political issues um what are your views on um on such things as cancel culture and the whole woke movement and trying to keep all narratives politically correct what's what's your view on this where's this leading us so my view is the view of clinical psychology in the past few years we have begun to study victim world movements and the psychology of victim world movements so we have for example studies by gabai gabay and allies for form massive study conducted mainly in israel we have studies in british columbia and so forth and i'll summarize them for you what we are beginning to find is that certain people are prone to adopt victimhood as an identity their victimhood is their identity their victimhood endows their life with meaning makes sense of the world so it's an organizing principle they would seek to be victims even in situations where they would not have been victimized otherwise when they are not victimized they push you to victimize them this is called projective identification and so there is something called tiv tiv is a new psychological construct describing these kind of people you can see these people online for example in the empaths movement and other nonsensical labels where these people are actually very narcissistic very grandiose extremely aggressive lacking in empathy of any kind and yet they claim that they have been victimized all their lives because they are super empathic and they are you know sensitive and and so forth and they are proud of their victimhood they compete with each other my abuse was much worse than your abuse no my abuse was unprecedented i understand that you were abused i'm sorry for you but my abuse was much and so it's identity politics becomes identity politics a separate set of studies in canada and elsewhere has shown that very fast very soon within usually two to three years maximum victimhood movements such as me to black lives matter and so on get hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths so the infiltration of narcissists and psychopaths is universal in all these victimhood movements and they become the public face of the movement victimhood movements are one of the most threatening and pernicious developments there is a sociologist by the name of camber and he said that we have transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood it's very dangerous because if you are a perennial victim if this is your identity you are determined by your victim you would tend to develop attendant behaviors for example you would tend to feel entitled to special treatment and if they don't get the special treatment you will become aggressive and this is the irony this was first described by kaltman there's a guy called kaltman and he described what he called the drama triangle and he said abusers the drama triangle includes abuser victim and rescuer or savior but he said these roles are not fixed when the when the victim is not gratified by the rescuer she becomes an abuser and when the abuser witnesses the behavior of the rescuer he tries to be the rescuer so everyone cycles what i'm trying to say is that the potential for aggression and even violence in victimhood movements is much larger than in the general population and even i would go as far as saying that it's equal to psychopathic movements for example the nazi movement equal of course the nazi nazism was a victimhood movement nazis presented themselves as victims of the versi agreement of the world order germany was discriminated against as a and look on where it led similarly communism was a victimhood movement the proletariat was exploited by the land owners and by the industrialists and so on you know we need to redress grievances anything that is grievance based leads to violence and death end of story all death cults started as victimhood movements isis is no exception so it's interesting okay thank you um we have one last question for the taped version how do you see male identity state in today's western culture or global culture if they're the same especially when the coveted all-female stereotype is basically a psychopath there is a huge confusion between sexual identity sexual orientation and gender rules sexual identity is the innate feeling the self-perception that you are either male or female it's largely biologically determined you tend to attribute to yourself certain certain identity parameters based on your genitalia basically sexual identity can be dysphoric in the sense that you could have one set of genitalia but feel of the opposite sex so and that is the foundation for the transgender movement and so but transgender movement is is an excellent example of the confusion because they confuse sexual identity with sexual orientation they say I was born a man with a set of genitalia of a man but I always felt like a like a woman and how do I know that I felt like a woman because I'm attracted to men but being attracted to men is not sexual identity it's sexual orientation you could feel like a hundred percent men and be attracted to men it's your attraction is nothing to do with your sexual identity so there's a enormous confusion and above all the biggest confusion is in gender roles gender roles have nothing whatsoever not even remotely to do with your biology none zero zilch nothing statistically of course if you are born with a penis society your your parents the agents of socialization your peers your teachers your neighbors you name it role models mass media they will broadcast to you that if you have a penis here is the set of behaviors that you should adopt boys don't play with dogs they also teach you sexual social sexual scripts they tell you if you have a penis you should pay for the drinks in the past at least so these are these are social cultural messages they are part of the process of socialization and acculturation they have nothing to do with biology sexual identity sexual orientation this is the the enormous source of confusion today with regards to masculinity and femininity male and female are real categories we do have societies where men have roles which are identical to female roles in other societies and these are not liberal or progressive societies northern northern albania in northern albania a woman can decide to be a man all she has to do is bind her chest and from that moment she is allowed to sit with a man in coffee houses to smoke she has all the privileges of men it's a decision she just announces gets up one morning and says i'm a man so there is no such thing as as masculinity that's that's the irony masculinity is a confusion or conflation of sexual identity sexual orientation and gender roles and because there is no such thing as as masculinity when we started to have fluid fluid sexual identities and when we started to legitimize sexual orientations we got completely confused when it comes to gender roles because we mistakenly connected these you know fluidity should be should exist on the level of identity and orientation on the level of gender roles we should realize that either we can safely abolish them we can redefine them we can play with them they are not necessary gender roles are not necessary they reflected economic economic kind of so men you needed muscles in the agricultural revolution so men became dominant economic distribution of wealth economic distribution of allocation of resources determined gender role today women and men are becoming one unigender 43 percent of primary red winners in the united states are women women outweigh men in college graduation almost two to one that's the best predictor of future income under age 25 women earn considerably more than men women do begin to fulfill traditional male roles during the world war two during world war two most traditional male roles were fulfilled by women because the men were all fighting this is nonsense all this conversation about masculinity femininity gender roles men women this is nonsense total nonsense unfounded not found with anything that is scientific i think that's a great way to end an interview for a for men's magazine could you have more more starters thank you so much thank you thank you for your time thank you thank you thank you i appreciate thank you okay i'm gonna have a little cigarette break is that okay