 Hello, boys and boyettes, girls and girlettes. If I flicker, it's because the narcissist is dissociative. He doesn't have a continuous existence or a continuous identity. He flickers on and off, approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion. He doesn't remember 90% of his life. You are his external memory and today I have a special treat for you. I'm going to describe my own personal experience with the shared fantasy and the bargaining phase based on my 26 relationships. Yes, 26 relationships. And the last one is, of course, with the inevitable mini. Here she is. She's back. How are you, Sam? Okay, never better. I'm flourishing. I'm rich. I'm getting supply. I'm making money. I'm productive. I'm making YouTube videos. Never better. And I'm irresistibly handsome. Well, in a Lizardy reptilian kind of way. But Sam, what about all the people out there who are suffering? What about the pandemic? Don't push your luck, mini. The fact that I'm giving you access to me doesn't mean that you can abuse this access. Oh Sam, sorry. I didn't mean it. And you know what? You're hot. You're sexy. You're irresistible. And you are very, very handsome. That's it, you mug. You broken mug. You damaged goods. You have crossed the line. You have pushed the envelope. I am going to delete your tea and block your mug account. And that'll be the end of you. Not before, of course, I take a seat. This is one of the six things I do before breakfast. I delete your comments and block your accounts. And it makes me feel euphoric and omnipotent and godlike. I'm very grateful to you for providing me with this opportunity. Okay. Jokes aside, let us start with today's crucible. And as usual, before we get to the crux and to the point, and to remind you today, I'm going to discuss my personal experience with shirt fantasy and bragging and so on. And I'm doing this in order to clarify some things. Because from your questions and comments, I see that many, many things remain how to put it gently, confused and discombobulated. So I want to help you get to grips with exactly what's happening. And this time from the narcissist point of view, we'll come to it. But before we come to it, you have as usual to suffer through my rant. This is the daily rant. It's a price you pay for granting you access to my inestimable, amazing, unprecedented, unique divine mind. Start with the issue of entitlement. Entitlement has two forms. One is when you require special treatment. You should be treated only by the best doctor. You should receive priority service. Over and above everyone else, you should jump the queue. This is special treatment and you deserve special treatment just by merely existing. Your very existence warrants special treatment because you are special. And the second form of entitlement is others work you benefit. You don't want to Google, so you ask others to Google for you. Yes, many of you do this. It's entitlement. I have a surprise for you. It's grandiose narcissistic entitlement. You don't do your homework. You don't search this channel. You don't Google. You don't search other channels. You don't bother. You simply appear online and ask other people to do your work for you. And that is a form of entitlement. Now, the second comment I want to make is about envy. And I'm going to dedicate a whole video to the issue of envy and how the narcissist experiences envy and how envy and the envious narcissist, how this constitutes a major motivation with a narcissist. But the thing is, the narcissist denies that he is envious because to acknowledge that he is envious would be to acknowledge that he is inferior. After all, you don't envy your inferiors. You envy your superiors. You don't envy someone who has less than what you have. You envy someone who has more than what you have. Things that you wish you had and you don't. Success, position, rank, dominance, a beautiful wife, a flashy car, a great bank account. So to envy is to admit inferiority. And that's why narcissists vehemently deny that they are envious. I've been accused by you, many of you, that I'm envious of the likes of Jordan Peterson and others. Well, that I am an envious person because I'm a narcissist and all narcissists are envious. Envy is actually one of the diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorders, believe it or not, pathologically envious. So, and I am envious. But when it comes to public intellectuals, this is one of the sole exceptions where I'm not operating out of envy. For example, I'm a great admirer of Slavoj Zizek. I'm a huge admirer of Noam Chomsky. There are public intellectuals which are holding very high esteem and as role models and I wish to emulate and learn from. It's not true that I envy success because Slavoj Zizek is as successful as Jordan Peterson and Chomsky is even more successful, more well known, more popular. So it's not about envy. I rail against people I perceive to be narcissists and I doubly rail against people who are narcissists and present themselves as saints or gurus or mystics or people with all the answers. I rail against such people. I rail against politicians, not because they are successful, but because they are narcissists. I rail against public intellectuals and self-styled mystics, self-styled experts, fake because they are narcissists and they are abusing you. All these cults are a form of mass narcissistic abuse. You should understand that. They treat you with contempt. They think your brain dead and your behavior confirms this. And recently there's this phenomenon. I'm getting like hundreds of messages and emails and comments from young people, young men to be more precise. And these young men are trying to pit me against the other intellectuals. It's like a gladiator, gladiatorial spectacle in the coliseum in Rome. I'm supposed to come with a mace and John Peterson will come with a spear. And we're going to go at each other until we draw blood. And all these young men are going to sit around. So there was criticism of my work on the monosphere by a guy called Tomassi. He wrote a book called The Rational Mail, if I remember correctly. And he fancies himself to have established to be the father of the monosphere. And Tomassi made this video where he said essentially that I'm an idiot. And I've received this avalanche of messages. Tomassi destroyed you. You must protect your honor. And then you see videos with Jordan Peterson where all the young people taunt him and tease him and attack him facetiously, not really, in order to bring out his fighting spirit. And it is the most despicable, reprehensible, repulsive, public spectacle imaginable. And these self-styled and sometimes real public intellectuals collaborate in this because it makes them very popular. And they go at each other's thrones. And they display exact erudition in response to questions proving that they are omnipotent, I'm sorry, that they know everything. There's nothing they don't know. These are narcissistic displays. And I will never ever collaborate in anything like this. Ever. Not because I don't need to prove anything. Each and every one of us has to prove himself day in and day out. If I claim intellectual authority, I back it up. I back it up with books. I back it up with other authors. I cite at length my sources. I have to prove myself to you. Of course I do. But I don't have to prove myself to other public intellectuals. And definitely I don't have to do this to please you. I mean, FU, I'm doing what I'm doing to further knowledge, erudition, and to bring, if possible, a modicum of enlightenment. My small pearl in a vast sea of gems. And so if you expect me to be your entertainment for the night, use Tinder. I'm out. I hope this message is clear. Don't ever dare to write to me such messages again. And now to the issue. Before I come to the core of today's video, and by the way, at the end of the video, I'm again going to quote at length from a book, which I find very interesting. So before we come to the issue of how does it feel inside the shared fantasy? What's a narcissist's point of view of the shared fantasy? Without the adulteration of society and culture, and what gurus say, and what experts say, and what you say, and what victims say, and what self-styled empaths, covert narcissists, say without all these contaminating influences. How does a narcissist, all by himself, alone at night, feel, actually experience this whole relationship cycle? Before we come to that, it's important to understand that there is a cascade. The narcissist's sex or sexuality is always auto-erotic. Narcissists always essentially prefer to masturbate, because he's incapable of adult, mature sexual relationships. The narcissist is also usually kinky, not always, but usually kinky. And a small minority of narcissists are sadists. And these gradations of unconventional, non-conventional sex turn women off. Simply, the overwhelming vast majority of women are turned off by the narcissist's sexuality. It's a fact. The narcissist is capable of the most amazing sexual fantasies. But when it comes to performance and to bed, either it's masturbatory pyrotechnics, he uses you as a sex doll and he himself becomes an animated dildo, a vibrator, with not too many speeds, or he pitas out. He shrivels literally sometimes with erectile dysfunction. So women are turned off by the narcissist's sexuality, having experienced it firsthand. And this gradually leads to sexlessness. As the narcissist's sexual needs are frustrated, and your sexual needs are frustrated, you drift apart from each other sexually. And so at the beginning it's three times a day, then it's three times a month, then it's three times a year. Then it's once in three years. So you become a sexless couple. The definition of a sexless couple in psychology is a couple that has fewer than 10 full-fledged penetration sexual encounters a year. If you have fewer than 10, you're a sexless couple. Sexlessness leads to estrangement. There's a lot of resentment, a lot of bad blood, a lot of damage, enormous damage to self-esteem, especially with a woman, but not only with a woman. Self-confidence, the sense of self-worth is challenged head-on. And subject to such a relentless attack, sexlessness challenges self-worth, a sense of self-worth. It begins to fluctuate, it becomes volatile. In other words, the parties develop borderline-like, borderline-like, the ability of mood, dysregulation of emotions, and narcissistic-like inability to regulate the sense of self-esteem. Sexlessness leads to extremely bad mental health consequences for both members of the couple and to estrangement. And of course, estrangement leads inexorably to some kind of withdrawal. Withdrawal, cheating, and other forms of betrayal. Now withdrawal can have many forms. The woman can suddenly invest herself 100% of the time in her children, in her work with her girlfriends. Or she can cheat. She can have an emotional affair. She can have a sexual affair. She can go on a binge of one night stands. Or she can attend the local bar seven days a week, 24 hours a day. She can become an alcoholic, or a junkie, or whatever. Estrangement leads to action, the action of withdrawing from the relationship. And so the relationship becomes transactional. The narcissist provides, he gives, usually material goods, money. And his spouse or his intimate partner provides services. The sexist gun, the adulation, supply is gun, and all that's left is a service provision contract, similar to your internet service provider. But long before this happens, there are the initial phases. The honeymoon with the grooming and love bombing, followed by the shared fantasy. Now I'm about to tell you how I had experienced all 26 of my relationships. Five of them, very serious relationships. And 21 relationships that lasted more than four months. More than four months each. If you calculate, if you put all of them together, I'm 293 years old. Okay. Again, trying to be serious. Now, I'm going to discuss my personal experience, but I want you to understand. I have a database, the biggest in the world, of close to 1,800 people, diagnosed by clinicians, not by internet forums, diagnosed by clinicians, as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. About half of them have only narcissistic personality disorder. They're not comorbid with anything else. Not with mood disorders, not with borderline, not with psychopathy, nothing. They are pure, pure bread, nine criteria, level nine, narcissists. And the other half are comorbid. So these are not narcissists diagnosed by their very angry spouses. These are narcissists diagnosed by diagnosticians, by experts, mental health practitioners. And I'm going to describe my personal experience, but I'm going to describe only parts of my personal experience, which resonate with at least 70% of these diagnosed narcissists. To remind you the size of the database is 1,800 narcissists. So whenever I say something right now, yes, it is my personal experience, but close to 1,000 or 1,200 narcissists in my database had the very same experience, shared the same experience. So though it is my personal experience, it is absolutely almost universal and valid to the vast majority of narcissists. Cerebral and somatic, by the way. So there's no distinction here. Also, just a comment about cerebral and somatic. I'm cerebral, and I can go like 15 years without sex. And I've done that. But I have periods where I'm somatic, actually, as horny as they come. And then I'm essentially very close to a sex addict. And these periods can last two, three years. So there's no type constancy. Cerebral can become somatic. Somatic can become cerebral. Now, so that you don't give up your breakfast, try not to visualize me when I'm somatic, because I really, really want you to retain your breakfast. Let's talk about the shared fantasy phase. In the shared fantasy, I refuse to act as a man. Why do I refuse to act as a man? First of all, I don't know how to act. I don't know how to be a man. In my childhood, I was not allowed to differentiate. Every human being goes through a phase called gender differentiation. It's part of a bigger process called socialization. The child observes mommy, observes daddy. The child picks up information from the environment, from role models, from teachers, from the media, from television. Now online. And gradually the child forms a view, an opinion, as to what it takes to be a man, how men should behave. The child acquires behaviors and traits, which differentiate him or her as man or woman. In other words, to be a man or to be a woman is an acquired, mostly learned thing. Now obviously I'm not denying that there is a biological template or biological foundation upon which gender roles are imposed. If gender roles were to be contrary to the biological template, they would have failed. But gender roles resonate with the biological template. However, 90% of gender roles are socially and culturally determined. I will not go into it right now, I've done it in other videos. And the narcissist has a problem because he is not allowed as a child to set boundaries, to separate, to individuate. So he remained attached to one of the genders, in most cases to the mother. And if he's a male, he cannot become a male. He's not allowed to become a male, because to become a male, to become a full-fledged man, male by the way is biological, men. To become a full-fledged man means to say bye-bye to money, to go away from one woman, mother to another woman, lover, spouse, intimate partner, wife, mother of his children. It is this process that he mismanages. And he mismanages because of wrong cues, bad cues, bad signals coming from his mother, but never mind all this. He fails to become a man, simply fails to become a man. He is undifferentiated. And indeed the vast majority of narcissists have bisexual tendencies, or can conceive of and consider homosexual experiences. They are not fully differentiated, they are not androgynous. Many of them are not actually bisexual. They don't practice bisexuality. But they are far more bisexual than the normal population, the control group. And they are bisexual because they are not fully differentiated. They have a very powerful feminine element and a very powerful masculine element and none of them is dominant. The masculine doesn't predominate the feminine and the feminine doesn't predominate the masculine. Consequently, many of them have latent homosexual tendencies which they then deny as oppressed. Many of them become homophobes and so on. The narcissists' sexuality is a bloody mess. It's extremely chaotic. The gender roles are similarly non-differentiated. And so I don't know how to be a man. I refuse to act as a man because I'm not good at it. And I don't want to do something that I'm not good at, partly because I'm grandiose. I hate to fail. If I try to be a man, I fail. And the second reason I refuse to act as a man is because I refuse to grow up. I don't want to grow up. I want to remain a child. I don't want to assume adult chores. I don't want to have to cope with adult responsibilities. This is the Peter Pan Pueri Aeternus syndrome, the eternal adolescence. Since I don't want to grow up and I don't know how to be a man, I'm not a man, I decline to act as an adult would. I personally don't drive. Many of narcissists are simply immature. They are focused on themselves in the sexual act. We call this autoeroticism. Okay, so I accept that when I'm in a relationship, when I'm inside the shared fantasy, I mean, I may not be a man, but I'm not a moron. I'm not an idiot. I happen to have 198 IQ and most of the narcissists in my database are pretty intelligent. And they are self-aware, contrary to online mythology. So I know, I know I can't be a man. I refuse to be an adult. And I can't give my intimate partner what she wants. Black helicopters are swooping down. They don't want me to tell you this. You heard the noise? It's over. They picked up some other narcissists. So I realize that I can't give the woman who is with me. I can't give her what she needs. I can't provide her with what she wants. I can't be a man for her. I can't fulfill her needs. I can't meet her requirements. So I accept that in order to persevere, in order for her to survive within an increasingly more sexless shared fantasy, I accept that she has to meet her sexual and emotional needs with other men. Imagine the following. For example, crippled in a horrible car accident and I were to become quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down, no erection, nothing. Of course I would have given my wife permission to be with other men. I can't satisfy her sexually. Probably I wouldn't be able to satisfy her emotionally with all the depression and the anxiety attendant upon the accident. So I would give her permission to kind of stray. I would give her permission to go look out for other men, be with them, spend time with them, fall in love with them, have sex with them. If I really love her, or if I'm attached to her in some way, or if I care about her, then I, as a quadriplegic man, the only moral and ethical thing to do is to give my wife permission to be with other men. Similarly, the narcissist is an invalid, he is a cripple. And he knows that in order to keep the shared fantasy alive, in order to ascertain and to ensure that the woman stays in the shared fantasy, he has to let her go. That's Rumi, that's not me. The Persian poet, if you love the bird, let her go. So I, in the shared fantasy, I'm intermittently a child, I'm intermittently a father, but I'm never, not ever, not for a split second, an adult man. I don't know to court, I don't know to flirt, I have no passion, I have no desire. Technically, I have no sex drive. I'm goal oriented. I use sex to achieve goals, like for example, to acquire an intimate partner to captivate her during the love-bombing and the grooming phase. So I know this, and I know that she has emotional and sexual needs, so I tell her, okay, go look for other men. Go look for men, actually, not for other men. Go look for a man. I'm not a man. As long as there is no risk of abandonment, I turn a blind eye. I even encourage my intimate partner tacitly or openly to cheat on me and to resort to other men as extensively for as long as she needs to. As I, my woman has emotional and sexual needs, so she has emotional and sexual affairs. And many of my women also had casual sex with other men. And I know, I, I, I realize that. And sometimes I came across proof and evidence of that. And sometimes the women themselves came, came back, returned from the night out and told me about it. Sometimes in great detail, cruel detail, because they were angry at me. But as long as there is no risk of abandonment, as long as I don't spot this click, this switch, this hint, this shadow, this reflection, this, this intuitive, ambient, atmospheric kind of olfactory thing that she's about to abandon me. As long as I don't have this, I'm absolutely 100,000 million percent sure that she may have casual sex. She may have a lover, but she's going to stay with me. She's not going to abandon me. I do not experience romantic jealousy. Now, many of you have written, this is not true. My narcissist was romantically jealous. He forbade me. He didn't. He prohibited. He curtailed my social life. He wouldn't let me even meet gay may friends. Yes, it's true. But bear with me, be patient. We are coming to this. As long, let me repeat, as long as there is no risk of abandonment, narcissists do not experience romantic jealousy. I never experienced romantic jealousy. Put together the 26 women I had relationships with, they have dated a total of well over 140 men and they have slept with them. They have slept with well over 140 men while they have been in a relationship with me. These are the 140 men I know of. And in about half these cases, I knew where they were going, what they were doing, and many of them came back and told me everything about. And yet, I never experienced a twinge, a hint, a twitch, a tick of romantic jealousy. Actually, I didn't experience any other emotion. Not only romantic jealousy, no other emotion, no sadness, no fear, no jealousy, nothing. Okay, you had sex? Good for you. What shall we have for breakfast? Sometimes I even experience relief. Relief that I don't have to cater to the demands of my intimate partner as a woman. Her needs as a woman? That's someone else's problem now. She had outsourced. She had outsourced the potentially thorny and threatening issue of my needs as a woman. I'm not a man. I can't help her with this. I feel helpless. I feel humiliated. I feel less and omnipotent, mind you. It challenges my grandiosity. So I'm very relieved and happy when she finds a solution. Even if this solution is another man, there's no place for jealousy or any other emotion except relief. With her gun, the hours and the evenings and the nights and the years, some of these, some of these affairs lasted four years. With her gun, imposing on another man's time and other man's resources, you know, good riddance. I have now regained my mastery of my life. I feel liberated and euphoric. Like a child. You know, a child feels good, feels wonderful when all the adults are gone. Home alone. In my case, home alone, one, two and three, all the sequels. The adults are gone. My intimate partner who is an adult, she is gone to play with other adults. She left me the child all alone. At home, I can do anything I want. I can eat anything I want. I can play with any toy I want. The nuisance, the imposition, the upload presence is busy elsewhere. She's sleeping with another guy. Good for her. I'm left to my pleasurable devices, to my time consuming vocations or avocations. Avocation is a fancy word for hobby. But I'm not going to say hobby. I'm not going to say hobby because I want to humiliate you. No, I'm kidding. Avocation is a beautiful word for hobby. So I'm left all alone and I love to be alone. Because when I'm alone, I don't feel inadequate. I don't feel like a failure. I don't confront nagging and resentment and disappointment and disappointment and dissillusion and disenchantment and criticism and disagreement. When I'm alone, I'm alone with my biggest fan and with my greatest lover because I'm auto-erotic. All my erotic feelings and all my sex drives, such as it is, is directed at myself, at my own body. I turn myself on big time. I fulfill the father role. But I fulfill the father role only when my woman seeks my advice. Or more frequently, when she asks for money. I give her the money. I give her the advice. When I give her the advice, I'm the sage, sagacious guru. I sit there like Buddha embodied and I spew my words of wisdom. And I solve cases very often because I'm clever. I'm intelligent. And then I chastise her and, you know, I discipline her because I'm a father. That's what fathers do. Having dispensed with this sequence, I revert to childish form. I become a child again. This is when I don't perceive impending abandonment. When there's no risk of abandonment. But when I perceive a growing and veritable risk of abandonment, when I perceive abandonment in the air, for example when the woman becomes avoidant, secretive or deceptive, I begin to stalk my woman persistently and intrusively. I abruptly impose new strict rules and boundaries. I insist on sexual exclusivity. I limit my partner's contact with men. Or I prohibit her from meeting men altogether. I may even initiate short-term reclaimed sex until I deem the shared fantasy restored until the risk of abandonment is over. I will have sex with her until I'm sure that she will not abandon me. And then I will stop, of course. So when there is abandonment in the air, when I feel it coming, when I intuit my intuition tells me she's about to abandon me, I suddenly become a man or an imitation of a man. You know, I impose discipline. I impose sexual exclusivity. I become suddenly hyper-sexed. But this doesn't go down well with my intimate partner. I'll come to it in a minute. The more approach avoidant, the more labile, the more dysregulated the woman is, the higher the probability of abandonment, the higher the risk of loss. If the woman is all over the place, the roller coaster, if she's an up and down, if she is a hate you, I hate you, don't leave me. You know? She's this kind of woman. I love you, I'm going to kill you. Then she can dump me any minute. Abandonment is always there. Loss is always there. And it's very, very difficult to maintain a stable, predictable shared fantasy. And this creates an eternal love-bombing-grooming honeymoon phase. I never exit the honeymoon phase. I never succeed to transition from love-bombing and grooming to the shared fantasy. And so I get stuck in the love-bombing and grooming phase with a lot of sex. Remember that the grooming and love-bombing phase includes loads of sex. Because the sex is a way to lure the woman to convince her of the quality of her future sex life to tell her that I'm normal. Which is counterfactual. Not true. So during the love-bombing and grooming phase I'm super sexual. I'm actually somatic during this phase. But if I'm stuck, if the woman doesn't allow me to transition to the shared fantasy because every morning I wake up and I don't know if she's going to be in my life or not, she's going to abandon me or not, I'm stuck in the love-bombing and grooming phase. And this may explain why narcissists find borderlines, borderline women and histrionic women irresistible. Because these women force the narcissists to remain stuck in the grooming and love-bombing phase. They force the narcissists to have sex actually. And when a narcissist comes across a borderline and a histrionic narcissist is going to be an extended period of thrills, of excitement, of arousal, of risk, of an adventure. The narcissist is when he teams up with a borderline and a histrionic ends up in an eternal loop of grooming, love-bombing, honeymoon, grooming, love-bombing, honeymoon, honeymoon approach, avoidance, threat of abandonment, I'm with you, I'm not with you, I'm cheating on you, I'm back and back to you etc. And he loves it. He's an adrenaline jump but he is much more likely to end up having a stable sexless shared fantasy with a co-dependent or with a healthier woman. Because the borderline and the histrionic don't allow him to transition into a shared fantasy. Sooner or later he gets tired of all this mess and he looks for a woman with whom he can establish a shared fantasy. Okay, so you remember that when there's a risk of abandonment I suddenly become a man, I become a macho, I demand social exclusivity, I impose rules and boundaries and regulations, I forbid my woman from dating or from even meeting other men and in most cases by this stage my newfound assertiveness, my newfound virility and masculinity pushes the woman to either abandon me altogether or to ignore me disdainfully and aggressively. Why is that? Why doesn't she accept my new role as a man? First of all, she got used to life as a virtual single. She loves it. She loves to be a single. She loves to pick up many bars. She loves to have love affairs. It's exciting. It's forbidden. It's colorful. It's adrenaline. The chase, the conquest, the love, the infatuation, limerence. So she doesn't want to give it up. Who are you, she says? For ten years, or five years, or two years you haven't been a man. You've been a child, you've been a father. You pushed me towards other men. Now you want to reclaim me? No. 2 The sexlessness. The absence of masculinity. The absence of virility. The absence of a man. The infantilization. The childish behavior of the narcissist. The emotional absenteeism of the narcissist. And the dormant acceptance of the woman's cheating and betrayal. Well, I have a surprise for you. The woman loses all respect for me. She says to herself, it's not a man. He can't even have sex. He's an infantile. I mean, he's childish. He's an idiot. He's emotionally absent. And he's a bloody dormant. I'm wiping my cheating. You know, I'm doing it in his face. He witnesses my cheating. He witnesses my betrayal. And he never ever protests. He never reclaims me. He's a dormant. He's a carpet. He's a nobody. He's a nothing. How can I respect someone like that? He's not only not a man. He has no spine. He has no principles. He has no boundaries. Over the years, my intimate partners develop profound disrespect for me. Even I would say, she holds me in utter contempt. And she resents me. She's furious at me. She feels deceived. She feels fooled. But not only does she feel fooled, she feels like a fool. It makes her feel stupid. It makes her feel inadequate. Because how could she have chosen such a man? How could she have ended up with such a man? A dormant. A man who doesn't protect his so-called property. Who doesn't enforce boundaries. Who is open to any misbehavior and misconduct. Who is sexless, gender neutral. Infantile. Retarded. Absent. How did she fall for this? How stupid could she have been? So there's a lot of self-castigation, self-criticism. And she blames me for that. By now, my woman is likely to have developed a sex aversion. She can't even conceive of me in sexual terms. I mean, if you tell her can you have sex with Sam, she's likely to throw up. Literally, I mean, it's puke. Her sex aversion is extreme. And she finds me utterly repulsive. Lizard, anyone? A reptile. A reptile. She reacts to me as she would to a lizard. If she stays with me and one or two did, it is merely to enjoy material benefits. Or because she can find an alternative. She looks hard, but she can find an alternative. I'm a money maker. I'm a money maker and you know, an inducement. But at some point, some stage, she doesn't bother even to act. She doesn't even bother to pretend that she is within the shared fantasy anymore. I mean, forget things like I love you, care for you. It's all gone out of the window. And I can't cope with this. I can't cope with this loss. The woman is physically next to me. And they're all these memories and there's a shared fantasy which is a critical construct in maintaining my inner balance. My balance is precarious. My personality is chaotic and disorganized. My emotions are very threatening. And so I need outside input. That's the essence of narcissism. I need narcissistic supply and shared fantasy is a generator of narcissistic supply. The main role of shared fantasy is an engine of supply. It's a dynamo. It's a generator. It creates supply. So I need the supply. And now she's gone. Even if she is with me physically, she's definitely gone emotionally. And she cheats on a regular basis. She doesn't even hide it anymore. And her behavior becomes more and more egregious. It escalates because now she doesn't even pay heed or attention or allegiance to even the most basic rules of respecting another person. Narcissism. So she's utterly brazen. She's utterly relentless and callous, reckless. Doesn't give a, you know what, about me. But I can't take it. I have no alternative or because I need the shared fantasy. So I become increasingly more delusional. I try to fend off the menacing and harrowing realization that it is all over. And my only way to do this is by lying to myself, by deceiving myself, by becoming delusional. I cling to any shred of evidence to support the ongoing existence and potency of the shared fantasy. And I reject any evidence to the contrary. I develop what is called confirmation bias. I isolate myself in an echo chamber where only information that supports the shared fantasy enters. There's a filter and everything that challenges the shared fantasy its existence, its strength, its resilience, its longevity, anything that challenges the shared fantasy remains out. I can, I witness I witness my erstwhile intimate partners extreme misbehavior and misconduct. But I fend it off somehow. I reframe it somehow. I lie to myself. I deceive myself because I need the shared fantasy. But even this has a limited shelf life. An expiry date. At some point there is actual or imminent abandonment. And it usually involves other men. At some point my intimate partner falls in love with another man or sees better prospects for creating a family or just having life-long companionship with another man. And it's a man. His advantage over me. Never mind how repulsive he is, how poor he is, how stupid he is, how everything he is. I'm rich, he's poor. I'm intelligent, he's not. I'm better looking, he's ugly. I'm an abuser, he's an abuser. Never mind how inferior the man is to me. He has one prevailing overwhelming advantage over me. He's a man. I'm not. I can't compete with this. So sooner or later my women, my intimate partners find a man. And there's imminent or actual abandonment. At that point I develop severe romantic jealousy. Dread of loss. Abundant anxiety. This is what you're describing. When you're describing your narcissist and how he's all over you and wants to prevent you from hitting other men, establishes strict rules, makes your life hell, suspects you of cheating, etc. etc. This is because he fears abandonment. He fears impending doom, impending loss of the shared fantasy. This is the shared fantasy. Transition to a phase called bargaining. Some women withdraw. Some of them cheat. Others don't. But they withdraw. They abandon the shared fantasy. They exit. And then ultimately they find an alternative. And they simply leave. They pack their things and leave. But some women still struggle on. They try somehow to resuscitate and maintain the shared fantasy. Transition to a phase called bargaining. And in the bargaining phase the woman makes demands. She says, I want you to stop doing this and I want you to start doing this. I want you to stop behaving like a child. I want you to assume other responsibilities. I want us to have a family. I don't know. I want us to buy a home. I want you to have a steady job. I want you to stop drinking. She makes a list of demands. 95 physies of Martin Luther. And she pins it on the narcissist's forehead. And so in the bargaining phase I relentlessly push the woman to cheat on me ostentatiously, conspicuously overtly even to humiliate me in public in the process. Why do I do that? I wanted to do this. To do that. I brainwashed her. I brainwashed her into doing this. Very often I introduce her to men knowing full well she will end up sleeping with them. Many of these men are my friends and colleagues. Why do I do this? I do this because I want to break up. I want her gun. She becomes a threat. A nuisance. She makes demands. She threatens. She bargains. She hackles. The hell with this. I don't need this. I don't want this. I didn't bargain for this. I want her gun. And I want to feel justified that I got rid of her. I want to be able to shift the blame to her. I want to say she broke up with me. She made it happen. She misbehaved. She cheated on me. I want to shift the blame. I have something called a low plastic defense. I need to blame others for my failures, for my defeats, for my misbehavior. For everything bad that's happening to me, I need to blame others. The government, people, the CIA, my deceased mother-in-law, my wife, my neighbour, my colleague, my partner. I need to blame other people. This is called a low plastic defense. If... The woman presents a list of demands. If I were to accept these demands, ostensibly we can continue the shared fantasy. So I feel bad that I can't accept these demands. I know it's not okay not to accept these demands. So instead I push her to misbehave. If she misbehaved, I have an alibi. Why did I break up with her? Not because she presented demands. No way to read. Had she just presented demands? I would have contemplated them. No, she misbehaved. She cheated on me, the being. So I dumped her. I dumped her. She had a sense of regaining control. And it's... It allows me... When I shift the blame to her for the breakup, it allows me to disguise an internal modification with an external one. Because the outcome is modification. Any exit from a shared fantasy in whichever route using... Under whichever circumstances, any dissolution of the shared fantasy created by me. The shared fantasy is dead. I go through modification because it's a failure of the false self. I'm angry at the false self. I'm estranged from the false self. The false self can no longer protect me. So I say... I divorce the false self. I tell the false self to f off. And I'm left like a turtle without a shell, defenseless, skinless. So I go through modification. But at least if the reason and the cause for the breakup was her misconduct, her misbehavior, if I can blame her for what had happened, if she should feel guilty and I should feel blameless and shameless, then at least I can swap. I can exchange. I can transform. Shapeshift. My internal modification with an external one. Now my internal modification is I misbehaved. I abused her. I gave her what she needed. I didn't act as a man. That's internal modification. It's very uncomfortable. I prefer the external modification. She's a slut. She misbehaved. She's a bad apple. She's a bad character. She's a borderline. She's horrible. She's this. She. That's external modification. Okay. All this mess is part of something called in psychology, belief persistence. To explain to you what is belief persistence, I'm going to read to you a pretty lengthy segment from a book as had become our tradition by now. The book is called The Enigma of Reason. It's written by Hugo Mercier, M-E-R-C-I-E-R and Dan Sperber S-P-E-R-B-E-R S-P-E-R-B-E-R S-P-E-R-B-E-R I need meaning. Listen well to the segment from the book. France's infamous Dreyfus Affair of 1894 was the trial of a young Jewish military captain named Alfred Dreyfus for treason. It became a scandalous example of prejudice and miscarry justice in that the charges were based on falsified documents throughout France. An expert in criminal investigations, Alphonse Bertillon was asked to determine if Dreyfus' handwriting matched the handwriting on a treasonous letter known thereafter as the Bordero. Though it clearly did not match, Bertillon concocted an elaborate explanation of how the difference in handwriting actually proved the guilt of Dreyfus. Since Bertillon argued, Dreyfus had intentionally obfuscated, falsified his handwriting. A year later, further investigation uncovered a real spy, Ferdinand Estahasi whose handwriting did match the handwriting on the treasonous Bordero. But in a retrial, Bertillon, the expert, was undeterred and the Dreyfus guilty verdict was upheld. In 1899, so long after the original trial, in another retrial, Bertillon went further in a 10-hour deposition. The more Bertillon defended his original conclusion, the more incapable Bertillon became of accepting the obvious explanation, the handwriting on the treasonous document simply did not belong to Dreyfus but to Estahasi. Among psychologists, that phenomenon, the use of reasoning to defend pre-existing beliefs, especially when one has previously defended these beliefs. This is known as belief persistence. In 1899, the original guilty verdict is scorched while is held in Reyn. Bertillon, again, is one of the expert witnesses. His task has become more difficult as he must now prove that the Bordero is not an undisguised note left by the sloppy spy Estahasi but the carefully designed product of Dreyfus' devious mind. Bertillon is up to the task. Apotheosis of Bertillon's system, the deposition runs more than 50 pages of dense text plus pictures, plus exhibits. He went wide. Of that Bordero, Bertillon peruses every word, measures every letter, photographs every wrinkle. Bertillon sees patterns everywhere. When the thirteenth line of the Bordero is superimposed on the thirtieth line, three letters are a line, when the word intere is taken out and repeated and the two copies put end-to-end, they measure 12.5 mm, a unit size on military maps. Even more damning, a standard subdivision of this unit, 1.25 mm is found everywhere in the world. Length of the T's it's a mess. Bertillon's opinion is a mess. Let me quote one sentence. Length of the T's cross three units of 125 mm. Length of the acute accent width of the circumflex 1.5 mm in the height of the final T4 etc., a coincidence impossible, the Bordero utterly unreadable opinion. The Bordero must be the work of a master craftsman who used several templates and a military issue ruler to create one of the most complex forgeries of modern times according to Bertillon. Such considerations can leave no place for doubt. This is a ten hours of deposition ten hours of analysis of graphology, analysis of handwriting. Bertillon gives a forceful conclusion, by now I hope it's clear to you that Bertillon is a narcissist, yes? He gives a forceful conclusion in the set of observations and concordances that form my demonstration. There is no place for doubt and it is made strong by a certainty both theoretical and material of responsibility born of such an absolute conviction. I affirm with all my soul today as in 1894 under oath that the Bordero is the work of the accused. I am done. It is it is hard to tell how impressed the court is with Bertillon's arguments. In any case, the judges find driver's guilty of treason once again although with mitigating circumstances. This nonsensical verdict reflects more the need to uphold the status core than the merits or lack of merits of the case. Driver's innocence is plain for everyone to see. Refusing to wait for yet another new trial that may never happen driver's consent to be pardoned by President Loubet on September 19th, 1899 at the course of accepting the guilty verdict. Driver's will have to wait seven more years for his final rehabilitation being reinstated to his former rank in the army. Bertillon offers a fascinating study in the use of reasoning to defend pre-existing beliefs. He seems to have been truly convinced by his own arguments. When three experts were tasked with evaluating his system they found an incomprehensible jumble. Today we would call it word salad. Incomprehensible jumble totally devoid of scientific value whose absurdity was so blatant that one is hard to explain the length of its exposition. Yet these experts also concluded that the very naivete with which Bertillon unveiled the secrets of his system would lead one to believe in his good faith. It would be easy to regard Bertillon as a madman or a narcissist. Many of his contemporaries did but that would overlook his otherwise successful professional career. How he rose through the ranks and devised new ways to catch criminals. Hardly what you would expect of a lunatic. Unless we feel too smug every aspect of Bertillon's thinking has been reproduced in the laboratory showing how reasoning can lead everyone on the wrong track. These experiments have replicated on a smaller scale fortunately the mental processes occurring in Bertillon's mind. Unambiguously they point to reasoning as the culprit. When Bertillon mentions the perfect comprehensiveness with which he embraced all the facts he exhibits clear symptoms of overconfidence. According to the intellectualist approach reasoning is supposed to make us doubt our own beliefs especially when they rest on foundations as shaky as Bertillon's. How can reasoning lead to overconfidence instead? Well, this is what the book deals with the enigma of reason and belief persistence. These are crucial points in narcissism together with the Daning Kruger effect. And we will discuss cognitive deficits and so on in one of our next videos and you can take that as a threat.