 My topic is narcissism and I understand you're kind of one of the the world's experts. So the first thing I just like to talk about is yourself and if you could just give me kind of your story and how you came to be an expert in narcissism. Well, in a nutshell, because I would like the interview to focus on my on my work in the field rather than my personal history. Yeah, in a nutshell, I had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. And then I discovered that there's a dearth. There's almost nothing, no literature, no understanding of the disorder. The disorder had just been introduced into the diagnostic and statistical manual. So no one knew what the heck they were talking about. And so I had to I had to do my own research. I had to invent a whole new language, which is currently in use all over the world. So most of the phrases you hear when you talk about narcissism, I had to coin them in 1995. And I had to do that because there was no language to communicate the vagaries and the exigencies and the vicissitudes and the nuances of narcissism, its effect on the narcissist and its impact on people around the narcissist. So that's in a right. And then I wrote a book by Lignan Zelflav, Narcissism Revisitors. I placed I created the first website on narcissism for 10 years. It was the only website I created the first six support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse, which is a phrase that I had coined narcissistic abuse as well. Wow. Yeah. So I think let's talk a little bit about kind of those the language you were speaking about. So can you kind of help me define narcissism? And maybe we can also talk a little bit about how we currently now go about diagnosing it. There are two types of narcissism. There's healthy narcissism, which underlies self-esteem, self-confidence, a sense of self-worth, knowing your limitations, establishing boundaries, et cetera, et cetera. You need narcissism for all this. And that's healthy narcissism. Then there's the malignant version, the pathological version of narcissism, where there's a narcissistic style which can sometimes evolve into a narcissistic disorder. And the narcissistic disorder involves basically, basically two things. The first one is an inability to relate to other people as autonomous or independent entities and internalization of other people, treating other people as internal objects. That's the first major thing. This, of course, precludes the ability to exercise empathy, the ability to commiserate with people, to be compassionate, to help people, to defer to people, to compromise with people. So this inability to regard other people is external to you. As a narcissist, renders the narcissist a social misfit. And in this sense, narcissism is a bit akin to autistic spectrum disorders. I see. That's one element in narcissism. And the second element in narcissism is a cognitive distortion, a misreading of reality in the world, an impairment of what we call reality testing, which is known as grandiosity. Grandiosity is a filter which involves a fantasy defense and rewriting or reframing of one's personal history on the fly so as to aggrandize oneself and to render oneself unique. Put these two together and you get other types of behaviors. Put these two together, you get, for example, entitlement. Because if you're the greatest of them all, you're entitled to special treatment. Right. Put these two together and you get envy. Because other people are inferior to you. And if they have accomplishments or if they stand out, something's wrong. So you're envious of them. This creates passive aggression sometimes or outright aggression, etc. We can actually derive the vast majority of narcissistic behaviors or misbehaviors from these two single singular principles. Hmm. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things people kind of throw about when it comes to narcissism is they suggest that a narcissist has like no feelings. But it sounds like that isn't exactly true when you describe it that way. So maybe you can describe to me kind of what it would be like to be kind of in mind of a narcissist, like how they feel going through their day. Does a an initial caveat is that there is an inordinate avalanche and tsunami of nonsense online about narcissism. Perhaps this is the topic most nonsensitized than all other topics. So we have self-styled experts with and without academic degrees, spewing total rubbish and trash and conditioning victims to kind of remain in their victimhood and and pay them as they go along. So it has become a cottage industry of a cottage industry, which which comes strikingly close to corn artistry. So one of the more nonsensical claims, for example, is that narcissists are incapable of emoting, capable of emotions. And another nonsensical claim is that narcissists always claim to be the best, the greatest and so on. That's another nonsensical claim. And there are many others referring more specifically to your questions. Narcissists are able to experience emotions, but it is true that narcissists are able to experience only negative emotions. We call these range of spectrum of emotions negative affectivity. So narcissists are able to experience, for example, anger, which transforms very fast into rage known as narcissistic rage. Narcissists definitely are able to experience envy, because envy is one of the defining criteria of narcissistic personality disorder in the diagnostic and statistical manual. So by envy is an emotion, mind you. Narcissists are able to experience the whole monopoly of negative emotions. They have difficulty accessing and therefore experiencing positive emotions. They had suppressed their positive emotions as children, usually. And they had done that because positive emotions were not rewarded in childhood. Whenever the child had experienced positive emotions, he was hurt. He was punished. So the child learned to have learned to associate positive emotions with negative outcomes, such as being in pain. So narcissists, for example, very frequently associate love with pain or love with hurt. They are hyper vigilant. They scan the environment for looming threats. They have abandonment anxiety exactly like borderlines. They are terrified of being abandoned and consequently of disintegrating a process known as modification or narcissistic modification. So consequently, narcissists prefer, if you wish, to not experience positive emotions. They repress them. They deny them. We call this process emotional numbing. But the emotions are there. The emotions are there. They are active. They generate energy. This energy manifests in day to day life and in decisions and choices that the narcissist makes. It's just that the narcissist and the psychopath, for example, would tend to deny the existence of these emotions. They would even brag that they are emotionless. Narcissists and especially psychopaths, they create an ideology, an ideological shell around their lack of emotions, around their ruthlessness and callousness and so on. So they ideologize it. They make ideologies up. And so this could easily slide over or sleep over into sex. So we have a whole category of narcissists, cerebral narcissists, who are essentially rendered asexual by their own disorder. And they tend to glamorize and idealize and ideologize their sex, their sexlessness or their celibacy or their asexuality. They claim that this renders them superior to other people who are basically bestial and animalistic. So that's an example of how an agglomeration of emotions known as sexuality or psychosexuality is repressed by the narcissist. And then the whole thing is glamorized. Like, yeah, it renders me superhuman, superman. Hmm. So you mentioned that some of these tendencies may develop kind of in childhood. I'm curious, yes, is have we come to a point yet where we've discovered whether narcissism is kind of nature, nurture or some combination of the two? There is a general deplorable tendency in psychology to pretend to be a science. And so psychologists team up with neuroscientists and they come up with the most inane concoctions and conjunctions and speculations. The facts of these, as far as psychopathy is concerned, we have good grounds to believe that it involves brain abnormalities, potentially hereditary. The same for borderline. There is a strong link between borderline personality disorder and some brain abnormalities, both in functionality and in structure. However, we failed miserably to find any connection, any rigorous connection, mind you, because there's a lot of nonsense online, including nonsense propagated by neuroscientists who think that all of psychology should be abolished because it's all the brain. So this nonsense aside, we fail to find a rigorous connection between brain abnormalities, whether structural or functional and the spectrum of behaviors and traits, which together are known as pathological narcissists, as opposed to psychopathy, which involves two or three or four very well defined behaviors and traits and nothing else besides and as opposed to borderline, which involves essentially emotional dysregulation as 90 percent of the disorder. So in borderline and in psychopathy, we have clear cut clinical fictions and therefore, therefore we are able to come up with clear cut clinical entities similar to bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, you know. So this is not the case in narcissism. Narcissism is such a wide, such a wide array of behaviors and traits that there is no way to reduce it probably to genes, genetics, or to brain functionality or structure. It's too wide. Gotcha. It's actually, I would say, an alternative personality. So if we have a healthy, normal personality, the antithesis or the antonym would be narcissistic personality. So it's a whole, a total personality. So you said like not too many years ago, you had discovered very little out there for a narcissist. I'm kind of curious now, maybe ten years later, what is available for a narcissist who wants some treatment, diagnosis? Where can they go and what can they they do? I started my work in 1995, which is not ten years ago, but twenty five years. And prior to 1995, they have been studies by Sigmund Freud, who coined the word narcissism. They have been studies by several other scholars, all of which had belonged to the psychoanalytic object relations and psychodynamic schools, a very well-defined group of schools in psychology. And so these people, like Kohut and Kernberg and many others, Winnie Kohut, others, they defined and redefined psychology in terms of ego, in terms of self, in terms of all kinds of structures that they they kind of came up with metaphorically to describe the functioning of the human mind. This, unfortunately, limited our understanding of psychology. It was counterproductive of the narcissism. It was counterproductive, very counterproductive. Now, in 1974, 1974 was the last year anyone had made any meaningful contribution to the study of narcissism. And then there was a twenty five year, twenty one year hiatus. There was nothing for twenty something years. And then in the last twenty five years, there's been a revival. And today, narcissism is definitely the hot button topic. In the series, in the television series, in treatment, which is a television series, predicated and premised on the work of a psychotherapist. I think Gabrielle Byrne or David Byrne, I remember there's the actor there. He keeps mentioning he keeps mentioning all kinds of mental health problems. And he doesn't mention that by name. If you look, if you peruse the series closely, you will discover to your shock that no mental health disorder is mentioned by name with one exception, narcissistic personality disorder. It's the only mental health disorder over two seasons mentioned by name nine times. So it's definitely the hot button topic, right? However, the bulk of the efforts goes into treating and helping the victims of narcissistic abuse, survivors, those who had endured the narcissist onslaught on their identity and their functioning. There is precious little, if anything, intended to help the narcissist. And the reason is very simple. Narcissists are considered untreatable. The disorder is considered intractable. The best you can hope for is to modify certain abrasive and antisocial behaviors of the narcissist, but never ever touch the core. So it's very dispiriting. It's very disappointing for the therapist. Therapists don't want that. So they reject narcissists as clients. They refuse to work with them. And so a few years ago, trying honestly to help myself mainly, I cobbled together a new treatment modality, which I dabbed called therapy, called like very cold, opposite of hot therapy. It's an amalgam of techniques and procedures borrowed from trauma therapies and from child psychology, plus 25 techniques that I came up with. And so this I spent the last 10 years or nine years to be precise. I spent the last nine years applying this therapy to people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. And the results seem to be good or even impressively good, but the sample is very small. We're talking about 60 patients, 60 clients. So I don't know yet. I can't tell you yet if this thing works, but it's the first therapy aimed squarely at narcissistic personality disorder. And what I, why cold therapy may be more effective is because I do not regard narcissistic personality disorder as a personality disorder. I regard it as a post-traumatic condition. The child had been traumatized. The child had reacted with narcissism, so it's a post-traumatic condition. And the narcissist is a two year old child. He never grows up, he never matures. It's unwise to try to apply adult therapies, adult treatment modalities to narcissists. So that's why cold therapy is based on child psychology, actually. I treat the narcissist as though as though he were a child. So this is the only therapy I'm aware of that any impact whatsoever on any important element of narcissism, all the others modify behaviors successfully sometimes, but only behavior modification. Well, I'm glad somebody's out there doing the work. So maybe to kind of cap off our interview, let's talk a little bit about the internet and sense that you brought up earlier. As you very well know, the term narcissist is thrown around very free nowadays. You know, you see people on the internet just calling anyone they don't like a narcissist. And I'm kind of curious what you think that means for society, the way we treat narcissism and just the way we talk about mental health as well. If you devalue the term, which is supposedly supposed to denote a clinical entity, if you devalue it, you misuse it, you misapply it. The minute you corrupt language itself by rendering a clinical entity a way to put down people, a pejorative, a curse word. The minute you do this, you lose all the intricate nuanced understanding of the disorder and you you give up on any ability to help yourself as a victim or narcissist, if you're so inclined. So the corruption of the language and there had been a debasement and spoilage and corruption of the language. The word is abused and misused egregiously. It has nothing to do with narcissism as we know it in psychology. So and that the minute you do this, you're lost. You're lost because you begin to you begin to use the word narcissist to describe, for example, psychopaths. You begin to use the word narcissist when you dislike someone. You begin to use the word narcissist to put down someone or to humiliate someone. So it becomes a sadistic too. So today, I would say the understanding of narcissism, pathological narcissism is in much worse shape than 20 years ago. Not much better shape, but much, much worse shape. I watch they I make it a point to watch daily five or six videos from various YouTubers and self-styled experts and so on and so forth. It's an abomination, absolute abomination. Even people with academic degrees. Who claim to be experts on narcissism, they mislead. They talk utter unmitigated rubbish. It's horrible what's happening out there. And of course, clinicians, professors of psychology, like myself, others, you know, we don't want to dirty our hands. We don't want to go into a mud, into the mud, you know, and fight it out with this. So the the huge community of victims, wannabe victims, professional victims, real victims, narcissists posing as victims and so on and so forth and the community of narcissists. They they can't get get the help they want and deserve. There's nobody there almost with one or two, except for simply nobody there. And I I think there's a primary scene of Akadem, the fact that most academics and most scholars don't want to dirty their hands. They don't want to open their own YouTube channels and try to counter this tsunami of of, you know, misleading information. That's that is something that is not to the credit of of academic institutions and so on. I'm a professor of psychology and I'm out there fighting the fight. Yeah. I'm creating videos which are based on scholarly research and I'm trying doing my best, but I'm not nearly as popular as these, you know, gurus and so on who kind of pollute and contaminate the arena with with their output. Yeah. Well, I'm out there. This is really interesting. So I think less I'm all good if there's anything else you'd like to add. Feel free. But this has been a really helpful conversation for my understanding. Well, I think narcissism is no longer merely a clinical entity. Narcissism is an organizing and explanatory principle of our lives, of our environment and of the world at large. Using narcissism alone, you could explain maybe 90 percent of of what's happening in the world today. You could explain politics, you can explain show business, you could explain the media, mass media, you could explain the alternative media, you can explain. I mean, you're naming. Narcissism is sufficient, sufficient in itself without any other type of input, without any other type of principle, sufficient in itself to explain so much of our world today. Our civilization had become very narcissistic and is gradually, gradually migrating to psychopathy. Consequently, people, individuals are becoming more and more narcissistic and psychopathic and that is that is a gender free observation. Women are also becoming more narcissistic and psychopathic. And when you look at when you look at politics of business or finance or high tech, no area of life, no field of life on the individual level and the societal level is free of narcissism. And not only narcissism is a way to understand things, but narcissism is a way to put things together and organize them. So job interview, job interviews in the financial industry emphasize narcissistic traits and behaviors. When you go, when you try to, when you try to apply to a high tech job, you get the same. When you try to understand your relationship with your girlfriend, you're well advised to take narcissism into account. When you try to, when you try to make sense of politics, of this pandemic, of everything, everything around you, of things, of Netflix, of television series, of movies. If you bear narcissism in mind, you are well equipped to make total sense of everything that's happening to you and around you. And that is a sad testament to where we're heading. Because narcissism on the individual level and the collective level has only one end. Ends only in one way. After total and unmitigated self-destruction, narcissists are self-destructive and self-defeating. This is the main feature of narcissists. So you elect narcissistic leaders. You behave narcissistically. Your workplace demands that you act as a narcissist. Your loved ones become more and more narcissistic and you have to adapt. All this leads to a major conflagration, to an Armageddon. Armageddon not in the religious sense, but in the social cultural sense. Narcissism ends badly. There is no way for narcissism to end well. There's a group of scholars who are trying to propagate and promote the idea of high functioning productive narcissists. This is pure trash. All pathological narcissism ends really badly. And if you don't believe me, have a look at Donald Trump. Well, all the more reason why, I guess, really do need to have society come to a genuine understanding of narcissism and kind of move us, you know, part of the sea of the Internet nonsense. Now we're currently talking about it, so. I'm especially worried with regards to narcissism impact on technology, accessible technology, popular technology. And I'm very worried. I'm very worried. I'm actually most worried about narcissism's impact on intergender relations. This really, really, really bothers me. I'm I've been losing sleep over this because the very existence of the species is premised and built upon intergender tensions, intergender interplay, intergender magic, intergender attraction, intergender collaboration and so on. When I say intergender, I'm not saying I'm not related. I'm not referring to sex. I'm referring to gender roles, which are essentially social culturally determined. So you could have same sex couple where there are gender roles. But when gender roles are abolished because of narcissism, so direct outcome of narcissism, then we're in serious trouble. We are in serious trouble. And this, perhaps, is a topic for another conversation one day, because you are a man's magazine, if I remember correctly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that is an interesting topic and probably one for a different article all together. But yeah, once again, really interesting. I appreciate you hopping on this call. Thank you. Yeah, I'll let you know. I'll be in over the next couple of days how the article goes. And I'll definitely talk with my editors as well. Sure thing. If I upload it to my YouTube, it will give added exposure to men because my YouTube is pretty, pretty sizable. Yeah, I'm sure there'll be there'll be. Yeah, I'm sure there'll be more than happy. All right. Well, I'll shoot you an email in short time and we'll see. Kind of. Thank you. Have a nice day there. Have a good one. Bye. Bye. Take care.