 I'll record as well. Perfect. Are you right for us to launch straight into it and we just see where we go? I do have a list of questions. Do you want me to touch on them now or are you okay? No, let's just charge ahead. Spontaneity is the mother of necessity or something like that. Let's go ahead. I like it. Well, in that case, Sam, it's an absolute pleasure having you with us today. I'm sure our listeners are going to get a lot from this conversation. So I guess just to set the scene for anyone who's not familiar with your work. So Professor Vaknen has a background originally in physics. If you wanted to talk to him about chronons and quantum mechanics. He's got another life in there. He's a medical doctor. He's a professor of finance and he served as an advisor to several governments for a long period of time. He's an author. He's written lots and lots of books, including malignant self-love, narcissism, malignant self-love. You've got a YouTube channel with 170,000 subscribers and you have over 805 videos on there. So you're very prolific, I guess, to where the conversation will go today, which is in psychology. So you are a professor in psychology and many would regard you today as an expert in the field of narcissistic personality disorders, so MPD. And that's really what we want to share with some of our listeners today. So maybe let's just launch straight into it if that's right with you. Yes, please go ahead. Absolutely. I forgot my main qualification. I mean, so many at 60 year old. Well, given how much you've done in life, that's probably not a surprise. It's believable, isn't it? It's credible. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We often hear people talk about narcissism. They'll say things like, oh, my gosh, my ex was such a narcissist or, you know, my boss is a narcissistic maniac. And I guess in the world of psychology, when we talk about narcissism as a pathology, as something that's gone wrong, it's very different to someone who has a narcissistic trait. So maybe let's start with that. Can you set the scene for our listeners? What is narcissism as a trait? And what is narcissism as a disorder where it's gone deeper than that? Well, we don't use the word trait because narcissism is a complex of traits and behaviors. But we do use the phrase narcissistic style, which was coined by a scholar by the name of Lin Sperry. So Lin Sperry was the first to suggest that there is a distinction, should be a distinction between narcissistic style and the narcissistic disorder. Now, the disorder is merely a malignant form of the style where the style, for example, might be abrasive and a bit antisocial. The disorder would add to that a lack of empathy where the style would be self-centered and a bit egotistical. The disorder would be exploitative and abusive. So it's simply a malignancy of exactly like cancer is a malignancy of the healthy cell. Now, the narcissistic style is becoming more and more common because it's a positive adaptation in our civilization. Self-promotion, the mid-generation, self-centeredness, social atomization, the collapse of institutions such as family and community, et cetera, et cetera, force us to become self-sufficient and self-contained and self-referential. So we, all of us, gradually are developing in narcissistic style as a way of coping with our reality, which is harrowing and dystopian. But the disorder itself involves a bewildering multiplicity of pathological processes, defense mechanisms, gun or eye, childhood traumas converted into other forms of trauma. I mean, it's a much more complex landscape than the style. It's entirely simply a set of strategies, coping strategies, which had coalesced into something coherent and cohesive, while the disorder involves a massive disruption in almost every conceivable dimension of personality, identity, and functioning. And what sort of percentages of men and women in the Western world suffer from NPD? Actually, we have good statistics in other places as well. For example, India, Egypt, China, Russia. So by now, we know much more than we used to 20 or 25 years ago. Here's the thing. In the past, we used to believe that 75% of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder are men and 25% are women. Today, the ratio is 50-50. And actually, there's a very worrisome phenomenon where women are becoming gradually more narcissistic than men. And we think the number of women is beginning to exceed the number of men. And we think, I mean, one of the hypotheses why this is happening is a traumatized women, women who had been traumatized in intimate relationships, tend to develop narcissistic defenses, tend to become narcissistic. And so they tend to present with such a variety of intense narcissistic symptoms that they cross the threshold into narcissistic personality disorder. But it's a different type of narcissistic personality disorder because it is situational. It's reactive. It's not something that had happened to them in early childhood. So we might as well call it late onset pathological narcissism. So we are beginning to see, therefore, a panoply, a zoo of narcissistic disorders. We see post-traumatic narcissism. So narcissism is a reaction to trauma, whether in early childhood or late in life. We see constitutional narcissism, which usually is allied or aligned with psychopathy. We see grandiosity, which is an integral feature of borderline personality disorder and all the anti-social personality disorder spectrum. So we are beginning to understand, we're beginning to reconceive of narcissism in several ways. First, we are beginning to consider narcissism a form of post-traumatic reaction, a kind of post-traumatic disorder. Then we're beginning to reconceive of narcissism as an addiction, a type of addictive personality, because narcissists are addicted to narcissistic supply. They're addicted to input from the environment in order to regulate their internal landscape. And finally, we are beginning to realize that actually all these distinctions, the differential diagnosis between psychopaths and narcissists and borderlines and history only, they're bullshit, sorry for the rough language. No, no, we can talk. They're utter nonsense. And so for example, the latest addition of the international classification of diseases, which is the world's DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is used mainly in North America, more precisely in the United States. The rest of the world is using another book. And that other book is titled, The International Classification of Diseases, ICD. The latest addition of the ICD, edition 11, had eliminated all these diagnoses, their gun. And they have a single diagnosis, personality disorder. So now in the rest of the world, you are diagnosed with a personality disorder with narcissistic emphasis, personality disorder with psychopathic emphasis or overlay. So it's very antiquated thinking to say, oh, he's not a narcissist, he's a psychopath, or he's not a narcissist, he's a borderline. We're beginning to understand that all of these, especially narcissism and borderline, are post-traumatic artifacts. And that they share, they have so much in common and so many crossovers and so much comorbidity. In other words, they are so common together in the same patient. That all these distinctions are totally, besides the point and wrong, simply wrong. Hmm. How would you tell if you were in a relationship with someone and they started displaying personality concerns, particularly narcissistic concerns. What are the sorts of warning signs that some of our listeners might look for that would flag that there might be a narcissistic issue there, specifically narcissistic? Well, the first red alert by far the most dominant, most important is a lack of empathy. Now, narcissists have what we call cold empathy. Cold empathy is cognitive empathy coupled with reflexive empathy. In other words, they are able to read you well. They're able to spot your vulnerabilities. And once they had spotted your vulnerabilities, they intrude, they invade you via the chinks in your armor. So they're very good at reading your weak spots, your frailties, your fears, your wishes, and then leveraging this to take over you, essentially, to launch a hostile takeover. But they don't have the emotional correlate. In other words, they may notice that you are sad, but they will not feel sad consequently. They will not even understand what it means to be sad. They will not empathize, therefore. So a lack of empathy. A lack of empathy manifests on a first date or a second date or an initial relationship. A lack of empathy manifests in two ways. When the person is hyper-intellectualizing. In other words, when everything goes through the mind but nothing goes through the heart. So when there's a lot of analyzing, a lot of analysis going on, when the narcissist analyzes you all the time, breaks you to pieces, disassembles you, puts you together, synthesizes you and deconstructs you all the time. It's like you are a lab rat. You know, like you're an experiment in psychology and the narcissist keeps trying to put you together in his mind. So this is a very telling sign. Hyper-analyzing you without concomitant emotional reactions. Doing it as one would do to a laboratory mouse or a rat. The second thing is, even when you are in need of support and support and understanding, even when you show overt signs of being in distress and so on and so forth. The narcissist is extremely unlikely to react or is likely to react with aggression because you're weak and contemptible. So we call this inappropriate effect. The narcissist reacts wrongly. He loves, he loves at the funeral. He finds tragedy funny. And he finds your distress contemptible because it means you're weak. Wrong reactions, inappropriate effect. These are the two I think. And then you can observe the narcissist in action. Is he trying to take over you, to control you, to micromanage you? To tell you what to do, where to put the keys, when to go to the toilet, why have you been there for too long? He chooses the wine, he orders the dishes, it doesn't bother to consult you. He takes over, he micromanages your life from the first moment. Another very telling sign is how does it treat people he perceives to be inferior to him? Like cab drivers, waiters, service providers, how does it treat them? He perceives people to be inferior. If he berates them and demeans them and attacks them and insults them and humiliates them and then he is very likely a narcissist because narcissists immediately establish hierarchies, hierarchies of power. Narcissists are engaged constantly in power plays. Another very telling sign is if he immediately tries to establish his superiority. And so he scans you and he finds the only area where he's superior. And then the rest of the evening, the rest of the date revolves around that area where he's superior. So if you're more athletic, he's not going to dwell on this. But if you know a lot less about biology, the rest of the date will revolve around biology because that's where he can be superior. So focus on superiority. And finally, there are many, I mean there are numerous. Another sign is an external locus of control. If the narcissist plays the victim, it tends to claim that all his defeats and failures and mishaps and wrong decisions were brought about because of other people's envy, or because he's a misunderstood figure, or because society is wrongly constructed on wrong principles or always blaming someone else. An institution, another person, his boss, his ex-wife, you name it. If he has alloplastic defenses, if he tends to blame other people constantly. Here's the thing. The minute you come across a narcissist on a date, in the workplace, in the presentation, never mind where. You immediately feel ill at ease. Immediately. There's something wrong. Something has gone awry. There's something creepy. It's like the parts of the narcissist don't fit together. A badly assembled robot. It's like there's something, there's a glitch in the software. It's like a badly run simulation of a human being. It's like an android, but of the first generation, not yet fully ironed out. And so you have this ill at ease feeling. And this is called the uncanny valley. The technical term for this feeling is the uncanny valley. Because there was a Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori. Then in 1970, he suggested that when robots come to resemble human beings to the maximum, we're going to feel very uncomfortable around robots. So, because they are so, they would be so close to human beings that resemble human beings that would simulate human beings so well. But there would still be something missing. The robotic essence, if you wish. The robotic essence, we're going to spot this because we are not robots. We're going to spot another species. We're going to have this problem with artificial intelligence as well. And so that's why compare narcissists to forms of artificial intelligence or aliens from another planet, who body snatch human bodies. And then you know, of course they are not the human beings, but they are so deficient and defective human beings. That they defy the definition itself, they defy the word. They're not human in the full sense of the word, absolutely. And we are uncomfortable around pseudo humans, quasi humans, wannabe humans, imitation humans, simulation humans. We feel very uncomfortable. So why do women, why do women ignore this gut feeling, this uncanny valley? Because they're lonely. They're lonely, they're self deceiving. They want to believe. They want to hope. They crave and long for a relationship and they're going to overlook anything and everything. That's the truth. The truth is, had people listened to their gut instincts, all narcissists would be utterly isolated. No one would have any dealings with them. But people deny their intuition. They bury it because their intuition tells them run for the hills. Now. So is there something charming and engaging about that projection that the narcissist gives off? Does that play at all? Narcissists are not, are not charming or engaging. But narcissists has a very simple trick up his sleeve. The narcissist idealizes you. So the narcissist idealizes you and then projects to you. He's your idealized version. So the narcissist focuses on you like a laser beam. He acts as though you're the most interesting person in the world that he had ever come across. He makes you feel so elevated, elated and superior. He infects you with his own grandiosity. He idealizes you and then he lets you see, he lets you witness your own idealized version. So he actually makes you fall in love with yourself. It is not that you find the narcissist charming. It's that you find the charming that the narcissist finds you charming. That's what charms you. The narcissist finds you charming or pretends to find you charming and you find this irresistible. Because you want to be charming. You want to consider yourself irresistible. The person who messaged the narcissist is sending you. There's no one like you. You're amazing. You're hyper intelligent. You're the most gorgeous person I've ever seen. Drop dead gorgeous. You are this, you're that, you know. And you want to hear that. It's addictive. It's an addictive message. You're actually, when you fall in love with the narcissist, you fall in love with yourself. I compare the narcissist to a hall of mirrors. When you enter the hall of mirrors, it's empty. Just mirrors. When you enter the hall of mirrors, you see yourself reflected a thousand million times. Who can resist this? No one can. Is that, is that what we commonly hear refer to as love bombing? That phase when, as you said, the laser lighting you. You are absolutely overwhelmed with their affection and their adoration of you. Yes. That is a love bombing phase and it's followed by the grooming phase. The love bombing phase is idealizing you and exposing you to your own idealization, which no one can resist. It becomes totally addicted. That's why this is the essence of trauma bonding. Trauma bonding has two pillars. One pillar is core idealization where the narcissist idealizes you and in return, you return the favor. You idealize the narcissist. So there's co idealization. That's one pillar of trauma bonding. And of course, when you feel idealized, it is so addictive that you can't let go. You need the source of idealization next to you. You can't let go. And the second pillar of trauma bonding is what we call intermittent reinforcement. The narcissist conditions you gets you addicted. Very much like social media buddy. The narcissist gets you addicted to your own idealization. And then he withdraws it abruptly. He just goes back and exactly like a drug pusher. You would chase him because you need the next fix. So this creates extreme bonding. It's known as trauma. The trauma is the intermittent reinforcement. And so love bombing is this co idealization phase and it is followed by grooming. Groming is simply a set of procedures, strategies and instructions on how you should behave. If you want me to continue to idealize you. So this is what you should do. You need me to continue to be in your life and to become the unwavering found of your idealization. And of course, you're an addict by now. You would do anything. You would still money from your mother. You know, you would do anything to continue to get the drug to get your fix. So I think in your book, you refer to an inverted narcissist as the victim of a narcissist. It's almost this impression of someone that's been pressed up against a narcissist. And it's the flip of that. Is that sort of that dynamic that you're describing there? No, it is a narcissist. It's a subspecies of covert narcissists. The inverted narcissist is a covert narcissist who obtains her narcissistic supply via another narcissist. So she is a parasite narcissistic. She creates a symbiosis. She's crazy symbiosis with another narcissist. The inverted narcissist, because she is a covert narcissist, cannot, is too, is too, lacks the confidence to go out on her own, to strike out on her own and obtain supply. So what she does, she teams up with someone like me, you know, with a narcissist, an overt or grandiose narcissist. And then he obtains the supply and she busks in his glory. It reminds me that in the 19th century in Germany, 19th century Germany, if you were married to a doctor, if you're a woman and you were married to a medical doctor, you were called Frau Doctor, Mrs. Doctor. So his glory, his academic accomplishments reflected on you as a woman. Even if you, you've never attended elementary school, you were still called Frau Doctor. So it's the same with the inverted narcissist. Think about it as the sun and the moon. The moon doesn't have its own light, but it reflects the light of the sun and the moon is the inverted narcissist. The sun is the covert narcissist. Sounds extremely toxic. I guess I want to go back to this phase that you were describing. So initially your, your, your love bomb, your put in the laser of the last of the narcissist. You feel amazing. And then you're groomed as you said, can you walk our listeners through what happens beyond that point? And beyond the nature of this. Yes, beyond that point, we have something called shared fantasy. It's pretty shocking and amazing that not a single one of the self-styled experts on narcissism online, even mentioned shared fantasy, because it is by far the main mechanism of relationships with the narcissist. Anyone who had bothered to lead the academic, read the academic literature should have been acquainted with it. And it shows me that these so-called experts online don't have a clue about narcissism and have read nothing about it. It's, you talk about toxic environment, YouTube is a toxic environment. Absolutely. Because there are many essentially con artists with and without academic degrees. Okay, don't get me started. Let's, let's, let's revert to your question. The next phase is known as shared fantasy. It was first described in 1989. Not by me, by, by Sander, as a NDR, who was a scholar of cluster B and narcissists. So the shared fantasy is an extremely complex, extremely complex relationship. And this is also the source of the trauma of narcissistic abuse, because the shared fantasy acts or operates on multiple layers and dimensions and processes. I mean, it's, it would take like a whole book to describe a typical run of the mill pedestrian shared fantasy, let alone a shared fantasy between two really unique people. I would say a very intelligent narcissist and a very accomplished woman that would create a shared fantasy, which is kaleidoscopic and even more difficult to describe. But in a typical shared fantasy. The narcissist is trying to convert his intimate partner and I'm going to use stereotypically I'm going to use a man and a woman. But gender, gender is utterly interchangeable. Gender pronouns are totally interchangeable. In a typical shared fantasy, the narcissist is trying to convert his intimate partner into, first of all, a bed object, what we call a persecretary object. In other words, he's trying to convert her into an enemy in his mind. The first stage is called snapshotting. The narcissist takes a snapshot of his intimate partner. He internalizes the snapshot. He photoshopps it. The process of photoshopping is idealization. So he idealizes the snapshot. The snapshot is what we call introject in clinical terms. He then proceeds to interact with the snapshot, not with the real person, ever, never with the real person, only with a snapshot. But inevitably, the real person begins to diverge from the snapshot, because she is real. She learns things, she grows, she evolves, she moves away, she gets a new job, she meets new people. She diverges from the snapshot. The snapshot is static. That pieces off the narcissist. And that renders her an enemy, because she is challenging the internal equilibrium of the narcissist, precariously balanced on all these introjects remaining static. So the narcissist's sanity that these introjects or snapshots will never ever change. That has to do with other issues, abandonment, anxiety, object inconsistency, and so on. So the intimate partner inevitably threatens the narcissist in her peace, harmony, and equilibrium. So she becomes an enemy. The first stage in shirt fantasy is converting your intimate intimate partner into a bed object, threatening object. Then the narcissist proceeds with the first type of narcissistic abuse because there are two types of narcissistic abuse when I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse in 1995. I thought there was only one kind. And I was wrong. There are two types of narcissistic abuse. In this phase, in this initial phase of the shirt fantasy, there is a special type of narcissistic abuse. And it is intended to test to test the partner to see if she is loyal. If she will, if she's, if she will walk away when she's abused, if she's resilient, if she's strong, and if her love is true. So the narcissist abuses egregiously his intimate partner to test her to see if she's a keeper, if she will stay. The second reason is to transform her into a bed object, because of course such abuse creates bad blood and a lot of hostility in the partner, which affirms her, the narcissist view that she is a per-secretary object. And the third reason is because the narcissist is about to transition to the next phase in the shirt fantasy and convert his intimate partner into a mother figure, a maternal figure. But to do that, he must first ascertain, he must make sure that she will not abandon him, that she will not betray him. So to do that, he abuses her. The abuse is a pre-qualification test. Are you going to love me unconditionally? Never mind what I do to you. If the answer is yes, you can be my mother. If the answer is no, if you cheat on me, if you betray me, if you abandon me, you cannot be my mother. So this is a job interview. Then the third phase within the shirt fantasy is the maternal phase where the narcissist converts his intimate partner into a mother figure, the mother he never had. And reenacts with her all the conflicts he used to have with his mother, the early childhood conflicts, hoping for a different resolution. At this stage, because she's a mother figure, it's incestuous to have sex, so most of these relationships devolve into sexlessness. The woman at this stage has two options. She can acquiesce, she can accept, she can play along, and then she will remain an eternal mother figure in the narcissist's life. The relationship can continue for 40 years, unhindered and unobstructed. The second option for the woman is to say, wait a minute, what's going on here? I have a list of demands. I insist on commitment. I insist on investment. I want to build a home. I want to have a family. And this is called the bargaining phase. When the woman enters the bargaining phase, she no longer qualifies as a mother. She had failed as a maternal figure. And the narcissist wants nothing further to do with her. He wants her gun. And now depending on the narcissist, there's a series of strategies to push her away. The narcissist eliminates all the intimacy, loses interest, becomes absent and indifferent. Some narcissists push the woman to cheat. And of course, when she cheats, they have the pretext to end the relationship, but they push her actively. They introduce her to men. They get her drunk and send her away. I mean, you can't imagine. I mean, it's an active strategy to get her to cheat. So some narcissists do that. Some narcissists become abusive and that's the second type of narcissistic abuse, but that's extreme abuse. Some narcissists insist on kinky sex, which they know full well. The woman would reject. For example, they insist on three sons or group sex. So there is a variety of strategies in the bargaining phase to push the woman away and get rid of this unwanted relationship. And then there's a brief interlude and the narcissist moves on to love-bombing the next target. And sometimes that love-bomb can go back to the original target. Can it cycle back on itself? It depends. If the narcissist had experienced something called narcissistic modification, again, it's pretty amazing that none of the other experts online, so-called experts, mentioned this modification. This modification has been described in 1957 and it's a foundational process in narcissism. I mean, I'm pretty amazed at the low level of low quality of the so-called information online. And so if the woman succeeds to modify the narcissist, he's never going to come back to her again. He's never going to Hoover her. Hoovering is a word I coined in 1997 to describe the process of kind of re-obtaining, re-engaging, re-acquiring the original supply. Wait, that was a word you coined as well. I hadn't realized it was- I know most of the words. Most of the words that you know I coined between 95 and 97. Flying monkeys, Hoovering, narcissistic fleas, somatic narcissists, cerebral narcissists, narcissistic abuse, you name it, I coined it. I also borrowed words. I also borrowed words from psychoanalysis like narcissistic supply, false self, and I redefined them. And so they're used today the way I imbued them with new content or meaning. So the overwhelming majority of the language in use today I coined between 95 and 97 because there was no language. There's simply no language. I wanted to communicate insights and this new understanding, new comprehension, but I didn't have the language. So I had to coin new words, new phrases, 10 a day. I mean, a dozen a day. I mean, every day. Well, they've stuck around. Yeah, it's common practice. I mean, that's the language of Franco. That's the language of narcissism. Also, even in academic publication. Oh yeah. So we're up to Hoovering. So Hoovering, the narcissists, when I coined the phrase in the word in 97, I thought that narcissists always Hoover. I mean, you go back to the articles that I wrote then, which are available online, still available online in the way back machine and so on. You will see that I was wrong there. When I said the Nazis with, I was wrong very often, by the way, between 95 and 97. Don't misunderstand. So I said that narcissists always Hoover. That's not true. Narcissist Hoover. Sorry, sorry, Sam, just as a quick asterisk for listeners who may not be familiar with the concept of Hoovering. Do you mind just doing a quick little side step to that and then maybe when the narcissist recycles old intimate partners, previous intimate partners, exes, and previous sources of supply, narcissistic supply. So he recycles them. He comes back to them. He can come back to them after a week, four months, sometimes 20 years. They are in his address book forever. That's it. And he recycles. And of course, because he has a snapshot, when he recycles them, he is astounded that they're not the same, that they're changed. Because he's actually recycling the snapshot, not the real person. And so he might, he might revert or return to an old source of supply and old intimate partner and discover that she's a great model. And this would shock him no end, because in his snapshot, she's 30 years old and just waiting for him frozen in time, waiting for him to return. You know, she didn't get married. She didn't have children. She doesn't have grandchildren. And all this is very shocking to the Nazis. Time stands still in the Nazis' mind. Because he inhabits, he is very solipsistic. He lives exclusively in an internal universe. And he, like the psychotic, he confuses external objects with internal objects. And the first to make this observation was not some vacuum, it was Otto Kernberg, who is probably the father of the field. And Otto Kernberg suggested that borderlines and narcissists are actually psychotic or near psychotic. And he was very right about this. They all confuse the external with the internal. And so, but not all narcissists hover. That was my mistake. When the narcissist is modified, he never hoovers. Now what is modification? Modification is when the narcissist's grandiosity is efficaciously challenged, efficiently challenged in public, in front of meaningful or significant others. And it involves shame and humiliation. So there are several components, ingredients, necessary ingredients in modification must be public. It must challenge grandiosity successfully, shatter, demolish the grandiosity. It must be done in front of other people, witnesses who mean something to the narcissist. Witnesses who are meaningful, significant to the narcissist. And it must involve shame and humiliation, which are unbearable. If you put all these four elements together, you have modification and the narcissist will never ever come back to you. Because modification is life-threatening. It disables all the narcissist's defenses. And then he is actually, he becomes a borderline. He is exposed to the external environment and he becomes enormously dysregulated to the point of suicidal ideation. So he will never take the risk that you will do it to him again. You're gone. You're deleted. I want to ask you to dive into the mind of a narcissist for a moment because I feel like we haven't really gone down that path. So what goes on in the mind of a narcissist and how do they see the world? And I guess that'll put a lot of our previous conversation in context as well. They don't see the world. It's very easy. They don't see the world at all. They have extremely impaired reality testing. They have severe cognitive deficits. They have no access to positive emotions. They don't have the rudimentary tools or instruments to see the world. Because if you want to understand the social environment, for example, you can't do that if you don't understand emotions and you don't have empathy. If you want to gauge what's going on, if you want to predict, extrapolate, hypothesize what might happen, you need to take into account elements which are not accessible to the narcissist. For example, these cognitions are very distorted, very sick because they are filtered through his grandiosity and fantasy. Grandiosity is a fantasy defense. So narcissism is a fantasy defense writ large. It's, of course, fantasy by definition is the opposite of reality. It's divorce from reality. So he doesn't see the world. What a narcissist has is a playground or a space which is occupied essentially by two very important things. One is fantasy. So it's a fantasy space, a fantastic space. And within the fantastic space, there are narratives and the narratives unfold very much like a serious on Netflix. You know, so the narcissist experiences his life as a movie is an unfolding movie. This is one thing. The second thing in the narcissist mind is introjects or internal objects. There is an enormous amount, enormous number of internal objects, much bigger number than in a healthy person's mind. Why? Because the narcissist converts everyone and everything into an internal object. Why? Because the narcissist needs to be in control and he can control only internal objects. He can never control external objects. And he has abandonment anxiety. He doesn't want to be abandoned exactly like the borderline. So he creates this space which is occupied by fantasies, which are narratives. The narratives organize internal objects in ways that are meaningful to the narcissist and in ways that do not threaten him with abandonment, for example. So we call this situation object constancy. The narcissist creates internal object constancy. In other words, he can't trust you not to abandon him, not to betray him, not to cheat on him, not to deceive him. It's a bit paranoid. So what he does instead, he internalizes you. He converts you into an internal object into an internal object and then he embeds you in a story, in a piece of fiction, which is his fantasy, and then you're safe. Then you're safe because then he controls you 100%. Consequently, narcissists have precious little contact with reality. The problem is exacerbated even further by the fact that narcissists exactly like borderlines experience what we call dissociation. Dissociation has three elements. Amnesia. Narcissists simply forget. I have a database of well over 2000 narcissists, which I had accumulated since 1996. And I have a subsection of my questionnaire. If you if you're diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, you provide me with a letter from your diagnostician, a testing that you had been diagnosed, and then you're eligible to join my database. I have a tester to you, a test of 680 questions. And you answer all these questions. One module in the test is about dissociation. And so what I discovered to my utter shock is that narcissists dissociate away, forget, very close to 90% of their lives. That's 90, not 19. Very close. Some of them much less crazy. It's crazy. Totally. This is amnesia. Another thing they have is depersonalization. It's when they feel that it's when they feel like they suddenly are taken over by another personality, or that they're not, they're not, they're acting, but it's not there for acting someone else is acting. And it's a bit like demon possession if you wish. And the third element is derealization, when very frequently narcissists feel that reality is not real. That it's a bit hallucinatory. It's kind of, you know, but these are more rare depersonalization and derealization are much more common with borderlines. Amnesia is very common with narcissists. And it's dissociation. Now the narcissists react to dissociation in two ways. They confabulate. They try to construct reasonable hypotheses as to what may have happened, because they don't remember what had happened. They say, well, I don't remember what had happened, but likely this is what had happened. And then they believe in it. Then it becomes reality. So they confabulate. They bridge over the memory gaps with invented stories. And then they believe these stories. This is mechanism number one. And the second mechanism is what we call self states or sub personalities or pseudo identities. The narcissists borderlines, they have, they don't have a unitary self. They don't have a unitary personality. They, the self did not constellate it did not integrate. So there's no core. And of course if you have no memory, you have no identity. So they don't have an identity as well. There's nobody there. It's an absence. It's an emptiness. Instead, they have fragments of the self. And these fragments have characteristics, specific characteristics. And these fragments are used deployed in a variety of circumstances. So for example with the borderline feels threatened with abandonment or rejection or humiliation. When she's stressed. She becomes a secondary psychopath. The secondary psychopath is a psychopath who experiences empathy and emotions. So the borderline becomes secondary psychopath. She, she trots out, she takes out the secondary psychopathic self state. And this self state protects her because she's feeling stressed and humiliated and abandoned and terrified and so on. She becomes a psychopath and now she's okay. She becomes a narcissist. You could easily say that the narcissist grandiosity is an overwhelming self state. Now, this sounds a lot like multiple personality. And indeed I suggest, indeed I suggest that narcissism and narcissistic disorders because borderline is a narcissistic disorder that narcissistic disorders are actually dissociative post traumatic states. They are very, very close to multiple personality. And in some respects they're indistinguishable. Of course the narcissist by definition has at least two personalities, the false self and the true self by definition. That's the definition of narcissism. So at least two. Anyone who has spent any time with a borderline, especially in an intimate relationship. Anyone will tell you how the world borderline suddenly switches and becomes an entirely different person. Utterly different is nothing to do with the original. Anyone will tell you this, who has ever spent more than four days with a borderline. Something is happening there. The self states take over, then they recede. The only difference between borderline, borderline is a narcissist and people with dissociative identity disorder, people with multiple personality disorder. The only difference is that in multiple personality disorder which today is called dissociative identity disorder. In this kind of disorder, there is a host personality. There is a core. There is someone personality that moderates the other personalities. This host personality makes decisions can be communicated with and is the core of the person. In many ways, narcissists and borderlines are clinically in much worse shape than people with multiple personality disorder because they do not have a host personality. They do not have a core personality. No one is moderating. No one is in control. Utter, discombobulated, unmitigated chaos, which is precisely what Kanberger described. He called it the inner emptiness. And Seinfeld called it the empty schizoid core. So in your videos, you talk about how if you are in a intimate relationship with a narcissist, with someone who is effectively an empty shell, there's not much you can do to help them. Can you talk about that scenario a little bit? What would you do if you realize, oh my gosh, I think I'm in a relationship with a narcissist or I might be related to parents or brothers and sisters, or maybe even your boss at work. What do you do in those dynamics and what can be done? You can't help them because there's not them. You can't help someone whose main attribute is absence. Narcissism is not about presence or existence. It's about absence. Narcissists are the borderlines to some extent, but narcissists are the only entities of absence that we know. They are entities of absence. Yes, it's mind boggling. We can't help them because there's nobody there to help. There's nobody there to help, which is not the case with borderlines, but with narcissists, nobody there. It's an extreme state. It's a little like schizoids. Schizoids also have a big problem with this. Schizoids and narcissists are states of absence, entities of absence. You can't help them. You can help on yourself. You can help yourself by adjusting your expectations, by reframing the situation, and by reconceiving of the narcissists as something else. So first of all, adjust your expectations. Expect nothing. Easy. Expect nothing. Then reframe the situation. Don't tell yourself, for example, I'm his intimate partner because narcissists are incapable of intimacy or partnerships. So it's a meaningless phrase. Tell yourself, I'm having a great time with him. It's a fun thing. You know, for example, reframe the relationship because language affects your consciousness. Consciousness creates moods and emotions in you. If you misperceive the situation, if you mislabel the circumstances, if you develop expectations, you can end up being very depressed and very frustrated, perhaps angry and aggressive. Why do you need all this? What for? The narcissist is a delight to be with sometimes. Take it if that's what you want. But don't expect anything much more than this. Don't expect depth and profundity and connection and intimacy and love and empathy and don't. And if all these are prerequisites, if all these are sine qua nonnes, conditions without which you cannot survive, then walk away. You're never ever going to get this from the narcissist. At best, if the narcissist is hyper intelligent and a bit psychopathic, he's going to provide you with a simulation. But it's built on sound. The first test, the simulation crumbles. So you don't want to build your entire life constructed on the foundation of quicksand, you know. And then the last piece of advice is reconceive of the narcissist. The narcissist is like the latest smartphone. It's like iPhone 12. It has numerous apps. It's great fun. You can download things. You can do numerous things with him. He's adventurous. He's usually a risk taker and a novelty seeker is a delightful partner for some things, etc, etc. If this is what you want, if this is what you, if you're in a phase in your life, for example, that you want to experiment a bit, you want to be adventurous, you want to take risks. You seek novelty. And you want a partner who is essentially a child. The narcissist is two years old in most cases. Well, then, you know, if you, for example, if you are maternal, a very strong maternal instincts and you want to mother someone. Well, the narcissist is a perfect fit for you. There's no, there's no hard and hard and true rule. There's no kind of heuristics or rule of thumb to say, you know, it depends. The answer is, it depends. It depends. Some women end up being very happy with narcissists. Because the narcissist is the eternal child, the poor, the eternal adolescent. And they want to be the eternal mother. They're not really concerned about being intimate partners. They're not even concerned with sex. They're willing to render themselves asexual or to cater to the sexual needs to outsource the sexual needs. So there are as many arrangements as there are couples. And that is true for the narcissist as well. But if you're a typical person, typical person, psychological equipment, hormonal equipment, our psychological predispositions and proclivities and so on, we need, we need like food, like air, we need intimacy, we need love. We need support. We need many. And this can never, ever, ever be provided by the narcissist. And anyone who believes otherwise is what I call a malignant optimist. If you earlier in that conversation, you described that path in a little bit more detail where you decide, okay, well, I can't find the strength to leave or I don't have the resolve or for whatever reason, you decide to stick it out in a relationship with the narcissist. And you can't successfully reframe yourself as you've described. Do we have any idea from the literature or from your experience on what that actually does to someone in terms of long-term health outcomes for them or what that does to their own mental space, being in close contact with the narcissist for a long period of time? If you're not, if you don't do any of the three things I mentioned, adjust your expectations, reframe the relationship and reconceive of the narcissist, if you don't do any of these three, you will immediately embark on or get involved in the process of traumatization. You will start being traumatized. And the trauma will accumulate. And that's a condition known as complex trauma. So complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The traumas are daily. The traumas are hourly. The narcissist traumatizes you in myriad ways. And someone is honking endlessly outside. It's one of the noisiest cities imaginable. You're in Skopje. Right now in Skopje, I returned from Russia and United Kingdom and Hungary, where I used to have clinics and so on. I returned to be here because my wife is here. So I wanted to be with her during the pandemic. I didn't want to leave her alone. Actually, do you mind if I ask you a question along those lines? So you mentioned earlier that and you have on your other videos that you were diagnosed as someone with narcissistic personality disorder twice. And we didn't talk about this, but the variety that you sort of express is grandiose. So what does that mean for you in your life? And I guess how did that play out? Because you're married and you're a professional. How has that journey been? And how has being so vocal and open about your own personal situation affected your work and I guess how you put yourself forward? I'm actually a hybrid and what we call comorbid narcissists. I was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. So what people misunderstand is that my work is not autobiographical at all. The vast majority of things I had written do not apply to me at all. There's a hybrid borderline narcissist. In a typical hybrid of borderline narcissist, the borderline is always dominant. The narcissist is always recessive. Narcissist is a secondary diagnosis. Primary is always borderline. So my primary diagnosis is actually borderline. My secondary is grandiose narcissists. So it's not autobiographical and there's very little to learn if you're pure narcissists and you're diagnosed only with narcissistic personalities. So there's very little to learn from my life. Because for example, borderlines have possessed empathy and they possess positive emotions. So that's why I'm very reluctant usually to talk about myself because it could mislead people seriously. People misidentify me as the epitome of the narcissist because I was the first. Historically, I was the first narcissist ever to admit that he's a narcissist online. I was the first outed narcissist. There was no one before me. Now there are others online who are outed narcissists and so on. But even these narcissists, for example, they had been diagnosed usually also with psychopathy. So even they are not pure and a lot of what they are saying is sheer and mitigated nonsense. But a typical narcissist is actually capable of maintaining a long-term, very fruitful marriage. A narcissist maintains one island of stability in his life and the rest is chaos. So a narcissist could have a career with the same company for 40 years and end up being the chief executive officer of the company. But at the same time, divorce five times and have 19 children in and out of wedlock. So the island of stability is the career and his personal life is chaos or vice versa. The island of stability is the marriage which lasts 20, 30, 40 years. But in these 40 years, he had changed 19 jobs. So he's an unstable career, very pathetic, itinerant career. So there's always an island of stability. It's very important. This distinguishes the narcissist from the psychopath. Psychopath has no island of stability. Everything is chaotic. Same with the borderline. Everything is chaotic, not with the narcissist. So this gives hope to spouses and so on of narcissists because there are many narcissists who maintain this island of stability. And for example, they're very faithful. They never cheat because the island of stability is critical to them. Again, there's a lot of nonsense online myths and so on because, you know, narcissists always cheat. Absolutely untrue. So that's why I'm essentially evading your question because any answer I may give you would be tainted by my dual diagnosis. I was also subjected to a documentary where supposedly I was diagnosed with psychopathy. But again, it's untrue. It's a misrepresentation is I didn't score high enough. The cutoff rate for psychopathy in North America is 3030 on the PCLR, which is one which is the dominant test for psychopathy. And the cutoff rate in Europe is 19, including on the short form of the test. And I scored 18. So I'm a near European psychopath, but I'm very far from an American psychopath. I could never star in American Psycho, which breaks my heart. Well, that's probably a relief for everyone involved, including your wife. It's a relief for the competitor actors. Yeah, we made a great American Psycho. I'm so heartbroken. I only watched that movie recently and I loved it. I was like that one. So he, I mean, he's a narcissist as well, right? Right. All psychopaths have grandiosity. So it's not narcissism, it's grandiosity and all borderlines of grandiosity. So grandiosity is called to all clusterbeats, actually. Right, right, right. Can I ask you one more question to have time? Yeah, please go ahead. So you talked about grandiosity specifically in context of narcissism and in your writing, you talk about the introverted narcissists. Can you expand a little bit on the subtypes of narcissism and what people might see expressed? Today we distinguish between two major forms of narcissism and this distinction is enshrined in the diagnostic and statistical manual. So it's not widely accepted. It's mainstream. It was first suggested in 1989 by Akhtar, Akhtar and Cooper, the late Cooper Cooper diagnosed here. So these two scholars suggested that we're getting narcissism wrong and there's another type of narcissists. And the first type is what used to be called phallic narcissists very suggestively and became, came to be known as overt or grandiose narcissists. It's the confident ego symptonic go getter daring do in your face defined a little psychopathic antisocial narcissists. That's a classic type. But there's another type with which is also known as covert covert or shy or vulnerable or fragile or what have you. And that's a narcissist who is very different to the overt or grandiose type. It's a narcissist who is incapable of obtaining supply by narcissistic supply by himself, because he's very avoidant. He's socially phobic, he's shy. He's very fragile and any criticism and disagreement break him apart. And so he withdraws. And he's very frustrated because you cannot obtain supply. So he also becomes passive aggressive. That's the second type covert narcissists. The most recent cutting edge studies. We are beginning to think that overt grandiose narcissists is actually another name for psychopaths. We're beginning to unify psychopaths and overt grandiose narcissists. We think they're one and the same. And the real narcissists are compensatory. These are the covert narcissists because they're compensating for an inferiority complex. They feel inferior. They're compensating by feigning grandiosity or teaming up with grandiose people. So this is the, these are the two major distinction. And then there are many, many other subtypes. So for example, taxonomy that I had suggested between somatic and cerebral. The cerebral narcissist obtains narcissistic supply by leveraging his intelligence, his intellect, his intellectual accomplishments, etc. But he's usually, usually sexless, celibate. He doesn't, he resents his body. He rejects his body. And therefore he rejects his sexuality as well. The other type is a somatic narcissist who is less endowed up here. Less brain, less brain, more brain, more muscle. And so this kind of narcissists leverages his body to obtain narcissistic supply. And that includes, of course, bodybuilding, sexual conquests, any use of the body to obtain narcissistic supply. So these are two subtypes. They are not constant. The cerebral can become somatic when, for example, the cerebral is abandoned by a major source of narcissistic supply when a shared fantasy crumbles. The cerebral becomes somatic. It is to capture another victim, another prey, another intimate partner, he needs to have sex with her. So he then becomes somatic. So that's, that's another distinction we have, another type of taxonomy that we have. Right. And there are many other taxonomies. There's one suggested by Westin, the scholar turned Westin others. So, by now we have a proliferation of about 10 or 15 types of suggested types of narcissists, but somatic cerebral, inverted, inverted grandiose and overt, overt, overt. These are the major distinction, major subtypes. Are they formed in the same way? Is it the same sort of trauma early on in life that could create those sorts of patterns? Yeah, it's a good question. There's a debate about this. We all agree, all scholars agree that the etiology, the cause of all types of narcissism, with no exception, is early childhood trauma, but an abuse. But there are many types of trauma and abuse. Generally, early childhood abuse is when the child is not allowed to develop his or her own boundaries. The self is not allowed to constrain and to integrate, and the child is not allowed to separate from the parent and to become an individual. That's the widest definition of abuse. Now within this space of abuse, there are two types. One type is when bodily integrity and psychologically integrity are invaded aggressively. So that would be physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, verbal abuse. This is invasion. And the second type is when the child is prevented from gaining access to reality. So when the child is idolized, pedestalized, when the child is spoiled, pampered, when the child is instrumentalized, becomes an instrument to realize the parent's unfulfilled fantasies and wishes. When the child is parentified, when the child is forced to act the role of a parent, when there is incestuous, when there is ambient incest, the child becomes the parent's spouse or substitute spouse. All these are also forms of abuse. Depending on these etiologies, we get the different types of narcissism. Now there was a scholar by the name of Rothstein, Rothstein, and he suggested that all children who are exposed to abuse go through phases. The first thing they want to do is because they are not allowed to become individuals and so on, it's very painful and very frustrating. The first thing they want to do is to get rid of the frustration and the pain and the negative emotions and so on and so forth. And because these children are a bit more advanced in age, between two and six, they are unable to split, unable to divide the emotions and to project the negative emotions onto someone. They are unable to do this anymore. The splitting mechanism is lost. So what they do, what they do instead, they try to numb the feelings, numb the emotions, and create an imaginary friend. And this imaginary friend within something called paracocin. It's an imaginary friend within an imaginary universe, fantastic universe. And this imaginary friend is everything the child is not. The child is helpless. This imaginary friend is omnipotent or powerful. The child cannot predict the behavior of adults. This imaginary friend is all-knowing, is initiate, etc. So this imaginary friend is perfect. This imaginary friend is perfect, is brilliant, is never wrong, etc. So infallible. This imaginary friend is everything the child is not. And it serves as a decoy. It shields the child from abuse. The abuse is now decoyed, redirected at the imaginary friend. He bears the burden. He absorbs the pain and the hurt. This imaginary friend, the child is unmolested. So these are the two mechanisms, basically emotional numbing and this. Emotional numbing is very common in PTSD post-traumatic conditions. When the child fails, fails with the imaginary friend and fails with the emotional numbing, we have borderline. Then we have borderline. The child remains stuck in emotional dysregulation. The emotions overwhelm the child. He is drowning in the emotion. He has no skin. Everything hurts. Everything is huge pain and so on. Disregulation, lability and suicidal ideation is very common. 11% of borderlines commit suicide. But when the child progresses and succeeds, succeeds with emotional numbing and with the imaginary friend, we have a narcissist. That's more or less our current thinking on the topic. But I guess that friend that I've built was a childhood friend. It's the false self. It's God actually. That's why he compared narcissism to a private religion. I think the child discovers God, but discovers it idiosyncratically. The child is alone and discovers a God-like figure, a divinity, and creates a private religion. And exactly like in ancient primitive religions, this new God, this Moloch, demands human sacrifice. And the child sacrifices himself to this God. He sacrifices his true self. What is the true self? It's human sacrifice. So the child sacrifices his true self to this new God, the false self. And from that moment on, there's a religion. The child, the false self is divinity. The child is the worshipper. And there's been an act, a binding, bonding act of human sacrifice which sealed the covenant, exactly like God and Abraham sealed the covenant. And from that moment on, it's a religion. And the narcissist is a missionary, exactly like in Christianity. The narcissist is a missionary. They're trying to convince you that they are really perfect and geniuses and great. They're trying to convert you to their religion. So they're very missionary. You see a lot of religious undertones and overtones in Nazism. That's why I believe that the future distributed religion is going to be Nazism. I think Nazism would be the religion of the future. I mean, forget Christianity, forget all this. Nazism is a religion of the future where everyone is both a God and a worshipper and the temple. Everyone is a self-sufficient, self-contained, solipsistic God. And so it's a very religious, it's a meta, mega religious transformation, the age we're in, because we are all converted into gods. We're all being transformed into gods, lesser gods, higher gods, but gods. And we're going to end up in the distributed network of gods. The prevalent metaphor of today is the network, of course. So a new religion would be a network religion. It would be a distributed religion by definition. Everyone is a node, a node in the religion. And everyone is a god in the religion. I mean, we are in a state of malignant egalitarianism. We're all equal, known as advantage over anyone. Your truth is as good as my truth. Your facts are as good as my facts, alternative facts. So we're all in a situation where I call it malignant egalitarianism. And of course, no one will accept any position less than God in this reality. I will not let you be God. Who are you? You're equal to me. I'm equal to you. If you're God, I'm God also. That's the future. Whoa. Like how archetypal, first of all, as you describe the sacrifice of self, I just had all these connections go off in my mind as you walk through that. It's pretty somber to think that we're all ending up in a space where we're in this distributed religion of self. Why do you think that's happening? Because we lost the alternatives. We lost the alternatives. Religion in the past was a total solution. It wasn't about God. Religion provided you with social prescriptions, told you how to live your life, gave meaning to your life. Religion incorporated folklore and mythology and botany and zoology. Religion was science. Religion was today's science. Religion was a total solution. And in some societies and cultures to this very day it is a total solution, for example, in certain Muslim society among ultra-orthodox Jews. Everything you need to know is in these sacred writings. You don't need to go outside. It's a self-contained hermeneutic space. Everything is there. But then religion spawned institutions. It spawned monogamy and then family and then church and then state. When we undermine religion, when we destroy it really, I'm not religious by the way, let it be clear. I am ferociously hateful of religion. I consider God to be an infantile projection and so on and so forth. I have a very, very dim view of religion, religious people and the nonsense that is known as God and so on. So let it be clear. What I'm saying is not religious propaganda, but it's a fact. We dispense with religion. We left a void. And that void was not only an issue of who is ruling the universe. It wasn't a void that was limited to the question, is there a supreme being? It was a total void because religion was total. We dispense not only with God as the primum movements, not only with God as the mover and shaker. We dispense with everything that came with religion. We dispense with morality and instead we have moral relativism. We dispense with inter-gender relationships, the very concept of gender roles. We dispense with family. We dispense with community. We dispense with charity. We dispense with villages. We dispense with through the baby, the bathtub and the bathroom. Nothing was left. We created a total void where there was a total solution. And now this condition is called anomy. It was first described by Emil Dukheim, the sociologist 100 years ago. Emil Dukheim presciently and eerily had described our civilization right now, the current faith in civilization, to perfection 100 years ago. Amazing guy. Of course, he was Jewish. So, Emil Dukheim, well, that's my antisemitic streak. I can afford it, I'm a Jew. So, Emil Dukheim. So, small tangent, you were born in Israel, right? Yes, I was born in Israel. I'm of Moroccan descent, Turkish descent, but I was born in Israel. Born and grew up to my teens in Israel, then I left Israel. So, this is called anomy, this condition of total emptiness. It's called anomy. Now, there are two options, nothingness and narcissism. This is the only two options. Narcissism is when you try to fill in the void that was left in the wake of religion and its spawned institutions. This rationality failed to provide a total solution. Failed. And it failed for good reason, which Kurt Gordel, the logician, mathematician, I mean, he pointed out that rationality by definition can never be complete and can never be true. So, rationality failed as a total solution and it left an enormous void. And now people face two choices. The first solution is to say, okay, I will become my own source of meaning. I will eliminate the void inside myself by rendering myself the frame of reference. I will become my own total solution. I will establish internal institutions, internal objects. I will conduct internal dialogues. I will become self-sufficient with the aid of technology. So, that's it. I will not need anyone. And this is solution number one and it's known as narcissism. And solution number two is nothingness. This is a hell of a lot more difficult because first described in the West, first described essentially by Heidegger and then Sartre. Sartre called it called an element of nothingness, authenticity. It simply means that you treat yourself like an onion. Onion has layers. You begin to remove the layers. This belief that I have, is it really mine or did it come from my mother? Came from another? The hell with it. I'm discarding it. This behavior that I have, is it mine or am I imitating someone? Oh, I'm imitating someone. If that, I'm getting rid of this behavior. This, what appears to be trait of mine, is it really a trait or is it peer pressure? Wait a minute. If I remove all my friends in my imagination, will I still behave this way? No. Then forget this behavior. I'm never behaving this way again. So you peel the onion. You peel the onion layer by layer by layer. You become authentic. What is left after you get rid of all the layers? The smell of the onion. The smell of the onion lingers. That's who you are. Not the layers. The smell. This is your essence. This is who you really are. And yes, when you remove all the layers, you minimize yourself. No question. It's the opposite of narcissism. It's the antidote to narcissism because in narcissism, you expand to become the universe. We call this process in psychosis hyperreflexivity. Psychotics do this. Psychotics believe that the world, they are the world. If they have an internal voice, they think it's external because the psychotic says, I am the world. My internal voices are out there. They're in reality. They are reality. Narcissists do the same. They expand to become the universe. Nothingness, which is the principle I'm working on now, is exactly the opposite. It's becoming the big bang. It's becoming the infinitesimal point. The point that has no dimensions. And that point is you. After you had removed all the layers of society, socialization, your mother, your father, your teacher, your ex-wife, your future wife, your current wife. After you remove all these peers, media, influences of media, influences of social media, you remove and remove. It's a lot of work. You remove and remove and remove. And suddenly, here's you. You're there. That's you. That's you. Take it or leave it. You take it. You henceforth will maintain an authentic life. Your core will be unbreakable and 1,000% resilient. There will be no influences from the outside ever. It doesn't mean you will not collaborate with people. On the contrary, it will make you much more social, sociable and social, because you will not be afraid of contamination, of undue influences, manipulation. You will not be a conspiracy theorist because you will know yourself. What is it all about? Go back 2,000 years. Know thyself, 2,500 years. Know thyself. Know thyself. Not Vaknin, the ancient Greeks. And this is the antidote to narcissism. But how many people can embark on such a project? I'm asking you. Not many. Maybe a few saints. Maybe a few true gurus, the ones you don't see on YouTube. I don't know. It's enlightenment. This is the essence of enlightenment. It's not ego death. It's not ego death. Because ego death is a Western distortion by corner artists of Eastern mysticism and so on. It's not ego death. It's actually the opposite. It's strengthening your ego. It's defining clearly and unambiguously what your ego is. Not what others tell you it is, but what it is, really. Getting in touch with your essence, totally. And that is enlightenment, of course. Because all the people disappear. This might be a silly question, but could a narcissist or someone who's already been damaged to the point of becoming a narcissist go through a process like that, in theory? No. Because the narcissist... Because they're already dead. Yeah, first of all, he's an absence. But the narcissist has no smell of the onion. Only layers. The narcissist is only the layers. There's no smell. Nothing will linger if you remove all the layers. It's sort of... I mean, there's a lot of pop psychology which pushes... I guess general psychology pushes empathy, sympathy, support for people with mental illness. And, you know, when we tease out narcissism as we have over the course of this conversation, you kind of get to the end. And the answer is you accept or you leave. Sure. And that... I mean, it's not really the ideal solution, but I guess it's... Like, I don't know. What do you make of that? The narcissist will be the first to tell you. Take it or leave it. My way or the highway. Listen to the narcissist. He's telling you the truth. Nothing to be done. You know, there is this American, American obsession, American... I don't know what to call it, grandiosity in a way. Every problem has a solution. And every risk should be avoided. That's the American way of thinking. Well, I was surprised for you. Many problems don't have solutions. And you cannot avoid all the risks. This is reality. America is delusional. Not every problem can be solved. Forget the self-help gurus and scammers and swindlers who masquerade as public intellectuals and so on. Not every problem has a solution. Narcissism has no solution. No cure. Some elements of narcissism can be tweaked and modified. For example, behaviors can be modified. Abrasive behaviors, antisocial behaviors can be modified successfully. I came up with a new treatment modality called therapy where I essentially eliminate default self and grandiosity. But these are elements of narcissism. The rest remains. The narcissist remains. He's just not grandiose. He doesn't need supply anymore. But he's the same a-hole as before. He likes sympathy. He's exploitative. He's predatory and sane. Nothing changes. If we destroy the soul of a child... And don't ask me what is a soul. I know it doesn't exist. Metaphor. If we destroy the soul of a child at such an early stage, there's no child. Nothing is left. If you kill the child when he's two years old, the body continues somehow. It's a zombie. Somehow the body continues. And of course you can teach this young dog new tricks. How to speak, how to obtain a degree, how to be a world-class intellectual. But who is there? Nobody. There's nobody home. Now you can say, but who are you, Samvakni? I mean, who is talking to me, you can ask. If I'm not here, if I don't exist, who is the one doing the talking? What entity controls his processes and so on? To a very large extent, these are automated processes. And that's why I keep comparing narcissists to artificial intelligence. We can definitely create computer procedures which will yield and give rise to coherent speech, meaningful speech. We have programs that write beautiful poetry. Poetry. We have programs that administer therapy, psychotherapy. And they do it well. They pass the Turing test. In other words, an observer cannot tell if it's a human output or computer output. Computer becomes indistinguishable from a human. Can we simulate a human? Of course we can. We do it daily. Of course we can. Why do you think people bond emotionally, get attached emotionally to the smartphones? These fast smartphones are approximations of humans. Take the smartphone away from someone. See the reaction. It's a highly emotional reaction. And smartphones are 5% human. In the future, we will have androids who will be 95% human. But would anyone say an android has a soul, except in Blade Runner? I don't think so. There's a lot in there. I'm conscious of time as well, Sam. Yeah, I think we're really exhausted. The topic and our viewers. I'm incredibly grateful and I'm sure our viewers and listeners are as well for your thoughts, your insights. Thank you. Thank you. To everyone out there who wants to learn more, Sam's got an incredible YouTube channel. He's got just a huge amount of information out there. Look him up. It's incredibly insightful. Thank you. Thank you, Ron. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Just stay on, please, because I want to talk to you about logistics. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to stop the recording. Yeah. The American stand-up comedian and writer, Harvey Condabolu, once wrote, The last place the colonizer leaves is your mind. Those of you brave enough or self-hating enough are about to watch a talk or an excerpt, an extended excerpt from a talk I've had with Azam Ali. Azam Ali is a very famous Iranian singer from Iran. And in this talk, I suggested to her a new way of looking at narcissistic abuse. The narcissist enters a shared fantasy with a maternal figure, his intimate partner. You know all this by now. And he does this only in order to separate from the intimate partner, which represents the mother. He failed to separate from his biological mother. He failed to accomplish separation and individuation from his mother of origin. So now he tries it again, a second chance, a second time with his substitute mother, his intimate partner. So far, so well-known, nothing new. The new thing in this conversation is when I explained that the intimate partner is expected to help the narcissist by acting the part of a rejecting, betraying mother. The narcissist coerces her to behave this way. And if she refuses, he tries to punish her. And if this doesn't help, he devalues and discards her. So either way, whether you collaborate or you resist, you will end up in exactly the same spot, devalued and discarded. But during the talk, I described dynamics that have been neglected online by scholars and even by myself in my previous videos. If you don't have to watch the entire video, you can skip from one question to another because the first half of the video, more or less, I deal with things that you've been exposed to. Those of you who are loyal viewers, those of you who have watched my previous videos, those of you who have watched the videos in my shared fantasy playlist, you know all these things. There's nothing new there. The second half of the of the conversation is new. And so just skip the questions that you're ledger and focus on the exchanges between me and as I'm Ali, which present a new angle on narcissistic abuse. It was a long interview. And I went very deep into the shared fantasy concept. Coercion coercive snapshotting. The narcissist need the narcissist needs you to fail him to let him go. And so ironically, if you're a good partner, you're the wrong partner for the narcissist. I wish you an interesting hour with me and as I'm Ali, and feel free to comment and ask questions and so on so forth. I will, of course, ignore them as I always do. Okay, have fun. Okay, so we can dive in now. So what what brought me really to narcissism, just to give context in case in the event that I mentioned anything in this interview is. It's the first time I'm even speaking about this publicly but my father left when I was four years old. And my mother was very much like your mother she was a dead mother and. And I never thought that my father had that kind of influence on my life because he left and it took many, many years for me to, to realize that those four years were enough for him to have an impact on my interpersonal relationship with relationships with men. So I chose my father over and over again, until of course I married my husband and he's wonderful. So that's the context of why I came to you and I can tell you single handedly your work has helped me to realize and fully understand and comprehend what kind of personality I was really dealing with. So I thank you for that and that's one of my that was really the reason I wanted to interview you and also I realized as soon as I read your book that the word narcissist is one of the most misused words in the English language. And that it really is a clinical identity narcissism, a serious mental health disorder. So I, and in this interview, I think one of my goals is besides having you enlighten everybody on the topic is I think in this age of social media we need to be extremely vigilant because because you know narcissism narcissists are everywhere on the internet now and because of anonymity. It's an ideal place for them to target victims. So we'll start with like the most basic so there's so many confusing typologies. And I myself sometimes get confused, you know, over covert sadistic cerebral. And even after listening to many of your lectures, I, I can't say I even understand the difference between let's say a sadistic narcissist and a psychopathic narcissist. So in your own words, tell us what is narcissism. What are the various forms, and how is a narcissist form. Quite to introduce some structure and order into the mess. The situation nowadays, the situation nowadays reminds me of the 19th century where there was when there was a proliferation of elements chemical elements, but there was no periodic table. So there were all over the place these elements and no one knew how they were interconnected. Same with elementary particles until the 60s we had an accumulation, an inventory of elementary particles in physics. And there was no table. There was no system of elementary particles now there is. Narcissism is first and foremost, a failure to transition from self preoccupation to other preoccupation. In clinical terms, this is called a failure to transition from self object to to object relations. And in typical healthy developmental path, the child starts off fused with a mother, merged with a mother and this used to be called the symbiotic phase. So child and mother were one mother brought the world to the child mother was a reification of the world. So the child identified with mother also as a way to identify with the world and to explore the world safely. And this is called a secure base mother is a secure base. Then around the age of 18 months, the child starts to separate from mother. And the reason for the separation is that mother frustrates the child. She doesn't always meet the child's demands, however vocal. So the child gets frustrated. This frustration teaches the child that he is not mother. There is something or someone out there who keeps frustrating him. So that is a break a schism in the world is a breakdown of the universe. Suddenly the child realizes to its consternation and shock and trauma. That there are things out there, which are uncontrollable and external the concept of external is exceedingly traumatizing. Because it is a threat. There's no control over the external. So what the child does. He begins to gradually abandoned mother. This process is known as separation individuation. The child separates from mother and gradually becomes an individual by by creating boundaries and then maintaining the boundaries. Narcissists or children who would become narcissists as adults. They fail the separation individuation phase. They never succeed to separate from mommy. And that's because mommy is perhaps insecure and doesn't allow them to separate. Perhaps she's selfish and appropriates and expropriates them consumes them in a way. There could be perhaps she instrumentalizes them. She uses them. The mother uses the child. Perhaps the mother parentifies the child. So the child has to be to act as a parent or as a substitute spouse. In all these cases, the child fails to separate because the child fails to separate. It does not become an individual because it does not become an individual. There's no boundaries. And because he has no boundaries, he doesn't recognize the separateness and externality of other people. So this precludes relationships with other people. This precludes what we call object relations. This is one of the core elements of narcissism. We're not defining narcissism right now as it is defined as being defined in the diagnostic and statistical manual. In the diagnostic and statistical manual, there's a list of symptoms and a list of a descriptive list of dimensional list of behaviors. And if someone meets these symptoms and behaviors, then he's a narcissist is, for example, incapable of empathy, envious, exploitative, etc. And if he's like this, then he's a narcissist. But these are the symptoms. That's not the disease. I'm now describing the etiology of the disease. So the first issue is separation individuation. The second issue, because the child never becomes an individual, the child fails to develop a self or an ego. So ironically, narcissists are selfless. They have a self or an ego. Narcissism, therefore, in existential terms is the opposite of existence. It's absence. Narcissism is absence where all people healthy and even mentally ill are present. They have a core core identity. They have a self however deformed and thwarted. They still have a self. They have an ego. They use Freudian model. They have something. The narcissist is an absence. It is what we call the empty schizoid core. And this applies also to people with borderline personalities. So these are diseases of absence. Because the narcissist cannot exist in principle. Narcissist needs to borrow his existence from the outside. He needs to import an existence from other people. So what he does, he latches onto other people and he coerces them to provide him with a sense of existence. To help him to regulate his internal environment, for example, his sense of self worth. And coerces her intimate partners to regulate her moods and her emotions. So these people use something called external regulation. People around the narcissist becomes subcontractors. And their job is to keep the narcissist alive or at least to allow the narcissist to experience existence however vicariously. Now this is life and death. And that's why narcissists are essentially very aggressive about obtaining narcissistic supply, about maintaining the shared fantasy. They create fantasies and they introduce you into the fantasy where you have to play a role. And any defiance and any divergence and deviance from these allocated screens results in aggression, devaluation and discard. So this is the second element in narcissism. And the third element in narcissism is what I would call alien artificial intelligence. By no definition that I am aware of, of what it is to be human, is the narcissist human. These are not even partial humans. And I'm not saying this in order to be pejorative or derogatory or, you know, this is not hate speech. This is simply the fact. If you have no empathy, if you have no access to negative, to positive emotions. If you are exploitative, if you are unable to accept other people as external objects separate from you. If you treat all people as instruments, instrumentalize them and objectify them, treat them as objects. If you compel people to participate in a fantasy which is divorced from reality and then penalize them if they insist on remaining grounded in reality. These are not human behaviors. The narcissist is more like an agency of some kind or an artificial intelligence program. Narcissists emulate and mimic empathy, positive emotions, because they are manipulative, they're Machiavellian. But there's no inner resonance. That's why narcissists have cold empathy, cognitive empathy, reflexive empathy, but no emotional empathy. So they are users and takers. But they do all this pretty automatically. All this demonizing online of narcissists is malevolent scheming. That's confusing narcissists with psychopaths. Psychopaths are malevolent, malicious, scheming, goal-oriented and ruthless and callous. That's psychopaths. Narcissists are the same, but automatically, unconsciously, essentially, this is their essence. They can't help it. They don't sit around making plans on how to subjugate you, they just subjugate you, because that's what they do. And so the way I describe narcissism now, you won't find it in any textbook and in any diagnostic manual. But this is the core and essence of narcissism. These are empty shells who suck your essence in order to feel alive and coerce you into specific roles in order to maintain a fantasy within which they are godlike, omnipotent, omniscient and so on. One last comment. Narcissism is the exact equivalent of a primitive religion. It is a primitive religion. When the child is exposed to trauma and abuse by a parental figure, and abuse can also mean smothering, pampering, idolizing the child, any denial of boundaries, any breach of boundaries, any isolation of the child from reality, for example, developing a sense of entitlement to the child. All these are forms of abuse. When the child is exposed to trauma and abuse, the way the ancient Israelites were exposed to God's wrath, God's trauma and abuse, or the God of the Old Testament is a parental figure. But it's a very abusive parental figure. It's a violent, aggressive, I would almost say malevolent parental figure. Controlling, manipulative, threatening. So when a child is exposed to this kind of parental figure, the child reacts the way Moses did. The child develops a religion and the parental figures are God-like. They're divinities. So the child develops a religion. In this religion, the child comes up with a private God, a private deity known as the false self, and then the child human sacrifices. The child sacrifices himself his true self to the false self. So this is human sacrifice. And then the child merges with the false self and becomes empowered by his or her exclusive privileged relationship with this new found deity. Narcissism is therefore a primitive religion and this is the force and power of narcissism. That's why it is so such a phenomenon that captures the imagination, invokes fears and is almost inexplicable because we are using the wrong tools. We are using the tools of science. We are using the tools of psychology in an attempt to explain narcissism when actually it's a theological phenomenon. It's a private religion developed by a terrified child with a deity. That's so fascinating. I mean, it is even if you've been fortunate enough never to be in a relationship with a narcissist. It's such a fascinating subject. And I think one of the main reasons I love your lectures and when you look at your statistics on YouTube and there are those people who watch and listen all the way to the end. That's me. So what I love about yours is you don't vilify the narcissist. If you're someone like me that you don't subscribe to binary thinking, you don't think in terms of this is good, that's evil. And that's why self-help groups just don't work because they are really cesspools of vitriol and hate. So I really appreciate your approach to it, which makes it incredibly, it's really better. Your book is better than any sci-fi book I have ever read in my life. And I really appreciate also that you touched on the subject of abuse because I think that's another word that is quite misunderstood that there are so many various kinds of abuse. I really appreciate that you touched on that. I quickly want to just touch on something else. Before I do that, I just want to say, because there is a war on vocabulary and pronouns these days that even though you're using he and she, they're all interchangeable. I quickly want you to just, if you can touch on what healthy primary narcissism is and when does it become pathological? Because you have said it's very essential in healthy development. So if you can just quickly just touch on that. I'll be brief on this one. In the first 18 months of life, the child, as I said, cannot tell the difference between itself and the world. So the child is the world. It's like the famous song, We Are The World. So highly narcissistic song. So We Are The World. And then because the child cannot tell the difference between itself and the world, the child invests. So he redirects his emotional energy in itself. As far as it is aware, he's investing it in the world because he is the world. So he redirects his emotional energy at itself. Sexual energy as well. So there's auto-erotism. The child is sexually attracted to itself. And the child falls in love with itself. All the emotional energy goes into the self. This is known as primary narcissism. And it, for example, facilitates the formation of a coherent self. Of course, it's known as constellation or integration and so on and so forth. Later on in life, the child takes the same mental energy, the same emotional energy known as catexis. So the child takes this mental energy and redirects it. Rather than invest it in itself, the child redirects it to the outside. And this is the primordial foundation of object relations. So rather than fall in love with himself, he falls in love with another person. Rather than being sexually attracted to itself, he becomes sexually attracted to another person. So there's a redirection of this energy. Now, if the child gets stuck at a developmental phase, for example, if the child cannot complete separation and graduation, then the child remains enmeshed, remains engulfed and consumed by the maternal figure usually. And so the child cannot, the child having become an adult, cannot really tell the difference between itself and the rest of the world. And so he remains stuck in a narcissistic phase. Healthy narcissism, however, in healthy people is a remnant of the original self-directed emotional energy that allows you to maintain or stabilize or regulate a sense of self-worth, and especially self-confidence and self-esteem. The difference between primary narcissism, which is healthy, and secondary narcissism, which is pathological, is that primary narcissism operates on the reality principle. It recognizes your limitations, for example, and your strengths, it adheres to boundaries. Primary narcissism realizes where you stalk and other people begin. So primary narcissism is grounded in reality. It has something called reality testing. While secondary pathological narcissism is grounded in fantasy. It's an extended fantasy defense, gun or eye. So secondary narcissism impairs the reality testing. Narcissists cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. That's why narcissists actually never gaslight. They never lie. That's not true. Psychopaths do this. Narcissists believe their own nonsense. They believe their own confabulation, confabulations and stories and promises. They never future fake. They make your promise. They believe the promise. They introduce you into their fantasy because they believe that fantasy is a reality. So there is an enormous confusion that severely impaired reality testing with narcissists. And there are no boundaries. The narcissist has no boundaries because he has no self. So the narcissist internalizes you. He introjects you. He converts you into what I call a snapshot. An internal object. And then he continues to interact with the internal object as if you have never existed. So even if you're married to a narcissist, he would take a snapshot of you. Then he would Photoshop it. He would idealize it. And then he would continue to interact with a snapshot and ignore you completely. You will come to the narcissist's attention if you deviate from the snapshot, if you diverge from the snapshot, if you challenge the snapshot, undermine the snapshot with your independence, with your agency, with your personal autonomy. And that would enrage the narcissist because he would feel threatened. And he would then devalue you and discard you. He would consider you an enemy. The narcissist prefers the internal object to you. Always. Because you don't exist. External objects don't exist for the narcissist. As far as the narcissist is concerned. So secondary narcissism is fantasy. Primary narcissism is reality. And because you are grounded in reality with primary narcissism, you are self-efficacious. In other words, you are capable of obtaining positive outcomes and securing favorable results in your environment, acting in your environment and on your environment. Primary narcissism, reality-based, self-efficacy, the ability to operate successfully to make your life a success. Secondary narcissism, fantasy, impaired reality testing, therefore an inability to operate in reality and on reality in a way which secures good outcomes, favorable outcomes. So narcissists are failures by definition. Even when they are temporarily successful, they're going to destroy everything. They're very self-destructive. Because not because necessarily because they're malicious or malevolent, but because they can't read the reality properly. They can't read social cues, sexual cues, other people, they have no empathy. They're devotional reality. It's a delusional disorder. But there are also psychopathic narcissists, right? Yes, about 3% of narcissists are what we call malignant narcissists. They are psychopathic narcissists and these are narcissists who obtain narcissistic supply by deploying psychopathic methods, psychopathic techniques, psychopathic strategies. So they are likely to be, for example, reckless and defiant and conchumacious or post-authority and impulsive when in the pursuit of narcissistic supply then they're going to trample over people. They're going to abuse people, exploit people, ruin people, hurt people, you name it, just in order to obtain supply. The psychopath is going to do exactly the same thing, but in order to obtain sex or money or power or access or luxury life. So psychopaths are goal oriented. The narcissist is also goal oriented, but he has only one goal and that is narcissistic supply. So it would be good actually at this point. I was going to get into the, have you go into the phases, but since you ended there, can you tell us what is narcissistic supply? The narcissist inhabits a fantasy, as I said, and his fantasy is founded on a cognitive distortion. A cognitive distortion is known as grandiosity. It is an inflated, fantastic self-image and self-perception that is counterfactual, defies reality and is extremely difficult to uphold because reality keeps challenging the grandiose self-image, obviously. So the narcissist needs you to tell him that his self-image is accurate, that his false self is not false, that if he considers himself to be a genius, he is a genius or handsome, he is handsome. He needs external, he needs input from the outside to regulate and to stabilize his belief in the fiction that underlies his life, the fiction known as grandiosity. In clinical terms, we say that the narcissist regulates his sense of self-worth via input from the outside and this input is known as narcissistic supply. Well, if you could just describe what you call the three S's and also the difference between narcissistic supply and sadistic supply. Actually, there are four S's. The narcissist, first of all, there's this myth that the narcissist is attracted to specific kinds of partners. That is not true. The narcissist couldn't care less if you're empathic because he doesn't do empathy. He couldn't care less if you're kind because he's not kind and he couldn't care less if you offer him intimacy because he wouldn't know what to do with it. So all this self-aggrandizing mythology that if you have fallen victim to a narcissist, it means that you're empathic and kind and amazing and angelic. That's utter, sheer, unmitigated nonsense. Narcissists are promiscuous when it comes to the selection of partners. They are partner promiscuous. In other words, they go with anyone. If you give the narcissist, if you provide the narcissist with two out of four S's, the narcissist would willingly team up with you and become your intimate partner. And the four S's are sex, services, personal assistance, chauffeur, cook, cleaning lady, so sex, services, supply, sadistic and narcissistic, and safety to allay, to reduce, to mitigate the abandonment anxiety. If you provide the narcissist with two out of these four, you could be a psychopath, the narcissist would be with you. You could be another narcissist and the narcissist would end up having a couple with you. It's a myth, it's nonsense, that there is tight constancy. Sadistic supply is the narcissist's realization that he is about to experience pain and punishment by inflicting hurt and abusing another person. So it's not what people think. People think that sadistic supply means that the narcissist enjoys inflicting pain on other people. That is sadism. The sadist, the classical sadist, derives gratification from humiliating other people, from inflicting pain on other people, from torturing other people. That's the classical sadist, not the narcissist. The narcissist derives anticipatory gratification the joy of anticipation. He knows that if he hurts you, you're going to hurt him back. If he misbehaves, you're going to punish him. And it is the anticipation of this masochistic pleasure that I call sadistic supply. The narcissist acts sadistically, torches you, hurts you, causes you pain, humiliates you, shames you, debases and degrades you. All this is true. All this is true. But he does this in order to make sure to experience masochistic punishment. So this is a sadistic supply. Not a sadistic supply, we discuss. It's the attention granted by other people that allows the narcissist to regulate his internal organs. So this is a good time to get into, I mean, I really, when I first heard one of your lectures on the stages, is it five or six stages? I can never remember. It feels like more. But it's so phantasmic, the whole experience when you have a relationship with a narcissist that you don't realize how surreal it is until you try to explain it to someone else and then you realize there's no language to really explain what it is, but you have created that language. So if you could just kindly take us through the different stages. You mean from the shared fantasy to the discard? No, the whole thing is a shared fantasy. The whole thing is known as a shared fantasy. It has seven stages. I will not go right now to each and every one of the stages. I'll describe in broad brush strokes what's happening. When the narcissist decides that you could be an intimate partner, the narcissist love bonds you. He love bonds you, and the aim is to create something which I call the whole of mirrors. What the narcissist does, he idealizes you, and then he exposes you to your idealized image. He exposes you to your own idealization. So you begin to see yourself through the narcissist gaze and it's very intoxicating and it's very addictive because you see yourself through the narcissist as an ideal figure, super intelligent, drop dead gorgeous, amazing, amazing, unprecedented, and no one can resist this. It's irresistible. So the narcissist gets you addicted to his gaze and he maintains a monopoly on this gaze. So if you were to break up with the narcissist, you would no longer be able to see yourself as this idealized God-like figure and you become addicted. At that point, the narcissist draws you in. He uses, he leverages the love bombing and the whole of mirror effect and he draws you in. The whole of mirror works because the narcissist sees you the way a mother sees her child. A mother idealizes her newborn baby. When the mother has a new baby, she idealizes the baby. Otherwise she wouldn't survive motherhood. It's a very onerous task. So she idealizes the baby and she loves the baby unconditionally. The narcissist does the same. He idealizes you and then he offers you unconditional love. In other words, the narcissist becomes your mother. But for this to work, you need to become a child. If the narcissist is your mother, you need to become a child to benefit from this. So the narcissist regresses you, infantilizes you, forces you to become an infant so that then you can regard the narcissist as your mother and get attached to the narcissist and bond with the narcissist as if the narcissist were your mother. At that moment, it's too late for you. You have been infected. You are corralled, corralled and there's no way for you to live now. Because you have a second child with a mother figure and you're being idealized and you fell in love with your own idealized image. You're experiencing intoxicating self-love. Now the narcissist leverages these newfound assets and compels you to become his own mother. He converts you to a mother figure. So now there is dual mothership. He is your mother and you are his mother. And you have entered together the shared fantasy. This is the essence of the shared fantasy. Within the shared fantasy, the narcissist creates a snapshot of you. Creates an internal object that represents you in his mind and interjects. This internal object because you are his mother, this internal object is totally idealized. Mother is all good. Mother is always all good. So your representation in the narcissist's mind is all good because you're mother. But life compels you, forces you to deviate from this natural, to diverge from this natural. You have your own friends, you have your own family. You make your own decisions. You go on a trip. You have your own job. You deviate from this natural. This frustrates the narcissist the way he used to be frustrated as a baby with mother. So it frustrates the narcissist. And so he begins to get angry. He begins to be aggressive. And then he converts you to a frustrating bad object. He transitions you from all good mother to all bad mother. A frustrating mother, a hateful mother. And in other words an enemy, a persecutory object. So then he needs to separate from you. The whole exercise, the shared fantasy is about re-enacting the narcissist's childhood and allowing him to separate this time successfully. So he has converted you into a persecutory object, an enemy and now he can safely separate from you because you're bad. You're a bad object. So he devalues you and then he discards you and this is a symbolic re-enactment of the separation from the original mother. Now there's nothing you can do about this. This is an inexorable process that unfolds and unfolds inside the narcissist's mind. Nothing you could say, nothing you could do. No behavior you could adopt would have secured any different outcome. This is going to happen regardless of you because it's all happening inside the narcissist's mind and his interactions are with the internal object. And this is the end of the shared fantasy, the discard phase where the narcissist experiences separation from the maternal figure and for a brief moment he believes that he's on the verge of individuation of healing and completing the original unresolved conflict with his mother, with his real mother, biological mother. Of course it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And then the narcissist needs to go through the same cycle again sometimes with you so he re-idealizes you and starts from zero and this is known as Hooverie and sometimes with others. Narcissist is doomed specifically is doomed to repeat the original conflict with his mother the mother who did not allow him to become himself did not allow him to separate an individual is doomed to repeat this with umpteen women if he's a man. By the way, same dynamic applies to a female narcissist also with her mother, not with the father. So the female narcissist converts her male counterpart into a maternal figure and of course it applies to same sex it's this dynamic is universal it's just the members of the couple if one of the members of the couple is a narcissist he forces the other one to become a mother and he himself becomes a mother and this is a dual mothership and this is how it goes time and again prepare to only move with it What you always say Freud calls repetition compulsion. Yes, this is the narcissist variant of repetition compulsion. Yeah, so you're saying basically a mother is the only one who can really is the mother is the only one who helps us to individuate it's not the father not the father the father is not relevant to this. Okay, actually one very important thing that I want to touch on here thank you for taking us through the stages so if the ultimate goal of the narcissist is to keep repeating the cycle in order to separate and individuate and he's doing this over the course of an entire lifetime successfully I mean it's going to take a tremendous amount of energy because he needs other people to collaborate with them and eventually no one is going to collaborate because people want to express their own autonomy and agency so what happens once they are able to if the process is interjection and they snapshot you in order to only deal with your interject because they need you to remain stable across time so even if they get rid of the external object the internal objects are still there so they never really go away so what happens you have said that these they accumulate a library of idealized objects or interjects and as you say and these remain psychodynamically active to the extent that sometimes even if they're having sex they could realize if they're having sex with multiple partners so what happens to all these interjects that he's accumulated over time and how does this affect future relationships and how does it not even lead to a complete psychotic state it does but before I go there it's clear that I haven't been clear the narcissists the only reason the narcissists has intimate relationships is not love is not children is not family is not intimacy none of these things the only reason the narcissists enters a diode a couple has intimate relationships is in order to separate and individuate it's a compulsion it's a compulsive thing it's a repetition compulsion so the narcissists if you are the narcissists intimate partner he wants you to make it easier for him to separate from you he wants you to deviate from the snapshot he wants you to undermine the shared fantasy he wants you to be the bad guy he wants you to become the enemy he wants you to become a secretary object this is the source of sadistic supply he pushes you to reactively abuse him he wants you to abuse him so he abuses you sadistically so then you abuse him reactively and that's great that's precisely what he wants he wanted you to justify the transition from an idealized mother figure to a total devalued enemy and so the more autonomous you are the more independent the more agentic the more insistent the more you disagree with him or criticize him the more you abuse him reactively the more conflictive you are the more aggressive you are the better that's exactly what he's looking for he's looking for someone to make the separation easier if you are kind and nice and compliant and codependent and submissive that makes it a hell of a lot more difficult to get rid of you and getting rid of you is the point of the shared fantasy so this is very important to understand most victims don't understand that so this is projective identification then that's what you just yes it forces you to behave in a way that that recreates his comfort zone and conforms to his expectations exactly now what happens if you're kind and nice and empathic and submissive and compliant what then makes the narcissist very unhappy and then he says she's doing it on purpose she is passive aggressive she's being nice in order to frustrate me she's being kind kind because she hates me there's no winning there's no way for you to win if you are the narcissist's enemy if you abuse the narcissist great then he can get rid of you with a clean conscience then you must be passive aggressively undermining it also means you're his enemy you're his enemy in any case he's going to convert you into a secretary object in any case there is no winning strategy with analysis period victims can't can't digest this and they don't understand that they are totally interchangeable they are fungible the identity of the victim is totally irrelevant the victim is a place of order from eternal figure that's all that's all you also coined I'm so sorry I thought you were finished I'm finished yes so one of the most as I mentioned at the beginning you've created so much of the terminology and one of them is narcissistic abuse which everybody utilizes that now but I would really like for you to just quickly tell us what is what are the various forms of narcissistic abuse overt and also ambient emotional and mental torture tactics that narcissists employ to also as you say impair your reality testing as a victim so that they can because at the end you say it's just about power and being able to manipulate you to control you so if you can just talk about the various kinds of narcissistic abuse so that people who maybe have experienced it and don't know that they have can relate to it narcissistic abuse has two distinguishing features the first distinguishing feature the narcissist wants to kill you kill you in the sense that he wants to take away your independence your personal autonomy your agency he wants to disable you deactivate you and render you inanimate the closest I can come to illustrating this is the scene in Psycho the first the famous movie by Hitchcock were Norman Bates his mother has died yet he keeps mummified the mummified voting of his mother and then every morning he takes her out of bed he washes her up and he puts her in front of the window and every evening he comes up and he puts her in bed and he kisses her every morning that's the narcissist ideal partner that's how he wants you to be so this is the first bar and distinguishing feature of narcissistic abuse all other forms of abuse without a single exception are dimensional so financial abuse legal abuse I don't know physical abuse sexual abuse verbal abuse they are all limited to a single dimension and they don't constitute an attack on your existence they constitute an attack on some aspect of you some dimension of you but not on the very fact that you exist narcissists cannot tolerate the fact that you exist because they don't do separateness they've never experienced separateness separateness threatens them they need to annex you then you need to become an extension you need to become an internal object so your externality your extraneous features are threats the narcissist needs to eliminate them so this is the first the second distinguishing feature is that narcissistic abuse is the entire repertory of abuse known to mankind so in narcissistic abuse you would find sexual coercion you would find verbal abuse you would find very often physical abuse however attenuated but some forms of physical abuse you would find financial abuse you would find legal abuse you name it it's in narcissistic abuse typically typical abusers have an MO a modus operandi method of operation if you are a financial abuser you are likely to continue to abuse people financially but you're not going to beat them up you're not going to beat them up if you are a physical abuser you're going to beat your wife up but you're not for example going to resort to verbal abuse just as an example every abuser has a preferred method of operation the narcissist makes use of every kind of abuse known to mankind it's total coercion unmitigated there's no way out everything is abusive good morning is abusive the narcissist converts every human interaction every exchange every speech act every element of body language every expression and micro expression everything is at the service of putting you down of abusing you of making you of rendering you inert and inanimate it's terrifying and people do react by freezing it's a trauma response a post-traumatic response narcissistic abuse is traumatizing but what about the because all the verbal abuse physical, sexual, all of that it's such an obvious form of abuse what about the more ambient forms of abuse that you're not sure if they are abusing you but they are over a period of time I mean I know you said gaslighting is not unique to narcissists I mean it's not something narcissists do perhaps psychopathic narcissists but there are so many other forms of ambient abuse if you can just talk about that I think the only form of ambient abuse that narcissists use is the fantasy itself the shared fantasy they coerce you to renounce reality it's a little like the inquisition in Spain you know they coerce you to renounce your religion so the narcissist forces you on pain, on pain of penalty and humiliation and you know silent treatment forces you to say you're right this is not real this is real my family hate me because you said so the narcissist becomes the reality test of the victim so that the victim would accept and endorse and embrace and adopt everything the narcissist say never mind how outlandish and counterfactual narcissists therefore create an immersive total environment which is the shared fantasy where they develop a shared psychosis they become answering your previous question they do become psychotic when you renounce reality to that extent it acquires psychotic cues or elements and then they force you to become psychotic as well and this is known as shared psychosis or shared psychotic disorder so this is the ambient abuse it's not like the psychopath the psychopath would make you doubt your own perception of reality he would make you doubt your own judgment and opinions this is gaslighting the psychopath would falsify things for example falsify the future or falsify the past the psychopath would coerce you openly would be violent or aggressive psychopaths are far more direct narcissists don't actually say okay now I'm going to create an ambience of terror, intimidation and abuse this is coercive control that's the behavior typical of psychopaths what this narcissist does he tells you this is reality from now on you don't want to be in my reality do you hate me are you not my friend do you want me to walk away do you want me to punish you do you want me to abuse you so gradually you become a slave it's a process of enslavement so if it's for the narcissist a relationship is as you say a state of mind that is not based on reality it's a fantasy world and therefore they will never recognize your individuality or your separateness and in order to do that they have to subsume you in order to internalize you so they're not really interested in any sort of intimacy because as you just described right now the fact that you are based on reality you are an agent of reality and therefore you are I love in one of your lectures you say you are a Trojan horse you have invaded their reality and if you don't collaborate they it's the biggest challenge to their grandiosity and they will have to discard you but the question I have then is this whole process must be so excruciating so why is it hard for the narcissist why are they unable to abandon the fantasy world and inhabit reality if they keep repeating this cycle and each time I mean we didn't even get into you've given me so much of your time already we didn't even get into mortification and all of that but it must be so devastating for them so why are they unable to abandon the fantasy world with what tools the narcissist never separated from his mother he never became an individual he doesn't have a self he doesn't have the interface with reality known as the ego what are the tools at the disposal of a narcissist to cope with reality or to integrate in it zero none would you expect an infant an 18 month old infant to embrace reality and operate in it and on it effectively you wouldn't narcissists are stuck in the mental age of 2 to 9 years old 9 years old is a highly developed narcissist almost I would say high functioning narcissist the vast majority of narcissists are stuck at the age of 2 years old and the same expectations you have from a 2 year old you should adopt and then you would have flourishing relationships with narcissists the great mistake of therapies for example is that they interact with the narcissists as if he were an adult they have adult expectations from the narcissists they try to strike an alliance with the narcissists they try to develop a treatment with the narcissists are you kidding me that's an 18 month old they should deal with I mean if you want to be successful with a narcissist in therapy you should apply child psychology there's an infant sitting in the chair you know and so they have no capacity to cope with reality or to operate in it and on it zero none, no tools, no instruments they have never grown beyond this age and fantasy is a defense that starts around age 6 months according to melaninic languages starts around it's a very primitive defense it's very much like splitting and projection it's one of the family of primitive defenses so this is a primitive defense and it's understandable to an infant and indeed indeed narcissists use all these defenses for example they split splitting or dichotomous thinking is black and white thinking today you are the narcissist's best friend tomorrow you are his worst enemy something is either all good or all bad there's no grey, no middle ground this is splitting narcissists also project a lot they project onto you states of minds, moods, emotions and characteristics and traits that they find unacceptable in themselves all these are defense mechanisms typical to age 2 and the vast majority of them disappear after age 2 not with the narcissists so we know that the narcissists are stuck at a very early age and so the fantasy is the only place the narcissists can survive in and the reason the narcissists can survive in the fantasy is the control is utterly in control he can rewrite the fantasy rewire the fantasy, reinvent the fantasy demolish the fantasy the problem is you are in the fantasy with him so if you were to alter the fantasy or transform it you would need to adapt and if you don't adapt the narcissists would need to separate from you and this is precisely why the narcissist introduces you into the fantasy he knows it's going to end badly he wants it to end badly because he wants to separate from you that is what victims don't understand victims say but why did he push me why did he destroy everything why did he because that's what he wanted the aim of the shared fantasy is to lead to a catastrophe which would allow the narcissist then to devalue and discard you as the enemy that's the entire game that's the only purpose of this whole exercise well my goodness it's so fascinating I wish I could talk to you forever I want to just bring it to so you have said there's absolutely no cure for narcissism so what would your advice be to survivors of narcissistic abuse or anyone who might be in a relationship with a narcissist and is having a hard time believing number one is not your fault there is nothing you could have done period period period don't analyze don't study don't read don't blame yourself don't say if I only had behaved differently forget all this this is an inexorable process that is independent on you you have nothing to do with it you are interchangeable you are just an excuse a trigger so don't feel bad it's not your fault second thing it's never been real it has never been real it's been a dream it's a dream state or a dreamscape it's a fantasy you've been watching a movie you've been watching a bad movie that's all it's a bad movie it's over lights are on and time to leave the cinema cinema theater realize that what you have had with a narcissist was a piece of fiction a movie a theater play a script it was never real there except in the narcissist's mind and the narcissist solipsistically was interacting with himself only with himself and going through automatic motions in a script that will repeat itself after you and had repeated itself before you so that's number two number three the narcissist did not choose you and the narcissist therefore did not choose to discard you everything the narcissist had done has been dictated decades before you've met the narcissist you were not chosen or targeted by the narcissist you just happened to be there and you were amenable to the narcissist's dual mothership offer maybe you should look into your own issues and see why you were rendered vulnerable but as far as the narcissist is concerned you just happened to be there you were no more than a coincidence and then the narcissist inducted you into the fantasy and then you fulfilled your role and you're out like an actor or actress you know the run on Broadway is finished and you're fired you're going to the next production ask yourself why did I end up being there to start with because the narcissist transacted with you it was a transactional a transaction he offered to you a second chance at a childhood from your mother he offered you an idealized image of yourself which you found irresistible and then you colluded and collaborated with the narcissist in the unfolding of the shared fantasy even though you grew increasingly uncomfortable and even though you were in pain why? why did you do any of these things look deep into yourself do not exempt yourself from your contribution to what had happened if you say I'm an angel and I'm a magnet and things just happened to me and it's none of my responsibility and I had zero contribution to this and it's a force of nature or a natural disaster in which I've never been involved and never asked for you are setting yourself up for failure and repeat because you are also you're also subject to repetition compulsion you found yourself with the narcissist because both of you are into repetition compulsions so accept your personal responsibility and your contribution to your predicament look deep into yourself and reform yourself so that it never happens again that's all I have to say to victims of maybe one more thing you have been victimized but you're not a victim a victim is an identity your victim would is not your identity your victim would is an event that happened to you if you were mugged tomorrow you would not become a mug victim for the rest of your life a mugging victim for the rest of your life even if you were raped tomorrow you would not define your identity as a rape victim rape is a horrible thing but it's an event it's not a dimension of your identity victimhood and victimhood stans are debilitating paralyzing, disabling and they are exactly this is exactly how the narcissist wants you to feel the narcissist wants you to experience his own indispensability like now that he is gone I will never be whole again his voice is inside my mind I've been compromised forever I'm a victim from now on I've been stamped and I've been branded you're not the narcissist's property and this incident in your life however long it may have been is just a part of your life not the totality and it's not who you are thank you so much for that because I think I relate to it and it's one of the reasons I've never done well in talk therapy or even self-help environments because in order to function there you have to have a victim mentality and I'm sure you get a lot of grief for asking people to seek and search for their own role in why they ended up there I'm sure people call you a victim-blamer more than you like to know for that but I think it's such an important component of this conversation I want to come back to your philosophical side and end here and I'm going to embarrass you maybe you don't get embarrassed but I want to read two very beautiful ideas a lover of language the way you describe insight and empathy are so beautiful that I really want to end on this positive note after travelling through the horror house of narcissistic personality disorder actually I'll read three quotes one is a quote that you said which for me encapsulates the utter sadness and grief that you yourself as a narcissist would feel you said in one of your interviews that the conflict between the absence that I am and the presence that I wish I were is a conflict that is ongoing I was denied as a child I was not allowed to become so I never became and I remained an unfulfilled promise or a dream that brings so much tears to my eyes and I think that having empathy and being able to understand that actually even you as a narcissist is also a very critical component now I'm going to end on these two and if you want to add anything to it I just want to end on your poetic side on your poetic side on insight I love this human life is a process of becoming the environment acts upon our genes and helps us to become we are being formed as we go along so we are never the same from moment to moment which is why psychology can never be a science life is a process of becoming via insight into who you are and insight into others because it is insight that creates empathy and empathy crucially depends on having insight into yourself because who else is empathizing if you don't know yourself you cannot empathize empathy depends on an I who empathizes and such a self cannot consulate or come together without an immeasurable amount of cumulative insights which gradually form into your identity having an insight to yourself allows you to have insight into others and this is called theory of mind on empathy you said learning is a derivative of comparison we learn by comparing social media is founded on this concept knowing is not enough you need to emote to induce dynamics and change the base of all this is empathy it is the bridge and the crossing to other people it is only by comparing yourself with other people that you calibrate yourself that you gain realistic insight about the world because other people are your reality testing they are your viewfinder who help you to focus and empathy is another word for directed insight when you have insight into your when we have insight into ourselves we call it insight when we have insight into others we call it empathy if that's not literature I don't know what is I forgive me for paraphrasing some of it but I never heard anybody describe insight because often when you have subject when I talk about psychology and my interest in it people say well you know I'm not interested in any of that stuff but I think developing insight is also critical if you have been victimised because I don't think of myself as a victim even though I've lived a traumatic childhood I have this beautiful we every individual human being has this gift the biggest gift is that we can create ourselves every day every day we can create ourselves anew and to do that we need insight and empathy and I really thank you for that I thank you for your immense contribution to the field of psychology I think your book personally should be a textbook in schools I thank you for helping me even if that was not your even if you didn't set out to help people you do know how many people you have helped and I'm so grateful I want to perhaps interject with one last sentence I'm a bit as you indicated before I'm embarrassed but I'm so effusive thanks because I haven't meant to him so I feel a discrepancy between my motivation and the way I'm perceived people can tell me you can't be a narcissist that's not true you're so empathic you're smiling you're cute you're this you're that and that's embarrassing because I am committed to truth and I'm committed to reality my roots are as a physicist I'm a scientist so I feel it's a wrong theory like wrong theory and okay but what I wanted to say something else the meeting between the narcissist and his victim is a meeting of two hungers the victim is hungry for love and intimacy and acceptance and the narcissist is hungry for existence the narcissist tries to become through the victim the narcissist tries to exist through the victim but the said irony is that the only way for the narcissist to exist through the victim is to abscond with her existence and the only way for the narcissist to become through the victim is to deny the victim her own becoming and on the other end of the equation the only way for the victim to obtain love from the narcissist is to stop being to not be and the only way for her to maintain intimacy with the narcissist is to become as much of an absence as he is and this is the predicament and the conundrum of the shared fantasy there's a meeting of two irreconcilable incompatible hungers thank you so much Sam thank you enough for your time you've been so generous I hope one day when I'm somewhere where you are I know you're in Europe right now yes you're originally from Israel so hopefully I travel a lot to Europe so hopefully sometime I'll be in your area and would love to invite you to one of my concerts it would be an honor to meet you in person thank you thank you so much bye bye bye bye