 Ok, Tabarishi and Tabarishets, Comrades and Comradez, today we are going to discuss a perennially communist topic, private versus public, the narcissist in private versus the narcissist in public. Which one of them is the real narcissist? And apropos a real narcissist. My name is Samvaknin and I'm the author of Malignancy of Love, Narcissism, revisited and a former visiting professor of psychology in Russia, believe it or not, and currently on the faculty of a more benign institution, hopefully, in Toronto, Canada, Cambridge, United Kingdom with an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria, SEAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, whew, that was a mouthful even for a verbose person like moi. Ok, so which one of them is the real one? The narcissist in private with you as his intimate partner, with his children, with his so-called friends, is this the real narcissist or when he is in public, in the workplace, in public appearances, at the pub, in church, is that the real narcissist? Which one of them? The thing is, these are masks. The narcissist is nothing but a mask. He is only, nearly, a serious, a kaleidoscopic, dizzying series of masks. There is no real narcissist. Narcissists change masks the way normal healthy people change self-states, but the narcissist mask is not profound, is not deep, and is not essential in the sense that he does not reflect any essence. It's just a shell, a facade, an apparition beyond the mask, underneath the mask. There's nothing. There's nobody there. It is not even the borderline's identity disturbance. The borderline changes identities, mainly in response to stress, rejection, and abandonment. But these are real identities, full-fledged. In a way, they're kind of self-states, mutually exclusive self-states, but still identifiable with some core. With the narcissist, the masks have nothing to do with his self because he doesn't have an integrated, constellated self. He doesn't have an ego as well. So the masks are really masks. You know, carnival masks, pouring masks, masks, how many times do I have to say this? Also known as persona. And we're going to deal today, in our video, in my video, not yours, we're going to deal today with these concepts of mask and persona. Just remember this. When the narcissist is prosocial, when he is communal, when he is kind and empathic and compassionate and understanding and healing and rescuing and saving and fixing and you name it, that's a mask. When the narcissist is aggressive and abusive and anti-social, that's a mask. When the narcissist is neither, that's a mask. You never see the narcissist. You never get a glimpse of the narcissist. The narcissist wears masks even when he sleeps. The mask has replaced the narcissist, took over. We're going to discuss the concept of false self. The narcissist had become the mask. Remember the film Mask with, I think, Tim Curry? More or less. Jim Curry. I'm sorry. Okay. Now, let's start, as I promised, with the false self. False self was first suggested by Donald Winnicott, a pediatrician turned psychoanalyst. But it had its antecedents. One in the field understood sooner or later that the narcissist presentation is unreal, fantastic, fake, phantasmagoric, a mirage, a kaleidoscope. Helen Deutsch, who was a colleague of Freud, called it as if personality. She said that pseudo-relationships substituted for real ones, as if personality reigned the field for several decades, actually, until Winnicott erupted on the scene. And I think it's a great phrase as if personality, there's not personality there. Winnicott had an analyst. All psychologists and therapists and psychiatrists are in therapy for some reason. So Winnicott had an analyst, her name was John Riviere, and she explored the concepts of the concept of the as if personality. The narcissist camouflage, the narcissist masquerade, the narcissist everlasting, all pervasive, ubiquitous, never off facade. And she said that it's essentially a superficial ascent concealing a subtle hidden struggle for control. I'll try to translate this into English. What she said is that the narcissist pretends and fakes because he believes that by doing so, he's going to gain a modicum of control over himself as well as over his environment. It's all about control. Freud suggested at the time that the ego is a product of identifications. This is not very far from the false sense. What Freud had said is that the ego is comprised of layers like archeological layers of identifications with other people, parental figures, role models, teachers, and so on and so forth. These identifications are internalized and introjected and become part of the constellated or integrated ego and of the functioning super ego. So Freud hinted that the ego and the super ego are actually fictitious, they're pieces of fiction. They are an accumulation of other people's ideas, beliefs, values, behaviors, and so on and so forth. Everyone said Freud is imitating this mimicry involved. But Freud didn't go the extra step that Winnicott had. Winnicott suggested a dichotomy between true and false. So this true self and false self. Michael Baylien suggested something very similar. He called it the basic fault, like break between two parts. Ronald Fairburn's notion of the compromised ego was another kind of antecedent of the false self. And then there was Eric Fromm in his famous 1941 book, The Fear of Freedom, where he distinguished between original self and pseudo self. The pseudo self was inauthentic, and of course Fromm was heavily influenced by existentialists such as Cern Kirkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre dedicated the whole book to the question of authenticity or lack of authenticity, what he called bed faith. The bed faith is a close cousin of the false self, which is another name for the mask. Experts such as Kirkegaard, the aforementioned, claim that to will to be that self, which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair. Despair, Kirkegaard defined despair as the need or the exigency of being someone another than oneself, someone who is not oneself, in short betraying oneself. One could therefore perceive or reconceive of narcissism as a form of self-betrayal. The narcissist is an abused and traumatized child, betrays his true self, sacrifices it to the false self, which is Godlike, a divinity, and this creates in the budding narcissists in the child who would become an adulthood narcissists, creating this child grief, everlasting grief, and despair. And I have videos dedicated to narcissism as a form of long-lasting grief. Kaan Honai in her 1950 book Neurosis and Human Growth took the idea of the true self and false self and ran with it. She interpreted these two as the real self and the ideal self. The real self is the one that reflects the current state. Like who you are right now is your real self. The ideal self is who you could become, who you wish to become, your dream state in a way, your dream self. Now, of course, ego ideal is a precursor of this conception. Kaan Honai's theory of self suggested therefore that narcissism is a conflict between who the narcissist really is currently as we speak, as we behold the narcissist and who the narcissist thinks he should be, he could be, and ultimately would be, kind of a grandiose ego ideal or grandiose ideal self. It's another angle of looking at the mask and the persona. The true self and the false self, they went through various permutations. The true self is also known as the real self, the authentic self, the original self, the vulnerable self, you're naming. The false self is known as the fake self, the idealized self, the superficial self, the pseudo self, and so on and so forth. But we will stick to the true self and the false self. And this dualism, this dichotomy, which was sharpened and became an asset in current psychological thinking is attributable to Winnicott. He said that the true self denotes a sense of self based on spontaneous, authentic experience, the feeling, the general feeling of being alive. So when you have a real self, you don't feel any dissonance. You don't feel any conflict about being you. Being you comes to you automatically. You don't need to think about it. You don't need to imagine it. You don't need to work on it. Being you is just there. It's who you are. It's your existence. It's your presence. It's your being. And of course, by contrast, the false self denotes a sense of self created as a defensive facade, which in extreme cases can leave an individual lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty behind an inconsistent and incompetent appearance of being real. And this is, of course, a great definition of narcissism. So we have in the narcissist a situation where as a child traumatized and abused in a variety of ways, remember that spoiling the child, pampering the child, idolizing the child, pedestalizing the child, instrumentalizing and parentifying the child, all these are forms of extreme forms of abuse, because they don't allow the child to set boundaries to separate from the parental figures and to individuate, to become. They hinder, they obstruct the process of becoming. So the abused and traumatized child, whether classically, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and whether this way that I've just described, this child strikes a Faustian deal, he sacrifices his true self, he suffocates it, literally, it's like assassination. And then the true self, in the best case, gets ossified and fossilized, and this creates a huge internal emptiness, avoid whether true self should have been a black hole that had consumed the true self, to compensate for this emptiness, which is also characteristic to a characteristic of borderline personality, so to compensate for this. The narcissist comes up with the false self, and of course the false self is everything the child is not, it's perspicacious, it's prescient, it's omniscient, it's omnipotent, it's perfect, it's brilliant, it's lovable, it's handsome, perfectly handsome, etc. So this is the compensatory mechanism at the heart of narcissism, all narcissism. Today we know that this is at the heart of all types of narcissists, including the in-your-face I'm a winner, I will make you great again types of narcissists, they are also driven by a core of shame, by self-rejection and self-loathing, by a bed-object that keeps informing them how inadequate and unworthy they are, so to compensate for all this, and for the deadness at the center, the narcissist creates the false self, and the false self is a variant, a very virulent and toxic variant of what is known in psychology as persona or mask. I'm going to define persona right now, and then I'm going to discuss masks, and then I'm going to come back to persona. Now, why am I doing it this way? Because masks are sociological constructs, masks crucially depend on society, on the individuals functioning in society, on social mores and conventions and norms and scripts. So we need to start from the big picture. You know my view, there's no such thing as a self, there's no such thing as individual, and there's no such thing as personality. We are all the outcomes of the intersection or intersections multiple with other people. We are relational creatures. Now that's not my view, it's not my invention. This is object relations in the 1960s. And so we need to start with society and then concentrically home in on what we would call the individual, the person, personhood. But before I go there, I'm going to define persona, bear the definition in mind. You are acquainted by now with the true self, with the false self, and now the third concept which we're going to use a bit later, persona. Persona in the analytics psychology of Carl Jung, not one of my favorites, is the public face that an individual presents to the outside world in contrast to more deeply rooted and authentic personality characteristics. In this sense, Jung makes a distinction between who you really are and the facade or the presentation to the world. It's as if there's a chasm, there's a divorce, there's a break between our quiddity, our essence, our core, what defines us, what makes us who we are, what we had become, and the information that we broadcast, that we signal, that we present to the world out there. And he implies that these are never the same, never the same. Persona, by the way, is Musk, the meaning of the word is Musk. Now this is Jung's view. In the case of narcissism, if we apply the Jungian approach, in the case of narcissism, the Musk is the narcissist. There is no divorce between the Musk and an essential narcissist. There is no core, there's no identity, there's no essence, there's nobody there, it's a black hole, it's a nothingness, nothingness in the bad sense. It's a void covered by within Musk. So, while Jung insisted that people have a constellated, integrated, immutable core in adulthood, covered with a Musk, which is presentable to the outside, to other people, in narcissism, because the inside has been demolished and eradicated in early childhood, nothing but temple ruins and archaeological excavations there. And all that's left is the presentation. Narcissists are walking, talking presentations. Okay, now we need to discuss the role of society in all this and how people fake and pretend and play act and create masks and put them on and take them off, et cetera, et cetera. The whole Musk-related dynamic. And this leads to a seminal figure in sociology by the name of Irving Goffman, G-O-F-F-M-A-N. Goffman was probably the most celebrated sociologist of the 20th century and he analyzed social interactions. His emphasis was on how we try to control impressions that we give to other people and how we, in turn, try to read impressions that people kind of sell us on. So, he was concerned with the two-directional traffic of impressions. We are trying to impress people, people are trying to impress us. How do we cope with this? How do we manage this? And what happens in these exchanges? And in 1959, he wrote a book and the book's title is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. And he, in that book, he came up with the idea of a mask. He said, when we have face-to-face encounters with people, we put on masks in social life. We're all performers and social life is nothing but but dramaturgy, it's theater. He said, behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look and naked, unsocialized look. Had he lived today, he would have carried it forward probably and he would have said, with the exception of the narcissist. This is how this sentence is going to sound when it is applied to pathological narcissism. Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to have nothing inside himself and naked black hole. When the normal course of events, when normal interpersonal relationships and interactions are disrupted, only then the mask slips. Only then people get what he said, what he called an image of the men behind the mask, reminiscent of Wizard of Oz, I assume. And this was Irving Govman. Govman's book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959 or 1956, I think it was 56 and second edition was 59. His book transformed the discourse, transformed the conversation regarding what do we really know about other people, what do people tell us about themselves, what do they broadcast and how manipulative, manipulative is this. When we come face to face with another person, are we really interacting with someone there or are we stupidly, stupidly interacting with the mask and when people take off the masks, what then or do they always wear masks? For example, at work you wear a mask with your boss and then you come back home. Do you wear another mask? Do you change the mask to that of a husband with your wife or a father with your children? Is being a husband or being a father types of masks? These were crucial and in many ways terrifying questions because we have these underlying assumptions that self-reporting is reliable. The totality of social sciences, sociology and psychology included, rely heavily and crucially on self-reporting. The vast majority of psychological tests rely on self-reporting. Even tests for psychopathy and narcissism, ironically and idiotically may I add, rely on self-reporting. But if self-reporting is done by a mask, then we're in trouble. We're in trouble because we are fed with the wrong information. We are fed with the right information when it comes to the mask. But how correlated is the mask with a person underneath? How connected is the mask? What can we learn from the mask about the person? Is there a way to somehow convert or translate the mask into the underlying personality characteristics of the mask bearer? It reminds me of a horror novel by Stephen King, Rose Meadow. Meadow, M-A-D-D-E-R. Rose escapes an abusive relationship and husband is Norman. He's a cop, he's a policeman. And he has this mask which he talks through and he uses the mask to interact with the world or to interface with the world. This is a stunning book, by the way. Okay, so it raised many questions. It was a very controversial book. The government believed that when an individual comes in contact with other people, that individual will attempt to control or to guide the impressions that other people might have of him. The person will try to change her setting, her appearance, manner. She or he would broadcast, in short, false information. So all human interactions are premised on, based upon and founded on, falsity, lies, white lies, intricate lies, delicate lies, gentle lies, lies, all the same. The person the individual is interacting with is trying to decode the lie, to decipher it, to somehow form and obtain information about the individual, not about the mask, to penetrate the mask. And so government believed that all participants in social interactions are engaging in some practices intended to kind of maintain control by avoiding being embarrassed or by embarrassing others. And so he developed what he called dramaturgical analysis. And he said that there's a connection between the kinds of acts that people adopt and theatrical performances. I'm not going to it right now. In social interaction, said Govman, it's a performance. There is a front region, public facing, where the performers, individuals are on stage in front of an audience, the other person or the other people. Now everything is describing, applies to healthy people, normal people, common folks, and applies to narcissists as well. Here's the difference. If you reach out and strip the mask of the narcissist, what will be left behind is nothing, air, a transparency. You will have discovered that the mask was the only thing there. If you reach out and strip the mask of a normal, healthy person, you will see the normal, healthy person and the correlation between the qualities or traits of the mask and the normal and the person who is displaying the mask correlation is pretty high. People rarely engage in actual deceit, intentional deceit or even unintentional deceit. The mask is shaped, the mask is formed, the mask is designed to feel comfortable, ego-syntonic. So when you come up with a mask to show your boss or a mask to show your wife or a mask to show in church, you would design the mask in a way that it won't create too much dissonance. You will be very close to the mask, even if the mask is stripped away by some cataclysmic event or some stress or some anxiety or some. Even then, the difference between you and the mask is going to be very small if you're healthy, if you're normal, if you're narcissistic, there is no difference between you and the mask. You are the mask and only the mask. So according to Govman, there's a positive aspect of the idea of self and this positive aspect are the desired impressions. We are trying to emphasize our positivity and convey these positive aspects of who we are via impression management. There is of course always what he called a back region and other people call the shadow or the complexes and so on. And in these areas which are usually inaccessible, many of them conscious and so on and so forth, there is a gap between the mask and reality and people are often unwilling to kind of venture there. But in therapy, for example, people set aside the mask and set aside their role play and allow the therapist access. Presumably this happens in love as well. The front side, the front office of the performance includes manner, how the role is carried out, appearance, that's the dress and the look of the performer. And when you put manner and appearance together, you have the performance or the mask. Sometimes performance work together in teams and they form bonds. The bonds could be emotional bonds, collegial bonds, common goals, common commitments, common interests, common investment and so on and so forth. But these would still be masks collaborating. And this is the crucial insight of Govman. The inevitable connection, the strong connection between performance and life, one could even say life as a series of performances. It is what the narcissist fails to grasp that life is not only a performance, it's also a performance and that the performance has to be as authentic as possible, as close as possible to who you truly are. Because the narcissist has no experience of being, of becoming, of existence. He doesn't know, he cannot calibrate, they cannot gauge the proximity of the mask to his core identity, because he has no core identity. He can't tell you if the mask is real or not real, if the mask represents him or does not represent him, because there's no him. He gives up early on in childhood, he gives up and he says, well, I might as well become the mask. There's nobody there, there's no me. I might as well become the mask and I might as well make it Godlike so that it can protect me, so that it can bring me narcissistic supply, so that it can soothe me and comfort me and guide me and regulate me. And this is called the false self. Govman really went deep into the theatrical metaphor. He took all the elements of acting into consideration, settings, scenery, stage, backstage, props, direction, action, audience, and so on and so forth. So you should read his book because it's pretty amazing and it led directly to later to transactional analysis, internal family system and so on and so forth. Govman said that the social actor, the person who acts socially in social settings, takes on established roles with a pre-existing front and back and props and costumes and so on and so forth. So the roles are out there, you just put them on. It's like actors changing costumes in midplay. These are the social roles and here's another massive difference between healthy and normal people and the narcissists. Healthy normal people assume roles that already exist, pre-existing roles. They fit into the role, they mold them, they flow into the roles. For a while, they become a husband or they become a father or they become an employee or they become a soldier, you know, a reparationer. These are roles but all these roles have been defined thousands of years ago, not so of the narcissist. The narcissist creates his role, his mask from scratch. He creates it from scratch because he has no authenticity. He doesn't know who he is and because he doesn't know who he is, he doesn't know which of the pre-existing roles would fit and because he is highly fragile and highly vulnerable and highly susceptible and sensitive to criticism. In this sense, the narcissist resembles someone with avoidant personality disorder. So because of this, the narcissist doesn't dare to experiment with pre-existing social roles. The narcissist says, I may look ridiculous, I may end up being criticized by myself, not least, by my harsh inner critic, I may fail, I may botch it, I shouldn't take this chance because my personality, so to speak, is so precariously balanced, I could fall apart, I could sustain narcissistic injury, collapse or God forbid, those who believe in God, God forbid, modification to avoid all these life-threatening outcomes. The narcissist avoids pre-existing roles and designs his own roles, tailor-made, custom-made. So the roles the narcissist assumes are idiosyncratic, they fit him like a hand in glove, they're his unique to him and only to him. They can't fit other people, they can't fit other narcissists. This is what renders the narcissist anti-social, he can't fit in because he wouldn't play social roles, he plays his roles, he is a law unto himself, he is his own law and so the narcissist creates these roles and uses them to interact with other people but they are so unprecedented that in many respects they're a big dysfunctional. People interact with each other via masks that are used and worn for thousands of years and so they can predict, it creates certainty, creates determinacy. The narcissist's insistence on idiosyncrasy, uniqueness, being unprecedented are one of my mask or the highway, creates a lot of uncertainty, unpredictability and make it very difficult to interact with the narcissist in social settings. Okay, the issues of structure and agency, I will not go into them right now, it's enough to say that in normal healthy people structure limits agency. Structure is an outside constraint on agency. The narcissist, because there's no structure, agency is unlimited. That's why the narcissist feels godlike, omnipotent. I'll go to it maybe in some other video. Today we're discussing masks. So it's important when we ask ourselves, why has this particular mask been adopted or how fitting is this mask for the purpose and for the circumstances. It's important to specify the situation, to define it in any given interaction because the coherence of the interaction, it's relevance and its appropriateness rely crucially on the situation, on the environment, on circumstances. Here there's another failure by narcissists and not only by narcissists, also by some, by many borderlines, by people with autistic spectrum disorder, by paranoia, by schizoids, schizotypals. There is a general failure in defining the environment or apprehending it correctly, perceiving it correctly. Because these people cannot, cannot grasp the environment properly. They come up with the wrong roles, with the wrong masks. And this creates in people extreme unease, a phenomenon known as uncanny valley. You feel uncomfortable when you're around a narcissist. Something doesn't fit. It's like a 98% human, but the 2% are kind of alien or robotic. And that's because a narcissist keeps changing masks that are wrong, simply wrong for the situation, the circumstances, the exigencies and vagaries, the constraints in which he finds himself. Consequently narcissists engage a lot in inappropriate behaviour, which could lend them in hot water. In interactions which Govman calls performances, the parties involved can be performance, but they can also remember half, half of the people involved are audience members. While you perform, while you as a healthy person perform your mask perform your wrong act on stage, there's someone, someone observing you, someone viewing you, someone trying to decode and decipher what you're trying to say. Who are you? Who are you? So some are performers and some people are audiences. And the role of the audience is pretty crucial as well. Because everyone, in a conversation for example, everyone is a performer one minute and the audience the next minute. So there's a rapid oscillation, rapid shifting between performer, audience, audience, performer, performer, audience, performer, you're never stuck, you're never static. Here's another difference with the narcissists. While normal healthy interactions involve masks, involve performances, performing, involve being part of the audience. Yeah, it's all true. In normal healthy interactions, your role, your mask is flexible enough to allow you to to act both as a performer and as a member of the audience, because you need to do that in any human interaction. At some point you're observing, at some point you're talking, at some point you are being watched. You need to adapt to all these changing situations. That's where the narcissist differs. He is incapable of being anything but a performer. The narcissist can never be a member of an audience, ever. Consequently, narcissists try to monopolize and control interpersonal interactions in order to ascertain or to secure their position as the sole exclusive monopolistic performer. Everyone else is an audience, the narcissist is on stage, limelight, projectors, curtain up, and it's the theater play of his life. And everyone else is supposed to sit, observe, and applaud and clap or with morbid fascination recoil in horror. Any reaction is okay, just attention, yeah. Narcissist needs attention. But that means the narcissist is highly rigid, inflexible. He is unable to transition from the performer mask to the audience mask because he can never be an audience. So he misses out on at least half of all human interactions and is unable unable to participate meaningfully in any exchange. The role of member of the audience is super crucial because it is only then that you receive. As a performer you give, in order to receive you need to be a member of the audience. So narcissists ironically can never receive in the full sense of the word. They can take and they do take a lot. They steal your ideas, they steal your work, they steal your loved ones, they steal your money, I mean they are not nice people. I don't know if it escaped your notice. But none of this has any meaning. None of this taking, what none of these positions, none of this property in wealth and money, and the fame and none of it fulfills the narcissist. None of it is enough. It's never enough. And it's never enough because the narcissist can never be a member of an audience. He can never let himself be positively inundated with another person's act of giving. He can never subject himself to other people's impressions and performances in a way that will be transformative, healing, even in therapy the narcissist is incapable of being the audience. He tries to take over the therapeutic session, control the therapy. So he's never, he never benefits from therapy. Never. That's why there's no way to treat narcissists. Forget the self-interested nonsense online. There's no way to treat narcissistic personality disorder. End of story. You can modify some behaviors and that's it, abrasive, antisocial behavior. That's it. You can't touch the core. You can't touch the core because the narcissist can never truly receive, receive by assimilation, receive by immersing himself, receive by opening himself up and becoming sufficiently vulnerable to accept change and possibly risk. He can't do that. That's why he can't love. That's why he can't heal and that's why he's always unsated, always hungry for more. Never enough. And so defining the circumstances and the settings and the environment is crucial. Narcissists can't do that. Being able to be a member of the audience is crucial. Narcissists can't do that. They just can't do that. And when narcissists project impressions, when they try to reflect upon themselves, projection and kind of impressions that reflect well on the narcissist, try to encourage others to provide narcissistic supply to accept a preferred definition of the narcissist. It doesn't work, at least not in the long term because a narcissist can never be an audience to another person. People get tired and exhausted and walk away. Govman's work is huge and exceedingly creative. One of the most amazing authors to read and to study. And he said that when the accepted definition of a situation changes, because it's been discredited or the real situation changed, or we reframe the situation, we say it in a new life, some of the actors continue to pretend that nothing has changed. And they continue to do so because they believe this strategy of pretending that everything is the same is profitable to themselves and they wish to not rock the boat to keep the peace. So they ignore, they ignore uncomfortable things. They maintain positivity. They assist people, they're kind, they're nice, they're empathic, and so on and so forth. It is a bit artificial. It is what Govman called willed credulity. But he said it's the oil that greases the machine. It allows social interactions to proceed. And his theory of self is known as self presentation theory. He said that the self is about controlling impressions that other people have of you. And this is a concept widely used to this very day, especially in the study of social media and so on and so forth. Today we don't call it self presentation theory. We call it impression management. It's a conscious or unconscious process. People attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about themselves or about an object or about an event or about other people. Impression management, impression control is crucial to people. They invest a lot in it. In the last edition, as far as I remember of the presentation of self in everyday life, 1967, Govman touched upon this compulsive need to control impression. Compulsive need that is the outcome of angst, outcome of anxiety, outcome of panic. If you don't control impressions, other people may do bad things to you. If you come through, if you present yourself as for example evil or dangerous or selfish, people retaliate. People punish you. So impression management is a crucial survival strategy, providing explanations for negative aspects or traits or events to escape disapproval. This is Govman's phrase. Account for these things. Excuse some things. Deny responsibility for negative outcomes in his words. Conform with opinions, speaking or behaving in ways which are consistent with the target and so on. This is all manipulative and that's why I keep telling people, even healthy people, even normal people, and they are very insulted. They immediately tell me, you're a narcissist, that's why you're saying this. I keep telling people, everyone manipulates everyone. All our behaviors are manipulative in the sense that we are trying to secure outcomes by modifying the perceptions, the impressions, and the behaviors of other people. Period. This is the best definition of every conceivable human interaction. Even when a baby cries for food, it's manipulative, let alone an adult who manages impressions in order to extract some benefit from another person. It's all manipulative. We utilize these behaviors in impression management to mold our environment or the situation in a way that will not be detrimental to us, that will not hurt us. Of course, like every other tool, impression management can be maliciously leveraged. This is where the narcissist and psychopath come in. While the narcissist I insist is not evil and not malicious, he's just deluded. He lives in fantasy and he coerces other people into his fantasy. The psychopath is malicious. Both of them manage impressions and the narcissist is made of impressions. There's nothing there but the impressions. So the stake of the narcissist in managing impressions is much higher than the stake of the borderline, or the psychopath, or the paranoid, or the schizoid, or you name it. Because all these other disorders involve a human being with problems. In the narcissist's case, there are only problems. There's no human being. I insist on this. There's nobody there. It's an apparition. It's a trick. It's a slight of hand. It's an illusion. It's a mirage. Phantasm. Phatamoogana. Did I get through? There's nobody and nothing there. So impression management in the narcissist's case is life. Impression management is character. Impression management is personality. Impression management is temperament, is biography, is an accomplishment in and of itself. That's why narcissists don't hesitate to falsify their biography, to lie about their accomplishments and resume and so on and so forth. As far as they are concerned, what's the problem? They're just managing impressions and since they are made of impressions, they believe in the veracity of their own lies and their own confabulations and their own fantasies. After all, if you are just a thought, if there's nothing there except impressions and you change the impressions in whatever way, you are changing yourself, aren't you? Narcissists feel that they are progressing, accomplishing things, making breakthroughs just by managing how people see them, just by managing the outside, the facade. Potemkin villages, you know the famous story with Potemkin and Catherine the Great, Russia again. It's all a facade but in the case of the narcissist, managing the facade is in itself an accomplishment, is in itself a biography. Self-presentation in which a person tries to influence the perception of their image by other people is the core of narcissism. It's the core of narcissism and it's the core of narcissism because there's nothing in narcissism except self-presentation. Now we come to the persona. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, not one of my favorites, I keep saying, I think he went off the rails multiple times by the way. He was clinically diagnosed with psychotic disorder for a time but he had a few amazing insights of course, he was far from stupid, a genius. So this Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, he said that persona is the social face that the individual presents to the world. I will quote, persona is a kind of mask designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual and this is where he differs, differs from, differs from Govma. Both of them agree that when people interact with other people they wear masks and that the aim of the mask is to manage impressions. Both of them are in full agreement in this but Jung thinks that the mask is intended to deceive. The aim of the mask is to mislead, to conceal the true nature of the individual in his words. Govman disagrees, he doesn't think so. I disagree as well, I disagree as well because as I've explained there should be a close affinity between the mask and the individual if the individual wants to avoid dishonest, constant ego distantly. Okay, okay, now according to Jung the development of a viable social persona, this mask, is a healthy thing. It prepares you to life. It is an adaptation to adult life in an external social world which is unforgiving. He said a strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona, identifications with a specific persona, doctor, scholar, artist, inhibits psychological development. Of course, this is exactly what happens to the narcissists. The narcissist like every other human being develops a persona but this persona is fixed, rigid, inflexible, inhibits psychological development, keeps the narcissists at a mental age of between two and nine. The narcissist persona is God, his mask is that of God, it's the mask of God. So God is immutable, unchangeable, fixed, forever, for eternity. This is how the narcissist experiences himself if he had a self. So this kind of mask is dysfunctional. It doesn't allow the narcissists to explore other possibilities, other options, other dimensions of his personality, other character traits. No, he's Godlike. He must be perfect. He's a perfectionist. He must be brilliant. He must be unique in some way, even if negatively, but he must be unique. As far as Jung is concerned, the danger, I'm quoting it, the danger is that people become identical with their personas. And this is exactly what happens to the narcissists. He becomes the false self. He can't tell the difference anymore between mask and self because he has no self. That's only the mask remains. He has assassinated, murdered his self as a child. And the result according to you is the shallow, I'm quoting, the shallow, brittle, conformist kind of personality, which is all persona, with a successive concern for what people think. Narcissism. It is an unreflecting state of mind in which people are utterly unconscious of any distinction between themselves and the world in which they live. They have little or no concept of themselves as beings distinct from what society expects of them. The narcissist is the ultimate, the quintessential conformist. That's what I've been saying for decades. All narcissists are pro-social. They are conformist because they need to extract, they depend on narcissistic supply. They're junkies. This is their drug. They need other people. They depend on other people. However, reluctantly, they resent this, but that's the case. So they need to work with other people. And Jung just described this pathology. Jung coined the term enantiodromia. My apologies. I replaced this term with narcissistic tunneling. I released a video about narcissistic tunneling a few days ago, maybe two days ago. Enantiodromia is the emergence of the repressed individuality, presumably the authentic individuality, from beneath the persona. So the rebellion and mutiny of the repressed and suppressed personality that is disguised by the rigid mask, a mask that would not allow any flexibility, would not, would not brook any criticism. So Jung says the individual will either be completely smothered under an empty persona, or an enantiodromia into the buried opposites will occur. In other words, either the individual will conform to the mask and become the mask, that's a narcissist, or there will be rebellion. There will be a clash. There will be dissonance, just precisely what I'm saying. The breakdown of the persona constitutes the typically Jungian moment, both in therapy and in development, the moment when excessive commitment to collective ideals masking deeper individuality. The persona breaks down and disintegrates. Jung said that the persona is a semblance, the dissolution of the persona is therefore absolutely necessary for individuation. And here, I converge fully with Jung. The lack of separation and individuation in narcissism causes the narcissist to remain stuck with his persona. Individuation and separation require the breaking apart, the disintegration of a persona. Of course, we continue to have personas throughout life, but the initial process of separation and individuation requires a rebellion against a persona and its demolition. And if we fail in this, for example, if we have a persona imposed on us by our parental figures, mother and father, and we fail to break through it, we fail to eliminate it and create our own persona later on, then there's no separation individuation. The persona's disintegration, according to Jung, can lead to a state of chaos, and that's why separation and individuation is a highly traumatic event. That's why kids compensate for this fear, for this horror of separating from mommy with grandiosity. That's why they become tiny small narcissists, primary narcissists. So the persona's disintegration leads to chaos. Chaos is terrifying. Jung says, one result of the dissolution of a persona is the release of fantasy disorientation. Exactly. That's when the narcissist gets stuck. He is unable to break the mask on the one hand. So when he tries to separate an individuate, he fails to break the persona. He fails to get rid of it. But at the same time, he's already developing the fantasy that is required in order to separate an individuate, the grandiose fantasy. Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion based on a fantasy defense. So suddenly there's a clash, suddenly there's a war, a civil war between the persona that the child cannot get rid of and the child's emerging fantasy, which is a precondition for separation and individuation. And this creates total lifelong mess in this kind of child who later becomes a narcissist. As the individuation process gets underway, says Jung, the situation has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality with no false veils or adornments of any kind. Yes, that's the part that the narcissist misses, misses only. He never makes it to this stage. One possible reaction to this experience of chaos and disorientation, what Jung called the regressive restoration of the persona. So when the child begins to separate an individuate, tries to get rid of the persona and compensate with fantasy, yes? And then he fails. He fails to get rid of a persona. The very attempt to get rid of a persona is horrifying and terrifying in the fantasy supposed to compensate for this fear, for this terror, for this trauma. The child develops a belief that he's God, so he's invulnerable and nothing will happen to him if he separates from mommy and explores the world. But there is a phase of chaos, even in healthy people. And in some people, when the persona won't be abolished, you cannot get rid of a persona. These people regress back to the persona. Jung calls it the regressive restoration of the persona, whereby the protagonist laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality, pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience. Yes, the child regresses into the primary inocicistic phase and remains stuck in it and it becomes secondary inocicism in adulthood. And so there is an issue of absence. What if the child breaks the persona, abolishes the persona? And there is a fantasy defense. A fantasy defense compensates for the terror of mother gun, persona with mother and father, mother gun. And then the child grows up, develops objects, relations, becomes healthy. But what happens if the child gets stuck and is unable to progress? Some children remain stuck with a persona and a fantasy. These children are narcissists, become narcissists later in adulthood. And some children succeed to get rid of a persona, but they get stuck with a fantasy. They don't progress beyond the fantasy. And so Jung described this situation, he called it the absence of the persona. The man with no persona is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic playground. Such people who succeeded to get rid of a persona defiantly, recklessly one could say, but remain stuck in fantasy, they are the ones who become psychopaths, paranoids, schizoids to some extent, schizotypals and so on. The result of this, according to Jung, is the streaming in of the unconscious into the conscious realm. Simultaneously with the dissolution of the persona and the reduction of the directive force of consciousness is a state of disturbed psychic equilibrium. Tell me about it. And those who remain trapped in this stage, according to Jung, are blind to the world, hopeless dreamers, spectral casandras dreaded for the attacklessness, eternally misunderstood, etc. etc. He was being gentle, he was describing the psychopath or at the very least someone with antisocial traits and behaviors. So restoration is the aim of individuation, not regressive restoration, individual idiosyncratic restoration. As a child, you get rid of the original persona, you compensate that the persona was protective, persona was the secure base of mommy or mother. So you compensate for this with fantasy and then you go on in life, you progress, you're three years old or four years old and you create your own persona. So this is called restoration. It's not the same as regressive restoration. Regressive restoration is when you got rid of the original persona, but you are so terrified, the fantasy is not sufficient compensation and you regress, you restore the original persona and you remain stuck and these are noses. The other alternative, you destroy the original persona, you have a fantasy defense, but you never attain restoration, you never create your own persona, you adopt other people's personas and so on. And this is of course, psychopathy, borderline and so on. Now restoration is the last phase in individuation. According to Jung, it is not only achieved by work on the inside figures, but also as contizio sine qua non by a re-adaptation in outer life, including the recreation of a new and more viable persona. To develop a stronger persona might feel inauthentic, like learning to play a role, but if one cannot perform a social role, then one will suffer in life and others may add they will also suffer. One goal for individuation, said Freud, is for people to develop a more realistic, flexible persona, not the original one that was discarded and replaced with fantasy, but a new one, a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society, but does not collide with or nor does it hide their true self. Eventually said Jung, in the best case, the persona is appropriate, it is tasteful, it is a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self. None of this applies to the narcissist, none of this. Later, scholars and thinkers like Eric Byrne, Eric Ericsson and others had a lot to say about persona, about the mask and so on and so forth. Numerous thinkers contributed to this study, my humble self included, and now you begin to see how everything intermeshes. When the narcissist is born, he's born like everyone else. Narcissists, as opposed to psychopaths and borderline, at this stage, we don't have any proof that narcissism is a brain abnormality or some genetic or hereditary component. Narcissists are born as totally normal kids, totally normal babies. They take on a persona, they play a role for mommy and daddy in order to secure food and shelter and so on. Mommy becomes a secure base because of the persona, the persona manipulator, to become a secure base. Then around the age of 18 months, the child wants to get rid of a persona because he wants to explore the world as himself. So the child gets rid of a persona, it's terrifying to get rid of mommy, and so he compensates for fantasy. And then the trouble starts. If the fantasy is insufficient, the child regresses and re-adopts the original persona and separation and individuation is scuttled, done, gone, not successful. Narcissist, and the child becomes a narcissist in due time. If the fantasy is strong enough, but the child is unable to develop his or her own personal, individual, idiosyncratic persona, this kind of child remains stuck essentially as an antisocial type, and that includes borderline. If the child succeeds to develop his or her own persona, coupled with a reduced role of fantasy defense, the child becomes healthy and normal. This is the story of narcissism from the point of view of masks and role plays in theater personas. Now you understand why I started this lecture by saying that there is no such thing as a real narcissist. The only masks, pro-social masks, antisocial masks, masks used in private, masks used in public, masks. It's a huge rack of masks, interchangeable, changeable. Take off the mask, there's nobody there, nothing there. Void, emptiness, black hole. Who is it who is changing the masks all the time you could ask? Who is doing the changing? Why would masks be changed reactive to environments and changing circumstances? Who is making these decisions to change the masks? It's not a decision. There are no decisions involved and no choices. It's a totally automated process. It's very much like asking who makes the decision to replicate proteins inside the human body? No one does. No one does. It just happens. The narcissist is an automated pseudo biological process. He is a process, not a person, not an entity, not a creature. The narcissist is in flux. He is a swarm, a swarm of, I don't know, he's a hive mite. He's a colony. And like a colony, he has the appearance of a mite, but it's not real. Trust me, there is nobody there, absolutely none. And so when you are living with a narcissist or interacting with a narcissist, it is a mask. It is a mask that you're interacting with or living with. And I don't know of anything more terrifying than this statement that I've just made.