 Last month I gave a lecture in Zagreb, in Croatia, to a group of clinicians, psychotherapists and psychologists from various disciplines. You are about to watch bootleg snippets taken during the lecture. If you wish to organize a lecture for the wider public, or a lecture to clinicians and mental health practitioners and professionals in North Macedonia, please contact me at Sam Vaknin, that's one word, S-A-M-V-A-K-N-I-N, my name, at gmail.com, Sam Vaknin at gmail.com. I'll be delighted to give a lecture to the wider audience, or to mental health practitioners, professionals and clinicians in Macedonia, and it's free of charge. You will have, however, to pay the cost of the lecture hall and the cost of a cameraman to record the event so that I can upload it later to my YouTube channel. So if you're in Macedonia and you're interested to organize such an event, and you believe you can find the audience, then I'm here, Sam Vaknin at gmail.com. If you live in other countries in Europe and wish to organize a lecture or seminar with me, get in touch. My lectures are usually free of charge, seminars, however, cost money. So get in touch, you have the email address, enjoy the rest of the show. It's taken secretly, bootleg smartphone during my lecture in Zagreb, Croatia, March 2024. And we know, for example, that this happens. We know that there is no object libido in such cases because of something, because there are many indications. And one of them is known as auto-erotism. Auto-erotism is when you are sexually attracted to your own body, when you are your own sex object, when you are your own love object. In classical terms, when the eros part of the libido is directed at the self. So auto-erotism has been observed and absolutely documented in laboratories that reject Freud. Anything before 1980 still documented auto-erotism. So we know that there is a redirection of energy at the self that has a sexual component, but also a kind of mother component. In other words, emotional investment. So it's sexual and emotional. Because of this, because the energy which should have been given to mother as a gift, a gift of being one with mother, the gift of what we call secure base. Mother is a secure base, a safe environment. Instead of this, we get a child who is essentially abandoned, neglected, terrified. And then the child lies to itself, deceives itself and says, it's okay, I'm here. I don't need mother, I'm here. I'm my own secure base. I'm my own sex object. I'm my own love object. I can love myself and that's sufficient. I don't need to love anyone else. And this kind of child fails in two functions. He fails to develop what we call internal working model. He fails to develop a model of the world and how he operates in the world and how other people operate in the world. Why? Because his energy goes inward, it does not go outwards. He does not at this stage at least. He has no access to the outside world. And he fails to develop this model, which is super critical model for functioning later in life. Another task, another function that he fails is called mentalization. The ability to perceive or speculate about how other people's mind, In psychosis, there is confusion of internal objects as external. The psychotic has a voice. He thinks the voice is coming from there. Yes? So internal object is misidentified, an introject is misidentified as external. In narcissism, an external object is misidentified as internal. So narcissism is the mirror image of psychosis. The left hand and right hand of psychosis, in effect. And like in psychosis, there's trauma, there's dissociation. There's another thing called hyperreflexivity. Hyperreflexivity is expanding outwards to include the world. So digesting the world, assimilating the world. So to speak, I'm not going to this. There are self-states in cluster B situations. There are self-states. If you want to read more about self-states, the guy who came up with the idea is called Philip Bromberg. Philip Bromberg. And I built on his work. I adopted his work to pathological narcissism. If you go on my channel, YouTube channel, you will find many, many videos about self-states, pseudo identities, ego states, sub-personalities, and so on and so forth. You'll find many videos. I'm also publishing a book soon about all this. So they all have self-states. Self-states is simply when you switch from one type of identity to another. And of course, if you don't have an identity, then you have only self-states. And in both borderline and narcissism, there is something called identity disturbance or identity diffusion. No stable identity, because it's empty. If it's empty, you can pour wine, you can pour milk, you can pour water. It's empty. So one day you're milk, one day you're wine, one day you're water. One day the borderline believes that being cheating the partner, being engaging in infidelity is horrible. And the next day she does it. And one day the narcissist believes that he's going to be a great writer and the next day he's a businessman. There's no constancy of goals, beliefs, values, and so on because there's no identity. Similarly, there is no constancy of ex... This is for posterity, minimal for posterity. Okay, we are now going to discuss the narcissist's interpersonal relationships. In other words, with other people. I mentioned before, hopefully some of you remember, if you're not dissociating throughout this lecture, which I wouldn't blame you, that the narcissist uses the same methodology, the same structures, the same dynamics, and the same techniques in all relationships. Whenever external objects are involved that are internalized. So it could be anything from colleague to intimate partner and so on. And the shocking thing for all of you, perhaps, is that the narcissist does not see a difference between an intimate partner and a colleague. A boss and a child, none. Therefore, the narcissist does not choose you as his intimate partner. There's no choice involved here. You're all dispensable, interchangeable, commoditized. You're like so many grains of rice. The narcissist doesn't care if you are empathic, because he doesn't do empathy. He doesn't care if you're kind and nice. He doesn't care about any of these things that you see online, when victims self-aggrandize. The narcissist chose me because I'm amazingly empathetic. I'm super galactic empath, some bullshit like this. Supernova empath. These are all nonsense. The narcissist is interested in four things. They are known, or I call them the four Ss. Four Ss are sex, of course, services, safety, and supply. There are two types of supply, narcissistic supply and sadistic supply. A small minority of narcissists are sadists. So they derive pleasure from inflicting pain. And this is a form of supply, not sadistic supply. These are the four Ss. If you provide two of the four Ss, two, any two, you qualify. So if you provide sex and services, it goes, you got the job. If you provide services and safety, you got the job, etc. So it's also not true that the narcissist insists on the totality of the package, all the four. Narcissist, therefore, is in this sense antisocial. He is goal-oriented, exactly like the psychopath. Now, he's converting you into an enemy. What does it mean? He has been wrong about you. He's been wrong. If you're an enemy, then you should not have been idealized in the first place. There's a mistake here. And one thing narcissists never do, especially me, is admit to a mistake. They are never wrong. What we call infallible. They're like the Pope, only worse. They're infallible. So the narcissist cannot admit that he has made a mistake in having idealized you. So this creates internal narcissistic injury. The narcissist is wounded by his own machinations. He cannot reconcile. He doesn't know how to explain. How did he make this mistake? And so in order to explain this to himself and to restore his grandiosity, because the narcissistic injury is a challenge to the grandiosity. My grandiosity, for you to understand, is a cognitive distortion. It's a misperception of reality. It's an impairment in reality testing. So am I going too fast? A little too fast? You want me to put on a face? A little too fast? OK, so you understand that when he converts you from ideal to persecutory, it presents a problem, because it means he has made a mistake. So to solve this, to restore his grandiosity, he has to devalue you. He has to convince himself that you have been like that. I'm sorry, when he idealized you, you have been like that, but something happened. For example, you were under the influence of bed friends or something biological happened to you, some disease. You're having some brain disease or something. Or your mother died and it affected you in ways that change your cycle. You have changed. You're not the same. The person you idealized is not the person that is now a persecutory object. She has changed. He does not change. Or the fighting with God, Jacob Brocker, God's. There's a lot of kind of anthropomorphism. Narcissism is a private primitive religion invented by a child. That is what narcissism is. And because it's a private religion and because it's a primitive religion and because this religion was invented by a child, the narcissist is missionary. He's trying to convert everyone into this religion. And so how to convert you to this religion? He makes promises. Is it different to classical religion? Of course not. God makes you promises. If you believe in him, if you obey the commandments, if you engage in some rituals and ceremonies and so on and so forth, there are some promises. There's a contract here. Religion is a shared fantasy. Absolutely shared fantasy. And it's no wonder that God, all gods, are described in narcissistic terms. They're narcissists. Yahweh is a narcissist. Allah is a narcissist. They're all narcissists. I'm sorry to say. The prophets are psychotic, but the gods are narcissists. It's a shared fantasy. So, and the narcissist is a private religion. Now, narcissism is threatening to become the biggest global religion. Why? Because unlike other religions, actually unlike most religions, it's distributed. It's a distributed religion. It's like network religion, the internet religion. Because you have one god and one worshiper, one god and one worshiper, one god and one worshiper, or one god and 10 worshippers, or one god and 10 million worshippers. But it's always separate. These are called nodes. These are network nodes. And, but the religion is common. The belief in the false self and the shared fantasy. The rituals and ceremonies of this religion are the same. So, it's a distributed religion. There's only one other religion like this, Islam. Islam does not have a central authority. No central authority in Islam. Not unlike the Vatican and Catholicism. Islam is a distributed religion. That's a source of its power. That's why it's the biggest growing religion nowadays. Narcissism is growing like mushrooms. And Islam is growing like mushrooms. I'll leave it up to you to make the connection. I'll probably be assassinated after I upload it to YouTube. Good object. And there is idealized object. Idealized object is when you believe, or when the voices tell you, that you are totally perfect, that you're amazing, that you're godlike. This usually comes from parental figures. Parental figures that idolize the child, idealize the child, place the child on the pedestal, tell the child that he can do no wrong in his perfection. And everyone else is wrong. The teachers are wrong. The peers are wrong. So these messages accumulate, accrue, and they create idealized object. And narcissists have one of two objects. They never have a good object. As narcissists are not grounded in reality. Remember, they don't have a reality testing. In fact, reality testing. So they cannot have a good object. But what they do have, many of them have a bad object, and many of them have an idealized object, a godlike object. The narcissists who have a bad object, compensate for this bad object, because these voices are intolerable. Imagine that you have someone who keeps criticizing you, telling you that you're wrong and so on. In short, imagine your marriage. So, you know, it's unbearable. It's intolerable. So the narcissist compensates for this. And he compensates for this by pretending to be everything opposite to the bad object. Everything in the bad object is same the opposite. So the bad object tells you by the law. You're stupid. It's a non-ingenious. This is a compensatory mechanism. And this is known as the false self. The false self is a term developed, not invented, but developed by a miracle. So the false self is actually a kind of compensation for the bad object or the idealized object. If the narcissist has an idealized object, then there's no compensation. The narcissist believes that he's the ideal godlike. There's no need for compensation. Then we get typically overt grandiose narcissists. If the narcissist is a bad object and compensates for it by pretending to be godlike and lying to himself, he's eating himself and others that he is. Then we get typically, not always, a covert narcissist. Vulnerable, fragile, shy narcissist. These are all the names. Swing around. So these are two types of narcissists. And their etiology is very different because the bad object narcissist was raised by parents who were critical, who were harsh, who were disciplinary, and the idealized object narcissist was raised by parents who spoiled him, pampered him, worshiped him, admired him, told him he could do no wrong and he's better and so on and so forth. So this is the sort of clinical background and when some of you come back, those of you who are brave enough and narcissistic is not human, I'm sorry. But if you don't have empathy and you don't have unconscious and you don't have emotions and you don't have the ability to distinguish other people as external and you don't have the separation. What do you have? It's a drive machine. It's Freud's ideal drive machine. Like Freud at the beginning, early Freud. He later regretted it, he changed it, nevermind. But early, early, early Freud said that we are all machines, devices driven by drives. And we need to find these drives and control them and so on. This is Freud's drive machine. So yeah, of course biologically it's human. It has a heart, it has kidneys, liver, some of them have brains, but you know, that's not what defines a human being. As we will discover in 200 years, we will have androids with all these organs and they will not be human beings. That's not what defines a human being. They're sentient, many of them are intelligent, but so is artificial intelligence. I have serious doubts whether we are talking about human beings. I think it is possible to frustrate or thwart or distort the developmental pathway in early childhood so as to produce, I don't know, a mutant. I don't know how to explain, not a human being. Something that is so divorced from what makes a human being, so alien, that maybe we should not use this term anymore. And this is what we have a lot of criticism. Patriotism, not us. Freud's invention. It's Freud's, but there is a big debate in psychology about the unconscious. The Freudian approach and later, his daughter and many others, this school, says that the unconscious is the seat of repressed wishes and drives and urges. I'm simplifying, of course, but generally speaking, it's the seat of repression. And there's another school, and that other school says that the unconscious is the internalization of other people. It's the sum total of interactions with other people. It's the relational unconscious. I mentioned Lacan, Lacan regards the unconscious as relational, but there are others. For example, Harry Stack Sullivan, who was the father of interpersonal psychology. So the unconscious is the sum total of interactions with other people. Imagine what it says about the narcissist. The narcissist is incapable of interactions with other people because the narcissist is incapable of perceiving the existence of other people. There's no externality and no separateness. So according to Lacan, the narcissist is possibly the only creature without an unconscious, only creature which is totally conscious. What you see is what you get. A mirror reflection. This deep, you know, nanometer deep, it's not that because they are not, according to Salih, they are not. They are not interpersonal relationships which create the unconscious. Lacan said that this is mediated through the language. I don't want to mislead you. It's other people speak to the individual than the language is internalized. What they say is internalized and the language shapes the unconscious. Never mind all that. When you don't recognize the existence of other people, according to many major scholars, you cannot have an unconscious. We have here a human being allegedly, with only with a conscious. The narcissist dysregulates everyone around him. The narcissist rips havoc and chaos wherever he goes. And it is by observing other people's reactions actually that we can safely diagnose narcissism. Because if you try to diagnose narcissism via test structure interviews, that's nonsense. There's no one to talk to. Also, I think it's a major mistake to try to treat narcissists with adult psychology or adult psychotherapy. They are not adults. You need to use child psychology and child psychotherapies combined with trauma therapies. So today we are making big mistakes when we are trying to, for example, strike a therapeutic alliance with the narcissist or agree on treatment goals. It's ridiculous. It's a two-year-old. At some point he will throw a temper tantrum and leave the clinic and tell you to f off. That's what you're dealing with. You become social creatures. We know how to function in society. We have sexual scrapes, social scrapes, and so on and so forth, mores, nons, and so on. One of the main ways is known as socialization. There's a process of socialization. Now there are socialization agents, mother and father, mainly father, by the way, is a socialization agent. They are socialization agents. They teach us to be social creatures. But there is another process, equally important. So there's socialization and another one. The other one is known as modeling. It was first suggested by Bandura in social learning theory. Modeling, but narcissists as a child cannot model because to model, to adopt a model, to emulate father, to imitate mother, yeah? This process was first described in depth by Edith Jacobson. So to do this, to accomplish this, you need to recognize that mother and father are external. Imitation is a form of internalization but of an external object. And if you're incapable of accepting that other people are outside you, you cannot model. There's a modeling failure. This is catastrophic consequences in the life of the narcissists. And it was short, thanks God, because I ran away, but I agreed for two, three years. But it was almost clear to me what is happening. But I was in desperate feelings and situation before I met him for three, four years. It was my business relationship between people. I was really desperate. I wanted to run away from that situation and to run away from my body. It was so strong wish to run away from that situation. So I run away straight to his arms and all happened. All this addictive idea, everything, everything what you mentioned. So I was questioning myself how this happened to me. But now when you said this loneliness before this situation, before I met him, was really hard for me for years. The shared fantasy is a promise that you no longer need to be in reality in order to obtain outcome. So you can be self-refficacious even when you're not in reality. And it's a promise that all options and alternatives and possibilities will materialize. So like endless promise, whatever you wish, whatever you dream of, whatever you, it will happen. There's a guarantee by the narcissist that it will happen. Narciss, because he feels God-like, projects to you or somehow convinces you that he has the capacity to make anything happen and everything happen. It's like land of infinite possibilities. You enter a land of infinite possibilities that is not grounded in reality. You don't have to pay the cost, only the benefits. And it's very, very captivating as well because who wants to be in reality and who doesn't want to be with someone who can instantly realize all your wishes and dreams. This helps for shared fantasy, it helps a lot. I really wanted to run away. And it happened that I run away from Croatia to run the country. So this shared fantasy, my part, was very strong that I really wanted to run away into this, of course, fantasy and the rest of the story. I think people who find themselves in the shared fantasy of narcissism, I think that's speculation because there's no more studies. But I think. And everything has a sort of splitting again. Yes, all the realities of narcissism as I said at the very beginning, all the dynamics of narcissism are built on splitting and another mechanism called projection. Yeah, but also like splitting the good from the bad. Yes, yes. You're right. It's a form of splitting. But all interactions of the narcissism, all the dynamics of the narcissism based on splitting and projection. So for example, it involves not only splitting, but also projection. Because the narcissist makes you all bad and by implication, he makes himself all good. But he makes you all bad because he's all bad. He projects onto you the parts of him that he rejects, the parts of him that he's ashamed of. So it is the narcissist who wants to be aggressive with you. He wants to discard you. He wants to get rid of you. It is he who is planning to do something bad to you. But he cannot admit it. So he projects it onto you. Says you are the one who is planning to do something bad to me. You're evil. When actually he is the one who is planning to. So this projection and splitting involved. And I... I'm afraid you're going to ask a question. Okay, so I want to ask a question about grief after a relationship. If it was such an abusive relationship, then what would you say that people or abused one is grieving about? That's precisely what I said. You are not in love with him. You are not in a relationship with him. You are in a relationship with yourself. What you are grieving is yourself. You are grieving the lost self-love, lost capacity to self-love. You're grieving, of course, the shared fantasy. You're grieving the child. You're like a mother who lost her child. You are grieving a mother who lost a mother. So grief after narcissistic abuse is not typical grief. It's what we call prolonged grief disorder. It's not typical grief, but it's four layers of grief, like a wedding cake, four layers of grief. And each one of us is very powerful. Is there anything more powerful than losing your child? And narcissism gradually becomes more and more your child. And when you lose this child, it's horrible. And then you also lost a mother because initially he truly acted as a mother. And you lose a shared fantasy, which was a refuge, an escape from reality if you hate reality. And you lost yourself. Finally, you fell in love with yourself, learned to love yourself, and then it was taken away from you because you can love yourself only through the narcissist gaze and all of mirrors. It's not that the narcissist teaches you how to love yourself independently, on the very contrary. It makes you addicted to his gaze so that whenever you want to fix, when you want to inject, intoxication of, I'm perfect, I'm amazing, I'm ideal, I'm gorgeous, sir. You go to him, he will tell you. He'll tell you what you want for him, about yourself. Then you are living in fantasy. Because you're all living in fantasy, of course. Every time you open the television, you're in fantasy. Actually watching a movie, believe it or not, involves extreme dissociation. Do you know why you jump in a horror movie? Because you're inside the horror movie. You're dissociating. And fantasy in today's world was not the case, let's say, a hundred years ago, 150, but today's world of fantasy definitely has replaced reality in many ways. So we have a general situation of pathological fantasy. Now, the shared fantasy between the narcissist and his intimate partner, I'm taking this as example, yes? The shared fantasy between the narcissist and the intimate partner is first of all shared. We all tend to ignore the shared part because the victims of narcissistic abuse, the survivors of such relationships and so on, they want to exonerate themselves. They want to say, I am not guilty. I didn't do anything wrong. I was the passive recipient of evil intentions and evil actions. It's not my fault. I did not contribute anything to my predicament. And that's of course counterfactual. It's actually a fantasy. It's a fantasy defense. The shared fantasy is a full-fledged, full-scale collaboration between the narcissist, intimate partner and the narcissist. Each for their own reasons. Each for their own reasons. And each couple, each diet requires a different, as a highly specific and idiosyncratic analysis. So we cannot generalize. But the rule is that the partner collaborates with the narcissist, colludes with the narcissist, conspires with the narcissist to create a common fantasy. What is this reminiscent of? A cult, it's equivalent of a cult. This fantasy is inward-looking. It excludes the world. And it has its own narratives which are counterfactual that define the facts. And narratives which are very often paranoid and narratives that are grandiose in majority of cases. And the partner of the narcissist fully collaborates with all this. For example, she encourages the narcissist to be grandiose. She enhances the narcissist's grandiosity. She colludes with the narcissist in excluding all others or criticizing all others or demeaning and debasing all others. She conspires with the narcissist to adopt unrealistic goals unrealistic goals about, I don't know, marriage or children or financial plans or business plans or whatever. So there's a lot of collaboration and collusion. And when victims will tell you, I have been deceived, the narcissist is a great actor. I didn't know what was happening until the last moment. And when I discovered I exited whatever it was. That's unfortunately untrue. Actually, we have studies that show when you're in the presence of a narcissist within minutes, you develop something known as uncanny value reaction. It's a sense of discomfort. And even it is as if the person you're with who happens to be the narcissist is not fully human. Something wrong, something of key, something put together wrongly, wrong manufacturing, you know? Now the uncanny value reaction was first described, of course, by a Japanese in 1970. Masahiro Mori, a roboticist. Masahiro always said as robots will become more and more human, we're gonna begin to feel more and more discomfort, more and more ill at ease. The more the robot resembles humans, the worse we will feel in the presence of the robot. And this is the uncanny value reaction and everyone has it in the presence of narcissists. So why do many people claim to have been deceived? Because they suppress it. They deny it. They don't want to recognize it. For example, if you're very, very, very lonely, then you would tell yourself all kinds of stories about the narcissist. You say, ah, it's nothing. Otherwise it's a great guy. Yeah, he's misbehaving here, but otherwise it's a great guy. You will convince yourself, you create narratives to push yourself into the family. So it's a collusion. It's a collaboration. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.