 Hello everyone, my name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignan self-love narcissism revisited sake So today we are going to discuss yet another disagreement between Freud and his erstwhile disciple Yung And I'm in a bit of a pickle here because I'm a Jew and I'm a narcissist as a Jew Obviously, I should support Zygmunt Freud against the German Yung And as a narcissist, obviously, I should support the psychopathic Yung against the relatively middle-class bourgeoisie Freud So I don't know what to do. I will let you be the judges I'm going to present to you the two views of Freud and of Yung regarding narcissism They are not diametrically opposed, but they are like 80% or 70% different and Yung's view Did not prevail Freud's view of pathological narcissism is the current orthodoxy. It's what we teach at school Universities, colleges, what you can read in textbooks and of course The prevailing view online. It was also my point of departure when I started the whole narcissism craze in 1995 But today, 25 years later, I'm older More handsome and consequently I think more clearly and I am not quite true that Freud had been a hundred percent right about Pathological narcissism. I'm going to present a more subtle and nuanced variant nuanced view So be prepared because Um Yung is not easy. Yung is not easy. He was a Strange bird to use another statement And when it came to narcissism, he had equally strange notions coupled with amazing diamond-like incisive insights Generally speaking in the narcissist the false self usurps the role of the ego So narcissists don't have an ego don't have a functional ego exactly the opposite people people say that narcissists ego teases They don't have an ego the false self fulfills these functions the mediation between the individual and the world in a sense of personal continuity and identity These are these reside in the false self and because the false self is false. It's a piece of fiction It needs constant input from other people which we call narcissistic supply Yung used a totally different language. He used terms like shadow complexes images archetypes repressed material And he used this terminology to describe the narcissist's early childhood So the video is divided into two parts. The first part is Yung and I assume that all of you know the basics of psychoanalysis The trilateral model what is ego? What is superego? What is Eid? Um drives urges pleasure principle reality principle, etc. If you do not Please fast forward to the second half of the video And watch that second half first There's a second half describes Freud's view of all these issues Freud preceded Yung of course and we're still using his language. So you can if you know The basics the rudiments of psychoanalysis watch the video as it unfolds If you don't watch the first the second part first the first part later So the classical Freudian concept of the ego is that it's partly conscious Partly pre-conscious and partly unconscious It operates on what Freud called the reality principle as opposed to the Eid Which operates on the pleasure principle The ego maintains an inner equilibrium between the onerous and unrealistic or ideal demands of the superego And the almost irresistible and unrealistic drives of the Eid So there are like three guys inside everyone The Eid is very basic very primitive very disorganized It's wants to eat it wants to drink and of course, it's one it wants to have sex Actually, it mostly wants to have sex Then there is the uh, and it reminds me of some some people. I know Then there's the superego and the superego is all the The inner critic voices the intro checks the chastising Diminining debasing degrading humiliating something critical voices That we accumulate your life could be our parents teachers peers Other voices as on and they all call less into the superego and superego Contains a component which is known as conscience. He tells us your bad boys or your bad girls You should not have done this and then there's the ego and what the ego does poor ego Stands between the superego in the eat and also between the Eid and reality So the ego kind of mediates the ego goes to eat to the Eid and says listen You can't really you can't really have sex with these girls. She doesn't want you, you know, if you do that It's great. You're gonna end up spending 20 years in jail without sex And then it goes to the super ego and says could you could you chill a bit? Could you stop criticizing this criticizing this poor guy so horribly and could you give him a break? So the ego is like an arbiter or a mediator And it also has to fend off the unfavorable unfavorable consequences of comparisons between itself And another structure called the ego ideal. The ego ideal is what you want to be The what you want to be when you grow up when you mature when you have acquired skills If you were more talented, if you were more handsome or beautiful, whatever. So this is the ego ideals ideal The superego uses the ego ideal to torment and torture the person It tells the person see how far you are from the ego ideal, you know, here's the ego ideal Here's you you will never bridge his gap and the ego comes in and says listen Some parts of the ego ideal are realistic if you only put your mind to it You have to you know, you have to study you have to work hard This so in many respects the ego in Freudian psychoanalysis is the self But not in Jungian psychology So Jung was a psychoanalyst. He was Freud's disciple before they broke up And before he rebelled against him in an act of symbolic patricide And he was very controversial. He was also very unethical. He slept with his patients. He was in my view a psychopath But a brilliant psychopath I'm going to quote from his work and all these quotes are from his collected works These Collected works were edited by G. Adler, Fordham and Reid. It's 21 volumes. Yes Princeton University Press was published over 23 years between the 1960s and 1983 So here's the first quote from Jung. It's from the structure and dynamics of the psyche Volume 8, page 121 if you want He says complexes are psychic fragments which have split off Owing to traumatic influences or certain incompatible tendencies As the association experiments prove Complexes interfere with the intentions of the wheel and disturb the conscious performance They produce disturbances of memory and blockages in the flow of associations Complexes appear and disappear according to their own laws They can temporarily Obsess consciousness or influence speech and action in an unconscious way In a word complexes behave like independent beings a fact especially evident in abnormal states of mind In the voices heard by the insane Complexes even take take on a personal ego character like that of the spirits who might be in a state of mind Spirits or manifest themselves through automatic writing and similar techniques He continues in another work titled the archetypes and the collective unconscious Volume 9 page 275 He says I use the term individuation to denote the process by which a person Becomes a psychological individual that is a separate indivisible unity or whole And he further elaborates on individuation in two essays on analytical psychology volume 7 page 266 He says individuation means becoming a single Homogenous being and in so far as individuality embraces our innermost lust and incomparable uniqueness It also implies becoming one's own self We could therefore translate individuation as coming to selfhood or self realization Not to be confused with self actualization must laws Jung continues in the structure and dynamics of the psyche volume 8 page 226 But again and again I note He says that the individuation process is confused With the coming of the ego into consciousness and then the ego is in consequence identified with the self Which naturally produces a hopeless conceptual model. So here he goes head to head with Freud Individuation is then nothing but ego-centeredness and autoeroticism But the self says you comprises infinitely more than a mere ego It is as much one's self and all other selves as the ego Individuation does not shut out shut one out from the world, but gather the world onto one's self So to Jung the self is not the ego. It's it's the ego plus. It's an archetype It's actually the archetype It is the archetype of order as manifested in the totality of the personality and as symbolized by a circle a square Or the famous quaternity Sometimes Jung uses other symbols. He was very very pot and strong and symbols He would have been a symbologist like, you know, Dan Brown's character so He uses the child uses mandala the mandala and so on he says the self is a quantity that is Supraordinate to the conscious ego It embraces not only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche And it's therefore so to speak a personality Which we also are There is little hope of our ever being able to reach even approximate consciousness of the self Since however much we may make conscious They will always exist an indeterminate An indeterminable amount of unconscious material which belongs to the totality of the self This is what we feel in consciousness is not the self. It's part of it In psychology and alchemy He was also Very big on the occult. He studied ufo's and alchemy and he came up with Nonsensical concepts such as synchronicity and collective consciousness and and so on. He is not by far my favorite psychologist or Example of a rational person. I think he's a throwback to the middle ages in many respects. He is he is an anti Profit He acts against enlightenment and he's a very irrational person in many of his of his writings, which I find rank nonsense But there are diamonds in there Here's one of the diamonds. He said the self is not only the center But also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious It is the center of this totality Just as the ego is the center of consciousness and that's A diamond observation an insight that escaped actually Freud In two s's of analytical psychology young Kind of ends with an aphorism The self is our life's goal for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination that we call individuality Okay So it's clear by now Ego is the ego self is self ego is a component of the self. They are not coterminous. They're not the same The same thing as Freud suggested And so now we go to a Jungian another Jungian. His name is Jeffrey Satinover and he wrote a brilliant essay Where are items the narcissistic relation to the self? That essay has deals with another issue That's the fact that that narcissists are immature that they are eternal children or eternal adolescents And so he tries to explain why but he sums up At the beginning of the essay which is 18 or 20 pages long He sums sums up the differences between Freud and Jung and he says and um, um, it's an I'm quoting him extensively he says Freud considered that all people begin life in a blissful state that he called primary narcissism In this state no distinction between self and world exists Hence no painful tensions in the form of as yet unfulfilled desires of the subject for any object And therefore no conscious experience of drives and frustrations He says just to summarize this segment. He says if you are one with the world You are never frustrated because the world is inside you. You don't want for anything. You don't lack anything By the way, that was Spinoza's attribute of God. He said God Spinoza said God cannot want anything because he includes everything How can he want anything? You can want only something that is outside outside you and when you fail to obtain it you're frustrated So when you're a baby and one with the world You are never frustrated and you don't have drives and you don't have unfulfilled desires That's Satinova. He continues Satinova As the infant develops it separates itself from its surroundings and begins to experience needs for other things As the infant grows these needs put pressure on the developing ego to acquire the skills necessary to fulfill these needs And so the ego adapts to object reality All the energy which an infancy was bound to the subject In this way Slowly extends out and becomes bound out bound up in the subject's pursuit of objects So at first the energy was inward and then it's externalized to obtain objects. This process is normal development Satinova continues Freud originally described the essence of neurosis as an interruption in this smooth transition from subject bound to object bound libido The childhood libido reaches out fascinated by the objects of its desire But being as yet insufficiently adapted to succeed It fails to attain its goal To compensate for this failure in adaptation and for the consequent lack of gratification An alternate easier form of gratification is sought One with which the ego is already familiar The libido regresses and reactivates an earlier form of adaptation It reactivates the blissful state of narcissism now called secondary narcissism In this view a narcissistic neurosis consists of the habitual seeking of gratification Through self-stimulation and the consistent refusal to take the more difficult path of adaptation or work The grandiose fantasy is preferred to the modest accomplishment The brief idealized affair or masturbation is preferred to the rocky long-term commitment Jung's modification of this idea is that says Satinova Is that the retreat to earlier forms of psychic life and behavior to secondary narcissism Is not only or even primarily an alternate means of gratification It is rather the necessary way that has yet unused Instinctive modes of adaptation latent within the psyche are released Thus the retreat to the narcissistic state releases archetype archetypal fantasies These fantasies are the representations in consciousness Of inherited but as yet unused adaptive behaviors I beg to differ with the word inherited because it implies a kind of Collective unconscious unconsciousness that we all tap into One of Jung's ideas, which I find to is a british understatement unacceptable, but still The regression according to Jung is not in itself neurotic says Satinova But rather it is the sign of a compensatory process of the psyche whose purpose is enhanced adaptation Early in his career Jung equated narcissism with introversion The general notion that introversion per se is pathological Stems from the early Freudian idea that narcissism is a substitute employed Where adaptation to object reality or extraversion has failed In consequence of his expansion of Freud's conception Jung separated the two terms And the general turning inward of libido Introversion was recognized as a servant of psychological development rather than an enemy to it In his book psychological types Jung suggested that introversion does not occur only in response to failures of extraversion But that the habitual turning of attention inwards to the self Is a normal function of the psyche Which in some individuals actually predominates in degree over the habitual turning of attention towards objects to summarize According to Jung narcissism or introversion can be one the pathological state And here he agrees with Freud But more often A compensatory response regression in the service of the ego and to further personal development And three a normal form of personal of psychological development And this last idea of of Jung means that there is There is such a thing as normal narcissism Jung says that there is such a thing as healthy and normal narcissism It implies that to some extent narcissism or introversion is actually a necessary aspect of all individuals And that like adaptation to the outer world. There is such a thing as better or worse thoughts of adaptation to the inner world We adapt to the outer world. We adapt to the inner world Sometimes we succeed to adapt to the outer world. Sometimes we don't Sometimes we succeed to adapt to the inner world. Sometimes we don't and when we don't Narcissism becomes pathological, but when we do it's novel and healthy That neurosis can develop which are narcissistic Not in the sense that narcissism per se is a neurotic response to failures of external adaptation In other words, the narcissistic neurosis is not because of the narcissism But they are they are narcissistic in the sense that they are failures to develop healthy introversion Failures to develop a proper form and degree of narcissism Jung postulated the existence. So this was Satinova this excellent overview and expose of Jung's attitude to introversion and narcissism Jung postulated the existence of two personalities actually two selves One of them being the shadow Technically the shadow is a part or an inferior part of the overreaching overarching personality one's chosen conscious attitude The shadow develops in a peculiar way Inevitably some personal and collective psychic elements are found wanting or incompatible with one's personality personal narrative to use today's phrase And so the expression of these psychic elements, which I remind you are wanting and incompatible their expression is suppressed And they coalesce into an almost autonomous splinter personality The second personality is contrarian It negates the official chosen personality. So it is totally relegated to the unconscious Jung believes therefore in a system of checks and balances The shadow balances the ego consciousness And this is not necessarily negative as most people think The behavioral and attitudinal compensation offered by the shadow can and usually is actually positive Shadow our dark side is a positive element Jung says The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself And yet is always thrusting itself upon the individual directly or indirectly For instance inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies are aspects of the shadow And this is in his in his essay the archetypes and the collective unconscious He continues Jung the shadow is the hidden that hidden repressed for the most part inferior and guilty personality Whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors And so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious. That's the part I strongly disagree with If it has been believed here that too that the human shadow was the source of all evil It can now be ascertained on closer investigation That the unconscious man that is his shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies But also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts Appropriate reactions realistic insights creative impulses and so on It would seem fair to conclude that there is a close affinity between the complexes Split of materials remember and the shadow Perhaps the complexes also the result of incompatibility with the conscious personality Yes, they're also the result of dissonance attention Perhaps the complexes are the negative part of the shadow. Perhaps it just reside in the shadow Or I don't know closely collaborate with the shadow in a feedback mechanism Perhaps perhaps whenever the shadow manifests itself in a manner which is obstructive destructive or destructive to the ego We call it complex Complexes may really be one and the same the result of a massive split off of material and its relegation To the realm of the unconscious and this is part of past and parcel of the Individuation separation phase of our early childhood development Prior to this phase the infant begins to differentiate between self and everything that is not self The infant tentatively Explose the world and these excursions bring about a differentiated worldview suddenly the world is populated with objects suddenly The unity Cracks and breaks. It's a break of the world. It's cartesium. It's like the carp Suggested that as an observer and observed us and nature We and the world the child goes through this early on child begins to form And store images of himself and of the world initially of the primary object in his life normally his mother And these images are distinct First time it's very traumatic mother is not me She is separate and if she's separate I can lose her She can abandon me to the infant. This is revolutionary stuff Nothing short of a breakdown of an erstwhile unitary universe and his substitution with fragmented unconnected entities. And as I said, it's very traumatic Moreover, these images in themselves are split The child has separate images of a good mother and a bad mother Respectively associated with the gratification of his needs and desires and then she's good Or with the frustration of his needs and desires and then she's bad mother The child also constructs separate images of a good self and a bad self linked to the ensuing states of being gratified By the good mother and being frustrated by the bad mother Everything fractures at this stage the child is unable to see That people are both good and bad that an entity with a single identity Can both gratify him and frustrate him at times. He has no concept of time And so he splits he derives his own sense of being good or bad from the outside The good mother in Inevitably and invariably leads to a good satisfied self And the bad frustrating mother always generates a bad frustrated self But the image of the bad mother is very very threatening Imagine imagine a rich conclusion that the person you depend on for your life Is evil. It's it's frightening. It's a horror movie. It is anxiety provoking So the child is afraid that If it is found out by his mother that he thinks that she is evil She will abandon him Moreover the bad mother is a forbidden object of negative feelings One must not think about mother in bad terms One must not think badly about mother And so the child splits the bad images off And he uses them to form a separate collage Of bad objects. It's like a bad bank There's a kind of reservoir where he puts all the bad feelings bad emotions frustrations Bad images of mommy and everything this process is called object splitting It is the most primitive defense mechanism When still used by adults For example in borderline personality disorder narcissistic personality disorder. It is an indication of pathology And this is followed by the phases of separation and individuation between 18 and 36 months of life The child no longer splits his objects He no longer puts put bad objects to one repress one repress side and good objects to another conscious side He learns to relate to objects to people as integrated holes Holes with w1 As with nuances with subtleties with the good and bad aspects coalesce Gray shades instead of black and white and integrated self-concept also follows inevitably Because if you if you merge the good and bad aspects and you begin to see people as they are You begin to see yourself as you are partly good partly bad It's integration the child internalizes the mother. He memorizes her roles He becomes his own parent becomes his own mother and he performs a function by functions by himself He becomes way less independent personal autonomy He develops boundaries. He acquires object constancy. He learns that the existence of objects does not depend on his presence or on his vigilance Mother always comes back To him and for him after she had disappeared from sight A major reduction in anxiety follows and this permits the child to dedicate his energy to the development of stable Consistent and independent senses of self and interjects internalize images of others And this is the junction at which personality disorders form between the ages of 15 months and 22 months A sub phase in this stage of separation individuation is known as raposhmon Raposhma the child at this stage is exploring the world This is a terrifying and anxiety inducing process Terai kognita here be dragons the child needs to know that he is protected That he's doing the right thing and it is gaining the approval of his mother for this trip of exploration voyage of exploration The child peer periodically returns to his mother for reassurance affirmation admiration and unconditional love as if making sure that his mother endorses Excepts his newfound autonomy and independence is not angry at him and and accepts his um separate individuality What happens when the mother is immature narcissistic suffers from a mental pathology has her own abandonment anxiety She withholds from the child what he needs She doesn't give him approval admiration and reassurance On the contrary she feels threatened by the child's independence. She feels abandoned. She feels she is losing him She doesn't let go of the child sufficiently She she smothers him with over protection and indulgence She offers him overpowering emotional incentives to remain mother bound dependent undeveloped Part of mother child symbiotic diet or she banishes him She abuses him And so the child in turn develops mortal fears of being abandoned of losing his mother's love and support He's unspoken dilemma is should I become independent and lose mother or should I retain mother and never ever self the child and this This dissonance is so fundamental essential. This is quiddity. This is This is the the core that it creeds founds and and vortex vortexes Vortices and tsunamis of rage the child isn't rage because he's frustrated in his quest for himself He's anxious fearful of losing mother if it's guilty for being angry at mother. He's attracted to mother repelled by mother In short, he's in a chaotic state of mind Whereas healthy people experience such eroding dilemmas now and then To the personality disorders these dilemmas are constant These dissonances are characteristic emotional states To defend himself against this intolerable vortex of emotions the child keeps them out of his consciousness Slices them off The bad mother and the bad self plus all the negative feelings of abandonment anxiety rage. He splits them off But the child's over reliance on this primitive defense mechanism obstructs His orderly development. He fails to integrate the split images The bad parts are so laden with negative emotions that they remain Virtually untouched throughout life in the shadow as complexes It proves impossible to integrate such as such explosive material With the more benign good parts and so the adult remains fixated at this earlier stage of development He's unable to integrate and to see people as whole objects People are either all good or all bad and he goes through idealization and evaluation cycles This kind of adult deformed partly developed arrested developed adult is terrified unconsciously of abandonment He actually feels abandoned Or at least on the threat of being abandoned and he subtly plays it out in his or her interpersonal relationships This is the core of borderline narcissism And so is the reintroduction of split-off material in any way helpful Is it likely to lead to an integrated ego or self? The question itself is wrong Because it confuses two issues With the exception of schizophrenics and some types of psychotics the ego or the self is always integrated There's not such thing as non-integrated ego or self That the patient cannot integrate the images of objects both libidinal and non-libidinal Doesn't mean that he has a non-integrated or disintegrative ego The inability to integrate the world this is the case in borderline or narcissistic personality disorders This inability relates to the patient's choice of defense mechanisms. It's a secondary layer The crux of the matter is not what state the self is in integrated or not But what is the state of one's perception of his self? So personality disorders are secondary layers They are like shrink wraps Pardon the pun They are like Self They're like introspective things. They're like self observation self referential That's why auto eroticism is very strong there Who is From the outside to the inside. So it's like the narcissist or borderline Has a self perception or self image or That is divorced from the integrated ego because it cannot It cannot put together every all the content Some of it is hidden shelved in the darkest resources of the unconscious And thus from a theoretical point of view The reintroduction of split-off material does nothing to increase the ego's integration And this is especially true if we adopt the Freudian concept of the ego as inclusive of all split-off material And of course, it's right if we are Jungians You