 Yes, my name is you know who, and I am the author of you know what. I am also a professor of psychology in several universities which will remain unnamed. And all this secrecy, all this secrecy, is because I am developing a strong, yet well substantiated suspicion that Jordan Peterson is stalking me. Look at the facts. He had resigned his post in the University of Toronto. He went on to Russia, where I am teaching. He couldn't find me there. So he ended up in Serbia. And did I tell you, Serbia is just across the border from where I am. So the fact that I am a paranoia doesn't mean that Peterson is not after me. Jokes aside, I am profoundly heartbroken to have learned of Jordan Peterson's multiple medical conditions. Peterson is not the intellectual giant that he makes himself to be. But he is a wise and compassionate teacher, and he had helped millions of lost souls regain their composure and their direction in life. And for this, he is owed a debt of gratitude that can never be paid. Had I been a religious man, I would have prayed for Peterson's recovery. As it is, I just wish Jordan Peterson well, heartfeltingly, from the bottom of my heart. And now to the topic of the video. Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, had a saying, I don't like that man, so I must get to know him better. Lincoln was of course referring to me. But inconsiderately, he got himself assassinated before we had the chance to socialize and get to know each other better, and before he had the chance to like me even less. Honest Abe was a contemporary of mine. No way, you say, you can't be that young. Yes, brethren, yes, sister-in-law, I am as old as the Civil War. Some people say that I am even older. All I know is that my birth certificate is printed on a papyrus. What am I on about? Per chance, many spiked my job, could well be. But coming back to dead presidents, Lincoln was a sharp cookie. You don't like narcissists. And you really don't like me, especially if you're a woman. I make your skin crawl. I make you lose your breakfast, and then some every time I pollute your screen. I'm a one-man bulimic diet, but you got to get to know the narcissist better. And I don't mean by demonizing the narcissist, and I don't mean by parroting what everyone says, and I don't mean by joining one of the cults that sprang up around oxymoronic and just plain moronic figures who woke up one day and discovered their inner narcissistic abuse expert. No, you should be more, more clever than that. You should be exposed to clinically proven information based on scholarly literature. I take pains to incorporate these in my horror shows known as YouTube videos. So without further ado, plunge into my seething quadrant, babies and bebets, and get to know the men and women you all love to hate the narcissist. Just a gender comment before I'm flooded with, you know, countervailing arguments. Women are catching up to men in every domain. The number of women in universities exceeds the number of men. Women are catching up in the workplace. Women are catching up as far as wage equality. Women are catching up in politics. Kamala Harris. And in my not so humble opinion, women are surpassing men in many ways, and the future belongs to women. We are heading from patriarchy to matriarchy, but women have begun to display antisocial behaviors that border on psychopathy, not only narcissism. So women are catching up to men in this field as well. And I would venture a guess, unsubstantiated guess, based on anecdotal evidence, that the number of women narcissists is equal today to the number of men narcissists, and that women are fast catching up in terms of psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. So when you listen to this video, just exchange the pronouns and you will be fine. Whenever I say he, in your mind use she, whenever I say him, her, et cetera, et cetera. If you were exposed or fell victim to, or were traumatized by, a narcissistic woman or a psychopathic woman, just change the pronouns. It fully applies. The problem is that it is useless to adopt normal language, to describe the alien and the abnormal. How do you transcribe the mind of another person, even a healthy person, even a neurotypical? How do you transcribe, how do you access someone else's mind? How do you know for sure that the reports emanating from another person are accurate, authentic, non manipulative, true? We don't have access to anyone else's mind. We use empathy as a bridge, but empathy is speculative. You see someone crying. You say she said, maybe she said, maybe she's manipulating you. You never know. So you can't really, there's no true statement about the mind of another. That's a restorative, it's not vacuum. So if you can't access the minds of healthy people, can you imagine the difficulty in trying to make sense of the mind of a narcissist, or a psychopath, or a person with psychotic disorder, it's almost insurmountable. There's so little in common between you and them, such a paucity of shared experience, so much is missing, so many jigs of puzzles, that you might as well be talking about an alien from Mars, a Martian. Or maybe about future advances in artificial intelligence where robots will become indistinguishable for people, when androids will roam the earth and blade runners will be all over. Did you ever get the feeling that language breaks down when you try to reach out to a narcissist? That the very structure of words and sentences and syntax and grammar kind of evaporates. It's like language itself becomes slimy. It's okay, you can hold on to it, it's like a goldfish. My proposed language, did you ever get the feeling that the word heartthrob? Heartthrob, I hope I'm pronouncing, I mean my accent is atrocious, my apologies. But did you ever get the feeling that the word heartthrob sounds suspiciously like a lethal medical condition and that it inexorably leads and inextricably linked to drop dead gorgeous? Why all these metaphors of sexual attraction have to do with death and devastation and destruction and everything? Okay, let's not go there or you will all start to suspect that I'm envious of muscular Tinder kindlers. Forget it, I'm unique. To hook up with me, you must swipe right, not left. Let's start with some basic facts. Narcissists and psychopaths, and there is a very big debate, has been for decades, a very big debate, whether this distinction should be made at all. Whether psychopathy is not actually an extreme form of narcissism. But leave that aside. Narcissists and psychopaths, there's a series of facts, indisputable facts, fact number one, their users, their takers, their exploiters. And this is the core essence of the word predator. A predator does not negotiate with a prey. Predator does not befriend the prey. Predator is not compassionate or empathic. Predator doesn't try to understand the prey beyond stalking the prey, mapping the prey's habits so that the predator can lunge at the prey's jugular and tear it apart. That's the extent of the predator's interest in the prey. Predators are there, they are entities. They are like objects, they are like forces of nature. They're not something to reckon with or to negotiate with. They are like the virus. It's, you have to accept this. These people are, they look like people. They look like human beings. But they are in essence kind of a modern manifestation of body snatchy. There's an alien inside. There is a type of psychological construct, series of structures that are totally alien to you. You know nothing about them. You have no access to them, nor can you understand them or comprehend them using regular tools like empathy. These people, these predators, they don't form committed relationships. They don't form relationships that are long-term. They don't form relationships based on emotion. These are the three things you must remember. Remember, remember, memorize, repeat until it gets through your thick skulls. These predators, narcissists and psychopaths are never committed, never long-term, never emotional. These predators, like all predators in nature, they sometimes collaborate with you. They sometimes collude with you. They sometimes co-opt you. They sometimes cooperate with you. They sometimes love you or love bomb you. They often groom you. They, it's not that they, it's not that they are separated somehow. They are, they do interact with you. But they do all this ad hoc for a purpose. It's goal oriented. The goal could be narcissistic supply. The goal could be to avoid, in the case of narcissists, the goal could be to avoid humiliation and rejection and abandonment in the case of a borderline. The goal to be to crawl into your panties in the case of a psychopath. But it's always a goal or to take your money. It's always a goal. It's always about extracting benefits, securing favorable outcomes. And narcissists and psychopaths in this sense are highly self-efficacious. They're very efficient. Just look around you. See who manages the greatest companies on earth, the Fortune 500. See who is on top of political echelons all over the world. See who is in media, in show business, in the judiciary, in law enforcement. Narcissism and psychopathy work. They're adaptive, self-efficacious, highly efficient strategies, at least in modern civilization, as we had misconstructed. And then once they're through with you, once mission had been accomplished, you're instantly discarded. You're just a source. You're a provider. And you're instantly discarded because you're no longer of you or of you is. And if you try to retaliate, if you try to reciprocate, which reciprocation in the eyes of the narcissist is an imposition. When you try to reciprocate, the narcissist interprets it, like you're trying to incarcerate him, to imprison him, to hem him in, to limit him, to drag him down to mediocrity and commonality. So narcissist regards reciprocation as a form of aggression with malicious intent. So if you try to retaliate, if you're vindictive, or if you try to reciprocate, if you try to win him over by loving him, by being empathic, by being compassionate, by thinking of his needs, by preempting his needs, it's a no-go strategy. It doesn't work. It alienates the narcissist and psychopaths. It makes them your enemies. Only no contact works. So when the narcissist and psychopaths having eradicated, demolished and devastated and destroyed everything good in their life, when they're forced to return to the scene of a systemic failure in a business, a relationship, they numb themselves emotionally. And they go through a period of dysphoria, which is a form of depression. It's critical to understand that narcissists and psychopaths interact with you, are with you in a marriage, in a business partnership, in a club, in a church, in a political party, in a nation, the narcissists and psychopaths are with you, within something that I call pathological narcissistic space, P&S. Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. P&S, penis, got it. The P&S, pathological narcissistic space, is a physical space within which the narcissist can optimize narcissistic supply, can regulate it, can render it predictable, where the sources are constantly available. And so it could be the neighborhood pub or bar, it could be a country, it could be a company, a business, it could be his marriage. These concepts are critical for you. I'll come shortly to the topic of the video, but this is the introduction. These are critical concepts for you to understand. The narcissists and psychopaths don't operate oppositely, wildly, they're not wild. They're very methodical. They construct spaces within which they operate maximally and optimally. So that's the reason that narcissists and psychopaths having exhausted the pathological narcissistic space, often relocate, relocate or initiate a new business or start a new relationship with another woman or with another intimate partner. Sometimes they try to buttress grandiosity by keeping very busy or by getting involved in a new venture with a new position or by making an endless stream of YouTube videos. But it's always about a new start. So now you have all the three elements, no long-term committed relationships, pathological narcissistic space and as a new novelty, novelty seeking. Naughty seeking is actually a parameter, a dimension of psychopath. So it has to be new, has to be shallow in order to gratify or satisfy the narcissist and the psychopath. What is the role of women in all this? If the narcissist or psychopath is a man, remember you can change the genders and switch gender pronouns. How does the narcissist or psychopath view women? Through the narcissist and psychopath, women are either mothers or they're whores. It's a famous Madonna whore complex, but I would like to rename it. It's not Madonna whore. Madonna was good in Catholic Vienna when Zygmunt Freud coined the phrase. No one, I mean, Madonna's don't work anymore. It's not the meme, the right meme. Mothers, to the narcissist and psychopath, all women are mothers or whores. And how to discover, how to ascertain, how to make sure whether you're a mother or a whore. There has to be a procedure. There has to be a job interview. There has to be a path towards establishing your credentials as a potential mother or potential whore, promiscuous. So they abuse women. Abuse in the case of narcissism and psychopathy is a functional strategy. You know, you go online, you go to all these coaches and self-styled experts and they all tell you how demonic the narcissist is, how evil and how really, really, really, really bad and it's not nice what he's doing. I mean, please, this is a kindergarten approach. Narcissist abuse because abuse is a function. And the function is to test you. It's an ongoing test. Will you continue to be useful despite the abuse? Will you act with matters? What is your breaking point the testing, the testing of boundaries, the testing your resilience, the testing your commitment. Are you a mother? Are you a whore? Narcissists and psychopaths are interested only in two types of interactions, adulation or profit or sex or subgoal, subgoal orientation. So in the case of narcissists, admiration in the case of narcissistic supply. In the case of a psychopath, there'll be money, sex, power, contacts, access, whatever. And the second type of interaction is stress testing. The narcissists and psychopaths stress test your limits and boundaries and they do it via abuse and via sadism. And the sadism is manifest everywhere. The sadism is manifesting the smile, the smile that erupts on the narcissists and psychopaths face when you're in pain. The sex is manifested, the sadism is manifested in the sex, in the sex acts. The narcissists and psychopaths doesn't have reciprocal adult loving, caring sex with you. He doesn't even use sex to communicate with you. He uses sex to degrade you, to despoil you, to destroy you, to ruin you in a way, to deconstruct you, to decompose you, to render you a dead mother. Narciss, psychopaths are not interested in intimacy, in friendship, in companionship or in reciprocated adult sex, get rid of all this. This is what you're trying to offer them. They're not buying, they're not buying. You are in the wrong marketplace. Okay, these are the foundations, these are the pillars. Now let's go into the dynamic of the shared fantasy. You know, in London, in the West End, in the days before the pandemic, there was a long running theatre play, theatre show. It's called The Maus Trap. I think it's been like 50 years, it's ongoing for 50 years. It was written by, originally authored by Agatha Christie, adopted to the stage, theatre, and has been running since like forever, the 1950s, I think. It's a Maus Trap. Had you visited the West End, that's Broadway, that's London's Broadway, had you visited the West End in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000, like I did with my wife, had you visited London, you could have watched The Maus Trap in each and every one of these decades. So the show has been going on for 60 years, but here's an important fact. The ensembles of actors changed, of course. The actors that put on The Maus Trap in the 1950s were not the same actors that put on The Maus Trap in the 1990s. Evidently, the actors change, the show goes on. The show must go on. The play remains the same. The shared fantasy is a permanent, permanent structure. The actors within the shared fantasy change. They're interchangeable. They are commoditized, they're like commodities, they're like grains of rice. The dish of rice is forever, but the individual, the idiosyncratic grains of rice change, you are the grains of rice. You, you are the commodities in The Maus Trap's warehouse of shared fantasy. In The Maus Trap's fantasy is a theater production. It's like a movie. It's like a never ending telenovela or soap opera or sitcom. The Maus Trap's craze the shared fantasy because it is his exit strategy from his life. The shared fantasy allows The Maus Trap's to not be himself. Do you remember what I said in previous videos? Narcissism is not about existence. Narcissism is about absence. The narcissistic disorder of the self is simply because there is no self. It all starts from the fact that there is no self. There's nobody there. It's an empty hall of mirrors in a totally deranged nightmarish theme park. And there's wind howling in the empty corridors. This howling is the narcissist's pitch. It's the all, and the narcissist himself is trapped, trapped within this contraption, within this hall of mirrors. Wherever he looks, he sees himself, millions of himself looking at himself. Can you imagine the nightmare, the surrealism of it all? It reminds me of the least paintings for Hitchcock's movies. And so he needs to exit, to exit himself. He needs to run away. He needs to flee. This night, he needs to wake up to cut a long story short. And the only strategy that seems to work is the shared fantasy, because it allows him to abandon his life as it is. It allows him to not be himself. It allows him to act. As long as he's acting, there's a role. And the role is never the narcissist. The shared fantasy is an organizing principle. It imbues the narcissist's existence with cinematic color, with meaning, with direction, with frills, with goals. It's very similar to a drug addiction. The reason it's very difficult to win somebody off drugs. The reason most rehab centers keep failing all the time. The reason most alcoholics start to drink a year within rehab. It's because the drug or the alcohol, the substance, they fulfill important psychological functions. They provide life with color, with meaning, with direction, with frills and with goals. And the shared fantasy does the same. It's a drug addiction. But being a fantasy, this dream state, of course, is vicarious. And comfortingly, it has no real life consequences. When you consume heroin, when you're on crack, when you drink to excess, believe me, there are very real, real life consequences, as Jordan Peterson, but when you are in a shared fantasy, the only real life consequences are to others, to the woman who had fallen in love with you, and who had hoped to construct a life with you, to your business partner, who is now bankrupt, and homeless, perhaps, to the university that you had shamed and disgraced. I mean, the only consequences of the shared fantasy are to others. And this is exactly how the narcissists and psychopaths love it. They love it that they don't pay the price. They love it that their actions have no consequences. They love it that they don't have to curb and control their impulses, because they never, ever end up badly. Even when they go to prison, they don't regard it as a punishment. They regard it as a risk, a respite. Prison is a retreat to most people, not to everyone, but to narcissists and psychopaths, I can tell you, from personal experience. Prison is a respite, is a retreat. It's time to regroup, time to recharge your batteries. I have written Malignosa of Love and seven other books, including an award-winning book of short fiction, published by Israel's largest publishing house, and it won the second most prestigious literary award in Israel, the Ministry of Contrast Award. And I have written these seven manuscripts within 11 months in prison. Prison was no punishment. Prison was the best vacation I've ever had. There's no way to punish the narcissists and psychopaths. That is the infuriating thing. That's why people are all over the place in tangles, because they are infuriated. I mean, it's so unjust. It's so unjust that these people just walk through life and life slides off their backs, and they're happy-go-lucky. And everyone around them is ruined, devastated, depressed, suicidal, messed up, everything. I mean, they are like the eye of the hurricane. Nothing happens in the eye of the hurricane. It's very calm and quiet and non-destructive, but a periphery of the hurricane, nothing much is left standing. When in a shared fantasy, the narcissists and the psychopaths appear to be normal, they are hopeful, they're hopeful, they're optimistic. They possess emotions. Of course, they display emotions, they exhibit emotions ostentatiously, they are ed. But of course, these are fake emotions, full emotions, they're grandiose emotions, they're erotomatic emotions, they're not real. They're imitations, poor imitations, simulacra. When they're in a shared fantasy, these people make plans and schemes, usually get rich quick schemes, and plans to conquer the world, and after that, the universe, and well, on the way, the galaxy, and then the universe. Plans on how to become God-like, in effect. And these plans, of course, are unrealistic, they're delusional, but psychopaths and narcissists in the throes of the shared fantasy are so upbeat, so upbeat, so optimistic, so energized, that they sweep you off your feet. They carry you on this tidal wave into a future that is easily defined, but very luring, very Disney, Disney world-like. It is a self-induced, largely controlled manic state, and very reminiscent, by the way, of the manic state in bipolar disorder. That's why we very often misdiagnose. Narcissism and psychopathy with bipolar disorder and vice versa. And many, many mental health practitioners conflate and confuse borderline personality disorder with bipolar disorder. It's a common mistake. The shared fantasies come in several forms, not one, three forms, with a man, or with the same sex, with a woman, or with the opposite sex, and via creative work. So let's stick to the male version of the narcissists and psychopaths. I'm reminding you again, you can safely change the pronouns. Wherever I say he, you can say she, and vice versa. But for convenience sake, I'll limit myself to the male psychopathic, male psychopathic, male narcissists. So these men have three types of shared fantasy, with a man, with a woman, and creative work. Shared fantasies, to remind you, are the only way out of the sometimes life-threatening clinical depression which invariably follows failures, injuries, narcissistic injuries, and narcissistic modifications. Each shared fantasy ends with an interstitial phase which very often leads to ego-dystonic processes such as dysphoria, depression, dysthymia, narcissistic injury, and narcissistic modification. I've dealt with this in previous videos, so do not repeat, do not ask me about these things. Use the magnifying glass on the upper navigation bar on every page of YouTube, and on my channel. Use the magnifying glass to search for modification. Search for narcissistic injury, search for depression. This is widely, narcissism is widely conceived as a depressive state. Core therapy, the treatment modality that I develop, works equally well with major depression as it does with narcissistic personality disorder. There's an element of grandiosity in depression. We'll come to it perhaps in another video, but shared fantasies is the way out of depression. Shared fantasies are a way to revive oneself, to resurrect, to have a Lazarus affair. And there are three types, with a man, with a woman, and with creative work. May I remind you that narcissists and psychopaths are actually not into sex. They're into sadistic dispointing. They're equally not into money. They're not into money. They're into power, which sometimes is mediated through money. Or they're into economic security, which renders them self-sufficient and self-contained and able to defy the world. In order to tell the world F off, in order to be able to defy authority, to defy others, defy expectations, go against the grain, be your own man, free forever, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, in order to be a psychopath, properly qualified psychopath, in order to be a narcissist, a grandiose narcissist, you need to be truly economically and financially independent. And this is the main motivation to obtain money. Money liberates. Money liberates. Echoes of Auschwitz. Money liberates. And money provides access. Money provides power. So they are not interested in money, but in what money gives them. And they are not interested in sex. Sex provides them access to a partner which they then can torment and taunt and despoil and degrade and humiliate via the sex acts. A narcissist and psychopath is always one step removed. One step removed from normal human motivation. You want sex because sex is fun, if I remember correctly. It's great fun. Not the narcissist, not the psychopath. They want sex because it gives them access to your body and your mind, your mind, more than your body. You want money because you can buy things with money. You can buy dinner. You can buy a yacht. You can buy this cycle with your Britannica when it was still available. Not the narcissist and psychopath. They want money because it gives them access to other things which they value much more, like autonomy, personal autonomy and defiance. Like power. So they're always one step removed. The measure of self-actualization of a narcissist and psychopath is how long they have spent within shared fantasies. It is in a shared fantasy that they feel good, that they feel fulfilled, that they feel happy. And to some extent they have access to their long repressed emotions. They can process their traumas. And so a shared fantasy has psychodynamic and therapeutic functions in narcissism and psychopathy. And when it is followed by modification. The modification completes the therapeutic cycle. So narcissists and psychopaths know that every shared fantasy will end with injury or modification and that it has a therapeutic effect on them. It rejuvenates them. It revives them. It endows them with power, ironically. So they kind of enter the shared fantasy in order to exit it. They enter the shared fantasy in order to demolish it from the inside to insidiously, subversively undermine the foundations of the shared fantasy. Even as the fantasy makes them happy and they bask in the warm light of acceptance and love and empathy offered to them, it's very convoluted and so complex that it defies reasoning. The life of the narcissist is comprised of cycles of shared fantasy followed by depressive episodes. Shared fantasy's depression. In each depression serves actually to recharge the narcissists, to attack again another target, target being you, to make a new business, to get married again, to have a relationship, intimate relationship, or whatever. A new venture. A new scheme. I mean, it is a depression that charges the narcissists and the only way to depression is via the shared fantasy. You could even say that the narcissists and psychopaths engage in shared fantasies in order to obtain modification and thus be energized. But while they are in the shared fantasy, which is the majority of their lives, when narcissists and psychopaths spend most of their lives in fantasy, fantasy state, actually the diagnostic criterion for narcissistic personality disorder includes fantasy, grandiose fantasies. So while they are in the fantasy, it's heaven. Fantasy is a recreation of the family of origin without all the blemishes and the warts and the dysfunctions and the hurt and the pain of the original family. It's like having a mother that is finally not abusive, not evil, not bad, not malicious, not malevolent, not absent, not dead. It's like finally having a father with understanding and compassionate and supportive. It's like finally being happy, experiencing emotions, however remotely, echoes of emotions. And it's like finally, finally almost becoming normal. But instantly the old repetition compulsions kick in and the narcissist is trying to convert you into a dead mother. You're too alive for him. It's out of his comfort zone. He's not used to it. It renders him paranoid. He doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't know how to relate to you. So he must convert you, transform you into dead mother. And if he's in business, he must destroy the business because success threatens him. Success is a form of commitment that terrifies him, frightens him a lot, success, love. And during this, during the depressive phases which follow the shared fantasy, the narcissist engages in obsessive, compulsive behaviors, compulsive behaviors, I'm sorry, that are ritualistic in nature and intended to fend off the threat because the narcissist, of course, and the psychopath, they have magical thinking. If I think it is, if it happens in my head, it happens outside. So the tumult, the chaos, the dark side, the shadow in their mind, they're terrified of it. So they engage in rituals, compulsive rituals to fend it off, to protect against it so narcissists can more collect all kinds of things, write obsessively, overeat, watch films, endlessly binge, binge watch, withdraw socially and romantically, avoid sex, shower frequently, etc. They have all kinds of compulsive behaviors. They have, this is the sequence, there's a shared fantasy, narcissists and psychopaths destroy the shared fantasy from the inside, this depresses them or mortifies them or injures them and they defend against this with compulsions. Narcissist typically has a few shared fantasies at the same time and usually the energy of one shared fantasy feeds off, underlies the creation of another shared fantasy. So if he finds himself within a romantic shared fantasy, this will give him energy to start a new business which will also become a shared fantasy. Because the goals will be unrealistic, the schemes will be named, it will all be outlandish and will end in major disaster, bankruptcy or worse. But for a while it will look good, for a while it will attract investors or punters or, you know, clients. So the romantic shared fantasy feeds, for example, the business shared fantasy or the business shared fantasy feeds, provides a narcissist with the energy to create so he becomes creative or the romantic shared fantasy renders him more creative, which is another shared fantasy. The narcissist always overvalues his creativity and his creations. He misjudges their value, misjudges their place in civilization or history or whatever. He is grandiose. So a narcissist also, another thing is that narcissists can switch between shared fantasy. He can have, for example, a romantic shared fantasy, then start a business shared fantasy and then give up on the romantic fantasy and become totally emotionally invested, perfected, full cathexis in the second type of shared fantasy, which is a business shared fantasy and then he becomes creative. So he completely forgets about the romantic shared fantasy. And you see that a lot with narcissists and psychopaths, they circulate, they circulate among shared fantasies. They start off with you, there's this love-bombing and grooming and amazing honeymoon and I don't know what. This gives them energy. They open a new business, they forget about you. They become alcoholics, you never see them again. And then within the new business, they begin to write something or to draw something or to paint something or to create something and they forget about the business. And their excuses, I'm a creative type, you know. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm not a manager. I don't want to waste my life on administrative issues and minutiae in details. So then they switch from the second type of fantasy, the business fantasy to the creative fantasy and so on and so forth. It's a merry-go-round. It's a merry-go-round. When the narcissist finds a person, narcissist or psychopath, they find a person who can provide all three fantasies. For example, that person is rich, romantically available and I don't know what. Creative in a way that encourages the narcissist's creativity. When there is a package deal which includes all three fantasies, that person becomes a permanent feature in the narcissist's life. And the narcissist is capable of marital fidelity and stability with such a person. But it's a rare person. It's someone who can provide all three or at least two out of three shared fantasies on a consistent basis disregarding and ignoring the constant abuse, the constant testing of boundaries and limits, the constant sadistic sex, the constant sadistic withholding of sex or other things, the constant sadism in general. It has to be a very strong, centered, boundary personality to cope with the narcissist. And the narcissist has to be very special for someone to make these sacrifices. What about shared fantasies which are not romantic? For example, business shared fantasies. Shared fantasies that revolve around a new scheme, a new business, a new venture, a new enterprise, a new political party, a new NGO, a new, you know, something that's not romantic. So the first critical criterion is usefulness. When the narcissist and psychopath choose partners, I mean non-intimate partners, this is about non-romantic shared fantasies. When the narcissist and psychopath choose partners, they choose people according to their usefulness. Are these people willing and able to provide narcissistic supply? So they tend to surround themselves with psycho funds and yes, yes sayers, you know, yes men and this kind of people. Fans, followers, blind followers, brain dead followers and so on. So they create actually cults. So when they team up with other people in a non-romantic setting, these people would tend to provide narcissistic supply in an unthinking, non-critical manner and gradually coalesce into a cult-like sect. Or they team up with people who can provide services. Services could be money, seed money, investment, could be access to other people who can provide money and power, could be access to power, could be access to decision-making. So services could be logistical service. They have an office, you know, located in a critical hub. So useful people. Useful people are people who provide adulation, if you're a narcissist, or people who provide services if you're a psychopath. Money is much less of an ironically and surprisingly, money is much less of a consideration. A narcissist and psychopaths would not team up with someone because he has money unless they want to take his money. But they would never team up with someone just because he has money. Because money, seed money is less important and dispensable and as a means to something, as a tool, as an interim step. But they would team up with someone who can help them to make the money. They want their own money. They don't want to be dependent on other people. And this is, there's a lot of mythology and nonsense online about this. Narcissists and psychopaths are averse to any form of dependence and dependency. So they are very unlikely, for instance, to become gold diggers. Gold diggers and women who look for sugar daddies and so on, these are usually histrionic women, not psychopaths and narcissists. Psychopaths and narcissists want to make his own money so that he controls the money, so that he controls everyone around you. He would be very averse to being dependent on someone else's money, even if that someone else is a bona fide investor. But they're looking for people who can provide them with supply or with services, whether actually or potentially. When I say potentially, I mean, if the Narcissist has a track record, a common experience with someone in the past and that someone had provided him with supply regularly, predictably and reliably, or that someone had provided him with services reliably. So this track record, this track record registers, there's a memory and this leads to the process of hovering. That's why narcissists keep coming back to original sources of narcissistic supply, to original partners in insured fantasy if there was no modification and to original business partners. When the Narcissist psychopaths maintain full contact within a shared fantasy with other people, only when and only for as long as these people actually provide supply, services or sex, the three S's. And this applies to men and women. In other words, they will maintain full contact within a shared fantasy with men, only if these men provide supply or services and they will keep on. They will remain in a shared fantasy with a woman, only for as long as he provides supply or services or sex. This is the full contact variant of the shared fantasy, but there's a spectrum, there's a spectrum of contact within shared fantasy. The full contact is a typical shared fantasy, but you have limited contact shared fantasies, mainly during the interstitial phase. Limited contact shared fantasies are when the other person remains useful, actually or potentially, based on track record, but is useful, but is hostile. So the narcissists will remain, for example, in a shared fantasy with a woman who still provides him with sex and with services, even if she no longer provides him with supply and she's hostile to him. She hates his guts, but as long as she provides this thing, he will remain, stay with her and he will stay with her. And this is a limited contact shared fantasy. Similarly, he will continue to partner, to have a business partnership with men who provide him with access to money and access to power and access to contracts and access to procurement and access to international trade and so on. Remain partners with these kind of people, people who bring clients, rain makers. He will remain partner with this, with this kind of men, even if these men envy him, try to undermine him, passive aggressively, act against him. He will still remain. So the critical point in a shared fantasy, what's in it for me? What do I get out of the shared fantasy? As long as I get anything out of the shared fantasy, I don't really care what you think about me, what you're thinking about me. You can hate my guts. You can try to obstruct me. You can be passive aggressive. You can undermine me. You can poison me daily with arsenic or any other poison of your choice. I don't give a fig. As long as you provide me with services, access, contacts, money, sex, supply, you name it. As long as you fulfill my goals, I'm with you. And I'm with you in full contact, in a full contact, in the full contact version of the shared fantasy. If you are, if you still love me, if you still admire me, if you still look up to me, if you still emulate me, then it's okay, it's full contact shared fantasy. But if you hate my guts and if you want me dead, it's okay. We can have a limited contact shared fantasy. For as long as you're useful, the minute you're no longer useful, I'll dump your ass. And then there is no contact, of course. No contact is when the shared fantasy is usually abruptly abandoned. It's when the narcissist and psychopaths reach a conclusion that the partner in the shared fantasy is no longer of use. Remember, narcissists and psychopaths do not care what you think about. The narcissist regards being hated is a form of narcissistic supply. The narcissist loves to be feared. Feared. The psychopath loves to be feared. It's supply, it's buttresses and upholds and supports and proves and evidences their grandiosity. Because if someone is afraid of you, someone hates you, you are the center of attention and this is what counts. The only thing that counts. Narcissism applies about being seen, about being the focal point, about being the prime cause. Prima causa and Primum movins. So it doesn't matter what are the emotions that swirl around the narcissist, that surround the psychopath. It's nice the narcissist and psychopath thrive in adversity. Absolutely thrive in adversity. Actually, they so much like adversity that they provoke it on purpose. They act obnoxious. They act defiant, impulsive, disempathic, sometimes just in order to garner attention. The same way a small child would misbehave and throw a temper tantrum to obtain and secure his mother's attention. This creates in them the feeling of a safe base. So they go no contact only if the other party is no longer of use. Of course, if the other party in the shared fantasy is malicious and dangerous. If they're planning things to do things to the narcissist or psychopath, I don't know, snitch to the police or the FBI. Still, all the narcissists and psychopaths money do really, really bad things. If they are actually psychopathic in a way, if they are narcissistic, then of course the narcissist and psychopath will go no contact. So narcissists and psychopaths will go no contact if you're no longer useful, or if you begin to represent a clear and present danger if you're malicious. When in the limited contact and the no contact phases, the narcissists and psychopaths are no longer interested in the partner to the shared fantasy. They are not protective of the partner, they're not possessive of the partner, they're not attentive or supportive, they couldn't care less about the partner. He's of her fate, family, crisis she may face and who she associates with and what she does with with other people. So she can slip around promiscuously, narcissists couldn't care less. In the limited contact and no contact strategies, there is absolute decafaxis, in other words removal of the emotional investment and emotional energy from the partner. And from that moment on, the partner is perceived as a neutral instrument, a tool in more than one sense of the word. A neutral object, a means which allows the narcissist and the psychopath to realize goals and nothing else. In limited contact shared fantasy, the narcissist and the psychopath limit the interaction to extracting supply or to receiving services or to making money and so on. It's very instrumental. The shared fantasy becomes instrumental. It loses a lot of its allure, this fantastic nature is diluted and sometimes this appears all together. It becomes like cold hard facts. It pushes the narcissist, the psychopath back into their dreary, sharp edged, wounding lives. So the limited contact shared fantasy is an interim phase between the full contact shared fantasy and the no contact. And many of you have gone through this, by the way. Many of you were involved in a full contact shared fantasy and then you transitioned through a limited contact shared fantasy. You couldn't let go. You wouldn't let go of the fantasy that you had with the narcissist and the psychopath. It took you a while. It was a process of de-escalation. You got rid of these certain elements, certain figments, certain dimensions. You couldn't just turn it off like a faucet. And the narcissist and psychopaths do the same. They go from full contact to limited contact to no contact. People exit the shared fantasy. Disillusioned, sad, enraged. Having realized that they were mere, they were objectified, dehumanized, instrumentalized. The narcissist and psychopaths were just fantasizing. That they were averse to any true, deep, profound commitment. That there were liars, losers, failures, misanthropes, misogynies, sadistic abusers. And so men just give up on the narcissist and psychopath and they resort to other people to do business with, to befriend. But it's always harrowing. It's always heartbreaking. The narcissist and psychopaths present a facade which is so easy to fall in love with. It's, there is this addictive element. This shared fantasy is a respite from life, is a retreat, is a break. Also for the other partner. The psychopath and narcissist convince the other partner that life could be a fantasy. And this is irresistible. This is addictive property, properties. When women are deemed useful by the narcissist or psychopath, it means that they are able and willing to provide supply, services, submissive sex, whether actually or potentially, depending on circumstances, depending on previous track record. But there are these elements of narcissistic supply, adulation. So the woman has an idol she has someone to look up to. She has someone, she can suspend her judgment. She can suddenly feel not responsible because it removes the burden, the angst of existence. It's kind of outsourcing your need to cope with life. Suddenly there's a bigger figure, a father figure if you wish. A bigger figure who takes care of you and takes care of everything. No need to worry. All you have to do is provide services and be submissive in sex. What's a big deal women say? It's not such a big thing. And the narcissists and psychopaths maintain full contact with the woman within a shared fantasy. Only when and only for as long as she actually provides supply, sex and services. When she stops providing one of these, she cuts off the sex or she no longer adulates and admires the narcissist unconditionally and uncritically or she falls ill, she becomes sick. At that point the narcissist reverts switches from full contact to a limited contact shared fantasy, which I call the interstitial phase. But even the limited contact shared fantasy is only when the woman somehow remains useful, actually or potentially. So even if the woman is hostile, the woman hates the guts of her partner. If she still provides two or three, she provides an adulation, supply and services or sex and services. Narcissists and psychopaths would still be there, but they would begin to gravitate towards no contact. Full contact shared fantasy suddenly becomes limited contact shared fantasy. There is a withdrawal. There is an absence. There's a coldness. There is neglect and abandonment. There's the woman suddenly is ignored most of the time. And there is utter decafexis, utter lack of interest and caring. Narcissist doesn't mind, doesn't care. Where is his spouse? What is she doing with whom? He doesn't care about her life, her concerns. He doesn't care about the small events that cause her happiness and the bigger events that cause her sadness. She is no longer relevant. He is on his way out. And he goes no contact if he deems the woman no longer reviews, regardless how she feels about him. She could still be in love with him. She could still be no. But if she's no longer reviews, he's out. He goes no contact also if the woman of course becomes malicious, even when she's useful actually or potentially. So again, he goes no contact in two cases if the woman is no longer reviews or if she becomes malevolent and plans his downfall. His schemes, engages in schemes to attack him and damage him. So when in the limited and in the no contact strategies, as I said, the narcissist and the psychopath lose all interest in the woman. They're not protective. They're not possessive. They're not attentive. They're not supportive. They couldn't care less about them. The one can do anything she wants with anyone she wants as ostentatiously and loudly as she wants. It's of zero consequence or interest to the narcissist. He is busy planning his next shared fantasy. He is busy preparing his mental reserves to cope with the inevitable ineluctable modification in narcissistic injury. In limited contact, the narcissist and psychopath limit the interaction to extracting supply or to receiving services on the way out the door. Women also exit the shared fantasy sometimes. These illusions said, enraged exactly like men, exactly like business partners, exactly like anyone else who's been involved in any of the narcissists and psychopaths shared fantasies. But women exit the shared fantasy more rarely. Unfortunately, that's been my life's mission since 1995. I instituted the rule of no contact. By the way, the rule of no contact is not just a sentence, no contact. I wrote dozens of articles with hundreds of policy steps and strategies on how to implement no contact. So I did this because women don't give up. Women are malignantly optimistic. They keep trying. They think their love will fix things or fix people. They're fixers. It's not healthy. Women should give up on the narcissist and psychopath. And they should resort to other men. I encourage this. They haven't met needs. They should satisfy them. They shouldn't try to triangulate or even to hurt and punish the narcissist or psychopath, but they should take care of themselves if they can't exit the relationship. But the primary goal should be to exit the relationship. Narcissists and psychopaths are perennial pessimists. They believe the worst. They anticipate the worst. They think that failing and being hated is real. Failing and being hated feel more real to the narcissist and psychopath, more reliable, way longer lasting than any other alternative. The narcissists and psychopaths anticipate losses. They know they're going to fail. And they fully realize they're hated because they're obnoxious. They're exploitative. They're abusive. They're sadistic. They know they're hated. And so failing and being hated are constant features and fixtures in the narcissist and psychopath's life. And so they're reliable. They're longer lasting. And in this sense, failing and being hated have a calming, anxiety-reducing effect. The narcissist knows where he stands, who is who, and what's next when he is hated. The psychopath knows where he stands, who is who, and what's next when he fails. In contradistinction, love and success are fickle, ephemeral. And when they are ineluctably gone, they're painful. They mortify. They injure. Often love is feigned by gold diggers and worse or conflated with erotomania and dependence. Success calls for antisocial cutting of corners and for compromising and bargaining away one's integrity and principles and even worse one's independence. They have to trample on loved ones in an inexorable process of success. Success is a price. Now the narcissist and psychopaths don't care about this price, but they do care about being conned, being cheated, being deceived, being taken advantage of. Love opens the door to vulnerability and vulnerability opens the door to exploitation and abuse and they hate to be the subjects of abuse. They're the ones who meet out of abuse. They hate to be the recipients on the receiving end. And similarly, success calls for compromising one's independence. You have to work with people. Collaboration implies limitation. Limitation implies boundaries. Boundaries imply restrictions. No way. I'm the king of the world. I'm God. So attempts to be loved, to be loved and attempts to accomplish things and to succeed require great investment. They require, require faking, grandiose faking. And for what? For passing, soon to be forgotten returns. And so the narcissist and psychopath decide that the price is often unworthy of the price. Consequently, as far as the narcissist is concerned, love and success feel inferior to and less safe than any other alternative. Love and success are worse even than being socially shunned and derided or then becoming a total loser. The narcissist and psychopaths undermine love and success because they consider them seductive lures. They consider them a form of deception. They say to themselves, narcissists and psychopaths, say to themselves, better be an authentic loser, but true to myself than a full fake winner who is doing the winning anyhow. If one is not oneself, but a fraud. Ironically, many narcissists and psychopaths quote the Bible. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? Matthew 1626. Indeed, good questions.