 The pace of global vaccination is so glacial that I will probably be the first person to be inoculated post-mortem. And that would make me the first corpse immune to COVID-19. Now don't raise your hopes too high. Remember, necrophilia is still illegal in most jurisdictions. Welcome to the Saint-Vaknin Narcissism Horror Show. And today, a papuri, a smogas board, a collection of vignettes about psychopathy, new discoveries, about borderline, new insights, about narcissism, old faces. And so stay with me for this train ride, which has no final destination. My name is Saint-Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a host of other books and e-books and DVDs and recordings, and you name it, about cluster B personality disorders. I also happen to be accidentally a professor of psychology in several universities around the globe. And so let's delve right in. And the first issue is the apparent switching or shifting between personalities in people with cluster B personality disorders. And honestly, not only with cluster B, I would say with personality disorders in general. People with personality disorders who are high-functioning are very disconcerting. They compartmentalize their promiscuous, antisocial, addictive, sadistic and defined behaviors. During the day, these people are competent professionals, diligent students, pillars of the community, responsible citizens and fathers or mothers, loving husbands or wives, and thriving entrepreneurs. Come evening, though. Come evening, as the sun sets, exactly like in vampire lore, the mask drops. The drink and the drugs are out, replete with dissolute reckless sex with virtual strangers, gambling, or any number of self-trashing and dysfunctional, even self-destructive behaviors. Reckless driving, for example. What baffles scholars, what confuses us, is that all these self-states are part of the personality. This is not faking. There is no faking involved. The switching is abrupt, but it's also seamless. Dissociation is often involved, but never to the point of rupturing continuous autobiographical memory and core identity, at least not in high-functioning individuals. Clickly, in desperation, called it the mask of sanity. He raised his hands, having worked in a mental institution for decades. He said, I don't understand these people. It's like they look sane, but it's a mask of sanity. Behind it, there's something that is deeply depraved and insane. It challenges everything we thought we knew about psychology and personality. Consider, for example, the borderline. Person, a man or woman, usually woman, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, BPD. Recklessness and fantasy are both clinical features of borderline personality disorder. As a form of self-mutilation and self-trashing, borderline women often place themselves in harm's way with relative strangers. And so they end up ineluctably being defenseless and sexually assaulted. Having been raped, these women then use fantasy to fend off, to defend against the trauma and to resolve the cognitive dissonance. So these women are likely to say, I initiated the sex, I wanted the sex, I found him attractive, or I thought we could have a relationship after that. This is a way to square the circle, to live, to coexist with the realization of having been raped, having placed yourself in a situation which inevitably leads to rape. And the thing is that they keep doing this. They keep coming back for more. To prove the point, these women may even meet and have sex with the attacker again. And they definitely keep creating and gendering engineering situations where the same is going to happen. So most borderline women are victims of multiple sexual assaults and rapes. All of them eerily familiar, eerily familiar settings, eerily familiar proceeding behaviors. It's creating this repetition compulsion. Fantasy characterizes the borderline's intimate relationship as well. So the borderline doesn't only fantasize in order to resolve some dissonance or to somehow ameliorate anxiety, but she fantasizes as a way of life. Watch my previous video about the fantasy life of the borderline. So it characterizes her intimate relationships as well, but her self-destructiveness, her emotional dysregulation, her modulability are such that she always sabotages what she has. I would add to this her grandiosity. As reality intrudes on the fantasy, which the borderline finds intolerable and anxiety-inducing, borderline hates reality with a vengeance. So when reality breaches the fantasy, when it challenges and undermines the fantasy, the borderline can't tolerate it. It's unbearable to her. And so she begins to devalue the partner. She begins to act out egregiously. The resulting deterioration in the quality of the bond justifies and legitimizes bouts of cheating on the partner and reckless self-trashing on the way to a new man with a new fantasy. Generally, these kind of behaviors are known as reactants. The reactants in personality disorders often masquerades as boundaries. The psychopaths' defiance and consumatiousness, hatred of authority, for example, they can be easily mistaken that way. They can be easily misconceived and misperceived as boundaries. But true personal boundaries are endogenous. They come from inside. The true personal boundaries are proactive. In other words, true personal boundaries are not triggered by the environment. They are immutable certainties. They are given. They emanate from a healthy and stable sense of self-worth. True personal boundaries are forms of internalized self-defense. Fake boundaries are reactive to events and reactive to people. They are hair-triggered by events and people and circumstances. Fake boundaries are inconstant. Their content shifts all the time. They do not reflect any inner reality, any processes, anything stable. They are forms of externalized aggression. And this leads me to recent discoveries about psychopathy. You see, we have this stereotype of psychopaths as fearless people. People who experience no fear. People who are able to be ruthless and callous and cruel and aggressive. Defiant and reckless and so on. They don't foresee the consequences of their actions. And if they do, they don't care. They are fearless. Recent studies are teaching us something completely different. It seems that psychopathy is an anxiety disorder. I had written about it many years ago. Suggesting that psychopathy is actually anxiety disorder. And this is why borderlines, when they are exposed to abandonment anxiety, become psychopaths, secondary psychopaths. Psychopathy is a reaction to anxiety. In the case of the borderline, psychopathy is a reaction to abandonment anxiety, separation anxiety. But in the case of other people, psychopathy is a reaction to generalized anxiety or specific anxiety. There are many articles about this. One article, for example, which I chose honestly pretty randomly, is Psychopaths show enhanced amygdala activation during fear conditioning. It was authored by Douglas Schultz, Nicholas Baldurstone, Arielle Baskin-Somers, Christine Larson and friend Helmsetter. These names should be outlawed. Okay, and here is the abstract. Primary psychopaths exhibited a pattern of activity in the dorsal and ventral ACC, consistent with enhanced fear expression. That's primary psychopaths. It's not actually that they have no fear. They have too much fear. They have anxiety. While secondary psychopaths exhibited a pattern of activity in these regions, consistent with fear inhibition. We got it completely backwards. Primary psychopaths cope with fear via anxiety. Secondary psychopaths inhibit the fear. These results say the authors contradict the low fear model of psychopathy and suggest that the low fear observed for psychopaths in previous studies may be specific actually to secondary psychopaths. Okay, so we're beginning to see the confluence and the convergence between borderline psychopathy as anxiety reactions. In the case of the borderline, of course, the anxiety reaction is post-traumatic, very similar to the narcissist. But psychopaths cope with anxiety, unlike narcissists and unlike borderlines because psychopaths are constitutionally different. First of all, there is ground to believe that psychopaths have abnormalities of the brain and that there is an element of a genetic, hereditary component in psychopathy. So I want to find something to read to you that I had written long ago. Let me see if I can find it. If I can't, not a big deal. But long ago I had suggested that psychopaths are actually, psychopathy is actually a form of anxiety. I had written this in the year 2000. The anxious psychopaths. Psychopaths are said to be fearless and selfless, nonchalant. Their pain tolerance is very high. Still contrary to popular perceptions and psychiatric orthodoxy, some psychopaths are actually anxious and fearful. Their psychopathy is a defense against an underlying and oppervasive anxiety, either hereditary or brought on by early childhood abuse. Psychopaths nurture and cultivate an image of themselves as free-spirited, daring, nonconformist geniuses who are grievously misunderstood and mistreated by lily-pushion society and its mindless cohorts. This grandiose and romantic self-narrative legitimizes three classes of antisocial behaviors. Defiance, passive aggression, and reactance. I'm not going into it right now. So I've written this 20 years ago, 21 years ago, and only now the first studies are appearing that support this contention. I would like to read to you two comments made on YouTube by intelligent viewers. These rare species, extinct species. Two of them appeared mysteriously out of the woodwork and posted comments. And I was so dumbstruck and awestruck that I decided to read these comments, share them with you. Jenna Basil, B-A-S-S, sorry, I-L, read, wrote, My heart anguishes for you, Sam. I never wanted to believe that hardwiring was true. I'm beginning to understand. It is an abyss. The flat line was for too long. They are technically alive, she discusses narcissists. Narcissists are technically alive, but in a coma unaware of their state, sleepwalking through all their nightmares. Your attempts to break through and to help ultimately gets filtered and distorted through their confused subconscious and an integrated aura. If they could only wake, they would realize there is so much beautiful, meaningful life to be had. You mourn as deeply as that abyss for what could have been while they wither away, clinging to the tubes and wires of a mechanical life support machine that only affords them the very crude, tethered and degenerate form of survival that they have grown desperately dependent on. Beautifully written. If they could only wake up, they would be free of it. And truly live. I'd like to hope that, at the very least, some of our kind words and gestures do filter through and are received as genuine love and support, giving them a lull of peace from their perpetual haunts. It is quite something. A treasure of gold gleaming into the abyss. Stay golden, Sam. Another well-written comment by Pokerace4477. Don't try to dial at home. She or he writes, It is possible they intend to self-trash, not only to punish themselves for not gaining supply, but also to punish others, loved ones, the world or the world for not giving them the kind of supply they think they deserve. Don't you think there is an element of revenge? Martyrdom? Blaming? Escape from taking responsibility? Or getting narcissistically injured, shamed? Rebellion? A power play to have control over their failure? An experiment to see how low they can get and still thrive by extreme denial and ignoring of needs of theirs and of others? Loss of motivation and hopes from oneself to finally be free and independent of all the expectations and hopes that set up for themselves, which they can't live up to. Rupam Rupam. Yes, even intelligent viewers have unintelligent names. Rupam Rupam had written this. I do data and evidence-driven psychophysiological analysis of emotional health. This video is a gem, Sam. My observations are absolutely in line with that of what you stated in this video. I myself fall in the narcissistic spectrum side with continuous reality check as the means of keeping the trait below clinical level, subclinical. One, borderline and narcissism prevalence is higher in female and male, respectively. Both are compensatory mechanisms to deal with childhood trauma. Number two, trauma type, abusive father, beating mother, child, drug, alcohol abuse, aggression. Girl, borderline with victim, shared fantasy. Guy, narcissism with savior, guru father. So these are reactions to the trauma type, abusive father, beating mother. Another trauma type, golden child with silver spoon, parents loving but giving more materialistic love than time and heart. Girl reacts with borderline with two type fantasy, from obscurity. Guy reacts as with grandiosity, god, omnipotent, messiah, the world depends on him. Next trauma type, trauma type, triangulation. Parents give time and love, but the love is conditional. You come first in class, we will love you more. So the child works hard to get that love. They are compared with other children. Girl reaction, borderline with grandiosity and switch between a strict mother and a helpless daughter. At times, she will become motherly. At other times, a little girl who grew up too fast and never had a childhood with a girl. Guy reaction, passive aggressive, covert narcissists, unsecured, high on energy, high on anxiety. Virtue signaling, afraid to take accountability, no core, only stories and beliefs, very opinionated, experiences, no positive emotions, loves conflict, doubts people around, snooping is characteristic, feels low about self if he could not meet parents' expectations, feels high if he indeed met, had met parents' expectations. His shared fantasy is all about switching between strict father and helpless child. Next trauma type, trauma type, dead mother, promiscuous mother or career mother who was unavailable. Girl reaction, borderline with promiscuity but is violent from core, sees father as weak and so attracts rank narcissists as they appear strong and alpha. In her shared fantasy, this kind of woman is the Cleopatra of Julius Caesar. Guy reaction to this type of trauma, overt narcissists with no emotions, mostly hypersexual and BDSN types shared fantasy. They're strong men who own females. All the above are trauma bonding, very, very addictive relationships that hang on a thin thread of attention, adulation, admiration, availability and anxiety. All are unhealthy relationships where it is hard to get away and even if one partner does, the damage to the mind is never repaired because a child's mental development stops at the age of 12. Most of the characters and behaviors are not changeable. One can just manage the damage, no repair. Shared fantasy is just an easy but unhealthy way to get away from harsh reality. Behavioral psychology may well be thought of as a compensatory psychology of the child's psychology. That would take the diagnosis to root cause of trauma. Thereafter, rapid retraumatization or other such methods can be used for therapeutics. If not, at least power thread meaning framework, PTMF, can be used to explain the mind to a subject, in which case the subject can build better tools to deal with. I love this video, Sam. Keep enlightening us with your knowledge. Your wish is my command. Rupam, Rupam. Okay. Onward to the next subject. Christian pioneers said the Jew. And so the next subject is the narcissistic, anti-narcissistic masochists. You cannot wrap your hands, your heads around this. It confounded you. It confused you. It discombobulated you. It provoked personality disorders in many of you. Some of you emigrated. Some of you vowed off YouTube for life. This video, the anti-narcissistic, narcissistic, masochistic, narcissists ruined you for life. We call it trauma. Let me help. I was not the one to invent the anti-narcissist, narcissist, masochistic suggested diagnosis or category. I mentioned some names, bolus, green. I mentioned them in the video. But I would like to read to you, except from a series of psychoanalysis dictionaries. Let's start with the first except about the narcissistic, masochistic character. So I'm reading from the dictionary. Described by Arnold Cooper, the late Arnold Cooper died last year. Described by Arnold Cooper in 1988. The narcissistic, masochistic type is characterized by, number one, pursuit of rejection or disappointment by others. Number two, drawing of secret pleasure from the predictability of rejection which is invariably greater than the predictability of love. Number three, obtaining secondary pleasure from exhibiting one's hurts and from self-pity. Number four, excessive harshness of super ego in a critic. Number five, a constant sense of envy. Number six, an unshakable conviction of being wronged. Number seven, a hypersensitive self-esteem alternating between grandiosity and humiliation. Now, this is pretty close to the covert narcissists. With a few important differences, the passive aggression, for example, is more extreme. The tendency to self-mutilate, self-harm, self-trash, self-defeat and self-destroy, much more pronounced in the masochistic narcissists than in the covert narcissists. I'm continuing from the dictionary. In some cases, the narcissistic features are more overt. In some others, the masochistic features are more overt. However, both features are sooner or later found in one and the same individual. The unconscious aim of such character organization is not a fantasied reunion with a loving and caring mother. Rather, it is fantasied control over a cruel and damaging mother. And there is something called the narcissistic masochistic position quoting from another, quoting from the dictionary. Noting the inherent contradiction in the proposition that the masochist feels pleasure in pain, for if it is pleasurable, where's the pain? Daniel Lagash, L-A-G-A-C-H-E in 1968 suggested that one needs to view the masochistic pleasure differently. Lagash said that the passive dependent submissive child must experience some satisfactions at being submitted to the beneficent omnipotence of the other. So, the passive dependent submissive child must experience some satisfactions at being submitted to the beneficent omnipotence of the other. And so, replaced pleasure in pain by a state of well-being by submission. Lagash's stance emphasizes that the essential component of masochism might not be suffering per se, but the position taken by the masochist in the masochistic relationship, the position of submission. Since this assures the masochist a sense of safety and well-being, it is appropriately called the narcissistic masochistic position. It's a selfish position. One last word about narcissistic neurosis. People ask me about neurosis and so on. Neurosis or originally psychoneurosis and then divided into two, action neurosis and so on. So, neurosis in general was a code word, a buzzword for psychological disorders which had no organic or bodily or somatic origin, whose etiology did not lead to an organ or abnormality functioning or biochemical, but was up in the air, was diseases of the mind, if you wish. Now we have something called neuroticism. Neuroticism is one of the five factors of personality together with agreeableness, reversion, etc. Neuroticism is not neurosis. People with neuroticism are more prone to psychotic disorders, for example. They have extremely high levels of anxiety. They react to stress and threats very badly. So neuroticism is a personality dimension or feature which is not the same as neurosis. Neurosis is simply another name for a group of disorders. And we don't use it anymore. Since 1980, we don't use neurosis anymore. It's an obsolete term. Today, what used to be neurosis, the family of neurosis, today is divided in three. Depressive illnesses, anxiety disorders and personality disorders. Put them together, you get the ancient neurosis. I'm reading from the dictionary. Term from the earliest days of psychoanalysis when neurosis were divided into actual neurosis and psycho neurosis. The former actual neurosis were caused by disturbances in contemporary sexual life. And the latter, psycho neurosis, by childhood conflicts and trauma. Psycho neurosis was divided into transference neurosis, Jung coined this term in 1907, where libido was displaceable and the possibility of developing transference existed. And narcissistic neurosis, where libido turned back to the ego and a clinically meaningful transference did not develop. Owing to its intensely self-centered nature, this condition was not amenable to psychoanalysis. In today's terms, the category of narcissistic neurosis would encompass severe narcissistic personalities, psychotic character and psychosis. Additionally, today we know that narcissists actually do not have an ego, functioning ego or a constellated self. So the libido is turned inwards, but it's turned inwards on the internal objects and introjects, not on any ego or anything. But this was the early days of psychoanalysis. Freud himself had changed his position multiple times until he died. So that's all for today, the Popuri of today. I hope you had fun and see you next time. If I'm not vaccinated and I vanish suddenly, you will know what happened to me and you will celebrate, no doubt.