 I keep reminding you that the narcissist is an eternal adolescent, where I tell you. He's a Peter Pan, even a famous book, the Peter Pan Syndrome. He doesn't want to grow up, he doesn't want to assume adult chores and responsibilities, he doesn't want to commit, he doesn't want to invest. He's a whole outcome of his schizoid core. Because the schizoid aspect of narcissism pushes the narcissist away from people, away from sex, away from intimacy, away from relationships. So it's an approach avoidant situation. The narcissist seeks intimacy, his version of love, relationships, but then the schizoid core kicks him and pushes him away from all this. But what are the advantages of being an eternal child? Well, quite a few actually. When the narcissist acts as a child, when he infantilizes, when he refuses to be an adult, he's sending two signals. It's a form of virtue signaling, if you wish. He's sending two signals out to the world. The first message is, I'm a child, I'm harmless, I'm vulnerable, don't hurt me. So the child-like posture is a defensive posture. It's intended to fend off harm and hurt and pain and adverse consequences. It intends to keep at bay enemies and foes and critics. I'm a child, don't do this to me. And the second message is, I'm a child, I'm helpless, I'm a toddler, I'm hurting, care for me. This is the narcissist's version of codependency. This is his way of emotionally blackmailing you into staying with him, not abandoning him, catering to his needs, servicing him. So the child posture is actually an adaptation. It may be a dysfunctional adaptation in some respects, but all in all, it's a self-efficacious, positive adaptation because it allows the narcissist, despite his extreme disability, despite his deformities, despite his deficiencies in the face of his inadequacies, it allows him to extract maximum beneficial outcomes from the environment. But here's the thing, narcissism is on the rise because the entire course of the human species is from adult to child. We are becoming more and more child-like as the ages progress. More, 100 years ago, we're more adult than we are. People 400 years ago were much more adult than people 100 years ago. And people 4,000 years ago were absolute adults compared to people 400 years ago. Over history, we are becoming more and more child-like, more and more childish, more and more infantile. As a collective, each and every one of us, this is not limited to narcissists and psychopaths. The rise of narcissism in society is because narcissists are uniquely positioned, uniquely evolved to take advantage of this inexorable wave of infantilization in human society and the human species over thousands of years. So there's a general wave of everyone becoming more and more child-like. And as everyone becomes more and more child-like, the narcissists is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this wave, to leverage it to his or her benefit. That's why the number of narcissists is increasing because society is more and more infantilized. Of course, we create institutions that reflect the fact that we are less and less adults and more and more children. We had created the welfare state, the nanny state. Even our computing devices reflect a patronizing, condescending attitude in various features. An attitude that says, you're children, you don't know what's good for you, we're going to make decisions for you. It's the same with the state. It's the same with various institutions and authorities. But who had constructed these institutions and authorities? Who is coding the software programs? We are. So we have created an environment, institutional environment, technological environment to cater to our increasing infantilization and it reflects this trend. Now it has a name. This increase in childlike features in the human species over millennia, it has a name. It's called neoteny, neoteny or juvenileization. Neoteny is when development, physiological development, somatic or psychological development slows down. It slows down or is delayed. Neoteny is typical of all modern humans. The opposite of neoteny is progenesis. Progenesis also called pedogenesis is when development is accelerated, when someone is beyond their age, when they are premature, precocious, they have attained and obtained capacities which exceed their chronological age. But generally speaking, the entirety of humanity, every single individual and the collective, the species as a whole is neoteny, neotenic. In other words, it becomes more and more childlike. Now neoteny results in something called pedomorphism, pedomorphosis. Pedomorphism is the retention in adults of traits previously seen only among the young. It's when you grow up and yet as an adult, you retain traits, behaviors, cognitive structures and even emotions which are much more typical of a much younger person. And this is called pedomorphism or pedomorphosis. It's a form of heterochrony. Heterochrony is when there is a mismatch between chronological age and psychological or physiological age. Pedomorphism, the retention of traits, young youth traits, the retention of childlike traits into adulthood, pedomorphism is very common in the animal world as well. So it's not limited to the human species and it seems to be a general principle of nature actually. Now in humans, evolution has taken a turn. Evolution in humans, in the human species incorporates psychological and cultural elements. We are continuing to evolve not only bodily but we are continuing to evolve in our minds and we are continuing to evolve via technology and via our cultural and societal frameworks. So consequently, neotony, which is an evolutionary mechanism, pedomorphism, which is the outcome of neotony, they have permeated and perpetrated and invaded, pervaded our minds and our cultures and our societies. Everything is slowed down. Everything regresses. Everything becomes more and more childlike, more and more infantile. Everything is neotonic, our institutions, our relationships, our ways of thinking, the way we emote, the way we are having sex, our impulse control, our choices, our decisions, they are becoming more and more puerile, more and more infantile, more and more childlike. One of the reasons neotony is a feature of nature is because it seems that neotony facilitates some human capacities, some capacities in nature in general, but especially in human beings. It seems that adults are much less good, much worse, and for example, emotional communication. Children are much better at communicating emotions. So there is an evolutionary advantage to remaining a child, emotional communication. The problem with narcissism is that the infantilization, the neotony of narcissists is coupled with other pathological features which inhibit access to emotions. And so this particular evolutionary advantage is not manifest among narcissists to use an understatement, they are very poor at emotional communication. But in healthy people, neotony facilitates emotional communication, empathy. These are all features dependent on neotony because they evolve very early on in childhood, ages 2 to 6. And so retaining childlike features enables people to tap into childhood capacities, childhood traits, childhood capabilities which are lost as we grow up. So if we look at human beings, we look at the bodies, the somatic aspect of human beings. We have, for example, relatively large head, that's very common of embryos, of fetuses. We have a very large head. The ratio of head to body in human beings is the largest, almost the largest in nature. We have a flat face, relatively flat face. We have relatively short arms compared, for example, to apes and monkeys. So all these are features of babies. Babies have large heads. They have relatively flat faces, including flat noses. And they have short arms. These are babylike features. So even our bodies express neotony. Now, of course, we also have adult features. We have large noses. We have long legs. We have paramorphic traits, paramorphic, somatic, and psychological traits and features. Paramorphic is the opposite of neotony. And so it is gradually more and more accepted in evolutionary theory that neotony, harkening back to childhood, refusing to grow up, retaining childlike traits into adulthood, many evolutionary theories now say that this is a key feature, actually, of human evolution. The late lamented Stephen Gould argued that the evolutionary story of humans is one where we have been retaining to adulthood the originally juvenile features of our ancestors. JBS Holden, concurred with Gould, he said that a major evolutionary trend in human beings is a greater prolongation of childhood and a retardation of maturity. Delbert Thiessen, Thiessen, T-H-I-E-S-S, sorry, E-N, said that neotony becomes more apparent as early primates evolved into later forms. Primates have been evolving towards a neotonic flat face. In other words, evolutionary theories consider regression to childhood or at least the retention of childhood into adulthood as a feature of evolution. As I said, narcissists are taking advantage of this evolutionary trend, of this evolutionary feature by remaining children psychologically, they actually fit into neotony, but then of course their pathologies prevent them from taking full advantage. Doug Jones, another evolutionary theorist, suggested that human evolution's trend towards neotony was probably caused by sexual selection in human evolution. He said that women prefer neotinous facial traits and men even more so. Men, he said, choose women, select mates, select possible spouses or girlfriends or lovers or one-night stands, never mind, by how neotinous, how childlike, how babylike, the face of the woman is. So the more childlike and more babylike the woman is, the more likely she is to experience sexual mating with men. But also the reverse, the neotony in male faces is a byproduct of sexual selection for neotinous and female faces. Let me explain this. If you're a man and you have a preference for babylike, toddlerlike, childlike women, your children are likely to be more babylike, childlike, toddlerlike. And this process of sexual selection, which has been taking place at least since the agricultural revolution, possibly earlier, had resulted in neotinous males. Men are becoming more feminine and more childlike. They resemble females, they resemble women more and more. We are converging gender-wise, sex-wise. We are converging on a neotinous, a universal unisex, neotinous solution. We are all beginning to look the same. Gender is a socio-cultural construct, but our sexuality underlies it. If we are all becoming the same, if we are all beginning to look the same according to Doug Jones, this would have tremendous impact on our psychology, on our gender identity, on gender differentiation, and on our ability to maintain intimate relationships. And you already see in some cultures a preference for immature, neotinous, childlike people. In Japan, for example, you have kawaii. Kawaii in Japanese means lovely, cute, lovable, adorable. It pervades Japanese culture. It can refer even to objects and to animals, but when the Japanese use kawaii to refer to humans, they mean that these people are charming, vulnerable, fragile, shy, childlike. And so these people have cute handwriting, cute body language, cute psychology. They are very, very childish. And the Japanese have a preference for the kawaii aesthetic. It's a prominent aspect of Japanese popular culture, entertainment, clothing, music videos, food, toys, personal appearance, mannerisms. Japanese women use childlike voices to communicate. It's in the culture. Increasingly, neotinous features, childlike cuteness, is invading Western civilization. All you have to do is look at Tinder. Cuteness is also a clinical term in psychology. It's a subjective term. It describes a type of attractiveness, commonly associated with youth, with appearance, with children, but there is an analytical, scientific, analytical model in ethology, the study of animal behavior. It was first introduced by our wealth, Conrad Lawrence. Conrad Lawrence proposed the concept of baby shema, what he called kinchen shema. So baby shema is a set of facial features, body elements, body physiology that make a creature appear cute. He said that kitchen shema, baby shema, children shema, actually more precisely, child shema, this external appearance of a youthful childlike person coupled with appropriate immature, retarded childlike psychology in an adult, he said that it's actually an advantage because it activates, it releases in others the motivation to care for this person, to help this person, to provide support, to hug, to embrace, to contain, to hold. So the childlike appearance, the childlike body, the childlike baby face, the childlike psychology, I'm not a grown-up and I don't want to grow up as Peter Penn had said explicitly in the eponymous book, these trigger positive outcomes in the human environment. They trigger in other people behaviors which are helpful, behaviors which are productive and constructive and conducive to the progress and well-being of the childlike individual. When you're a childlike, people want to help you, people want to care for you, especially women, it provokes the maternal instinct. Cuteness is attractive and charming but it's also adaptive in the sense that it motivates people to not harm you and on the other hand to provide you with things, to cater to your needs. And now I want to link neotony, the preservation of childlike features and behaviors into adulthood. I want to link this to schizotypy. Schizotypy is in my view a form of neotony. In a minute I will explain what is schizotypy but schizotypy is refusing to grow up, psychologically. When neotony is mostly somatic, mostly concerned with body features, physiology, schizotypy is the psychological equivalent of neotony. Schizotypy is a continuum of personality characteristics and life experiences which involves dissociative, imaginative states up to the point of psychosis and schizophrenia. But what's interesting in schizotypy, it is a regression. It's a regression to childhood, pre-self childhood. Childhood before the child had a self and integrated ego, very early childhood. At that point the self was not constellated, was not integrated. There was no, in melanic lines language, in gumtrips, in furbirds language, there was no integrated ego, libidinal or anti-libidinal or any kind of ego. So schizotypy is when the person regresses psychologically to a stage before that person had a self or an ego. Of course schizotypy is most common among people who don't have a self or an ego to start with. For example, narcissists borderline paranoid possibly. Schizotypy is definitely. So schizotypo, people with schizotypal personality disorder. So we are beginning to see that schizotypy is a regression to childhood, a regression to extremely early childhood where boundaries are not formed yet or are very fuzzy and unclear. And when there is a massive confusion between external and internal object, there is no real perception of the world out there as a separate entity, as a separate environment. But there is a kind of flow and flux between internal and external so that the boundaries, the fuzzy boundaries are made even fuzzier and the person either absorbs the world in a process called hyperreflexivity or confuses internal and external objects in a process called psychosis or confuses external for internal objects in a process called narcissism. So this is a very early stage. Interestingly, this regression to pre-self childhood where there's no constellation itself where there's confusion of internal and external objects, fuzzy boundaries, this regression enhances creativity and imagination as our civilization places emphasis and value-added on creativity, creative efforts, works of art, imagination, the need to deploy creativity in a variety of daily settings as creativity becomes the predominant mode of relating to the environment and managing one's life. The more creativity becomes the pivot of modern life and post-modern society, the more we are incentivized as individuals to regress to childhood because children are much more creative and imaginative than others by regressing to a pre-self state, by blurring our boundaries, making them fuzzy, by beginning to confuse internal and external objects, we become much more creative, we let loose our imagination and then we are better able, better adapted to cope in a post-modern environment. So our civilization incentivizes us to become children and people infantilize their behaviors. We see people still cohabiting with their parents well into their 30s, marriages delayed, child-bearing and child-rearing are delayed or canceled altogether, people refuse to grow up, they refuse to assume adult accountability, responsibility and chores, they insist to remain children because remaining children is increasingly more adaptive, it's increasingly a very good reasonable choice. So they choose neotony, they try to baby-fy, they try to infantilize themselves, they choose neotony and on the other hand they choose schizotypy even if they are not schizotypal, even if they don't have pathological schizotypy, schizotypy becomes a lifestyle choice, becomes a personal style, becomes a kind of conformity asset, becomes a form of virtual signaling, so schizotypy is in vogue, it's in fashion. To remind you, schizotypy is a set of characteristics, personalities, personality characteristics and experiences which involves dissociation, imaginative states, creativity and so on and so forth. In schizotypy we have a continuum, we have a spectrum, prior to the conception of schizotypy we used to think that people are either or, either they are totally normal or they are totally schizotypal or schizophrenic, so they were either psychotic or they were normal or neurotic, so they were like categorical divisions and that is the fault of Crecline and of Zygmunt Freud. Later on we began to have a kind of more nuanced approach, starting I would say in the 60s. We began to have a more nuanced approach, there were outliers and dissidents and free thinkers like R. D. Lang which were way out of the mainstream, but there were people who were mainstream scholars such as Hans Eising, Eising for example suggested the trait of psychoticism, he said that there are three traits that define every person and they are psychoticism, extroversion and neuroticism, so he had a model of personality and one of the elements was psychoticism and it was very similar to intelligence constrained factor in his three factor model of personality. Psychoticism was an agglomerate, was a constellation of traits, it included for example impulsivity and sensation seeking, what we call today novelty seeking and these were divided to even more specific traits, for example you could have narrow impulsivity which is unthinking responsibility, you could have risk taking, you could have non-planning, you can have liveliness, you can have reactance etc etc, so psychoticism was not one trait but a family of traits, sensation seeking was one of them, so Eising was the one who introduced the idea which was later verified and confirmed in quite a few studies, that psychoticism must be somehow connected to creativity, I will not go into the reasons right now although it's a fascinating topic in itself and I advise you to watch my video on the connection between art and narcissism, but here we have a situation where we started 130, 140 years ago believing that people are either healthy or psychotic and then within the healthy group we started to think of people who are totally healthy and people who are neurotic but they are still not psychotic and then there were all kinds of middle of the middle of the way scholars who tried to find interstitial, the seams between psychosis and normality and so for example Cunberg came with the idea of borderline, borderline personality disorder is on the verge of psychosis but is not psychotic and then there was Eising who said that actually psychoticism is an element of every personality, depends on the weight of the psychoticism but it's an element of every personality and it is the found of creativity. To understand where all this is going we need to time travel, we need to go back in time to Emil Kruppelin, Emil Kruppelin was a towering figure in very very very early psychology in the early childhood of psychology. He was, he tried to medicalize, he was among the first to try to medicalize psychology and the way he did it was very similar to Carlos Linus, he began to compile lists, he began to classify different forms of psychotic illness so he came up with dementia precox which today we call schizophrenia, manic depression in depressive insanity which today we call bipolar disorder and other non-psychotic states. Kruppelin is the real father of the DSM because the DSM until the most recent edition and even in the most recent edition has a categorical list oriented, list based view of human mental illness. So the DSM is seriously heavily concerned with compiling lists of traits, list of behaviors, classifying categorizing differential diagnosis between diagnosis etc etc. That's all Kruppelin's work. It's the Kruppelin, Kruppelinite way of of regarding mental illness. At the same time there was another guy, Eugen Bloiler which I consider even greater than Sigmund Freud, an obscure forgotten figure because Freud was much better at public relations. So Eugen Bloiler who coined, who coined, who literally was the father of most modern, most language used in modern psychiatry. He coined the words schizophrenia, he coined the word autism. I mean Bloiler was a giant, was a genius. Bloiler did not agree with Kruppelin. He said that the separation between sanity and madness, it's a degree, it's a question of degree. He said that madness, psychosis was just an extreme expression of thoughts and behaviors that are present in varying degrees throughout the population. He said everyone is a little mad and then a little more mad and then we have mad people. So he said psychosis is simply taking things to extreme but all the elements of psychosis exist in healthy people. That was the spectrum approach which is now gradually being adopted in the diagnostic and statistical manual, edition 5, when it comes to personality disorders. Everything is on a spectrum and then you had Iseng and you had Gordon Claridge and they had adopted Bloiler's approach and they tried to construct a personality theory which was dimensional, were cognitive and behavioral variations are spread, are smeared across a whole spectrum and so we can find psychotic elements, narcissistic elements, neurotic elements in totally otherwise healthy people. Claridge was the one who named his concept of schizotypal spectrum, schizotyping. It's his invention, he coined the word. He studied unusual experiences in the general healthy population and then he clustered the symptoms and then he compared the symptoms to people diagnosed with schizophrenia and Claridge came up with the view that the personality trait of psychoticism in its extreme form psychosis is much more complex than anyone had thought and he said there were four factors. Number one unusual experiences, the disposition to have unusual perceptual and other cognitive experiences such as hallucinations, magical or superstitious belief and interpretation of events for example delusions. Number two cognitive disorganization, a tendency for thoughts to become derailed, disorganized or tangential. It's known as a formal thought disorder or word salad. Word salad is typical of psychotics, not of narcissists. A third element in psychosis or schizotyping, the range, the spectrum of psychoticism. A third element is introverted anhedonia, a tendency to be introverted, a tendency to be emotionally flat, a tendency to have a social behavior, schizoid actually associated with a deficiency in the ability to feel pleasure from social and physical stimulation including sex. The fourth element is impulsive non-conformity, the disposition defines reactants, the disposition to have unstable moods and behaviors particularly with regard to rules, authority and social conventions. Okay this was Claridge's view of psychoticism and you're already beginning to see the convergence between many elements of schizotyping and many elements of narcissism and psychopathy and as we said, as I said in previous videos, the narcissist does not have a self, he does not have an ego and in this sense he is a schizoid, he is on the schizotyping spectrum and as Kernberg has suggested 40 years ago he is on the verge of psychosis, the narcissist. We will come in a minute to the psychopath. Similarly, if psychopathy is much more nuanced than wannabe experts online would have us believe, it's much more nuanced. So let's summarize up to here and then continue. Neotony is an evolutionary adaptation whereby members of a species become, adopt or retain childlike traits, behaviors, cognitions, emotions and physical properties well into adulthood. It's an adaptation because it allows them to extract benefits from the environment. That's neotony. Schizotyping is a form of neotony. Schizotyping is the psychological equivalent of neotony because it's a regression to a very early childhood state where there was no self, where there were no boundaries and there was no distinction between external and internal objects. This is where we are right now and when we discuss schizotyping we need to think of clarriages, observations that schizotyping involves unusual experiences, cognitive disorganization, introverted on hedonia and impulsive nonconformity. Okay, when we study personality we usually apply what we call factor models. Factor models are models which describe personalities in terms of factors, in terms of components, ingredients to use a cooking analogy. So the most widespread model is known as the five-factor model but there are other models, I mentioned intelligence, I mentioned isanks, there are many models with factors. We use the five-factor model because it had been validated by many studies and it seems to be the most powerful way we have to capture the essence of personality via its interacting components. And so when we take clarriages breakdown of psychoticism or schizotyping and we combine it with the five-factor model we get some very interesting results. For example, clarities said that unusual experiences are an integral part of schizotyping and it seems that the five-factor model combines it with high neuroticism and with openness to experience. Now openness to experience could take the form of risk-taking, adrenaline junk junk junkie, novelty seeking which are very very common features of psychopaths. Unusual experience in combination with positive affectivity predicts religiosity and spirituality. In this sense religiosity, religion, the belief in God, belief in spirits, in angels, all this, they're indicative of a tendency towards psychosis and in many respects this is a form of delusional disorder, culturally accepted, socially tolerated delusional disorder but mental illness all the same. Religion is a mental illness, end of story. So when we combine unusual experiences with neuroticism, openness to experience from the five-factor model this is what we get. What about introverted anedonia? When we combine this element of psychoticism with the five-factor model we see that it is linked to neuroticism and low extroversion. This fits well with the schizoid narcissist or with the schizoid phase in overt classic grandiose narcissism and of course it fits perfectly with covert narcissism. The cognitive disorganization factor is linked to low conscientiousness. It's if you take all the five factors and combine them with clarages you get a fully dimensional model of schizotyping and it's proof positive that there is a continuum between normal personalities and schizotypo personalities, schizotyping. Schizotyping has been linked to other questionnaires, other tests like temperament and character inventory etc etc. Now in the temperament and character inventory there is something called self-transcendence. It's a trait associated with openness to spiritual ideas and experiences and it has moderate positive association correlation with schizotyping particularly with unusual experiences. So here's another test, another measure which confirms that religion and religiosity are schizotypo. They are towards the end of the pathological side of schizotypy where psychosis resides and happens. Kloninger describe the specific combination of self-transcendence, low cooperativeness and low self-directedness as schizotypo personalities type and additional research proved that this specific combination of traits is associated with a high risk of schizotyping in other words with a high risk for psychosis. But wait a minute, when we say high self-transcendence, low cooperativeness, low self-directedness, low conscientiousness, what are we talking about? Isn't this a very good description of psychopathy? Yes, it's a good description of psychopathy. Low cooperativeness, self-directedness, combined with high self-transcendence resulting openness to odd and unusual ideas and behaviors associated intimately with a distorted perception of reality with an impaired reality testing. So schizotypy seems to begins to look like a catch all term for maladaptive, a range, a whole range of maladaptive personality traits. And here is the interesting thing, studies have shown that element, I mean, when you take schizotypy to a certain point on the spectrum, what you get is increased psychopathy but lower narcissism. Amazing. In other words, we are beginning to see two types of psychopaths. One psychopath who is grandiose and his grandiosity propels him and impels him to behave consumatiously, defiantly, impulsively, recklessly. That would be the primary psychopath. But if we take the psychopath and move him across the spectrum of schizotypy towards the psychotic end, we get a secondary psychopath. That's a psychopath with access to emotions and empathy and a psychopath that is very low on narcissism. It's not a grandiose psychopath. That would be, for example, the borderline. Borderlines have grandiosity but their grandiosity is not the pronounced feature of borderline. The pronounced feature of borderline is on the being on the verge of psychosis. Borderlines often have psychotic microepisodes and all the schizotypy features, including decompensation acting out in a transition to secondary psychopathy. This emotional dysregulation, etc., etc., they drive the borderline towards the psychotic end of the schizotypy spectrum where we also find the secondary psychopath. Now we're beginning to understand how borderlines transition into secondary psychopathy. They are one and the same, actually, according when you combine this schizotypy model with the 5-factor model or with other inventories, such as the temperament and character inventory. This is very interesting because it's the first time we begin to see how all personality disorders converge within a single spectrum, which is a spectrum of schizotypy. And I'm suggesting that schizotypy's main feature is main two features, and this is my standard model of personality disorders, which is actually an enhancement of this schizotypy model. I claim that schizotypy relies on two pillars, a lack of constellated and integrated self, no ego, and a blurring of internal and external objects because of failure in boundary formation. I refer you to the article by Lang, Birkas, Laszlo, and others, December 2018. In the academic journal Psychological Reports, the article is titled Schizotypal Trades and the Dark Triad from an Ecological Perspective. Schizotypal Trades and the Dark Triad from an Ecological Perspective. So, we are beginning to converge. We're beginning to converge and we are beginning to see how secondary psychopathy, how covert narcissism, how narcissism itself emerge on different points along the schizotypy spectrum, along the schizotypy range, increased borderline personality traits goes hand in hand with increased psychopathy in a single particular point on the schizotypy range. When we reach this point, suddenly there are borderline traits coupled with psychopathy traits. Okay, there is evidence that schizotypy correlates with differentially enhanced and impaired aspects of cognitive function, cognitive deficits, impaired reality testing. I keep telling you that the narcissist is no longer with us. His reality testing is short. He has no access to reality. What he does instead, he internalizes reality. For example, he internalizes external objects in order to control them because he's terrified of losing control, being abandoned, etc., etc. And because he has no ego and no self to guide, you need an ego. You need a self to guide, to discipline, to moderate, to modulate, to curate. There's no ego there. There's no self. So, these internal objects are in constant conflict, constant fight. They are polarized. So, these findings that the schizotypy correlates with cognitive dysfunctions and impaired cognitive style, impaired reality testing, they indicate that schizotypy is positively correlated, positively associated with enhanced global processing over local processing, lower latent inhibition, attention and memory deficits, enhanced creativity and imagination, and enhanced associative thinking. Now, it's easy to understand why, for example, borderlines, narcissists and even many psychopaths prefer fantasy to reality. The fantasy defense mechanism is predominant in borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. But why? We could have asked ourselves. We can ask, you know, there are like dozens of defense mechanisms, for example, intellectualization, rationalization, I mean, you name it, projection. Why do the narcissists, why do the narcissists in the borderline prefer fantasy? Because of what I just said, they have lower latent inhibition, which leads to impulsiveness and dis-empathy, lack of empathy. They have attention, not lack of empathy, but dis-empathy. When their impulses take over, they are less empathic. They have attention and memory deficits, but they have an enhanced creativity and imagination and enhanced associative thinking. And these are the ingredients that go into making the fantasy cake. Fantasy requires creativity, imagination and associative thinking. Fantasy also requires a disrupted interface with reality, memory deficits, cognitive deficits, attention deficits. Fantasy and creativity rely on partial access to reality. They are compensatory. Where your access to reality is impaired, your judgment of reality is wrong, erroneous very often, where you don't process information and data, where you filter them or repress them or reframe them, you need fantasy. Fantasy kicks in to fill in the gaps. One very well-known fantasy mechanism is confabulation. So fantasy compensates for all these elements of schizotypy. Now, some of the features in schizotypy can be diagnosed in mental illness. They are observable and discernible in mental illness, but schizotypy is not about mental illness. It's a personality theory. It's a theory of the entire personality and it actually says that everyone is schizotypo to this or to that extent. Schizotypy could be beneficial. Creativity, artistic achievement rely on schizotypy and usual experiences, cognitive disorganization. Jackson came up with a concept of benign schizotypy. He said that certain classes of religious experience are forms of benign schizotypy because they solve problems. They have adaptive value. They make you feel good. They make you feel egocintonic. They motivate you to act in certain ways and inhibit you in other ways which are long-term beneficial. They secure beneficial outcomes from the environment. They prevent you from ending up in jail. So he said that benign schizotypy, even when it manifests in a delusional way like religion, has adaptive value. It's a positive adaptation. So schizotypy is not a bad thing. It's not a curse word. It's like narcissism. And narcissism is not a bad thing. We have healthy narcissism. Schizotypy there's been a debate about the extent of schizotypy in healthy populations. And so there are basically three approaches quasi-dimensional, quasi-dimensional, and fully-dimensional. And schizotypy reflects cognitive, biological vulnerability to psychosis because of regression to early childhood when we had no ego defect, where it was children, we had no ego defenses. There is no self there. And because there's no self, the entire inner internal environment is dysregulated. And it's difficult to tell the difference between out there and in here. It's difficult to reconcile internal objects. It's difficult to force them to collaborate. So schizotypy reflects vulnerability to psychosis because of the level of chaos and disorganization inside. But there is a debate whether everyone on earth alive has a modicum, some measure of disorganization and chaos, but it is so low that it is latent and dormant and never expressed and never manifested. Only when it is triggered by appropriate environmental events, conditions, stressors, substances like drugs, only then the disorganization and chaos manifest and express. And so susceptibility to stress, for example, would condition some people to express their schizotypy much more than other people. And we need to think. That's why I'm suggesting to reconceive personality disorders as post traumatic conditions. Because in post trauma, there is intolerance of stress of any kind. Stress immediately triggers decompensation, immediately triggers acting out, immediately triggers schizotypy or schizotypal reactions. I said that there are three models and we'll start with the first and oldest one, which is the quasi-dimensional model. Quasi-dimensional model was proposed by Bloyler, of course, who coined the word schizophrenia. Bloyler said that there are two types of continuity between normality and psychosis. There is continuity between the sick person and his or her relatives, so Bloyler was the first to introduce 100 and odd years ago, 120, 30 years ago. He's an amazing man, amazing genius. He was the first to introduce a relational approach to mental illness, to mental health. He said that schizotypy manifests, is expressed in the relationships between the sick, the ill person, the mentally ill person and his or her relatives. And another dimension is between the patient's pre-morbid and post-morbid personalities. Personality before the illness, the personality after the illness, after the onset of, for example, psychosis, after the onset of personality disorder. He said, if one observes the relatives of our patients, one often finds in them peculiarities, which are qualitatively identical with those of the patients themselves, so that the disease appears to be only a quantitative increase of the anomalies seen in the parents and the siblings. And this is exactly how we conceive of personality disorders. We say that many personalities, or not all, but many personality disorders, are the outcomes of early childhood environment, of abuse, of trauma, of parentifying, of breach of boundaries, of idolizing, of not allowing separation, individuation, of a dead mother, narcissistic, selfish, absent, etc. This observation is as old as Bloyler. He suggested that human environment conditions people to become ill, and therefore illness is a contextual, relational, environmental thing. I can't tell you how revolutionary this thinking was at his time, in his time. On the second point, the relationship between the personality before the illness and after the illness, Bloyler mentions peculiarities that are displayed by the patient before admission to hospital. And he said, these peculiarities are premonitions. They're premonitory symptoms of the disease. There are red alerts, they're warning signs. They're at the very least are indications of a predisposition to develop the illness. And again, Bloyler was a pioneer, because he had hinted at genetics when there was no genetics. He said, there must be something in these patients which predisposes them to become ill. And so despite these observations of continuity, Bloyler didn't dare to go all the way. He remained committed to the disease model of psychosis and schizophrenia, and he invoked the concept of latent schizophrenia. He wrote, in the latent form of schizophrenia, we can see in a nutshell, all the symptoms and all the combinations of symptoms which are present in the manifest types of the disease. The quasi-dimensional view of schizotypy as propounded by Rado, Miel, M-E-E-H-L and others, they say that schizotypal symptoms represent less explicitly expressed manifestations of the underlying disease process, which is schizophrenia. Rado proposed the term schizotype to describe the person whose genetic maker gave him or her a lifelong propensity, proclivity, predisposition to schizophrenia. The quasi-dimensional model is called quasi-dimensional because the only dimension it postulates is gradations, gradations of severity, gradations of expliciveness, gradations of manifestation in relation to the symptoms of a disease process. So the spectrum is a spectrum of quantity, not of quality. Enter the dimensional approach. Dimensional approach was a derivative of an innovation at the time in psychology, personality theory. As western civilization and society became more and more individualized after the 1920s and 1930s, there was a reorientation of psychology from relationships, from contexts, from environment to the individual, the indivisible, the atom, the personality. This was called the personality theory. And so personality theory and the dimensional approach to schizotype suggested that full-blown psychotic illness is only the most extreme end of schizotype spectrum. There is a natural continuum between people with low and high level of schizotype. The model is associated with the work of Hans Eising, the aforementioned Hans Eising. He regarded the person exhibiting the full-blown manifestations of psychosis as simply someone occupying the extreme upper end of his psychoticism trait or dimension. And so it seems that there is some support for the dimensional model of schizotyping because it seems a schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, schizoid personality disorder, schizotable personality disorder, and I would add cluster B personality disorders because they are all centered around the schizoid core. And if you take all this, there seems to be intimate connections of gradation in quantity and in quality. In other words, both the number of manifestations increases and the intensity of the expressed trait or behavior increases, both quality and quantity. The reason I'm adding cluster B and claiming that cluster B is a schizoid core is because there is a whole school of extremely prominent scholars, the scholars which are the authority on the self, scholars like Winnicott, like Spitz, like Guntrip, like Fairburn, like others. And these scholars were the ones who who had suggested that schizoid personality is at the core of cluster B personalities and others, not only cluster B. So I'm standing on the shoulders of giants and following the footsteps of giants. When I say that the schizotyping spectrum should definitely include cluster B personality disorders. And indeed, when we combine it with a five-factor model, we get borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and anti-social personality disorder, aka psychopathy in its extreme form. So this leads me to the fully dimensional approach. Claridge called his model the fully dimensional approach, fully dimensional model. According to him, schizotyping is a dimension of personality normally distributed throughout the population. And in this, he agrees with Isaac. There's no big innovation here. But he says schizophobia is a breakdown process. It's totally distinct from the continuously distributed trait of schizotyping. In other words, he said, you're all wrong. Schizophobia is not a member of the family of schizotyping, schizotyping illnesses or schizotyping disorders. I am of this view. I think that schizoaffective disorder, schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic to a large extent, anti-social disorder, they all centered around the schizoid core. But these personality disorders are positive adaptations to the schizoid core and they prevent schizophobia. The only thing standing between a personality disordered person and psychosis is his disorder. The disorder, the personality disorder protects the patient from becoming psychotic, protects the patient, defense the patient against schizophrenia. If the patient were to come into contact with his or her schizoid core, they would have been rendered psychotic or schizophrenic. The personality disorder is another adaptation intended to prevent precisely this development, precisely this development. Schizophrenia in his in Claridge's model is a breakdown and he said in itself schizophrenia has a graded continuum and he said okay we can place schizotypal personality disorder on one end and schizophrenia on the other but we should not confuse the two spectra, we should not confuse the two issues. There is schizotyping which is normal distributed in all the population and its abnormal manifestations are various personality disorders, schizoaffective disorders and then we have separately a continuum of schizophrenia at one end of each is schizotypal personality disorder and at the other is schizophrenia and that's the model I adhere to. It's fully dimensional because not only is the personality trait of schizotyping continuously graded but the independent continuum of the breakdown processes is also graded, it's all non categorical. The fully dimensional approach argues that full-blown psychosis is not just high schizotyping but must involve other factors that may make it qualitatively different, pathological, there's a differential diagnosis and I fully agree. Narcissists, border lights, psychopaths, histrionics, paranoids, schizoids, schizotypals, they're all on the schizotypy model when their traits intermix with schizotypy the results are personality disorders and personality disorders are the defenses which evolved over time mainly in childhood to isolate the patient, to isolate the person from ultimate schizophrenia and psychosis. They are anti-psychotic medication personality disorders, the anti-psychotic defenses and now you understand why the patient is so invested in his personality disorder, why it's almost impossible to heal and cure in reverse personality disorders with the exception perhaps of borderline independent personality disorders, why because it's the only thing separating the patient from total, unmitigated, all-encompassing, all-pervasive, raving madness.