 My name is Sam Wabnien. I'm a professor of psychology in several universities and the author of Malignant Self-Life, Narcissism Revisited and other books and e-books and videos and everything else about personality disorders with emphasis on class-to-be personality disorders. And today we are going to deal with a very loaded question. Is narcissism inherited? Is it in our genes? Can we pass it on to our children? Is it, on the other hand, acquired? Maybe it's only the outcome of upbringing, family dysfunction, mistreatment, abusing on its forms. Or is it epigenetic, a combination of both, when the family environment or other environments induce changes in the way that genes express themselves? We're going to discuss all this at great length and mention all the important luminaries, scholars and experts throughout this video. But before we do this, a little philosophy. I want to put this in context. Why suddenly? Why are we discussing this issue now? What causes us to question the consensus that had emerged about pathological narcissism since 1915? Why 1915? Because in 1915, another Jew, as intelligent as I am, which is not easy, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay titled, very inspiringly, On Narcissism. He was the first to use the word narcissism to describe, guess what, narcissism. And ever since then, there has been a tradition. A tradition of viewing pathological narcissism as the outcome of family environment. Pathological narcissism is a lifelong pattern of traits and behaviors which signify infatuation and obsession with oneself to the exclusion of all other people and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one's gratification, dominance and ambition. This is how narcissism was first defined as a secondary phenomenon. Children are like that, but they are supposed to grow out of it. They are supposed to develop what is called object relations. They are supposed to notice other people. And they are supposed to transfer their emotional energy, for example, their ability to love, their libido, their life force, so to speak, onto other people and form diets, form bonds and attachments to other people. And if they don't, if they remain stuck at the primary phase of narcissism, the childhood phase, the infantile phase, if they regress and remain embedded in early childhood, then we are talking about pathological narcissism. As distinct from healthy narcissism, which we all possess, pathological narcissism is maladaptive. It's rigid. It's persisting. It causes significant distress and functional impairment in a variety of settings. Pathological narcissism, as I said, was first described in detail by Freud in his essay on narcissism, but there were many other major contributors to the study of narcissism. Melanie Klein, Karen Hornai, Franz Kohut, Otto Kernberg, Theodor Millen, Elsa Ronningston, Gunderson, Masterson, Robert Hare, many others. And what was common to all of them is the belief that, or the template, the intellectual template, that pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse and trauma is rather immaterial, surprisingly. It's a bit irrelevant. The perpetrators could be parents, teachers, other adults, peers, society at large. Pampering, smothering, spoiling, engulfing the child, placing the child on a pedestal, idolizing the child, instrumentalizing the child, telling the child that he can do no wrong. These are all forms of abuse because they don't allow the child to develop boundaries, to rub against reality, to use this friction to grow. They don't allow the child to separate from the parent. Okay, so this is the traditional orthodox view of narcissism, the view of narcissism that I teach at university, and all other, actually, professors of psychology teach. So what gives? What has happened in the last 10 or 20 years that people are beginning to question this etiology, this causation? Why people are now talking about genes, about epigenetics? Why various scholars are trying to isolate alleles, and I don't know what else, in an attempt to embed narcissism in some bodily function, or bodily element, or bodily structure? I think several things have happened between 1915 and now, and these things all conspired to drive us to medicalize pathological narcissism, or at least attempt to medicalize. First of all, we had discovered that other cluster B personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, we have discovered that these personality disorders have very pronounced genetic causation and brain abnormalities. Similar to what has happened with schizophrenia, similar to what has happened with depression, we are discovering that actually several cluster B, important cluster B personality disorders, may well be, may well be, these functions of the brain, brain abnormalities, and that these brain abnormalities or these functions are founded upon flawed genetics. So today we no longer conceive of borderline personality disorder as merely a reaction to childhood abuse, including sexual abuse. Today we realize that someone who has borderline personality disorder has problems with his or her brain and some very peculiar genetics. So people are saying, well, if this is true for psychopathy, if this is true for borderline, why not for narcissists? And on they go, on the quest for the Holy Grail, the narcissism gene. The second reason is, and I think possibly even more influential reason, is Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler established or joined and then enlarged the Nazi party. And then one of the tenets, one of the credos, one of the creeds of the Nazi party was eugenics. The belief that you can improve the human race by weeding out, exterminating and eradicating outliers such as intellectually challenged people or very, very sick people or mentally ill people, et cetera, et cetera. So eugenics was founded on the belief that mental illness is genetics based. That if you were to eliminate the reservoir of mentally ill people, the next generation will be far more mentally healthy. And so often Nazism has been discredited by losing the Second World War and when we discover the atrocities of Auschwitz, et cetera, et cetera. There was a backlash, backlash against genetics. A backlash against associating genes, heredity with mental phenomena, not only mental health, not only mental illness, but any mental phenomena, for example intelligence. To this very day, it's a no-no in Akadem to talk about the genetic foundation of intelligence and whether there are groups of people which will remain unnamed, whose intelligence is lower than other groups of people owing to the genetics. This is a no-no. This is politically incorrect. If you say such things in a loud publicly, you might as well kiss your job goodbye. And this is a direct, a direct inheritance from the period of Nazism, because the Nazis did this. So if the Nazis did this, we should never do this again. And so what has happened during the 50s and 60s and 70s, all kinds of psychologists and scholars, they said, well, if we can't attribute mental illness to genetics, we should attribute it to something else. What can we attribute it to? Ah, well, if it's not nature, it's nurture. If it's not genes, it's mother. And so they began to vilify and demonize mothers. Women, actually. It was a misogynistic move, and a misogynistic movement within psychology. At the time, there was the Schizophrenogenic mother. The belief was that Schizophrenia was the outcome of the wrong upbringing by a dead mother. By a mother who was not responsive and called and rejecting. It was a negative stereotype. And you could find it all over the place in the 50s, 60s, 70s and even 80s. And the belief was that mothers cause mental illness. Ironically, it was a woman who first suggested it, Frieda from Reichmann. Frieda from Reichmann has coined the term Schizophrenogenic mother in 1948. And she wrote, The Schizophrenic is painfully distrustful and resentful of other people. Due to severe, early warp and rejection he had encountered in important people of his infancy and childhood. As a rule, mainly in Schizophrenogenic mother. So it was a woman who brought mothers into the stew, into the brew. It was a woman who had pointed the finger at mothers and said, Mothers make mentally ill children. And then of course men were all over the place. Bateson, Leeds, Winn. Winn, W-Y-N-N-E. Winn had written as late as 1981. Scholarly articles published in academic journals where he had insisted that despite the cumulative evidence of biochemical disturbances in the brain and so on and so forth, mothers, mothers created, mothers engendered, mothers fostered. Mothers were the etiology behind bad mothers, not good enough mothers in the language of Donald Winnicott. Mothers were responsible for Schizophrenia. And there was a belief that mother, early childhood, mother-child interactions in early childhood, they were the ones which determined later psychopathology. If you see someone mentally ill, go look for his mother. Go look what his mother did to him. And so the whole etiology of psychiatric disorders and psychiatric disease became mother-oriented. There was a familial transmission of psychopathology that had nothing to do with genetics, but had to do with being a bed rejecting far away abusive mothers. There was even a phrase, refrigerator mother. And there was a whole theory called refrigerator mother theory. I'm kidding you not. This was the belief that autism is caused by lack of maternal warmth. The mother is like a refrigerator. She is cold. She is frozen. She is withdrawn. She is avoidant. She puts distance. She does not allow attachment. She doesn't bond with the child. And so because of this, because of this refrigeration of the relationship, of the attachment relationship between mother and child, the child develops autism. So refrigerator mother, there was a phrase that was coined around 1950. And Leo Kanner, K-A-N-N-E-R, when he first identified autism in 1943, because Asperger, who was a Viennese Nazi doctor by the way, described Asperger's syndrome, but he didn't exactly come up with the concept of autism. The concept of autism spectrum disorder came much later. Again, mysteriously or not so mysteriously during the Second World War. And at that time Leo Kanner noted the lack of warmth among parents of autistic children. Parents, particularly mothers, are to blame for their children's atypical behavior, which included rigid rituals, speech difficulties, and self-isolation. Today we know of course that schizophrenia is a brain disease, utter medical condition, and that autism has very, very powerful genetic precursors and predictors, and in all likelihood is a brain disorder and has nothing to do with mothering. And yet for decades mothers had been blamed for these conditions. And so now we're beginning to suspect, where people tell us mothers are guilty for the creation of narcissists. Mothers make the narcissists. Mothers are abusive to the child, and the child reacts by developing a defense mechanism, a facade, an imaginary friend, a god, the false self, and becomes a narcissist using his grandiosity to fend off pain, to fend off the hurt that mother meets out to him. When we postulate this template of motherly, motherly rejection, or on the contrary motherly, motherly assimilation and the child's reaction, we are a bit suspicious because we say wait a minute, we've been mistaken with schizophrenia. We've been mistaken, badly mistaken with schizophrenia. Mother, mothering, parenting has nothing to do with schizophrenia. We've been badly mistaken with autism spectrum disorder. There's no such thing as refrigerator mother. And even if there is, it has nothing to do with autism. We've been mistaken so many times when we had blamed mothers. Maybe we shouldn't do it again. Maybe narcissism has nothing to do with upbringing, with family environment, with nurture, with caring, with loving, with smothering, with spoiling. Maybe it has nothing to do with mother to cut the long story short. Maybe it has to do with essentially with genetics. And so this is the second reason we are talking about genetics. And then there's a general trend. There's a general trend to medicalize psychology. Psychology feels very inferior because they are not taken seriously. I'm a physicist by training. And as a physicist, I don't consider psychology a science. Nor do I think that psychology can ever be a science in principle because the raw material, the subject matter of psychology, is so mutable, so changeable, so hyper complex and so unpredictable that to claim that psychology is a science or could be a science just because it uses scientific methodology and statistics is ridiculous in my eyes. And in the eyes of most scientists. So psychology is trying to become a branch of medicine. Trying to become a branch of medicine by somehow merging with psychiatry. So there's psychopharmacology medications. Or it tries to become a medical branch by medicalizing conditions by saying, for example, narcissistic personality disorder is a metaphor. What actually happens, there's a genetic disorder. So it's actually psychology is a branch of genetics. It's as rigorous as genetics. It's as real as genetics. It's as observable as genetics. We can isolate things, small things in laboratories and look at them through the microscope, the narcissism gene. And if we do this, then we can wear white lab coats. We can be considered scientists and not just quacks and not just literary figures because today psychology is a branch of literature. It had been a branch of literature since Ziegmund Freud. Ziegmund Freud was the author of fiction akin to Dostoevsky. And in this sense, I fully agree with Jordan Peterson. So psychology wants respectability. And one way to obtain this is to claim a genetic origin or brain abnormality origin for psychological disorders. And then there's a general tendency to try to find single cause etiologies. The single thing that explains everything. So today we see this with the Black Lives Matter thing. Black Lives Matter, racism explains everything. Racism explains why black people are dying of COVID. Racism explains why they don't make as much money as whites. Racism explains housing. Racism, we found the single button, the single key. The single explanation, the organizing principle. So we are in search of organizing principle. Now, bad parenting or bad motherhood is one such organizing principle. Racism is another. And perhaps genetics is an attempt to reduce very, very complex conditions which involve the human mind, which is the most complex entity in the universe, much more complex than the universe. So we are trying to reduce all this into a single factor. Single factor, etiology. Similarly, we are trying to derive a single outcome from complex processes. So we describe very complex processes and say, well, this results in narcissism. This is reductionism. This is the attempt to take the complex and reduce it to the simple. How? By eliminating, by removing, by discarding, by rendering irrelevant. And so we have this general intellectual tendencies, not only in psychology, but in science generally. Then there is the issue of evolutionary psychology. Narcissism is beginning to be thought of as a positive evolutionary adaptation. Scholars are talking about high functioning narcissists or successful narcissists. Narcissists are to be emulated. And many, many scholars say that if you are narcissists, your chances at assortative mating are much higher. Self-seeking life. So people would tend to be attracted to you because of their own narcissism. Your chances to find a mate are much higher if you are a narcissist. There are psychologists like Nicholas Holtzman and Brent Donilon. And they describe assortative mating, which is heavily influenced by narcissistic traits. Reactive, reactive inheritance. A person's physical appearance shapes the personality. So very handsome dudes like me, normally, become narcissists. Or very intelligent dudes also like me, become narcissists. Narcissism is linked in numerous studies to attractiveness, to strength, to smooth movement, to athletic prowess, to intellectual achievements, sharper facial features, larger head, thinner lids, symmetrical faces. You name it, thick eyebrows, thick eyebrows, and so on. So there's a lot of attempt to reduce narcissism to a stereotypical physique, stereotypical body image. And the belief that narcissism advances short-term mating. It provides evolutionary fitness. In other words, it allows the narcissist to pass on his genes. And all the qualities associated with narcissism being attractive, for example, or on the other end of the spectrum being sexually coercive. Narcissists are involved in sexual assault much more than the average. These kind of behaviors and traits, they allow for people either to mate willingly with willing partners, or to force partners to pass on the genes and have reproductive success. And also, narcissists are dominant. There's no question about this. They enter the room, their presence is felt. You can't ignore a narcissist. You can abhor a narcissist. Ask me. But you can't ignore a narcissist. And so it's a way, if the narcissist is clever enough, if he's willing to fake it till he makes it, if he's willing to play the game, to pretend that he's a pathic, that he's loving, that he's supportive, that he's wise, that he's, you know, we know quite a few of these. And they can lead the herds. They take the money of brain dead people and they become rich. They acquire social status. And so there are emotional systems involved in narcissism that allow the narcissist to express hubristic courtiness, hubristic pride. And this makes the narcissist appear dominant. And this paves the way to high social status, which then translates in the ability to obtain mates in assortative mating, food, material goods, shelter, and of course, survival. In other words, narcissism is beginning to be considered an evolutionary package. A package which provides dominance, social status, access to mates and so on. And when you put all of them together, you have the equivalent of co-evolution. If you're dominant, you have social status. If you have social status, you can obtain a mate. If you can obtain a mate, you propagate your genes, etc., etc. All these things evolved simultaneously. This is a process called co-evolution. Evolved simultaneously to create the perfect storm. And a perfect storm is one of the best definitions of narcissism that I know. So there is this evolutionary strand of psychology which tries to explain narcissism as an evolutionary adaptation. But let's go back. Now that we have surveyed the territory and we understand where all these people are coming from are personality disorders, the outcomes of inherited traits. Can they be traced down to one or more genes or gene arrays or gene complexes? Are personality disorders connected to the body, to the brain or are they brought on by abusive and traumatizing upbringing? Who is right? Maybe the confluence, the same results of both, nurture and nature, who is right? Who is right? So we have to go back to someone, a psychologist called Paul Meale, M-E-E-H-L. He was at the time studying schizophrenia. And he was describing the disorder and its trajectory. Schizophrenia, by the way, is an amazing mental health disorder. It's a brain disease. But the mental manifestations of the disease are mind-boggling. They teach us a lot about internal objects, external objects. And they teach us a lot about narcissism because exactly like Karen Bird, I think that narcissistic and borderline disorders are actually forms of psychosis and possibly distant cousins of schizophrenia. But never mind all this. So Meale was studying schizophrenia when he came up with the idea that there is a predispositional vulnerability. There is a template. There is a preparedness. There is an unexpressed genetic wish. So he called it predispositional vulnerability. And the name he gave it was diathesis. So there is diathesis, proclivity, tendency, inclination that is expressed in the genes. The genes are ready to express. They're just waiting for the right triggers, the right inducement, the right stimulus from the environment. So what he said is there is diathesis, which is a genetic template, and then there's stress. The stress of life experiences. And this stress acts upon the genes and forces them to manifest and to express. And so he called it the diathesis stress model. Now the stress can be psychological. It can be biological. You get sick. It can be situational. It can be social. And it even can be genetic. Stress can come from the inside when other genes express, when other genes are activated. So stress can come from multiple sources, some of them internal, many of them external. But whenever the person comes across stress, whenever the person is exposed to stress, if he has predispositional vulnerability to a mental illness, that mental illness will erupt, will become manifest, will also express. And this diathesis, this pre-existing template is stable and it is also latent. It's not expressed. The stress exposes it. The stress activates it. But it's there lurking, waiting. Stress is a life event or a series of events or a chronic condition. And the thing about stress is it disrupts a person's psychological homeostasis and equilibrium. We all aspire to a state of equilibrium, to a state of homeostasis, to a state of inertia actually. We are all in this sense entropic. We aspire to entropy. We aspire to stasis. We aspire to just sitting there. And we aspire to some of us called inner peace or nirvana or enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. We all aspire to peace. And what stress does, it destabilizes us. It discombobulates us. It decomposes us. It disrupts. It's disruptive. It destroys this equilibrium and homeostasis that we took such large pains to construct and took such a long time to construct. And the combination of predisposition and stress, if it exceeds a certain threshold, the person develops a mental disorder. Now we all have protective factors, factors that protect us from reaching this threshold. The stress comes from the environment. There's a series of stimuli from the environment. They're stressful. They act upon our genetic predisposition, upon our diathesis. But we have protective factors that somehow insulate us and isolate us, isolate us from the stress or somehow assimilate the stress, reframe the stress, digest the stress, emulate, transform the stress, so as not to reach the threshold. And these protective factors include, for example, positive parent-child attachment relationship. So if you had a positive attachment to your mother and your father, this is a protective factor. If you have a supportive peer network, if you have many friends, some friends, good friends, and they are supportive, they provide support. That's a protective factor. If you have social and emotional competence, a high status is a protective factor. And so all these factors ameliorate the stress and they don't allow it to reach the threshold. Even so, even if you do reach the threshold, it doesn't always translate into mental illness. Or if it does translate to mental illness, it could be in transitory form. Jung, the famous second father of psychoanalysis, analytic psychology, Jung had a period of five years where he had, technically, he experienced psychotic disorder. He was psychotic for five years. I don't know if people realize that. He was bonkers. He was raving mad for five years. He was talking to voices. He was seeing things. He was totally sick. Today he would have been on medication. At the time, had he exposed his condition, he would have been hospitalized, like Nietzsche. Nietzsche was also mentally ill. And these people, they develop mental illness as the outcome of stressors, especially Jung and Nietzsche, the examples again. Tolstoy, the same Tolstoy, also went through a period of mental illness after his 50th birthday, which culminated in his death in his 80s. But these people were in a window of vulnerability. There are periods in the lifespan where you are more vulnerable to mental illness than other periods, and we call them the windows of vulnerability. So for example, if you have traits, and we do believe today in trait psychology, we do believe today that some of these traits are genetically grounded, that they reflect the activity of a single gene or groups of gene, complexes of gene. So for example, extraversion, probably genetic related, agreeableness, agreeableness is such. And so these kind of people, extroverts and agreeable, they tend to create strong social support. And strong social support serves as a protective fact and fends off, protects against stressors and against losses. And so people like that, they don't develop depression very often. Your window of vulnerability is very limited. Conversely, if you have difficulty to develop or to maintain supportive social networks, you will be more vulnerable and you will have many more windows of vulnerability. You lose your job, you will develop depression, you will much more likely to develop depression because you're windows of vulnerability. So there is a direct linkage. One could almost say quantitative or numerical linkage between the number and quality of your protective factors and the number of windows of vulnerability. A child where the adults in the family have a history of depression, he grows up in a family where everyone is depressed. Or such a child who has been exposed early on to a specific stressor, for example parental rejection, abuse, exclusion or rejection by peers, this kind of child is more likely to develop depression later on as an adult. And he is more likely to develop depression later on as an adult unless he has protective factors. I'm repeating all this to make clear that it's not a pure situation. It's not like if you have the genes and you have the stress, you have the disorder. That's highly untrue. You have the genes, you have the stress, you may have the disorder. It depends on your protective factors, on your environment, on your friends, on your family, on your history, on your early childhood, on many numerous factors and then there is a question of window vulnerability. And so this is I think where the view of nature and nurture, nature and environment interacting gains credence, gains it becomes credible, becomes realistic and comprehensible because these protective factors are outside the individual and yet they regulate the individual's moods, the individual's emotions and the individual's mental health. So when we have breakups, when we have severe traumatic life stress wars, I don't know, divorce, you find that your wife is cheating on you, you lost your job, you have contracted COVID and you are 60 years old. So when you have all these, you may end up developing depression or you may end up developing bipolar disorder, at least the manic phase of bipolar disorder, but you may also develop certain behaviors, not necessarily mental illness. Combination of genes and stress can lead to the development of behaviors such as addictive behaviors, binge drinking, alcoholism and it may also trigger brain disorders such as schizophrenia. And so because the scene is so complex, because so many things interact with each other, for example children who grew up in a depressing household where the adults, the parents were depressed, if they have a good relationship with an adult who is not depressed, are far less likely to develop depression later in life. You see how intricate and complex this web, web of interconnections and details is. And so this led to an advance in thinking. Instead of the classic diathesis stress model, today we are far more inclined to believe in a differential susceptibility hypothesis. It was first proposed by Jay Belsky and it's a kind of diathetic model, it's a kind of model that also assumes that there's a template, a genetic template upon which the environment acts, a genetic template that reacts to stress by developing mental illness. But this model is far more nuanced because this model says if you have the genetic predisposition, if you have the gene for, I don't know, schizophrenia, if you have the genes for genes actually, it's never one gene by the way, it's usually a complex of genes, an array, a group, acting together. So if you have the genes for autism, or schizophrenia, for bipolar disorder, or for depression, or maybe in the future we will find the array of genes or whatever for cluster B personality disorders. We're already having inklings of such genes for borderline, for psychopathy. If you have these genes and they're in you and they're dormant, they're latent, they're asleep, they're lurking, and then you're exposed to stress and these genes are expressed. They're expressed. If this happens, this happens when you're exposed to negative environmental factors but it also happens when you're exposed to positive environmental factors. Negative environments and stress activate these genes but positive environments similarly activate these genes. So you could have a biological vulnerability and then when you are exposed to a stressor you will develop a psychopathology but you could also have this biological vulnerability and be exposed to a positive environment and then actually you will be better adapted to that environment because this so-called vulnerability will make you better suited, a better competitor will give you a relative competitive edge in the positive environment and we can think of many environments where actually a vulnerability becomes an advantage and in a way I've been saying it for many years because I've been saying that narcissism is a positive adaptation in narcissistic and psychopathic societies. As our societies become more and more narcissistic and more and more psychopathic and they are studies have been showing this consistently since the 1980s we are becoming more narcissistic and more psychopathic. In such environments the biological vulnerability which may underline narcissism becomes an advantage. The environment then becomes positive for the narcissists negative for his victims, positive for the narcissists. You see there's no value judgment in psychology there's no good and bad, right and wrong, sick and healthy, positive and negative. It all depends, it depends. In a healthy normal environment the biological vulnerability of the psychopath is a handicap, it's a disability and when he's exposed to stress he becomes defiant, he becomes impulsive, he becomes reckless and he self destructs. But if the environment is Nazi Germany exactly this biological vulnerability will render the psychopath supreme, will render him a winner, a victor. So Bersky's differential susceptibility hypothesis followed later by Boyce and Ellis biological sensitivity to context, another theory is that individuals do not simply vary in the degree to which they are vulnerable to the negative effects of adverse experience but they vary more generally in what we call developmental plasticity. We say that people are plastic first of all on the level of the brain it is true, there is what we call neuro plasticity you can rewire the brain you can put your hand in the brain and change the pathways, change the connections between neurons, create new memories and this is why talk therapy such as dialectical behavior therapy cognitive behavior therapy and even cold therapy which I had developed this is why talk therapies work because speech, communication, language they rewire the brain and similarly abuse in early childhood rewires the brain, creates wrong pathways counterproductive self-destructive self-defeating self-hating self-loathing negative negative inferiority complex pathways abuses, abuse uses leverages the brain's neuro plasticity against itself, against the individual but if this is true then individuals are plastic they are plastic, they are malleable they are like potting, they are more susceptible to environmental influence than we had thought and of course there is a spectrum some people are more plastic than others some people are more malleable than others some people's brains are more neuro plastic than others this is why some people experience more empathy than others this is why some people are more intelligent than others this is why some people are more something than others we luckily for the human race are not all cloned in the same production line we are all very different to each other we are all unique that's the irony last I just think that they are unique but we are all unique Belski suggests that evolution selects for some children who are more plastic and for others who are more fixed so when you have a parent and the parent has a parenting style and the parent has several children evolution will make sure that some of them are plastic and some of them are fixed if the parenting style is good then it will affect the fixed children well if the parenting style is bad, dysfunctional the plastic children will survive what Belski says is that in families with more than one child there is likely to be a diversity a panoply, a spectrum of plasticity among the children he said that parents like parents today parents in the past ancestral parents they are called ancestral parents could not have known consciously or unconsciously which of their practices which of the parenting styles which of child rearing habits would prove to be successful when we started this experiment of parenting a million years ago as a species we were blind we were groping in the dark the first parents who had children didn't know what to do with children what do you do with children how do you raise children how do you rear children and this experiment is still ongoing it has taken us a million years to discover some basic truths about parenting for example attachment attachment styles, bonding this is new, new thinking, new only 100 years ago you know what, only 50 years ago if you read Dr. Spock's famous manual on how to raise children so much nonsense, so many mistakes common sense mistakes exactly the problem it was common sense we are still experimenting and because we are experimenting we need a wide variety of types of children as we have a wide variety of types of parents we need a wide variety of types of children we don't know what would be more successful in promoting reproductive fitness of our offspring, of our children we don't know which of these children will develop inclusive fitness in other words we don't know which of these children will pass on our genes our genes our children are the containers of our genes they are like FedEx they are like a courier service they take our genes and they forward it you know what do you call this in the Olympics with the torch, you know when they pass on the torch so they pass on the torch that's all, the genetic torch the selfish gene, Richard Dawkins and as a result the fitness optimizing strategy must involve hedging we must have some form of insurance natural selection must have ensured that children are not all the same that children have varying degrees of plasticity that some children don't react at all to the parental style if the parent is abusive some children will utterly ignore it the abuse will slide off their backs they will not be affected they will grow up to be totally normal these are the fixed children and if the parent is abusive the plastic children the children with biological vulnerabilities built in the children with diathesis these children will react badly they may develop mental illness if we don't have enough protective factors and so if the effect of parenting had proven counterproductive in fitness terms those children not affected by parenting would not incur the loss of developing in ways that prove misguided in evolutionary terms in other words they would not develop in a way that doesn't allow them to pass on their genes I am, for example I am an example of a plastic child a child who had reacted very very badly in childhood of course to parental abuse and consequently I did not pass on my genes I am a perfect example of this I don't have children I didn't pass on my genes I didn't pass on my parents genes my parents genes stop with me well my sister has children and my brother they hedged they had an insurance policy my sister and brother are all fixed I was more plastic so natural selection might favor genetic lines with plastic and fixed developmental and affective patterns it's very likely actually and I advise you to read the work of Belsky Buckerman's Cronenburg and Van Ijzen Duren I am absolutely convinced in my hypothesis people go to psychology because they have non-pronounceable family names it is such a humiliating experience it's cool that they are traumatized and they become psychologists and now let's revert to the next question next question is epigenetics epigenetics is all the rage epigenetics is all the rage nowadays you see early on about 150 years ago there was a big debate between Lamarck and Darwin Darwin suggested that hereditary traits are encoded and embedded in biological entities which we later named genes and chromosomes and that hereditary traits are handed down in populations according to certain principles like natural selection and so on Darwin was, Charles Darwin was adamant that the environment has no effect zero effect on our genetic material that our genetic material is unmolested and transferred from one generation to the other it could get corrupted in the process of transmission and we call this mutation but it's an internal corruption and this corruption of course can happen because of environmental factors but if it happens owing to environmental factors it will not be passed on to the next generation only a mutation that occurs owing to internal processes can be inherited but not owing to external processes so Darwin clearly separated the environment from our genetics our genetics is a reservoir of coded information that is transferred from one generation to the other there are coding and transcription errors there are mutations yes, it's normal in the copying of every text we have this, when the Bible had been copied over the generations numerous mistakes had accumulated in the copying process copying involves errors but the environment has no say no say in the composition and the functioning of genetic material Lamarck said exactly the opposite Lamarck said as organisms try to adapt to their environments they will pass on these adaptations to future generations so if the giraffe had to extend her neck to eat the leaves on tall trees, high trees you know then it will pass on this type of neck to her offspring and all future giraffes will have this extended neck so this is Lamarckism Darwinism Lamarckism two conceptions of evolution Darwinism one ends down but today there is a kind of synthesis between Darwinism Lamarckism and it's known as epigenetics epigenetics is a study of phenotypes the way our genetics manifest the way they are expressed the way they are visibly translated so we have genes the genes determine how we look to some extent how we behave our cognitions our emotions our brain etc this type is the external the external expression of genes so epigenetics is a study of heritable phenotype changes in other words when our phenotype changes sometimes these changes are passed on to future generations on condition that these changes do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence epigenetics and both changes that affect gene activity gene expression but not the DNA sequence in the gene only the way the gene operates only the way the gene is expressed is affected by the environment and these changes in expression these changes in activity sometimes are passed on to future generations so any heritable phenotypic change is in the in the remit of epigenetics there are effects on cells cellular effects there are physiological effects the environmental factors could be external could be internal something we ate exposure to radiation they can be part of normal development environment is a very fuzzy concept because we have internal environment but the standard definition of epigenetics requires that these alterations are heritable heritable in the progeny heritable in the next generation heritable in the osprey in the cells of the osprey or the organism and the term also refers to the changes themselves we say epigenetic changes it's functionally relevant changes to the genome that do not involve a change in nucleotide sequence I hope this is clear the genes do not change the way they affect us the way they express changes and some of these changes are transferred on to future generations how? we'll leave it aside this is not a lecture in biology but there are various mechanisms ten that we have identified ten pathways, ten mechanisms but it happens there is epigenetic inheritance well, if this is the case what about narcissism? if someone develops pathological narcissism as an adult is it conceivable that this reaction to the environment because narcissism, pathological narcissism even in the diathesis stress model is a reaction to the environment narcissism is a reaction to stress coming from the environment according to the diathetic models there is a genetic template a biological template, a series of genes that are latent dormant, asleep, lurking and then there is stress for example parental abuse and then these genes come alive they're activated and they express themselves and the way they express themselves ok, if this is all true can we pass it on to our children epigenetically our genes would be the same but can our children inherit the way our genes are expressed if I'm a narcissistic parent if I'm a parent diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder my genes operate differently they're activated differently they're expressed in other people, they're dormant they're latent, in me they're expressed when I have a child will his genes express also will he inherit the way my genes are expressed and activated even if I don't abuse the child even if I treat the child with love and warmth and acceptance and everything even if a child grows apart from me with a divorce and the child never sees me will my genes be in the child will they express themselves will the child is the child more likely to develop narcissistic personality disorder just because of the fact that he had been born to me I am afraid I can't give you guarantees in this sense and the reason I cannot tell you no, it's nonsense is because it's not nonsense we actually have identified already a series of mental health issues or issues that had been considered either to purely mental and these mental health issues are transferable in principle and have been transferred in observation in studies from one generation to the next even in the absence of contact and the only explanation is that certain mental health issues and the behaviors and traits that facilitate these issues or are intimately linked to these issues somehow affect the genes of the mentally ill person or the person with the mental problem or the person with the dysfunctional behavior and these genes are expressed activated and manifest differently and then somehow they are passed on to the next generation so for example in 2003 Caspy and his colleagues they found out higher rates of adult depression and suicidality in people exposed to childhood maltreatment and that was not surprising of course but they also discovered that parental nutrition in utero exposure to stress male induced maternal effects such as attraction of differential mate quality maternal and paternal age of spring gender they discovered that all these are linked to adult depression and the only way they could be linked to adult depression is via via genetics via some epigenetic pathway this adult depression is a reaction to abuse but why do these factors affect adult depression they shouldn't unless they change the parents pay attention these factors change the parents genes these factors affect the way the genes of the parents express themselves and then this is passed on to the child Caspy's study was absolutely shocking Caspy had shown that there are factors which should have absolutely nothing to do with depression but they clearly engender and affect depression in adults why? there are genetic changes and epigenetic changes in the parents similarly addiction addiction is a disorder of the brain's reward system there are issues with dopamine pathway and so on and so forth I personally don't regard addiction as a brain disease or a brain disorder I think that we are putting the cart before the horse I think addiction causes changes in the reward system there is a clear linkage between addiction and the reward system either the reward system causes addiction as many scholars say or addiction causes the reward system to change as I say and some others so whatever the case may be there are changes in the reward system but the same changes in the dopamine pathway in the reward system arise through transcriptional epigenetic mechanisms and they occur over time from chronically high levels of exposure to an addictive stimulus or to an addictive person so if you are exposed to morphine, cocaine sexual intercourse, gambling shopping this is the addictive stimulus you might develop addiction but this crucially can also happen if you have genes have been transcribed from an addicted individual it's like if you were born to an addicted individual your chances of developing addiction are much higher and why is that the only explanation is epigenetic inheritance of addictive phenotypes transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of addiction it seems that if you are born to an addicted person you are more likely to be an addict can we say that if you are born to a narcissist even if you were separated from the narcissist at birth can we then say that you are more likely to develop narcissism same with anxiety there is accumulating proof of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of anxiety related phenotypes there have been studies with mice and this seems to be transmission of paternal stress induced traits across generations and we don't quite know why speculation is that there are small non coding RNA signals never mind all that but anxiety is transmitted across generations without exposure without exposure to the anxious person the anxious parent so if you are born to an anxious parent then immediately separate at birth you are more likely to be anxious than the healthy population than the normal population if you are a mouse at least same of course with depression depression is much better document epigenetic inheritance of depression related phenotypes is pretty well substantiated in other words if you are born to someone who is depressed who has stress induced traits you are much more likely to develop depression we don't know yet why the speculation about RNA snippets of RNA signals this, that non coding RNA let's ignore all this for a minute same with fear condition we made experiments with rats and we discovered that there is a textural fear condition and especially strong long term memory and why is that because the genes of these rats and more specifically the genes that coded for the hippocampus where long term memory is they were differently differentially methylated in other words they went through a certain process differently and so this is highly inheritable so it seems that being born to the wrong being born to the wrong father being born to the wrong mother predisposes you to develop a variety of mental illnesses anxiety, depression, fear apprehension etc mental illnesses, mental traits but this is not necessarily only because of inheritance in other words if your parents have a specific gene and they give it to you and this gene predisposes you to anxiety and depression that's one thing but if your parents had this gene and they developed anxiety and depression because they were exposed to stress diethesis stress model so if they developed depression anxiety you are also more likely to develop depression and anxiety even if you were not exposed to stress or even if you were separated from these parents so there seems to be an epigenetic transfer there seems to be a transfer of the way the genes are expressed of the circumstances in which they are activated some susceptibility some vulnerability if this if all this is true then why not narcissism why not say that narcissism is the same if you were born to narcissistic parents your genes are far more likely to express in a narcissistic way we know that this is true for sensory processing sensitivity it's a temperamental personality trait involving an increased sensitivity of the central nervous system and deeper cognitive processing of physical, social and emotional stimuli you know the famous highly sensitive person which is the foundation of the Empath label so Arthur Aaron and Elaine Aaron the two psychologists in the 1990s they studied highly sensitive people they discovered sensory processing sensitivity and they established some kind of epigenetic transfer from one generation to the next when it comes to this so if we have so many mental phenomena which are transferred from one generation to the next not necessarily via child rearing not necessarily via abuse but epigenetically if a parent conditions his child genetically to react in a specific way to stress if a parent transfers to the child instructions gene should react should activate should express given certain stress sores certain stressful circumstances why not narcissism and to identify the role of reddity researchers, scholars have resorted to a few tactics they studied the occurrence of similar psychopathologies in identical twins separated at birth in twins and siblings in environment and in relatives of patients usually across a few generations of an extended family and tellingly, twins both twins raised apart and twins raised together show the same correlation of personality traits 0.5 so there's a study by Bouchard Lichen L-Y-K-K-E-N Megew Sego and Teligan in 1990 it's a very early study which have demonstrated this that twins are intimately correlated in the way they express traits and intimately correlated in having these traits even attitudes even values, even interest fields of interest, hobbies hobbies have been shown to be highly affected by genetic factors because these twins were separated and yet both of them developed an interest in NASCAR, in car racing in wrestling in Saint-Vaknin which is in itself a mental illness so these studies waller co-jetting others, there's quite a few studies have shown that twins become identical mentally and psychologically even if they are totally separated at birth so the effect of the environment here is not relevant what is relevant is the genes the template the vulnerability, the susceptibility the diathesis and the way these genes are expressed and activated when exposed to circumstantial and environmental factors like stress and this is epigenetics the three authors of the dimensional assessment of personality pathology it's a powerful psychological test the three authors are Lysley, Jackson and Shrodin so these three authors joined forces with another chap in 1993 to study whether 18 of the personality dimensions were heritable could be inherited they found that 40 to 60% of the occurrence of certain personality traits across generations can be explained by heredity anxiousness, callousness cognitive distortion compulsivity, identity problems oppositionality rejection, restricted expression social avoidance stimulus seeking and suspiciousness and if this sounds like an excellent description of narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder especially psychopathy or even borderline personality disorder it's because it is and it seems that 40 to 60% of the variance the variance in these traits across generations could be explained only with genetic inheritance proper genetic inheritance my gene, your gene or epigenetics the way my gene expresses is the way your gene will express each and every one of these qualities is associated with a personality disorder in a roundabout way therefore this study alone supports the hypothesis that personality disorders are hereditary and this would go a long way towards explaining why in the same family with the same set of parents identical emotional environment some siblings grow to have personality disorders while others are perfectly normal and healthy and surely this indicates some diathesis, some genetic predisposition some template of susceptibility and vulnerability and some plasticity of some people to developing personality disorders and still this often touted distinction between nature and nurture maybe it's a question of semantics think about it when we are born we are not much more than the sum of our genes and the manifestations or expression of these genes our brain those of us who have it it's a physical object it's the residence of mental health the residence of mental disorders mental illness cannot be explained without resorting to the body and especially to the brain it's nonsensical to pretend that the mental illness is divorced from the body this is the dualistic approach in philosophy which has been pretty discredited the psychophysical problem our brain cannot be contemplated without considering our genes and thus any explanation of our mental life that leaves out our redditary makeup and our neurophysiology is lacking or even I would say nonsensical such lacking theories are nothing but literary narratives they are not science they are pseudoscience psychoanalysis for example is often accused of being divorced from bodily reality and rightly so corporeal reality is the only reality I am not a materialist but I am not a vitalist and I am not a dualist I do think that our introspection creates something akin to consciousness or creates consciousness and that this should be captured by tools and instruments and language which are separate from the language of the accurate sciences in other words I do think that biology and psychology should remain divorced but they should raise the common children biology and psychology were married once they have common children they should get divorced but they should have joint custody our genetic baggage makes us resemble a personal computer we are all we are kind of an all purpose universal machine to use Alan Turing's language subject to the right programming conditioning, socialization stress, education upbringing, abuse subject to this kind of programming we can turn out to be anything everything a computer can imitate any kind any other machine a computer can become a television with exceptional refrigerator a computer can be anything given the right software the computer becomes goes through a process of becoming computer can play music can articulate print paint even print objects with a 3D printer and compare this compare the computer to a television set television set is constructed and expected to do one and only one thing it has a single purpose a unitary function we are not television sets we are computers we are much more like computers single genes rarely account for any behavior or any trait an array of coordinated genes is required to explain even the minutest human phenomenon so discoveries of a gambling gene here an aggression gene there they are derided they are the idiotic they are nonsensical they are hype and more series and less publicity prone scholars they mock this kind of media hype announcements yet it does seem that even complex behaviors such as for example risk taking novelty seeking recklessness compulsive shopping it does seem that they do have a genetic underpinning and so full circle is pathological do you have an answer or not stop prevaricating and procrastinating either you have an answer or not is pathological narcissism the outcome of inherited traits or the said result of abusive and traumatizing upbringing yes or no you've been dragging us for one hour now enough is enough maybe it's the confluence of both it is a common occurrence after that in the same family with the same set of parents identical emotional environment as I said some siblings become malignant narcissists others are perfectly normal so what gives surely this indicates some predisposition to develop narcissism some genetic heritage and so we don't know that's the answer I think it's a promising path of inquiry I think it should be pursued it would seem reasonable to assume though at this stage there's not a shred of proof by the way that the narcissist is born with a propensity to develop narcissistic defenses we are beginning to have inklings of brain abnormalities in narcissists far from convincing but inklings and these propensities this susceptibilities and vulnerabilities they're triggered by abuse or trauma during the formative years in infancy and during early adolescence so when I say abuse I'm referring as you know to a spectrum of behaviors which objectifies a child treats a child as an extension of the caregiver the parent or as an instrument so dotting smothering spoiling or is temporary or as much abuse as beating and starving and sexual abuse abuse can be dished out by peers as well as by adult role models so if I had to commit myself if I were a gambling person which I used to be what would I get below nature or nurture I have to put my chips it's a difficult question and still my intuition based on the decades of studying the condition I tend to attribute the development of narcissistic personality disorder mostly to the environment mostly to nurture the narcissistic personality disorder is an extremely complex battery of phenomena behavior patterns cognitions, emotions, conditioning so on NPD is a personality disorder for good reason even the most ardent proponents of the school of genetics do not attribute the development of the whole personality to genes and so organic and mental conditions it's a dubious distinction at best they have many characteristics in common confabulation emotional behavior emotional absence of flatness in difference psychotic episodes and so on and so forth the distinction between the psychic and the physical is horribly disputed philosophically the psychophysical problem is as intractable today as it had ever been if not more so it is beyond doubt that the physical affects the mental it's beyond doubt that the mental affects the physical but basically it's like psychiatry all about the ability to control autonomous body functions such as heartbeat and mental reactions to pathogens of the brain these are proofs of the artificialness of the distinction between physical and mental some yogis control their blood pressure their heartbeat we have documented cases of people eliminating viruses in the brain bacteria of the reductionist view of nature is divisible and summable that we make this distinction between body and soul, mental the sum of the parts alas is not always the whole and there is no such thing as an infinite set of the rules of nature only an asymptotic approximation of it the distinction between the patient and the outside world we will say mental health patients and the environment this distinction may be superfluous may be wrong and may be at the root of all these misunderstandings and all these questions the patient and his environment are one and the same entity disease is a perturbation in the operation and management of the complex ecosystem known as patient world humans absorb their environment humans feed the environment there is a total exchange of energy and when there is a total exchange of energy there is a system we can't separate ourselves this was the mistake of the count it's the Cartesian worldview the observer and the world it's nonsense this ongoing interaction is the patient we cannot exist without the intake of water, air visual stimuli, food in a way we are all these things when we take them in they become part of us we internalize the environment our environment is defined by our actions by our output physical and mental and then it defines us there is a total feedback loop one must question the classical differentiation between internal and external some illnesses are considered endogenous generated from the inside naturally internal causes a hard defect by chemical imbalance, genetic mutation metabolic process is going to arrive this cause disease aging and deformities cause disease but problems of nurturance problems of the environment, early childhood abuse for instance malnutrition external exogenous classical pathogens germs and viruses, accidents natural disasters they are all exogenous so we have this clear separation between what makes us sick some things from the inside make us sick, some things from the outside make us sick but what if we were to eliminate this distinction what if we were to appropriate the environment what if we were to become the environment as we should because this distinction is totally artificial it's based on the fact that we introspect we are the only animal that can look inside our mind at our mind from the so called outside there's no outside it's all in here even reality as we see this is a sample and then this sample is processed by internal software it's not real in any sense it's not objective it's a counterproductive approach to make this separation exogenous and endogenous pathogenesis is inseparable mental states increase or decrease susceptibility to externally induced disease every doctor will tell you this some of the depression is much more likely to die of cardiovascular problems of a stroke talk therapy abuse which is a form of negative talk therapy for external elements they alter the biochemical balance of the brain the inside constantly interacts with the outside it is so intertwined with it that all distinctions between inside and outside are artificial they are misleading the best example is of course medication medicine is an external agent but it influences internal processes it has very strong mental correlates its efficacy is influenced by mental factors we all we've all heard of the placebo or nocebo effect we give people sugar, we give them water and they heal, they are cured it's the mind it's all in the mind the very nature of dysfunctional sickness is highly culture dependent, period dependent society dependent societal parameters dictate right and wrong in health especially mental health it is all a matter of statistics normality a statistical artifact certain diseases are accepted in certain parts of the world as a fact of life or even a sign of distinction the paranoid schizo-phrenic patient was for millennia considered to have been chosen by the gods if there is no disease disease, illet is there is no disease that the physical or mental state of a person does not imply that it must be different or even that it is desirable that it should be different in an overpopulated world sterility might be a desirable thing or even the occasional epidemic or pandemic there is no such thing as absolute dysfunction the body and the mind always function together they adapt themselves to their environment and if the environment changes they change which proves that they are part of the environment we are the environment personality disorders are the best possible responses to abuse they are post-traumatic conditions cancer may be the best possible response to carcinogens and cancers and viruses may be evolutionary vectors they may be good for us as a species aging and death are definitely the best possible response to overpopulation species-wide they have the point of view of the single patient or individual is incommensurate with the point of view of the species but this should not serve to obscure the issues and to derail rational debate as a result it is logical to introduce a notion of positive aberration certain hyper or hyper function can yield positive results and prove to be adaptive the difference between positive and negative aberrations can never be objective it is a value judgment homosexuality was described as a mental illness in the diagnostic and statistical manual until 1973 nature is morally neutral nature embodies no values no preferences nature simply is it exists we human beings introduce our value systems our prejudices and biases and priorities into our activities including into science it is better to be healthy we say because we feel better when we are healthy circularity assigned this is the only criterion that we can reasonably employ we feel better than it must be good if the patient feels good it's not a disease even if we all think it is so I don't know if you are mentally ill and happy with it ego-syntonic and functional is it mental illness if the patient feels bad ego-dystonic unable to function suddenly it is a disease and if a patient feels very good functional, happy ego-syntonic with his disease mental illness and then the next day he feels bad suddenly it's a mental illness it's ridiculous needless to say that I'm referring to the mythical creature the fully informed patient if someone is sick and knows no better has never been healthy then his decision should be respected he is given the chance to experience health and so in today's environment in civilization who has experienced normalcy and mental health show me this mythical creature show me this unicorn all the attempts to introduce objective yardsticks of health are plagued and philosophically contaminated by the insertion of values preferences and priorities into the formula values, preferences and priorities one such attempt is to define health as an increase in order or efficiency of processes as contrasted with illness which is a decrease in order increase of entropy and in efficiency of processes but that's also can be easily factually disputed and this contrast suffers from implicit value judgments why should we prefer life over death for example who said life is preferable today why should we prefer order to chaos why should we prefer efficiency to inefficiency and who says that a mentally ill person who has authored the Oxford English Dictionary totally mentally ill paranoid schizophrenia has authored the first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary single handed from his mental asylum cell who says this guy has not increased order considerably we don't have objective yardsticks so we should be very careful without hubris I recommend to you to read the article genetic and environmental contributions to dimensions of personality disorders in American Journal of Psychiatry volume 150 it was authored by Lifelye Hank Jackson and Vernon 1993 genetic and environmental contributions to dimensions of personality disorder and if this video hadn't rendered you hadn't stressed you to the point of becoming mentally ill of expressing your vulnerable susceptible genes then I have failed just kidding thank you for listening