 Is she a borderline or is she a narcissist? Is he a narcissist or is he a psychopath? Does she have borderline or is she simply traumatized? CPTSD, complex trauma. Is he a covert narcissist or is he a covert borderline? Is he a covert borderline or is he a covert borderline? This is a serious problem in modern diagnostic psychology, clinical and abnormal psychology. We call it the polythetic problem. We have comorbidities. Comorbidities means that two or more mental health issues are diagnosed in the same individual. And sometimes these mental health issues are mutually exclusive. They contradict each other. For example, when we diagnose psychopathy and borderline personality disorder in the same person. Psychopathy, no empathy, no emotions. Borderline personality disorder. Only emotions. Disregulated emotions. So it's a joke. The whole thing is a joke. Differential diagnosis. Differential diagnosis are feeble attempts in the diagnostic and statistical manual to help us to tell these disorders apart. The diagnostic and statistical manual had doubled its pages in the past 20 years. Actually went up 10 times in terms of pages since 1952. We are 10 times mentally ill. 10 times more mentally ill it seems, according to the committee of the DSM. Well, until such time as the distinguished and venerable members of the diagnostic and statistical manual committee gather the courage to oppose the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. And to do what the ICD, International Classification of Diseases Edition 11 had done. Until such time as we recognize that there's only one personality disorder and that this one personality disorder is actually a form of complex trauma, CPTSD, post-traumatic condition. Until such time we are forced to cope with the whole zoo of literally indistinguishable, allegedly different conditions. Hence differential diagnosis. It's a mess. It's a joke. It's a caricature of science. It's pseudoscience. But it allows therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists to get reimbursed by insurance companies because they can point to a specific page or article in the DSM. And it allows the pharmaceutical industry to inundate you with antidepressants, anxiolytics and other mind effing drugs. So all is well in the land of capitalism. I have prepared for you a playlist. A playlist is a series of thematically connected videos. So you go to the playlist and you watch a series of videos about the same topic. Now if you look at the description under the video, you will find that there is a link. If you click on the link, you will see a variety of videos. Each one of them will help you to distinguish autism from narcissism, narcissism from borderline, borderline from complex trauma, complex trauma from narcissism, narcissism from psychopathy, etc. It's all there and I encourage you to watch it. Today we're going to discuss autism, narcissism and borderline. And we're going to add to the mountain of videos I've already made by calling your attention to a few additional similarities and differences between these disorders. We start with autism and borderline. There is an affinity between low functioning autism and borderline personality disorder. Low functioning autism is the stereotypical autism. That's the kid who bangs his head on the wall, can hardly dress himself, is silent most of the time and suddenly erupts in rage, etc. The classical picture, stereotypical picture of autism. Most people with autism spectrum disorder are actually high functioning. They have families, they have jobs, they go out into the world and they are almost indistinguishable from other people. But there is a minority of people with autism spectrum disorder. There is a minority who are low functioning autism people with low functioning autism. And they have a lot in common with borderline personality disorder, which of course raises the tantalizing possibility that both conditions are actually brain abnormalities. In both cases, the sufferer is overwhelmed by stimuli. The person with autism spectrum disorder is overwhelmed by external stimuli. He drowns in the environment, he is flooded by queues, messages, signals and information from his environment. He doesn't know how to react to this other lunch, he doesn't filter it as normal people do. He cannot relegate 95% of it to the unconscious as all of us do. So instead of being exposed to 5% conscious content, he is exposed to 40% or 50% and of course such a person falls apart. It's terrifying, it's a feeling of being hemmed in, strangled, suffocating, smothered by the environment. The environment closing in on you like walls and it's very claustrophobic. But the same way the autistic person is overwhelmed by the external environment, the borderline person is overwhelmed by her internal environment. As the autistic person is exposed to external stimuli and then this regulates behavior, his behavior becomes out of control. The borderline is exposed to an avalanche at tsunami of internal signals, internal stimuli, especially effects, emotions. And similarly, she dysregulates, she falls apart, she is incapable of coping with the onslaught of emotions and so she emotionally dysregulates. Indeed, autism and borderline personality disorder appear to be flip sides of the same coin. It is a form of dysregulation in reaction to stimuli, stimulus induced, stimuli induced dysregulation. In both cases, self-harm serves to fulfill three self-soothing functions. The autistic person self-harm bodily, bangs his head on the wall, scratches himself, what have you. The borderline person does the same, he cuts himself or burns himself with a cigarette. So both people with low functioning autism spectrum disorder and people with borderline personality disorder engage in self-harming, self-mutilating behaviors. And these behaviors have the same three functions in both cases. Number one, to reassert control over the dynamic of irritation and aggravation by the stimuli. Imagine the stimuli as an invading army. An invading army and the autistic person and the borderline person have no defences. The borderline person is besieged internally by a fifth column, a Trojan horse, traitors from within. And she can't cope with it. She's aggravated, she's irritated, she's terrified, she's anxious. The same applies to the autistic person. He reacts this way to external stimuli. Both of them are trying to reassert control over this dynamic. The elective act of self-mutilation and self-harm. This act is a form of I'm in control. I am cutting myself, I am burning myself, I am banging my head against the wall, but I'm in control of this. A similar dynamic plays out, of course, in eating disorders. It's all about self-control. There is a niche, there is an act, there's a choice, there's a decision which I control fully. I can't control my external environment, I can't control my internal environment, but I can control how much I eat, or how I harm myself, or how I mutilate my body. The second function of self-harm is to drown out sources of frustration and pain with even greater agony. So the self-inflicted pain of the autistic person and the borderline person, they counterbalance and cancel out the pain, the hurt and the anxiety that they feel in reaction to over-stimulation. So if the borderline cuts herself for a minute there, she's focused on the pain of the cut. She no longer is preoccupied with her emotions and what her emotions are threatening to do to her, which is to kill her. Indeed, 11% of borderlines, people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder end up committing suicide. Actually, cutting self-harm, self-mutilation, these are desperate attempts, desperate attempts to create an external pain, an external torture that counterways the internal battle, the internal battle that often is lost. And the third function is to reawaken, feel alive as a self-inflicted hurt, negates the numbing, the erstwhile numbing. Both autistic people and borderline people react to their inner turmoil with numbing, what we call reduced effect display. They acquire habits which deny to observers the ability to discern what's happening inside them. So their emotions are shallow effect or flat effect. Their emotions are shallow and numb until the point where they decompensate and become rageful. But most of the time they have numb emotions and in the case of the autistic person they have numb effect, in other words they don't show any emotions and any effects. The only exception is of course the rage attacks, the aggression, the externalized aggression which are common to both the borderline and the autistic person. Cutting, self-harming, self-mutilation, they revive the borderline, they revive the autistic person. They imbue the borderline and the autistic person with a renewed sense of being embedded in reality. They bring them back to reality in a sense. Now these are autists and borderlines. What about narcissists and borderlines? Again, go to the description, there's a link there, it's a playlist. Click on the link, you will find a wealth, a plethora of videos about the differences between borderlines and narcissists, borderlines and complex trauma victims. Borderlines and covert narcissists, etc, etc. Watch these videos, I'm not going to repeat myself. I'm going to add to what I've said in the past. The narcissist experiences periods of collapse. If you look at the recent videos I've made over the past week or two, you will find a video dedicated to the collapse phase in narcissism and psychopathy. So the narcissist experiences goes through horrible, harrowing periods of collapse, usually coupled with something known as narcissistic modification, but not always and not necessarily. The collapse simply means a sustained failure to obtain narcissistic supply despite all efforts, attempts and strategies. Narcissist tries everything, attempts everything, changes himself, escalates his behavior, nothing works. He's unable to obtain supply so he collapses. The collapse can be subclinical collapse that's a protracted, drawn out, incremental type of collapse because there is some incoming narcissistic supply. It's barely sufficient and it's a maintenance dose of supply, but there is still some supply coming in, drips and drops of supply coming in. And so the narcissist is able to somehow maintain the precarious balance of his disorganized, chaotic personality. This is called subclinical collapse, a slow, inexorable, injurious traumatizing process of gradually and incrementally losing your supply day in and day out, less and less supplied by the day. That is, in contrast to traumatic collapse, traumatic collapse is abrupt. It's when the narcissist loses all his sources of supply, simultaneously. For example, when he goes to prison, it's an example or when he becomes very ill and he's hospitalized or when he joins the army. So this is an abrupt collapse or when everyone abandons him because he has been canceled or he has been outed or he has been shamed and humiliated in public, which also leads to modification. Okay, so that's the background of collapse. As long as the supply keeps coming, the narcissist is egocintonic, is happy-go-lucky, he is comfortable in his own skin. As long as the supply keeps coming, the narcissist is a-okay. The collapse results in severe egodistony, the opposite of egocintony, being dejected, unhappy, uncomfortable with yourself. It's called egodistony when you are very self-critical, self-punitive, self-loathing, self-defeating, self-destructive. It's a manifestation of egodistony. So the collapse leads the narcissist to severe, very harsh egodistony and dysphoria, often to the point of depression. So in this sense, the collapse in narcissism resembles decompensation in borderlines. Decompensation is a clinical term. It simply means the inactivation, the disabling of all psychological defense mechanisms so that your left naked, immediately exposed to the environment, or as a scholar once said, without skin. The borderline goes through decompensation when she is abandoned, rejected, humiliated, or when she anticipates such things. And so she decompensates. And then later on she acts out, she switches to secondary psychopathic state and acts out. But decompensation resembles very much, collapse in narcissism. Very, very much, actually, with one exception. Collapse does not include emotional dysregulation because the narcissist doesn't have access to his positive emotions. His negative emotions, however, do get dysregulated. His angry, his rage, his anger, all these, they do get dysregulated in the collapse phase. Only positive emotions don't. In the borderline, decompensation leads to an emotional dysregulation that is all encompassing. Both her positive emotions and her negative emotions become dysregulated, go out of control, threatened to overwhelm her and destroy her, which is why she switches to a secondary psychopathic state. So the first distinction between narcissists and borderline is that both of them go through collapse. In the borderline case, it's called decompensation. Both of them lose everything, all their defenses because narcissistic supply and the false self, it's a defense. It's a compensatory defense. So both of them lose the defenses, but with the narcissist, only his negative emotions get dysregulated and with the borderline, all her emotions get dysregulated. Which further supports Grotstein's idea that borderlines are actually failed narcissists. They didn't make it. They got stuck in the middle. And so they still have access to their emotions and they still have empathy. So once the narcissist experiences collapse, he transitions from one type of narcissism to another type of narcissism. He transitions, for example, from cerebral to somatic, or he transitions from being overt to being covert. And this is exactly what happens with the borderline. The borderline switches between self-states. Again, when she is abandoned, rejected, humiliated or stressed, she then switches from borderline to secondary psychopath. In this sense, the narcissist type in constancy. His tendency to change his type, like a chameleon, subject to environmental cues and stressors. This is very similar to the switching process in borderline. But in borderline, the switch is very short, no longer usually than a few days. Typically a few minutes or a few hours, but no longer than three or four days. In the narcissist, the switch could last years, even decades. The narcissist could switch, could transition from being cerebral to being somatic, and it could last years. I, for example, have switched from cerebral to somatic a few years ago, and it's still ongoing. Similarly, I've switched from somatic to cerebral, and I've stayed in a cerebral mode for 15 years. This is how long. So the only difference, the only clinical psychodynamic difference between narcissists and borderlines, is that when the narcissist switches between self-states, when he alternates and cycles between self-states, it's for long, it's for keeps. It could take years until the next switch is upon him. When the borderline switches, it's a remedial measure, it's a self, it's an adhesive. She's just trying to leak her wounds, to cater to her injury. And then when this is done, in a few hours, in a few days, she's back to her original state. Now, in the cerebral type, in narcissism, sexual abstinence is a form of self-supply. In other words, sexual celibacy, abstinence, makes the cerebral narcissist feel superior. He creates a whole ideology around it, that he doesn't have sex, just goes to prove that he isn't the next stage in evolution, that he is far above the bestial instincts of the hoipoloi and the great unwashed. In other words, the cerebral narcissist, asexuality, in effect asexuality, almost there, is at the service of his grandiosity. It's an integral part of his identity and of the ways that he buttresses and sustains and supports his grandiose view of himself. In other words, he regards sexlessness as meritorious and virtuous, the same way the church regarded it during the Middle Ages. It is the collapse-induced depression that drives the narcissist to become sexually voracious in the somatic phase. Now, this is mind-warping. It's a mind-boggling insight. In all people, and I mean all people, even mentally ill people, even schizophrenics, even people with borderline personality disorder, even bipolar, depression means a decrease in sexual libido, a decrease in the sex drive. When you're depressed, you don't want to have sex. End of story. Very often, one of the ways we diagnose depression in clinical settings is we inquire about the sex life of the patient. If we see precipitous and sudden drop in sexual activity, we tend to immediately suspect depression. But contrary to the rest of humanity, as usual, in narcissists, depression leads to enhanced libido, a higher sex drive, a stronger sex drive. When they're depressed, they want to have more sex. Why? Because sexual conquest and sexual performance are antidotes to the depression. Because it's not real depression. It's a depression that is reactive to the loss of supply. So the narcissist tries to garner new supply through sexual activity. So depression, the chain of events is this. The narcissist loses his narcissistic supply. He becomes depressed. He needs to find new supply urgently or he will fall apart. So he begins to have sex because sex is immediate narcissistic supply. And so with a narcissist when he's depressed, he's likely to become hypersexual, sexually hyperactive, as opposed to all other humanity, the rest of humanity. Now, in narcissism, and when it comes to borderline, the situation is different. Borderline who is depressed will become highly obstinate and highly celibate. Actually, in borderline, we have periods of extreme promiscuity, unbridled, unboundary, self-trashing sexual misconduct, followed by periods of withdrawal, avoidance, and utter total sexual abstinence. It's similar with the narcissist. He goes through periods of sexual abstinence and periods of sexual promiscuity exactly like the borderline. But as you see, the etiology, the reason this is happening is not like the borderline. In the borderline, these alternations in sexual behavior are an outcome of her internal dynamics. For example, her perception of having been abandoned and humiliated and rejected by many people, by many intimate partners. In the narcissist, these alternations between sexual hyperactivity and sexual hyperactivity, low activity, they are driven by the fluctuations in supply. Supply runs dry, the narcissist gets depressed, becomes sexually active. Supply runs high, the narcissist becomes grandiose and idolizes and idealizes sexlessness. Completely different etiologies, same behaviors. Now, back to the types in narcissism, we know somatic, cerebral, vertegoverte. The types are actually highly dissociative self-states. In narcissism, these self-states are almost full-fledged personalities, which is why I think narcissism is a very close cousin, a first cousin of dissociative identity disorder, essentially a post-traumatic condition. Because in narcissism, the self-states are very demarcated and they don't share a lot of information with each other. They have impermeable dissociative partitions. They don't have access to full access to the same database, for example, of memories. Each self-state has its own set of memories which it doesn't share with the other self-states. So, this is the narcissistic condition and because they are not one and the same in narcissism, we in narcissism sometimes encounter binary systems. We find narcissists which are both covert and overt at the same time. Both cerebral and somatic at the same time and the two self-states are in conflict, are in dissonance. These are passing phases usually, except in extremely pathological conditions, but they're there. And so we could have a situation where the narcissist transitions from a cerebral phase to a somatic phase and then the somatic phase, the somatic ratification of the narcissism, the somatic embodiment of the narcissist, mourns the years of cerebral sexlessness. So you would talk to this newly minted somatic narcissist who used to be cerebral and this somatic narcissist is in mourning and very angry at the cerebral for having denied the common body, they both share sex. So for example, I transitioned from cerebral to somatic a few years ago and I'm furious at myself for having denied myself sex for 15 years. My somatic reincarnation is furious at my erstwhile cerebral manifestation for having denied our common body sex, but similarly the cerebral grieves over the time wasted by the somatic in the relentless pursuit of sexual conquest. Both of these types fail to recall the bliss that they had experienced during the time spent as the other type, regardless of the so-called sacrifices made. Because these types don't share information fully and don't have access to the same memories, they're very monopolistic and exclusive when it comes to memory, because they don't share a common template even though they share a body. They're very angry at each other and they don't remember. The somatic doesn't recall, doesn't remember how good it was, how good it had been to be a cerebral and the cerebral doesn't recall what a wonderful time the somatic has had. They simply don't remember. And all they do remember are the sacrifices. The somatic remembers that the cerebral had sacrificed their sexuality and the cerebral remembers that the somatic had sacrificed their common time, these are the sacrifices. But they don't recall at all that when they had been in the phase, when they had been a different type, they were happy, they were egocintonic, they don't remember that. So if you were to tell the somatic, but wait a minute, why are you angry at the cerebral? These 15 years that you didn't have sex, the cerebral was perfectly happy. It was a blissful period and the somatic would deny this. He would say, not true, the cerebral had been depressed but there's a misattribution here, there's a misunderstanding. The cerebral had been, the somatic remembers that the cerebral had been depressed because this depression had led to the emergence of the somatic. It's a bit complex, let me try to explain again. I know it's a bit complex, mini break. The narcissist is sometimes cerebral, sometimes somatic. He transitions from cerebral to somatic because of collapse. He cannot obtain supply, so he becomes somatic to obtain supply via sex. Get supply sex quick. Okay, that much is clear. When he transitions from cerebral to somatic, the somatic is angry at the cerebral for not having had sex during the cerebral phase. And the somatic says the cerebral was depressed. The cerebral experienced depression and he experienced depression because he didn't have sex or he didn't have sex because he experienced depression. Somatic links the memory of the depression of the cerebral to the absence of sex. But the somatic is getting it wrong, is getting it wrong. The reason the cerebral was depressed had nothing to do with the sex. The reason the cerebral was depressed is because he couldn't get supply. The only reason for depression in the narcissist is collapse, inability to obtain supply. Depression in the narcissist is 100% reactive. And so the somatic is getting it wrong. He's saying, look at this idiot, the cerebral, he didn't have sex. And consequently he has had depression. But the truth is the cerebral didn't have sex and was very happy with not having sex, not having had sex, very happy. It supported his grandiosity. He felt blissful and blessed and superior for not having had sex. That's not the reason he got depressed. The cerebral got depressed because he couldn't obtain supply anymore. It has nothing to do with the sex. And so they keep blaming each other. They misattribute the depression brought on by imminent or actual collapse to the compulsive behavioral constriction of the other type. And so this is very common in borderline as well. This misattribution error or attribution error. The borderline attributes to her previous state. Errors, mistakes and misbehavior, guilt and shame. So for example, when the borderline transitions to the secondary psychopathic phase defending against abandonment, anxiety, humiliation and stress, the secondary psychopathic borderline would criticize her behavior as a pure borderline before she had switched. Each of the self states of the borderline is critical of the other. The psychopath would say, look at this stupid borderline, how gullible she was, how dependent she was, how weak she was. So the psychopath criticizes the borderline. The borderline criticizes the psychopath. When she switches back from secondary psychopath to borderline, she would say, look at this psychopath. How reckless she had been, how stupid her decisions were. So this conflict between the self states, this dissonance, is common to borderlines and to narcissists. And attribution errors are common as well. And the memory, the recall of the mood disorder that preceded like a harbinger, like a warning sign preceded the immediate switch. So sequences, a collapse or an injury, or a humiliation or a rejection in the case of borderline, and then a mood reaction, a reactive mood, and then the switch to another self state. Finally, both borderlines and narcissists experience separation in security colloquially known as abandonment, anxiety. Both of them are terrified of being abandoned because both of them have something called object inconsistency. I've made a zillion, gazillion videos about this topic. So please search the channel, use a magnifying glass, use the downward arrow on a smartphone. Object inconsistency simply means that the borderline and the narcissists cannot maintain a stable representation of another person if he's not with them physically. So in their minds, there is no avatar or representation of the real person. The real person has to be with them present physically. The narcissist has a snapshot, but the snapshot has nothing to do with the real person. It's an idealized version of the real person. So both of them suffer from abandonment, anxiety. Both of them also merge and fuse with an intimate partner in a symbiotic phase, the shared fantasy. This is common to borderlines and to narcissists, but the borderline distances herself from her intimate partner owing to an overwhelming engulfment anxiety. When she gets too close to her intimate partner, she feels suffocated. She feels subsumed, submerged, assimilated. She feels that she's about to disappear. This creates in the borderline approach, avoidance, repetition, compulsion, a cycle of approaching the intimate partner because she needs him to regulate her internal environment, her movements, her emotions, but then she's terrified of too much intimacy because she feels that she's drowning. She's overwhelmed. She develops a motion of dysregulation and runs away, decompensates and acts out in a secondary psychopathic phase. This is why the borderline is distancing herself. But the narcissist does not have an engulfment anxiety. He devalues and discards his partner exactly as the borderline does, owing to his need to separate from a maternal figure. Again, I recommend that you watch the several videos I've made including Conversations with Richard Ranham on the topic of separation individuation. The borderline and the narcissist create a shared fantasy with the intimate partner. The borderline wants out because she feels that she's vanishing. She's disappearing within the shared fantasy. The narcissist wants out because he needs to separate from his intimate partner who had become his surrogate new mother, a maternal figure. He needs to complete the unfinished business, complete the cycle, the early conflict in the unfinished business with his real mother. He needs to separate and become an individual. These are a few of the differences between borderlines and other mental health disorders. Again, go to the description. There's a link to the playlist. This playlist has placed all the videos that deal with comorbidities and differential diagnosis. In other words, differences between various mental health diagnosis. I wish you a good day despite this video. Try to recover. Don't listen to me too often. It could be harmful to your health. Well, exactly like cigarettes. I am addictive. My name is Sam Wagner. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love. Narcissism Revisited. And the most handsome and your favorite professor of psychology. Be well. Everyone and her mother-in-law are now experts on cluster B personality disorders. It's all the rage. It's a money spinner. So here's a message to these self-styled experts. Autistic thinking is not the same. Repeat, not the same as autism spectrum disorder or more generally autism. Autistic thinking has little to do with autism despite the label. Here's a piece of free advice. I usually charge 500 euros an hour and here I'm giving it to you for free. Go and actually study psychology under professor Sam Wagner preferably. Or much easier and much more pleasant watch this video to the end and you will be enlightened and educated and edified about autistic thinking and dereistic thinking. But not before. We travel through multiple service announcements. For those of you who don't want to listen to the service announcements fast forward find where the video starts the actual content starts. Others who are curious as to what is happening in the esteemed venerable professor Sam Wagner's life. This is for you. OK, first of all, my name is Sam Wagner I'm the author of Malignant Self-Law Narcissism Revisited I'm a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in London a Russian Federation I left when the war started and I'm a long time faculty member in CIAP's Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies in Toronto, Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria. Here are the service announcements preceding the actual content of the video. Number one, there's an artificial intelligence channel artificial intelligence channel called Mindful Wealth Mastery link in the description the channel summarizes the thought the thinking of public intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson, Yuval Noah Harari and so on so forth and among these public intellectuals poor humble me I'm also my thinking and teachings are also summarized there. Go to the channel have a look around and please pay attention to the number of views hint hint and not Wagner and not self congratulating and self bragging people might think that you're a narcissist okay a proper narcissism I'm honored and privileged to have been the latest guest in the Human Rights podcast of the University of Cambridge the podcast is called Declarations and it is put together by the center of governance and human rights at the University of Cambridge it's available on Apple podcast and on Spotify and again there's a link in the description now during this podcast I suggested a new approach to abuse involving involving dual concepts borders versus boundaries the host was Nima Jaiasing and the panelist was Dr Mariam Tanweer and we we dealt with the discourses regarding personal border violations in mental abuse versus boundary violations it's very interesting because I identified several behaviors which are not considered abusive as actually abusive go there and listen if you didn't have enough of a vaccinate dose for the day overdose on vaccinate is the new black okay next as you well know may know I have a PhD in physics so there's several videos I've made about physics a theory that I came up with in 1984 in my PhD dissertation is now being elaborated upon by scientists all over the world so there are several videos on physics there are videos on economics I used to be an economic advisor to several governments I used to be the senior business correspondent of United Press International UPI I was an M still interviewed widely in all international media lately on Newsweek RTL TV Hungary and so on and so forth and I'm the current columnist in Brussels Morning which is a European Union newspaper now all these contents and materials are available on my Vaknin Newsings channel Vaknin Newsings channel and again there's a link in the description another channel that I maintain is about nothingness finally the last service announcement I'm uploading academic papers academic articles that I've published that I've offered and published and I'm uploading academic articles and papers where my work is cited there's a total of 1500 academic papers where my work has been cited and I'm uploading all these to my page on academia.edu academia.edu academia.edu recently academia.edu selected me to be top 0.5% of 270 million academics around the world it's a huge honor and I accept it untypically, atypically of me I accept it with due humility top 0.5% of all academics in the world confirmed by academia.edu I'm also a member of their editorial board and other positions. So these are the service announcements as I promised today we're going to discuss a very fascinating topic autistic and deraistic thinking but before we go there I want to mention a school of thought known as inactivism and activism is the proposition that minds arise and take shape through the precarious self-creating self-sustaining adaptive activities of living creatures living creatures regulate themselves by interacting with features of the environment now the insights of inactivism went into my recent IPAM model intra-psychic activation model there's a video on my channel dedicated to IPAM and there are already a few papers published in academic journals about IPAM so inactivism is a part of IPAM because it recognizes that the minds of creatures are the outcomes of regulatory or self-regulatory activities in the environment now the term inaction was first introduced in a book and the embodied mind co-authored by Varela Thompson and Roche and published in 1991 at the time the authors defined cognition as inaction and they defined an action as the bringing forth of domains of significance through gas organismic activity that has been its self-condition by a history of interactions between an organism and its environment mentality never mind how complex, never mind how sophisticated yes, even my mentality has to do with living beings dynamically interacting with their environment from the inactivist perspective minds cannot be described unless you specify all these interactions because they are at the heart mentality and mentalizing in all their forms now this leads directly to autistic enteristic thinking because these two types of cognitions are actually divorced from the environment and fly in the face of inactivism have fun Yeladim and Yeladot look it up and this topic also known as dereistic thinking is the topic of today's video and what qualifies me to hector and preach and chastise and castigate all the plagiarist and self-styled experts out there? my credentials my name is Sam Vaknin I am the author of the first book on narcissistic abuse malignant self-love and I am revisited first published in 1999 when the dinosaurs roam the earth I am also a former visiting professor of psychology in southern federal university in Rostov-on-Don Russian Federation and I am a long-term member of the faculty of CIAPS Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies with offices in Toronto, Canada Cambridge United Kingdom Cambridge Campus in Lagos, Nigeria here you are you span the globe with me join Vaknin tours okay Neshamot look it up let us delve right in enough with the nonsense Vaknin let us delve right in and discuss autistic and dereistic thinking autistic and dereistic thinking are ways of relating to reality to personal experience to logic itself and to other people interpersonal relating autistic and dereistic thinking are fantasy-infused they are based on fantasy however they are technically speaking or clinically speaking cognitions dereism and autistic thinking as the name implies deal with thoughts with cognitions but these cognitions are somehow distorted these are cognitive distortions their autistic thinking is narcissistic and egocentric self-centered thought that's autistic thinking dereistic thinking is totally fantastic it revolves around fantasy and daydreaming it is divorced from reality it involves impaired reality testing both autistic and dereistic thinking are self-referential they cause the individual withdrawal from the world and to focus upon oneself to the exclusion of all others everything else and even the logic order and structure that rule the universe so these patients have illogical and idiosyncratic cognitions their thinking is very bizarre to the point that often they are misdiagnosed as schizotypo but the thinking or I mean autistic thinking and dereistic thinking derive from an overarching and all pervasive daydreaming or fantasy life in other words they are not isolated figments or mechanisms they are not integrated well into other psychodynamics they form a part and parcel and very often the pivot or the axis of the total mental world psychological universe inner landscape of the person involved cognitions in this case dereistic conditions autistic cognitions actually form the internal universe of the patient so that everything becomes suffused with fantasy dreams highly unusual very specific and unique to the individual thinking very stereotypical or concrete thinking a defiance logic and inability to relate to other people as if they were real of course if you deny reality also deny the reality of other people with the exception of plagiarists out there okay shoshani so we have a patient he is illogical he is odd he is weird he misinterprets his own experience in ways which are delusional or strange he has a very poor interface with reality he misjudges reality and we have this kind of patient and they infuse people and events around them with completely subjective meanings it is on the thin line with psychosis actually because there are strong elements of hyper reflexivity and the usual confusion between internal and external objects these patients regard the external world as an extension or projection of the internal one such patients often withdraw completely they retreat into an inner private realm unable to communicate and to interact with others this is very common in specific phases of the narcissistic cycle for example the schizoid phase and so there is a close affinity between narcissism and autism mediated via autistic thinking the narcissist is the only clinical case who engages in both autistic thinking and deraistic thinking depending on the phase in the cycle narcissists are like pocman too they are like a compendium of these types of counterfactual unrealistic modes of thought relating to the environment people with autism spectrum disorder they are they engage in autistic thinking narcissists as I said engage in autistic thinking and deraistic thinking but autistic and deraistic thinking are not limited to these mental disorders if we were to consider the belief in God and other supernatural beings as a form of delusional disorder a mass psychogenic illness the way I do that's how I regard this idiotic nonsense well these are mentally ill people religious people are mentally ill and they are there in some of them, not all of them some of them can easily degenerate into autistic and deraistic thinking for example many of them believe that God himself cares for them specifically personally individually monitors them micromanages their lives and rewards them or punishes them according to their behavior or misconduct this is delusional autistic deraistic thinking self-absorbed and divorced from reality so we have an example of socially acceptable delusions which actually involve deraistic and autistic thinking similarly paranoia paranoid ideation is a form of narcissism it's grandiose the paranoid believes that he is at the center of some malign attention malevolent conspiracy he is so important that everyone is out to get him to take him down and the paranoid engages in autistic and deraistic thinking as well what I'm trying to say is that autistic and deraistic thinking are crucial components of many mental illnesses and also many mentally ill but socially condoned behaviors not only religion political movements such as Nazism for example or communism they engaged in autistic and deraistic thinking it's an exceedingly dangerous phenomenon and one of the main tasks in therapy, in psychotherapy is to negate or to confront and to ameliorate and to subdue and to suppress and to repress autistic and deraistic thinking somehow confronting them with countervailing information, data and evidence this is precisely what is done what we do in cognitive behavior therapy I'm not a therapist, I'm a counselor but this is what is done in CBT so autistic and deraistic thinking if you go one level down and if you accept that emotions are a subspecies of cognitions then of course autistic and deraistic thinking would affect emotions as well more precisely access to emotions autistic and deraistic thinking would deny the patient access to his emotions because emotions would be perceived as out there external part of reality and so there would be a gap or a chasm or a schism or a general fragmentation of the patient where for example the narcissist cannot access positive emotions and is left only with negative affectivity access to emotions is totally denied in the case of the psychopath and in the case of the borderline there is emotional dysregulation which is also a direct outcome of misjudging her emotions weighing them improperly again involving autistic and deraistic thinking it's a much neglected field and could be the key for future advances in the study and treatment of cluster B personality disorders hopefully not by self-styled experts, their mothers-in-law and other plagiarists I needed a humongous glass of wine to get through this topic the topic today is high functioning autism are these people psychopaths are they narcissists what the heck happened to Asperger's syndrome and how do we view autism today after the massive revision in the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 5 2013 let's start with observations many of you who had come across people with autism spectrum disorders describe them as somewhat antisocial somewhat psychopathic a lot grandiose and entitled and narcissistic many people say he's not a narcissist he has Asperger's syndrome or he's not a psychopath he's a high functioning autist or the other way around he's not autistic he's actually a psychopath there's a huge confusion in the field and by the way this confusion extends not only to you the layman but to my colleagues professors of psychology to therapists to psychologists everywhere and this is the autistic moment to tell you my name is Sam Vaknim and I'm the author of my Lignan self law Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of psychology okay let's get to business and business is not as usual let's start with the most cutting edge, bleeding edge knowledge we have psychopathy begins to emerge as a kind of global feature global trait possibly global behavior or global cognitive deficit in a variety of disorders just yesterday I made a video regarding a new study which supports Theodore Millen's view and more modestly my view of narcissism as compensatory grandiose narcissists are actually psychopaths said the study you may wish to watch yesterday's video to understand what am I talking about so psychopathy is almost indistinguishable from grandiose narcissism but people with borderline personality disorder classic borderline also become secondary psychopaths or primary psychopaths under conditions of stress when they feel rejected humiliated and abandoned that's why I came up with a new diagnosis which I'm proposing which is a hybrid between primary psychopathy and borderline and that is covert borderline borderline is a very strong psychopathy is a very strong feature of borderline one of the self states of the borderline woman is a psychopath and I'm saying woman because we have studies only about the psychopathic self state in women mysteriously no one bothered to study men in relation to this so psychopathy borderline narcissism they're all interlinked which is one of the main reasons I'm proposing to eliminate all these distinctions and to come up with a single personality disorder with various overlays manifestations and emphasis but what about autism let me start by saying we have no idea what causes autism we have a perfect idea what doesn't cause autism vaccines do not cause autism this is discredited research discredited research which had been withdrawn in disgrace by the authors and the journals that had published it it was fake it was wrong there's no connection correlation causation anything whatsoever to do between vaccines and autism however we don't know what causes autism we suspect that genetics may be involved it's hereditary maybe some abnormalities in the brain we are not sure we can demonstrate pretty conclusively using functional magnetic resonance PET and other methodologies we can demonstrate that people with autism spectrum disorders have abnormal brain activity patterns mainly abnormal blood flow and various areas of the brain are activated in the wrong sequence at the wrong time and with the wrong stimulus stimuli so something is wrong with the brain of the autistic but something is wrong with the brain of the psychopath psychopaths have severe brain abnormalities for example when it comes to white matter to multi-unit activity electrical activity in the brain to activated areas they don't respond for example to emotional photography or photography displaying all kinds of stressful situations their brains do not process fear even their skin conductance the skin conductance of psychopaths is different, they don't sweat it so to speak their heartbeat is not heightened they don't develop tachycardia their bodies don't react to situations of fear and terror so something is very fundamentally different in the brain and the body of the psychopath same as it is in the brain and the body of the autistic person now we are trying to map the abnormalities in the brain of the autistic person to the abnormalities in the brain of the psychopath and to complicate matters further there are abnormalities in the brain of the borderline and there are very strong indications that both borderline and psychopathy have a hereditary component somehow inherited we can't prove it but there are strong indications if you have first degree or second degree relatives borderline and psychopathy you are likely to develop borderline and psychopathy to a much higher degree four or five times higher to some extent this is the case with autism so we are beginning to see similarities in the transmissibility of this disorder across generations the fact that the brains of these people are abnormal what about the behavior there are quite a few studies actually linking high functioning autism and criminal behavior several studies have shown that features associated with high functioning autism increase the probability of engaging in criminal behavior of course criminal behavior is one of the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder aka psychopathy in extreme cases so there is a lot of thrust there is a lot of effort doing research in this area we don't know why people with high functioning autism and in a minute I will define high functioning autism we don't know why people with this this variant of concern of autism are the ones who commit crimes well way and above the statistical average in the general population we don't know and that's why we are conducting the studies and the research we think maybe it has to do with a lack of empathy another thing linking high functioning autism and psychopathy and narcissism of course is a lack of empathy later in this video lecture I am going to discuss the connection between autism and narcissism and why they are very difficult to tell apart and so there is a lack of empathy there is also social naivet inability to decipher properly interpret embed in a context social cues and when you don't understand people when you don't understand what they mean what they want to say, what they are communicating you may end up doing things which are stressful and distrustful you may end up actually committing crimes to do so so there is a question here of mens rea and acti rea in other words, does the autistic person mean does he mean to be violent because most autistic crimes are violent actually they involve violence does he mean to be violent or is he just flailing and thrashing about because he doesn't understand where he is and what people are trying to tell him and disorienting and very frightening is he in panic or is he a hard-wired, hard-core criminal owing to a lack of empathy and so another very interesting feature is that both psychopathy and borderline but not narcissism and not autism both psychopathy and borderline remit in midlife after the age of 40, 45 depending on the study 50% of people with borderline personality disorder lose the diagnosis spontaneously there is hope for borderline borderline is a very hopeful disorder because it is treated very effectively with dbt with medication and it remits spontaneously I would give my right arm for this to happen to me because narcissism is hopeless hopeless now the same happens with psychopaths believe it or not psychopathy antisocial features of the personality remit and literally disappear late in life, late in life could be 50, 45 sometimes 60 but always disappear the psychopath seizes to be a psychopath when he reaches the second half of his life which is a very, very hopeful message something unites and links the borderline with the psychopath on a biological, cerebral neurological level clearly it's not the same for narcissism and autistic spectrum disorders especially high functioning autism that's why we're going to I'm going to analyze the connection between these two things these two disorders a bit later of course in psychopathy we distinguish between primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy the same way we distinguish between grandiose or phallic narcissists and covert or vulnerable or shy or fragile narcissists there's not such distinction in borderline the construct of shy or quite borderline failed failed the test of clinical studies and trials there's no proof that it exists never it does exist in narcissism and it does exist to some extent in psychopathy where we have primary and secondary psychopath the behaviors of the primary and secondary psychopath are the same but the secondary psychopath has emotions imagine psychopath with emotions it's like vacuuming with empathy and impossibility but it exists secondary psychopathy involves emotions especially dysregulated emotions strangely a little like borderline and it involves empathy no wonder the borderline patient when she is exposed to stress humiliation rejection and abandonment real or imagined or anticipated she becomes a secondary psychopath she cannot become a primary psychopath because she has emotions and empathy so she becomes a secondary psychopath and displays the full panoply a full range of behaviors of a psychopath but with empathy and emotion ok let me read to you an excerpt from an article which I'll refer to later which describes, which gives an overview of autism spectrum disorder autism spectrum disorders are neurodevelopmental disorders that comprise a heterogeneous group of conditions which are characterized by impairments in social interaction and communication as well as repetitive and stereotype interests and behaviors reported prevalence rates have risen markedly in recent decades there is up to 1% lifetime prevalence with more and more adults being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder it is assumed that the male to female ratio is between 3 and 4 to 1 although nearly half and there exist particular gender differences in autism spectrum disorders although nearly half of individuals with autism spectrum disorders are not intellectually impaired and have normal cognitive language skills such as individuals with high functioning autism or asperger syndrome the social interaction and communication deficits and difficulties in seeing the perspective of others so the social interaction and communication deficits the difficulties in seeing the perspective of other people and intuitively understanding non-verbal social cues these put together constitute hidden barriers to the development of romantic and sexual relationships sexuality related problems can arise especially at the start of puberty at the time when the development of autism spectrum disorder individuals social skills cannot keep up with increasing social demands and the challenges of forming romantic and sexual relationships become particularly apparent now before we jump into the issue of what is high functioning autism a warning high functioning autism is not a clinical construct accepted in among scholars in the diagnostic and statistical manual or even in the more advanced conceptually more advanced international classification of disorders so it is a kind of phrase that clinicians use very frequently but has no foundation in clinical research and studies it's anecdotal it results from observations self-reporting and reporting by family members many scholars and many autism rights activists they disagree with the categorization of high functioning low functioning they disagree because the functioning of a typical person with autism fluctuates one day this person is high functioning the next day for whatever reason this person is very low functioning so you can't take look at someone with autistic spectrum disorder and say oh this guy is consistently high functioning because there will be many days when he will be low functioning and what about medium functioning people where do you categorize them? aren't they the majority? we don't know because we don't use the construct of high functioning high functioning autism is usually results for people who have diagnosed autism spectrum disorder but no intellectual impairment no intellectual problem they can speak, they can read they can write, they can handle basic life skills they can eat by themselves get dressed by themselves they can live independently attain positions, they are professionals and so on starting in the 1990s we began to have a more nuanced and subtle view of autism spectrum disorders we began to recognize high functioning autism asperger's disorder or asperger wrongly called asperger's syndrome and these are people who actually function in society they have families they have jobs, everything in 2013 the American Psychiatric Association decided to get rid of all this mess and they created a single diagnostic group called autism spectrum disorder that's it, ASD no aspergers no nothing there's a single diagnosis there's level 1 ASD which corresponds roughly to asperger's disorder but there's only one diagnosis of course there are different levels of functioning different levels of empathy different levels of deciphering social cues, different levels of social behavior, etc there's a spectrum there's a spectrum and that's why it's called autism spectrum disorders but it's a single a single diagnosis and so people with high functioning autism are exactly like everyone else with autism spectrum disorders they are very bad in social interaction and communication all manner of social interaction and communication including later in life dating, job interviews holding a job, a career now this from the outside may look like social anxiety or like personality disorder this is the reactive side the autistic person tries to integrate tries to interact tries to belong tries to be accepted tries to be loved tries to become a part of a peer group and keeps being rejected keeps being shunned and so she develops or he develops social anxiety which is a secondary and reactive artifacts of the initial rejection by everyone around the autistic person they don't read social cues they find it extremely difficult to make friends let alone date and they get very stressed in social situations because they anticipate rejection and they shut down they don't make eye contact they don't make small talk people on the spectrum who are high functioning they're very rigid they're very structure and order oriented they make lists for example or they go through robotic robotic routines whine at 3.30 like me so they're very very kind of predictable they're machine like and they have repetitive and restrictive habits and very often people find them very odd because they're very compulsive and insistent on these habits on these procedures on these routines they're devoted to them and they become very dysregulated very anxious if they can't carry out these routines at the prescribed time and usually in a prescribed location and people find it extremely bizarre so people with autism spectrum disorder sometimes are misdiagnosed as schizotypal personality disorder there's a wide range of functioning in school and at work some actually do very well at school others get overwhelmed can't concentrate some roll the job other finds it's very hard very difficult to roll the job it all depends and that's why high functioning, low functioning, middle functioning sounds a bit strange sounds a bit wrong even for someone on the spectrum who can do a lot who is very functional the commonality among everyone diagnosed with ASD is underdeveloped social skills which is one hell of a barrier makes it extremely difficult so if one has to summarize what is high functioning what's high functioning autism it's trouble with social interaction impaired communication restricted interest restricted interests and repetitive behavior this leads to social isolation employment problems family stress bullying by others self-harm that's where it begins to be difficult to distinguish autism spectrum disorder from borderline personality disorder and so the thing that sets high functioning with autism apart is there is no intellectual disability there are deficits in communication and emotion recognition cognition expression social interaction yes but no intellectual disability and in this sense high functioning autism is actually level one autism spectrum disorder which used to be called asperger syndrome or asperger disorder more precisely and so in these cases including high functioning autism there had been a significant delay in the development of in the developmental path now in asperger syndrome level one asperger disorder what used to be called asperger disorder in high functioning autism there was no language delay they began to use language on time there is language delay speech delay language skills delay among other types of autism people with people who are low functioning have low functioning autism these people start to talk at age three and later so it's a distinguishing feature language skills high functioning autism have no problem with language and there are other things other differences people with high functioning autism have a lower verbal reasoning ability people with asperger disorder have a higher verbal reasoning skill than people with high functioning autism people with high functioning autism have better visual and spatial skills higher performance IQ than people with asperger people with HFA high functioning they don't have deviating locomotion clumsiness they're not clumsy, people with aspergers are people with FHA have problems functioning independently more often than aspergers people with FHA high functioning autism they're curious they have interest in many things people with aspergers have limited and restricted interest people with aspergers are better at empathizing with another person people with HFA almost completely lack empathy and in decent's resemble there is strongly narcissists and psychopaths and so autism spectrum disorder low functioning high functioning always includes almost always is diagnosed with anxiety anxiety is very commonly occurring mental health symptoms in high functioning autism and the reason I'm mentioning it is anxiety is a hallmark of psychopathy and a hallmark of borderline and remember borderline and psychopathy are two brain disorders and both of them in both cases there's a very high comorbidity of anxiety disorders and depressive disorders which is exactly the case in high functioning autism but not the case with other types of autism there are other comorbidities and they include bipolar disorder obsessive compulsive disorder that is the number one comorbidity the link between high functioning autism and obsessive compulsive disorder is very strong and it seems that in both cases there is a problem with serotonin in the brain there's also ADHD there's also Tourette syndrome now ADHD is intimately linked to narcissism I encourage you to watch the relevant videos I think one or two on my channel but there's no intellectual disability in high functioning autism okay there are no differences in sexuality between high functioning autism people and normal people healthy control as they are called I refer you to the article sexuality in autism hypersexual and paraphilic behavior in women and men with high functioning autism spectrum disorder published in the academic journal Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience December 2017 I think it was volume 19 the short and the long of it that there is no difference there's no difference in sexuality between high functioning autism and the normal population more or less so before we go to narcissism what do we have? we have strong similarities in behavior between psychopathy and HFA high functioning autism we have a lack of empathy we have brain artifacts we have normalities we have criminal behavior including violent behavior which indicates of course lack of impulse control and defiance and recklessness we have inability to decipher social cues which doesn't sit well with psychopathy psychopaths have cold empathy they're actually excellent at deciphering social cues and that's why psychopaths are very good we have dysfunctional dysfunctional social life including problems with dating not sex dating social interactions psychopaths usually don't have this they're very skillful in social settings many of them are gregarious and charming they're manipulative they're good they're good with people they're not good people they're good with people so it would seem on the face of it that artificially when you look from the outside you see someone who is cold detached lacks empathy goal oriented even to the point of compulsiveness a bit criminal or antisocial and you say to yourself it could be a high functioning a person with high functioning autism the critical the critical elements, critical differential diagnoses or differential factors I mentioned so go deeper don't make snap judgments what about autism and especially Asperger's syndrome Asperger's disorder what about Asperger's disorder and narcissism Asperger's disorder to repeat for the ninth time was renamed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5 as Autistic Spectrum Disorder Level 1 and it is often misdiagnosed as Narcissistic Personality Disorder though it is evident as early as age 3 which narcissism is not pathological narcissism cannot be safely diagnosed prior to adolescence and I would even say late adolescence because adolescents are narcissistic babies are narcissistic you can diagnose narcissism pathological narcissism in young people but you can of course diagnose Asperger's disorder in someone who is age 3 so here is the first difference between the two in both cases narcissism and Asperger's the patient is self centered and grossed in a narrow range of interest and activities social and occupational interactions are severely hampered and conversational skills given take or verbal intercourse are primitive the Asperger's patient body language eye to eye gaze body posture facial expressions the body language is constricted and it is very reminiscent of the narcissists body language which is hotty and superior non-verbal cues are virtually absent and the interpretation of non-verbal cues in other people is lacking solely against something very common to narcissists and Aspergers and yet the gulf between Aspergers and pathological narcissism is vast the narcissists switches between social agility and social impairment and he does this voluntarily the narcissists chooses to retreat into a schizoid phase or to become gregarious and charming the narcissists social dysfunction is the outcome of conscious hotness and the reluctance to invest scarce mental energy in cultivating relationships who are deemed inferior and unworthy when the narcissist is confronted with potential sources of narcissistic supply however he easily regains his social skills his charm and his sociability many narcissists reach the highest levels and ranks of their community church firm voluntary organization most of the time narcissists are high function flawlessly though the inevitable blow ups and the grating extortion of narcissistic supply usually put an end to the narcissist's career and social liaisons narcissists always ends badly but until then he functions perfectly the Aspergers patient often wants to be accepted socially wants to have friends wants to get married to be sexually active to sire for offspring he just doesn't have a clue how to go about it his affect is limited his emotion emotional repertoire is limited his initiative for instance to share his experiences with his nearest and dearest or to engage in foreplay during sex the initiative is thwarted his ability to divulge his emotions this ability is tilted in the Aspergers the Asperger is incapable of reciprocating is largely unaware of the wishes, needs and feelings of his interlocutors or counter parties inevitably Aspergers patients are perceived by other people to be called eccentric insensitive indifferent repulsive exploitative emotionally absent to avoid the pain of rejection themselves to solitary activities but unlike the schizoid they don't do this by choice and also unlike the narcissist the Asperger patient limits his world to a single topic single hobby or person and he dives in with the greatest all-consuming intensity excluding all other matters and everyone else it is a form of pain control pain regulation if you wish and so while the narcissist avoids pain by excluding by devaluing by discarding other people the Aspergers patient achieves the same result by withdrawing by avoiding by passionately incorporating in his universe only one or two people and one or two subjects of interest both narcissists and Aspergers patients are prone to react with depression to perceived threats and injuries but the Asperger patient is far more at risk of self-harm and suicide resembling very much the borderline the use of language is another differentiating factor the narcissist is a skilled communicator narcissists uses language as an instrument a weapon if you wish to obtain narcissistic supply to obliterate his enemies and discarded sources cerebral narcissists arrive narcissistic supply from the consummate use they make of their innate verbosity just look at me it's not the same with the Aspergers patient Aspergers patient is equally verbose at times and taciturn on other occasions but his topics are few and so he's tediously repetitive the Aspergers patient is unlikely to obey conversational rules and etiquette for example he's unlikely to let other people speak in turn and the Aspergers patient also is unable to decipher non-verbal cues and gestures and to monitor his own misbehavior on such occasions narcissists are similarly inconsiderate but only towards those who cannot possibly serve as sources of supply I want to make a comment about refrigerator mothers the concept of refrigerator mothers has been long debunked its rank nonsense autism is a brain disorder it is not linked to bad parenting but a dead a dead mother to use Andrea Green's phrase 1978 a dead mother narcissistic mother absent mother selfish mother she can cause her autistic child to defend himself by developing narcissism in other words a bad mother can push the autistic child the congenitally autistic child with a brain disorder to become a narcissist ADHD has been intimately linked to the precursors in children of adults narcissism and psychopathy these precursors are conduct disorder and oppositional defined disorder so a bad dead cold mother a refrigerator mother fosters in the autistic child narcissistic defenses and in her other children attention deficits hyperactivity and antisocial behavior these dysfunctions make it difficult for the child to translate his or her reflexive empathy into a mentalizing theory of mind in other words the child cannot because of these deficits the child cannot understand other people this process is called mentalization he cannot understand other people he has no theory of the minds of other people early childhood abuse and trauma therefore inhibit the development of a mature form of empathy with cognitive and emotional components there are three problems with raising awareness and educating people about autism spectrum disorders we don't know the etiology of autism what causes it and whether the brain abnormalities often observed in autistic patients cause the autism or are caused by the autism or are merely correlated or effectuated by a third common factor we don't know autism is a family of disorders which have little in common with each other some autistic persons are high functioning and accomplished as I mentioned others self-harm are hypersensitive to stimuli or non-communicative number three the long discredited aforementioned refrigerator mother theory blamed emotionally unavailable dead or frigid mothers for the pathogenesis of autism in their children and this deterred parents from seeking help they should be blamed for her child's autism the ignorance, taboos stigma, biases prejudices and lack of evidence based theories and practices that pervade mental health apply even more so or maximally even to autism I would recommend I'll give you now a reading list McDowell, Maxon the image of the mother's eye autism and early narcissistic injury in behavioural and brain sciences and James Robert Brasic pervasive developmental disorder Asperger syndrome autism spectrum disorder is amazingly one of the least explored areas the first study is a lot of interest a lot of money sloshing around but we are very far from understanding we are very far from even realising whether it's a single clinical entity or a family of disorders that just artificially resemble each other and so clearly it's easy to confuse autism spectrum disorders with narcissism as I've just demonstrated it's equally easy to confuse it with psychopathy don't make this mistake what better way to open the week than with some vacuum glorious Monday to all of you Shoshanim and Shoshanot and today I'm going to embark on a mission impossible to make myself even a bigger hate figure than I already am and I'm going to do this comparing to scientific studies that prove repeatedly over at least 10 years that number one people on the autism spectrum disorder lack empathy exactly like narcissists and psychopaths and yes of course I've been saying it for many years number two so called empaths are actually narcissists and psychopaths who engage in deceptive virtual signaling and yes of course I've been saying this also for many years but now I'm adding to a corpus of videos that I've already made with two new additional studies there are dozens by now but two new additional studies I do recommend that you watch my recent video about victimhood competitive victimhood and my previous videos about autism spectrum disorder compared to cluster B personality disorder especially high functioning autism spectrum disorders okay got the picture I wish you a bumpy ride and let us delve right into what I have to tell you okay there's this new study it's authored by one triggered TRIGT Colonesi Jorgensen, Nicolich and others it is titled autistic traits and self-conscious emotions in early childhood was published in childhood development recently few weeks ago I'm going to read to you from the abstract self-conscious emotions arise from evaluating the self through the eyes of other people given that children with autistic traits may experience difficulties with understanding other people's minds they might show less attuned self-conscious emotions so self-conscious emotions include guilt, embarrassment and shame and so on and so forth shame leads sometimes to avoidance and sometimes to other reactions so there was this experiment and in the experiment the experimenter pretended that the kids broke his toy the experimenter was playing with a toy and then he said to the kids oh my god you broke my toy he shamed them and named them and so there was data the experiment lasted almost a year and a half and was repeated very often here are the conclusions in the abstract children with more autistic traits showed less theory of mind theory of mind is the long phrase for mentalization the ability to perceive or conceive of other people's minds and what makes them tick ok so children with more autistic traits showed less theory of mind and more shame like avoidance but associations were not mediated by theory of mind in other words the children's tendency to avoid shame were not the outcome of their inability to perceive other people's minds this provides say the authors this provides initial evidence that children with more autistic traits may show disturbances in some but not all self-conscious emotions which could hinder their social functioning nothing new here this has been established in numerous studies in the past but never with young young young children like two years old, three years old, four years old all the previous studies were conducted on adolescents and adults not on children but like nine year old children, eight year old children not two and three and four year old children so what the researchers in this particular experiment have done they wanted to find out whether autistic traits are associated with a deficit in theory of mind whether autistic traits make, render the child incapable of understanding other people's mental states and predicting their behaviors and whether deficits in the theory of mind deficits in mentalization are related to the experience of self-conscious emotions with emphasis on shame like avoidance remember self-conscious emotions include guilt include many elements of empathy actually one could say that self-conscious emotions are the foundation of empathy empathy is predicated on self-conscious emotions like guilt and shame and embarrassment and so on so forth if you lack these emotions you're extremely unlikely to have emotional empathy you may be able to have what I call called empathy which includes reflexive or instinctual empathy and cognitive empathy but you will never have full-fledged empathy because you must have in order for you to have full-fledged empathy you must have an emotional component autistic children seem to be unable to conceive of other people and their emotions and so on and so forth the results of this study show that children with higher level of autistic traits did demonstrate a clear deficit in their ability to perceive other people's mental states otherwise in their ability to empathize in their ability to construct a theory of mind additionally autistic traits were positively associated in the study with verbal shame-like avoidance I will explain this in a minute now there is definitely a need there was a lacuna, there was a need to understand or conceptualize the relationship between autistic traits self-conscious emotions in very very young children because that's where it all starts the formative years astoundingly no one studied the formative years in autism spectrum disorders when it comes to guilt and shame and empathy and avoidance and so on critical features of the formative years self-conscious emotions such as guilt embarrassment and shame are a crucial role in social interactions they motivate pro-social behaviors or when they are absent they inhibit pro-social behavior when people transgress when they misbehave when they act out or when they break mores and rules of conduct and conventions and norms when they act non-normatively when people transgress self-conscious emotions are automatically triggered and they are known colloquially as conscience actually so when you do something bad when you do something you shouldn't have done and then you feel shame you're not likely to repeat it you feel guilty, you're likely to offer some amends or try to make amends or somehow recompense self-conscious emotions are the ones that regulate and maintain social relationships and minimize transgressions misconduct misbehavior via a form of disinhibition and negative reinforcement so previous research has conclusively demonstrated disturbances in self-conscious emotions in older children and adults with autism spectrum disorders this is beyond debate I'm sorry to tell you this older children above the age of 6 and adults with autism spectrum disorder lack empathy they have extreme deficits or deficiencies in empathy they are comparable to some types of borderline personality disorder and even narcissistic style or narcissism this is known this is not debatable anymore it may not be palatable it's not politically correct and everyone online present themselves as victims and perfect and beyond reproach and empathic and loving and caring that's online hype and BS psychology is merciless because it pursues the truth the truth is often inconvenient to quote Al Gore okay? but what we didn't know is whether these disturbances present in early childhood and whether they are related to autistic traits in early childhood and the answer is now yes they are autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition it is characterized by significant deficits in social interaction reduced social awareness and communication inability to decipher social and much later sexual cues restricted emotional engagement reduced affect display stereotype behavior patterns and concrete thinking and communication speech acts children with autism spectrum disorder display severe impairments in their capacity to consider the thoughts and emotions of other people they are unable to construct a theory a theory as to how other people think what other people feel what makes other people tick what are the dynamics and motivations of other people and how other people fit into the environment social or otherwise this is known as theory of mind and the process is known as mentalization and it's absent literally absent in autism spectrum disorder disorders and of course this leads to severe disturbances in self-conscious emotions post transgressive behavior someone with autism spectrum disorder misbehaves egregiously and then is unable to experience shame or guilt and when he does experience shame he avoids it verbally or otherwise he shuns the self-conscious emotions and he is rarely embarrassed if a child fails to comprehend that they have broken a norm transgress transgress against the conventions of society if they fail to understand that they have hurt someone someone else's feelings someone else's interests someone else's property this kind of children cannot feel guilty or embarrassed they may experience shame and they experience shame because of the reactions of other people and then when they experience shame they display withdrawal or avoidant behaviors gradually over the years many of these people many of these children develop narcissistic defenses to the point of narcissistic personality disorder in a small minority of them narcissistic defenses simply are a form of alloplastic defenses narcissistic defense means other people are the problem they are deficient something's wrong with them I'm okay, I'm alright I'm perfect, I've done nothing wrong it's a form of shame avoidance or shame withdrawal studies investigating the association between autistic traits and self-conscious emotions now prove conclusively in all age groups that there are fewer signs of guilt and more signs of shame mind you it is still unclear when these disturbances develop exactly what are the underlying mechanisms are they neurological are they environmental are they genetic we know very little about autism strangely autism has been first described 90 years ago that's like 90 years ago and we know very little about autism same with narcissism first described 110 years ago we still know very little about narcissism it's the disgrace of the profession in the new studies and her colleagues they investigated these relationships between autistic traits self-conscious emotions and remember there's not empathy without a theory of mind there's not empathy without self-conscious emotions period so if autistic children lack a theory of mind and they lack most self-conscious emotions in the best case they have extremely impaired empathy and really in reality they lack empathy exactly like narcissists it also raises interesting questions about narcissists someone should study children who are exposed to abuse and trauma between the ages of 2 and 4 and see whether they traverse the same developmental trajectory as children with autistic spectrum disorder with autism spectrum disorder so it could be that children at these ages children fail to develop a theory of mind fail to understand or to read appropriately other people fail to experience shame because they avoid it because they simply don't experience it they don't have such a thing it's possible that children what I call idiosyncratic children children with problems mental health problems, neurodevelopmental problems problems in the environment they're being abused, traumatised and so it's possible that this is the typical reaction to idiosyncrasy it is as if the child says I'm special I'm special because I'm rejected, I'm ostracised by society, by my peers, by my parents and so on only special children are rejected by society and so they develop narcissistic defences the child says my mother rejects me, she's a dead mother yes, she rejects me or she breaches my boundaries or she won't let me separate or she hates me or she loves me too much or whatever, all these are forms of abuse the child says what it must mean that I'm special I think autistic children undergo this exact same process even though they feel to some extent inferior damaged and broken they convert this into uniqueness they say yeah I'm a special child we have this special needs special needs children this special element so I think narcissistic defences are provoked very early on in children who are idiosyncratic and when they say idiosyncratic it doesn't have to be autistic it doesn't have to be an abused child it could be an immigrant child it could be a child who is exposed to racism systemic racism or peer racism it could be a child who is obese it could be a child who is gifted a child who stands out a child who never fits in a child who cannot conform for whatever reason you name it intellectual reason intellectually challenged children as well these kind of children would tend to develop a theory of themselves an internal working model which renders them special and so this hypothesis of mine needs to be tested we need to see whether children who are about to become narcissistic in adulthood are distinguishable from children with autism spectrum disorder I believe that they are I believe you can't tell the difference at age 2 or age 4 now the researchers were faced with a dilemma they needed to separate what we call confounding factors factors that affect each other and contaminate the picture there's no pure situation so for example higher levels of autistic traits correlate with reduced guilt and embarrassment they also correlate with increased shame based avoidance and withdrawal but do these deficits do these problems are they associated with the inability to form a theory of mind because both are present and it's very difficult to say whether there's causation correlation or whether these two phenomena are related somehow to a higher level third phenomenon so they found that children with more autistic traits showed more verbal shame like avoidance mean what I mean is that they tended this kind of children tended to verbally withdraw or avoid social interactions or situations after they have committed a transgression they did something wrong and then they just ran away they avoided other people they didn't want to talk to anyone because they didn't want to feel shame they didn't feel guilty they didn't feel even embarrassed but they did not want to be shamed by other people they wanted to avoid the consequences of their actions sounds familiar yes, narcissists and psychopaths there was also some evidence of non-verbal shame like avoidance but it was not statistically significant so we're going to ignore it the study it's important to emphasize that the study did not support the idea or the hypothesis that children with more autistic traits experience less guilt and embarrassment after doing something wrong than normally in other words it seems that the level of guilt and embarrassment in people with autism spectrum disorder is stable it's not reactive to having done something wrong let me tell you what it means in plain English politically incorrect as I can make it these children have no conscience that's why they don't feel guilty they don't feel guilty when they do something wrong they don't feel guilty when they don't do something wrong they just don't feel guilty the researchers also found that children with more autistic traits had reduced theory of mind abilities as I told you but the disturbances in self-conscious emotions as I said at the beginning they were not directly related to this so it looks like the inability to experience guilt and shame are constitutional they are not the outcome of the inability to empathize with other people they are not the outcome of the inability to make to create a theory about other people to put yourself in other people's shoes no, it's just a built-in hardwired inability to experience guilt and embarrassment here again a proposed study psychopaths are like this the developmental trajectory of psychopathy between the ages of 2 and 4 the developmental trajectory of narcissism between the ages of 2 and 4 and the developmental trajectory of children with autism spectrum disorders between the ages of 2 and 4 they all strike me as identical so there must be a common denominator here what is it? neurological brain abnormality genetic exactly creates the same psychological psychological outcomes when theoretically the patho etiology is different autism is not psychopathy psychopathy is not narcissism yes, psychopathy is not narcissism don't listen to self-styled experts online they are blabbering nonsense so these are three different conditions and yet they have so many commonalities in early childhood that it's shocking they are almost indistinguishable developmentally overall the findings of this study suggest that children with more autistic traits may experience difficulties in some self-conscious emotions particularly shame-like avoidance but not necessarily in guilt and embarrassment this wouldn't bother them because they don't experience it and these disturbances in self-conscious emotions may be related to autistic traits but they are not solely explained by a deficit in theory of mind there's something else at work and the same thing the same mysterious X-factor is at work in the development of narcissism and the development of psychopathy and possibly borderline as well these are amazingly important findings even the authors themselves don't fully grasp what it is that they've stumbled across there's all social interactions these disorders are relational narcissism, psychopathy these are relational disorders they reflect social deficits and deficiencies in social interactions and this is the core problem in autism spectrum disorders disorders understanding other people's perspectives needs, emotions, cognitions, intentions motivations there's a failure here in all three conditions which ostensibly are not related but here they are phenomenologically definitely related there's a positive association between autistic traits and verbal shame-like avoidance and lack of guilt and embarrassment same goes for psychopaths and all three experience harsh overriding, overpowering difficulties in social interactions and social functioning something to look into one should think okay so people don't really know what to do what to do okay people with autism spectrum disorders lack empathy exactly like narcissists and psychopaths let the hate fest begin, all the haters this is your cue next I'm going to make an even bigger group of enemies so-called empaths the self-aggrandizing self-infatuated group of wannabe victims would be victims online there's a new study which tends to support what I've been saying for six years and yes, to the best of my knowledge I've been the first to say it empaths are in all likelihood covert narcissists failed covert narcissists collapse covert narcissists covert narcissists who have been abused by overt grandiose narcissists and by psychopaths I'm not taking away the facts of the abuse or these people have been victimized probably but the way they react to having been victimized is narcissistic and psychopathic because they are narcissists and according to the most recent study they are also psychopaths I repeat this empaths are self-styled victims and they leverage their victimhood to coerce people to manipulate people to deceive people the entire empaths community is exactly this supergalactic, supernova empaths included and there's a recent study that tends to support this and the study is titled one minute give me a minute the study is titled signaling high sensitivity to influence others initial evidence for the roles of reinforcement sensitivity sensory processing sensitivity and the dark triad the study was authored by Martina Kaijik and Małszin Moron although they're not morons so it says that what we call empaths are actually narcissists and psychopaths who engage in deceptive virtual signaling yes, vacuum vindicated and others now in my footsteps so the study suggests that high sensitivity label is used by narcissists and psychopaths as a manipulative tactic the study was published in psychological reports and it says that labeling oneself as highly sensitive person which is not a clinical label by the way highly sensitive person it's a suggested construct popular hype more or less a bit like the inner child emotional flashbacks or quiet borderline so this label self-applied, self-imputed label I'm a highly sensitive person a manipulative tactic used by individuals with dark personality traits particularly narcissism and psychopathy and I quote to sway others' behavior and to gain advantages the researchers conducted this study to better understand the construct known as sensory processing sensitivity that's the clinical term sensory processing sensitivity it refers to individual differences in sensitivity to external and by the way internal stimuli so emotional dysregulation in borderline personality disorder is a form of sensory processing sensitivity in this sense borderlines can say that they are empaths and yet empaths claim to have been victimized by borderlines so and this trait of sensory processing sensitivity was popularly relabeled online as highly sensitive person in public discourse there's even a book about highly sensitive people and it erroneously of course claims that 20% of the population are highly sensitive that's nonsense, that's absolute nonsense it's not lower close to 20% and such individuals identify as highly sensitive on online forums expressing a need and may I add a coercive demand to be treated specially, special care special understanding and concessions does it strike a chord it should because narcissists are entitled narcissists demand special care they narcissists have special needs and narcissists require special care and concessions and understanding this study aimed to investigate the associations between sensitivity to external stimuli and the tendency to signal high sensitivity to other people and it took into account any sort of study which which does this by the way I recommend that you watch my video on competitive victimhood where I cite 10 other studies who actually reach the same conclusions so this particular study took into account dark triad personality traits now mind you dark triad is not the same as narcissism and psychopathy dark triad personality includes subclinical narcissism narcissistic traits and style that do not amount to full-fledged narcissistic personality disorder subclinical psychopathy psychopathic behaviors and traits that amount to psychopathy and Machiavellianism Machiavellianism, the ability and tendency to manipulate other people in order to obtain favorable outcomes a form of self-efficacy so these scholars, these researchers studied highly sensitive people I'm using the media hype online label so they studied highly sensitive HSPs and then they dealt deeper and asked themselves are these people narcissists and psychopaths and they correlated narcissism and psychopathy with signaling signaling, highly sensitive people who keep signaling I'm a victim, I'm super sensitive I'm amazingly delicate you should treat me with with the kid gloves you should respect me, you should make concessions because I'm brittle and I'm damaged and I'm amazing and I'm fantastic and I'm supernova and all other disgusting manipulative virtual signaling deceptive practices which narcissists and psychopaths do on a daily basis online and offline the researchers hypothesized two possibilities assertive signaling of specific needs where individuals genuinely expressed their sensitivity in order to alert others to their unique situational needs these are people who say broadcast I'm sensitive, please take this into account when you interact with me so this is called assertive signaling of specific needs and it is contrasted with deceptive signaling with the expression of high sensitivity is used to manipulate other people it's a manipulative strategy and I'm going to quote from the study due to the advantages that could be achieved as a result of signaling victimhood the public displays of one's weakness and oppression by personal limitations might be considered as a two-sided social strategy on the one hand it could help individuals with particular sensitivities neurotics that's in the study not my word to better satisfy their needs in everyday social interactions on the other hand listen well a number of studies showed that victimhood signaling was also used as a deception strategy by individuals high in the dark triad namely narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy traits it's pretty unequivocal and so the researchers found a weak association between sensory processing sensitivity and signaling high sensitivity to influence other people it means that there are people out there who are sensitive, they have high they score high on sensory processing sensitivity but these kind of people are actually less likely to signal their sensitivity they're likely to be loners, schizoids avoid other people, withdraw protect themselves against overstimulation they're not likely to go online and seek additional stimulation they're not likely to troll they're not likely to have fights with other people online they're not likely to make a public of themselves, they're not extroverted they're introverted, they're terrified they're overstimulated they're in pain constantly the last thing they want is to interact with thousands of other people no way the very fact that someone is online rules out almost rules out the possibility that it's a truly highly sensitive person individuals who score high on sensory processing sensitivity it reflects a heightened depth of stimulus processing an awareness of subtleties in the environment these people are like constantly traumatized, like death by a thousand cuts it's like they have no skin their nerve endings are exposed to the environment without any isolation or firewall and they don't signal this sensitivity to others their way definitely not more frequently and online that's nonsense there was a statistically significant association between signaling high sensitivity to influence other people and behavioral inhibition system sensitivity BIS sensitivity BIS sensitivity is related to the tendency to respond to a passive or threatening stimuli with caution and inhibition and so it seems that there is a correlation between the wish to signal victimhood in order to manipulate other people and affect them somehow make them do your bidding coerce them into satisfying your entitlement so there is a correlation between this and the tendency to respond to threats and aversive situations with caution and inhibition but the correlation is very weak the association is weak it's statistically significant but it's weak it seems that many of the empaths for lack of a better word are at the same time also aversive to threats and risks the cautious this is not a typical psychopathic trait but it is a typical trait of narcissists I have breaking news for you narcissists are cowards total cowards the craven everyone knows that bullies are cowards it's not just a platitude or a cliché it's absolutely true bullies are cowards and the vast majority of bullies are narcissists narcissists are cowards so they are likely to try to manipulate other people via deceptive signaling lie to them that they are victims or even self-perceive as victims narcissists believe their own BS they believe their own confabulations and their own fantasies and constructs so there could be narcissists online who firmly believe that they have been victimized and therefore they are victims the world's biggest victims ever of course because they are narcissists but when they do so they are aware of threats and risks in the environment and are trying to avoid them and this is even further proof of narcissism to my mind among empaths there is a positive association a much stronger positive association between signaling high sensitivity to influence others and the behavioral approach system BAS BAS is related to reward responsiveness it reflects an individual's motivation to seek positive outcomes positive reinforcements and rewards it's a dopamine thing kind of dopaminergic thing and so this kind of person would use victimhood signaling signaling of high sensitivity in order to secure rewards to secure pleasure, narcissistic supply positive outcomes sex power over a group of people in a forum for example as a moderator or whatever these individuals with high reward responsiveness are more likely to engage in self-presentational strategies such as signaling high sensitivity in order to gain positive reactions and outcomes from others to finagle benefits from others individuals with higher scores on dark personality so I want to quote to you something individuals with higher scores on dark personality traits especially narcissism and psychopathy were more likely to engage in signaling high sensitivity to influence others these findings supports the deceptive signaling hypothesis indicating that the expression of high sensitivity can be a manipulative interpersonal strategy employed by grandiose and callous individuals to gain advantage in social interactions I couldn't have said it better myself I continue it suggests I'm quoting it suggests that individuals with dark personality traits may use the perception of high sensitivity as a means of garnering sympathy or obtaining special treatment from other people this result showed that signaling high sensitivity is also a deceptive interpersonal strategy used by grandiose and callous manipulators and this is a quote from the study not my words I swear the study suggests that signaling high sensitivity to influence other people is a complex phenomenon not everyone there is a full fledged narcissist and psychopath but I dare to venture I go on a limb here and say that the vast majority of them if not all of them have narcissistic traits and psychopathic traits and definitely they display narcissistic behaviors if not psychopathic behaviors and so some highly sensitive individuals may seek help online I would find it very shocking very much against type but maybe maybe there are a few 3%, 5% but the majority and I'm quoting again particularly those with high reward responsiveness and dark personality traits may use it as a calculated tactic to elicit specific responses from others and now I am I have become definitely the number one hate figure on the internet I'll drink to that and yes I've read all your comments that I'm encouraging alcoholism cheers my name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited I'm also a professor of psychology in several universities and today I would like to discuss the connection between ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder autism and narcissism it's kind of a new triad are these linked somehow are these connected there will be a lot I'll be quoting a lot citing a lot from scholarly literature and trying to demonstrate that there are intimate connections between these but before we go to scholarly literature I would like to set out the conceptual map I think mind you I think it's speculation based on 25 years of studying pathological narcissism but it is still speculation to be tested experimented on repeated experiments should be repeated etc etc etc until we see if there's any truth to my speculation but this is my gut feeling that's my hunch that's my intuition intuition plays an important part in the progress because it helps us formulate research goals and it helps us to direct our studies in a way which would yield meaningful results or not so my gut feeling is that the narcissist as a child because the narcissist doesn't have a primary object a mother a narcissist who is warm empathic loving unconditionally loving embracing accepting he doesn't have a safe base to come back to once he had explored the world the narcissist has no focus of attention he has no object mother in this case or you know what even father caregiver he doesn't have an adult figure but especially mother mother is much more critical than any of the other figures he doesn't have an adult figure upon which he can latch upon which he can hang towards which he can direct his attention mother is rejecting mother is painful she is humiliating she is cold she is absent she is self preoccupied she is self centered she is selfish she is you know she resents the child for you know infringing on her free time and leisure she sometimes regard the child as the reason for all her troubles so very often she is aggressive towards the child she induces terror in the child panic reaction so the child is afraid simply afraid to direct his attention at the primary object he does he never learns he never learns how to pay attention he never learns how to laser focus his mental resources so that he can so that he homes in he zeroes in another person and this is the foundation in my view the psychodynamic foundation of attention deficit the child never learns to become attentive because there is no one there which who could absorb his attention who could accept his attention and reciprocate in a way which would reinforce this attention positively reciprocate respond in a way which would encourage the child to continue to pay attention whenever the child tries to pay attention to money he is rebuffed he is attacked he is criticized he is humiliated or even punished sometimes punished corporeally bodily so the child learns that attention is bad paying attention is bad he is conditioned via negative reinforcement to not pay attention he regards attention as a form of threat and so he develops attention deficit and yet these mental energies have to go somewhere children there is a steep learning curve and developmental curve including body development including brain development the brain doubles in size every few months so the child has a lot of pent up energy which usually is directed to the primary object when there is a good enough mother a safe base the energy goes there and mother loves this energy and accepts this energy and encourages it and absorbs it in a positive way so as to encourage the child to develop boundaries and to explore the world however grandiosly and to separate from her and become a healthy individual standing on his or her own two feet that's a healthy mother a non narcissistic mother a non labile mother a mother who regulates her emotions not a dysregulated mother not a borderline mother but when there is a mentally ill mother or mentally disordered mother the child is in trouble because all this energy has to go somewhere so he becomes hyper active hyper active and he learns he learns that hyperactivity garners him gets him the attention that he is not getting otherwise so there is a vicious feedback loop a negative reinforcement from mommy actually rejects him so inability to develop positive attention attention span and attention deficit and attention from other adults and from mommy when he is a bad boy when she is a bad girl so being bad comes to be associated of being hyper active a troublemaker comes to be associated gradually with garnering and getting much desired, much sought attention and the child gets conditioned by the ADHD and this is doubly true if the child is on the autism spectrum disorder if the autistic child would have severe difficulties to interpret for example body cues, body language cues social cues and autistic child processes the world very differently akin to borderline and autistic child doesn't have a skin, doesn't have protection so his emotions are so enormously dysregulated it's like the emotions develop and escape velocity like in rockets they move with such energy the emotions up and down that one day they just go into outer space and they are never to be found again autism preconditions predisposes the child to develop in essence narcissism is a defense so narcissistic defenses in autistic children are very common and one of them of course is a pronounced lack of empathy or at least discernible empathy, functional empathy that's one of them second thing many autistic children are grandiose in some highly specific ways and all autistic children have severe attention deficits we are beginning to see the connections here possibly there's an autistic child who reacts with narcissistic defenses and learn these functional ways of regulating attention both because he has a biological proclivity and predisposition to dysregulation of attention and because he learns from his environment from his human environment the certain types of attention the negative ones go hand in hand with hyperactive behavior so it becomes all these three conditions become enmeshed and tangled and cannot be separated they feed on each other they feed on each other and it's very very difficult to break this part that there is such a connection this part is not speculation and this is why I want to read to you from scholarly studies in the book Sadism Psychoanalytic Developmental Perspectives which I mentioned in yesterday's video there's a scholar by the name of Damian McCann and I'm quoting from his article in the book he says according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry almost half of those diagnosed with a Positional Defined Disorder or Conduct Disorder are also diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder ADHD so for you to understand Oppositional Defined Disorder and Conduct Disorder are the precursors of psychopathy most children, about 80% of children with Conduct Disorder grow up to become psychopaths so here we see early on the connection between Oppositional Defined Disorder ODD and Conduct Disorder the precursors for narcissism and psychopathy how they are intimately linked with ADHD half of children with ODD and Conduct Disorder also have ADHD I'm continuing from the article Adolescents living with ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder so adolescents living with ADHD and a coexisting Conduct Disorder such as Oppositional Defined Disorder these adolescents are at higher risk for antisocial behavior and suspension from school the school dropout rate for this group is 12 times greater than the rate among adolescents who are not affected by ADHD outcomes that underline the importance of early identification the McCann continues it has been suggested that parents of children living with ADHD and Conduct Disorder often feel frightened and intimidated by their child's behavior they worry about danger or injury to other family members parents may also be shocked or embarrassed by their child's sadistic behaviors at one and the same time family members can act in ways that either reinforce or diminish the patient's problematic behavior or faults so their involvement is helpful and often essential this is McCann and this connection between ADHD and early nascent narcissism and psychopathy is extremely strong what is ADHD actually the American Psychiatric Association says symptoms of ADHD include inattention not being able to keep focus hyperactivity excess movement that is not fitting to the setting and impulsivity exactly like borderlines in psychopath by the way impulsivity, hasty acts that occur in the moment without fault it's exactly it's a very good description of a primary psychopath by the way they are exactly like this the American the APA continues an estimated 8.4% of children and 2.5% of adults have ADHD by the way 2.5% of adults amazingly that's also the percentage of psychopaths in the general population and also the percentage of narcissists in the general population that's the median among many studies so if you make a meta analysis of studies that's the number you get so ADHD, psychopathy narcissism they have the same incidents and the same prevalence in the general population identical number ADHD is diagnosed as one of three types inattentive type hyperactive impulsive type or combined type a diagnosis is based on the symptoms that have occurred over the past six months inattentive type six or five for people over 17 years of the following symptoms occur frequently so in the inattentive type doesn't play close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in school or job tasks has problems staying focused on tasks or activities such as during lectures conversations or long reading or listening to long vakny videos does not seem to listen when spoken to seems to be elsewhere does not follow through on instructions doesn't complete schoolwork chores or job duties may start tasks but quickly loses focus has problems organizing tasks and work for example does not manage time well has messy disorganized work misses deadlines avoids or dislikes tasks that require sustained mental efforts such as preparing reports and completing forms often loses things needed for tasks or daily life such as school papers books, keys, wallet, cellphone and eyeglasses tell me about it is easily distracted forgets daily tasks such as doing chores and running errands older teens and adults may forget to return phone calls, pay bills and keep appointments that's the inattentive type as I go through the list of characteristics of various types for example with the ADHD you will immediately identify your narcissist or your psychopath many of these features are very very typical of psychopathy and narcissism, pathological narcissism and any and every one of you will confirm this I'm sure, feel free in the comments that there is the hyperactive impulsive type again, fidgets with or taps, hands feet or squirms in the seat not able to stay seated in classroom or workplace runs about or climbs where it is inappropriate unable to play or to do leisure activities quietly or is on the go as if driven by a motor engine, talks too much that's me, blurt out an answer before a question has been finished for instance may finish people's sentences can't wait to speak in conversations very typical of narcissism has difficulty waiting his or her turn such as while waiting in line again a feature of entitlement in pathological narcissism interrupts or intrudes on others for instance cuts into conversations games or activities starts using other people's things without their permission older teens and adults may take over what others are doing all these are features which describe ADHD also features in pathological narcissism and in primary psychopathy there is a very powerful connection between these diagnosis and again I repeat my hypothesis, my working hypothesis to be tested I think the child in a dysfunctional family with a dead mother non-responsive mother not good enough mother with the wrong kind of mother selfish, inattentive cold, detached, narcissistic self-centered instrumentalizing and parentifying mother which uses the child to gratify her wishes and needs smothering and pampering and doting mother teaching the child that he can do no wrong isolating him from reality mothers who don't allow the child to develop boundaries to separate to individuate because they have abandonment anxiety the child is there to cater to their needs to reduce their anxiety the child is a kind of anti-anxiety medication and anxiolytic these kind of mothers the child cannot develop the skill of paying attention because he doesn't have a focus of attention the mother is rejecting or she is not there or she treats him as an object not as a person and so he doesn't learn to pay attention to the place, wanders he has attention deficit and he doesn't have long enough interactions with the mother she is cold, she is detached she just walks away she creates object inconstancy by her frequent absences so he doesn't learn to develop an attention span even when he does have attention when he does show attention this is very brief attention and then his attention wanders the mother never teaches him to pay long term attention to anything social media are doing the same to us by the way they are reducing our attention span advertising and even television these kind of media they are destroying our ability to focus to have long term attention span and they induce attention deficits that is backed by many studies and so the child compensates for this by becoming hyperactive and becomes hyperactive for two reasons first of all he has a lot of energy he has to go out somewhere he develops outlets dysfunctional outlets for this energy and the second reason he gets attention when he misbehaves he gets attention he learns the connection now that creates a problem in mentalizing in mentalizing is a crucial crucial foundational prerequisite for developing empathy now let's start by explaining what is mentalizing mentalizing is a process by which we make sense of each other and of ourselves implicitly or explicitly in terms of subjective states and mental processes mentalizing is a profoundly social construct in the sense that we are attentive to the mental states of those we are with physically or psychologically we ask ourselves what is he thinking what makes her tick what did she want these innocuous questions are actually attempts to theorize to create a theory of other people's minds and indeed it's called a theory of mind and in psychology mentalizing is the ability to understand the mental state of oneself or others the mental state that underlies our behavior so the first stage we observe behavior and then we speculate like I'm doing now we speculate about the motives the dynamics behind the behavior we speculate about the state of the mind that had generated this behavior so mentalization can be seen as a form of imaginative and creative mental activity fiction writing that lets us perceive and interpret human behavior in terms of intentional mental state mentalization goes with the assumption of intentionality that is very confusing to many victims of narcissistic abuse because we observe the narcissist's behavior we observe a behavior with the narcissist or the psychopath or the borderline and of course we try to mentalize the narcissist we try to understand the narcissist we try to make a constructive theory as to what made the borderline what she did or what drove the psychopath to act the way he had done so this we construct theories but these theories fall flat they collapse they disintegrate because we can't really penetrate the minds of narcissists psychopaths and borderlines we can't create an efficacious theory of mind for these people a theory of mind and so there's a huge gap with discrepancy with our theory and the ultimate observable behaviors because our theory yields predictions when we construct the theory he tells us well the narcissist did it because of this so he is likely to do this because of that and then he doesn't the same with the psychopaths, same with the borderline they are so unpredictable this regulated label that all our theories fall like houses of cards a theory of mind is an important cognitive skill it involves the ability to think about mental states your mental states, other people's mental states and in theory of mind we use beliefs, desires, intentions and where do we find information about these beliefs, desires and intentions inside ourselves we make the wrong assumption that the narcissist is exactly like us that he has the same base desires the same intentions, the same urges the same drives the same hopes and fears and dreams that he has the same, in other words, mental states that he has the same mind like us that is absolutely wrong and erroneous this is where everything fails, this is why you keep being victimized and abused this narcissist don't have mind that's like yours they don't have a human mind and I'm not saying this in a pejorative term, I'm not cursing or demonizing the narcissist because they lack empathy and they lack access to positive emotionality they lack the two pillars upon which the edifice of the human mind rests like Samson take away these two pillars and the temple crashes the temple collapses on you if you're inside so be careful make no assumptions about the narcissist and the psychopaths and the borderline because they utterly alien to you they have almost nothing in common their inner their inner space is, I don't know galactic interplanetary it's not earthly and it's not human by any extension of this world and so we use theory of mind to understand why someone acts in certain ways and does not act in other ways hypothesizing this scientific method is not working with people who are not like you for example if tomorrow an extraterrestrial an alien were to land on earth coming all the way from Alpha Centauri and total alien from another planet in another galaxy were to come to earth we would be very foolish to assume that an alien has the same desires and the same mental states and the same fears and the same hopes and dreams and wishes as we do that would be a very foolish assumption very dangerous assumption because we need to assume that an alien from another galaxy has nothing in common with us we may discover gradually similarities resonances echoes of our mind but we should not make a priori assumption that an alien is like us Narcissus comes from another planet from a galaxy of pain and hurt from a planet of rejection humiliation and abuse from a place where he could not become Narcissism is a work in progress that had been arrested stopped midway he is like a construction site completed is nothing in common between an apartment that has never been completed and livable livable quarters, livable apartment nothing in common the walls are bare the electrical wiring is all over the place it's dangerous and theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states beliefs, intents, desires, emotions knowledge, cognitions our mental states and to others we really make the assumption that we are 99% the same, theory of mind is necessary to understand that others have the same beliefs, desires, intentions and perspectives like us the content of these beliefs the content of the desires the intentions, the perspectives may be different but the vessels, the containers are the same Narcissus are not using your cutlery they are not using your pots and pans and spoons and forks they are using something you are not going to recognize now empathy has three components and that's why I am against against the term cognitive empathy when attributed to Narcissus and Psychopaths as Narcissus and Psychopaths have two forms of empathy out of three, they have reflexive empathy and cognitive empathy not only cognitive empathy so it's wrong to say that Narcissus has cognitive empathy and healthy people have emotional empathy it's absolutely wrong, there are three layers reflexive cognitive and emotional the psychopaths and Narcissus lack the emotional part borderlines by the way have all three reflexive but they cannot regulate so let's talk a bit about reflexive reflexive empathy because cognitive empathy you can find huge amount of information online emotional empathy needless to say millions of videos and everyone experiences cognitive empathy and emotional empathy I mean when you see someone crying when you see someone smiling you have a cognitive reaction you say she said he is happy and you have an emotional reaction you say she said she is happy I'm happy I remember how it feels to be sad and I'm sad for her remember how it feels to be happy and he makes me smile so emotional cognitive empathy are not alien to you but the vast majority of humans unless they get stuck at a seriously early stage don't remember and don't know what is reflexive empathy and I want to elaborate a bit on this because in the next video I'm going to propose a new theory of empathy and reflexive empathy is a crucial part of it I'm going to quote from the book sadism psychoanalytic developmental perspectives I'm going to quote from Graham music yes music someone is called music wonderful name from Graham music article he's a scholar so I'm citing the article by about four months infants can know they are they are the subject of another person's attention they show coiness for example and that is based on studies by ready reddy in 2000 soon most infants most babies have sufficient understanding of other minds to be able to tease in mutual enjoyment again ready 2008 a crucial developmental window at about nine months allows much more sophisticated understandings of other minds as seen in joint attention social referencing and secondary intersubjectivity these are terms coined by trevard and hubbly trevard and hubbly very early on in 1978 kind of deconstructed empathy and they demonstrated the role of joint attention the baby pays attention to an adult and the adult pays attention to the baby it's crucial this feedback loop social referencing and secondary intersubjectivity I'll discuss this a bit later I'm continuing from the article by music with these skills come early empathic capacities but only if infants receive experiences that we tend to take for granted in particular this includes what minds in 2002 has called mind-mindedness that is an awareness of someone being responsive to and caring about our thoughts and feelings that infant needs this response this is often so this is so often missing in maltreated abused children who lack early experiences of attunement and so they do not develop empathy or care for others they don't get this feedback early on and without this feedback they can't develop attention without attention to others they can't develop a theory of mind they can't develop empathy so you see the sequence you see the chain bad upbringing, bad mother bad mother no attention, inability to focus attention inability to focus attention inability to notice other people can't notice other people you can't develop a theory of mind you can't mentalize of course you cannot develop empathy by around I'm continuing from the article by around 14 months of age most children have an innate desire to help other children Tomasello, Woneken in 2009 they found that in experimental situations when an adult has a tricky problem such as fetching out of reach objects or opening a cupboard door with full hands most toddlers were quick to help the adult spontaneously motivated by empathic concerns and disliking seeing wrongdoing and suffering there's another study by Veich V-A-I-S-H by the way the same year 2009, it was a good year for empathy studies so children when they see you in trouble they try to help already when they are 14 months of age indeed babies as young as a few months old have a preference for kindly as opposed to nasty puppets or animated characters so they prefer animated characters who help over animated characters who hinder another figure that's a study by Damlin in 2007 young babies appear to comprehend another person's intention to help or to be nasty and they show surprise when an innocent character approaches a seemingly nasty animated object but not when the same character approaches a good guy Kohlmeier 2003 such experiments, for example by Bloom in 2010 they show that babies can distinguish pro-social and antisocial behaviors even babies can already tell the difference between a good healthy person and a narcissist and a psychopath babies that's why don't buy your stories that you didn't see anything you didn't spot anything you had no intuition the narcissist is such a great actor that he put the wool over your eyes he misled you, nonsense as early as nine months old babies react clearly to psychopaths and narcissists babies and that's studied by Bloom in 2010 maybe more surprisingly such babies also prefer puppets that punish the bad figures over puppets who are nice to the bad guys in other words babies have a rudimentary sense of justice and a desire to see bad behavior punished and yet early empathy and healthfulness they depend on receiving a tuned and mind-minded attention containment as beyond called it in 1962 babies need good enough parenting, Winnicott 1996 by the end of the first year children have built up considerable expectations of relationships based on past experiences and these expectations include whether or not other people are likely to be kind or helpful Dweck in 2009 he described abused children and how they are recoil it's horrible to see by the way mal-treatment inhibits the capacity for empathy continuous gram music ordinarily toddlers respond kindly to other toddlers distress in nursery but abused children generally can show little or no empathy or concern for another's distress and indeed could be quite aggressive to such children abused children abuse children Maine and George 1985 securely attached children who have been sensitively attuned to consistently show more empathy that's a study by Mikulinsa in 2005 the circuits in the brain central to empathy turn off in the face of stress fear and trauma short-cliff 2009 analogous with what neuroscientists and other researchers seem to be discovering about developmentally sensitive periods in general it's a big study by Thomas and Johnson 2008 and so music says I hypothesize that in many mal-treated children an early window of opportunity is missed when they might have developed ordinary empathy and compassion and I would add to that in the same window we develop attention in the same window we develop regulation of impulses in the same window we develop regulation of emotions in the same window we develop control of moods when this window is shattered with a stone of abuse and maltreatment and rejection and coldness and self-centeredness when the mother is dead and bad and detached and cold and rejecting and humiliating and wrong for you this window closes and it's too late for you later to develop all these capacities empathy, compassion attention, activity control impulse control and so on I want to read to you a fragment snippet and excerpts from an article by Reina Fugohar in Financial Times September 3rd 2020 several years ago she said a wise colleague wrote a wonderfully contrarian column arguing that no organization should hire more than a few very clever people sure, clever people are great with facts abstract ideas and vigorous debate but put too many of them in a room together and they can gum up the system with their love of complexity in conflict as we, knowledge worker, know clever people aren't always the most collaborative they often lack in empathy she continues in his 1958 book of dystopian fiction the rise of the meritocracy Michael Leone predicted that the hubris of the meritocratic elites would eventually trigger a political revolt resulting in the downfall of meritocratic elites elites is that where we have come or where we are going whatever the November election result in the United States or the ultimate outcome of Brexit we would be wise to heed Young's advice says the author of the column if people were valued according to their kindliness courage, imagination and sensitivity and not just according to their intelligence, education occupation and power there would be no, not classes he wrote but every human being would then have equal opportunity not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure but to develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life perhaps in some post meritocratic world it will be so end of the quote from the column great column by the way she mentions the author mentions a lot of other literature on meritocracy and empathy but sometimes we come across people who grew up in apparently in apparently functional families with a lot of love and acceptance and so on why these people don't have empathy when their upbringing was normal and the family was highly functional and so we speculated there may be a genetic problem or a brain abnormality but the evidence for this is very sparse lack of empathy owing to abuse and trauma breach of boundaries no safe base, dead mother when the child is not allowed to separate and individuate we understand this we understand why this might lead to a lack of empathy lack of empathy owes to instability arbitrariness, capriciousness reversal, discontinuity unpredictability one day the child is on the pedestal the next day the pedestal is on the child that could destabilize anyone let alone the child abusing functional sorry children in functional families where the mother is is good enough mother where there's unconditional love and acceptance where boundaries are set and encourage where separation individuation is a normal process without emotional blackmail and so on so forth most of these overwhelming majority of the children develop very healthy empathy which lasts a lifetime but at some stage a tiny sliver small minority of the children are exposed to other influences other out of the family influences a bed sadistic teacher a group of peers bullying the child a drug dealer a neighborhood drug dealer I mean media visual content on television social media I mean you never know there's so many extra family influences that you never know and these influences if they come early enough before the age of 6 and in some cases before the age of 9 I'm a hamper and hinder an obstruct and undermine empathy Albert Schweitzer who was a great humanitarian wrote in his book philosophy of civilization 1923 if I'm a thinking if I'm a thinking being I must regard life other than my own with equal reverence for I shall know that it longs for fullness and development as deeply as I do life therefore I see that evil is what annihilates hampers or hinders life goodness but the same token is the saving or helping of life the enabling of whatever life I can to attain its highest development and it's precisely the philosophical point of view of Harvey Clackley who is still by far the most preeminent scholar of psychopathy when Clackley had at the end of the book to summarize his thinking he said well I can't offer you anything the field is very new it was in 1942 the field is very new but I can tell you this psychopaths reject life and this rejection of life is at the core I came up a few years ago with the I equal MCU theory I wanted to be like Einstein because I think I'm better looking than Einstein so I wanted to be like Einstein where Einstein invented the E equals MC squared I invented the I equals MCU theory of empathy I postulate the existence of three basic modes of interpersonal relatedness I equals MCU in other words I am seeing you it's one way of relating to other people I am seeing you I equals MCU another way I UCM I am what you see in me I equals UCM UCM I am what you see in me and defined by you gaze yes? so the first one is I am seeing you second one is I UCM and defined by you gaze and the third one is equals ICM. U is what I see as me. U is what I see as me. So 1 and 3, they're variants of empathy. I'm seeing you and you is what I see as me. I and you have a lot in common, but I'm seeing you, so you're seen, you're not transparent. I realize that you exist as a separate, boundary, autonomous, self-efficacious agent, agency, there's agency there, and this is the foundation of empathy. Recognizing others, they have a right to live, they have a right to happiness, they have a right to boundaries, they have a right not to be hurt and abused and molested. And the third one is you is what I see as me. I realize that we have so much in common, we're human. And so 1 and 3 are variants of empathy. The ability to see the other is indispensable to the development and exercise of empathy. Even more crucial I would say is the capacity to identify with the other, to see the other as me. But the child who grows up in a dysfunctional family with a dead mother, with a rejecting mother, with a cold detached mother, he has no other. He has no other to exercise on. Empathy takes developing, it's a skill, it's an acquired skill. The reflexive part is biological, but then to become social, you have to exercise and develop it as a skill. But if you don't have a mother, you don't have a partner. You don't have a partner to develop this skill. And so the second mode, the second mode, I am what you see in me, I'm defined by your gaze. This is pathological narcissism. The narcissist forges a false self that is designed to elicit external input in order to sustain itself. And just to perform some important ego functions, the narcissist needs other people. He cannot do anything by himself. He does not exist by himself. He is an absence. It is the intersection of multiple gazes, the intersection of the minds of multiple observers. In this intersection, in this circle created by their combined views, this is the narcissist. It's like a hurricane. But inside there's a quiet, dead eye, which is the essence of the narcissist. He is the outcome of multiple reflections. He is a whole of mirrors, but inside there's nothing. The narcissist exists merely as a reflection in the eyes of others. In the absence of narcissistic supply, he crumbles, he withers. Like an apparition, an enchantment, magic is a mirage. I granted an interview to the national post in Toronto in Canada in July 2003. And I would like to read this interview to you. It's short. And it's the last segment of this video. Yay. And I would like to read it because I think it's a relatively benign summary of empathy. First question was how important is empathy to proper psychological functioning? My answer. Empathy is more important socially than it is psychologically. The absence of empathy, for instance, in narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. This absence predisposes people to exploit and abuse others. Empathy is the bedrock of our sense of morality. Arguably aggressive behaviour is as inhibited by empathy as it is by anticipated punishment. So empathy, interiorized, becomes conscious. And our conscience tells us not to do some things because they're bad. So we are afraid of punishment externally, but we are also afraid of punishment internally. Our internal punishment is called guilt or shame. And it is built on empathy, interiorized. I continue my answer to the natural cost. But the existence of empathy in a person is also a sign of self-awareness, a healthy identity, a well-regulated sense of self-worth and self-love in the positive sense. The absence of empathy denotes emotional and cognitive immaturity and inability to love to truly relate to others, to respect their boundaries and accept their needs, feelings, hopes, fears, choices, wishes and preferences as autonomous entities. Question. The journalist asks, how is empathy developed? My answer. Empathy may be innate. Even toddlers seem to empathize with the pain or happiness of other people, such as their caregivers. Empathy increases as the child forms a self-concept, identity. The more aware the infant is of his or her emotional states, the more the infant explores his limitations and capabilities, and the more crony is to projecting this newfound knowledge onto others. By attributing to people around him his new gained insights about himself, the child develops a moral sense and inhibits his antisocial impulses. The development of empathy is therefore a part of the process of socialization. But as the American psychologist Carl Rogers taught us, empathy is also learned and inculcated. We are coached to feel guilt and pain when we inflict suffering on another person. Empathy is an attempt to avoid our own self-imposed agony by projecting it onto another. Question. Is there an increasing dearth of empathy in society today? Why do you think this is so? Answer. This is, remember, this is an interview given 20 years ago, in 2003, 17 years ago. So my answer. The social institutions that had ratified, propagated and administered empathy have all imploded. The nuclear family, the closely neat extended clan, the village, the community, the neighborhood, the church, friendships, they've all unraveled. Society is atomized, synomic. The resulting alienation fostered a wave of antisocial behavior, both criminal and legitimate. The survival value of empathy is on the decline. It is far wiser to be cunning, to cut corners, to deceive and to abuse than to be empathic. Empathy has largely dropped from the contemporary curriculum of socialization. It's not on the menu. In a desperate attempt to cope with these inexorable processes, behaviors predicated on a lack of empathy have been pathologized and medicalized. The sad truth is that narcissistic or antisocial conduct is both normative and, in today's environment, rational. No amount of diagnosing it, treating it and medicalizing it and medication it, no amount of such things can hide or reverse this basic fact. Psychopathy and narcissism work. Ours is a cultural malaise, cultural malaise, which permeates every single cell and every strand of the social fabric. Question. Is there any empirical evidence that we can point to over decline in empathy? My answer. Empathy cannot be measured directly, but only through proxies such as criminality, terrorism, charity, domestic violence, domestic abuse violence, antisocial behavior, related mental health disorders, other types of abuse. These are all proxies for empathy. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to separate the effects of deterrence from the effects of empathy. Sometimes it would behave properly because we are afraid, not because we have empathy. If I don't batter my wife, if I don't torture animals, if I don't steal from, if I don't shoplift, is it because I'm empathetic or because I don't want to go to jail? No one knows. Rising litigiousness, zero tolerance, a skyrocketing race of incarceration, as well as the aging of the population. They've all sliced intimate partner violence and other forms of crimes across the United States at least in the last decade. There's been a precipitous decline, for example, in the murder rate. It's down 50 percent. But this benevolent decline had nothing to do with increasing empathy, I think. The statistics are open to interpretation, but it would be safe to say that the last century has seen the most violent and the least empathetic period in human history. Wars, terrorism are on the rise. Charity giving is on the wane, measured as a percentage of national wealth. Welfare policies are being abolished. There's an altruism fatigue. Darwinian models of capitalism are spreading. In the last two decades, let's remember the interview is 17 years ago, in the last two decades, mental health disorders were added to the diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association and these mental health disorders, their war mark is a lack of empathy. The violence is reflected in our popular culture, movies, video games, the media. There were no social media when this interview was given. Empathy, supposedly a spontaneous reaction to the plight of our fellow humans, is now channeled through self-interested and bloated non-government organizations or multilateral outfits. The vibrant world of private empathy has been replaced by faceless state largesse, pity, mercy, the elation of giving, they're all tax deductible. And generally speaking, it is a sorry sight. It's the demise of empathy. So this was an interview in 2003 and by far I haven't been the only voice I'm in. And long before this interview in 1974, in 1978, Christopher Lash wrote the Cultural Narcissists and Emil Durkheim a hundred years before. Describe anomic societies where empathy will vanish and suicide will flourish. And then you had, I mean, this we, when I say we, I mean psychologists, sociologists, academics, public intellectuals, Ramona, you name it. Dozens, hundreds of names, Marcuse, I mean, Santayana, we have been warning against this for, for like ages. And no one would listen. And no one would listen because the ethos of money, ethos of power, ethos of manipulate, manipulating other people to obtain desirable goals and preferable outcomes, it's taken over. Even public intellectuals would tell you how to live your life, how to become better people. They're not telling you how to become better people. They're telling you to become, they're teaching you how to become more efficient people very often at the expense of others. I'm sorry. I can't think of a single public intellectual who is not narcissistic, psychopathic, self-centered, egotistical, labile, dysregulated, sadistic to some extent. And all of them are teaching you, all of them are teaching you not how to develop empathy, compassion and care and love towards your fellow beings, but how to make maximum use of your natural endowments and to fake and to lie and to pretend so as to obtain whatever and to extricate whatever you can from others. In other words, the view of public intellectuals today is that the world is a win-lose situation. In this sense, I'm terribly sorry, terribly sorry to say that I can't see any difference in principle between Donald Trump's jungle, Darwinian view of the world and any public intellectual I know. They're all saying the same, but some of them are saying it in a high-falutin way, some of them in a pub with a pint kind of way, but they're all saying the same. It's eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, manipulated, manipulate or be manipulated, don't be the sucker, get ahead, make the most and the hell with others. So many women are asking to interview me lately that I'm beginning to seriously consider the possibility that I'm actually a desirable man. Well, talk about delusional disorder. My name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of psychology and today we are going to discuss a very intricate problem for those of you who are my students. This is within the unit on presentation, intake, interviews and what was the last part? Presentation, intake, and presenting signs and symptoms. Okay? So here's the question, even skilled diagnosticians, even diagnosticians, therapists, psychologists with decades of experience in institutional settings find it very difficult to distinguish between psychopathy, autism, schizoid personality and PTSD or complex PTSD. Let me repeat, psychopathy, the extreme form of antisocial personality disorder, autism spectrum disorder, schizoid personality and schizoid personality disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder or straight out post-traumatic stress disorder. These are, they present, the people with these problems present so identically that in the intake interview, the first time the therapist or the diagnostician comes across the patient or the client, it's very difficult to tell them apart. Now we already know that people with borderline personality disorder, emotional dysregulation disorder, people with this disorder are actually indistinguishable from secondary psychopaths when they are exposed to stress, humiliation and rejection. So there is a confluence, there is a confluence or a convergence between borderline personality disorder and secondary factor two, psychopathy. But we are talking about factor one psychopathy, the classic psychopath, the animal, the beast, the monster. In short, me. Factor one psychopathy, someone with autism spectrum disorder, mainly high functioning autism or formerly known as Asperger, level one autism, Asperger's disorder, schizoid personality and personality disorder and complex trauma. How do we tell them apart? All four conditions, all four conditions present the same. In all four conditions, there is extreme reduced effect display. Now reduced effect display is a fancy name because we psychologists will like fancy names. It gives us the illusion that psychology is a science. So reduced effect display simply means not showing emotions, flat effect, not displaying any emotional reaction to past events, to present occurrences, to future catastrophizing or speculations, no emotions, no display of emotion, a flat presentation of emotions and a flat presentation of personal experiences. These people describe the most harrowing, most traumatizing, most exceptional, most extreme situations and you don't see a hint of a flicker of anything resembling an emotion on their faces. This is a poker face and there is reticent self-disclosure. It's like pulling teeth, talking to these people. They refuse to kind of come clean. They refuse to share, confess, admit. They refuse to talk. It's very, very difficult to get these kind of people, these kind of patients or clients, to actually talk about their lives, what had happened, how they had felt, what led to these events and how did they extricate themselves and how do they feel about these occurrences nowadays. They absent themselves. They shut themselves off. You can see the curtain falling. You can see there's nobody there suddenly. When you try to talk to them about emotions, about personal experiences, when you try to kind of coerce them or convince them or cajole them into self-disclosure, they become reticent, reluctant and their body language changes. It becomes very defensive or very aggressive for both and this is common to all four types, including survivors of trauma and including survivors of complex trauma, complex or traumatic stress disorder. So the first thing we see when such a patient or a client enters the clinic, the first thing you see is the body language and the body language is again very defensive and very aggressive, a bizarre mixture, kind of passive aggression. And the second thing you see is that when you try to talk to them, they shut off. They vanish. They absent themselves. And the third thing you see, they refuse to talk about emotions, personal experiences. They refuse to self-disclose and they refuse to attach emotions to anything they divulge on their personal histories. All four types of patients also use language in a highly idiosyncratic way, in a special way. Narcissists abuse language. Narcissists leverage language as a weapon. They use language to be fuddle, to confuse, to gaslight, so they abuse language. But psychopaths, people with autism spectrum disorder, schizoids and victims of trauma, use language not in order to obtain any goal or to score points as the narcissist does. They simply corrupt language. They undermine language. They render, they, it's like their language festers, it's like it became infested or infected with something. First of all, they are likely to use very vulgar, a very vulgar type of language, you know, with obscenities and profanities and so on. The language is likely to be patried as though it's rotting from the inside. They're likely, whenever they try to communicate something which is very rare, or if they have to respond to the therapist or the diagnostician or the psychologist, for example, in court mandated evaluations, they tend to play with language. They tend to become ambiguous and equivocal. If you ask them, did you do this and this? They're gonna say, how do you define doing this and this? Or they're gonna answer in a way which is essentially hair splitting and nitpicking, wiggling, wiggling their way out, finagling their way out of conundrums and predicaments using language. Language is their exit strategy. They think that if they can redefine and reframe situations, behaviors and traits, they're scot free, they're home free, it's like monopoly game, they're playing a game all the time and you can feel it. Their language is a gambit like in chess, so it's very ambiguous and very equivocal and leaves place for vagueness and kind of finagling and wiggling. The language is non-committal, it's clinical, it's impersonal. They're likely to describe the most terrifying, traumatizing, horrific experiences in very, very impersonal and clinical terms, as though they were talking about the third party at making clinical observation for some medical chart or some paper about to publish in an academic journal. They corrupt the language and they render it circumspect and cynical and cold and detached. And so this is the fourth thing you notice, the misuse of language. All four types of patients, the psychopath, the autism, the autist, the schizoid and the traumatized victim, trauma victim, all four types of patients are inaccessible. You feel that there's a kind of transparent partition that you cannot penetrate. They look at you, they're watching you and you're watching them through a glass, darkly. There's something, something standing between you and them. It's ephemeral, it's ethereal on one hand, but on the other hand it's very real and it tends to regenerate all the time. The more intimate the conversation becomes, the more the clinician tries to broach difficult topics, painful topics or threatening topics, the more the partition solidifies, becomes thicker. And so there is this membrane between the patient and the diagnostician or therapist. The patient is inaccessible. The client is sealed off from the world when you talk to a psychopath or trauma victim or schizoid or a autistic person. You feel that he is ensconced and cocooned in his own tiny bubble of a universe. Drifting away from you, never mind how desperately you're trying to reach out and hold on to them. They're out of grasp. They're like slimy goldfish. You can never get hold of them. You cannot nail them down. You cannot get them to commit even linguistically. And so they're sealed off and they are emotionally numb. They're incapable of true intimacy, true communication, let alone intimacy. You can never get anywhere with them because you keep getting the feeling that there is somebody there but out of reach, out of reach and they kind, you feel that you're being reduced by these patients into caricature, a two-dimensional icon avatar, a symbol. They don't relate these four types of patients, don't relate to the clinician or the therapist as another human being. They reduce him to a function and then they become very defensive and they try to isolate themselves from the situation and from the other person that's the therapist. And so you have this, you have this eerie, eerie feeling that the temperature had dropped, the oxygen had been sucked out of the room and you're in the presence of someone who is suspending their humanity. These people, all four types, the psychopath, the schizoid, the trauma victim, the borderline which is a form of psychopath and the autist. Deep inside we now know from multiple studies, starting in the 90s, we know that deep inside they harbor, they have the experience, self-loathing, self-hating. And so sometimes they act out, they act out by becoming self-defeating or self-destructive or self-trashing or aggressive or passive aggressive. And so even the schizoid who is utterly detached ostensibly from the outside world, happy in his own nest, in his own den, happy thriving in his solitude, even the schizoid actually has moments of rage and acting out and reaching out desperately, trying to connect. Actually the prevailing theory of schizoid personality is that the schizoid defense is an attempt to maintain object relations, an attempt to maintain relationships with other people by somehow rejecting them, by somehow isolating them. Because even rejecting someone, even isolating yourself from someone is a form of connection. So it's one step removed from psychosis or schizophrenia, that's why it's called schizoid, almost schizophenia. So even the schizoid has these moments of rejecting others, sometimes aggressively rejecting others, especially when he is, when he feels uncomfortable or disconfident by the presence of others, when he feels overwhelmed. And so all these four patients are self-destructive and all of them act out one way or another. The psychopath is defined and contumatious and reckless and impulsive, borderline of course, when she becomes a secondary psychopath. The trauma victim is disregulated, heavily disregulated emotionally. She has typically modulability and I'm saying she because majority of victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder are women. Not all, but a majority. Now one thing, so to summarize this part, as a clinician, as a diagnostician, as a therapist, there's a conundrum. How to tell these apart? Of course you wouldn't treat a trauma victim as you would, as you would treat a psychopath. You wouldn't administer the same techniques to a borderline as you would to a autistic person. And definitely you would not try to treat someone with autism spectrum disorder as you would, as you would someone with schizoid personality disorder. These are seriously different problems, issues in mental health and they require totally different approaches. It's very dangerous to misdiagnose and misdiagnosis is very common in clinical practice precisely because all the presenting signs and symptoms on the face of it and initially sometimes for five sessions, ten sessions, they seem to be the same. Only when you delve deeper, you begin to discover differences. For example, attitude to sex and intimacy. The psychopath's attitude to sex and to sexuality, psychopath's psychosexuality is very unique and is not typical of the schizoid, of the trauma victim, the borderline and definitely not of someone with autistic personality, autistic disorder. So the psychopath first of all makes a distinction between sex and intimacy. There's the Madonna horror complex, which also applies to narcissists. The psychopath is very likely to regard his sexual partner, even his long-term sexual partners, as intimate. He doesn't do intimacy at all, not with his sexual partners, not with anyone. So consequently, his sex is devoid of intimacy. Even when it looks outwardly as intimate, it's not. Psychopaths regard their bodies as dispensable, disposable objects, so they trash themselves, they self-trash sexually. It's very common for a psychopath to engage in very extreme sexual practices, reckless or not. Sexual practices which objectify his or her body, sexual practices which trash the psychopath, disrespect his boundaries, physical or otherwise. It is only in sex that the psychopath allows himself to be abused in effect by his sexual partners. So they regard their bodies as a kind of coin or commodity. They leverage their bodies, the psychopaths leverage their bodies and use them to obtain goals. The goals could be instant gratification, satisfaction of an impulse. Harvey Cleckley said in his famous, Musk of Sanity, the masterpiece, Musk of Sanity, Harvey Cleckley said that in 1942, that psychopaths, the sexual activities of psychopaths are like scratching your back. He said that psychopaths act on a whim. They rarely have any deep motivation to engage in sex. They engage in sex because they want to scratch their backs. It's just an impulse, an itch. They scratch the itch. So sex for them is utterly meaningless. Their bodies are utterly meaningless. Actually in the psychopath's life, everything is meaningless. And so it's very shocking, very unsettling. I would even say horrifying and gross to observe the sexual history of a psychopath. In the sexual history of a psychopath, he or she subjects herself to the most degrading and dispoiling treatment by others. She is likely to find herself in situations which no healthy or normal person, not even a mentally ill person, would find herself or himself. Psychopaths are unlikely to have sexual boundaries. They're unlikely to be sexually dysregulated. They're likely to engage in extreme and reckless sex from a very, very early age. It's very common in the history of psychopaths to engage, for example, in group sex in teenage years, or to give a series of 100 blowjobs on consecutive days to all the boys in the school. It's utterly, utterly normal occurrence in the sexual history of psychopaths. And the same people, psychopaths, usually develop comorbidities or dual diagnosis like eating disorders. And some of them suffer from body dysmorphia, although this is much more common in secondary psychopathy and therefore in borderline personality disorder. So attitude to body, attitude to sex, attitude to the bodies of other people. The willingness to self-trash sexually, the willingness to be objectified, degraded and despoiled, subjecting oneself to these situations, seeking them actually. This is a hallmark, a major hallmark by the way, according to Cleckley and many other authorities. It's a major hallmark of psychopathy. And it is a differential diagnosis in the sense that it does not exist in trauma victims among people with autism, schizoids and narcissists. It is common among psychopaths all year long. And it's common among borderlines when they switch into a psychopathic state, secondary psychopathic state. So this is the first differentiating or differential sign. Now, psychopaths are deceitful, they're deceitful, they're disloyal, they're unfaithful, they're manipulative, they're parasites. Psychopathic women are usually gold diggers, they're gold oriented. This is not, this is another differential diagnosis. This is not the case with schizoids, with borderlines, with people with autism spectrum disorder and with trauma victims. Only psychopaths are like this. So when you see a history of deceitfulness, cheating for example, in multiple relationships, serial cheating, betrayal, a history of adultery and unfaithfulness, extramarital sex, non-consensual extramarital sex, when you see a history of parasitism, when you see a history of antisocial even criminal activities, actions. When you see extreme goal orientation, which is without scruples, without boundaries, without rules and without limits, which is reckless and callous and ruthless. When you see these things, this is a psychopath. Finally, a psychopath is likely to be very devaluing and humiliating of others. Psychopaths hold everyone in disdain and contempt, which is not the case with the narcissist by the way. The narcissist does have role models. The narcissists tend to adopt public intellectuals, important politicians, footballers, you name it, he tends to adopt public figures and idealize them. This is not the case with the psychopath. The psychopath holds everyone, and when I say everyone, I mean everyone, in disdain and contempt. So psychopaths are compelled, it's almost compulsive, they're compelled to devalue you, to humiliate you, and this is apparent and transparent in the therapy setting where the psychopath embarks almost immediately on doubting the therapist's credentials, experience, knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, etc., etc. The evaluation and humiliation, degradation and dispoiling of other people are psychopathic acts when they are indiscriminate and when they don't target only specific individuals like intimate partners. Psychopaths are also very hyper-vigilant and very paranoid, much more so than trauma victims. So when we see someone who is viciously, viciously, contemptuous, disdainful, hatefully devaluing, totally hyper-vigilant and paranoid, that's likely to be a psychopath, not a trauma victim. The etiologies of this identical presentation, the etiologies couldn't be more different, and this is why it makes it crucial, it's crucial to apply the differential diagnosis, diagnostic signs and symptoms and criteria that I've just described, because if you get it wrong, you can, as a clinician, as a therapist, you can wreak havoc and create enormous damage. The etiologies of these four groups or classes of disorders is very different. The psychopath has no empathy, he has no positive emotions. The narcissist has no access to his positive emotions, but he does have positive emotions. The psychopath does not have positive emotions, there's nothing to access, nothing there, he has no empathy, he has nothing to report. His self-reporting is denuded, minimal or sometimes non-existent, not because he's playing mind games or not because it's a power play, although they're prone to both. It's because he has nothing to report, there's nothing there. So the psychopath is goal-oriented, he defines himself via his environment. He derives his identity from his actions and from his environment and this is why his goal orientation is extreme. Psychopaths are primitive two-state devices, almost in animals, almost in an animalistic level. Feel good, feel bad. So they're two-state device, they mimic humans because they're great mimics, they have thespian skills exactly like the narcissist, but it's mimicry, it's not real. The etiology of the psychopath is severe damage, probably cerebral, probably brain damage, to the ability to experience empathy or positive emotions, that's the root of psychopathy in effect. The autistic person is oblivious to social and sexual cues, he cannot read other people, he cannot read their body language. His thinking is concrete, so he is incapable of understanding and applying metaphors, similes, jokes, he has a problem with humor, so his language is very concrete and very simplified, it's a dictionary language, it's like it's a walking, talking lexicon or dictionary, so he cannot, he doesn't understand other people, he doesn't get them, he has no clues, clueless, and this renders his reactions weird, even antisocial sometimes, unintentionally. The autistic person is reluctant or unable to verbalize his internal world, his inner world, and that is partly because this inner world overwhelms him, and partly because he's been rejected all his life, owing to anticipated rejection, he doesn't want to expose himself, he doesn't want to be mocked, shun, ostracized, ignored, punished, the schizoid just wants to be left alone, that's all he wants, he is incapable of strong emotions, he is incapable of intense experiences, he, the schizoid flatlines, flatlines into solitude, the schizoid's solitary confinement is his comfort zone, it defies belief because we're all social creatures, even narcissists, even psychopaths, but not the schizoid, he thrives when he's alone, and the survivor of trauma, she represses, she numbs her emotions because she finds her emotions and the memories that are attached to these emotions, threatening, she feels that she will be overwhelmed if she allows herself to directly touch upon and interact with what had happened to her, with her trauma, so she's reluctant to revisit her harrowing experiences, and she's triggered by any attempt to be intimate with her in any way, though all four present identically in clinical settings, you need to dig deeper, you need to delve deeper, you need to ask yourself how do they regard their bodies, how do they regard sex and intimacy, are they deceitful unfaithful, goal oriented, parasitic to the extreme, are they immediately vicious in devaluing and humiliating other people, are they hyper vigilant to the point of paranoid ideation, and if the answer to all this is yes, that's a psychopath, and you did your job.