 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. Is a piece of free advice, I usually charge 500 euros an hour, and here I'm giving it to you for free. Know and actually study psychology under Professor Sandaknin 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 trowel 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 Sandaknin's life, this is for you. Okay, first of all, my name is Sandaknin, I'm the author of Malignan Self-Law, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, West Devon Don, 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 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 and 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. End, end. Enough, Maknin, enough self-congratulating and self-bragging people might think that you're a narcissist. Okay, apropos 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 Podcasts and on Spotify and again, there's a link in the description. Now during this podcast, I suggested a new approach to abuse involving dual concepts, borders versus boundaries. The host was Nima Jayasin and the panelist was Dr. Mariam Tanweir and 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 the, of a Vaknin dose for the day. Overdose on Vaknin is the new black. Okay, next, as you well know, or some of you may know, I have a PhD in physics. So there are several videos I've made about physics. The 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 do, to several governments. I used to be the senior business correspondent of United Press International, UPI. I was, was and am still interviewed widely in all international media, lately on Newsweek and 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. 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 accepted, untypically, atypically of me, I accepted 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. Inactivism 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, 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 called The Embodied Mind, co-authored by Varela, Thomsen and Roche and published in 1991. At the time, the authors defined cognition as an action. And they defined an action as the bringing forth of domains of significance through gas-organismic activity that has been self-conditioned by a history of interactions between an organism and his 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 of mentality and mentalizing in all their forms. Now, this leads directly to autistic and derisistic thinking because these two types of cognitions are actually divorced from the environment and fly in the face of inactivism. Have fun, Jeladim and Jeladot. Look it up. Autistic thinking, also known as derisistic thinking, is a topic of today's video. And what qualifies me to hector and preach and chastise and castigate all the plagiarists 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, narcissism revisited, first published in 1999 when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. I'm 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 and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria. Here you are. You spanned the globe with me. Join Vaknin tours. OK, Neshamot. Look it up. Let us delve right in. Enough with the nonsense, Vaknin. Let us delve right in and discuss autistic and derisistic thinking. Autistic and derisistic thinking are ways of relating to reality, to personal experience, to logic itself and to other people, interpersonal relating. Autistic and derisistic thinking are fantasy-infused, they're based on fantasy. However, they are technically speaking or clinically speaking cognitions. Derism 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 and self-absorbed. That's autistic thinking. Derisistic thinking is totally fantastic. It revolves around fantasy and daydreaming. It is divorced from reality. It involves impaired reality testing. Both autistic and derisistic thinking are self-referential. They cause the individual to withdraw 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 derisistic thinking, derive from an overarching and all-pervasive daydreaming or fantasy life. In other words, they are not isolated figments or mechanisms that 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, derisistic conditions, cognitions, 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, idiosyncratic thinking, very stereotypical or concrete thinking, a defiance of logic and an 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. OK, Shoshani. So we have a patient. He is illogical. He's odd. He's 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 hyperreflexivity and the usual confusion between internal and external objects. This patient 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 unavailable 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 deregistic thinking, depending on the phase in the cycle. So narcissists are like Pokemon, too. They are like a compendium of these types of counterfactual unrealistic modes of thought and relating to the environment. People with autism spectrum disorder, they engage in autistic thinking. Narcissists, as I said, engage in autistic thinking and deregistic thinking. But autistic and deregistic 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 these idiotic nonsense. Well, these are mentally ill people. Religious people are mentally ill. And some of them, not all of them, some of them, can easily degenerate into autistic and deregistic thinking. For example, many of them believe that God himself is taking care of 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, deregistic thinking, self-absorbed and divorced from reality. So we have an example of socially acceptable delusions which actually involve deregistic 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. So the paranoid engages in autistic and deregistic thinking as well. What I'm trying to say is that autistic and deregistic 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 deregistic 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 deregistic thinking by 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 deregistic thinking, if you go one level down and if you accept that emotions are a subspecies of cognitions, then of course, autistic and deregistic thinking would affect emotions as well, more precisely, access to emotions. Autistic and deregistic thinking would deny the patient access to his emotions, because emotions would be perceived as out there, external part of reality. And so there will be a gap or a chasm or a schism, an internal 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's emotional dysregulation, which is also a direct outcome of misjudging her emotions, weighing them improperly, again involving autistic and deregistic 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.