 My favorite pastime on Sunday when I'm not drinking wine, of course Mmm Is to throw out the trash And so I will start with this I will try to clear a lot of nonsense online Which unfortunately made its way offline as well And we will be discussing the role of genetics and heredity in narcissism His narcissism pathological narcissism and more specifically narcissistic personality disorder. Is it an Inherited thing. Are you born with it or are you made into a narcissist in early childhood as the vast majority of psychological theories suggest Now this is not the first video I'm making about this topic. There are a few others You're well advised to look for them search search the channel and To watch them perhaps before you watch this one this one is a bit more grounded in studies and literature and research and Is cutting-edge? I'm gonna bring you the latest in in the field as I always do on this channel because I am The author of Malignan self-love narcissism revisited a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of see-ups Let's start by clearing one major misconception Heritability is not the same as gene specificity. What a mouthful Her it heritability means that when we see a trait a phenotypic trait in a population a Component a Component is hereditary some segments some element of the trait is hereditary We would tend to believe that we would tend to think that the trait is Manifested in the cohort in the population because of some genetic Transmission or transmission via genes. This is heritability. So heritability is never in individuals And it is an observational thing we observe Traits the manifestation of traits and we make an assumption Assumption that there is a contribution of heredity or genetics or genes to The emergence of the trait the way it does and in the frequency it does in a population Now this is not the same as gene specificity in other words by saying that a certain trait Manifest because of heredity or there's a hereditary component genetic component We are we are it's not the same like saying that a specific gene is Responsible for this trait. There's no one-to-one correspondence or mapping Moreover genes never operate alone. It's not a light switch Jeans never even never express themselves alone Gene work genes work in groups known as arrays So gene arrays are responsible for the emergence of traits and The gene array which sometimes includes thousands of genes The gene array interacts with the internal environment for example hormones and with the external environment And this is known as epigenetics. So it's much more complicated There is absolutely no such thing as a gambling gene or a narcissism gene or this is rank unmitigated total horse, you know total nonsense and The irresponsible scientists who appear in the media because they like to see their ugly faces Reflected. It's a narcissistic grandiose thing. They are ruining the profession What they are doing is utterly unethical There is no single gene that is responsible to any human trait Let alone a combination of traits let alone a confluence of traits and behaviors For example in a personality disorder. So heritability means nothing. It just means that in large populations a Certain trait would be manifested more than probability would allow and this indicates an underlying genetic Propensity but not any specific gene and not a genetic substrate. So this is no more number two Narcissistic personality disorder is not I don't know tuberculosis. It's not localized It's all pervasive Narcissism is the narcissist Narcissism is a personality structure. It encompasses traits behaviors Reactions responses emotions cognitions. It's a multi-faceted ginormously complicated Phenomenon that cannot be reduced to any single gene any single neural pathway in the brain any single area of the brain It cannot even be reduced to the total activity of the brain or the total Genetics or genetic map or genome of the individual. No, it cannot be reduced this way And anyone who says otherwise is either a charlatan or someone in pursuit of instant celebrity Both a frowned upon in academia Number three the very definition of the construct of narcissistic personality disorder is in flux It's in flux today We are phasing out The nine criteria of narcissistic personality disorder that characterize the fourth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual They're being phased out then being phased out in in favor of a dimensional alternative model and this will be the diagnostic landscape in the sixth edition of the DSM the forthcoming edition of the DSM I Additionally, we are transitioning from a static view of narcissistic personality disorder type Constant view your grandiose so your grandiose so your grandiose. That's it We're transitioning from this very primitive view of narcissism to a much more nuanced and dynamic model Where there is no type constancy where every overt grandiose in your face defined Obnoxious narcissists is also shy and fragile and vulnerable Depending on circumstances or anxieties on stress on on life events life crisis and so on and so forth So there's not a constancy. There's a dynamic landscape narcissism is a flux. It's a river not a pond and Finally, we are transitioning from an egocintonic view of narcissism the belief that the narcissist is happy. Go lucky Is comfortable with who he is Admires himself Feels good about himself and believes that he is the next stage next stage in evolution all true all true at times But we are transitioning from this model to an egocintonic model Compensatory mode where we believe that pathological narcissism Compensates for deep set insecurities and a sense of inferiority So we are transitioning from overt to from an overt or covert money Now all this is still work in progress and Therefore it begs the question if we don't know what is narcissistic personality disorder How can we then map it onto a gene? How can we say a gene or an array of genes cause narcissistic personality disorder? if we failed either to to even define what narcissistic personality disorder is and Remember heritability is not gene specificity So the answer to the question is no We are not aware of any gene or combination of genes which are responsible for Narcissism period. We are not even aware of any brain activity or abnormality structural or functional Which causes narcissism again period you can switch off now because the rest of the video Substantial is what I just said okay, the start by I would start by Acknowledging that there is a hereditary contribution genetic contribution in other cluster B personality disorders most notably borderline personality disorder an antisocial personality disorder, especially the malignant extreme form Known colloquially, but not clinically as psychopathy So I refer to a study by the Lala Diaz Janik and others Titled toward the dark side temperament personality and genetics related to antisocial behaviors It was published in behavior genetics of temperament and personality advances in behavior genetics It's a book by Springer published in 2020 and there's a great literature review there That's why I'm referring to this specific now in the literature under the in the description under the video There's a literature list as is my habit and I'm going to read to you the summary of the chapter several personality factors associated with criminality for example impulsivity psychopathy have genetic components Specifically the dopaminergic system and various dopamine candidate genes may be related to these personality traits Preliminary research on gene environment correlations. It's known as RG Gene environment correlations may shed some light on the relationship between genetic and environmental influences Although these assumptions remain challenging to test empirically In contrast several researchers have found interactions between genes and environment GXE Such that certain environmental stressors harsh interactions over T may impact the phenotypic presentation of genetic vulnerabilities in otherwise how specific genes express themselves and are observable via traits or behaviors so to summarize Antisocial aspects antisocial behaviors antisocial traits in antisocial personality disorder including but not limited to criminality Do probably reflect some genetic contribution possibly even a pronounced genetic contribution. It's a behavior Specific behavior. It's not a complex It's not a whole picture. It's not a big picture. It's highly specific behavior So there is a chance that one day will be able to reduce it to an array of genes and then maybe turn them off and prevent crime altogether Similarly in borderline personality disorder, there is heritability Your chances to develop borderline personality disorder is anywhere from three to five times higher If any of your relatives has borderline personality disorder, which is why borderline personality disorder is Definitely a clinical entity and anyone who says otherwise have no idea what he's talking about Borderline personality disorder is real and it is a clinical entity. However It may be best captures and best is best captured and best described as a form of post traumatic emotional dysregulation that I agree but Clinically, of course, it exists and it has a strong Indisputable observable genetic component now even when the relative in question Relative with a borderline personality disorder Does not reside with the child does not educate the child does not raise or care give even then Someone born into a family of borderlines is a lot more likely to develop borderline Even if that person has not been exposed to the family at all and That is a strong indicator of genetics. Also, we know that in both psychopathy and borderline personality disorder There are abnormalities structural and functional of the brain multiple areas in the brain and multiple pathways and multiple interconnectedness Between various areas. So this is all true Psychopathy and borderline and this raises the question if narcissism and borderline Are so closely related if their first cousins or Even if they are flip sides of the same coin has come back this claim and I'm very close to claiming if This is the case. Then is it not safe to assume that narcissism also has a pronounced genetic component? well Possibly I'm saying possibly and not of course and not certainly because narcissism is a different set of defenses and These defenses Manifest and are expressed in a way so dissimilar to borderline personality disorder that we are forced to give up on the Assumption however appealing The assumption that they both share the same genetic substrate or the same genetic environment or the same genetic predisposition or proclivity It seems that narcissists and borderlines evolve So differently choose different defense mechanisms Process reality very differently because they are very different In this in the genetic sense. They're very different. They're predisposed differently They are similar in In in psychodynamic ways They're similar in some ways, but these ways the similarities are ironically not reducible to genetics while the dissimilarities are Can easily be attributed to genetics. That's why No, we can't learn anything from the genetics or heredity of borderline personality disorder with regards to narcissistic personality disorder In a study published in 2015 Researchers at the University of Michigan They recruited 40-plus boys between the ages of 16 17 some like that adolescents and They administered to them The NPI the narcissistic personality inventory and they isolated those of The boys who were more narcissistic than the others So they had like a control group of non narcissistic boys and a group of narcissistic boys now mind you I Diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder in a 16 year old or a 17 year old is a no-no It's bad practice So the whole study is tainted from its very inception We cannot safely diagnose narcissistic personality disorder prior to age 21 at least In many scholars say 25 and these are dominant prominent scholars So the whole study is questionable to use an understatement But they have discovered that teenagers with higher levels of grandiose narcissism Had a higher activity In an area of the brain known as the social pain network so The more grandiose the kid The more The more narcissistic the teenager The more active was the part of the brain known as the social pain network It's a collection of brain regions Including the insula the anterior Singulate the cortex and so on so forth and this area of the brain is associated with distress in the face of social exclusion That's fascinating Because first of all, it implies vulnerability It's more covert than overt And it demonstrates On the cerebral neurological level The narcissist's Absolute dependence On other people's input acceptance Attribution Admiration or at the very least attention Which what all scholars have been saying for like a hundred years Even more interesting was the fact That the area in the brain which processes distress In social exclusion cases When the child is when the person is ostracized ostracized Shunned ridiculed mock avoided etc. This area lights up What and there's a lot of distress of course subjective distress As anyone who is who has short social anxiety or is avoidant and they will tell you how distressing this is It's very traumatic And it leads often to depression. So they asked the kids. They asked the adolescents Are you feeling distress? And none of them said i'm feeling distress Even the narcissistic grandiose adolescents Whose brain was signaling enormous distress Even they did not report subjective experienced distress And that is the denial part in narcissism Narcissists have no access to Their own internal world In they have no introspection. They have access, but they have no introspection They falsify everything. They have a pronounced fantasy defense. They deny Any vulnerability and any imperfection There was another study by Joachim Gratz In grab in glad some sorry So Joachim and his colleagues Conducted a study an fmri study with men and women And they discovered something very very interesting women react very very differently to men Very it's as if there were two species Both men and women in the study had high levels of grandiose narcissism And both of them Were subjected to the same set of experiments And yet the men Showed higher activity in parts of the anterior single aid cortex Associated with negative emotions social pain and so on and and and so forth And the women Didn't But the women reacted this way When they were shown images of themselves I'm going to repeat this. It's a very fascinating Fascinating experiments When men Were exposed to what they perceived to be social pain Negative emotions and so on And these men had higher levels of grandiose narcissism They showed more activity in the area of the brain That is a part Of the social exclusion or social pain network area known as anterior single aid cortex But women Didn't react this way even when women were exposed to social pain and social exclusion. So they didn't react like the men They didn't react like the men So this is very interesting And it begins to tell us That narcissism is in men is not the same as narcissism in women And of course it falsifies many of the things I've been saying But I owe you the truth And I I follow where the evidence leads I was of the opinion That female narcissism and male narcissism, especially in today's world Where women are very masculinized according to studies To many studies Especially in today's world both women and men Would basically have the same type of narcissism But brain studies demonstrate that women react very differently At least they react very differently to rejection And and so on men are much more invested Emotionally in being accepted Belonging in influencing In in gathering narcissistic supply The bodies of narcissists both men and women Indicate extremely elevated stress The bodies of narcissists Are flooded with stress hormones, especially cortisol That is easily explained by traditional theory Narcissists are constantly anxious now. We know that psychopaths are actually anxious as well There are even outliers myself included who are trying to reconceive of psychopathy as an anxiety disorder, but Put that aside Anxiety is a very common reaction in narcissism So is depression The narcissist is anxious. Will he be able to obtain supply? Will he fail to to garner supply? Will he experience a collapse? Is someone insulting him? Is this an injury? Is he about to be mortified? Is he being betrayed? Is a big paranoid because paranoid ideation? Paranoia is a form of narcissism It's put it puts the paranoid in the center of attention It places the paranoid at the heart of conspiracies and malevolent intent. So paranoia Is a variant of narcissism paranoid are of course All the time anxious Narcissism is anxiety Is very often comorbid With anxiety and depression as we see in the work of is a is a running stuff So it's not surprising that narcissists bodies are suffused drowning Flooded with cortisol and other stress forms in 2020. There was a study by Royce Lee at the University of Chicago And his colleague colleagues, of course, no one works alone And they reported that people with npd And also by the way bpd So both narcissists and borderline have greater concentrations of molecules associated with oxidative stress A stress response at the cellular level So their blood was flooded With the byproducts of processing stress on the cellular level I want to read to you something that Joke said in an interview we granted to the september 2023 edition of scientific merit He said vulnerability is always there, but maybe not always expressed And on the particular circumstances such as in the lab, you can observe signs of vulnerability at the physiological level Even if people say I don't have vulnerability He continued to say that the neuroscience of narcissism is incredibly interesting But at the same time I'm very hesitant to interpret any of these results. Actually, this was someone else. It was Mitya Beck Psychologist in Germany so This I would say this this is a great summary All narcissists are vulnerable But many of them are not aware of the vulnerability until they experience an adverse circumstance A life crisis a threat an abandonment humiliation modification injury only then The most in-your-face antisocial Resilient powerful amazingly untouchable narcissists even then they fall apart and they discover their vulnerability It's point number one point number two Neuroscience and genetics are not conclusive sciences. They are correlative sciences And I'm hesitant to use the word sciences So be careful Don't jump to conclusions and don't listen to know-it-alls online including know-it-alls with academic degrees who unscrapulously and unethically misinterpret results of flimsy research non-representative samples and basically useless studies non-rigorous studies In order to make proclamations and promulgations of breakthroughs and amazing discoveries Don't listen to these sensationalists Science is not sensational science is incremental gradual slow and glacial Now let's proceed It's from the Oxford Handbook of Evolution and Emotions published by Oxford University Press and it's a chapter titled Nazism and narcissistic personality disorder evolutionary roots and emotional profiles. I'm going to gain I'm going to gain to read. I'm going to read to you again paragraph behavioral genetics as established say the authors a heritability component for narcissism and they refer to an overview by Vernon in 2008 While this does not imply that specific genes are associated with narcissism because heritability does not signify a genetic substrate Remember how we opened the video and also I refer you to work by Jackson 2011 The authors continue this finding that there is a heritable component in narcissism This finding is a necessary yet insufficient condition for showing that narcissism is a genetic basis They refer to studies by Lysley, which I will analyze in a minute These are the original studies of genetics in narcissism 1993 and deal with these studies in a minute Evidence the authors continue evidencing in search of specific genes That reflect narcissism is lacking There is scant research evidence on the molecular molecular genetics of narcissism So it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding putative gene narcissism associations Some research has examined polymorphisms in the five HTTLPR gene which codes for serotonin transporters This genetic variant has been linked to a variety of psychiatric disorders and symptoms including several personality traits associated with psychopathy and narcissism and they are referring to studies by Bremer 2016 Luo and Kai 2018 Sadegh as early as 2010 and so on so forth this particular gene Is well studied and it really makes an appearance in many mental disorders dysfunctions and illnesses And still this research they say and it's a recent book This research is in its infancy and it is not yet known what genes or combinations of genes might play a role in the development of narcissism Indirect evidence of a genetic basis for narcissism Comes from genetic associations with antagonism an extraversion And the corresponding biological psychology literature pertaining to these broad band personality traits As noted earlier both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are antagonists have Are antagonistic traits at their core And they are referring to work by crow vise and others 2020 consistent with this view grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism involve Disagreeableness Miller 2011 Paul Hausson Williams as early as 2002 Vazir and others in 2008 and so on so forth In other words, there are traits These traits are heritable But we are very far from identifying specific genes which work in narcissism Extremely far. We are not even sure that there are such genes and what would their contribution individual contribution be Maybe it's not the genes. Maybe it's a combination of genes and the interaction of the genes with the internal environment Or its response to an external environment. Maybe maybe six thousand genes are involved. We don't know yet Neighboring research has shown that narcissism. I'm continuing to quote from the book Neighboring research has shown that narcissism particularly the grandiose variant Is strongly positively correlated with extraversion Lee and Ashton 2004 Paul Hausson Williams 2012 Which is in and this is indeed evident across different measures of the big five the big five personality traits. Yeah Most research in this literature including both self-report and behavioral measures is consistent with Paul Hausson's minimalist assertion That grandiose narcissists are disagreeable extroverts Because grandiose narcissism manifests as Disagreeable extroversion any genetic basis for disagreeableness and for extroversion could be taken as indirect evidence of a genetic basis for narcissism Multiple studies have provided evidence of specific genes associated with extroversion and agreeableness Kim 2015 Sanchez Voyage 2018 and others Although there is stronger Such evidence for extroversion than agreeableness Luo 2017 and against Sanchez who is who kind of was critical of some of the studies These genetic factors continues the text account for approximately one To 20% of the variants in extroversion and agreeableness in genome-wide association studies and polygenic studies We will use round number percentage Let's say 10% is a heuristic for the genetic basis for narcissism Recognizing that the confidence interval is large. By the way across the field Across the field heritability Has been linked to specific genes or gene arrays only 5% of the time That's how weak the connection is We assert say the authors That the genetic components for these two traits Agreeableness and extroversion Are approximately 10% Which albeit lower than the common heuristic of 50% heritability for personality traits based on behavior genetic research Indirectly suggests at a genetic a genetic basis for narcissism Because narcissism appears to be partly genetically inherited Next we consider two primary pathways Perhaps somewhat positively intertwined that may help explain the evolution of narcissism and how it was selected sexual selection and natural selection Our personality disorders the outcomes of inherited traits Are they brought on by abusive and traumatizing upbringing? Or maybe they are the said results of the confluence of both so This is the question that I posed in 2000 The year 2000 exactly That's the question I posed And I would like to review the beginnings of the literature How the initial the first the pioneers Try to tackle the question because I think their choices their decisions their preferences dictated the field And the study and the biases to this very day To identify the wrong of heredity Researchers have resorted to a few tactics They studied the occurrence of similar psychopathologies in identical twins separated at birth In twins and siblings who grew up in the same environment And in relatives of patients usually across a few generations and the an extended family Tellingly twins Those Raised apart and those raised together Show the same correlation of personality traits, which is 0.5 And I'm referring to studies by Bushar Licken McGew single tell it gone 1990 Even attitudes values and interests have been shown to be highly affected by genetic factors in twins Waller cogitin Bushar Licken again 1990 that was the beginning of the of the whole field A review of the literature demonstrates the genetic component in certain personality disorders mainly the mainly antisocial schizotypal Is strong and I refer you to studies by thapar and mcguffin in 1993 Negan goldsmith found a connection in 1993 between the between schizoid and paranoid personality disorders and schizofrenia Which we know is genetically determined Or at least as a strong genetic component The three authors of the dimensional assessment of personality pathology Liceley Jackson and Schroeder Join forces with jang in 1993 to study whether 18 Of the personality dimensions are heritable They found that 40 to 60 percent of their recurrence of certain personality traits across generations can be explained by heredity most notably anxiousness callousness cognitive distortion randiosity compulsivity identity problems Oppositionality rejection restricted expression social avoidance stimulus seeking and suspiciousness Each and every one of these qualities is associated with a personality disorder and With a hereditary component In a roundabout way, therefore This study supports the hypothesis that personality disorders are hereditary And this goes a long way towards explaining why in the same family with the same set of parents in an identical emotional environment Children who were brought up the same way by the same people even twins grow to have personality disorders While others Are perfectly normal So you could have five children One of them becomes a narcissist One becomes a codependent And three of them are totally normal and healthy and mock the other two life long Surely this divergence Indicates a genetic predisposition to of some people to develop personality disorders Otherwise all children Raised up in a dysfunctional family with a dead mother would have become personality disorder and that's Absolutely not the case a very small minority of children Go on to develop personality disorders And still This off-doubted distinction between nature and nurture May be merely a question of semantics And this is where the origin of the field in the early 90s In my view Created a stalemate led to stagnation to a dead end because The original thinkers including lifestyles who is great, you know The original thinkers assumed that it's a yes or no situation a proposition either genetics influence either genetics Genes determine The emergence of personality disorders later in life or they don't there's no middle ground And there's no interaction between genes and environment internal external circumstances They were not aware in other words of possible epigenetic effects I wrote in my book malignments of love narcissism revisited in 1995 When we are born, we are not much more than the sum of our genes and their manifestations Our brain, which is a physical object is the residence of mental health and mental health disorders Mental illness cannot be explained without resorting to the body and especially to the brain And our brain cannot be contemplated without considering our genes Thus any explanation of our mental life that leaves out Our hereditary makeup and our neuroscience physiology is lacking Such lacking theories are nothing but literary narratives. They're not science Psychoanalysis, for instance, is often accused of being divorced from from corporeal reality I would just add that today neuroscientists are trying to create a bridge between neuroscience and psychoanalysis with amazing results, by the way I'm continuing to read from My my book malignments of love narcissism revisited written in 1995 Our genetic baggage makes us resemble a personal computer We are in all-purpose universal machine Subject to the right programming, conditioning, socialization, education, upbringing, we can turn out to be anything and everything A computer can imitate any other kind of discrete machine Given the right software It can play music, screen movies, calculate, print, paint Compare this to a television set A television set is constructed and expected to do one and only one thing It is a single pathos and a unitary function We human beings are more like computers than like television sets It is true that single genes rarely account for any behavior and any trait An array of coordinated genes is required to explain even the minutest human phenomenon Discoveries of a gambling gene here and an aggression gene there Are derided by more serious and less publicity prone scholars Yet it would seem that even complex behaviors such as risk taking reckless driving and compulsive shopping have some genetic underpinning And to end I refer you to the seminal study, which is still cited decades later by Lifesly Jank Jackson and Vernon in 1993 It's titled genetic and environmental contributions to dimensions of personality disorders It was published by the American Journal of Psychiatry Vol. 150 What a way to end Narcissism is a virus Narcissism is a global pandemic It rages throughout the earth across cultures civilizations and societies I'm going to teach you how to vaccinate yourself The virus of narcissism evades your immunity and attacks you unexpectedly You need to be prepared You need to be protected And above all, you need to make sure it never happens again Stay tuned Here is what you need to know These are insights borrowed from the sciences of virology and epidemiology and applied to the pseudoscience of psychology In 1998 I granted my first interview on narcissism It was titled The Ambassador of Narcissism And there I said that narcissism is an epidemic Many years later Keith Campbell used it as the title of his book The Narcissism Epidemic Narcissism can be easily compared to a virus First of all, the incidence and prevalence of narcissism in the global population and especially among the younger generation is exploding There's no other way to describe it Young people are five times as likely to be narcissistic or full-fledged narcissists than older generations We have studied by twins, Campbell, numerous others to substantiate this Social media had contributed to the emergence of this pandemic But it is a pandemic What can the sciences of virology, epidemiology and medicine in general Teach us on how to protect ourselves Well, first of all, for a virus to spread The virus needs a naive susceptible population A population that had never been exposed to this virus before And therefore has no immune ready-made immune response In 1995, when I started my work and coined the phrase narcissistic abuse The population was definitely naive and susceptible People didn't know anything about narcissism They didn't know how to identify it They didn't know how to defend themselves against it They didn't know what to do There were no prescriptive measures, no strategies Nothing, there was one huge vacuum Even among scholars, there were serious disagreements As to what on earth is narcissism to start with You had Freud, who said that narcissism is a fixation on an early phase of development With emphasis on auto-eroticism, especially sexual Auto-eroticism You had Jung, who said that narcissism is healthy actually But it can go awry in the process of constellating the self Creating the self in the process of introversion Narcissism can take over and become malignant You had Melanie Klein and her followers Including Otto Kahnberg, Harry Gantry Many of the object relations schools, Fairbearing and others Who said that narcissism are actually a schizoid phenomenon Problems, it's a problem of people who withdraw their emotions Withdraw their involvement, withdraw their object relations and internalize it They don't interact with other people properly or at all You had someone like Kovut, who said that narcissism is a problem with the self-object Etc, etc, etc There was massive substantial fundamental disagreement As on what on earth is narcissism to start with And then if you don't know what it is How, how can you shield yourself from it The situation is reminiscent to what had happened when What happens when new viruses emerge When we don't know anything about the new virus And there are great massive debates in the medical community As to what is the virus, how does it propagate How does it infect, how should we protect ourselves, etc This was the situation in 1995 So the population at large, laymen, were definitely naive and susceptible They were open to infection with narcissism in two ways As victims of narcissists In a process that I described as narcissistic abuse And as victims of complex trauma CPTSD who develop narcissistic and psychopathic reactions, traits and behaviors Narcissistic and psychopathic overlay So very much like vampires and zombies If you were bitten by a narcissist You could either become one or you could die mentally, sometimes physically So here was the virus of narcissism Unleashed on an unsuspecting, gullible, open, empathic, receptive, naive, susceptible population And the experts couldn't agree as to what it was And what should be done There was 1995 Now every virus has a life cycle It starts as what we call a wild type A wild type is the prototype, the template, the initial virus It could be a zomotic virus A virus that is transferred from an animal to a human being And it could be human to human transmission virus But it's a wild type Gradually as the virus replicates within cells There are replication errors There are mistakes in the copying of the virus And the virus begins to mutate These mistakes are called mutations So slowly we are beginning to have mutant viruses Viruses which are not exactly identical copies of the original Most of these mutations, the overwhelming vast majority of these mutations are benign Or even helpful Viruses end up becoming enfeebled and weak And finally pitter out and die owing to such mutations The Spanish flu ended this way When the virus had mutated to its own disadvantage And couldn't infect people anymore So mutations are not a bad thing But if mutations accumulate They can become dangerous Especially if they accumulate on critical parts of the virus For example the spike or the membrane So in this case we have isolates Also known as variants They are sufficiently recognizable as the wild type original But they have important changes and alterations Which allow them to enhance one or more traits Such as transmissibility How contagious they are How deadly they are How lethal they are So we have variants or isolates And then finally If a sufficient number of mutations accumulates We have strains Strains are deviations from the wild type original virus That are beginning to be actually new viruses The same process is happening with narcissism The wild type narcissism occurs in early childhood It is the outcome of trauma and abuse Including behaviors which are not recognized Widely as trauma and abuse But are actually traumatic and abusive If the parents does not allow the child to separate To become an individual To individuate If the parents isolate the child from the beneficial impact of reality Don't allow the child to grow up If the parents idolize the child Thereby generating in the child a grandiose defense If the parents parentify the child Forced the child to behave as an adult And to become their parent All these behaviors, spoiling, pampering All these behaviors are actually abusive Because they breach the boundaries The emerging boundaries of the child At that point Some children become viral They develop a wild type virus An original virus That we call Primary narcissism turns secondary So this is a type of narcissism That is already pathologized As these people, as these children grow up And become ostensible adults They actually remain children for the rest of their lives The core, the core wild type virus of narcissism Is always there And that's one they can never grow up But they give a good imitation They give a good show Of being adults So as they become adults Or pseudo adults Or imitation adults As they emulate adults The virus of narcissism mutates Because they have to adapt They have to adapt to circumstances They have to adapt to objects, to other people They have to adapt to expectations They have to adapt to social mores, to the law I mean, numerous constraints Act on the wild type viral narcissism So the narcissism itself mutates Now, if the narcissism is antisocial for example The mutations weaken the narcissism And psychopathic narcissists, antisocial narcissists Get rid of most of their narcissism Spontaneously By the age of 45 or 50 But if the narcissism is not antisocial Not psychopathic The mutations lead to isolates Lead to variants And these variants are more self-efficacious Than the original wild type Narcissism in the vast majority of cases Becomes more dangerous More transmissible More lethal More deadly More risky As time passes Because it mutates into variants We will discuss in a minute Why variants are more dangerous than the wild type So narcissists evolve Shapeshift Change Transform In ways that render them much more ominous and dangerous And finally, there are strains of narcissism A typology of narcissists Somatic, cerebral, covert, inverted, etc, etc All these strains are not evident in childhood They are the outcome of cumulative mutations Over the life of the narcissists Moreover Exactly like in nature Narcissism combines with other mental health disorders It disguises underlying conditions It undergoes something which in virology In genetics We call genetic drift An antigenic shift Let's go back to medicine for a while Viruses, as they mutate and so on and so forth Fluctuate They change some of their genetic material Suckly, imperceptibly almost And this is the genetic drift But sometimes They undergo a massive change In genes, in the genetic material And this is called the antigenic shift They become effectively an almost completely new virus Now narcissism undergo both types of changes Narcissism, as a virus, undergoes genetic drift It changes minimally It modifies behaviors It keeps certain traits at bay It emphasizes other traits depending on the circumstances And the expectations and the environment But by and large it's the same core of narcissism There is identity disturbance The core is unstable But this is the stable feature of narcissism Or in other personality disorders The lack of a clear core identity And so, but gradually as time passes Many narcissists and narcissism in general undergoes an antigenic shift The narcissist becomes something else I have discussed this in my standard model of personality disorders Where I had suggested that there is no type constancy That narcissists shift from an overt state To a collapsed state And from a collapsed state To a covert state And from a covert state To a collapsed state And back to an overt state Similarly they shift from a somatic state To a cerebral state, etc, etc These are antigenic shifts The differences between the subtypes of narcissists Are sufficiently pronounced For us to say that it's a new type of narcissism For example, a cerebral narcissist who becomes somatic These two have nothing in common It's like two different personalities Two different identities And I call it pseudo identities Self-states So, narcissists literally shape shift They literally become different people Under different circumstances In different environment With different people And this is the equivalent in virology The equivalent in viruses Of changes in genetic material Now, here's the problem Genetic drift and more so Anti-genetic shift What they do They help the virus to disguise itself From the immune system The immune system no longer recognizes the virus There is immunological evasion Or immunological escape The virus cloaks itself The virus becomes invisible By altering itself sufficiently And by mimicry By imitating cells of the body itself These are very complex mechanisms Now, let's apply them to narcissism As the narcissist shape shifts From one subtype to another He gradually begins to evade your immunity He begins to cloak himself He imitates normal people Empathic people Loving people Compassionate people It's a form of false advertising He makes promises Which are delusional and fantastic And in which he himself is invested emotionally So it's not future faking It's a shared fantasy But consequently You are unable to identify and recognize the narcissists He puts on such an excellent show Especially the covert narcissists That he evades your immune defenses He kind of skirts Circumvents your antibodies Never mind how many times before You have been exposed You had been exposed to narcissists Never mind how educated you are How well developed your immunological response is By shape shifting Antigenic shifts By altering the bit By transitioning between types The narcissist and narcissism in general Can evade anything you have to throw at it You have become defenseless So we're beginning to see that the analogs The comparisons between viruses Viral entities and narcissism Are very apt and almost perfect Another problem with antigenic shift So the first problem is that it can evade your immune system Sort of penetrate your defenses Penetrate your firewall intrude into your city under siege The second problem is it can reinfect you If you got sick with one strain of the virus And there's a sufficient number of mutations So that there are new isolates New variants, let alone new strains Which had diverged considerably from the wild type original I have a surprise for you You can get reinfected Even if you had COVID For example, even if you were ill with the original wild type virus You can get sick again with a new strain With a new isolate With a new variant You can get reinfected Same with narcissism Even if you had been exposed to a wild type narcissist And you had developed immune responses You had acquired knowledge Your firewall is up and running You have red alerts and red alarms You are hyper vigilant, you're on your toes You scan, you distrust, you mistrust I mean you're all primed to detect the narcissist By antigenically shifting By modifying behaviors and transitioning between types As my standard model predicts Covert types, overt types, collapse types By doing all this, the narcissist can reinfect you The mimicry is one way of doing this Or simply becoming a totally different type of narcissist To which you had not been exposed And so at that point You can fall for it again You can get reinfected Moreover The greatest danger in viruses is community transmission It's when people transmit the virus to other people The virus travels from one human host to another human host This is community transmission This is what we are trying to prevent With the various measures now in place We're trying to flatten the curve By disallowing the virus Not giving the virus access to this conveyor belt There is community transmission in narcissism Narcissists abuse you Narcissists challenge you, attack you Push your buttons Narcissists invade you via the chinks in your armor Narcissists leverage your vulnerabilities And your defenses are provoked Your immune defenses, psychological immune defenses Are provoked by the narcissist And these defenses are actually narcissistic and psychopathic defenses So when you're exposed to the narcissist You catch the narcissist's virus You become mildly narcissistic and mildly psychopathic But if your exposure is long enough If the viral load of narcissism is long enough Is great enough If you catch a lot of narcissism viruses You know your immune system crumbles Is overwhelmed And then your narcissistic and psychopathic defenses Go haywire We have the same process in the human body If the viral load is very high The immune system goes haywire And we have an autoimmune response Known as a cytokine storm The narcissism virus can over-stimulate your immune system If you're exposed to it for too long Or too intensively Or too extensively Or repeatedly This is complex trauma And then your psychological immune system Loses control in effect Becomes hyperactive And your defenses render you a narcissist And a psychopath This happens in borderline personality disorder When the borderline patient switches To a psychopathic full-fledged Psychopathic self-state Known as secondary psychopathy A psychopath with emotions and empathy So narcissism can over-trigger your immune system So that you become a narcissist And in this sense It's community transmission The narcissism, the narcissist Passes his viral load Passes his viruses on to you Your immune system is provoked Becomes hyperactive You become narcissistic You abuse other people You become disempathic You become vicious antisocial You lose impulse control You become reckless You become despotent And then as you abuse other people Their immune system is provoked And there's no end to it Community transmission is in place What can you do? This is the background Borrowed from medicine Pyrrology and epidemiology What can we do against the narcissism Epidemic or now pandemic Cuts across every culture Every society Every region And it's been going on for decades now What can we do against it? What we can do against it Is what we do against real-life viruses Start with masks Once the pandemic gets out of control Masking is obligatory It's a powerful defense Against pandemic That are ubiquitous In cases of rampant community transmission What is masking When the virus is a psychological virus It's narcissism What do I mean when I say you have to mask? Well, education Knowledge Learn Educate yourself Ask questions Be curious Exchange information Go to libraries Download books Get educated Become knowledgeable About narcissism All its facets and aspects That's why I keep making videos About the workings and the machinations Of the narcissist's mind Because I think that's the key issue The key issue is not to say I have a victim for me The key issue is not to talk to other victims Who will tell you you are a victim for you That's not going to get you anywhere You've got to learn Everything there is to know about narcissism That's your only That's your first line of defense You've got to mask yourself Knowledge and education are the mask Mask yourself against narcissism Number two Social distancing Keep away Keep away from people Who appear to have caught the virus Keep away from people Who belong to vulnerable, susceptible, naive Population cohorts Cohort is a group of population So for example Perhaps you should keep away From high-powered business executives People in show business People in specific professions Including, for example, law enforcement I mean Narcissists gravitate to certain professions Maybe it's a good idea To avoid these professions for a while For example, when you're dating You need to socially distance From population groups, cohorts Who are much more likely to catch the narcissism virus If you are dating And someone tells you I've been abused as a child My heart goes out to you But sorry, I'm not going to continue to date you If you are dating someone And is a bit haughty and arrogant And mistreats the waiter Say goodbye nicely Be alert Be on your toes Identify Identify Virus carriers Identify super spreaders Socially distance from these people It's for your own good Next Do not gather outdoors What does that mean? Let me explain In a typical viral situation The advice is to gather outdoors What it means in the case of narcissism So my advice is gather outdoors I'm sorry, I mispronounced I misspoke Gather outdoors Exactly like in a typical viral pandemic What does it mean? It means keep everyone outside Don't allow people within your perimeter Don't let people breach your boundaries Don't maintain secrecy about abuse Everything in the open Everything outdoors Everything you do should be visible To friends, to family To colleagues Keep your boundaries Keep your private space Don't trust so much Don't be gullible Don't be naive Don't be susceptible Be hyper-vigilant Sorry, but that's the world today Gather outdoors You date outdoors Outdoors, by the way, physically Don't invite people into your personal private space Until you're sure Keep boundaries, keep limits Establish border police controls Don't let in incoming flights Without a PCR test You know? So when I say gather outdoors Arms length Keep distance Hyper-vigilance Clear, firm, boundaries, enforceable No secrecy Everything in the open Everything visible Everything known Do not jump on the bandwagon too fast Do not be love-bombed Do not allow yourself to be groomed Do not move too fast in any relationship Any attempt to push you to move faster than your instincts tell you something's wrong If it's too good to be true, it's not true If you feel something's wrong, it is wrong Trust your gut instincts and keep them away Everyone Everyone is assumed to have the virus until proven otherwise It's exactly the opposite of the legal system In the legal system, everyone is innocent Until proven guilty In our world today, which is a narcissistic psychopathic civilization Everyone is assumed to have been infected with narcissism Until he or she proves to you that they had not Gather outdoors Wash your hands Wash your hands After every transaction, every encounter, every interaction Starting with one night stands, casual sex, and ending with dating or conversation Every contact After every contact Wash your hands And I don't mean your hands, of course, your literal hands I mean your figurative hands Sanitize Sit down Analyze what had happened Ask yourself questions Listen to your gut instinct Listen to the red alerts and alarms Open your mind up And just let your stream of consciousness flow You will know at the end of such a process Whether you have come across a carrier of the narcissism virus or not Wash your hands Cleanse your consciousness Take time Take time Take time Take time out Sit back Relax Be bored Think about it Let it flow Give it a few days Don't rush Don't be terrified of loneliness Don't panic Don't panic because of anything Don't panic because you're bored Don't panic because you're alone Don't panic because you're old This would lead you to bed places Wash your hands Sanitize your soul Cleanse and when the surface is clean Anything that is unclean Anything that is contaminated and adulterated Will stand out in stark contrast Clean your background so that you can see the shapes And above all Vaccinate yourself Vaccinate yourself against narcissism How do you vaccinate against narcissism? Is it enough to know about narcissism? No, that's masks That's masking Is it enough to educate about narcissism? No, that's a surgical mask That's N95 One step removed But still mask Vaccination is something else Vaccination What are vaccines? By the way, I have a video here About vaccines How they're made How they work How they operate in the human body and so on and so forth If YouTube hadn't taken it down In its infinite wisdom It should still be here It's a totally scientific video No conspiracy theories Just teaches you the primer It's a primer on vaccination It should be in the COVID-19 playlist That I have on this channel And on my Vaknin Musings channel So what do vaccines do? Vaccine There are two types of There are several types of vaccines But there are two type Two relevant types of vaccines One is when we inject the human body With a weakened version of the pathogen A weakened version of the organism that causes disease It's so weak It cannot cause the disease But it's sufficiently alive To cause an immune response That's one type of vaccine Another type of vaccine We take an element A segment A fragment of the pathogen Fragment of the virus Fragment of the bacterium And we inject it into the human body Or we inject to the human body A series of instructions on how to generate this fragment mRNA And then the human body generates this fragment Or when exposed to this fragment Reacts with an immune response These are the two types of vaccines we have And we should vaccinate against narcissism In exactly the same way You should expose yourself To weakened versions of narcissism And you should expose yourself to elements Fragments of narcissism As your psyche As your mind As your soul if you wish Is exposed to a weak narcissist A weakened version of narcissism It will develop an immune response It will be able to identify and avoid Shun stronger narcissism And as your soul or psyche or mind Is exposed to an element of narcissism It will develop an immune response And whenever it sees this element Or similar elements It will avoid and shun the person Who carries these elements Let me be more More precise I suggest that you deliberately expose yourself To certain traits and behaviours Which are the whole mark of narcissism For example Narcissists are grandiose Expose yourself to arrogant, haughty Grandiose Verbose Narcissists Expose yourself to grandiosity It's a very unpleasant feeling Similar to getting a vaccine You have side effects But by exposing yourself to grandiose, haughty, venglorious Grand wheel of print People You will have vaccinated yourself You will have immunized yourself And because grandiosity is common in 90% Of the occurrences and manifestations of narcissism In the human population It's a good vaccine It's similar to Pfizer Pfizer is 95% effective So they say So you know Exposing yourself to grandiosity and arrogance That's 90% effective Against the narcissism virus Expose yourself to entitlement Entitlement characterizes 60, 70% Of the population of narcissists Virus infected Narcissism virus infected people So if you expose yourself to entitlement You have the Johnson and Johnson Protection rate 66% So expose yourself to these traits Entitlement Someone who demands Incease That he deserves Your time Your resources Your money Special treatment Without investing Anything Without committing Without doing anything To deserve any of this That's entitlement And the more aggressive the entitlement The better off you are I'm not telling you to expose yourself to narcissists I'm not telling you to date narcissists Or to get married to narcissists or whatever I'm telling you to seek out People With narcissistic traits Or what Lensperry calls narcissistic style These are not dangerous people They are weakened versions Of the narcissism virus They carry a weakened version Of the virus They are simply narcissistic Or as they used to be called When I was young A-hauls Expose yourself to A-hauls You know Because they are grandiose And they are entitled Put the two together And you will be able to avoid 90% of all future narcissists Because your immune response Will have been provoked And you will develop Variety of cells Intended to cope with the narcissism virus Psychological cells What kind of cells will you develop If you seek out An interactive purpose With A vain Self-centered Grandiose Entitled Biaque A-hauls You know What kind of immune response Should you expect And how will this immune response Protect you and defend you From future exposure To real The real thing Full-fledged Nine criteria Narcissistic personality disorder The strong The strong version The enhanced version of the virus Not the weak version A-haul is a weak version Narcissist True narcissist NPD is the strong version How being exposed to an A-haul Vaccinates you against being exposed To a true blue narcissist Well, you create exactly like in nature You create three types Of psychological immune immune cells Number one Antibodies The Russians call it Active measures Antibodies are cells that go after the virus Or the bacterium And kill it Kill it or neutralize it By exposing yourself to narcissistic people Who are not narcissists Weakened versions of narcissism Or elements and fragments of narcissism Without the full thing in context By doing this You will have created antibodies Psychological antibodies These are elements in your mind Constructs and sometimes interjects Who will go after After the narcissistic infection The narcissistic contagion Once the narcissist pushes your buttons Triggers you to narcissistic behaviors And psychopathic behaviors Your antibodies will wake up And prevent you from doing this They will attack the narcissism virus and contagion And force you to disengage And detach from the narcissists That's the antibodies The second type of cells Which are generated in the human body When you're exposed to a real life virus Are memory cells These are cells that bear the memory Of the virus It's a library This looks exactly like a library Where there's a volume dedicated to it Each pathogen A volume for this virus A volume for this bacterium And there are thousands of volumes The minute there is a re-encounter Or reinfection Or community transmission of the same virus The body takes the book out of the shelf Opens it And here are the instructions How to fight the infection These are called memory cells And each memory cell is like a book in a library Or a digital record in a database And the book or the digital record Contains instructions on how to fight the pathogen Similarly, once you expose yourself to weak versions of narcissists Once you expose yourself to mere narcissistic traits and behaviors in isolation Not to the full-fledged version But just to traits and behaviors in isolation You will develop memory cells You will develop a library And the minute you come across the real thing Your psychology or mind will take the book off the shelf Will access the digital record And there will be instructions there On how to disengage, detach, avoid Protect yourself emotionally Regulate your emotions Regulate your labile moods, etc. Etc. Build defenses Recreate the firewall And rebuild an army of antibodies You will see it's an immune reaction You wouldn't be able to help it And it would feel like ecodistony You will feel extreme discomfort These are the side effects of the vaccine Next time you meet a narcissist Having exposed yourself Because this is called exposure therapy Having exposed yourself to narcissistic elements Narcissistic fragments Narcissistic traits and behaviors Weakened version of narcissists Having done this Your immune system is in full operation Next time you meet a narcissist You will have an extreme discomfort You will be extremely ill it is And these are the side effects of the vaccine Number three You will develop like in every human body Exposed to a virus or a bacterium You will develop cells That attack the cells in your body That were infected by the virus So we have three types of cells When the human body is exposed to a real life virus There are three types of cells Antibodies Active measures The guys who go after the virus And kill it In a variety of ways Or neutralize it Don't allow the virus to replicate or to activate You have memory cells Which are like a library of how to A how to library How to fight this virus How to fight this bacterium And you have cells That attack your own cells It's an autoimmune response Cells that attack It's not exactly an autoimmune response But it's an immune response that attacks your own cells But not every cell in your body Just cells Who are already Which are already compromised Cells which already contain the virus Cells where the virus is already replicated So you will develop this third type of cells Exposing yourself to weak conversions of narcissism Exposing yourself to narcissistic traits and behaviors You will develop this third type of cells And these cells Psychological cells Will attack any part of you that had been infected Any behavior Any trait Any speech act Any relationship pattern That had been infected by the brief exposure Even to narcissists And they will kill it They will destroy it In other words It's a self healing Self repairing mechanism By vaccinating yourself against narcissists In the way that I describe Exposing yourself to limited isolated traits and behaviors Exposing yourself to weak narcissists Weak versions of narcissists You will have created three defenses Three neurological defenses Active defense Pushing the narcissists away Avoiding and shunning the narcissists Killing all the narcissists Destroying all the narcissists' weapons Before they hit the target A library of memory On how to deal with future narcissists Even much bigger and stronger And full-fledged narcissists And a defense Which immediately will neutralize Any contagion Any infection with the narcissists and virus Will prevent you from behaving Acting Talking like a narcissist Ultimately I believe the last few decades We have seen an exposure of the general population To the narcissism virus On the one hand So we had seen enormous community transmission On the one hand And on the other hand We've seen herd immunity developing We've seen a growing number of people Becoming sensitized to narcissists Exposed to narcissism Aware of narcissism Protect against narcissism Defend against narcissism So we are beginning to see herd immunity Regrettably after many hundreds of millions of people Had already been infected And they are one way or another Narcissists Now Herd immunity Creates selective immunological pressure It forces the virus to mutate In order to survive Herd immunity means That the virus has difficulty To find ready hosts Naive susceptible hosts Because they are all immunized They all have immunological response On at the ready So when the virus tries to enter the body It's destroyed, neutralized Cannot replicate So the virus has to mutate Has to become much more aggressive Much more violent And we see this happening As herd immunity against narcissism The narcissism virus has developed Psychopathy is on the rise Psychopathy is the mutation of narcissism It's the aggressive variant of narcissism It's transmissible and it's deadly As we become immunized As our defenses become stronger and stronger Against the classic Wild type And even variants of narcissism As we begin to spot narcissism Avoid narcissists Shun them Isolate them Defend them Deactivate them Prevent them from causing harm And we take care of our own psychology We see where we have gone wrong Where we are acting as psychopaths and narcissists As our immune system Operates against the parts of us Which had been infected as well As all this happens The virus of narcissism Is going to be under enormous pressure To evolve To change To become more violent More aggressive Because the number of hosts Will have become much smaller The competition much fiercer And we are seeing a transition From classic narcissism In all its forms To psychopathy Secondary psychopathy And more and more A growing number of primary psychopaths There are even scholars in academia Who say that psychopathy is a positive adaptation Good for us We should put them in charge I'm kidding you're not And this is where humanity is going And then we would need With this new virus of psychopathy To go through all the stages that I've just mentioned There's community transmission We would need to mask Get education We would need to socially distance from them We would need to gather outdoors Keep them out Not allow them into our private Psychological and physical space We would need to wash our hands After every encounter With these contaminated beings And above all we would need to vaccinate What happens after that When we are immune to psychopathy Psychopaths Anybody's guess Many viruses Most viruses in human history Most bacteria actually In human history Just go away When herd immunity is reached The pandemic dies Dies out Spanish flu Even the black death The plague So the prognosis is good If we do our share If we put masks on Educate ourselves with knowledge We socially distance from these people We isolate them We render them ineffective They are reagent without a substrate We gather outdoors We keep them out We don't allow them into our private spaces Mental and physical We wash our hands every time And above all We vaccinate against them We're going to win this war Ultimately Narcissism and psychopathy Will have become obsolete Survival strategies There will be Always narcissists And always psychopaths But these will be like schizophrenics You know People Unfortunate people With a disease To be treated in facilities Or medication They will not have Access to society As they do now They will definitely not run society As they are doing now We need to rinse To cleanse To purify Human civilization There is massive community transmission We the infection is rampant And we should act now Vaccinate yourself So that you can contribute your share To this unfolding Titanic battle The real pandemic Dear colleagues Welcome to the 10th conference on Psychiatry, Psychology and Brain Studies held in Paris in April 2019 My name is Sam Baknin I am the author of Malignan Self-Lab Narcissism Revisited And a few other books on personality disorders I'm also a professor of psychology In Southern Federal University In Rostov-on-Don In Russia I'm a professor of psychology And a professor of finance In Siyas Siyas The Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies Having dispensed with this introduction We can move on to my video presentation On the connection between trauma and brain And between trauma, brain, personality disorders And cerebral models Neural models Phineas Gage was 25 years old He was a construction foreman And he lived in Vermont in the United States In the 1860s While working on a railroad bed He packed powdered explosives Into a hole in the ground Using tamping iron Powder heated and blew in his face The tamping iron rebounded And pierced the top of his skull Ravaging his frontal lobes A few years later, in 1868 Harlow, the name of his doctor Reported the changes to Phineas Gage's personality Following his accident And this is what his doctor wrote He said, he became fitful Irreverent, indulging at times In the cross's profanity Which was not previously his customs Manifesting but little deference To his fellows In patient, of restraint or advice Were in conflicted with his desires At times, pertinaciously obstinate Yet capricious and vacillating Devising many plans for future operation Which are no sooner arranged Than they are abandoned In turn, for others appearing more feasible His mind, Phineas Gage's mind Was radically changed So that his friends and acquaintances said He was no longer Phineas Gage Said the astounded doctor In other words, Phineas Gage's brain injury Turned Phineas Gage into what we know today As a psychopathic narcissist A grandiose narcissist Similarly, startling transformation Have been recorded among soldiers With penetrating head injuries Suffered in World War I Orbital media wounds Made people pseudo-psychopathic In the language of those days They were described as being grandiose Euphoric, disinhibited, and purile When the dorsolateral convexities were damaged Those affected became lethargic And apathetic And they were called pseudo-depressed The word pseudo indicates That the doctors of their time did not feel comfortable With the diagnosis of psychopathy Or with diagnosis of depression They felt that something was wrong After all, these people had not been psychopathic Nor have they been depressed Before the brain injury Before the brain trauma It seemed that the physiological or physical alteration of the brain The wound, the scar, the trauma, the severance of lobes The renaissance of neural pathways Had massive systemic effects On the personalities of the patients As Geshwin noted Many had both syndromes In a study titled Gray Matter Abnomalities In Patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder Published in June 2013 In the Journal of Psychiatric Research The authors concluded Relative to the control group Narcissistic Personality Disorder patients Had smaller GM volume in the left anterior insular Independent of group GM volume in the left anterior insular Was positively related To self-reported emotional empathy Complementary whole-brain analysis yielded smaller GM volume In front of paralympic brain regions Comprising the rostral and median cingulate cortex As well as dosolateral and medial parts of the prefrontal cortex And here we provide the first empirical evidence For structural abnormalities In front of paralympic brain regions Of patients with narcissistic personality disorder The results are discussed in the context of Narcissistic patients' restricted ability For emotional empathy This was more or less the first one documented study Of connection between brain structures or brain deficiencies In this case And a lack of empathy It is still debatable Whether a lack of empathy Should remain as a main diagnostic criterion For narcissistic personality disorder I was the first to suggest that narcissists and psychopaths Actually do possess empathy Only the third type of empathy Is very different to normal empathy Or empathy in normal or so-called healthy people The empathy of narcissists and psychopaths Is called It lacks the emotional component It's merely cognitive and to some extent reflexive But still they do possess empathy And I dubbed it cold empathy If they do possess empathy Then all these changes in the brain observed by the authors In the aforementioned article May not actually be related to narcissistic personality disorder But to something a lot more profound The diagnostic and statistical manual is clear The brain injured May acquire traits and behaviors Typical of certain personality disorders But head trauma never results in a full-fledged personality disorder Indeed, the DSM says In general diagnostic criteria for personality disorder The enduring pattern is not due Not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance Drug of abuse, medication Or to a general medical condition Such as head trauma You can find this text on page 689 Of the text revision on the fourth edition of the DSM In my book Malignance of Love Narcissism Revisited I have written It is conceivable though that a third unrelated problem Causes chemical imbalances in the brain Metabolic diseases such as diabetes Orthological narcissism And other mental health syndromes There may be a common cause A hidden common denominator Perhaps a group of genes Certain medical conditions can activate The narcissistic defense mechanism Chronic ailments are likely to lead to the emergence Of narcissistic traits Or a narcissistic personality style To borrow Theodor Millen's terminology Traumas such as brain injuries have been known To induce states of mind Accompanied to full-blown personality disorders As I've mentioned before Such so-called narcissism though Is reversible Tends to be ameliorated or disappear altogether When the underlying medical problem does the same Other disorders like bipolar disorder Which used to be known as mania depression These disorders are characterized By mood swings that are not brought about By external events Not exogenous or reactive mood swings Endogenous mood swings But the narcissistic mood swings Are strictly the results of external events They are reactive As he perceives and interprets these events So does he react with mood liability Phenomena which are often associated With narcissistic personality disorder Such as depression Or obsessive-compulsive attributes These are treated with medication Rumor has it that SSRIs Such as fluoxetine Known as Prozac Might have adverse effects If the primary disorder Is indeed narcissistic personality disorder They sometimes lead to the serotonin syndrome Which includes agitation And exacerbates the rage attacks Typical of a narcissist The use of SSRIs is associated at times With delirium and the emergence of a manic phase And even with psychotic microepisodes This is not the case with heterocyclics MAOs And other mood stabilizers such as lithium Blockers and inhibitors are regularly applied Without discernible adverse side effects As far as NPD is concerned But this is curious If changing brain biochemistry Nevermind in which way Has an effect on personality Then all classes of antidepressants Should have had a discernible observable effect On important aspects of NPD But that is not the case That is not true It seems that we can interfere with brain biochemistry Can rewire the brain, so to speak Can create new neural pathways or whatever And yet NPD, narcissistic personality disorder Will remain monolithic As a clinical entity Will not be affected in any meaningful discernible clinical way Not enough is known about the biochemistry of narcissistic personality disorder There seems to be some vague link to serotonin But no one knows for sure Others suggest links to dopamine There isn't a reliable non-intrusive method To measure brain and central nervous system serotonin levels anyhow So it is mostly guesswork At this stage I think the whole problem The whole problematic Is founded on a fundamental Misunderstanding of the brain And we seem to misunderstand the brain Periodically and repeatedly Because we borrow technological metaphors The brain and by implication the mind Have been compared to the latest technological innovation In every generation The computer metaphor is now in vogue Computer hardware metaphors were replaced by software metaphors And lately by neural or neural network metaphors Metaphors are not confined to the philosophy of neurology Architects and mathematicians for instance Have lately come up with a structural concept Of tensegrity to explain the phenomenon of life The tendency of humans to see patterns and structures everywhere Even where there are none This tendency is well documented And probably has its survival value But it may mislead us considerably Another trend is to discount these metaphors As erroneous, irrelevant, deceptive and misleading As I myself have just done Understanding the mind is a recursive business Rife with self-reference The entities or processes to which the brain is compared Are also in effect brain children They are the results of brainstorming Everything is conceived by the mind Especially computers What is a computer? What is a software application? What is a communication network? If not the material representation of events in the brain So there's a kind of tautology here There's a kind of a close logical loop We use brain children We used our creations to understand the brain that made them A necessary and sufficient connection surely exists Between men-made things tangible and intangible In human minds Even a gas pump has a mind correlate It is also considerable that representations Of the non-human parts of the universe Exist in our own minds Whether a priori not deriving from experience Or a posteriori dependent upon experience This correlation Call it what you will This emulation, this simulation, this representation In short, this close connection between The excretions, the output, the spin-offs The products of the human mind And the human mind itself Is a key to understanding the brain And this claim is of course an instance Of a much broader category of claims That we can learn about the artist by his art We can learn about the mind of the creator By studying his creation And generally we can learn about the origin By any of the derivatives The inheritors, the successes, the products The by-products and the semilays, they're all This general contention That we can reverse engineers, so to speak We can go from the product to the producer From the child of the mind to the mind From an object to the brain that design it This general contention is especially strong When the origin and the product share the same nature If the origin is human And the product is human For example, parents and child There is an enormous amount of data That can be derived from the product And safely applied to the origin We can study the child And learn a lot about his mother and father Of course The closer the origin is to the product The more we can learn about the origin From the product We have said that knowing the product We can usually also know the origin The reason is that knowledge about any product Collapses the set of probabilities And increases our knowledge about the product's origin Originating mind Yet the converse is not always true The same origin can give rise to many types Of entirely unrelated products The same mind can give rise to numerous products Which have little to do with each other A good poet can also be a great carpenter A good painter can be a great general in the army They can create products that have utterly nothing to do with each other That share no common denominator That are divorced from each other And yet come from the same brain or from the same mind There are too many free variables here The origin, the mind, exists as a wave function A series of potentialities with attached probabilities The potentials being the logically and physically possible products And these products come into being In a kind of collapse of the wave function What can we learn about the origin By crudely perusing the product Let's assume that all we have are the products And let's assume that we don't have much time to study We can just cursorily glance at them, peruse them, and prod them Well, if we do that, we can learn mostly Observable structural and functional traits and attributes We cannot learn almost anything About the true nature of the mind that made them We cannot know the true nature of anything, actually This is the realm of metaphysics, not of physics Consider, for example, quantum mechanics It provides an astonishingly accurate description Of microprocessors and of the universe Without saying much about the world Or about reality or about the essence of the cosmos Modern physics strives to produce correct predictions Not to expound upon this or that worldview Modern physics describes, it does not explain Where interpretations are offered, for example, the Copenhagen interpretation Quantum mechanics, they invariably run into philosophical snags Modern science uses metaphors We use words like particles, we use words like waves And we use words like the mind These metaphors have proven to be useful scientific tools In the thinking scientist's kit But these metaphors are not reality As these metaphors develop, they trace the developmental phase Of the origin, but they are not the origin Okay, let's go back to the brain Consider the software metaphor of the mind The mind is software The computer is a thinking machine It is limited, it is simulated, it is recursive, it is mechanical, true But it's a thinking machine Similarly, the brain is a thinking machine It is much more agile, much more versatile, much more non-linear Much more qualitatively different to a computer There is no question about that too But both of them are thinking machines Computer and the brain Whatever the disparity between the two They must be related somehow to one another There are even people like Ray Kurzweil and others would say That it's only a question of time Until computers become brains And brains can be utterly understood In terms of artificial intelligence computers This relation is by virtue of two facts One, both the brain and the computer are thinking machines, as we mentioned But there is a second reason It is the latter, the computer, is the product of the former It's the product of the brain Thus, the computer metaphor is an unusually tenable and potent metaphor It is likely to be further enhanced Should organic or quantum computing transpire At the dawn of computing Software applications were offered serially in machine language And with strict separation of data which was called structures And instruction code which was called functions or procedures The machine language reflected the physical wiring of the hardware This is akin to the development of the embryonic brain The embryonic mind In the early life of the human fetus, the human embryo The instructions, the DNA, are also insulated from the data From amino acids and other life substances In early computing, databases were handled on a listing basis And this was called a flat file Databases were serious And they had no intrinsic relationship to one another Early databases in the 1960s, for example, in the 50s Constituted a sort of substrate ready to be actled upon By functions, by the computer Only when they were intermixed with the computer As a software application was run These functions were able to operate on the structures Otherwise they were kept separately This phase was followed in the history of computing By the relational organization of data A primitive example of which was the spreadsheet in the early 1980s Data items were related to each other through mathematical formulas This is the equivalent of the increasing complexity Of the wiring of the brain as pregnancy progresses As gestation progresses The latest evolutionary phase in programming is known as Oops, object-oriented programming systems Objects are modules which encompass both data and instructions In self-contained units The user communicates with the functions performed by these objects But not with the structure and internal processes Programming objects, in other words, are black boxes And engineering term The programmer is unable to tell how the object does what he does Or how does an external useful function Arise from internal hidden functions or structures Objects are epiphenomenon They are emergent They are phase transient In short, objects are much closer to reality As described by modern physics, actually Though these black boxes communicate It is not the communication It is not the communication speed or its efficacy Which determine the overall efficiency of the system It is the hierarchical and at the same time Fuzzy organization of the objects This does the trick Objects are organizing classes Which define their actualized and potential properties The object's behavior, what it does and what it reacts to Is defined by its membership of a class of objects Moreover, objects can be organized in new subclasses While inheriting all the definitions and characteristics Of the original class in addition to new properties In a way, these newly emergent classes are the products While the classes that they are derived from are the original This process is so closely resembling The natural and especially biological phenomena That it lends additional force to the software metaphor Software, as it is written today, resembles very much How biology works, especially genetics Thus, classes can be used as building blocks No wonder we have evolutionary software Their permutations of these classes Define the set of all soluble problems It can be proven that Turing machines are a private instance of a general Much stronger class theory, a la principia matematica The integration of hardware, computer, brain And software, computer applications, the mind Is done through framework applications Which match the two elements structurally and functionally The equivalent in the brain is sometimes called By philosophers and psychologists A priori categories, or the collective unconscious To use a Jungian term Computers and their programming evolve Everything I'm saying now is already 20 years old Relational databases cannot be integrated with object-oriented ones, for instance To run Java uploads, a virtual machine Needs to be embedded in the operating system These phases closely resemble the development of the brain-mind couplet When is a metaphor a good metaphor? When can we say that we have finally understood the brain Via a very powerful comparison A powerful semen A metaphor is good when it teaches us something new About the origin If we compare the brain to software This comparison should teach us something new about the brain It must possess some structural and functional resemblances But this quantitative and observational facet, the resemblance, is not enough There must also be a qualitative kind of resonance The metaphor must be instructive Revealing insightful, aesthetic and parsimonious In short, the metaphor must constitute a complete, self-contained, full-fledged theory And it should produce falsifiable predictions A metaphor is also subject to logical and aesthetic rules And to the rigors of the scientific method So let's go back to the software metaphor The question we were asking is If we interfere with the brain and it has no effect on personality For example, if we administer medication And the medication is consumed And the medication interferes, interjects itself into brain biochemistry Alters biochemical pathways, changes neural pathways Changes conductance, changes the excretion of neurotransmitters The all very powerful elements in the brain ecosystem And yet, the personality remains the same What is the connection between personality and brain? What is the connection between personality and mind? And perhaps most importantly, what's the connection between mind and brain? And so here we go back to the software metaphor If the software metaphor, if comparing the brain to a software Is correct, the brain must contain the following features Number one, parity checks through back propagation of signals The brain's electrochemical signals must move back to the origin And forward simultaneously in order to establish a feedback parity loop The second requirement is that the neuron, the basic unit of the brain Cannot be a binary two-state machine A quantum computer, for example, is multi-state The neuron must have many levels of excitation, many models of representation of information The threshold, all or nothing firing hypothesis must be wrong Either it is wrong, or the software metaphor is wrong Both of them cannot be right We may yet discover that neurons have multiple levels of excitation and arousal Not yes or no, firing, not firing, black and white The third requirement is its redundancy must be built into all the aspects and dimensions of the brain And its activities Redundant hardware, different centers to perform similar tasks, is very common Redundant communication channels with the same information simultaneously Transmitted across them are also very common Redundant trivial data, redundant storage of data, redundant usage of obtained data Through working upper memory, etc, etc, etc Redundancy is built into all known processes and elements of computing If the software and hardware seem highly If they elucidate the workings of the brain The brain must have multiple layers and levels of redundancy And we know that to a large extent it's true In cases of brain injury and trauma, other centers of the brain take over And perform the same tasks and functions The fourth requirement is that the basic concept of the workings of the brain Must be the comparison of representational elements To models of the world or theories of the world Or in case of mind, to theories of mind This is the foundation of empathy The intersubjective agreement regarding the content of other people's minds We have no access to other people's minds We must create a theory about these minds We must presume, we must speculate, we must deduct We must analyze The only way we can interact with other people Is to make a series of hidden assumptions, for example That they are more or less like us That we are the same And so these models of the world, these models of the mind Must be somehow compared to representational elements A coherent picture is obtained Which yields predictions and allows to manipulate the environment effectively Should these comparisons fail, as is the case in pathological narcissism We would have an impaired reality test And a form of autism, in effect Many of the functions tackled by the brain Must be recursive This is the fifth requirement We can expect to find that we can reduce all the activities of the brain To computational mechanically solvable recursive functions The brain can be regarded as a turing machine And the dreams of artificial intelligence are likely to come true Sooner rather than later I think we are going to discover that computers and brains are one and the same There will come a moment where our brains will be indistinguishable From sufficiently complex, self-assembling, self-recursive, and self-learning machines At that point, the question will arise What is the personality? Could we then say that certain computers have certain personalities? If we create androids, like in the famous movie Blade Runner Could we attribute a personality to them? Is personality nearly the epic phenomenon? The emergent quality of set of qualities Is it dependent on complexity, or is it something totally separate? And what about the mind of the brain? Is the mind a byproduct of the complexity of the brain? We will not know until actually we have reached this stage in computing Once we do, we will be faced either with totally thinking machines With personalities Or the metaphor Brain is computer, computer is brain will break down And finally, the sixth requirement is that the brain must be a learning, self-organizing entity The brain's very hardware must disassemble, reassemble, reorganize, restructure, reroute, reconnect, disconnect, and in general alter itself in response to data I have actually written this sentence several years before neuroplasticity was discovered Today we know that neuroplasticity is an external phenomenon in the brain And does exactly what I have described several years before In most man-made machines, the data is external to the processing unit It enters and exits a machine through designated interfaces But does not affect the machine's structure or functioning That's not the case in the brain The brain reconfigures itself with every bit of external data One can say that a new brain is created every time there's new information and it is processed So these are the six requirements and only if all six of them are met Can we say that the software metaphor is useful to understanding the brain Then we can also understand the mind And we can begin to have the most initial glimpse of what is the personality We are a very, very long way off And any claim to the country is hubris, vanity, and indeed narcissistic megalomania and grandiosity Thank you for listening Today we are going to discuss the multifarious ways the narcissist uses to deceive you mislead you into believing that he or she is not a narcissist This is known in biology and zoology as mimicry And the topic of today's video is the narcissist aggressive mimicry Wait a minute, all of you howl in unison Mimicry occurs between two species, usually a predator and a prey Well, I regard the narcissist as a member of another species The narcissist in the most profound sense is asexual The predator is amoral and is above all inhuman In many ways the narcissist belongs to another species An alien species, a predator species, which preys upon you So welcome to the twilight zone My name is Saint Wackney and I'm the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited And I'm a former visiting professor of psychology We are all animals, ultimately we are all animals Human beings are an evolved complex form of animal No one knew this better than the ancient sages One of the most common and simple forms of mimicry is known as wolf in sheep's clothing Zoologists use this phrase to describe aggressive mimicry We'll come to it a bit later Animals have evolved to deceive their prey by appearing either as other prey Or as something completely unrelated, a prey spray or something like that The phrase wolf in sheep's clothing originated in the Sermon on the Mount When Jesus said, beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing But inwardly they are ravening wolves, the Gospel of Matthew 7.15 And then he continued to say, by their fruits shall ye know them That's excellent advice Jesus would have made a great YouTuber, a life coach probably So let's delve right in I want to start with something known as bipolar mimicry system I will describe it and then I will explain to you what is mimicry And where does it fit in with other deceptive strategies in the animal kingdom such as camouflage The narcissist uses all of them, you would be well advised, well advised To think of the narcissist, to conceive of the narcissist as an alien predator species Roaming amongst you, hunting for prey Using everything at its disposal, deception first and foremost Bipolar mimicry system, some psychopathic narcissists imitate a sensitive much wronged victim of narcissistic abuse or an empathic savior rescuer That's a perfect example of a bipolar mimicry system Bipolar mimicry systems involve two species And they are a very unique form of mimicry because the dupe is the model In other words, the predator imitates, emulates, copies the prey We have two variants of bipolar mimicry system where the target is imitated In the first case, this is known as baitsian, valacean mimicry And that's when the predator simply copies the prey to the point that it becomes indistinguishable from the prey, like the aforementioned psychopathic narcissist pretends to be very convincingly a victim of narcissistic abuse In the second case, the model is a host of a brute parasite I'll come to it a bit later I'm going to explore all the forms of mimicry used or deployed by narcissists But what is mimicry? What am I talking about? Mimicry is a concept in evolutionary biology It means an evolved resemblance between an organism and another organism or between an organism and an object Now usually the two organisms, the dupe and the model The two of them belong to different species The dupe is usually the predator It dupes the prey The model is usually some other species So the predator pretends to be another species which is not a predator For example, narcissists would pretend to be a nice guy An average Joe or just a talented person who is a nerd Narcissists would pretend to not be a narcissist When a narcissist pretends to be a victim of abuse When a narcissist pretends to be a borderline When a narcissist pretends to be co-dependent Then we have a case of bipolar mimicry When a narcissist pretends to be just a normal guy or a normal girl Then we have classic defensive or aggressive mimicry Which we will distinguish in a minute So mimicry is pretending to be someone else Someone else that belongs to another type Another kind another variety another species And sometimes in the animal kingdom the mimicry involves an object So an insect would pretend to be a leaf and so on Mimicry may evolve between different species But it also occurs between individuals of the same species And this is where the narcissist comes in Mimicry evolves when a receiver for example a predator perceives the similarity between a mimic An organism that has a resemblance and a model the organism that is resembles And as a result it changes its behavior in a way that provides selective advantage So there are several components several elements in mimicry Number one deception Misperception when a predator perceives an organism as another organism When a predator perceives the dupe as a model one organism is another Or when a prey perceives a predator as a non-threatening organism Because the predator pretends to be a member of that non-threatening organism So this is element number one deception being misled Pretending to be someone else convincingly Number two a change in behavior When the deception works It induces a change in the prey's behavior in the victim's behavior in the target's choices and decisions Effective mimicry is behavior modification. It's a form of behavior modulation And the third element the mimicry provides a selective advantage to the mimic So if a predator pretends to be a non-predator if a predator pretends to belong to another species Which is not a predator It gives the predator an advantage Because it can safely approach the prey and pounce on it These are the three elements remember And now you can easily apply the three elements of these three components of mimicry to the narcissist Number one he pretends to be a non-narcissist. He pretends to be a victim He pretends to be a compassionate empathic person He pretends to be a savior or a rescuer. He pretends to be an average guy Non-threatening etc. There's pretension. There's deception element one element two because Because you believe these erroneous signals because you You are misled and you're deceived Your behavior changes The choices you make and the decisions you adopt are radically transformed element two and element three This grants the narcissist access to you The ability to manipulate you to entrain you to recruit you to a shared fantasy In order later to devalue you and discard you All three elements of mimicry Absolutely exist in every single interaction with the narcissist and in this sense What's happening between you and the narcissist? Is not 100 psychological It is at least 50 biological It's a war between species It's survival of the fittest fittest. It's Darwinian Darwinian selection As simple as that Now mimicry can sometimes accrue to the advantage of both organisms Both organisms somehow transform themselves Their resemblance changes the signals they emit are modified And consequently both of them benefit This is known as a highly specific type of mimicry. It's called mutualism But mutualism is very rare An example of mutualism Is when a narcissist teams up with a borderline The narcissist provides a borderline with external regulation Pretending to be a nice guy A supportive Loving attentive compassionate affectionate containing holding understanding an accepting guy A best friend or special friend This is the narcissist mimicry And the borderline benefits from it Also by pretending to be A golden hearted loving caring Holding compassionate accepting maternal subject maternal person Both of them The narcissist and the borderline engage in mimicry And they benefit each other The borderline allows the narcissist To separate and individuate and also buttresses the narcissist's grandiosity Renters the narcissist the most important person in her life He becomes her world her universe The narcissist on the other hand externally regulates the borderline. They both benefit. So In the case of borderlines and narcissists There is mutualism A form of mimicry that benefits both sides But in the vast majority of cases When the narcissist is involved There is no mutualism The mimicry is to the detriment of the narcissist's intimate partner The narcissist is parasitic And in some cases competitive And always deleterious Destructive damaging Breaking Harrowing Hurtful So the narcissist's mimicry Is a savage Savage Mechanism Used to lure the prey And then do with it as the narcissist pleases or needs to do is compelled to do And that is at the total cost Of the praise well-being Mental functioning and finally physical health In the case of mutualism The two parties are considered co-mimics But as I said, this is very rare Actually, what happens is As we become more and more aware of narcissists and narcissism I give myself some credit In raising awareness starting in the 1990s As we become more aware Narcissists need to develop novel more advanced mimicry techniques They need to act more they need to evolve Into thespian Thespian beings They need to stage more elaborate productions The shared fantasy needs to become so convoluted So misleading so comprehensive That it easily supplants reality This is known as evolutionary arms race When mimicry negatively affects the model And the model evolves a certain different appearance from the mimic So here we are Where victims targets Potential intimate partners mates Identify the narcissists much earlier than before Owing to growing awareness The narcissist needs to be a hell of a lot better In deceiving and misleading and camouflaging and pretending and faking Evolutionary arms race. So let's get now to the narcissist's main strategy In terms of mimicry. It's known as aggressive mimicry Aggressive mimicry is a form of mimicry in which predators Parasites Share similar signals Using a harmless model And this allows them to avoid being correctly identified by the prey or the host So aggressive mimicry Is when the predator imitates emulates copies replicates another species or another type of individual In order to deceive the prey into believing That he is harmless The predator renders himself harmless By copying or replicating a harmless model And this is known as aggressive mimicry Because it involves aggressive intent The idea is of course to consume the prey one way or another psychologically or physically and so The predator looks around And says, who am I gonna imitate? What kind of model Can I imitate which will allow me to get closer to the prey to penetrate her defenses to disable her firewalls To reduce her awareness to involve her in fantasy and then to digest her subsume her consume her and Get rid of her This is this is the aggression in this form of mimicry And this is what is known as wolf in sheep's clothing In the broadest sense aggressive mimicry includes various types of exploitation And so Aggressive mimicry can be focused on obtaining sex and reproductive access It can be focused on feeding food or in the case of human beings money wealth and resources And It can it but it always involves deception It always involves sending the signal. I am harmless I am benevolent I am helpful I'm supportive I myself am a victim I will love you Etc. Etc. All these messages involve self camouflage Self camouflage now aggressive mimicry is not the same as defensive mimicry In deep defensive mimicry exactly the opposite is done The defensive mimic pretends to be dangerous harmful The the defensive mimic is actually harmless But in order to deter the the predator in order to Frighten terrify scare terrorize the predator The harmless prey pretends to be a predator himself itself Now this happens a lot Among for example borderlines and codependence. They would pretend to be psychopaths and narcissists This is a form of defensive mimicry When codependence and borderlines find themselves in the presence of narcissistic and psychopathic predators They often pretend to be Narcissists and psychopaths and they even adopt narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors And the aim is to broadcast the message Stay away Be careful I'm warning you. I'm dangerous I will destroy you. I'm a narcissist. I'm a psychopath. Etc. Etc. So this is defensive mimicry The mimic may resemble An organism That is harmful to the predator in defensive mimicry Or harmless harmless to the prey in aggressive mimicry The model the organism being imitated What happens to it? If more and more narcissists an increasing number of psychopaths pretend to be normal healthy average blokes Or chicks What happens to the truly normal healthy nice kind blokes And chicks what happens to them? They're in trouble They're in trouble Because the narcissist prey of the psychopath spray begins to be hyper vigilant She begins to be afraid even of the genuine model So if if If you've had a bad experience with a narcissist or a psychopath And this narcissist or psychopath mimicked Pretended to be a nice guy Next time you meet a really nice guy You would be afraid You would be suspicious You would push him away You'd be hyper vigilant And consequently The opportunities of the model are affected by the mimic In short the opportunities of the nice guy To have sex with you To have a relationship with you To have children with you Make a family with you Do business with you The opportunities of the nice kind supportive loving caring empathic guy Are much reduced by the fact That Narcissists use this kind of guy as a model Imitate this kind of guy mimic this kind of guy Thereby reducing This kind of guys opportunities with you So The mimic always benefits The model sometimes suffers Consequently from a general deterioration In trust in the environment So We say in in biological terms that The model suffers The organism or the species or the individuals Being imitated the models Suffer reduced fitness Their ability to compete Survival of the fittest Their ability to be selected in for example made selection process This ability is much reduced Because there are many fakes around That look and behave very much like them Narcissists and psychopaths The signal receiver the prey Always suffers because Is she strict In most mimicry behaviors and mimicry complexes the prey The victim the target Always pays a heavy cost first and foremost Because she bases her behaviors and decisions and choices on The wrong information on the information emitted By the predator Who pretends to be non predator? By the predator who pretends to be prey a victim poor codependent By the predator Who pretends to be another species which is harmless Being misguided this way can lead and thus lead to catastrophic consequences aggressive mimicry Often involves the predator employing signals That attract the prey So we are not only talking about what happens After an initial contact has been made the contact is initiated The predator magnetically Electrically if you wish hypnotically Attracts the prey Part of the mimicry mechanism or the mimicry complex Are signals That generate attraction attractability Like the equivalent of pheromones in the animal kingdom So the narcissist of the psychopath pretending to be a victim of abuse or a rescuer and a savior or But just a normal average guy This narcissist or psychopath They're not going only going to passively wait and pretend and fake They're going to actively attract you They're going to emit signals saying for example I need love Only you can cure me I've been waiting for you all my life and this is precisely what we call love bombing or grooming It is an integral part of mimicry in the animal kingdom Not only among animals by the way plants Other kinds like insects and so everyone engages in mimicry. Absolutely. Everyone engages in mimicry And always part of the mimicry is the element of attraction Narcissists and psychopaths mimicry involves love bombing What is love bombing? Love bombing is the ability to experience emotions and express them to have effect We know that narcissists Don't have access to any positive emotions and we know that psychopaths don't have positive emotions period And yet they imitate well positive emotions and they Broadcast to you the existence the alleged existence of these emotions and you are attracted inexorably To this overwhelming sensation of intensity and warmth and passion and desire And acceptance and ability You're being idealized. You fall in love with your idealized image. It's all part of the mimicry It's a strategy that allows predators To simply sit there and wait for the prey to come to them The promise of love The promise of sex The promise of money With the promise of togetherness and intimacy The promise of whatever intellectual stimulation These are the lures Predator Puts out debate And the bait involves mimicry. Don't worry. I am not a narcissist. I am not a psychopath Says the narcissist Or say the narcissist and the psychopath We are not who you think we are We are another species very nice species cutie pie species loving species come to us come to us As long as the predator's true identity is concealed It may be able to approach prey more easily than would otherwise be the case clearly And the Signals exactly like the in the animal kingdom the signals are compounded The visual how you dress How are your feet or not? Do you take care of yourself? They are intellectual Are you intelligent? Are you beyond intelligent? Maybe? They are verbal You know smooth talking sweet talking small talk Small talk light pleasant fun Jokes sense of humor. These are all the dimensions of aggressive mimicry and they involve camouflage There is an active effort to hide certain angles aspects and dimensions There are scholars such as wickler and wickler said that The there the signal is the most significant thing the signal Is the thing that activates the receiver And it is the signal the content of the signal the intensity of the signal the outcomes of the signal This is what differentiates camouflage from aggressive mimicry Camouflage is more passive aggressive mimicry Intended intends to attract But still it's not very easy To tell how significant the signal is For the dupe And the distinction is is very fuzzy. I myself think there is no aggressive mimicry Without camouflage in other words with the narcissist and the psychopath. What you see is not what you get Never ever what you get Aggressive mimics involve always mixed signals deceptive signals and parts that are hidden or transformed via disguise and camouflage into other parts We said I said that aggressive mimicry is not the same as defensive mimicry I'll remind you again aggressive mimicry is when a predator pretends to be harmless Defensive mimicry is when the prey pretends to be harmful defensive mimicry has various forms At least three that we know of And all these forms are the antithesis the exact opposite of aggressive mimicry And Also the targets are different in defensive mimicry The predator is the target In aggressive mimicry the prey is the target Defensive or protective mimicry takes place when organisms are able to avoid harmful encounters By deceiving enemies into treating them as something else So this also happens In shared in a shared fantasy or in an intimate so-called intimate relationship with the narcissist or the psychopath Where the partner the intimate partner would pretend to be someone else As I said, she would say I'm a narcissist. I was a psychopath don't f with me. I you know This is a form of aggressive defensive mimicry. There's the opposite by the way there's When the victim pretends to be meaningless insignificant boring the gray rock technique And unworthy of the of the predator's attention in other words not tasty When the victim renders herself non-delicious Not palatable that drives the Predator away and it's also a form of mimicry. So there's baitsie and mimicry Where a harmless mimic poses as harmful There is mullerian mimicry where two or more harmful species Mutually advertise themselves as harmful narcissists in a psychopath There is Mertonese mimicry where a deadly mimic resembles a less harmful But less in teaching mode. We're not going to all this. There's even a fourth type. It's known as Vavilovian mimicry where The bad sorts resemble good the good sorts like weeds resemble crops And so on so forth. We're not going to all this because narcissists and psychopaths Extremely rarely engaged in defensive mimicry their victims their targets Their intimate partners their children They're harried and bullied co-workers They are the ones who engage in defensive mimicry and again Generally speaking of two sorts I am dangerous stay away from me This is one type of mimicry prey that a prey engages in And the other type is I'm not interesting. I'm not interesting for you. Move on find another prey Find a prey that would gratify and satisfy your needs In defensive mimicry the mimic benefits by avoiding a harmful interaction with with the predator Had had Had the prey not engage in defensive mimicry such an encounter would have been much more likely The deception helps the prey to survive And this is partly known as reactive abuse And that's why I keep saying that narcissism is contagious Is that narcissists forces his intimate partner to become deceptive? He forces the intimate partner to become a mimic He forces the intimate partner to lie to pretend to fake to deceive to abuse In short to be to to become a narcissist or a psychopath So the aggressive mimic benefits from an interaction that would be less likely to occur without the deception At the expense of the target, of course And the defensive mimic benefits from a lack of interaction Or the avoidance of an interaction that would have happened had there not been deception That's a very strong incentive to be deceptive and gradually Victims who have been exposed for a very long time To a predatory person such as a narcissist or a psychopath Find themselves Allinated and estranged from themselves. They don't know or recognize themselves anymore They have become narcissists and psychopaths a little like in a zombie movie when the zombie bites you, you know I said before that aggressive mimicry Has a component of attracting the prey Luring the prey capturing the prey captivating it The signal receiver is lured Toward the mimic the mimic is the predator pretending to not be a predator. Yeah, so The signal receiver the prey the victim the target is lured and This raises the question What does the predator use? To lure the victim to lure the prey Yes, the predator is deceptive the predator Pretends to be to not be a predator the predator Pretends to be someone else or some other type or some other kind or some other species. Yeah, we get all this But what in it? What in this kind of behavior attracts the prey? Why would the prey move towards the predator inexorably? unable to stop herself Unable to contain himself. Why why this magnetic hypnotic attraction? exerted by the deceiving mimicking Predator it's because the predator is sending a message I have what you need. What is it that you need? Do you need love? I have it. Are you lonely? Do you need togetherness? I can give you that Do you crave intimacy? I I will provide you with it. Do you want to be listened to do you want to be attended to do you want to be? I will be here and listen to you Indefinitely, do you want to be saved or rescued? I'm I'm your man. I'm a rescuer a savior a healer and a fixer Are you a victim? Do you want to commiserate? I'm a victim too. I've been a victim of narcissistic abuse all my life I've never done anything wrong. Everyone did wrong to me I'm like you Idealizing the victim Rendering the victim an angel Creating a morality play where the victim is all good And the abuser is all bad Engaging the victims splitting defense primitive infantile defense Regressing the victim to her early childhood All these are lures All these are baits and they are irresistible They're irresistible because the prey finds these things crucial They pray believes That these are things which are vital to survival Even sometimes sex all these things love intimacy sex being understood being accepted being listened to being seen Being attended to taking being taken care of being held being contained being healed being rescued being saved all these are perceived by the victim to be vital Critical there is an element of catastrophizing if I don't have these things I will die This is the baby's natural reaction. If mommy doesn't pay attention to me. I will die And this is exactly the principle of dual mothership This is dual mothership. That's the core. It's a mimicry complex The narcissist mimics a mother and then He reduces his intimate partner into a baby By becoming a mother The narcissist intimate partner becomes a baby And then She is afraid. She becomes afraid terrified to lose the narcissist Because if a baby were to lose his mother The baby would die The narcissist reduces his intimate partner To such a primitive level of organization such an early stage of life That she becomes utterly dependent on him for her own survival and existence of life itself That's at least that at least is what she comes to believe He becomes her nutrition and The narcissist knows exactly what it is that you're missing. He has called empathy He scans you He spots your vulnerabilities the chinks in your armor your unmet needs And he provides them Everything he offers is of great value Everything everything he offers is of great value. Now, of course We engage in mimicry. We as human beings not narcissists and psychopaths simply, you know, healthy normal human beings We engage in mimicry makeup is a form of mimicry When women put makeup, they're sending a deceptive signal to the male to the male sex It's a strategy to Guarantee appropriate male selection and to ward off or to avoid unwanted making So this is a form of mimicry, but makeup Is deceptive In a very limited sense It's like saying this is my potential While the narcissist and psychopaths mimicry is not about exaggerating their potential their underlying assets It's about pretending to be someone else The predator in the case of the narcissist and psychopath Psychopath pretends to be a prey pretends to be a victim or pretends to be someone else a harmless harmless nice kind person the promise of psychological nourishment Is a way to attract the prey into into a relationship with The wrong kind of person So the prey the victim the target Bones with the narcissist attaches to the psychopath Fully believing that they're not And this is This is why narcissistic and psychopathic mimicry Love bombing grooming May definitely be criminal They involve fraud now There is something called curbing or blood parasite mimicry Host parasite mimicry is a situation where a parasite mimics its own host And again We see this among narcissists and psychopaths They pretend to be victims of narcissistic abuse They pretend to be codependence They even pretend to be borderlines They pretend to be much wounded Much wounded targets Of narcissists and psychopaths when actually they are the narcissists and psychopaths And the mimicry is so effective that people tend to overlook and ignore Even visible signs of extreme narcissism So when the narcissist comes Or a meeting on the screen on a date Um Usually there are many many warning signs many physical science Body bodily science behavioral science Postural science body language science verbal science I mean you name it there are many signs But the mimicry is so effective Because there is something called base rate fallacy We tend to believe most of what we are told we are gullible So A prime narcissist someone who is clearly beyond any doubt extremely narcissistic Would look you in the face and say I'm a poor victim of narcissistic abuse I'm a codependent who unto me I'm a people pleaser and you would bite You would believe it Because he said it for no other reason In the human among Among humans Mimicry is mostly verbal And it is mostly believed So Very often Narcissists who are essentially parasites they entrain your mind. They penetrate it And they install in your mind apps Introjects, this is a highly parasitic activity But they imitate pray they imitate victims they imitate targets And this is definitely An example of brood parasitism Or brood parasitism mimicry or cubian mimicry Another type of mimicry is known as wichlerian isnerian mimicry Of harmless species The prey doesn't have to be attracted towards the predator For the predator to benefit It is efficient for the predator simply to not be identified as a threat The minute you are not identified as a threat Even if you don't attract the prey actively There are numerous other societal benefits Wichlerian isnerian mimics resemble to some extent a mutualistic ally Or a species of little significance to the prey such as a commensural symbiotic species So It doesn't have to be the narcissists and psychopaths don't have to attract you all the time Into the to ensnare you to trap you and then to you know suck the life out of you They don't have to do this It's enough for example that they are seen with you Associate with you communicate with you and the signal sent to the environment is they're harmless they're safe So this is a kind of of mimicry Where they are By benefits by products Side effects positive side effects of being wrongly considered harmless Now mimicry Is Involves also behavior. So for example, there's something called mimesis Mimesis in latin at least mimesis is a kind of aggressive mimicry cryptic aggressive mimicry. It's where the predator mimics an organism That its prey is indifferent to So the predator mimics an organism that the prey is not worried about is not afraid of And it's the same with narcissists and psychopaths They could imitate harmless people irrelevant people people Which create indifference in the victim So I don't know a doorman A service provider an electrician a plumber A teacher So they're like They're not perceived as threats, but they're also not relevant to the life of the victim or the target And this way they create a back door A back door into the victim or target's life And it is through this back door that they penetrate and inflict the damage By imitating another type of person To whom the victim is indifferent And of whom she is not afraid. She doesn't feel that other type of person is a threat It allows the narcissists and psychopaths to invade her home her space and to colonize her in effect The predator is ignored by the prey Allowing the predator to avoid detection Until the prey is close enough for the predator to strike Again, it's a kind of camouflage Parasites, for example, often imitate the hosts And we have We have situations Where parasites mimic Either the hosts or the host's natural prey But when the roe's reversed They want the host to eat them In order to penetrate the hosts To enter the host's body These parasites pretend to be another species Which is the host's food The host's Normal diet or nutrition And then the host Pouses on them Consumes them And they're inside the host's body Narcissists do this as well It's known as It's a form of parasites mimicking prey Narcissists do this as well If they know, for example, that you are highly attracted to a specific type of guy They would imitate this specific type of guy So that you consume them Grant them access And then they're inside And it's too late They've penetrated your fortress Your firewall So Narcissists and psychopaths Often imitate Tasty morsels Appealing characters People you want to associate with or make love to Or be intimate partners with And then You take the bait You kind of Pounce on them And they're in And this deception provides a parasite with easy entry into the host Once inside the host They feed upon the host And they continue the life side So As you've seen Narcissists and psychopaths Use The entire arsenal Of mimicry Camouflage deception Available to animals in the animal kingdom It's predator and prey It's an ancient dance macabre It is proof positive That regardless of the veneer of civilization And all our deceptions and pretensions We're still at heart Animals And some of us Are very good at pretending That we are animals Of their own kind Neuro plasticity And what does it tell us? About the antiquated concept of a unitary self We're going to discuss fascinating things Such as ambivalence Cognitive dissonance Compartmentalization It's not the longest word I know But it sure competes with the longest word I know And we're going to start with London cabbie drivers But before we go to London And to its infamous famous cabs A few service announcements Number one I'm going to be in Romania July 1st to July 11th I would be seeing paying customers I still have a few slots Time slots available If you're interested Make contact with me My email is Sam Vaknin That happens to be my name At gmail.com Sam Vaknin at gmail.com Write to me And I'll see if I can fit you in Face to face One on one Counseling With me In Bucharest Romania That's one thing Second thing Don't forget There's a seven days Seven days Not five days But seven days Free Free means no cost No pay Nada No money Free Call therapy seminar In another city in Romania The fairy tale Turnu Severin There's another video That I've made a few days ago Go to that video Watch everything Write to me And I'll reserve a seat for you We have well over 200 participants by now So hurry up We the city of Turnu Severin Had given us a cultural palace A veritable palace A beautiful building And the seminar is going to take place in that palace But even there The number of seats is limited And you want to hurry up The early bird catches the Vaknin Okaishoshanim My name as you have just surmised Is Sam Vaknin And the author of Malignan self-love Narcissism Revisited And I'm also a professor of psychology To all my unfortunate students Around this shrinking polluted globe And before I proceed into the main topic I want to tell you about a modification I've made in some of my thinking Hit the two I've told you that the narcissist needs only three things I call them the three S's Sex Supply The supply could be narcissistic or sadistic And services And I told you repeatedly That two out of three is enough If you provide the narcissists with two out of these three One of which must be supplied Then you can you qualify as a narcissist intimate partner So there's sex services and supply If you provide the narcissists with supply and sex you're in If you provide the narcissists with supply and services You're in Supply is a pillar Without which A precondition without which the narcissists will never be your intimate partner But you can tack onto it You can add onto it either sex or services as As the spirit dawns upon you I want to modify this picture I think it's actually the four S's Sex Supply Services And safety Safety means the narcissists can trust you You never lie to the narcissists You inside the shared fantasy You come to be seen by the narcissists As a mother who would never deceive him And never lead him astray That doesn't mean that you cannot reach an accommodation with the narcissists For example to have other men But this accommodation must be explicit And honest The communication must be sincere Deception renders the narcissists Renders anyone actually Feel unsafe Narcissist has abandonment anxiety And needs to feel safe So the four S's Supply must be one Added to this sex services and safety These are the four S's And if you have three of these four You qualify to be the narcissist intimate partner Sex is not a prerequisite It's not a sine qua non It's not a condition You could have a sexless relationship with the narcissist As long as you give him the other three And as long as one of these three is supply Okay, I'll discuss it In my next video Next recording When I discuss how the narcissist experiences the shared fantasy Because hitherto I've discussed your experience of the shared fantasy And I want to give you the narcissist point of view Inside the point of view of how does he feel When he is in the throes of a shared fantasy Let's go to today's topic Which as I said is neuroplasticity The amazing ability of the brain to rewire itself To rebrand itself so to speak And to render you a new person Now immediately those of you who are discernible enough Those of you who are discerning enough I'm sorry Will come to the fore and say Vacline again you're contradicting yourself You said people can't change Well certain things cannot change indeed They cannot change because they occupy too many areas of the brain The brain as a whole cannot change Areas of the brain can change And usually that's limited to one or two areas But there are phenomena There are issues for example your personality Which encompass the bulk of the brain The majority of the brain And these things are immutable Cannot change their life long But they are not the same as having a self We're going to review phenomena such as ambivalence Emotional ambivalence Cognitive dissonance And compartmentalization And these well observed well documented psychological phenomena Support my view that the best way to go forward in psychology Is to adopt a model of self-states An assemblage of self-like apparitions if you wish Self-like constructs Which are provoked and triggered by environmental external cues And then take over for a while until they're no longer needed It's like a theater troupe or theater group And so each one has his role or her role in the script Self-states the self-states model in my view Is much superior to the unitary self or to the core identity models And when we look at these phenomena Bivalence, cognitive dissonance, compartmentalization They militate against any model involving a unitary self or a core identity But I want to start, of course, with London cabbies Studies about 10 years ago, so, 11 years ago Studies have shown that the brains of London cab drivers Are not the same as the brain of normal people Anyone who has used a cab in London could have told you that Without any investment in fancy equipment and researchers But what the study had discovered is that some areas A trophy, actually, while others, the hippocampus, had grown almost malignantly And so this was one of the most conclusive truths Of what came to be known as neuroplasticity Now neuroplasticity had been described 230 or 40 years ago It's nothing really, really new I'm going to read to you the definition in the Encyclopedia Britannica Neuroplasticity is the capacity of neurons and neural networks in the brain To change their connections and behavior in response to new information Sensory stimulation, development, damage or dysfunction Although, says the Britannica, although some neural functions Appear to be hardwired in specific localized regions of the brain Certain neural networks exhibit modularity and carry out specific functions While also retaining the capacity to deviate from their usual functions and to reorganize themselves Hence, neuroplasticity is considered generally to be a complex, multifaceted, fundamental property of the brain And so this is the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica Before I go into what we know today about neuroplasticity And of course there's a lot of hype, a lot of media hype And I blame neuroscientists for this hype, for a change I don't blame self-styled YouTubers because they just picked up on the lead of unscrupulous Neuroscientists who were after funding And so they exaggerated numerous claims and hyped the whole concept of neuroplasticity I'm going to bring all of you and myself a bit down to earth later But the aim of this whole exercise Is to demonstrate that if neuroplasticity does exist Then we cannot have a unitary self There's no such thing as a core identity which is unchangeable, immutable throughout the lifespan These two concepts are mutually exclusive But again, let's start with observable psychological phenomenon Ambivalence, emotional ambivalence, first described well over 100 years ago Take for example hate and love, ambivalence is when you have two conflicting emotions Simultaneously, when you hold them simultaneously, so you love someone and you hate them Think about your mother, so hate is often confused with love Because it produces the same bonding and attachment to its subjects The transition from love to hatred is seamless and imperceptible The two emotions often cohabit Ambivalence is a form of dissonance Such conflation between love and hate Is especially pronounced in mental health disorders that involve objecting constancy Persecretary objects, dysregulation and abandonment anxiety In these disorders, the wish to subsume the intimate partner To merge or to fuse with the intimate partner Is felt as a wish to destroy an object that is at times frustrating The idea of merging with the partner is about controlling the partner And you need to control the partner because he frustrates you Consequently hate is sometimes mistaken for love And vice versa, and this is especially true when certain defense mechanisms Such as projection, reaction formation, splitting, projective identification When these defense mechanisms are at work, they reframe reality And it's easy to deceive yourself that you love someone when actually you're terrified of them Or you want to control them or they frustrate you and make you angry all the time And so you want to merge and fuse with them and so you feel that you love them Ambivalence is not strictly exactly like cognitive dissonance It's not strictly a defense mechanism But it exhibits many of the hallmarks of a defense mechanism I mentioned cognitive dissonance By the way, there's a whole video, the whole video I've made on my channel Dedicated to ambivalence, love and hate Let's go to, let's proceed to cognitive dissonance Cognitive dissonance is when you simultaneously, at the same time You harbor or you have two or more conflicting pieces of information Contradictory thoughts, beliefs, values and so on So you could say that ambivalence is a subspecies of cognitive dissonance Because today we consider emotions to be a form of cognition Anyhow, when you have two thoughts or beliefs or values or pieces of information That are mutually exclusive Contradict and conflict with each other You have a cognitive dissonance When you have two simultaneous, when you hold simultaneously two bits of data Which call for diametrically opposed decisions or actions You are in the throes of a cognitive dissonance And this state of things is uneasy, it's uncomfortable It generates an inner conflict It triggers several primitive infantile defense mechanisms Such as denial or splitting or projection or reaction formation One way to cope with this predicament of the cognitive dissonance Is to transition from dissonance to consonance And how do you do that? You come up with a reconciling narrative A theory which seamlessly accommodates both conflicting points of view or data But when you do this habitually When you consistently adhere, obey, trust in and follow such reconciliation narratives You're just touching reality Because in reality a bit of information is either true or false And not two conflicting bits of information can be true at the same time Not two contradictory bits of data can be true at the same time So this is unreal If you create a narrative where your inner conflict The mutually exclusive pieces of evidence Are somehow accommodated That narrative is counterfactual Defies the facts, is unreal And if all your life is constructed around such narratives You become mentally ill Indeed, personality disorders can be reduced Can be easily described As a search of narratives intended to somehow accommodate, ameliorate and mitigate dissonances People with personality disorders who are high-functioning Are very disconcerting because they compartmentalize Their promiscuous, antisocial, addictive, sadistic and defined behaviors During the day these people are competent professionals, diligent students, Pillars of the community, responsible citizens, fathers and mothers, public intellectuals, Loving husbands and wives, thriving entrepreneurs That's during the day but come evening and night The mask drops They suddenly drink They do drugs Their behavior is replete with disroute, reckless, self-trashing sex with virtual strangers Gambling, any number of addictive and dysfunctional, even self-destructive behaviors It's as though they have two personalities Indeed, two self-states Cognitive dissonance and the mental illness that comes out of cognitive dissonance Are proof positive that we have self-states, not a unitary so Anyone who had witnessed a psychopath or a borderline in action Would confirm to you that there are several pseudo personalities there Several pseudo identities competing for the same body What Baffler's scholars is that all these self-states are a part of the personality There is no faking involved The switching is abrupt, but it is also seamless Dissociation is frequently involved But never to the point of rupturing continuous autobiographical memory and core identity Core identity in the sense that there is an organizing mechanism, an algorithm which decides which self-state will out So I replace the concept of self and the concept of core identity With an algorithmic operating system Which essentially is a form of artificial intelligence Collectly called it in the 1940s the mask of sanity It challenges everything we thought we knew about psychology because we've organized modern psychology around counterfactual concepts and narratives Wrong concepts and narratives such as self, individual identity, personality These things don't exist. It's nonsense. It's not even helpful Not even helpful as an idealized hypothesis And you see this a lot in people with mental disorders But also in people who have been victimized By abusers who are mentally ill So victims of narcissistic abuse had been victimized by Narcissists, victims of psychopathic abuse, victims of borderline abuse These victims also kind of fragment and split Into their constituent self-states. They develop extremely strong cognitive dissonances Ambivalences and compartmentalization. They begin to mirror their abusers through the process of training I urge you to watch my videos with Richard Brennan on this topic Some people adopt the role of a professional victim and in doing so They become actually their abusers. They become self-centered, devoid of empathy, abusive and exploitative In other words, they become Narcissists or psychopaths. So the role of a professional victim Is the role of someone whose existence and very identity rests solely and entirely on his victim or victim It's well researched in victimology And it doesn't make for a nice reading But what I'm driving at is that These victims entertain the false notion That they can compartmentalize their narcissistic behaviors They think they can be abusive Only with a narcissist They're gonna abuse only the narcissists In other words, such a victim trusts Her ability to segregate her conduct and to be verbally abusive towards the narcissists While at the same time, she is civil Affectionate, compassionate and empathic with other people With a narcissist, she acts with malice When the narcissist is concerned, she is scheming and malevolent and cunning and so because she has to survive It's a survival strategy But at the same time, she displays Christian charity and altruism towards all everyone else This belief, I call it the faucet of a tap theory This kind of victim believes that she can turn on and off Her negative feelings, her abusive outbursts, her vindictiveness and vengefulness Her blind rage and her non-discriminating judgment This is of course untrue These behaviors spill over into interactions with innocent, non-narcists So as you see, there's a limit There's a limit to how much you can change There's a limit to how differentiated the self-states are The self-states are not mutually exclusive. They share a lot in common. They have access to databases. For example, your memories And they share these databases to a large extent. They have what we call partial dissociative partitions So there is In the some parts of your brain and some parts of who you are Are immutable. They are not changeable But they don't amount They don't they don't amount to what we call the self These parts Which can never change And which are with you to the day you die These parts are not what is normally called the core identity Because they're disparate Because they are not enough Like they are I don't know maybe 60 percent of you or 40 percent of you. No one has measured And there's a lot of you at least half of you maybe That is changeable permutable and mutable So the self-state model doesn't imply That you are never you That every minute or every day or every second or every year you become someone else That's not what the self-state model says It says that within certain confines and boundaries Which determine Your immutability determine your inability to change within these boundaries your influx Think of a river A river has river beds and river banks These rarely change they take eons millennia to change But the river itself Flows constantly you can never enter the same river twice Pantarei, this is the self-states model. No, it's of course everything So we believe at least everything happens in the brain. So any changes Any any outing of a self-state Any alteration in your pattern of cognitions motions and behaviors Must be somehow reflected in the brain And if these patterns become ingrained and long term There must be a corresponding change in the brain Which is also ingrained and long term. In other words, there must be new Neural pathways. The brain must somehow rewire itself The dopamine pathway for example is fixed the structures of the brain the Hippocampus the cerebellum Cerebral it's they're all fixed No one is implying that the brain shape shifts physically or physiologically But what happens in the brain? Where electrochemical signals Move and transition from and to these pathways These highways of the brain They keep changing they keep rewiring themselves and this is of a non unknown as neuroplasticity. It happens It's a it's a myth. It's wrong To say that it happens only in humans. It happens in all all life forms with the brain And so in animals individuals in animal species Their brain morphology even changes. Actually you could easily make a claim that animal neuroplasticity Is much more prevalent and dominant and discernible Than human neuroplasticity because our brain our brains are so complex Anything that happens in our brains is mere tinkering While animal brains are much more primitive and much more amenable to massive changes. So in animals even the morphology the shape changes A release of hormones evolutionary factors developmental stages even seasons affect the brains of many species and enhance or even generate Responsive behaviors, which are sometimes utterly new And we see animals Change their behaviors in ways which are interpreted as learning But may be only the outcome of an a changing transforming brain children Have undeveloped brains when they're born Their brain is only about half developed many areas of the brain when in a newborn are utterly undeveloped So children are easily comparable to animals in this sense. They have primitive brains and indeed neuroplasticity Is most active in childhood? It's a part. It's a normal part of human development It's a mechanism It's a mechanism which allows the child to avoid risk And to develop resilience In in in the face of the exigencies and dangers of life Taking on the world. It's very traumatic very terrifying And what happens is when this process of neuroplasticity is disrupted When this process of evolving changing unfurling brain Which takes well over 25 years When it is disrupted This is what we call trauma Trauma negatively affects the brain puts a strain on sympathetic nervous system and It either prevents constant activation or triggers constant activation. It alters the brain's connections trauma Creates severe problems in in childhood because It causes the child to become hyper vigilant or hyper aroused overly aroused The excitation state becomes permanent uh neuroplasticity Whenever the child is traumatized And abused and there are many forms of abuse as I mentioned spoiling and pampering and Pedestering and parentifying and instrumentalizing the child are as bad as sexual abuse or verbal abuse So there are many forms of abuse When the child is not allowed to separate from the parent and become an individual That's abuse. The child is treated as an extension of the parent. That's abuse So this kind of abuse is traumatizing when the child is helpless and small and terrified And not grandiose enough to take on the world the child is traumatized even by the slightest things even by frustration And had it not been for neuroplasticity All of us would ended up a stead banding or even worse as some vacuum Neuroplasticity saves the day It allows the brain to rewire on the fly In the face of adverse childhood experiences ace a c e neuroplasticity has several categories and several types of neuroplasticity And almost every imaginable area of the brain And almost every imaginable neuronal functioning Is neuroplastic so Neuroplasticity and I'm becoming a minute to to the various types of neuroplasticity and and so on so forth neuroplasticity Is the mechanism of the brain the process in the brain that competes With adverse processes such as impairment or excess or trauma or even A negative adaptation maladaptation Uh, there have been many many studies Everything affects the brain Everything changes and molds its brain is very malleable indeed very very plastic Musical training actually is one of the most powerful influences on the brain which led me to suggest that and training via abusive verbiage and training via abusive words Is the equivalent of music or musical training and therefore leverages the brain's neuroplasticity in a bad way maliciously or malevolently When these changes in the brain occur They are unique to the individual so no brain is not two brains are alike. It's a myth Uh, if you play sports If you learn multiple languages, if you do theater, if you listen to music depends which type of music If you do the knowledge and you become a cab driver in london You're not the your brain is not the same as anyone else's our brains are highly unique Yes, you can identify the structures, but they will be of different size They would be wired differently. They will interact differently with other structures of the brain, etc, etc Changes in the brain start Very early There are studies that have demonstrated conclusively that brains begin to deviate from each other The brains begin to be idiosyncratic. They begin to be unique to the individual as early as 15 months The degree of plasticity in the brain as Kerr and Nelson had written Helps provide a form of intervention for children with developmental disorders and neurological disorders diseases Another type of neuroplasticity, which is not structural again Well, we come to all the other types, but another family of neuroplastic processes Is what is known as activity dependent neuroplasticity It's the only type of neuroplasticity that is both functional and structural And it arises from the repeated use of cognitive functions And is very responsive to personal experiences actually when Self-styled experts on youtube use the term neuroplasticity they mean this sub sub type activity dependent neuroplasticity is when when Your cognitions Are of a specific type Especially when they are reactive to specific experiences, for example abuse Or on the very contrary compassion and love These reshape the brain there's a biological basis for learning and the formation of new memories There are new pathways created all the time activity dependent neuroplasticity arises from intrinsic endogenous activity from the inside All other forms of neuroplasticity Are reactive they arise from exogenous extrinsic factors from the environment So when we stimulate the brain electrically or we give ECT in inpatient uh settings when we administer drugs it also has These treatment modalities also have an effect on neuroplasticity And i've been claiming for decades that talk therapy Is a form of neuroplastic engineering We are using structured sentences and words within well defined algorithms In order to induce A rewiring of the brain and the mind and of course psychopaths and narcissists They have this cold empathy So they intuitively know how to rewire your brain with words and actions The brain's ability to remodel itself is an asset But it's also a liability because other people can abuse it Can use it against you The brain's capacity to retain memories improve motor functioning enhance comprehension and speech All these rely on neuroplasticity. We wouldn't have been human without neuroplasticity and The variability to to Retain memories even to form memories What is to form a memory is to is to reconnect neurons Which is the foundational mechanism of neuroplasticity and we do it on a daily basis when neuroplastic on a daily basis And so but abusers Know this And they use it against us They know they can reach into our minds into our brains Re-shape them rearrange the furniture And come up with a totally new thing and that's totally new thing is a zombie It's a slave. It's an extension you Another type of neuroplasticity is intimately connected to gene expression Gene expression genes can be triggered by what we call signaling cascades signaling cascades cause the release Of signaling molecules even simple substances such as calcium dilutamate dopamine they are Other neurotransmitters. They are actually signaling signaling molecules. So these molecules Triggers certain genes and this enhances neural or neural neural activity And so neuroplasticity is also reactive to the genetic template And it's also an integral part of epigenetics, but let's stop it for another For another fascinating Lecture because we can actually transmit neuroplasticity intergenerationally via expressed and triggered genetic material It's it's these are recent discoveries in the past 10 years. They are revolutionizing the way we see evolution introducing Lomarckian elements into it so Because consider for example, a right-handed person Right-handed person can practice his left hand and become ambidextrous And then his brain changes Someone with autism someone with a stroke can rewire his brain to mitigate Uh this kind of dysfunctions. Okay. I promise to give you a breakdown The various types of neuroplasticity and as you notice Neuroplasticity is good When you have a physiological problem a medical problem a biological problem or even a genetic problem It's good because it allows you to circumvent the problem To create a shortcut or a bypass of the problem But neuroplasticity also allows you to to fall memories To cope with emotions To counter and fight back when you're traumatized and abused So neuroplasticity is just a general term. I think for adaptation It's the biological template of adaptation. It's simply the physiological electrochemical neuronal biological machinery That underlies what we call adaptation, which is a second order phenomenon an epi phenomenon an emergent phenomenon adaptation emerges From the ability of this machinery to self assemble In reaction to environmental cues Does it strike a chord? Does it remind you of something? Yes, self states I think neuroplasticity Again the capacity of our mental machinery To self assemble in ad hoc networks I think neuroplasticity as defined this way Is the biological foundation for self states There are various types of neuroplasticity. First, there's homologous area adaptation It occurs during this happens or occurs during early Childhood in a critical period of development If a particular brain module Becomes damaged in early life The normal operations of this module Shift to other areas in the brain that do not include the affected module The function is often shifted to a module In a matching or homologous area of the opposite brain hemisphere So it shifts from left to right and from right to left I'm pointing here because I think I have a brain although this is still hotly disputed online The downside of this form of neuroplasticity is that it comes to costs To functions that are normally stored in the module that is now used But this module has to make room for new functions and this decreases other functions Similar with London cabins by the way The frontal area of the hippocampus Grows dramatically in London cabins But the back area The anterior area I mean becomes depleted and atrophied There's always a compensatory mechanism at work You do something well you do something else less well You use some structure it can't be used for other things There's no parallel processing and there's no multitasking In in any given square inch of the brain that everything is dedicated So redundancy is in terms of structures Everything is a double but not in terms of function When the right Parietal lobe for example the middle region of the cerebral hemispheres When the parietal lobe the right one becomes damaged early in life The left parietal lobe takes over visual visual and spatial functions But this impairs arithmetical functions Which the left parietal lobe usually carries out exclusively It's an example Timing is also very crucial because A child learns how to navigate For example physical space Before the child learns arithmetic So if the left parietal lobe is compensating for a damaged right parietal lobe This child will never learn how to calculate It will have serious troubles with mathematics Another type of neuroplasticity is known as compensatory masquerade They have names. Oh, I love it very literary compensatory masquerade Is when the brain figures out An alternative strategy for carrying out a task When the initial strategy cannot be followed because of some structural impairment or some other problem Is every task has a strategy It's kind of algorithm that tells the brain how to act in order to accomplish the task For example, drinking coffee from Mini's lips You should try it And so Example you try to navigate from one place to another Most people have an intuitive sense of direction and distance and they employ it for navigation But we all know People who are totally disoriented If someone has some kind of brain trauma or an impaired spatial sense They need to develop another strategy just in order to find the way back home Or in a foreign city They need another strategy for spatial navigation So for example, some memory areas in the brain Short-term memory areas Will spring to life And they will try to compensate by memorizing landmarks So what The the masquerade here Is that it's a reorganization of pre-existing neuronal networks. It's like the brain says I can't find my way home Relying on my sense of direction and navigation and spatial recognition So i'll find my way home using memory I'll memorize landmarks this way. I'll find my way home And that's the masquerade Another form of um neuroplasticity is known as cross model cross model m o d a l reassignment It it entails an introduction of new inputs into a brain area deprived of its main inputs So for example, imagine that you're blind Okay, don't imagine imagine that you're blind and your blind sees birth um And so you see the world by touching it You visualize by touching It's a somatosensory input. It's redirected. I don't know if you know, but when a blind person touches your face The input is not tactile Is not the touch What what happens is he touches your face This creates electrochemical signals And they are transferred to the visual cortex in the occipital loop The blind person literally Sees your face with his fingertips The visual cortex of the blind person In his brain reacts to touch This area is known as v1 The neuroscience buffs among you But people who have normal eyesight They're not blind They don't display any activity in the v1 area They don't display Any compensatory activity that when they touch faces The the signal goes to the right place Neurons communicate with each other in the same abstract language of electrochemical impulses Regardless of sensory modality This is something which is lost And on on many people That the languages is the same. It's identical. It's the routing that matters Where the language elements go Where the input The bytes and bits The data Where it's Where it's redirected So in a blind person, the same data will be redirected to the visual cortex While in a sight sighted person person who sees it will be redirected elsewhere All the sensory courtesies Cortex says as courtesies all the sensory courtesies of the brain the visual the auditory all factor is smell Gastatory taste somatosensory all of them Have a similar six layer processing structure So the visual courtesies of blind people Can still carry out the cognitive functions of creating representations of the physical world But based these representations on input from another sense Namely touch not sight So it's one area of the brain compensating for a lack of vision But it's not only that it's a change in the actual functional assignment of a local brain region You see how you see how amazingly flexible the brain is How neuroplastic The last form of neuroplasticity is known as map expansion It entails the flexibility of local brain regions that are dedicated to performing One type of function or storing a particular form of information The arrangement of these local regions In the cerebral cortex Is what we call the map When one function is carried out frequently Through repeated behavior Or repeated stimulus By the way conditioning Addiction repetition They Rewired the brain they create neural pathways neural pathways. So when one function is repeated sufficiently The region of the cortical map Dedicated to this function grows and shrinks If if you don't repeat it often it shrinks Revisit often it grows. It's responsive to exercise It's a kind of use it or lose it And this phenomenon takes place during the learning or practicing of a skill such as playing a musical instrument But can easily respond for example To learning how to cope with suicide suicide ideation It it is responsive to learning how to how to reframe trauma The region grows as the individual gains implicit familiarity with a new skill And the new skill can be anything And it shrinks to baseline once the learning becomes explicit Now explicit and implicit learning A very important concept Implicit learning is the passive acquisition of knowledge through exposure to information explicit learning It's the active acquisition of knowledge gained by consciously seeking out the information So it's not the same When you search search for something on Wikipedia And you then read the article. These are two types of learning actually Um as you continue to develop a skill over repeated practice The region retains the initial enlargement As drive a cab drivers in london can tell you those of them who are neuroscientists Max this type of neuroplasticity map expansion neuroplasticity has been observed in association with pain In a phenomenon of for example phantom limb syndrome After amputation you can still feel your limb the amputated leg or amputated arm And this is because of this map expansion neuroplasticity You have a map of your organ of the mystic organ In the brain the brain still reacts to it as if it were there The relationship between cortical reorganization and phantom limb pain Let us to understand many many things it seems that the the brain map shifts to take over the adjacent area of the missing organ And the cortical changes um could be reversed For example by peripheral anesthesia So there's a lot still we don't know But we know that we have a representation of ourselves This is the map in the cortices the cortical areas presentation of ourselves And we can modify Some parts of this representation But not all Again, we come back to the same model of self states there is a part that is Kind of boundary There is a part that is unchanging, but it's not the self. It's not core identity It's like conditions boundaries limits Language terms of use within which Changes can take place which in which You as an individual A word I dispute you as a person can flow and transform And use various self states In response to the environment. It's a much more factual model. It's much more evidence based and fact based And it's much more powerful. It's a model that is much more powerful Is a normal explanatory Power much much better than any model of of unitary cell or model of core identity Consider for example stress Stress or continuous stress Affects the brain very bad The many areas of the brain that are sensitive to stress can be damaged By extended exposure to constant triggering neuronal Neural neuronal activation Multi multi unit activities and so so many areas of the brain actually get worn out Exhausted eroded corroded by By stress Hormones also have some impact on the brain however indirectly Most of the mechanisms involved in increased memory retention comprehension adaptation they somehow Involve activity dependent plasticity mechanisms And stress suppresses these mechanisms I want you to understand stress destroys your ability to retain Memories and form new memories to comprehend What you are being told and to adapt to an ever-changing environment. So We don't quite know How stress accomplishes this suppression Had we known we would have known how to intervene and we still don't know how to intervene They are studies by dr. Lee and others But we still don't know much We just know That there is an ability of neural networks in the brain to change Through growth and reorganization And trauma and stress suppress Many of these mechanisms Neural plasticity is the brain's attempt to cope With a changing environment that is potentially frustrating traumatic or stressful And it it does this by creating new neural pathways connections systemic adjustments like cortical remapping and circuit and network changes Which are the outcome of learning And and so on and so forth everything affects The brain everything induces neuroplastic Kind of responses that is especially true in childhood as I told you Okay, so we We distinguish between two broad categories of neuroplasticity structural neuroplasticity It's a brain's ability to change its neuronal connections as I've repeatedly mentioned new neurons Constantly produced in some areas of the central nervous system Although not in some areas of the brain But in some in other areas and so they're integrated throughout the lifespan It's also a form of neuroplasticity and And The all kinds of imaging studies have demonstrated This structural this restructuring this constant restructuring in action The effects of internal and external stimuli in the brain on the anatomical Reorganization of the brain. They're stunning. There is these are beautiful things to Behold even things like gray matter and white matter Synaptic strength All these change fluctuate all the time now we this raises issues with the brains of psychopaths the brains of borderlines We know that these brains have abnormalities in terms for example of white matter Does this limit their ability to Be neuroplastic Does it limit the capacity of neuroplasticity to operate in these diseased brains? We don't know yet, but it's a fair assumption I would imagine that in borderline brains And definitely in psychopathic brains Neuroplasticity, especially of the structural kind is very limited because of the abnormalities structural abnormalities Functional neuroplasticity, however, is more open to question Functional neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to alter and adopt functional properties of neurons It it's a response to previous activity as I mentioned activity dependent memory acquisition Um, it's a damage or malfunction of neurons. This is called reactive plasticity Uh, some pathological event brain injury and trauma which is a physical event prolonged complex trauma complex post-traumatic stress disorder ptsd all these traumatic event And there is reactive plasticity The functions from one part of the brain Transfer to another part of the brain Based on the demand to produce recovery of behavioral or physiological processes What about the physiological forms? um There is something called synaptic plasticity The strengthening or weakening of synapses results in increase or decrease of the firing rate of uh neurons And this is called long-term potential and long-term depression LT LTP and LTD These are also examples of synaptic synaptic plasticity associated with memory And it's a form of neuroplasticity The cerebellum Is a typical structure and there you have combinations of LTP and LTD Long-term potential long-term depression And there's a lot of redundancy within the circuitry And consequently It's a very plastic Structure of the brain it has multiple sites of plasticity plasticity Synaptic plasticity is complemented by another form of activity dependent plasticity And it involves the intrinsic excitability of neurons and this is known as intrinsic plasticity So you see there are multiple mechanisms the brain Can change and does change in every possible way Synaptic strength The rate neurons fire Intrinsic excitation how they connect and reconnect You know memories everything Affects the brain and it it's constantly shape shifts At least functionally and even structurally as some parts became become Bigger owing to exposure to stimuli and learning and others shrink As opposed to homeostatic plasticity Intrinsic plasticity of neurons does not necessarily maintain the overall activity of a neuron within network But contributes to encoding memories So it seems that memories Are somehow Connected to the level of excitability of neurons. We don't know exactly how it's very The the modern treatment the neuroscientific treatment of neuro plasticity is very modern We know that there is functional neuro plasticity on the level of brain networks We know that training alters the strength of functional connections in the brain and But we don't quite know yet how We don't know for example if there is a systematic requirement of the brain network for reorganization We don't know if this reorganization is not like Spring cleaning so to speak We also don't know how neuro plasticity and the constant shifting and you know to and fro in the brain How they're connected to phenomena such as dreaming and sleep There's a lot it's a fascinating area in neuroscience but it intimately ties in with a model in psychology which is flexible open involves multiple entities redundancy algorithmic approach plasticity And the only kind of model that fits all these demands Is a self-states model Not necessarily mine could be from birds or others But a self-statement The self model The model of a unitary self The model of cognitive congruence And stability the model of core identity these were invented 120 years ago Or a hundred years ago. We knew far less about the brain than we do today And the people who had come up with these concepts Were Germans and Austrians embedded in empires where rigidity and hierarchy And unitary control Were critical their culture And social societal mores Are reflected in these theories as fire a band And others Thomas Kuhn and others Have made clear science is not divorced from social influences and cultural influences. It's culture bound So today we are much more open We are much more Transigent And we need to adopt new models New models in psychology which correspond far better To current knowledge in current findings in neuroscience and to an open tolerant Networked society With crumbling hierarchies and institutions And this is a self-states model Thank you for suffering throughout all this I hope I haven't transformed your normal healthy brains Into the brains of cab drivers in london God forbid Okay, Nechamot and Nechamim Look it up Today we are going to discuss A new approach to how narcissism is formed and why narcissists are the way they are Infuriating My name is Sanbaklin. I'm the author of Malignance of Love Narcissism Revisited I form a visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of cups And we'll start with your favorite part, which is the bullet points the bullet points summary and then Feel free to break my heart and sign off And leave me all alone with the camera And otherwise those those of you who choose to stay to the very end Better end, shall I say Are going to be exposed to Freud's thinking language theories Neuroscientists and a host of other titillating exciting Amazing people Let's start as promised with the bullet points I suggest in this video That the flaw in spatial processing the ability to process space And language processing the ability to process language I suggest that these two flaws Are responsible for the emergence of narcissistic defenses including the form self and ultimately narcissistic personality disorder or pathological narcissism including narcissistic style Now why Why would a baby an infant? Experience these dual flaws the flaw in processing space The flaw in processing language because of trauma and abuse The trauma and abuse force the child To hide To minimize itself In short to withdraw From the world from reality Thereby ignoring or denying or repressing the dimensions of reality The most evident of which the most ubiquitous of which is space similarly and training By abusive parents Brainwashing Shall we say being entrained causes the child To misidentify language with negative affectivity And also to be inhibited in processing language I can put it otherwise The abusive parents language Takes over and does not allow the child to develop his or her own linguistic capabilities Language comprehension and ultimately language usage So the abuse and traumatized child Withdraws from the world and loses access to space to space and spatial Processing and Is exposed to the misuse of language The egregious misuse of language In order to induce in the child fear trauma Negative effects negative emotions such as anger and so on so forth So the child kind of renounces language And takes on the parent's language a process known as identification Introduction incorporation Now these two flaws which are induced in the child By the dead mother or the dead parent if you wish the dead mother The parent parental figure who is a primary caregiver But is absent depressive hateful selfish instrumentalizing parentifying pedestalizing Idolizing pampering smothering such all these are forms of abuse This kind of parent induces the dual flaws the twin flaws that are described Now when you can't when you're not integrated with reality when you have no conception of space You cannot tell the external from the internal Space is about the external obviously you are embedded in space So space is not you space is outside to you Is an outside phenomenon so these children whose spatial processing capacity has been hampered or obstructed These children are unable to tell external from internal And this is a great definition of psychosis and of narcissism The psychotic Confuses his internal world with the external. He believes that his internal world is external The narcissist confuses the external world with the internal He believes erroneously that the external world is actually happening inside his mind inside his head He internalizes external objects and continue continues to interact with the interjected representations of these external objects Hyper reflexivity both ways so This is the first consequence of inability to process space second consequence Impaired ability to form memories in the absence of space Or the capacity to somehow relate to space and in the absence of language or functioning language Of course, we cannot form memories This is grounded in neuroscience The part of the brain that processes memories the hippocampus is also responsible For spatial for spatial orientation spatial perception and functioning in space So this is amazing memory and space in the human brain are one and the same So this kind of trial is unable to form memories. He has an impaired ability to form memories in short. He dissociates the main the main Relational mode the main way the child interacts with his own life his own autobiography He dissociates he cuts them off. He represses them. He denies them. He buries them And he has no access to these memories which forces him later on in life to confabulate the child Attempts to hide The memory gaps the lost time the child does this by confabulating Inventing narratives inventing coming up conjuring stories that are plausible probable likely And then affording these stories and narratives with truth value Insisting that the confabulation is true Although technically, of course, it's a lie The third impact the third outcome Of abusive traumatic Childhoods is impaired reality testing If you are not able to process space if you are not able to use language properly If language is associated with negative emotions If space is associated with fear and the need to hide And therefore the need to renounce reality if you have impaired reality testing if you can't form memories And so on and so forth if you leave a lie, you have a false self you confabulate Then of course, you can't you can't have a grasp on reality You have impaired reality testing and then depending on the Path or etiology depending on the path That you take as a child You begin to use other people For reality testing and the processing of reality other people became become the gauges of reality And this is known as external this part of external regulation next another outcome of the devastation Wrote on the child by abuse and trauma Is grandiose magical thinking The child develops magical defenses Against an environment which is perceived as arbitrary cruel capricious threatening terrifying and so on so forth Magic and primitive religions were the reactions of humanity to similar environments when we didn't have science So the child becomes a magician. He adopts magic as a defense Magical thinking and magical thinking survives into adulthood Referential ideation the belief of everyone is talking about everyone is mocking you. That's magical thinking Paranoia is magical thinking. You are at the center of malign malicious malevolent conspiracies against you. So you're important You are you are, you know grandiose, but at the same time, this is magical thinking Megalomania the belief that everything that's happening is happening because of you And that you have the capacity to induce change in the external environment just by thinking about something Just by imagining something and of course just by wishing something very hard Now megalomania megalomaniacal magical thinking is at the heart of many of modern the modern day phenomena of business coaching dating coaching and so on so forth these coaches tell you All you have to do is really wish all you have to do is really think about it And you will attract to you the universe the universe will adopt itself To you and you will manifest Your wishes and expectations and dreams and hopes out there Things are gonna happen people are gonna be attracted to you and you know everything will rearrange itself To suit your needs to cater to them This is of course, magical thinking and finally this erotomanic erotomanic delusions erotomanic delusions is to believe That other people are in love with you attracted to you Even if they are not self even if they are not aware of this they are in love with you They are attracted to you and so their Magical thinking in this case is that everything the other person does is a formal signaling And that actually the other person unconsciously sometimes Is just attempting to get close to you because you are the center of love your eros reified So this is grandiose medical thing magical thinking another outcome The next outcome is identity diffusion and disturbance Of course abuse and trauma Induce and inability to process space inability to process language inability to form memories inability to gauge reality grandiose magic magical thinking and without memories And without emotions attendant on memories There's no identity. There's no core identity and we have something that ericsson called identity diffusion and today we We used to be we call identity disturbance It fits well with my theory of self states founded on philip romberg's work Where actually in the case of borderline and narcissism The mechanism for alternating between self states is broken And the self states alternate autonomously triggered by cues from the environment Like a kaleidoscope gun or I or kaleidoscope gun bed So this is identity diffusion and disturbance. And finally arrested development in phantillism The inability to become an adult Of course, there's no separation individuation from an abusive parent or dead mother There's no separation and individuation Therefore, there's no individual And there is an inability to perceive the separateness of other people boundaries, for example Um, there's no experience of separateness. That's why in narcissists borderline psychotics Paranoics to a logic. That's why they can't tell the difference between themselves and the world There's no out out there and in here. There's no external and internal as I said before So the this kind of person remains emotionally stuck In very early childhood. Let's say very early. I mean very early like two years old Three years old something like that So we have infantilism now These were the bullet points You're free to go dismissed Report to duty tomorrow And those of you who are of masochistic bend Or have nothing better to do on a Wednesday morning Here I am with Filling in some of the details of what I just said Let's start with a With zygmunt Freud Zygmunt Freud coined the term who else? I mean I There's nothing in human in the human mind or human psychology that zygmunt Freud didn't have something to say Or was not somehow involved in amazing genius Amazing genius discarded Idiotically by the new establishment in academic psychology Which plays an establishment which places emphasis on statistics because they are grandiose and they want to appear to be scientists I can't tell you how stupid this is can begin to tell you. Anyhow coming back to zygmunt Freud. Forget my rant Zygmunt Freud was the one who coined the term infant amnesia At the time he explained it as a form of repression The brain said zygmunt Freud was hiding the desires and emotions of infancy from the adult from the adult psyche and only psychotherapy would allow Access to these repressed Memories and emotions and desires and urges and drives and and so on so forth. So this was infant amnesia and Unquoting allow me to quote Freud He that who it has not occurred to us to feel any astonishment At the fact of this amnesia though. We might have had good grounds for doing so. He wrote it in 1910 For we learned from other people that during these years of which at a later date we retain nothing But a few unintelligible and fragmentary recollections During this period we reacted as children In a lively manner To impressions We were capable of expressing pain and joy in human fashion We gave evidence of love jealousy and other passionate feelings by which we were strongly moved at the time And even we gave utterance To remarks which were regarded by adults as good evidence of our possessing insight and the beginnings of a capacity for judgment And yet we remembered none of this And of all this We when we are grown up Have no knowledge on our own. We forget all of this. We deleted erased all of this First few years of life three four Why should our memory asks Freud? Why should our memory lag so far behind the other activities of our minds? Freud conceived of memory as a permanent storage system that an acts a lasting influence over behavior in adulthood in adulthood And he said it doesn't matter if the memory is conscious or unconscious. It's there It is an energy of its own and it uses this energy to influence behavioral choices And other things like emotions and so on so forth in adulthood But Freud of course Was writing in 1910. There has been some progress since then In our understanding of both the brain neuroscience and psychology and what Freud didn't know is that This period of infant amnesia usually until age two, but it could go up to age three this period of infant amnesia um And then childhood amnesia, but there's something called childhood amnesia, which lasts until age six Where we have only filtered memories Extremely specific and extremely few memories until age two. We have no memory We no one remembers anything that happened before age two And if they claim to remember something that happened before age two years They were probably probably told about it and forgot that they were told about it So this infant amnesia followed by childhood amnesia until age six So Freud didn't know that this is common not only among humans, but among all mammals Now that's interesting because we tend to connect memory identity and so on so forth to upbringing to the environment to parental figures to abuse to trauma to good parenting good enough mother and so on so forth, but it seems that Amnesia to some extent is biological There is some biological reason for it. Perhaps brain structures are not sufficiently evolved But it's a fact that even mammals have infant and childhood amnesia All artificial species Uh, who that these are species who raised their young Including rats including monkeys experience a period of amnesia And then it seems that there is some kind of evolutionary necessity for this amnesiac Dissociative developmental period I am not disputing this I am not saying that abusive traumatizing dead Parents induce infant amnesia. That's not what I'm saying Infant amnesia is independent. Even if you have the best parents in the world You would still not remember anything prior to age two and very little prior to age six But what I am saying Is that traumatizing abusive parents fixate infant amnesia Make it impossible for the child To exit the period of infant amnesia and to begin to develop memories and identity founded on memories Now this corresponds perfectly With this with separation individuation separation individuation takes place between 18 months and 36 months of life It seems that abusive traumatizing instrumentalizing parentifying parents Do not allow the child to separate and therefore the child cannot become an individual and cannot transition from infant memory infant amnesia to childhood amnesia and then to memory This kind of parenting somehow damages the circuitry the ability to develop memories And to to recall them the recall ability And we are finding out that this is done. This is mediated. This damage is mediated via Some kind of obstruction to spatial processing capacities the ability to process space and language processing capacities And all these are linked to later life effects In adolescence and adulthood Which I mentioned in the bullet's point In the bullet points, I'm sorry Okay Time has passed Freud has died like the best of us and Between the 1970s and the late 1990s there was another school and they suggested that infant amnesia Was a child's was owing to a child's lack of language They said that early memories become inaccessible Because babies transition from non-verbal to verbal communication. So early memories are non-verbal When language becomes the main mediator Between the child and the environment the world and the child and itself the emerging self the Constellated integrated self Some language is a bridge. It's a bridge between the child and his newly emerging nascent self and it's a bridge between the child and the universe and reality And this new bridge or if you wish the glue that holds everything together if this new bridge when this new bridge emerges It eradicates It buries represses destroys Whatever you wish to call it Non-verbal non-verbal memories because there's no way to access them Language monopolizes access The only way to access our memories our identity our emotions. Yes our emotions too our cognitions The environment reality other people object relations. The only way Is language? So if your memories at age one are non-verbal They're dead they're gone because Language is a monopoly. It doesn't allow any other forms of communication Now of course people who have had who have mystical experiences on mystical experiences religious experiences they claim to have gained access to various aspects of reality and of themselves via non-language means That is wrong and we'll deal with it perhaps in another video that is absolutely wrong There is no other way except language and anything that preceded language is dead and gone. That's a theory Okay, so around the age of 18 months There is an explosion of language in infants Which is a precondition for separating from the from mommy separation and then becoming an individual And shortly thereafter infant amnesia dissipates and disappears Nora Nukon the founder of the spatial intelligence and learning center temple university said the following They believed that the advent of memories has to do with both language acquisition And is then tied up with cultural norms about the importance of remembering unique events These are obviously not unimportant. We speak we live in social groups But that idea wasn't going to be enough. It wasn't going to be the only explanation language was needed But how to explain animal species that never developed language and do seem to remember events in their lives They're here neuroscience has a contribution. It's a concept of space It seems that all of us Even the most lowly forms of life We have a conception of space. We somehow relate to space And space is a language Any physicists would tell you other physicists any physicists would tell you space and time are language elements So even mammals Who don't use English or Arabic or Hebrew? What did I just say? Okay, even mammals who don't use language They use language. It's a very primitive language rudimentary language. It's a language of space And so the human brain uses the same neural circuits For navigating space An episodic memory. That's a fact so Kate Jeffrey is the in is a neuroscientist She works in university college in london and she published an article an intriguing article in current biology It's an academic job and she wrote why would nature have used the same structure? for both space and memory Which seems so different An intriguing possibility is that the cognitive map provides in a manner of speaking the stage Upon which the drama of recollected life events is played out By this account, it serves as the mind's eye Not only for remembering spaces, but also the events that happened there In that space and even according to recent human neuroimaging evidence imagination itself Now I recommend that you read the you read the book. There's a book Um called the science and mystery of how humans navigate the world was written by m.r. O'Connor Don't ask me what is m.r. Published by st. martin's press in 2019 and he deals with with many of these issues at length if you want to go deeper Suffice it to say That the abuse and traumatized child Suffers multiple blows It's not a double whammy It's like a quintuple whammy The child feels the need to hide and to conceal itself to minimize itself to disappear In order to not be traumatized So the child rejects space Space is where bad things happen Space is where abuse happens space is where trauma happens. So no space for me. Thank you child reject space The parents language is so dominant And so terrifying and so inducing of negative emotions That the child also rejects language itself and adopts The parents language interjects it and this remains with the child for life And so in the absence of language and in the absence of space as a language There's no ability to develop reality testing and everything I've mentioned in the buddha points Okay, what about animals? What can we what can we learn from animals? I mean we can't experiment on human babies Unfortunately So what about animals? What their studies has shown that when animals are raised in a Space which is without features featureless space Or in confinement in a box They are unable to engage in Successfully engage in spatial tasks If they are blindfolded They don't see Sharp angles and so on and so forth So The exposure to space Big space Varied space space with features Is very important And if you as a child Minimize yourself put yourself in a corner literally put yourself in a corner and refuse to venture out Because you're afraid of being beaten Or being expropriated Or being exposed To breach of boundaries And I repeat again smothering pampering idolizing Pedestalizing these are breaches of boundaries. They don't allow the child to separate and individuate. They are abusing Children are terrified of these as much as they are terrified of physical abuse or sexual abuse or whatever. So If you are a child and you You know, that's what's waiting That is what awaits you if you were to kind of expose yourself and become visible. You try to become invisible You know the famous stories about invisibility cloaks and so on. These are childhood imaginations This is an escape route And so You don't explore space as you should And that is disastrous consequences of the ability to form memories Because it's the same circuitry use it or lose it There is a phenomenon Uh in infancy and beyond And kate kate jeffrey says When she when she talks about Studies in animals experiments with animals and so on so forth There is a phenomenon this period of time in infancy and beyond during which we don't have a lasting We don't have lasting episodic memories. We don't seem to be laying down these memories Young infants don't form cognitive maps in the way adults do their spatial organization of information Is a lot less rich It's possible that memories you form is an infant because the hippocampus is still developing May get overwritten or disturbed by the new circuitry that is still developing And as an adult you as an adult you cannot retrieve those early life memories the way you can later ones and so No one knows what is the exact process By which the hippocampus perceives and creates representations of space And stores long-term memories and whether one is the condition to the other although It would seem Based on design principles that if the same circuitry is used for spatial processing and memory Formation then these two have something to do with each other so We're just speculating at this stage, but it seems that this is what's happening The ento entorhinal cortex Is split Into five layers And they represent different cell types entorhinal cortex is the interface between the neocortex The part where we process where we the part where intelligence resides so most people have neocortex With the exception of course of youtube viewers So neocortex is the seat of intelligence and there's the hippocampus and the mediator the facilitator the interface whatever you wish to call it Is the entorhinal um or entorhinal depending on the professor entorhinal cortex the This kind this interface this bridge entorhinal Cortex is divided to five as I said vision Primary sensory areas vision or faction audition touch A little bit of this a little bit of that as jeffreys puts it And all this feed into the entorhinal Cortex and from from the entorhinal renal or entorhinal cortex the arrows There's kind of channels channels of communication Into the hippocampus Hippocampus is divided there are many circuits in the hippocampus each one is fed by various layers of the entorhinal cortex but The connection is clear jeffreys says by the time you get to the hippocampus quite a lot of stuff has happened These senses are very highly processed But it turns out that layer two goes here layer three goes there And so and so forth. So it's all highly specialized the channels channels of communication are not diffuse Are not diffuse There's a lot of backward and forward flow of information, but along dedicated channels And she says in recent years some of the most stunning images of the hippocampus have emerged from harvard university center of brain science for brain science There's a neuroscientist there. His name is Jeff Jeff Liefman He used he uses microscopes to map neural connections in the brains of mice And he plays with genes and he causes mice to express different fluorescent proteins in in individual neural neurons It's a stunning light show Um And there are these bursts beautiful bursts of pink and blue and green these are known as brain bow brain bow photographs and he shows How the cells in the hippocampus are condensed into single orderly layers if you go to the cortex The neurons look like a galaxy Who has exploded a kind of supernova like a galaxy which has exploded a galaxy Which came across an improvised improvised explosive device But all the neurons are strewn totally randomly. It's like a big mess. It's like someone spilled neurons And you can't make head head or tails. There's no sense in any of this. Nothing is organized but the hippocampus is elegant Everything is aligned in curving our arcs It is struck. It is structured Hippocampus is the seat of order and structure Well, the cortex thrives on randomness It seems that randomness Gives rise among other things to intelligence the ability to synoptically connect things because they are adjacent by mistake So the cortex is randomized And it's it's built on coincidences But not so the hippocampus hippocampus resembles a library The cortex resembles a carnival Or a rave And the hippocampus resembles a library Their cells they're called Pyramidal neurons Pyramidal pyramids And many other neurons many neuroscientists are very fascinated by these cells and it seems that All is converging there that these cells are the key to infantamnesia, but I won't go into I won't go in any further. I'm not a neuroscientist and my My area my field is the meta phenomena the The phenomena that emerge from neuroscience Also known as mind And the connections are unequivocal early childhood abuse and talk prevent the child from Developing an ability to process space prevent the child from processing language appropriately because this language is hijacked by the by the parental edicts The entraining parental voice trauma and abuse Because they hamper the ability to process space and they hamper the ability to relate to the world by a language they Make it impossible for the child and later on the adult To tell the difference between external and internal hyperreflexivity in psychosis and narcissism Make it impossible to form memories to test for reality And the child compensates compensates with grandiose magical thinking Identity diffusion because there's no memories Memories are the glue that holds that memories make up identity. Identity is just another name for the library of memories So there's no identity. There's identity diffusion and disturbance And finally there's no separation and no individuation And the person remains stuck at around age two And these are known as narcissists Both the narcissists and the psychopath Offer you a fantasy The narcissist fantasy consists of We are going to be each other's mother And we are also going to be each other's child The psychopath's fantasy is I'm going to make all your dreams come true But both types of fantasies are predatory and you are the prey the fantasies are goal oriented and self-centered And today I'm going to discuss the dynamics of predator and prey Boring from a variety of disciplines mathematics biology psychology et cetera et cetera displaying my amazing erudition in unparalleled vocabulary Why? Because babies and bebets I am Samhagni The author of Malignan Zephlau Narcissism Revisited A former visiting professor of psychology And currently on the illustrious faculty of SEAPS Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies Cambridge United Kingdom Toronto Canada And the inevitable Outreach campus in Lagos Nigeria Which is in Africa And apropos Africa Let's talk about predators and prey What happens When the predator fails to find prey Increasingly narcissists and psychopaths Find it more and more difficult to find victims To locate targets To home in on the gullible and the vulnerable Why is that? Number one Victim awareness I started my work in the late 1980s and early 1990s When no one has heard of narcissists And so I contributed by coming up with the idea of narcissistic abuse Describing it for the first time and so on and so forth I launched a essentially global movement of victim awareness And today everyone, his dog and his mother-in-law Is either a victim of narcissistic abuse Or an expert on narcissistic abuse So there's no space left for narcissists and psychopaths I'm kidding you're not They find it increasingly more and more difficult to deceive people To pull the wool over people's eyes To drag them To groom them And to love bomb them Into the shared fantasy The more victims are aware of the attributes The behaviors, the traits, the warning signs The red alerts Which have to do with narcissists and psychopaths The more difficult narcissists and psychopaths find it To corral, cajole, or convince someone Pursuade someone to join them in the shared fantasy This is issue number one Number two Narcissistic abuse again first described by me in the 1990s Narcissistic abuse is now stigmatized Elements within the constellation of behaviors that constitute narcissistic abuse Some elements have been actually criminalized in some countries So for example coercive control Is now criminal in the United Kingdom and in other countries So narcissistic abuse is not only frowned upon Considered socially unacceptable Beyond the pale Something to be stigmatized and shunned But it's also being criminalized Now this put this together Reluctant, totally aware victims Who are on the alert Who fend off attempts by narcissists and psychopaths Because they identify them, they recognize them On the one hand And an increasing willingness To criminalize and stigmatize such behaviors And to punish the perpetrators Put these two together And you have a field day for victims And a serious emerging problem for predators What happens to a predator When the number of prey declines What happens to predators when they can no longer find prey This is a topic, the delectable topic of today's video We start of course with game theory Game theory is a branch of mathematics And game theory says that when everyone becomes a predator There's no prey The an increase in the number of predators Reduces the availability of prey Proportionally And in due time Absolutely And then everyone dies out Each member of the predator class just dies out The historical origin of the predator prey issue In game theory Can be traced back to Benda B-E-N-D-A in 1985 Benda together with some other scholars Adopted the predator prey ecology problem Into a pursuit environment Which focuses on the dynamics of cooperative behavior Between predator agents That is very interesting Because what Benda has discovered Is that there's a number of prey declines Because the prey is more alert The prey is faster The prey is for whatever reason Or the prey has died out for some reason Or the prey moved on to another niche in the ecosystem Whatever the case may be What Benda has discovered Is that predators tend to team up They tend to cooperate and collaborate In the pursuit and hunting of prey That's a point to remember Because we are beginning to see Coalitions of narcissists Groups of psychopaths Hunting together It's like herds Or tribes Or hunting expeditions Or posies So we have It's no longer an individual thing But the hunting is done in collectives Benda has predicted this Outcome We see this in politics We see this in show business We see this in other arenas Of life increasingly more so Another model is the hawk dove model Hawk like bird, dove like bird model It illustrates an evolutionary dilemma In the hawk dove model We pit pro-social and selfish behavior In direct competition Over a shareable resource You So the narcissists and psychopaths Adopt a variety of strategies To captivate you To introduce you into the shared fantasy Some of these strategies Are actually pro-social Communal Moral Narcissist type psychopaths Pretend to be sheep Rather than wolves They pretend to be co-dependent They pretend to be victims of narcissistic abuse They go online And they convince you That they have been harmed and hurt repeatedly By narcissists They're helpless They're childlike They're in need of your love and protection They keep whining about Having been abused Having been maltreated Having been mistreated And so on and so forth They cry on camera and beg for your understanding and love and collaboration This is a strategy A dangerous strategy Very typical of covert narcissists Doves, doves pigeons They're not the same Have a proclivity to share resources And this in this sense Covert narcissists are the doves In the dove-hawk model Hawks rather fight And suffer the costs In effort To acquire the resources in its entirety They refuse to share But both doves and hawks are predators It's very important to understand this And I encourage you to watch my video on mimicry Covert narcissists and many psychopaths Imitate victims In order to victimize you It's a very dangerous environment Especially online Now, there are this set of equations Mathematical equations Perish the thought And they're known as lotka voltera equations They're also known as lotka voltera predator prey model It's a pair of first-order non-linear differential equations They are used to describe the dynamics Of biological systems In which two species interact One species is a predator The other species is prey Narcissists and their victims or co-dependence Narcissists and borderlines Psychopaths and narcissists actually Psychopaths and borderlines etc So one species is predator One is prey lotka voltera model In the model Predators thrive When prey is plentiful But ultimately the predator depletes Outstrips the food supply And it is the predator which ends up declining I think this is exactly what's happening With narcissists and psychopaths They have overplayed their hand They were overconfident And consequently the number of prey The number of targets and victims available Is decreasing, is shrinking Because people have become aware Behaviors have been stigmatized Or even criminalized And not so many specimen of prey Are available to narcissists and psychopaths That's why they form collectives In order to hunt together Increasing the chances of a successful hunt As the predator population is low The prey population increases again And the cycle recommences These dynamics continue In a population cycle of growth and decline Two other scholars, Leslie and Gower Created a model Which is characterized by a logistic type Predator growth equation The environmental carrying capacity of predators Is a function of the available prey quantity So this is the Leslie Gower model It seems that everyone is in agreement That the longevity, the success, the reproducibility In terms of procreation, in biology In terms of mental contagion Or psychological contagion in society All these depend crucially on the number of suckers On the number of gullible people out there On the number of potential victims Targets, marks So the less aware a population is The more naive, this is called naive population Exactly like a virus The less immune a population is To the charms of the narcissist And the manipulations, Machiavellian manipulation Of the psychopath The more successful the narcissist Or the psychopath would be In their quest to secure the prey For a variety of reasons Shared fantasy in the case of a narcissist Some goal orientation In the case of the psychopath Narcissistic supply in the case of the narcissist Sex, power and money in the case of the psychopath They all require raw material The raw material is you The finished product is the goal In the case of the psychopath And narcissistic supply in the case of a narcissist But the raw material that goes into the manufacturing process Is absolutely limited to you You are the one If you were to deny yourself If you were to prevent access Render yourself inaccessible To the narcissist and psychopath The incidence and prevalence Of narcissism and psychopathy As adaptive strategies According to these models would decline And this is known as a cascade And we are going to discuss it a bit later Now, there is an open question here Is the virus of narcissism self-limiting or not? Is it a self-limiting organism? And I encourage you to watch the video I've made Comparing narcissism to a virus Using epidemiological models The links to all these videos are in the description So a self-limiting organism or colony of organisms Limits its own growth by its actions It's a very important thing The limitation in growth is a direct outcome of overdoing it Overdoing it Actions which are exaggerated Which are inconsiderate Which are unwise Lead to self-limitation So for example a virus Who would kill all the hosts A virus who would kill everyone Would cease to survive Because this kind of virus will run out of hosts So by killing the hosts The virus would be self-limiting Narcissists are like this kind of dumb stupid virus They kill all the hosts And sooner or later in old age They run out of hosts And they remain lonely pathetic figures A single organism may have a maximum size Determined by genetics A colony of organism may release waste Which is ultimately toxic to the colony Once it exceeds a certain level amount of population In some cases a self-limiting nature of a colony May be advantageous to the continued survival of the colony And that is a case of parasites for example So the number of members of a colony If it becomes too high It kills the host And the colony dies on Same thing is happening with narcissists As narcissism Pathological narcissism becomes a positive adaptation In our post-modern civilization As more and more people become narcissists Because narcissism pays And narcissism works It is a very number of narcissists It is this increase This exponential eruption of narcissism That will limit narcissism Narcissism is self-limiting by virtue of the fact That more and more people becoming narcissists And fewer and fewer people remain as prey It's a very simple commonsensical thing You don't need to be a scientist for this As numbers become high The host or the victims or the prey die out or disappear And this self-limitation restricts the viability of predators And it ensures the long-term survival of other species Or essentially prey We have this in medical conditions It's a condition that runs its course It's self-limiting Without the need of any external influence Or medical treatment We have many such things The common cold for example Or some varieties of the flu The fact that a condition is self-limiting Doesn't mean that medical treatment Wouldn't bring this condition or its symptoms To an end more quickly Or that medical attention is not necessary Not needed That's not what I'm saying But in the vast majority of cases Even when left to its own devices The condition is self-limiting Because predatory organisms Have built in mechanisms of equilibrium They know when to stop They know when not to not kill all the prey To not destroy all the hosts To not ruin their environment There's only one exception Human beings Human beings ruin their environment And within human beings Narcissists never know when to stop They simply don't know when to stop And so they run out of victims or prey This is reminiscent of something called Trophic cascades Narcissists are often compared to vampires Aliens or robots and so on and so forth One of the most frequent comparisons At least in my experience Is between narcissists and sharks They smell blood in the water They use cold empathy To discern your vulnerabilities Your chinks in the armor Your soft spots Your shortcomings and freighties The buttons to push And in this sense they're a little like sharks I want to read to you an extended excerpt From a book about sharks The book is titled Why Sharks Matter By David Schiffman It's an amazing book, by the way Even if you're not interested in sharks And I'm not But it's an amazing book About the dance macabre The tango Between predator and prey And the ripple effects That come from the removal Or diminished size Of a predator's population So I'm leading here To something very interesting The decline in the population of prey And the decline in the potential number of victims And targets Because they become more self-aware Or because the activity of targeting them And victimizing them Is stigmatized or criminalized or whatever The decline in the population of prey Leads to a decline in the population of the predator But what we have observed in sharks Raises a fascinating question Why are there narcissists? What did evolution want to accomplish By creating narcissists and psychopaths? Maybe these predatory creatures Unneeded somehow Maybe they have a function To drive us forward somehow I am not a proponent of this view Which is promoted by the likes of Dutton And Maccoby and others Other scholars I don't hold this view But I must admit That if we were to compare narcissists to sharks This raises some very interesting question About the indispensability Of predators We need predators actually Otherwise the whole chain of being Goes out of whack Falls apart And everything is destabilized massively This is what I am about to read to you I am going to read an excerpt From the book Why Sharks Matter By David Schiffman Listen well what happens When the shark population is overcome Reduced too dramatically And throughout my reading Ask yourself Replace the word shark with narcissists And ask yourself What would happen if all narcissists Were to vanish tomorrow If all psychopaths were to die Would that not somehow endanger our own existence Imperil the delicate equilibrium and balance That is the chain of being David Schiffman Sometimes the ecological effects Resulting from changes In predator populations Ripple through the food chain This ripple effect is called a trophic cascade The classic example of a trophic cascade Comes from the pacific northwest When Orca whales began to consume More and more sea otters In the kelp forests of the north pacific It wasn't surprising that sea otter populations declined But the plot thickened One of sea otters favorite foods Is the sea urchin Which they consume by adorably crushing them With rocks on their bellies The population declines of sea otters Then resulted in sea urchin predation release The increasing sea urchin population Ate more and more of their preferred food Seaweeds called kelp Resulting in kelp declines All of this was caused by a change at the top of the food web Even though area whales and otters didn't eat don't eat kelp Changes in how orcas whales interact with otters Significantly affect or affected kelp And that was bad for everything that lived in the kelp forests The most famous example of a trophic cascade In a terrestrial ecosystem Occurred in Yellowstone National Park As a result of wolf declines Fewer wolves meant an increase in the wolf prey population Including giant herbivores like elk More elk meant more grazing And perhaps most impactfully grazing in areas where elk Were previously afraid to graze Such as riverbanks That restricted their ability to run away from a predator This led to major disruptions in a unique Yellowstone ecosystem Called an aspen forest The Yellowstone case study Also remains one of the best examples of predator restoration When wolves were eventually restored They ate more elk Bringing the population back under control And pushing elk back to their normal feeding grounds As a result the aspen forest is growing back So what about sharks? Which are sometimes called the wolves of the sea There are two commonly cited examples of sharp driven trophic cascades Both are considered fairly controversial in the marine biology world But I'll explain them here because you are likely to come across them In the conservation discourse The first was documented in a 2007 paper Led by Ram Myers It took place near North Carolina's Outer Banks Where seven species of apex predatory sharks Have declined significantly since the 1970s Sandbar sharks experienced the least decline Eighty-seven percent Eighty-seven percent since 1972 Declines exceeding 99 percent since 1972 Have been documented among several other species of sharks These declines were believed to result in predation release Of small sharks and rays including the cow-nose ray The authors claim that this increase in cow-nose rays Cow-nose rays used to be the prey of sharks When the sharks declined almost disappeared Cow-nose rays' populations exploded This is called predation release So the authors claim that this increase in cow-nose rays Was partially responsible for a collapse in populations of base callops Once a commercially important fish in the region Resulting in a shark Cow-nose ray Scallow Trophic cascade To me says Schiffman The key message of this study was Sharks are important And bad things can happen when we overfish sharks So let's not do that Others got a different and unfortunate message from this study Oh my god Cow-nose ray populations are exploding We need to kill cow-nose rays in order to save our scallow fishery This led to the birth of the Save the Bay Eat Array movement There were even fishing tournaments for cow-nose rays Where anglers used explosive-tipped arrows To shoot at the surface swimming rays Which is hardly sporting in my opinion It is unlikely that ray populations could survive this kind of pressure For any extended time, given their very low reproductive rates I'd argue that trying to solve a conservation crisis By causing another conservation crisis is perhaps not ideal Remember throughout these texts Replace the names of the animals with narcissists and victims Okay It turns out that the data I'm continuing to read from Schiffman's book It turns out that the data showing this trophic cascade Has major flaws in its underlying assumptions And it has been thoroughly rebutted If you look closely at the data It would suggest that cow-nose ray populations Supposedly started to increase Well after scallow populations began to collapse Almost as if something else caused the scallow populations to decline Dean Grubbs who led the rebuttal pointed out that this explanation Only makes sense if you think that cow-nose rays can go back in time Like the terminator Also cow-nose ray populations aren't increasing as much as these data seem to show What's instead happening Is that existing cow-nose rays are migrating into new waters Furthermore sharp populations haven't declined as much as these data seem to show The Grubbs rebuttal also notes that including more datasets complicates The supposedly clear pattern shown by the Myers paper Finally cow-nose rays don't really eat very many scallows So although this is a well-known example of a trophic cascade That is often cited by environmentalists as a reason to protect sharks It's a fundamentally flawed one Another possible shark-driven trophic cascade might operate on the coral reefs Coral animals have a symbiotic relationship with tiny photosynthetic organisms called zooxanthelia They live inside the corals the zooxanthelia Live inside the corals and secrete sugars which the corals eat Presumably they are not diabetic Without exposure to light Xenoxanthelia, a zooxanthelia I'm sorry Cannot photosynthesize and the corals will starve their vino sugar Happily herbivorous fish like parrotfish help to graze fast-growing algae Off of the corals ensuring that sunlight can reach the zooxanthelia Parrotfish are eaten by larger fish like grouper which are eaten by you guessed it sharks The decline of shark populations may cause predation release in grouper An increase in grouper populations which then eat more and more parrotfish Fewer parrotfish means more algae growing on coral reefs which means dying corals This model seems to be essentially correct but it's more complicated than that It turns out that humans aren't just overfishing the sharks but also overfishing the grouper And in some cases even the parrotfish Algae also grows on the coral for because of warmer waters or nutrient blooms Not simply because parrotfish populations are declining Additionally corals face other threats besides algae overgrowth And while it's true that reef sharks often occupy a pretty similar Seep on the food chain as groupers some larger sharks eat small and medium-sized groupers So do sharks do sharks keep coral reefs healthy? They certainly play important roles in maintaining coral reef health Health under many circumstances but as you can see there are many variables to consider A 2013 paper claimed to find true evidence of a trophy cascade on coral reefs Specifically the authors argued that pacific coral reefs reefs that have been heavily fished were home to fewer sharks and more medium-sized predators called mesopredators And this created a situation in unprotected reefs that differed from situation in protected reefs Which had more sharks and fewer mesopredators like groupers On fished reefs with more mesopredators the authors find fewer herbivorous fish fishers In this case of a trophy cascade with declines in sharks indirectly leading to declines in herbivores Is this true? Not so fast A 2016 paper claims that the pattern isn't quite so clear The rebuttal argues that the difference in shark populations between fished and protected reefs Isn't as significant as claimed in the 2013 paper Furthermore, the 2016 paper argues that some of the fish species in the 2013 paper authors that authors counted as mesopredators Should not have been created as such because sharks don't eat these species That rebuttal got a rebuttal which got another rebuttal that's a way of science As of this writing there hasn't been any conclusive evidence of trophy cascades Driven by the loss of sharks on coral reefs In fact an early 2021 paper found pretty strong evidence of the lack of trophy cascades on the great barrier reef But the search is ongoing Other possible shark trophy cascades include a reef shark octopus rock lobster food chain Overfishing reef sharks in Australia Seems to have led to an explosion in numbers of their octopus prey Which aces all the rock lobsters and damaged One fishery yet another possibility Yet another possibly shark driven trophy cascade involves seals fewer sharks mean Means more seals which eat a lot more fish Trophy cascades are powerful forces in nature, but they're also really hard to detect Because food webs are so large and complicated I'd guess that even though some of the most popular examples of shark driven trophy cascades may be flawed It is very likely that some real cascades caused by sharks are out there Some conservation activists have taken things too far Incorrectly asserting that because of trophy cascades The crash of shark populations could be directly responsible for the extinction of all life on the earth According to this argument, which got its highest profile mention in the documentary shark water phytoplankton the base of the ocean food web Produce about half of all oxygen on earth If we lose sharks the reasoning goes this will destabilize the whole ocean Kill all the phytoplankton and result in the loss of half of all oxygen on the planet killing everything ourselves included Let me note again here that this is not correct But it's an example of using trophy cascade theory for conservation advocacy Trophy cascades are generally speaking more likely to occur in simpler ecosystems with more straightforward food chains If you have five species that serve similar ecological roles as top predators Losing one species probably won't disrupt the whole system Because the other four species can still keep mid-level predator populations in check If you have only one top predator Losing its ecological role is more likely to describe disrupt the whole system The examples described above range from hotly debated to thoroughly debunked And I share them just to illustrate the general principle despite their particular imperfections Despite their flaws these high-profile examples are still useful to think about if only because something like this is probably happening somewhere What I'm trying what I'm trying to illustrate with this very extended excerpt Is that we don't know enough About the predator-prey relationships between narcissists and psychopaths and their victims within the ecosystem known as civilization Or modern or post-modern society. We definitely don't know enough About narcissists and psychopaths interactions with targets or victims in more traditionalist conservative Documented and understudied societies and cultures all over the world which and they constitute the majority of humanity but So back off a bit Don't make exaggerated claims I'm the one who coined the phrase narcissism pandemic and narcissism epidemic. I coined these phrases at the end of the 1980s and they were later adopted and Recirculated recycled by scholars and self-styled experts throughout the decades But One shouldn't go too far. We shouldn't run too far with this metaphor. We really don't have enough information We also I'm not quite sure which type of cascade may occur Should narcissism and psychopathy become self-limiting Imagine tomorrow the overwhelming vast majority of potential victims potential targets um Are well informed well educated and well equipped To fend off the advances of narcissists and psychopaths population of narcissists and psychopaths should decline From an evolutionary point of view and gradually of course incrementally, but it should decline What would happen then? Is this a trophy cascade? Would the population of victims and targets explode? Would this destabilize human society somehow? Narciss do narcissists and psychopaths fulfill some role of control over population control some regulatory evolutionary mechanism Trophy cascades are powerful indirect interactions that it can control entire ecosystems They occur when the trophic level in a food web is suppressed so It's an ecological concept And it can be applied theoretically to populations such as narcissists and psychopaths and their victims Definitely we use these populations as cohorts in studies in psychology Narcissists and psychopaths are apex predators. They are top predators They prey upon others They prey upon people with narcissistic style as well So This would create some destabilizing effect, but isn't going to be a top down cascade That's a trophy cascade where the top predator controls The primary prey population Is it's going to be this kind of a thing? um It's it's an open It's an open question The removal of the top predator in the top down cascade alters the dynamics The primary Kind of targets and so on overpopulate And then they in their turn become predators actually So we have this possibility this happens with invasive species for example We have this possibility another possibility is it a bottom up cascade The population of Of victims Somehow controls the increase or decrease in the energy of the higher trophic levels the predators I mentioned stigmatization criminalization More awareness and so on these are controlled. These are regulatory mechanisms that somehow inhibit populations of narcissists and psychopaths and definitely inhibit their behaviors Or maybe we will come through a phase of Subsidic escape where species Species populations at one trophic level Can be supplemented By some kind of external input or external food external prey So we could see narcissists and psychopaths branching out migrating Exporting their exploitation to naive populations the same way a virus does We don't know what's going to happen, but I think it's high time To begin to discuss The impact that increasing awareness Stigmatization and criminalization The impacts that these trends Which are powerful In those are inexorable becoming stronger by the day The impacts these trends Are having on narcissists Psychopaths Their strategies choices Decisions and ultimate survival