How THEY See YOU: Narcissist, Codependent, Borderline, Psychopath (Compilation)

It may come as a shock to you, but the narcissist doesn't see you the way you see yourself. The narcissist doesn't see himself the way you see him. And frankly, it's doubtful whether the narcissist sees anyone at all.

My name is Sambakn. I'm the smiling blue professor of psychology and the author of the inestimable malignant self-love narcissism revisited, the Bible of the field, and the book that coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. Today, we're going to discuss the narcissist's point of view. How he perceives you and the relationship. Are you truly a significant other, or maybe just an insignificant other? Are you an intimate partner? Is there intimacy? And is there partnership in the relationship with the narcissist? But most importantly, what does he think about you secretly in the inner recesses of his undisclosed mind, the occult areas of his demented soul?

I know you like this. You like to think that narcissists are possessed by demons. They're not possessed by demons. They are demons. I'm kidding. I'm just kidding. Narcissists are flawed human beings with lacking equipment. Nothing more, nothing less. Terrified, traumatized kids who throw temper tantrums and can't perceive other people as separate from them. And so, let's delve straight in, straight in.

When the narcissist sees you for the first time, he takes a snapshot of you. He internalizes a snapshot and he continues to interact with the snapshot. Blah blah blah. You know this from previous videos. He also photoshops the snapshot, a process known as idealization. By idealizing you, he can idealize himself. If you are perfect and he is in possession of a perfect object, you, then he is perfect, or maybe even uber perfect, more perfect than even you.

But then gradually, life intervenes. Reality intrudes. You begin to deviate and diverge from the idealized snapshot, which pisses the narcissist off. And then he begins to change the way he sees you, the external object. Mind you, the internal object, the introject, your representation in the narcissist's mind, the snapshot, the avatar, that doesn't change until very late in the relationship. But the way he perceives you begins to change. He cannot, he cannot really accept you as separate from him. You are an extension. You're an organ. But it's like someone with a chronic illness who is very angry at his heart, or his liver, or his lungs because they give him trouble. So when you get, when you get chronically ill with your, your kidneys, for example, you may develop a hate-love relationship with your kidneys. You may resent your kidneys for giving you a tough time. Same, it's the same thing. That's how the narcissist sees you. Another arm, another leg, if you're extremely lucky, another heart.

The narcissist, first of all, is likely to convince himself that he had judged you correctly when you had met. He needs to preserve his grandiosity. The narcissist never makes mistakes. The narcissist is never wrong. The narcissist is infallible. It's inconceivable that he has misjudged you, for example. So, he's telling him, he tells himself, "I judged her correctly and appropriately when I met her. My perception of her was right. My judgment of people is intact. Nothing's wrong with me. She has changed. She has changed." Why has she changed? Well, I don't know. The influence of bad friends, her family is poisoning her against me. Um, circumstances, she is mentally ill, or she is physically, uh, ill. The medication she's taking. Um, exposure to left-wing radical ideas in college, what have you. Whatever the reason may be, uh, the narcissist convinces himself that you are being transformed, that you're in the process of metamorphosing into another, another person.

And so the gap between the snapshot and you in reality, the gap between your introject, your the internal object that stands in for you in the narcissist's mind, and you, this gap grows not only because of what you are doing. This abyss opens up also because of the internal narrative of the narcissist. And this narrative is about how you are changing for the worse. Narcissists are paranoid. They have secondary delusions. They regard the world as a hostile place out to get them, as Donald Trump.

The second, uh, process that happens with the narcissist, his point of view is that you constantly blame-shift. He thinks you're guilty. He thinks you've done something wrong. He thinks he is immaculate and innocuous and innocent. You keep blaming him for things. You keep assigning to him responsibility and guilt and accountability. And he resents this. He thinks you're manipulating him. He thinks you're playing with his mind. He thinks that's a power play and a mind game that you have embarked on. He is bewildered. He's disoriented. You are his mother. You're a mother figure. Why are you doing this to him?

And so whenever you disagree with a narcissist, or criticize something, or suggest something, or prefer, or suggest, give advice, the narcissist, or, or, or even offer help, the narcissist perceives perceives this as shifting the blame counterfactually. The facts are in the narcissist's mind that he is blameless, that he is guiltless, that he doesn't deserve any, and that what you're doing borders on malice. Mind you, everything the narcissist thinks about you, everything he says about you may be true. Even narcissists get it right from time to time. And because it may be true, even in principle, it provokes in you profound self-doubt. You begin to ask yourself, "Maybe he's right. Maybe he has a point. Maybe I'm the narcissist. Maybe I'm misbehaving. Maybe I'm too onerous, ordinary, tough, harsh, strict. Maybe I should change my ways." And this is how the narcissist molds you, makes you malleable and mutable.

The narcissist presents himself at all times as a victim. A victim of his superior, is a victim of the state, a victim of circumstances. Is he was born in the wrong period in history, is, and you're, of course, swept in this tsunami wave of self-imputed victimhood. Today, it's known as victimhood. It's a new personality construct. And so the narcissist casts himself as the, as a victim. And he does this because it affords him the high moral ground, and it's a tool of manipulation. It's also an integral part of his confabulation. He rewrites his history. He recomposes his narrative in a way that casts him in the good, in a good light, and all others in a bad light. He's the angel. All the others are demons. He has always been right. They have always been wrong. He deserved much more. They got it. He has been discriminated against, underappreciated, and generally mistreated. That's the victim stance. And he sees you as a victimizer. He sees you as an abuser, which makes communication with the narcissist very difficult because you don't have common ground, and you don't have a common language.

Even your most innocuous acts, even things you do which are unrelated to the narcissist, are going to be, are going to be fitted into the victimhood narrative. The narcissist is going to hyper-vigilantly monitor you, supervise you, spy on you, follow you around in order to gather incriminating evidence. Everything you say and everything you do can and will be used against you in the narcissist's court. You have been warned, Miranda.

And so this is the "I am the victim" thing, and you are my abuser. And he, he also thinks that you guilt-trip him. He thinks that you are an emotional blackmailer, that you actually sacrifice in order to leverage your sacrifice to make him behave in specific ways. He thinks that you love him because you want something from him. It's not real love. It's conditional love. It's manipulative love, if it is love at all. He thinks you make him feel guilty because by making him feel guilty, you can modify his behaviors, and you, you're goal-oriented. In his eyes, you're very, very close to a psychopath. And that is regardless of how empathic you are, how caring, how compassionate, and how loving. Don't think you can, by caring for the narcissist and by sharing with the narcissist, you can somehow change his mindset or state of mind. You can't, because it's not about you. It's about an internal world populated with avatars, a paracosm, an alternative reality where the narcissist writes scripts for movies. He's a movie director, an actor, and you're just an actress or a prop on his theater play stage.

So, it's not about you. Still, the narcissist perceives himself as a victim who is being emotionally manipulated and blackmailed via guilt-tripping. He accuses you when you, when you disagree with this assessment of, of you. He accuses you of being, um, of lacking self-awareness. You have no introspection. He tells you, "You can't see yourself, really. You don't look at yourself in the mirror. You are totally unaware of yourself. You have no self-awareness. You really need to get to grips with who you are. You really need to accept how flawed and wrong and sometimes malevolent you are." He is trying to convince you that there's in you a grain of evil.

Mini, all of you who miss her, here she is, always by my side and on my lips. So he tells you you're not self-aware. He also accuses you of being self-destructive, of being hateful. "You want to drag me down with you." He tells you, "Your habits are self-defeating. I'm not going to succumb to this. I'm soaring into the stratosphere. I'm bigger than this. I'm cosmically significant. I am divine. I'm godlike. You're not going to drag me to the level of a common human." In extreme cases, the narcissist may deny you sex and become celibate because by denying you sex, he transcends the foibles and the weaknesses of the human species. He becomes ubermensch. He becomes a superman. So it's important for him to sustain his grandiosity by casting you not only as an abuser but as a toxic influence. Someone who creates an ambiance and environment that reduces the narcissist to the lowest common denominator. "The narcissist is not human. He is the next stage in evolution, and you're trying to transform him or transmute him or transubstantiate him back into human. You're trying to devolve him, not evolve him, and he is not going to let you. He's not going to let you contaminate him and infect him with your low-grade humanity."

The fact that you can't appreciate the narcissist's, um, amazing exceptionalism, the fact that you underestimate, um, his rarity, his sui generis, the fact that you can't absorb or, or, or worship him as the god that he is, that just proves that you are disloyal. You're disloyal. There is this cult. There's this narrative that you belong to, and you are betraying it. There's a sense of betrayal, a bit traumatic. The narcissist has been betrayed as a child by his mother. And here comes Ripley, a reenactment of his early childhood betrayal. Actually, he pushes you to betray him. And then when you look for alternatives, he blames you for it.

"You're out to get me. You are just after my money. You lie to me. You deceive me and you cheat on me with others. You, you entrap me. I could have, I could have, I could have been much further in my career, in my life. I could have been much more accomplished, but because of you, I'm stuck here. Because of you, I can't self-actualize and realize my potential. You're a bad influence on me. You're a trap." You know, in, in, um, medieval times, they had this vagina dentata, um, vagina with with teeth. Women were considered to be predators, actually, throughout the majority of human history. Not men. Women were considered predators. The Venus trap. Venus trap. Yeah. So, he has this misogyny. He has this deeply embedded hatred of women. And by the way, everything I'm saying, just flip the genders, flip the gender pronouns, and it still, it still works. So if it's a woman, a female narcissist, a woman narcissist, she hates men, she's a misandrist. So the choice of gender pronouns in this presentation is arbitrary. You can easily flip between the genders. It's equally, equally accurate with men and women, because there are no men and women left today. Women are just men with vaginas.

So he accuses you of trapping him. He accuses you of an elaborate scheme to shackle him, imprison him, prevent him from realizing his huge potential and from self-actualizing. It's like Samson and Delilah. You cut his locks, hair locks. "You never mean what you say." He tells you, "You are, you are very devious. Um, you double-speak. It's difficult to, to tell the truth. I can't really make up what it is that you're after. I don't understand your direction and goals. You are not mysterious. You are more like devious. You're more like cunning. You're more like scheming." Again, this view of you as a psychopath, or a psychopath in the making. He blames you for gaslighting him. He tells you, "You are distorting reality, and you are impacting my ability to judge reality properly. You, you create an, um, hallucinatory nightmarish world where I'm totally disoriented, dislocated, derealized, depersonalized, and amnesiac. It's your effect or your impact on me that make me lose, makes me lose my reality testing. When I'm with you, I feel totally, um, flat, totally empty, sometimes as if I'm dead or unreal. And so I need to get away from you because you create this alternative reality for me. You force me into it. And I know it's a lie. I know it's not true. I know the world is not like this. I know I am not like this. Everything you're telling me about yourself is intended to deconstruct me and reconstruct me in your image." He's projecting. Of course, this is projection. That's precisely what he's doing to you.

And he says to you, "You hate me, while I love you self-sacrificially. I do everything for you. I did everything for you. I changed my life for you. You were the center of my world. You were my world. And look how you're treating me now. Why do you hate me? Having loved you." So, so in his mind, he's casting you as a persecutory object. You're becoming gradually the enemy. Number one, two, and three. He needs you to become the enemy because he needs to discard you because he needs to separate from the, from his original mother via you, the substitute mother. I've explained this in previous videos. Watch my, um, interview with Richard Grannon about the fantasy lives of narcissists and borderlines. So he, he is caught in these convoluted dynamics where on the one hand, you're, you're the mother figure, and on the other hand, he needs to hate you and discard you in order to separate from the mother figure and finally become an adult individual. On the one hand, it's very promising and very alluring, and so devaluing and discarding you is an irresistible proposition. On the other hand, it's very terrifying to abandon mother, or to be abandoned by her. He needs a secure base, a sense of safety. So, he keeps coming back and forth. And that is the narcissist's approach, avoidance, hot and cold, intermittent reinforcement.

Finally, he accuses you of humiliating him, shaming him, especially in front of peers, mortifying him. He begins to truly hate you. Begins to truly hate you and plot plot revenge. In many cases, that is at the stage where you should bail out because he's no longer with us. He has lost touch with reality. He's immersed in his internal murky dynamics. There's nothing further you can do for him. He is gone. He is gone far away where you could never reach. Okay, baby seal and multiple panim. My name is San Baknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. And yes, I am a professor of psychology in SEAPS, Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies, the outreach program of the CAS Consortium of Universities. A few weeks ago, I made a video about how the narcissist sees you. Today, I'm going to tell you how the borderline sees you, her intimate partner. It's going to be a tough ride. Very triggering. Mind you, make frequent stops, drink water, think positive thoughts. The borderline is a harrowing experience. Living with a borderline, let alone loving a borderline, is a suicidal mission. But it's intense. It's colorful. It makes you feel alive like nothing else. You had been warned, babysim, and shaveim. Look it up.

Okay. So, there's a borderline in your life, and you are her intimate partner. Yes. Yes. Yes. Before I get an avalanche of sanctimonious, self-righteous comments, 50% of all borderline personality disorder diagnoses are handed out to men. I propose a new diagnosis, covert borderline, which better suits men. Because while the emphasis with borderline women is about emotionality and sexuality, the emphasis in borderline men is more about grandiose power and similar things. Borderline men resemble much more narcissists than borderline women. That's why I'm proposing to break the two apart and to have an emotional dysregulation disorder assigned to women with secondary psychopathy as a self-state, and covert borderline, which is a combination of borderline and narcissism, assigned to men. Okay. So, every gender pronoun here is interchangeable. I'm going to use she. I'm going to use a female figure, female protagonist in this narrative, because hitherto, which is a fancy word for until now, uh, most BPD diagnoses were handed down to women. Women were diagnosed mostly with BPD. Okay, enough with this gender nonsense. Let's get to the point. How does a borderline see you, her intimate partner?

And so, as you well know by now, there are two stages in borderline. And these two stages in the borderline's behavior correspond to her two anxieties: abandonment anxiety, the clinical term is separation insecurity, and engulfment anxiety. The borderline's point of view is the outcome of her internal dynamics, especially the compulsive need to approach you and then avoid you. "I hate you. Don't let me go. I love you. I want you dead. I, I detest you. Don't ever leave me." These conflicting messages, these mixed signals, render the life of the intimate partner of the borderline a mayhem. Totally chaotic, utterly unpredictable, a roller coaster of emotions, reactions, and pain. Pain permeates every interaction with a borderline. Pain coupled with exhilaration, coupled with pain, coupled with exhilaration. The ups and downs of the borderline infect the partner. They are contagious.

In the approach phase, this is how the borderline sees you. "You're my world. You're my life." And she means it. She means outside of you, apart from you, there's nothing. There's no one. She kind of minimizes herself and projects herself onto you and into you. She renders herself the equivalent of an introject. She wants you to subsume her. She wants you to consume her. This is not exactly merger and fusion, which are common in codependency. This is much more than that. This is identification and introjection. It's an infantile process. The borderline is intensely childlike, which provokes in you paternal or parental reactions. The borderline parentifies you. "You're my world and you're my life because I don't know any better. Because I don't have any other access. Because you are the vector through which I exist." Detequated fringe. The borderline sees you as a savior. She forces on you the role of a rescuer. "You will save me from myself." She says, "I'm horrible. I'm intolerable. I'm poison. I ruin everything for myself and for others. And you are going to change all this. You're going to save me from myself. You're going to save me from others. And you're going to save others from me. You're going to be the buffer, the firewall between me and my pernicious radioactive impact on the world around me."

"Everything," the borderline tells you, "everything is meaningless without you. Your existence as my intimate partner imbues the world, events, other people, interactions with sense. You, my intimate partner, you make sense of reality for me. You are my reality testing." The borderline is likely to often ask you, "Do you think the same? Is it true?" Because you are the yardstick of her universe. You are her reality. You are a stable rock, guaranteed presence, permanence, constancy, determinacy. When you are there in her life, the borderline feels utterly oceanic, safe. You are, in other words, a secure base. Again, these are infantile childhood dynamics. But you have other roles in the borderline's life during the approach phase. Don't ever mix your drinks. You stabilize the borderline's moods. She has ups and downs. It's known as mood liability. She's depressive and she's a bit manic, which is the reason why many diagnosticians confuse and conflate borderline personality disorder with bipolar disorder. Wrong. Of course, the first is a personality disorder. The second, the latter is a mood disorder. But people with borderline personality disorder cycle all the time. And this rapid cycling of moods, affects, cognitions, decisions, choices, values, behaviors, reactions, this renders the borderline identityless. This is called identity disturbance. It's as if she has no core, no kernel, no stable, um, atom inside her which kind of, kind of, uh, oscillates and determines her time. The borderline is a river in flux, an ephemeral cloud, and it is the role of the intimate partner, you, to stabilize, says the borderline, to stabilize my moods. You should regulate your emotions because with you I feel safe, and with you I feel whole. I feel completed. Without you, I'm partial. Without you, I am almost dead. Parts of me decay and decompose and fall apart and disintegrate. Without you, you are the vital, you are the animating force within me, says the borderline.

"When you are with me, committed to me, monopolized by me, 100% mine, possessed by me, owned by me, inside me in every way, sexual and otherwise, you are me. But you are a better me. You're a stronger me. You're more stable me. And so I can merge with you, thus improving my functionality, allowing me to cope, to survive, to somehow go through life because I don't like life. I hate life and I hate who I am in life. I need you to live another life for me vicariously, by proxy, and I will give my life for you. I will sacrifice myself." Self-sacrificial. It's the same with the narcissist, by the way. He sacrifices his true self for a false self. The borderline also has a false self. But her false self merges with the intimate partner, a process known as external regulation. So gradually, you are sucked into the vortex of the borderline. You begin to feel responsible for her moods, her emotions, even her cognitions. She pretends to be dependent on you all the time, fostering dependency in you. You are becoming codependent on the borderline because she can't live without you. She can survive without you. You feel responsible. She's very childlike. She's very vulnerable. She cries. Her beautiful eyes tear up anytime you threaten to leave or to go. And you just can't take it. She pushes all your buttons. She leverages your softness and your empathy. All your need to be needed, or your grandiosity. The borderline is adept at finding, finding all the chinks in your armor and then invading you and penetrating you like no other.

The borderline says, "I'm bad. I'm evil. I'm unworthy. I'm poisonous. I'm a bad object. But with you, my intimate partner, I feel good. I feel worthy because you accept me as I am. Because you love me as I am. Because you see me like no other. And because you enable and empower every part of me, every hue and every frequency in my spectrum, I come, I become more through you. I self-actualize through your agency." Borderline borrows your agency in order to become more self-efficacious. But in the process, she renders you less agentic. And this is merely the approach side. Now we are heading into the real turmoil, the avoidance.

You can't win with a borderline. You love her. You're intimate with her. You lose her. You're cold and detached and neutral and therapeutic and aloof. You lose her. You try to help her too much, give her advice, direct her. You lose her. You ignore her. You let her live her own life. You lose her. It's a lose-lose proposition, or a lose-win proposition in some cases, but usually a lose-lose proposition. There's no winning strategy with a borderline. And some people are addicted to the ride, to the drama, to the roller coaster. They don't care about the borderline. They, they want, they want to experience the borderline dysregulation vicariously. They love the ups and downs. They adore waking up in the morning not knowing what the day will bring. Borderline guarantees this serendipity, this unpredictability, this inconstancy, impermanence, and indeterminacy. The borderline is a bag full of surprises, a never-ending adventure, a risk, a novelty, a danger lurking in your own bed. How is this resistible? It's not. It's not even for healthy people.

So approach is always followed by avoidance, regardless of your behavioral choices and regardless of your strategies with the borderline. Approach and avoidance repetition compulsion in the borderline is, as the name implies, a compulsion. It's out of the borderline's control, and it is not mitigated or affected by any external factors or parameters. Some stage the borderline says, "I'm overwhelmed by pain. You are hurting me owing to your rejection and abandonment." And yet the borderline tends to interpret almost everything as a rejection. Almost any behavior is a form of abandonment. You are too long on the phone with a business associate. You're abandoning and rejecting. Go on a business trip. You're abandoning and rejecting. You have your own set of friends. You're abandoning and rejecting. You cast a glance at a beautiful woman in a restaurant. You're abandoning and rejecting. You refuse to countenance and accept the borderline's egregious misconduct and bad behavior. You're abandoning and rejecting. You disagree with the borderline more than once. You're abandoning and rejecting. Everything is abandonment and rejection in the borderline's eyes. And she often projects abandonment and rejection onto you. It is she who wants to abandon and reject you. And she projects it onto you. She anticipates abandonment and rejection. After all, she is a bad object. She's unworthy. She's corrupt. She's unlovable. She's inadequate. Why would you not abandon and reject her? It's inevitable, ineluctable that you should. So, she prepares herself. She preemptively cheats on you. She prophylactically abandons you first before you abandon her.

"You're not protective. You don't love me. Really, your love is not true. You don't care about me. You found someone else to take my place. You're disloyal. You're looking for alternatives." And no amount of proofs to the contrary, no amount of evidentiary presentation would help you. She's made up her mind. Don't confuse her with the facts. Most borderline women are also misandrists. They hate men because they've been exposed to the vagaries, vagaries of abuse and bad relationships. They're post-traumatic. So they're likely to punish you for being men. They're likely, for example, to cheat on you in order to cause you pain, or to triangulate to accomplish the same, to get a rise out of you by sexually self-rushing with other men. The borderline accomplishes multiple goals simultaneously. She affirms and confirms the bad object in her, thus justifying her anticipation of rejection and abandonment. She also proves to herself that all men are immoral beasts. The all men take advantage of heartbroken, damaged women such as herself, and that upholds her misandrist, men-hating view.

Cheating is only one type of reckless behavior. Promiscuity, one type of reckless behavior. The borderline can become violent, aggressive in other ways. Shopaholic, workaholic, pathological gambler. There are numerous ways to self-destruct. But whenever the borderline anticipates abandonment and rejection, she decompensates. All her defenses collapse. And at that point, she's ready to move on to a stage called acting out. But not before she switches into another self-state, a secondary psychopathy self-state. She becomes merciless, disempathic, hateful, revengeful. She needs to prove to herself that she is still irresistible, and she would do it with another man. She needs to prove to him, to herself, that she's omnipotent. Her grandiosity equals easily the narcissist. So she would, I don't know, overspend, deplete the family savings in retail therapy, spray shopping. Reckless behaviors are very common in borderline, in the acting out phase, be it with men, be it with money, be it with violence, be it with behaviors such as drunk driving, etc., etc.

At some point, the borderline decides upon the following sequence. "You're a man. She's a bad object. Because you're a man, and therefore impervious to the needs, emotions, and love of a woman. Because you're a man, you're evil. You're a beast. You're immoral. Because she's a bad object, you're going to abandon her. You're going to reject her. She needs to strike first." So she would decompensate, she would switch to a psychopathic state, and she would act out. And while she does this, she experiences triple dissociation: three types of dissociation: amnesia, depersonalization, and derealization. And the borderline experiences typically two or all three during a period of acting out. Amnesia. She deletes the memories, simply. She has no access to them. She has very blurred memories, even when she's not drunk. Autopilot. Depersonalization. She feels that she is not inside her body, that it's just she is just going through the motions, that her body is some kind of independent entity taking on a life of its own. Depersonalization. "It's not me. I'm not there. This is not happening to me. I'm not doing this." Derealization. The whole thing feels like a movie. It's not real. It's dreamlike or nightmarish. These are three mechanisms of dissociation that operate in a borderline that had been hurt, that had been rejected, that had been abandoned, that had been humiliated. This is her reaction. She acts out dissociatively. She says to herself, "I need to do something. I have to do something. I need to do anything. I need to hurt him, my intimate partner. And then, having hurt him, the power matrix is restored because it's a power play. Of course. Having hurt him, and the power, power matrix, power balance restored, I can regain his love. I'm going to cheat on him and still regain his love. I'm going to destroy his finances, and he would still love me. I need to test him to the limits. I need to push beyond the most extreme nether regions of my world and then act in ways which are so egregious, so ostentatious, so horrible, so beyond the pale, that if he still loves me after all this, it means that he really loves me." It's a test of loyalty, which many intimate partners or friends often fail. It's a test of loyalty and a test of the veracity of the intimate partner's love, because a borderline never trusts the intimate partner to truly love her. How can anyone love her? She's horrible. So she acts horrible. She becomes the bad object, boorish, or whatever. And then she returns to the intimate partner, begging for forgiveness, riven with guilt and shame and discomfort and ego dystony, begging on her knees to be forgiven and accepted back to the fold. And if the intimate partner says yes, for a while, she rests assured that she's loved. She feels accepted.

The avoidance phase. In the avoidance phase, the borderline openly says, "You want me dead. You want to shackle me. You want to chain me to your world or to your bed. You want me to be only yours. You're meant to disappear into you." She says to the partner, "You've changed. You blame-shift. I'm the victim, not you. You guilt-trip me. I've done nothing wrong. You have rejected me. You have abandoned me. And so I was just retaliating, and I didn't even know what I was doing because I was dissociating. It wasn't me. I don't feel it. I don't feel it wasn't me." There's some Vakin with his self-state theory. So I think it was a self-state. It wasn't me. She says to the intimate partner, "You're not even self-aware. You're very self-destructive. You're going to destroy our relationship. Never mind what I've done. You can forgive me. You know, I can't help it. You know, it's stronger than me. You know, it's not me. I wasn't there when I shagged this guy. When I slept with him, I wasn't there. It was just my body, and anyhow, meaningless because I love you and only you. You're judgmental. You're overcritical, and you want to drag me with you. You're just after my looks. You just want to have sex. You don't really love me."

And paranoid ideation sets in in the avoidance phase. Borderline becomes paranoid. She has, she develops secondary delusions. A persecutory object, which used to be you, the idealized object of the intimate partner, the idealized introject, the internal object, is replaced by a persecutory one. The intimate partner becomes the enemy. "I love you. Don't leave me. I hate you. Stay with me. I want to kill you. I hope you live forever." The secondary object. And the borderline is likely to tell you, "You're lying to me. You constantly deceive me. You constantly cheat on me. You're out to get me. You entrap me. You never mean what you say. You gaslight me. You hate me, while I love you unconditionally and self-sacrificially. You don't know how to love. You are humiliating me and shaming me all the time. You're malicious. You know how guilty I feel. You know how shameful I feel for what I've done. And yet you harp on it, and you keep bringing me back to these memories which I want to erase, which I just want to forget. And yes, of course, it will happen again. But that's just the way I am. It's a take it or leave it proposition. If you truly love me, you will accept me. And now that you have survived the ordeal, the test that I've imposed on you, now I know that you truly love me. And now I can approach you again. Again, you become my world. You are my life. You will save me from myself and from others. Everything is meaningless without you. You're a stable rock. You stabilize my moods. You regulate my emotions. With you I feel safe and whole, completed. I will give my life for you. I'm bad and evil, but with you I feel good and worthy because you've just proven that you accept and love me as I am." A borderline. Okay, baby seal.

This is my Christmas baby seal, and I'm with you today to discuss how does the codependent see you, her intimate partner. This is the third in a series of three videos. The first one is how does the narcissist see you? The second one is how does the borderline see you? And now, how does the codependent see you? It's reminiscent of the World Series, only much more thrilling and much less predictable. My name is Sambati. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm also a professor of psychology in SEAPS, Center for International Advanced Professional Studies, the outreach program of the CES Consortium of Universities. Yep. This over. We can go straight into the codependent's mind.

The codependent says to her intimate partner, "I need you. I depend on you. I won't survive without you. I'm afraid that you will dump me." And her insistence in repeating these sentences borders on brainwashing or indoctrination. She leverages learned helplessness into an art form. It is the equivalent of emotional blackmail. The codependent says, "I can't make sense of the world without you. I need you to make decisions for me. I want you to rescue and protect me, especially from myself. I am so, I'm so unsure of who I am and what is the best course of action that you have become my lodestone." Her clinginess and neediness are couched in words of wisdom. She says, "I have so much ambition, so much energy and imagination and a lot of insight, but I lack self-confidence, and it's holding me back. I don't trust my own abilities and judgment. And that is where you, my intimate partner, comes in as my alter ego, as my, uh, facilitator. Tell me," she says. "Just keep telling me that you love me. Tell me this all the time, unsolicited. I need you to tell me this. I need you to reassure me because it feels so wonderful to love you. It feels so magnificent to be needed and wanted finally by someone. You're the only person in the world who cares about me and loves me, and it makes me, makes me feel alive again. Without you, I'm numb. Without you, I'm dead. So I want to become one with you. I want to merge with you. I want to fuse with you. I want us to be inseparable because I love myself through you. I demand that you give me what I need because I always give you what you need. And I do it unquestioningly. I do it unhesitatingly. I, I submit to your every whim and wish. I never disagree with you. I never criticize you. Doesn't this call for reciprocity? Don't I deserve something for putting up with you?" Essentially, "I love you. Don't ever leave me. Take me everywhere with you. I wish I could fit into your pocket. We will do everything together, always. And I will be your child, and you will keep me safe." I call this in-house talking, by the way.

And the codependent continues her soliloquy. She says, "Never mind what you do to me. I will always be here by your side. I will always have your back. I will save you. I will have pity on you when no one else will. And I'll redeem you. I feel guilty and responsible for your abuse. And because sometimes I'm considering to abandon you, but I never, I never will. Rest assured, it's only me saying stupid things. Don't pay attention. I cannot live apart from you. I cannot have a life without you anymore. I wish I could overcome you. I wish I could erase you, but this will never happen." This is the codependent's voice. This is how she sees her intimate partner.

I wrote in the open site encyclopedia the entry about codependent personality disorder, and I said there, "The codependent dependent molds herself or himself. Yes. Molds herself and bends over backward to cater to the needs of her nearest and dearest and to satisfy their every whim, wish, expectation, and demand. Nothing is too unpleasant or too unacceptable if it serves to secure the uninterrupted presence of the codependent's family and friends and the emotional sustenance that she can extract or extort from them. Codependent does not feel fully alive when she is alone. She feels helpless, threatened, ill at ease, and childlike. This acute discomfort drives the codependent to hop from one relationship to another. The sources of nurturance are interchangeable to the codependent. Being with someone, anyone, no matter who, is always preferable to agonizing solitude."

There are several types of codependence. Codependency is a complex, multifaceted, and multidimensional defense against the codependent's fears and needs. There are five categories of codependency stemming from the respective ideologies. Number one, codependency that aims to fend off anxieties related to abandonment. These codependents are clingy, smothering, and prone to panic. They are plagued with ideas of reference, referential ideation. They display self-negating submissiveness. The main concern of these types of codependents is to prevent their victims, friends, family members from deserting them or from attaining true autonomy and independence. These codependents merge with their loved ones and experience any sign of abandonment, actual, threatened, anticipated, or even imagined, as a form of self-annihilation or amputation. In this, the codependent is very similar to the borderline, resembles it.

The second type of codependency is geared to cope with the codependent's fear of losing control by feigning helplessness and neediness. Such codependents coerce their environment into ceaselessly catering to their needs, wishes, and requirements. This is control from the bottom. These codependents are little drama queens, and their life is a kaleidoscope of instability and chaos. These codependents refuse to grow up. They force their nearest and dearest to treat them as emotional or as physical invalids. They deploy their self-imputed deficiencies and disabilities as weapons. They wield them as weapons. But these types of codependents use emotional blackmail, and when necessary, they, uh, threaten to secure the presence and blind compliance of their suppliers, one way or another. Both types, by the way, the first type and the second type, do this.

Then there is the third type, the vicarious codependent. Vicarious codependents live through others, like the moon with the sun, reflected light. Vicarious codependents sacrifice themselves in order to glory in the accomplishments of their chosen targets. They subsist on reflected light, on secondhand applause, and on derivative achievements. They have no personal history, having suspended their own lives, wishes, preferences, and dreams in favor of someone else's. One type of such vicarious codependent is the inverted narcissist. I'm quoting from my book, Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, 10th edition. The inverted narcissist, a subtype of covert narcissist. This is a codependent who depends exclusively on a narcissist. A narcissist codependent. If you're living with a narcissist, if you have a relationship with one, if you are married to one, if you're working with a narcissist, it does not mean that you're an inverted narcissist. To qualify as an inverted narcissist, you must crave to be in a relationship with a narcissist, regardless of any abuse inflicted on you by him or her. You must actively seek relationships with narcissists, and only with narcissists, no matter what your bitter and traumatic past experience has been. You must feel empty and unhappy in relationships with any other kind of person except the narcissist. Only then, and if you satisfy the other diagnostic criteria of dependent personality disorder, can you be safely labeled an inverted narcissist.

The fourth type of codependent is the borderline codependent or borderline narcissist. These codependents oscillate between periods of clinging and other codependent behavior patterns, which they interpret as intimacy, and periods of aloofness, detachment, and emotional neglect and abandonment, which they regard as legitimate and the only possible manifestations of their personal autonomy and space. Codependent or borderline narcissist also tend to form with their intimate partner a shared fantasy, a shared psychosis, for example. These are all the outcomes of their overwhelming and all-pervasive abandonment anxiety. They either smother their partner in an attempt to forestall abandonment, or they preemptively abandon ship, thus avoiding hurt and maintaining an illusion of control over the situation. "I walked out on her, and I dumped her, not the other way around." The codependent deploys strategies such as merger, becoming one with her intimate partner while renouncing all personal autonomy and independence of both of them, up to the point of a shared fantasy. So this is one strategy deployed by codependents. There is another strategy known as co-extensivity. The, I call it the ventriloquist, the ventriloquist defense, insisting that the partner mind-read her and acts in ways that reflect her inner psychological states and moods, which are not communicated. Then there is shifting boundaries, using behavioral unpredictability and ambient uncertainty to induce paralyzing dependence in the partner. And finally, the fifth type of codependent is another form of dependence that is so subtle that it eludes, eluded detection until very recently. So the fifth type of codependent is known as counterdependent. Counterdependents reject and despise authority. They are consummating and they often clash with authority figures such as parents, bosses, the law. Their sense of self-worth and their very self-identity are premised on, and they are derived from, um, this autonomy. In other words, they are dependent on these acts of bravura and defiance. They are personal autonomy militants. Counterdependents are fiercely, uncompromisingly independent on the surface. They're controlling. They're self-centered. They're aggressive. But actually, they're highly dependent on these displays of reactance. Many of them are antisocial and use projective identification. They force people to behave in ways that buttress and affirm the counterdependent's view of the world and his expectations. And these behavior patterns are often the result of deep-seated fear of intimacy. In an intimate relationship, counterdependents feel enslaved, enslaved, captive, shackled. Counterdependents are locked into approach-avoidance repetition compulsion cycles. Hesitant approach is followed by avoidance of commitment. Avoidance of commitment. They are counterdependents, lone wolves and bad team players, but highly dependent on reacting to other people. Counterdependence is a reaction formation. The counterdependent dreads his own weaknesses. He seeks to overcome them by projecting an image of omnipotence, omniscience, success, self-sufficiency, and superiority. It's very similar to narcissism. Most classical overt narcissists are actually counterdependent. Their emotions and needs are buried under scar tissue which had formed, coalesced, and hardened during years of one form of abuse or another. Grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, and of winning haughtiness usually hide knowing insecurity and a fluctuating sense of self-worth.

There may be a sixth form of codependency, and I call it situational or late-onset codependency. Some people develop codependent behaviors and traits in the wake of a life crisis or a trauma, especially a traumatic relationship, especially if it involves an abandonment and the resulting solitude, a divorce, an emptiness. Such late-onset codependency fosters a complex emotional and behavioral chain reaction whose role is to resolve the inner conflict by ridding oneself of the emergent undesirable codependent conduct. Consciously, such a part, such a patient may at first feel liberated, but unconsciously, being abruptly dumped and lonesome is a disorienting and disconcerting effect. I have dedicated a whole video to situational codependency and late-onset codependency. I recommend that you watch it. Thank you for listening, and happy new year. Tomorrow, a video about the best New Year's resolution you can ever make: Get rid of a fake friend.

I'm going to take you on a tour of possibly the most desolate wasteland, the most terrifying landscape and territory in the entire universe: the psychopath's mind. My name is Sambaknim. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of clinical psychology. And today, we're going to tour the psychopath's inner recesses. How does he see you? How does he perceive of others? How does he conceive of human beings and of himself within this working model? It is not, um, an easy question. It's difficult to answer. And it's difficult to answer because, exactly like the narcissist, the psychopath lacks emotional empathy. He has cold empathy, a combination of reflexive and cognitive empathy, but he lacks emotional empathy. Exactly like the narcissist, the psychopath has access to negative emotions, which are amplified tenfold over the narcissist. When the psychopath is angry, he rages. When he rages, he is violent. So psychopaths, in many respects, are exaggerated versions of regular, run-of-the-mill, normal, so-called healthy, so-called human beings. But on the other hand, they lack the basic machinery of being human. They lack positive emotions. They lack empathy. And in the absence of positive emotions and empathy,

How human can they be? It's another topic for today's lecture. So let's start with the basics.

Now the psychopath regards the world as a hostile jungle, a war, a war zone, a battlefield. Everyone is out to get him. Everyone is out to take him down. Everyone is a potential enemy. People hiding knives and just waiting for the moment to stab him in the back. Betrayal is his daily bread.

Now when I say "his" in this case, it's justified because the majority of psychopaths are men. Although the number of women diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, which is the clinical uh term for psychopathy, the number of women is increasing, has been increasing dramatically since the 1980s. Still the majority of men and because the majority of men majority are men, perhaps it is it is a testosterone-laden view of the universe. Dog eat dog, survival of the fittest. Um, if you don't fight, you die. So, this is how they see the world. And everyone in the world is a kind of military asset or a potential weapon.

Psychopaths, in other world, in other words, weaponize everything. While in other mental health disorders, people sexualize everything. The psychopath weaponizes everything, including, by the way, his sexuality.

The psychopath regards other people as objects. The way you regard inanimate objects, your refrigerator, your smartphone, your television set, your laptop. Psychopath sees you the same way. Objects are immutable. They're responsive. They're functional. These are the three crucial elements in objects. They don't change. They're responsive to your needs and commands. You know, you use a remote control to change channels and they are responsive. And they are functional. They fulfill some function.

Now, in cognitive development, we have something called object identity. It is the awareness that an object is the same even though it may undergo transformations. For example, take your coffee mug. Don't take my coffee mug. Take your coffee mug. Don't be psychopaths. Okay? Take your coffee mug. Your coffee mug remains the same object despite differences in size, distance, color, lighting, orientation, how much coffee you pour in, how much coffee you have drunk, etc., etc. Shape. It's still a coffee mug. There is some essence of coffee mugness and this is object identity.

Psychopaths have an overdeveloped sense of object identity. In other words, they distill, they isolate, they extract, they extract the essence of people around them. And rather than refer to people around them as three-dimensional objects with a separate external existence with needs and hopes and dreams and fears and priorities and so on so forth. The psychopath relates exclusively to the extricated essence to this.

So when the psychopath sees you, the psychopath analyzes you using cold empathy. The psychopath isolates your possible utility, in which ways you could be of use to the psychopath. And this is your essence. From that moment on, the psychopath would interact and refer to your essence. The rest, the rest of you is of no interest to the psychopath.

So psychopaths reduce people to functions. They dehumanize them. They functionalize them. And from that moment on, they regard them as immutable, unchangeable, fixed, frozen in time. In other words, psychopathy involves object fixation or perhaps more precisely object identity fixation where they are incapable of perceiving changes in people. The subtle transmutations that people undergo on a minute-by-minute basis. They're incapable, psychopaths are incapable of interacting with the multifarious facets, the kaleidoscopic nature of people. They reduce them to point-like entities and they continue to interact with these entities.

Now this is not the same as snapshotting or introjection in narcissists. This narcissist snapshots you and introjects you in your totality. The narcissist, when when the narcissist creates an introject of you, the introject contains all the information about you. It is true that the introject is incapable of change, but the introject is complete and in the narcissist's case, the introject can be somehow modified. For example, the the narcissist can idealize the introject and then devalue the introject.

With a psychopath, that's not the case. There is a there is a pinpointed reduction of you to a single sentence or a single statement and all the interactions are with this statement and this statement never changes or if it does change, uh, it is erased and a new statement takes its place as we will see momentarily and I call it object identity fixation.

The process of object learning in psychopathy, making a connection or an association between one aspect of an object and another is disrupted. Object learning in psychopathy is disrupted. I give you an example of object learning. You have a cucumber. A cucumber is long and a cucumber is green. That is object learning. You associate the two qualities of a cucumber. And these two qualities put together give rise to the cucumberness of the cucumber. The psychopath is incapable of doing this with people.

In other words, the psychopath's view of people is very infantile and is essentially based on some elaborate modification or elaborate rendition of splitting. The psychopath reduces you to an all-good object. In other words, an all-useful object. An object that can further the psychopath's goals, allow the psychopath to accomplish things, and to experience the gratification of goal orientation. So then you're all good. And you're all bad if you stand in the way of the psychopath. If you're an obstacle, a hindrance, an impediment, if you fight back, if you resist the psychopath. So all good, all bad. But in psychopathy language, psycho language, all useful and all obstacle, it's splitting all the same. And splitting interferes with object learning and creates a fixation, freezes the object identity.

So the psychopath gets stuck. He is unable to integrate the various facets and dimensions and aspects and behaviors and manifestations and changes and transformations and transmutations of an object. It's a very, very immature and infantile way of seeing people. People in the psychopath world, people are either tools or they're obstacles or they don't exist. People's existence emerges from and comes to the attention and awareness and consciousness of a psychopath only if they are useful or if they are a hindrance, if they are an obstacle on the way to accomplishing a goal. You're either with me or you're against me. You're my friend or my foe. You're with me or you're my enemy. Again, as we can see, this is a kind of extended splitting, a splitting mechanism.

And so, in the psychopath's world, there are two groups of people who stand out in sharp relief. They're noticeable. The psychopath notices them. Psychopath pays attention to them, monitors them, supervises them, micromanages them, spies on them. And these people are the tools and the obstacles. All other people, as far as a psychopath is concerned, do not exist. And I don't mean this metaphorically or figuratively. They don't exist literally. A psychopath is incapable of perceiving the existence of people who do not serve him in some way or fight him and resist him in some way. These are the only two groups which uh kind of gain um a sense of being in the psychopath world.

Now this is a this is similar to narcissism. In pathological narcissism, the narcissist is incapable of perceiving the externality and separateness of other people. But whereas the narcissist is incapable of perceiving anyone's separate existence. As far as a narcissist is concerned, he or she is the only existing object. In other words, it's solipsism. With psychopathy, uh the psychopath is healthier, let's say, more endowed in this sense. The psychopath is capable of noticing, accepting, embracing, and acting on and in and with the separateness and the externality of people. Psychopath recognizes people as external to him, as separate from him, as agents, people with agency and autonomy, personal autonomy and independence. And the psychopath doesn't resent this. Unlike the narcissist who is hell-bent on denying you your personal autonomy and independence and agency, the psychopath doesn't care as long as you don't stand in his way, as long as you don't hinder his efforts, as long as you don't become an obstacle on the way to whatever goal he is pursuing.

So, you're a tool if you collaborate with the psychopath. You're an obstacle if you stand in the way of the psychopath. You are non-existent otherwise. These are the three categories. And there are transition rules. You uh as a as a human being, as an external object, you could transition from being irrelevant and therefore unnoticed and therefore non-existent. You can transition from this status to being a tool or to being an obstacle. If you bring yourself to the psychopath's attention by offering him something useful, by suggesting a collaboration, by rewarding him somehow, then you become a tool. You used to be irrelevant. You used to be non-existent. You used to be a penumbral shadow shadow of a human being, a shade. And now suddenly you erupt into full-dimensional life. You erupt into the consciousness of the psychopath as a tool, as an instrument.

On the other hand, if you resist the psychopath, if you fight the psychopath, if you criticize, disagree with the psychopath, create coalitions against the psychopath, you become an obstacle. Again, you transition from having been irrelevant, having been a shadow, having been non-existent, having been a non-entity and a non-being. You transition from that to having become an obstacle.

Now you're an obstacle. As an obstacle, the psychopath perceives you as you are. He perceives, he fully perceives you as external, separate. He realizes you have your own priorities and dreams and fears and emotions and cognitions, so on so forth. And the same if you're a tool. Actually, the psychopath studies you meticulously. It's a survey, surveillance kind of psychology. It surveils you. He studies you meticulously, spies on you. He accumulates, gathers information and intelligence on you and so forth in order to leverage you somehow or in order to eliminate you. The narcissist never does this. Is incapable of doing this because he never perceives you as real, while the psychopath does.

So the first rule of transition in the psychopath's universe, you could transition from being irrelevant or non-existent to being a tool. You could transition from being irrelevant or non-existent to being an obstacle. You could transition from being a tool to being an obstacle. But you cannot transition from being a tool to being irrelevant, contrary to myths online. So if you used to be the psychopath's instrument, if you used to work with the psychopath, collaborate with the psychopath, reward the psychopath, enhance the psychopath, help the psychopath, assist the psychopath, support the psychopath. If you were in cahoots with the psychopath, in a coalition with the psychopath, if you were part of the entourage of the psychopath, an acolyte, a psychopant, an admirer, you name it. If you were with the psychopath in any context and if you helped the psychopath attain and obtain his goals and then you stop or your utility is over, you transition to being an obstacle because this is very frustrating to the psychophile. The cessation of your function. The fact that you're no longer functional, no longer responsive, no longer promote him, no longer help him, no longer um um kind of drive him towards the accomplishment of his goals. This frustrates the psychopath. And we know from Dollard's work, we know that frustration leads to aggression. When your utility is over for your own reasons or because it's just over, you can't help the psychopath anymore, you become an obstacle because you provoke a new trigger in the psychopath, frustration, and then he becomes very aggressive towards you.

So actually, there are only two rules of transition. If you used to be irrelevant, you can become an an instrument or you can become an obstacle. If you used to be an instrument or a tool, you can become an obstacle, but never irrelevant, and you're very likely to provoke aggression. This has to do with something called reversal of effect. In psychoanalytic theory, reversal of effect is a change in the aim of an instinct into the opposite. So the instinct, for example, regarded you as a love object and then there's a reversal and you become a hate object. That is reversal of effect. Another example, when you are internally a masochist, you have a masochistic impulse to hurt to hurt yourself or more precisely to hurt the self, to to hurt the ego, and then it is transformed into a sadistic impulse to hurt other people. So you start off as a masochist. You want to hurt yourself and then there's a reversal of effect and you become a sadist and you hurt other people.

Psychopaths go through a reversal of effect when you cease to be a tool or an instrument. There is a reversal of effect and the psychopath transitions from positive emotional investment, positive cathexis in you. You used to be a love object, for example. So he transitions from this to negative cathexis. You become an enemy. You become demonic. You become hated. And the and the psychopath is so frustrated that is the only option is to eliminate you somehow, to destroy you, to ruin anything, I don't know, your reputation, your financial, your financials, your your family, your your job. Something. It's not revenge, it's the need to remove a source of frustration. Psychopaths cannot countenance frustration because they're so goal-oriented. They need to accomplish goals because goals guarantee gratification and they're addicted to the pleasure principle. They are pleasure-driven and they are power-driven and frustration takes away the pleasure and takes away the power and leaves them denuded of any reason to exist. So they need to destroy you and remove you from the scene. And they do this through a reversal of effect.

Obstacles must be eliminated forthwith. Instruments can be on standby. Instruments can be deployed. Instruments can be withdrawn. That is up to the psychopath's discretion. A little like in the military, you know, if you're in the reserves or if you're in the regular military, if you're So, a little like in the military, the psychopath deploys his battalions, deploys his resources and his sole decision-making and choice. But obstacles trigger the psychopath into destructive, violent, aggressive behavior. Anything from a smear campaign to murder, essentially.

So when you lose your utility as an instrument because you have chosen to disengage from the psychopath, this exacerbates the frustration because it challenges the psychopath's perception as omnipotent, all-controlling and takes away his power, disempowers him. When on the other hand, you lose your utility as an instrument because you're no longer useful. You have lost your access. Your contacts have died. I don't know, you don't have money anymore to give him. You are growing old and the sex is not what it used to be. You have lost your utility. At that point, you become a burden and a threat. A burden and a threat because you're also a repository of memories of glories past. The psychopath needs to eliminate any record and any trace of failure or potential failure. And your transmutation, your transformation, your transsubstantiation into um an obstacle. You used to be a tool, now you're an obstacle is unacceptable to the psychopath because it implies that there are processes outside his control, that the power is outside himself. He is not godlike. This is a psychopath's grandiosity.

Now, a small percentage of psychopaths are also narcissists. Online experts who claim that all psychopaths are narcissists need to go back to school, regardless of their academic degrees. Only a small portion are also narcissists. But it is true that both narcissists and psychopaths are grandiose. And whereas the locus of the narcissist's grandiosity can be anything, even victimhood. You know, I'm the ultimate victim or I'm the ultimate genius or whatever. The locus of the psychopath's grandiosity has to do usually with power. Power granted to him by money, power granted to him by sex, power. And he cannot countenance and survive instances and reminiscences of disempowerment. He cannot cope with the realization that he is not as powerful as he wants to believe that he is. And your transition from instrument to obstacle does this to him. Reminds him of his limitations and incapacity.

So he needs to eliminate. Accomplishment of goals, I mentioned, yields gratification. It also upholds and buttresses the psychopath's grandiosity. But much more than that, it's a pleasure. Whereas healthy people, normal people experience pleasure in a variety of ways, hundreds of ways, the psychopath experiences pleasure only when he has accomplished his goals. Actually, the goals sometimes are not that important. It's the accomplishment of the goals, the attainment of the goals, having proven to himself that he's able to transcend all obstacles, the perseverance, the stamina that generate the gratification, the sense of unmitigated power over circumstances, over environments, over other people. And it's the kind of power that is essential power. It's not power that the psychopath doesn't perceive his or her power as external, something that he has acquired. He perceives it as emanating from who he is. The psychopath is power. You know, the state is I, I'm the state. So the psychopath is his own power. In this sense, the psychopath is self-generating. Everything comes from the inside is innate, which is of course a godlike quality. The psychopath's addiction to money or to sex or to is all about power. And even the psychopath's addiction to power in many ways is secondary. The attaining power, securing power, exercising power is a kind of self-affirmation. The gratification is embedded or is the outcome of the psychopath's self-affirmation. So when the psychopath has power, when he exercises power, when power is evident and the outcomes of power are discernible, the psychopath says, "Everything I think about myself must be true." So power confirms to the psychopath that his self-perception and self-image are correct.

And all this emanates from anxiety. Today we know recent studies have demonstrated and are demonstrating that psychopathy may be a compensatory reaction to anxiety. Exactly like narcissism. Narcissism is a compensatory reaction to shame. Psychopathy is a compensatory reaction to insecurity, a sense of lack of safety, dread, angst, anxiety. The psychopath feels that he is on an alien, hostile, menacing planet. And the only way to calm himself down, the only anxiolytic solution, anxiety-reducing solution is to demonstrate to himself how powerful he is. Because if he is infinitely powerful, he is finally safe. He is finally secure. He doesn't need to to worry. He doesn't need to wake up at night drenched in sweat. He doesn't need all this.

Now, the myth that psychopaths are fearless is a myth. They're not fearless. They're actually anxious. It is true though that their bodies react differently to fear. We don't know whether this is the outcome of some innate hereditary genetic template or whether actually the psychopath's need to cope with threatening, traumatizing, abusive, dangerous environments has caused his brain to rewire and his body to change physiologically. We don't know what preceded what, but it is a fact. The psychopath does not experience his anxiety and does not experience his fear. What he experiences when he's afraid, what he experiences when he's anxious is a surge of adrenaline, the need to conquer, the need to assert control, the need to drive towards a goal and to occupy it and to if necessary consume it and subsume it, to obliterate it or eradicate it, whatever the case may be, whatever the goal, however the goal is defined, destructive or constructive, it is the attainment of the goal that empowers the psychopath. And it is this empowerment that calms him down, reduces his underlying generalized anxiety and he experiences this as gratification.

We have a concept called object of instinct. Object of instinct in classical psychoanalytic theory, it's an object which is sought in order to achieve satisfaction. The object could be a person, a real inanimate object, a possession, it could be a behavior, it could be a goal, it could be a narrative, it could be anything. So it's an object that is sought, that is pursued, that is conquered in order to achieve satisfaction. The internal aim, this is called the internal aim. So there's an external aim which is the object to be taken over, the object to be secured, the object to be actualized and realized. Like as I said, the object could be a a project or a plan or an idea or a a behavior or what or a person or a possession. Could be anything. Object is simply anything outside the self. So this is the external aim and when the psychopath acquires this external aim, he achieves the internal aim, which is on the surface gratification and satisfaction, but in reality, a reduction in generalized, all-consuming underlying anxiety. The aim of the instinct in psychoanalytic theory is the activity through which an instinct is gratified, resulting in the release of internal tension, anxiety. So and and this is the instinctual aim. This is this is the mechanism which underlies psychopathy.

The psychopath consequently cathects or cthects goals. The cathexis is in goals. Cathexis in the is in the power to obtain goals. Actually, to be more precise, not not in the goals, but the cathexis is in the power to obtain goals. Because this kind of power proves to the psychopath that he needs not be afraid. He needs not be anxious. He need not be he need not be weary. He need not be hypervigilant. He need not be, you know, because the world is under control. This hostile, horrible jungle, Darwinian landscape is under control. This alien Martian uh soil is under his feet. He is in charge.

So the psychopath cathects the power that allows him to obtain goals. Never people. He never cathects people. What he does with people is known as reification or in colloquial terms objectification. Reification is when you treat something outside yourself. Could be another person, could be uh a possession, could be an abstraction, an idea, a concept, could be a formulation, could be a plan, could be a goal. When you treat something outside yourself as if it were an object, a material thing, you reify it. So you take it literally. So reification is a fallacy, of course, and this is the process of object object objectification. Converting living, breathing human beings into objects, inanimate objects via reification.

But in the case of the psychopath, reification extends not only to people. The psychopath reifies his goals. He objectifies them. He regards his goals the same way you and I would regard a shining new device. He reifies the power that he accumulates and exercises on the way to obtaining his goal. It becomes an object. Again, a shining new device. The the psychopath covets power. He craves power. He's addicted to power. He salivates over power because power is the only thing that can restore his inner equilibrium, his peace of mind, his homeostasis. It is when he exercises power that he experiences elation, narcissistic elation. Freud called it oceanic feeling, the merger with a symbolic atavistic primordial mother. He mothers himself. The psychopath becomes his own maternal figure, a a secure base, a safe haven when he acquires power. The power is his mother. He perceives power as maternal and then it allows him to take on the world. In other words, to separate and individuate in effect.

See, beginning to see the similarities with a shared fantasy in narcissism. And indeed, the psychopath develops a shared fantasy with his goals, not with people. There he is distinct from narcissism, from the narcissist. The narcissist develops a shared fantasy with people. People as props, people as actors in his shared fantasy, but people all the same. The psychopath develops a shared fantasy with his goals. Or much more precisely, the psychopath develops a shared fantasy with his power. Whereas in the narcissist's shared fantasy, the intimate partner is the maternal figure, the new maternal figure. In the psychopath's shared fantasy, power is the maternal figure. Power is a psychopath's wet dream. Literally, it's incestuous. There's an incest dynamic going on.

I keep saying object, object, object. Let's go back to basics. An object when we talk about people, an object is the other. That is any person or symbolic representation of a person that is not the self and that provokes or triggers behavior or cognitions or affects which are then directed at the object. So when you have a human being, when you have a person outside of yourself and you recognize that this person is not you, you recognize the boundaries. I end here and this person begins. This person ends here and I begin. So when you recognize the externality and separateness of that other person and you realize that this other person is the same as you via the mechanism of empathy. When this happens, the other person ironically becomes an object and your behaviors object. I mean, in psychological parlance, in psychological lingo, when we say object in psychology, we mean a person outside yourself and we mean that you recognize this person's externality and separateness. You recognize that this person is exactly like you. So then we call this kind of person uh an object in psychology, which tells you a lot about psychology. Anyhow, at that moment when you recognize the externality and separateness and equality of that other person, your behavior changes. You develop cognitions, develop emotions, you develop affects. The information about that other person changes you and affects your behavior, modifies your behavior. And this is what we call object relations. We'll come to it in a minute.

Psychoanalytic theory. There's a more expansive definition of object. Object as I've described now is a common definition in object relations theories. But in classical psychoanalytic theory and current psychoanalytic theory, object when we use the word object, we mean something a lot more expansive. Object is anything in psychoanalytic theory. Object is anything. Person, thing, part of a body, symbol, plan, idea, I mean, you name it. Object is anything through which an instinct can achieve its aim of gratification. Period. Anything external to you and anything internal to you which grants or guarantees gratification, instinctual gratification is an object.

So in the case of the psychopath, this second definition pertains, not the first, because the psychopath regards everything as an object. Not only everyone, but everything. Everything. The psychopath objectifies everything, including his sense of power, including himself, including other people, including plans and and and uh goals and objectives. And in everything immediately. The psychopath immediately converts into an object, reifies everything. Whereas the narcissist reifies and objectifies mostly people, the psychopath's reification or objectification is out of control. It's totally wild. The psychopath regards everything, himself included, as some kind of object. That's why psychopaths don't react the way you do to being wounded, physically wounded. They don't react the way you do to threats because the psychopath object has objectified himself. He he is one step removed. It's a kind of dissociation.

The psychopath's tendency to reify and objectify everything, humans, abstracts, concepts, possessions, himself, you name it. This tendency is a kind of defensive dissociation. If the world is so horrible, if it's survival of the fittest, if it's nature red in tooth and claw, you know, if the world is a dystopian uh kind of environment, to dissociate yourself from the world, to remove yourself from the world is a great idea actually. And this is what the psychopath does. He cuts himself off the world. He no longer exists by becoming a rock, by becoming a stone. You know the famous the famous horror movies and documentaries where psychopaths are described as stonelike or nonhuman in the inanimate sense. They're they're not animated. And that's because they have removed themselves from the scene. They're not there. And not only are they not there, there is no self which has been removed. I mean, the psychopaths do possess, I want to be clear, psychopath psychopaths do possess a self, a fully constellated and integrated self. The formation of selfhood, formation of the self or the ego in psychopathy is much less disrupted than in borderline and in narcissism. And in this sense, psychopathy ironically, psychopaths ironically are much healthier, mentally healthier than narcissists and borderlines. But when the psychopath dissociates because he needs to objectify himself, he he removes even his self from the scene. He ceases to exist. Kind of astral astral tree. He he just is not there. He's not there. And this imbues him with a sense of security, safety, enhances his power. So the source of the psychopath's power is is his invulnerability, impermeability, untouchability. Psychopath says, psychopath message is, "You can't do anything to me because I'm not here." And yes, this is very reminiscent of depersonalization and derealization, essentially dissociative mechanisms. I've dedicated a video to this. You can watch it. It's taking yourself out of reality. It's telling yourself this is not happening to me. Depersonalization and or this is not real. It's just a fantasy. Derealization. The psychopath says, "You have no power over me and I have all the power over you because there's nothing you can do to me and I can do everything and anything to you and you can do nothing to me because I'm not here. My body may be here, but nothing else and nothing much more. So, I'm untouchable. I'm impermeable. I'm invulnerable. In short, I'm godlike." There is a direct correlation between the level of dissociation in in psychopathy and the level of perceived self-empowerment. The higher, more pervasive, more profound the dissociation, the more the psychopath feels empowered, the more he feels present. Ironically, the more he feels in control and in charge. He's the boss. He's godlike. He determines the fates of everyone and everything around him. You talk to any psychopath and they will describe this out-of-body experience. They will describe that when they were at the height of their power as they have perceived it, when they were killing someone, when they were when they've accomplished a heist or a scam, when they were doing something which which flew in the face of social mores and norms and and the law and and broke every rule and and when they were defiant and when they were consummating, rejecting authority and when they were, you know, gung-ho supermenpowered, whatever, at that point they will tell you, psychopaths will tell that they felt they were not there. They felt as if they were observing something, watching something, a movie kind of. It's a dissociation-power equation in psychopathy.

Object relations in narcissism is mediated through the shared fantasy and the narcissist has internal object relations. Narcissist's object relations with objects is with representations of external objects in his mind. So whereas healthy normal people have external object relations, they fall in love with someone out there, the narcissist has internal object relations. He falls in love with a representation of someone out there in his mind.

The psychopath's object relation is highly complex. As I said, the psychopath is capable of perceiving the existence, the functioning, the separateness of external objects. Unlike the narcissist, psychopath's reality testing is not impaired, it's intact. While the narcissist's reality testing is short, is destroyed. In other words, the narcissist is delusional and embedded in a fantasy defense, whereas the psychopath is not. So the psychopath is capable of perceiving external objects and relating to them if if they're instruments or obstacles. And so in principle, the psychopath should be able to maintain object relations. He should be able to be responsive to the external existence of objects. Object relations is an individual's relationship to their entire external world with emphasis on people. In psychoanalysis, object relations is an individual's relationships to their objects, real or imagined, persons, activities, things that function as sources of connection as well as libidinal or aggressive gratification.

In the case of the psychopath, there is a problem. There is a problem because the psychopath is fully interactive with and responsive to the external world, including people in the external world. But his relationship with with people is premised on utility. What can people do for him or in which way they endanger and undermine his agenda? So this inability to to relate to people except in so far as they fit into a cunning scheme or project or a plan renders the psychopath's object relations very impoverished and one-dimensional. And yet, whereas the narcissist has object relations only with internal objects and whereas the borderline has object relations only with external objects. The psychopath has object relations with external objects having reduced them to their utility, to to a a pinpoint-like entity. Remember how we started the lecture?

Um, this has to do a lot with object cathexis, the investment of libido or the investment of psychic energy, emotional energy, cognitive energy in objects outside the self. A person, God, ID, activity, plan, goal, they're all outside the self. And you invest energy in these things. When you love someone, you invest energy in them. When you have a plan, you pursue it, you invest energy in it. This process is called cathexis. There is a problem with object cathexis in psychopathy. It underlies and gives rise to the problem in object relations. The psychopath does not cathect the object. He cathects what the object can give him. He cathects how the object can promote his agenda. He cathects the goal. He cathects the power that he has over the object, over the the person. So he doesn't cathect people, he cathects the interaction with people and much more precisely cathects his side of the interaction with people. So the psychopath is self-contingent. The psychopath perceives other people as external but as one would perceive pawns on a chessboard. The psychopath is emotionally invested in his power over people, on what people can give him, on what people how they can promote his accomplishments, guarantee them, or how can they obstruct and hinder his progress. He's affected in all this, but not in the people themselves. The same way a chess player is emotionally invested in the game and in winning or even in the adversary. But the chess player is never emotionally invested in the pieces, in the pieces of chess. He's not emotionally invested in the pawn or the knight or the queen or the king. They're mere instruments and sometimes they're obstacles. You could perceive, you could visualize or you could conceptualize and definitely verbalize the psychopath's internal world as an infinite infinite chess game where all people are pieces on a board. That would be getting very close to the psychology of the psychopath.

The psychopath has a problem with people, but not the same problem that a narcissist or a borderline has. If we want to delve deeper and understand why psychopaths end up the way they do, something an exploration which I did with narcissists and borderlines, I will give you a hint because I'll dedicate a video to it much further down the road, but I will give you a hint. But before I give you this hint, we need to define a concept known as object constancy in object relations theory. And object constancy is an infantile feature, feature of infancy, early childhood. It is the ability of the infant to maintain an attachment. Attachment that is relatively independent of gratification or frustration based on a cognitive capacity to conceive of a mother who exists when she is out of sight and a mother who has positive attributes even when she is frustrating, rejecting, and unsatisfying. In other words, object constancy, object constancy relies on two psychological processes, two psychological dynamics. The ability to retain an image of a person who is not physically present. Mother left the room, but she's still in my head, says the infant. I can still see her in my mind's eye. And the second mechanism or process or dynamic is the ability to integrate the negative and positive features of a person into a single unified vision. In other words, to counter or counteract splitting. When you put these two together, you get object constancy. The infant becomes attached to the mother herself rather than to her tension-reducing ministrations or so he he gets attached to the mother not to the functions of the mother. He gets attached to mother not to what mother does for for the child, for the infant. The infant gets attached to mother not to how she comports herself or behaves. So the mother comes to exist continuously for the infant, not only when the infant needs her, not only when she satisfies the infant's needs, not only when she frustrates the infant, she's there, a continuous presence. It is an investment by the infant in a specific libidinal object. And this also means that mother becomes unique. She is no longer interchangeable with someone else. The infant has fixated her. The infant has created a fixed image of her, an internal object, an imago, an introject of her in the infant's mind, in his or her mind. And so from that from that moment on, she is recognizable. She cannot be confused or conflated with anyone else. So this is object constancy. And remember this when we discuss psychopathy.

There's also a concept of object loss. In psychoanalytic theory, the actual loss of a person who served as a good object is known as object loss. A good mother, for example, or good enough mother. The child is afraid afraid to lose her. So what the child does? He introjects her. He creates a snapshot of her, an internal object, a photograph of her, and he internalizes it. He puts this in his or her mind. From that moment on, the infant has a representation of the good object in his or her mind. And this reduces the separation anxiety. The anxiety about the possible loss of a good object begins with panic. The infant panics about being separated, being abandoned, being rejected. It's known clinically as separation insecurity. So what's the solution? You make a photograph of mommy. You place it in your mind and you're safe because mommy now is always there. Adult grief and mourning are examples of object loss and separation anxiety. Adult grief and mourning trigger infantile separation anxiety and infantile object loss anxiety in infancy and childhood. And this complicates, of course, the grief reaction. Okay. Object constancy, object loss. If you have difficulty to make retain this information in your head, go back, listen to it again, make notes, be good students. All right. And I will uh now discuss object permanence. In the wake of all these concepts, we put them together and I'll attempt to explain the dynamics inside the psychopath's mind. But we need to get acquainted with these concepts. Otherwise, uh whatever it is that I have to say will sound nonsensical. It usually sounds nonsensical, but I'm trying to reduce this. Okay.

Shushim object permanence. Object permanence was first described by Jean Piaget, the eminent child psychologist. I still haven't decided who was number one child psychologist. Winnicott, Piaget, Mahler, and so on. I think Piaget is a claim. So object permanence is the knowledge of the continued existence of objects even when they are not directly perceived, even when they are not physically present. According to Jean Piaget, object permanence develops gradually in infants during what he called the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development. And there are milestones that indicate the acquisition of object permanence. Piaget was very like Mahler, Piaget was very meticulous in documenting his observations of children and so he broke it down to stages. The same way Erikson broke down life, the lifespan into stages. Piaget did the same with childhood. He said that if we observe children, we can see the moment or the time or the period when they begin to develop object permanence. When the child reaches for and retrieves a covered object. The object is covered, but the child knows that under the cover there's an object. It's an example of object permanence. And this happens between ages 8 and 12 months. Or when a child retrieves an object at location B even though it was previously hidden several times in location A, again, the same timeframe, 8 to 12 months. So the child can conceptualize that the object is the same, never mind that the location has changed. This is known, by the way, as the A-not-B task. Or when the child removes a series of covers to retrieve an object even though the infant only witnessed the object being hidden under the outermost cover. This is known as invisible displacement. It happens usually between the ages of 18 and 24 months. So non-reaching, these are the reaching tasks when the child reaches out to an object even though there's no hint of the object's physical presence. It's covered or relocated or something dislocated.

Now, more recent research using non-reaching tasks suggests that infants display some knowledge of object permanence at a much earlier stage than suggested by Piaget. And this sits well with the work of Fairbairn about the ego. Fairbairn and Melanie Klein claim that children are born with an ego. They don't develop it. They don't constellate or integrate it, but they're born with it. Okay, I will not get go into it right now. Um, so now that we've become acquainted with object constancy and with object permanence and with object loss, remember, let's go back to the psychopath. Remember that psychopaths are probably born. There's a strong hereditary component in psychopathy, genetic component. There are brain abnormalities in psychopathy, pronounced brain abnormalities, amygdala, gray matter, you name it. And there is a difference between the physiological reactions of the psychopath's body and physiological reaction of a normal body. For example, psychopaths sweat much less. Their pupils don't dilate when they are exposed to horror, pictures of horror, photographs of horror, and so on. So we know psychopaths are different, even kind of a species unto their own, an alien species. But never forget that every genetic and hereditary predisposition is triggered by the environment. You could be born for a predisposition for narcissism, but it would remain remain dormant and latent if the environment is loving and compassionate and containing and holding. Psychopaths grow up in abusive, traumatizing, violent, aggressive, shocking, terrifying, terrorizing families. That has been proven in numerous studies. The incidence and prevalence of adverse childhood experiences among psychopaths is much higher by multiples than the incidence of prevalence of such bad experiences among more normal or healthy people. Psychopaths have been exposed to a terrible childhood in dysfunctional families. Anything from substance and drug abuse to to beatings to, I mean, you name it. So psychopaths were not exposed to a good object. Psychopaths were not exposed to loving parents, holding parents, understanding and accepting parents. They were exposed to animals. They were exposed to bestial criminals. They were exposed to the most horrific torture. And so they did not have a good object outside. They didn't have a mother or a father they could consider to be good objects. And because they had only a bad external bad object, they never experience object loss. I mean, if your father or your mother keeps beating you up to pulp, almost killing you in the process day in and day out, you're not likely to regard them as good objects, and you're not likely to grieve if they were to die. You're not likely to experience the terror or the anxiety of object loss, and you're not likely to feel the need to introject them. Why would you introject an abusive, traumatizing mother, for example? You wouldn't. I mean, there's another process known as a primitive, the primitive superego, the internalization of a bad, a bad object. That is an unconscious process. But classical introjection fails in psychopathy because classical introjection fails. Psychopaths have no object constancy, and that is similar to narcissists. Both psychopaths and narcissists have been exposed to horrendous parenting, to dead mothers, to evil parents. And so both of them did not experience object loss and both of them failed to introject in in one in some ways. So like the narcissist, the psychopath has no object constancy. But the psychopath also doesn't have introject constancy because of the failure to introject. So the psychopath is a combination of narcissist and borderline. You remember the narcissist has object object inconstancy and introject constancy. The borderline has object constancy and introject inconstancy. The psychopath has object inconstancy and introject inconstancy. So the psychopath is unable to relate to you not only when you're out there as external objects. He's unable to relate even to internal objects that represent you in his mind because he doesn't form them. He doesn't create them. His reality testing is intact. So he is able to tell that you're out there. He's able to perceive and recognize and accept your externality and separateness. But there is no emotional resonance to it. It's as if he it's as if this were some kind of objective knowledge. I don't know the distance to the sun is 150 million miles or kilometers, whatever it is. So, you know, okay, so what? There's a so what thing with psychopaths. You're out there. You're external. You're separate. You have wishes. You have dreams. You have fantasies. You have hopes. You you're afraid. You have cognitions. So what? And there is no internal object inside the psychopath with which the psychopath could continue the interaction or which the psychopath could use to try to understand you out there. No, nothing. You're there. You're out there. So what? And you're not in here. So what? And you're so what. That's a so what attitude. Whereas a narcissist internalizes you and continues to interact with the internal object. So at least there's a tenuous connection to you somehow. Maybe not to you, but to your representation in the narcissist's mind, to the memory of you in the narcissist's mind, to this snapshot, a moment in time frozen, but at least this. The same with the borderline. She cannot maintain an internal object in her mind which represents you. But when you're there, she's all over you. She's intensely interacting. The psychopath is like a totally disinterested, bored observer. You're out there. Okay, you're not in here. Okay, who cares? Why would I waste my time, energy, emotions on this? I have better things to do. You you do exist out there, but this existence doesn't resonate with the psychopath. Doesn't provoke him any emotional reactions, cognitions, nothing. It's as if you did not exist. It's same like knowing that atoms are comprised of neutrons. I mean, the nucleus of atoms is comprised of neutrons and protons. So okay. So you know they are out there, but do they have any impact on you in any way, shape, or form? No. This knowledge has zero impact on you. The knowledge of your existence has zero impact on the psychopath. I think the distinguishing feature of psychopathy is extreme apathy, extreme indifference bordering on uh effective paralysis, flat affect, flat attachment, flat everything. The psychopath is a reified flatline. In a distant sense, he's dead. It's totally dead externally and internally. Whereas in the narcissist, there are still some dynamics going on. In the borderline, there's drama. With a psychopath, there is just the dead stare of a dead fish. And it's a fish. The dead stare of

a dead shark. And it's a shark who is after your blood. Because as far as a psychopath is concerned, your externality, your external reality is exactly like blood in the water for a shark. I hope I succeeded to capture and to convey some of this utterly surreal um existence experience.

Another problem with psychopaths is known as object of consciousness issue. Object of consciousness is um a clinical term a concept that perceived object is distinct from the perceiver. The separation of observer and observed is a contentious issue in philosophy and there are some philosophies philosophical schools like phenomenology which contest this. They say this distinction, this cousin, this breaking of the world, the universe, breaking of the universe into observed and observer is artificial. And new develop, I mean developments in quantum mechanics 100 years ago tended to somehow substantiate this perception that observer observer and observed one and so on so forth. But in psychology, we do make the distinction between the perceived object and the perceiver. The distinction between the perceived uh object and the perceiver is not illusory. This is not Buddhism. This is not vanta philosophy. You know we do make this distinction in psychology and we say that object of consciousness is anything of which the mind is conscious including perceptions, mental images, internal objects, external objects, emotions. Anything the mind becomes aware of is an object of consciousness and it involves an observing eye. Someone is doing the observing some ego um some eye some call it as you wish but there is an observer definitely and this is the observer is the subject of consciousness. It's subjective. This observing ego observing I this is the subject. This is the subject and the subject observes the object. This is how we perceive.

Of course with the psychopath there is a problem here because of the aforementioned issue with issues with object constancy and introject constancy. There is an inability to maintain the process of observation based on this separation between observer and observed. Again, don't confuse this with the ability to externalize. The the psychopath recognizes your externality. But this is just a fact. It's just a fact. Something taken out of Wikipedia. The sun exists and you exist. Okay. Existence. You know, it doesn't resonate with the psychopath. Doesn't change the psychopath in any way. Emotionally, cognitively, effectively, behaviorally, there's no change. And because you don't change the psychopath, for all practical purposes, you don't exist. And so the psychopath has difficulty to distinguish the process of observation from the process of occupation or the process of acquisition or the process of overpowering or the process of conquering. The only way the psychopath observes you as an object of consciousness is when he appropriates you, annexes you, takes over you, usually in a hostile manner, makes what you what's yours is. So it is the process of acquisition the this interaction of essentially merger and fusion by force coerced merger and fusion that brings your external existence to the psychopath's attention and awareness. So the psychopath is actually accepts your externality and separateness as challenges as triggers. They provoke in him the need to eliminate you. Either eliminate you via incorporation by becoming one with you or taking over you or eliminate you by killing you, destroying you. In the psychopaths world, eradication, obliteration, destruction are the only modes of communicating with reality. You included. Because they are the only ones which guarantee safety and security in a hostile, dangerous, menacing world. And because the psychopath doesn't have object constancy and doesn't have introject constancy, he has no problem moral or otherwise to destroy you or to assimilate you or to consume you or to obliterate you. Because by doing this to you, he is not uh reverting from object constancy to object inconstancy. He is it doesn't trigger in him any sense of loss, any anxiety, any fear and also it doesn't change the internal balance and furniture in his mind. You don't exist in his mind. There's no introject there. The narcissist when he devalues you and discards you, this has a massive impact on the narcissist because it transforms the internal object into a persary object into an enemy. This is not the case with the psychopath. There's no internal object there. Well, no meaningful or stable internal object. So using you and getting rid of you, this is done as an afterthought offhandedly. Um it's part of a of a scheme, part of a plan, part of an agenda. You you just you just happen to be there. your collateral damage, so to speak. You're faceless. You're not humanized. You're dehumanized. And remember the metaphor or the simile of the chessboard. You're just being moved on the on the board.

The self. There's been there is a a theory about the the function of the the functions of the self and and so on so forth. It's was first proposed by William James. It's one of my favorites. I mentioned it before in some of the in some few of my videos. So William James said that there various kinds of functions of the self. There is the self as the observer. the self that has access to conscious experience and knowledge including knowledge of the self. William James contrasted this with the self as known and it is synonymous with the nominative self the eye and he said that the self is known is the self that is known through reflection. It's very similar to the empirical self. It contrasts with the self as observer or knower and it's synonymous with a me. So we're beginning to see the structure. There's a self as known. I know myself. I know me. There's a self as an observer. I'm observing others. I'm observing also myself. Okay. The nominative self is the self as knower of the self rather than the self so known. In the psychology of William James, the nom nominative self or the I is contrasted with the empirical self or the me. The self that is known by the self rather than the self as knower. So there's one self as the self who knows and one self as the self who is known by the self who knows. In the psychology of William James, the empirical self is held to consist of the material self, everything material that can be seen as belonging to the self. The social self, the self as perceived by others, and the spiritual self, the self that is closest to one's core subjective experience of oneself. So the empirical self, the me is not the nominative nominative self, the I, the observer. Now the social self are this is a combination or compilation of aspects of one's identity or self-concept that are important to or influenced by interpersonal relationships and the reactions to other people. So the the social self also includes characteristic behaviors in social social situations and the persona the mask the facade that an individual exhibits when they are in contact with other people as contrasted with their real self. Self as agent is a self that has goals, plans and control over voluntary actions. Gordon Alport and others considered this term self as agent to be similar in meaning to the eye or the nominative self, the self-observer. So the aspect of the self that has agency, the aspect of the self that plays a role in a psychic process or in anything in goal accomplishment um is closer to the me to the empirical self.

Okay, why did I mention all this? Because the psychopath doesn't have a self as an observer. He doesn't have the self as an observer. He because he has no internal object or no capacity to introject. Introjects. These internal objects always include a representation of the self. They include a representation of an external object of someone out there combined with a representation of the self. When you don't have introj or the introjection process is disrupted, there is a problem with the perception of the self and this of course disrupts the ability to observe oneself. So psychopaths are not self-aware and much more importantly it destroys the capacity to develop a social self. So psychopaths are not influenced by interpersonal relationships by reactions of other people. They are divorced. They are as I said impervious, impenetrable, untouchable. You could say anything to them. You can punish them. You can they are unchanged immutable like a stone because they don't have this rich internal world that even the narcissist has internally it's a wasteland. There are no internal objects here. Oh, I mean of course there are internal objects but they're not like the kind of internal objects that we usually discuss when we discuss pathologies of the self. There is nothing there except an extremely primitive self, nuclear self, um that strives for mastery and control of the environment because it catastrophizes and anticipates the worst and regards other people as tools, instruments or obstacles in a chess game that never ends where they Adversary is the devil himself.