Transcription
I received an interesting question by music by homie. Sorry about the handle. And the question pertains to self-states. I'm going to respond to the question, which is a bit theoretical, and then I'm going to discuss narcissism, borderline, and psychosis in the context of the question. So, it's going to get interesting, but you have to wade through a bit of a theoretical introduction. So, here's the question.
Professor, is it possible for the psyche to form a new, to-be-used self-state with its own construction, a newly activated set of introjects, simply because the anticipatory system predicts a future need for it, building this self-state brick by brick before it's actually needed?
The answer is that all self-states are anticipatory. They're all constructed on anticipation. They're all reactive to an existential or state-uh-specific anxiety. In other words, the organism constantly predicts, constantly deploys predictive models, and these predictive models generate scenarios. These scenarios pertain to the external environment and anticipate an internal reaction to the external environment, a reactive pattern known as a self-state. All self-states are on standby. All of them contain algorithms that allow them to compare the actual environment to predictive environments, and all of them generate predictions on the fly, constantly. So, it's all anxiety-based. It's all a way to cope with anxiety by matching predictions with actual external and internal environments. So, the answer to your question is absolutely. We constantly generate self-states based on the output of the predictive models inside our mind.
The second question is, can a self-state completely change or replace its attached constructs, and can a construct suddenly switch its sets of introjects, its set of introjects, just in order to preserve self-efficacy or coherence? If so, how can we distinguish between the psyche adaptively forming a new protective self-state, a new set of introjects, from the psyche being caught in introjection anxiety and a necessary harsh self-judgment?
The second part of the question is addressed in my video on IPAM (Intrapsychic Activation Model) and my academic papers on this topic. I will therefore limit myself, confine myself to responding to the first part. The self-states are not agentic. They're not the ones making the choices. You've got it all, all topsy-turvy. You implied that the self-state changes. The self-state replaces. The self-state makes choices and decisions. That's completely wrong. Self-states are inert. They're inert, and they have no agency.
The constructs are the dynamic aspect. The constructs are the agents. The constructs have the capacity to make choices and decisions, to assemble coalitions, to establish clusters, and to activate the self-state. The self-state is a reactive pattern to changes in internal and external environments. But, and and they, as I said earlier, they can be constructed on the fly based on predictions emanating from predictive models, which are responding to innate anxiety. But the self-state, once they're generated, are static, not dynamic, in the sense that the self-state cannot self-modify, self-assemble, reconstruct, mod-change. They are, they're there. The self-state may prove to be inefficacious or incompatible with a changed environment, in which case it will be discarded, and a new self-state will be generated by the constructs.
Now, the constructs, of course, constantly make choices of introjects. Introjects are like a common resource. Introjects are available in a kind of database, and how you combine the introjects depends on the constructs. The experience of reality is comprised of data from both the external and the internal environments. The inputs are mediated, structured, and reframed via constructs, which activate introjects. Not the same introjects, of course, every single time. Depends which introjects are chosen by the constructs, depends crucially on the stimuli and the data and the information which are received from the external and the internal environment.
The constructs produce automatic thoughts using the introjects. The introjects are instruments for producing automatic thoughts. These thoughts affect behaviors intended to modify the environment to conform to a self-state, buttress the self-state, or validate the self-state. So, the self-state is an interface intended to allow the constructs to somehow change or modify the environment to conform to the self-state. Constructs also select memories in order to prevent dissonance and anxiety between recall and self-state. Constructs dissociate memories. They alter their emotional content, and they, and and correlate via attribution and reframing, and they impose selectivity.
Constructs are the name of the game. They are the, they are the ones in charge. The construct organizes the output from the introjects according to an algorithm known as identity. And this algorithm provides for each specific environment selection criteria for self-states and corresponding introjects. So, this is the picture. I advise you to revisit the IPA model because clearly, from your questions, you still have a way to go. I'm being charitable, as usual. Okay.
How is all this connected to anything? Psychosis is a situation where the person confuses the environment with a self-state. To use language borrowed from object relations theory, the person confuses external objects with internal objects. The person with psychotic features, uh, kind of expands outwards and renders the environment an internal figment of his or her mind. This is known as hyper-hyperreflexivity. So, the psychotic person cannot tell the difference between external, internal, outside, inside, the world, me. All these distinctions vanish. All these boundaries dissipate, and consequently, this kind of person perceives the world, reality, the environment, other people, objects as self-states. Misperceives them. Misperceives them as self-states, which is a catastrophic thing because it renders the individual non-existent. And if they, if an individual doesn't have self-generated self-states or self-states generated internally, and if an individual is unable to tell the difference between such internally generated self-states and the environment, then this individual dissolves into the environment, becomes a part of the environment. The defense against this is to convince oneself that it is the environment that is a part of the mind, not the mind that is a part of the environment. In other words, the psychotic disappears into the environment. And in order to defend against this terrifying realization, terrifying state of things, the psychotic lies to himself or to herself by saying, "I'm not the one disappearing into the environment. The environment is part of me. It is the environment that is me. I am not the environment."
And so, I've been arguing to reverse Kernberg's Autoto-Kernberg's hierarchy. I postulate that the narcissist is far closer to psychosis because of this, because of the narcissist's inability to tell the difference between external and internal objects. The personality is far less organized, far more fragmented and permeable. It's not a membrane, an effective membrane. It allows the environment in. And again, there's this self-deception that yes, the environment is allowed in, but actually, these are internal objects that I'm, I fully control. I fully manipulate. The narcissist lies to himself about this. But still, this is the, the situation. There's a flooding. There's an avalanche. There's an intrusion of, of the environment, of reality into the narcissist's mind because there are no efficient defenses in the form of boundaries. This is where I stop and the world begins. This is the world, the world ends, and I begin. There's no such thing because there's no coherent, cohesive, integrated, constellated self. And that's why I say that narcissists are much closer to psychosis than borderlines. Only the narcissist's rigid grandiosity, a cognitive, cognitive distortion, is keeping the narcissist together. Only the self-concept, the false self, is the glue that holds the narcissist together. When it is effectively challenged, the narcissist decompensates and acts out and literally disintegrates into a borderline personality organization.
Grchstein postulated that the borderline is a failed narcissist. The pathology did not progress or devolve or evolve into narcissism, which is a full-fledged form of binary dissociative identity disorder with two selves: the false and the true. The narcissist's solution to this duality of selves is to switch off the dilapidated, atrophied, and dysfunctional true self and relegate it to the deepest recesses of the mind where it has no dynamic influence whatsoever on the narcissist's psychodynamics. Only the false self is left. And it is precisely because of this that the self-states of the narcissist are not well-demarcated, not well-delineated, not well-separated. And that's why the narcissist fuzzily dissolves into the environment like ink in water.
You know, in contrast, the borderline fails to repress and dissociate the true self. Borderline possesses a false self in this conceptualization. Using this language, the borderline possesses a false self, but she fails to repress and dissociate the true self. And consequently, the borderline never becomes a narcissist. This failure causes the borderline's two selves to compete for control over her identity and memories because both of them are still active and dynamic. Hence the chaos and the disorganization in the borderline's life. It is this inner struggle that mimics other dissociative disorders. It is this inner conflict, this incompatibility of the two selves, this competition for for resources, mental resources. This has led scholars such as Masterson and Dell and Putnam and Ross and Ryle and many others to suggest that borderline personality disorder may merely be another label for the identity diffusion and alteration common in dissociative disorders.
Narcissists, psychopaths, and borderlines react by imitating the environment. They are reflective mirrors. They don't, narcissists don't really exist in any meaningful sense. They are a foil to the environment. They are, they, because they imbibe the environment, because they absorb it, because the environment floods them, they become the environment. So, for example, narcissists, borderlines react with abuse to perceived abuse. The problem is that their reactive misconduct is based on perceptions and internal dynamics, not on reality. They cannot be trusted to appraise reality properly. Their reality testing is compromised, impaired. So, they are reacting to internal dynamics because they misidentify these internal dynamics as existing out there as external.
People with these personality disorders also possess a low threshold for frustration and poor impulse control precisely because of these reasons. They don't perceive the environment as external. They perceive it as, as, as internal. They confuse. They think the internal environment is actually external. But they have this sense that they should have control, utter, unmitigated, total control. And they should. It's internal. But they don't. This confusion between external and internal, inside, outside, me, the world, the world, me. This confusion creates a sense of, it creates an almost frustration, a sense of lack of efficacy and of failure, of defeat, because you know there's something in your mind you're trying to do something with it, manipulate it, and you fail. You fail because it's not in your mind, and then you think it's external. You mistake it for external. Then you try to interact with it as if, as if it's external, but it's not external. And the real external object deviates from the internal object, diverges, contradicts it, challenges it, undermines it. It's very frustrating.
The greatest problem is a triple whammy trifecta of cognitive deficits, hypervigilance, and referential ideation. Cluster B patients maintain poor reality testing and paranoid ideation owing to these dynamics. Consequently, they misperceive and misinterpret many behaviors as abusive and react with an arsenal of nuclear weapons to the slightest upset. They would also tend to misinterpret totally innocuous and innocent behaviors and speech acts as hostile. So, though many of these perpetrators abuse only when triggered and rarely ignite the chain reaction of maltreatment, their behavioral choices are disproportionate, and they leverage everything they have, body and intelligence, for instance, to lend the response a bleeding edge, a decisive edge. So, even when narcissists and borderlines are first provoked via projective identification, for example, they always embark on an unbridled attempt to destroy the source of frustration or narcissistic injury or mortification, at least mentally, if not physically.
This dynamic is especially evident in couples where one partner is borderline and the other one is a narcissist. And here you see an example of constructs which fail to appreciate the environment, the external environment appropriately, select the wrong introjects, generate the wrong automatic thoughts, "I'm being abused," wrong automatic thought, and select for a self-state, an abuser, for example, self-state, abusive self-state, which is not efficacious, counterproductive, and could be even dangerous to the individual. The consequences of such actions could be very adverse and punitive.
It's this time of year, May 2026, yet another seminar, and this time in Ovid. Ovid. O-R-I-D. Ovid is a world heritage site. It's one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It is perched on a lake. It sports hundreds of exquisite churches, icons, a fort, and amazing architecture. It is an undiscovered gem. You can learn more about it by surfing the internet or going to the Wikipedia article. I believe Ovid has a tourism website. And so, in Ovid, we're going to hold our next seminar at the end of May 2026. The Vaknin Rangelovska Foundation is organizing a free seminar, no entrance fee. The seminar is going to last three and a half days. There's going to be an opening session followed by three full days of lectures. The topic is intriguing, suggested by Lydia Rangelovska: the narcissist's relationships with parents, day one; intimate partners, day two; and his or her children, day three. A progression from a disrupted relationship with the self to even more disrupted relationships with others, known in psychology, unsurprisingly, as objects.
To reserve your free place right now, write to me at sambakin, that's my name, at gmail.com. s.vaknin@gmail.com. Write to reserve your place because, um, we are going to rent or hire a venue based on your participation. So, you first come, first serve, the early bird takes the worm, and so on and so forth. Write to me now. Again, a free seminar, three and a half days, in the magnificent city of Ovid, at the end of May 2026, with me. What could go wrong?