Transcription
My name is Albert Nina, and I'm the author of *Malignant Cells, Lava Narcissism Revisited*. Today I would like to discuss with you the Cluster B calendars, or the Cluster B personality disorders: narcissistic, borderline, antisocial personality disorder, the extreme end of which is known as psychopathy. These personality disorders may be mere kaleidoscopic facets of an underlying dissociative process, amounting in extreme cases to full-fledged dissociative identity disorder (DID), which used to be known once as multiple personalities.
In other words, these personality types may be self-states, alters, alternatives of each other. There may be an underlying psychodynamic of dissociation, a breakup, a fragmentation, and then, like in a kaleidoscope, we sometimes see the narcissistic aspect, sometimes the borderline aspect, sometimes the antisocial psychopathic aspect. This would explain, for example, why most, if not all, of these patients are diagnosed with more than one personality disorder, a condition, a situation known as comorbidity. For example, borderlines have very pronounced grandiosity, as do narcissists and psychopaths. Borderlines, when they are faced with fear of abandonment or rejection, when they anticipate being rejected or abandoned, they they become very psychopathic; they become secondary psychopaths.
So maybe there are all facets of the same single unified mental health condition, which has to do a lot with dissociation. I'm saying dissociation because in dissociative identity disorder, a multiple personality disorder, we have exactly the same situation: one personality appears, then it vanishes as circumstances change, as stress mounts, as demands are posed, and then that personality vanishes. Presently, alter number one, and an alter number two appears, and alter number two has nothing to do with alter number one. Another one could be a—alter number two is a woman or a girl, alter number one is an artiste. Alternate between an account—I mean, there's no connection, of course.
In narcissism, psychopathy, and borderline, we don't have these extremes; we don't have full-fledged personalities with their own biographies, their own behavior patterns. We have, instead, we have self-states. It's kind of a halfway house between full-fledged personalities and aspects of personality. Having endured a narcissistic injury, a narcissistic mortification, a trauma with severe anxiety and stress, these patients decompensate; they act out along predictable pathways. The borderline becomes a vicious secondary psychopath. There's a video on my YouTube channel that deals exactly with this transition from borderline to secondary psychopathy. The primary psychopath morphs and becomes a rabid grandiose narcissist. We've all seen psychopaths, and when they're challenged, or when they believe themselves to be challenged—because they're very hyper-vigilant, they see insults and humiliation everywhere—so we've all seen psychopaths like this suddenly become grandiose, and their grandiosity pushes them to misbehave, to act sometimes even criminally. But the same happens under the influence of alcohol. When psychopaths consume alcohol, they develop grandiosity, which is known as alcohol myopia. And so, primary psychopath moves into a rapid grandiosity, and the quavering narcissist shape-shifts when he is denied supply, for example, shape sheets, shapes into a codependent, clinging borderline. And this is exactly the process of—when the narcissist suddenly becomes needy, clinging, dependent. These phase transitions are startling to behold, and they throw off even the most experienced clinician. I have videos about each and every one of the aspects of what I just said, and I encourage you to go through my channel, for example, and to watch the series that I've made about mortification. I think there are three or four videos in this series, and the other series I've made about the connection between borderline, dissociation, and psychopathy.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that Cluster B disordered personalities find it near impossible to access, process, or regulate both their emotions and their cognitions. Their cognitions, their thought processes are chaotic and disrupted, as are their emotions. These gaping deficits, this gaping deficit, interfere with the meanings that these patients attribute to the events in their lives and to people around them. Because if your thinking is disturbed, and if you have no access to your emotions, it's very difficult to attribute significance to people around you; it's very difficult to properly put in context things that are happening to you. The psychopath sees no meaning whatsoever in anything or anyone, himself included. He lives life—he drifts, he drifts through life; nothing touches him, nothing reaches him, nothing is significant enough for him. He's kind of in a state of—days-long coma, oh, I don't know what you want to call it—is is like a tsunami—least he—he's like a sleepwalker, sleepwalker.
The borderline regards herself as meaningful, but everyone and everything else is mission-critical to her personal autonomy and self-efficacious agency. In other words, the borderline depends on other people, um, to the extent that she cannot function without them. It could be one person, her intimate partner; it could be a group of people, could be her family of origin, her current family, her friends, some friends, but there's always a person or a group of people who are mission-critical, and she clings to these people; she depends on them; she extorts them; she aggressively coaxes and cajoles them into fulfilling her emotional needs, into being there for her, into not abandoning her, into not rejecting her. It's very similar to the codependent, but with the critically important difference that the borderline becomes very psychopathic, very vicious when she is not gratified, always. She, when she anticipates not being gratified, she becomes aggressive, becomes violent, becomes promiscuous, becomes a substance abuser. This is much less common among codependents, although both codependency and borderlines seek to merge, infuse, as a way of infusing their lives with meaning. And finally, the narcissist regards only himself as totally meaningful, draining all the rest and all others of any significance whatsoever.
So, when under radical pressure—these actors, borderline, the psychopath, narcissist—they attempt to reframe the situation in a less injurious manner by reallocating and relocating the foci of meaning. In other words, when they're faced with stress, with trauma, with anxiety, with demands, with challenges, with mockery, with risks, danger, what they do is they shift meaning; they they place meaning or attribute meaning or imbue with meaning other things, other people, other situations, so as to avoid the meaningfulness of that which they cannot change or cope with. And in this way, seamlessly and smoothly, they transition between extended and extensive role-plays, the wrong place that we call in psychology personality disorders. There's a lot of acting which goes on in narcissism, borderline, and psychopathy. These people have thespian skills. This has been noted a long, long time by Cleckley, Lykken, and others. They, these people can deceive, deceive everyone, and to to a huge extent. Okay, Cleckley himself says that the thing that distinguishes the psychopath from the psychotic is that no matter how much and how often you test the psychopath, no matter how much you talk to him, no matter how much you probe him and investigate him, he still strikes you as a totally sane person with the right reasoning, the right justification, the right thinking, a proper plan of life, and the right attributes, the right meanings to the right people and the right situations and the right places, etc. And he is right. It's Cleckley says it's—it's the psychopath is a perfect simulation. There's an element of acting here; there's an element of emulating what I call emotional resonance tapes, and acting the same with borderline, the same with narcissism. These people are actors, and so you can reconceive of personality disorders, especially the dramatic personality disorders, known as—to be—you can consider them as drama; it's theater; it's role-playing. Indeed, I again emphasize Cluster B personality disorders, the dramatic, or the dramatic personality disorders, or erratic personality. And so, every actor needs his tools; his body is a tool, for example, in the case of the semantic analysis of psychopath, borderline—but all of them are united by using the tool of language. Language, speech is critical, critical, for example, for obtaining supply, critical for co-opting other people into the theater play, critical for obtaining outcomes, favorable or otherwise. So speech and language, exactly as with normal and healthy people, is very critical in these role-play transitions, in this kaleidoscopic shifting of facets and personalities and disorders in front of our very astonished and shocked eyes. And so I want to dwell a little in the second part of the video about language, language and speech, and then the third part of the video will deal—I'm going to deal with the underlying unifying principle in Cluster B. But first, let's start with speech, because this is by far the most visible thing, the main tool. [Music]
When we talk to a psychopath, we talk to a narcissist; when we interact with a borderline, the interface, the main point of friction, is is, of course, speech, language. And so there's something I call palindromic speech. It is any kind of statement about facts or inner mental states that intentionally, or in more rare cases inadvertently, creates confusion and disorientation in the listener. Gaslighting, for example, lying, are examples of crass and malicious palindromic speech acts. Confabulation and word salad are benign variants of palindromic speech acts. Word salad is illogical, in—illogical, in—in this course, but it doesn't imply necessarily malice or evil intent. But these are benign variants, intended to bridge dissociative gaps in memory or to buttress grandiosity. So they are goal-oriented. The lying and gaslighting are also goal-oriented, but they are more psychopathic; they they characterize actually psychopaths, not narcissists or borderlines, but all of these are palindromic speech. And by palindromic speech makes use of various semantic devices. First of all, there's the referential shift, when the words refer to one thing while appearing to be referencing another thing. Then there's the duplicity, when the word or phrase are open to two, sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations or meanings. There is contextual drift, subtly altering the context of the conversation and thereby the message or the reality testing of everyone involved. And then there's manipulative speech, goal-oriented utterances intended to impress or to accomplish aims, not to communicate. Then there is misattribution, preferring the wrong connections or the wrong links between alleged or ostensible motivations and intentions and actual actions. So, wrongly connecting motivations and intentions with actions, thus deflecting blame, for example, or casting one's actions in the best possible light. And then there is circumstantial mitigation, an external locus of control and a victim stance: events conspired to—heal the misconduct; I slept with him because I was drunk. It is abrogating personal responsibility, putting on the mantle of the passive voice. And finally, these logical fallacies, most famous of which is post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It means that A caused B; correlation is causation. There is reference to authority, ad hominem attacks—attack on the speaker, not on his message—and straw man fallacies. So now, this is—psychopaths and narcissists make a lot of use of all these devices, which put together I call palindromic speech. Why palindromic? Because you can read it from left to right and from right to left. You can be at the same time an Israeli and a British guy.
Palindromic speech is efficacious because of the base-rate cognitive bias. The base-rate cognitive bias has been documented in numerous cycles of psychological studies by the likes of Tversky, Kahneman, and others. It's when people automatically, fully believe 95% of what they are being told, sight unseen. That's a fact, by the way: people automatically believe 95% of what they are being told, sight unseen, and they don't bother to check in the majority of cases, because people are intellectually lazy, or because they feel unintelligent, or because they feel stupid, so on. Palindromic speech is is efficient; it takes advantage of the base-rate cognitive bias. It also mitigates the ineluctable hurt associated with truth-telling. People hate the truth; truth hurts; truth-tellers are very often considered to be enemies; they are persecuted, and in biblical times they were killed, assassinated—the ancient biblical prophets. So people don't wanna hear the truth, and they want to believe everything they hear, and palindromic speech takes advantage of these. It colludes with the psychological defense mechanisms, such as denial, and with behaviors such as reframing, and avoids—palindromic speech has powerful side—another psychodynamic allies. In other words, but palindromic speech is only one type of obstructive speech pattern; there are others. Let's talk about two of them: the hypothetical and the counterfactual speech. The narcissist, the borderline, or the psychopath, they use something called hypothetical speech, and they do it in order to test the waters, to see how their interlocutors would react to information. Sentences which start with maybe or possibly or it could be that or I think that or I thought so but I wasn't sure are forms of such exploratory excursions. So when a psychopath or narcissist reports, maybe X, maybe something, typically means X had actually happened; X is the truth. And the borderline or psychopath narcissist they're asking you how do you feel about it; they are they're kind of testing, testing the waters. If if they do admit to X, what will be the repercussions? When they get penalized, will they be punished in some way, and so on. So this is the hypothetical speech. And then there's the counterfactual speech. Counterfactual speech is a very fancy way of saying lie, lie—misinformation. And these guys—is either a rhetorical question, the answer to which is already known, or is a statement of settled and universally accepted fact which is nothing of the sort. So it's like the psychopath and borderline narcissist come to you and say, we both agree that—when there's no such agreement, of course—or they ask you a question in such a way that they can fully anticipate your answer. And so I know psychopath or narcissist can say, maybe she flirted with me in the restaurant, but she didn't come to my room later that evening, now, did she? When, of course, she did visit his room that night. So this is the counterfactual speech, but they're all part of a very disturbed pattern of communication.
Now, just to remind you what we're talking about: communication underlies the regulation of thoughts and emotions in healthy people, and much more so in in narcissists, borderlines, and psychopaths, because they use communicative language; they use speech to obtain critical ego functions. In case of the narcissist, so the narcissist needs narcissistic supply; he uses language to get this. In the case of the borderline, she tries to secure the environment, to feel safe and to reduce her anxiety, using speech, usually by interacting with a significant other, with an intimate partner, in order to fuse and merge with him, in order to reduce abandonment and separation anxieties. And the psychopath uses language or speech to obtain goals. Psychopathy is goal- or aim-oriented; his motivation is very shallow; he acts from whims and so on, but he still is still very goal-oriented. His whole values years language, and it reminds me of Rip Van Winkle in the story by Washington Irving, and he said, a short tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use. And when people—when journalists interviewed President Garfield's assassin, they were shocked because—he said he spoke with deliberation, from Carrie, occasionally emphasizing somewhat dramatically with his voice or gesture, or by gesture, a remark which he deemed of transcend—transcended—transcendent importance, sometimes sharply chuckling in the mention of the incident which he considered amusing. Here, about a presidential assassin, he objected strenuously to the continuity of his thought being disturbed by interruption and frequently stated so in a most imperious swing, intimating that the interruption had placed in immediate jeopardy of destruction, so thought of vital interest and importance to the entire community. This is—all these people—this—he loves to be—people communicate—not only the narcissist—this case, this assassin is clearly a psychopathic narcissist, but borderline communicates the same way. Anyone who has ever tried to interfere with the borderline's speech can tell you that she becomes immediately aggressive and violent. Anyone who tried to cross a psychopath or disagree with him can tell you the the outcome, if he survived. And anyone who tried to disagree with the narcissist or criticize him—same thing. In the narcissist's unrealistic world, even language performance—same with the psycho, same with the borderline—language mutates into a weapon of self-defense, of defiance, a verbal fortification, a medium without the message. These people replace words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables. Clown, ever a trans—durbur, called it conversational. Narcissism is replete with shift responses—replica stood—shift the attention back to the speaker, the narcissistic speaker, psychopathic speaker, borderline speaker, Cluster B personality disordered, and often by contagion, their unfortunate victims. They don't talk; they don't communicate; they fend off; they hide; they evade; they avoid; they disguise; they lecture; they act; they preach—always yes, but they don't communicate. In their planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semantics, and semantics dooms these people. They perfect the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches. The speech of borderlines, narcissists, and psychopaths is impregnated with first-person pronoun density; it is saturated with first-person pronouns—I, me, my, mine. The ensuing convoluted sentences are arabesques of meaninglessness, acrobatics of evasion, a lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. So the narcissist prefers to wait and see what waiting brings; it is a postponement of the inevitable that leads to the inevitability of postponement—a strategy of survival. It is often impossibly difficult; it's impossible to really understand the narcissist or the borderline or the psychopath, even if you listen very carefully. The evasive syntax first deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures, or you get flooded with clichés, and you can—you look at them, it oppresses the speaker's eyes, and you see there's nothing there. This is like a tape recorder. The grammar is tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise the source of information, its distance from reality, the speed of its degeneration into rigid, official versions, replicas buried under the lush flora and fauna of idioms without an end. The language erupts like some exotic rash, an autoimmune reaction to its own infection and contamination by the speaker. So, like vine weeds, the language spreads throughout, strangling with absent-minded persistence the ability to to understand, to feel, to agree, to disagree, to debate, to present arguments, to compare notes, to learn, to teach. If you ever try to do any of these things with psychopaths, narcissists, or borderlines, you know what I mean: it's absolutely impossible to have any meaningful or even goal-oriented communication—is what they want. Narcissists, psychopaths, and borderlines therefore never talk to others; rather, they talk at others. In the way you could say that these are modern oracles; they're talking to themselves. It's like—because they are dissociative and so broken inside, it's like they're trying to use language to glue back Humpty Dumpty, to put back up—to—to glue back together the shards they used to be—their personality. And so they they exchange subtexts; they come—flush—the texts are coming flush, wrapped by elaborate flotsam. They they read between the lines, spawning a multitude of private languages, prejudices, biases, superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumors, phobias, mysteries. There is a solipsistic world where communication is permitted only with oneself, and the aim of language is to throw others off the scent or to obtain narcissistic supply. [Music]
Cluster B personality disordered patients' inability to listen and pay genuine attention stems from their overriding need to sustain their grandiosity. And the other key is common to all of them—narcissist, borderline, psychopath—they need to rehearse the next lines, retort, or clever responses. And while the interlocutors, you know, the person they're talking to, Maria, is is just an audience—he's talking, but they are ignoring him—there—or the other person is just an audience, after all. Why should the narcissist waste his precious time on listening when he is already omniscient? Why should the psychopath waste his precious time when he is already so close to the goal? And why should the borderline waste her precious time when she already knows that she has been abandoned and rejected, and she is hell-bent on vicious revenge? And this has profound implications. Communication, through unequivocal and unambiguous information, reached simple systems—is such an integral and crucial part of the world that its absence is not postulated even in the remotest galaxies which grace the skies of science fiction. In this sense, narcissists are nothing short of aliens. It is not that they employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a new fluid; it is also not the outcome of upbringing or social cultural background. It's just that they are not there. And so this void, this emptiness—so empty—and repeatedly described by Cleckley—only the mask of sanity; there's only a mask; behind the mask is nothing; it's a piece of fiction. Curb—I call it emptiness. This void in each of these disordered people is trying to fulfill or regulate, at least, this emptiness, because they are afraid to be consumed by it. They feel that they're being consumed by deep space inside themselves; there's a wall of mirrors, and the mirrors are breaking. So they need narcissistic supply—not citric supply. The histrionic—she uses sex, seduction, conquest, flirtations, romance, bodybuilding, demanding physical regimes—I don't know what—same with the semantics. Narcissists—this—their form of supply—the narcissist—adulation, admiration, attention, or being feared, if he is into sadistic supply. The borderline needs the presence of their main partner; they're terrified of abandonment; that's their supply. And the psychopath—money, power, control, funds, sex. Borderline fairy princess can be described as narcissist with an overwhelming separation anxiety. Borderlines do care deeply about not hurting others, though they often cannot help it, but it's not out of empathy, as they like to present; they they have a selfish motivation. If they hurt others, they're rejected and abandoned in the control radius. So this is a selfish motivation to avoid rejection. Borderlines depend on other people for emotional sustenance and regulation. A drug addict is very unlikely to pick up a fight with his pusher, but borderlines also have deficient impulse control, saying that psychopaths—and this is why they're emotionally labile; their behavior is erratic; and they heap abuse on their nearest and dearest.
I'm mentioning all this huge salad of personality disorders to show you that perhaps all these very, very fine, you know, distinctions, all these nitpicking distinctions between sub-categories—maybe, maybe they are artificial. Say, have you ever watched a borderline, an enraged borderline? You would immediately have realized that they are totally psychopathic, secondary psychopaths. So is the true self of the narcissist the equivalent of the host personality of the dissociative identity in dissociative identity disorder? Is the false self one of the fragmented personalities also known as alters? The—borderlines—people with borderline personality disorder also have a full set. So are we talking about private cases of multiple personality disorder? And what about the psychopath? He doesn't have a false self, does he, a true self? It seems he doesn't have a true self as well. Psychopathy is no self, period—not false, not true. So what is he, if there's no self, integrated self, assumed in the Union Scholar? If there is no constellated self, what does the psychopath have in its place? Is it merely an automaton, a robot, a higher form of artificial intelligence? These are very difficult questions to answer, because clearly the narcissist doesn't have a functioning internal self, constellated self, integrated self, true self. He is operating on the basis of a piece of fiction. In his in—his life is a is a mega-production or a movie. From the borderline—she also does a false self, but clearly she has a true self. So if it looks like psychopathy is no self, true or false, borderline is both—announced this as one—are these private instances typical of a typical dissociative identity disorder? The false self is a mere construct, a façade; it is the locus of the narcissist's fantasies of grandiosity—these feelings of entitlement, omnipotence, magical thinking, omniscience, and magical immunity. But the false self lacks many other functional, structural elements. It is a very common—in a typical self. Moreover, there—the false self, unlike, let's say, alters in multiple personality—for self is not cut off—no start date—like you cannot date it in DID. All alters—orders in multiple personality have a date of inception. When I say date, I mean a date—12th of May, 16th of October—usually it's a reaction to a specific trauma, for instance, of extreme abuse. In other words, DID alters have an age; some of them are 3 years old, some of them are 330, usual, but they all have an age. So the false self looks less like a DID alter, less like a fragment of personality, let alone a full-fledged personality, and more like a self-state, more like a process, not an entity. It is a reactive pattern and a reactive formation. In some ways, the false self is not a self, nor is it really false; it's very real—more real to the narcissist than his true self, and more real to the victims of the narcissist, to his so-called nearest and dearest. They interrupt all the time with the false self, which is—no one else than only the falsity. So if the false self is a process, not an entity, and so—for if it's a self-state, we could say that it's the same with a borderline; she is a psychopathic self-state; is the psychopathic self-state her false—and possibly—this is some—this is an area of investigation that is—
Very new, and there is no definitive answer. We don't know if the borderline's false self is her psycho-secondary psychopath. Maybe she is several surf states. Maybe Kernberg and others were right when they suggested that borderlines are actually ameliorated or mitigated psychotics. Collectively, and others suggested that the psychopath is actually a psychotic. Then, Collectively changed his mind, but at the very beginning, in the 40s, Collectively was adamant: the psychopath is a psychotic; only he hides it behind a perfectly perfect imitation, impenetrable impermeable imitation of sanity. So are we? Is the underlying unifying principle the principle principle psychosis?
Now all these people, broken-down people, people who self did not constantly, did not integrate, and he still fragmented. It's like someone put an improvised explosive device in early child, early childhood, them and blew up the nascent self with its boundaries. And now we are looking at a scene of devastation, or wasteland of shards and remnants of the personality. And, and each of these individuals found their own solution: the narcissist with, with his grandiosity; the borderline with her extreme dysfunctional attachment; the, the psychopath with his lack of disinhibition, lack of inhibitions and end goal orientation. As Kernberg observed, a narcissist actually vanishes and is replaced by the false self. There is no true self inside the gnosis. The gnosis is a hollow mirror; but the false self is an optical illusion created by the mirrors. It's like constructing a car as you careened down a hill, or constructing an airplane while you are in midair. It's cartoonish. No wonder I'm using a minimum schmuck. Now this is amiss, reminiscent of a painting by, by Escher, you know, Cornelia session, where stairs go up and then before you know it you're down back at the very beginning of the staircase. In this, this is, this is a personality disorder, might be the ultimate form of dissociative identity disorder, where the dissociation actually takes over the individual, not that the outcomes of the dissociation, but the dissociative process itself, psychodynamic process becomes the person, completely vanquishing all other personalities and rendering them quivering relics.
It's, in other words, it seems that in the case of the narcissist at least, and possibly the borderline, dissociation is a constant white noise, background noise. It's, it happens not every like three weeks, but more like every three milliseconds. This is, it's like a seismograph in this, an earthquake, a permanent earthquake inside. Not so with the psychopath. The thing is, a psychopath, we're seeing the outcomes of this, and simply that's it; there's nothing there anymore. In the dissociative identity disorder, the emotions are segregated into personality-like internal constructs, entities, alters. The notion of unique, separate, multiple, whole personalities is primitive, and we no longer vote which we consider it a true dissociative identity disorder. It's a continuum. The inner language, a proper language, breaks down into polyglot caves. In the ideal, emotions cannot communicate with each other for fear of provoking overwhelming pain and its fatal consequences. To put it more clearly, the dissociated person, persons with multiple personality, doesn't dare to allow these personalities to communicate to each other because then the pain and the hurt will erupt, and he will commit, or she will commit suicide. So they are being kept apart by various mechanisms: a host of birth personality, a facilitator, moderator, alters, and so all personality disorders involve a multi-compartmentalization. It's not about this, the dissociation is even a diagnostic criterion in borderline personality disorder. But the narcissistic solution is to emotionally disappear altogether, hence the tremendous insatiable need of the narcissist for external approval. So he disabled his ego. His equation was very pure: I'll, in the best case, in front. I'm more common, more commonly, and so nas is disabled his ego and all the functions will be, including, for example, reality testing. So he needs input from the outside; oh, he will not survive. Narcissus exists only as a reflection. It was a tremendous insight by Sigmund Freud that gnosis is actually not a person but a reflection. The gnosis falls in love repeatedly, libidinal cathexis, or effects, not himself but his reflection in the water. Since the gnosis is forbidden to love his true self, he chooses to have no self, like, don't want my true self, I will have no self. It is not, it is, it is the ultimate dissociation. It's a vanishing. A narcissistic personality disorder is a total, pure solution, self-extinguishing, self-abolishing, entirely self-invented or self-conjured, not to say fake. Other personality disorders are diluted variants or variations on the themes of self-hatred and perpetuated self-abuse. It's German. The histrionic is a narcissist with sex and bonding as the sources of narcissistic supply. As I said before, the borderline personality disorder involves more line person involves lability, the movement between poles of life, we should death wish and so on. A sense of entitlement talk is common to all cluster B. Narcissists almost never act on their suicidal ideations, ideation precisely because of this sense of entitlement they feel, and tightening to life, they feel entitled to other people, on their resources. Borderlines incessantly self-mutilate or try to commit suicide, or at the very least have suicidal ideation. They threaten suicide, mention suicide, think about suicide, someone cut, some of them are self-injurious and so, but there is a, a kind of internalization of the explosive nature of both lights, the rage internalized become suicidal. And yet both narcissism and, and borderlines tend to become suicidal, at the very least entertain suicidal thoughts under severe and prolonged stress. So it's, it's another example of what I'm saying that under stress, with stressors, this so-called alleged extensively separate personality disorder actually facet of the same clinical entity. The nicest easily announces transitions to borderline when he is under really, really, really severe stress, for example, after mortification. After mortification, Massa suddenly his emotions, he even has a modicum of empathy, and he becomes, if you put everything together, after mortification, he becomes a borderline. And I encourage you to watch the videos about mortification that I mentioned at the beginning. Narcissists, for example, can suffer from brief reactive psychosis in the same way that borderline suffer from psychotic macro episodes. I'm not saying that narcissism and borderline are the same thing. Narcissist is way less impulsive; the narcissist less self-destructive, rarely self-aware, deletes practically never attempt suicide. Psychopaths, the same gnosis is more stable, displays reduced emotional lability, instability in interpersonal relationships is all but what I am saying is that there are default modes and winds when certain circumstances coalesce and some situations constant, the novice moves to the next default which is borderline; borderline moves, moves to the next default which is psychopathy; the psychopath moves to the next default which is not desist. So they all play a kind of musical chairs reactively.
Kan suggested that the, the diagnose, the borderline diagnosis is somewhere between psychotic and neurotic, actually between psychotic and personality. So he said that the neurotic has autoplastic defenses, something wrong with me, but the personality disorder person has a alloplastic defenses, something's wrong with the world. When the psychotics have that kind of bizarre defense, something's wrong with those who say that something's wrong with all personality disorders have clears, I mean cluster, we have a clear psychotic streak. Borderlines, as I said, have psychotic episodes. Gnosis is react with psychosis to love light press and, and very frequently in treatment. It's well known that in treatment now system gnosis is developed psychotic macro episodes which can last sometimes for things. And so even this, the psychotic, psychotic reaction is, is common to, to these personality disorders. Psychopaths, just to make clear, psychopath, sociopath, these are the old names for antisocial personality disorder. The line between narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder is extremely thin, and the social personality disorder may simply be a less inhibited and less grandiose form of narcissism. The important differences between gnosticism and antisocial personality disorder are inability or unwillingness to control impulses in the psychopath, and enhanced lack of empathy on the part of the psychopath, that psychopathy, the psychopath's inability to form relationships, not even, not statistically twisted relationships with other people; then the psychopath's total disregard for society's conventions, mores, social cues, social treaties, which also mean that the psychopath is not really dependent on the sadistic supply in the, in, in way that analysis does. And as opposed to what Scott Peck says, these are not even people, you know. There's a tendency, a religious tendency to cast everything in is a morality play, bad versus good, evil versus ill. Even is, not as a psychiatric term, has no place in such a discourse. These people, psychopaths, narcissists, borderlines, may come as a surprise to you, but they don't have intention to cause harm, developments real. Even the psychopath is not out to cause harm; he's out to gratify himself. And the thing with the psychopaths is his motivations and drives are so ephemeral, so passing, so trifle, so stupid, so, and yet he makes people pay the huge price to satisfy. And it is this discrepancy between motivation which is puny and passing and not very important and the huge price that he makes people pain that causes us to regard him as evil. It's only an evil person, but, but even is Islam an ethical tournament, so religiously, as million notes, some the narcissist incorporate moral values into their exaggerated sense of superiority. Here, moral laxity seen by the narcissist as evidence of inferiority, and it is those who are unable to remain morally pure who are looked upon with contempt. So actually self-righteousness, are truly service, or that they are, all I mean they are many, many narcissism and psychopaths who are altruistic, charitable, compulsive givers, and the upholders of morality and any ethics. I wouldn't use this criterion of evil as a unifying principle these disorders. And again we see that these disorders are actually operational, in functional facets of each other. They looks really distinct narcissism in different colors and careless in their conduct and in their treatment of others, exactly like psychopaths. Their abusive conduct is often handed, an absent-minded, not calculate implemented. And with the psychopath this is not always true. Psychopaths is very often calculated and premeditated, but still, still the underlying monologue, the, the inner, the inner dialogue, if you wish, between the psychopathy analysis and their entry takes is people don't matter, I matter. So the narcissus abuses and hurts people as a by-product, as a side-effect. He pursues his goal, his obsession, his compulsion with autistic supply. Anyone who stands in his way, you know, his gun finished, trampled or destroyed. This psychopath, it behaves exactly the same, but his range of goals is much wider. So he doesn't much more often and bring many more people in his mode. As I said, his motivation, the reason for the reasons for doing what history is so primitive, so trifle, so puny, so, so unimportant, so insignificant that we are shocked that the psychopath is really to damage people, to kill people, sometimes trying to kill someone for five dollars, you know, to cheat on his wife, to cheat with you with her husband's, be a business associate, colleague with his wife's best friend or with his best friend's wife, in all this because it's a prank, the joke is fun. And psychopaths just want to have fun, you know.
So what if we accept that narcissists, borderlines, and psychopaths are actually facets of one clinical entity, and these facets are stages, phases? Start perhaps as a last assistant, then you become borderline, pick up cycle, start as a psychopath, you become narcissist, you start as a borderline who become psychopath, etc. If we accept that these are phase transitions within a single clinical entity, by where this happens a lot is schizophrenia, for example. So if we accept that these, these are phase transitions, still, what is this clinical entity? What is this undefined thing, disorder, disease, illness that gives rise kaleidoscopically to these varying, shape-shifting, dizzying facets of misbehavior? I think the underlying problem is not statistical offenses, narcissism. In other words, I think this is the second psychopathological default. It is the base state. Abuse and trauma in early childhood perpetuate primary narcissistic defenses into adulthood. Pathological narcissism wears many forms: it's classic or malignant, appropriative, and when you take other people and use them, schizoid, aggressive, destructive. It's, it's, in other words, you could say the pathological narcissism is at the roots of most personality disorders, that's as a general state. Now let's try to study it in depth. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is linear, it's descriptive, it's phenomenological, it's a series of lists actually with, you know, check, check please, and it's a button presentation, its bureaucratic, its medical, Mechanica, dynamical, physical, and so it's reminiscent of the old taxonomies in botany. It's already, and these and losses of the patient using traffic life circumstances, biological and psychological processes, and if it's not overarching conceptual and exegetical interpretive framework. Moreover, the DSM is heavily influenced by cultural attractions, prevailing social lauren ëthis and by the legal and business environment, insurance companies, from a suitable companies heavily involved in the construction and composition of the DS. So whatever I'm going to say is a bit of a departure from the DSM. So I don't regard the DSM as psychodynamic authority and authority, but psychodynamics. I regard the DSM ism is a pretty exhaustive and comprehensive list of diagnostic criteria or symptoms. So let's put the DSM aside. We are all narcissists at an early stage of our lives. As infants, we feel that we are the center of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient. Our parents, those mythical figures, are immortal to us; they are possibly power, they are, they are only protected to protect, in service, both itself and other people, especially primary objects like mother, deputee maturely is idealizations and is one as parts of the same entity. Inevitably, the inexorable processes and conflicts of life grind these ideals into the fine dust of the real. Disappointments follow, disillusionment. When these are gradual and tolerable, they're adaptive, but if they are abrupt, if this disappointments, disillusionment, disenchant is abroad, their proper, capricious, arbitrary, intense, the injuries sustained by the tender parting self-esteem are both very deep and irreversible. Moreover, the imperfect support of caretakers, the primary objects, parents, it's crucial. In the absence of such succor, self-esteem in adulthood tends to fluctuate, to alternate between evaluation, idealization, and evaluation, but not only of evaluation and evaluation of others, but of myself. Narcissistic adults are the result of bitter disappointments, of radical disillusionment with parents, role models, peers. Healthy adults accept their limitations, the boundaries of their selves. Healthy adults accept disappointments, setbacks, failures, defeats, criticism, disillusionment, and acceptable breaks, grace, and tolerance. The sense of self-worth in a healthy adult is concept, it's positive, it's minimally affected by outside events, no matter how severe their. In the common view is that we go through the stages of a linear development. We are propelled forward by various forces. Freud gave him all kinds of bizarre names, never mind the libido, eros, force of life, Thanatos, force of death, destroyed on Friday that had this tripartite model, you know, Franklin context, meaning, in other words, thinking, in behaviorism, these are socially mediated phenomena. In Horning's opera, there's a cultural context; in Sullivan's work, its interpersonal relationships; and neurobiological and neurochemical processes in, in more modern world. And these are few schools of developmental psychology that are kind of floating around. It doesn't really matter what label you slap on this move, inexorable move forward, but this is clear, everyone agrees this is a move from A to B and from B to C, from self to others, from others to, and so in an effort to gain respectability, many scholars attempted to propose the physics of the mind, but these four systems differ on many issues. Some say that personal development ends in childhood, otherwise [Music], you know, we would be like protein, it would be a never-ending piece of work. Other scholars say it ends in adolescence, and yet others say the development is a process which continues throughout the life of the individual to its last breath. Ericson, common to all these schools of thoughts are the mechanics and dynamics of the process of personal growth. Forces, inner or external, facilitate the development of the individual. When an obstacle to development is encountered, development is stunted or arrested, but never follow a distorted pattern of development to bypass the peers. Psychopathology is the outcome of perturbed growth. Humans can be compared to trees. When a tree encounters the physical obstacle to its expansion, especially its roots, its branches, they curl around it, they kind of circumventing, deformed, mainly oddly, mainly, but they reach the destination, however late, however partially. Psychopathologies are the same; they are actually adaptive mechanisms. They allow the individual to continue to grow around obstacles. The nascent personality twists and turns, deforms itself, is transformed until it reaches a functional, equally brew of homeostasis, which is not true ego-dystonic, not too unpleasant, unacceptable to the individual. They having reached this point, everything settles down, everything settles down and continues it's more or less linear pattern of blocks. The forces of life is expressing the development of the personality as stronger than any hindrance, any obstacle, any stress, any challenge. The roots of trees, remember, they crack mighty rocks and pavements. Microbes live in the most poisonous surroundings, extremophiles. Similarly, similarly, humans are a life-form. In humans form these personality structures which are optimally suited to their needs and to the outside constraints. Such personality configurations may be abnormal, but their mere existence proves that they had triumphed in the delicate task of successful adaptation. In other words, one thing you can say in favor of narcissists and psychopaths, the borderlines, they're alive, they're alive, they're not dead, they're survivors. Only death puts a stop to personal growth and development. Life's events, crises, joys and sadness, disappointment, surprises, big successes, all these contribute to the weaving of the delicate fabric that we call personality. When an individual at any age encounters an obstacle to the orderly progression from stage one to stage two, then individual retreats to his early childhood narcissistic phase, rather than circumvent or go around the ocean, always happens, you're mortified, some horrible crisis, I don't know, divorce, you were fired, and it is immediately a narcissistic wretch. The process is free-faced, the personal encounters some kind of life crisis or life obstacle, number two, the person regresses, regresses, goes back to the infant, I lost 60 traits, number three, the person in the infantile faiths gathers force, recuperates, recovers, and then confronts the obstacle again, usually successfully. When in step two, which is the narcissistic infantile things, the person displays childish, immature behaviors. He feels it is a limited, misjudges his powers and the might of the opposition. He underestimates challenges facing him; he pretends to be Mr. Normal. His sensitivity to the needs of emotions of others is empathy; his ability to empathize deteriorate sharply; he becomes intolerably 40 with sadistic, even paranoid tendencies. Happens to everyone. Healthy individuals who come who undergo life crisis react exactly like sick individuals who go for a life crazy; they all share this what Freud called primary narcissist, infantile, childlike, toddler narcissism. I'm leading some woman. It is from here that we come to unifying, unify grand theory, huge of cluster B, a theory which implies that what we call personality disorders is a mistake; is these are just operations; this we have been misled by the various facets and shimmering manifestations of a single clinical entity. So what the person is in this infantile state, narcissistic state, he demands unconditional admiration or unconditional love, even when he does not deserve that kind of person in crisis, a traumatized person is preoccupied with fantastic, magical thinking, daydreams is life for me. He tends to exploit others, to envy others, to be edgy, to explode with unexplained rage, will abolish. This is very common, for example, among the newly, the newly unemployed or people who have just contracted the chronic illness. People who psychological development is obstructed by a formidable obstacle mostly revert to excessive and compulsive behavior patterns. To put it succinctly, whenever we experience a major life crisis which hinders our personal growth and threatens it, we suffer a mild and transient form of narcissistic personality disorder, exactly as running stone wrong determined Millman. See the fantasy world full of falsity and hurt feelings. Fantasy world serves as a springboard from which a rejuvenated individual resumes his progress towards the next stage of person. This time around, second round, faced with the same obstacle, he feels sufficiently potent, omnipotent to ignore it or to attack it. And that's exactly what happens in early childhood. The child develops grandiosity, and this grandiosity allows the child to take the risk of going out to the world. In most cases, the success of this second onslaught is guaranteed by the delusional assessment; the obstacles, fortitude and magnitude are diminished. This indeed is the main function of this reactive, episodic, and transient processes: to encourage medical thing, to encourage magical thinking, to wish the problem away, to enchant it, to tackle and overcome it from a position of omnipotence and omniscience. A structural abnormality of personality arises only when recurrent attacks, time and again, time and again, fail constantly and consistently to eliminate the obstacle. If you're faced with the crisis, you regress to the narcissistic face, you attacked the obstacle, you try to resolve the crisis, you try to adapt to the new circumstance, and you fail, you regress again, try again, you fail again. If this happens many times, the abnormality of the personality becomes structural, embedded. If you fail to overcome the hindrance, the hindrance becomes you. The controls between the fantastic world temporarily occupied by the individual and the real world in which he keeps being frustrated, this contrast is too acute to countenance for long without some resulting deformity or deficiency. And these disciplines, the gap between grandiose fantasy and frustrating reality gives rise to the unconscious decision to go on living in the world of fantasy, grandiosity and entitlement. It is better to feel special than to feel inadequate; it'll be better to abeam omnipotent than psychologically important; is better to abuse others then to be abused by them; it's preferable, in short, it is better to remain of illogical narcissists than to face harsh, unyielding reality. Perhaps not all personality disorders are fundamentally narcissistic, cluster B roster name, yet I think that the default when growth is stunted by the existence of a persistent obstacle or set of obstacles, I think the default is remission to the narcissistic phase or early. I concur with bigger fingers like fruit. I further believe that this is the only default available to the individual whenever he comes across an obstacle. The individual regresses to the narcissistic phase. But so how can we reconcile it with the apparent diversity of cluster B personality? Certainly, I think it behooves us to go back one step. Gnosticism is the substitution of a false self for a true self. The true self is put aside, shunted and shunned, and there's a philosopher, and this arguably is the predominant feature of gnosis. The true self is repressed, relegated to irrelevance, obscurity, left to degenerate, decay, and n becomes atrophied and ossified. Instead of the true self, a psychological structure is from construct and projected onto the outside world, and that's the false self. The narcissist's false self is reflected at him, back at him by other, and this process of the narcissist, the diff'rent self indeed is real; it exists independently. Here people are reflecting it. How can people reflect the false self if it doesn't exist? It means the for self fixes; it's not entirely a figment of the narcissist's imagination, and therefore it is a legitimate successor to the true self. It is this characteristic which is common to all psychopathologies: the emergence of force, fake, improvised psychic structures, fictitious, emulating, imitative, imitative, mimetic, simulated psychic structures which reserved the powers and capacities of the previous legitimate and authentic ones. Horrified by the absence of a clearly bounded, cohesive, coherent, reliable and self-free regulate itself, the mentally abnormal pers resorts to one of the following solutions, all of which involve reliance upon faker, invented personality constructs. So there is a process when the false self is created and then takes over; there is a profit, ongoing process of mortification. Perhaps this is the dynamic that we feel in all, in borderline, psychopaths, analysis, that they are constantly modified by their own absence, and so they choose solutions. This is a lot of statistical erosion. The true self is replaced by false self. Schizotypal personality disorder also largely belongs here because it's for its emphasis on fantastic and magical thinking. Borderline personality disorder is a case of a failed narcissistic solution. Both Rothschild described it as failed, doesn't bother my personality, so that the patient is a winner, that the solutions that she had opted for is not working, and this is the source of her separation anxiety, fear of abandonment. She doesn't, the fear of being abandoned by the intimate partner, who is usually a narcissist, by the way; he's actually the fear of being abandoned by her own internal structures, the fear of self-abandonment. This, the intimate partner is the reification in the resonance of an inner structure that had failed. And borderline is this permanent hope that the intimate partner will succeed where the internal solution had failed. She had tried to become a Nazi; she had failed. Maybe this narcissist who is her husband, her boyfriend, her lover, her one-night stand, maybe this losses will succeed where her obtains had faked. And this generates her identity disturbance, her affective and emotional lability, suicidal ideation, dysregulation, emotional dysregulation, suicidal action, chronic feelings of emptiness, rage attacks, transient stress-related paranoid ideation. All these have a lot to do with what Kernberg called the emptiness of the void. This is emptiness and void that is not only sure, let's a space where there's nothing, space of nothingness, deep space; it's an emptiness that is the outcome of deeply ingrained, assimilated or pervasive, ubiquitous failure. Second
Solution is the appropriations. This is the appropriation of the confiscation of someone else's self in order to fill the vacuum left by the absence of a functioning ego. While some ego functions are available internally, many others—most others—are adopted by appropriating another person's personality. Histrionic Personality Disorder is an example of this. Rouge mothers who sacrifice their lives for their children; people who live vicariously through others—they all belong to this category: appropriation. People who dramatize their lives, their behavior in order to attract attention—the appropriators misjudged the intimacy, the level of intimacy, extent of their relationships, and the degree of commitment involved. They are easily suggestible, and the whole personality seems to shift and fluctuate with the input from the outside. And in these reactive dysphoria and some, they are very similar to masters because they have no self of their own, even less so than classical narcissists. The appropriators tend to overeat and overemphasize their bodies. Perhaps the most striking example of this type solution is dependent personalities.
So this is the second truth, and you can really immediately see that this solution and the narcissistic solution have like 90% of things in common. The narcissist also prostrates himself to other people and their attention to regulate his internal environment, that does the schedule. These patients are mental zombies, trapped forever in the no-man's-land between stunted growth and the narcissistic default. They're not narcissists because they lack a self; nor are they fully developed adults because the true self is immature and dysfunctional. They prefer to avoid contact with others; they lack empathy and so they don't understand that they're not party to the engine in the subject-object frame of reference; exactly like the novices or people with autism spectrum disorders. So they avoid contact with others in order not to upset the delicate, tightrope act that is their internal space. Withdrawing from the world is an adaptive solution because it does not expose the patient's inadequate personality structures, especially his self, to onerous and failure-laden tests. The schizotypal personality disorder is a mixture; narcissistic, experiment, Gordon personality disorder isn't another closed key.
The fourth solution is the aggressive, destructive solution. These people suffer from hypochondriasis, depression, suicidal ideation, dysphoria, and have compulsions, obsessions, other expressions when turned; Eliza transformed aggression. These are people who are aggressive but have sworn off their aggression; they redirect aggression at the self, why? Because they perceive themselves to be inadequate, guilty, disappointing, worthy of nothing but elimination in punitive action. Many of the narcissistic elements are present in an exaggerated form; actually, lack of empathy becomes reckless disregard for others, with manipulativeness, deceitfulness, and criminal violence. Undulating self-esteem is transformed into impulsiveness and failure to plan ahead; antisocial personality—so the psychopath is a prime example of this ruse whose essence is the total control over oneself without the mitigating presence of a shred of true self, in the case of narcissistic, apathetic narcissists; or the lack of any self, false or true, in the case of classic, purebred psychopaths—no such thing, by the way. The vast majority of psychopaths are not…was a mother diesel. Perhaps this common feature, the replacement of the original structures of the personality by new, invented, mostly forced structures, constructs—perhaps this is what causes one to see narcissists everywhere. This common denominator is most accentuated in narcissistic personality disorder, but it also entails a confusion between internal and external objects, some of which are contradictory. It also entails a fragmentation of the self accompanied by pervasive dissociation and confabulation. Any—we encroach upon territories such as borderline personality disorder, psychotic—as a psychotic disorder, I mean—it seems—in terms of disturbed narcissism, especially in early childhood, maybe the fountain, the source of everything wrong that can go wrong with someone's mental health, and with very strong emphasis on personality disorders and within these Cluster B, the interaction—really the battle between the struggling original remnants of the personality and the malignant, newly constructed—this battle can be discerned in all forms of psychic abnormality.
Question is: if from any phenomena have one thing in common, should they be considered one in the same, or at least caused by the same thing? I say that the answer in the case of the Cluster B disorders should be in the affirmative. I think that all the Cluster B personality disorders, especially Cluster B, are forms of malignant self-law. In each personality disorder, different attributes are differently emphasized, different ways attached to different behavior patterns, but these, in my view, are all matters of quantity, not of quality. The myriad deformations, deformations of the reactive patterns collectively known as personality disorders—they all belong to the same family. And people, patients, as any practicing psychiatrist or psychologist or therapist or counselor will tell you, people easily and seamlessly transition between various personality disorders, especially within the same family—easily. And this is the reason for comorbidity; this is the reason for the appalling fatigue problem in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. There is ultimately only one Cluster B personality disorder, and everything we see is like the famous story with the elephant—where blind scholars were brought for the first time in their lives to see an elephant. From one of them hugged the legs; the other one pulled his tail; and the third one touched his trunk; and of course, they had totally different descriptions of what an elephant is. But we, who have eyesight, can look upon these scholars and say, “Hey, there’s an elephant in the room,” an elephant that has a trunk, and a tail, and sturdy pillar-like legs, but it’s one animal with different manifestations as you probe it differently; life probes it differently; and people with a Cluster B personality disorder react differently, transition from sociopath to borderline, from borderline to psychopathy, from psychopathy to narcissism—the cycle is closed.