Transcription
You sure know how to get to the point. So, thank you for having me. Uh, call me Sam will make the interview a lot shorter.
Um, narcissism or pathological narcissism to be precise because there is healthy narcissism. Healthy narcissism underlies phenomena such as self-esteem or self-confidence or the ability to regulate one's sense of self-worth.
So unhealthy narcissism, pathological narcissism, also known as secondary narcissism is a very multifaceted phenomenon because it's not only a clinical entity. It's not only a diagnosis with diagnostic criteria with clinical features with case studies. It's not only that. It's also an organizing principle. what what we call a hermeneutic principle. A principle that makes sense of of the world, makes sense of society, of individual behaviors, of certain professions, of So when you superimpose uh pathological narcissism on the world around you, suddenly you decode it. It's a way to decode it. It's a way to decipher it. It's a way to suddenly imbue it with meaning, direction, purpose. And so many people now use pathological narcissism as a tool to, for example, explain uh certain political movements and certain political leaders. Um, phenomena such as me too or sexual assault in in various industries etc etc. This is one dimension of pathological narcissism which I will not deal with right now and I will focus on the clinical entity.
Now there's a big difference between narcissistic personality disorder and what we call narcissistic style or more precisely subclinical >> rude or whatever. Selfish, rude, lacks empathy to some extent, prone to temper tantrums and rage attacks from time to time and so on so forth. But all these elements do not coalesce into a disorder of the personality. Someone who is obnoxious basically and there are other words which I cannot use on camera. But an obnoxious person would be someone with very likely with a narcissistic uh personality style. But there is no connection whatsoever between a narcissistic personality style and a narcissistic personality disorder because the disorder involves massive disruptions to internal psychological processes to the perception of the world to perception of others to interpersonal relationships. It's an all-pervasive ubiquitous form of psychological malignancy. It's it's stage four cancer of the mind. And of course it's this is narcissist people with narcissistic personality disorder. Of course they are obnoxious. But this is a superficial similarity. There's no extrapolation here. It's not like if you have a style and then you amplify your style you suddenly become a narcissist. That's a common misperception especially online.
Now to answer your question, pathological narcissism if we focus on the clinical aspects and not on the behavioral aspects because you could describe pathological narcissism using behaviors. So you could say the narcissist is envious. The narcissist is exploitative. The narcissist lacks empathy. These are all true. Narcissist is entitled. Believes that he's entitled to special treatment. Narcissist cuts corners and is essentially intellectually and otherwise lazy. And so these are all true. These are all clinical features. Narcissists are self-enhancing. They seek input and feedback from the environment, the human environment, in order to somehow augment and buttress their inflated fantastic self-perception and self-concept. All these are true. But all these do not touch the core of narcissism. They are phenomenological descriptions of their symptoms. They're not the disease.
The disease is much more complex because pathological narcissism is a disruption to the process of the formation of the self in early and mid childhood. The self, the constellation, the integration of the self, the emergence of the self has been disrupted. And consequently, ironically, these people are selfless. They lack what Freud used to call ego. They don't have this. They don't have a core identity. Where a person should have been, there is an emptiness, a void or what some psychologist call a black hole. And so it's an absence masquerading as a presence. It's a kind of simulation of a human being in many ways. And so this is uh aspect number one.
The second pertinent dimension is the fact that narcissists are incapable of perceiving other people as external objects. What they do when they come across other people who they whom they deem to be useful in some way, they internalize them. They convert them into an internal representation into an avatar. So they have this library of internal objects kind of snapshots and I I indeed call it snapshotting. They they have a library of snapshots all of them photoshopped in a process known as idealization. So the the snapshots don't even represent accurately and faithfully the external object and they continue to interact with internal snapshots or internal objects or introjects. They continue to interact with these exclusively. They cut off the external object. When there is a discrepancy between the external object and the internal object, this gives rise to aggression, devaluation and ultimately a breakup or termination of the relationship because the frustration and the triggering are too much for the narcissist.
I've mentioned now discrepancy between external object and internal object. The internal object of course is fixated is permanent and while the external object has a life of her own. She's independent. She's agentic. She is um she has personal autonomy. She has her own friends, her own family. She makes decisions. She travels. She comes back. And all this grates upon the narcissist because all these proofs or evidence of independence undermine and challenge the permanence of the internal object. the introject constancy. So that drives the narcissist to try to control the external object in order to deanimate her in order to render the external object an Egyptian mummy so that in her immobility she would conform perfectly to the static internal object or internal representation.
This discrepancy is just one case of discrepancies in pathological narcissism. Another example of a discrepancy is between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem. The narcissist puts on an act. The narcissist is grandiose. The narcissist is self-confident. The narcissist is omnipotent, all powerful. The narcissist is omniscient, all knowing. Narcissist is godlike. and he's a perfect being in every other way. That's a facade. That's a kind of invulnerability signaling or kind of superiority signaling. But the signaling is compensatory. It compensates for something. And what it compensates for is what we call implicit self-esteem. And Adler called about a century ago inferiority complex. Deep inside the narcissist has something known as internalized bad object. It's a coalition of voices, coalition of introjects. For example, mother, father, teachers, maybe influential peers. These voices keep informing the narcissists, you're unworthy, you're unlovable, you're a failure, you're stupid, you're ugly. And to counter these intolerable, burdensome, denigrating, vitiating, negating voices, the narcissist puts on an act of being the exact opposite.
In the history of the study of narcissism, which by the way is one of the first topics to have been studied in psychology. Um, the study of narcissism dates back to Havelock Ellis in 1897. It's a long time. And so what we used to think until more or less the 1990s or the end of the 1980s, we used to think that all narcissists are happy-go-lucky. They're ego-consonant or ego-syntonic. In other words, what you see is what you get. They really do believe their own inflated fantastic, grandiose, divine, godlike emanation or signaling. We believed that there was no discrepancy between implicit and explicit self-esteem.
And then at the end of the 1980s, we discovered a variant of narcissism. The variant, it's like a virus. We discovered a variant of narcissism known as covert or vulnerable or fragile or shy narcissist or at the time it was called closet narcissist. And this narcissist clearly possesses the discrepancy that I've described between an inferiority complex, a bad internalized object and a show, a facade, a theater production. It's a thespian who is kind of. And then we ask the question, is this variant of narcissism the dominant um gene so to speak or is it a recessive gene? Is it a kind of mutation in narcissism or is it actually the core of narcissism? Is there. And now we are beginning to think that the only real narcissists are actually compensatory. We're beginning to think that maybe covert narcissism is the only form of narcissism. While overt and grandiose narcissists may be still being debated, maybe a presentation of a psychopathic state. In other words, there's some confluence between antisocial personality disorder aka psychopathy in the extreme cases and overt grandiose narcissists.
One of the reason we are having this debate is that there is a tiny group of narcissists, well 3% of narcissists who are manifestly and expressly psychopathic. They are known as malignant narcissists. Malignant narcissist is a confluence of narcissism, psychopathy and sadism. It was first described by Otto Kernberg. And so we now know that there is a subgroup of narcissists who are the bridge between classic narcissists and classic psychopaths. And we're beginning to ask ourselves, are the the rest of the the rest of the group of overt narcissists, are they just attenuated psychopaths? >> And the only real group is the covert narcissist. So this is the debate nowadays. >> Fascinating.