Transcription
Everyone and her mother-in-law are now experts on Cluster B personality disorders. It's all the rage; it's a money spinner. So here's a message to these self-styled experts: autistic thinking is not the same—repeat, not the same—as autism spectrum disorder, or more generally, autism. Autistic thinking has little to do with autism, despite the label.
Here's a piece of free advice—I usually charge $500 an hour, and here I'm giving it to you for free: go and actually study psychology under Professor Sam Vaknin, preferably; or, much easier and much more pleasant, watch this video to the end, and you will be enlightened, and educated, and edified about autistic thinking and deistic thinking. But not before we trudge through multiple service announcements. Now, for those of you who don't want to listen to the service announcements, fast forward; find where the video starts—the actual content starts. Others who are curious as to what is happening in the esteemed, venerable Professor S. Vaknin's life, this is for you.
Okay. First of all, my name is Vaknin. I'm the author of *Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited*. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology at Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation. I left when the war started, and I'm a longtime faculty member at CUPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, in Toronto, Canada; Cambridge, United Kingdom; and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria.
Here are the service announcements preceding the actual content of the video:
Number one: There's an artificial intelligence channel—artificial intelligence channel—called Mindful Wealth Master. Link in the description. The channel summarizes the thought, the thinking, of public intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson, Yuval Noah Harari, and so on, and so forth. And among these public intellectuals, poor humble me—my thinking and teachings are also summarized there. Go to the channel, have a look around, and please pay attention to the number of views. Hint, hint. Enough bragging, enough self-congratulating, and self-bragging. People might think that you're a narcissist.
Okay. A propos narcissism, I'm honored and privileged to have been the latest guest in the Human Rights Podcast of the University of Cambridge. The podcast is called *Declarations*, and it is put together by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge. It's available on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, and again, there's a link in the description. Now, during this podcast, I suggested a new approach to abuse involving—involving—dual concepts: borders versus boundaries. The host was Nima Jaa Singh, and the panelist was Dr. Mariam Tanir. And we—we—we dealt with the discourses regarding personal border violations in mental abuse versus boundary violations. It's very interesting because I identified several behaviors which are not considered abusive as actually abusive. Go there and listen if you didn't have enough of the Vaknin overdose for the day. Overdose on Vaknin is the new black.
Okay. Next, as you well know, or some of you may know, uh, I have a PhD in—in physics. So there—there are several videos I've made about physics. A theory that I came up with in 1984, in my PhD dissertation, is now being elaborated upon by scientists all over the world. So there—there are several videos on physics; there are videos on economics. I used to be an economic advisor to several governments. I used to be the senior business correspondent of United Press International, UPI. I was—was and am still interviewed widely in all international media, lately in *Newsweek* and RTL TV Hungary, and so on, and so forth. And I'm the current columnist in *Brussels Morning*, which is a European Union newspaper. Now, all these contents and materials are available on my Vaknin Musings channel—Vaknin Musings channel—and again, there's a link in the description. Another channel that I maintain is about nothingness.
Finally, the last service announcement: I'm uploading academic papers—academic articles—that I've published, that I've authored and published, and I'm uploading academic articles and papers where my work is cited. There's a total of 1,500 academic papers where my work has been cited, and I'm uploading all this to my page on Academia.edu—Academia.edu—Academia.edu. Recently, Academia.edu selected me to be in the top 0.5% of 270 million academics around the world. It's a huge honor, and I accept it—untypically—typically of me, I accepted with due humility. Top 0.5% of all academics in the world, confirmed by Academia.edu. I'm also a member of their editor board and other—other positions. So these are the service announcements, as I promised.
Today we're going to discuss a very fascinating topic: autistic and deistic thinking. But before we go there, I want to mention a school of thought known as enactivism. Enactivism is the proposition that minds arise and take shape through the precarious, self-creating, self-sustaining, adaptive activities of living creatures. Living creatures regulate themselves by interacting with features of the environment. Now, the insights of enactivism went into my recent IPAM model—IPAM model—Intra Psychic Activation Model. There's a video on my channel dedicated to IPAM, and there are already a few papers published in academic journals about IPAM. So enactivism is a part of IPAM because it recognizes that the minds of creatures are the outcomes of regulatory or self-regulatory activities in the environment. Now, the term enaction was first introduced in a book called *The Embodied Mind*, co-authored by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, and published in 1991. At the time, the authors defined cognition as enaction, and they defined enaction as the bringing forth of domains of significance through organis—organismic activity that has been itself conditioned by a history of interactions between an organism and his environment. Mentality—never mind how complex, never mind how sophisticated—yes, even my mentality—has to do with living beings dynamically interacting with their environment. From the enactivist perspective, minds cannot be described unless you specify all these interactions because they are at the heart of mentality and mentalizing in all their forms.
Now this leads directly to autistic and deistic thinking because these two types of cognitions are actually divorced from the environment and fly in the face of enactivism. [Music] Look it up. Autistic thinking, also known as—as deistic thinking, is the topic of today's video. And what qualifies me to lecture and preach and chastise and castigate all the plagiarists and self-styled experts out there? My credentials: My name is S. Vaknin. I am the author of the first book on narcissistic abuse, *Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited*, first published in 1999, when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology at Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation, and I am a long-term member of the faculty of CUPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, with offices in Toronto, Canada; Cambridge, United Kingdom; and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria. Here you are—you pan the globe with me—join Vaknin tours. Okay. Look it up. Let us delve right in. Enough with the nonsense bragging. Let us delve right in and discuss autistic and deistic thinking.
Autistic and deistic thinking are ways of relating to reality, to personal experience, to logic itself, and to other people—interpersonal relating. Autistic and deistic thinking are fantasy-infused; they're based on fantasy. However, they are, technically speaking, or clinically speaking, cognitions. Deism and autistic thinking, as the name implies, deal with thoughts, with cognition, but these cognitions are somehow distorted. These are cognitive distortions. Their autistic thinking is narcissistic and egocentric, self-centered and self-absorbed. That's autistic thinking. Deistic thinking is totally fantastic; it revolves around fantasy and daydreaming. It is divorced from reality; it involves impaired reality testing. Both autistic and deistic thinking are self-referential. They cause the individual to withdraw from the world and to focus upon oneself to the exclusion of all others, everything else, and even the logic, order, and rules that rule the universe. So these patients have illogical and idiosyncratic cognitions. Their thinking is very bizarre, to the point that often they are misdiagnosed as schizotypal. But the thinking—or I mean, autistic thinking and deistic thinking—derive from—from an overarching and all-pervasive daydreaming or fantasy life. In other words, they are not isolated figments or mechanisms that are not integrated well into other psychodynamics. They form a part and parcel, and very often the pivot or the axis, of the total mental world, psychological universe, inner landscape of the person involved. Cognitions—in this case, the deistic cognitions, autistic cognitions—actually form the internal universe of the patient, so that everything becomes suffused with fantasy, dreams—highly unusual, very specific and unique to the individual—thinking—idiosyncratic thinking. There is stereotypical or concrete thinking, a defiance of logic, and an inability to relate to other people as if they were real. Of course, if you deny reality, you also deny the reality of other people, with the exception of plagiarists out there. Okay, Shani.
So we have a patient. He is illogical; he's bizarre; he's odd; he's weird. He misinterprets his own experience in ways which are delusional or strange. He has a very poor interface with reality; he misjudges reality. And we have this kind of patient, and they infuse people and events around them with completely subjective meanings. It is on the thin line with psychosis, actually, because there are strong elements of hyper-reflexivity and the usual confusion between internal and external objects. These patients regard the external world as an extension or projection of the internal one. Such patients often withdraw completely; they retreat into—into a private realm, unavailable to communicate and to interact with other—others. And this is very common in specific phases of the narcissistic cycle, for example, the schizoid phase. And so there is a close affinity between narcissism and autism, mediated via autistic thinking. The narcissist is the only clinical case who engages in both—uh—autistic thinking and deistic thinking, depending on the phase in the cycle. So narcissists are like—Superman 2.0—they are like a compendium of these types of counterfactual, unrealistic modes of thought and relating to the environment. People with Autism Spectrum Disorder, they—they engage in autistic thinking. Narcissists, as I said, engage in autistic thinking and deistic thinking. But autistic and deistic thinking are not limited to these mental disorders. If we were to consider the belief in God and other supernatural beings as a form of delusional disorder, a mass psychogenic illness—the way I do—that's how I—that's how I regard this idiotic nonsense—well, these are mentally ill people. Religious people are mentally ill, and they are very—and some of them—not all of them—some of them can easily degenerate into autistic and deistic thinking. For example, many of them believe—believe that God himself is taking care of them specifically, personally, individually monitors them, micromanages their lives, and rewards them or punishes them according to their behavior or misconduct. This is delusional, autistic, deistic thinking—self-absorbed and divorced from reality. So we have an example of socially acceptable delusions which actually involve theistic and—and autistic thinking. Similarly, paranoia—paranoid ideation—is a form of narcissism; it's grandiose. The paranoid believes that he's at the center of some malign attention, malevolent conspiracy. He is so important that everyone is out to get him, to take him down. So the paranoid engages in autistic and deistic thinking as well.
What I'm trying to say is that autistic and deistic thinking are crucial components of many mental illnesses and also many mentally ill but socially condoned behaviors—not only religion—political movements such as Nazism, for example, or communism; they engaged in autistic and deistic thinking. It's an exceedingly dangerous phenomenon, and one of the main tasks in therapy, in psychotherapy, is to negate or to confront and to ameliorate and to subdue and to suppress and to repress autistic and deistic thinking by somehow—uh—confronting them with countervailing information, data, and evidence. This is precisely what is done—what we do in cognitive behavior therapy. I'm not a therapist; I'm a counselor, but this is what is—was—what is done in CBT. So autistic and deistic thinking—if you go—if you go one level down, and if you accept that emotions are a subspecies of cognitions, then, of course, autistic and deistic thinking would affect emotions as well. More precisely, access to emotions. Autistic and deistic thinking would deny the patient access to his emotions because emotions would be perceived as out there, external, part of reality. And so there will be a gap or a chasm or a schism, an internal fragmentation of the patient, where, for example, the narcissist cannot access positive emotions and has—is left only with negative affectivity. Uh, access to emotions is totally denied in the case of the psychopath, and in the case of the borderline, there's emotional dysregulation, which is also a direct outcome of misjudging her emotions, weighing them improperly, again involving autistic and deistic thinking. It's a much-neglected field and could be the key for future advances in the study and treatment of Cluster B personality disorder—hopefully not by self-styled experts, their mothers-in-law, and other plagiarists.