Brain, Brawn, Body, Bluff: Narcissists, Somatic, Covert, Cerebral, and Classic

Uploaded 4/24/2020, approx. 14 minute read

Summary

Narcissists can be either somatic or cerebral, depending on whether they use their physical appearance or intellect to obtain supply. While there is no constancy, there is type dominance, with cerebral narcissists emphasizing their intellect and somatic narcissists emphasizing their physical appearance. Narcissists are competitive and ambitious in sex, using their partner's body as an animated dildo or masturbatory object. Covert narcissists, who are mostly women, tend to be largely asexual due to deep-set inferiority complexes and body dysmorphic disorders. They may engage in body-altering behaviors such as surgeries and look-maxing, which is more prevalent among covert somatic narcissists. Altruism can also be a form of ostentatious narcissism.

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And Sam, the cerebral versus somatic?

When the narcissist tries to obtain supply, the first question is, of course, what are the assets that are at my disposal, which I can leverage to obtain supply?

So if you’re an idiot with muscles, you will use your muscles. If you are intellectually endowed, then you would use your intellect.

And so there are two types of narcissists, the drawn and the brain.

There are those narcissists who use sex, bodybuilding, appearance, looks, attire. They cultivate, they nurture their external appearance and they use it to obtain supply.

And because the only thing you can obtain with external appearance is sex, there’s no other thing you can really obtain with it in today’s environment at least, that’s their supply, sex. So they use their external appearance to obtain casual sex partners, the motorbethany. This is their supply.

And they are the somatic narcissists. Soma in Greek, ancient Greek, means bodybuilding. The cerebral narcissists are narcissists who are intellectually endowed to some extent, to a very large extent. And they use their intellect for precisely the same reason. They’re intellectually pyrotechnic fireworks, intellectual fireworks.

And that garners supply. For example, I’m giving you an interview, that’s supply. So their intellect, they display their intellect, they’re exhibitionistic. Both types are exhibitionistic. They display their intellect, they bring into the table their brain, their mind, amazing mind, kaleidoscopic, colorful, stunning, synoptic mind. And this gets them supply.


Now, one thing that people I think are very confused about, there is no type of constancy.

Cerebral can become somatic and does become somatic. Whenever the cerebral loses a source of supply, or when the cerebral is faced or controls a willing partner, he becomes somatic on a dime.

No problem whatsoever. So if a guru or a top level intellectual were to meet a very, very beautiful student who would offer him sex, trust me, he would become somatic, that’s very same.

Somatic and cerebral are modes of obtaining supply and narcissists are not picking, not choosing, whatever works. But for the intellectual narcissist, for the intelligent narcissist and so on, what works is usually the intellect.

So while there’s no type of constancy, there’s type dominance, recessive and dominant.

So the intellectual, the cerebral narcissist would emphasize this.

Now, usually cerebral narcissists don’t look so good. I mean, they’re not, you know, so it’s difficult for them to obtain willing partners, willing sexual partners and so on. So they end up in most cases being celibate and they focus on their intellect because their intellect guarantees a stream of narcissistic supply, an interrupted stream.

So why waste the time on trying to obtain sex when failure is almost guaranteed.

Similarly, the somatic narcissist doesn’t bother to develop his intellectual faculties if he has any, because his muscles do the job pretty well. It’s a default state.

We all tend to gravitate towards what we do best. And what the intellectual does best is to talk, what this rebel does, what the somatic does best is to display his body and then use it in sex.

So they both end up doing almost exclusively this, but there is that fluidity.

Narcissists, all narcissists are both, if they can manage it.

Would the cerebral be less, view the body as a source of irritation because it’s the brain that is focused on, that it’san irritation.

Yeah, not only an irritation, but a source of negative narcissistic supply. I mean, it’s not pleasant to be rejected by women all the time. You’re a genius, you know, that you’re unique and all that you’re, but while a woman takes one look at you and goes the other way and she usually goes the other way with the somatic narcissist who is not 5% your intellect.

And so the body becomes a source of frustration.

Yeah. And we have a hypothesis by Dollard in 1939, Dollard discovered that frustration is invariably converted to aggression.

So narcissists, cerebral narcissists are very aggressive towards their bodies because their bodies are sources of frustration. They neglect their bodies. They punish their bodies. They tend to ignore their bodies. They’re very neglected. Their health is failing and so on. They don’t exercise. They overeat because their bodies constantly frustrated.

Now with the somatic, Sam, if there is a, a lot less intelligence there, then that somatic narcissist can’t be cerebral because there isn’t the intelligence there to support it. So that would be a, it’s sort of difficult to do that.

Whereas the cerebral can, how lucky, how lucky we are that we have 8 billion people because even the somatic can find women who are much more stupid than he is and can be impressed by his infinite intelligence.

Right. And Sam, the COVID female somatic narcissist, can you give us the characteristics of them and how they see their partners, how they work with their intimate partners?

The vast majority of covert narcissists are women. Right. So it’s a bit redundant to ask about covert female. Most covert narcissists are women and most border, exactly as most border lines are women.

The male covert narcissist is extremely rare because male are stutter and laden and they are usually extroverted, extroverted and they go out there and they get things done and they’re hunters, you know? So vast majority of classic narcissists are male, about 75% we think are male and vast majority of covert narcissist is probably also 75%.

No one made a study, but probably a female. And so the question is redundant. I mean, there’s nothing to it because what I’ve just described regarding covert narcissist is about female narcissist.

And in terms of the, you said in another seminar that thecovert somatic narcissist in intercourse views the partner as almost a dead object. I think you said something like that.

The narcissist, not the covert narcissist, the covert narcissist would tend to be largely asexual actually, because the covert narcissist has a deep set inferiority complex. She also usually has body dysmorphic disorders. She misses perceives her body as too fat, too ugly, too old, do something. So she would generally avoid sex. She would be either a tease. And in this case, she would have come up with histrionic personality disorder.

But even if she’s histrionic, she would still avoid sex. She would be what used to be called free. She would engage in sex only when she’s disinhibited.

So many of these women would drink on purpose in order to engage in sex. They would abuse substances. They would drink alcohol or smoke weed or something in order to engage in sex because otherwise they can’t give them the freedom. They need to give them, to disinhibit them.

Part of their inhibitions, part of the reason they don’t have sex in a normal state is that their covert narcissism inhibits them. The feeling that they are imperfect, that they’re inadequate, that they’re repulsive, that they are inhibiting of course.

And so they, to overcome this, they drink and so on. And then they are disinhibited. They have a grandiose view of themselves. There’s something called alcohol myopia. It’s when you drink, you become grandiose and you think you can do anything. You perceive your own attractiveness and the attractiveness of people around you very wrongly. It’s known as beer goggles.

And so it changes things and allows the covert narcissist to have sex.

But normally she would be sexless or asexual. It is the narcissist who regards sex as a form of competition.

So it’s the narcissist, for example, who would ask his partner how many times he has climaxed, how many times he has masturbated, and would monitor other performance parameters or even inquire openly. Was I good? Was I good? Was I, was I as good as last time? Was that as good as your last boyfriend?

It’s a scorecard. He keeps a scorecard. It’s one big quiz show or something.

So narcissists are competitive and ambitious and grandiose in sex, in sex as well.

And they use the partner’s body to masturbate with on and in. There’s no real interrelatedness or interconnectedness, but the partner is perceived as an animated dildo.

If the woman, if it’s a woman or animated sexual with taste and smells on the periphery.

And so they must debate with the partner’s body. It’s very autoerotic. In other words, the eroticism, and this was observed first by Freud, the eroticism of the narcissist, the limiter, the sex drive is directed at the self, not at others because object relations, the ability to perceive others is interrupted in early childhood. The narcissist sex drive never is never externalized. It’s internalized.

So the narcissist needs to regard himself as the erotic object. It’s very common for narcissists during the sexual act to actually look at themselves in the mirror or, or stop in the middle of the sex act, stop and have a look at their own bodies, like regard their own bodies. It’s very common for a narcissist to go doggy style, because in doggy style, you don’t confront the partner. There’s no partner. It’s just an object. It’s very common for a narcissist if he’s forced to have to, to go in the missionary position to close his eyes and to imagine.

So all these are what we call estrangement techniques. There’s a techniques to alienate, to remove the partner, except as a masturbatory object.

When and if sex dogs would become sufficiently humanoid and pornography would become holographic, not all narcissists, I think would stop having sex with very real people because they’re utterly autorotic.

Now this would explain the propensity or the prevalence of narcissists in certain types of sexual behavior and certain types of sexual preferences.

For example, narcissism is rampant among homosexuals. And when I say homosexuals, I don’t mean only gays, I don’t mean only men and men, but women and women and so on, and among bisexuals.

Among bisexuals and homosexuals, narcissism is much more prevalent than the general population. And the reason is simple. It’s not because they’re bad people. It’s because homosexuality by definition is autorotic. You’re making love to someone who is exact, always almost exactly like you, as far as genitalia and psychosexuality, making love to another man, if you’re a man is essentially making love to yourself in some ways, not in all ways, of course, but in some critical ways.

Similarly, incest, when you make love to your daughter, you’re making love to 50% of you. So incest is autorotic.

And indeed the prevalence of narcissists among those who commit incest is very high. And, and narcissistic fathers and less so mothers, but mostly fathers are very prone to committing incest.

But the reason to commit incest is not the sex act. It’s simply that the child is 50% you. It’s like exactly like making love to half of you. It’s autorotic.

Sure. It’s the same getting back to the narcissist.


There’s hyper sexuality, there’s hypochondria, often body surgery. What do you think of that?

Among the somatic narcissists?

The COVID, you are that the, that there’s the hyper sexuality that there’s often hypochondria, body surgery.

I don’t know. I don’t know why the need to insert the word covert, but, the somatic narcissist in general, have fictitious disorders. They’re hypochondriacs.

And, um, it’s true that among covert narcissists, for example, you would tend to find, you would tend to find, um, body altering behaviors. They have body dysmorphic disorders. That’s true. The body dysmorphic disorders are more common among converts than among classics.

Body dysmorphic disorders extreme in the case of covert narcissists sometimes lead in the margins to, uh, body modification, surgeries, and so on, so forth.

So today there’s a new phenomenon, for example, called look maxi. Look maxi is common among incense in voluntary syllabus. And the vast majority of involuntary syllabus are in my view, at least covert narcissists, overwhelming majority of them. They’re men, they’re exclusively men, but vast majority of them are covert narcissists. And perhaps that’s the reason they can’t find partners because they are covert narcissists.

And in this sense, extremely effeminate actually, and possibly latent homosexuals, just, you know, homophones, homophones.

So they hate to admit it. They have something called reaction formation. They’re homophones.

So they attack their own essence, which they refuse to accept.

I think these are speculations, but the fact is that among incense, for example, look maxi is a new, a new, a new fashion and look maxing simply means extremely expensive facial maxing of facial and facial surgery, which alters your face beyond recognition because the belief of incense is that they are loathsome and repulsive. And that’s why they’re not fighting problems.

And so you have these phenomenon, of course, uh, fitness, beauty treatments, cosmetics. And so I’m much more prevalent among covert narcissists, covert somatic narcissists than amongclassic narcissists.

Yeah. There is another diagnosis called histrionic personality disorder, which closely mimics the somatic behaviors of covert narcissists and histrionic personality disorder.

Today, again, we think to unify histrionic borderline and secondary psychopathy into a single diagnosis. So that would sit well with the psychopathic tendencies of covert narcissists.

Even when it comes to their bodies and their sexuality, they will tend to react like psychopaths do now, psychopaths don’t hesitate to undergo surgery. They treat their own bodies like malleable objects that they can play with just because they’re goal oriented. They would use anything to obtain the goal.

The bodies, the children, the family, the friends, the social friends.

I mean, psychopaths are like in the exuberant machines. They have a goal and they go there.

Anyone on the way, mold, mold down and kill them.

So covert somatic covert narcissists probably are combinations of histrionic and psychopathic. And they would be very concerned with their bodies, with their health and with their sex, but more in an instrumental way.

Yeah. Like it would, they use their bodies to try to defray or, or, or reduce their internal egos, egodystonic, their internal discomfort that is a result of the underlying inferiority.

That’s what Miller meant when he said compensatory. These are compensatory beginnings. They try to compensate through a toxic inner environment.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s interesting when I look at the covert narcissists, how often they appear to be kind, altruistic, sensitive. They do community work like they clean rivers, they rescue animals, they priests, they psychotherapists, but what’s underneath is, is very dangerous, which is what you’re saying.

Well altruism, everything that is ostentatious is narcissistic. You can be ostentatiously charitable. Conspicuously, conspicuously altruistic. If you have good public relations like Mother Teresa, you can be, you can win the Nobel prize. It’s narcissism is surreptitious. It’s shape shifting. It’s deceitful. It’s malleable. It’s permeable. It’s, it’s, it’s more like smoke, more like smoke and mirrors. It’s not something tangible. It’s, it’s everywhere. It, and it, it can, it’s what we call trotian, trotian, you know, it changes in the middle. I mean, you can’t grasp, it’s like a slimy fish. You can’t really get the grasp of it.

And so, and so compulsive givers, conspicuous.

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Summary Link:

https://vakninsummaries.com/ (Full summaries of Sam Vaknin’s videos)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html (My work in psychology: Media Kit and Press Room)

Bonus Consultations with Sam Vaknin or Lidija Rangelovska (or both) http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/ctcounsel.html

http://www.youtube.com/samvaknin (Narcissists, Psychopaths, Abuse)

http://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings (World in Conflict and Transition)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com (Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html (Biography and Resume)

Summary

Narcissists can be either somatic or cerebral, depending on whether they use their physical appearance or intellect to obtain supply. While there is no constancy, there is type dominance, with cerebral narcissists emphasizing their intellect and somatic narcissists emphasizing their physical appearance. Narcissists are competitive and ambitious in sex, using their partner's body as an animated dildo or masturbatory object. Covert narcissists, who are mostly women, tend to be largely asexual due to deep-set inferiority complexes and body dysmorphic disorders. They may engage in body-altering behaviors such as surgeries and look-maxing, which is more prevalent among covert somatic narcissists. Altruism can also be a form of ostentatious narcissism.

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