I will record and, okay, I’m nervous.

Are you recording as well? Should I?

Or no?

I will record.

Are you recording?

Yes, I’m recording. You’re recording? It says there’s a small button on the left, a small button that says recording.

Yeah, it is recording in my left corner. In your left corner.

Okay.

****REDACTED

Well, hopefully, one recording will survive. We’ll see. Sometimes Zoom is not very reliable when it comes to recording. That’s why I personally use Webex.

Okay, so welcome then, everyone. And today, we’ve got a special guest. Some of you may know him, some of you may not. That’s why I would like to introduce him.

Tom Bachman, his narcissist, psychopath, and abuse YouTube channel has more than 32.1 million views and 145,000 subscribers. Congratulations, it’s incorrect.

Tom is visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, Roscoe, London, Russia. He’s also professor of finance and psychology in Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies, Founder Healthcare Committee, Ministry of Health, Republic of Macedonia.

Tom also, Tom is the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. And if I remember, you wrote like more than 3000 more books, I think, if I remember.

It’s more like 60, but I’m still young.

I’m very happy to have you here today.

Today, we’ll be talking about narcissist personality disorder and dependent personality disorder, and especially about dynamic between these two personalities.

And so, so yes.

One more time. Welcome Tom and thank you.

My first question, maybe it’s like we can start from your point of view about narcissist personality disorder and dependent personality disorder, like in a perspective that it’s two sides of the same coin.

If you could say how you see this perspective and maybe even referring to childhood.

Well, I wouldn’t say two sides of the same coin, but I would say that both of them are solutions that the child chooses when the child is confronted with a dysfunctional family with abuse, with trauma, with what André Green called the dead mother, a mother who is selfish, depressed, emotionally unavailable, a mother who makes the child parentify her, a mother who instrumentalizes the child, uses the child to realize her dreams and wishes, a mother, of course, or parents who abuse the child classically, physically, verbally, psychologically and so on.

I’m saying mother because in the critical years which are zero to probably four, what we call the formative years, it is the mother that has 90% of the influence. It is the mother that dictates the developmental trajectory of the child.

The father comes much later, the father comes in as a socialization agent, as a representative of society. The father also contributes very greatly to gender differentiation. The father also teaches the child skills, survival skills, social skills.

The father is a very important figure. I’m not underestimating the father’s contribution or the father’s ability to damage the psychology of the child, but that comes much later. Much, much earlier, it’s the mother and almost exclusively the mother.

When the mother is dysfunctional, the child has several options.

And two of these options are narcissism or codependency, or what we call dependent personality and so on.

The child can emulate the abuser, can internalize the abuser, can imitate the abuser. The child can make a kind of internal, mostly unconscious decision that it’s better to be the abuser than the victim.

And then the child tries to become an abuser and succeeds, then becomes a narcissist.

The alternative is, of course, for the child to merge, to merge with a frustrating object, to fuse with the mother, to become one with the mother.

To merge or to fuse in this sense, to assimilate the mother, to assimilate the bad object, and thereby to neutralize, to render the bad object innocuous, not frightening, not threatening.

Because if the bad object is part of you, then it gives you the illusion of control.

And indeed, dependent personality or codependency is a disorder of control. It’s the use of various behavioral tactics, such as clinging, such as neediness, in order to control the partner.

Now, in both cases, in narcissism and in codependency, the person, the patient, the client, whatever you want to call it, the person with the disorder needs the intimate partner, not only physically, but needs the intimate partner psychologically.

The intimate partner fulfills ego functions, fulfills internal functions.

The narcissist uses the intimate partner to regulate his sense of self-worth, uses the intimate partner to gain access to reality, to gain what we call reality testing, and uses the intimate partner for a variety of functions that are usually internal functions, usually functions that are not dependent on other people.

The narcissist depends on other people, and more specifically on his intimate partner.

The codependent needs her intimate partner so as to regulate her internal environment.

In both these cases, and of course in borderline, there is a dysregulated, chaotic environment, an environment that is labile, up and down, an environment that’s unpredictable.

The situation with borderline is so bad that in the last 15 years, we are reconceiving of borderline. We are beginning to consider borderline personality disorder as a form of multiple personality, as a form of dissociative identity disorder.

Because in borderline personality disorder, we have self-states, several states of self, which are very, very distinct from one another.

Similarly, in narcissism, we have at least two self-states. We have the true self and the false self. These are distinct, they have nothing in common whatsoever. They’re actually kind of enemies. They’re hostile to each other.

So we have at least two, I wouldn’t say, personalities, but self-states, distinguishable self-states.

And so we see that this entire family of disorders, formerly known as cluster B personality disorders or erratic or dramatic personality disorders, we are beginning to see that they have common etiology, common causation, common developmental pathway or trajectory.

First of all, all these disorders are post-traumatic conditions. We can reconceive of all these disorders, not as personality disorders, but as forms of complex trauma.

So we can reconceive of these disorders as forms of CPTSD.

Indeed, in recent studies, we are discovering that victims of CPTSD, for example, victims of narcissistic abuse, victims of domestic violence, victims of emotional abuse, victims of these types of abuse, they are psychodynamically indistinguishable from people with borderline personality disorder. CPTSD and borderline personality disorder are literally indistinguishable.

So we are beginning to rethink these disorders as combination post-trauma and dissociation.

So there was a trauma. It created a post-traumatic condition. This condition was so severe, the child couldn’t cope with it, so the child broke to pieces. The child was shattered like a Ming vase, shattered to pieces.

There was a personality fragmentation. There was no personality at age four, or even at age nine, there is still no what Jung calls constellated self.

But there were the rudiments of self, and they broke to pieces. And these pieces are what we call the self-states.

In other words, to summarize, I regard all these personality disorders as forms of dissociative, post-traumatic, multiple personality disorders.

I think we need to reconceive of them that way, and then we can become a lot more efficient in administering therapy.

Yes, I completely agree with what you said, especially when you compare borderline and CPTSD.

I think it’s a lot of mistakes, especially from psychologists, that they, for example, give someone, diagnose that the person has borderline.

To be honest, it’s not true, because it’s just CPTSD, right? So I completely agree with what you said.

If I may add one thing, it is this attempt to reconceive of these personality disorders and to connect them to trauma and to connect them to dissociation.

This attempt is part of a much bigger war, much bigger battle.

In the 19th century, when the modern discipline of psychology had been established, because psychology has been around for 4,000 years, but the modern discipline, let’s say the German discipline, because psychology started as experimental science in laboratory, went and others.

So when psychology started in Germany, in Austria, later in the United States, it was heavily influenced by the ethos of individualism. At that time, it was the beginning of the capitalist phase of individualism.

Free enterprise, private enterprise, profits, the individual as a risk taker, people immigrated, there was huge immigration.

So when you immigrate, you are an individual. You break apart from your community, you break apart from your country, from your language, you become total atom individual.

So there was an ethos, there was a kind of spirit, ambience, atmosphere of individualism. And of course, modern psychology started as the science of the individual.

What has happened since the 60s? We are beginning to reconceive of modern psychology, not as the science of the individual, but as the science of interpersonal relationships.

You see Freud, for example, Freud wrote about individuals. It’s very difficult to find in Freud’s writing anything about relationships.

For Freud’s trilateral model, he’s 99% about the individual and 1% about society. Society is kind of abstract. Afterthought is not really there.

Same with Jung, of course. Although Jung tried to compromise somehow by introducing the collective unconscious. But the collective unconscious is so bizarre, so non-scientific, so not open to study and experimentation, it might as well be occult, you know.

So until the 60s, because Jung died in the 60s, yes, until the 60s, it was all about the individual.

And then we started to shift. We started to realize that individual is an obstruction and not a useful obstruction.

Not obstruction, but obstruction. Something that makes it very difficult for us to understand how humans function.

Today we have emphasis on relationships, interaction, groups, dynamics, and so on.

The new disorders, because narcissistic personality disorder first appeared in 1980. It’s a very new disorder. The first time NPD was mentioned was in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 3, 1980.

That’s new. In terms of history, it’s new.

Borderline, the first serious attempt to study Borderline was in the 70s. And the most serious attempt was with Otto Kernberg in 1975. That’s also new.

I was already a teenager at that time. I was alive. Okay, I’m a dinosaur, but you know.

So these are new disorders. And if you look at these disorders, they are social disorders.

Now, narcissistic personality disorder is not an individual’s disorder, but it’s a disorder of how individual relates to other people.

The criteria are interrelational, interpersonal.

One of the main criteria of narcissistic personality disorder is a lack of empathy.

Empathy. There’s no empathy without other people.

Another criteria, that the narcissist is exploitative. There’s no exploitation without other people.

Another criteria is the narcissist is envious. There’s no envy without other people.

Same with the Borderline. If you look at the diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and especially so in the fifth edition, 2013, just published, you will see that these are not disorders of the self. They are not disorders of the individual. They are disorders of how the individual functions within networks of other people, within communities, within families, within romantic relationships.

So intimacy is a crucial determinant.

Empathy, envy, negative emotionality, reactance.

In other words, defiance, lack of impulse control in relation to other people, exploitation, harming and hurting other people.

All these are critical facets of these disorders.

Now, Freud was the first to describe narcissism, but he didn’t describe it as we understand it today.

He described it as a reaction of the individual as a baby.

His work in 1914 was about baby narcissism. He called it primary narcissism.

That’s not the narcissism we are talking about today. Not the same.

Yes, I agree, because he was writing about the stage that everyone is going to, right?

And it’s like, let’s say, good narcissist, right?

And today we are talking about completely different things, like you said, about dynamics between personalities.

And yes, but if we are talking about dynamics, then I would like to stop here and ask you about, because we’ve got a lot of experts, especially on YouTube, that they’re showing this dynamic between narcissists and codependents as a magnet.

And I can’t agree with this point of view, because then I’m asking myself, like, okay, to take the magnet, where is the responsibility, right?

So what do you think about that? How do you see it?

There is not a single expert on YouTube. All the real experts in narcissism and codependency are not on YouTube. You cannot find them on YouTube.

The leading experts on narcissism today are John Twenge, Keith Campbell, even Kernberg was alive, Theodore Millon, when he was alive, there was YouTube already and so on.

And similarly, the leading experts on codependency are Linehan and others. These names, the real experts, you will not find them on YouTube.

The people who find on YouTube are not experts. They have published nothing in the field. They don’t teach the subjects in their own universities, if they are in any university at all.

And I would use the word experts very judiciously. I have yet to come across a single expert online. One expert, exactly.

So let’s put this aside.