The classic borderline has explosive behavior, which the covert lacks, but he has histrionic attention seeking. She is impulsive. He is merely reckless, and his recklessness is aimed at hurting or affecting other people. He is sadistic. The covert is sadistic, punitive, goal-oriented, and may engage in triangulation. The borderline engages in triangulation to restore the relationship, or to please people. The covert has object inconstancy. He goes through idealize, devalue, discard, revert, or replace cycles. The classic has approach, avoidance, repetition, compulsion, and preemptive abandonment. She also has object inconstancy, and she’s a drama queen, which the covert is not.

As far as social adaptation, the covert is socially charming and charismatic, while the classic is nagging and aimless and has social anxiety. He is a hard worker, and he is consistent, because he seeks admiration. This is pseudo-sublimation, while the covert is shallow and has no vocational commitment. The covert is intensely ambitious. The classic is dilettante. The covert is often successful. The classic has multiple but superficial interests and never succeeds to carry out anything to the end. The covert is preoccupied with appearances. The classic is preoccupied with boredom and has an aesthetic taste, but it is often ill-informed or imitative. The covert is idiosyncratically and unevenly moral, his caricature modesty. He may be an activist.

There was a study in British Columbia, in Canada, not long ago linking secondary and even primary psychopathy to social justice activism.

The covert borderline may be an activist and has apparent enthusiasm for socio-political affairs.

The real borderline, the classic, couldn’t care less. She is ready to shift her values to gain favor. She is a pathological liar, while the covert is not necessarily a liar, just as ethic and moral relativism. The classic covert has a materialistic lifestyle, while the covert borderline may display contempt for money in real life. He may feign spirituality. He may attain a guru status. He is not delinquent like the classic, but both of them have irreverence towards authority. The covert has marital instability and the borderline, the classic, is unable to stay in love. The covert is called greedy, seductive. He has extramarital affairs, he’s promiscuous, and he has an uninhibited sexual life and sexual preferences. He is disinhibited. The classic borderline is an impaired capacity for viewing the romantic partner as a separate individual with his or her own life, interests, rights, values, and inability to genuinely comprehend the insistable and occasional sexual perversions, so they are not that different, with the exception of perhaps extramarital affairs, where the covert is more dominant.

The cognitive style.

We asked you to conclude in a couple of minutes so we can have an opportunity. I’m about actually to conclude. I apologize.

No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’m misbehaving. What can you expect?

So, the covert borderline is dichotomous thinking, splitting, is impressively knowledgeable, is egocentric perception of reality, fondness for shortcuts to acquisition of knowledge, is decisive and opinionated, and he has a love of language, is strikingly articulate.

This is in contrast to the regular or classic borderline, which has a dichotomous thinking, also splitting, but is catastrophizing. Her knowledge is limited to trivia, headline intelligence, she’s forgetful of details, especially names, impaired in capacity for learning new skills, has a tendency to change meanings of reality when faced with a threat to self-esteem, and her language of speaking is used to regulate self-esteem rather than communicate.

So, these are the two types. I have another type, which I will not discuss, owing to time limit, and that is the covert anti-social or the covert psychopath. That’s the model.

These are the ingredients that go into the model.

The covert diagnoses are what comes out of the model. It’s nothing revolutionary. It’s an amalgamation of many previous scholars and thinkers, but because I’m a physicist, perhaps, I organized it in a structured way, very similar to the standard model, and it’s like a table, and each rubric, each cell in the table, gives you a different so-called personality disorder, so-called state of personality disorder, so-called affect, cognition.

So, the standard model in its graphic form is very, very efficient because it’s a kind of theory of everything when it comes to cluster B.

Thank you for your inordinate patience. I taxed it, and I misbehaved. Please accept my apologies.

Not at all, Dr. Vaknin. You know, I’d like to congratulate you for your presentation and for your courage. It’s not the kind of presentation, you know, it’s the kind of presentation that is always going to leave us wanting for more, so I hope you’re not expecting more frustration.

I’d like to ask people to turn on their cameras. I’d like to see as many faces as possible, please, and you are free to direct your comments or your questions to Dr. Vaknin.

Please, go ahead. I know you’re holding back. Go ahead. I can see you’re holding back.

They’re all traumatized. They dissociated the whole lecture.

Oh, we have Dr. Vaknin as well. I look forward to her comments.

Go ahead, Dr. Vaknin. Very, very, very briefly, I would like to thank you for this mind expanding lecture, which I cannot say that I understood everything. Actually, I probably did not understand most of what you said, but it certainly led me to think a lot.

One of the questions that I have, I have many, but the one that I will ask is, only one, is you mentioned that these states, you have covert and overt, and I think there was a collapse, especially covert and overt, which is the two states that you contrasted in borderline, that covert states are unstable, and they tend to revert to overt state.

And so the vignette or the description of traits that you described to contrast covert and overt, not narcissist, but borderline, I mean, this seems to me so strikingly opposite that I would love, if you could direct me to a, you said that you have cases, vignettes, to a case where the same individual will transition from a covert to an overt.

It seems very difficult for me to see because the traits that you describe seem fairly stable. And so I guess that’s my question, is how can you explain how somebody can go from covert to overt in such striking opposites?

Yes, as I said at the end, and that was not false modesty, there was nothing I said today that is not very close to the orthodoxy.

For example, I refer you to the latest edition of Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences published by Wiley, where the authors, hundreds of authors, actually say that transition between overt and covert are not stable states, and the transition is very common in multiple entries.

Moreover, at the very beginning of the presentation, I referred you to an article about borderline personality disorder as a psychopathic state, as a factor to psychopathy, where actually they document and describe such transitions from borderline to psychopathy.

Now, if there is any bigger contrast between two mental conditions, I’m not aware of it. Borderline is the absolute opposite of psychopathy, but it seems that people fluctuate between.

Now, the reason for your question, the underlying assumption is trait constancy, attribute constancy. And that is, of course, highly debatable. I don’t need to tell you that there is vast literature with serious debate and argument whether traits are constant, especially over the lifespan, and especially in reaction to stressors in traumatic situations, post traumatic reactions, etc. There’s a huge debate on this.

And of course, my model assumes that a diagnosis are not stable, are not real. Actually, my model assumes that diagnosis are not real constructs. They’re not political entities. They are overlays in the sense that there is a pool of traits to choose from. And people transition between traits and between states and between effects, and between regulatory regimes, and between cognitions.

And so my perception is that the very concept of individual or personality, if you wish, should be challenged in view of definitely in view of the last 20 years of cumulative knowledge.

This underlying presumption or assumption of stability, of unity, of core, of identity, of I mean, it’s challengeable. So it’s documented in the literature, plus I have case studies and so on.

I don’t flinch and I don’t hesitate to say that someone can transition from covert to overt, because this is well documented in narcissism, where the transition from covert narcissist to overt narcissist proliferates in the literature, just Google, Google scholar, you don’t need more than that.

And, and in the two subtypes are dramatically different. One of them is outgoing, assertive, near psychopathic, defiant, and so on. And one of them is shy, one of them is avoidant.

The covert narcissist can easily be described as avoidant personality disorder, easily.

Hypervigilant with regards to criticism, dysregulates in reaction to disagreement and criticism. I mean, it’s total avoidant hybrid of avoidant and borderline.

And the classic narcissist is exactly the opposite. One is introverted, the other is extroverted. I mean, totally. And yet it’s documented beyond any doubt that covert transitions to overt and overt to covert subject, for example, to extreme narcissistic injury and definitely to mortification. And that’s exactly the work of Libby. Libby described reactions to mortification. And she said that the narcissist in reaction to mortification can choose internal mortification or external mortification.

And when you read the description of internal mortification, it’s covert narcissism. And when you read the external, it’s classic narcissism.

So it seems that mortification mediates, mediates the transition, creates the bridge.

It also seems, I agree, that there is no trade, no such thing as trade consensus. I agree. And that’s a philosophical question.

Is he about to meet you and is almost in your camera? Does she have a question?

Dr. Bergeron, comments, other people?

I don’t mean to single anybody. I just subconscious of the time.

I would love to. Unfortunately, I need to step away. I want to thank you for this incredibly thoughtful, deep dive into what we lack very often, which is a theoretical, academic, intellectual conceptualization of the people we work with every day. And I hope you come back and you talked to us about clinical applications, models of work, how we work with Dr. Tofik, according to you, what you think of mentalization– based treatment, transference focused therapies, and all the other gold standards with personality disorders, particularly borderline.

But I can’t thank you enough for now. And unfortunately, I have to step out.

But again, one comment to your very kind comment. On my YouTube channel, there is a video that I’ve just made about 12 treatment modalities for cluster B, where I analyze these treatment modalities. It may be of interest. I don’t know. Absolutely. I am. Thank you again.

I was just thinking, how does all this jive with, you know, in, in, in whether, in, you know, whether somebody’s coldly in touch with reality or not.

So in how does all this jive with, you know, personal responsibility and criminal responsibility in decisions of those.

This may be off the topic, but it came to my mind.

Actually, just to be a pet, a pet topic of mine, I wrote and published about about the insanity defense. So this is kind of the fringe of the insanity defense.

The tests which are used in the insanity defense, when they’re replied to cluster B personality disorder disorders, they establish full accountability. I mean, these people are able to tell right from wrong at any given moment. They’re able to modify or control their impulses at any given moment.

Let me give an example.

Narcissists and psychopaths who end up in prison.

And these are the studies by Robert here and numerous others, even Harvey quickly in his inpatient residential facility where he conducted most of his studies of psychopaths and Robert here and others.

Narcissists and psychopaths modify their behaviors without the benefit of any therapy. They immediately modify their behaviors.

If you are in prison and you continue to be a narcissist or a psychopath, something happens to your life expectancy.

And so it seems that fear modulates, modulates the behavior, a report, a portrait constantly. Suddenly they become empathic. Suddenly they become receptive, responsive. Suddenly they, you know, so if they can moderate, modulate their behavior in, in what we call total environments, total institutions like hospital, army, prison, then clearly they can modify and they just don’t want to modify their behavior. They don’t care.

Moreover, it’s not true to say that cluster B or narcissists, narcissists and psychopaths don’t have empathy, which is how you have it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual form. The fifth edition is a little better in the alternative model, but they do have empathy.

They just lack the emotional component of the empathy. They have full, fully developed, actually overdeveloped cognitive empathy and reflexive empathy. They can scan you, read you well and spot your vulnerabilities, the chinks in your armors, your intrusion points, and so on and so forth. They could have, they’re not idiots. They could have leveraged this cold empathy to realize that, you know, if someone is sad or if someone is in bad shape, you shouldn’t do something to them. They could have translated their cold empathy into behavioral mores or they could have conformed it to summarize. These are choices. These are absolutely choices. And these are choices motivated by the lack of emotional empathy and by extreme goal orientation.

And in the case of the narcissist, the goal is to avoid mortification by buttressing grandiosity. And in the case of the psychopath, the goal is real life goal, like, you know, sex, money, power. They are goal oriented, they’re goal focused, goal directed.

Absolute criminal responsibility, 100%.

I strongly disagreed with the court in Britain, in the case of Brian Blackwell, where they said that narcissistic personality disorder is a mitigating circumstance, implying that at some point, he was not in touch with reality, he didn’t know what he was doing.

It’s utter unmitigated nonsense.

Dr.

Vaknin, I regret to be so rude, but we are, time has come and we have to close, but I’m getting, I’m gathering that we can certainly listen to you a lot more.

Certainly, it’d be very helpful to have case examples, so that we can talk more about things rather than concepts. So, you know, let’s see how we can do that, how we can keep in touch with you, and bring you back and to dialogue a bit more.

Thank you very much. And thank you for your patients as well with us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

And thank you all for being present and for your patients. I mean, thank you.

We’ll see you soon, okay?

Okay, be safe everyone. Take care.