And here is the interesting thing.

Studies have shown that when you take schizotyping to a certain point on the spectrum, what you get is increased psychopathy but lower narcissism. Amazing.

In other words, we are beginning to see two types of psychopaths. One psychopath, who is grandiose, and his grandiosity propels him and impels him to behave contumaciously, defiantly, impulsively, recklessly. That would be the primary psychopath.

But if we take the psychopath and move him across the spectrum of schizotyping, towards the psychotic end, we get a secondary psychopath. That’s a psychopath with access to emotions and empathy and a psychopath that is very low on narcissism. It’s not a grandiose psychopath. That would be, for example, the borderline. Borderlines have grandiosity, but the grandiosity is not the pronounced feature of borderline. The pronounced feature of borderline is being on the verge of psychosis. Borderlines often have psychotic micro-episodes.

And all the schizotypy features, including decompensation acting out in a transition to secondary psychopathy.

This emotional dysregulation, etc., they drive the borderline towards the psychotic end of the schizotypy spectrum, where we also find the secondary psychopath.

Now we’re beginning to understand how borderlines transition into secondary psychopathy. They are one and the same, actually, when you combine the schizotypy model with the five-factor model or with other inventories, such as the temperament and character inventory.

This is very interesting because it’s the first time we begin to see how all personality disorders converge within a single spectrum, which is a spectrum of schizotypy.

And I’m suggesting that schizotypy’s main feature is main two features.

And this is my standard model of personality disorders, which is actually an enhancement of the schizotypy model. I claim that schizotypy relies on two pillars, a lack of constellated and integrated self, no ego, and a blurring of internal and external objects because of failure in boundary formation.

I refer you to the article by Lonsdale, Biukas, Laszlo, and others, December 2018. In the academic journal Psychological Reports, the article is titled, Schizotypal Traits in the Dark Triad from an Ecological Perspective.

Schizotypal Traits in the Dark Triad from an Ecological Perspective. So we are beginning to converge. We’re beginning to converge, and we are beginning to see how secondary psychopathy, how covert narcissism, how narcissism itself, emerge on different points along the schizotypy spectrum, along the schiztypy range.

Increased borderline personality traits go hand in hand with increased psychopathy in a single particular point on the schizotypy range.

When we reach this point, suddenly there are borderline traits coupled with psychopathic traits.

Okay. There is evidence that schizotypy correlates with differentially enhanced and impaired aspects of cognitive function.

Cognitive deficits impaired reality testing.

I keep telling you that the narcissist is no longer with us. His reality testing is short. He has no access to reality.

What he does instead, he internalizes reality.

For example, he internalizes external objects in order to control them because he’s terrified of losing control, being abandoned, etc. And because he has no ego and no self to guide, you need an ego. You need a self to guide, to discipline, to moderate, to modulate, to curate. There’s no ego there. There’s no self.

So these internal objects are in constant conflict, constant fight. They are polarized.

So these findings that the schizotypy correlates with cognitive dysfunctions and an impaired cognitive style, impaired reality testing, they indicate that schizotypy is positively correlated, positively associated with enhanced global processing over local processing, lower latent inhibition, attention and memory deficits, enhanced creativity and imagination, and enhanced associative thinking.

Now it’s easy to understand why, for example, borderlines, narcissists, and even many psychopaths prefer fantasy to reality.

The fantasy defense mechanism is predominant in borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, but why?

We could have asked ourselves, we can ask, you know, there are like dozens of defense mechanisms, for example, intellectualization, rationalization, I mean, you name it, projection.

Why does the narcissist prefer fantasy?

Because of what I just said, they have lower latent inhibition, which leads to impulsiveness and dysempathy, lack of empathy. They have attention, not lack of empathy, but dysempathy.

When their impulses take over, they are less empathic. They have attention and memory deficits, but they have an enhanced creativity and imagination and enhanced associative thinking.

And these are the ingredients that go into making the fantasy cake. Fantasy requires creativity, imagination, and associative thinking. Fantasy also requires a disrupted interface with reality, memory deficits, cognitive deficits, attention deficits. Fantasy and creativity rely on partial access to reality. They are compensatory.

Where your access to reality is impaired, your judgment of reality is wrong, erroneous very often. Where you don’t process information and data, where you filter them, or repress them, or reframe them, you need fantasy. Fantasy kicks in to fill in the gaps.

One very well-known fantasy mechanism is confabulation.

So fantasy compensates for all these elements of schizotypy.

Now, some of the features in schizotypy can be diagnosed in mental illness. They’re observable and discernible in mental illness, but schizotypy is not about mental illness. It’s a personality theory. It’s a theory of the entire personality.

And it actually says that everyone is schizotypal to this or to that extent.

Schizotypy could be beneficial. Creativity, artistic achievement, rely on schizotypy, unusual experiences, cognitive disorganization. Jackson came up with the concept of benign schizotypy. He said that certain classes of religious experience are forms of benign schizotypy because they solve problems. They have adaptive value. They make you feel good. They make you feel egosyntonic. They motivate you to act in certain ways and inhibit you in other ways which are long-term beneficial. They secure beneficial outcomes for the environment. They prevent you from ending up in jail.

So he said that benign schizotypy, even when it manifests in a delusional way like religion, has adaptive value. It’s a positive adaptation.

So schizotypy is not a bad thing. It’s not a curse word. It’s not like narcissism. And narcissism is not a bad thing. We have healthy narcissism.

Schizotypy, there’s been a debate about the extent of schizotypy in healthy populations. And so there are basically three approaches, quasi-dimensionala debate about the extent of schizotypy in healthy populations. And so there are basically three approaches, quasi-dimensional, quasi-dimensional, dimensional, and fully dimensional. And schiztymphy reflects cognitive biological vulnerability to psychosis because of regression to early childhood when we had no ego defense.

As children, we had no ego defenses. There is no self there. And because there’s no self, the entire inner internal environment is dysregulated. And it’s difficult to tell the difference between out there and in here. It’s difficult to reconcile internal objects. It’s difficult to force them to collaborate.

So schizotypy reflects vulnerability to psychosis because of the level of chaos and disorganization inside.

But there is a debate whether everyone on earth alive has some modicum, some measure of disorganization and chaos. But it is so low that it is latent and dormant and never expressed and never manifested, only when it is triggered by appropriate environmental events, conditions, stressors, substances like drugs, only then the disorganization and chaos manifest and express.

And so susceptibility to stress, for example, would condition some people to express their schizotypy much more than other people.

And we need to think. That’s why I’m suggesting to reconceive personality disorders as post-traumatic conditions.

Because in post trauma, there is intolerance of stress of any kind. Stress immediately triggers decompensation, immediately triggers acting out, immediately triggers schizotypy or schizotypal reactions.

I said that there are three models, and we’ll start with the first and oldest one, which is the quasi-dimensional model.

The quasi-dimensional model was proposed by Bleuler, of course, who coined the word schizophrenia. Bleuler said that there are two types of continuity between normality and psychosis. There is continuity between the sick person and his or her relatives.

So Bleuler was the first to introduce a relational approach to mental illness, to mental health. He said that schizotypy manifests, is expressed in the relationships between the sick, the ill person, the mentally ill person and his or her relatives.

And another dimension is between the patient’s pre-morbid and post-morbid personalities. Personality before the illness, the personality after the illness, after the onset of, for example, psychosis, after the onset of personality disorder.

He said, if one observes the relatives of our patients, one often finds in them peculiarities which are qualitatively identical with those of the patients themselves.

So then the disease appears to be only a quantitative increase of the anomalies seen in the parents and the siblings.

And this is exactly how we conceive of personality disorders.

We say that many personality disorders, not all, but many personality disorders are the outcomes of early childhood environment, of abuse, of trauma, of parentifying, of breach of boundaries, of idolizing, of not allowing separation, individuation, of a dead mother, narcissistic, selfish, absent, etc.

This observation is as old as Bleuler. He suggested that human environment conditions people to become ill, and therefore, illness is a contextual, relational, environmental thing.

I can’t tell you how revolutionary this thinking was at his time.

On the second point, the relationship between the personality before the illness and after the illness, Bleuler mentions peculiarities that are displayed by the patient before admission to hospital. And he said these peculiarities are premonitions. They are premonitory symptoms of the disease. They are red alerts, they are warning signs.

They are, at the very least, are indications of a predisposition to develop the illness.

And again, Bleuler was a pioneer because he had hinted at genetics when there was no genetics. He said there must be something in these patients which predisposes them to become ill.

And so, despite these observations of continuity, Bleuler didn’t dare to go all the way. He remained committed to the disease model of psychosis and schizophrenia, and he invoked the concept of latent schizophrenia.

He wrote, in the latent form of schizophrenia, we can see in a nutshell, all the symptoms and all the combinations of symptoms which are present in the manifest types of the disease.

The quasi-dimensional view of schizotypy as propounded by Rado, Miehl, MEEHHL, and others, they say that schizotypal symptoms represent less explicitly expressed manifestations of the underlying disease process, which is schizophrenia.

Rado proposed the term schizotype to describe the person whose genetic makeup gave him or her a lifelong propensity, proclivity predisposition to schizophrenia.

The quasi-dimensional model is called quasi-dimensional because the only dimension it postulates is gradations, gradations of severity, gradations of explicitness, gradations of manifestation in relation to the symptoms of a disease process.

So, the spectrum is a spectrum of quantity, not of quality.

Enter the dimensional approach.

Dimensional approach was a derivative of an innovation at the time in psychology, personality theory. As Western civilization and society became more and more individualized after the 1920s and 1930s, there was a reorientation of psychology from relationships, from context, from environment to the individual, the indivisible, the atom, the personality.

And this was called the personality theory.

And so personality theory and the dimensional approach to schizotyping suggested that full-blown psychotic illness is only the most extreme end of schizotyping spectrum.

There is a natural continuum between people with low and high level of schizotyping. The model is associated with the work of Hans J. Eysenck, the aforementioned Hans J. Eysenck. He regarded the person exhibiting the full-blown manifestations of psychosis as simply someone occupying the extreme upper end of his psychoticism trait or dimension.

And so, it seems that there is some support for the dimensional model of schizotyping because it seems a schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder.

And I would add cluster B personality disorders because they are all centered around the schizoid core.

If you take all this, there seems to be intimate connections of gradation in quantity and in quality. In other words, both the number of manifestations increase, increases, and the intensity of the expressed trait or behavior increases, both quality and quantity.

The reason I’m adding cluster B and claiming that cluster B has a schizoid core is because there is a whole school of extremely prominent scholars, the scholars which are the authority on the self, scholars like Winnicott, like Spitz, like Gannon, like Fairburn, like others. And these scholars were the ones who had suggested that schizoid personality is at the core of cluster B personalities and others, not only cluster B.

So, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants and following the footsteps of giants when I say that the schizotyping spectrum should definitely include cluster B personality disorders.

And indeed, when we combine it with a five-factor model, we get borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder, aka psychopathy in its extreme form.

So, this leads me to the fully dimensional approach.

Claridge called his model the fully dimensional approach, fully dimensional model.

According to him, schizotyping is a dimension of personality normally distributed throughout the population. And in this, he agrees with Eysenck. There’s no big innovation here.

But he says, schizophrenia is a breakdown process. It’s totally distinct from the continuously distributed trait of schizotyping. In other words, he said, you’re all wrong, schizophrenia is not a member of the family of schizotyping, schizotyping illnesses or schizotyping disorders. I am of this view.

I think that schizoaffective disorders, schizoid personality disorders, schizotypal personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic, to a larger extent antisocial, and so on. They are all centered around the schizoid core, but these personality disorders are positive adaptations to the schizoid core, and they prevent schizophrenia.

The only thing standing between a personality disordered person and psychosis is his disorder. The disorder, the personality disorder, protects the patient from becoming psychotic, protects the patient, defends the patient against schizophrenia.

If the patient were to come into contact with his or her schizoid core, they would have been rendered psychotic or schizophrenic.

The personality disorder is an adaptation intended to prevent precisely this development.

So, schizophrenia in his encourages model is a breakdown, and he said in itself, schizophrenia has a graded continuum, and he said, okay, we can place schizotypal personality disorder on one end and schizophrenia on the other, but we should not confuse the two spectra. We should not confuse the two issues.

There is schizotyping, which is normal, distributed in all the population, and its abnormal manifestations are various personality disorders, schizoaffective disorders, and then we have separately a continuum of schizophrenia at one end of which is schizotypal personality disorder, and at the other is schizophrenia, and that’s the model I adhere to. It’s fully dimensional because not only is the personality trait of schizotyping continuously graded, but the independent continuum of the breakdown processes is also graded. It’s all non-categorical.

The fully dimensional approach argues that full blown psychosis is not just high schizotyping, but must involve other factors that make it qualitatively different, pathological. There’s a differential diagnosis, and I fully agree.

Narcissists, vaudelites, psychopaths, histrionics, paranoid, schizoids, schiztypals, they’re all on the schizotyping model. When their traits intermix with schizotyping, there is also personality disorders, and personality disorders are the defenses which evolved over time, mainly in childhood, to isolate the patient, to isolate the person from ultimate schizophrenia and psychosis. They are anti-psychotic medication personality disorders, they are anti-psychotic defenses, and now we understand why the patient is so invested in his personality disorder, why it’s almost impossible to heal and cure and reverse personality disorders, with the exception perhaps of borderline independent personality disorders. Why?

Because it’s the only thing separating the patient from total unmitigated, all-encompassing, all-pervasive raving madness.