I think people are the outcomes of interactions with other people, not starting with mother, of course, but gradually the circle expands and I think these interactions, these relatedness, these relational activities, they create a feeling of separateness, they create a feeling of separateness on the one hand and a feeling of connectedness.

And when you have separateness and connectedness, you have boundary between being separate and being connected, and so this boundary of course separates you from others, and defines you as a separate entity.

But the concept of self is very different because the concept of self in psychology is an internal process, not an external process.

Freud, Jung, and many other self-psychologies, including Kohut, many others, they describe the formation of the self as an autonomous indigenous internal process that is not affected, almost not affected by anything in anyone in the environment. That is catastrophically wrong in my view, totally wrong.

And even in object relations theory, people like Gantrip and others, to some extent, Winnicott, Fairbairn, definitely.

Winnicott, Fairbairn, even they were talking about ego nuclei, there are many nuclei of ego, and so it’s like we are born with something that then continues in internal process and then becomes something.

I don’t agree at all. My perception which I think is much more supported by studies than the alternative, my perception is that we are born with a potential, and then this potential is activated by the environment, by the way.

This is an absolutely biological model, when we are born, we have something called genes, potentials. If the environment does not act on the genes, they are not activated. That’s why we can use gene therapy, genes are activated by the environment, that’s why air pollution is very dangerous because it activates cancer genes.

I mean, and it’s I think this is the same in psychology. We are born with potentials, then environment, mother, father, neighbors, teachers, role models, peers, society as a whole, operate on these genes, activate them.

And they start to work and then we develop this feeling of separateness, connectedness, not also known as personal boundary, but this is radically different than the perception, than the self as a concept.

Similarly, I think the concept of individual is a grandiose counterfactual concept. I think it’s absolutely nonsensical.

There is no such thing as individual, absolutely no such thing.

And when we isolate people, for example, in deprivation tanks, when we take a person and we put him in a tank with water with no connection with other people, that person becomes mentally ill, disintegrates, stops functioning.

So the concept of the individual, which is think about the word individual, to divide the concept of the individual is that there is an entity that is totally independent from the environment, totally independent from other people. And this entity can function by itself, and doesn’t need anyone. It’s totally self-sufficient.

That is also complete nonsense.

And finally, I think that the concept of personality is complete nonsense, because personality assumes permanence, constancy, no humans are permanent or constant.

For very long. That’s total nonsense.

It’s like these people have never seen human beings like they are aliens.

And speculating from some planet, it’s humans are anything but permanent or constant.

Humans are rivers, they’re not lakes, they’re like a river.

They flow.

And you cannot enter the same river twice.

So instead, what I have, what I’m suggesting, and promoting is a new foundational theory of psychology.

Where I’m saying that people have states, these states are like potentials.

So people have potential reactive potentials, they’re active now.

Each reactive potential includes emotions, specific emotions, specific cognition, specific values, specific beliefs.

So each reactive potential is what is called schema.

In schema therapy, it’s a scheme.

So these reactive potentials are like a library, a big library.

And then you go out to life, and you come across a situation, the minute you come across a situation, you go back internally to your library, you take out one self-state, you activate it, and then you operate in that environment optimally using that self-state, using that potential.

When the situation is over, when your intimate partner has left, when I don’t know you, will resign from your job, when you move to another country, when you end up mourning someone, you loved, who had died.

You know the situation is over, you take the self-state that you were using, you put it back, and you take out another third state.

So it’s like a giant library.

When we have a library, we don’t read all the books all the time.

We read one book at a time.

It’s the same in my theory of self-states.

Now my theory of self-states is much better adapted to describe a disorder like borderline.

Much better adapted because when the borderline is classic borderline, she is empathic, she is loving, she is caring, she’s compassionate, she’s playful, she is wonderful, she’s delightful, she’s you know, everything is emotional, hyper-emotional.

Too emotional, that’s when she in a classic state.

Then suddenly, environment changes, suddenly the environment changes.

She thinks that she is about to be rejected or abandoned, instantly she switches.

Anyone who has been with a borderline will confirm this to you.

They switch another personality takes over.

They become psychopaths, they become violent, aggressive, dangerous, risky-taking, reckless, frightening, defiant, reactant, contumacious, they become totally different people.

So how can you explain this with the current theory of personality?

You cannot explain it with the current theory of personality, because the current thinking about personality is that it is a stable structure, across the life span.

So how can you explain this switching in borderline?

How can you explain dissociative identity disorder?

If you have this theory of personality, but if you adopt my theory it’s very easy to explain the borderline has a library in that library, there’s a book called secondary psychopathy.

When she is exposed to stress, she is exposed to abandonment and hurt and rejection, she takes out the book from the library, and the book is titled secondary psychopathy.

She becomes secondary psychopath for a month, for a very night or for an hour or for three days.

Then the situation is over, she puts the book back, she takes out another bookloving empathic, emotional borderline. These books are her potentials, her schemas, her self-states.

This is a much more flexible theory of personality. And any therapist and any clinician will tell you that it’s much closer to reality than the assumption that you have a personality that never ever changes. And always you react the same. So you’re totally predictable.

And you know if we learn everything about you, we can analyze you and we can know everything you’re going to do, ever, forever. This is total unmitigated nonsense.

No one is like that. Even healthy people, we all have these libraries of self-states.

I like this metaphor with a library. It’s showing really clearly what is going on with us.

Yeah, so thank you. Thank you. For that.

My last question, but not the least one.

Speaking about libidi, borderline, so how does emotional dysregulation work? How does this apply to that?

That’s a much more complex question than it sounds.

So if you talk to clinicians who are not theoreticians, people work in the field, and so on, or when she’s confronted with stress. So she has such emotions, she cannot control these emotions. They take over her. She’s overwhelmed. And she can do crazy things or she can start to cry. Or you know, you know that’s a classic description of emotional dysregulation.

But emotional dysregulation is a very very deep phenomenon. When you’re in more into theory, it’s a very very deep phenomenon. And very enigmatic and very unique.

First of all, emotions, we know today, emotions are forms of cognition. There are thoughts, there are thoughts that are unique. Why are they unique?

Because they couple with body sensations, typical cognition.

Just thinking, you see this is a glass of water. When I say this is a water, that’s a cognition. But typical cognition does not require sensory input or body perception, proprioception. So we can think in ways which are detached from the body, or from our experience in the environment.

Emotions are these types of thoughts. These thoughts that are intimately linked to sensa, sensory input, and to body properly, to bodily, to how you feel your body, how you feel your body, how you experience your body.

And we call these emotions, now, because emotions are cognitions. They are subject to all the flaws and the deficits and the distortions that cognitions are.

We know that our thinking is not straight. We have biases, we have deficits, we have distortions. We don’t think clearly. We think wrongly. We filter out information, so that it doesn’t challenge our beliefs.

There are types of cognitions known as beliefs and values, which are resistant to any outside information. It’s called confirmation bias.

So we know that our cognition is very very defective, ironically. Our cognition is very fragile, very brittle, very very vulnerable. And so we defend it very strongly. We most of our defense mechanisms defend our cognitions, rationalization, intellectualization, even splitting. These are most of these things are about regulating cognitions.

So if emotions are cognitions, then our emotions are equally defective.

Yeah, then we can have emotional distortion, exactly as we have cognitive distortion. We can have emotional deficit, we can have emotional bias. In other words, we can have impaired reality testing. Our perception of reality can be wrong.

But while cognitively, our perception of external reality is wrong, when we deal with cognitions, we perceive external reality wrongly. With emotions, we perceive internal reality wrongly.

So it is impaired internal reality testing, as opposed to external.

How do I know that all this is true? Very simply, there are therapies, there are treatment modalities where we change emotions by changing cognition.

There is, for example, reappraisal therapy, where we go to the patient and we teach the patient to think in new ways. We teach the patient different cognition.

Shockingly after a while the patient loses all her previous emotions and has totally new emotions. So we know for sure that cognition leads to emotions.

There is another therapy known as exposure therapy where we actually modify the emotion of fear. So we know that via action, behaviorally, or via cognitions, we affect emotions. So we know that emotions are derivative, they’re secondary, they’re not primary entities.

Because if they were primary entities, we could not have changed them through other entities. So they are secondary. They are a derivative of primary entities which are cognitions and behaviors. And of course behavior is cognitive. That’s why we have cognitive behavior therapy.

So it’s all cognition. Why is this all so important?

Another thing I forgot to mention is that you can see something called inappropriate affect.

Inappropriate affect or reduced affect display.

The situations where people show emotions that are inappropriate for the environment, or they don’t show emotions at all.

Numbing and so on. These are also examples of cognitive distortions.

So why is this so important?

Because if emotions are as vulnerable to deficits and distortions and biases as cognitions, if they create a wrong perception of internal reality, then it would make it very difficult for us to understand other people.

We grasp, we interact and we understand other people mainly, amazingly, mainly through emotional displays.

We have many, many studies that show that cognitive exchanges have minimal impact on other people, minimum.

We are very closed, we’re very shut off. That’s why it’s difficult to persuade the conspiracy theorists that the conspiracy is wrong, that’s why it’s difficult to argue about politics or sports because words cognitions don’t work. We don’t interact with each other via cognition, but emotional displays via emotions.

That’s the main modus of communication between people and we do this via the bridge of empathy.

If our emotions are distorted, wrong biased, subject to deficits and defects, it would mean that our interactions with other people would be very very problematic. And what we think we are doing or feeling or experiencing is also totally wrong.

In other words, it would lead to empathy and empathy deficits in a series of truly shocking studies conducted by Israel Shrilly and I think also Agneta Fisher.

Yes, Agneta Fisher. These studies are very new, they’re I think two years old.

It was discovered that the more empathy you have the less well you understand people, yeah exactly opposite.

The more empathy you have the less you are able to understand people and predict them. People with maximal empathy, who like to call themselves empaths, highly sensitive people actually don’t understand other people at all, don’t read them correctly, don’t predict them.

Why this inverse relation between empathy and understanding other people?

Intuitively, intuition is if you are more empathic you understand other people better.

But the hard data, the hard science, is that it’s exactly opposite. The more empathic you are the less you understand other people.

Why?

Well, because of emotions. The more empathic you are the more likely you are to be emotional.

This, there’s a very strong correlation between empathy and emotion and we just said that emotions are like cognitions, they are distorted. There are deficits, they are biases.

So the more empathic you are the more emotional you are the less well you perceive reality.

This is the connection, the less well you perceive reality.

Now if you go back to borderline which is the topic of this interview, when we were both much younger, if we go back to borderline, you see this sequence borderlines have empathy. They are hyper emotional. And so their reality testing, internal and external, is very damaged. It’s very damaged. And this is this leads them to emotional dysregulation, because the feedback from the environment doesn’t sit well with what they believe about the environment. It creates what is known as dissonance.

When you get information from the environment that clashes, conflicts with what you believe about the environment, and they become dysregulated. That’s the more or less the sequence.

Thank you so much for all of this. I’m so happy that we can hear it from you. To be clear of all of this topic, especially like the new things that you said today. So I’m so grateful and so happy for for your time. Sam. Thank you. For having me and suffering me and so on. I know you need therapy after these three dialogues. I’m available free of charge. Okay. Yeah. So thank you one more time and thank you. For listening and see you next time. Thank you again.