So in the third phase where he had converted you into a service provider, where he had converted the whole process into a transaction, he owns you in the sense that you are an internal object. You’re part of his mind. So all your knowledge, all your skills, all your talents, all your education, it’s him. It’s not you.

Because you are part of his mind. You’re an internal object. So everything that you can offer is not external. It’s coming from the inside. It’s a very sick situation. It’s coming from the inside.

So he doesn’t feel that you know more than him because you are part of him. You’re an extension. Whatever you know is his knowledge, not your knowledge. Whatever skills you have are his skills, not your skills. Then whatever you’re doing is his doing, not your doing. So because you’re an internal object, he can overcome the narcissistic injury.

Actually converting you an internal object is his way of overcoming the narcissistic injury. He makes you an extension. He makes you an internal object.

So that moment you are no longer an external threat. You’re part of him. And he can be even very proud of you because you’re part of him. He can even go around and say, I have a great therapist. You should go to her. She’s amazing and so on.

But he’s not saying this because he sees you as a great therapist, but he says it because he owns you. He’s proud of his ownership. You know what I mean? It’s very crazy.

And they’re doing this. You can see it. This is one of the ways that they’re working like that.

Absolutely.

But during my clinical experience, many people ask me like, do a narcissist has emotions? And I think it’s not a good question even because everyone has emotions.

What probably they don’t understand or what they cannot see. It’s like, you know, like narcissists, they can only emulate emotions or, you know, that their emotions are only like, you know, reactive, not proactive.

And people are confused with this. They don’t understand what.

First of all, the modern perception of emotions is that it’s a form of cognition, emotions of subspecies of cognition. So these are thought processes, essentially experienced differently. And that’s why we call them emotions, but they’re essentially thought processes.

And the narcissist and narcissism is a fantasy defense. So narcissism by definition is a cognitive distortion. It’s a cognitive distortion. It’s not a deficit, but it’s a distortion.

When the narcissist sees the world, he rewrites reality. He doesn’t see reality as it is. He has impaired reality testing. And he needs this to support his grandiosity.

If I believe that I’m God-like, reality will deny me. Reality will tell me you’re not God-like. You’re zero. You’re nobody.

So I need to falsify reality. I need to ignore reality.

And this is called cognitive distortion.

Freud was the first to describe at length a series of cognitive distortions known as psychological defense mechanisms. And one of the psychological defense mechanisms is fantasy.

When fantasy defense mechanism takes over the personality, takes over the person, we call it narcissism.

So narcissism by definition is cognitive distortion.

Consequently, narcissists have emotional distortions because emotions are cognitions. So they have emotional distortions and they have emotional distortions in two ways.

First of all, they have access only to negative affectivity. They have access only to negative emotions such as envy, rage, etc. So this they have direct access and exactly like other people like normal healthy human beings. But they don’t have access to positive emotions.

The access to positive emotions is denied because very early on positive emotions like love were associated with pain and with hurt. So the narcissist denies himself access to positive emotions because if he experiences them, he will decompensate and he will become essentially a borderline. He will be dysregulated, overwhelmed.

Grozstein, who was a famous psychoanalyst, suggested that borderlines are children who tried to create narcissism and had failed.

And so consequently, the borderline is in touch with her positive emotions. And whenever the borderline is in touch with her positive emotions, she is dysregulated. She falls apart. She’s terrified. She has abandonment anxiety. She has engulfment anxiety.

In other words, the borderline experiences a positive emotions, but in a very bad way. It’s a very bad experience.

And many borderlines envy narcissists. They say, I wish I were a narcissist. I wish I were a psychopath. Then I would not feel all these emotions.

The narcissist, on the other hand, is a child who had succeeded to destroy his true self and to deny himself access to positive emotions. It’s like the child says, I’m not going to love money because whenever I love money, she hurts me. So I’m not going to love money anymore.

And of course it becomes a habit. So he doesn’t know how to laugh. You’re right that narcissists imitate or emulate emotions.

25 years ago, I suggested something. I called it emotional resonance tables.

The narcissist collects information. He says, this person is crying and she tells me that she said, ah, okay. So when people are said, they’re crying. So he makes like a big table of behavior and reported affect. So what people report to their feeling and how they behave. And then he uses this table to imitate and emulate empathy and emotions. And they’re very good at it.

Narcissists, they can easily deceive you and convince you that they’re actually very empathic and very emotional and so on. To the point that many, many therapists and diagnosticians misdiagnose narcissism as for example, borderline or misdiagnose narcissism as bipolar. It’s very easy for narcissists to deceive even clinicians by imitating empathy and emotions very expertly, but it’s an imitation. It’s not real.

So why should NPD commit to the therapy if it’s only limited, you know, remission?

The same way you go to the gym is to exercise his muscles.

As I said at the very beginning, narcissists don’t come to therapy for transformational purpose. They come to therapy for restorative purpose.

So they come to therapy either because their efficacy had declined. The routines they’re using to obtain supply are not working anymore. For some reason, the environment changed. People don’t like them anymore. Friends abandoned them. Their intimate partners broke up with them. Something bad happened. They lost all their money. They went bankrupt. They’re in jail. They’re in prison. Something went wrong.

So the old tactics, the old strategies of the narcissist to obtain supply are no longer working. So he needs to go to an expert and ask, how can I regain myself? How can I become a alpha male predator? That’s restorative.

The second thing is they believe that if they come to you, you can teach them new techniques to obtain supply. So they would use you again as a service provider and they would try to learn from you how to obtain supply.

Now in the narcissist world, everything is about supply. The only reason you give therapy is because it gives you supply. In his mind, you’re giving therapy. You’ve chosen this profession because it makes you feel superior because it gives you supply.

So he says, okay, let me go to a therapist, see how she gets supply and I will do the same. I’ll copy her. I’ll imitate her.

They say to themselves, medical doctors and therapists, these two professions, they’re about obtaining supply. They’re not about healing people. Therapists don’t care about people. Medical doctors don’t care about people. They care about being admired. They care about being respected. They care about being adored.

So the narcissist, in his mind, you’re a narcissist because of the profession you had chosen. So he would try to learn new tricks from you. Very simple. And he would hope that you can fix him. It’s like a broken machine. You can fix him, but he wants to be the same machine. He doesn’t want to be another machine. He comes to you as a dishwasher. He doesn’t want to exit as a refrigerator. He wants to be a better dishwasher or a fixed dishwasher as a minimum.

This is the huge difference between narcissists and all other patients, all other types of patients, including borderline. They want you to change them. They want transformation. They want a different life, a better life. The narcissist doesn’t want you to change him. He thinks he’s supreme. He thinks he’s perfection.

It reminds me of the joke. Not a joke, actually, historical fact. There’s a Jewish language called Yiddish. It was a Jewish language used in Poland and Russia and so on.

Okay. So one day the Jews decided in the 19th century that they should begin to learn the literature of other countries. So there was this small Jewish publisher in a shtetl. Shtetl was a small town in Poland. So there was this small Jewish publisher, a tiny Jewish publisher, working from a room in a shtetl, which is a tiny town, you know, village, actually. And he decided to translate Shakespeare, finally, for the Jews to read Shakespeare. So he worked very hard and he translated Shakespeare. And this is what the cover page says. William Shakespeare’s plays translated and improved.

So this is the narcissist. He wants to come to you to remain William Shakespeare, but maybe improved a little. So more Shakespeare, more narcissist. He doesn’t come to you because he wants to have another life or a new life or a better life or to get, you know, to make other people more happy or to keep his intimate partner. It’s none of this. He comes to you because he failed to obtain supply and he wants you to fix this. Simple.

And you are nothing but an internal object. You’re an extension service provider. It’s very demeaning, very humiliating for the therapist. And it’s very difficult dynamic with narcissists and with borderlines.

Borderlines are also brand new. That’s why many, many, many therapists don’t refuse to take class to be patients, absolutely refuse.

Okay.

I’m working with them, but yes, for me, yeah, sometimes of course it’s difficult, but most, you know, work with me than with NPD.

But so yeah, is there anything that they can do for themselves?

Before they decided to go for the therapy?

The best thing a narcissist can do for himself is to self-destruct completely. The only window of opportunity, which is not long, three to six months, the only window of opportunity to induce some real behavior modification. And even I would say some psychodynamic change in the narcissist is when the narcissist has utterly destroyed everything imaginable in his world.

And in my case, as everyone knows, I’m diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder twice. So he’s pretty sure.

And there was something really happening in my life. I was repeating the same cycles, repetition compulsion, it’s called. I was repeating the same cycles over and over and over again until at age 35, my wife abandoned me for another man.

I lost all the money I had. I had a group of companies with 8,000 employees and $40 million turnover. I lost all of it. The state took it as a punishment for criminal offenses. I went to prison. My reputation was destroyed because this was a big public affair. So it was mortification.

Clinically, it was mortification. It is then, then a window of opportunity opened for me.

And I’m glad to say that I was sufficiently wise, shall we say, to take advantage of this window of opportunity.

And this is when I wrote Malignant Self-Love. This was, and ever since then, I am not healed and I’m not cured. And I would still be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder without a doubt.

But I’m a productive, pro-social, communal narcissist. I don’t hurt people. I help people. I even heal people. And I contribute.

And that’s why in 1997, I described the concept of, I also coined the phrase, pro-social narcissist or communal narcissist.

So you can go to a narcissist and say, listen, why don’t you obtain supply by being good to people? Why don’t you obtain supply by helping people, by healing people, by working in socially acceptable ways, socially sublimated ways?

And many, many narcissists would, why don’t you, why don’t you become superior by being morally superior?

Now, many narcissists would do this. Many narcissists would strike this deal. They would become famous by being charity oriented. They would become superior by being morally superior. They would become known for being a good husband or a good father. So they would derive supply in ways which are socially sublimated and helpful to them and to others.

It’s not true that all narcissists are menaced to society, horrible people who destroy everything.

Actually, there is a convincing case that the majority of creative people are narcissistic or narcissists. They create the music that you listen to. They create the books that you read. And they had created the social institutions that are working in your favor.

Narcissism is a force either for evil or for good. And it’s easy to convince the narcissist to be a force for good if you promise him supply in return.

So he would do good things because it gets him supply.

I think Mother Teresa was a narcissist, for example. For example, and yet she’s Mother Teresa.

I think, what’s the name of this Swedish girl? The environmental activist Greta. I strongly think she’s a narcissist. But she’s definitely pro-social. She’s communal.

I strongly, yeah. I think she’s a narcissist, absolutely. And I can give you thousands of names of narcissists and all of them had transformed art, culture, society, history, some of them for the worse, like Hitler and Stalin and Napoleon, but many of them for the better.

So narcissism is energy. How you channel it and what you do with it and how you transform it is very much up to the people around the audience.

Unfortunately, there is this stigma and so on and people, you know, make it easier for narcissists to be evil, to be destructive, to be, it’s easier because of expectations.

Now we know from expectation theory in psychology, if you expect something from someone, they will fulfill the expectation.

We have studies, for example, where teachers discriminated against some students in a class and these students had the worst grades, not because they were more stupid than the other students, but because they were fulfilling the expectations of a teacher.

Society expects narcissists to be evil and bad and destructive, so narcissists are evil and bad and destructive.

Has society created an incentive system where narcissists, as the children that they are, get supply only in socially acceptable ways, socially beneficial ways, we would have benefited enormously, humanity would have benefited enormously from this.

Now wasted energy.

How you channel it and what you do with it and how you transform it is very much up to the people around the audience.

Unfortunately, there is thisstigma and so on and people, you know, make it easier for narcissists to be evil, to be destructive, to be, it’s easier because of expectations.

Now we know from expectation theory in psychology, if you expect something from someone, they will fulfill the expectation.

We have studies, for example, where teachers discriminated against some students in a class and these students had the worst grades, not because they were more stupid than the other students, but because they were fulfilling the expectations of a teacher.

Society expects narcissists to be evil and bad and destructive, so narcissists are evil and bad and destructive.

Has society created an incentive system where narcissists, as the children that they are, get supply only in socially acceptable ways, socially beneficial ways, we would have benefited enormously, humanity would have benefited enormously from this.

Now wasted energy.