Give me an example of confusion between external and internal objects, not in narcissism.

Not in narcissism. Don’t be afraid.

Can you think of a situation where someone, a patient, confuses internal object with external object?

Remember, the narcissist thinks that external is internal.

He makes mistakes. He thinks external is internal.

Can you think of a similar confusion between external and internal, but it’s not narcissism?

You’re all in a state of shock. Psychosis.

Yes. Psychotic disorder.

The clinical term today is psychotic disorder.

Psychotic disorder. In psychotic disorder, there is the reverse process.

The narcissist confuses external object. He thinks it’s internal.

The psychotic is exactly the opposite. He confuses internal object with external.

He thinks his internal objects are external.

How is all this connected to self-states?

Self-states are objects, internal objects.

Self-states are internal objects.

In pathologies, we see that internal objects are intimately linked with external objects.

In pathologies, we see that external objects are interconnected with external objects.

This is the mind. This is the mind.

These self-states are internal objects.

And we see in narcissism, in borderline, in psychosis, we see that internal objects somehow are connected to external objects to the point that they are confused.

The pathologies are showing us. The pathologies are teaching us.

That self-states are connected to external objects. They are relational.

Take away everyone around you. You will not feel that you exist.

The emergence of you depends on object relations, depends on other people.

If we isolate a baby, which is a bit unethical lately, if we isolate a baby completely, there will be no baby. There will be no one there.

The interaction with other people is what makes you.

You are not this. You are not this.

You, me, not a stranger. That is not true.

You are this. This is you.

This is the Venn diagram. This is called the Venn diagram.

So this is you. The relationship makes you. Other people make you.

Take away all the other people in the world. There will be no you if you are a baby. There will be no you.

We have cases, of course, of children who grew up in forests. They are called feral children. Children who grew up with wolves and tigers. And we know they never didn’t have anything resembling a son. Remotely. Not even remotely.

It is what we are talking about.

So we know that other people are critical for formation of such things.

I am shortly coming to the end of the lecture.

In pathologies, you remember that in pathologies, the self-states are receiving the right food. They are not receiving correct data, correct information about reality.

So the defense mechanisms cannot operate properly. Or they give crazy results.

So these are the self-states in pathology. These are the self-states.

There is a distortion issue here. These are the defense mechanisms.

In reality, it is coming here, but there is a filter.

For example, grandiosity. Grandiosity of the most is a filter.

Because there is a filter here. Grandiosity.

And this filter distorts reality, changes it.

So the defense mechanisms are not working properly.

At some point, the defense mechanism receives so much garbage that they stop functioning. They don’t work.

Because the defense mechanisms are receiving garbage, wrong information from reality. This is called confirmation bias.

Because of that, they stop working. And we call this decompensation.

At some point, the mechanisms stop working. Because the mechanisms are not working, reality is not filtered. It is not changed. There is no processing of reality.

And the self-states get in direct touch with reality.

This is how borderlines describe their feeling.

The borderline says, I don’t have a skin. I am skinless. I feel everything immediately on me.

Yes, the defense mechanisms are shut down.

And so she experiences reality directly.

The self-states are not built to cope with reality without defense mechanisms. They don’t have to do that.

So the borderline or the narcissist or the pathologist people, they act out. There is a process called acting out. Acting out is simply switching from one self-state to another self-state. And then rewriting an imaginary reality for the other self-state.

So I’ll give you an example.

That’s the borderline with four lines.

No, no, no. That’s the borderline with four self-states.

That’s the borderline with the pathologist people.

She has freedom. Yes? She is not receiving correct information. She is not receiving correct information from reality.

For example, she thinks the partner is about to abandon them. She thinks the partner is about to abandon them.

But it’s not going to abandon them. It’s wrong.

But she receives wrong information from reality. Her defenses are so overloaded with junk.

Wrong information is junk. The defenses are so overloaded, they stop working. Decompensation.

At that point, the self-states get exhausted with reality. And the borderline has no defenses. She is defenseless.

11% of borderlines in this condition commit suicide. This is how badly we need defense mechanisms. 11% commit suicide. It’s a huge number.

The others create a new reality. They create a fantasy.

Remember dissociation? Fantasy defense is dissociation. They dissociate. They come to tolerate reality, so they cut off reality. They dissociate.

Actually, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, dissociation is a criterion, diagnostic criterion, for borderlines.

They dissociate reality. They immediately create a fantasy. They select another substrate. They switch to another substrate.

Why?

Because this self-state is better adapted for the fantasy.

Now, in 90% vast majority of cases, a borderline would switch to another state that is clinically not a borderline, but a secondary cycleline.

If you look at the comparison of the borderline, you can see that the characteristic of the anti-dependence of the borderlines is different.

So they become a cycleline?

One second.

A cycleline?

A cycleline.

A cycleline.

A cycleline could compensate, would create a compensatory fantasy, and would choose a psychopathic self-state.

If you look at the borderline, you can see that the characteristic of the anti-dependence of the borderline is different.

Not a typical psychopath, but a secondary psychopath. It’s another type. It’s called facto two psychopaths.

But it’s a psychopath.

No, it’s a psychopathic psychopath. It’s a psychopathic psychopath. It becomes psychopathic.

And this is what we call acting alpha.

What’s the definition of acting alpha?

In acting alpha, the borderline would become violent, aggressive, promiscuous, reckless. Take risks. She would become totally different. A second self-state would have nothing to do with a person.

It’s an example of the self-state system in action.

I will mention in five minutes my contribution to this emerging theory.

Then those of you who survived, if you feel like asking questions, I’m here.

There is support like every theory in this apology.

The self-state theory has problems, of course. Every theory has problems.

I mentioned that the self-states don’t share everything. They don’t share all the memories. They don’t share all these things.

So how come you feel that you are the same? How come you feel continuous? You don’t get up in the morning and say, today I’m not me.

Some of you may wish.

It rarely happens. And it does happen. It’s definitely a problem.

So there’s a problem of identity disturbance. That’s a clinical term.

If the self-state theory was 100% correct, everyone would have identity disturbance.

You would not feel fully integrated. You would not feel one. You would feel many.

And the second problem is what we call trait constancy.

Some traits, not many by the way, are a lot fewer than you think. But some traits persist in all the self-states’ life. Very few.

People think that they have traits, and these traits are in every situation for life. That’s completely untrue. Most of your traits are unstable, and very few of them, if any, survive life on.

But some do.

For example, I like to talk, and I like to talk since I was 9. So probably it’s a constant trait.

How do you explain this? If you have such things and they don’t share everything, how do you explain trait constancy?

I think about it as you and use the original idea. And I’m now making the rounds in all the important universities in the world promoting this idea.

So you can watch, for example, my symposium, my colloquium at McGill University, which is one of the leading universities in the west for psychology. You can watch my colloquium there, it’s available on my YouTube channel.

So I give a colloquium there, about to go to Cambridge to give a series of two colloquiums. So I’m promoting this idea.

And this idea is next stage of search space. This idea is pseudo-identity.

Again, nothing is totally new. Nothing is totally new.

We have theories in psychology, for example, family systems theory, where they have sub-personalities, for example.

But pseudo-identity is new in some areas.

To get to the idea, to get to a new theory of pseudo-identities, which is probably the latest theory, I think.

Again, like all my predecessors, I studied pathology.

When you study pathology, hopefully you get some insight into health care.

So I studied people with dissociative identity disorder. Dissociative identity disorder is a new name for what used to be called multiple personality disorder.

So don’t ask me why every two years we come up with a new term or new word for something that existed six years.

It’s a hobby. A hobby of psychologists. They like to rename it all the time.

So I studied the idea, dissociative identities.

In multiple personality disorder, there is a central entity. The central core is called the host personality.

And you have many, many pseudo-personalities. They look like personalities.

So some authors can be small children, some authors can be big, some authors can be different gender.

You could have a man who has multiple personality, and one of the authors of two or three would be women.

The host, the host personality, decides which author will be used in which circumstances.

So the host has a co-ordinative function. Of course it is also protected, like in all portfolios.

But in D.I.D., in multiple personality disorder, there is a co-ordination center. And there is no such thing with helping people. There is even no such thing with narcissists. And there is no such thing with both of them.

Only in the most extreme dissociation, multiple personality, we have a co-ordination center.

How do healthy people decide which self-state will function?

You are healthy. You have four self-states. Who decides which self-state will go out and take over?

I have never received more criticism than this.

I suggest, in my work, I suggest that the self-states are organized in 10 places.

Not my idea, I’m afraid. Jung suggested that in early childhood there is what he called the self-care template.

So I borrowed the idea of a template from Jung. I didn’t ask his permission. But I borrowed it from Jung. And I organized all the self-states in a template.

What is the template? Meaning, narrative. The template is a narrative. Story.

So, the narrative decides which self-state will become dominant.

In multiple personality disorder, it’s not the outside that decides. It’s the inside.

In multiple personality disorder, there is an internal structure that decides which self-state will be used.

In all other people, healthy and not healthy. It’s a cue. It’s an environmental cue. It’s a signal from the environment. Information comes from outside, organized in a narrative, in a story, and then a self-state naturally reacts to a specific narrative.

So, my contribution is to say that self-states alone are not enough.

We need self-states with context. Narrative context. So, this together is called pseudo-identity.

It includes the self-states, ego-functions, and probes, stimulation, extracting information from the environment and framing it inside another.

How do you feel about this?

All the schools, all the schools ever, which deal with personality, I’m sorry, and with the self…

Think perfectly here. Everything you can imagine. From Freud, to defense mechanism, to Jungian shadow, to complexes, to cold self-psychology, to dissociation school, to self-state, everything is translated into this. This is like theory of everything, in a way, when it comes to personality.

So, it also provides us with some therapeutic tools.

I was very close, actually. Victor, my good friend. He was very good.

What Victor Franklin said, essentially, was that we need a narrative. A narrative that endows us with meaning.

So, he was very close, but he was not a structuralist. He was more descriptive about it.

Tomorrow, for those of you who are not too frightened by today’s lecture, tomorrow I’m going to discuss the ten or twelve aspects of mental illness in children and adolescents, especially personalities.

There is a common misconception that adults are mentally ill, children and adolescents are not, or if they are, it can be easily reversed.

Regrettably, that is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Most mental illness is diagnosable already in earlier lessons.

Some of it, even in childhood.

And our ability to reverse, to intervene, is already strongly impaired, strongly handled.

At age, I would say, 13, 14.

There is nothing we can do with psychopathy by age 9, actually.

There is a disorder called contact disorder. And contact disorder is psychopathy for children.

There is very little we can do with borderline personality disorder after age 12.

And actually, it is diagnosable at age 11 at home.

But tomorrow I will try to go through the warning signs, the red alerts. Many of them counterintuitive, many of them would sound strange.

Because early intervention is still critical.

But we need to catch these problems extremely early on.

Freud was a warrior, and after Freud, and after the tomb, they understood that therapists stand in for parents, their parental figures.

And if we catch the patient in adolescence, we are faced with a very serious problem.

Because adolescence is the second phase of separation and individuation.

There is negative identity formation. I am not going to be like my mother, I am not going to be like my father.

Negative identity formation.

And there is what we call reactors or defiance, so a challenge to authority.

If we catch the patient too late in adolescence, too late is already 13-14.

Our ability to intervene is very good.

So the early warning signs are critical.

And again, many of them would surprise you, I think.

I have tortured you enough. Thank you for listening.