Because, like logically, I think not.

But how do you see it?

Because it’s some form of abuse as well.

Yes.

Andrei Green in 1978 coined the phrase dead mother.

Dead mother is not a physically dead mother. She’s a mother who is emotionally absent, depressive, narcissistic, self-centered, selfish, or absent in the sense that she’s out and auto.

So here’s the problem with parenting.

You need to find the thin line, the perfect equilibrium, the balance between overbearing and being absent, between encouraging the child to separate and protecting the child, providing the child with a secure base, with a safe environment.

Very few parents find this balance.

Now children, when they get hurt, when they get seriously hurt, when the abuse is extreme, when the child is not allowed to develop boundaries and to separate and become an individual, children begin to grieve. They develop a grief response and they grieve what they could have become. They develop a lot of anger. There’s a reservoir of anger, which they cannot direct at the parent because it’s not legitimate.

So children then develop a false self. A false self is an imaginary friend and the false self is everything the child is not. The false self is omnipotent, all powerful. The false self is omniscient, all knowing. The false self is perfect and brilliant.

In short, the false self is a divinity. It’s a God, it’s a private God. And the whole thing becomes a private religion.

Narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a private religion where the child is both God and a worshiper.

Wait a second. Sam, can you please lower the camera so I can see your whole face?

Okay, perfect, perfect.

Is that what you mean?

Yeah, that’s perfect.

And you talked about the God, like the narcissist being God, because in a religion, you’re always can find a way to convince yourself of anything that you do, the good and the bad.

And therefore, let’s talk about it in narcissism.

Do they convince themselves in everything that they do?

Is there a mechanism for it that they use in themselves for it?

Narcissists, like many other people, have defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms are psychological processes which falsify reality or reframe reality in a way that would make you feel comfortable.

It’s known as egosyntony, would make you feel egosyntony.

So of course, narcissists make use of this, but ironically, much less than other people.

And the reason is this, the false self becomes the narcissist.

Gradually, the child disappears completely.

I compare it to human sacrifice.

This new God, the false self, is a very demanding God.

It’s a molech, yes?

It’s a molech.

So he demands human sacrifice.

And then the child sacrifices his true self.

And there’s nobody left except the false self.

The narcissist merges with the false self, becomes the false self.

And so all that is left is a piece of fiction, a concoction, a narrative, a storyline.

It’s the false self.

And the false self is God-like.

It has God’s attributes.

Exactly as we wouldn’t think that God second-guesses his own actions, or that God has self-doubt, or that God goes to therapy, we wouldn’t assume that a narcissist would do this.

Because in the narcissist’s eyes, he is a kind of deity.

He is a kind of divinity.

He is infallible.

Everything he does is for the good and for the better.

You even have communal narcissists.

These are narcissists who really do good.

They are charitable.

They are altruistic.

They help people.

They are in the helping professions.

Medical doctors, therapists, activists, social activists.

There are studies, including, by the way, a major study in Israel by Gabbai and her partners, four studies actually in Israel, that demonstrate that victimhood is a narcissistic construct.

So many narcissists use their victimhood as a form of grandiosity.

They become social activists and they leverage their victimhood to feel unique and special and God-like.

There’s no end to the guises and disguises and permutations of narcissists.

They are narcissists who are proud that they are the world’s biggest losers.

They are the world’s unique failures.

A narcissist would go around and say, “My company was the biggest bankruptcy in Israel ever.” And I’m proud of it.

Grandiosity is about being special for better, but also for worse.

You’ve talked about it in other interviews that you did about we as human beings, in order to understand ourselves, we need to experience the world.

And that means, in the Navy SEALs, in order for you to be in the Navy SEALs, you need to go for hard training and all of that to show that you are made of what they need.

And therefore you understand yourself.

Can narcissists do it and somehow go to the real them that was suppressed when they were children and understand themselves really, or you cannot do it and you’re only left with this God-like figure that is just not the real you.

The child who became a narcissist as an adult found reality unacceptable and intolerable, especially the parental environment.

So the core of narcissism is impaired reality testing, suspension of reality, rejection of reality.

Lekli, who was the father of the study of psychopathy wrote that psychopaths and narcissists reject life.

And that’s very true.

So narcissists would go to great lengths to falsify reality through cognitive distortions, for example, grandiosity.

Hegrandiosity. He would create this inflated self image, which is essentially a fantasy defense gone awry.

And then he would reframe reality. He would figure out information. He would falsify and he would confabulate. He would invent stories about himself, about others, which later he would believe in all this in order to maintain himself inside a solipsistic, utterly isolated bubble.

It’s a bubble existence. That’s why Kernberg and other scholars, myself included, no comparison.

We believe that narcissism is one step removed from psychosis. They are no longer with us. They’re floating in the clouds. They can’t judge reality properly.

Ironically, narcissists gaslight themselves. They gaslight themselves because they lie to themselves about reality and they tend constantly to falsify.

But to what length it goes, because I think that each human somehow lies about the reality or reality as we see it.

So if you can go more into depth on it, I would appreciate that.

People reframe reality and to some extent falsify it via psychological defense mechanism.

And the idea is not to feel too uncomfortable about who you are and what you do.

And this state is known as ego-syntony.

So you’re trying to avoid ego-distony in order to attain a state of ego-syntony.

In other words, to avoid discomfort, to avoid extreme harsh, life-threatening inner criticism and so on.

So yes, you’re right that everyone has a view of reality that doesn’t exactly match reality 100%, shall we say, gently.

Not so with the narcissist.

The narcissist rejects reality in its totality and subjects it to a single organizing principle, which is the fantastic false self.

Now, the false self is called false self because it’s false.

So whereas people would, normal people, healthy people, whatever that means, by the way, would falsify reality 10% of the time and only in special occasions and special circumstances where they feel uncomfortable with who they are and what they’ve done.

A narcissist would falsify reality 100% of the time, simply 100% of the time, in order to buttress and uphold an image of himself that has nothing to do with reality, actually.

And then this raises a question about criminal responsibility.

And in at least one case in the United Kingdom, it was a teenager who murdered his parents. In at least one case, narcissistic personality disorder had been recognized as an insanity defense and that may be a growing trend.

So narcissists are insane, in my view, clinically insane. You yourself are a narcissist.

And when I saw that fact, I was mind blowing because you’re talking about it and okay, it’s understandable.

Like if you have this quote unquote problem, you want to deal with it and want to learn about it and all that.

But how do you control this horse that is so wild? How can you do it yourself?

That’s so interesting.

And I know you have high IQ. You said like in some interview that your IQ was measured like when you was a kid or something, you can say it later, about 185 IQ or something along those lines.

So if you can go into length on it, I will appreciate it.

That’s precisely the solution I found.

Solution I found is imposing my intellect, my intelligence as a barrier or a constraint on the insanity of narcissism.

Is it working some of the time? Is it working all the time?

No.

So every narcissist uses his or her resources.

We have, for example, somatic narcissists. They use their body. They use their bodies in order to obtain narcissistic supply.

Now, narcissistic supply is the input from other people that helps the narcissist regulate his sense of self worth.

So the narcissist maintains his inflated and fantastic self image by coaxing and sometimes coercing other people to give him the kind of input that would support his view of himself.

So if I’m a genius or I consider myself to be a genius, I would push you and others to tell me that I am a genius. You’re great and smart. You’re great. You’re amazing. What an intellect.

Yes.

Since they’re unbound.

So it’s and this is the narcissistic supply that I need in order to maintain my fantastic view of myself.

But every narcissist uses what he has.

So if you have a nice body, you develop it, you evolve it, you become a bodybuilder, an athlete, and then you engage in sexual conquest. That’s your narcissistic supply. That’s how you maintain your inflated self image and self view.

If I have a hundred and eighty five hundred ninety most recent tests, IQ, then you’re going to use this. This would be your resource.

It never works all the time. It caters. It never works. It’s not a path to healing. It’s a path to self restraint and self control, which is very minimal, intermittent, and very often fails.

So narcissists have, I would say, 70 percent of the time moments of insanity, self destructive and self defeating acts, huge damage to others. They hurt other people in a variety of ways all the time.

And then they have these lucid moments, these lucid moments like in dementia. They have these lucid moments where they control themselves. They can verbalize. They can intellectualize. They can. They sound normal. They sound convincing, even charming and so on and so forth. It’s a facade. It’s a mask and it never holds.

But can you control it, though, this facade?

I can put it on for a while. But sooner or later, the real me, the false self will emerge. False self will take over. It’s a part of the false self.

The masks are what we call in psychology sublimation. Sublimation is converting urges and drives which are socially unacceptable to activities and speech acts which are socially acceptable and commendable.

So from being condemned to being commended to being commended, if I were to act on my impulses, narcissistic impulses, I would have been socially condemned or even worse.

So I sublimate them. I convert them into socially acceptable behaviors.

But this is a process that consumes a lot of energy. And it’s a process of self denial. You have to deny who you truly are or who you feel that you truly are. You feel that it’s true.

The false self.

And so sooner or later, there’s an internal rebellion. There’s a defiant reaction, very antisocial.

So that’s why many, many scholars conflate narcissism with psychopathy in the form of malignant narcissism.

So at some point, the narcissist rebels, the facade cracks, and the true beast emerges.

So you just said the thing, the true beast and Machiavelli talks about the beast and all of that.

And we can talk about the term Machiavellianism and link it also to psychopathy, as you said, and also to narcissism.

If you can explain the links between those three terms, you can. It’s an idea that is now being further developed. It’s called the dark triad, the dark triad.

And it’s part of what is known as dark personalities.

So the dark triad includes subclinical psychopathy, traits and behaviors that cannot be diagnosed in psychopathy, although they are typically psychopathic.

Subclinical narcissism, traits, behaviors, fantasy defenses that are narcissistic, but do not amount to a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. So these are known as subclinical conditions, coupled with a tendency to manipulate, which is known as Machiavellian, the tendency to manipulate in a variety of techniques, including gaslighting in other ways, and so on and so forth.

If you put the three together, you get a dark triad.

If you add to this sadism, the wish to inflict pain on others and gratification from doing so, then you have the dark tetrad personality.

And recently I suggested the dark pentagram personality.

I added to the mix borderline.

So then we cover essentially all cluster B personality disorders.

Dark personalities are much more common than diagnosis of cluster B personality disorders.

Anywhere between 10 and 15% of the population have dark personalities.

We don’t know. We are not quite sure, but it should be between 10 and 15%.

And dark personalities are very similar to another construct, another idea proposed by Lynne Sperry.

Sperry said that we should distinguish between disorder and style.

So he said you could have a narcissistic personality disorder, or you can have a narcissistic style.

And Theodore Millon, one of the giants of the field, accepted this.

And so narcissistic style is basically being an a-hole, a jerk, essentially.

But if you take it to extreme, and if you’re unable to perceive other people as separate from you, and if you treat them as objects, and if you dehumanize them, and if you exploit them, then it becomes a disorder.

All in all, I have huge reservations about the entire field.

I’ll tell you why, for two reasons.

Number one, I think many of these so-called disorders are actually not clinical entities, but social judgments. We call these culture-bound syndromes.

A psychopath is someone who rejects the rules and laws and mores of society. He is defined. He is contumacious. He is authority. He is reckless. It’s all bad. Of course, it’s bad in the eyes of society, and many of these guys end up in prison.

But is it a mental health issue?

I don’t think so at all. It may be a character, a specific character, coupled with a specific temperament, if you’re impulsive. It may be a predilection. It may be the outcome of some upbringing. It may be many things, but it’s not a mental health disease.

Similarly, narcissists, there’s a very thin line between being a jerk or an a-roll and being a narcissist. It is so thin that sometimes it’s invisible.

So yeah, these people are obnoxious. They’re not nice.

But do they have a mental illness?

The only thing that militates against this view is that narcissists have impaired reality testing. So they are a bit psychotic. So maybe they do have a mental illness.

In borderline, you have emotional dysregulation. So that’s a real clinical thing.

But in psychopathy, there’s nothing. Nothing clinical.

If you read the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder, they are all about functioning in society and behavior. Nothing about the internal world of the psychopathy.