Why am I so insistent on being credited for the work that I’ve done?

Is it because I’m a narcissist?

It’s because I value history. Memory is the glue that holds all of us together, individuals and collectives.

Context, lineage, pedigree, provenance, they all provide additional information. They help us to understand things more profoundly and more accurately.

If creators, artists, authors, filmmakers, if creators are not credited, there’s no incentive to create.

What would happen to humanity if people were to steal each other’s ideas, each other’s work, misattribute them, lie about them, plagiarize?

What would happen to humanity?

I insist on the veracity of the historical record. I insist on getting credit for my work because I want everyone else to get credit for theirs.

I want a world where people don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat.

In 1995, I was the first person in human history to the best of my knowledge. I was the first person to out himself as a narcissist. I was the first person to admit to having been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

You heard the phrase “patient zero”? I am patient zero.

I was and still am narcissist zero.

But then having confessed to my mental health diagnosis, I couldn’t find anyone else to talk to.

People were shy, avoidant. They were either victims of narcissists or narcissists themselves.

So to be able to communicate my experiences, I had to coin a whole new corpus of language. And this corpus of language is still widely in use today.

Now, of course, I haven’t coined all the phrases and all the words that are in use today, but I’ve coined the majority of the most important ones.

And when I mention this, people contest the fact. People have no memory. They have no timelines. We are living in a timeless period.

And people say, “You didn’t coin no contact?” The phrase “no contact”?

“My grandma used no contact on my grandpa.”

Well, of course, I didn’t put the two words together. I was not the first one to use the phrase “no contact.”

But no contact is a set of 27 strategies. Look it up on my channel. There’s a video dedicated to no contact.

And these 27 strategies of coping with the aftermath of narcissistic abuse, I named them the collective. I named it no contact.

Listen to this short excerpt from an interview that I gave to a documentary about narcissistic abuse.

I really think it’s a matter of ethics and morality. I think we’re increasingly living in an amoral space which degenerates very easily, devolves very easily into immorality.

People steal from each other, troll each other, attack each other, abuse each other with impunity online.

These are the parameters, the behavioral parameters of the online space. Everything goes. It’s the Wild West. There are no rules. It’s a jungle out there. Hostility, enmity, hatred, anger are the coinage of this realm.

So listen to this excerpt.

About Narcissist Zero, that’s me, and the language of narcissistic abuse that I was forced to coin in 1995 because there was nobody there.

For 10 years, I’ve had the only website on narcissism and narcissistic abuse. And I owned and moderated the only six support groups for victims of abuse.

My websites have garnered 100 million page views. And in my six support groups, there were 300,000 members. And we are talking 1997, 1999, when the internet was an embryo, a fetus, not even a newborn, an experiment.

Can you imagine the magnitude of this phenomenon?

And it has grown ever since.

Now tens of millions of people are involved in the study of narcissistic abuse, in teaching each other, sharing experiences, and so on and so forth.

I started it all.

I insist on that.

That’s a historical record.

I don’t insist only oncredit.

I insist on history.

I insist on memory.

I insist on rigorousness.

I insist on a pioneer status because the history of the topic is important.

It’s important to understand.

It may not be an accident that a narcissist started it all and not, for example, a victim.

Why is that?

It’s a fascinating question.

Behoves us to study it.

Now, how can we study it if we don’t know the history or deny it when we are faced with it?

We need to stop this.

We need to develop a connection to our past, to our communities, to others.

We need to stop being atomized not only physically but also mentally.

Where have we gone with all this?

It’s a world of present only, no past, no future.

So it is my personal battle, but it is part and parcel of a much bigger war, the war to regain traditions, history, memory, identity, and after all, humanity.

I wish you enjoyable listening.

No, not the Wizard of Oz.

They are not called flying monkeys.

The Wizard of Oz.

They are called winged monkeys.

The winged monkeys in the Wizard of Oz are the good guys.

They actually had Dorothy.

So no, it wasn’t borrowed from them.

In 1995, I watched a National Geographic movie.

There were these monkeys and they occupied an abandoned shrine or temple or something.

They were flying all over the place.

And so it occurred to me to coin the phrase flying monkeys to describe people who aided and abet the narcissist and the psychopath by doing their bidding against targets, against victims, against, you know.

So this is how the phrase came to be.

The first time flying monkeys is mentioned, check it out, is in 1995 in my writings in connection with narcissism, of course.

The Wizard of Oz, winged monkeys.

A variety of other books and movies and cinema use the term winged monkeys, not flying monkeys.

There is an interesting history to many of the terms in use today, which I have either coined, so I coined cerebral narcissist, somatic narcissist, knock on tar, etc., etc. or phrases that I borrowed.

Yeah, I simply borrowed these phrases and I infused them with a new meaning.

So for example, narcissistic supply is not a phrase that I coined.

It was first, I think it was 1937, the first time it was used.

And what I did, I took it and I imbued it with a new meaning.

I applied it to narcissism, I divided it to primary and secondary and so on and so forth.

The original term, the original phrase, not 1937, had to do with the relationships between parents and children only.

And it had nothing to do with narcissistic pathology.

It had to do with the normal process of growing up in a family, interactions between children and parents.

And so on and so forth.

Narcissistic abuse, yeah.

Yeah, there was the name of the first support group ever for victims of narcissism in 1997.

It was the first support group ever.

For a period of 10 years, I owned and moderated and so on and so forth all six groups of support to victims of narcissism.

I again, I borrowed the term narcissistic abuse at the early 1990s.

You could say I coined it, because it was not used anywhere.

And then I adopted this phrase to reflect its current meaning.

So yeah, I borrowed many things.

I borrowed false self from Winnicott.

I borrowed idealization, devaluation, and I added to it, by the way, I added to it discard and replacement.

So it was a hectic period within one year, 1995, I coined dozens of phrases.

And the vast majority of these phrases are still in use today.

There have been people who tried to sublimate these phrases, replace them with other phrases, replace them with other phrases.

It didn’t catch on really. It didn’t catch on.

Most recently, I’ve coined, I’m again, coining new phrases, for example, dual mothership.

I took the Sanger’s concept of shared fantasy and I applied it to narcissism in a totally new way. Cold empathy. Cold empathy, yeah.

Snapshotting. These are all new phrases that I came up with.

And again, they’re spreading. They’re spreading like fire.

So I suspect that in 25 years time, I’ll be having a similar conversation and having to convince people that I’m the guy who coined snapshotting. Or so on and so forth.

It’s not very important to me, but I think it’s a virtuous and moral and ethical thing to give credit where it is due.

And plagiarism is intellectual murder, stealing someone else’s work and ideas and passing them off as yours. That’s murder. That’s intellectual murder.

First degree.

Yeah.

And many people are doing this.

And in today’s world, there’s no concept of time and progression and people are totally confused who coined what, who invented what, who said what and so on and so forth.

It was the same in periods of great intellectual ferment. There was the same situations.

For example, Freud borrowed many terms from others, including Adler. He borrowed a lot from Adler. Jung borrowed from Freud.

And today many things are attributed to Freud, which actually, actually there were Jungian things. Jung came up with this, not Freud. And many things are attributed to Freud that were actually Adlerian. Adler came up with these things, not Freud.

And vice versa. Many things are attributed to Jung that were actually Freud’s, not Jung’s. So there’s a mess. There’s a big mess in terms of crediting people with their work.

People deserve credit for their work. I don’t think there’s vanity. I don’t think there’s hubris. I don’t think it’s grandiosity. I don’t think it’s narcissism.

If you, is it narcissism to say that this child is your daughter? It’s not. It’s just that you want to claim motherhood over her. She’s your child. And that’s the way I see it. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

And I’ll continue to insist on what’s mine or what’s rightfully mine.

I didn’t coin all the phrases. I didn’t coin all the words, not by far.

But many, many obscure things that you wouldn’t believe came from me.

Narcissistic fleas. You heard of that?

Mine, also.

Even the term fuel comes from my work.

So it’s important to recognize paternity, provenance, the degree, and to trace an intellectual lineage because influences, intellectual influences are critical to understanding the context, the background, and the meaning, simply the meaning of text.

And today we are missing this. We’re in a timeless, contextless world. There’s no time. There’s no context. Everything is frozen. Everything is at present. There’s no background, no depth, no memory, no nothing. This is bad. This is really bad. It’s supposed to be the end of civilization. Civilization relies on time and memory. And we have sacrificed both for the instant gratification of the moment, the likes on Instagram.