Let’s consider a few of these ways.

Signaling. The somatic narcissist uses his body as a signal, a message, a broadcast.

His body is a palimpsest of hidden and overt texts piled on top of each other. Tattoos, for example. Tattoos externalize the somatic narcissist’s essence. They record the somatic narcissist’s personal history, milestones, mnemonics and so on. They’re like a book.

Somatic narcissist tattoos are like a book. And they’re definitely intended to elicit curiosity, questions, reactions from bystanders and observers. They’re a tool of obtaining a tool, an instrument for obtaining narcissistic supply.

The somatic narcissist makes use of his skin, his skin deep anyhow, but he makes use of his skin to obtain supply.

This has nothing to do with sex. And yet it is very common in somatic narcissism.

Now tattoos have a strong history, a long history. In many places in the world tattoos designates a rank hierarchy, social hierarchy. Or, for example, in the Pacific Islands, Maori’s and so on and so forth.

In other places tattoos serve as badges of in-group affiliation, for example, in gangs, various criminal gangs and so on.

But in the case of the somatic narcissist tattoos are not part of a cultural phenomenon. They are a message, the equivalent of texting, texting with your skin.

And they’re intended definitely to lure and attract and entrap and convert possible sources of narcissistic supply.

And again, it has nothing to do with sex. So sexual narcissism is wrong. It’s partial. It’s reductionist. It’s counterfactual.

Somatic narcissist use their body in any way imaginable, including in sex, which is actually not sex. It is autoerotic. They’re using the partner’s body, but the partner is not there as far as they’re concerned. They are unable to perceive external objects.

Bodybuilding, for example, is compensatory. The somatic narcissist uses bodybuilding to rewrite his body.

If you consider the body as a text, he rewrites the text by a bodybuilding. He rewires his musculature by changing the emphasis, emphasizing certain muscles over others because they’re more visible.

So it’s all about visibility and ostentatiousness and communication. These are all forms of communication, tattooing, bodybuilding.

Somatic narcissism doesn’t have to be done. Doesn’t have to be done.

For example, martial arts, which definitely attract their share of somatic narcissist, especially covert somatic narcissism.

Martial arts are deeply immersed in and emanate from philosophies and worldviews, which are pretty complex.

So you don’t have to be done to be somatic.

It’s just that your emphasis is on the body.

You have a truly attractive body.

Your body is more amenable to manipulation or to reshaping than the cerebro.

Or because your intellect or intelligence are not outstanding, as are the intellect and intelligence of the cerebro.

The narcissist uses his natural endowments, whatever they may be, to obtain supply.

Somatic narcissism happens to have a nice body and the cerebral narcissist happens to have an amazing mind.

So they use them to obtain supply.

But somatic narcissism is not about sex.

So it’s not sexual narcissism.

It’s also about sex.

And even then, it’s a strange kind of sex, as I made clear.

Extreme sports.

It’s also a form of somatic narcissism.

You know what? Sartorial attire.

How you dress.

Norm core, maybe?

Ostentatious?

Clothing is a form of signaling.

It signals your social ingroup, your belonging or affiliation with a specific socio-economic stratum, worldview, philosophy, and so on and so forth.

The somatic narcissist dresses ostentatiously, conspicuously.

His attire, his fashion statements are statements. They’re intended to attract attention.

He is always overclad.

And even when he is dressed ostensibly simply, it’s with very expensive items, which he makes sure everyone knows are expensive.

And he fits the clothing to his specific musculature, dimensions and proportions and so on, in order to aggrandize himself and emphasize.

And of course, attract, attract potential sources of narcissistic supply, which in the case of the somatic narcissist could become sex partners.

So as to allow the somatic narcissist to make love to himself with the body via the body of another partner.

It is therefore not surprising that among somatic narcissist, homosexuality is more common than in the general population.

Because the sex is auto-erotic, the somatic narcissist is attracted to the same sex, to himself.

He’s attracted to himself and so he’s attracted to the same sex.

And so this allows for homosexuality to be much more gratifying in somatic narcissism than heterosexuality.

All this has to do with a mechanism that I am working on nowadays and that I’ve nicknamed “othering”.

Othering is recognizing and accepting the externality and separateness of other people.

The child “others” himself via his mother’s gaze.

The child suddenly perceives himself through mommy’s gaze, through mommy’s eyes.

Prior to that, the child is merged, infused with mother in a symbiotic state.

But then one day, the child wakes up and realizes, “Mommy sees me, so there must be a me and a mommy.” And a mommy, and we are not the same.

So, “othering” starts very early in life.

It starts at a point where the child realizes his own separateness and externality to his mother.

This is a major traumatic event.

The world breaks into “me” and “mommy world”.

For example, at that point, the child “others” himself through his mother’s gaze.

But when this happens, which is usually around the age of 18 months, when the first incident of “othering” happens, when the child “others” himself through his mother’s eyes, the child doesn’t have a fully-constellated and integrated self.

He doesn’t have an ego. He doesn’t have much of a mind to talk of.

His brain is still developing. There’s nobody there, almost.

I mean, there are a few rudimentary apparatuses. There’s some templates and infrastructure, which later will blossom into a full-fledged human being with a personality.

But at the age of 18 months, there’s very little there. And yet, the child is able to internalize the new insight that he is separate from “mommy”.

He is not the same as mother. He is external to mother.

And therefore, there is the child and the rest of the world, including mother.

This is the first instance of “othering”.

Because the child doesn’t have much of a mind and no personality at all, no self, no ego.

The child “others” himself from “mommy” through his body.

The child perceives his separateness from “mommy”, his externality to mother, the fact that he is not mother.

He perceives this through the only instrument at his disposal, his body.

And this is what Freud called the “psycho-sexual stages of development”.

You know, oral stage, anal stage and so on.

They all have to do with the body.

Only much, much later in life does the child begin to “other” himself through his mind.

And this is a very early form of splitting.

But it is neutral splitting.

Whereas the splitting defense mechanism is black and white, good and bad, all or nothing.

It is dichotomous thinking. It divides the world.

“I’m all bad, my mother is all good”, that’s a form of splitting.

The earliest form of splitting, proto-splitting, is neutral.

It just says, “There’s me and there’s mother”.

The world is split. The world is broken.

And this is done through the body. And much, much later, through the mind.

So the child, others, his mother, he realizes that there is him or her and there is the other.

And the first other is the child.

The child perceives himself or herself as an other.

And then once the child has integrated and consolidated, once the child has developed an identity, however rudimentary, however basic, the child then “others” mother.

And having “othered” mother, having come to the conclusion or to the realization that mother is an “other”, another person, the child is incapable of othering other people, realizing that they are separate from him, that they are external to him.

He develops boundaries and he is ready for object relations.

In clinical terms or psychoanalytic terms, we say that the child transitions from autoerotic narcissistic libido to other directed object libido.

So, to summarize these stages, the child is born.

At first, he is merged and fused with mother. The child doesn’t see the difference or the distinction between himself and mother. It’s a single unitary entity. The whole world is one. The child, mother, others, the old one.

Then, through the mother’s gaze, through the mother’s eyes, the child realizes that he is separate from mother and he “others” himself.

He begins to realize that he is “other” in mother’s eyes. He still sees the world through mother’s eyes. Mother is still the intermediary and the agent through which he perceives the world.

So, he “others” himself because in his mother’s eyes or through his mother’s gaze, he is the other.

So, the first thing, first instance of “othering” is self-othering.

Gradually, the child develops an identity, an ego, a self, personality and so on.

And so, the child is integrated and consolidated and becomes one with himself.

So, he doesn’t regard himself as the other. He begins to regard mother as the other.

And then, he regards other people as others, separate to him and external to him.

Narcissism is a failure of “othering”, disrupted “othering”.

The child remains stuck in his own avid body. He becomes somatic, solipsistically somatic.

So, if the interruption, if the disruption in development is at an extremely early stage, when the child processes “othering” through his body because he doesn’t have a mind, and if he gets stuck there, then he would “other” his own body.

The “othering” of the body would be fixated at that stage.

So, his body would become an object, an “other”, and he would treat his body as an “other”.

His relationship with his body throughout his life will remain as if his body were not him, estranged, something else, an object, an instrument, a container, a laboratory, but not him.

There will not be a feeling of co-extant, co-terminus existence between himself and his body.

It’s as if his mind somehow was observing his body, or residing outside his body, or projected outside his body somehow.

If the disruption happens much later, then the mind is “othered”.

This is solipsistically cerebral. The mind is “othered”, the mind is perceived as this enormous contraption or machine.

Cerebral narcissists very often talk about their brains as if their brains were alien to them, as if their brains were some kind of computer, a device they are using, not they.

So, the narcissist that regards his own body as “othered” is the narcissist who got stuck developmentally at a very early stage.

And the narcissist who gets stuck at a much later stage becomes cerebral, and the others is mind, not his body.

That is why cerebles have a very conflicted relationship with the body.

They have difficulty to objectify their own bodies, whereas somatics can objectify their bodies with ease.

Because somatic gets stuck at a stage where the body is “othered”, whereas the cerebral is transitioned through this stage, completed it successfully, and moved on to where the mind is “othered”.

In any case, it’s an “othering” thing.

Of course, this raises the question.

I just said earlier in this video that somatics are healthier than cerebral, closer to reality.

How to reconcile that statement with this statement that somatics are stuck at a much earlier developmental stage?

The thing is that reality testing as an ego function is crucially dependent on the relationship with the body.

If you have a good relationship with your body, or if your relationship with the body is such that your body is functional and instrumental for you, allows you to be self-efficacious, more self-efficacious.

Then, even though you are stuck at an earlier developmental stage, you would still be closer to reality.

Self-efficacy is a measure of reality testing and the ability to operate in reality.

If you are close to your body, or if you use your body in a way that instrumentalizes it and allows you to derive or extricate beneficial outcomes from your environment, then you are closer to reality.

The cerebral denies his body, gives up on his body, hates his body, rejects his body.

Consequently, the cerebral is driven much further away from reality than the somatic.

A similar thing happened in Western civilization.

Primitive people in the Amazon, in Africa, in Polynesia, in Pacific Islands, in India, primitive people, primitive tribes are much closer to nature.

They are much more integrated with nature.

They are very self-efficacious as far as survival is concerned.

People in advanced civilization, and they are like somatic narcissists, because they are close to their own bodies and they use their own bodies to secure favorable outcomes from an environment with which they are totally integrated bodily.

It’s all about the body.

In more advanced civilizations, and especially Western civilizations, we divorced the body.

And the emphasis shifted, at least until the middle of the 20th century.

The emphasis shifted to the mind.

It was all about the mind.

Science, day is dead, philosophy, it was all about the mind.

And so we divorced our bodies.

We denied our bodies.

In Christianity, for example, we divorced it, sacrificed it.

We mistreated our bodies.

We had a bad relationship with our bodies.

And consequently, we are experiencing a breakdown, a pandemic of loneliness, mental illness, and so on and so forth.

We are not as self-efficaciously as we think we are.

We are confusing technology with survival and survival with self-efficacy.

They are not the same.

The closer you are to your body, the healthier you are psychologically, regardless of your level of development.

And 18 months old can be mentally healthy.

The closeness to the body is the test.

The body does keep the score.

You need your body to be mentally healthy and to interact with reality and to be embedded in it and to make sure that the outcomes of your behaviors and actions are good for you, favorable to you.

And the somatic is much closer to his body than the cerebral is.

The somatic has massive problems.

He’s auto-erotic. He instrumentalizes his body.

It’s all true, but he’s definitely much closer to his body.

The cerebral is bodyless.

It’s just the mind.

The mind in the machine, the demon in the machine.

The cerebral is an obstruction, not real in any sense.

That’s why ultimately cerebrals end badly, in many ways more badly than somatics.

Somatics gradually begin to resent their bodies because their bodies betray them.

They become diseased or disabled, aging, death, and so on and so forth.

And they try to transition to cerebral, but they usually fail or they’re pretty reasonable.

But they end up the way most people do.

Most people have problems with their bodies at a later stage of life.

The cerebral is a different story.

The cerebral’s hatred for his own body or her own body is such that his mind even becomes diseased.

The rejection and denial of the body are a pathology in its own unique right.

So cerebral narcissists suffer from the pathology of narcissism, but piled on top of it, there’s the pathology of estrangement from the body, dissociated body, rejection and hatred of the body.

That’s a pathology in its own right.

The second layer is absent in somatic narcissism.

And that’s why, while it’s true that somatic narcissists are more primitive as far as personal development is concerned than cerebral narcissists, they are also more mentally healthy and attuned to reality.