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1. 00:00 Our attitudes are determined by many factors. Emotions, memories, people around us, the environment, society, culture, gender roles. I mean, you name it. There's hundreds of things that feed into the attitudinal machine and creates our attitudes. Attitudes lead in turn to
2. 00:25 motivations. Motivations result in actions. One of the main inputs into this machinery of attitudes, motivations, actions. One of the main inputs is of course emotions or effects, especially positive ones. Today we're going to discuss the narcissist
3. 00:47 predicament, the narcissist problem. Narcissists do not have access to positive emotions. How therefore do they develop any kind of attitude or motivation? Stay with me. My name is Sam Baknin. I'm the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited. I'm also a
4. 01:10 professor of psychology. Highly motivated. There's been more attitudes than you can count. Okay. Shosani. As I said, healthy people are driven largely by positive effects, positive emotions, examples, love, joy, interest, hope, these all shape us and
5. 01:35 then drive us forward. But narcissists have no access to positive emotions. They have no access to positive emotions because early on in life they have learned to associate positive emotions with pain, with hurt. The first relationships they've had resulted in bitter frustration,
6. 01:57 disappointment, and perceived rejection or breach of boundaries. I will not go into all this. If you want to learn more, visit the from child to narcissist playlist on this channel. Be that as it may, while narcissists have no access to positive emotions, they are flooded, one
7. 02:19 could even say overwhelmed from time to time by negative effects. Negative effectivity according to the ICD11, the International Classification of Diseases. Negative effectivity is one of the core clinical features of what passes for narcissistic personality disorder in the DSM.
8. 02:39 Narcissists are flooded from the inside. They're overwhelmed. They are in a borderline state when they experience emotions such as anger or actually rage, envy, hatred. So, no positive emotions, yes, negative emotions. What kind of attitudinal motivational landscape would this
9. 03:01 generate? Narcissism, pathological narcissism is an adaptation. It's an attempt to survive in a very honorous and demanding environment, very harsh, very unforgiving environment. And so, one of the things the narcissist learns to do early on in life is to
10. 03:22 leverage certain traits and certain emotions in order to generate simulations of what happens in the minds of other healthier people. simulations of psychonamics, simulations of emotions, simulations of empathy. The narcissist in general is a simulated person. It's a
11. 03:46 form of advanced mimicry. Narcissists therefore leverage their negative emotions in order to engender on the fly attitudes and motivations. And because the negative emotions change all the time, they're constantly in flux, this generates the equivalent of identity
12. 04:07 diffusion or identity disturbance in the narcissist. So at one point the narcissist can be very friendly, superficially charming, glib, compassionate or imitating compassion and empathy, pro-social, communal, helpful, uh understanding, caring and
13. 04:26 and so on so forth. That's one minute and then the next minute the narcissist could be rageful, disempathic and incredibly cruel. These fluctuations, this switching has to do with the fact that negative emotions as opposed to positive emotions are contextual. They're driven by
14. 04:47 context. They're triggered from the outside and they're therefore highly unstable. Positive emotions for example love is a very stable thing. Rage is momentary. So when you build your entire edifice entire psychological mental edifice on such quicksand of negative emotions
15. 05:11 you're likely to appear from the outside as unstable. People are likely to regard you as mercurial uh volatile, untrustworthy, unpredictable, arbitrary, capriccious and overall dangerous. So narcissists use the following emotions or following effective states
16. 05:35 to generate attitudes and motivations. Number one, paranoia. Number two, rage coupled with hatred. Number three, envy. Start with paranoia or hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is the behavior that is associated with a trait of paranoia. Paranoia or paranoid ideiation triggers
17. 05:58 anxial anxiety. When you're paranoid, you anticipate the worst. The worst you catastrophize. You create scenarios and then believe that these scenarios are actually reality. and about to transpire. In these scenarios, you're being victimized, you're being persecuted,
18. 06:21 you're being eliminated, you're being harmed. These are harmful scenarios. Selfharming via paranoid ideation in a way. And so this creates a lot of anxiety and anxiety is intolerable, unbearable and has to be mitigated, amilarated and reduced. In other words,
19. 06:40 the narcissist needs to activate an anxolytic process, anxolyis. Narcissist has to reduce the anxiety which is the inevitable outcome of paranoia, paranoid ideiation, hypervigilance and suspiciousness, including referential ideation, the belief that you are the
20. 06:59 butt of mockery and worse, gossip, malicious intent. So this is the sequence. paranoia, anxiety, and then the need to reduce anxiety. And in order to reduce anxiety, the narcissist engages in action. One could therefore say correctly that in pathological narcissism,
21. 07:23 paranoia or paranoid ideiation is a motivational force. It generates motivations, generates attitudes of course, but it also generates motivation. Motivation to do what? Motivation to reduce the anxiety. How? By changing. Paranoia is a change agent, a force for
22. 07:48 transformation within the narcissist. It motivates the narcissist to change. To change in which ways? Well, maybe to become less antisocial, less criminal, less abrasive, less obnoxious, less confrontational, less antagonistic. Paranoia creates motivation to become
23. 08:10 more pro-social, more communal, to conform more to social norms, conventions, and mores in order to avoid the negative, dangerous, risky outcomes of nonconforming, of in-your-face defiance and recklessness, the psychopathic aspects, the antisocial aspects of pathological
24. 08:33 narcissism. So the anxiety causes the narcissist to change, but it also serves as an anti-depressant. It energizes the narcissist. When you're driven to change, narcissist or not, this is very energizing. And being energized, being hellbent on the
25. 08:56 implementation of a self-transformative or self transformational project is very energizing. and the exact opposite of depression. And this is accomplished in the case of pathological narcissism by restoring grandiosity. Paranoid ideiation in narcissism,
26. 09:17 pathological narism has is Januslike. It has two faces. It's like a coin with flip sides. On the one hand, paranoid ideation involves catastrophizing apocalyptic thinking. It creates anxiety and the anxiety motivates the narcissist to change. That's one side of the coin.
27. 09:38 The other side of the coin is that paranoia or paranoid ideation is grandiose because the paranoid says I'm sufficiently important to be the center of attention. I'm sufficiently significant to become the butt and the target of malign, malevolent, and
28. 09:58 malicious scheming and conspiracies. I am uh hunted and haunted by the likes of the CIA and the Mossad and the United Nation nations and Salvakin. So there's a lot of self-enhancement, self agrandisement in paranoia. I claim throughout my work that paranoia is just
29. 10:22 another name, another variant of narcissism, of grandiosity, I'm sorry. And so this is the flip side of paranoia. On the one hand, paranoia creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of existential fear, which then leads to transformation in order to restore um a sense of
30. 10:43 well-being and safety, personal safety. This is a bit humiliating, the need to change because of fear. It implies that you're less than omnipotent. You're not exactly godlike. You're vulnerable. You're weak. But then paranoia counters this by restoring grandiosity. It solves the
31. 11:05 wounds of the narcissist. On the one hand, it paranoia informs the narcissist. Imagine that paranoia is another person, the narcissist's best friend. So paranoia tells the narcissist, you have to change. If you don't change, it's going to end badly.
32. 11:17 The consequences of your actions going to catch up with you and you're going to end, you know, dead in prison. something bad is going to happen. That implies that the narcissist is less than omnipotent, not all powerful, not godlike, and it's very shameful and
33. 11:35 humiliating. The narcissist is very fragile and brittle. to prevent collapse, to prevent narcissistic collapse. The second message of paranoia, concurrent message, conccommittant message, syn synchronous, simultaneous message is you're great. You're the center of attention. You're
34. 11:55 amazing. Everyone is focused on you. Yes, their intentions are malign. Their state of mind is malevolence and malice. But this conspiracy proves that you are highly important. And so this balances the humiliation. Humiliation in the need to transform is
35. 12:16 balanced by the grandiosity imparted and communicated via the paranoia. The second type of effect that induces change in the narcissist that motivates the narcissist is rage. The narcissist version of anger. I've dealt with rage in multiple videos and I encourage you
36. 12:35 to search this channel. Rage is externalized aggression or externalizes aggression. In narcissistic rage, the narcissist becomes verbally abusive and in rare or on rare occasions physically abusive. Rage by externalizing aggression restores omnipotence, restores a sense
37. 12:58 of being all powerful. You're determining other people's fates and destinies with your rage as a narcissist. As a narcissist, your rage molds other people, shapes the environment and modifies people's decisions and choices and behaviors. So this renders you godlike.
38. 13:19 And of course, it has an anti-depressant effect on the narcissist. By raging the narcissist self-enhances and by self-enhancing he reduces dysphoria. A rage restores a sense of control over the environment by helping to modify it
39. 13:42 by somehow inducing change in other people or in the physical mill. And so this is these are the roles of rage. And so rage creates change. Rage motivates the narcissist. But the change is external rather than internal. Whereas paranoid ideation
40. 14:03 induces internal change. Rage is the narcissist's way of creating external change. But it is still highly motivational. motivates the narcissist to rearrange the furniture, to modify the behavior, the the environment, to amen, to amend it somehow, to correct it, to fix it somehow.
41. 14:27 And finally, envy. Envy is a core feature in narcissism. And whereas shame, which is another core clinical feature, is denied and repressed and dreaded, envy is close to the surface, is conscious. Actually, narcissist realizes and knows that he is envious of
42. 14:48 others. Envy motivates the narcissist. It motivates the narcissist to accomplish, to compete, to take his rivals and adversaries down, to undermine them, to destroy them. It triggers ambition. Envy sets life goals, helps the narcissist to create a life plan. Now,
43. 15:11 envy could result in positive transformation when the narcissist invests in himself and somehow creates a long-term vision, long-term goals, and pursues them. It's a positive transformation, but it's rare. In most cases, envy motivates the narcissist to
44. 15:31 become destructive, vengeful, and envy is is other directed. It's the only form of object relations with the narcissist. So it motivates the narcissist to somehow challenge and undermine and humiliate and shame and demean and denigrate and criticize the
45. 15:54 source of the frustration, the object which the narcissist envys. Be that as it may, paranoia, rage, and envy motivate the narcissist. They're motivational forces. Whereas healthy people leverage positive emotions, narcissist makes do with what he has or
46. 16:15 what she has. And what they have are negative emotions. So they make use of them to make motivate themselves to push themselves to get out of bed in the morning and to face life.