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1. 00:02 In people with a hereditary trait of dissociity, people who are antisocial, for example, psychopaths or uh narcissists, malignant narcissists, um or people with a coorbidity of narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder and even
2. 00:22 some types of borderline. In all these people we see an ailaration of antisocial behaviors, a reduction in antisocial tendencies, actions, decisions, choices, and even state of mind. With age, as they grow older, they become more pro-social, more communal.
3. 00:46 They begin to develop a life that is indistinguishable from a normal healthy life. Now of course this is not true in 100% of the cases but it is true in more than 80% of the cases. So one can generalize pretty safely. Why? Why is that? What is happening? One of the
4. 01:04 transitional dynamics is from recklessness to risk aversion. My name is Sambaknim. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I’m a professor of psychology. So I mentioned um risk aversion. Psychopaths and psychopathic people are usually uh riskprone.
5. 01:29 They are risk seekers. They’re also novelty seekers but they engineer situations which are highly dramatic. They have a dramatic content and at the same time are highly dangerous. These situations consume them somehow. They superimpose these situations on
6. 01:50 their lives. They engineer environments and interactions with people in their interpersonal relationships or even with casual strangers all in order to increase thrills. They seek thrills. They seek risks. They seek adventures. And this is a key feature
7. 02:12 in uh in psychopathy possibly because the psychopath or psychopathic people have a very low threshold of boredom. They cannot tolerate boredom. They disdain routine. They hold in contempt people whose life is orderly and mundane and repetitive.
8. 02:35 And so these people are not only defiant or consumatious, reject authority, but they are first and foremost reckless. Recklessness involves denial. Recklessness involves grandiosity. Recklessness involves fantasy or delusion. All three are interconnected.
9. 03:00 There is a denial that actions have consequences, that choices and decisions lead to inexurable outcomes, many of which are adverse and bad and dangerous. There is also a sense of impunity, an immunity to one’s to the consequences of one’s actions. And all this is embedded
10. 03:20 in a narrative which is typically very fantastic or delusional and involves elements of omnipotence or omniscience or impermeability or untouchability or invulnerability. Of course, risk-seeking, thrillseeking, adventurousness go hand in hand with recklessness in the
11. 03:45 sense that the denial of consequences,
12. 03:51 the innate sense of impunity and immunity and the fantastic narrative which is self-enhancing and supports a completely counterfactual, unrealistic self-concept. All these together in a confluence and synergy create dramatic and risky um and adventurous situations within
13. 04:15 which the psychopathic personality thrives. In other words, it’s difficult to tell which is the egg and which is the chicken. Is it that the psychopath or the psychopathic personality seeks thrills, adventures, risks and dangers and drama and then
14. 04:35 justifies this with a s with denial with a sense of grandiosity, invulnerability or and with a fantasy? Or is the fantasy, the primitive defense mechanism of denial and the cognitive distortion of grandiosity when you put them together, do they generate risky, reckless
15. 05:01 behaviors? We are not quite sure which leads to which. In the psychopathic person’s mind, failure is perceived as a risk. And ironically, because the psychopathic personality is a risk seeker, it would tend to fail more often than healthy and normal people because of the drama and
16. 05:27 the dangers attendant upon failure. Failure becomes a kind of adventure in a way. Actions are risky. Actions have consequences. And yet in the mind of the psychopathic personality, actions and consequences are completely divorced. It is a misperception of the very notion
17. 05:54 of time, the inexorability of time, the error of time, the fact that action A usually yields uh result B, causation itself is frayed and challenged in the psychopathic personality’s mind. And so because consequences of actions could be risky and because this kind of
18. 06:20 personality seeks risks, adores risk, thrives on risk, it’s a kind of fuel or food or supply, call it risky supply. So because of that this kind of personality would tend to act in a manner which would bring on adverse, challenging, dangerous, undermining, terrifying
19. 06:45 consequences on the one hand and at the same time would lead to failure as a form of dramatic risk of dramatic adventure. At some point though, and we don’t know why, possibly there are neurobiological changes in the brain, some kind of plasticity that is reactive to a
20. 07:09 lifelong of adversity and and strife. That’s one possibility. Maybe there are processes in the brain that we are not aware of which take time to evolve and unfurl and unfold and then have an impact. And maybe they simply discover the good life. They discovered that
21. 07:26 being with a family, having a family and, you know, steady job and so on is is sometimes more fun than, you know, ending up in prison every few years. So, we don’t know why. We don’t know if it’s the outcome of life experience or the outcome of something inside one’s skull.
22. 07:43 But psychopathic personalities, as I as I mentioned, tend to amilarate with age. Psychopathic behaviors decline precipitously. Criminal activities almost vanish. And but the energy the energy is still there. The need for drama and risk is still there.
23. 08:04 The consumption of thrills and excitement and arousal is still there is still there. So how to satisfy this? Usually such a personality becomes passive aggressive rather than externalize aggression. It either internalizes aggression and abuses substances, does drugs or commits
24. 08:29 suicide. So this is internalized aggression or it exter this kind of personality, psychopathic personality externalizes aggression but passive aggressively under the radar underhandedly by sabotaging people by undermining them by challenging them. So initially in a psychopathic
25. 08:52 personality’s life trajectory, initially the aggression is externalized and the aggression is at the use of seeking risk, seeking thrills and seeking adventures. Then with age this amilarates and even disappears altogether, but the aggression is still
26. 09:10 there. The aggressive energy is still there. The aggressive cexis, if you wish, is still there. And it has to manifest somehow. Freud called it a reaction. It has to manifest somehow. And then the new manifestations of the aggression later on in life. Later on in the psychopathic
27. 09:33 personality’s life, the new manifestations are passive aggression, sadism or self-destructiveness. At that point when the aggression has been in a way sublimated become more socially acceptable at that point the psychopathic personality transitions from
28. 09:59 recklessness to the exact opposite risk aversion. Risk aversion is a narrative or a kind of trait that justifies the sublimation of aggression, the conversion of aggression into socially acceptable or more socially acceptable forms. And so passive aggression, sadism,
29. 10:25 and self-destructiveness are coupled with a new taste for new appetite for risk aversion. It’s a sublim sublimative process process of sublimation rendering the psychopathic personality more conformist more integrated with society and less likely
30. 10:45 to suffer the consequences the untoward consequences the punitive consequences of his or her actions. The initial aggression in the form of defiance in the form of recklessness and in the form of consummaciousness the hatred of authority. This initial
31. 11:01 aggression is transformed. Some of these people may even become social activists. They may become um all kinds of uh dogoodas. They become more pro-social. But they channel their aggression by pitting themselves against institutions, against nation states,
32. 11:23 against law enforcement and so on so forth. But this time on the good side of society. Sublimation in classical psychoanalytic theory is a defense mechanism. Initially the belief Freud believed that unacceptable sexual or aggressive drives are unconsciously channeled into
33. 11:46 socially acceptable modes of expression. They’re redirected into new learned behaviors which indirectly provide some satisfaction for the original drives. So for example, an exhibitionistic impulse may gain a new outlet in choreography. A voyeristic urge may lead to scientific
34. 12:10 research. A dangerously aggressive drive may be expressed with impunity on the football field or in the army or the police. So sublimation allows the individual to satisfy a drive which is frowned upon by society, condemned by society to express it in a
35. 12:31 way that society com finds acceptable, that society agrees with, that society condones and promotes. So this allows for substitution as well as allowing for substitute satisfactions. Such outlets are uh protect individuals from the anxiety induced by the original
36. 12:54 drive. So they are this whole process sublimation is anxolytic at some point in the psychopathic personality’s life. The psychopath, the malignant narcissist, the psychopathic borderline, they become risk averse. They become passive aggressive. They become maybe self-destructive
37. 13:19 or they channel their impulses. They channel their risk seeking, thrillseeking, novelty seeking. They channel all this into socially acceptable venues and they sublimate all this and then they become ostentatiously virtue signaling pro-social or communal personalities.
38. 13:44 They their aggression is now embraced and adopted by society because is it is at the service of social cohesion, social goals and social institutions. These transformations are actually extremely common in borderline personality disorder where more than 80%
39. 14:07 of individuals after age 35 lose the diagnosis. They are common in psychopathy and they are the least common among narcissists. Strangely.