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1. 00:02 My loyal and long-suffering subscribers are flooding me with mis aiming to peruse the intricacies of the narcissistic disorder. And I am here to serve if not to protect. My name is Salvad and I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I’m a professor of
2. 00:28 psychology and today we are going to discuss two concepts the locus of grandiosity and type fluidity. Don’t you just love these phrases? Okayim stay with me if you are masoistic and listen to the rest of this. Here’s the missive. I would like to ask you Mr.
3. 00:54 Are all narcissists all the same at the very core? And thus all methods of triggering, controlling, manipulating them are the same. For example, telling each one of them that they’re not special in any possible way or does each one of them deep down want to be special
4. 01:15 in their own way? For example, telling a narcissistic musician that he is not special in terms of computer science, thus his her not caring about not being special in it. I’m asking regardless of them being in either overt or covert state of narcissism. Okay, let me
5. 01:35 translate this into English. I think I believe I hope what the author had in mind was the following. Is each narcissist invested in a self-concept, a fantasy, a narrative, a false self that says you are good at everything. You are perfect in any and
6. 01:58 all subjects. You are always right. You are uh omniscient. You’re all knowing. In this sense, you’re godlike. Is this how the narcissist sees himself? Or does the narcissist say, “I’m the best there is in music. I’m not great in football, but I’m great in music.”
7. 02:22 Which which is it? Now, if you go online, self-styled experts will mislead you yet again. They will tell you that narcissists want to be the best, the richest, the most famous, the most handsome, etc., etc. That is not true. Narcissists want to be unique.
8. 02:45 If they can be unique by being drop deadad gorgeous, so be it. If they can be unique by being intelligent, so be it. If they can be unique via intellectual pyrochnics, they will. If they can be unique via sexual contest context, conquest, I’m sorry, they will
9. 03:02 embrace this option. The narcissist just wants to be considered special, unprecedented. Suie Geneovis one and one and only the narcissist doesn’t care what leads him there. Narcissist doesn’t care which attribute which trait which behavior which element in personal history
10. 03:27 um makes him renders him unique. He just wants to be unique. So you can find narcissists boasting that they’ve had the greatest bankruptcy in their country or you can have narcissists boasting that they are huge enormous victims. Victimhood is actually
11. 03:48 um the brag of a narcissist. Many narcissists brag about being victims. They have something called competitive victimhood. They are martyrs. Failures if the failure is big enough. If the defeat is notable enough, if people pay attention to the narcissist
12. 04:06 because of the um magnitude of the ruination and collapse, so be it. The narcissist is perfectly happy with that. Narcissists don’t want to be the best or the greatest or the richest or the most famous and so on. They want to be attended to. They want attention.
13. 04:26 And whatever grants them attention, whatever engenders and generates attention is per perfectly legitimate. Now we call this the locus of grandiosity. The locus of grandiosity is the self-enhancing self agrandizing narrative that leads the narcissist to believe that he is one
14. 04:49 of a kind. That no one has ever been like this present, past, and ever will will be like this in the future. that he has experienced and he has endured and he has secured and he has accomplished things that no one else has ever done. So as I said it could be negative
15. 05:12 things. The accomplishments could be negative like many serial killers boast about the numbers of their victims. Many narcissists are very proud of the calamity and the apocalypse that they brought upon families, businesses, neighborhoods, communities, or even nations.
16. 05:36 It’s the the only requisite for the locus of grandiosity is I am fame. I’m I’m known. I’m I’m unique. I’m special. People pay attention to me because they’ve never seen anything anything like me before. I am so outstanding. I am so unique. I am so idiosyncratic
17. 06:00 that people are gape um are there to monitor my success or my failure, follow my life and so on. So one could say that the emphasis on is on being a celebrity. A celebrity is someone who is known for the attention that he or she is getting. And so celebrity is someone who is
18. 06:25 famous for being famous. And that’s exactly the core of the narcissist. The essence of the narcissist is about appearances, about garnering and harvesting attention. not about doing doing anything real but doing whatever it is uh in a way that makes it stand out that
19. 06:46 makes it notable. So the locus of grandiosity is a narrative. It’s a story. It’s a piece of fiction. It’s a script. It’s a movie which renders the narcissist in some way unique. And we call this process self-enhancement. Again remember before we proceed the
20. 07:07 narrative could be self-denigrating, self-negating, humiliating, self-shaming. I’m a victim. I’m an enormous failure. I I’m a bad person, evil. I am, you know, whatever it is. But as long as the narcissist is at the center of attention and never waivers from this. So narcissists
21. 07:37 do not care about anything and they do not care about anyone outside the locus of grandiosity outside the fantastic narrative. The answer to the question that has been posed by the subscriber is that a musician who is a narcissist would care about music. He would consider him so
22. 08:04 the musician to end all music. The musician the likes of which have has never been before. The musician the likes of which is will never emerge in the future. A musician who has revolutionized music. A musician who has redefined music. A musician whose talent
23. 08:20 whose expertise whose professionalism is unequaled, unparalleled, unique, idiosyncratic, amazing, fascinating etc. So the focus, the locus of grandiosity would be on music in this particular case. And yes, this kind of narcissist wouldn’t care much if you
24. 08:40 were to tell them that they are not very great in astrophysics because that’s not the locus of grandiosity. Now a narcissist could develop a universalist focus, a locus of grandiosity. Narcissist, for example, could consider himself a polymoth, a new renaissance
25. 09:02 man, a jack of all trades. Anarissist could say, “I’m good at anything I put my mind to. I I could be great in physics and I could be great in biology and I could be great in chemistry and I could be great in marketing and I could be I it’s just a question of applying
26. 09:21 myself, of making the decision.” So a universalist locus of grandiosity is an indiscriminating narrative that says you are in principle you the narcissist you are in principle made to be constructed to be the best at whatever you choose to do. And we have
27. 09:43 for example someone like Donald Trump who says that where wherever he decided to apply himself he became the best and the greatest. He believes that he can master medicine and physics and and uh psychology and marketing and real estate and you name it and and foreign affairs
28. 10:05 and international affairs and and finance and you name it. It’s just a question of applying himself. And if he were to decide to apply himself to any field, he would be much better than anyone else in that field than any expert in the field. He would become the
29. 10:23 preeminent and dominant expert in that field. So yes, if you were to ask Donald Trump if he could win a Nobel Prize in physics, he would say, “Of course I can. I’m just not in it. I’m I’m not a physicist. I’m not dealing in physics.” But should you had I decided to, I would
30. 10:40 have won easily a Nobel Prize in physics, in chemistry, in medicine, in literature and now in peace. So while the vast majority of narcissists have a well-defined, well demarcated locus of grandiosity, locus of grandiosity with narrative boundaries, a
31. 11:01 locus of grandio grandiosity that says I’m a great musician, I’m a great biologist. I’m an amazing physicist or I’m the greatest failure ever or I’m the the most troden upon victim ever. So these are demarcated lo a demarcated locus of grandiosity. Some narcissists
32. 11:20 the small minority luckily for all of us have a universalist view of themselves. They think that in principle they are superior. In principle, they are made of material which is far far into the future in terms of evolution. They’re evolutionarily advanced. And so whatever
33. 11:44 they decide to do, wherever they decide to apply themselves in, whichever field they choose to enter, they’re likely to end up at the top. But this is again a very small minority. Now the problem with the locus of grandiosity is that it is not constant. It is not stable. And
34. 12:03 this confuses many many people laymen self-titled experts of course and even scholars. The locus of grandiosity is shapeshifting or ever shifting. It’s it’s not stable throughout the lifespan. It is reactive and it is reactive to two processes known as decompensation and collapse.
35. 12:30 Decompensation is when all psychological defense mechanisms are switched off. The individual is no longer able to process reality in a way which is not mentally injurious. reality barges in, invades, penetrates, and it’s harsh and it’s destructive.
36. 12:52 Defense mechanisms, psychological defense mechanisms, as the name implies, they’re a defense against reality or at least against the unadulterated, unmititigated version of reality. What they do, defense mechanisms, they rewrite reality. They reframe it so that you
37. 13:10 could survive. Sometimes all defense mechanisms are shut off, the disabled, for example, when one is confronted with extreme public humiliation and shaming or when one is caught in a natural or man-made disaster etc. So in these situations the defense
38. 13:32 mechanism shut off and this process is known as decompensation. Similarly, in a state of collapse, the narcissistic or psychopathic or borderline individual is unable to obtain feedback and input from the outside from other people mostly that will allow them to regulate their
39. 13:51 internal environment. One type one extreme type of collapse is known as narcissistic motification. So in a state of decompensation and definitely in a state of collapse or motification there is what we call type fluidity. In other words, there’s a change in the
40. 14:12 locus of grandiosity. There’s an alteration of the fantastic narrative that underlies the functioning or allows the functioning of the narcissist internal dynamics or the border lines or the psychopath. So um for example when the narcissist decompensates and then collapses or is
41. 14:37 motifed there is a transition from narcissism to borderline. The narcissist becomes a borderline. He becomes emotionally disregulated, suicidal and so on so forth. At that point, the narrative that is incorporated into and comprises the false self, this narrative is rewritten
42. 15:00 completely. And it’s as if the individual has transitioned from one state to another. And this is known as identity diffusion or identity disturbance. So when the narcissist for example is publicly shamed, humiliated, exposed and has no defenses against this, the
43. 15:20 defenses have crumbled because reality is too much, cannot be buried, cannot be ignored anymore. It intrudes and the collapses, the defenses collapse. There’s there’s a state of the defenses are switched off. There’s a state of collapse or mortification. At that point
44. 15:38 the urswile the previous locus of grandiosity the narrative that has kept the narcissist alive and functioning either too this narrative is discarded and the nar and the narcissist comes up with a new narrative with a new locus of of grandiosity which resembles a lot a
45. 15:58 borderline personality organization. So it’s fluid. there’s a transition from a narcissistic grandio narrative to a vulnerable borderline narrative. So when the narcissist is confronted with these situations, he becomes a borderline. When the borderline is
46. 16:21 confronted with these situations, for example, when the borderline is rejected or is abandoned or anticipates rejection and abandonment or is engulfed, exactly the opposite, she feels suffocated by the intimacy. In all these situations, the borderline transitions
47. 16:37 from a borderline locus of grandiosity, a narrative that somehow sustains the borderline, keeps her alive literally because many border lines are suicidal. So she transitions from this to another narrative, to another story, to another piece of fiction, to another fantasy. In
48. 16:57 other words, to another locus of grandiosity, and she becomes a narcissist. Actually, when people with borderline personality disorder are confronted with rejection, abandonment, engulfment, decompensation, collapse, and motification, they become highly
49. 17:13 narcissistic. They become grandiose. They become entitled. They become aggressive. and even to some extent defiant and the this this combination this confluence is sometimes known as secondary psychopathy. What happens to the psychopath when the
50. 17:32 psychopath under goes the same processes unpleasant ego egodistonic processes process pro processes which are uncomfortable even threatening processes of the compensation of collapse and so on the psychopath becomes a narcissist. So the borderline and the psychopath
51. 17:53 transition into enhanced an an enhanced form of narcissism. They become highly narcissistic and the borderline even becomes a psychopath, a primary psychopath. The narcissist on the other hand becomes a borderline. This type fluidity applies also within the diagnosis. So
52. 18:15 for example, an overt narcissist which is exposed to collapse or decompensation and so on often becomes a covert narcissist. An overt becomes a covert. We now know that overt narcissism and covert narcissism are phases in the life cycle of every narcissist. Every narcissist is
53. 18:38 sometimes overt and sometimes covert. So the transition between overt and covert is mediated via the collapse. And this transition involves the rewriting of the grandio part. The rewriting of grandiosity, inventing a new story, a new narrative, a new piece of fiction
54. 18:59 which justifies and underlies and butresses the grandiosity. So there is a narrative transition, a change in locus of grandiosity between overt narcissism and covert narcissism within the same person. There is a change in types. There’s a collapse, decompensation, motification.
55. 19:20 They induce either a change in type from overt to covert, from cerebral to somatic, or a change in diagnosis from borderline to narcissist, from narcissist to borderline, from borderline to psychopath, and from psychopath to narcissist. This is type fluidity.
56. 19:41 The consequence of type fluidity is we never know what would be the narrative we would be confronted with with these people. They are not the same person from one day to the next, from one month to the next and from one year to the next. They don’t have a fixed identity.
57. 19:59 They don’t have a core. They’re in flux all the time. And this identity diffusion, this identity disturbance is why narcissists, for example, sometimes regard themselves as great musicians and sometimes regard themselves as great victims and sometimes regard themselves
58. 20:21 as great astrophysicists and sometimes regard themselves as great husbands. And the locus changes and shifts all the time. whatever gets whatever gets the the deal done. Whatever whatever guarantees the uninterrupted flow of narcissistic supply. But the majority of
59. 20:42 narcissists coming back full circle to the question. Majority of the narcissist are invested in a highly specific delineated demarcated narrative which is known as the locus of grandiosity. I am a great musician. I’m an amazing financeier. I’m the best physicist ever.
60. 21:02 I’m a great husband. I’m a wonderful father. These are all narratives which underly they are the foundation of the locus of grandiosity. And the narcissist is committed to these narratives and to these narratives only excluding all other people and all other options.
61. 21:20 Again to remind you there’s a tiny percentage and they have a universalist or universal locus of grandiosity. They think they could be good at anything with anyone all the time. Never mind the circumstances. Never mind the environment. Never mind other people. They are essentially
62. 21:41 supreme. They are sup. Their very being is perfect and superior. They are godlike. And so they can metamor met metamorphos. They can shapeshift. They can transform themselves. And they are so malleable and so flexible and so transigent that they could become good at anything. It’s
63. 22:02 it is their choice. It is their decision. Uh whether to be a physicist or a painter or a husband or what have you. Whatever they choose to do, they would be they would rise to the top and would they would define the field. And yes, they believe that they can transition
64. 22:22 from one field to another with elacrity and seamlessly and accomplish the same outcomes in all these fields because they are a superior universal machine to borrow from Turing. Okay, I hope I clarified the issue and why narcissism is so confusing, so disorienting
65. 22:48 because there’s nobody there in in this void, in this black hole. There is a story generator and this generator generates stories all the time. And the problem is these stories have nothing in common. There’s no common thread or denominator. There’s no continuity
66. 23:06 because there’s no identity. The narcissist is completely discontinuous, disjointed. That’s why we can safely say that the narcissist does not have a self, does not have an ego. Because the best definition of self we have is that thing, that construct that maintains a
67. 23:27 sense of continuity across time, across space, and across circumstances and environments. Narcissists don’t have this. They are discontinuous border lines of the same. And again, identity diffusion. I encourage you to search the channel. There are videos dedicated to
68. 23:45 this uh crazy crazym phenomenon.