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1. 00:01 By now, everyone knows that narcissists feel superior to other people. But how do narcissists support this counterfactual, grandio, inflated, fantastic, divorce from reality, self-concept, and self-perception? Where do they acquire this inordinate amount
2. 00:21 of self-confidence? Where do they exude this self-esteem that tells them you are superior to everybody else? The obverse sentence is every everyone else is inferior to you. How can a human being never mind how deluded, never mind how psychotic, never mind how removed from
3. 00:40 reality. How can a human being truly believe in this be invested in it affected be invested in it emotionally and psychologically? Well, the mechanism involves contempt. Narcissist hold everyone else in profound unmititigated allervading all permeating contempt.
4. 01:06 They’re contemptuous. But I would like to propose to you today another way to look at contempt. My name is Sam Baknin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited. I’m also a professor of psychology and before we go further I’m going to be in Paris in October
5. 01:29 and anyone who wants to have a face-toface paid consultation or anyone who wants to organize a seminar free seminar or free lecture in the city of lights in the city of lovers please contact me my email address is in the description svakningmail.com
6. 01:50 And let us proceed contemptuously to the rest of this video. I propose that contempt is actually preemptive. I think that narcissists sometimes prefer contempt to narcissistic supply. They hold so many people in contempt so ostentatiously and so visibly and so conspicuously that
7. 02:17 ultimately they end up completely isolated, completely alone and unable to extract narcissistic supply from people around them. And yet many narcissists make this tradeoff pretty knowingly. Why would they do that? Why would a narcissist risk collapse?
8. 02:38 um narcissisticity collapse just in order to be able to feel superior to express contempt in an unbridled way. I would even say a disregulated way. Why? Why is contempt so important? Because I think contempt guarantees something. It guarantees that the narcissist would
9. 03:00 never be injured, would never actually experience collapse or mortification. Because you see, if you hold people in contempt, if you devalue people, if you say people are stupid, too stupid to understand my, you know, magnanimous, magnificent intellect, if you say people
10. 03:19 are too envious to really appreciate my work and that’s why they are trying to undermine and challenge me malevolently. And so if you create if you create scenarios and narratives where people are trash where people are really really the bottom of the barrel and you are on top
11. 03:39 you’re a member a selfd designated member of a self- selecting elite. When you feel superior based on the rejection of other people, then other people can’t hurt you. Other people can’t harm you. Other people’s criticism or disagreement or snide commentary or mockery, have no
12. 04:02 bearing, have no impact, have no influence. Contempt deweaponizes other people. Contempt takes away the potency of other people. Contempt disempowers other people rendering them unable to hurt the narcissist. So a narcissist who is 100% contemptuous
13. 04:26 is also 100% independent of the opinions of other people. Is also 100% invulnerable to anything other people may do or not do. Is also invincible. Is also impermeable. Is also untouchable. Contempt is a firewall. Contempt is an armor, a shield that allows the
14. 04:49 narcissist to self-supp because the narcissist then becomes the only worthy source of narcissistic supply. Everyone else is depreciated and devalued. Everyone else is vermin or trash or you know human garbage or human refu and jetsum or hoy poloy or you name it.
15. 05:15 Everyone else doesn’t have the capacity to provide the narcissist with highgrade narcissistic supply because they are lowgrade people. Contempt therefore is a defensive posture. It reflects anticipatory anxiety. The narcissist is anxious about being
16. 05:38 rejected, being humiliated, being exposed. Narcissist is terrified of enduring deep narcissistic injury, narcissistic motification, or a more protracted narcissistic collapse. And the only way to fend off these um these emanations, the only way to fend off
17. 05:57 these apparitions, these threats is to hold people in contempt. When you hold people in contempt, they don’t have the power to inflict on on you injury, an injury or motification, and you never collapse. This is the thinking of the narcissist, conscious or unconscious.
18. 06:14 Contempt, therefore, is an example of anticipation in narcissism. But anticipatory strategies, anticipatory responses, responses which deal with anticipation with preeemption, they’re not unique to narcissism. For example, when we are very afraid of
19. 06:35 death, when we have a death anxiety, one way to solve the problem is to not live. When you don’t have a life, when your life is constricted, limited, boundaried in the in the bad sense of the word. When your life is when you reject your life, when you
20. 06:54 don’t have a life, you don’t have a family, you don’t have a job, you don’t interact with other people, isolate yourself, you do only minimal things, you never test yourself, you never exit your comfort zone. When you do when you when your life has
21. 07:09 become a a sliver, when your life has become a laser beam rather than a diffused light, at that point you’re not alive anymore. The more you limit and constrict your life, the less alive you are. And this is unaliving in effect. So sometimes anticipating death, the fear of death,
22. 07:32 death anxiety evolves into a strategy of not living, not being. When you’re dead inside and dead outside, behaviorally and internally, psychologically, psychonamically. When you’re not alive, you do not need to fear death. You need not fear death
23. 07:54 because only live people die. People without a life never really die, do they? So that’s an example of an anticipatory um preemptive um strategy. Strategies that anticipate something and then preempts it by behaving in exactly the opposite way. One could for example say that the
24. 08:21 famous defense mechanism reaction formation is anticipatory. Reaction formation is when you protest loudly and too much about something. It indicates there’s a part of you that you loathe, part of you you hate, part of you that you reject. And the only way to convince yourself
25. 08:43 and others that no such part exists is to act in ways which are exactly the opposite of the content of the part. So for example, if you’re a latent homosexual, you are likely to become homophobic. If you are afraid that you may be a homosexual, if you loathe yourself
26. 09:02 because of of your homosexual attraction and leanings, if you reject that part of yourself because of a religious upbringing or something else, one way to convince yourself that you are not a homosexual and never would be a homosexual and never was a homo were a
27. 09:18 homosexual, one way to convince others that you’re not a homosexual is to become homophobic, a hater of homosexual, a persecutor of homosexuals. But of course, reaction formation involves anticipation of other people’s reactions. When you imagine
28. 09:38 the scenario where your homosexuality is exposed or revealed and how other people are going to castigate you and chastise you and mock you and ridicule you, put you down because of it. Anticipating these reactions of other people causes anxiety
29. 09:57 and to allay the anxiety to amilarate and mitigate it the only way is to deny yourself or to deny the part of yourself that you reject or hate. And the way to deny it is to act exactly the opposite ostentatiously in public. So this is a preemptive reaction formation is a
30. 10:17 preemptive anticipatory mechanism. Take for example the fear of abandonment. Fear of abandonment known clinically as separation insecurity is very very common in several mental health issues such as borderline personality disorder. Fear of abandonment could lead to what I
31. 10:39 call prophylactic abandonment, preemptive abandonment. It’s as if you are saying I’m bound to be abandoned. There’s nothing I can do about it. Inelectably and inevitably, I am going undoubtedly to be abandoned. I’m going to be rejected. I’m going to
32. 10:59 find myself all alone, humiliated. And to prevent this, the only way to prevent this is to abandon first. I’m going to do the abandoning. I’m going to act preemptively. I’m going to abandon first before I’m abandoned. That is an example of a behavior that is determined
33. 11:20 by preemptive anticipation. A behavior that reflects catastrophizing. And catastrophizing of course is a mechanism of anticipation which often leads to preemptive behaviors. There’s something called a prop abandonment. There’s something called abandonment reaction. The dictionary
34. 11:44 defines it this way. Abandonment reaction is a feeling of emotional deprivation, loss of support and loneliness experienced by children and adults who have been deserted or neglected by a parent, a primary caregiver, a significant other. Abandonment reaction is also experienced
35. 12:04 by adults who have lost a loved one or on whom they have dependent emotionally or otherwise. So anticipation not only of abandonment itself but of the emotions and effects associated with abandonment with a reaction to abandonment. Such anticipation could lead to preemptive
36. 12:26 abandonment. Indeed I’ve mentioned borderline personality disorder. The borderline person diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. the borderline is often engaged in preemptive abandonment. She is or he is approachidant whenever she attaches whenever she gets
37. 12:48 attached to an intimate partner. Whenever the intimacy increases and the love is evident, whenever there’s total acceptance and warmth and understanding and so on, this terrifies the borderline because she anticipates the inevitable hurt and pain overpowering,
38. 13:04 overwhelming, disregulating pain of being abandoned and rejected. She knows for sure that she’s going to be rejected, abandoned and humiliated. And then the borderline abandons first. She preempts the abandonment by abandoning and this is known as approach avoidance
39. 13:22 repetition compulsion. There is another element in approach avoidance um and that involves a fear of intimacy. I will not go into it. I’ve dealt with it in other videos. Similarly, when we anticipate aggression, when we fear that we are about to be hurt, someone is about to
40. 13:43 become violent or to abuse us verbally or you know when there’s aggression in the air, this induces in us aggressive stances and often aggressive behaviors. Aggression breeds aggression. And so when we are exposed to a situation or when we are embedded in an
41. 14:05 environment or when we’re interacting with people where aggression is a likelihood, aggression is probable and plausible under the developing circumstances. We are likely to become aggressive in advance, preemptively aggressive and try to shut off the onslaught of the
42. 14:25 incoming um anticipated catastrophized aggression. It’s another example of preemptive behavior. When we are afraid of dangers, of risk, when we are risk averse, when there is a risk aversion, one of the ways to avoid risk and dangers is to avoid life simply to avoid
43. 14:45 life. And there’s a whole spectrum of avoiding life could stay at home and never leave. Agorophobic people do that. You could commit suicide. It’s a way of it’s the ultimate way of avoiding life ironically and avoiding all future risks and dangers. Sometimes
44. 15:08 committing suicide is the only way to cope with with risk aversion. But very few people commit suicide. The vast majority of people develop avoidant withdrawal behaviors trying to isolate themselves in artificially constructed environments where risk is minimized or
45. 15:30 eliminated altogether. There is a psychosis of risk in the modern mind. We are terrified of risks all the time. We anticipate them. We see them everywhere. And this risk aversion constricts our lives, limits our lives, renders us not only less adventurous and less less
46. 15:53 risk-seeking and less thrillseeking, not only less psychopathic, if you wish, but renders us less alive. It’s a form of slow motion, simmering, unaliving, which is a great way of avoiding risks. Ironically, all these behaviors, all these preemptive behaviors bring about
47. 16:15 the very outcome that um the anxiety has anticipated.
48. 16:23 So for example, if we are afraid of dangers and risks and we limit our lives, we constrict our lives so that we never come across anything risky or anything dangerous, that in itself is risky and dangerous because it means you’re not alive. It’s like dying.
49. 16:40 Similarly, if we abandon first rather than be abandoned, we still experience abandonment or separation. All these behaviors lead to the very feared outcomes. It’s not fear of missing out. It’s fear of not missing out. Its fear of being exposed to the inevitable
50. 17:02 consequences and outcomes of a life lived to losses which are a major engine of personal growth and development to pain and hurt and grief and sadness which are very positive effects in the sense that they they foster they foster and engender and bring on bring about rejuvenation
51. 17:24 a reconstruction of the personality. And yet many people want to avoid all these things at all costs, even at the cost of unaliving themselves, at least metaphorically. Risk aversion is the tendency when choosing between alternatives, to avoid
52. 17:41 options that entail a risk of loss, even if that risk is relatively small and even if the loss is actually a good thing in the long term. Of course, anticipation is a prophecy. It’s a hypothesis. It’s a theory about the world and how the world behaves and how
53. 18:00 the world is run and the mechanisms that underly reality. And so these prophecies, these anticip anticipatory prophecies sometimes are self-fulfilling. Catastrophizing leads to behaviors which are which are suboptimal behaviors which may bring about the very catastrophized
54. 18:23 events and outcomes. Prophecies are often self-fulfilling. To catastrophize is to exaggerate the negative consequences of events or decisions. A dictionary says that people are said to be catastrophizing when they think that the worst possible outcome will
55. 18:41 occur from a particular action or in a particular situation or when they feel as if they are in the midst of a catastrophe. In situations that may be serious, maybe upsetting but are not necessarily disastrous. The tendency to catastrophize can unnecessarily increase
56. 18:57 levels of anxiety and lead to maladdaptive behavior. So catastrophizing or awfulizing it’s was first described by Albert Ellis is a maladaptive kind of strategy or maladaptive trait or behavior cognition and it’s self-fulfilling in many ways. If you’re very afraid of
57. 19:21 something, your behavior will change in ways that will bring it about that will create the very monster under your bed that you’ve always been dreading ever since childhood. It is you who is the source of darkness. You who is the creator and progenitor of
58. 19:38 your own monsters. You who is the father of all the demons inside you. It is you who is the source of the shadow. And sometimes the void or the deep space inside you. It is you. It’s only up to you. Preempting preempting things by avoiding them. Preempting life by avoiding it.
59. 20:01 Rejecting life as a solution to death is ridiculous. Of course, self-fulfilling prophecy is a belief or expectation that helps to bring about its own fulfillment. The dictionary gives an example. When a person expects nervousness to impair their performance in a job interview,
60. 20:20 this exactly is what’s going to happen. When a teacher’s preconceptions about a student’s ability influence the child’s achievement for better or worse, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And there’s an expectancy effect. Expectancy effect is defined as the
61. 20:36 effect of one person’s expectation about the behavior of another person on the actual behavior of that other person. This is known as the interpersonal expectancy effect. So if you go around catastrophizing, anticipating, then you’re going to influence people.
62. 20:55 You’re going to change. You’re going to modify their behaviors and they’re going to conform to your expectations. They’re going to fulfill your prophecies. They’re going to bring on the catastrophe that you’ve been anticipating all along. And if they
63. 21:08 don’t, you will. The expectancy effect in interpersonal relationships is one thing but there’s also an effect of a person’s expectation of about their own behavior on that person’s actual subsequent behavior. So the expectancy effect is interpersonal.
64. 21:28 Your expectations affect other people their behaviors and their own expectations. And there is an intrapersonal expectancy effect where your expectations about yourself actually mold you, shape you, make you who you are. And it results in behavioral
65. 21:51 confirmation. Behavioral confirmation is the process by which the actions of one person, the target, come to reinforce the expectations of another person, the perceiver. There is a social interaction and there’s communication and there’s signaling. There’s information changing
66. 22:09 heads and it shapes not only the interaction itself but the expectations of everyone involved. Actions shape expectations but expectations also shape actions. Anticipating, predicting the future. Futurology creates it. Very often, behavioral confirmation processes are used to
67. 22:35 explain how expectations and beliefs, including, for example, stereotypes, come to affect reality. It is often considered a special case of the self-fulfilling prophecy or expectancy effect. But behavioral confirmation differs from these terms primarily in
68. 22:51 emphasizing that the target’s actual elicited behavior serves to serves to confirm the perceivers’s initial beliefs. A subgroup subset of this is confirmation bias. Anyhow, this whole thing was described by Mark Snyder, the Canadianborn US psychologist. Anticipation therefore
69. 23:16 is rarely a good thing, especially when it’s coupled with what we call negative effects. Fear, envy, hatred, rage, anger. Anticipation leads us to behave in ways which bring about the very outcomes we dread. And this is especially true in people
70. 23:36 who are compromised as far as mental health, for example, narcissists. Gradually and ultimately someone who is subject to self-fulfilling prophecies anticipatory anxiety someone who suffers from this they constrict their lives they limit their lives until the life
71. 23:56 life itself is extinguished and with it all expectations all dangers and all risks