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1. 00:02 Hello Shashanim and Shasha. Welcome to my bedroom in Paris. Sorry about that. Today we’re going to discuss a fascinating concept, grandiosity bubbles and how do they relate to idealization. My name is Samakin. I’m the author of malignant self-loav narcissism revisited
2. 00:26 and a professor of psychology. Now you all remember those of you who have been exposed to my videos uh you all remember that idealization has several functions. Idealization usually occurs in the early stages of the narcissist shared fantasy.
3. 00:44 The narcissist lovebombs you, lovebombs you, having auditioned you, having selected you, having spotted you and all these initial phases. Having settled on you as a potential participants participant in the shared fantasy, the narcissist then lovebombs you. The
4. 01:00 lovebombing is not about you. It’s about the narcissist. By lovebombing you, by verbalizing his idealization, the narcissist convinces himself that you are the ideal partner. So when the narcissist is lovebombing you, he’s actually lovebombing your idealized
5. 01:20 version in his mind. The narcissist idealizes you in order to fulfill several psychological functions. Number one, co- idealization. By idealizing you, the narcissist is actually idealizing himself by owning you, by possessing you. The narcissist becomes
6. 01:40 exalted, elevated, improved, perfect.
7. 01:46 So, it’s like owning a flashy car. You know, it’s a status symbol. Co- idealization is a very important aspect of idealization, but there are others. There’s also baiting. You remember that the concept of hall of mirrors? By idealizing you, the
8. 02:07 narcissist grants you access to your own idealized image, your own idealized version through his gaze, through his eyes, and you become addicted to it. It’s intoxicating. You fall in love with the idealized version of yourself. And this is a bait. This lures you into the
9. 02:30 shed fantasy. The narcissist maintains a monopoly of this kind of gaze, a monopoly of this kind of axis. If you want to see yourself as a perfect being, flawless, drop dead gorgeous, amazingly intelligent and so on so forth, you can do it only via the good services and the
10. 02:50 channel maintained by the narcissist. So you become addicted to the narcissist and everything he has to offer you. especially his gaze and this is the whole of mirrors and it is an integral part of the idealization phase but there’s another function which is much
11. 03:07 neglected even in my own work and that is what I call bubbling has to do with grandiosity bubbles I will uh try to explain what is a grandiosity bubble grandiosity bubble is a fantasy defense against collapse. In other words, a grandiosity bubble is about
12. 03:32 opting for fantasy, about choosing fantasy 100% of the time and giving up on reality, renouncing reality, rejecting reality, ignoring, repressing and burying reality 100% of the time. When the narcissist’s divorce from reality is complete, when it is
13. 03:52 detachment becomes total, the narcissist finds himself trapped in a bubble of his own making, a grandiosity bubble. It’s a bubble of self-enhancement. So there are many types of grandiosity bubbles. Some grandiosity bubbles have to do with agilation.
14. 04:13 Celebrities for example maintain such grandiosity bubbles with fans and admirers and and psychopans and and so on. There are bubbles which have to do with grievances and commiseration. And all bubbles are echo echochambers. In in a bubble, the narcissist or the
15. 04:36 narcissistic person surrounds himself or herself with likeminded people encourages builtin hardwired confirmation bias. The narcissist in a grandiosity bubble filters out all information, all stimuli and all data who undermine which undermine which challenge the narrative
16. 05:04 of the grandiosity grandiosity bubble. So a grandiosity bubble is also a membrane. It’s a filter. It keeps out counterveailing information. information which is which might create ego destiny or dissonance or information which might wake the narcissist up force the narcissist to
17. 05:26 confront his own or her own inadequacy and shame. So the grandiosity bubble, the surface of the bubble is the membrane and the filter. And within the bubble, the narcissist encompasses, includes, introduces all the people who are willing to participate in and
18. 05:48 confirm the fantasy, confirm the narrative, uphold it, butress it, support it, repeat it. Similarly, we might we may have an intellectual thought silo group of intellectuals who basically agree on everything. Communists or liberals or conservatives. We may have uh uh celebrities
19. 06:15 who are after adulation. We may have people who commiserate and grieve together and sometimes this leads to aggression, externalized aggression. The insult community comes to mind and all these situations are actually grandiosity bubbles. They are grandiose
20. 06:36 because the main aim the main purpose of the grandiosity bubble is to prevent collapse to prevent any attempt to dismantle or deconstruct the self-enhancing counterfactual self-concept narrative self-concept. So there’s a a self-concept, there’s a
21. 06:57 self-image or self-perception. I’m divine. I’m godlike. I’m perfect. I’m hyper intelligent. I am amazingly handsome or whatever the narrative may be. This is the self-concept. There are self-enhancement behavior, self-enhancing behaviors which are
22. 07:16 intended to support this counterfactual fantastic inflated self-concept. And in order to prevent challenges from the environment, in order to prevent collapse, in order to prevent a situation of repeated injuries or even narcissistic motification, the narcissist creates a
23. 07:38 bubble around this narrative landscape which anyhow is internalized. The whole thing is happening inside the narcissist’s mind. And the role of the bubble is both to support the narrative and to prevent challenges to the narrative coming from the outside. And
24. 07:57 one of the ways to accomplish this is confirmation bias. Filtering out um counterveailing information. Uh accepting only information that supports the narrative and surrounding yourself with yesmen, like-minded people, people who would tell you that
25. 08:14 your fantasy is not fantasy. It’s actually real. You want examples? Well, many people on cyberspace creates visible, ostentatious, clearly discernable and identifiable grandiosity bubbles. Jesus, so-called Christ, created a grandiosity bubble with his disciples,
26. 08:38 12 of them. Not much of a following, mind you. It wouldn’t have been a success on social media. Freud and his psychoanalytic movement which was comprised initially of around I think if I remember correctly eight people admirers fing on him telling him he’s
27. 08:56 always right and so on so forth. In other words all cults cults are grandiosity bubbles in effect and grandiosity bubbles have pronounced cultish elements. As one source of narcissistic supply dwindles, the narcissist finds himself trapped in a frantic, though at times
28. 09:18 unconscious effort to secure alternatives. As one pathological narcissistic space is rendered uninhabitable, uh the narcissist wanders off to find another. Now, to remind you, a pathological narcissistic space is the narcissist stomping stomping ground.
29. 09:35 It’s a narcissist haunt. It’s where the narcissist goes physically to obtain supply and to groom new sources of supply. This could be a pub, could be a church, could be a workplace, you name it. So sometimes pathological narcissistic spaces get depleted or
30. 09:53 compromised. They are rendered unusable. Too many people in the pathological narcissistic space begin to see through the narcissist manipulation and mach machinations and reject the narcissist. At that point, the narcissist has to move on and to create or find another
31. 10:11 pathological narcissistic space. In all these situations, the narcissist faces the real threat of narcissistic collapse. Collapse can be brought on by repeated narcissistic injuries, by an inability to secure an uninterrupted flow of narcissistic
32. 10:30 supply, by narcissistic motification, by compromise and exposure within a pathological narcissistic space, or by the dwindling of sources of supply. For example, when sources of supply become unreliable or when they are exposed as manipulative and and
33. 10:49 therefore not real, lowgrade. In all these situations, the narcissist panics, absolutely panics and and embarks on hysterical endeavors. And these endeavor endeavors to find alternatives to find alternative sources of narcissistic supply, alternative
34. 11:07 pathological narcissistic spaces. These panicky, hysterical, outofcontrol, frantic, frenetic endeavors sometimes lead to boom bust cycles which involve in the first stage the formation of a grandiosity bubble. A grandiosity bubble is an imagined self- aggrandizing
35. 11:33 narrative involving the narcissist and elements from the narcissist’s real life borrowed from the from his real or her real life people around the narcissist places he frequents or conversations he’s having all these can fit into the narrative that is self aagrandizing and
36. 11:55 fantastic which is the grandiosity bubble the narcissist is weaves a story incorporating elements from his life. Incorporating these facts, inflating them in the process and endowing them with bogus internal meaning and consistency. In other words, the narcissist confabulates.
37. 12:15 But this time, the narcissist’s confabulation is loosely based on reality. In the process of constructing a grandiosity bubble, the narcissist reinvents himself and and recreates his life in order to fit the new fangled tale, the new narrative, the new
38. 12:38 grandiosity bubble. The narcissist recasts himself in newly adopted roles. He suddenly fancies himself, I don’t know, an actor, a guru, a political activist, an entrepreneur, an irresistible hunk. The narcissist modifies his behavior to conform to
39. 12:57 these new functions, these new roles. He gradually morphs and shapeshifts into the fabricated character and becomes the fictitious protagonist that he has just created. All the mechanisms of pathological narcissism are at work during the formation of the grandiosity bubble and
40. 13:19 what I call the bubble or bubbling phase. The narcissist idealizes the situation, the other actors and participants in the fantasy, the environment, the context, you name it. There’s global idealization of the whole situation, especially of people involved.
41. 13:39 Narcissist tries to control and manipulate his millure into butressing his false notions and false perceptions and false narratives. Faced with an inevitable grandiosity gap, a gap between the narrative which is fantastic and inflated and reality which is harsh
42. 13:59 and pushing back. This gap is the grandiosity gap. So when he’s faced with the grandiosity gap, the narcissist becomes disillusioned and bitter. He then devalues and discards the people, the places, and the circumstances involved in the bubble. That’s why
43. 14:15 grandiosity bubbles are temporary. They’re temporary. They are defensive. They are reactive. They are not the same as a shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is a stable structure which is inexurable. And its stages or its phases are ineluctibly intertwined. There’s no way to reverse
44. 14:38 the shared fantasy or to undermine it or to change it. But the shared fantasy is one mechanism. Grandiosity bubble is a transient um pseudo fake or or imitative shared fantasy that is intended to isolate the narcissist as the narcissist licks his wounds, recuperates,
45. 15:02 recovers, and is able to embark on a new shared fantasy with new sources of supply in a new pathological narcissistic space. In the transition phases between one pathological narcissistic space to another, one source of supply to another, one shared
46. 15:21 fantasy to another, the narcissist creates an isolating protective bubble, protective membrane within which he resuscitates, within which he can somehow recover his sense of grandiosity and so on so forth. This is why bubbles are typical reactions uh to mortification.
47. 15:46 Still grandiosity bubbles are not part of the normal narcissistic mini cycle. They are bubbles are rare events. It’s bubbles are like trying on a new outfit for size and comfort. bubbles fizzle out rapidly and the narcissist reverse to his regular
48. 16:09 pattern the shared fantasy idealizing new sources of supply devaluing and discarding them pursuing the next victim to be exploited or leverage or drain and so on. Bubbles are protective structures that allow the narcissist to transition from one shared fantasy to the next
49. 16:30 without experiencing reality in the meantime in the stage between two fantasies. In order to not experience reality, in order to not endure the pain and hurt of humiliation and rejection, the absence of narcissistic supply, the collapse of the self-concept in order to not
50. 16:52 experience all this, the narcissist encases himself in a bubble and then invigorated, reinvigorated within the bubble, is able to take on the world and move on to the next fantasy. Actually, the deflation of the of a grandiosity bubble is met with
51. 17:12 relief by the narcissist. It does not involve a narcissistic injury. When the bubble is over, there’s no injury or modification. The narcissist views the bubble as merely an experiment at being someone else for a while. It is a safety valve. It allows the narcissist to
52. 17:30 effectively cope with negative emotions, frustration, hurt, rejection, humiliation, shame. Within the bubble, the narcissist purges himself. He’s cleansed. It’s cathartic. And the narcissist can go back to doing what he does best, projecting a false
53. 17:50 self, gathering attention from others, constructing a shared fantasy pathological narcissistic space. And again riding the delusional wave of in an inflated fantastic counterfactual unrealistic self-concept which to the narcissist appears to be all too real. And all of
54. 18:12 this incredible sequence of events is taking place within the great playground, the narcissist mind.