Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissist’s Fantasy Not About YOU, Psychopath’s Is (Collateral Victimhood)

1. 00:07 Yes, you have it right. I have left the residency in Paris and I’m now in my home in North Macedonia. And again, I’m giving you your favorite background. Today, we’re going to discuss what else after Paris. We’re going to discuss the narcissist fantasy. The problem is that
2. 00:32 many self-styled experts online as usual create a god awful confusion and spew an inordinate amount of nonsense when they discuss the narcissist fantasies or the fantasy defense in narcissism. My name is San Vaknin. I’m the author of malignant self love narcissism revisited
3. 00:53 and I’m a professor of psychology. Now this first of all we need to distinguish between the psychopathic fantasy and the narcissist fantasy. The psychopath fantasy is focused on the victim. The psychopath gives the victim a narrative, a delusion, a story, a
4. 01:15 movie, a theater production within which the victim attains his or her goals. The victim is gratified. The victim is prosperous or happy or in love or you name it. Whatever the victim’s needs, the psychopath caters to them. Whatever the victim’s dreams and
5. 01:36 hopes and wishes and expectations and fantasies, the psychopath is there to convince the victim that he or she is the only one who can grant the victim their wishes. The psychopath is a kind of Santa Claus, writ large. But that’s the psychopath, not the narcissist. The
6. 01:57 narcissist couldn’t care less about the victim. The narcissist shared fantasy with the victim is focused on the narcissist, not on the victim. The narcissist shared fantasy is about gratifying the narcissist’s needs, catering to his needs or her needs. It’s
7. 02:16 about fulfilling and realizing the narcissist’s fantasies, inflated um dreams and hopes and wishes and expectations so as to butress and support the narcissist’s counterfactual and unrealistic self-concept. So it’s very easy. The psychopath shared fantasy is about the victim. The
8. 02:39 narcissist shared fantasy is as usual about the narcissist. But when we say the word fantasy, what do we mean? And when I keep telling you that the narcissist is unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, what on earth am I talking about? I
9. 02:57 mean, I mean, narcissists walk and narcissists talk and narcissists are in position of power and narcissists make money and narcissists have children and they get married and they travel the world, they go to Paris. I mean, in which sense is the narcissist immorted
10. 03:12 and immersed in fantasy to the oblivion of all reality? In which sense does the narcissist renounce reality? In which sense is a narcissist reality testing impaired? What am I talking about? I think the source of the confusion is between what we call semantic and episodic.
11. 03:34 Semantic, for example, semantic memory is about skill acquisition, self-efficacy, the ability to secure favorable outcomes in the environment by acting in it and on it. This is semantic. Episodic aspects of personality, for example, episodic memory are autobiographical.
12. 03:55 They have to do with self-concept, self-perception, memory, uh, retention, identity formation. And whereas a narcissist can be highly proficient when it comes to semantic aspects, the narcissist can be highly accomplished and so on, the narcissist is very very
13. 04:14 impaired when it comes to all episodic dimensions, including episodic memory. The narcissist dissociation, for example, makes it very difficult for him to maintain a continuity of narrative and a sense of self. this identity disturbance there, identity diffusion, very similar to
14. 04:33 borderline personality disorder. So if we make this distinction, we are beginning to understand that someone who is not embedded in reality, someone who finds reality utterly unacceptable, unbearable, intolerable, someone who rejects reality as a
15. 04:51 paradigm, as a coping strategy, still can operate in reality and on reality very efficiently in certain aspects, in certain ways where skill is required. But where emotions are required, where interpersonal relationships are required, where proper cognition is
16. 05:13 required with regards to the self, where self-concept is required, where personal autobiographical memory is is called for, there’s a total failure when it comes to pathological narcissism. In this sense, narcissists are machines. I mean, we have robots. They’re highly
17. 05:32 efficient. They perform tasks. We have artificial intelligence nowadays. It performs tasks. Performing tasks is not an indicator of a full-fledged personality, maturity, and the presence of an identity or a self. And this is exactly the narcissist. A robotic
18. 05:51 machine-like artificially intelligence-based entity can do many things. Can accomplish numerous things. Can become a pillar of a community. Can even imitate uh all kinds of effects, emotions, empathy, and so on. But in reality, there’s no one there.
19. 06:11 There’s nobody there except a gaping discontinuity which a narcissist tries to paper over with confabulations. I hope you got the picture. And now to the question of fantasy. There are multiple types of fantasy involved in narcissism in pathological
20. 06:29 narcissism. Actually the prevailing view is that pathological narcissism is a fantasy maladaptation. a situation where fantasy is used as the main coping strategy and the main coping mechanism when the narcissist is confronted with other people with a need to interact
21. 06:49 with them with reality with with changing environments and circumstances. In all these situations, the narcissist is incapable of truly adapting, authentically changing and transforming himself in order to meet the new exigencies and the new requirements.
22. 07:08 Instead, what the narcissist does, he avoids. He withdraws into a paracosm, a
23. 07:16 virtual reality, an alternative reality which we call fantasy. And this is the core of the fantasy defense in narcissism. When the narcissist is confronted with different settings, different areas of life, he he conjures up on the fly multiple fantasies. But what is common to all
24. 07:35 these fantasies in narcissism is that they’re they’re delusional. Now you could ask me what is a delusion? What is a delusional disorder? I could give you a long recitation or a long lecture. Actually, I’ve done that. There are videos on this channel which deal with
25. 07:51 delusions, but I think one could summarize it very simply, which I usually don’t do, of course. A delu, a delusion is when you’re living a lie that feels real. When you’re deceptional, actually selfdeception feels real to you. when you cannot tell
26. 08:11 the difference between the story lines and the movie scripts that you’re conjuring up and your real life because you don’t have a real life. A delusion is the collapse of reality testing. an inability to tell when you’re in fantasy and when you’re in reality, when are
27. 08:30 you’re dreaming or daydreaming and when you’re embedded in the harsh uh vicissitudes of the world at large, the universe. So, fantasies are delusional because they feel real. How can the narcissist be so mistaken? What is leading the narcissist astray?
28. 08:56 What is causing the narcissist which is who is otherwise accomplished and skilled and you know a man of the world worldly. What is causing the narcissist to fall in this trap to mistake fantasy for reality? I think uh it’s because fantasy is comprised of factual elements. Fantasy
29. 09:22 is not a negation of fact, not not the rejection of evidence. Fantasy is not a renouncing of all aspects of reality. Fantasy is when you take when you take facts, verifiable facts, which many people would attest to, what we call an intersubjective fact. When you take a
30. 09:45 fact facts and you rearrange them, you reframe them and you interpret them wrongly. It so fantasies are based on facts put together in the wrong way. facts interpreted and misunderstood, misinterpreted and misunderstood, explained in the wrong way. Fantasy, in
31. 10:09 other words, is a hermeneutic fallacy. It’s not about an inability to gather information from the environment and from reality. It’s about an inability to make sense of the information gathered because you keep putting things wrongly together. It’s like having a huge jigsaw
32. 10:29 puzzle and continuously, repeatedly placing the wrong pieces together, attempting to make sense of the resulting suralistic, outlandish picture. This leads to an impaired reality testing. The reality testing in pathological narcissism is so impaired
33. 10:52 that the narcissist often endangers himself or herself. The narcissist undermines his or her own efficacy, self-efficacy. Narcissists are not efficient. They’re very wasteful. They rarely truly accomplish their goals. They usually alienate other people. So
34. 11:14 they are unable to interact in larger framework with teams in order to accomplish things. And that is as distinct from the psychopath. By the way, that’s why there’s such a huge confusion between narcissists and psychopaths who psychopaths are efficacious.
35. 11:30 Narcissists are delusional and very often pathetic. No efficacy and a lot of self- endanger endanger endangerment. Because if you’re divorced from reality, if you’re detached from it, you’re unable to predict accurately the adverse consequences of your actions, choices,
36. 11:49 and decisions. you’re likely to make the wrong ones. And so many narcissists ultimately having attempted repeatedly to extract narcissistic supply, having constantly endured narcissistic collapse, mortification and injury, having failed all the time. Many narcissists either
37. 12:10 become covert, they transition from overt narcissist to covert narcissist or and that is a majority of the cases, they begin to self-supp. They give up on external separate sources of supply. They give up on other people. They become schizoid, avoidant, isolated, hermetic
38. 12:32 hermits. So self-suppid defense against these inevitable, ineluctable, adverse outcomes and the constant failure, constant inability to avoid them, the constant collapse. I have quite a few videos on this channel which deal with self-upply. But throughout it all, even the
39. 12:56 self-supparist
40. 13:02 renders himself in his own eyes kind of external authority, a source and found of judgment and opinion, elevates himself into a god-like position with complete omnipotence and omniscience, all knowing and all powerful, genius and brilliance,
41. 13:21 perfection. This is a fantasy. This is a kind of selfcon concept that is so inflated explicit self-esteem that is so inflated and so grandio and so divorced from reality. So fantastic that it’s unsustainable, untenable. So self- supply is also a fantasy
42. 13:40 defense. And throughout the entire lifespan of the narcissist, the fantasy or fantasies feel real. So what happens in for example motification in narcissistic motification and the rare situations where the narcissist gains a glimpse of reality gains access to his own
43. 14:05 selfdeception realizes that he’s deceiving himself sees himself in the mirror and is flooded with negative effects such as shame. What happens when the fantasy is falsified by reality? At that point, the narcissist cannot take it and he dissociates.
44. 14:24 Clinically, the narcissist transitions into a borderline personality organization replete with dissociation, emotion dysregulation, and in extreme uh cases selfharming ideiation including suicidal ideiation. One of the elements there is dissociation.
45. 14:43 The narcissist cannot take reality. So, he denies it. He buries it. He represses it. He eliminates it, eradicates it, negates it, visiates it, deletes it, and erases it. No reality. Thank you. Dissociation is the defense when the the challenge to
46. 15:02 the fantasy by reality is too much. When even the narcissist copious, profuse, all pervasive falsification, decept deceptive mechanisms don’t work. when he can no longer lie to himself. When he’s confronted with his own inadequac inadequacy and deficiency and
47. 15:22 unworthiness and extreme allconsuming life-threatening shame, at that point the narcissist gives up gives up on reality because reality becomes a menace and he withdraws not into fantasy because the fantasy has failed. He withdraws into oblivion. These are the
48. 15:42 three states of narcissism. reality direct contact with reality skinless contact with the narcissist experience experiences self annihilation dissipation into molecules like in the famous Galatia Dali painting that’s one state the other state is dissociation
49. 16:03 and the third state is fantasy which is the prevailing state so when the fantasy is falsified by reality and there is the harrowing experience of dying essentially dying non-existence. The narcissist resorts to dissociation. He says to himself in a
50. 16:19 way reality is not real. This is not happening to me. And he forgets reality is not real. This is called derealization. It’s not happening to me. This is depersonalization. Let’s forget that is this is happening. This is amnesia. These are the three
51. 16:38 heads of the hydra of dissociation. And this leads to aggression. attempts to reshape reality to fit the fantasy. Coers including coerced people. Shouhorn everything. Mold and reshape. Force everyone and everything. The environment, the circumstances,
52. 17:02 the narratives that this the force reality, force the universe, force the world to acquire the shape of the fantasy. And when this fails, there’s always aloplastic defenses. It’s not my fault. It’s other people’s fault. It’s institution’s fault. It’s reality’s
53. 17:19 fault. It’s the universe’s fault. It go It’s God’s fault. Someone is at fault. I don’t know, Satan. Maybe it’s always someone else’s fault. And these are these are the stages of coping with a collapsed fantasy. The narcissist is fiercely protective of
54. 17:36 the fantasy because that’s the only ecosystem, the only habitat within which he can survive somehow intact. The fantasy is reflective only of the narcissist locus of grandiosity. The narcissist’s fantasy, including the narcissist shared fantasy with you, has nothing to do with
55. 17:57 you. It does not cater to your needs. It doesn’t do anything to gratify you to meet your expectations. Nothing to do with you. You don’t exist as a separate external object. This is when self-styled experts confuse narcissistic fantasy with a victim is non-existent
56. 18:18 with psychopathic fantasy which is which revolves around the victim li. The psychopathic fantasy deceives the victim into believing that good times are coming, lures the victim and baits the victim. That’s the psychopath. That’s not the narcissist. The
57. 18:36 narcissist fantasy revolves about revolves only around one thing and one thing only and only about one thing. narcissistic supply, the locus of grandiosity, maintaining the inflated fantastic, crazy self-concept of the narcissist as godlike, as perfect.
58. 18:56 And of course, there is the maternal aspect. There is the the four S’s, sex, services, supply, and stability and safety. Yeah, all these things absolutely. But it’s all again about the narcissist. It’s not about the victim. It’s like the questions in the
59. 19:14 narcissist fantasy, shared fantasy. The questions are, can she be my mother and love me unconditionally? Can she supply me with sex or services or or or narcissistic supply or sadistic supply and safety and stability? What can she give me? What’s in it for me? What can I
60. 19:31 take? Narcissists never give. Not even in order to deceive the victim. They never give. when they discuss a shared fantasy, they’re actually informing the victim of their script, their role in the fantasy. Whereas the psychopath focuses on what the victim wants to
61. 19:50 accomplish, what the victim hopes for, what the victim fantasizes about, what the victim dreams or of being or and so on. And then the psychopath tailor the shared fantasy to accommodate the victim’s the victim’s fantasy actually. So the fantasy of the narcissist is
62. 20:08 reflective only of the narcissist’s locus of grandiosity. If the narcissist believes himself to be a genius, he would expect the victim to affirm and confirm that he is a genius to structure herself as a disciple to a guru as a student with a teacher to cater to the
63. 20:25 narcissist self-perception as all knowing to pretend to ignorance to subdue herself and so on. I call this collateral victimhood. Whereas in psychopathic abuse and psychopathic shared fantasy, the victim is the focus, is the center. Ironically, because the victim has
64. 20:48 something the psychopath wants. In narcissism, in pathological narcissism, the victim is collateral damage. The victim is uh an afterthought. The victim is a side effect, a byproduct. That’s why the victim is so instantly replaceable and and interchangeable and
65. 21:07 funible. The collateral victimhood parameters are made to fit the fantasy of the narcissist. The victim is molded and shapeshifted and broken, housebroken and tamed in order to cater to the narcissist expectations and needs and dreams and hopes and wishes and above
66. 21:26 all the narcissist self-perception, self-image, self-concept as godlike, as a perfect being, a perfect entity. Psychopath’s fantasy or shared fantasy is goal oriented and revolves around the victim’s needs, wishes, dreams, hopes, expectations, and anxieties. Not so the
67. 21:45 narcissist shared fantasy. But as I said, the narcissist shared fantasy springs to action and is triggered by in in in the in the framework of interpersonal relationships. It’s when the narcissist interacts with other people that the shared fantasy is
68. 22:01 activated. But there are many other types of fantasy in pathological narcissism. When the narcissist is all by himself, there is self-upp which is a form of fantasy. When the narcissist is in a collective uh a nation, a church, a club, you name it, the a workplace and
69. 22:19 whatever, there’s another type of fantasy. There are multiple fantasies and the narcissist is busy maintaining, sustaining, butressing and proving time and again the veracity of these fantasies. They’re not fantasies. He keeps broadcasting their reality. You’re
70. 22:36 wrong about reality. I’m right about reality. My fantasies are more real than your reality. And there he invests all his time and effort and energy in keeping these fantasies alive. And when he inevitably fails, and he inevitably fails because these fantasies have
71. 22:53 little to do with reality. When he inevitably fails, he withdraws. He dissociates. He self-supplies and say he half of all narcissistic women applies to them as well. I wanted to clarify these points about the narcissistic fantasies which are very very different
72. 23:11 to the psychopathic fantasies and regrettably most self-styled experts online actually all of them as far as I know uh as usual confused psychopaths and narcissists and have no idea what they’re talking about. Narcissists truly believe their fantasies. They’re not
73. 23:28 deceiving anyone. They’re not deceiving anyone. They truly believe their fantasies and they come to the victim and they say, “I have this amazing reality within which I reside.” And it’s not a fantasy. It’s reality and I’m inviting you to share it with me.
74. 23:46 I’m inviting you, says the narcissist, to be a figment in my fantasy, to become a participant in it. I want to induct you into my shared fantasy because it’s such a wonderful world and you will feel a lot better in this shared fantasy. And so what the narcissist is offering
75. 24:06 is a paracosm is a movie basically whereas what the psychopath is offering. I’m going to make all your dreams come true. I’m going to cater to your needs. I’m going to realize all your expectations. I’m going to help you self-actualize. The psychopath fantasy is therapeutic
76. 24:25 in in is not therapeutic. Psychopath fantasy is goal oriented. It’s pragmatic. Whereas the narcissist fantasy is therapeutic. The narcissist says, “I’m going to enhance your well-being. I’m going to increase your happiness.” Whereas a psychopath says, “What is it
77. 24:46 that you want? I’m going to give it to you. Come join me in my Disneyland.” where everything can happen and everything does because I’m there and I run the show. I run the carnival. I run the ship of whereas a narcissist says, “I have this utopia where happiness
78. 25:03 prevails. Please come and join me in this paradise where you will never ever be expelled.” The narcissistic fantasy is biblical. The psychopathic fantasy is capitalistic.