Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissist’s Mask of Normalcy

1. 00:01 In 1942, Herby Cleley published his seinal tome,
2. 00:08 The Mask of Sanity. This is to this very day the best
3. 00:14 description of the dual nature of narcissists and psychopaths.
4. 00:20 Outwardly, they’re completely normal, sometimes pillars of the community, high
5. 00:26 functioning. Inwardly they’re a mess, chaotic, tumultuous,
6. 00:33 and rejecting of life. He called it the mask of sanity.
7. 00:40 Narcissists invest a lot of effort and psychic energy, cexis,
8. 00:46 in appearing to be normal. They want everyone to think that they’re normal because deep inside they suspect that something is wrong with them, that they’re insane
9. 00:58 unconsciously maybe. And so this is reaction formation.
10. 01:04 They reject, narcissists reject their own deformities, their own deficiencies, their own vulnerabilities, their own weaknesses. And they reject them by pretending to be
11. 01:17 exactly the opposite. Totally normal, highly functional, high achievers,
12. 01:24 accomplished, based in the community, pro-social and so on. This is what I call the mask of normaly
13. 01:35 and this is the topic of today’s video. My name is Sambaknin. I am the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and the completely normal professor of
14. 01:47 psychology in the commonwealth institute in Cambridge the United Kingdom.
15. 01:54 Okay shanim let’s delve right in. Cle used the word mask in ancient Greece in ancient Greek. The word for mask is persona. And this is the word that Jung used in his analytic psychology. Carl Jung suggested that we have two faces.
16. 02:17 There’s the public face. The public face is presented by the individual to the outside world. It’s the public face. Public facing face if you wish. And there’s another phase. It is deeply
17. 02:30 rooted. It is the authentic personality. And it has its own characteristics and traits which are distinguishable and different to the characteristics and
18. 02:41 traits of the public face. So we all juggle these two faces. When we go
19. 02:47 outside to the world, we wear a mask, the persona. Irving Goffman elaborated
20. 02:53 on this. And when we are at home among our nearest and dearest in intimate
21. 02:59 circumstances, we drop drop the pretense. We stop acting. We become
22. 03:06 exactly who we are. And so the mask worn by actors in
23. 03:14 ancient Greece and Roman antiquity, this persona um is one of the key characteristics of
24. 03:24 pathological narcissism. In pathological narcissism, the
25. 03:30 narcissist is the mask. Unlike healthy normal people who put on
26. 03:36 the mask when they exit home and take it off when they return, the narcissist is
27. 03:42 always the mask. He is always wearing the mask. It’s to the extent that the
28. 03:48 mask had become himself. And when he’s alone or when he’s with intimates or when he’s in surrounded by
29. 04:00 fans, followers, admirers and so on, regardless of the environment, regardless of circumstances, regardless
30. 04:06 of the people he’s surrounded with, he’s always wearing the mask. Now mind you, there are situations such as extreme
31. 04:13 narcissistic injury, narcissistic motification, narcissistic collapse. In all this situation, the mask slips.
32. 04:21 But when it falls, when it slips away, when it dissipates and disappears and dissolves, what’s left behind is not a
33. 04:29 human being, but an absence, a void, what tasting called a black hole.
34. 04:39 Now narcissism, pathological narcissism is an inversion
35. 04:47 of health. Whatever you observe in healthy people, just presume the opposite and you get a
36. 04:55 trait or a characteristic or a clinical feature of pathological narcissism. Whatever the whole list, the whole list
37. 05:02 of characteristics and traits and behaviors and cognitions and emotions and effects and processes of healthy
38. 05:09 people just the mirror image is what we call the narcissist.
39. 05:15 Similarly, the narcissist has two constituencies. Every human being does. We all have our inroup and our out groupoup.
40. 05:26 In the inroup, they are nearest and dearest, loved ones, intimate partners, our children, our community, perhaps co-workers in our workplace and so on
41. 05:37 and so forth, people we share a hobby with. This is the inroup and the out groupoup is everybody else. The out
42. 05:44 group is all the strangers. Now, every healthy normal person has an in-roup and an out group. And usually what happens
43. 05:52 is as a healthy normal person you would tend to behave in one way with the with
44. 05:59 members of the ingroup and another way with members of the out group. You would tend to be a lot more compassionate and affectionate and empathic and
45. 06:06 understanding and embracing and accepting and you would tend to afford support and suck. You would tend to be
46. 06:13 there. You would tend to be present. you would tend to interact much more intimately and intricately with the
47. 06:20 members of the ingroup. In we say in psychology that you’re more integrated into the ingroup whereas the out
48. 06:27 groupoup being composed mostly of strangers the outroup merits caution
49. 06:34 vigilance. You would be a lot more reserved, a lot more a lot less forthcoming. Um you would tend to keep
50. 06:42 your distance. you would tend to observe rather than participate. The out group represents a potential
51. 06:49 threat whereas the ingroup is the secure base. It’s an extension of the mother’s secure base. He feels safe. This is with
52. 06:57 normal healthy people. What did I say earlier? Pathological narcissism is the
53. 07:03 mirror of normal healthy people. And so in pathological narcissism, the roles
54. 07:11 and behaviors are reversed. The in-group and the outroup are inverted.
55. 07:17 Nearest and dearest, intimate ones, loved ones or so-called loved ones, friends, family members, girlfriends, boyfriends, children, parish, workplace,
56. 07:31 people the narcissist interacts with habitually and regularly. people the narcissist is supposed to have intimacy with, supposed to be vulnerable with, these people are the enemy. They are the
57. 07:43 out group. Whereas strangers, all strangers are the
58. 07:49 inroup. Now, we observe similar um a similar inversion
59. 07:55 in empathy when we are intoxicated. People who embibed inordinate amounts of
60. 08:02 alcohol, they’re highly intoxicated. They tend to empathize more with strangers than with their nearest and
61. 08:09 dearest and loved ones. That’s a fact. So there is this inversion in in with
62. 08:15 alcohol and there is this inversion on a permanent basis with a pathological narcissist. But why is that? Why does a
63. 08:22 narcissist reject, humiliate, shame, abuse, mistreat his nearest and dearest? Whereas he extends courtesies
64. 08:33 and attention and and imitated mimicked empathy and compassion
65. 08:40 and affection to strangers. Why invest all your mental resources, all your cexis? like affect strangers and deconict take away your mental energy
66. 08:51 from your loved ones. Why redirect yourself towards strangers and ignore the the very people who love you, who care for you, who have your best interest in mind?
67. 09:03 There’s a very logical reason for that. And the narcissist behavior is utterly rational.
68. 09:09 Remember that the narcissist is in pursuit of narcissistic supply and nothing else. That’s the only goal in the narcissist’s life. Only strangers can offer the narcissist
69. 09:20 supply. Whereas intimate people can injure the narcissist and mortify the narcissist
70. 09:27 because they are fully aware of the narcissist’s vulnerabilities, weaknesses, deficiencies, and frailties.
71. 09:34 In other words, people the narcissist is intimate with, people the narcissist shares his life with, people who are
72. 09:41 exposed to the narcissist, people who have been in the position to observe the
73. 09:47 narcissist in the long term. These people know a lot about the narcissist and they can emotionally blackmail the
74. 09:54 narcissist somehow. They can at the very least humiliate and shame the narcissist, criticize the narcissist,
75. 10:00 disagree the narcissist. People who possess information about the narcissist, the narcissist behaviors, traits, choices, decisions. These people are the enemy. These people can induce injuries and motifications whereas
76. 10:16 strangers cannot. Strangers are subjected to a charm offensive, superficial charm. Strangers are very
77. 10:24 likely to become sources of narcissistic supply. Strangers afford or provide gratification. Whereas loved ones, intimate ones represent a risk. And that
78. 10:37 is where the why the narcissist tends to fend off and push away those in his
79. 10:43 inroup, those in the inner circle and cultivate and and ingratiate himself
80. 10:49 with strangers. Similar reversals
81. 10:55 happen across the spectrum of narcissistic of effect and emotions and
82. 11:02 cognitions in narcissist. Everything is mirrorimaged. Everything
83. 11:08 is chyal in a way. Everything is I mean left is right, right is left. It’s all very very confusing. Consider for example what is known as fundamental
84. 11:19 attribution or horror error horror actually also fundamental attribution
85. 11:26 error. First the definition in attribution theory the fundamental
86. 11:32 attribution error is the tendency to overestimate the degree to which to
87. 11:38 which an individual’s behavior is determined by their abiding personal characteristics attitudes beliefs and so
88. 11:46 on. So in attribution theory when you observe someone doing something you
89. 11:52 attribute their actions to who they are to their essence to their core identity
90. 11:59 to their characteristics attitudes beliefs motivations and so on so forth. You say they behave this way because of
91. 12:06 who they are. They behave this way because of what makes them them. And this is an overestimate of of uh this linkage. This linkage is
92. 12:18 overestimated and it’s known as fundamental attribution error. At the same time, you minimize the influence of the surrounding situation on their
93. 12:29 behaviors. So you would see someone stealing bread from a grocery store and
94. 12:35 you would say they’re stealing bread because they are evil people or they are ill brought up or they are uh stupid or
95. 12:43 you would attribute the action of stealing bread to to their nature
96. 12:50 rather than saying he’s stealing bread because he’s under financial or social
97. 12:56 pressure. He doesn’t have enough money to buy bread for his family. So you would minimize the environmental
98. 13:03 pressures, you would minimize the situational factors and you would overestimate or maximize the quidity of the person, the essence of the person,
99. 13:14 alleged essence. You would attribute essence to the person and this is known as fundamental attribution error.
100. 13:24 uh fundamental attribution errors are more common in some societies than others. I will not go into all these.
101. 13:32 You can read more about correspondence bias, overattribution bias and so on so forth and even ultimate attribution error. These are all subjects I’ve dealt with in other videos. The whole thing
102. 13:43 was first described by social psychologist Lee Ross, American social
103. 13:49 psychologist. So this is fundamental attribution error. With the narcissist there is reverse fundamental attribution error. Remember the narcissist is a
104. 14:00 mirror. Everything is a mask. Normaly is abnormal.
105. 14:07 Attribution errors are reversed. Everything uh inroup becomes outgroup. Outgroup becomes inroup. Everything is
106. 14:14 completely mirror imaged. And so when narcissists reverse the attribution error, they tend to overestimate situational
107. 14:25 impact on behaviors. So they tend to see someone doing
108. 14:31 something and they would say he is doing it because of his environment, his
109. 14:38 situation, people around him and so on so forth. and they would tend to underestimate
110. 14:45 um personal characteristics, traits, qualities, beliefs, attitudes, values
111. 14:52 and so on. They would tend to do this especially when it comes to themselves because
112. 14:58 remember narcissists do not perceive other people as external or separate.
113. 15:04 They perceive other people as internal objects. So they would apply reverse fundamental
114. 15:12 attribution error to themselves first and foremost. They would say I did what
115. 15:19 I did because I had no choice. I found myself in a situation
116. 15:25 that led me to do what I did inexurably. I did what I did because of social
117. 15:31 pressures or financial exigencies. I did what I did because anyone and everyone
118. 15:37 would have done the same. Not because of who I am, not because of my traits,
119. 15:44 characteristics, deficiencies, attitudes, beliefs, values. None of this. Not because of my identity. I did what I did because I had no choice, no other choice.
120. 15:56 So this is a a reverse fundamental attribution error. And because a narcissist tends to see himself this
121. 16:02 way, he would also tend to see other people this way.
122. 16:08 Other people is is lang is is an insufficient language in the case of
123. 16:14 narcissism because they’re not other. They’re internalized. They are figments in the narcissist’s mind and sometimes
124. 16:21 fantasy or imagination. So the narcissist would tend to interpret the world as externally controlled,
125. 16:29 controlled from the outside. Narcissist in other words has an external locus of
126. 16:35 control. And when the narcissist observes events in the world, he immediately attributes
127. 16:42 these events to himself or to herself. We’ll come to it in a minute. Everything revolves around the narcissist. He’s not only the center of the world, he is the world. And so other people are just
128. 16:54 props elements in his theater production, actors in his movie. And
129. 17:00 because he knows no other way as far as the attribution error, he know he all he
130. 17:06 he completely attributes his actions and especially his misconduct and misdeeds to external circumstances and to other people. Then this is how he sees the world more generally. And this is because the narcissist
131. 17:22 regards himself as the be all and end all. So before we come to that, if you ask a narcissist, why did this person do this?
132. 17:34 Why did this person make this choice? Why did this person choose this course
133. 17:40 of action? Why did this person end up acting the way they did? And so on so
134. 17:46 forth. um the narcissist would tend to engage in fundamental attribution error. He would tend to say because that person is evil or that person is stupid.
135. 17:59 Narcissists have contempt for other people. But this applies only to strangers. This applies to not to strangers but this applies to people who have not been internalized by the
136. 18:10 narcissist. The minute someone is internalized by the narcissist, the fundamental
137. 18:16 attribution error is reversed and there is an external locus of
138. 18:22 control. Everything that’s happening to the narcissist and to the internal objects in the narcissist’s mind that
139. 18:28 represent significant others outside significant people.
140. 18:34 Everything that happens to him, to himself or to herself and to these people who are already captured within his mind, everything then is subject to
141. 18:46 reverse fundamental attribution error. Everything is happening to him or to her
142. 18:52 and to these other people, highly selected, internalized, introjected people. Everything that’s
143. 18:59 happening to all this group is coming from the outside. So the narcissist
144. 19:05 would tend to say, for example, I’m the subject of a conspiracy. People envy me. They are out to get me and take me down. And not only me, but my family members also. My wife didn’t get the job because
145. 19:17 people hate me. My children failed their exams because the teacher hates hates me
146. 19:24 or envys me. So everything is coming from the outside. But of course if the
147. 19:30 narcissist is asked about Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, he will engage in
148. 19:36 classic fundamental attribution error. He will say Donald Trump is a narcissist or Vladimir Putin is evil.
149. 19:43 I want to clarify this. Reverse fundamental attribution error applies only to other people who are internalized within the narcissistic
150. 19:54 mental space within the narcissist mind. Okay. Now the narcissist regards himself
151. 20:01 and this galaxy of internal objects in his mind which represents other people.
152. 20:08 The narcissist regards all these complex the narcissistic complex as the center of the world. the pivot, the axis around which the entire universe revolves. It’s not that the narcissist is stupid or irrational. The narcissist knows that
153. 20:27 it may that it’s not he knows rationally. He knows objectively, neutrally that it’s not true. He may be
154. 20:34 social scientist. He may be a professor of psychology. He knows that he is not the center of the universe, of the
155. 20:40 world, of history, of his society or culture or whatever. But that is the cognitive level. On the unconscious level, the narcissist does perceive himself as the synquinon of the world. The entity without which there is no
156. 20:57 world. The world exists inside the narcissist mind. This is a cognitive
157. 21:03 distortion or a defense mechanism. There’s a debate known as hyperreflexivity.
158. 21:09 This is also common in psychotic disorders. The psychotic annexes the world, digests the world, the psychotic conflates his own mind
159. 21:20 with the world. And so because the narcissist regards himself
160. 21:27 as the world, you know the famous narcissistic song, we are the world. So he regards himself as the world.
161. 21:33 Narcissists have something called referential attitude. Referential attitude. According to the
162. 21:40 American Psychological Association dictionary is this an expectancy attitude sometimes observed in certain individuals with schizophrenia or other forms of psychopathology
163. 21:52 who are seeking justification via environmental aspects for their ideas of
164. 21:58 reference or delusions of reference. Now what are ideas of reference or delusions of reference? This is a group of psychopathological clinical features.
165. 22:10 They’re very common in psychosis, but not only in psychosis. Definitely people with bipolar disorder, people with paranoid personality disorder, people with narcissistic personality disorder,
166. 22:21 antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, they all have ideas of reference or
167. 22:27 referential ideiation, not delusions of reference, which are common only in
168. 22:33 psychosis, but ideas of reference. It’s a spurious, erroneous sense of
169. 22:39 self-reference in otherwise neutral events in one’s immediate environment.
170. 22:47 Typical presentations include feelings of being talked about, gossiped about, mocked, receiving hints, or being targeted in the mass media or in personal communications.
171. 23:01 And so let’s break it down. The narcissist
172. 23:08 believes himself to be the center of attention, the axis and pivot around which the entire world or at least his
173. 23:15 world revolves. That means that everyone is interested in him and in him only.
174. 23:23 Everyone is mocking him behind his back. Everyone is gossiping about him. Everyone is talking about him. Everyone
175. 23:29 is analyzing him. Everyone is trying to predict his next actions, choices, and decisions. Everyone is criticizing him.
176. 23:36 Everyone is admiring him. Everyone Everyone’s attention is focused on him
177. 23:42 or her, on the narcissist. Of course, it’s a form of self-supp. The belief that you’re the center of attention is very gratifying and constitutes in itself a form of
178. 23:54 narcissistic supply. But it’s wrong. It’s objectively wrong. It’s not true.
179. 24:01 And that’s why we call it ideas of reference or referential ideation. It’s just an idea. It’s not reality. And so narcissists have this referential
180. 24:13 ideation. But because narcissists are basically hypervigilant, they scan the environment for insults and slides and criticism and
181. 24:24 disagreement and hostile intent and and paranoid ideation and imminent attacks
182. 24:32 and injuries and modification. Their attitude is negative. Narcissism is characterized by negative affectivity according to the international classification of diseases. And so
183. 24:45 narcissists are constantly envious, constantly angry, constantly hateful, constantly rageful, constantly resentful, constantly bitter, and constantly of course either passive
184. 24:57 aggressive if they are covert or aggressive if they are overt. It’s a lot of negativity. And this negativity
185. 25:05 colors the ideas of reference, colors the referential ideiation.
186. 25:12 The narcissist referential attitude is the belief that he is the center of
187. 25:20 malign intention, malevolent intention, malicious intention, conspiratorial
188. 25:26 attention and intention that he is being mocked or ridiculed or hated or
189. 25:32 criticized or disagreed or gossiped on or talked about in a negative way. Very rarely the narcissist would attribute positive effects and positive attitudes to other people.
190. 25:44 Sometimes the narcissist would deceive himself into believing that he’s being admired and adored and adulated. That is
191. 25:51 also pretty common. But these flashes of positivity don’t survive in the enormous
192. 25:57 ocean of negativity. Um the narcissist
193. 26:04 attributes therefore everything to the environment and especially to other people.
194. 26:10 The narcissist perceives himself more or less as an inert passive object lacking a agency.
195. 26:19 That’s the irony in pathological narcissism. On the one hand, the narcissist presents himself as godlike,
196. 26:25 a divinity, perfection, raified, an entity which is omniscient and
197. 26:31 omnipotent and brilliant and genius and maybe handsome or whatever. So the
198. 26:37 narcissist is always perfect on the one hand, always godlike. But on the other hand, the real perception of the narcissist, the self-perception of the narcissist is
199. 26:48 someone who is at the mercy of other people. Someone who is inert, someone
200. 26:55 who is passive, someone who is a receptacle, recipient and container of other people’s intentions which are
201. 27:01 often malign because they envy him or they hate him or they misunderstand him or they compete with him or whatever. So the narcissist
202. 27:12 has this sequence referential attitude. My life is determined by the environment. Yes. Everything that’s happening, all my
203. 27:23 decisions and choices and so on, they’re because of the environment, because of other people and generally speaking, the
204. 27:30 misdeeds or misconduct of other people. And then there is referential ideiation.
205. 27:36 These very people who have made me do it. These very people who have provoked
206. 27:42 me, pushed me, humiliated me, denigrated me, shamed me into action. These very
207. 27:48 people who colluded and conspired against me. These very people who
208. 27:54 underestimate me. These very people who who make sure that I don’t get my due.
209. 28:01 These very people uh are also constantly talking about me, constantly mocking and
210. 28:07 ridiculing me, constantly seeking to undermine me and ent trap me. These people, I am the center of their attention. I’m the focus of their world. And this is um ref referential
211. 28:19 ideiation. But because there is negative effectivity in narcissism, there’s also something called hostile attribution
212. 28:27 bias. Hostile attribution bias is simply the belief that the you are the center
213. 28:33 of other people’s hostile attention, malevolent intent. You’re a victim. In
214. 28:41 other words, this whole worldview, this external locus of control, my life
215. 28:47 is determined from the outside also leads a narcissist to paranoia and to a
216. 28:55 self-concept of self-perception as the victim of other people, of other forces,
217. 29:02 of institutions and collectives and and so on. Hostile attribution bias is, I’m quoting
218. 29:10 from the dictionary, a general tendency to ascribe harmful or otherwise adverse intent to the ambiguous behavior of others. For example, a child will insist
219. 29:21 that another child bumped into her on the school playground on purpose when the action in fact was accidental, that
220. 29:28 is demonstrating a hostile attribution bias. an employee who claims that his
221. 29:34 name was deliberately left off the distribution list for a recent memo despite c-orker assurances that the error was inadvertent. In other words, there’s no acceptance of
222. 29:47 incidents. Nothing is incidental. Accident, nothing is accidental. Happen
223. 29:53 stance, randomness, chance, human error, none of this is accepted. It’s all
224. 29:59 intentional. It’s all deliberate. It’s all intended to harm the narcissist in the
225. 30:05 narcissist’s mind. Everyone is a potential or actual enemy. Everyone is
226. 30:11 hostile. Hostile attribution bias. Everyone is colluding and conspiring and
227. 30:18 planning to take him down and destroy him. That is referential ideation. And the general attitude is consequently
228. 30:25 because everyone is against me, the whole world is against me. There’s little I can do. Even though I’m omnipotent, even though I’m godlike, well, wasn’t God crucified? I am about
229. 30:36 to be crucified. I’m the new Jesus and the new savior and Messiah and so on and so forth. This cognitive distortion is
230. 30:44 associated with such phenomena as aggression, conduct disorders, narcissism, and externalization.
231. 30:51 It was first described in 1979. the personality psychologist William psychologist William Nasby
232. 31:00 and with contributions by clinical psychologist Brian Hayden and social psychologist Bella de Paulo.
233. 31:07 So this is the narcissist world. A world of mirrors. A whole of mirrors
234. 31:14 where everything is inverted. Everything is reversed. And self-concept
235. 31:20 contradicts the perception of reality, contradicts reality testing where the
236. 31:26 narcissist’s way of seeing the world, the narcissist theory of mind, theory about what makes other people tick and the narcissist’s internal working models about models about relationships with other people. All these are actually
237. 31:42 highly paranoid, highly suspicious, infused with suspicion,
238. 31:48 uh, hypervigilant, on the alert, flight or fight kind of thing. Narus is
239. 31:54 constantly on his toes or her toes awaiting the inevitable sword to fall.
240. 32:00 There’s a a a sense of imminent allervasive all permeating threat
241. 32:06 atmospheric ambient threat and constant alertness. And in this world the narcissist is an
242. 32:13 object. He’s a victim. And while the self-concept informs a
243. 32:19 narcissist that he is all powerful, all knowing, godlike, divine, and this is
244. 32:26 the irreconcilable dissonance within the narcissist which gives rise to anxiety
245. 32:32 and in extreme situations decompensating and acting out.