Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissist’s Discordant Notes: Why Uncanny Valley Reaction (Conference Presentation)

1. 00:02 There are multiple studies that have demonstrated conclusively that in the presence of narcissists, people re react with acute discomfort.
2. 00:15 They are upset. There’s something missing, something off key,
3. 00:22 something halfbaked, something not full-fledged, something in short a bit alien.
4. 00:29 Now this has been established in multiple scientific studies in very
5. 00:35 prestigious venues such as Harvard University and elsewhere. Exposure of 30 seconds or less even as
6. 00:44 few as 3 seconds triggers this discomfort.
7. 00:52 I borrowed a term from the study of robots of automata from robotics.
8. 00:59 The phrase is uncanny valley was coined by Masahiro Mori in 1970. I borrowed it
9. 01:05 and I applied it to the study of narcissistic abuse. I expanded it and
10. 01:11 called it the uncanny valley reaction. When you are in the presence of a narcissist, overt or covert, you react. Your body knows the score. It
11. 01:23 is your body that reacts initially. Something unconscious, some steerings
12. 01:29 take take place. You may deny it. You may ignore it. You
13. 01:35 may reframe it. You may even criticize yourself for being so unforgiving and so
14. 01:41 you should give a second chance and so on. There are a lot of society approved and
15. 01:48 condoned mechanisms for dealing with this discomfort and they’re all in favor
16. 01:55 of the narcissist. You should give people a second chance. Don’t be too harsh in your judgment. Don’t don’t
17. 02:03 hurry up. Don’t don’t engage in in elacrity. Don’t society keeps telling
18. 02:09 you to compromise, to negotiate, to fit yourself into situations, to conform.
19. 02:15 And this all works in the fa in favor of the narcissist. But the studies unequivocal.
20. 02:21 If you’re exposed to the narcissist, even via email, even via photograph,
21. 02:28 let alone video of fewer than 30 seconds, you know it’s a narcissist.
22. 02:34 Some studies have shown that lay men, lay persons diagnose narcissists accurately 85% of a time after an exposure of 30
23. 02:48 seconds or fewer to emails, photos and videos.
24. 02:56 85% accurate diagnosis. We know when you come across a narcissist, you know it’s a narcissist. Later on, you may tell yourself all kinds of stories because I don’t know, you’re lonely, you are sex starved or
25. 03:12 whatever, but you know it’s a narcissist. But then the question arises, what in the narcissist exactly
26. 03:20 triggers the uncanny valley reaction? Why does the narcissist provoke people
27. 03:26 these largely unconscious responses? This illlet is this upset, this
28. 03:36 discomfort, what in the narcissist triggers this incipient fight or flight reaction? What
29. 03:44 emanations, what broadcasts, what messages, what signals,
30. 03:50 what constitu constituents, what ingredients, what components, what what
31. 03:56 behaviors, body language, something, what in the narcissist causes you to realize that it’s a narcissist accurately 85% of the time.
32. 04:07 And this is the topic of today’s video, the secret source of the uncanny valley
33. 04:13 reaction. My name is Sam Vagnney. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and a professor of psychology. The narcissist discordant notes the uncanny valley reaction. It starts with
34. 04:30 body posture. Narcissists hold their bodies in a
35. 04:36 special way. It’s like haughtiness, postural hortiness.
36. 04:42 It’s like their hubris and arrogance reshapes reshape their muscles in a way
37. 04:51 that exudes and broadcasts it. There’s a visionary gaze. There is a tilting of
38. 04:59 the body halfway, half sideways. There is there are facial microaggressions. In
39. 05:05 short, the body language of the narcissist is pretty unequivocal. Now people have been describing the narcissist’s gaze or the narcissist.
40. 05:16 There’s no proof of that. But there is no question that the narcissist comports himself or herself somatically, bodily,
41. 05:24 corporeally in a way that is distinguishable from a normal average healthy human being. And that is because the narcissist enlists
42. 05:35 their bodies. narcissists enlist their bodies um and use them, leverage them in order
43. 05:42 to elicit and extract narcissistic supply from the environment. It’s it’s as if the narcissist says is saying look
44. 05:50 at my body um how unique it is, how specially sculpted and how reflective it is of my
45. 05:58 supremacy and godlike qualities. So first thing is body language probably.
46. 06:05 But then we go a bit deeper. Body language is what we call a presentation.
47. 06:11 That’s how the narcissist presents himself. But then there are interactions with the narcissist on a date, for example. You sit with the narcissist, you’re having dinner, if he is generous
48. 06:24 enough, and you’re talking. So there’s a lot that goes on in further interactions
49. 06:32 in long longer term interactions beyond the initial presentation of the body language and and micro facial expressions beyond this and and it’s all
50. 06:44 tainted. It’s all deformed. It’s all defective. It’s all wrong. It’s all off key. It’s
51. 06:51 all discordant. There’s something wrong there. Start with the fact that narcissists
52. 06:58 engage in causitative misapprehension. In other words, they often confuse cause
53. 07:04 and effect and they engage in what is known as nonsequittor. In other words,
54. 07:10 the conclusions do not necessarily emanate from the premises. It’s as if they live in a risenfree, logic-free zone where they make up the
55. 07:24 rules as they go along and they contradict themselves within the same sentence
56. 07:30 very often and they don’t notice the contradiction and they try to convince you that
57. 07:38 whatever it is they’re saying, it’s logically sound, ineluctible
58. 07:45 and syogistic. ically um formidable and firm.
59. 07:51 In short, what I’m trying to say is that narcissists automatically and unconsciously engage in a form of
60. 07:59 gaslighting. They’re trying to modify your reality testing. They’re trying to
61. 08:06 uh impinge uh on your ability to gauge and evaluate reality properly by generating instantly
62. 08:16 uh an Alice in Wonderland ambiencece, a surrealistic paracosm,
63. 08:22 an alien landscape, a fantasy, a fantastic space that is at the same
64. 08:30 time illogical. It’s not necessarily irrational, but it’s illogical. Like A doesn’t follow B or doesn’t follow from B. And yet the
65. 08:42 narcissist presents this alternative virtual reality, this this
66. 08:48 metaverse, this uh this uh this universe
67. 08:54 presents it as if it’s the only viable option and that something’s wrong with
68. 09:01 your perception of reality. This latent, implicit, occult, hidden challenge to
69. 09:10 the way, you know, things work, to the to your to the certainties that you have amassed over a lifetime regarding what makes people tick, a theory of mind, how relationships work,
70. 09:22 an internal working model, and how the universe functions, also known as physics. When all these are challenged
71. 09:28 repeatedly, albeit subtly and subliminally, you feel very
72. 09:34 uncomfortable, very unsafe, very insecure, and the narcissist does it to you from the first moment, from the
73. 09:41 get-go. Another problem with with narcissists
74. 09:47 um and we are discussing now the elements in the narcissist behaviors and speech acts that lead that result in and
75. 09:55 that yield the uncanny value reaction in people around the narcissist. So another
76. 10:03 problem is the non-modulated intensity. The narcissist transitions between
77. 10:10 moments of laxity, languidity and half lethargy
78. 10:16 and moments of erupt in and eruptive moments which are volcanic and mercurial
79. 10:22 and crazym and and frankly um very terrifying.
80. 10:28 And this non-modulated intensity is often aggressive. It is clear that the narcissist’s vehements, the narcissist’s elacrity,
81. 10:41 the narcissist’s intensity, the narcissist investment, cex cexis, emotional investment and physical investment. It’s clear that all these have something to do with fountains and
82. 10:54 rivers and lakes and oceans of aggression within the narcissist. that it is the aggression inside that is
83. 11:02 shaping the narcissist outside external manifestations behavioral and verbal.
84. 11:10 It is as if the narcissist is driven by some imp or demon. That’s a metaphor by
85. 11:16 some impo demon uh which is very very angry. The narcissist’s unabating, all
86. 11:23 pervading, all permeating rage is on clear display.
87. 11:30 And while it may be sublimated to render it socially acceptable or it
88. 11:37 may be modulated or it may be disguised or camouflaged, it still comes true. You
89. 11:43 still witness to this bile, to this venom that is pouring out
90. 11:51 of the narcissist that the narcissist exudes unwillingly and it creates a very for a very
91. 11:59 uncomfortable ambiance and atmosphere and a very very harrowing experience
92. 12:05 and it’s there all the time. We are talking now about elements in the narcissist personality, behavior and
93. 12:11 presentation which are always there ever present and which put together generate
94. 12:18 the uncanny value reaction within fewer than 30 seconds. The next thing you may come across as
95. 12:25 you interact with a narcissist perhaps as the narcissist unwilling interlocutor
96. 12:31 or audience is pronoun density or more precisely first pronoun density. The
97. 12:39 narcissist uses an inordinate am inordinate amount inordinate number of
98. 12:45 times I me myself mine.
99. 12:51 So um the way the narcissist uses these
100. 12:57 pronouns is such that it is self-enhancing and self aggrandizing and the frequency
101. 13:05 is insane is incredible is untenable is the
102. 13:11 pronouns swamp the rest of the speech. A narcissist may use the words I, me,
103. 13:18 myself, and mine and my dozens of times in a typical sentence or
104. 13:25 paragraph, which is like 50 times 100 times more than a typical human being. And this pronoun density is grating. It’s alarming. It’s comic sometimes.
105. 13:38 It’s pathetic. and it creates enormous discomfort in the interlocutor or the listener. The pronoun density is coupled with
106. 13:49 outlandish claims. Outlandish claims regarding the narcissist’s autobiography
107. 13:55 or outlandish claims in general. The narcissist
108. 14:02 tries to establish his or her authority, intellectual authority,
109. 14:09 command authority, any kind of authority as tries to establish a hierarchy,
110. 14:16 put himself at the top as supreme and superior. And he often or she often does this
111. 14:25 by making exaggerated, egregiously inane, unsubstantiated,
112. 14:34 crazym, illogical, and sometimes irrational, unbelievable, fantastic, childishly fantastic claims.
113. 14:45 These promulgations and pronouncements and announcements and are counterfactual. They’re
114. 14:52 unrealistic. They’re inflated. They’re grandiose. They’re eminently and evident evidently
115. 14:58 nonsensical. And they’re coupled with entitlement,
116. 15:04 grandio a grandio self-concept, self-enhancement using pronoun density that I mentioned before and contemptuous superiority
117. 15:15 which is visible ostentatious exhibited demonstrabably
118. 15:21 and when you put all these amalgam together the aggressive intensity the
119. 15:27 self focus the pronoun density The narrowed focus actually the
120. 15:33 outlandish crazym or insane sounding almost psychotic claims, the grand the
121. 15:40 the in yourrface demanding grandiosity, the entitlement, the which is which is
122. 15:48 coupled with aggression, the the self-enhancement, the contempt and the protestations and insistence on on one’s superiority and supremacy. god-like
123. 15:59 qualities and and perfection. If you put all of these together, of course, it creates um a sense of of disease, lack
124. 16:08 of ease, illlet ease. It creates an upset. It it it it unsettles
125. 16:14 uh the settled view of the world. It it kind of challenges everything you came to believe about what is appropriate and
126. 16:21 inappropriate in human human discourse and exchange. There is some abrogation and undermining of the protocol. Narcissists are
127. 16:33 protocol busters. They are iconoclass but in a very narrow sense of the word. The
128. 16:40 narcissist seeks to destroy the the existing order in order to replace it
129. 16:46 with a narcissistic cult. And so first of all he needs to destabilize you. He
130. 16:52 needs to de deharmonize you, take away your harmony. He needs to challenge you. He
131. 16:59 needs to undermine you. He needs to to sabotage everything you you believe. He
132. 17:05 he he so he causes in you mistrust. He there’s a sense of disorientation, enormous disorientation and dislocation almost bordering on dissociation, depersonalization, derealization. The narcissist induces in you a
133. 17:22 dissociative fugue of some kind and it’s very very frightening on a very very
134. 17:29 animalistic level. the the the whole interaction with the narcissist is very primitive, very primordial, atavistic
135. 17:36 and animalistic. As I said, it’s two animals gauging each other, measuring each other, evaluating each other. One
136. 17:44 of the animals being a predator and the other being prey.
137. 17:50 The next thing as the narcissist goes on and on um exclaiming um inane and
138. 17:57 outlandish u promulgations as the narcissist goes um spins spins all kinds
139. 18:05 of yarns and come comes up with self- aggrandizing self-enhancing narratives.
140. 18:11 An integral part of this fabric is contabulated memories.
141. 18:17 As some of you may know by now, those of those those of you who have been victims of my videos,
142. 18:24 survivors of my videos, I should say, the narcissist contabulates because narcissists are dissociative. They
143. 18:31 experience memory gaps in order to bridge these memory gaps. They come up with stories, with narratives, with
144. 18:37 pieces of fiction which then they come to to believe. They come to regard as facts. And so as the narcissist tries to
145. 18:46 lure you in into his cobweb, into his spiderweb, the shared fantasy, he also
146. 18:53 engages in constant on the-fly confabulation, which serves to batter and support the grandio narratives, the the and and
147. 19:07 provide um the a causal thread provide causation.
148. 19:13 in what otherwise is totally disjointed and discontinuous. It’s like the glue holding together the narrative of the shared fantasy. And so you’re exposed to a lot of confabulation. Confabulation is
149. 19:25 perceived unconsciously perceived by you as lying,
150. 19:32 as gaslighting, while the narcissist is fully invested
151. 19:38 in the veracity of his or her confabulations. You on the other hand experience these confabulations as manipulative as machavelian attempts to modify your
152. 19:50 perception of reality and consequently your behaviors, choices and decisions.
153. 19:56 So there’s a sense that you’re being manipulated and this is of course very inconvenient
154. 20:03 and it triggers in you highly aggressive reactions. uh we tend to react to to
155. 20:11 visible manipulation, clear manipulation. We tend to react with aggression. It’s a defense.
156. 20:20 As you react this way, so does the narcissist. As far as the narcissist is concerned,
157. 20:27 the interaction with other people is binary. Either they could become
158. 20:33 sources of narcissistic supply and willing participants in the shared fantasy or they cannot.
159. 20:39 If they possess the potential to be co-opted into the yarn or into the
160. 20:46 cobweb of the shared fantasy, then they are positive people. The narcissist splits them. He says they’re all good.
161. 20:53 If you’re incapable because you are you have you’re too possessed of critical thinking or because you are alert to
162. 20:59 reality or because you’re highly independent minded or or for whatever reason if you’re unable to be to become
163. 21:08 um a component or an ingredient of the shared fantasy, a source of narcissistic supply, then you’re the enemy. You’re
164. 21:14 all bad. And so throughout the interaction with other people, regardless of the setting,
165. 21:21 romantic, dating, the workplace, church, the family, regardless of the setting, throughout the interaction, the narcissist is always hypervigilant,
166. 21:33 defensive, and possessed of paranoid ideiation. As the interaction with you unfolds,
167. 21:41 as the narcissist continues to engage with you, he’s gauging you. He’s evaluating you. He’s estimating whether
168. 21:48 you could become um a collaborator, an accomplice in his
169. 21:54 collusion, whether you could conspire with him to weave this web of shared
170. 22:01 fantasy and maybe to ent trap other people in it. And so he’s it’s like a job interview.
171. 22:07 But a job interview that matters a lot to the narcissist because if you fail to
172. 22:14 meet the criteria, if you don’t qualify for the job, the only other job available to you is a mortal enemy. And
173. 22:22 so the narcissist regards you simultaneously as his potential best asset, best
174. 22:29 friend, best lover, best mother, best everything. All good. All good. Faithful, loyal, loving, caring, encompassing source of supply,
175. 22:41 you name it. And at the same time, you’re also potentially the enemy, a mortal enemy, wants to take him down, destroy him, expose him, and so on. And this creates in the narcissist defensive
176. 22:54 behaviors, hypervigilance, and paranoia. And you as the narcissist interlocator
177. 23:02 or partner or in interaction with the narcissist, you perceive it, you absorb
178. 23:09 it. These are like waves emanating from the narcissist. You It’s myasma. You You’re exposed to it. You spot it. You
179. 23:17 have senses. Every human being does. You have senses and you feel this paranoia, this aggression, this defensiveness,
180. 23:23 this hypervigilance. And of course it creates a very very um unpleasant and
181. 23:29 discordant atmosphere. At the same time the narcissist is trying to charm you into the shared
182. 23:36 fantasy. This is the antisocial or psychopathic aspect of narcissism. The superficial charm. Now superficial charm
183. 23:43 is more common in psychopaths and psychopathic narcissists also known as malignant narcissists. But all
184. 23:49 narcissists try to enchant you to kind of delude you into the shared fantasy to
185. 23:57 distort your reality testing and your values and your beliefs and your hopes and your dreams and your fantasies, your wishes, everything and introduce you into this new narrative where
186. 24:09 essentially you’re a kind of mother figure. So there’s a lot of cajoling taking place,
187. 24:16 a lot of flattery, a lot of there’s there’s ingratiation. The narcissist is
188. 24:23 uncou but but is also ingratiatingly smarmy. The smarmyiness,
189. 24:30 this it’s kind of slimy. It’s a feeling of slime. It’s as if the narcissist cannot be
190. 24:37 captured. on the one hand is very evasive, very shape-shifting,
191. 24:43 very fuzzy, unclear, has no real boundaries. And that’s the truth.
192. 24:49 There’s nobody there. There’s no one there. There’s no self on the one hand. And on the other hand he presents
193. 24:57 as this kind of self-confident authoritative
194. 25:03 wise guru type teacher like savior rescuer person
195. 25:10 and this conflation which is supposed to be mutually exclusive.
196. 25:17 The fact that these two poles, these two resonances co reside in a single human
197. 25:23 being. This creates a lot of of discomfort, a lot of reticence, a lot of reluctance
198. 25:32 to engage, a lot of hidden uh fear and the uncertainty, the unpredictability, the indeterminacy of the of of this person. Who is he? What is he? What is
199. 25:45 he after? Um the the whole thing is perceived again as manipulative and machavelian and the smarmyiness, the superficial
200. 25:56 charm and the sliminess and the unc
201. 26:02 conduct or misconduct with flashes of aggression and and
202. 26:09 counterfactual or counterintuitive moments. uh the counterpoint uh counterveilling
203. 26:16 moments where the narcissist is pleasant, pleasant, pleasant, and then extremely unpleasant. Um docsile, cool,
204. 26:26 understanding, compassionate, affectionate, and then suddenly extremely aggressive. These sudden flashes, these eruptions, these they don’t sit well within the narrative.
205. 26:37 It’s as if there’s a mask and the mask keeps falling and exposing the alien
206. 26:43 behind it. You remember the alien movies where there was a human a human facade,
207. 26:50 a human front hiding a monster inside. The narcissist is good at maintaining
208. 26:56 this facade but only for so long. the minute the their instances their flashes there their eruptions and ejections where the narcissist the true narcissist
209. 27:07 becomes visible and it’s very disconcerting it’s very frightening
210. 27:13 and one of the one of these types of of
211. 27:19 disclosures I I would say non-aututonomous disclosures like unwilling involuntary disclosures
212. 27:27 one of the Um, one type is inappropriate speech. When the narcissist walks on eloquently, fluently,
213. 27:38 highbrow, intellectual, and then suddenly emits or ejects a profanity or says something which is really lowbrow and stupid, lowbrow and stupid,
214. 27:50 you know, and you can’t put the two together. Is the narcissist intelligent or is he
215. 27:57 imitating intelligence? Is he an intellectual or he is he just paring someone possibly plagiarizing someone
216. 28:04 which is very common in narcissism? Is it and the profanity is it just a uh a
217. 28:12 point of emphasis a counterpoint or or is it the real essence and quiddity of
218. 28:18 the person speaking? So the speech is incohesive. Not incoherent but incohesive in the
219. 28:25 sense that it is comprised of two strata two two levels layers two elements.
220. 28:33 One of which is lowass lowbrow uneducated
221. 28:39 u violent verbally violent and honestly pretty dumb or stupid person. And on the
222. 28:46 other hand, this pretension at sophistication, suavveness,
223. 28:53 um even glibness to some extent and uh intellectual vigor, irudition and and
224. 29:01 you can’t put the two together and these are exactly the that’s exactly
225. 29:07 the issue. This gives rise to the uncanny valley reaction. the fact that there are there’s a tectonic clash
226. 29:14 there. There are tectonic plates that keep clashing, keep bumping into each
227. 29:20 other and generating these visible violent aggressive earthquakes,
228. 29:27 these volcanic eruptions. And it’s talking to the narcissist,
229. 29:33 interacting with the narcissist, let alone sharing your life with the narcissist or sharing a workplace with the narcissist. It feels all the time
230. 29:40 not only like walking on eggshells which is more typical of borderline being with a borderline uh but more like
231. 29:48 in a constant state of low intensity tremble tremors and earthquakes. It’s
232. 29:55 like there’s a constant earthquake but it’s very low intensity three or four on the rich scale.
233. 30:04 The speech is inappropriate and exposes the monster behind the mask. But there
234. 30:11 also age inappropriate behaviors. Behavior behaviors which are more much more typical of infants and toddlers.
235. 30:20 behaviors like temper tantrums and aggressive entitlement and a vision of the world which is so self-focused and self-centered
236. 30:31 that it excludes other people or renders them internal objects splitting people into all good and all bad or situations
237. 30:39 into all good and all bad. These are all age inappropriate. These are all infantile defense mechanisms, infantile
238. 30:45 behaviors. The narcissist is an infant. Infant pretending to be an adult,
239. 30:51 masquerading as an adult. Absence pretending to be a presence. In short, narcissism, pathological narcissism is a
240. 30:58 set or repatory of pretensions. And these pretensions hold only soul for
241. 31:05 for as long as the narcissist is not under stress and duress and tension and
242. 31:11 anxiety. When the narcissist is pushed to the corner, push comes to shove. You know,
243. 31:18 when the narcissist is stressed, when the narcissist becomes anxious, when the narcissist is mocked and ridiculed,
244. 31:24 shamed, humiliated, exposed, abandoned, rejected and criticized and disagreed with, the narcissist falls apart. This
245. 31:32 process is known as decompensation. and the age inappropriate of the inappropriateness of the narcissist. The fact that there’s a child inside that and that this child is in charge of the machinery. This is the Wizard of Oz.
246. 31:47 It comes to the four. It comes to the surface. And of course, it’s incredibly
247. 31:53 unsettling. It’s it’s absolutely mindboggling
248. 32:00 and uh terrifying in in many cases because the narcissist is a child, an infant, they are also mentalization failures. The narcissist is unable to
249. 32:11 construct a a rigorous applicable theory of mind. In other words, the narcissist is very bad at figuring out what makes people tick. Um, narcissists are able to
250. 32:25 spot vulnerabilities, shortcomings, frailties, chinks in the armor of other
251. 32:32 people. They are they have cold empathy. They’re able to scan other people cognitively and reflexively and gather information which allows them to manipulate other people efficaciously.
252. 32:44 That much is true. But narcissists are incapable of generating a theory of mind because they don’t have access to positive emotions. This access is blocked and so they don’t understand what makes people tick because emotions
253. 33:00 make people tick not cognitions. If you don’t do emotions, if you don’t grasp
254. 33:06 emotions, if you don’t glom emotions, you know nothing about human beings. And in this sense, narcissism is a close cousin of autism spectrum disorder disorders. So there are mentalization failures. And because a narcissist
255. 33:21 doesn’t perceive you as a human being, doesn’t perceive you as separate external with your own internal life and
256. 33:28 is incapable of of gauging even your emotions. He has never
257. 33:34 experienced them personally. There’s no shared there’s no shared shared reality
258. 33:40 or shared existence between you. There’s no what is known in in philosophy an
259. 33:46 interubjective space between you. So he keeps getting you wrong, disastrously
260. 33:52 wrong, shockingly wrong. He keeps misinterpreting your motivations, your
261. 33:59 attitudes, your beliefs, your values, your emotions, your cognitions, things you say. He keeps constantly failing
262. 34:08 at seeing you as you are making making sense of you and somehow fitting into
263. 34:17 you creating with you a third wholeness. So the nar it’s it’s as if the narcissist is indeed some extraterrestrial or alien and is trying to decode you and decipher you. the effort the effort is visible but it’s not working and it it’s there’s no click
264. 34:37 it’s not working now very often you fall in the narcissist trap you succumb to
265. 34:46 the shared fantasy you walk willingly into uh in the door and pass into the
266. 34:53 narcissist’s fantastic counterfactual uh territory
267. 34:59 very often of course you become um and amored with the narcissist and and addicted to the narcissist and so on. But it’s not because you you feel u it’s
268. 35:10 not because the narcissist um manipulates you because you are manipulating yourself and that’s my
269. 35:18 whole of mirrors effect. You fall in love with the way the narcissist sees you with your idealized version in the
270. 35:25 narcissist’s gaze and you get addicted to it and you want more of it.
271. 35:31 Now because narcissist the narcissist shares the same episodic autobiographical
272. 35:40 background as most of his victims because narcissists are childhood victims of abuse and trauma and their victims are also childhood victims of abuse and trauma. they are able to leverage this tortured internal child
273. 35:58 in order to make the the victims feel understood.
274. 36:04 So victims would say, “I never felt more understood in my life. He really knew me. The intimacy was instant and immediate.” But what victims fail to understand that is this is a simulation.
275. 36:18 It’s a simulation. There’s no real mentalization taking place. It’s the it’s the kind of feeling
276. 36:26 understood that artificial intelligence chatbots provide. It’s based on a on a
277. 36:33 language model. You share the same language with the narcissist because you share the same experiences. But the way
278. 36:39 the narcissist copes with his childhood experience is so dramatically different to other people, normal, more normal,
279. 36:46 more healthy people that there is no common denominator. It’s it’s a hoax. It’s wrong.
280. 36:53 And what you really do experience is the mentalization failure.
281. 37:00 And some people convince themselves that this mentalization failure is actually
282. 37:07 endearing and charming and disarming. You know, it’s like a kid. He doesn’t really get
283. 37:13 it. He doesn’t really know how to be an adult and so on so forth. And some people find it off-putting and
284. 37:20 horrifying, frankly. And so the mentalization failure coupled
285. 37:26 with the age inappropriate behaviors coupled with the inappropriate speech and so on, they give rise to what I call
286. 37:33 hesitant immaturity. It’s as if the narcissist is trying very, very hard
287. 37:41 to appear to be a mature adult. not only mature but well balanced, well put together, conssonant adult and keeps failing.
288. 37:52 It’s his maturity or her maturity, the hesitant, the intermittent,
289. 37:58 maybe a better phrase would be intermittent maturity. And this this applies to everything.
290. 38:05 Intergender relationships, sexual scripts, social scripts,
291. 38:12 behavioral modes, sublimatory channels, persona, mask, nothing fits together. Nothing works.
292. 38:24 Everything is off key. Everything is a work in progress. Everything is almost there, but never there. Everything is
293. 38:31 full halfbaked and and not full-fledged. Everything is like it’s it’s it’s it’s
294. 38:38 like raw material. It’s it’s it’s like um Michelangelo said that when he
295. 38:46 looks at a slab of marble, he sees the sculpture within. It’s the same. The narcissist is a slab of marble. A slab of marble and there’s a sculpture inside, but it’s not visible, not
296. 38:58 evident. Takes a lot of work to liberate it from the slab of marble. And the
297. 39:04 result is guaranteed to not be as qualitative as Michelangelos. And so the narcissist keeps fumbling and
298. 39:12 bumbling and failing and botching and blundering about like a drunk person,
299. 39:19 like a blind person, like I don’t know, like like someone in the dark. It’s it’s like he’s experimenting all the time. He’s trying things on, he’s attempting,
300. 39:31 and it keeps failing. and then he reframes the failing the failure as success and then of course it doesn’t lead him anywhere. There’s no learning um involved. Even the perception of time
301. 39:42 is wrong. Narcissists don’t perceive time as linear. They perceive time as
302. 39:48 cyclical. That’s why narcissists find it very difficult to grasp the consequences of
303. 39:54 their own actions because the narcissist is disjointed and discontinuous. There’s no continuity because there’s no self or at least no constellated or
304. 40:06 integrated self. There’s a host of self states which are loosely associated very
305. 40:12 reminiscent of dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder. So because there’s no
306. 40:18 continuity, the narcissist starts a new all the time from zero from scratch.
307. 40:26 Every single day there’s a new narcissist that leapt into existence
308. 40:32 from the mouth of Zeus or Kronos. Sorry, Kronos, not Zeus. And so there is a new
309. 40:38 narcissist and this new narcissist has very little in common with the previous narcissist. They share the same body but
310. 40:46 they like have different memories, different autobiographies, sometimes different values and beliefs and so on.
311. 40:52 And this is known as identity diffusion. Narcissist identity disturbance or identity diffusion is extreme exactly
312. 40:59 like the border lines and this creates major problems in apprehending or perceiving time causation and process.
313. 41:10 There’s time symmetry, not time asymmetry, the cyclicality rather than linearity. And you feel it when you’re interacting with the narcissist. you you have this
314. 41:21 feeling that there’s no record, there’s no history, there’s no accumulation.
315. 41:28 It’s as if you’re starting from scratch every every time. As if nothing is
316. 41:34 recalled, nothing is remembered, there’s no memory. And so the narcissist is forced
317. 41:40 ultimately to ignore reality, the environment and you in it
318. 41:46 because he is he lacks the basic instruments, tools, capabilities to to
319. 41:53 structure his his or her environment and then create a representation of this
320. 41:59 environment in his or her mind which would be adequate and functional. This is a total failure. You can’t do this without a fully structured, fully
321. 42:10 integrated, fully constellated, fully functional self. And narcissists don’t have this. So instead, what they do,
322. 42:17 they withdraw. They go inwards. They go inside. They adopt a skit solution. And even
323. 42:26 in the midst of a date with a narcissist, an interaction in the workplace, a conversation with a total
324. 42:32 stranger who happens to be a narcissist, a friendship with a narcissist, any type of interaction which is longer than 30
325. 42:38 seconds. You have this feeling, that he is talking to himself,
326. 42:44 that it’s not a dialogue, it’s a monologue, that you may be the audience, but it’s
327. 42:50 an internal audience. He is self audiencing. that is self-supplied. That it’s all
328. 42:56 about him. that you are a consumable, that you are
329. 43:02 commestable, that you are kind of a food, that is digesting you and
330. 43:08 consuming you and and and and sort of taking over you that you become an
331. 43:15 ingredient, a component, a cog, a wheel, a a prop in a theater production that
332. 43:21 takes place inside the narcissist. That’s what the stage is. And so ultimately the main reason for the uncanny valley reaction is that when you’re with a
333. 43:33 narcissist you feel at all times all alone and that is very very upsetting, disconcerting
334. 43:44 and primordly terrifying when you are faced with someone who does not exist
335. 43:51 just appears to exist simulates existence. but is an absence masquerading as a
336. 43:58 being. Someone who is as close as you can get to a ghost,
337. 44:05 to an apparition, someone who is a walking talking piece of fiction, a civil room. There is nothing in my view more frightening than
338. 44:17 this. It is after all the stuff of nightmares.