Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. How Narcissist Experiences False Self

1. 00:02 Do you feel that you are the same person every morning regardless of the revolving cast of characters in your life, changes in your body, health, illness, changes in your environment, anything from climate
2. 00:19 change to a new grocery store, things are in flux, things are evolving.
3. 00:26 Transformation is the way of the world. And yet like an island in a storm, there is a
4. 00:34 core core identity. There is some nucleus in you. There’s something stable.
5. 00:40 Something that keeps informing you every morning and every evening and in between
6. 00:46 that you are you. That you are immutable. That you are in some ways unchanged.
7. 00:54 that there is this thing that experiences everything. That there is
8. 01:00 this um as I said kernel that is there
9. 01:06 and it is gazing out into the world and inwardly and arranges everything so as to yield the perception or maybe
10. 01:17 even the misperception of continuity. Continuity
11. 01:23 and contiguity are the elements of the self.
12. 01:30 So if you wake up in the morning and you know that you are you regard regardless
13. 01:36 of what has happened yesterday or what’s going to happen tomorrow to you and to others. If you know that it is you who
14. 01:44 is experiencing all this, this is your self speaking. This is your self acting
15. 01:53 as an organizing principle and also as a hermeneutic explanatory interpretative p
16. 02:00 principle making sense of your life imbuing it with purpose direction and meaning. The self therefore is a core psychological feature around
17. 02:13 which everything else revolves. And today we’re going to ask the question, does the narcissist experience himself or herself the same way? Does the
18. 02:26 narcissist have a self? Does the narcissist have this sense of continuity?
19. 02:33 Does the narcissist wake up in the morning saying, “I am myself and no one else.” And the answer to this, for those of you whose attention span is limited to 30
20. 02:44 seconds, the answer to this is yes. The narcissist has this sense of continuity which he attributes to a functioning self.
21. 02:56 But we all know that the narcissist does not have a self, is not possessed of an ego. We all know that pathological narcissism is a compensatory reaction to
22. 03:07 a disruption in the formation of the self. So where does this sense of
23. 03:13 continuity emanate from? It is exuded by the false self.
24. 03:21 Let me summarize this. The narcissist experiences his false self the same way
25. 03:28 you experience your true self. And because the experience is identical, the
26. 03:35 narcissist is unable to tell the difference. The narcissist is convinced
27. 03:41 that his false self is the true self. He is convinced that his false self is
28. 03:48 authentic, real, not fantastic, factual, not counterfactual. that the false self
29. 03:55 is not a fantasy, not a piece of fiction, not a concoction, not a script for a movie, not some kind of elaborate
30. 04:03 yarn or narrative. No way, no Siri. The false self insists the narcissist is
31. 04:09 real and it is not false. It is absolutely true and voracious.
32. 04:16 And so this is where the confusion starts. Whereas normal healthy people have a functioning authentic self around which they organize their experiences,
33. 04:29 the narcissist has a false self, a narrative, a piece of fiction around
34. 04:36 which the narcissist organizes experiences which are fantastic, unreal,
35. 04:43 grandiose, inflated, counterfactual. a paracosm.
36. 04:49 The narcissist resides in a neverland of imagination
37. 04:55 or and of storytelling whereas healthy normal people reside firmly in reality
38. 05:01 at least most of the time. And the reason is that the self of normal
39. 05:07 healthy people is true and grounded in reality. Whereas the self of the
40. 05:13 narcissist is concocted, invented, an imaginary friend gone or a deity or
41. 05:21 divinity which has consumed the narcissist as a child. The nar narcissist can be conceived of as human sacrifice having sacrificed
42. 05:32 itself to the mo to this new god in a primitive religion the false self. Now
43. 05:41 why do I use he all the time? Half of all narcissists are women. Yes, you heard correctly. 50% of all narcissists are women. So why do I keep using he? Because I am a Victorian pre-suffragette
44. 05:55 male chauvinist. Yes, I am that old. Whenever I say he,
45. 06:03 translate it in your mind to he or she. Okay, Shashanim, my name is Sambaknin.
46. 06:10 I’m the author of Malignant Self- Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. And yes, I’m a male last
47. 06:19 time I checked. And let’s start by
48. 06:26 discussing the difference between false self and self-concept.
49. 06:32 The narcissist is aware of the false self and even proud of it. He is emotionally invested in the false self.
50. 06:39 He is affected. He has affected the false self. But the narcissist misidentifies the
51. 06:45 false self as his only and true and authentic self. And the reason is that
52. 06:52 the false self provides all the ego functions that a regular healthy normal
53. 07:00 true self provides. And one of these functions is a sense of continuity. Now in the case of the narcissist of course the sense of continuity is false and because it is
54. 07:12 false because it is premised on nonrealistic counterfactual fantastic
55. 07:18 grounds the sense of continuity of the narcissist is glitchy
56. 07:24 buggy and the narcissist experiences himself as disjointed and dissociative.
57. 07:31 But there’s still this presumption to continuity afforded by the false self.
58. 07:39 This sense of continuity is goes hand inhand with what is known as the synthetic function. The synthetic function is one of the main roles of the
59. 07:52 ego. It’s the crucial ability to organize, unify, and integrate different
60. 07:58 often conflicting aspects of one’s personality. You have some thoughts, you
61. 08:04 have some feeling effect, feelings, effects, emotions, and you have some experiences and they don’t always go
62. 08:11 together. But what you do on the fly, you spin a narrative. You reframe
63. 08:18 everything so that it fits cozily and snugly into each other into a coherent
64. 08:25 hole. And this allows you to engage in balance efficacious function action
65. 08:33 allows you to act in a balanced efficacious way. It it provides you with a stable sense of self and it is in in this sense an adaptation to reality. The
66. 08:45 synthetic function is a key process for healthy psychological development and it is absent in pathological narcissism. The false self provides an exat pseudo
67. 09:01 synthetic function. The false self causes the narcissist to experience himself continuously and to be able to act in ways which are
68. 09:13 efficacious. But it’s all fake and it’s all intermittent and disjointed and
69. 09:19 dissociated. The synthetic function is the ego’s way of making sense of internal conflicts.
70. 09:27 You’ve all heard of ambivalence. You love someone and you hate them at the same time. Loving and hating the same person is known as ambivalence. So
71. 09:38 ambivalence is an example where the ego uses the synthetic function to generate
72. 09:45 an attitude which is a synthesis a combination of the love and the hate and
73. 09:52 allows you to interact with that individual in a way which yields
74. 09:58 beneficial long-term outcomes. It is a synthetic function which allows
75. 10:04 the ego, the self, call it as you will, the core identity. It is the synthetic function which copes
76. 10:12 with external demands and other externalities. It is a synthetic function which leads to sublimation,
77. 10:20 a channeling of energy in socially acceptable ways. It is a synthetic function that is responsible for
78. 10:26 creativity and as I said for a unified identity. The false self provides a
79. 10:33 feigned fake uh imitated emulated mimicry of the synthetic function. And
80. 10:41 because this is the case, the narcissist experiences the false self as though he
81. 10:48 were the false self. There is a cerminous cospacial identity between the narcissist and the false self. It’s not like the narcissist says, “I am a
82. 11:00 narcissist and I have a false self. I’m a narcissist and I possess a false self
83. 11:06 the same way I possess a flashy car or a trophy wife.” No, that’s not how the
84. 11:12 narcissist experiences the false self. The narcissist says, “I am the false
85. 11:19 self. There is only the false self. The false self is my true self.
86. 11:26 There is no other self and therefore the false self is an au authentic expression
87. 11:34 of who I am. The false self he is who I am. The false self was first described
88. 11:41 by Donald Winnott and um one of the founders of object
89. 11:48 relations theory especially the British school of object relations theory and it was built on Helen Deutsche’s concept of as if personality
90. 12:00 suggested that there is a kind of self that develops as a defense against
91. 12:06 impingements trauma trauma abuse and in adaptation to
92. 12:12 such a dysfunctional hostile environment. And the false self in Winnott’s work is
93. 12:18 contrasted with the true self. The true self develops in an environment that
94. 12:24 adapts to the infant and allows the child to discover and express true impul
95. 12:30 impulses. In other words, Winnot who used who who was a pediatrician by the way, Winnott
96. 12:37 suggested that if you legitimize the child’s urges and drives and wishes and
97. 12:44 dreams and fears, if you legitimize the child’s um exploration of the world and
98. 12:50 of itself, the child’s emotions, effects, cognitions, in short, if you
99. 12:56 validate the child, if you do not negate the child, the child is likely to end up
100. 13:02 having a true self. On the other hand, if you do not allow
101. 13:08 the child to become, if you do not for example uh allow the child to separate
102. 13:14 from you as a parental figure, if you do not allow the let the child individuate, if you frown upon the child’s attempts
103. 13:21 to express emotions and independent critical thinking. If you are overprotective of the child and you do
104. 13:28 not allow the child to explore the world and to interact with peers because it’s too dangerous, whatever the case may be,
105. 13:34 if the child is invalidated, then this kind of child is going to come up with a false self, an imaginary
106. 13:42 friend that gradually transforms into a deity or a divinity, which then merges
107. 13:48 with a child and becomes the entitled grandio narcissist.
108. 13:55 We could therefore say that the self, both the true self and the false self
109. 14:01 are internal objects. They’re internal objects because they engage in what is known as in psychoanalytic theory as a secondary
110. 14:12 process. A secondary process is a conscious process. It’s rational mental activity under the control of the ego and what
111. 14:23 Freud called the reality principle. And this mental process, the secondary uh process which includes problem solving, judgment, planning and systematic
112. 14:34 thinking, it enables individuals to meet both the external demands of reality of
113. 14:40 the environment and the internal demands of their instincts, their drives, their
114. 14:47 urges. So the ego is a kind of mediator. It’s a kind of broker. It’s kind of
115. 14:54 arbitrator between reality and your internal drives, urges, wishes,
116. 15:02 instincts which threaten to overpower you. What Freud called the id.
117. 15:10 And it’s all done in rational effective ways known as the secondary process thinking. And here it lies the problem because the narcissist is not possessed
118. 15:23 of a true integrated constellated self. Because the narcissist identifies with
119. 15:30 an internal object which is facious, which is counterfactual,
120. 15:36 which is irrational, which is founded on cognitive distortions and biases.
121. 15:43 Because the narcissist is led astray or misled by a kind of godlike entity which
122. 15:52 comprises omniscience and omnipotence and perfection and brilliance. Because of all this, the narcissist is not
123. 15:59 grounded in reality. He’s divorced from reality. His reality testing is impaired. Because the narcissist is
124. 16:07 incapable of perceiving reality appropriately, his actions and his decisions and his choices and his cognitions and his effects, his
125. 16:19 emotions, all of them are completely off the charts. They are completely all
126. 16:25 right, out of control, deformed. One could even say uh in the footsteps of
127. 16:32 Otto Kenberg, demented, pseudocycotic. You see, narcissists have no self.
128. 16:40 They have no ego. When people say ego death, the irony is that ego death means narcissism. There is no other psychological state without
129. 16:52 a self. The only exception is pathological narcissism. Narcissists are therefore ironically, sarcastically,
130. 17:03 selfless. They are not egotist because they don’t have an ego.
131. 17:09 The ego functions include reality testing, impulse control, emotion
132. 17:15 regulation, judgment, object relations, cognitive processes, defense mechanisms. The
133. 17:22 synthetic function that I mentioned, none of them, none of them persist or
134. 17:28 operate appropriately and continuously in the narcissist’s mind. Not one of
135. 17:34 them. The narcissist reality testing is impaired. His impulse control is
136. 17:40 impaired. His emotion regulation is impaired. He disregulates in reaction to
137. 17:46 injuries and motification. His judgment is completely erroneous.
138. 17:52 object relations, forget about it. Cognitive processes, distorted defense
139. 17:58 mechanisms, rampant, especially primitive ones, infantile ones, like splitting. And the synthetic function is
140. 18:07 really synthetic, is fake, completely fake. The narcissist’s ego functions
141. 18:14 are inoperative because the narcissist doesn’t have anything that could remotely pass for an
142. 18:21 ego. He has a pale distorted deformed defective imitation of the self or the ego which gets everything wrong. It’s a
143. 18:33 caricature of the self, not a functioning true authentic veritable
144. 18:39 self. Simulacrum psychoanalytic theory ego functions are the various activities of the ego including as I said perception of the external world self-awareness problem
145. 18:51 solving control of motor functions adaptation to reality memory
146. 18:57 reconciliation of conflicting impulses and ideas and regulation of effect. The ego is frequently described as the executive agency of the personality working in the interest of reconciling
147. 19:09 with reality and preventing adverse consequences.
148. 19:15 None of this exists in the narcissist. The narcissist has a false self and in
149. 19:22 narcissism the false self is also the locus of the self-concept and the target of co-
150. 19:30 idealization. Now that’s a mouthful. Allow me to explain. In normal healthy people, there is a clear boundary impermeable partition between the self
151. 19:43 and the selfconcept. The self is an organic
152. 19:50 unitary entity which organizes everything, takes care of everything and
153. 19:57 interprets, explains everything. There is a perception an experience of the self which is known as self-concept. Self-concept is the way you see
154. 20:08 yourself, the way you apprehend and perceive your self, the way you conceive of your self.
155. 20:17 It’s as if you and yourself were two entities and you were able to observe yourself and then describe yourself and then analyze yourself. Put all of these
156. 20:29 together, you get the self-concept. This is what happens in healthy people. In the narcissist,
157. 20:36 because the false self is false and it’s a piece of it’s a narrative piece. It’s
158. 20:42 a script. It’s not real. There is no distinction between the false self and the self-concept.
159. 20:50 When the narcissist selfobserves, introspects, when the narcissist, what
160. 20:56 the narcissist sees is the false self, the self-concept of the narcissist is
161. 21:03 the false self. There’s no difference between them. They are co-extant.
162. 21:09 Consequently, when the narcissist interacts with other people, whatever the narcissist does to
163. 21:17 the concept of other people reflects back on him, let me explain why.
164. 21:26 When a healthy normal individual interacts with other people, talks to
165. 21:32 them, walks with them, makes love to them, has dinner with them, uh you name it,
166. 21:38 any kind of interaction with other people, a healthy, normal, balanced
167. 21:44 person possessed of a true functional self. This kind of person what they do
168. 21:50 they distinguish an external object which is
169. 21:56 the other person from the internal representation of that external object in their minds. Because healthy people are able to make the difference between
170. 22:08 self and self-concept. They can also make the difference between external object and representative internal object.
171. 22:20 These healthy normal people have experienced separation from the mother.
172. 22:28 And by experiencing separation they came upon the knowledge and they
173. 22:34 internalized the knowledge of the difference between inside and outside, external and internal, me and you, me and the world and so on. boundaries.
174. 22:46 They developed healthy self or ego boundaries. Whereas in the narcissist,
175. 22:53 not having experienced separation, the narcissist is unable to tell the difference between self and self-concept, between false self and himself,
176. 23:05 between external objects and internal objects. And so the way the narcissist
177. 23:12 perceives other people as external object objects becomes totally
178. 23:18 internalized. The minute the narcissist starts to interact with someone out
179. 23:24 there with an external person, separate person, that minute, that split second,
180. 23:31 the narcissist internalizes the other person and continues to interact with a
181. 23:37 person only internally. Let’s translate it and give an example.
182. 23:44 Imagine that the narcissist targets you as a potential intimate
183. 23:52 partner or a participant in a shared fantasy, the mother figure, the substitute mother figure. Imagine the
184. 23:58 narcissist decides that you would be a great source of narcissistic supply. That minute, the narcissist idealizes
185. 24:06 you. And yet because the narcissist is unable to perceive you as external to himself, as separate from him, by idealizing you, he is actually idealizing himself.
186. 24:24 You have become an internal object in his mind. Now that he is idealizing this internal
187. 24:31 object in his mind, he is actually idealizing a part of his mind, a portion of his
188. 24:38 mind, a segment of his mind. So all idealization in narcissism is co-
189. 24:46 idealization. And yes, all devaluation is co-devaluation.
190. 24:52 The narcissist is unable to differentiate himself from
191. 24:58 his environment or at least human environment because he
192. 25:04 cannot make the distinction between false self and self-concept. They’re one
193. 25:10 and the same. Gradually over the years across the lifespan, the
194. 25:18 false self replaces the narcissist’s true self. Originally, the false self was an imaginary friend. The false self was everything the child was not. The child was helpless. The false self was all
195. 25:35 powerful, omnipotent. The child couldn’t create a theory regarding the minds of
196. 25:41 the adults around him because these adults were themselves very deranged and
197. 25:47 disturbed. And so the false self is omniscient, all knowing. The child has
198. 25:54 been told that he or she is unworthy, unlovable, inadequate. The false self is exactly
199. 26:02 the opposite. It’s a perfect being. It’s a god-like entity, etc. So the the false self
200. 26:10 initial function was compensatory. It was intended to shield the child from
201. 26:16 hurt and narcissistic injury by imputing to the child in other words by
202. 26:23 self-imputing omnipotence, omniscience and omni omnipresence godlike
203. 26:29 attributes, divine attributes. The narcissist pretends or keeps
204. 26:35 pretending that his false self is real and demands that other people affirm this confabulation, confirm it. He not only says my false self is who I am. He
205. 26:47 wants other people to say your false self is who you are. No, no doubt about it. Your fantasy is not a fantasy. It’s
206. 26:54 completely real. He wants to coersse other people, cajol them, convince them,
207. 27:00 persuade them or bribe them into confirming his fantasy as the only reality and his false self as actually who he is. In this sense, narcissism,
208. 27:12 pathological narcissism is a missionary religion. It’s like the missionaries who went to Africa and tried to convert the natives into Christianity. The narcissist wants to convert you into his
209. 27:24 primitive private religion where he is the godhead and you are the worshipper.
210. 27:32 The false self reinterprets information from the world from the environment in a
211. 27:38 way that is flattering to the narcissist and at the same time tries to keep it
212. 27:46 socially acceptable. So there’s a an inherent or innate
213. 27:52 conflict. On the one hand, the main role of the false self is self agrandisement
214. 27:58 known in clinical psychology as self-enhancement. But at the same time, the false self
215. 28:04 pretends to be an ego. The false self acts or mimics a real self, a true self.
216. 28:12 So the false self pretends that it is acting on the reality principle. The
217. 28:18 false self insists that it is socially commendable, socially acceptable,
218. 28:25 conforms to reality and and social mores and norms and conventions and so on. And
219. 28:32 it imitates and emulates normaly, normal emotions, normal cognitions,
220. 28:38 empathy, normal interactions, normal reactions. The emphasis on being normal, the emphasis on emulating and imitating a
221. 28:49 state of normality and statistical normaly is a core feature of the false
222. 28:55 self, but it has many other functions. Two of the most important ones are
223. 29:02 number one decoy. The false self serves as a decoy. It
224. 29:08 attracts the fire of abuse and trauma. It is a proxy for the true self. It is a
225. 29:15 firewall. It is a protection. It is a fortress, a moat. It is tough as nails.
226. 29:22 And it can absorb any amount of pain, hurt, and negative affectivity, negative emotions.
227. 29:28 By inventing it, the child develops immunity and impunity to the
228. 29:34 indifference, manipulation, sadism, smothering or explo exploitation. In
229. 29:41 short, the abuse inflicted on him by his parents or by other primary objects and
230. 29:47 caregivers or peers and so on. So the false self is an invisibility
231. 29:56 cloak. It protects the child by rendering the child invisible
232. 30:03 by taking away the true self. It’s as if the child is not there to be abused,
233. 30:11 not in situ to be traumatized. It’s a it’s very primitive infantile magical
234. 30:17 thinking. You know, small children when they are afraid, they cover themselves
235. 30:23 with a blanket. They believe that when they are under the blanket, they’re invisible to the monster in the room.
236. 30:30 It’s the same with the false self. The false self is this blanket. Indeed, many
237. 30:36 scholars claim that the false self is a transitional object exactly like a
238. 30:42 blanket or a teddy bear carried by a child everywhere. The false self protects a child, renders
239. 30:50 a child invisible and omnipotent at the same time. The second function of the false self
240. 30:57 is misrepresented by the narcissist. Narcissist says the false self is the
241. 31:03 true self. What the narcissist is saying in effect is I am not who you think I am. I’m invisible to you. I’m someone else. I am this self, the false self. I
242. 31:16 am not someone. I am not the true self. Therefore, because I’m the false self,
243. 31:22 because the false self and I are one and the same, I deserve special treatment. I
244. 31:28 deserve better, painless, and more considerate life experience. This is
245. 31:34 known as clinical entitlement. The false self, thus is a contraption intended to
246. 31:42 alter other people’s behavior, to modify their behavior, to change people’s attitudes towards a narcissist. One could say that the false self is a
247. 31:53 machavelian device, a manipulative device intended to alter the environment
248. 31:59 in subtle ways by miscommunicating misinformation, by flooding the zone
249. 32:06 with misinformation about the narcissist. This misinformation causes people to
250. 32:13 react to a moving fuzzy target thereby rendering people more
251. 32:20 vulnerable, weaker, more aminable to manipulation and goal orientation or
252. 32:28 goal accomplishment. This is the antisocial aspect of the false self.
253. 32:35 And all these roles of the false self are crucial to survival. The false self therefore is a positive adaptation. The child could not have survived his
254. 32:47 abusive and traumatizing environment. If the child had not invented the false
255. 32:54 self, the false self was the guardian and custodian and protector and the
256. 33:01 angel that kept the child alive. And through the lifespan of the narcissist, the narcissist perceives the false self in these capacities, in these
257. 33:12 roles as crucial to survival and to the proper psychological functioning of the narcissist. The false self is by far more important to the narcissist than
258. 33:23 his dilapidated, dysfunctional, frozen, oified, infantile true self. And the two
259. 33:31 selves, the false self and the true self, are not part of a spectrum. They’re not on in at two ends of a continuum. There are some neorudians
260. 33:43 who suggest this, but I strongly disagree. It’s not like the false self
261. 33:49 is some exaggeration, hyperbolic rendition of the of the true self. The false self and the true self
262. 33:56 have nothing in common because the false self is defined by the child,
263. 34:02 molded and shaped by a child to be the exact opposite of the true self, the
264. 34:08 exact negation of the true self. The child rejects itself. The false self is about self-loathing, self-rejection. The false self in many ways is a reaction formation. The false self is a signifier of the
265. 34:25 child’s mental suicide and reinvention or reincarnation as someone completely
266. 34:32 different. So the false self has nothing to do with the true self. Healthy people, normal people do not have a
267. 34:40 false self. And it and the false self differs
268. 34:48 uh from the true self because it’s pathological.
269. 34:54 Uh there can be no equivalency between something which is healthy, normal,
270. 35:01 functional and something that is through and through thoroughly. pathologize.
271. 35:08 The true self is about reality. The false self is about fantasy. They don’t
272. 35:15 inhabit the same realms. It is true that even healthy people have
273. 35:21 something called mask, the work of Irving Goffman or Persona, the work of
274. 35:27 Carl Jung. And it is true that people present an artificial facade. They play
275. 35:34 act. They they they kind of pretend um and they present this mask or persona
276. 35:40 to the world. That much is true. But the mask and the persona are not like the
277. 35:46 false. At any given moment, the individual who presents a mask to the world, presents a
278. 35:53 persona to the world, is fully aware that he is not the mask, that he is not
279. 36:00 the persona. The mask and the persona are a far cry from the false self because the false self is is submerged. It’s mostly unconscious and the false self depends on outside feedback is externally regulated and the
280. 36:18 false self self is compulsive. And there isn’t a minute or a second in the
281. 36:25 narcissist’s life where the narcissist is alone with his true self.
282. 36:32 The false self is present in every microscond of the narcissist’s life
283. 36:38 because the narcissist has made the fatal attribution misattribution
284. 36:45 having identified itself with a false self. The false self is an adaptive
285. 36:51 reaction to pathological circumstances, but its dynamics make it predominant.
286. 36:57 The false self devours the narcissist’s psyche. The false self is a predator. It
287. 37:04 press upon the true self and upon the narcissist. It consumes the narcissist.
288. 37:10 It subsumes and digests the narcissist. Nothing is left behind except bleached
289. 37:16 the bleached bones of what the narcissist used to be. And so the false self prevents the efficient flexible adaptation and functioning of the personality as a whole. It renders the personality rigid.
290. 37:32 That the narcissist possesses prominent false self as well as a suppressed and
291. 37:38 dilapidated true self is by now commonly accepted. It’s mainstream. And yet, how
292. 37:44 intertwined and inseparable are these two? Do they interact? How do they influence each other? And what behaviors can be attributed squarely to one of them or the other? One of the other of
293. 37:57 the one or the other of these two protagonists? Does the false self assume traits and
294. 38:03 attributes of the true self in order to deceive the world and and to deceive the narcissist? In a full-fledged narcissist, the false self does imitate the true self. As I said, it imitates the ego functions.
295. 38:21 It gives a semblance of continuity, an inner experience of contiguity, an
296. 38:27 immutability. These are all fake. These are all intermittent. And every impingement from the outside world destabilizes this precarious house of cards.
297. 38:38 And the false self deploys two mechanisms to artfully imitate the true self. Reinterpretation.
298. 38:46 The false self causes the narcissist to reinterpret certain emotions and reactions in a flattering, socially acceptable light. The narcissist may for
299. 38:57 instance interpret fear as compassion. If the narcissist hurts somebody
300. 39:03 and he is afraid of that somebody, an authority figure for example, he may feel bad afterwards and interpret this
301. 39:10 his discomfort as empathy, regret, remorse. To be afraid is humiliating. But to be
302. 39:16 compassionate and remorseful is commendable. It earns the narcissist social capital, social commendation and
303. 39:23 understanding. In short, narcissistic supply. So reinterpreting the internal
304. 39:29 states of the narcissist and the narcissist’s interactions with his environment a major is a major function
305. 39:36 of the force cell. And the other function is pure unmititigated uh mimicry, emulation, imitation. The narcissist is possessed of an uncanny
306. 39:47 ability to psychologically penetrate other people. I call it cold empathy.
307. 39:53 Often this gift is abused and put at the service of the narcissist control freery
308. 39:59 and sadism. The narcissist uses this capacity uses called empathy to
309. 40:06 liberally to penetrate the defenses of people to take over them to manipulate
310. 40:12 them to annihilate the natural defenses of his victims by faking for example
311. 40:18 empathy. This capacity is coupled with the narcissist’s eerie ability to imitate emotions, empathy, and the the behavior’s attendant on effects. The
312. 40:30 narcissist possesses what I call emotional resonance tables. He keeps
313. 40:36 records of every action and reaction, every aerance and every consequence, every datum provided by other people
314. 40:43 regarding their state of mind and emotional makeup. And from this gigantic database, the narcissist constructs a set of equations, formulas, which often
315. 40:56 result in impeccably accurate renditions of emotional behavior, effective behavior. And this can be enormously deceiving. That’s another major function
316. 41:07 of the false self. Okay, I gave you a survey of the false self.
317. 41:13 I hope I hope you get the picture. When you’re interacting with the narcissist, you’re interacting with the false self.
318. 41:20 There’s no one else there. There’s nobody inside. It’s an absence masquerading as a presence. It’s a falsity pretending to be the truth. It’s
319. 41:32 a fantasy claiming to be reality. It’s all in the narcissist’s mind or
320. 41:38 what passes for his mind. It’s a playground. It’s a space that is infested and infected and contaminated
321. 41:46 by trauma abuse and the adaptations to trauma and abuse that only a child who
322. 41:53 is two year two years old can come up with. adaptations that become in later
323. 42:00 life mal adaptations and that afflict the narcissist and
324. 42:06 everyone around him and causes great harm and hurt and pain and heartbreak
325. 42:13 and devastation all around.