Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Psychopaths, Narcissists Rage Differently, for Different Reasons

1. 00:02 Narcissists rage. Psychopaths rage. Even professors of psychology rage. Don’t ask. And the question, of course, is narcissistic rage the same as psychopathic rage or are the major psychonamic differences between the two? That is the topic of today’s video. My
2. 00:30 name is San Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and the raging professor of psychology in several universities whose unfortunate students are at my complete mercy. Okay, Shanim, you’ve had enough of my creepy laugh. Let’s go. Let’s go and
3. 00:55 discuss the topic. Let’s delve right in. Unlike psychopathic rage, narcissistic rage is short-term. There’s a flare up, there’s an eruption, there’s a kind of trigger and then there is a disproportionate over the top, totally crazy to be frank. Um, explos explosive anger
4. 01:22 display. It’s very ostentatious. It’s very exhibitionistic and it rarely culminates in violence because narcissistic rage is a form of self-regulation. And this is a major difference. There’s a major difference between this and psychopathic rage. Psychopathic rage is
5. 01:47 terrifying to behold, as terrifying as narcissistic rage, but it has nothing to do with self-regulation. It’s not about regulating the psychopath’s internal environment. Whereas a narcissist uses displays of rage to kind of convince himself of his omnipotence, his
6. 02:10 divinity, his, you know, the psychopath rages mainly when he is frustrated. Now, before you all jump down my throat, half of all narcissists are women. I’m going to use the male gender pronoun because I’m a Victorian male chauvinist. Okay, so that’s the first difference. The
7. 02:36 first distinction is that psychopathic rage is um about expressing channeling frustration. It is a perfect example of dollars frustration aggression hypothesis. Whereas narcissistic rage is a form of self-regulation. It’s a it’s kind of internal communication. It’s as if the
8. 03:01 narcissist is putting putting up some kind of stage production mainly to convince himself rather than others. We’ll come to it in a minute. Now, sistic rage is reactive.
9. 03:17 It is triggered by something. But this something doesn’t have to be external. For example, when the narcissist anticipates humiliation and rejection, the narcissist re may react with rage. Um, same applies to some extent to the borderline. The borderline has
10. 03:36 anticipatory anxiety. Borderline anticipates rejection, abandonment, and reacts accordingly. Whereas the narcissist anticipates humiliation, shaming, exposure, denigration, and um generally speaking, being discriminated against and treated unjustly. And so the
11. 03:55 narcissist rage emanates from a victimhood narrative, a morality play where the narcissist is the eternal victim and everyone, absolutely everyone conspires against him, is out to take him down, hates him and so on so forth. So narcissistic rage is reactive. When
12. 04:18 you insult the narcissist, when there’s an a slight when there is criticism or disagreement with the narcissist, then of course this may trigger or provoke narcissistic rage. But at the same time, the narcissist has paranoid ideiation and hypervigilance and he may
13. 04:36 be he may react with rage to totally imaginary slides to innocuous comments and behaviors. And this involves a mechanism known as referential ideiation and hostile attribution bias. So narcissistic rage is reactive. But I said earlier that it has something to do
14. 05:03 with a narcissist’s need to regulate his sense of selfworth, his grandiose, fantastic inflated self-concept. In other words, narcissistic rage is intimately connected to the cognitive distortion known as grandiosity. It is self-enhancing. The rage is self-enhancing.
15. 05:26 The narcissist perceives a challenge to the vulnerable fragile self-concept to the implicit self-esteem as it is called in clinical literature. And then the narcissist reacts with resto restoration a restoration of his alleged omnipotence divinity and and so on. So it’s
16. 05:49 restorative. Narcissistic rage is restorative. It restores um the grandiosity or the grandio narrative of the self-concept. And in this sense, narcissistic rage regulates the narcissist’s internal environment by providing visible, ostentatious, in yourrface, dramatic
17. 06:12 uh terrifying self-enhancement. Psychopathic rage is completely different. The psychopath is goal oriented. And so psychopathic rage is mavelian. It’s manipulative. It’s goal focused. The the psychopath rages because he wants to accomplish something. He wants
18. 06:34 to change your behavior. He wants to take something away from you. He wants you to give him something. He wants you to comply with his wishes and demands. The rage is highly instrumental. So this is instrumental weaponized rage and it is goal oriented.
19. 06:50 Sometimes more rarely psychopaths engage in purging behaviors. The rage is is purging purges the the psychopath. It’s a form of externalized aggression. It’s as if as if there’s a volcano there inside the psychopath and there are pressures building up magma and lava and
20. 07:12 I don’t know what else building up and then this pressure erupts cleansing the psychopath. So the psychopathic rage is a kind of self-inflicted purgatory. and it lasts for as long as it takes to accomplish the goal or until the frustrating object is eliminated or punished.
21. 07:39 So narcissistic rage is a reaction to a real or imagined trigger and has to do with restoring the narcissist’s sense of inflated fantastic grandiosity. So self-regulation is that’s the reason it is dramatic. It’s like a theater production. It’s
22. 08:01 like a movie. And that’s the reason it’s disproportionate because the narcissist is God. It’s the wrath of God. Psychopathic rage is much more limited. However, it’s manipulative. It’s goal oriented. And it’s intended to accomplish something. It lasts for as long as it
23. 08:20 takes to accomplish the goal. There’s another type of psychopathic rage, the purging rage. Um, and that goes on until the frustrating object, the object that gave the psychopath kind of frustration is eliminated or punished. One of the main functions and outcomes
24. 08:41 of rage is that of course it negates intimacy. It’s very diff difficult to be intimate with someone who rages at you or rages in general. Negative affectivity, someone who is constantly negative in a highly viferous, aggressive, violent, visible, ostentatious,
25. 09:01 exhibitionistic way. It’s very difficult to love them, to care for them, to be attracted to them. It’s very unattractive and it negates intimacy. And so one of the main functions of narcissistic rage mainly is about self-denial of happiness and love.
26. 09:23 The rage destroys all sources of happiness and all founds of love. It’s the rage takes care to make sure that the narcissist never ever experiences love and happiness because he destroys the very people and the very situations and the very jobs and the very job
27. 09:48 prospects and the very circumstances and the very collectives and the very everything that could give him happiness and love. It’s a rejection of life. As Hervy Cleley observed, the narcissist rage is destructive, is self-defeating. But at the same time, the nar the the
28. 10:13 rage of the narcissist affirms, confirms to the narcissist the internalized bed object. So on the one hand the rage pushes away and obliterates any potential for love and happiness and contentment and accomplishments and so on so forth. self-defeating, self-destructive.
29. 10:35 But even as it is self defeating and destructive is perce it’s perceived as just. It’s associated with a deep sensation of justice. And above all, it’s the justice metered out to the narcissist himself as the incarnation and raification of an
30. 10:56 internalized bed object. The voice that keeps telling the narcissist, “You’re unworthy. You’re unlovable. You’re inadequate. You are a failure. And you need to be punished for your shortcomings. And the rage brings on the punishment by denying the narcissist happiness and love.
31. 11:16 So the rage in the case of nar of narcissism pathological narcissism the rage fulfills a dual function two functions and these two functions are mutually exclusive and this creates constant dissonance. The first function, you’re bad. You’re unworthy. You’re
32. 11:38 unlovable. You deserve to be punished. And the rage will end up punishing you. Will end up destroying your life. That’s one function. Second function, you’re godlike, you’re perfect, you’re superior, you are omnipotent, you’re all powerful. And so the rage is going to prove it.
33. 12:00 It’s going to prove it above all to yourself, but also to other people. You’re going to rage as a display and exhibition of who you truly are. And who you truly are is a divinity, a dity. So, at the same time, the narcissist rage is sending mixed signals to the
34. 12:18 narcissist. Above all, to the narcissist, mixed signals. You’re nothing. You’re a loser. You’re a failure. You’re unworthy. You’re inadequate. You deserve punishment. That’s one message, one signal. And the other message, you’re godlike. It’s the wrath of God. Your rage terrifies
35. 12:40 everyone. You control everything. You’re the master and the boss and in charge and so on. And these two messages are of course incompatible and they create a permanent sense of dissonance in the narcissist. And they lead to another round of rage. in order in a desperate attempt to
36. 13:00 resolve the dissonance via the gaze of other people. Say Narcissist wants other people to tell him, “Yeah, you’re godlike. Your rage is so impressive. We It’s all inspiring, you know, shock and awe. It’s it’s amazing. It’s it’s a it’s a fireworks display of superiority and
37. 13:20 supremacy.” And so the narcissist wants to compel other people to resolve the dissonance for him. He wants to use rage to force other people or coersse other people to tell him that he is perfect, that he is divine, that he is omnipotent, that he is brilliant, that
38. 13:38 he is unequaled and unprecedented. And so in this restricted sense, the rage is instrumental. And of course it doesn’t resolve the problem because never mind how frightened and terrified and terrorized people are, never mind how they inform the narcissist of his super alleged
39. 14:02 superiority on ostensible supremacy. The internalized bed object is there and it’s working full-time overtime and it’s it constantly is informing the narcissist, sending the narcissist exactly the opposite message. You’re nobody. You’re nothing. You don’t deserve to live. And so
40. 14:28 there is this constant tension between the two messages of the rage, internal messages of the rage, the way the rage is interpreted by the narcissist himself and the conflict between the narcissist internalized bed object, this constellation or cluster of voices that
41. 14:48 disparage the narcissist, put him down, this attempt to destroy him from the inside. and what people are saying. So there’s always this clash and the desperate attempt to resolve the dissonance between bad object and self-concept never succeeds. Never succeeds because
42. 15:09 both omnipotence and unworthiness and lovability are preserved by the rage. So this leads us to early work by Otto Kenberg in the 70s where Kenberg suggested that the grandio self-concept is not only compensatory but it is the only defense against is
43. 15:32 only bull work against borderline self-destruction. He said that pathological narcissism is a defense against borderline impulses, borderline dysregulation and borderline dynamics. And we see this in action in narcissistic rage. The rage is of course a form of emotion
44. 15:52 dysregulation. It’s highly borderline and indeed borderline rage as well. And yet the narcissist reframes the rage, embeds it in a fantastic narrative which is self-enhancing and self aggrandizing and self-justifying and try the narcissist desperately attempts
45. 16:19 to silence the internalized bed object with a rage. It’s as if making external noise will drown the internal noise. And and you could say therefore that the rage is the narcissist’s way of attempting to cope with the bad object to quell it to reframe it maybe to
46. 16:43 rewrite it to to do something with it. It’s narcissistic rage seems to be an internal strategy for coping with a bad object. This leads to a larger insight that mental health disorders in general are divided could be divided. We could I could offer an osology or a taxonomy of
47. 17:06 mental health disorders which is divided in three. We have mental health disorders that mirror something. There’s something healthy, there’s something normal. You put a mirror to it, you get the reverse reflection. You see in the mirror you see yourself reversed of
48. 17:24 course. So a mirror doesn’t provide you with an accurate reflection. It provide you with the wrong information about yourself. And so there are certain mental health disorders that are mirror disorders. They reflect erroneously healthy normal dynamics.
49. 17:45 Um there are other mental health disorders that are distortion disorders. These are disorders that involve an exaggeration of healthy normal features and traits, a rearrangement of these traits in in combinations that yield psychopathology. So, and narcissism is is an example. And
50. 18:05 then you have hybrids, disorders that are both mirroring and distorting. And so when we discuss narcissistic rage, it is an attempt to combine mirroring elements, psychopathological mirroring elements with psychopathological distorting elements like
51. 18:29 I’m going to the narcissist says I’m going to exaggerate my anger you know and by exaggerating my anger I’m going to rearrange my internal world not the external world my internal world in a way that would reflect normaly or normality would reflect
52. 18:51 health would so I’m going to rearrange my internal worlds to render it efficacious functional healthy so the narcissist attempts to distort a normal effect and to distort it in
53. 19:11 order to accomplish um an escape from the mirror disorder. And then what the narcissist ends up doing is ends up creating a hybrid disorder where there are mirror elements and distortion elements. And so narcissistic rage is probably one of of the three most dysfunctional
54. 19:37 behaviors of narcissist. In this sense, it exacerbates the disorder. Makes it much worse. And no wonder the narcissistic rage is often coupled with what could easily be described as psychotic micro episodes, as borderline dysregulation um or borderline regression. easily because
55. 20:00 the narcissist introduces through via the vehicle via the instrument of narcissistic rage. The narcissist introduces into his basic foundational disorder. He introduces elements from other disorders. He converts his disorder from a pure distortion disorder to a hybrid disorder.
56. 20:24 All these are ways of coping with grief.
57. 20:30 With grief and with dysphoria. Both the grief and the dysphoria are strongly attached to the internalized bed object. You could even say that grief and dysphoria are ways of affecting investing emotional psychic energy in the internalized bed object.
58. 20:50 Grief and dysphoria are crucial elements in pathological narcissism in borderline personality disorder. I also believe that in psychopathy the problem again is that grief and dysphoria which usually co occur. They’re usually comorbid in in pathological narcissism are again
59. 21:11 mutually exclusive. They are again a form of mirror disorder because the because grief is past oriented whereas depression is future oriented. You could say that depression is a kind of anticipatory grief like anticipating something that would cause you to mourn or to grieve. When
60. 21:37 you anticipate a bad hopeless future, you become depressed. When you recall your bad hopeless past, you grieve. And so depression has a close affinity to grief but different time orientation, temporal orientation. And in pathological narcissism, the the
61. 22:00 desperate attempt to reconcile interminable infinite grief, all-consuming grief with the prospect of equally potent, equally powerful depression. The the the solution the narcissist comes up with is the grandio self-concept. The grandio self-concept reconciles the
62. 22:24 grief and the depression. The grandio self-concept says no need to be depressed because I’m godlike and there’s magical thinking. Anything I put my mind to I’m going to accomplish and so on. And also no need to grieve because the trauma and abuse that you
63. 22:46 have suffered and the adverse circumstances or mistreatment or parental bad parenting or whatever it was they’ve led to an excellent outcome. They’ve made you a god. So the grandio self concept is a narrative that seeks to eliminate grief and depression. And it is when
64. 23:12 these attempts fail, when the grief breaks through or the depression breaks through that narcissistic rage is triggered. And so we can now put everything together and say that narcissism is a re narcissistic rage is a reaction to internal frustration
65. 23:36 whereas psychopathic rage is a reaction to external frustration.
66. 23:45 grief or a depressive posture. A grief posture or a depressive posture is it is the way of the world. There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s a form of helplessness, form of self-minimization. But the narcissist clings, demands, rages. He goes, he goes against the way
67. 24:07 of the world. He’s a rebel with a cause. And this is facilitated and mediated by hubris, grandiosity. The narcissist rebels because he feels entitled to special treatment. And when he fails to secure it, he rages. The psychopath rebelss because he was he was on his way to
68. 24:29 accomplishing something and some people frustrated him. some people hindered, impeded his efforts and he wants to eliminate them and destroy them and punish them and kill them in some cases. These are completely two different psychological phenomena. They appear to
69. 24:47 be the same rage, but they’re not the same. And I haven’t yet broached the topic of borderline rage, which is a major clinical feature of borderline and requires an elaboration in a separate video. If I continue, they’re going to rage at me, and I’m very afraid of you.
70. 25:07 Bye-bye, everyone.