Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissist’s False Self: Sublime or Sublimation?

1. 00:02 We are going to start 2026 with psychoanalysis. Isn’t it fun? Today I’m going to link two concepts, the false self and sublimation. I’m going to propose that the false self is a form of sublimation. What is sublimation? What on earth am I talking about? Stay tuned. My name is
2. 00:29 Sand Baknne and I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and a professor of psychology. Recently, there is a wave of new explanations about the ethology, the causation of narcissistic personality disorder. I call it the possession theories.
3. 00:50 Narcissists are either possessed by demons or possessed by genes.
4. 00:58 Both so-called theories are equally contentious. We have no conclusive, no rigorous proof or evidence that pathological narcissism is hereditary. I will ignore for a minute the possession by demons theory, the demonic possession theory. But what we do have
5. 01:22 is a mountain range of evidence, case studies, information, analysis, and literature, scholarly literature over more than a century suggesting that in the personal background of people with narcissistic personality disorder, there is a history of early childhood adversity,
6. 01:44 early childhood abuse and trauma in a variety of ways and overprotecting ing, spoiling, pampering, idolizing and pedestalizing parent is as abusive as a sexually or physically or psychologically or verbally abusive parent. There are many forms of abuse,
7. 02:04 parentification, instrumentalization, overprotectiveness. They’re all forms of abuse. It is difficult to get parenting right. The child is harried via imitable gauntlets of circumstances, events, occurrences that the child perceives as insurmountable, that the child fails to
8. 02:29 process, that the child is terrified of. This create these circumstances, these events, these elements in personal history and autobiography create in the child the propensity to avoid reality. The child’s only solution is to renounce the world, to reject
9. 02:50 life, to give up on everyone and everything around him or her and then to withdraw into fantasy. And one of the elements of the fantasy is a fake self, a false self, an as if
10. 03:08 personality. The false self is not really the equivalent of the true self. The true self, the healthy normal self which accompanies one throughout life is a boundared structure which affords the individual a sense of continuity. Whereas the false self is spectral. It’s
11. 03:33 a Portuguese men of war. It’s a hive mind. It’s a colony. The false self is
12. 03:42 too relational, highly relational to use Lacans and Sullivan’s interpersonal theories. And so whereas the real healthy normal true self, the self that characterizes the majority of humanity like luckily for us is about a separation of the individual from the world. It’s a
13. 04:08 boundary condition that says the world ends here and I begin or I end here and the world begins. The false self is the exact opposite. It annexes the world. It consumes the world. It digests the world. And it becomes one with the world. And in this sense, the false self
14. 04:28 is a psychotic clinical feature. The false self is less about flexing, boasting, bragging. It’s less about less about show off. It’s less about ostentation and more defensive. It’s more about fending off. It’s a falcrum around which the child revolves and later on the adult. The
15. 04:56 false self is jitty when it scuttles the abuse, frustrates the aggression of the abuser. Sometimes by identifying with the aggressor and sometimes by serving as a decoy and sometimes by pretending the abuse is not happening. A delusion. So the false self
16. 05:17 has a variety of techniques and strategies not only to avoid abuse, not only to feain compensatory superiority and grandiosity, not only to withdraw into fantasy, but also to reconstruct or recreate um an on the fly fantastic space, a paracosm, a sanctuary city in the mind
17. 05:44 of the child to which a child can withdraw when reality becomes unbearable and intolerable and in this sense of course the false self is highly dissociative. But one thing I think that all scholars with no exception have failed to realize is that the false self is sublimated.
18. 06:08 It’s a sublimatory channel. It’s about sublimation. To understand what I’m saying, we need to delve a bit deeper into the suggested defense mechanism known as sublimation. I am saying suggested because Freud was the only one who took it seriously,
19. 06:29 maybe with the exception of climb. Later scholars disputed the concept of sublimation, tried to con to convert it into something else um or gave it up altogether. And yet I think that sublimation sublimation is an amazing idea which has huge explanatory power
20. 06:50 when it comes to pathological narcissism precisely as Freud has claimed. Now sublimation is according to Freud a physiological process. It’s um it involves the nervous system
21. 07:11 and that is why he chose the word sublimation because sublimation in physics is a physical process where one substance changes directly from solid to gas skipping the liquid stage. For example, dry ice turning into vapor without turning into water first. Sublimation
22. 07:33 occurs due to specific temperatures and pressure conditions and it allows solids to bypass melting. Sublimation therefore in physics is a phase change. It’s a direct solid to gas transformation and it is the opposite of deposition gas to solid like for example frost.
23. 07:57 And so sublimation involves skipping one stage. It in it involves a shortcut in a way. And as we will see later on during this convoluted lecture, this is exactly what the false self is doing. In alchemy, sublimation, sublimatio in in Latin, was a key laboratory process, but also
24. 08:25 at the same time a spiritual metaphor. Sublimation in alchemy involved the purification of substances and at the same time the unadulteration and purification of the self, the cleansing of the self via the laboratory procedure of sublimation. Actually,
25. 08:47 what alchemists were doing during the Middle Ages and well into the 18th century, they were heating a solid in order to convert it into vapor, into air or spirit as they called it. And so, as they were heating the solid, they collected the vapor as what they called
26. 09:10 a refined solid. And this symbolized the elevation of the base, the corporeal, the bodily into a higher purer state, a spiritual archetypal state. Sublimation represented the separation of the pure from the impure. Unadulteration, the transformation of raw energy, obeys
27. 09:37 emotions into something more refined. Sublimation was considered crucial in alchemy. It was a foundational pillar of what was known as the magnum opus, the great work which involved the attainment of spiritual perfection. And so when Freud borrowed the word
28. 09:58 sublimation, he was a highly educated person. When he borrowed the word sublimation, he intended to incorporate the two other meanings. The physical meaning of skipping one stage, transitioning from one phase to another without enduring the entire trajectory, a kind of shortcut
29. 10:21 and at the same time a process of refinement, a process of acculturation and socialization. Sublimation in Freud’s work was defined this way according to the American Psychological Association’s dictionary. Sublimation in classical psychoanalytic
30. 10:43 theory is a defense mechanism in which unacceptable sexual or aggressive drives are unconsciously channeled into socially acceptable modes of expression and redirected into new learned behaviors which indirectly provide some satisfaction for the original drives.
31. 11:05 For example, an exhibitionistic impulse may gain a new outlet in choreography or fashion. Voyeristic urge may lead to scientific research, and a dangerously aggressive drive may be expressed with impunity on the football field or in the army. as well as allowing for substitute
32. 11:30 satisfactions. Such socially condoned outlets are posited to protect individuals from the anxiety induced by the original socially unacceptable drive from condemnation to condoning. It is important to realize that in Freud’s early work, sublimation was
33. 11:57 perceived by him to be the embellishment and the enobblement and the refinement of a fantasy, not of reality. He linked sublimation to fantasy defenses. We will come to it in a minute when we discuss Lan’s work. Sublimation involved several critical facets and dimensions.
34. 12:22 First of all, loss and the early work of mourning and grief. The child grieves the loss of the primary object, the caregiver, usually the mother. The mother becomes unavailable or frustrating inevitably. She cannot always cater 100% to all the needs and wishes and demands of the
35. 12:47 child. The child learns that the mother is a separate external object. The child lets go of the symbiotic phase and begins to grieve and mourn the lost world of oneness and unitary um existence. So this is the first element in sublimation. Then there is the
36. 13:13 recurrence of a catastrophic factor. Something that emanates from the outside and is frustrating, discomforting, terrifying, humiliating, shaming, something from the outside which is which creates or generates ego destiny. Something from the outside which has to
37. 13:32 be somehow integrated. this information, this stimulus from the outside, this negative stimulus has to be integrated somehow either um the child needs either to deny it or to reframe it or to to do something with it. Sublimation is a solution to the processing of these
38. 13:51 negative stimuli and data and inputs from the outside. The next factor is a coincidence with a process of psychosomatic categorization. which at the same times gives rise to becoming a subject to the perception of oneself as a subject. In other words,
39. 14:12 sublimation always goes hand inhand with some body manifestation with something that happens in the body. Like you know the body keeps the score. As sublimation is in action and while the body accompanies the process of sublimation, the child learns to
40. 14:31 integrate the two. And in the process of doing so, the child develops subjectivity, also known as mind. This was early Freud. As usual with Freud, he changed his mind six times before breakfast. So in his later work, sublimation involves the redirection of the drive,
41. 14:57 usually the sexual drive, to a diff, usually nonsexual object. In my view, the later iteration is an impoverishment of the first draft. I think Freud’s initial perception or conception of sublimation was much more potent, much more accurate, much more imaginative,
42. 15:21 much more creative. And so later Freud was a reductionist view of sublimation as a way to channel socially unacceptable sexual drives into socially acceptable modes of expression. And that is a very narrow definition because it ignores for example aggression
43. 15:47 which was introduced into the cannon by Adler not by Freud. Lakan in my view got it uh got it right and much better. In Lakan’s account, what changes with sublimation is not the object, not the aim, but the position of the object in the structure of a narrative, in the
44. 16:15 structure of a fantasy. Lan says the drives and the instincts they give you energy. and you direct this energy at the outside at some object. Sublimation is not about changing the object from object one to object two. Sublimation means that you create a new
45. 16:39 narrative. you rewrite the fantasy so that the role of the object in the fantasy or in the narrative changes in a way that society would find acceptable. In other words, according to Lan, sublimation does not involve the directing of the drive to a different
46. 17:01 object, but rather changing the nature of the object to which the drive was already directed. As Lakan said, a change of object in itself, something which is made possible because the drive is already deeply marked by the articulation of the signifier.
47. 17:24 And so why do we call it sublimation? What is sublime about all this? You have a sex drive. You have an aggressive um urge. You want to be aggressive. You want to be sexual. Society says no. if you do this, you’re going to be punished. The ego intervenes and tells
48. 17:42 you, don’t do this because, you know, there will be adverse consequences and circumstances. And then you say to the ego, but I really, really feel like having sex or I really, really feel like smashing this guy’s face. What am I going to do about it? And the ego says,
49. 17:58 I’m going to give you a solution. Instead of smashing this guy’s face, why don’t you smash a a marble, some marble, and create a sculpture? Instead of having sex with this woman uh in a way which would put you in prison, why don’t you redirect the energy and create a
50. 18:18 work of art or write a novel or make a movie? So, sublimation is a transformation of the energy. According to Freud, there’s a new target. According to Lan, it is the same target, but the target is rewritten or reintroduced into a completely different narrative or
51. 18:40 fantasy. The sublime quality of the object is not due to any intrinsic property of the object itself. Is not that the object is sublime, but it is simply an effect of the object object’s position. in the symbolic structure of the fantasy. In other words, what imbuss
52. 19:03 the object with sublimity, what elevates the object into the position of the sublime is the object’s character within the fantasy. The data we have about the object, the way we see the object, the way we embed the object in the context of the
53. 19:25 narrative. It is therefore the narrative that is the engine of sublimation. It is the fantasy that is the engine of sublimation. Not the target, not the object, not the individual, not the drive, not the instinct. It is the stories that tell we tell ourselves
54. 19:48 that render the target the object and
55. 19:54 the path to the object sub sublimated socially acceptable. In other words, there is an implication here that what we call society is actually a story, a piece of fiction, a narrative. And indeed this is the case. To be more specific, sublimation relocates an object
56. 20:18 in the position of the thing. Lacan’s formula for sublimation is that as he as he said, it raises an object to the dignity of the thing. the thing you know but one drawback in Lakhan’s work is that he tends to ignore the narcissistic aspects of sublimation. You see sublimation
57. 20:47 is always narcissistic. But wait a minute, you say, you have spent the past 20 minutes telling us that sublimation is about socially acceptable ways of expressing drives and instincts. So sublimation is about society. It’s not about the individual. No, Siri,
58. 21:11 I’m sorry if I’ve misled you. Let me explain. Sublimation is always about the individual. It’s always narcissistic. The focus of sublimation is the individual. Sublimation is a formula. It’s a recipe. It’s an algorithm that informs the individual.
59. 21:31 How to express urges and drives and wishes and instincts. How to realize fantasies and dreams in a way that would not conflict with society. In a way that would not elicit adverse punitive consequences. in a way that would yield beneficial outcomes efficacy.
60. 21:53 So sublimation is focused on the individual, the gratification of the drives and the instincts and the urges, the avoidance of negative consequences. It’s all about the individual. It’s a completely narcissistic process. Sublimation allows the individual to internalize society,
61. 22:18 to internalize social mores and norms and scripts and conventions and expectations and demands and punishments and rewards. Sublimation is the way the individual experiences socialization. The individual internalizes society initially the parental figures later on
62. 22:43 peers later on teachers role models. This individual internalizes all these cohorts or this population of internal objects and having internalized society and its representatives and its agents. then the individual renders society a private case. In other words, the only
63. 23:10 reason for the individual to take account to take into consideration what society expects is in order to avoid punishment is in order to maximize benefits. It’s very egotistical. It’s very self-centered. Sublimation is about acting in socially acceptable ways
64. 23:34 in order to maximize benefits to oneself. It is therefore highly narcissistic something that lan has ignored had ignored whereas Freud paid attention to we’ll come to it a bit later. And although supplimation appears as the guarantor of the social
65. 23:56 bond and the promoteries of culture, it is according to psychoanalytic thinkers a bit of a dangerous demand because as Mopic said it is a ruse of civilization. Uh ide individual sublimations are presented as ideal models of conduct. Like if you want to be a good person,
66. 24:22 you need to internalize the demands and expectations of society. You need to act according to social scripts, mories and conventions. And if you and norms and if you don’t then you’re a bad person. You’re evil, maybe even criminal. And this is dangerous.
67. 24:40 But this builds on a misunderstanding of sublimation. As I’ve explained, sublimation is not the same as the criminal code. Sublimation is not about gratifying society, fulfilling the expectations of society, acting in accordance to societal dicta and accord
68. 25:02 and and catering to society’s needs. That is not sublimation. That is slavery. That is servitude. Sublimation is the exact opposite. Sublimation is how can I act in society in ways which would maximize benefits to me? How can I act in society
69. 25:25 to avoid the punishments or the punitive measures of society? It’s not about society. It’s about the individual. And Freud made it very clear in his work that sublimation is not the core or the predecessor of some axiological or anagogic approach to psychoanalysis. He
70. 25:49 he he was very adamant that psychoanalysis should not become a kind of new religion or new moral philosophy. No way. The introduction of narcissism into psychoanalysis in my view was Freud’s attempt to divorce psychoanalysis from morality, from ethics, from religion.
71. 26:16 It was an important turning point in his theoretical approach to the human mind. Freud said that sublimation took place, I quote, through the mediation of the ego, which begins by changing sexual object libido into narcissistic libido and then perhaps goes on to give it a
72. 26:39 different aim. So in this paragraph alone, Freud makes clear that sublimation is narcissistic and that um sometimes the aim or the target remains the same. There’s just a change from object libido, especially sexual object libido to narcissistic libido.
73. 27:05 It’s a change of framework. It’s a change of perspective. Rather than looking outwardly, considering other people, society, culture, time, pre per period in history, institutions, the individual very often looks inward and it is a form of adaptation. The
74. 27:28 individual says that’s me. That’s what I want. That’s what I dream of doing. These are my fantasies and wishes, expectations and needs and I want to realize all of them. I want to actualize them. But I exist in a world.
75. 27:47 I am embedded in a society. There is a context which I must take into account. And to do this I need to sublimate. I need to modify my drives, my wishes, my urges, my instincts. I need to behave in ways which would maximize beneficial outcomes
76. 28:08 and minimize adverse consequences. And to do so, I need to get acquainted with society. I need to internalize the code of conduct allowed by society and I need to act as a social creature for my own good. I need to be a social person. I need to be pro-social.
77. 28:31 I need to be communal. I need to be moral and ethical. I need to be honest and I don’t know what. I need to do all this not because I’m a good person, but because this yields good consequences, because it’s efficient, because it’s utilitarian, because if I want to gratify myself,
78. 28:52 ultimately I have first to accommodate society. The way to self-gratification, the way to narcissistic elation, the way to all this is via society maybe regrettably, but realistically. Sublimation no longer occurs at the expense of object libido, but offers the
79. 29:18 narcissistic libido a needed extension. But I think there’s a a kind of misunderstanding here in some of the some of the literature that I’ve read. Sublimation does not protect the individual. It’s not a protective mechanism. And in this sense, when some scholars
80. 29:40 say, most most scholars actually say that sublimation is a defense mechanism, emphasis on the word defense, I think it’s a bit of a mistake because it does not afford the individual any protection. It prevents adverse consequences. It prevents uh punitive consequences. It
81. 30:03 it it isolates and the individual from eventual punishment but it does not protect the individual from from the individual. Whereas sublimation is like a firewall like a an isolation chamber a solitary confinement if you if you wish. At the same time, sublimation is not efficient
82. 30:33 in isolating the individual from the individual’s own self-destructiveness, own self-deeat and self-loathing and self-rejection and infantile defense mechanisms such as splitting and projection. In other words, sublimation may act as a defense mechanism
83. 30:56 or a protective mechanism by teaching the individual to redirect and reshape energy, remold it in a way that would not trigger the wrath and the and the and the long arm of society. Would not trigger society. But at the same time, sublimation fails to protect the
84. 31:19 individual from the individual himself. And in this sense, sublimation is not really a defense mechanism. Not really. It’s closer, I would say, to reframing or maybe even a strategy, a survival strategy. Back to the false self. The false self is a very curious solution.
85. 31:48 Remember that the child is abused and traumatized in a variety of ways. Again, I emphasize we have conclusive, rigorous, indisputable evidence that in the history of literally everyone with narcissistic personality disorder, there is a background of dysfunctional family
86. 32:11 in early childhood period. So the child needs to defend itself or at the very least isolate itself from such an environment because the environment is frightening. It’s terrifying. An environment which is unpredictable, arbitrary, capriccious, aggressive, even
87. 32:33 violent. An environment which breaches the child’s boundaries, instrumentalizes the child, parentifies the child. an environment that isolates the child from peers and reality. Maybe by idolizing and pampering and spoiling the child. In all these situations, the child needs to
88. 32:51 protect itself and to preserve the capacity to adapt, to separate, to individuate and to become. And majority of children succeed, pull it through. There’s a tiny minority of children and we don’t know why who fail to do so. They fail to come up with a
89. 33:19 positive adaptation and what they come up with is a mal adaptation. Now the knee-jerk reaction this happens because of a genetic predisposition or a hereditary background and it might well be the truth only. We don’t have any evidence for this yet. And there are other possible
90. 33:40 explanations which I will not go into right now. Be that as it may, this small minority of children about one and a half to 2% they come up with a solution which came to be known in Winnott’s work uh as the false self. Ellen Deutsch called it the as if personality.
91. 34:00 But the false self is a very very curious solution, very self-defeating and very problematic and I would even say crazy. It’s an illogical irrational solution because the child at the age of two or the age of three is incapable of logical rational thinking. The false self is the
92. 34:23 design of a of a of a toddler, is the design of a baby. The false self is a creation of someone who is an infant, someone who is two years old. It’s the best a two three year old can do. So the false self is call and callous. It has childlike infantile features and
93. 34:50 at the same time antisocial features. Call and callus infantile and antisocial. Because children at the age of two or three are immature. They’re infantile of course by definition and at the same time they’re a bit antisocial because empathy is just starting to develop or
94. 35:11 at least the effective component of empathy. And so the false self is a frozen snapshot of the child at the age of two. It is endowed. The false self is endowed fictitiously with divine properties and powers, but it is a child with divine properties and powers. It’s an infant
95. 35:38 and it is an infant in grief. The false self is lubrious. Lubrious. It’s in a in a process of prolonged grief. The child grieavves and mourns itself. The true self is dying. The false self is emerging and the false self is all consuming. The child is
96. 35:58 devoured by its own golem, by its own creation, by the Frankenstein that it has created. This monster is taking over and the child is grieving. The false self is therefore lubrious and it and the solution of the false self to these egoistonic sensations like
97. 36:20 grief this like anger like fear the solution is sublimation. The false self is a sublimatory channel. It’s a sublimation sub a solution of sublimation. Sublimatory solution. You recall when we were all much younger at the beginning of this video that I
98. 36:43 mentioned that sublimation in physics involves the transition from one phase to another from solid to vapor for example in the case of dry ice. So it’s the same with the false self. It’s a phase transition from the true self to the false self without going through a real self, a
99. 37:08 fully constellated integrated self. So, Fairburn would have called it a transition from ego nuclei to the false self. In other words, let me translate this to English. The child is born with an ego template. um a latis upon which the ego will is
100. 37:31 built over time and this is the true self. The child then gives up on the true self in some way or or evolves the true self. The true self becomes more sophisticated, more integrated, more constellated and the self emerges. The self includes elements of the ego. So
101. 37:51 the ego is not exactly the same as the self but the self emerges. So there is a transition from the ego nuclei from the ego latattis from the ego template call it as you wish from the primordial atavistic initial primitive ego to the fully full-fledged fully developed fully
102. 38:11 baked ego or self later on in life.
103. 38:17 In the case of the abused and traumatized child, the child transitions directly from an underdeveloped or undeveloped ego potential ego template to the false self to a a fake self. The child never experiences never succeeds to form a real self. And
104. 38:43 so the false self is a phase transition from a potential self to a fake self
105. 38:53 without going through a real self. At the same time, the false self is also sublimatory in the psychoanalytic sense because what is the false self? It is a pro-social normative construct. Its contents are pro-social and normative. The false self is about being successful,
106. 39:20 is about making money. It’s about being attaining power. It’s about accomplishing social goals. The narcissist, the false self of the narcissist is just an exagger an exaggeration, a caricature, a hyper hyperbole of common social goals. You want to make money, the narcissist
107. 39:46 wants to be the richest person in the world. You want to be um recognized, the narcissist wants to be famous. You want to have a little power over your life. The narcissist wants to have power over other people. So the the the social the goals within the false self, the
108. 40:06 narrative of the false, the what the false self is comprised of, the elements of the false self are all pro-social. They are they all conform to what society defines as success. The goal accomplishment in the false self is pro-social. So one could say that the false self is
109. 40:32 a sublimation. It is a redirection of the negative effects of the negative energy, the outcome of abuse and trauma. A redirection of this dark black depressive energy into socially acceptable goals. The goals are compensatory. There’s a compensation here through the eyes of a
110. 40:58 child. So the goals are exaggerated. The goals are caricature. But they still are socially recognizable. So this is the sequence. The child is traumatized. The child is abused. This creates a lot of negative energy, negative effects, negative emotions,
111. 41:19 rage, anger, hatred, aggression. The child cannot direct these negative effects at the parents because this is socially unacceptable. And the child is also afraid of consequences. So what the child does, he takes all these energies and he redirects them in socially
112. 41:42 acceptable ways into a container, a repository which is the false self. The false self is therefore definitely a sublimation. It is reolent of the fantasy of pro-social normality, pro-social goals, pro-social power and money, pro-social standing and status,
113. 42:08 pro-social family, pro-social. It’s pro-ocial. It the false self fosters an appearance of normality the mask of sanity but not of normaly. Normaly is statistical averess. You you conform to normaly when you are statistically average. The false self
114. 42:36 rejects normaly because the false self is exaggerated in caricature. So the narcissist does not perceive himself as average but the narcissist does perceive himself erroneously as normal. The false self is pseudosublimatory or even fully sublimatory.
115. 42:59 The thing is that the narcissist experiences the false self as normal. The narcissist doesn’t see anything abnormal in himself, in his behavior, in the outcomes of his behavior to himself and to others. The narcissist perceives his life as just, you know, another life.
116. 43:21 The narcissist at the same time is grandiose. He believes himself to be unique and special in many ways. But he would reject, narcissist would vehemently reject, ferociously reject any implication that they are not normal, that they’re abnormal.
117. 43:39 Narcissists are very very protective about the idea that they’re completely normal because the narcissist confuses the reality principle as raified and expressed through ego functions with pro-social dimensions. In other words, in normal healthy people, there is a
118. 44:05 reality principle. The reality principle is embedded in the ego and operates through the ego. According to Freud, the ego interfaces with reality and the ego tells you what you should and you should not do on utilitarian grounds. Don’t do this because you will end up badly. You
119. 44:26 will end up punished. Or do this because it’s good for your long-term goals. This is the ego speaking using the reality principle and reality testing within the monopoly of ego functions. That’s in a healthy person. In a narcissist, the reality testing is compromised. It’s
120. 44:48 impaired. There is no ego. There’s been a disruption in the formation of the ego. So, there are no ego functions. And instead, what the narcissist does, the narcissist says, I’m going to act. I’m going to act. I’m going to make decisions and choices. I’m going to take action.
121. 45:09 And then if it works, it means that I’m embedded in reality. If whatever I’m doing yields beneficial consequences to me, if my choices and decisions prove out to be to have been the correct ones, that means that I am well integrated with reality. That means
122. 45:30 that I grasp reality appropriately. That means that my reality principle and my reality testing are intact. In other words, a normal healthy person first engages with reality and then makes decisions and choices and then acts. The sequence in a normal healthy person is
123. 45:55 what is reality? Let’s evaluate reality. Let let’s gauge reality. Let’s analyze reality. Then let’s make choices and decisions which conform with the information that I’ve gathered. and then let’s reap the benefits. Whereas in a narcissist is exactly the opposite.
124. 46:14 Let’s act. Let’s make choices. Let’s make decisions. Then we see the consequences and the consequences of my actions would tell me if I have evaluated reality properly. Efficaciously acting in reality and on reality is conflated by the narcissist with acting normatively.
125. 46:41 Self-efficacy is mistaken by the narcissist for moral righteousness. The narcissist says if it works then it’s right. If it works it’s moral. If my goals are accomplished, it means that I’m ethical and righteous. This is a Puritan point of view. If you
126. 47:02 are rich, you must be blessed by God. At the same time, the false self seeks to invagle and manipulate people and the environment at large. In other words, the narcissist does not approach reality innocuously, innocently. The narcissist does not trust reality
127. 47:27 because the narcissist knows deep inside that he’s a bit delusional that his reality testing is is shot and compromised. The narcissist knows that something is wrong with him or her although they will never admit it of course but there is this unconscious
128. 47:43 realization that something is seriously all right. So the narcissist constantly seeks to control the environment, to manipulate the environment, to invad to cajol people, to make them do things, to modify their behaviors. The false self, if I were to use the
129. 48:04 language or the lingo of Freud, the false self users the functions of the id and the functions of the ego, but without a conccommittent or concurrent super ego. And consequently, the false self is often pungent, obnoxious, traculent, atrobillious, canankerous or
130. 48:25 contemptuously tacitan if the narcissist is a schiz. No.