Yeah.

So Sam, if we go back to the difference between narcissistic traits style and what’s currently called the disorder.

So the first to suggest, the first to suggest that there’s a difference was a guy called Lynn Sperry. And he suggested that there should be a distinction between people who have narcissistic style, also known as assholes, and people who have narcissistic personality disorder.

Then Theodor Millon came into the scene, adopted Lynn Sperry’s work. He cites Lynn Sperry in his seminal book, Personality Disorders in Modern Life. And so he adopted his work and he added another layer, the narcissistic personality.

So now we have three layers. We have style, personality, and disorder. And the difference between them is quantitative, literally, but quantity to the point that it becomes quality. So for example, traits would be exaggerated, lack of empathy would be more extreme, behaviors would be escalated, exploitation would be emphasized, envy would be much stronger in the disorder. Antisocial behaviors are almost exclusive to the disorder, etc.

So it’s a matter of quantity. It’s these exaggerated forms of each other.

The disorder though, when you cross into the disorder, you’re beginning to have several psychological and psychodynamic features which are absent from the style and from the personality.

For example, you are no longer able to relate to other people as external. What you tend to do is a narcissist with a disorder. You tend to internalize other people. You tend to create internal objects which represent these people. And then you regard other people as figments of your mind, as extensions, which explains a lot of the abuse. If I abuse you as a narcissist, it’s self-inflicted because you’re not there, you’re in my mind, you’re an internal object. So I subject you to all the dynamics in my mind because you’re a part of my mind.

For example, my mother taught me to not have boundaries. I abuse means when the parent, parental figures, or caregivers breach the child’s boundaries, don’t allow the child to separate.

Okay, so I am used to not having boundaries, but because you’re part of my mind, I have no problem to breach your boundaries. I do to you that which was done to me because you are me, you are me. That is something victims can contract their heads around.

And that’s one example of a psychodynamic feature or psychological feature which clearly distinguishes the disorder from all.

I would say that perhaps the second thing with your permission, perhaps the second thing is where a lack of empathy crosses into sadism, antisocial behavior, the tendency to abuse in a way which is negating and vitiating of the victim. And that’s why I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse to distinguish it from other types of abuse.

Other types of abuse leverage some dimensions of your existence, financial abuse, legal abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, you name it, all of them leverage some aspect of you.

Sexual abuse leverages usually your genitalia, you know, so it’s a limited type of abuse.

Narcissistic abuse is all pervasive, ubiquitous, and above all, the main goal and the only goal of narcissistic abuse is for you to cease to exist because your separateness constitutes a threat and narcissists are not equipped to deal with separateness, they were never allowed to separate.

So this is where a lack of empathy in the disorder becomes extreme.

I mean, I think that the word narcissist and narcissism that it’s used very freely today, and I think I got this from you as well, that adolescence, for example, is a naturally narcissistic phase where the child is individuating, becomes God and saying to parents, or if you go, I’m becoming my own person, it is healthy.

Without some modicum of narcissism, you’re not going to survive.

Yeah, but I’ve always thought of it the way I see it is, it’s exactly what you’re saying that really what distinguishes the disorder from traits with style is that lack of emotional empathy. There is cognitive, as you’ve called it, cold empathy, and interpersonal exploitation. And we’ve spoken about narcissistic abuse, but so we have really four phases, which are not linear.

So we have idealization, as you’ve said, discard, sorry, devaluation, discard, and then the Hoover.

So do you want to take us through those phases, sir?

Seeing as you can say it’s so much better than I can.

Hoovering is another term that I coined, by the way.

Was that yours as well? I was wondering.

People don’t realize it’s another term.

Before I go there, you see the language breaks down, even for someone like you who is well versed in narcissism. The language breaks down because you use the term exploitation. Narcissist never exploits. I can’t exploit you, you don’t exist. You’re part of me. Who am I exploiting?

I’m taking what’s mine, I’m taking what’s mine.

I mean, right.

So from my perspective, not from a narcissist perspective, I get that. I didn’t see that a few years ago, but now I do.

It breaks the mind. I mean, it’s mind-boggling. The mind can’t function anymore because it’s so alien.

Narcissists are so alien in the way they perceive others.

Oh, don’t perceive others. That’s the core problem, by the way. Narcissists have no, what we call object relations.

The narcissist is stuck in a phase of development called self-relation, but he doesn’t progress to object relation.

Object relation simply means relating to others.

And as a joke, it’s very telling that in psychology, the word objects means people, just for your information. So object relations means relations with people.

Yes. Yes. So psychology is very, very narcissistic for him, because if I regard it as funny, it’s funny, you should say that. I was just thinking.

Yeah. Okay.

Coming back to your question, which you asked me, we were both a lot younger about idealization and so on and so forth.

As I said, there’s no, I’ve modified the concept of idealization and now it should be called core idealization, because the narcissist, by idealizing you, idealizes himself.

If you are the most intelligent person on earth and I’m with you, it says something about me. If someone is the most beautiful woman on earth and she chooses me or she is with me, it says something about me. So there’s no separate idealization. It’s always core idealization.

And actually, the main reason for idealization is the narcissist’s part. The narcissist wants to aggrandize and idealize himself.

And the only way to do this is to aggrandize and idealize everyone around him. That’s why he does that. That’s the first motivation.

Second motivation.

When I idealize, it’s irresistible to you, because as I said, it’s a form of maternal unconditional love and so on, but also who doesn’t want to be thought of as super intelligent, amazingly beautiful. It’s irresistible. It’s addictive.

So one of the second main function of core idealization is to get the victim or the prey or the target or the potential intimate partner addicted. So it creates addiction.

Idealization lasts for as long as you don’t diverge or deviate from the snapshot, from the introject.

Because in the process of idealization, the narcissist creates an image of you, which is photoshopped. That’s idealization. And then as long as you don’t deviate or diverge from this image, everything is okay. And you will continue to be idealized.

As long as we behave.

As long as you’re dead.

Let’s call a spade a spade, as long as you’re dead.

Right. Because if I tell you, let’s eat in this restaurant and you say, no, let’s eat in that restaurant, you had diverged from the snapshot. You had disagreed with me.

It also implies some form of criticism. Your choice of restaurant is wrong. It implies that you know something. It implies that you know something that I don’t know. So you’re challenging my omniscience.

If you tell me, listen, let me help you. I don’t interpret it as an indication or expression of love. I interpret it as an attempt to humiliate, to imply that I’m not omnipotent, that I need you, that you have something I don’t have.

So even the most innocuous comments, most loving or will be perceived as challenging or undermining the snapshot. You can’t do anything right. Whatever you do will be perceived as an attempt to unsettle the precarious balance of the narcissist in a universe, and therefore will render you a persecutory object, an enemy.

In other words, in other words, devaluation is inevitable.

As long as you show signs of life, it’s inevitable.

Victims should stop asking themselves, what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? Should I have done this? Should I have done that? Should I not have said this? You would have been devalued, period.

If you eat and drink and breathe, it’s sufficient for the narcissist to switch to the devaluation mode.

The only way for you to have avoided devaluation is to have rendered yourself an ancient Egyptian mummy, about as lively and as attractive.

Too uncommon.

Yes. The narcissist also suffers from extreme separation insecurity, also known colloquially as abandonment. So the moment you show a sign of independence and autonomy, any, the slightest, a new friend going out for coffee, doing something without the narcissist or without his permission, anything, using the smartphone.

Because when you’re with your smartphone, you have a private enclave, a private world. It’s very threatening. Anything you do would provoke devaluation.

Now, why did the narcissist need to devalue you?

Because you are a source of threat. And because you are proof positive that his judgment had been wrong. I mean, if he needs to devalue, then he judged you wrongly, didn’t he? So he needs to eliminate you. And he eliminates you by claiming that you had changed this new information. You had changed somehow, or he found out new things about you, or you went crazy, or you became insufferable, or something. There’s been a transformation in you that does not vitiate, does not negate his initial judgment. You had changed, not the narcissist.

That’s the first thing. And the second thing is, now that you have changed, he can create a negative introjective view. He can create the opposite of the snapshot. He can create a snapshot that is ugly, that is stupid, that is fantastic and then this justifies discarding you.

And that’s the last phase. He needs to discard you because your very existence is a threat. And this is what people fail to understand.

Now, statistic abuse is not about something you do, or something you don’t do, or choices, or decisions, or lifestyle.

Yeah. Statistic abuse is about getting rid of your existence, killing you, in effect. If possible, physically, but usually mentally, killing you.

Then the discard.

Following the discard, there’s another phase, which is replacement.

The narcissist tries to find an alternative to you and go through the whole process again.

The narcissist creates something called shared fantasy. Shared fantasy was first described by Sanger in 1989, not by Wachner. And the shared fantasy is a fantastic space where the narcissist can maintain his grandiosity and where he can exert full control over you and negate your agency.

So that’s the shared fantasy. Shared fantasy also includes fantastic elements, like dreams, aspirations, a brilliant rosy future. It could be children, it could be family, it could be money, it could be whatever. So that’s the shared fantasy.

He drags you into the shared fantasy.

And the replacement is simply finding another partner for the shared fantasy.

If he fails at the replacement phase, then he switches to phase four, four B. And four B would be hovering. The hovering is a lost result, actually. People think that narcissists move habitually. They try to avoid it as much as they can. It’s a lost result. It’s indicative of the narcissist’s failure to find a replacement for you.

But there is one case where the narcissist will never, ever over you. And that’s if you had mortified the narcissist.

In 1957, a group of scholars described a phenomenon in the study of narcissism known as narcissistic mortification. Narcissistic mortification is when someone, an intimate partner, or shames you and humiliates you in public, in front of people you care for, people whose opinions you value.

So if I were to create a situation where you are, for example, sitting with your colleagues or with your peers, and then I were to shame you and humiliate you horribly in front of all of them, I will have mortified you.

And then narcissists never hover after mortification.

Mortification is a fascinating process because what happens is the false self and all the defenses break down. They’re inactivated.

And the narcissist is faced with his own internal void, known as the empty schizoid core. The narcissist is faced with a black hole at his own center.

And that’s, of course, a harrowing traumatizing experience. So he will never come near you again.

You have the capacity to traumatize.

Is that the same as narcissistic decompensation, Sam?

Decompensation is an element in multifamily. Decompensation is an element, yes. Decompensation is a clinical term for when defense mechanisms, psychological defense mechanisms, are disabled. Are disabled. So they’re no longer able to filter and reframe reality in a way which will conform to the narcissist’s self-image. So his self-image is assaulted and assailed by numerous countervailing data from reality. And he can’t stand that.

And his false self falls apart. Borderlines, by the way, go through decompensation as well. The disabling of these defenses creates a very interesting phenomenon. And that’s the crux of my work nowadays. And it’s becoming widely accepted in academia. I just gave lectures in McGill University about this. And I’m going to give lectures in Cambridge and so on.

I suggested that actually we should consider all personality disorders as an assemblage of self-states. So people with personality disorders don’t have a single self. They have multiple self-states.

And then what happens is under stress, under duress, under humiliation, rejection, abandonment, etc., or when challenged and undermined, for example, by your independent behavior, people with personality disorders switch between self-states.

So for example, the borderline, if she perceives rejection and abandonment, which is her greatest fear, if she perceives them, then she decompensates. Her defense mechanisms switch off. And she switches from one self-state, the borderline self-state, to a psychopathic self-state. She becomes a psychopath, more precisely a secondary psychopath.

So the self-state’s argument of the self-state’s model is a fascinating model in effect.

Because first of all, it allows us to unify all personality disorders. We just say, okay, there is a limited set of self-states. And these apply to borderline, these apply to narcissism.

And also it means that when the narcissist switches to another self-state, he can easily become covert or a borderline, or he can become a psychopath. A psychopath can become a narcissist, or he can become a borderline. It opens up the field. It allows for all these transitions that have been observed in therapy and in clinical settings, but were not accounted for by the DSM and other categorical effects.

So it’s much more fluid.