So this study, this recent research that I’m referring to, in personality and individual differences by Doerfler, October 2021, this recent study, it tried to somehow correlate or somehow ascertain what’s the connection between dark triad traits and a sense of self.

Is the self somehow dependent on dark triad traits? Do dark triad traits derive from a stable sense of self or from the instability in the self?

The authors didn’t know the answer. They didn’t come into the study biased.

Actually, they came biased in a way for the wrong conclusions and they were pretty shocked and surprised by what they had discovered. And so the anticipated outcomes mostly did not come true.

Whenever you embark on a study in psychology, you kind of have an intuition what the results will be. And the great studies are the ones that defy your intuition.

So the authors, for example, assumed that narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy are correlated with each other as well as with a weaker sense of self.

And this was upheld by the study. People with higher Machiavellianism and psychopathy were more likely to use state-based descriptions rather than trait-based descriptions.

And this suggested a great instability in the sense of self with a tendency towards short-term thinking and impulsive risky decisions uninformed by self-awareness.

Let me explain the difference between trait-based descriptions and state-based descriptions.

When we ask someone, why did you do that? Usually, they will describe their own traits. They will refer to their internal mental state.

They will say, I did it because I’m stubborn. I did it because I’m impulsive. I did it because I was angry. I did it because I love her.

All these are trait-based, trait-based, self-based descriptions.

But when you ask a narcissist or a psychopath or even a borderline, why did you do that?

They’re likely to describe the environment. They’re not going to talk about themselves, rarely going to talk about themselves. They usually describe the environment.

So if you ask a psychopath, why did you snatch this old lady’s purse?

He’s not going to say, because I detest old ladies or because I’m impulsive or because I needed money. He’s going to say, well, she left it unattended. He’s going to describe the environment.

If you ask a woman, why did you sleep with this man? Why did you sleep with this man who had mistreated you? She would say, well, he created a pleasant environment for me.

So these people, narcissists, psychopaths and borderlines, they describe the environment. They derive their motivations and they derive the description of their internal world, their internal landscape from the outside. They outsource the description of their internal world.

It’s like they are not aware. They are not aware of their own internal landscape. They are not aware of their own minds. They are not aware of who they are and what they do, they scan the environment for clues, for hints, for information, for data to help them to realize who they are and what they are doing.

Healthy people use trait-based descriptions, mental state-based descriptions and unhealthy people use state-based descriptions.

Healthy people use descriptions of themselves and explain their behavior by referring to their state, who they are, their motivations, their dreams, their hopes, their thoughts, their emotions.

Unhealthy people explain who they are and why they do what they’re doing, why they did what they did because in reference to the environment, they refer to the outside to explain themselves.

And so these results confirmed this initial assumption. The initial assumption was that psychopaths, people with dark triad traits are going to use state-based descriptions and this was confirmed and upheld in the study and the results in the study held regardless of gender and regardless of age.

So it’s equal, it applies equally to women and men and throughout the lifespan. It seems to be therefore constant.

It seems that psychopathy, narcissism and to some extent borderline, preconditioned people to refer to the environment for their own self-definition.

They derive their sense of identity, they derive the core from the outside, they outsource these functions.

The second study captured nuances using what we call sub-traits of narcissism and psychopathy.

And so they tried to differentiate the dark triad traits from one another in terms of self and in terms of the clarity of the self-concept.

They tried to see whether narcissism or psychopathy or Machiavellianism are somehow more strongly connected to any specific way of perceiving the self, to any stability of the self or lack of stability.

And so what they discovered is that high-level dark triad traits are associated with a weaker sense of self, an unclear self-concept.

Both men and women had identical results. Men are much more likely to be psychopathic than women, although this is changing very fast because women are imitating psychopathic men.

But still, the connection between dark triad traits and a weak unstable sense of self, and an unclear, diffuse, disturbed self-concept, this connection held across genders, across ages, and seems to be connected to the psychopathy, to the narcissism, not to whether you are a man or a woman, for example, or not to whether you are an okay boomer or a millennial.

This is the first time, to the best of my knowledge, the first time we are beginning to see the hints of an invariable clinical entity, a clinical entity that does not depend on a narrative, does not depend on intuition, including the therapist or diagnostician’s intuition. A clinical entity that is all on its own.

It’s a bit like tuberculosis or COVID-19. It‘s a disease that can strike anyone at any age, regardless of gender.

And it’s the first time we‘re getting an inkling that narcissism and psychopathy may indeed be clinical entities. Gender-free, age-unrelated diseases, diseases, not even disorders.

With age, the sense of self in Machiavellianism strengthened.

So it seems that someone who has narcissism and psychopathy and also Machiavellianism, a dark triad person, has a better prognosis because he can develop greater self-awareness and later on greater self-acceptance.

This is not true for people who have only narcissism or only psychopathy or comorbidity of narcissism and psychopathy, but they’re not Machiavellian.

Machiavellianism, therefore, is a stable trait. It’s something that holds its uniform and it’s unitary.

And you can think of it as the glue, the glue that holds together the narcissistic self-states, the psychopathic self-states, gradually, because Machiavellianism is superglue, it brings them all together and creates self-awareness and a cohesive sense of self. Healing, in effect.

Ironically, Machiavellianism is the only hope and chance for healing in narcissism and psychopathy.

Regrettably, most narcissists and psychopaths are not members of the dark triad. They are, you know, these are separate diagnoses. Only a small minority have dark triad traits and even smaller minority have dark tetra traits.

And so, the scholars went a bit deeper and they started to study sub-traits, sub-traits of narcissism, sub-traits, lower-level traits of psychopathy, and lower-level traits of Machiavellianism.

When they did this, it was there that they were shocked because everything they discovered when they went a bit deeper contradicted the upper-level picture, the meta-level picture.

You see, if you just look at narcissism as a complex, as a unitary kind of clinical picture, you look at psychopathy separately, you look at Machiavellianism separately, you say, well, narcissists and psychopaths don’t have a sense of self. They have an unstable, diffused, disturbed sense of self which is not constant and not persistent across the lifespan regardless of gender.

That’s a general conclusion.

But if you go a bit deeper, the picture becomes a lot more nuanced and fine-grained. When you look at grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy and Machiavellianism, the story almost reverses.

It’s a bit shocking. It’s like when you transition from macro systems to micro systems to quantum mechanics.

In the world of quantum mechanics, everything we know about the quantum world contradicts everything we experience in daily life. In the quantum world, objects can be in two places simultaneously. In the quantum world, there is action at a distance. In the quantum world, objects vanish behind the solid partition and appear on the other side. Things happen in the quantum world that could never happen in daily life. In our reality, as we perceive it through our senses.

The same in this study.

When you look at narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism, you reach one set of conclusions. But when you go a bit deeper and analyze the subunits, the sub-trades, you get an entirely opposite picture.

Secondary psychopathy and vulnerable narcissism are most strongly correlated with a weaker or unclear sense of self.

Again, this is something I’ve been saying for at the very least a decade.

I’ve been advocating the view that borderline personality disorder is actually a form of secondary psychopathy and that covert narcissism is actually the only real form of narcissism because it’s the only compensatory form.

So secondary psychopathy is borderline. Covert narcissism is narcissism. And these two, what’s common? What do they have in common?

They have in common identity disturbance. They have in common a weak, unclear sense of self.

And this is why borderlines transition easily to secondary psychopathy and covert narcissism also transition easily to secondary psychopathy.

And that’s why I proposed the additional diagnosis of covert borderline. It’s the borderline who transitions to primary psychopathy as distinct from these two.

Okay. So we have these two subtypes, covert narcissism and secondary psychopath, also known as borderline.

And these ones have no sense of self to talk of.

Whatever sense of self they have, it shape shifts. It’s unstable. It’s unpredictable. It’s impulsive. It’s cerebral. It’s dysregulated. It’s discontinuous. It’s non-persistent. It’s not a self in any way, shape or form, any extension of the word.

They don’t have a self to cut a long story short.

And today we are beginning to think that the only form of narcissism is compensatory narcissism and its primary manifestation, covert narcissism. We are beginning to think that what we used to call grandiose phallic overt narcissism is actually a form of primary psychopathy.

And this study tends to support this because it groups together secondary psychopathy, which is borderline with covert narcissism. And it groups together grandiose narcissism with primary psychopathy, which is the real psychopath.

And so grandiose narcissism has a mildly stronger sense of self, but not fully, not fully.

What the authors did, they analyzed the narcissistic personality inventory, NPI test. And they found that one of the dimensions of the test known as leadership authority, one of the components known as leadership authority component.

When that component was dominant in the grandiose narcissist, the narcissist had a stronger sense of self, not strong self, not a strong sense of self, but stronger sense of self, still diffuse, still disturbed, still not cohesive, still incongruent, still problematic, but stronger than in covert narcissism, stronger than the secondary psychopath. The grandiose narcissist with an emphasized NPI component of leadership authority had a stronger sense of self than covert narcissist and secondary psychopath.

The other NPI traits, the other NPI components of, for example, grandiose exhibitionism and entitlement exploitativeness, they correlated with a weaker sense of self.

And I’m proposing that the reason is that they actually measure covert narcissism.

Grandiose exhibitionism is a trait of grandiose narcissist, of course, but entitlement exploitativeness is very pronounced in covert narcissism.

When you look more closely, vulnerable or covert narcissism, what does it include? What is it made of?

It’s insecurity, emotional reactivity, self-doubt, passive aggressions.

All these are correlated with problems, a problematic sense of self.

Grandiose narcissism is based on an innate, authentic sense of superiority.

Vulnerable covert narcissism is compensatory because it covers up for problems in the sense of self, because of developmental problems, developmental adversity.

You could say that the covert narcissist is a case of stunted growth or stunted development, which is a phrase we never use in academia, by the way. It’s taboo. You’re not supposed to use it. It’s politically incorrect.

The grandiose narcissist did not experience developmental adversity. The grandiose narcissist experienced a breach of boundaries.

For example, instrumentalizing, spoiling parents, parents who‘ve identified the narcissist, parents who’ve breached the narcissist’s boundaries in other ways.

When boundaries are breached, the likely outcome is a grandiose narcissist. When boundaries are breached in childhood, the likely outcome is grandiose narcissism. When development and growth are stunted, when there is adversity, for example, classic abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, et cetera, we are likely to end up with a covert narcissist.

A covert narcissist is closely associated with borderline, which is a form of secondary psychopathy.

So this cluster, covert narcissist, borderline, secondary psychopathy, they are actually the constituents of the dark tetrad, not triad, tetrad, the new concept, the new construct.

And there, there is no self. The grandiose narcissist and the primary psychopath, they have a sense of self, much higher, on a much higher level, much more organized than the covert narcissist and the borderline secondary psychopath, but it’s still a fragmented fractured self with multiple self-states.

Grandiose narcissists, who scored higher on leadership authority traits and components in the NPI, they had a clearer, more robust sense of self.

And the vulnerable narcissist, which is essentially the covert narcissist, which is essentially the traumatized narcissist, the narcissist who is post-traumatic and therefore, in my view, the only form of real compensatory narcissism, I believe the only real narcissist is the covert vulnerable compensatory narcissist, because I believe that narcissism is post-traumatic.

Well, this type of post-traumatic narcissist, yes, this type had a very, very diffuse sense of self, did not develop a self, in effect, had no ego and had to outsource ego functions even more than the grandiose, the grandiose narcissist.

So you could say that the grandiose narcissist is adaptive, is a form, grandiose narcissism is a form of adaptive narcissism.

Why? It’s adaptive because it leads to a stronger sense of self, while covert narcissism is maladaptive narcissism, is problematic narcissism, because it compensates for a lack of self.

And so, when you see a narcissist with a combination of leadership authority, grandiose exhibitionism, entitlement exploitativeness, the more pronounced these other traits are, the less of a self he has.

For the first time, to the best of my knowledge, we can come up with a scale, a scale of coherence and cohesion of self in Cluster B personality disorders, an invaluable tool.