Like you said, I feel like you were one of the pioneers of actually discussing the topic online when I was initially researching the topic. Again, I want to say maybe 2012, 2013. There weren’t a lot of people discussing this topic at all. It was pretty much your face was synonymous with this topic.

Do you feel like you’re a pioneer of bringing narcissism to the forefront?

I was the only person to discuss narcissism online between 1997 and 2004. That’s a fact. I had the only website dedicated to narcissism. I had the only support group dedicated to victims of narcissistic abuse and I coined 99% of the language everyone is using today. I coined phrases such as narcissistic abuse. I coined the phrase somatic narcissism, cerebral narcissism, no contact. I mean, you name it. 99% of the language is mine, ghosting, hoovering.

I had to. There was no language. In the absence of language, there’s no insight. In the absence of insight, there’s no change and no ability to transform and to develop and to evolve and to avoid dangers.

So I had to, first of all, invent the language and then following the language, I had to sort of disseminate it somehow. The internet was very helpful, frankly. The internet at that time was, there’s very little to do with the internet of, shall we say, up to 2006 or 2007. These were two totally dissimilar technological phenomena.

The internet until 2007 was community oriented, a bit altruistic, a lot altruistic actually. Had to do more with the dissemination of knowledge, support, with providing access, with elevating people intellectually, emotionally and otherwise, etc.

The internet after 2006-07 became much more narcissistic and was me focused, became me focused. And later on, I think this phase, which is the third phase of evolution, the internet is becoming psychopathic.

So the internet reflects major social trends. I, for one, don’t believe that technology engenders social trends. I think it’s the culmination and reification of processes that take place in communities and in other organizational social units, such as families, nations, politics, etc.

And I think what happened is as people became more and more narcissistic, a fact that is documented in quite a few studies, most notably the studies of Twenge and Campbell and others, as people became more and more narcissistic, they demanded empowerment. They insisted on access. They wanted interaction with like-minded people in order to amplify and enhance their omnipotence and omniscience and alleged or self-imputed omnipotence and omniscience and so on.

So there was a lot of grassroots peer pressure. Those demands, the supply and the internet had been utterly transformed within fewer than three years.

I watched the, and I really appreciate the fly on the wall series. I hope, I hope you guys continue that you and your wife, Lydia’s, it was wonderful to be able to just kind of observe and engage, but she made the point that, she herself was observing how volatile it had become towards her and towards yourself.

And you spoke about the fact that human beings are now becoming more machine-like, more of that left brain kind of logical, but to the point of, of almost being an android themselves, as far as the internet is concerned, is that what you’re saying we’re becoming more narcissistic as a result of our dependency on technology?

No, I’m saying exactly the opposite thing. I’m saying the technology had been created by these android people to gratify their needs and to amplify their alleged and self-imputed capacity.

I think what happened is as the number of people in the world increased, as the population exploded, when I was born, which is when the dinosaurs, lost dinosaurs roamed the earth, when I was born, there were 3 billion people. And today there’s 7.6 billion.

It’s much more difficult to be noticed. People need to feel that they are special, that they’re unique. People want to be seen. They want to be noted, that they are being seen, that they are being observed, that they’re being noticed.

And in the past, a hundred years ago, this was provided by the village. This was provided by the small town. This was provided by family members, extended family, nuclear family.

See, all these social units disintegrated, utterly disintegrated. Families are a long gone. Communities are nowhere to be seen. Towns have mushroomed and sprawled and became megalopolises.

I mean, it’s very difficult today to be, to be embedded in any kind of social fabric and to receive from this social fabric the affirmation, validation that one needs.

So what happened is a process called atomization.

I think with, with early formative years of childhood, the child needs to be seen because to be, his survival depends on being seen. If he’s not noticed, attended to by his parents and caregivers, a child can die.

So being seen is crucial, but it’s very difficult to be seen when there’s 7.6 billion others competing for scarce resources and scarce attention.

So narcissism has been on the rise because people want to render themselves unique, special, noticeable, apart from the maddening crowd.

And one way to do that is via social media and empowering technologies.

And so I think technologies reflect this need, not the other way.

Technologies were created to cater to this rising tide of narcissism.

And people have become machine like, when you say people have become machine like, it’s interesting in as early as 1970, there was a Japanese roboticist. His name was Maury. And he came up with the concept of the uncanny valley. He said that the more robots resemble human beings, the more ill at ease we feel in their presence, the more uncomfortable we feel. I mean, the more the machine resembles, the closer the machine is to a human being, the more uncomfortable we feel.

And this he called it the uncanny valley, taking off on Freud. Freud coined the term uncanny. So I think it’s the same with narcissists. We feel ill at ease, we feel uncomfortable because narcissists are good imitations of human beings.

However, they are not quite fully human beings. And the reason they’re not fully human is because of cold empathy. I suggested a few years ago that narcissists actually do have empathy, cold empathy.

But cold empathy is machine like. It’s cognitive. It’s analytic. There’s no emotional component in it.

And so narcissists lack empathy. They don’t understand the minds of other people. They don’t have a theory of mind. They don’t know what it is to be human.

Because they lack empathy. It is true empathy that we understand what it is to be human. They have the narcissist lack the common experience of being human. They lack the archetype of all archetypes, humanity. And instead what they do, they create artificial mechanical ways of coping with this lack.

Sam, how do I reconcile when you say that, and this is the struggle for myself, whether it be personally or professionally, that a lot of the criteria for NPD, it sounds like people today though, it sounds like empathy is gone. It sounds like, or empathy has to be learned as well. Does that make sense? Like it’s, I just, I hear a lot of what seems to be the norm now, but not under the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. How do I reconcile that?

Well, first of all, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual edition five, which was published in 2013, suggested an alternative model of diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder. And that alternative model placed emphasis on inability to attain intimacy, a pronounced lack of empathy, mood fluctuations or mood lability, and regulation of a sense of self-worth from the outside. So that goal orientation is directed by the outside.

In other words, the narcissist chooses what to do and what not to do in accordance with feedback from the outside that supports his grandiose self-image and self perception. He would embark on a course of action. If the course of action is unlikely to yield this feedback, he would abstain from it.

And this is the general description of the DSM 5. The DSM 4 is categorical in the sense that it provides nine diagnostic criteria, pathological envy, sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, exploitativeness, etc.

Any five of these nine criteria are satisfied, then you have yourself a narcissist.

A problem with the previous model, the nine criteria model is that it was possible for two people to be diagnosed as narcissists and to share only one diagnostic criterion, because you needed five out of nine. So one person could have one, one to five and the other one could have five to nine. So they would share only the fifth criteria.

I mean, force the committee of the diagnostic and statistical manual five to revamp the whole perception of narcissism. The minute they did this, the minute they revamped the way they viewed narcissism, it became a lot more general phenomenon. As long as the mental health profession limited itself to nine highly specific criteria, much fewer people could have been considered narcissists.

But the minute you start to talk in generalities, the minute you move from categorical, a categorical way of looking at narcissism to a dimensional way, the minute you start to say, well, people who cannot have intimacy, people who don’t have empathy, it applies to a much larger chunk of the population by definition.

And indeed today, I think, I don’t have numbers, but I think most people that I know have narcissistic traits and narcissistic behaviors and narcissistic defenses and so on.

I think narcissism is an all pervasive phenomenon today, actually to such an extent that I believe it is the organizing principle of our society, civilization and culture.

In other words, what I’m trying to say, I think we have created a civilization that is narcissistic and because it’s narcissistic and increasingly more psychopathic, it pays to be a narcissist. It’s a positive adaptation. It’s rewarding. If you are a narcissist, you end up being president of the United States. If you are not a narcissist, you end up being homeless.

Survival. It’s become a survival mechanism.

It’s a positive adaptation.

That’s the precise term. It’s a positive adaptation in the sense that if you adopt this set of traits behaviors and behaviors, you’re positively reinforced, you’re positively rewarded and you can accomplish things. In other words, you have an impact on your environment that is beneficial to you. That is in accordance with your goals and so on.

So narcissism works, to cut a long story short in a narcissistic psychopathic civilization, narcissism works and anything that is anti narcissistic does not work.

Empathy doesn’t work. Community doesn’t work. Teamwork doesn’t work.

It’s now a weakness.

Donald Trump works.

Yeah. It’s now considered a weakness to be empathetic.

Yeah. So here’s the question. When you as a therapist, because therapy is not devoid of values. Therapy is culture bound. It’s values oriented.

When you try to heal people, to cure them, you try to heal them and to cure them in accordance with some ideal type. Freud called it ego ideal.

You try to conform them to some mold or some set of criteria or some imaginary ideal person, which does not, who does not exist of course, or what we call normalcy. You try to make them more normal statistically speaking.

But if the very values change, then the whole profession of therapy should change because what have you, if empathy is not working anymore, if it’s counterproductive, if it is obstructive, if it prevents the patient from obtaining her goals, from realizing her life and life’s ambitions and so on.

We ask only two questions in psychotherapy, essentially.

The first question is, is the patient happy? Is the patient content? Is the patient egosyntonic?

That’s the first question.

And the second question we ask, is the patient functional? Is there any area or set of areas in the patient’s life which are adversely affected by the patient’s mental constitution?

If the answer is the patient is happy and she’s fully functional, then her set of values is irrelevant.

In other words, how do you take Donald Trump, how do you convince Donald Trump that he needs help?

Donald Trump is a psychopathic narcissist, extreme case, malignant. I vaingloriously consider myself an expert on the understanding of this condition more than most people alive.

And so I feel sufficiently qualified to make this statement.

Donald Trump is a seriously sick person, utterly malignantly narcissistic, bordering on psychopath, probably also psychopath.

But how do you convince Donald Trump to attend therapy? Why would he attend therapy?

His mental state was beneficial to him. He made money. He dated gorgeous women. He ended up being president of the United States. I mean, it worked for him.

His psychopathic narcissism was a positive adaptation. It brought him success, luck, money, and everything else that he set as his life’s goals. He is functional. He is functional in the sense that he realized his life’s ambition. So he’s functional.

And if you ask him, he will tell you, of course I’m happy. I mean, he’s egosyntonic. He doesn’t feel bad. He doesn’t feel uncomfortable. He doesn’t feel ill at ease. He doesn’t feel he has to change anything.

Why on earth would someone like Donald Trump attend therapy? What does he have to learn from a loser like the therapist?

In his world, therapists are losers.

And the problem is that more and more, our world is geared towards Donald Trump’s.

There is a Donald Trump in the Philippines. His name is Duterte. There’s a Donald Trump in Brazil. His name is Bolsonaro. There’s a Donald Trump in Russia. His name is Putin. And one in Turkey is Erdogan. And one in Hungary. His name is Oban. And one in Britain. His name is Farage.

Donald Trump’s are proliferating precisely because the structure of our civilization, our societies, our cultures, our political institutions and where the money flows, the transmission mechanisms of power and money, the nexus, all this is geared to promote, to empower, to enhance and to leverage and levitate people like Donald Trump.

Why on earth would they want to change? Our values are wrong. They are outdated. They are old-fashioned. They no longer work.

And in this sense, we are doing a disservice to our patients when we try to dissuade them from being narcissists.

Actually in July 2017, the science magazine, New Scientist, one of the two most important in the world, the other one being Scientific American. So New Scientist came up with a cover story. Teach your children to be more narcissistic.

You have a whole group of academics, Kevin Dutton, McCuby, others, you have a whole group of academics, scholars, pretty influential, pretty famous, who insist that narcissism and psychopathy are good things, that they are positive adaptations in a series of professions, that we should elevate narcissists and psychopaths to positions of power in politics, in business and so on.

That narcissists and psychopaths are creative. They are the yeast in our collective bread. They are the ones who come up with new arts, new culture, new books, new movies, new inventions, new science, new everything.

These people, these academics, they call, they invented, they coined the phrase, high functioning narcissists. Narcissists don’t have empathy.

Yes, they abuse and exploit everyone in their ambit, including their so-called nearest and dearest. Yes, they are treacherous, they are treasonous, they are exploitative, they are liars, they are antisocial, sometimes criminalized, and they are grandiose, they are delusional, they have fantasies.