Yes, that’s how I look after a sleepless night. Don’t ask, and I will not tell.

My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the blue professor of psychology, the most handsome one on this channel.

This you cannot dispute.

And today we’re going to discuss what else?

Sexuality.

Why does the narcissist transition from being a sexless cerebral to being a somatic sex addict? What pushes the narcissist to change his entire psychosexuality, his entire personality, in effect?

Is this a form of identity disturbance, or is something much more pernicious at play?

For those of you who are conspiracyminded. Tomorrow, by the way, there’s a bonus for all of you. The toxic family holidays reunion guide. Yes, everything you wanted to know about seriously sick, dysfunctional families. In other words, your family.

Okay, Shoshanim, my name is still Sam Vaknin. Last time I checked and I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the book that keeps giving and sometimes taking.

Onward Christian soldiers, and in my case, Jewish soldiers, to discuss cerebral narcissism.

Cerebral narcissism is a relatively stable construct across the lifespan. In other words, the cerebral remains cerebral until he dies.

There are periods in the cerebral’s life when he becomes briefly somatic. These periods never last more than a few years and usually they last a few months.

Why is cerebral narcissism so stable? Why doesn’t it fluctuate?

Narcissists to some extent have identity disturbance. Both the lines have much more than narcissists.

But narcissists also morph and shapeshift. Why don’t they change their sexual preferences?

And so the reason that cerebral narcissism is a fixture, a piece of unmovable, immutable furniture in the narcissist’s mind, is because it starts very early on in life. It can start even at age two, sometimes earlier. It involves what we call sublimation.

Sublimation is when the sex drive is converted into other types of activities which do not involve sex and have no sexual nature at all.

Freud gave the example of writing a book. Instead of having sex, you write a book. You’re so depleted and spent by the end of the day that you don’t have a mind for having sex. So there’s mental energy.

There’s a law of conservation of mental energy. There’s just a limited quantity. And this limited quantity transmutes and shifts from one activity to another.

If you invested in writing a book or making a political speech or appearing on television, or what have you, usually you have no energy left to do other unspeakable things to your girlfriend.

And so this is called sublimation. Sublimation means converting drives, urges, instincts into socially acceptable activities that consume the energy that should have gone to these drives, urges and instincts.

So cerebral narcissism involves very early life sublimation.

The child, sometimes age two, learns to convert libido, convert Eros, the sex drive, the component of libido that has to do with sex. The child learns to convert this into activities that gratify the adults around the child. The child learns to manipulate adults. The child learns to extract narcissistic supply from adults by emphasizing his intelligence, by displaying her intellect, by solving problems in mathematics, by reading aloud the daily paper when you’re four years old.

Yeah, that’s what I mean. And so the child learns that displays or pyrotechnics of the mind are even more efficacious, more efficient at manipulating adults than sexuality.

Normal healthy children, especially girls, as they grow up, they learn that sex is a form of energy. Sex is power. Young girls learn to give sex or to at least insinuate that they’re available to have sex in order to manipulate boys and adults around them.

Similarly, boys learn to leverage secondary sex characteristics and sexual behavior in order to attract girls and to manipulate, for example, the favorite female teacher.

Sex is a manipulative force and watch my previous video about reverse engineering.

But cerebral narcissists from a very early age have learned the power of something a lot more potent and a lot more mighty than sex.

The mind, words, intellect, intelligence, cerebral narcissists find out the secret of manipulating people via speech, via writing, and via reading. And they have learned that this kind of manipulation is much longer lasting, much more ubiquitous, much more profound than anything sex can accomplish.

So they drop sex all together. They don’t develop asexuality. They redirect their entire libido and eros into intellectual pursuits. They leverage their brain as an instrument and a tool to obtain supply and as a venue or conduit or vector of self-efficacy and agency.

In other words, they use their mind, they use their intellect, they use their intelligence to secure favorable outcomes from the environment.

Having learned this trick at age two or four or six, the child has no incentive to develop sexually.

Sublimation is so massive, sublimation is so all pervasive that it renders the cerebral narcissist asexual. It destroys, it eradicates his sex drive. He grows up without a sex drive, in effect, you could call it arrested sexual development.

And so when the cerebral starts to interact with peers, he is already abnormal. He is already misshaped.

While all his peers engage in the twin or dual tracks of intellectual development and psychosexual development, he is one-track minded. He is focused only on the intellect.

And while all his peers grow up to be adults, mature, sexually ripe and intellectually capable to a large extent, he is lopsided. He grows up only in one direction. He’s like a hunchback or a stalactite or a stalagmite or like a laser beam rather than a diffuse light. He’s totally focused, he’s point-like.

And so the peers of the cerebral narcissist sense his abnormality and potential sex partners shun the cerebral narcissist because they regard him as creepy and robotic.

In return, the cerebral narcissist injured, hurt, wounded and damaged by this rejection conjures up a defensive ideology.

He says, I don’t really need sex. I don’t really want sex. It is I who chooses to not have sex.

This is known as cognitive dissonance. He’s trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance by discarding one part, one horn of the dilemma.

It’s not that I want sex and I cannot have it, which is an intolerable thought. I actually don’t want sex. And celibacy says the cerebral narcissist is evidence of superior strength and self-control.

Women are contemptible if he is heterosexual. Women are contemptible and should be avoided.

This is the ideology of the cerebral. It acts as an exoskeleton, as a shell. It ossifies and regilifies and fossilizes until the cerebral narcissist resembles a very ancient Egyptian mummy still entombed.

So how can someone like that suddenly love sex, seek sex, adore sex and spend most of his time pursuing sex? What brings on this amazing transformation?

Cerebals become somatic usually in the vast majority of cases, following something known as narcissistic collapse. A collapsed narcissist is not a failed narcissist. It’s a common mistake among YouTube’s self-styled experts and their dogs.

Failed narcissism is a phase in the development of borderline. A collapsed narcissist is a narcissist who cannot secure narcissistic supply for whatever reason.

When the cerebral narcissist collapses, he can no longer garner supply by placing his intellect on public display.

And so this is one reason why cerebals transition and become somatic because they can no longer obtain supply in the classical traditional habituated ways, the ways they are used to.

So they switch to another strategy. It’s a narcissistic supply strategy being somatic. This is one reason.

The second reason, second possibility is when the cerebral is offered the opportunity to obtain a quick fix of narcissistic supply via sex.

Now this happens extremely rarely. Remember what I said before. The cerebral is highly abnormal. He lacks a critical dimension of humanity. Not only he lacks empathy, which renders him half human, he also lacks sexuality. The cerebral is nothing but a brain, just a brain in a vat.

So he is not perceived as human by others. There’s what we call an uncanny valley reaction. Look it up on my channel. There’s a video dedicated to the uncanny valley.

People feel uncomfortable with the cerebral narcissist. They feel under scrutiny as if they were in a laboratory in their mice. They feel they feel very threatened. They become hypervigilant.

And so people shun the cerebral narcissist. They avoid him. As I said, they regard him as creepy.

So it’s extremely rare for the cerebral narcissist to come across a sexual opportunity and especially a sexual opportunity, which would elevate his self-esteem, buttress his grandiosity and thereby constitute narcissistic supply.

But when this rarity happens, when this singularity, singular event happens, then the cerebral narcissist becomes somatic just in order to take advantage of this opportunity. When the cerebral narcissist becomes a somatic narcissist, when he metamorphosizes and transitions, he resembles very much a sex addict. He’s incapable of empathy or attachment or bonding or even perceiving external objects. He’s a narcissist, remember?

So instead, he uses bodies. He increases his body count. He uses body count as kind of a meter of success. Body count becomes the narcissistic supply.

And this applies to men, especially, but also to women who are cerebral narcissists and have turned somatic from zero to hero.

Finally, there’s another reason for such a startling transformation, age, looming death.

The cerebral attempts to deny his age. He attempts to fend off his ineluctable demise. He regards himself as immortal because the mind and thoughts and philosophy and physics, they are all immortal.

And so he must be immortal because he’s producing them.

But when age encroaches upon the narcissist, when he starts to see to his great horror, his body crumbling and falling apart, disintegrating in front of his terrified eyes, when he realizes the proximity of death, when he gets sick, chronically ill or otherwise, he tries to deny. He tries to deny, he tries to refrain, and he tries to substitute life for death by having sex. Sex is the force of life. Remember, Eros is an integral part of libido, which is the force of life.

And so by leveraging his libido and his Eros, by finally unleashing what is left of his sex drive, by regaining access to those parts of him, which have been suppressed or repressed for decades, the narcissist feels alive again.

And this is a way of pretending that he will never die. Usually, he chooses much younger sex partners, because their youth kind of rubs off on him, reflects on him.

It’s like King David, Omahatma Gandhi, who used to sleep with very, very young girls.

But the cerebral is a narcissist. Don’t forget this. He is now having transitioned to the somatic type. He is now a sex addict.

But his sex is still compulsive, a little coercive, and always autoerotic, mass-turbatory.

Narcissist uses other people’s bodies as animated dildos or sex dolls. The partners are fungible and forgettable to a large extent.

There is one exception to this. And it is when the partner is actually mentally ill, when the partner is unhealthy. When the partner is, for example, borderline, it caters to the narcissist’s grandiosity as a healer or a fixer.

And so this is the only case where the partner would not be considered dispensable or replaceable or interchangeable. More or less, healthy partners would be forgotten soon enough immediately after the sex.

But when the narcissist comes across someone who needs help, someone who is damaged and broken, it provokes in him the guru instinct, the messiah complex, the saviour-fixer-healing complex.

And so it caters to his grandiosity, and he is likely to bond or attach to these kinds of partners. The younger they are, the better.

Because as I said, it imbues him with a new sense of life.

Narcissists, cerebral and somatic, offer their partners, including sex partners, shared fantasy, a shared fantasy of some kind. The shared fantasy could be, I’m safe, you’re secure, I’m stable, I’m calming influence on you. I’ll always be there for you, will help you, care about you. That’s a shared fantasy in some way.

Another type of shared fantasy is I’m going to have a family, I’m going to get married, I’m going to have children. So there’s always a shared fantasy.

And these shared fantasies usually incorporate a fresh start.

Because remember, in this third possibility, in this third case, the cerebral transitions to somatic because he wants to forget about aging and about death.

The only way to do this is to team up with a young partner and have sex with her, which is a force of life, then offer her a fresh start, which is typical of a much younger age.

R relocation, marriage, children, incessant travel, or long term relationships, these are hallmarks of people in their 20s and 30s, rarely, rarely older.

So the narcissist actually regresses the transition from cerebral narcissism to somatic narcissism is a form of infantile regression.

The cerebral narcissist turns somatic frantically thrashes about trying to make up for lost time and missed sexual and romantic opportunities, his eyes are open, he suddenly sees what he had sacrificed over the years, what he has given up on, what could have been his.

And so he’s very mournful, he’s grieving, he’s furious, sometimes he’s even suicidal.

The transition from cerebral narcissism to somatic narcissism is very destabilizing for the narcissist, because he gets to see the other part of him that had always been denied and neglected and atrophied. He gets to realize the bad decisions that he has made about himself, how he had killed a part of himself, crucial part of himself. This is both infuriating, very sad.

And so the cerebral transformatic is a sex addict, because he is compulsive about the pursuit of sex, he self-medicates with sex, he reduces his anxiety, and his fear of death and his terror of age and aging.

And so as the cerebral narcissist inexorably declines, it becomes harder and harder for him to maintain this delusional self-deception.

The cerebral finally has to confront his mortality, the day of judgment is upon him, and he ends up often alone in a degenerative schizoid state, self-sufficient, but also dead, both internally and finally externally.

Thank you for listening to this cheerful video for a change.