Everyone and her mother-in-law are now experts on cluster B personality disorders.

It’s all the rage. It’s a money spinner.

So here’s a message to these self-styled experts.

Autistic thinking is not the same.

Repeat, not the same as autism spectrum disorder or more generally autism.

Autistic thinking has little to do with autism despite the label.

Here’s a piece of free advice.

I usually charge €500 an hour and here I’m giving it to you for free.

Go and actually study psychology under Professor Sandaknin preferably.

Or much easier and much more pleasant, watch this video to the end and you will be enlightened and educated and edified about autistic thinking and Dereistic thinking.

But not before we travel through multiple service announcements.

For those of you who don’t want to listen to the service announcements, fast forward, find where the video starts, the actual content starts.

Others who are curious as to what is happening in the esteemed venerable professor Sandaknin’s life.

This is for you.

Okay, first of all, my name is Sandaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I’m a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University. It was Tovondan, a Russian Federation I left when the war started. And I’m a long time faculty member in CIAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies in Toronto, Canada, Cambridge, United Kingdom and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria.

Here are the service announcements preceding the actual content of the video.

Number one, there’s an artificial intelligence channel called Mindful Wealth Mastery. Link in the description. The channel summarizes the thought, the thinking of public intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson, Yuval Noah Harari and so on and so forth. And among these public intellectuals, poor humble me. I’m also, my thinking and teachings are also summarized there.

Go to the channel, have a look around and please pay attention to the number of views. Hint, hint. Enough wackling, enough self-congratulating and self-bragging. People might think that you’re a narcissist.

Okay, a proper narcissism. I’m honored and privileged to have been the latest guest in the Human Rights Podcast of the University of Cambridge. The podcast is called “Declarations”. And it is put together by the Center of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge. It’s available on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. And again, there’s a link in the description.

Now, during this podcast, I’ve suggested a new approach to abuse involving dual concepts.

Borderlines versus boundaries. The host was Nima Jayasingh and the panelist was Dr. Mariam Tanwir. And we dealt with the discourses regarding personal border violations in mental abuse versus boundary violations. It’s very interesting because I identified several behaviors which are not considered abusive as actually abusive.

Go there and listen if you didn’t have enough of a wackling dose for the day. Overdose on wackling is the new black.

Okay, next.

As you well know, or some of you may know, I have a PhD in physics.

So there are several videos I’ve made about physics.

A theory that I came up with in 1984 in my PhD dissertation is now being elaborated upon by scientists all over the world.

So there are several videos on physics. There are videos on economics. I used to be an economic advisor to several governments. I used to be the senior business correspondent of United Press International, UPI. I was an M. Steele, interviewed widely in all international media, lately on Newsweek and RTL, TV, Hungary and so on and so forth. And I’m the current columnist in Brussels Morning, which is a European Union newspaper.

Now, all these contents and materials are available on my Wacknin Musings channel. And again, there’s a link in the description.

Another channel that I maintain is about nothingness. Finally, the last service announcement, I’m uploading academic papers, academic articles that I’ve published, that I’ve offered and published. And I’m uploading academic articles and papers where my work is cited. There’s a total of 1,500 academic papers where my work has been cited and I’m uploading all these to my page on academia.edu.

Recently, academia.edu selected me to be top 0.5% of 270 million academics around the world. It’s a huge honor and I accept it.

Typically, atypically, I accept it with due humility. Top 0.5% of all academics in the world confirmed by academia.edu. I’m also a member of their editorial board and other positions.

So, these are the service announcements.

As I promised, today we’re going to discuss a very fascinating topic, autistic and de-reistic thinking.

But before we go there, I want to mention a school of thought known as activism.

An activism is the proposition that minds arise and take shape through the precarious, self-creating, self-sustaining, adaptive activities of living creatures.

Living creatures regulate themselves by interacting with features of the environment.

The insights of an activism went into my recent IPAM model, intra-psychic activation model.

There’s a video on my channel dedicated to IPAM and there are already a few papers published in academic journals about IPAM.

So, an activism is a part of IPAM because it recognizes that the minds of creatures are the outcomes of regulatory or self-regulatory activities in the environment.

Now, the term inaction was first introduced in a book called The Embodied Mind co-authored by Varela, Thompson and Roche and published in 1991.

At the time, the authors defined cognition as an action and they defined an action as the bringing forth of domains of significance through orgasmic activity that has been in self-condition by a history of interactions between an organism and his environment.

Mentality, never mind how complex, never mind how sophisticated. Yes, even my mentality has to do with living beings dynamically interacting with their environment.

From the activist perspective, minds cannot be described unless you specify all these interactions because they are at the heart of mentality and mentalizing in all their forms.

Now, this leads directly to autistic, interistic thinking because these two types of cognitions are actually divorced from the environment and fly in the face of an activism.

Have fun, Jeladim, the Jeladot. Look it up.

Autistic thinking, also known as de-aristic thinking, is the topic of today’s video.

And what qualifies me to hacktor and preach and chastise and castigate all the plagiarists and self-styled experts out there? My credentials.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of the first book on narcissistic abuse, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, first published in 1999 when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. I’m also a former visiting professor of psychology in a southern federal university in Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation. And I am a long-term member of the faculty of SIAS-CIAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, with offices in Toronto, Canada, Cambridge, United Kingdom and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria.

Here you are. You span the globe with me. Join Vaknin Tours.

Okay, Neshamot. Look it up. Let us delve right in. Enough with the nonsense, Vaknin. Let us delve right in and discuss autistic and de-aristic thinking.

Autistic and de-aristic thinking are ways of relating to reality, to personal experience, to logic itself and to other people, interpersonal relating.

Autistic and de-aristic thinking are fantasy infused, based on fantasy.

However, they are technically speaking or clinically speaking cognitions.

Theoryism and autistic thinking, as the name implies, deal with thoughts, with cognitions.

But these cognitions are somehow distorted. These are cognitive distortions.

The autistic thinking is narcissistic and egocentric, self-centered and self-absorbed. That’s autistic thinking.

De-aristic thinking is totally fantastic. It revolves around fantasy and daydreaming. It is divorced from reality. It involves impaired reality testing.

Both autistic and de-aristic thinking are self-referential. They cause the individual to withdraw from the world and to focus upon oneself to the exclusion of all others, everything else, and even the logic, order and structure that rule the universe.

So these patients have illogical and idiosyncratic cognitions. Their thinking is very bizarre to the point that often they are misdiagnosed as schizotypal.

But the thinking or, I mean, autistic thinking and de-aristic thinking derive from an overarching and all-pervasive daydreaming or fantasy life.

In other words, they are not isolated figments or mechanisms that are not integrated well into other psychodynamics. They form a part and parcel and very often the pivot or the axis of the total mental world psychological universe, inner landscape of the person involved.

Cognitions in this case, de-aristic conditions, cognitions, autistic cognitions actually form the internal universe of the patient so that everything becomes suffused with fantasy, dreams, highly unusual, very specific and unique to the individual thinking, idiosyncratic thinking.

There is stereotypical or concrete thinking, a defiance of logic and an inability to relate to other people as if they were real.

Of course, if you deny reality, also deny the reality of other people with the exception of plagiarists out there.

Okay, Shoshanim. So we have a patient. He is illogical. He is odd. He is weird. He misinterprets his own experience in ways which are delusional or strange.

He has a very poor interface with reality. He misjudges reality.

And we have this kind of patient and they infuse people and events around them with completely subjective meanings.

It is on the thin line with psychosis actually because there are strong elements of hyper-reflexivity and the usual confusion between internal and external objects.

This patient regards the external world as an extension or projection of the internal one.

Such patients often withdraw completely. They retreat into an inner private realm, unavailable to communicate and to interact with others.

This is very common in specific phases of the narcissistic cycle, for example, the schizoid phase.

And so there is a close affinity between narcissism and autism mediated via autistic thinking.

The narcissist is the only clinical case who engages in both autistic thinking and de-realistic thinking, depending on the phase in the cycle.

Some narcissists are like a compendium of these types of counterfactual, unrealistic modes of thought and relating to the environment.

People with autism spectrum disorder, they engage in autistic thinking.

Narcissists, as I said, engage in autistic thinking and de-realistic thinking.

But autistic and de-realistic thinking are not limited to these mental disorders.

If we were to consider the belief in God and other supernatural beings as a form of delusional disorder, a much psychogenic illness, the way I do, that’s how I regard this idiotic nonsense.

Well, these are mentally ill people, religious people are mentally ill, and some of them, not all of them, can easily degenerate into autistic and de-realistic thinking.

For example, many of them believe that God himself is taking care of them specifically, personally, individually, monitors them, micromanages their lives and rewards them or punishes them according to their behavior or misconduct.

This is delusional, autistic, de-realistic thinking, self-absorbed and divorced from reality.

So we have an example of socially acceptable delusions which actually involve de-realistic and autistic thinking.

Similarly, paranoia, paranoid ideation, is a form of narcissism. It’s grandiose.

The paranoid believes that he’s at the center of some malign attention, malevolent conspiracy. He is so important that everyone is out to get him, to take him down.

So the paranoid engages in autistic and de-realistic thinking as well.

What I’m trying to say is that autistic and de-realistic thinking are crucial components of many mental illnesses and also many mentally ill but socially condoned behaviors.

Not only religion, political movements such as Nazism, for example, or communism, they engaged in autistic and de-realistic thinking.

It’s an exceedingly dangerous phenomenon and one of the main tasks in therapy, in psychotherapy, is to negate or to confront and to ameliorate and to subdue and to suppress autistic and de-realistic thinking by somehow confronting them with countervailing information, data and evidence.

This is precisely what is done, what we do in cognitive behavioral therapy.

I’m not a therapist, I’m a counselor, but this is what is done in CBT.

So autistic and de-realistic thinking, if you go one level down and if you accept that emotions are a subspecies of cognitions, then of course autistic and de-realistic thinking would affect emotions as well.

More precisely, access to emotions. Autistic and de-realistic thinking would deny the patient access to his emotions because emotions would be perceived as out there, external, part of reality.

And so there will be a gap or a chasm or a schism, an internal fragmentation of the patient where, for example, the narcissist cannot access positive emotions and is left only with negative affectivity.

Access to emotions is totally denied in the case of the psychopath and in the case of the borderline there’s emotional dysregulation, which is also a direct outcome of misjudging her emotions, weighing them improperly, again involving autistic and de-realistic thinking.

It’s a much neglected field and could be the key for future advances in the study and treatment of claustrophobic personality disorders, hopefully not by self-styled experts, their mothers-in-law and other plagiarists.