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- 00:00 No text In the malignant and skitsoid manifestations of pathological narcissism, there is an embedded paradox. There’s a conundrum. There’s a time bomb and the malignant narcissist, the schizoid narcissist contort themselves out of shape in order to try to resolve
- 00:26 it. This is the topic of today’s video. My name is Sam Baknin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited. I’m also a professor of psychology. So what’s the problem? No text First of all, you remember malignant narcissist is someone who has the full
- 00:48 pop of clinical features of pathological narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, psychopathy and sadism. In other words, a delectable person with whom you would like to make friends and who you would like to marry. So this is a malignant narcissist. The
- 01:09 schizoid narcissist is a narcissist who is essentially introverted, withdrawn, avoidant, whose life is constricted. A narcissist who finds it very difficult to interact with other people. Many covert narcissist or many narcissists in the covert phase become schizoid.
- 01:29 But some overt narcissists are also No text skitsoid. And this raises a serious problem because it creates a dissonance. It creates a discrepancy. On the one hand, all narcissists, including malignant narcissist, including schizoid, overt, covert,
- 01:51 cerebral, somatic, you name it. All narcissists, no exception, require, they have a need for, they crave narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is attention whether positive or negative emanating from the environment emanating from other people
- 02:10 and this attention allows the narcissist to self-enhance. It allows the narcissist to butress to support his or her inflated fantastic grandio self-concept. Narcissistic supply is very crucial to the maintenance of a stable status quo ante a stable environment precariously
- 02:35 balanced house of cards. So this creates dependency and addiction. The narcissist becomes dependent on narcissistic supply, addicted to it and consequently becomes dependent on the sources of narcissistic supply on the pushers of narcissistic supply. he becomes addicted to them.
- 02:56 This dependency and addiction don’t sit well with the narcissist self-concept as godlike because God is not dependent on anyone for anything. And here he is the narcissist utterly groveling, begging, coercing, cajoling, uh, crying for anything to obtain supply. this
- 03:27 um abyss, this gap between the way the narcissist sees himself or herself as self-sufficient, self-contained, omnipotent, omniscient, and as I said, divine on the one hand and the harsh reality of dependency and addiction on other people. This abuse, this gap creates a lot of
- 03:50 internal tension, inner tension known as dissonance. And dissonance gives rise to anxiety. Now the classic overt narcissist simply ignores the dissonance and reduces the anxiety amilarates and mitigates it by outsourcing ego functions by outsourcing psychological
- 04:13 processes to as big a number of people as possible. It is by distributing these psychological needs or psychological processes that the narcissist convinces himself that he’s less dependent on any specific source on any particular individual. So the overt narcissist solution is
- 04:37 dispersion or dispersal or distribution creating a distributed network of sources of narcissistic supply so that he doesn’t feel dependent on any particular node in the network and the network is perceived as redundant self-compensatory. In case a narcissist loses one source,
- 04:59 there are others there who are immediately available and accessible to compensate for the loss. This is the overt solution. But the malignant narcissist No text faces a problem because a malignant narcissist holds everybody in contempt. The superiority of a malignant narcissist
- 05:22 relies heavily and I would say even exclusively on his capacity to convince himself that everybody else is loathome, repellent, inferior and deserving of disdain and contempt. Everyone, everybody, no exception. No, this presents a dilemma because if
- 05:46 everybody is inferior, if everybody is stupid is, if everybody is envious, if everybody is contemptable, if everybody is worthy of disdain, if everybody is lowly and you know, hooy and what have you, then the narcissistic supply emanating from
- 06:07 these people is lowgrade. It’s not high octane. It’s not high grade, it’s low grade. And so the malignant narcissist, as I said, is faced with a conundrum. On the one hand, exactly like every other narcissist, the malignant narcissist is dependent on supply. On the other hand,
- 06:27 he constantly deprecates and devalues all potential sources of narcissistic supply, holds them in contempt, berates them, demeans them, at least in his own mind. And therefore he cannot obtain supply from other people because they are not eligible sources. They’re so
- 06:46 inferior, so bestial, so animalistic, so primitive that they can’t give him supply. They’re not good sources. The supply is low grade. So this is a dilemma of the malignant narcissist. The schizoid narcissist is faced with a similar dilemma. The schizoid narcissist wants
- 07:07 to avoid other people. He wants to avoid them because he believes that they are malevolent or that they’re envious. There’s a bit of paranoid ideation involved here. Or he wants to avoid them because they are burdensome. Any interaction with other people is
- 07:21 perceived as honorous, difficult, unrewarding and so on. So the schizoid narcissist is very avoidant, very constricted, very No text withdrawn and cannot actually tap sources of narcissistic supply, other people. He cannot because it’s too much for him. He
- 07:42 he just cannot interact with other people. It’s the the the mental cost, the psychological price of having any kind of intercourse with and recourse to and discourse with other people is too much. So we here we have two types of narcissist. The first one, the malignant narcissist
- 08:06 avoids other people because he regards them below him, beneath him. He regards them as contemptable. The second type, the schizoid narcissist, avoids other people because it’s too it’s too much. It’s the price. He he he just can’t contemplate or countenance interactions
- 08:23 with other people. And both these types subtypes of narcissist are faced therefore with a problem because in the absence of sources of narcissistic supply, if you are avoiding other people, you’re not able to garner supply. You’re not able to obtain supply. Obviously,
- 08:43 sources of narcissistic supply are exclusively other people. Although one can obtain supply from inanimate objects, for example, by owning a flashy car, this is another type of supply and it’s insufficient because it requires the gaze and the envy of other people. Even
- 09:07 if you have a trophy wife, it is not the trophy wise that trophy wife that provides the supply. It is the envy of other men that is the supply. So ultimately, whatever the case may be, the ultimate sources of narcissistic supply are people. There’s no way of
- 09:27 avoiding this. And if you hate people, if you hold them in contempt, if you disdain people, if you are repelled by people, if you want to avoid people because they’re too much, if you then where on earth are you going to and how on earth are you going to secure an
- 09:46 uninterrupted flow of narcissistic supply? And so there are two solutions. The first solution is self supply. In the description, you will find a link to a video which tells you everything you need to know about self- supply. And I will therefore not rehash it here.
- 10:07 Self- supply is when the narcissist becomes his or her own source of narcissistic supply and thereby renders himself or herself utterly self-sufficient and self-contained. So lipsistic in many ways. The other solution is faceless, impersonal, anonymized, crowdsourced supply.
- 10:30 So the malignant narcissist for example and the schizoid narcissist would prefer to not interact with specific individuals with particular sources with identifiable faces in the mass. But both of them would be happy to accept narcissistic supply from huge numbers of
- 10:52 people, from an audience, from followers, from fans, the number of views on YouTube videos, hint hint, the number of likes on Facebook posts or Instagram posts or Tik Tok posts. this aggregate numbers of viewership, likes, um, fans, audience numbers, these
- 11:20 aggregate numbers become the source of narcissistic supply without imposing the cost of having to interact with particular individuals, with specific people, with faces in the crowd. And so this is also a solution. Crowdsource anonymized supply. As you see, narcissism is a
- 11:44 contortionist act. The narcissist like water would find his or her way anywhere and everywhere in the pursuit of narcissistic supply and the stabilizing impact of self-enhancement strategies.