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- 00:02 the latest in the flux of misinformation emanating from self-styled experts online with zero credentials in the field is that pathological narcissism narcissistic personality disorder is hereditary it's genetically determined some of them go as far as to say that
- 00:23 you're born with narcissistic personality disorder this is based on a misapprehension a misunderstanding of the field which is of course the outcome of ignorance when you pretend to be an expert in something you have no idea about this is the end result let us
- 00:42 therefore lend them a helping hand my name is Sam Vaknin i'm the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of psychology in several countries including Cambridge United Kingdom now these self-styled experts confuse
- 01:01 narcissism with narcissistic personality disorder narcissism is considered to be a trait or a combination of traits narcissism is measured with a test called narcissistic personality inventory here's the first misinformation narcissistic personality inventory does
- 01:24 not measure and does not test for and does not diagnose narcissistic personality disorder the NPI the most widely circulated and widely deployed psychological test is used to diagnose narcissism mostly in healthy people the extent of narcissism especially in
- 01:52 healthy people we do not use narcissistic personality inventory to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder because narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder are absolutely not the same thing narcissistic personality disorder is measured by other tests for example
- 02:15 the PNI pathological narcissistic inventory pathological narcissism inventory so first thing we need to to do is distinguish between narcissism and the malignant pathological version known as narcissistic personality disorder and these have very little in common now
- 02:36 traits human traits trait domains are mostly heritable in other words traits are mostly determined by genes they are passed on from one generation to the next in according to the laws of genetics but the literature the academic literature and thousands of studies over
- 03:02 130 years are near unanimous personality disorders are induced by dysfunctional environments not by genes personality disorders in the vast majority of cases with one or two exceptions are not hereditary again make a distinction between traits and disorders they're not the
- 03:30 same and so that's the first issue second issue is that narcissism is not a trait or at least not a single trait narcissism is an umbrella term for a confluence of several traits for example in the international classification of diseases which is the diagnostic manual
- 03:53 used by the majority of humanity narcissism is actually a combination of several traits dissociity anastia negative affectivity antagonism and so on and so forth so even if we were to say that narcissism is traitbased or is trait related we would still not be talking
- 04:20 about genetic transmission or hereditary transmission in the strict sense because narcissism involves many traits some of them may be passed on from one generation to the next others may not so it's not as clean as clean and clearcut as it appears to be in the writings and
- 04:43 speeches and interviews of again self-styled experts with absolutely zero credentials in the field it stands that some people are more predisposed to develop narcissistic personality disorder but only when they are exposed to the wrong environment you are not born with
- 05:08 narcissistic personality disorder this is complete unmitigated unadulterated nonsense and misinformation no one is born with narcissistic personality disorder because traits are heritable it is likely that some people are born with a combination of traits which they have
- 05:31 inherited which they have been passed on genetically and that these combination of potential traits these combinations of unexpressed genes are activated in environments that involve abuse trauma and adverse childhood experiences another problem is how do we define
- 05:54 abuse most scholars today define abuse much more widely than self-styled experts do online abuse includes behaviors such as spoiling the child pampering the child instrumentalizing the child idolizing and worshiping the child abuse includes behaviors such as parentifying the child
- 06:16 abuse is not only physical abuse or sexual abuse or verbal abuse or psychological abuse abuse is any situation where the child is not allowed to form a personality a personhood is not allowed to individuate and is not allowed to separate from the
- 06:32 parent any situation where the the child the child is discouraged from forming boundaries and developing what used to be known as an ego so um to sum up what do we know right now there is no evidence that narcissistic personality disorder is hereditary there are no genes that are
- 06:58 linked to narcissistic personality disorder in any rigorous compelling serious study and even when it comes to narcissism which is a combination of traits a basket of traits we still don't have compelling evidence that it is passed on via the generations passed on
- 07:20 genetically although I must say that it makes a lot of sense it stands to reason that narcissism this basket of traits is hereditary there are many indications that it is in other words I believe that there is a predisposition a genetic hereditary
- 07:42 predisposition to develop narcissistic personality disorder when an individual a person a child is exposed to the wrong dysfunctional harsh or spoiling environment i believe in that but my beliefs and the beliefs of the self-styled experts online are
- 08:05 irrelevant beliefs and anecdotes are not science and the science at this stage is pretty clear we still do not possess any evidence rigorous compelling convincing repeated evidence in replicated studies we do not possess such evidence that indicates the hereditary genetic nature
- 08:30 of either narcissistic personality disorder or narcissism
