Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissist and Attention: It’s Complicated

1. 00:02 Don’t you just miss my old background, the shrine with the dolls and the self-portrait and the incense candles? Creepy. Okay, I’m still in Paris as you can see and I’m available for paid consultations and free lectures. I’ve said it like 150 times. And so today I want your
2. 00:26 attention. And I want your attention because we’re going to discuss the economy of attention. The psychological economy of attention in narcissists and not only in narcissists. Attention is a very complex psychological construct. I’ve discussed attentional hyperfocus
3. 00:46 in other videos and I recommend that you try to find them laboriously. My name is Samakin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and pay attention a professor of psychology. So there are three types of attention. Synoptic attention. Synoptic attention
4. 01:08 is the when you make connections between events or facts so as to create an emergent logical and explanatory narrative. It’s also colloquially known as connecting the dots. If you want to connect the dots, you need to pay attention and you you need to have full
5. 01:29 grasp of everything that’s happening around you and everyone involved. So in creating a synoptic map of your reality in um kind of generating or engendering an organizing principle um making sense of what’s happening imbuing it with many meaning purpose and
6. 01:52 direction all these synoptic activities require synoptic attention. Another type of attention is targeted attention. Targeted attention is when you maintain a laser focus on a few data to the exclusion of everything else. All other information, all other stimuli are excluded.
7. 02:15 You’re focused on a single thing, a single event, a single individual, a single environment. And this is targeted attention. Um, in extreme, in the extreme, this is hyperfocus. and it’s typical of several mental health pathologies. The third type of attention is the
8. 02:37 inclusive attention. Paying equal attention to people happening tasks and information multitasking without committing to a single theory or a single filter. In other words, the kind of attention that is devoid of confirmation bias that is open to learning, open-minded.
9. 02:57 These are the three types of attention. What about the narcissist? The narcissist is an obsessive compulsive junkie. He is addicted to narcissistic supply and he seeks out narcissistic supply relentlessly. Now narcissistic supply is just a fancy term
10. 03:16 for attention both positive and negative. The narcissist therefore manifests the second type of attention giving the focused type the hyperfocused attention. Victims of narcissist would tell you that on a first meeting the narcissist was so focused on them, so
11. 03:35 all immersed in them. So that that he the narcissist excluded everything and everyone else, they felt subject to some kind of laser surgery, laser analysis. And many people feel that this kind of attention is flattering and even addictive and intoxicating. It is part
12. 03:57 of the initial phases, one of the initial phases of u the shed fantasy, the auditioning, the spotting and auditioning phase. So the narcissist focuses on you to the exclusion of everyone else. It’s laser focus. It’s hyperfocus and it makes you very self-aware and self-conscious.
13. 04:21 Only when the narcissist can leverage the other two variants, the synoptic variant and the and the open-minded variant or the inclusive variant, only then the narcissist would consider if he can leverage them to obtain narcissistic supply. In other words, narcissist
14. 04:41 default to the s to the to the targeted or focused type of attention because it guarantees the best outcomes. it’s optimal. The other types of attention, the synoptic attention, the inclusive attention are suboptimal in the sense that they do not come with a guarantee
15. 05:00 of eliciting and provoking narcissistic supply from other people. Other people usually do react when they are the exclusive subject of attention. When they are flooded with attention, when they are drowning in attention, when the attention is laser focused on them,
16. 05:20 people tend to react. And these reactions in themselves constitute counterattension. They constitute narcissistic supply. Synoptic attention is more intellectual in nature. It connects the dots as we say and sometimes I would even say often it does
17. 05:39 not elicit the kind of attention the narcissist needs in order to regulate his internal environment. The synoptic attention does not usually engender or trigger the kind of attention that would constitute external regulation. Similarly, inclusive attention is nondiscriminatory.
18. 06:01 Everyone is welcome. Everything is noticed and everything is put into a big p put pori in into a big pot and and kind of there’s a soup a mix a salad of possibilities and theories and so on so forth. Inclusive attention is a is a kind of hypothesis generating attention.
19. 06:20 And again it does not come with a guarantee of narcissistic supply. you could hypothesize um all day long and you won’t be able to secure attention from anyone. Similarly, you can make connections between things and events and people and environments
20. 06:37 and and bits of history and you name it and you won’t attract anyone’s attention. But if you were to focus on an individual or a group of people or a collective or a you know if you were to focus and you were to focus to the exclusion of everything else you are
21. 06:53 very likely to garner attention and to harvest narcissistic supply which is what the narcissist is interested in. So the narcissist default mode of attention is the second type the targeted or focused attention. Even when the narcissist is hyper intellectual, hyper rational,
22. 07:15 hyper analytical, extremely intelligent, the narcissist is blinded by his or her urge to garner attention. Narcissists are addicted to attention. And uh I don’t want to say, you know, attention hoes, but addicted to attention. The narcissist often remains
23. 07:32 oblivious to the most amazing, bothersome or shocking occurrences and information and stimuli around him or her when it is uh not relevant to to narcissistic supply. Even when there’s the kind of data, kind of triggers, the kind of stimuli, the kind of information
24. 07:54 that is critical for personal safety or well-being, the narcissist would ignore them if they don’t come attached to a package of narcissistic supply or if they do not in themselves guarantee the triggering of narcissistic supply and the uninterrupted flow of attention.
25. 08:14 like the autistic um patient, the narcissist fails to read even the most blatant cues, sexual uh signaling, social cues, body language, uh forms of communication. The narcissist is oblivious to all these exactly like someone with autism spectrum disorder.
26. 08:34 But the reason differs in autism, the reasons differ. In autism spectrum disorder, the reason is neurobiological. It’s a brain thing. Whereas in narcissism, the reason is that all these cues and messaging messages and stimuli and signals are irrelevant to
27. 08:53 narcissistic supply. So if there’s a sexual cue or sexual signaling that could culminate in a sexual conquest, which would then lead to a form of attention or narcissistic supply, for example, in the case of somatic narcissism, then the narcissist would
28. 09:09 pay attention to it. But if it is a kind of sexual signaling that is not likely to end up in rendering the narcissist uniquely irresistible and amazingly Apollonian, the narcissist would ignore it. So narcissists uh limit themselves to a very thin
29. 09:31 sliver or slice of the information universe or information space that surrounds them in which they are immersed. They are like u projector in at night. They are like a laser beam at night. They slice and dice the information and then they pick and choose the highly
30. 09:53 selective and discriminatory and they adopt or pay attention to or assimilate or interact with data or information that has something to do with the kind of attention that amounts to narcissistic supply. In other words, with a kind of attention that can
31. 10:11 help a narcissist to regulate himself or herself, to regulate the internal environment. The thing is that fundamentally the narcissist is utterly disinterested in other people, in memories, in stories, in places, in nature, in emotions, in daily life. None
32. 10:32 of this interests a narcissist. Not in the slightest. No profession, no job, no invention, no device, no nothing nothing interests the narcissist. The narcissist has zero curiosity. But the narcissist educate educates himself. The narcissist learns new
33. 10:53 things. The narcissist exposes himself to new experiences. The narcissist listens to other people and so on so forth. When the outcome is guaranteed narcissistic supply, it’s all about narcissistic supply. The narcissist is onetrack minded. He’s a junkie.
34. 11:13 And so the narcissist instantly dissociates, appears to be bored or appears to be distracted. uh when he’s confronted with information that is unlikely to yield narcissistic supply, unlikely to lead to narcissistic supply or not related to narcissistic
35. 11:32 supply in any possible way, never mind how fascinating and amazing and interesting and relevant the information is, never mind how beneficial the information is, the narcissist would ignore it. He goes through a synoptic failure. The narcissist’s perception is
36. 11:49 impressionistic and linear. The narcissist acts or goes through random lists with no organizing principle or the connective tissue of a story line. The narcissist is not u a storyteller. The narcissist generates a shared fantasy. But the shared fantasy is
37. 12:10 actually very static. The shared fantasy is founded on a snapshot, not on a video. The narcissist may be analytic. Uh he could ask what does the data what do the data possibly mean? He could parse and decipher and decode all kinds of stimuli. He may be analytical but the
38. 12:32 narcissist is rarely synthetic and rarely uh plot plot oriented rarely uh
39. 12:42 continuous. Narcissist is disjointed, haphazard, random, stoastic. The environmental obliviousness is reinforced by the narcissist’s need to butress his or her grandiosity via reframing or by ignoring hurtful or counterveailing or countervening
40. 13:01 information. It’s a cognitive deficit or a cognitive distortion which leads to an impaired reality testing. The narcissist also refrains from actions whose outcomes are uncertain and may expose his weaknesses, his vulnerabilities, his natience, his impotence, ignorance and
41. 13:22 and so on so forth. So there’s a lot of constriction in the narcissist’s life and the constriction applies also to attention spans, attentional direction, attentional focus and so on. The narcissist’s life is constricted and the narcissist’s
42. 13:41 attention is constricted. He ignores all the information that may necessitate reactions which may undermine the grandio inflated self-concept that he possesses and and constantly upholds. So there are a lot of constraints on the narcissist’s ability
43. 14:02 not only willingness but ability to pay attention. Some kinds of attention may lead to information which would challenge and undermine the narcissist’s uh grandio self-image, the narcissist’s inflated self-perception, the narcissist’s fantastic, unrealistic
44. 14:22 counterfactual self-concept. This kind of information is dangerous and the narcissist would do everything possible to avoid to avoid this kind of information, to avoid this data. And the way to do that is by maintaining a hyperfocus triggered type of attention
45. 14:39 that is not inclusive and that is not synoptic attention that is a tunnel vision. Tunnel vision that excludes everything else exclusionary attention. Of course, a constitutional failure to appreciate other people’s actions and intentions renders a narcissist gullible, even
46. 15:01 naive. The narcissist is always shocked by what transpires around him or her and by the fact that his or her deeds and words have untoward consequences. Nazis can’t connect the dots between his actions and the consequences of his actions because he does not possess or
47. 15:24 he is not willing to deploy synoptic attention or inclusive attention. The narcissist therefore is a one one uh trick pony is a one function device and in this sense the narcissist is binary on and off yes and no I feel good I feel bad narcissistic supply or its absence
48. 15:48 everything else never matters never mattered and does not matter everything else you included everything else is incidental