Pandemics: COVID19 and Daddy Issues in Borderline-Narcissist Couples
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and borderline narcissistic couples. He addresses misconceptions and misunderstandings about COVID-19, such as confusing case fatality rate with mortality. He then delves into the dynamics of borderline narcissistic couples, where one partner is a narcissist and the other is a borderline. These relationships are characterized by power struggles, punishment, and emotional turmoil, with both partners fulfilling critical functions for each other, but ultimately being better off without each other.
Self-sufficiency and Narcissism (ENGLISH responses, with Nárcisz Coach)
Narcissism is problematic because it leads to a zero-sum game mentality, where collaboration and cooperation are seen as unnecessary. This mindset is exacerbated by technological advancements that make people self-sufficient, leading to a decline in collaboration and cooperation in various aspects of society. As a result, narcissistic societies perpetuate income inequality and create a majority of losers and a minority of winners. This ultimately leads to negative outcomes for society as a whole.
Social Media, ISIS, and Narcissism as Death Cults
In this transcript, Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the rise of narcissism in society and its connection to social media. He suggests that social media has become a potent drug that fosters addiction, depression, and anxiety, especially among vulnerable age groups. Vaknin also argues that the decline of traditional institutions and the rise of a death-centered culture have led to a society that values objects and appearances over human relationships and life itself. This has resulted in a growing preoccupation with issues of life and death, such as abortion and euthanasia.
Flat Attachment, Dreading Intimacy, and Defiant Promiscuity
Flat attachment is a type of attachment style where people are incapable of bonding or relatedness to others. They commodify people and treat them as replaceable objects. Flat attachment is common among narcissists and psychopaths. With the rise of dating apps and social pressures, people are becoming more atomized and isolated, leading to an increase in flat attachment.
Dissonances, Anxiety, and Addiction (Intl. Conference on Addiction, Psychiatry and Mental Health)
Dissonance, or inner conflict, is a powerful force that can lead to addictive, traumatic, or post-traumatic behaviors. While cognitive dissonance is widely discussed, there are many other types of dissonance, including volitional, emotional, axiological, deontic, and attitude dissonance. Dissonance can arise from conflicting thoughts, emotions, values, duties, and attitudes. When defense mechanisms fail to cope with dissonance, severe anxiety can lead to self-medication and addiction, which can engender trauma and personality pathologies such as narcissism.
Love as Addiction (Global Conference on Addiction and Behavioural Health, London)
Love is an addiction that is similar to substance abuse, with changes in behavior that are reminiscent of psychosis. Passionate love closely imitates substance abuse biochemically. The same areas of the brain are active when abusing drugs and when in love. Falling in love is an exercise in proxy incest and a vindication of Freud’s much maligned early puss and electro complexes.
Intimacy and Jealousy Regulate Relationships
In relationships, there are two ways to regulate behavior: intimacy and romantic jealousy. Healthy relationships achieve a balance between the two, but those with mood disorders or personality disorders cannot achieve intimacy and instead become fused together. To prevent abandonment, the partner may provoke romantic jealousy, but this can lead to the exact opposite effect and drive the other partner away. Finding the balance between intimacy and jealousy is difficult, and exaggerated regulatory behaviors can kill the relationship. The modern condition is that many people give up on relationships altogether.
Fear of Intimacy, Cheating, and Preemptive Abandonment
People who fear intimacy will choose partners who are also afraid of intimacy, and they will both make sure there is no intimacy in the relationship. Abusive relationships are mutually exclusive to intimacy, and people with fear of intimacy choose abusers as their partners because being abused is their comfort zone. Narcissists are terrified of losing their source of secondary narcissistic supply, usually their spouse or intimate partner, and they push their intimate partner away to allay their anxiety over the impending and ineluctable loss of the relationship.
Narcissism as Addiction (ICABS 2019: International Conference on Addiction and Behavioral Science)
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the idea of recasting narcissistic disorders of the self as addictions. He explains that pathological narcissism is a form of addiction to narcissistic supply, which is the narcissist’s drug of choice. The pursuit of narcissistic supply is frenetic and compulsive, and when it is missing, the narcissist resorts to abnormal narcissistic supply by behaving recklessly, succumbing to substance abuse, or living dangerously. Narcissists faced with a chronic state of deficient narcissistic supply become criminals, race drivers, gamblers, soldiers, policemen, investigative journalists, or develop phobias, fear, and anxiety.
The Three Voices: Histrionic, Psychopathic, Borderline
Borderline personality disorder is often comorbid with other personality disorders, such as histrionic, narcissistic, and antisocial. Women are predominantly diagnosed with these comorbidities, and borderline personality disorder is a post-traumatic state that is triggered by neglect, abandonment, and abuse. When comorbid with histrionic personality disorder, women seek comfort, acceptance, validation, sex, and intimacy from other men, but conflicting inner voices arise. The histrionic voice says men will make them feel better, the psychopathic voice says don’t feel guilty about cheating, and the borderline voice says their sexuality is bad, mad, and dangerous. When faced with the prospect of sex, borderline patients panic because of negative thoughts, and if they cross the line and have full-fledged sex