Dissociation (Amnesia) & Confabulation in Narcissism (Intl. Conf. Clinical Counseling Psychology)
Sam Vaknin, a visiting professor of psychology, discusses dissociation in narcissistic disturbances of the self at a conference in Tokyo. He explains that the narcissist’s sense of self is regulated by feedback from others and that the narcissist’s true self is suppressed and replaced by a false self. The false self serves as a decoy and absorbs pain, while the true self becomes dysfunctional and detached. The narcissist experiences life as a detached observer, feeling alienated and controlled by the false self.
Narcissist, Psychopath, Misogynist, Racist? Josh Neal Talk to Sam Vaknin
Sam Vaknin is a professor who has developed a new treatment modality called cold therapy for narcissistic personality disorder. He believes that language is an obstruction to understanding the physical nature of reality and that narcissism is a post-traumatic condition caused by abuse during the child’s formative years. Vaknin discusses the decline of power structures in North America and Europe and diagnoses the narcissism of American presidents, including Barack Obama and Donald Trump, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Narcissism, Brain Injury, Personality, Computers (10th Conf. Psychiatry, Psychology & Brain Studies)
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the connection between trauma, brain, personality disorders, and cerebral models. He uses the example of Phineas Gage, whose brain injury turned him into a psychopathic narcissist, to illustrate how brain trauma can have massive systemic effects on personality. Vaknin also explores the software metaphor of the mind, suggesting that if the brain is like software, it must contain features such as parity checks, multiple levels of excitation, redundancy, comparison of representational elements to models of the world, recursive functions, and self-organization. However, he acknowledges that understanding the brain and the connection between mind and personality is still a long way off.
Narcissism: The New Normal? (Mental Health Speak Show)
Sam Vaknin, a professor of psychology and author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, discusses the distinction between pathological narcissism and narcissism as a societal, cultural, and historical organizing principle. He believes that narcissism is an all-pervasive phenomenon today and is the organizing principle of our society, civilization, and culture. Vaknin also discusses his own experience with narcissistic personality disorder and how he has developed a treatment modality called Cold Therapy, which has had an impact on him and has been successful in treating others.
Reimagining Narcissism in a Psychopathic World (Dunc Tank)
Sam Vaknin explains that narcissism is a clinical entity and an organizing principle that can elucidate many processes. Narcissists seek external validation, known as narcissistic supply, to regulate their sense of self-worth. Narcissism and psychopathy are becoming a lifestyle, and as long as they were a pathology, they could have been contained, but the minute they become a fad or a fashion, we are doomed. Vaknin believes that there is no effective therapy for narcissism, and the only advice he has for prospective parents diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder is to not have children.
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.
Attention Whores, Impulse Control, and Munchausen by Narcissist
Attention-bores, mostly women with histrionic and borderline personality disorders, use male attention to regulate their sense of self-worth. They become flirtatious, seductive, and trade sex for even the most inconsequential signs of attention from a man. Male attention serves a few important psychodynamic functions with these women, including reassuring them of their irresistibility and attractiveness, reasserting control and power of a man via her sex, and adrenaline junkies. Impulsive behaviors are addictive, and recurrences and recidivism are very common. As these women grow older, most of the signs and symptoms of borderline and histrionic personality disorder recede, unfortunately only to be replaced with dysthymia, background depression.
Borderline Codependent: Clinging Child, Punitive Parent
Codependency in parents can lead to children who only receive conditional love based on their performance. This can result in a child who is objectified and treated as an extension of the parent. The child learns that to obtain affection, they must perform, leading to a lack of self-love. This can result in a psychopath, passive-aggressive personality disorder, masochistic adult, or an adult with depressive disorders. Codependents often experience extreme abandonment anxiety and swing between self-effacing and explosive behaviors due to divided loyalties between their partner and internalized parent.
Abuser-Victim Bond: Emotional Processing and Object Inconstancy
Victims of narcissistic abuse keep falling for it because they are the spitting image of their abusers in terms of psychodynamic processes. Victims and abusers have unusual ways of processing information, and they share impaired object constancy. Victims and abusers bond via their resonating pathologies, and this bonding is an addiction. Abusers and victims fulfill each other’s voids, and traumatic bonding is extremely difficult to break.