My name is Sam Bakhnid. I am the author of Malignance and Flava, Narcissism Revisited. Patients with Schizoid Personality Disorder, or Schizoids for short, enjoy nothing. They seemingly never experience pleasure. This is known as anhedonia. Even their nearest and dearest describe them as automata, robots, or machines. But the Schizoid is not depressed or dysphoric. It is merely indifferent. Schizoids are uninterested in social relationships, and they are bored and puzzled by interpersonal reactions and interactions. They are incapable of intimacy, and they have a very limited range of emotions and effect. Rarely does the Schizoid express feelings, either negative, such as anger, or positive, such as happiness. Schizoids never pursue an opportunity to develop a close relationship. Schizoids are mostly aid sexual. They are not interested in sex. Consequently, they appear to be called aloof, bland, stunted, flat, and zombie-like. Sexually, they are neuters. They derive no satisfaction from belonging to a close-need group, a family, church, workplace, neighborhood, or nation. They rarely marry or have children. Schizoids are loners. Given the option, they invariably pursue solitary activities or hobbies. Inevitably, they prefer mechanical or abstract tasks and jobs that require subskills and grounded beloneliness in the isolation that they seek. Many computer hackers, crackers, and programmers are Schizoids, for instance, as are some mathematicians and theoretical physicists. Schizoids are inflexible in their reactions to changing life circumstances and developments, both adverse and opportune. Faced with stress, Schizoids may disintegrate, decompensate, and experience brief psychotic episodes, or even a depressive illness. Schizoids have few friends or confidants. They trust only first-degree relatives, but even so, they maintain no close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. Schizoids pretend to be indifferent to praise, criticism, disagreement, and corrective advice, though deep inside, they are not. Schizoids are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable, and narrowly restricted routines and schedules. From the outside, the Schizoids' life looks rudderless and adrift. Like people with Asperger's syndrome, Schizoids fail to respond appropriately to social cues and rarely reciprocate gestures or facial expressions such as smiles. As a diagnostic and statistical manual puts it, Schizoids seem socially inept or superficial and self-absorbed. Be sure to watch the video which compares narcissists to Schizoids. It is available in my channel. My name is Sam Battening. I am the author of Malignant Self-Lug, Narcissism Revisited. Narcissistic personality disorder is often diagnosed with other mental health disorders. Other personality disorders such as borderline, is trionic or antisocial. This phenomenon of multiple diagnosis in the same patient is called co-morbidity. It is also often accompanied by substance abuse and other reckless and impulsive behaviors, and this is called dual diagnosis. Narcissists are often paranoid. Some of them are Schizoid. They avoid contact with other people. The basic dynamic of this particular brand of co-morbidity goes like this. The narcissist feels superior, unique, entitled, and better than his fellow men. He thus tends to despise other people, to hold them in contempt and to regard them as lowly and subservient beings. The narcissist feels that his time is invaluable. His mission is of cosmic importance. His contributions to humanity are priceless. He therefore demands total obedience and catering to his ever-changing needs. Any demands on his time and resources is deemed to be both humiliating and wasteful. But the narcissist is dependent on input from other people for the performance of certain ego functions, such as the regulation of his sense of self-worth. Without narcissistic supply, without adoration or attention from other people, the narcissist shrivels, crumbles, and withers, and becomes dysphoric, or in other words depressed. So on the one hand, he despises other people and holds them in contempt and regards them as inferior, but on the other hand, he is completely and utterly dependent on them. The narcissist resents this dependence. He is furious at himself for his own neediness and clinging. And in a typical narcissistic maneuver, which is called alloplastic defense, the narcissist blames other people for his own anger and fury. He displaces his rage and its roots. Many narcissists are paranoid. This means that they are afraid of people and of what people might do to them. Wouldn't you be scared and paranoid if your very life depended continually on the good will of others? The narcissist's very life depends on others providing him with narcissistic supply. He becomes suicidal if they stop doing it. In the absence of narcissistic supply, the narcissist dies either mentally or physically. So this dependence on others creates paranoia. Will they cease? Will they stop supplying him with the narcissistic supply? Will they doom? Will they judge him? Will they condemn him to death? To counter this overwhelming feeling of helplessness, dependence on narcissistic supply, the narcissist becomes a control freak. He statistically manipulates others to satisfy his own needs. He derives pleasure from the utter subjugation of his human environment. Pleasure and relief from anxiety. Finally, the narcissist is a latent masochist. He seeks punishment, castigation and excommunication. This self-destruction is the only way to validate powerful voices that he had internalized as a child. His parents told him, you're bad, rotten, hopeless.   He wants to satisfy the superego and so he punishes himself, self-destructs and self-defeats. The narcissistic landscape is therefore fraught with contradictions. The narcissist depends on people but hates them and despises them. He wants to control people unconditionally but is also looking to punish himself savagely. He is terrified of persecution he has per-secretary anxiety but he seeks the company of his own persecutors compulsively. The narcissist is the victim of incompatible inner dynamics ruled by numerous vicious circles pushed and pulled simultaneously by irresistible forces and urges. A minority of narcissists choose the schizoid solution. They choose, in effect, to disengage both emotionally and socially. They become recluses and hermits. They are no more in the social sense and even in the psychological sense. My name is Sandvagny and I'm the author of Malignac's Love, Narcissism Revisit. Narcissistic personality disorder is often diagnosed with other mental health disorders such as borderline, histrionic or antisocial psychopathic personality disorder. And this phenomenon is called comorbidity. Narcissism is often also accompanied by substance abuse and other reckless and impulsive behaviors, and this we call dual diagnosis. There is one curious match, one logic-defying appearance or co-appearance of mental health disorders. Narcissism, together with schizoid personality disorder. The basic dynamic of this improbable duo of this particular brand of comorbidity goes like this. The narcissist feels superior, unique, entitled and better than his fellow man. He thus tends to despise people, to hold them in contempt and to regard them as lowly inferior and subservient beings. The narcissist feels that his time is invaluable, his mission of cosmic importance, his contributions to humanity priceless. The narcissist therefore demands total obedience and catering to his ever-changing and ever-increasing list of needs. Any demands on the narcissist's time and resources is deemed to be both humiliating and wasteful. But the narcissist falls his braggadature away and swagger. The narcissist is dependent on input from other people for the performance of certain ego functions. For instance, the narcissist needs other people to tell you that he is perfect, brilliant, unique, special, etc., to regulate his sense of self-worth. Without narcissistic supply, without adulation, adoration, admiration, attention, the narcissist shrivels with us and becomes dysphoric, depressed. The narcissist resents this dependence. He is furious at himself for his neediness and in typical narcissistic fashion and maneuver, he blames other people for his own anger and his own dependence on their narcissistic supply. He displaces his rage and his roots. Many narcissists are paranoid. This means that they are afraid of people and what people might do to them. Consider this. Wouldn't you be scared and paranoid if your very life depended continually on the good will of others? You would. And so is the narcissist. The narcissist's very life depends on other people providing him with narcissistic supply day in and day out, minute in and minute out. The narcissist becomes suicidal if they, other people, stop providing him with supply. And to encounter this overwhelming sense of helplessness, this all-devouring dependence on narcissistic supply, the narcissist becomes a controlled freak. The narcissist statistically manipulates other people to do his bidding and to cater to his needs. He drives pleasure and derives pleasure from the utter subjugation of his human environment. Finally, the narcissist is also a latent masochist. The narcissist seeks punishment, constigation and excommunication.   As you can easily see, the narcissistic landscape is short with contradictions. The narcissist depends on people, but hates and despises them. He wants to control people unconditionally, but is also looking to punish himself savagely. He is terrified of persecution, of secretary delusions, but he seeks the company of his own persecutors compulsively. The narcissist is a victim of incompatible inner dynamics, ruled by numerous vicious circles, pushed and pulled simultaneously by irresistible forces. A minority of narcissists, therefore, choose the schizoid solution. They choose to disengage, to detach both emotionally and socially. They withdraw behind the ramparts. They pull back the drawbridge. They vanish. In isolation, their fantasy life develops. The delusions increase until they are completely consumed. I'm Sam Bachman and I'm the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisit. In the Review of General Psychiatry 1995, it says, The person with schizoid personality disorder sustains fragile emotional equilibrium by avoiding intimate personal contact and thereby minimising conflict that is poorly tolerated. Schizoids are often described, given by their nearest and dearest, in terms of automata, robots. They are uninterested in social relationships or interactions and have a very limited emotional repertoire. It is not that they do not have motions, but they express them poorly and intermittently. Schizoids appear cold and stunted, flat and zombie-like. Consequently, patients with schizoid personality disorder are loners. They confide only in first-degree relatives, but maintain no close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. Naturally, they gravitate into solitary activities and find solace and safety in being constantly alone.  Schizoids are unhedonic. They find nothing pleasurable or attractive. But they are not necessarily dysphoric, sad or depressed. Some schizoids are asexual and resemble the cerebral narcissists. They pretend to be indifferent to praise, to criticism, to disagreement, and to corrective advice. But if inside, they are not. They are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable and narrowly restricted routines. Intuitively, a connection between schizoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder seems plausible. After all, narcissists are people who self-sufficiently withdraw from others. They love themselves in lieu of loving others. Lacking in empathy, they regard others as mere instruments, objectified sources of narcissistic supply. But a distinction must be made between social interactions and social relationships. The schizoid, the narcissist and the inverted narcissist, they all interact socially. But they all fail to form human and social relationships. All three types fail to bond. Schizoid is uninterested in bonding. The narcissist is both uninterested and incapable due to his lack of empathy, a vasive sense of grandiosity and abhorrence of intimacy. The psychologist Ellen Deutsch first suggested the construct of as-if personality in the context of schizoid patients. A decade later, in the 50s, Winnicott named the very same idea as the false self personality. The false self has thus been established as a driving engine of both pathological narcissism and pathological schizoid states. Both Klöninger and McWilliams observed the faintly contemptuous attitude and isolated superiority of the schizoid. But these are narcissistic traits, so schizoidists are in a way narcissistic. Theodore Millen and Roger Davis summed it up in their seminal term, personality disorders in modern life. They say, where withdrawal is an arrogant or oppositional quality, fantasy in a schizoid-like person sometimes betrays the presence of a secret grandiose self that longs for respect and recognition while offsetting fears that the person is really an iconoclastic freak. These individuals combine aspects of the compensating narcissist with the autistic isolation of the schizoid, while lacking the asocial and unhedomic qualities of the pure prototype. Both the narcissist and the schizoid are examples of development arrested in early childhood and early adolescence due to envy and other transformations of aggression. Greenberg and Mitchell, in their famous book Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, wrote, The term narcissism tends to be employed diagnostically by those proclaiming loyalty to the drive model, Otto Kernberg, and Edith Jacobson, for instance. Mixed model theorists, such as Kobut, who are interested in preserving a tie-to-drive theory, also use this term narcissism. The term schizoid tends to be employed diagnostically by adherents of relational models, such as Fairburn and Guntrick, who are interested in articulating their break with drive theory. These two differing diagnoses and accompanying formulations are applied to patients who are essentially similar by theorists who start with very different conceptual premises and ideological affiliations. What Greenberg and Mitchell are saying is that schizoid is a narcissist by another name. United States psychologist theorists and UK psychological theorists simply use different terms to describe the same mental health disorder. Kernberg regards mature narcissism, as espoused by new Freudians, such as Rünberger and Scherzüglitz-Miergerl. He regards the very term mature narcissism, or healthy narcissism, as a contradiction in terms of oxymoron. Kernberg observes that narcissists are already grandiose and schizoid, detached, called aloof and asocial at a very early age. He even ventures to say that when they are three years old, their narcissistic traits are discernible.  In an adult, such an emergence is known as psychosis, and this is why Kernberg classifies narcissists as borderline, almost psychotics. Even Kohut, who is an opponent of Kernberg's classification, uses Eugene O'Neill's famous sentence in The Great God Brown, Man is born broken, he lives by mending, the grace of God is the glue. Kernberg himself sees a clear connection between schizoid phenomena, such as alienation in modern society and subsequently draw from social contact. Between this phenomena and narcissistic phenomena, for instance the inability to form relationships or to make commitments or to empathize. Fred Orford, in his book, Narcissism, Socrates, the Frankfurt School of Psychoanalytic Theory, summed it up nicely. He says, It is Greenberg and Mitchell, in object relations and psychoanalytic theory, who established the relevance of failure in their country.  This insight allows us to connect the symptomatology of narcissism, feelings of the emptiness and reality, alienation and emotional withdrawal with a theory that sees such symptoms as an accurate reflection of the experience of being split off from a part of oneself. That narcissism is such a confusing category is in large part because its dry theoretic definition, the libidinal catexes of the self, in word, self-love, seems far removed from the experience of narcissism as characterized by a loss or split in the self. Fairburns and Gantriff's view of narcissism as an excessive attachment of the ego to internal objects, roughly analogous to Freud's narcissistic as opposed to object love, resulting in various splits in the ego necessary to maintain these attachments. This view allows us to penetrate this confusion. In other words, coming back to myself, in other words, narcissism is not about self-love. It's about a broken ego, a broken self. And narcissists withdraw from society exactly as schizoids do in order to protect this vulnerable, precariously balanced house of cards that they have constructed. They, in an attempt to shield themselves from any hurt or pain, they have actually isolated themselves in a glass house. And they are afraid of every occasional and random stone thrown at them, hence their aversion to criticism and disagreement. As usual, I love just a door to bash self-styled experts and so-called scholars online. Here's the rule of thumb, if they're online, they're not experts, they're not scholars. With one exception, of course, me, my name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. And today, I'm going to discuss the god-awful confusion between shyness, avoidant personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, introversion, social phobia, social anxiety and anxiety disorder, not to mention shyness. Yes, all these psychological constructs are very often confused and conflated to the point of an utter mayhem where people can't tell the difference between being shy, being avoidant, being introverted, being schizoid, and other things. Socially phobic, socially anxious, anxious, generally anxious, paranoid, and so on and so forth. So even mental health practitioners, even people with academic degrees in psychology and even psychiatry, can't tell the difference. And they can't tell the difference because they largely rely on observable phenomena when actually what differentiates these disorders from each other is not the outside, not the behavioral aspect, but the etiology and the psychodynamics. I can't focus on all these disorders simultaneously in one video because I never make videos longer than 10 hours. So I'm going to focus today on two of these constructs. One is schizoid or schizoidism or schizoid personality disorder compared to introversion. What's the difference between an introvert and a schizoid person? On the surface, they look the same. They avoid social interactions, but are they doing this for the same reasons? Absolutely not. And so let's plunge right in. As usual, everything I say is backed by scholarly research and studies. I will place a very short bibliography in the description of the video. You're well advised to follow up on it, but try to purchase these books if the topic for some oblivious reason is of interest to you. So welcome to the same vacuum, narcissism, horror show, and this time it's not about narcissism. Well, at least not directly. Maybe my own, and that's it. We start with introversion. The dictionary of the American Psychological Association defines introversion this way. Introversion, noun, orientation towards the internal private world of one's self and one's inner thoughts and feelings, rather than orientation toward the outer world of people and things. Introversion is a broad personality trait, and exactly like extroversion, it exists on a continuum of attitudes and behaviors. Introverts are relatively more withdrawn, retiring, reserved, quiet, and deliberate. They may tend to mute or guard expression of positive effect, adopt more skeptical views or positions, and prefer to work independently. The concept, of course, was originated by Carl Jung for the study of personality types. I recommend to you to watch the video I had made about Carl Jung's view of narcissism, because Carl Jung says that narcissism is actually a very healthy, a very healthy, as you heard it right, a very healthy investment in introversion. And he said that introversion is an inevitable and very important phase or stage in the development of what he called a constellated self. In other words, Jung believed that introversion is indispensable to the formation of a self.   All this is explained in that video. But today we are focusing on the social manifestations and ecology of introversion. One thing that emerges immediately from this definition, and it's a very important distinction. Introverts are never, ever impulsive. They're deliberate, they're slow, they're guarded, they're paranoid, they're skeptical. Introverts are highly unlikely to find themselves in situations where they suddenly do something because they have an impulse to do it, or on a whim, or because they can control themselves, or because they're drunk. They never get drunk to the point of losing control. They never get drunk to the point of acting on an impulse. In this sense, they're very hyper vigilant. So if you see someone acting impulsively, recklessly, defiantly, even if that someone appears to be introverted and shy and avoidant, he is not. Introversion and impulsivity, introversion and defiance, introversion and recklessness, introversion and consumatiousness do not go together. To cut the long story short, a psychopath may well be shy. A psychopath may have anxiety disorder. A psychopath may be socially phobic or socially anxious, but a psychopath can never ever be an introvert. And introverts never find themselves in situations where they had lost control, or recklessly abandoned all safeguards, or act on an impulse, or get to the point of acting on an impulse, for example, but is inhibiting themselves with alcohol and drugs. That's not introversion. That is psychopathy, masquerading as introversion. If you were to acquire the wonderful, widely encyclopedia of personality published in 2020, you would find several mentions and a whole article about introversion and extroversion. And I would like to read to you the summary of this article.  Characterized by both interpersonal and temperamental characteristics, the key features of extroversion introversion are sociability and positive effect. The extroversion introversion are features, dimensions, when they became well established as a result of the biological basis and the lexical significance in cross-cultural language. Extroverts and compass approach behaviors rooted in the need for increased stimulation caused by cortical under-stimulation, while introverts demonstrate avoidance behaviors to inhibit over-stimulation. Similarly, extroverts are more likely to engage in approach behaviors commonly associated with impulsivity, while introverts are more likely to engage in avoidance behaviors commonly associated with anxiety. So here we're beginning to see the first very important distinctions. It seems that introversion is a result of dysregulation, sensory overload, over-stimulation, it's a defense. It's an attempt to wall yourself off the world to firewall yourself in order to avoid a collapse or a decompensation under consistent pressure of environmental stimuli. What does this remind you of? Yes, you're good students. It's reminiscent of autism spectrum disorders, and even more so, it's reminiscent of borderline personality disorder. Introversion therefore can be conceived of simply as another name for emotional dysregulation, or at least the observable reaction to emotional dysregulation, while extroversion is actually an attempt to compensate, attempt to compensate for a lack of environmental stimulation for under-stimulation, and therefore extroversion is much more likely to be associated with externalized personality disorders and personality traits and behaviors such as psychopathy. Again, impulsivity and anxiety, these are the keys. If you see someone who is anxious but then acts impulsively, that's a psychopath. If you see someone who is anxious and then withdraws or becomes paranoid or becomes deliberate, very slow and plodding, and then avoids life, situations, environments and people, that's an introvert. Anxiety plus impulsivity equals psychopathy. Anxiety plus avoidance equals introversion. And so here's a description from this encyclopedia of an extrovert. He enjoys attending all the class parties. He is known for having lots of friends and is open to seeking out new experiences that offer thrilling lifestyle. This person is energetic, a leader in most domains and is very happy with their life. And here's the introvert. The introvert tends to stay away from the class parties. He is instead happiest when quietly staying home with a good book. This second person, the introvert, may have a few close friends but tends to be more comfortable within their organized and routine lifestyle. So this sounds suspiciously like a schizoid. We would need to differentiate the introvert from the schizoid. We will do it a bit later in this video. At this stage, the distinction between the shy or quiet psychopath and the introvert rests on the pillar of impulsivity. Impulsivity distinct is the differential diagnosis between these two. What about shy and quiet borderlines? It's an unsensical construct. But borderlines do tend to become secondary psychopaths under stress, humiliation, rejection and abandonment. And when they do become secondary psychopaths, when they do make this transition, when they switch, impulsivity rains. So then we know these are not introverts but actually borderlines who had switched or transitioned to secondary psychopaths. But there is such a thing as a shy and anxious psychopath. Increasingly, we are beginning to realize this. We are even beginning to dispense with the old view that psychopaths are fearless. And I recommend that you watch the video The Myth of the Fearless Psychopath on my channel of course. Where else? The only channel with scientific proof and foundation. All right, enough self-promotion, Vaknim. You got your dose of grandiosity. Move on for pricing. Okay, I will. We are about to enter a much more fraught minefield, the distinctions, the delicate and subtle distinctions between extroversion, introversion and schizoid, schizoidism and schizoid personality disorder. But to do so, we need to delve a bit further into extroversion, introversion. Extroversion, as we said, has interpersonal and temperamental components. And the interpersonal characteristics of extroversion reflect the typical extroverted behaviors, sociability, assertiveness, etc. The stereotype in this case is quite true. The temperamental characteristics of extroversion reflect increased activity level and positive affect. And so when we consider extroversion, introversion dimension, an extrovert is someone who is outgoing, talkative, social, energized, exactly the stereotype. The introvert is the opposite, who is reserved, quiet, passive. And so Carl Jung, as we said, was the first to propose this dichotomy, the idea of extroversion. He conceptualized extroversion and introversion as two separate types of people. He identified extroverts as having a focus on the outer world, directing an outward flow of so-called personal energy to the social environment. And Jung said that introverts have a focus on the inner mental world, and they direct an inward flow of personal energy on internal factors, for example, internal objects and introjects. So extroversion, introversion started off as a classification, a taxonomy of personal styles, what we call today personality styles. But it had evolved and had become unrecognizable since Jung's time, luckily for us. Immediately after Jung, there were other scholars who entered the fray and had contributed greatly to the current understanding of introversion and extroversion. And possibly Hans Eisenk and Jeffrey Gray. Hans Eisenk in the 1980s, he conceptualized a hierarchical personality model with a hierarchy based on traits that Eisenk believed to be highly heritable. I want to make an intermezzo here. The idea that introversion and extroversion and other Eisenk types, the five-factor personality model, including, for example, agreeableness, which Jordan Peterson constantly mentions in each and every of his numerous lectures. The idea that all these five factors of personality, including introversion and extroversion, that they are based on genetics, on heritability, is just this, an idea. We do have some indications that, for example, introversion and extroversion run in families, sometimes skipping generations, but it's very weak and frail evidence. At this stage, it's a speculative hypothesis with very, very little foundation in studies and research, but for some reason, perhaps because it's invogue, perhaps because it's fashionable, we tend to believe that introversion and extroversion are somehow genetically determined. And all this goes back to Eisenk, because Eisenk was the one who said, without any studies to back up his claim in 1985, he was of us to say that introversion, extroversion is heritable and psychophysiologically rooted. Eisen theorized the concepts of excitation and inhibition in relation to personality and behavior, and he said that excitation and inhibition are actually biological determinants. In the model of personality of Eisenk, he focused on three dimensions of extroversion and introversion. The first dimension was sociability and so on, we'll come to it in a minute. Now, his original model had three dimensions, introversion, extroversion, neuroticism, emotional stability, and psychoticism. And so he began with these three broad brushstrokes at the top of the hierarchy, and then he went down, as I said, and within each one he found subunits or subsections, subsegments. And he narrowed down. So he started with these three enormous, with this canvas of three enormous dimensions, introversion, extroversion, neuroticism, psychoticism, and then he narrowed them down. He hacked, he sliced them into a highly specific list of characteristics. So for example, in the extroversion, he said that the traits are sociable, active, assertive, and sensation seeking. These are the elements of the factors of extroversion, loading into what he called the E factor, E extroversion. Eisenk then proceeded, he spent all of his career actually, breaking down extroversion, introversion, neuroticism, emotional stability, psychoticism, breaking them down into traits, and then breaking these traits into further traits, and then they're breaking these traits into further traits until we had the laundry list of every conceivable interpersonal and temperamental style elements. And on the third level of Eisenk's model, there is something called habitual acts. Someone who is extroverted is more likely to habitually attend many parties to seek out new adventures such as, I don't know, skydiving, traveling. And the habitual behaviors together load into a narrow second level characteristic of sociability and sensation seeking. So actually Eisenk's model is a grassroots model. Behaviors coalesce into traits, traits coalesce into dimensions on three levels. Raymond Cattel, C-A-T-T-E-L-L, expanded on Eisenk's three factor approach. He developed a list of 16 personality factors derived from modern factor analysis of lexical approaches. These 16 personality factors, five of them clustered together to form the higher order of extroversion including interpersonal warmth, impulsivity, and boldness. And so this, and I recommend that you watch my video on MBTI, but this created an enormous argument. The question was, could such a small number of factors include all the key elements of personality? Are we capturing everything there is to capture? Or do we need to continue to add to the list all the time? And one of the most common personality taxonomies is the five factor model of personality, referred to as the big five. It is derived from factor analysis of the most commonly used words in the English language. Five broad traits, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness. And within this model, extroversion is assumed to adopt a hierarchical structure with six lower order facets, warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking, and positive effects. So this is extroversion. Everything that's the opposite of extroversion is of course, by definition, introversion. There have been many studies which delved into the question of whether these characteristics and traits are heritable, nature versus nature. There was a huge study with 25,000 pairs of twins. There is the biggest study about ARAS, the ascending reticular activation system. So there are studies of this with introverts allegedly possessing a lower threshold for arousal compared to extroverts. I will not go into all of this. Isaac and Grace started this actually, these kind of studies. And then vehemently disagreed with Isaac's view of arousal as a conditioning behavior. So there's a huge row. I will not go into all this. Let's go back to personality. Extroversion, introversion is a robust personality dimension. It's robust in the sense that it's supported by numerous massive studies. It exists. It's real. It's not our imagination. It's not a figment. It's not an artifact of some other, for example, artifact of a test, a psychological test. It's real. It's a real personality dimension. It's dynamic. This is a spectrum. Extroversion and introversion don't exist in a vacuum. Extroversion interacts consistently with other personality correlates. And this provides implications for life outcomes and individual differences in behavior. There's substantial evidence that extroverts experience higher levels of positive affect, for example, compared to introverts who are usually prone to negative affect. And the relationship between extroversion and positive emotions has been replicated across cultures, regardless of personality disposition. So it seems that extroversion and introversion, while being personality dimensions, are not conditioned or dependent upon what personality type you have, or even whether you have a personality disorder. At its core, extroversion encompasses the core feature of positive affect. Extroverts react more positively when they are presented with positive stimuli, and the relationship between extroversion and positive affect is also explained by differences in behavioral tendencies. For example, sociability is a key feature of extroversion. Researchers propose that extroverts engage in a greater number of social activities, but they also reap more benefits when they engage in daily social behaviors compared to introverts. Introverts seem to fail in extracting benefits from social interactions. Extroverts are more likely to view their social interactions and the world in general positively. Research has examined the link between personality and psychopathology, and we found that extroversion is negatively related to anxiety and depression. So these mental health concerns usually lead or are characterized by social withdrawal.  You tend to have, by definition, low levels of positive affect, and this would lead you to a low level of extroversion. In considering psychopathology as maladaptive extremes of some personality dispositions, some researchers have identified that very low level of extroversion, also known as introversion, introversion is linked with social isolation and with anhedonia, inability to experience pleasure.  These concerns may be linked to the greater likelihood for extroverts to seek out and engage in rewarding and highly arousing activities. We're coming back full circle. You may be anxious, you may be depressed, but if you're abusing substances and thereby disinhibiting yourself, if you then engage in reckless behaviors such as sexual promiscuity and other reckless behaviors, such as extreme sports or especially if your reckless behaviors are intimately linked to your substance abuse, this rules out, precludes introversion. Introversion is about control. Introversion is a hyper-vigilant control reaction to internal dysregulation and overload, sensory overload, sensory overstimulation, highly sensitive persons, HSPs are introverts.  They don't do this. Psychopaths do this.  This is not an introverted behavior. Anything that leads via substance abuse usually to reckless behaviors is a strong indicator of psychopathy. Primary psychopathy, factor one or secondary psychopathy, factor two, borderline. Let me read to you something from another book written by Zelensky and Soboko, the Handbook of Solitude, published this year by Wiley. It's a summary of one of the chapters. In this chapter, say the authors, we review personality differences in propensities for solitude, focusing on the dimension of introversion, extroversion and its link with psychological well-being. Although extroversion is often linked with greater happiness, many scholars oppose this conclusion. We consider these objections and we examine their veracity with regard to empirical work. Although we ultimately conclude that introversion is indeed associated with lower levels of happiness, our review also provides a more nuanced view of disassociation, for example, how its magnitude can depend on measurement tools for culture or culture. Finally, we review and evaluate theoretical explanations for extroverts characteristically higher levels of happiness and we explore the potential of increasing happiness by increasing introversion. What the authors are saying very gingerly and very carefully is that extroverts may not actually be more happy than introverts. It's an artifact of testing and social and cultural conditioning and expectations. We are conditioned to feel happier when we interact socially, even if fundamentally we are actually not happier or even if we are hypervigilant and paranoid. We just told society kind of brainwashes us into feeling happier when we're with other people, which would explain why many of us drink and do drugs when we are with other people, because perhaps it's not such a pleasant experience after all. So, to summarize this first segment or first section of the video, introverts do not engage in psychopathic behaviors like substance abuse, like promiscuity, sexual and otherwise, reckless behaviors, defiance, consumatiousness and impulsivity. If you see these things, even if these things happen once a year, even if they happen once a decade, it's a powerful indication that the person is not an introvert, but a shy or anxious psychopath or a secondary psychopath, in other words, a borderline. End of chapter one of this video and we proceed now to schizoid personality disorder or schizoidism. Schizoids are exactly like introverts. They stay at home. They avoid social interactions. Mini is a schizoid. She never leaves home. I keep telling her, Mini, it's not good for you. You need to go out. You need to socialize with other mugs.  But she does want to. She stays at home. She says she's perfectly happy, hanging on. So, you know, I do what I can. What's the difference between schizoidism and introversion? Outwardly, as observers, we cannot tell the difference. They look identical. Both introverts and schizoids behave in ways which are indistinguishable from each other. They stay at home, avoid social interactions, hypervigilance and hedonia, depression and anxiety, the empty schizoid core. Both of them usually have grandiose defenses. It's very difficult to tell them apart. But let's try. We start by going again, reverting again to the American Psychological Association's dictionary. Schizoidism, noun, complex of behavioral traits that include seclusiveness, quietness, general introversion, indicating a separation by the person from his or her surroundings, the confining of psychic interests to the self, and in many cases a tendency towards schizophobia. It's also called schizoidia. Schizoidia was originally defined by Eugen Bloyler long before Freud, actually. Bloyler is a much, much neglected genius, which in some respects overshadowed Freud. I mean, even in my view, in many respects, more important than Freud. Bloyler, B-L-E-U-L-E-R. Knock yourself out. Let's define schizoidism, which is a personality trait. Let's define schizoid. Schizoid, the same dictionary, denoting characteristics resembling schizophrenia, but in a milder form, invoking lack of effect, social passivity and minimal introspection. These are beginning to be crucial differences between schizoids and introverts. Let me repeat, lack of effect. Introverts have effect. Sometimes they have inappropriate effect, but they always have effect, mostly negative effect. They're likely to show sadness, depression, anxiety, unhappiness, envy, anger. They have pronounced effect. They don't have. Introverts do not have lifelong or pervasive reduced effect display. Schizoids do. Schizoids are totally flat. They have exactly like psychopaths, flat effect. They never ever show emotions of any kind ever, like ever. That's the first difference. Second thing, social passivity. The schizoid is socially passive. In other words, he or she are likely to respond to social cues, for example, being invited somewhere, but are very unlikely to initiate social interactions. That's the schizoid. Introverts are different. They sometimes initiate social interactions with one or two good friends or family members. And finally, the schizoid has no introspection, is utterly incapable of introspecting, of seeing himself or herself as he is or she is. Schizoid has zero self-awareness. Schizoid would deny the most obvious facts about his or her life and personality. The introvert is exactly the opposite. The introvert spends an ordinate amount of time, actually most of his life or her life, introspecting. Introversion is another name for exaggerated, out-of-control, dysregulated introspection. The introvert spends 80% of her resources on studying herself, on minutely documenting every quirk, every dimension, every mishap and every happening within her soul. She is the chronicler of her own internal environment, including her internal objects and introverts. The introvert is focused like a laser beam on herself and does little else. The schizoid is exactly the opposite. Schizoid rejects self-knowledge and self-awareness, defends against them. Schizoid has alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control. Schizoid is unlikely to acknowledge shortcomings, failings, mistakes. Schizoid would defend ferociously against any attempt to define him or her, to describe him or her, to provide him or her with insight. Schizoids are against insight. They reject insight. They become almost psychopathic, almost defined when you try to introduce insight and self-awareness into their lives. Introvert welcomes insight and welcomes self-awareness. It's very common for an introvert to latch onto a therapist, for example, and over-attacks the therapist, become very clinging and demanding and needy, because the therapist can provide insight. The introvert's need for insight, the introvert's need for self-awareness, the introvert's need for self-knowledge is insatiable. There's no limit. And if you let the introvert, she will take over your life demanding minute responses and demanding repeated reassurances and analysis. The introvert over-thinks herself. Schizoid is the absolute exact opposite. He doesn't want to hear anything about himself. Schizoid is a surface phenomenon. The surface is he has no depth. Schizoid has no core. Its emptiness masquerading as presence. Schizoid is about absence. Introvert, introversion is about too much presence. The introvert is too present in her own life.  But it's not a black hole. There's a lot there.  She wants input. She wants feedback. The schizoid is exactly the opposite. Schizoid pushes people away because he does not want to know anything about himself. He wants to remain on the surface because all he has is a surface. If anyone goes deep, they find a black hole, void, emptiness, howling winds. Schizoid personality disorder is defined in the dictionary of the American Psychological Association as a personality disorder characterized by long-term emotional coldness, absence of tender feelings for others, lack of desire for and enjoyment of close relationships, and indifference to praise or criticism and to the feelings of others. The eccentricities of speech, behavior or thought that are characteristics of schizotypal personality disorder are absent in those with schizoid personality disorder. Let's delve a bit deeper. Horat Goldman is the editor of Review of General Psychiatry, published by Prentice Hall. He says, the person with schizoid personality disorder sustains a fragile, emotional equilibrium by avoiding intimate personal contact, thereby by minimizing conflict that is poorly tolerated. Schizoids are often described even by the nearest and dearest in terms of automatons, robots. Schizoids are uninterested in social relationships. They are utterly turned off by interactions with other people. They have a very limited emotional repertory. It is not that they do not have emotions, but they express emotions poorly and intermittently they have poor effect or lack of effect or flat effect. Schizoids appear cold, appear to be stunted, flat, zombie-like, dead, dead inside. The most common phrase when people come across a schizoid, they are likely to say, she's dead inside. She had died a long time ago. She doesn't know it and doesn't realize it. Consequently, exactly like introverts, schizoids are loners. Schizoids confide only in first degree relatives, but maintain no other close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. They are not a single friend or a single family member, and that's just about it. Naturally, schizoids gravitate into solitary activities and they find solace and safety in being constantly alone. Their sexual experiences are sporadic and limited, if at all. Finally, they cease altogether. Schizoids are unhedonic. They find nothing pleasurable, nothing attractive, but they are not necessarily dysphoric, said or depressed. Some schizoids are asexual. They resemble the cerebral nostasis. Schizoids pretend to be indifferent to praise, criticism, disagreement and corrective advice, but deep inside, they are not. They get hurt. It's painful. Schizoids are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable and narrowly restricted routines. For example, they are very likely to travel. They are very likely to be afraid of traveling, because they feel unsafe. They feel at risk. Now, if you are an introvert, you are unlikely to engage in reckless behaviors, impulsive behaviors, unlikely to disinhibit yourself with substances. But if you are schizoid, you are likely to do all these. Schizoids have these bouts, especially if they are also psychopaths. You remember that the schizoid core is at the heart of narcissism, at the heart of psychopathy, and ultimately at the heart of borderline personality disorder, because it's a form of emotional dysregulation coupled with psychopathy. So the schizoid core is an engine.  It has a lot of energy. So it's like an engine. And sometimes with the schizoid, this core generates impulsive, reckless behavior, disinhibited behaviors, dysregulated, unboundary behaviors. It never, ever happens with an introvert. It's a crucial distinction. The introvert never engages in dysregulated, unboundary, impulsive, reckless, defined behaviors. Introversion is a state of being predominantly interested in one's own mental self, one's own personality, one's own psychosocial and psychobiological history. It's a preoccupation with the self. It's constant, obsessive, compulsive introspection. Introverts are perceived as reserved or reflective because they're busy. They're busy thinking about themselves. You could conceive of introversion as a dimension of extreme narcissism. Some psychologists characterize introverts as people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction. It's like Jung. Jung said the same, although he focused on what he called mental energy. Don't ask. Some modern conceptions of introversion disagree. They say that actually introverts find pleasure in solitary activities such as reading, writing, or meditating. An introvert enjoys time spent alone, finds less reward in time spent in large groups of people. You are very unlikely. Ever to find an introvert at a club or in a bar or in a party, an introvert would never do this. Ever. And if you see an introvert in this location, someone in these locations, and he looks shy and anxious and withdrawn and avoidant, that's not an introvert. That's someone with social anxiety or social phobia or it's someone who is a psychopath. So introverts are easily overwhelmed by too much stimulation from social gatherings and engagement. Introversion is about being quiet, being minimizing, stimulating external environment. Introverts absolutely avoid assiduously and religiously environments with multiple people. Introverts concentrate on a single activity at a time. They are likely to kind of observe situations before they participate in these situations. And they're very, very hypervigilant and very careful and very cautious and very paranoid and very reticent and very reluctant and so on. They're very analytical. Before they say anything, they analyze it like a thousand times and they analyze it in conjunction with and in respect to their perception of themselves. So kind of how would it reflect on me or does it reflect me accurately? Susan Cain had written the book Quiet, The Power of Introverts and she defines introversion and extroversion as preferences for different levels of stimulation. She said and she's correct, it's nothing to do with shyness. Shyness is a fear of social judgment, fear of humiliation and therefore it's a very close cousin to avoidance, avoidant personality disorder, for example. It has even affinity with covert narcissism. But introverts are not like that. When we mistake introversion for shyness, it's a common error. Introversion is not shyness, it's not avoidance. Introversion is a preference. It's a choice. Shyness stems from distress. Introversion leads to strength. Introverts prefer solitary to social activities, but they don't fear social encounters the same way that shy people do. They just don't want. They're overwhelmed. They're overstimulated so they avoid them. So Susan Cain argues that modern western culture misjudges the capabilities of introverted people and that it's very wasteful of talent, energy and happiness. Cain describes how society is biased against introverts and that people are taught from childhood that to be sociable is to be happy. We are conditioned. If you're in a group of people, you should be happy. If you're not happy, something's wrong with you. Introversion is now considered somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. And Cain says that introversion is not a second class trait, both introverts and extroverts and rich society. Back to Iseng, who is the father of all this and also the culprit, the perpetrator of most of our misunderstandings and nonsensical exceptions of introversion and extroversion. Iseng, to remind you, described extroversion, introversion as a degree to which a person is outgoing and interactive with other people. So Iseng's kind of three-tiered, three-tier personality structure is heavily dependent on observations. In other words, it's anecdotal. It's phenomenological if you wish to be charitable. Later iterations of Iseng's model were even less rigorous because they relied on dictionaries. I'm not kidding you're not. On words in dictionaries, in lexicals. These behavioral differences are presumed to be the result of some brain physiology which had never been demonstrated or proved.  Extroverts, he said, seek excitement and social activity in an effort to raise their naturally low arousal level, while introverts tend to avoid social situation in an effort to avoid raising their naturally high arousal level too far. So Iseng designated extroversion as one of his three major traits, as I said, there's the PEN model, psychoticism, extroversion and neuroticism. He originally suggested that extroversion is a combination of two major tendencies, impulsivity or impulsiveness and sociability. Later, Iseng added several other more specific traits, liveliness, activity level, excitability, etc. And these traits are further linked in his personality model to even more specific habitual responses such as parting. Iseng compared extroversion to the four temperaments of ancient medicine, with choleric and sanguine temperaments equating to extroversion and melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments equating to introversion. And today our view of introversion and extroversion is heavily influenced by Iseng's model and by his tendency to link it to some mysterious, hitherto to be proven dynamics in the brain which are supposedly genetically and hereditarily determined. Okay, what about shyness? Shyness is a tendency to feel awkward, to feel worried, concerned, tense during social encounters, especially with unfamiliar people. Severely shy people have physical symptoms, they blush, they sweat. Skin conductance changes, the heart pounds, blood pressure, upset stomach, you name it. They develop negative feelings about themselves, they develop worries about how other people view them and they tend to become avoidant. They have a tendency to withdraw from social interactions. The thing is that most people are shy all the time. Whenever you meet someone new, whenever in a new situation, someone you tend to be shy, shyness seems to be a reflexive and very common response. But when it is intense, dysregulated and takes over, that's when we begin to discuss a kind of pathology. So as the encyclopedia of psychology says, most people feel shy at least occasionally. Some people shyness is so intense, however, that it can keep them from interacting with others even when they want to or need to, leading to problems in relationships and at work. Shyness is a personality trait. It's most likely to occur, as we said, in unfamiliar setting, environments and situations. But it hinders, it obstructs, it's dysfunctional and it metastasizes. So it starts as a kind of hyper-vigilant response to unfamiliar settings, but it takes over. And then you begin to be shy in familiar situations and relationships. You begin to avoid objects. I mean, other people, you begin to be apprehensive. You begin to feel uncomfortable inept. You develop a low or fluctuating sense of self-worth, low self-esteem, negative self-image, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes cancerous. It becomes malignant. Shyness perpetuates and enhances itself.  Sometimes Shyness vanishes, fades away, but that's actually extremely rare. There's a lot of data in studies suggesting that three personality types, evident in infancy, easy, slow to warm up and difficult, tend to change as children mature. Extreme traits become less pronounced and personalities evolve in predictable patterns over time. But the tendency to internalize or externalize problems, this tendency remains pretty constant. And by the way, also attachment styles, they're pretty constant. So individuals who are shy, they are shy because they tend to internalize their problems. They dwell on problems internally instead of expressing problems, sharing, communicating their concerns. And this internalization leads to disorders like depression and anxiety. Humans experience shyness in different degrees and different areas. But it's all pervasive. If it permeates everything, ultimately you will end up developing depression and anxiety. So shyness is a form of discomfort. It's because, very often it's because the person feels clueless. The person misinterprets, social and sexual cues is bound and apt to misbehave, to react wrongly. So people with autism spectrum disorder, for example, also tend to develop shyness. It's the difficulty of knowing what to say, what to do in social situations. A crippling physical manifestation of uneasiness which can culminate in severe anxiety and panic attack. Shyness involves symptoms. It's quite devastating. The person feels that she's boring or that she's bizarre. Or then she attempts to overcompensate to try to create interest and this alienates people further. So she doesn't know when to smile, she doesn't know how to engage in conversation. When to assume a relaxed posture, when to make good eye contact. When to respond to sexual cues and which social cues to respond to and how to do that. So there's a lot of dysregulated and boundary sexual promiscuity. Shyness becomes not only a second nature, it becomes the first nature. It determines actually the manifestation and expression of all other personality dimensions, traits and it is behavioral determinant. It's also socially self-reinforced because people tend to perceive shy people negatively. People react very negatively to shy people, especially in cultures that are extroverted cultures. Like for example the West, United States, United Kingdom. Sociability is considered a sign of health, especially mental health. And if you avoid people, if you withdraw and so on, something's wrong with you. Shy individuals are distant, they are not conversational and other people form poor impressions of shy people.   They may even be aggressive, but their perceived as okay. These are perceived as variations of a healthy theme, but everyone is critical towards shy people. Everyone is trying to get shy people out of their shells, kind of, motivate them to not become shy. When people try to draw out a shy person, even if they are kind, if they are well-intentioned, the exercise backfires because it focuses attention on the individual who is shy anyhow and increases self-consciousness, a sense of awkwardness and shyness. But what's the difference between shyness and introversion? Shyness actually captures a family of afflictions, a family of disorders, including timidity, a prehension emitting new people, bashfulness, diffidence, reluctance into assert oneself, a prehension and anticipation, dissipatory anxiety, general fear of potential interaction, intimidation, object of fear, not a low self-confidence but fear. So shyness is a catch-all umbrella term. But in some cases what appears to be shyness is actually reservation or introversion. It's a character trait which causes an individual to voluntarily avoid excessive social quota because of over-stimulation, causes an individual to be terse and abrupt in current in communication, but introverts avoid social contact, minimize communication, not because of discomfort, fear, anxiety, apprehension or lack of confidence. I repeat this because it's again a crucial differential diagnostic feature Introverts avoid people, not because they experience discomfort, not because they're apprehensive, not because they lack confidence, not because they hate people. Introverts avoid people because people over-stimulate them, so introverts are not shy, but they simply have a preference in order to avoid over-stimulation. Schizoids avoid people because they derive no benefit from social interactions, they find social interactions boring. So schizoids are boring, introverts are over-stimulated, shy people are anxious and fearful. Introversion is a personal preference, shyness is a form of distress. Bernardo Cauducci, professor of psychology, emphasizes that introverts choose to avoid social interactions because they are under pressure in social interactions owing to over-stimulation because they derive no reward, no other reward. So there's a surplus of sensory input, it's overwhelming, but they're getting nothing to compensate for it. Shy people are simply afraid, they're anxious. There's been a lot of research which had demonstrated that shyness overlaps with introversion and neuroticism, negative emotionality, but only very, very mildly, only in the fringes. In other words, these are not the same phenomena. Low societal acceptance of shyness or introversion reinforce shy or introverted behaviors owing to a lowering of self-confidence, but the etiology, the motivation, couldn't be more different. Schizoids are not introverts, introverts are not shy. Shyness and introversion outwardly manifest as social withdrawal. There's tendencies to avoid social situations, especially unfamiliar ones, but research is clear that shyness and introversion possess clearly distinct motivational forces, lead to uniquely different personal and peer reactions, and cannot be described as the same. Again, I refer you to Susan Cain's book, Quiet, published in 2012. Shyness introversion is involving being differently social, preferring one-on-one of small group interactions. The introvert is not antisocial or asocial, but simply has a preference for one-on-one. The introvert will never go to a party, the introvert will never go to a club, the introvert will never go to a bar, the introvert will try her best to not travel with big groups of people, organized tour. So, unique physiological responses are also attendant upon these states. What about social phobia? So, extreme shyness may amount to social phobia. Actually, in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 1980, they identified social phobia as a form of malignant shyness, extreme shyness. But when the DSM-4 was published 14 years later, 1994, it was converted to social anxiety disorder and they said it's little to do with shyness. But today, more recent studies demonstrate a very close correlation between shyness and social anxiety disorder. So it seems that social anxiety and social phobia are correlated with shyness, social inhibition, they are correlated with shyness. Back to introversion. Introversion is a basic personality trait. It's a preference for the inner life of the mind over the outer world of other people. One of the big five dimensions that define all personalities includes introversion. Introversion is a continuum. The opposite is extroversion. Compared to extroverts, introverts enjoy subdued and solitary experiences. Introverts do not fear others. Introverts do not dislike others. They are not shy. They are not plagued by loneliness. They never feel lonely. So introverts are going to avoid crowded situations, clubs, parties, bars, overcrowded workplaces. These are torture for introverts because of the overstimulation. They enjoy one-on-one engagement in calm environments. It's a nervous system issue, probably. Evidence suggests that the brains of introverts are a bit different as far as dopamine. But again, it's scant evidence. And so I hope that I made the distinctions clear. It's not easy to distinguish these. You need to be clinically adept. You need to be exposed to these various disorders. But the rules of thumb are pretty simple. Introverts avoid overstimulation and overstimulation environments. Schizoids avoid all environments with other people. Introverts avoid the environment. Introverts avoid other people, not because they don't like other people, not because they don't enjoy the company of other people, but because they need to take it one person at a time. Schizoids avoid other people. Because they don't enjoy the company of other people. Introverts are incapable of impulsive, reckless, defined behavior. Schizoids are. Schizoids are capable. Introverts cannot survive in an over-taxing, over-stimulating environment like a nightclub or a cruise. Schizoids can and often do. Actually, psychopaths seek such environments occasionally if they're shy, if they're anxious or depressed psychopaths. So the behaviors tell a part. The introvert is heavily invested emotionally, analytically, intellectually in analyzing herself all the time. That's her main preoccupation. The schizoid never does this, avoids it actively because there's nothing there. It's a surface phenomenon, a shimmering pond of no depth. The psychopath doesn't even understand what is introspection or self-awareness. He wouldn't understand it if you try to communicate. So the introverted person is a benign phenomenon, not a pathology. While psychopathy and schizoidism are extreme pathologies on the border of psychosis in some respects. Same goes for borderline personality disorder which combines the worst of both worlds, emotional dysregulation and psychopathy. The tendency to act psychopathically when she decompensates. Thank you for surviving this. Good day. During this winter semester we are going to discuss atypical presentations of narcissism. Sometimes it's difficult to identify a patient or client as a narcissist. It's an outlier. The characteristics, the traits and the behaviors don't amount to what we commonly perceive as narcissism, either overt or covert. What to do with these kind of people? If they have emphasized grandiosity they could as well be psychopaths or borderlines. How do we tell the differences? So the first two lectures are going to deal with a subtype of narcissist known as the schizoid narcissist. It's a very unusual, very bizarre concoction, cocktail of personality disorders. And this comorbidity misleads many diagnosticians and they misdiagnose this type as something else, avoiding personality disorder, a covert narcissist, et cetera, et cetera. I am often asked, narcissists are supposed to be gregarious. They are supposed to be sociable and excitable. They are supposed to garner narcissistic supply by acting pro-socially, by eliciting attention, affirmation, by mingling and mixing up with people. What about narcissists who avoid all social contact? Do not attend any social event. They stay at home, recluses, lone wolves, loners. Doesn't this behavior go against the grain of narcissism? Isn't it the antithesis of narcissism? My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. Some narcissists are also schizoids. There is a comorbidity between narcissistic personality disorder and schizoid personality disorder. Howard Goldman, in the review of General Psychiatry, puts it this way. The person with schizoid personality disorder sustains a fragile emotional equilibrium by avoiding intimate personal contact and thereby minimizing conflict that is poorly tolerated. The problem with schizoid narcissists is that they are often confused with and misdiagnosed as covert narcissists. Both types are shy. Both types are vulnerable and fragile. Both types are socially anxious and avoid social interactions. Both types appear to be at times lacking in effect and unemotional. So it's very easy for a diagnostician to mistake the schizoid narcissists for a covert narcissist. Here are some of the differences. The covert narcissist is likely to create an ideology around his social aversion, around his inability to elicit narcissistic supply directly. He is likely to believe that he is special exactly and precisely because he avoids the classic narcissist ways of obtaining supply. He is likely to consider himself elevated and superior. He is likely, in other words, to consider his social aversion, his social exclusion, his own avoidance as integral parts of his grandiosity. The schizoid narcissists would also do the same, but his ideology would be outward directed, whereas the covert narcissists would say, I don't mingle, I don't mix, I don't socialize, I don't ask people for attention and adulation and admiration and so on and so forth, because I'm beyond that. I don't need it. I am self-sufficient. I am self-contained. I am my own best trend in entertainment, etc. The schizoid narcissists is going to say that he is avoiding society and so on and so forth because people are not up to his standards. They don't appreciate him properly. They discriminate against him, they misjudge him. They don't treat him justly. So the schizoid narcissist ideology is going to be outward directed and alloplastic. He is going to attribute his aversive avoidant behavior to the environment, to deficiencies in the environment, to the misbehavior of other people, while the covert narcissist is going to attribute the very same behaviors to his makeup, to the way he is, to his essence, to his grandiose inflated view of himself. In this sense, the covert narcissist is actually much more autoplastic than alloplastic. So that's the first distinguishing feature, the ideology. Consequently, by the way, schizoid narcissists are in due time much more prone to antisocial psychopathic modes of action. We'll come to it in the second lecture. The second thing is emotional reactivity. Covert narcissists do react emotionally. Most of their emotional reactions are of course negative, envy, anger. So covert narcissists exactly like overt narcissists are unable to experience positive emotions, for example, love, true empathy, compassion, but they are able to experience negative emotions. The schizoid narcissist does not experience any emotions at all. He is totally unemotional. People describe him as robotic. And so all machine-like. So this is a major difference between the two. For example, when the covert narcissist is criticized, when he is humiliated, when he is slighted, the covert narcissist is actually very likely to react with rage. He is likely to act out. He is likely to become a psychopath, a primary psychopath. But when the schizoid narcissist is humiliated or criticized and so on, he's going to brush it off. He's going to devalue the source of the insult, the source of the criticism. And by devaluing the source, he's going to reduce the emotional potency of the narcissistic injury to the point that it's no longer injurious. These are two different mechanisms of coping with ego-distony. The covert narcissist copes with ego-distony by attacking aggressively the sources of discomfort. The schizoid narcissist copes with ego-distony by devaluing them and then easily ignoring them. He appears to be from the outside to observers. The schizoid narcissist appears to be indifferent, apathetic, impervious, unmovable. Next is the issue of sex and sexuality. Most narcissists, both overt and covert, use sex as an instrument. They instrumentalize, they weaponize sex. They leverage sex in order to obtain or acquire a potential partner in a shared fantasy. The shared fantasy could be cerebral. The shared fantasy could be somatic. But the shared fantasy is the organizing principle of classic narcissism, both overt and covert. The narcissist needs to establish a shared fantasy in order to avoid extreme ego-distony and potential modification. The environment is not conducive, is not helpful to the narcissist's inflated grandiose self-image. The environment, other people, circumstances, institutions, they countermand, they counterveil, they attack, they undermine, they sabotage. They challenge the narcissist's grandiosity all the time. The narcissist needs to establish a space, a mental space, coupled with a physical space, the pathological narcissistic space.  A genius, invincible, godlike, omniscient, omnipotent, etc., etc. And this space is the shared fantasy. But he needs at least one person within the shared fantasy to confirm to him, to affirm to him, to tell him that his false self is not false, that he is not delusional, that his grandiose-inflated self-image is not grandiose and not inflated, that it's all real. And this is the element of fantasy within the shared fantasy. But to acquire someone, to convert someone into a member of such a cult, because it's a cult in essence, to convert someone into becoming a member of such a cult, the narcissist needs to use everything at his disposal to get the other person addicted to create the equivalent of an addiction. And sex is by far the major instrument. So most narcissists go through periods of hyper-sexuality, being sexually hyperactive, creative, imaginative, excited about sex. And this is followed by periods of celibacy, asexuality and sexlessness in relationships. And yes, this applies also to somatic narcissists. They would seek sex but with external partners, outside the bond, outside the diet. On very rare occasions, and there are such occasions, the sex will continue within the diet, within the bond or within the couple, but this is usually because the narcissist is afraid of abandonment. He anticipates imminent abandonment all the time, possibly because he's a paranoid, for example. So such a narcissist will continue to provide sex to his partner, because he's afraid that she will abandon him. And this fear of abandonment, this abandonment anxiety and separation anxiety could be real, could be founded on real life facts, on intentions, on plans, on discoveries, or could be founded on paranoia and natural hypervigilance and suspiciousness. But these are rare occasions.  Great sex, kinky sex, even sadistic sex, followed later by utter drought, utter famine, total lack of sexuality once the partner had been acquired. Or if the narcissist decides for some reason that the potential partner is no longer potential and no longer a partner in the discard phase, for example. So sex characterizes, permeates, pervades, typifies the behaviors of narcissists. It could be hypersexuality, it could be hyposexuality, it could be asexuality, but sex is in the air. Sex is a major factor, a regulatory factor of the relationship. It serves to regulate the mood and the emotions and the bonding and the attachment and the functionality, operational functionality of the diet of the couple.  This is not the case with the schizoid narcissist. So both covert and overt are like that. Now, the schizoid narcissist is distinct from the covert narcissist and of course is distinct from the classic narcissist. The schizoid narcissist genuinely has no interest in sex at all. Even in the love-bombing and grooming phases, the initial phases when the schizoid narcissist tries to acquire the partner, tries to convert the potential into an actual source of supply within a shared fantasy. Even in this very, very initial phase, the schizoid narcissist is likely to be hyposexual, is likely to be sexually inactive. Such a schizoid narcissist, for example, never initiates sex. His sex is totally reactive. He reacts when the partner initiates sex, but he would never initiate it himself. His sex is mechanical. It's routine. It lacks imagination and creativity simply because schizoid narcissists do not enjoy sex. There's no pleasure. They are sexually unhedonic. They find no pleasure in sex. But this is typical only of schizoid narcissists. Both overt classic narcissists and covert narcissists actually do enjoy sex. When they have sex, it's just that at a certain point when object constancy is established and abandonment anxiety is ameliorated and reduced, somehow their sex drive vanishes. It's not that their ability to find pleasure in sex vanishes. They still find pleasure in sex. They just don't seek it out. It's like someone who likes to ski. Someone who likes to ski wouldn't spend all his life skiing. He would go on a ski vacation once a year. It's the same with the classic and the covert narcissists, somatic and cerebral. They like sex when they do have it. But they don't pursue sex. They don't initiate sex. They don't regard sex as an integral dimension of a relationship. They place emphasis on other things within the relationship. For example, narcissistic supply, sadistic supply, service provision. Sex comes, sex is at the bottom of the list. With a schizoid narcissists, sex is not on the list at all because it doesn't give him pleasure. It's a chore. It's just something to do. It's a maintenance function. It's boring. It's dull. And very often, many schizoid narcissists report they find sex disgusting, the physical aspect. So here's another very important difference between covert and overt narcissists and the schizoid narcissists. When the schizoid narcissists does engage in sex, it's very crucial what type of schizoid narcissists we are talking about. As you will see, there are several types of schizoid narcissists. When the schizoid narcissists is a sadistic schizoid narcissists, and he does engage in sex, which is very rare, his sex would be kinky and sadistic. He would seek to despoil, degrade, humiliate the partner via the sex. There's a whiff of misogyny if he is a man, a heterosexual man. But it's not really misogyny because schizoid narcissists are unable to experience any emotion, even hatred. So they don't really hate women.  Whatever the reason may be, it's a transformation of aggression. But that is typical only to the sadistic subtype of the schizoid narcissists. What about the schizoid somatic narcissists?  How does a somatic narcissist cope when he is also schizoid, when there is a comorbidity between somatic narcissism and schizoid personality disorder? In such a case, the somatic narcissists would tend to be autoerotic. He would tend to derive sexual gratification from his own body. He is likely to emphasize and prefer masturbation to actual sexual encounter.  And even when he is with a sexual partner, he is likely to be very egotistical, focus on himself and on his self gratification using the partner's body to masturbate with kind of an animated sex doll or an animated dildo, if that's a female. So the thing is that the overruling organizing principle, the dominant organizing principle of all types of narcissism, including schizoid narcissists, is the shared fantasy. And this creates extreme dissonance and conflict when there is a comorbidity of schizoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. The schizoid wants to avoid people. He doesn't like people. They don't give him pleasure. He doesn't have friends. He barely interacts with his family.  He is an isolated, solipsistic atom. That's his need. That makes him happy. He is ecosyntonic only when he is solitary, alone. He is a lone wolf, not because he has no other choice, but because this is his choice. But the narcissist needs people. The narcissist is dependent on other people for internal regulation. For example, of his sense of self-worth. He needs people to provide him with supply. He is addicted to other people. He has to be pro-social. If a narcissist is isolated, sequestered, secluded, quarantined away from other people for an extended period of time, he crumbles. He goes through a process called decompensation. He falls apart. His defense mechanisms, including his false self, become disabled. So, narcissists need people. Schizoids avoid people. Schizoids are happy only when they are alone. Narcissists are happy only when they are with other people or at least get feedback from other people. How to reconcile these two? The shared fantasy is the way the narcissist incorporates sources of narcissistic supply within a fantastic space, which will not undermine and challenge his grandiosity. And he creates a shared fantasy with any type of supply of any kind. Narcissists have shared fantasies with friends, with family, with business associates, with intimate partners. Whether the supply is primary or secondary doesn't matter. Supply is obtained only via a shared fantasy. So, if we have a grandiose narcissist who is forced, coerced to establish a shared fantasy in order to obtain supply from other people, but at the same time he is also a schizoid. He has schizoid personality disorder. This kind of narcissist will have an interminable, enduring internal conflict, a dissonance, that they can never resolve. And they are likely to react with animosity, with contempt, with hostility. They are likely to try to disengage from people. In other words, they become approach avoidant. They approach people. That's the narcissistic part. But the minute they get in touch with people one way or another in order to obtain supply, the schizoid part takes over. And then they withdraw in haste and in aggression and rage and anger and contempt and hostility. They become even faintly sadistic within the shared fantasy, within the shared fantasy, with an intimate partner, with a friend, with a business associate. There is some kind of compromise. The schizoid narcissist trains, domesticates his partner, his friends, his business associates, to let him be, to give him his personal space, to leave him alone, to allow him his solitary universe. So within the shared fantasy, over time, the intimate partners of the schizoid narcissist, the business associate, his business associate, his friends, they learn to minimize contact. They understand that the schizoid narcissist has a huge need for solitude. That he is happy only, actually, when he is alone, pursuing his hobbies, reading, writing, watching films, whatever it is that he's doing. When such intimate partners, business associates, friends, family, never mind who, when they try to withdraw too much, because it's difficult to modulate, it's difficult to reach the right balance to get, within the shared fantasy, it's very difficult to get it right. How much should the intimate partner withdraw to what extent? A withdrawal can easily be misinterpreted as abandonment. When the schizoid narcissist is together with an intimate partner in a shared fantasy, and the intimate partner wants to give the schizoid narcissist personal space, personal time, wants to leave him alone to his own solitary devices, the schizoid narcissist very often interprets such behavior as abandonment. And so there are extreme approach behaviors, for example, stalking, hoovering. The relationships with schizoid narcissists are by far the most complex and most unmanageable, because on the one hand the schizoid narcissist pushes people in the shared fantasy away. He wants them gone, he wants to be alone, he's happy only when he's alone, but when they do go away, when they do maintain distance, his abandonment anxiety kicks in and he approaches them aggressively via stalking or hoovering. This is very confusing to the narcissist's human environment, because they don't know what to do, they are at a loss. These are mixed signals. One signal is, I need you, don't abandon me, don't leave me alone.  I'm not happy when you consume my time and impose on my existence. So this suspicious of narcissists reacts with animosity, contempt and hostility to any act of friendliness, to any mindless adulation, to any offered empathy, support, succor, advice even, any attempted intimacy, even sexual advances provoking such a narcissist extreme aggression and it's enormously confusing because it is the narcissist side of the schizoid narcissist who actually signals, come here, come here.  So he is the one who is interpolating, hailing the others.  And when they do come in, when they are attracted to him, for example, when they seek to have sex with him, talk to him, spend time with him, whatever, the schizoid narcissist then sends the exact opposite signal. What are you doing here? What are you doing here imposing on my time? He regards such overtures of intimacy, such gestures of closeness and attempted friendliness. He regards these as presumptuous, narcissistically injurious, impertinent in positions, encroachment on his personal turf and territory. The schizoid becomes seriously aggressive to the point of violence. The ideal narcissistic supply source of the schizoid narcissist is a commodity like so many grains of rice. The ideal source of narcissistic supply in the schizoid narcissist universe has no face, no identity, is anonymous. So for example, the schizoid narcissist would prefer an audience at a lecture, because an audience at a lecture has no identity or names or faces. He would prefer to have views on his videos. If he makes videos and uploads them to YouTube, he would prefer to have views, many views, but no comments, because comments are personalized. Comments have identity. Views are commoditized. They are anonymous. The ideal narcissistic supply of the schizoid narcissist is a non-existent entity, a number, an abstract, which could be somehow packaged and quantified. A statistic in effect, the highest quality of unadulterated narcissistic supply, in the case of the schizoid narcissist, is statistics. If the schizoid narcissist is also sadistic, the ideal sadistic supply, his victim of sadistic mistreatment, must be personal and intimate. So we see a double, a dual track in schizoid narcissists, sadistic schizoid narcissists. When it comes to narcissistic supply, they want anonymous, faceless, identity-less narcissistic supply, adulation, admiration, attention. But when it comes to sadistic supply, when it comes to the ability to derive gratification by inflicting pain, these kinds of narcissists prefer personal, intimate, identifiable people. So they reserve their intimacy to sadistic encounters. Their intimacy equals sadism. The reason is very simple.  As far as they are concerned, any type of attachment, any type of bond, any type of relationship has to revolve around pain and hurt and disillusionment. And so they try to recreate this whenever they do have intimacy. They introduce pain, hurt, humiliation, rejection into the relationship to make it understandable, comprehensible. This is, in other words, their comfort zone. Now there are four types of schizoid narcissists. The first one I've mentioned, that's the sadistic schizoid narcissists. Now many schizoid narcissists end up being sadistic. Because the approach avoidance is so extreme and so frequent, they feel under siege. They feel that people will not let them be. They feel surrounded.  They hate them because they depend on them, but they also hate them because they respond to their signals. And so they are totally trapped and sadism is a way out of this trap. Because sadism allows the schizoid narcissists to recreate a form of intimacy, to actually experience intimacy while maintaining superiority and avoiding real intimacy. Because of course you can't have real intimacy in a sadistic relationship. Now the intimate partners of such sadistic schizoid narcissists, these intimate partners tell themselves, Okay, you know, everyone has his own specialties and eccentricities and flaws. I'm going to compromise.   He wants group sex. I'm going to give him group sex. He wants to humiliate me, despoil me, degrade me. During sex, after sex, verbally, psychologically, in any other way. I will accept it. This is a compromise which is very common in relationships with sadistic schizoid narcissists. Not only by intimate partners, the friends of the schizoid narcissists, they react the same way. That's a first subtype. The second subtype is the paranoid schizoid narcissists.  Precisely because of what I've described earlier, he feels that people are encroaching on him, that they are digesting him and gulfing him and meshing him, subsuming him. He feels that he's about to vanish to disappear. He's terrified. So he reacts with paranoia. He's hypervigilant. He scans.  Is this person going to try to have intimacy with me? Is this person going to try to become my friend, God forbid? So this is the second subtype. The third subtype is the classic avoidant schizoid narcissists. The avoidant schizoid narcissists is a subtype where the narcissism is much stronger than the schizoid features. So this kind of schizoid narcissists would actually be much more sociable, much more pro-social. Would have a career, would be a good team worker, collaborate with other people, but then suddenly would have a period of solitude. He would pack up his things and disappear for a year. He would move to another address or to another country and not inform anyone. He would destroy a pathological narcissistic space and establish a new one, or he would divorce and create a new family. So he would need the break. This kind of avoidant schizoid narcissists is what I call the punctuated narcissism.   And so actually it's a form of multiple personality disorder in a way. It's a form of dissociative identity disorder. It's a breakup, a breakup of the personality, of the coherence, integrity and cohesion of the personality. The person has in effect two fully functioning modes. One mode is narcissists and one mode is schizoid. They don't intermix, they don't intermingo. This is not approach avoidance. There is no repetition compulsion here. There is simply one personality vanishes and another personality suddenly appears full-fledged, fully fleshed, fully formed and takes over. It takes over for a period and then this personality disappears and the first one reappears. It could be described as extended fuse, but memory is intact and identity is intact. So this is not actually dissociation. I would like to expand a bit on what is a schizoid because I've been using the term schizoid and it would behoove all of you to get a bit deeper into the inner world of the schizoid. Now I'm about to describe the inner universe of the schizoid and in the next lecture I'm going to demonstrate that schizoid and narcissists have identical psychodynamics. That's why I've been advocating since 1995 to unify all the personality disorders into a single diagnosis, but that's the next lecture. Schizoids have very few friends or confidants. They trust only first-degree relatives, but even so schizoids maintain not close bonds or associations, not even with their immediate family. They pretend to be indifferent to praise criticism, disagreement and corrective advice, though deep inside some of them are not. Do you remember the subtypes? Schizoids are creatures of habit, frequently succumbing to rigid, predictable and narrowly restricted routines. From the outside, the schizoid's life looks rather less, the schizoid looks adrift, like there's no plan, no connecting thread, he's just floating in space. And exactly like people with autism spectrum disorder type 1 used to be known as Asperger's, exactly like these kind of people, schizoids fail to respond appropriately to social cues. They rarely reciprocate gestures or facial expressions. They rarely smile back. For example, the diagnostic and statistical manual says that they seem socially inept or superficial and self-absorbed. Of course, many narcissists are like that. These are the comorbid narcissists, schizoid and narcissists at the same time. Schizoids enjoy nothing. They seemingly never experience pleasure, they are anecdomic. Even the nearest and dearest often describe the schizoid as an automata, a robot or machine. But the schizoid is not depressed. Schizoid is not dysphoric, he's merely apathetic, indifferent, he's truly indifferent, he's not pretending. Schizoids are uninterested in social relationships, they're bored, they're puzzled by interpersonal interactions. They're incapable of intimacy, they have a very limited range of emotions and effect. Rarely does the schizoid express feelings, either negative or positive, anger, happiness, no way. Flat. I coined the phrase flat attachment and there is the phrase flat effect, and they have flat emotionality. Schizoids never pursue an opportunity to develop a close relationship. Schizoids are asexual, they're not interested in sex. They can engage in sexual activity, nothing's wrong with the machinery, but they don't enjoy it. They don't find pleasure in it, they are very befuddled and perplexed. Why do people pursue sex? What for? It's boring. Consequently, schizoids appear to be called aloof, bland, stunted, flat and zombie-like. They derive no satisfaction from belonging to a close-knit group. They don't like their families. They don't go to church, they don't socialize in the workplace, they don't meander around the neighborhood, they don't even belong to a nation or a club. They rarely get married, they almost never have children. Schizoids are loners. Given the option, they invariably pursue solitary activities or hobbies. Inevitably, schizoids prefer mechanical or abstract tasks or jobs that require such skills. Many coders, computer hackers, crackers and programmers, for example, are schizoids, some mathematicians, some theoretical physicists. They are schizoids. Schizoids are inflexible in their reactions to changing life circumstances and developments. Even if these developments are positive, opportune, they still don't know how to react or how to take advantage of them. And if the developments or life circumstances become adverse, bad, they're equally indifferent. Faced with stress, schizoids may disintegrate, decompensate and experience brief psychotic episodes of depressive illness. But it's going to be very brief. It's going to be reactive and it's going to leave no mark on the schizoid, barely a memory or a trace. Schizoids are often described, as I said, as robots. And I mentioned that they're uninterested in social relationships or interactions, they have a limited emotional repertory and so on. But it's important to emphasize, it's not that they do not have emotions. The problem is not with the underlying emotionality. Problem is, they can't express emotions. They express emotions poorly and intermittently. They appear cold, stunted, flat and zombie-like, but not because they are, but because their emotions never reach the surface. Now imagine this coupled with a narcissist. Narcissists don't have even this. Narcissists have no access to positive emotions, end of story. Many narcissists have access only to extreme negative emotions, so even the negative emotions have to be really, really powerful. So when you have a schizoid narcissist, the situation is really bad, because there, all emotionality is eradicated, eliminated totally, including negative emotionality. Many scholars say that schizoids are not human and that's the only case in clinical literature where people are described as not human by scholars, not by YouTube, not by YouTubers. So these people are loners. When they need to confide or to confess or to consult, they seek first-degree relatives. But even this doesn't create any bonding, any attachment. It's like there's no cumulative memory. Like every minute is a new minute, every start is a new day, and every day is a new start. And this is a typical dissociative feature where you don't, if you are the schizoid narcissist friend, you don't have credit. There's no deposits in the emotional bank. You start with the schizoid narcissist every day as though you have just met. He has no emotional, institutional memory. Your relationship is like a string of beads. Each bead is a totally separate moment. And each bead has a beginning and an end. And no bead is connected to any other bead except through this thin imaginary thread. But this extreme dissociation helps the schizoid narcissist to cut off intimacy, to disappear, to vanish, to extricate himself, to withdraw, to isolate, to firewall.  And walking away is the schizoid narcissist number one and two and three coping strategy.  Someone makes his expectations, the schizoid narcissist walks away. To do that, he needs to be emotionally uninvolved, or in clinical terms, he needs to be de-affected. So they naturally gravitate to solitary activities. They find solace and safety in being constantly alone.  And finally, usually, they cease altogether. There is this issue of anhedonia. They find nothing pleasurable, nothing attractive. But don't confuse anhedonia with depression. They're not sad, they're not dysphoric, they're not depressed. Even their asexuality is very close to the asexuality of the cerebral narcissist. It's a bit of an ideology, like, you know, I'm as asexual because I'm special. The schizoid narcissist is in a way invested emotionally in his own asexuality. He glorifies it. He renders it, he transforms it into a religion or a ideology that makes him superior. Both schiz, classic schizoids and schizoid narcissists pretend to be indifferent. But they are indifferent not only to criticism and disagreement and corrective advice. They are indifferent also to praise. So whenever they get positive supply, they don't react. Whenever they get negative supply, they don't react. Whenever they criticize, they don't react, they don't react. This is coping strategy number two of the schizoid narcissists. And it sets the schizoid narcissists apart from the classic narcissists and even the covert narcissists. The classic narcissists and the covert narcissists react with extreme narcissistic injury and aggression, narcissistic rage to any attempt to criticize or disagree with them or to give them advice. They perceive this as aggression and they counter react with aggression that feel humiliated to the core. And in extreme cases, they may even decompensate and go through a process known as narcissistic modification. The schizoid narcissist is not like that at all. He does not respond, he does not react. He has poker face. He has flat, flat effect, flat face, monotone voice. He is really machine like. And so you can do anything you want. You can say anything you want to such a narcissist and you will not react. The only way, the only reason we know this person to be a schizoid narcissist is that as opposed to the typical schizoid. The schizoid narcissist has periods of approach. The schizoid narcissist has periods of time where he does try to attract people because he needs supply. And this is the only way we can tell apart real schizoids from schizoid narcissists because real schizoids never approach people. They don't want people end of story. They don't want supply. Thank you very much. They don't want people, I mean they want to be alone. Just leave me alone 100% of the time. The schizoid narcissist needs people, needs people from time to time to replenish the reservoir of narcissistic supply. Both of them are creatures of habit. Both of them are rigid. They have predictable, narrowly restricted routines, as I said. Now, I mentioned the avoidance subtype, the sadistic subtype, the paranoid hypervigilant or referential subtype. That's a subtype of schizoid narcissist who anticipates looming attack. The attack would be an attempt to create intimacy, attempt to have sex with him, attempt to befriend him, attempt to take away his time, his precious time, his precious invady space. So this kind of schizoid narcissist becomes very paranoid. He scans the environment all the time. Who is coming? Who is about to enter my territory? That's hypervigilance. And he's also referential. He tends to assume that people are conspiring and colluding and planning to impose on him intimacy, sex, friendship. Consequently, demands and expectations. So this is the third type. There's a fourth type and the fourth type is the schizo-tipo. The schizo-tipo schizoid narcissist. The schizo-tipo schizoid narcissist is, for example, a conspiracy theorist. Some of who believes in conspiracy theories or in UFOs or in reptilians or in Donald Trump's election victory. These are people who have divorced reality, have suspended reality testing totally and have replaced it with a totally fictitious narrative. A fictitious narrative that caters to very crucial psychological needs and fosters specific psychodynamics. The schizo-tipo schizoid narcissist is a solitary figure, totally alone. And he doesn't approach other people for narcissistic supply. He approaches himself. He has self-supply. His narcissistic supply is himself. He is self-referential. He is also extremely autoerotic.  In a variety of ways, including looking at himself in a mirror. So the schizo-tipo lives in an imaginary fictitious universe where things are dictated by theories of the world and theories of mind which have very little to do with reality. He renounces reality and he renounces and denounces and abrogates and gives up on everyone in reality. So not only reality but everyone, people in general. So this is a kind of schizoid narcissist who would go and live in a shed or in a hut, in a forest, all alone. Or he would be homeless. Or he would be in a shelter. And he would avoid people assiduously. And his only form of supply is derived from the inside via the narcissistic, via the conspiracy theory in effect. Via the piece of fiction that he adheres to. Now, this is the end of the first of three lectures. In the next lecture we're going to deal with solutions. Solutions adopted by narcissists in general and schizoid narcissists in particular when they run out of supply. The approach avoidant behavior gradually depletes the number of people, the reservoir of people available to the narcissist. The schizoid narcissist is sending mixed signals. He approaches people and then he avoids them. He solicits narcissistic supply and then he reacts aggressively.  Now gradually people get tired of such a narcissist, more particularly the schizoid narcissist. They get tired of the schizoid narcissist. And ultimately such a narcissist finds himself alone, unable to find alternative sources of supply. How does he cope with this? This is the next lecture. What do narcissists do when they run not only out of narcissistic supply, but when they run out of sources of narcissistic supply. When there's a dawning realization that they can never ever get supply again. What do they do faced with such an apocalypse, such a calamity? There are several solutions, several behavioral modes that they adopt. This is the second lecture. And the third lecture is about the theory, the various psychological theories that connect schizoid personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and schizophrenia. Because there is an affinity as Otto Kahnberg had observed. There is an affinity between narcissistic personality disorder and psychosis. And the schizoid behaviorally is indistinguishable from the psychotic, especially if it's a schizotypal schizoid. So we are beginning to see the connecting lines. We are beginning to realize that the disorders bleed into each other. Narcissists having been exposed to narcissistic injuries, humiliations, degradations, having been insulted, having been rejected and rebuffed. Many, many narcissists end life and their lives as schizoid. They avoid the world because the world is too painful. As they enter the schizoid phase, as they become schizoid narcissists, many of them reject reality to the point of psychosis. So there is an affinity, there's a strong link between schizophrenia, which is a psychotic disorder, narcissism and schizoid personality disorder. And this is the topic of the third lecture. Put together the three lectures constitute one credit for class-to-c personality disorders. And they belong to the psychology track in C.U.P.S. Thank you for listening. So many women are asking to interview me lately that I'm beginning to seriously consider the possibility that I'm actually a desirable man. Well, talk about delusional disorder. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of psychology. And today we are going to discuss a very intricate problem. For those of you who are my students, this is within the unit on presentation intake interviews and what was the last part? Presentation intake up and presenting signs and symptoms. Okay. So here's the question. Even skilled diagnosticians, even diagnosticians, therapists, psychologists with decades of experience in institutional settings find it very difficult to distinguish between psychopathy, autism, schizoid personality and PTSD. Or complex PTSD. Let me repeat. Psychopathy, the extreme form of antisocial personality disorder, autism spectrum disorder, schizoid personality and schizoid personality disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder or straight out post-traumatic stress disorder. These are, they present, the people with these problems present so identically that in the intake interview, the first time the therapist or the diagnostician comes across the patient or the client, it's very difficult to tell them apart. Now we already know that people with borderline personality disorder, emotional dysregulation disorder, people with this disorder are actually indistinguishable from secondary psychopaths when they are exposed to stress, humiliation and rejection. So there is a confluence, there is a confluence or a convergence between borderline personality disorder and secondary, factor 2, psychopathy. But we are talking about factor 1 psychopathy, the classic psychopath, the animal, the beast, the monster, in short, me. Factor 1 psychopathy, someone with autism spectrum disorder, mainly high functioning autism or formerly known as Asperger, level 1 autism, Asperger's disorder, schizoid personality and personality disorder and complex trauma. How do we tell them apart? All four conditions, all four conditions present the same. In all four conditions, there is extreme reduced effect display. Now reduced effect display is a fancy name because we psychologists will like fancy names. It gives us the illusion that psychology is a science. So reduced effect display simply means not showing emotions, flat effect, not displaying any emotional reaction to past events, to present occurrences, to future catastrophizing or speculations, no emotions, no display of emotion, a flat presentation of emotions and a flat presentation of personal experiences. These people describe the most harrowing, most traumatizing, most exceptional, most extreme situations and you don't see a hint of a flicker of anything resembling an emotion on their faces. This is a poker face. And there is reticent self-disclosure. It's like pulling teeth talking to these people. They refuse to kind of come clean. They refuse to share, confess, admit. They refuse to talk. It's very, very difficult to get these kind of people, these kind of patients or clients, to actually talk about their lives, what had happened, how they had felt, what led to these events and how did they extricate themselves and how do they feel about these occurrences nowadays. They absent themselves.  You can see the curtain falling. You can see there's nobody there suddenly. When you try to talk to them about emotions, about personal experiences, when you try to kind of coerce them or convince them or cajole them into self-disclosure, they become reticent, reluctant and their body language changes. It becomes very defensive or very aggressive for both. And this is common to all four types, including survivors of trauma and including survivors of complex trauma, complex or traumatic stress disorder. So the first thing we see when such a patient or client enters the clinic, the first thing you see is the body language. And the body language is again very defensive and very aggressive, a bizarre mixture, kind of passive aggression.  They vanish. They absent themselves. And the third thing you see, they refuse to talk about emotions, personal experiences.  All four types of patients also use language in a highly idiosyncratic way, in a special way. Narcissists abuse language. Narcissists leverage language as a weapon. They use language to be fuddle, to confuse, to gaslight. So they abuse language, but psychopaths, people with autism spectrum disorder, schizoids and victims of trauma, use language not in order to obtain any goal or to score points, as the Narcissist does. They simply corrupt language. They undermine language. They render, it's like their language festers. It's like it became infested or infected with something. First of all, they are likely to use very vulgar, a very vulgar type of language. You know, with obscenities and profanities and so on. The language is likely to be patried, as though it's rotting from the inside. They're likely, whenever they try to communicate something, which is very rare, or if they have to respond to the therapist or the diagnostician or the psychologist, for example, in court mandated evaluations, they tend to play with language. They tend to become ambiguous and equivocal. If you ask them, did you do this and this? They're going to say, how do you define doing this and this? Or they're going to answer in a way which is essentially hair splitting and nitpicking, wiggling their way out, finagling their way out of conundrums and predicaments using language. Language is their exit strategy. They think that if they can redefine and reframe situations, behaviors and traits, they're scot-free, they're home-free. It's like monopoly game. They're playing a game all the time and you can feel it. Their language is a gambit like in chess, so it's very ambiguous and very equivocal and leaves place for vagueness and kind of finagling and wiggling. The language is non-committal. It's clinical. It's impersonal. They're likely to describe the most terrifying, traumatizing, horrific experiences in very, very impersonal and clinical terms as though they were talking about the third party at making clinical observation for some medical chart or some paper about to publish in an academic journal. They corrupt the language and they render it circumspect and cynical and cold and detached. And so this is the fourth thing you notice, the misuse of language. All four types of patients, the psychopath, the autism, the autist, the schizoid and the traumatized victim, trauma victim. All four types of patients are inaccessible. You feel that there's a kind of transparent partition that you cannot penetrate. They look at you. They're watching you and you're watching them through a glass, darkly. There's something standing between you and them. It's ethereal on one hand, but on the other hand it's very real and it tends to regenerate all the time. The more intimate the conversation becomes, the more the clinician tries to broach difficult topics, painful topics or threatening topics, the more the partition solidifies, becomes thicker. And so there is this membrane between the patient and the diagnostician or therapist. The patient is inaccessible. The client is sealed off from the world when you talk to a psychopath or trauma victim or schizoid or a autistic person. You feel that he is ensconced and cocooned in his own tiny bubble of a universe. Drifting away from you, never mind how desperately you're trying to reach out and hold on to them. They're out of grasp. They're like slimy goldfish. You can never get hold of them. You cannot nail them down.  And so they're sealed off and they are emotionally numb. They're incapable of true intimacy, true communication, let alone intimacy. You can never get anywhere with them because you keep getting the feeling that there is somebody there, but out of reach, out of reach. And they kind, you feel that you're being reduced by these patients into caricature, a two-dimensional icon avatar, a symbol. They don't relate these four types of patients, don't relate to the clinician or the therapist as another human being. They reduce him to a function and then they become very defensive and they try to isolate themselves from the situation and from the other person. That's the therapist. And so you have this eerie feeling that the temperature had dropped. The oxygen had been sucked out of the room and you're in the presence of someone who is suspending their humanity. These people, all four types, the psychopath, the schizoid, the trauma victim, the borderline which is a form of psychopath and the autist. Deep inside, we now know from multiple studies, starting in the 90s, we know that deep inside they harbor, they have the experience, self-loathing, self-hating. And so sometimes they act out. They act out by becoming self-defeating or self-destructive or self-trashing or aggressive or passive aggressive. And so even the schizoid who is utterly detached ostensibly from the outside world, happy in his own nest, in his own den, happy, thriving in his solitude. Even the schizoid actually has moments of rage and acting out and reaching out desperately, trying to connect. Actually, the prevailing theory of schizoid personality is that the schizoid defense is an attempt to maintain object relations, an attempt to maintain relationships with other people by somehow rejecting them, by somehow isolating them. Because even rejecting someone, even isolating yourself from someone, is a form of connection. So it's one step removed from psychosis or schizophrenia. That's why it's called schizoid, almost schizophrenia. So even the schizoid has these moments of rejecting others, sometimes aggressively rejecting others, especially when he feels uncomfortable or disconfident by the presence of others, when he feels overwhelmed. And so all these four patients are self-destructive, and all of them act out one way or another. The psychopath is defined and contumacious and reckless and impulsive, borderline of course, when she becomes a secondary psychopath. The trauma victim is disregulated, heavily dysregulated emotionally. She has typically modulability. And I'm saying she because majority of victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder are women. Not all, but a majority. Now one thing, so to summarize this part, as a clinician, as a diagnostician, as a therapist, there's a conundrum. How to tell this apart? Of course, you wouldn't treat a trauma victim as you would treat a psychopath. You wouldn't administer the same techniques to a borderline as you would to a autistic person. And definitely would not try to treat someone with autism spectrum disorder as you would someone with schizoid personality disorder. These are seriously different problems, issues in mental health. And they require totally different approaches. It's very dangerous to misdiagnose. And misdiagnosis is very common in clinical practice, precisely because all the presenting signs and symptoms on the face of it, and initially, sometimes for five sessions, ten sessions, they seem to be the same. Only when you delve deeper, you begin to discover differences. For example, attitude to sex and intimacy. The psychopath's attitude to sex and to sexuality, psychopath's psychosexuality, is very unique and is not typical of the schizoid of the trauma victim, the borderline, and definitely not of someone with autistic personality, autistic disorder.  There's the Madonna-Hore complex, which also applies to narcissists.  He doesn't do intimacy at all, not with his sexual partners, not with anyone. So consequently, his sex is devoid of intimacy. Even when it looks outwardly as intimate, it's not. Psychopaths regard their bodies as dispensable, disposable objects. So they trash themselves, they self-trash. Sexually, it's very common for a psychopath to engage in very extreme sexual practices, reckless or not. Sexual practices which objectify his or her body.  Disrespect is boundaries, physical or otherwise.  So they regard their bodies as a kind of coin or commodity. They leverage their bodies, the psychopaths leverage their bodies and use them to obtain goals. The goals could be instant gratification, satisfaction of an impulse. Harvey Cleckley said in his famous Mask of Sanity, the masterpiece Mask of Sanity, Harvey Cleckley said that in 1942, that psychopaths, the sexual activities of psychopaths are like scratching your back. He said that psychopaths act on a whim. They rarely have any deep motivation to engage in sex. They engage in sex because they want to scratch their backs. It's just an impulse, an itch. They scratch the itch.  Their bodies are utterly meaningless. Actually in the psychopath's life, everything is meaningless. And so it's very shocking, very unsettling.  In the sexual history of a psychopath, he or she subjects herself to the most degrading and dispoiling treatment by others. She is likely to find herself in situations which are not healthy or normal person, not even a mentally ill person. Would find herself or himself. Psychopaths are unlikely to have sexual boundaries. They're unlikely to be sexually dysregulated. They're likely to engage in extreme and reckless sex from a very, very early age. It's very common in the history of psychopaths to engage, for example, in group sex in teenage years. Or to give a series of 100 blowjobs. On consecutive days to all the boys in the school. It's utterly, utterly normal occurrence in the sexual history of psychopaths. And the same people, psychopaths, usually develop comorbidities or dual diagnosis like eating disorders and some of them suffer from body dysmorphia. Although this is much more common in secondary psychopathy and therefore in borderline personality disorder. So attitude to body, attitude to sex, attitude to the bodies of other people. They're willingness to self-trash sexually. They're willingness to be objectified, degraded and dispoiled. Subjecting oneself to these situations, seeking them actually. This is a hallmark, a major hallmark by the way. According to Cleckley and many other authorities, it's a major hallmark of psychopathy. And it is a differential diagnosis in the sense that it does not exist. In trauma victims among people with autism, schizoids and narcissists. It is common among psychopaths all year long. And it's common among borderlines when they switch into a psychopathic state, secondary psychopathic state. So this is the first differentiating or differential sign. Now psychopaths are deceitful. They're deceitful, they're disloyal, they're unfaithful, they're manipulative, they're parasites. Psychopathic women are usually gold diggers. They're gold oriented. This is not, this is another differential diagnosis. This is not the case with schizoids, with borderlines, with people with autism spectrum disorder and with trauma victims. Only psychopaths are like this. So when you see a history of deceitfulness, cheating for example in multiple relationships, serial cheating, betrayal, a history of adultery and unfaithfulness, extramarital sex, non-concentral, extramarital sex, when you see a history of parasitism, when you see a history of antisocial even criminal activities, actions. When you see extreme gold orientation which is without scruples, without boundaries, without rules and without limits, which is reckless and callous and ruthless. When you see these things, this is a psychopath. Finally a psychopath is likely to be very devaluing and humiliating of others. Psychopaths hold everyone in disdain and contempt, which is not the case with the narcissist by the way. The narcissist does have role models. The narcissist tends to adopt public intellectuals, important politicians, footballers, you name it. He tends to adopt public figures and idealize them and idolize them. This is not the case with the psychopath. The psychopath holds everyone, and when I say everyone I mean everyone in disdain and contempt. So psychopaths are compelled, it's almost compulsive, they're compelled to devalue you, to humiliate you. And this is apparent and transparent in the therapy setting where the psychopath embarks almost immediately on doubting the therapist's credentials, experience, knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, etc. Devaluation and humiliation, degradation and dispoiling of other people are psychopathic acts when they are indiscriminate and when they don't target only specific individuals like intimate partners. Psychopaths are also very hyper-vigilant and very paranoid, much more so than trauma victims, much more so than trauma victims. So when we see someone who is viciously, viciously, contemptuous, disdainful, hatefully devaluing, totally hyper-vigilant and paranoid, that's likely to be a psychopath, not a trauma victim. The etiologies of this identical presentation, the etiologies couldn't be more different, and this is why it makes it crucial. It's crucial to apply the differential diagnosis, diagnostic signs and symptoms and criteria that I've just described, because if you get it wrong, you can, as a clinician, as a therapist, you can wreak havoc and create enormous damage. The etiologies of these four groups or classes of disorders is very different. The psychopath has no empathy. He has no positive emotions. The narcissist has no access to his positive emotions, but he does have positive emotions. The psychopath does not have positive emotions. There's nothing to access. Nothing there. He has no empathy. He has nothing to report. His self-reporting is denuded, minimal, or sometimes non-existent, not because he's playing mind games or not because it's a power play, although they're prone to both. It's because he has nothing to report. There's nothing there. So the psychopath is goal-oriented. He defines himself via his environment. He derives his identity from his actions and from his environment, and this is why his goal orientation is extreme. Psychopaths are primitive two-state devices, almost in animals, almost in an animalistic level. Feel good, feel bad. So there are two two-state devices. They mimic humans because they are great mimics. They have thespian skills, exactly like the narcissist, but it's mimicry. It's not real. The etiology of the psychopath is severe damage, probably cerebral, probably brain damage, to the ability to experience empathy or positive emotions. That's the root of psychopathy in effect. The autistic person is oblivious to social and sexual cues. He cannot read other people. He cannot read their body language. His thinking is concrete, so he is incapable of understanding and applying metaphors, similes, jokes. He has a problem with humor. So his language is very concrete and very simplified. It's a dictionary language. It's like it's a walking, talking lexicon or dictionary. So he doesn't understand other people. He doesn't get them. He has no clue. He's clueless, and this renders his reactions weird, even antisocial sometimes, unintentionally. The autistic person is reluctant or unable to verbalize his internal world, his inner world. And that is partly because this inner world overwhelms him, and partly because he's been rejected all his life, owing to anticipated rejection. He doesn't want to expose himself. He doesn't want to be mocked, shunned, ostracized, ignored, punished. The schizoid just wants to be left alone. That's all he wants. He is incapable of strong emotions. He is incapable of intense experiences. The schizoid flatlines into solitude. The schizoid's solitary confinement is his comfort zone. It defies belief because we're all social creatures, even narcissists, even psychopaths. But not the schizoid. He thrives when he's alone. And the survivor of trauma, she represses, she numbs her emotions because she finds her emotions and the memories that are attached to these emotions, threatening. She feels that she will be overwhelmed if she allows herself to directly touch upon and interact with what had happened to her, with her trauma. So she's reluctant to revisit her harrowing experiences, and she's triggered by any attempt to be intimate with her in any way. Though all four present identically in clinical settings, you need to dig deeper. You need to delve deeper. You need to ask yourself, how do they regard their bodies? How do they regard sex and intimacy? Are they deceitful and faithful, goal-oriented, parasitic, to the extreme? Are they immediately vicious in devaluing and humiliating other people? Are they hypervigilant to the point of paranoid ideation? And if the answer to all this is yes, that's a psychopath. And you did your job. Okay, survivors. This is the third in a series of three videos. I recommend that you watch the first two. And all three videos deal with a combined, combined construct of a schizoid narcissist. Ostensibly, an internal contradiction, mutually exclusive. The narcissist needs other people. His pro-social depends on other people for the regulation of his internal environment, especially his sense of self-worth. The schizoid avoids other people at all costs. He doesn't have sex. He doesn't have friends. He barely communicates with a single member of his family. He finds people boring.  He is confined to his own solitary existence as a monk would. So how do these two sit together? Perhaps before we come to this, to clarify something. In earlier videos, I said that trauma is not an objective event or certain circumstances. Trauma is a subjective experience. It is the way you react to external circumstances, to other people's behavior or misbehavior, to natural disasters, to man-made disasters. Trauma is the way you react. It's a reactive pattern. I can take ten people, subject them to exactly the same experience, replicated identically, and only two of them would be traumatized. The other eight would not be. But one thing I neglected to mention is that trauma could be endogenous or exogenous, internally generated or externally generated. Trauma could be a reaction to an experience that emanates from and is contained inside the mind, has no outside correlates. Consider for example chronic illness. Consider mental illness. Mental illness and chronic illness generate trauma. But they are not external events. They don't depend on anyone's misconduct. They are not derivatives of any external or outside disaster, catastrophe or calamity. Mental illness is essentially biological in most cases. It's a medical condition. So is chronic illness. People react with trauma to internal processes, to internal dynamics. This trauma generates loads of anxiety and depression. I would say that endogenous traumas, traumas which are reactions to internal processes, endogenous traumas are even more anxiety producing and more depression inducing than exogenous traumas.  Where would you escape to? You can escape an enemy. You can escape an adversary. You can escape adverse circumstances. You can escape the police. Where are you going to escape your mind to? Where are you going to go to? Your mind is with you at all times. Your body is with you at all times. Where are you going to flee your chronic condition? So endogenous traumas induce much more anxiety and depression than exogenous traumas. Gradually over time people try to develop strategies to cope with this permanent, all permeating ubiquitous anxiety and depression. Depression that is kind of a democless sword hanging in the balance about looming imminent, ambient depression and anxiety. People try to develop strategies, coping strategies and these coping strategies are what we call personality disorders. One coping strategy is to say I am fearless, I am resilient, I am strong, nothing and no one can break me, not even myself. That is the psychopathic reaction. It's defined, it's consummations, it's reckless, it lacks impulse control. Another solution is to say I'm God, nothing can touch me, I'm untouchable, I'm invulnerable. That is the narcissistic solution. As you see personality disorders are forms, are reactive patterns and one of the main roles of personality disorders is to ameliorate, to reduce and to regulate anxiety, depression, moods and emotions in the wake of trauma and that's why I'm trying to recast personality disorders as post-traumatic conditions. To the issue, how do we connect? How do we connect schizoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder? You remember that my philosophy is that there is only one condition, persona