Good morning, Southern Federal University or Stov-on-Don, Russian Federation, dear students, faculty, esteemed colleagues. This is the year of the virus, and we all have to adapt. This year I'll be providing my lectures via YouTube. I'll be uploading them to YouTube and providing you with a link. All homework assignments will continue through the regular platform. But the lectures themselves will be available online. I'm also working on digitizing and uploading all the lectures from the past three years so that you have a repository and a library that is continuous and one thing leads to another. It's very regrettable that we have to do it this way. But the virus has taught us two things, how vulnerable we are, how small, and how interconnected. So while embracing our vulnerability, let's try our best to remain connected. It's our only hope for survival. In a proper connection, let us discuss the issue of therapy. The topic of today's lecture is comfort zones. Comfort zones, personal boundaries, and what happens when comfort zones and personal boundaries are pathologized? This is an emerging field in psychology, not older than 20 years, and there are all kinds of revolutionary thoughts circling and swirling around which I will try to introduce you to. But before we go there, many of you are here because you want to become therapists. You should be aware of the transformation of the role of therapists.  When people came to Freud, when people came to Jung, they went there in order to be transformed, to be changed. This is not the case nowadays, you must be aware of this. Nowadays, such insights, the truth, they are deemed hostile acts. And the professional who provides insights and unvarnished truth is castigated as a brutal sadist, or worse. Your patients are going to resent you if you carry on the traditional role of a therapist. And the reason is that people have never been more alone, more lonely than in our atomized, anomic, dying and materialistic civilization. I discussed with you last year the concept of fanatic civilization, a civilization which is essentially a death cult centered around material objects. The majority of people are single or divorced, and they lead secluded, reclusive lives. They are versed to sex, even to intimacy and to socializing. Many people are estranged from their life partners and family, and they have few, if any, friends. These are the realities. Everyone is becoming defiant, they call it assertive. Everyone is becoming petulant, entitled and grandiose. Everyone is becoming more and more narcissistic, there are numerous studies that have shown this. I keep referring you to studies by Twinge and Campbell, but there are others. In such a toxic environment, the therapist is expected to function as the client's best friend. Best friend, and to provide unwavering and uncritical validation, as it's called, as well as counterfactual. Fallacious and delusional hope. Many unscrupulous practitioners, especially online, collude with such egregious malpractice. They are laughing all the way to the bank at the brain-dead patients who pay them money just to be echoed. War unto the precious few who try to remain faithful to life-altering mission of treatment. They are shunned, they are bed-mouthed widely, even by their own clients. And I'm telling you to risk and to sacrifice, and to remain true and faithful to this mission, the therapeutic mission. You have an alliance with your patients. And that alliance obliges you morally, ethically, in many jurisdictions legally, to help the patient change, to help the patient avoid the pitfalls, and the heartbreak that had characterized the patient's life either too. And so, when we discuss today's subversive, decadent Western concepts, such as comfort zones and boundaries, we are actually talking about a variety of settings, because comfort zones and boundaries are expressed in intimate relationships. But they are also expressed, for example, in therapy. Now, we all strive to be egocintonic. You remember the distinction two years ago? Those of you who were here. So the distinction between egocintonic and egodistonic. Egocintonic effectively means is a high-falutin, grandiose way of saying, I feel good with myself. I feel comfortable with myself. And egodistonic is the opposite. I'm not comfortable with what I've done, with who I'm becoming, with who I am. Egodistonic, egocintonic, egodistonic. So we all strive to default to an egocintonic comfort zone. And when we are outside this comfort zone, we experience dissonances. We experience anxieties. What is a comfort zone? A comfort zone is a narrative. It's a story. It's a piece of fiction. It's a movie script. These are narratives that fulfill several requirements, and they cater to crucial psychological needs. Number one, the comfort zone comprises a coherent and cohesive library of theories of mind. It's a part of the process of mentalism. What makes other people tick? We leverage empathy to create the comfort zone via the process of mentalism. So we look at other people and we ask ourselves, are they the same like us? In which ways are they different? What makes them tick? What are their motivations? What are they going to do to us? What are they not going to do to us? Action in action. And so we create a theory about other people. That's a theory of mind. And empathy and the theory of mind become gradually incorporated into the comfort zone. And then there's a theory of the world, umwelt. Umwelt is more typical of animals, but people have umwelt too. It's a theory of how the world operates, what is the world? What is the quiddity and essence of the world? So these twin theories, theories of other people, theory of mind and theory of the world, the umwelt, they coalesce. They become one and they form the main pillar, the pivot of the comfort zone. The comfort zone allows us to predict the future choices and behaviors of people and to sustain a sense of personal continuity and safety. Because if we can predict the world, if we can foretell and foresee what other people are going to do, we feel safe. Not only do we feel safe, but we feel continuous. Our narrative is not disrupted by sudden abrupt behaviors or misbehaviors by catastrophic developments. Everything is smooth. Everything is incremental. Everything is gradual. And this is the main function perhaps of a comfort zone, to smooth things over, to grade them, to establish a gradient. The comfort zone is a set of principles that provide our lives and the world around us with organization and structure. The comfort zone is therefore an endoskeleton, like we human beings, we have a skeleton. And on this skeleton, there's this suit of flesh, you know, but the skeleton carries our flesh. And this is the endoskeleton. It's the same with the comfort zone.  It provides structure, cohesion, coherence, organization. The comfort zone imbues everything we experience or everything we do with meaning. It renders things meaningful. It helps us to make sense of an otherwise very chaotic, arbitrary, capricious, honestly meaningless reality. Because the universe is, the universe, the world, reality just is. There's no meaning in reality or the universe. They just are. They are endos. They represent existence. There is no episteme. There's no epistemological element in any of this. We impose meaning. We impose sense on things which are essentially and crucially not meaningless and totally senseless. Because we can't survive in a world without meaning and without sense. Viktor Frankl, I refer you again, men in search of meaning in his logotherapy. And so the comfort zone helps us to make sense of things. That's what we call an hermeneutic principle, explanatory, with explanatory power. Finally, the comfort zone generates directions and goals to pursue. And in this sense, it is an exoskeleton. It's a skeletal oriented at the world. So it has an endoskeletal function. It provides a structure upon which we subsist and we exist. But it also directs us outward, pushes us into the world. It's an exoskeletal. By providing safety, it allows us to be healthily narcissistic, healthily grandiose. Take on the world, take on challenges, assume risks and conquer and accomplish and overcome. So the comfort zone seamlessly incorporates our values, our beliefs, our wealth and shower worldview. The comfort zone is therefore axiological. It's normative. And it is typically acquired via the twin processes that we had discussed last year of socialization and acculturation. Our conscience, superego, inner critic, is an integral part of our comfort zone. And so the comfort zone is like an imaginary space, a paracosm. Remember the paracosm from one of my other lectures? It's an imaginary kingdom. It's a kingdom of heaven to use medieval terms. It's a space akin to cyberspace in some respects. It's a space within which we are egocintonic, within which we feel safe, within which we are empowered. And this space, the comfort zone, is protected, is fended off, is isolated from the world, is defended against intrusion by personal boundaries. So there is a comfort zone and the border, the borderline of the, the borderline, a very unfortunate expression. The border of the comfort zone are the personal boundaries. And personal boundaries, they are a form of signaling. These personal boundaries signal to other people, signal which behaviors and communication, which messages are permitted and accepted.  That's where I end and you start, that's where you end and I start. No entry, no trespassing. These and these behaviors are not acceptable to me. I don't allow them, they're forbidden. I will punish you if you're engaging them. Then equally, you tell people what behaviors are permitted, are welcome, are wanted, are desired. So personal boundaries are actually two lists, one list of things and things not to be done and things not to be said. And another list of things to be said and things to be done, things which are welcome. And it's also clear with personal boundaries that any infringement, any breach, any violation of the personal boundaries is actionable. Anything out of bound will trigger reprisals and sanctions. The comfort zone is such a critically utilitarian piece of psychological equipment that people ferociously resist any attempt to alter it, to modify it, to interfere with it or to challenge it. Even when you show people, many of you will become therapists, psychotherapists, that you will have patients and you will demonstrate to these patients that the comfort zone, their comfort zone is manifestly and patently counterproductive, self-destructive and self-defeating. You will show these people and they will come to accept that as long as they are within the comfort zone, they're hopeless, they're irredeemable and yet they will refuse to exit the comfort zone, they will still defend it tooth and nail, they will fight you back and this is what Freud called resistance. They will fight back because the comfort zone feels like a mother's womb. It's regressive, it's infantile, it's like going back to the period before the biggest trauma in human life being born. So victims set boundaries around the comfort zone which don't allow you to tinker with the comfort zone and these boundaries are essentially cognitive deficits because they falsify the nature and the functioning of the comfort zone. They aggrandize the comfort zone, they idealize the comfort zone, they convince the patient that without the comfort zone he or she will die or will not function or will be punished or something really, really bad with that will happen and this is of course the mechanism of catastrophizing. So the comfort zone is protected by cognitive deficits and mechanisms, cognitive mechanisms, cognitive fallacies such as catastrophizing. Those of you who watch my videos for laymen are acquainted with meaning. This is my neutral, transparent cup, academic. Okay, and so people set boundaries. The problem with dysfunctional people, mainly people with cluster B personality disorders, people with dependent personality disorders, victims of complex trauma, CPTSD, the problem with these people is they set boundaries long after the abuser had moved on, had moved out, having plundered and pillaged everything the victims had, having lost all the interest in the victims anyhow, having traumatized these hapless pray for life. So many, many people have a comfort zone, but they did not complete the work of establishing clear-cut personal boundaries and even if they had done so, they suspend these boundaries when they interact with the abuser. There's something the abuser that neutralizes, disables the personal boundaries and allows the abuser to enter, to intrude upon the comfort zone and to change it, to transmogrify, to transform it into another comfort zone, into another theme park, which is more amenable to the goals of the abuser. It's the equivalent of perhaps hypnosis, where there is a suspension of the wheel, or maybe it's the equivalent of psychotic disorder, where there is massive confusion with regards to external and internal objects. There is a pathological process happening between abuser and victim, even when the victim is totally mentally healthy. And it has to do with the abuser's ability to pierce through, to penetrate the personal boundaries, to somehow using a kind of mental toxin, neurotoxin, to disable these boundaries, and then to invade the comfort zone and convert it into a discomfort zone. So you will come across many examples of shutting firmly the doors of an empty stable, long after the horses were stolen. So you will hear someone say, I will never again date this guy.  That's ridiculous, of course. That's all he wanted. All he wanted was to rape the victim while she was drunk. He didn't want to see the victim again. It's not a self-efficacious sentence. It's a meaningless sentence. I will never see him again. He doesn't want to see the victim again. Or you come across sentences such as, after 20 years of his abuse, I moved out. You moved out after 20 years of abuse. What's left of you? You're nothing.  The damage is long-lasting, possibly lifelong. Why did you wait so long? For boundaries to be effective, they must meet four conditions, all four at once. And I'm providing you now tools for psychotherapy, which you are well advised to use with your future clients. Many of you graduate this year and will start to work with clients, presumably next year. So be aware. Personal boundaries are not mere statements. I mean, it's not enough to provide the client with a list. This should be your boundaries. You should not accept these behaviors. You should encourage these behaviors. That's not enough because for personal boundaries to be effective, they must meet four conditions. Number one, they should be firm. They should be rigid, never fuzzy, never negotiable. Number two, they must be clear and unequivocal, and they must be communicated unambiguously to everyone. And when I say everyone, I mean the patient's children, his mother, her father, his wife or spouse, her lover, everyone, her boss, his employees. Everyone should be appraised and acquainted with this list, which should be crystal clear, not open to interpretation. Personal boundaries must come replete with carrots and sticks. And the carrots and sticks must be applied to everyone automatically, equally and justly. Above all, the carrots and sticks must be applied to oneself. Rewards for behaviors that conform to the boundaries and punishments for any violation of the boundaries. The deterrent and inherent in boundaries must be credible, must be just, not knee-jerk, not defiant, not arbitrary, not impulsive, not reckless. These are the hormones of a psychopath. And finally, zero tolerance. Personal boundaries are never ever to be violated or breached or countermanded or counterveiled. First strike, first strike, and you're out. First breach, and you're gone. First offence, first incident of maltreatment, and the offending perpetrator should be history.  And so when people, your clients in the future, when they're confronted with this construct, of a comfort zone with personal boundaries which are impermeable, a little like the brain-blood barrier, that are impermeable, unchangeable, rigid, when they come across this, they feel very uncomfortable. And they develop a behavior which was first described by Zygmunt Freud, approach avoidance repetition compulsion. Approach avoidance repetition compulsion can be reconceptualized as inability to assimilate insightfully a workable, a workable model of the world which incorporates the personal comfort zone protected by self-efficacious personal boundaries. Now there's a mouthful for you. To put it more simply, the client, your future client approaches and avoids, approaches and avoids her husband, approaches and avoids his boss. The clients approach and avoid because they are not clear how far they want to go in protecting the integrity of their comfort zone. And they are not clear about that because they have identity issues. They have what we call identity diffusion or identity disturbance. This is very typical of borderlines, for example, but also of narcissists. Also of victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. These people have difficulties to establish a permanent, continuous, non-dissociative, well integrated, cohesive and coherent identity. And of course when you don't have an identity, you don't know who you are.  You don't know what you want, how could you establish a comfort zone and defend it with personal boundaries.  But once you withdraw, you ask yourself, is it really me? Maybe I'm guilty, maybe I did something. Where do I end? Where does he begin? Where does he end? Where do I begin? What about the world? Am I mis-pissing reality? Etc. Etc. Questions that healthy people never ask. And so approach avoidance, repetition, compassion, well first described by Freud, was it was initially adopted, applied mostly to mate selection and other life choices. But it is now considered more widely as any behavior that seeks a goal and then when it is within reach, when the goal is within reach, undermines the goal by withdrawing and absenting oneself. In this sense, approach avoidance is a self-defeating behavior. In victims and survivors of abuse, avoidance is a post-traumatic reaction triggered by memories of agonizing abuse. Any approach to a potential intimate partner causes panic and rage, some of it self-directed. So it's internalized and extenderized. Abrupt and incomprehensible withdrawal follows. So these people approach when they panic because they anticipate pain, abandonment, rejection, humiliation, hurt, and they withdraw. Their avoidance is abrupt, incomprehensible. It is only intended to avoid ego-distonic negative emotions and avoidance has many, many forms. It's multifarious, cheating, adultery, addictions, itinerancy, numbing, dissociation, passive aggression, reactance, defiance, impulsivity, recklessness, lying, all these are manifestations of avoidance. They all reflect a terror of intimacy and the pain that intimacy often brings, or when you catastrophize, inevitably brings. When you catastrophize, you don't say to yourself, intimacy may result in pain. You say to yourself, intimacy for sure will result in pain, ineluctably. Avoidance is closely associated with modulability and dysregulated emotions, precisely because of these cognitive fallacies among which are dichotomous thinking, black and white thinking, splitting, and catastrophizing. These kind of cognitive fallacies clash with reality. They undermine the reality testing. And so there's always a tension between reality and inner reality, external and internal, and it creates what currently correctly described as a pseudo-psychotic state, a borderline state. In a way, avoidance is a form of signaling. It's a cry for help. It's a way of begging people. Please let me go. I'm so broken. I'm so weak that I cannot even leave the situation. I cannot extricate myself. Discard me. Throw me away. Help me to not be. We often confuse modulability and emotional dysregulation with intensity. Some people need intensity because these kind of people, they cannot feel anything otherwise. If it's not intense, it's not. If they want to feel love, it needs to be perfect, brilliant love. If they feel hatred, it's profound and abysmal. If they feel rage, it's destructive and homicidal. These people, if it's not intense, it doesn't penetrate their anti-emotion defenses. They don't have access to emotions unless these emotions overpower them, overwhelm them. This is exactly the situation in borderline personality disorder and in victims of complex trauma. Victims of complex trauma are numbed by the abuse and trauma that preceded the CPTSD. And they become essentially zombies in between narcissists and borderline. And so dysfunctional people confuse intensity and they conflate the intense and the sentimental with the emotional. They mistake drama for feelings. But real, true positive emotions are not dramatic. They're not sentimental. They're not even intense. Positive emotions are just there. They're deep. They're thorough. They're rooted. They're profound. They're all pervasive. They're ubiquitous. They're no more intense than oxygen. They're no more intense than water. They're no more intense than electricity. You can't live without them.  Pain is dramatic. Pain is sentimental. Pain is intense and that's why many of these people seek pain. Foster pain and gender pain provoke pain via a process that we had discussed two years ago, projective identification and projective interjection. Pain makes them come alive. Pain fulfills two functions. It alerts them to their own existence. They feel alive as I just said and it numbs. It drowns out, countervailing other emotions, mostly negative. It becomes like the dominant negative emotion. Pain, anger, envy, hatred, negative emotions. They're all intense. Positive emotions don't require intense dramatics. Positive emotions are cheapened by such theatrics and here's the crux of the problem. Relationships with dysfunctional people, for example, narcissists, they are founded on negative emotions. They're founded on fear, on anxiety, including abandonment anxiety, on envy, on anger, control. The pain is caused by withdrawal, rejection and betrayal. Narcissists call it modification. Both parties experience the pain. The pain is the mediator, the common language, the coin they use to trade within the relationship. The relationship becomes one major marketplace, transactional marketplace of pain. This is how they communicate and when the relationship is founded only on negative emotions, it gives rise to anxieties and to insecurities and which leads back full circle to the comfort zone. The narcissists, for example, or the borderline, they're in relationship. They need to falsify the comfort zone and they do this by introducing a shared fantasy. Here's the sequence. You have a comfort zone. You are comfortable with your comfort zone. That's why it's called a comfort zone. It is protected by personal boundaries which are supposedly non-negotiable.  Now this person challenges your personal boundaries and breaks through them into your comfort zone and the comfort zone becomes uncomfortable. It's like home invasion or rape. The comfort zone is no longer comfortable. It becomes a bit estranged, a bit alien. It is transformed by the presence of the intimate partner who is dysfunctional and sick. This intimate partner needs to very fast establish an alternative to your comfort zone or you will leave. He doesn't want you to abandon him. He doesn't want you to leave. He doesn't want you to go away. He doesn't want you to break up. Yet your partner realizes that you had just lost your comfort zone and you can't survive without your comfort zone. So he gives you an alternative comfort zone. He says, listen, forget your previous comfort zone. Here is a new comfort zone for you where we can both survive, where we can both subsist, where we can coexist and love each other. This new comfort zone, it's our shared fantasy. It's defended with boundaries, exactly like the old comfort zone. But these are our boundaries. They are paranoid boundaries. They are boundaries of negative emotionality. They are boundaries comprised of fear, of pain, of hatred, of envy. These are the new boundaries of the new comfort zone, the shared fantasy, the shared psychotic disorder, the shared psychotic space. And within this psychotic space, of course, there's god-awful confusion between internal and external objects where your intimate partner becomes internalized, forces you to internalize her. And she, in turn, internalizes you, yet you are both external to each other. The shared fantasy is a very hallucinatory, very not only delusional space, but very surrealistic space. And it replaces fully your previous comfort zone.  Your identity is invested in the comfort zone. There is a process called cathexis. Your identity invests your emotions in the comfort zone. Personal boundaries that protect the comfort zone, they reflect your identity, of course. And when the comfort zone and the previous boundaries are discarded, thrown onto the trash, your identity is thrown away as well. And now you are left vulnerable, naked into the truest sense of the word. And flailing about, you will accept anything.  He says, listen, you have no comfort zone right now, you have identity problems right now. Why don't I solve your problems? Why don't you simply step into my shared fantasy, acquire a new identity, acquire a new comfort zone where we are both very happy, happy ever after. And you do that. Now the problem with this is that the shared fantasy is not real. It divorces you from reality. It firewalls you from reality. It impairs your reality testing. It renders you less self-efficacious. We cannot be self-efficacious. We cannot have agency when we don't have a good grasp of reality. And take the narcissist, for example. The narcissist shared fantasy is a game. The narcissist is the primordial homo-ludence. I remember last year I asked you to read Eric Byrne, Games People Play. So homo-ludence, the playing human. The narcissist is a primordial homo-ludence. He does nothing else but play games. His entire life, all his shared fantasies. It's a gigantic chessboard. It's a mega-screen. It's one video game. Now the narcissist pretends to be a hyper-sexed lover. Tomorrow he is a thespian man of God. Then he is an imposter. Then he is a mock psychologist.  Then he is an Azaz public intellectual or a wannabe father. He acts. He plays acts. It's one big theater production.  Very, very similar to video games. They look very real. The pixelation and the resolution are very high. The movement is smooth and fluid. It can deceive you into thinking that this is reality, but it's not. It's fun. It's a protein, constant, self-reinvention, but it's not reality. And within the shared fantasy, other people are either playmates or they are toys. And when the narcissist tires of playing the same game with the same animate and inanimate props, he discards the lot unceremoniously. He moves on to another location, a new vocation replete with a set of new characters, your history. Sometimes the narcissist breaks or dismantles his toys, abuses and rejects his playmates. He always switches abruptly and unexpectedly. And ephemeral apparitions were a solid, imitative rendition of a human being existed, either or. And finally, of course, like every bully, the narcissist is left with no one to play with, but the grim reaper. He resents this sudden constriction of his playpen, this inexplicable impoverishment of his sandbox. He had done nothing, he says to himself. I've done nothing to deserve this winding down. It was all just a game, he says. It was all just a game, you see. Just innocent fun. What did I do wrong? And when your comfort zone is replaced with the narcissist's shared fantasy and the borderline of the shared fantasies, well, psychopath is a shared fantasy. Shared fantasy is a feature of many, many personality disorders, not only cluster B, but also cluster C. So when your comfort zone is replaced with a shared fantasy, you have drawn further away from reality. Every comfort zone has fantastic elements. Every comfort zone being a narrative doesn't reflect the scientific truth, the objective ontological truth of the world as it is. The world as it is is intolerable. If we were to confront the world without the protective devices of a shared comfort zone and personal boundaries, we would have disintegrated, we would have died on the spot. The world is unbearable. We need meaning, sense, defenses, narratives, inventions like God and other things to sort of isolate us from the horror, from the absurd that is existence. The narcissist, I mean, intimate partner who is dysfunctional, comes together and says, listen, I have the latest version, iPhone 12, I have the latest version of the comfort zone. It's called shared fantasy. Why don't you discard your iPhone 6 and buy my iPhone 12? Many more features, many more jingles, many more bells and whistles. And you say it's irresistible. But what you don't realize is the price. The cost is to say goodbye to the world and all the potentialities of the world. The cost is to constrict yourself, to mummify yourself, to become a mummy, Egyptian mummy. The cost is to suspend your ability to change. The cost is to sacrifice autonomy, personal independence, to be no more.  They impose this cost because this is a cost they had paid a long time ago. They are dead. They are the walking dead. My favorite films involve a protagonist who poignantly fails to realize that he is a ghost. It is a perfect metaphor for the life-threatening but inevitable process of narcissistic modification. When the narcissist grandiose defenses crumble under a sustained attack, that's what happens. Stripped of his reified ideal ego for self, the narcissist is then reduced to an obnoxious but terrified child, rendered a veritable zero from an imagined hero. The narcissist can no longer sustain his delusional view of himself as irresistible, a winner, a genius. Instead, the narcissist comes face to face with his own weird creepiness, gaping in adequacies and history of failures.  This is the kind of people. This is the kind of abusers that your patients are likely to have come across and paired with, selected as mates.  And then abandonment is imminent and it's an overwhelming horror, terror. Modification occurs most commonly, though not exclusively, when the narcissist's intimate partner, abruptly or cruelly, bails out of the shared fantasy. The only illusory space which lets the narcissist maintain his counterfactual paracossum, imaginary kingdom. On rare occasions, moved by his evident distress and disintegration, the narcissist's intimate partner is reduced to such profound pity that she may even sacrifice herself and remain by his crippled side. But coming back to the core topic, the shared, the comfort zone. The comfort zone is replaced by a shared fantasy. Once a substitute of a shared fantasy takes hold and the previous comfort zone is discarded and vanishes, fades away, the victim is trapped inside the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is a cemetery, it's a mortuary, it's a mourn. The shared fantasy is inhabited by a ghost. It's ironically a kind of spiritual realm, it's not real, it's ephemeral. And it's very surrealistic, it's the exact equivalent of a horror movie. She is trapped with someone who has long been dead and doesn't realize he's dead. He thinks everyone around him is dead, he doesn't realize he's the ghost, like in the movies that I've mentioned. And you can see this manifest very explicitly in social media. Social media present a contradiction and therefore they're engines of dissonance. Social media cause the narcissist, modification by a thousand paper cuts. Social media constitute perfect sources of narcissistic supply. Perfect shared fantasies. I'll come to it in a minute, it's called pathological narcissistic space. But they also amount to constant generators of narcissistic injuries. Supply injuries, supply injuries, supply injuries, approach avoidance. Come go, withdraw, approach. Long exposure to these platforms makes it difficult for the narcissist to idealize his false self and may lead to recurrent mini-motifications. The narcissist's only way out of narcissistic modification is to forcefully reestablish his grandiosity and revive the false self. And he accomplishes this resurrection by reframing the mortifying events and by fleeing the sin, literally fleeing the sin. So let's go a bit deeper into the issue of modification, pathological narcissistic space, etc. Because remember the sequence. We start with your potential client, your typical client starts with a relatively healthy comfort zone which is not too divorced, too removed from reality. Incorporates big chunks of reality, is reality based and evidence based. This comfort zone is protected by non-negotiable, relatively impermeable and rigid personal boundaries. And now your client comes across someone who is a narcissist or a psychopath or a borderline and everything goes topsy-turvy. The dysfunctional intimate partner penetrates, ruins, destroys the personal boundaries, invades the comfort zone, demolishes the comfort zone and replaces it with a shared fantasy. And the mechanism that regulates a shared fantasy is modification. That's the mechanism. The shared fantasy has a mental psychological element which exists in the minds of the inhabitants of the shared fantasy. But it also has a physical correlate, a physical real world component which we'll come to in a minute. We must realize that the narcissist constructs narratives that absorb the narcissist of guilt and shame, remorse and regret. The narcissist attributes anything that happens to him, any downfall, disgrace, defeat, failure, either to the envious malevolence of others or to his own cunning and iron will. To resolve the cognitive dissonance, the narcissist will say, I actually wanted all this to happen. None of it surprised me. I engineered all this. And then the narcissist proceeds to discard his shared fantasy. So here's the sequence. Shared fantasy, comfort zone replaced by shared fantasy. Then there is modification of some kind. The modification causes the narcissist to discard the shared fantasy. Shared fantasy is contaminated by the modification and he cannot maintain it anymore because the modification forced him to confront reality. So he has to discard this particular shared fantasy. And together with the shared fantasy, he has to discard what we call the pathological narcissistic space. Now to remind you, the pathological narcissistic space is a location. It could be a physical location. The neighborhood pub, church, workplace, for example. It could be a system. The narcissist family, group of friends. It could be a virtual environment online, a support group, a YouTube channel, social media accounts, an MMORPG multiplayer game or MOOC class. These are all examples of pathological narcissistic space. So when the narcissist is modified and forced to discard the shared fantasy, he proceeds to discard also his erstwhile pathological narcissistic space, his physical hunting grounds. Because the pathological narcissistic space is an element in the shared fantasy. It's, shall we call it, the ontological element. There's epistemological element and ontological element. So he discards the shared fantasy and he discards everything connected and everyone connected to the shared fantasy.  They are all indelibly imprinted with the unbearable memories of traumatic modification. They are transmogrified into triggers and the narcissist avoids him and able to subsist and survive for long without narcissistic supply. The narcissist immediately embarks on love-bombing and grooming his way into new sources in a new location and restarts the cycle of idealization, devaluation, modification, discard, replace and so on. So the concept of P&S is very crucial, very critical to the concept or construct of shared fantasy and the shared fantasy is actually a dysfunctional or pathologized comfort zone. Sooner or later the pathological narcissistic space collapses because the narcissist alienates, disappoints and enrages everyone. Sooner or later the narcissist is going to be modified or severely injured and then he is forced to devalue, discard and replace. The hitherto idealized niche is current pathological narcissistic space and he is forced to scout for alternatives. And so when circumstances like pandemic, war, recession, when they conspire to restrict his mobility, the narcissist's access or ability to conjure up a substitute pathological narcissistic space, it can lead to personal collapse, severe vulnerability, total emotional dysregulation and to modification by itself. Consider the pandemic. The pandemic has rendered all this maneuvering impossible. Most narcissists are forced into immobility, into a virtual existence and many narcissists are driven to psychotic decompensation and life-threatening, potentially suicidal acting out. Attempts to compensate via social media, a cyber presence, only backfire. As the narcissist is exposed to multiple repeated narcissistic injuries every minute of every day, the narcissist proceeds to groom potential sources of sadistic or narcissistic supply. He proceeds to extract sadistic supply and narcissistic supply from these people in a well-demarcated and boundary ecosystem called pathological narcissistic space. But what happens when he is unable to establish a new pathological narcissistic space? Then he is stuck. He is stuck because he cannot discard the previous shared fantasy. He cannot discard it because it goes together with existing pathological narcissistic space. So again, to make order, narcissists, psychopaths, borderline and other personality disorder people and victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, they team up, they mate with potential intimate partners and then when they do, they invade the comfort zone of the intimate partner and they replace it with a shared fantasy.  When the narcissist is mortified when the shared fantasy is not working anymore, for some reason, he's been abandoned, he's been cheated on, he feels deceived, he feels disappointed, he's been challenged, he's been criticized, etc. Shared fantasy is not working anymore. He discards the shared fantasy. But when he discards the shared fantasy, he has also to discard the pathological narcissistic space. So the first thing he does, he tries to find an alternative pathological narcissistic space. When he finds the alternative pathological narcissistic space, he can then discard the old shared fantasy and begin to create a new shared fantasy. But when he's unable to find the pathological narcissistic space, because there is a pandemic and he can't, he cannot move around, or because he's disabled for some reason, when not able to move on, the narcissist remains stuck in the old shared fantasy, which had become a trigger for repeated modifications, and he can lose his mind or become suicidal. And so, narcissists try to resolve this dilemma via a process that I call vacillating modifications. You remember from last year that there are two types of narcissistic modification, internal and external. Both these types are counterfactual. Both of them are not based on reality, both of them are narratives, storylines, both of them are ego-syntonic, in one way or another. And the narcissist can decide. When he's stuck in a shared fantasy, that constantly injures him, constantly mortifies him, and he is unable to transition to another pathological narcissistic space and spawn another shared fantasy with new people, when he's stuck, he vacillates, he oscillates, he pendulates and shifts between internal and external modification, he's unable to make up his mind what works best for him. And external modification, for example, in the case of intimate relationships, external modification would be women reject me first, and only then do I react with abuse and negativity. So, that's external modification. They are guilty. People are guilty for my misbehavior. People are guilty for my aggression and misconduct and rage and negative emotionality. They are to blame. I'm just reacting. That's external modification coming from the outside. Internal modification is I abuse people first, I exude negativity, and only then people react with abusive misbehavior, cheat on me, betray me, abandon me. That's internal modification. The reason is from the inside. I'm the one who is initiating the whole process, but I'm the one who is initiating the process. I'm in control. So, this is external versus internal modification. Now, in a shared fantasy, in a shared fantasy, as I said, as I told you in my lecture last year, there are several types of abuse. It's very wrong to lump all kinds of abuse together. In a typical shared fantasy, there is narcissistic abuse type one. It revolves around externalized negativity, pessimism, ostentatious disappointment and disapproval of the partner, and of everyone in general. Sinicism, criticism, intermittent reinforcement and constant micro-rejections. That's how the abuse starts in all shared fantasy without exception. Narcissistic abuse type one. The reality is that it is always the narcissist or the borderline of the psychopath. It's always the dysfunctional partner who commences, who starts, who boots the cycle of abuse. It's always the narcissist, for example, who engages in low-grade, ambient narcissistic abuse type one, and then women, intimate partners, or colleagues, or coworkers. Everyone in this environment reacts with rejection and abuse. So, the narcissist starts him. That's a reality. The truth is that internal modification is much closer to reality than external modification. External modification is very paranoid. It's a morality play. Everyone is vicious and evil. Everyone is envious of me. I'm a saint. I'm a victim. It's a victim stance. Reality is closer to the internal modification. The narcissist starts every shared fantasy. Having gone through a phase of grooming and love bombing, he suddenly changes and he begins to externalize negativity. He becomes pessimistic. He's disappointed all the time. He disapproves all the time, criticizes, disagrees. Mox berates, humiliates, demeans, debases. He intermittently enforces it. He's hot and cold, love and hate, micro-rejections on multiple levels. This is type one. And then type one suddenly escalates. It escalates. It becomes proactive because the victims of type one abuse react. The narcissist starts with low-grade, low-intensity abuse, and people give him a taste of his own medicine. They react. They abuse him back.  They reject him as well. And so he escalates. He escalates and his type one abuse becomes proactive. He varies his maltreatment. He couples mistreatment with externalized and internalized negativity and aggression. It's still type one, but it had become really, really bad. And now this type one abuse within the shared fantasy usually leads to abandonment, cheating, betrayal, mutual hostilities culminating in MAD, mutually assured destruction. If the other party, if the intimate partner tries to bargain, to negotiate, to establish communication protocols, the narcissist transitions to type two. Type two narcissistic abuse. Type two includes overt verbal, psychological, sexual, financial, legal abuse, clear rejection. The narcissist pushes away his partner, total withdrawal, total avoidance, and so on and so forth. So these are the dynamics within the shared fantasy. I reiterated these dynamics. I repeated them because I described them in previous lectures. I repeated them for you so that you understand that if the narcissist is unable to discard, unable to transition from the current shared dysfunctional shared fantasy, the shared fantasy that is no longer working for him, no longer providing him with what he needs. He wants to move on. If he's unable to move on, he will escalate his type one behavior, misbehavior. He will escalate type one narcissistic abuse. He will become really, really seriously abusing because he will feel trapped and cornered. He will feel less than omnipotent. He will need to reassert his grandiosity, to buttress it, to re-establish it, to revive it by becoming super abuser, like a super spreader in a pandemic. He will become super abusing. That way he will feel, again, godlike, omnipotent. And as long as he is stuck in the shared fantasy, he is abused, will escalate, and can reach the point of homicide, really, really bad things. And so it's always recommended to break up the shared fantasy at an early phase. That's why personal boundaries must be enforced immediately. The first transgression that crosses the red line of your personal boundary, you need to let go. You need to break up. It's only going to get worse. It's going to escalate because of the dynamics that I've just described. Now the thing is, coming back full circle to the beginning of this lecture when I discussed your future vocation, you're going to come across an increasing number of narcissists, psychopaths, and borderlines in your practice. And you're going to come across many victims who had assumed the traits and behaviors of narcissists, psychopaths, and borderlines. Victims of complex trauma, CPT is dear, indistinguishable, psychodynamically, from patients with borderline personality disorder. Many victims assume, adopt, and display, exhibit traits and behaviors which are absolutely typical of primary psychopaths, secondary psychopaths in the case of borderlines, and narcissists, grandiose narcissists. So there's a major pandemic, real pandemic, of cluster B personality disorder spreading like wildfire throughout the population. I'm the one who coined the phrase narcissism epidemic that was later borrowed by Campbell and others. The father of modern sociology, Emil Dukheim, coined the term ananomy to describe the atomization and normative decoherence of societies owing to unsustainable population growth. In ananomic states, misbehaviors such as suicide and crime proliferate. Dukheim neglected to mention that mentally disordered people thrive in chaos. Their internal upheaval perfectly chimes in with and is optimally adopted to the external medium. They resonate with a mess, with a chaos, with a confusion, with a conflict. In eras of apocalypse, one frequently finds psychopaths gleefully contemplating the ruination of institutions and contributing to the demise of their own civilization. In decline and fall, antisocial individuals are defiantly euphoric, eerily content and counter-intuitively purposeful. They become self-effications. There's no dissonance there, just resonance. Our civilization is anomic, declining, disintegrating, decadent and not only in the west of course, all over the world. It's a global civilization. It's a global village, as McLuhan suggested. So, in this kind of civilization, narcissists and psychopaths rise to the top and not only in politics, in absolutely every profession. Why? Because they are better equipped to deal with these systemic dysfunctions. They know the ropes. They've experienced it starting in early childhood. Their response times are much faster. Their daring and reckless defiance are more suited to abnormal situations. They resonate. They love the apocalypse. Narcissism is machine-like. It's a form of artificial intelligence. The narcissist's pursuit of narcissistic supply is one-track-minded, relentless and compulsive, and the same goes for the psychopath. The psychopath doesn't pursue narcissistic supply. He wants money, sex, power, but the same. They're both the same. We're all becoming more narcissistic and therefore less human. Androids, humanoids, rigid robots. We all feel, we all feel a growing discomfort in each other's company, Uncanny Valley. You remember Uncanny Valley from two years ago? Capitalism, materialism, individualism. They're all mechanical. They're all forms of production lines. They are the ramification of the industrial revolution. They have coalesced into the prevailing ethos and the organizational principle of our lives and times. I attribute the rise of narcissism to urban overcrowding, the population bomb of a population, and our innate desire to be noticed by others, to be seen at any cost to us, and even at the expense of others. Narcissism is therefore the human equivalent of the behavioral sink in rats and mice. Remind you, that was three years ago, few of you will remember, but the ethologist, John B. Calhoun, conducted experiments in the 1960s and 1970s on rats in what he called rat utopias. These were pens, like cages, with optimal conditions for unfettered reproduction. He reproduced his alarming results with mice later in his career. As the numbers of rodents, numbers of these animals rose within the enclosures as they multiplied, Calhoun observed an explosion of social pathologies. The animals became promiscuous. There were miscarriages, cannibalism, maternal dysfunctions, schizoid withdrawal, or the opposite, compulsive and frenetic fraternity, gregariousness. Animals went wild, went crazy as the numbers multiplied. There was not enough personal space, and so they became totally enmeshed with the job.  The word utopia was unintentionally very fitting. The very fabric of social organization was frayed within the cages. The rodents developed what today would be called personality disorders. Mice and rats with personality disorders, psychopaths, vorder lines. Narcissists and psychopaths are better equipped to deal with modern life.  Our technologies encourage poor impulse control and defiance. In a society of spectacle, giddable, appearances and simulations are the only forms of reality. TV stars become presidents, not only in the United States, Ukraine. Fake it till you make it becomes to fake it is to make it. Celebrities are known for, are famous for being famous, vacuous celebrities. Fawning and media-hungry academics, they now talk about productive narcissists, high-functioning psychopaths, recovered narcissists, shy borderlines, empaths. These are all self-aggrandizing, self-justifying labels. And you know what? There's so much money in these cottage industries that you can always find fake academics and real academics who sacrifice their integrity, who lie, con artists, who make money by telling people what they want to hear. Narcissists are happy to go lucky, they expound and recommend their own narcissism. So today you have a whole literature telling parents, teach your children to be more narcissistic.   How do you, as psychotherapies, cope with this?  Aren't healthy people abnormal in such a civilization? It's a conundrum, not easy to solve. Thank you for listening and we'll see each other next month.


Hello friends, I am Sanjay Gupta. I welcome you on Sanjay Gupta Tech School. In this video, I am going to explain how you can check whether the number is prime or not. So this program I am going to implement in C programming. And before starting of the explanation, I just want to share one information. So if you go into the video description of this video, so you will find various links related to playlists that are available on my channel. So you can open those links and you can watch various programming related videos. So now I am going to start the explanation. So first I am going to explain what prime number is. So let's say we have a variable and whose value is 7. Now we need to check whether this 7 is prime or not. So the numbers which divides by 1 and itself the numbers which are divisible by 1 and itself only those numbers are treated as prime numbers. So if we take 7, so we have these numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. We have these 7 numbers from which this 7 can be divisible. So here you can see if we try to divide 7 with these digits individually. So 7 will be divisible by 1 and 7 only. It is not possible to divide 7 with these numbers. So 7 fulfills the requirement of prime number that the number should be divisible by 1 or self. So 7 is divisible by 1 and 7 is divisible by itself. So that's why this 7 is treated as prime number. Now if we take one more example, let's say number is 6. So it can be divisible by these 6 numbers. So now we need to identify actually from which number 6 can be divisible. So we can divide 6 by 1, we can divide 6 by 2, we can divide 6 by 3 and we can divide 6 by 6. So other than 1 and self, 6 is divisible by 2 more numbers that are 2 and 3. So it means 6 is not considered as a prime number. So 7 is a prime number but 6 is not a prime number. So now we need to implement the logic for this so that we can receive a number as input from the user. And then we need to check whether that number is divisible by 1 or self or it is divisible by other numbers as well. So if it is divisible by 1 or self then that can be considered as prime otherwise not. So I hope you understood the logic how we can check whether the number is prime or not. So this was mathematical explanation. Now we need to convert this explanation into C programming. So before writing the logic, I am just writing essential statements. So name, then variable n, then one variable I am going to use as flag. Its initial value is 0. One more variable I am going to use as i. Then I am writing printf, enter a number, then scanf, percent d and percent n. So this way with the help of this printf scanner we can read the number whose we want to check for prime and n, flag and i these variables I am going to use. Now let's try to implement the logic. So here we need to divide this number again and again by several digits. So it means it is sure we need to implement a loop. So I am going to use for loop. So inside for loop we have three parts initialization, termination condition and increment decrement. So we need to decide all three parts. So I am taking initial value as 2. Why so? Because every number will be divisible by one. So we are not trying to divide the number by one. So we are starting the loop from 2. Now termination condition will be i less than n. So we will repeat the loop till less than n. So let's say if number is 7. So we will start the loop from 2 and we will stop it to 6. Why so? Because we are removing one because from one every number will be divisible and we are removing the cells number because number is always divisible by itself. So we are not considering both the cases. Beginning that is 1 and ending that is the number itself. Or here you can also write i less than equals to n minus 1. So you can also implement this. Both are same. Then increment will be i plus plus because we want to increase i by 1. So this way I implemented this loop which is very simple now. Starting from 2 and ending to number minus 1. Now inside this for loop I am going to apply if condition. So this will be life. So here try to understand this condition carefully. So variable is n which is divisible always and it will be divided by i. So n will be fixed. Let's say example number is 7. So loop is started from 2. 2 is less than 7 which is 2. Then 7 we are trying to divide it by 2. So if it is divisible then its remainder will be 0 or otherwise not. Then loop will increment so i will become 3. So then again 7 will be divided by 3. Then 7 will be divided by 4 and so on. So this way n will remain fixed and i will be incremented by 1 by 1. And this remainder will be compared to 0. If it is true then further steps will be performed otherwise not. So if number is divisible by i. If number is divisible by i it means it is divisible by other than the number 1 or itself. It is divisible by the number which is other than 1 or itself. It means here we can print number is not prime and else if it is not divisible we can print prime. So initially you will think look like this but it is not correct. It is totally incorrect. So let me explain why. So we are taking example as 7. Loop is starting from 2. So 7 modulus 2. Is it divisible by 2 or not? So we are going to as part so it will print prime. Then loop will increment so value of i will become 3. So 7 modulus 3. So now it is divisible. Again it will print prime. Then for 4 again it will print prime. So for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So 5 times it will print prime. That is not correct. Now take example as 6. So 6 it will be divided by 2 first. So 6 is completely divisible by 2. So it will print not prime. Then it will become 3. 6 is divisible by 3 as well. So it will print not prime. Then i will become 4. So 6 is not divisible by 4. So it will print prime. So here you can see for 2 and 3 it is printing not prime. For 4 and 5 it is printing prime. So that is also incorrect. It means inside this loop we cannot decide whether the number is prime or not. Because we need to divide that number by all the digits first. And after completion of this loop we can decide whether the number is prime or not. So now I am removing these statements because these are not correct. And now I am going to try to implement some more logic here so that we can first check whether the number is divisible by other digits which are in the range between 1 to that number or not. So now we will be using this flag way. So here you can see its initial value is 0. Now if number is divisible by i, if number is divisible by i, so I am changing the value of flag as 1. And I am closing this brace. And this for loop is completed here. So after completion of this for loop I am going to check the value of flag. I am going to check the value of flag. So I am writing if flag number equals to 0. So it will print prime as and then we can complete the main function. So now let's iterate again. Number is 7. So first try to divide it by 2. So 7 modulus 2, it is not divisible. So condition will be false. So our control will not go inside if it will directly move to here. So now i is 3. So n is not divisible by 3. Again control will go here directly. Then I will become 4, 5 and 6. So this if condition will not be true in any case if number is 7. It means this if condition will not be true in any case. So we will not go inside this if, right? And if we don't go inside this if, then will flag change its value or not? No. So the value of flag will remain 0 because we are not moving inside if. So here after completion of this loop, you can check if flag is 0, then it will print prime. Right? So with the help of flag, we are going to check whether the number is divisible by any other visit or not. Now take the example of 6. So number is 6. i is 2. 6 is divisible by 2. Right? So it is true. So this time see if it's true. So we are moving inside flag. So it has become 1. It has become 1. Now if i increase i to 3. So 6 is divisible by 3 as well. So it will again move to this flag equals to 1. So value of flag was 1 and it is also 1 now. Then i will become 4. So this time 6 is not divisible by 4. So this condition is false. But still value of flag will remain 1. Because once we are inside this loop and this condition is true. So flag is changed from 0 to 1 and inside this loop, then it will remain 1 always. After completion of this loop, we will check if flag is 0. No, it is 1. So it will print not prime. Right? Now you might be thinking if 6 is divisible by 2. Then we have noticed that if number is divisible by other than 1 and 6 to any number, then it is not prime. So it is not correct if we divide 6 by 3, 4 and 5 as well. So it is not a good practice. So we can terminate our process if number is divisible in any step. So here I am removing this writing in flag equals to 1 and I am using one more keyword. That is break. I am using one more keyword that is break. So what will happen? When 6 is divisible by 2, so flag will be 1 and what break will do? Break will terminate by execution cycle of 4. So when 6 is divided by 2, so this loop will be terminated. Because if condition is 2, flag is equals to 1 and through break we are terminating 1 and control will directly transfer to 2. So now again and again we don't need to assign flag as 1 because once it is true, the same condition is true, then flag will be 1, flag will be 1 and loop will be terminated. So this way I hope you understood how we can calculate whether the enter number is prime or not. So here various combination I explained to you. So this is the final outcome of the program that you can use to check whether a number is prime or not. So use this logic carefully and don't put a printed statement inside of all loop because that will show incorrect results while you will be executing the program. So first identify whether your number is divisible by any other digit except 1 and extra. Then after completion of that process or loop check whether it was divisible or not. So you can use one variable like we use flag. So this way you can identify other process. So I hope you understood whatever I explained in this video. And if you want to watch more programming related videos, you can open my channel and you can go to playlists so there are various programming related videos are available. I have uploaded more than 1000 videos on my channel so you can watch them. So I hope you understood whatever I explained. So thank you for watching this video.


All right guys the content is about to start in one minute. I'm just talking very slowly Cuz I'm very tired So what I'm doing is that I'm gonna start this contest And I'll see if I could solve two problems, and I'm not gonna talk because I'm actually Very tired, and I'm gonna try to do this very fast. So Yeah, did you scratch mine? Okay? Hmm absolutely Yes, okay Budge cakes 11 How do you do this? So low BF is equal to zero. What if I do S plus W is Greater than P then we could do this also This is hurting my head, okay, let's put this over here Budge cakes. This is so hard Okay, so we need to put this at the end Wow, this is very hard Okay I don't think this would work though. Yeah, it didn't work. I guess we'll try to absolve this later The math question is so hard Okay, let's go to the next one actually and You are given an integer x and a resulting string s we construct the original w Maybe I shouldn't have submitted B and push me back down Two three man. I shouldn't have submitted Okay, you're given x you need to be build a string y how you choose it is if I Minus x is equal to one s equal to one i is greater than x Okay, it's equal to one is one if it's plus equal to one Then s of i is equal to one one one one zero one one Pick a letter three one two three There's index from one one zero i minus x It's either length of it This kind of sucks Hmm, how do you do this? How do you do this? I minus x I the character of s is chosen is equal to one Hmm, I don't know Hard hard very hard. It's a very hard problem. I'm like it's off a and B This guy submit anything Pick the ith letter as chosen How do you reconstruct that? Very difficult very difficult very difficult very difficult difficult difficult See this guy is this did this guy get anything? No This was tough. This is tough tough problem Damn, I got pushed back someone submitted something. Huh? You could you could get very high ranking just from submitting it in five minutes That's interesting Figuring out the problem in five minutes. You could actually get very high ranking. Hmm Maybe I should try to solve a very fast next time. This guy's good minus four 30 was 30 this guy's definitely not a newbie. How do you solve D? What's D? Wait Number of two poles. What's the problem after zigzags? Very difficult very difficult. Okay, so I'm gonna give up now Very cop scribe. I'll check you guys later. Peace


Welcome back in the last segment we did a somewhat detailed example of how structures could be used and how they might presumably improve the readability of our programs. Now in this segment we are going to talk about how pointers can be used in conjunction with structures and we will also have a conclusion for this entire lecture sequence of segments. So you have seen pointers earlier and pointers to structures are created in a natural manner. So we have in this statement we are defining a disk, so this is a disk a variable of type disk and we are also defining a pointer to a structure or variable of type disk. So that pointer is dptr and I will just remind you what this is, so this is a disk, so I guess we have had two kinds of disks now but this is a disk in which we had the first member was a point and here we are saying that the x coordinate is 2, the y coordinate of that center is 3 and then the radius is 4, yeah. Now you can do the normal pointer operations on structure pointers as well, so for example I can write dptr equal to the address of this disk type variable d1, so that is what you normally do and then I can take I can dereference this dptr as well. So if I dereference this dptr what do I get? I get d1 itself but then I can take its radius member and I can say that look I want the radius to be 5 rather than the 4 that it currently is, so that is what this statement is going to do. Now this idiom star x dot comes up quite frequently and therefore C plus plus gives a different way of writing it, so here is another operator the arrow operator which is made up of the characters minus and greater than you should read it as arrow. So star x dot y can be written as x arrow y, so in x arrow y this x should be a pointer and y should be a member. So I could have written this statement as this, so I could have written dptr arrow radius equals 5 not dptr dot radius. If I want to write dptr dot radius and dptr had better been had better be a disk type variable but dptr is not a disk type variable it is a pointer to a disk type variable and therefore I should use this arrow which dereferences first as well. Now pointers can be structure members as well, so I can have struct disk 2 which has double radius and which has point but this time my member is not a point but it is a point star or it is a pointer to a point, so center ptr not center ptr equal to address of p. So this is a pointer and into it I am storing the address of this point. Now I want to print the x coordinate of the center of this disk d, so how do I get to that? So I get to d dot center ptr which gives me a pointer to the point which is the center and since this is a pointer and I want the x variable the x member of it I write arrow x, then I can have disk 2 f, so f is another disk 2 and maybe I can set its center ptr also to this same point. So essentially these I am making these to be concentric disks but there is a subtle point over here if I change this, if I change the center of this then the center of this also changes. So you should do this only if you intend that and yes this might be a possible motivation for using pointers so that we can have disks which are sharing the centers and we can do similar things we can set f dot center ptr x equals 15 and that will set the coordinate for the disk d as well. So this will also print out 15. Now with pointers especially in this current context we might want to say that a particular pointer is not pointing to anything at all. So for that there is a keyword null which is reserved so it can be assigned to any pointer to indicate the pointer does not contain does not point to anything meaningful. We have remarked long ago that a pointer to disks cannot be assigned to a pointer to points but null is kind of a universal pointer. So you can assign you can store null into any kind of pointer. You can essentially you can say that this particular pointer does not point to anything at all and you can check whether pointer points to nothing by writing ptr equal to equal to null. Here is an example where we have pointers to the structure of the same type. So we have a struct employee but inside it is an employee pointer. So boss is a pointer to another employee. This is allowed. This looks like it is referring to itself. In some sense it is but what the purpose of writing this at least in this limited context is we need to know how much space to reserve for this employee ptr or this member boss. But all ptrs essentially have the same amount of space and therefore this is okay and this of course says that subsequently if you use boss it is expected to point to a variable of type employee. So here is how we might create employees. So this says even is precedent, so the title is precedent and there is no boss. So presumably we might be writing this for somebody who is the head of that institution. So that person does not have a boss. So its boss is pointing to null. There might be an MD in that institution, a managing director and maybe the managing directors boss is the president. So here we can supply the address of the president and so address of even is supplied over here. Similarly E3 maybe the executive director has as boss the president. So here we are supplying the address of that president. Now we can do this, so we can say E2.boss so we get to this address of even over here and we want to print out the title of that person. So to get to the title the title is a member of even but we have an address of even and therefore we should put an arrow here. So this will print president. Now if we write E3.boss we will get to even, we will get a pointer to even. If we take its boss member we arrow to boss then we will get null. So if we then print it out, then take the title then we are making a mistake because null is not pointing to anything. So we cannot take a title of it and therefore this is going to cause an error. So at execution time the program will say that there is something wrong. So what did we discuss in this lecture? So we talked about structures and we said that structures enable us to group together variables of different types. Now I should note that arrays also group together variables but in arrays the variables are of the same type whereas in structures they can be of different types. They may be of the same type but they can be of as many different types as you want. A structure name behaves like a variable. So the structure name does not denote the address of that structure but it denotes the content of that structure. So if you pass it or if you copy it that content gets copied. Again this is something different from the way array names behave. And then why we got on to this, we did all this because by grouping things together we can reduce the clutter in our argument lists and we can organize our data better and because our clutter is reduced we are more inclined possibly to write smaller functions and this functions can be written at different levels. So as we saw in the example the main function was written at a very high level. So whereas the other functions sort of dealt with the internals of the disks whereas the main function just said oh here I do these things with a disk without really worrying about what is going on inside. So let me conclude this lecture then by saying that disk that structures are a way by which you can improve the readability of your program because they help you to group all the attributes associated with an entity into a single structure or a single super variable. And as always I will suggest that please look at the problems at the end of this chapter. Of course the next lecture will also continue with chapter 17. So maybe you can wait until the next lecture to look at the problems at the end of chapter 17. Thank you.


Hello everybody! In this video, I'm going to show you how to fix such an error, which appears when updating a Windows operating system. If you need to recover deleted data, view or restore removed browse in history. Hetman Software products will help you. Follow the link in the description, download the necessary program for free, install it and analyze the disk. The utility will show you the data you can recover, so you will be able to view it or get it back. In our channel and blog, you will find solutions to any problem, from installing an operating system or configuring it to fixing possible bugs and errors or optimizing mobile gadgets. Our specialists will answer any questions you ask in your comments under the videos or articles. Talking of operating systems, at the moment, Windows is the easiest one to use while it offers lots of functions. Moreover, Microsoft engineers are working hard on improving it and adding new features all the time. Hence, all those new updates for more attractive interface, better system performance and so on. At the same time, users may encounter certain errors that have to be fixed. And in today's video, we are going to focus on a particular system error in Windows 10 and what can be done to eliminate it. Most of the time, you can see such an error when updating Windows 10 and 8, and when installing or repairing Windows 7. Quite often, even when you try to update Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10, sometimes you may encounter it when installing an application. After all, other cases are also possible, but it's more like a game of chance. This kind of error suggests there is a system failure that may occur while you are doing one of the following things. Install a new operating system. Restore on the current operating system. We choose to set wrong time and date values, or when the diagnostic troubleshooting wizard stops working properly. So before you move on to more serious stuff, I recommend checking if the time and date are correct. Open settings Time and language Date and time If their values don't match your region, get them right. If you do have proper date and time settings so they can't have caused any problems, let's have a closer look at other ways of fixing this error. The easiest way to fix this error in Windows 10 is by using a standard Microsoft utility. By default, it is integrated into the operating system. But if it's missing from your computer for some reason, you can download it from the Microsoft official website by following the link below this video. To start the utility, go to Settings, Update and Security. In the window that opens, select Troubleshoot to see the list of all possible actions. Find Windows Update and click on Run the Troubleshooter. It starts a system scan for any issues and new updates available. When the scan is over, click Apply this fix. Windows Update will fix the problems it has found, and in this window you can view the problems detected by the troubleshooter and their status after fixing. After the scan and fix process is complete, restart the computer and check if the operating system can work without errors. This error can also appear when the Windows Update service is disabled. To enable it, right-click on the Start menu and select Run. Then type the command services.msc and click OK. Otherwise, you can use the search window to look for services. Any of these actions will open the list of services. This is what you need to find. Windows Update Background tasks infrastructure service and Windows event log Check their status. It should be running for all of these services. If one of the services is disabled, right-click on it and select Properties. In the window that opens, click Start. Set startup type to Automatic and click Apply. Restart the computer and wait until all updates are installed. Now, this error should never appear again. If Windows Update and other services are running as they should, let's try to fix the problem by removing installed updates and deleting temporary files from your computer. To do it, stop the Windows Update service by clicking on the corresponding button. Follow this path to open a folder and remove all of its contents. Open the Run window again and type cleanmgr, then click OK. You will be asked to select a drive. Use the system drive where the operating system is installed. When the window disk cleanup appears, select Cleanup system files and click OK. Check the box for Windows Update files and click OK again. Then wait for the cleanup to be over. After all of these actions, run the Windows Update service again. And check if the error was fixed. If you only see this error recently, try restoring the operating system. Follow the link below to visit our channel for a video on SystemRestore. If you encountered this problem while updating Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10, you can try fixing it by editing the registry. To do it, open the Run window, type raggedit and follow the path, hkeylocalmachine, software, Windows Update, or supgrade. If the key doesn't exist, you can create it. Create a DWORD32 value with the name allowOSupgrade. Give it the value data 1 and then restart the computer. This error should disappear now. Another thing to be done is to make sure you don't have a Proxxas error enabled. Open Control Panel, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings. All boxes should be unchecked, including automatically detect settings. Sometimes, the error with such code appears when a Windows operating system is installed. In this case, try running the installer with your computer disconnected from the Internet or copy the image file of the operating system to be installed to a USB drive or DVD. Visit our channel for a detailed video guide about it, and you can find the links in the description below. Before installing the operating system, it would be a good idea for beginners to watch a video about MBR and GPT disks to avoid confusion. In the official Microsoft website, you can find a dedicated page with instructions on how to fix update errors. In the same page, you can download a special diagnostics file that will do the job for you. Just download it, start and wait until it completes the scan. When it is over, restart the computer and repeat your attempt to update. I hope that the methods I have shown today will help you fix this error and forget about it for good. And if it ever appears again, you will certainly know what to do. And that is all for now. I hope you find this video useful. Hit the Like button and subscribe to our channel. Leave comments to ask questions. Thank you for watching. Good luck!