the narcissist grandiosity is a very complex multifaceted multi-layered phenomenon and that of course is a highly grandio statement but today I'm going to deconstruct grandiosity grandiosity is not just about saying you know I'm unique I'm Godlike I'm perfect I'm omniscient I I I'm all knowing I'm omnipotent I'm all powerful these are the superficial supercilious external F manifestations of grandiosity they are more common in narcissistic style actually than in act than in narcissistic personality disorder narcissistic personality disorder involves a lot more melanism and so on so forth but this in your face type of grandiosity known
as hotess kind of um multifarious um uh arrogance this is more primitive grandiosity is a cognitive distortion and it operates unconsciously consciously and it involves multiple biases mechanisms and psychological processes and this is precisely why the narcissist is so emotionally invested in his or her grandiosity in this inflated fantastic self-image because grandiosity is the core and the pivot of of the Fantasy Defense known as pathological narcissism and aopo pathological narcissism my name is s Bakin and I'm the author of malignant self-love narcissism what else Revisited I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology and currently
on the faculty of Cups Commonwealth Institute for advanced professional studies all over the globe Toronto Canada Cambridge United Kingdom and an Outreach campus in Lagos Nigeria grandiosity it is let's delve right in grandiosity involves as I said multiple mechanisms and so on so forth and one of the most formidable is known as ideas of reference or referential ideation let me give you a few examples of referential ideation or ideas of reference believing that somehow everyone on a bus or in a club or in a room is talking about you feeling that people on television or
radio are either talking about you or talking directly to you or somehow signaling something to you in a kind of code that is known only to both of you believing that headlines articles in New newspapers have been written exclusively about you or your predicament or your situation or your future or your past believing that events even world events have been deliberately contrived to put you on a spot to somehow manipulate you uh or to cater to your needs they have special personal significance for you these world events believing that the lyrics of a song are
specifically about you believing that um social media post a YouTube video is actually meant as a coded message a cipher just between you and the author believing that the normal function of cell phones computers and other electronic devices is sending secret and significant messages that only you can understand believe and decode perceiving objects or events as having been deliberately set up or positioned to a particular meaning to you thinking that the slightest careless movement on the part of another person a twitch ATI has great personal meaning to you increased significance a kind of signaling thinking
that um internet blogs as I said posts and so have hidden meanings occult meanings pertaining to you and believing that the behavior of others is in reference to an abnormal offensive uh um dimension of either the personality or the body which is in reality non-existent this is known by the way as a reference syndrome and there is for example an Al Factory reference syndrome where you believe that um people are reacting to your abnormal or offensive body oror okay so these are ideas of reference you're getting the picture the sense that events or actions of
others talking Whispering smiling relate particularly to yourself to an extreme uh and and when this is taken to an extreme it is known as um delusion delusion of reference it is the false conviction that the actions of others and events occurring in the external World they have some special meaning or significance typically negative but not always in relation to yourself so ideas of reference delusions of reference this leads in extreme mental illnesses such as schizophrenia this leads to what is known a ref to a what is known as a referential attitude it is an expectancy
attitude anticipatory attitude that is sometimes observed as I said in severe psychotic disorders where uh you seek justification via envir the environment for ideas of reference or delusions of reference so you misinterpret the patient misinterprets the environment rewrites it reframes it and now we are beginning to see the first Nexus the first connection between grandiosity and ideas or delusions of reference a misinterpretation a misreading and a falsification of the environment an impaired reality testing but grandiosity involves a lot more than referential ideation the grandio person does believe that he or she is the center of
the world the focus of attention the life of the party the pivot and the axis around which everyone revolves the prime cause and the only cause for other people's states of Mind including their unhappiness or happiness there is this Godlike persuasion that one is the Mover and Shaker of one's world and one's environment and depending on the level of grandiosity it could even devolve into paranoid ideation um and expand hyper reflexively expand to include the World At Large including world events as I mentioned earlier so this all this all is part and parcel an element
and figment of grandiosity but there are other things involved the first is what I call and yes I'm coining another phrase again what I call object apophenia apophenia is a tendency to perceive meaningful connections between totally unrelated things and object apophenia is when you perceive meaningful relations among people or among elements in the environment which pertain in your mind pertain to you revolve around you have to do with you so conspiracy theories for example are a form of object apophenia and especially if you're paranoid and you believe there's a conspiracy against you that you are
the Target or the Mark or the victim of malevolent intent and malicious actions on behalf of one or more group of people that is object apophenia when you see connections where there are none tendency to perceive meaning meaning where there is none and so on so forth so when apophenia has been defined by K Claus conad in 1958 he said that it is the unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling feeling of abnormal meaningfulness and that's still the greatest description of apophenia that I'm aware of apophenia is of course one of the one
of the antecedents one of the first stages of delusional disorder it's a delusional thought pattern it's a kind of self-referential over interpretation of actual sensor actual sensory inputs it's not a hallucination it's just a misinterpretation and mislabeling of information that emanates from the environment and it is delusional and it it is self-referential and it is very common in grandiosity it's the human propensity to unreasonably seek definite patterns in random information and I call it also social parolia parolia is the tendenc to perceive or impose a meaningful interpretation some significance on a stimulus or a series
of stimuli visual usually but not only and in order to extract or to come up with some pattern or some meaning when there is none so parolia is a subtype of apophenia and when you combine object apophenia apophenia that applies to all object object objects animate and inanimate when you combine this with social paradia the tendency to see patterns of behavior coordinated patterns of behavior when there's none for example conspiracy against you when you combine these two what you get is all forms of grandiosity one of which is of course paranoia paranoid ideation is grandiosity
it's just a a subtype a subspecies of grandio I it because the paranoid person believes that he is the center of some evil Wicked plan uh involving one or multiple people they're out to get him they out to destroy him to incarcerate him to arrest him that he is the he is the focus of attention he is the pivot and the axis around which everyone revolves with a malevolent intent but still Revol grandiosity therefore is when you see patterns either among objects animate and inanimate when you see when you combine objects in ways that make
sense to you but to nobody else only to you or when you see patterns in behaviors of people which makes sense these patterns make sense only to you so object uh apophenia and social parolia these are strong elements powerful elements of grandiosity because the grandio person even when he is not or she is not paranoid the grandio person fully believes that objects in the environment and remember that in Psychology most objects are human beings human beings in Psychology are called objects the grandio person even the nonparanoid grandio person regards objects in the environment as arranging
themselves he believes that objects are arranging themselves in order to send a message to him to yield a signal to make sense of his self-perception or self-image to support and butress his fantasies etc etc objects around the narcissist are there to fit into The Narcissist self idealization and or shared fantasy that's their role because the narcissist is unable to perceive objects as external he injects objects he internalizes objects he converts external objects including people into internal objects he then tries to make sense of this zoo of internal objects by imposing on these objects a narrative
a storyline a piece of fiction which upholds butresses supports and enhances his self-perception and self-image as Godlike this is object apophenia another element in grandiosity is social parolia when the narcissist attributes motivations planning intentions to one or person or a group of people and these motivations and in intentions and plans and actions they all revolve around the narcissist okay so this all had to do with the narcissist inability to other othering failure remember that the narcissist because he The Narcissist has never experienced separation individuation as a child the narcissist is unable to perceive other people
as external and separate he does not perceive the externality and separateness of objects of external objects instead he converts external objects into internal objects in his mind and continues to interact only with the internal objects never with the external objects this inability to other inability to regard other people as other as out there as external as independent of the narcissist existence perception cognition and so on so forth this inability is what I call othering failure and it has to do with a concept introduced by George Herbert me he he called it the generalized other it's
it's part of U a larger topic known as symbolic interactionism never mind I will deal with it in some other video but the generalized other is the general notion that um there are expectations that are common to all people kind of social expectations so all of us have a generalized other perception we believe that other people um have expectations about actions and thoughts and so so we try to conform to these expectations we also believe that these common expectations serve to clarify relationships between people so when you are a member of a social system you
comply with his social society-wide expectations and this determines how you relate to other people and how you behave and in your mind there's this F baseless Anonymous generalized other and this imaginary person kind of dictates your behaviors and your faults your cognitions uh in accordance with elements of socialization in a culturation in accordance with society's norms and mores and expectations and so on so all the time we walk around asking ourselves what is expected of me taking the perspective of the generalized other according to me at least so this is also known as imaginary audience
it's a constructed audience and this audience doesn't have complete Insight or complete information about the individual but the individual measures himself or self in accordance uh with the imagined audience imagined audience dictates to some extent who the individual is now the narcissist because he has a problem with othering does not have a generalized other The Narcissist does not ask himself or cannot ask himself what are the expectations of others of me what do others expect of me how do they expect me to think how do they expect me to behave the narcissist is incapable of
asking this question because he doesn't perceive others he doesn't P he doesn't really relate to external objects so he cannot ask himself and he does not ask himself what do others think of me what do they how do they think I should behave how do speech acts and anything actions choices decisions uh I need to conform the narciss doesn't say this because the narcissist as an othering failure and all the narcissist objects are never external they're only internal the only generalized other in the narcissist mind is the narcissist the narcissist is the measure of all
things the narcissist is the source of all expectations about cognitions about actions about choices about decisions about behaviors the narcissist is the only law a law unto himself is the Only Rule the Only Rule Book is the rule book written by The Narcissist the narcissist is so lipistic he is the only person who exists in the entire universe so the only source of F of expectations is himself since he does not perceive other people as out there they cannot have expectations of the narcissist they cannot impose on the narcissist meaning they cannot dictate and direct
The Narcissist choices decisions and actions they are not there out there there's nobody out there they're all in here they're all in the narcissist mind so the narcissist self refers he is self-referential he refers to himself in order to derive meaning and sense expectations and directions behavioral codes and scripts everything emanates from inside the narcissist never from outside owing to othering failure this applies even to sex the narcissist is autoerotic he is attractive to his own body even when he's having sex with another person the narcissist is having sex with his own body through the
agency of another person's body in short he's masturbating with someone else's body so this is a very important thing to realize because the narcissist referential ideation The Narcissist social expectations the narcissist perceived behaviors perceived behaviors of other people all these come from the inside never from the oun outside so this creates a lot of dissonance for example imagine that the narcissist develops a conviction that there is a conspiracy against him this conspiracy cannot be linked in the narcissist mind to external objects it's a conspiracy of the internal objects representing these external objects it's a conspiracy
inside the narcissist mind the internal objects that represent the people who want to harm the narcissist these internal objects are in collusion against the narcissist it is as if the narcissis is conspiring against himself via the agency of other people exactly as the narcissist is having sex with himself via the agency of other people's bodies he is conspiring against himself via the agency of other people's minds they don't really exist except in his mind so this creates a lot of internal conflict and a lot of dissonance and this is the reason the narcissist is compelled
to seek narcissistic Supply narcissistic Supply is a compulsion it's an addiction it is intended the narcissistic Supply is intended to ameliorate and mitigate this internal conflict to reduce it somehow when the narcissist obtains narcissistic Supply from the environment attention adulation admiration even when he is feared when he's noticed somehow when he's seen by the environment that reduces the internal conflict because this validates his grandiosity a narcissistic Supply is like telling the narcissist you're not delusional you're really a genius you're not crazy you're really great it's the narcissist feels validated via narcissistic Supply and begins to
trust his internal world and his own cognitive distortions narcissistic Supply is like telling the narciss your cognit your cognition is not distorted it's perfectly okay you're not wrong about yourself and about the world and about the environment your internal working model is in perfect order and this is compulsive because the conflict inside the narcissist is ongoing it's cernal and it needs it requires quelling and mitigating all the time now of course grandiosity involves biases not only cognitive distortions but cognitive biases for example a confirmation bias the tendency to search for interpret favor and recall information
only in a way that confirms and supports one's prior beliefs and values so the narcissist bias narcissist belief is that the false self is not not false that is the narcist believe that his inflated fantastic grandio self-perception is accurate reflects reality and so he needs to filter out to deny to suppress to eliminate all information and data that May challenge and undermine this belief this self-image this self-perception so he creates his own Echo chamber thought Silo within which into into which he lets in only information that supports his grandiosity it's like a membrane like a
filter The Narcissist filters out literally forgets dissociates information that somehow threatens the validity the cohesion the erence and the longevity of his grandio inflated self-image and self-perception narcissist selects information that supports his views his interpretation of the environment and of himself he ignores contrary information he interprets ambiguous evidence as supporting his existing attitudes there are desired outcomes for this emotional outcomes and other outcomes confirmation bias is very entrenched even in healthy people but in the narcissist it's a precondition for survival in mortification all these all these mechanisms collapse it's a process known as decompensation so
in mortification public humiliation The Narcissist defenses The Narcissist biases The Narcissist a errors cognitive errors cognitive they all collapse they're all deactivated at that point The Narcissist comes face to face with who he really is pretty inferior he understands his narcissism is compensatory and fallacious it's a lie the false self is false it's a horrible feeling the naris becomes essentially a borderline there are various forms that fully functional narcissist various forms that such a narcissist not a high functioning narcissist a high functioning narcissist is a narcissist who functions well in society a fully functioning narcissist
in other words a narcissist who is narcissism is in action and unimpeded and unobstructed by anything such a narcissist you would use uses several forms of confirmation bias there is what is known as attitude polarization when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence there is belief perseverance when beliefs persist after the evidence is shown to be false irrational privacy effect a greater Reliance on information encountered early on than later on an illusory correlation when people falsely perceive an association between two events and two situations which is
a form of apophenia or parolia now narcissism is characterized according to the diagnostic and statistical manual by antagonism narcissist hold other people in contempt contempt is a precondition both for grandiosity and for sadism so people are host narcissists are hostile they're antagonistic they in your face they're very low on agreeableness in the five facto personality model and so their attribution biases their cognitive biases are likely to be hostile and this is known as a hostile attribution bias or a hostile attribution of intent or a hostile attribution error it's a tendency to interpret other people's behavior
as having hostile intent even when the behavior is benign or ambiguous so someone with a hostile attribution bias would see two people talking or laughing and he would immediately interpret their behavior as if they were laughing about him mocking him gossiping about him even though the behavior in this particular case is either benign or ambiguous now the term hostile attribution bias was first coined in 1980 by nasby Hayden and the the Pao and together with other um Scholars such as Kenneth Dodge and so on so forth they spotted this kind of defenses hostile attribution bias
in children children are of course highly narcissistic we cannot diagnose narcissistic personality disorder in children but as even Freud had observed children are narcissistic they have primary narcissism and so it's not surprising that most most children have hostile attribution bias it's a bias in Social information processing um so individuals perceive interpret and select responses to situations and when they perceive them as hostile we have this kind of bias and this is what's happening to the narcissist all the time and when you have this across the Development Across the lifespan when you don't succeed to get
rid of it after childhood when hostile attribution becomes your style your personality style uh you're likely to be aggressive you're likely to externalize aggression either verbally or physically this would go a long way towards explaining why it narcissist are so abusive in the process of devaluation the narcissist doesn't only de idealize you devaluation is not only about saying oh I made a mistake or oh uh you have changed and now you're not as ideal as I thought you were no that's not the case in the devaluation phase you're converted into an enemy a persecutory object
and that's because the narcissist attribution bias is hostile it's the world The Narcissist engages in a PR primtive defense mechanism known as splitting you're either all bad or all good in the idealization phase you're all all good in the devaluation phase inevitably ineluctably you're all bad and this has to do with hostile attribution bias it's founded on splitting in effect it's an important pathway through which other risk factors such as peer rejection or harsh parenting uh lead to aggression so we know this is the case with children and I've been saying all along that naiss
are children they remain stuck at a very very early age and so their hostile attribution bias never goes away it explains how the narcissist aggression develops why is the abusive and represents um a kind of targeting mechanism victimizing mechanism which is totally automated totally automatic back to ideas of reference and delusions of reference um how do they come about the scholarship is the Orthodoxy what we teach in University and so on so forth is that people who experience innocuous events or mere coincidences and then immediately after that something bad happens they to tend to create
a linkage between these innocuous behaviors and coincidences and the bad adverse outcomes they also begin to develop the conviction that this is personal it has personal significance of course this should this should and does happen multiple times so for example if a child has a bad parent a dead mother I mean dead metaphorically mother absent selfish depressed parentifying instrumentalizing as own if a child is exposed to this kind of continuous abuse and Trauma the child is going to create a linkage between behaviors and bad outcome parental behaviors and bad outcomes and of course this is
about the child the child is going to personalize this rule of thumb this euristic the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to one's own destiny usually in a negative and hostile manner because that's what a child the abused and traumatized child has learned delusions of reference are part one of the criteria for psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia delusional disorder bipolar disorder um narcissistic personality disorder schizotypal personality disorder schizotypal personality disorder and even autism paranoid personality disorder body dismorphic disorder and also substance abuse alcoholism and metam fetamines so it's very common more common
than we know now in psychoanalysis and I will dedicate a special video in the future to the psycho analysis analytic view of ideas of reference because it's a very fascinating view According to zigon Freud delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive form thus revealing its Genesis voices as well as the undefined multitude are brought into the foreground Again by the paranoid disease and so the evolution of conscious is reproduced regressively so according to Freud this involved regression infantilization and some kind of paranoia which are both very common and very pertinent and important
clinical features of narcissism K Yung for's contemporary disciple and then adversary wrote in 1928 that ideas of reference have something to do with synchronicity meaningful coincidences when people are exposed to synchronicity some of them develop ideas of reference autop fenical in 1946 concluded that the projection of the super ego is most clearly seen in ideas of reference and of being influence delusions of this kind merely bring to the patient from the outside what his self-observing and self-critical conscious actually tells him and how can we end without mentioning my dopple Doppel ganger my twin Jac Lan
we look identical by the way look him up Jac Lan L aan he regarded ideas of references linked to the unbalancing of the relationship relation to the capital other to the big other and the radical anomaly that it involves qualified improperly but not without some approximation to the truth in Old clinical medicine is partial delusion the big other the other of language the names of the Father the signifier of words later which later become the unconscious actually the realm of the super ego and the unconscious okay I promised a separate video about all this there
are other views of ideas of reference uh which I will deal with in in in this in this video I'd like to mention a few of them um anti psychiatrist such as David Cooper uh Rd Ling and and so on they actually used ideas of reference as a therapeutic tool as an instrument in the Arsenal of healing they they regarded the patient I'm quoting the patients idea ideas of reference and influence and delusions of persecution are merely descriptions of the patient parents Behavior towards her this happens to be my view as well there is certainty
uh there certainly confusion between persecutory fantasies and persecutory realities but ideas of connection with apparently remote people or ideas of being influenced by others equally remote are in fact stating their experience of social influence albe it in a distorted form including their network of uh influence institutions as absurd as Scotland Yard or the Queen of England or the president of the United States or the BBC so what they're saying the anti psychiatrist is that ideas of reference are an attempt to act within Society to somehow integrate with Society or even conform to society but this
attempt fails for two reasons hyper reflexivity the tendency to regard the whole universe as relevant to the individual including the Queen of England or the BBC or the CIA and on the other hand a bad parental experience which predisposed the individual to associate behaviors actions choices decisions and language however innocuous however benign with negative adverse hostile outcomes because this is what the individual has learned in his relationship with his parents Lang shared David Cooper's view he said that the person who was saying that his brains have been taken from him his actions are controlled from
to space such delusions are partially achieved derealization realizations he considered how in typical paranoid ideas of reference the person feels that the murmurings and mutterings as that that he hears as he walks past the street crowd they're all about him in a bar a burst of laughter behind his back is it's some joke cracked about him but he felt L believed that deeper acquaintance with the patient reveals that what tortures the patient is not so much the patient's delusions of reference but his harrowing suspicion that is of no importance to anyone that no one is
referring to him at all which is the bad object core the empty schizoid core of the narcissist and to some extent the borderline this is the driver The Narcissist suspects that he is not being seen the way he has not been seen by his parental figures so the narcissist is compelled to force people to see him and if he fails to force people to see him in reality because they don't exist they he is incapable of interacting with external objects then he's going to force people to see him in his own mind because they do
exist as internal objects inside his head so the narcissist enacts a monodrama or a drama where the internal objects inside his mind that represent real people out there they do see him they do pay attention to him they do notice him however in most cases in a hostile negative manner but not always again we must distinguish ideas of reference from delusions of reference they're similar in content but the difference is the conviction delusions of of of reference involve utter conviction the person um in the former case in in the case of ideas of reference has
the feeling that strangers are talking about him or her but if he's challenged he acknowledges that the people may be talking about something else the person with delusions of reference would never admit to it no way they're talking about him he knows it somehow you can transition from ideas of reference to delusions of reference and this happens very frequently in narcissistic mortification after narcissistic mortification The Narcissist develops delusions of reference he becomes delusional which is much more typical of borderline than of narcissism and so abortive ideas of reference I'm quoting abortive ideas of reference in
the beginning of the development or in schizotypal personalities continuously May remain subject to the patient's criticism under adverse circumstances by minimal economic shifts however reality testing may be lost and Daydreams of this kind turn into delusions a person rigidly controlled by his super ego readily forms sensitive ideas of reference a key experience may occur in his life circumstances and quite suddenly these ideas become structured as delusions of reference within the focus of paranoia that man crossing his legs that woman wearing that blouse it can't just be accidental or coincidental it's a message it's a signal
it is particular meaning it is intended to convey something in many ways the narcissist is delusional he believes the environment and the world organize themselves around him around self- perception and self-image and around his needs because he's envious he projects this Envy onto others and assumes that they are as envious of him as he is envious of them that they are as malevolent as he may be that they are uh as that they're engaged in some conspiracy against him to destroy him similarly the narcissists May group together sources of narcissistic Supply idealize them and convince
himself that they spend their time talking about him admiring him adulating him and so on so forth both are types of ideas of reference which base themselves on apophenia paradia in a total utter failure of othering of perceiving people out there as external separate individuals The Narcissist um enacts a narrative totally confined to his mind he's a prisoner of his own mind everything is happening in his mind the whole theater production the whole movie unfolds and unfurls exclusively within his mind nobody is out there this perhaps is the most terrifying thing of all this perhaps
is the cause root of narcissistic defenses it's the death desperate attempt to have object relations with internal objects rather than with external objects knowing somewhere unconsciously all the time that you're all alone that there's nobody out there and there's nobody in there because if there are no external objects what do these internal objects represent nothing nothingness this is the core and the psychodynamic engine of the narcissist and borderlines emptiness the inability to recognize external objects in the case of the narcissist leads to the generation of internal objects which are highly dubious because again what do
they refer to in the absence of external objects so suddenly the narcissist is faced with a compulsion with the need to generate an entire new world of which he is the ruler and the god head so as to avoid the profound existential loneliness of the black hole and the void of the and The Emptiness and the absence that is
