The Key to Treating Malignant Narcissism – FRANK YEOMANS

How do you treat malignant narcissism? Frank Yeomans says the key is empathy for the patient’s sadistic pleasure, however hard it might be to empathize with someone who gets pleasure out of hurting others. A clinical example features a young woman who cuts off her own fingers.

We talked with Frank Yeomans about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and how it can affect us on a personal and societal level.

Malignant Narcissism | Is it Narcissism and Psychopathy together?

This video answers the questions: What is a malignant narcissist? How doe malignant narcissism manifest in work settings? Malignant narcissism is a construct is not well studied, but in general refers to an individual has a combination of characteristics related to narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoia, and ecosyntonic sadism in aggression.

Psychopathy:

There are two types of psychopathy: Factor 1 (primary, interpersonal affective) and Factor 2 (lifestyle, antisocial) psychopathy. Factor 1 psychopathy has characteristics like grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulation, a superficial charm, callous, unemotional, low neuroticism and lack of guilt or remorse. Factor 2 psychopathy has a parasitic lifestyle, being prone to boredom, sensation seeking, impulsivity, irresponsibility, a failure to have long term goals, poor behavioral controls, and criminal versatility.

Narcissism:

There are two types of narcissism: With grandiose narcissism we see characteristics like being extroverted, socially bold, self-confident, having a superficial charm, being resistant to criticism, and being callous and unemotional. Vulnerable narcissism is characterized by shame, anger, aggression, hypersensitivity, a tendency to be introverted, defensive, avoidant, anxious, depressed, socially awkward, and shy.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2…

Kernberg OF: Severe Personality Disorders. New Haven,
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Kernberg OF: Aggression in Personality Disorders and
Perversions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Kernberg OF: Aggressivity, Narcissism, and Self-
Destructiveness in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship.
Yale University Press, 2004.

When Trolls and Crybullies Rule the Earth

How technology reshapes consciousness.

Over the past several years, teenage suicide rates have spiked horrifically. Depression rates are surging and America’s mental health over all is deteriorating. What’s going on?

My answer starts with technology but is really about the sort of consciousness online life induces.

When communication styles change, so do people. In 1982, the scholar Walter Ong described the way, centuries ago, a shift from an oral to a printed culture transformed human consciousness. Once, storytelling was a shared experience, with emphasis on proverb, parable and myth. With the onset of the printing press it become a more private experience, the content of that storytelling more realistic and linear.

As L.M. Sacasas argues in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, the shift from printed to electronic communication is similarly consequential. I would say the big difference is this: Attention and affection have gone from being private bonds to being publicly traded goods.

That is, up until recently most of the attention a person received came from family and friends and was pretty stable. But now most of the attention a person receives can come from far and wide and is tremendously volatile.

Sometimes your online post can go viral and get massively admired or ridiculed, while other times your post can leave you alone and completely ignored. Communication itself, once mostly collaborative, is now often competitive, with bids for affection and attention. It is also more manipulative — gestures designed to generate a response.

People ensconced in social media are more likely to be on perpetual alert: How are my ratings this moment? They are also more likely to feel that the amount of attention they are receiving is inadequate.

As David Foster Wallace put it in that famous Kenyon commencement address, if you orient your life around money, you will never feel you have enough. Similarly, if you orient your life around attention, you will always feel slighted. You will always feel emotionally unsafe.

New social types emerge in such a communications regime. The most prominent new type is the troll, and in fact, Americans have elected a troll as the commander in chief.

Trolls bid for attention by trying to make others feel bad. Studies of people who troll find that they score high on measures of psychopathy, sadism and narcissism. Online media hasn’t made them vicious; they’re just vicious. Online has given them a platform to use viciousness to full effect.

Trolls also score high on cognitive empathy. Intellectually, they understand other people’s emotions and how to make them suffer. But they score low on affective empathy. They don’t feel others’ pain, so when they hurt you, they don’t care.

Trolling is a very effective way to generate attention in a competitive, volatile attention economy. It’s a way to feel righteous and important, especially if you claim to be trolling on behalf of some marginalized group.

Another prominent personality type in this economy is the crybully. This is the person who takes his or her own pain and victimization and uses it to make sure every conversation revolves around himself or herself. “This is the age of the Cry-Bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper,” Julie Burchill wrote in The Spectator a few years ago.

The crybully starts with a genuine trauma. The terrible thing that happened naturally makes the crybully feel unsafe, self-protective and self-conscious to the point of self-absorption. The trauma makes that person intensely concerned about self-image.