How To Recognize Covert/Collapsed Personality Disorders

Meeting context

• Speaker: Sam Wagner (author and psychology professor). Presentation-style talk (audio/youtube format) about personality disorders, focusing on unifying theories of Cluster B disorders and the concepts of overt, collapsed and covert states.
• Main aim: Propose a parsimonious model (Occam’s razor) that reduces proliferation of diagnostic labels by explaining many personality disorders through a single underlying clinical entity differentiated by overlays and states.

Core thesis

• Psychological diagnoses proliferate unnecessarily; nature and human psychology favor parsimonious explanations.
• Proposed unifying principle: Many personality disorders and other mental health conditions arise from confusion between internal and external objects (internalized introjects vs external persons/events).
  • Psychosis: internal objects are externalized (voices, hallucinations perceived as coming from outside).
  • Narcissism: external objects are internalized (others are reduced to internal representations that can be manipulated to protect against abandonment/hurt).
• All Cluster B disorders (narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial) can be conceptualized as a single personality disorder with different overlays (narcissistic overlay, borderline overlay, etc.).
• Each overlay exists in three states: overt/classic, collapsed, and covert. Individuals transition between overlays and states in response to stressors.

Mechanisms for transitions

• Two primary processes drive transitions between overlays/states:
  1. The “gap” (e.g., grandiosity gap): reality intrudes on the narcissistic narrative and challenges defenses, causing anxiety and potential collapse.
  2. Narcissistic modification (mortification): blows to narcissistic supply or goal attainment cause shifts in state (overt → collapsed → covert, or other transitions).
• Transitions are dynamic and frequent — a person may oscillate among overt, covert, and collapsed presentations depending on circumstances and stressors.

Structure of the unified model

• Underlying single personality disorder (shared core vulnerabilities) with overlay-specific manifestations (narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial).
• Each overlay has three possible states:
  • Overt/classic: the prototypical presentation taught in diagnostic texts.
  • Collapsed: results from repeated failures or severe narcissistic injuries; marked by mortification, anxiety, withdrawal, and reorganization attempts.
  • Covert: a defensive/aspirational state following collapse; often characterized by self-delusion, passive-aggression, withdrawal, or other strategic adaptations.

Covert state — general features

• Aspiration: covert individuals often desire to be overt/classic in presentation (e.g., covert narcissists admire overt grandiosity like Donald Trump).
• Result of failure: covert state commonly follows collapse due to failure to obtain narcissistic supply or achieve goals.
• Covert individuals are less self-efficacious, more fragile, and may employ diverse defensive strategies to reconcile grandiose self-images with reality.

Covert Narcissist — historical notes and defining features

• First clinical descriptions attributed to Arnold Cooper and S. Akhtar (1989).
• Key self-concept features: feelings of inferiority, self-doubt, shame-proneness, fragility, hypersensitivity to criticism, relentless thirst for recognition.
• Interpersonal features: inability to genuinely trust/depend, chronic envy, capacity for deep but often problematic object relations, boundary issues, passive-aggression.
• Social adaptation/behavioral features: aimlessness, shallow commitments, imitative tastes, shifting values for advantage, materialism, delinquent tendencies.
• Love/sexuality: impaired capacity for stable romantic love; difficulty viewing partners as separate individuals; occasional paraphilias and boundary violations.
• Cognitive and communicative features: “headline” intelligence, forgetfulness for details, use of language to regulate self-esteem rather than convey facts.

Collapse Narcissist — development and dynamics

• Developmental roots: parental instrumentalization and idolization (Karen Horney’s ideas). Child becomes vessel of parental fantasies — pedestal is placed on the child.
• Result: poorly developed reality-testing, lack of empathy, weak boundaries, entitlement without merit, and brittle grandiosity.
• Collapse occurs when narcissistic supply is absent or when reality repeatedly contradicts the inflated self-image; leads to mortification and the disabling of the false self.
• After collapse, the narcissist may reconstruct via covert strategies; cycles of collapse, covert solution, and restoration to overtism may repeat.

Variants/solutions within the covert narcissistic spectrum

• Delusional narrative solution: creating confabulatory narratives where the individual is heroic/central; possible progression to schizotypal/catatonic states if entrenched.
• Antisocial solution: covert psychopathic tendencies emerge; disdain for others, criminality, lack of empathy, potential for severe harm (including extreme violence in rare cases).
• Paranoid-schizoid solution: persecutory ideation, ideas of reference, hypervigilance, conspiracy-style thinking, social withdrawal, and self-sufficient self-supply (self-sustained narcissistic supply).
• Paranoid-aggressive/explosive solution: volatile, verbally or physically abusive, interprets benign stimuli as malicious; high potential for interpersonal damage.
• Masochistic/avoidant solution: self-punishment, ostentatious suffering, self-handicapping, attention-seeking via victimhood, and passive-aggressive sabotage.

Collapsed histrionic (histrionic collapse)

• Often observed in women (higher prevalence of histrionic diagnoses in women due to gendered presentation patterns).
• Core issues: body image disturbance or body dysmorphia, low self-esteem, dependence on sexual/romantic attention as regulation, anticipatory anxiety about rejection.
• Post-rejection behaviors: social withdrawal, risky or self-sabotaging sexual behavior (to punish partner), or passive rejection of femininity (neglecting appearance) as retaliation.
• Behavioral expressions: triangulation, substance abuse, compulsive shopping, gambling, mockery, and other attention-seeking or self-defeating behaviors.

Covert Borderline (quiet/shy borderline)

• Not an officially accepted separate diagnosis; argued to be a state or presentation within borderline personality disorder rather than a distinct disorder.
• Covert borderline features adapted from Cooper & Akhtar schema:
  • Self-concept: false self, grandiosity, fantasies of extraordinary love or uniqueness, implied entitlement, identity diffusion.
  • Emotion regulation: emotional dysregulation, dissociation, hypochondriasis, addictive behaviors; often uses alloplastic defenses.
  • Interpersonal: numerous shallow relationships, intense need for love, people-pleasing, intermittent reinforcement behaviors that produce trauma-bonding, pseudo-humility masking contempt.
  • Behavior: cunning, malevolent, premeditated manipulation, triangulation with sadistic/punitive goals, pseudo-sublimation (work to obtain admiration), activism and performative moralism.
  • Love/sexuality: marital instability, promiscuity, extramarital affairs; impulsivity combined with goal-directed vindictiveness.
  • Cognitive style: black-and-white thinking, decisive but egocentric, fondness for language and rhetoric.
• Gender notes: many covert borderline presentations are seen in men; dissociation may allow transitions to a psychopathic protector self-state under stress.

Covert Antisocial / Secondary Psychopathy

• Proposal: the covert form of antisocial personality disorder (often called “secondary psychopathy”) is actually the covert state of classic psychopathy rather than a distinct subtype.
• Covert antisocial presentation often shares features with covert narcissism and borderline overlays, explaining overlap in clinical expression, particularly among women.
• Borderline and histrionic presentations in women may sometimes represent covert/secondary psychopathy (as reflected by elevated Factor 2 traits on psychopathy measures).
• Suggests antisocial presentation can be culture- and context-modulated and may result from narcissistic collapse plus borderline overlay.

Clinical and conceptual implications

• Diagnostic categories in DSM are often polythetic and fragmented; a dynamic, developmental, and parsimonious model may better capture clinical reality.
• Emphasizes movement between states (overt/collapse/covert) and overlays rather than fixed types.
• Highlights importance of childhood developmental experiences (e.g., parental instrumentalization or idolization) and recurrent narcissistic injuries in shaping trajectories.
• Warns about the ease of victims of narcissistic abuse developing narcissistic or psychopathic defenses if exposed to complex trauma.

Practical recommendations and meta-notes

• Speaker references multiple dedicated videos for deeper exploration of each overlay/state and suggests viewers search his channel and Google Scholar for more detailed resources.
• Encourages critical evaluation of internet content; recommends relying on classic clinical descriptions (Cooper & Akhtar) and peer-reviewed literature.
• Mentions ongoing academic publication plans (paper under review) and editorial roles, but refrains from naming journals until publication ethical constraints are resolved.

Tone and delivery

• Informal, provocative, and at times humorous/polemical; frequent tangents and anecdotal asides.
• Recurrent use of cultural and political examples (e.g., Donald Trump) to illustrate overt grandiosity.
• Repeated emphasis on the speaker’s authority (author, professor, editor) and personal style (long-form video series, repeated prompts to search channel).

Conclusion

• The speaker provides a unifying map and checklists aimed at simplifying understanding of Cluster B disorders: a common underlying personality dysfunction with overlay-specific expressions and three dynamic states (overt, collapsed, covert).
• The model emphasizes object confusion (internal vs external) as a fundamental mechanism, proposes reinterpreting several diagnostic categories as states of a single disorder, and details multiple covert solutions that follow narcissistic collapse.