To Become, Narcissist Needs You GONE (Clip: Skopje Seminar, May 2025)
To Become, Narcissist Needs You GONE (Clip: Skopje Seminar, May 2025) Introduction to Narcissistic Abuse as a Test Narcissistic abuse is often misunderstood as merely
30.12.2025
To Become, Narcissist Needs You GONE (Clip: Skopje Seminar, May 2025) Introduction to Narcissistic Abuse as a Test Narcissistic abuse is often misunderstood as merely
The contrast between DSM and ICD highlights a broader debate in mental health: Should diagnosis be rigid and categorical or flexible and dimensional? The ICD’s nuanced, clinically informed, and culturally sensitive approach better aligns with the realities of Cluster B personality disorders and human psychology. Clinicians, researchers, and patients benefit from diagnostic systems that reflect the complexity, fluidity, and cultural embeddedness of personality disorders. Moving toward ICD-like models promises improved understanding, treatment, and outcomes for those affected by these challenging conditions. NPD: American Hype or Clinical Entity? (DSM 5-TR vs. ICD-11) (University of Applied Sciences)
The ego is indispensable for psychological health, social adaptation, and self-coherence. It is the wise mediator that balances instinctual desires, moral demands, and reality. Rather than seeking to obliterate the ego, psychological growth involves strengthening and integrating it.
The myth of ego death, popularized without understanding, risks encouraging harmful psychological states akin to narcissism or psychopathy. Recognizing the ego’s true nature helps us appreciate the complexity of the mind and the foundations of mental health. “Ego Death”: Ignorant, Bad Idea
The speaker explains that narcissists experience death differently from healthy people: they psychologically deny death and experience an internalized state of “being dead,” so external deaths register as mere factual updates rather than emotionally impactful events. Narcissists lack object constancy and instead maintain internalized representations (internal objects) of others that never truly die, allowing them to cognitively note a death without emotional assimilation. The talk draws on psychoanalytic concepts like introjection and “ego passage” to argue that the narcissist’s mind operates as a dynamic hive of internal objects, preventing genuine integration of loss or transformation. How Narcissist Perceives Your/Their Death
Healthy narcissism is a foundational element of mental health—regulating self-worth, identity, and functioning—while the speaker argued that reality testing should be added as a core criterion to distinguish health from shared or delusional fantasies. The discussion warned that political correctness, the glamorization/denial of mental illness, and social media’s business model encourage addictive shared fantasies and hive minds that amplify envy, anger, and exclusion, eroding institutions and interpersonal belonging. The guest argued we are amid a major narrative transition (from reality-based to fantasy-based social organization) that is fragmenting society, increasing atomization and risk, and may be effectively irreversible once fully entrenched. Narcissism: Social Malaise Affects Individuals (with Psychologist and Biologist Marcia Maia)
The discussion focused on developing ‘peace post,’ a language-based tool to help victims of narcissists and psychopaths communicate neutrally, reduce emotional escalation, and protect boundaries through techniques like gray rock and protective communication. Speakers emphasized the importance of coupling the tool with professional support to provide alternative narratives and ongoing healing, especially for those who cannot go no-contact (e.g., co-parenting). They also contrasted narcissists (childlike, fantasy-driven) with psychopaths (predatory, goal-driven), noting different challenges and future product evolution to address psychopathic behaviors. Use AI to Grey Rock the Narcissist (with Erica Hagen, Peacepost.io)
Sam Vaknin distinguishes control from manipulation, power plays, and sadomasochism, arguing that control focuses on securing people as sources of outcomes and is largely unconscious. He outlines controller motivations—narcissistic grandiosity and separation/abandonment insecurity—and techniques such as withholding information, intimidation, disorientation (e.g., gaslighting), and expectation-broadcasting. He also explains why some people collude with controllers—seeking a secure base, embracing a victim identity, or validating internalized self-derogation—and describes collusive tactics like ostentatious helplessness, bottom-up control, and inducing unpredictability to provoke micromanagement. Control Freaks and Their Victims
Lecturer applies Baudrillard’s spectacle theory to pathological narcissism, arguing that in postmodern hyper-simulation identities are performative and constructed from the sign-value of possessions and curated images. Narcissism acts as a defensive, preemptive objectification in which the false self replaces the authentic self, broadcasting superiority and seducing others into a fabricated reality. Unlike psychopathy’s direct destruction of external reality, narcissism subverts it through mimicry, seduction, and the reproduction of simulations—phenomena amplified by social media and consumer culture. Narcissist’s Seductive Hyperreality: Feminine Sign-value of False Self (Baudrillard)
Professor Sam Vaknin discussed the distinction between legitimate no-contact as a response to abuse and estrangement driven by narcissism, atomization, and hypervigilance, arguing that many who cut family ties for minor disagreements are enacting a form of externalized aggression. He explained how projected splitting, projection, and projective identification in dysfunctional parents create the golden child and scapegoat roles, which often persist into adulthood and shape sibling dynamics and identity. Vaknin recommended reconstruction and integration over permanent estrangement—advocating empathy, realistic understanding of parental limitations, and reconciliation where possible, while acknowledging exceptions for genuine abuse. No Contact with NON-abusive Parents, Family? (The Nerve with Maureen Callahan)
Sam Vaknin explains that the human need to be seen—rooted in early survival—is lifelong and evolves into a need for witnessing, where others not only remember events but agree with one’s interpretation, shaping self-concept. He contrasts healthy witnessing, which supports a stable, autonomous self, with pathological witnessing in narcissism, where a fragmented self relies entirely on external witnesses, leading to vulnerability and psychopathology. He warns that modern isolation and declining social witnessing threaten mental health broadly, potentially causing widespread disorders as people lose the external scaffolding that sustains identity. Witnessing the Narcissist: Need to be Remembered, Validated