Narcissistic Shared Fantasy and Induced Psychosis Explained

[00:00:01]in 1989 a scholar by the name of sander came up with a concept of the shared fantasy six years ago I borrowed this concept and adopted it to describe relationships with narcissist and more specifically the various stages of the narcissist shared fantasy and the narcissistic abuse involved in it today I would like to expand the horizons of this concept and apply it to a multiplicity of settings but the main the core question I'm going to deal with is the following what is the impact the shared fantasy is having on you we already know that the shared fantasy has multifarious consequences and outcomes involving the victim we I have described at length the physiological effect psychological effects long-term identity problems disregulation etc etc there's a whole playlist dedicated to this on this channel it's called the shared fantasy playlist not surprisingly but today I want to delve deeper and I want to ask the terrifying question does the shared fantasy induce in psychosis a psychotic disorder is the whole is the entire shared Fantasy A manifestation or an extension of what we know about psychosis are you entering when you collude with the narcissist when you fall in love with the narcissist when you collaborate with the narcissis on the shared fantasy when you become an ingredient and a participant in the shared fantasy are you actually entering willingly although unknowingly a psychotic space and will you ever Rec this is the topic of today's video my name is Sak I'm the author of malignant self love narcissism Revisited I also a professor of psychology do does the narcissist make you psychotic from shared fantasy to mirror neurons I would like to start not unusually by being a bit controversial I think that the processes of mentalization and empathy are actually forms of shared fantasy I think when we try to make sense of another person what makes them tick what motivates them what inhibits them what is driving them what are their emotions and cognitions and hopes and priorities and dreams when we try to get a hold or get grasp of someone else's mental space someone else's psychology someone else's mind I claim that this is a form of shared fantasy similarly when we empathize with other people when we put ourselves in other people's shoes in my view this is also a form of shared fantasy now mind you mentalization and empathy are attenuated forms of shared fantasy they're not as very ENT and Insidious and impactful as the narcissist version of the Shar fantasy but their sh shared fantasy is all the same why am I saying this because we don't have access to anyone anybody's anybody's mind we don't have access to anyone else's psychological and mental space we don't really know what's happening in another person's um psychological life or landscape internal landscape we don't know when we empathize with someone when when we mentalize when we create a theory of Mind a model of someone else's mind we're speculating we're fantasizing we base ourselves on cues cues such as body language facial expressions um we we Bas ourselves on the other person's self-reporting someone says I'm sad and we say well he's sad why because he said so we observe someone and she's crying and say well she must be said she's crime but all this of course is speculation all this is a hypothesis and a hypothesis that cannot be truly falsified even if we were to observe consistently in in the long term the behavior of any one specific individual the number of Transformations and contradictions would be such that it would never give rise to a coherent cohesive Theory a theory that can yield predictions generate hypothesis and be subject to falsifiability to testing so everything we do with other people this inter subjective space this commonality that we inhabit our assumptions about other people what goes on in their minds what motivates them why are they behaving the way they do etc etc all these this process is known as mentalization when we then rely on mentalization to empathize we see someone crying we say she's crying she said I feel said this is empathy but the foundations are shaky how do you know she said because she told you so she may be lying she may be manipulating you so I I regard mentalization a theory of mind and empathy as mild forms mild cases of shared fantasy it's a fantasy space inhabited by two people at least and these two people or more they share a common narrative based on a common set of assumptions assumptions regarding what it is to be human assumptions regarding how to decipher behavioral behaviors assumptions regarding how to decode cues such as facial expressions in body language and assumptions regarding the honest usage of language in self-reporting and this leads of course to the question of theory of Mind bear with me because ultimately I will come to the core issue and the core issue is shared fantasies especially the narciss shared fantasy has extremely potent and Powerful psychotic elements and they're contagious they're infectious and they affect the narcissist victim the narcissist intim partner the NES his friends they affect them they infect them and this has long-term astounding and pernicious outcomes which I will discuss in this video but we have to go step by step I mentioned the theory of Mind theory of mind is a concept or construct in the philosophy of mind and it refers to our alleged ability to infer to make assumption about another person's mental States their beliefs their desires their motivations and so on so forth and we do this by observing and experiencing the cues that I mentioned behaviors and so on so this is a theory of mind when we come across another person we mentalize we immediately begin to create a theory about that other person in the case of the narcissist the theory of mind is internalized introjected and this is what I call the snapshot in healthy people the theory of mind is not internalized it's the equivalent of a book or an article it's an external object that is used by the individual in order to create a theory or make assumptions or derive predictions regarding another person this hyp this process of hypothesizing the narcissist abs absorbs the theory of mind appropriates it converts it into an internal process and so um recently there's been a raging debate about mirror neurons and there is a school in the philosophy of Mind known as simulation Theory there are several competing models and we're trying to make sense of other people we realize as philosophers that we have no access to anyone's mind that we are all solipsistic by Nature that the bridges that connect us are very frail and fragile and not very rigorous and that we rely too much on language and on our own experience which we then extrapolate and project onto to others but the discovery of mirror neurons gave a boost to simulation Theory so according to simulation Theory a theory of mind is available because we unconsciously empathize with the person that we are observing and we account for differences but we impose on the interaction with another person our own internal world we simulate the other person's State of Mind based on what we would desire what we would believe how we would behave what we what would motivate us so empathy and mentalization are essentially a projection a reflection of who we are not who the other person is that is an earth shattering proposition because it means that in this particular sense we are all narcissist that's exactly what the narcissist does the narcissist annexes Imports appropriates expropriates the external object the other person and converts him or her into an internal object The Narcissist assumes that everyone is identical clones and replic because of himself or herself mirror neurons have been now interpreted as a mechanism by which we simulate other people in order to better understand them and so the discovery of mirror neurons was taken by many simulation theories many philosophers as a validation of simulation Theory at the end of this video I'm going to review the recent controversy and the disputes which arose regarding mirror neurons I want to make clear there is not rigorous and strong evidence that miror neurons exist they've been hyped out of all proportion and I will review this these objections in in later on in in the video but at this stage let us focus on what the idea of mirror neurons um how it motivated philosophers to deal with the issue of the shared fantasy that we call empathy theory of mind and simulation Theory uh are now all the rage so we right now are at a point that we believe generally speaking with the aforementioned objections to the side we believe that there is a mechanism in the brain or that the brain as a whole is such a mechanism that allows us to predict another person's decisions and behaviors and covert states of mind which are in principle inaccessible but we all agree that we do this by somehow mirroring ing the other individual reflecting the other individual in our brains importing injecting the other individual we've come a full circle back to Freud 100 plus years ago the other predictive element in the brain the the part of the brain mirror neurons or something else the part of the brain that predicts the behaviors and traits and emotions and cognitions of other people evidently makes a difference makes a distinction between self and other we can therefore begin to link the two concepts it seems that a precondition for the emergence of the self is a shared fantasy the shared fantasy the belief that one has sufficient common ground and common denominators and commonalities and Inter subjective experiences with other people but as an individual in other words the self is the launching pad for the introjection and mirroring of other people and this is exactly the core or mechanism in narcissism we may even begin to believe that healthy narcissism exactly as Jung had suggested is the precondition and the precursor for the emergence of the self and that the self emerges by injecting other people converting them into internal object with within an imaginary mental space a paracosm thereby creating in the mind of the individual a shared fantasy with other people so there is the individual the individual comes across other people this is foundation of object relations the individual comes across other people and then what the individual does the individual creates a fantasy about other people this fantasy allows the individual to empathize with other people to mentalize other people to simulate mirror reflect other people in the individual's own mind as internal objects it the shared fantasy gives rise to this mechanism of introjection which explains why it is so crucial in the psychological economy and the psychodynamics of the pathological narcissist and so it is also clear so this is the first lesson the first lesson is the self is a mechanism for the introjection of other people via a shared fantasy this is very close to what Lan what Lan had said by the way what he had suggested at in in the 60s now the second condition is the social context and here we link with the relational approach of the relational schools of object relations it seems that the emergence of the self is never an individual Endeavor and here I disagree with Jung who suggested that introversion is the key uh process by which the self emerges I think exactly the opposite I think the con connection with other people the contact and friction with other people the push back by other people the input and feedback from other people the interactions with other people interpersonal relationships they are the ingredients from which the self emerges in this sense of course I'm more lanan than yungan the self is a relational construct if what I'm saying is right and the self leverages a shared fantasy that it imposes on other people and then within the shared fantasy is able to inject them and convert them into internal objects and this is the way the self is formed in a social context um there are limitations to this model within a social context we can try attempt to create a theory which would account for the majority of the observations and the majority of utterances majority of speech acts and statements by others and this Theory would have to be modified time and again as new input new data available becomes available um and it is or should be in principle connected to the encoding encoding of observed actions by others and the receipt of Rewards or punishments in other words it should be somehow connected to behaviorist behaviorist processes involving reinforcement but I will not go I will not go there right now um the new discovery 2015 of singulate anterior singulate uh cortex cells that somehow complement mirror neurons and work together um is also fascinating because these cells uh are in charge of predictions the NE neurons fire in reaction to observations so that you observe someone doing something and the neurons in your head which are in charge of this very activity fire you see someone eating the neurons in your head that fire when you eat when you eat also fire also are activated when someone else eats and you see them eating that's why they're called mirror neurons the sing the anterior singulate cells they create a theory a real Theory one could even say a mathematical Theory with probabilities and they make predictions about the behaviors of other people and they complement the function of miror neurons and they provide additional information about other social agents they speculate about things that are undecidable or non-observable or unknown and so on so forth and in the singulate cells are very scientific in this sense now in schizophrenia uh we know that mirror neuron activity is positively correlated with psychotic symptoms we know that when mirror neuron activity is high among people diagnosed with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders the severity of the psychotic symptoms is is massive is at its at its apex so there's some connection between miror neurons and psychosis or psychotic symptoms higher miror neuron activity some some Scholars say and I'm quoting higher mirror neuron activity may be the underpinning of schizophrenia sensory gating deficits and may contribute to sensory misattributions particularly in response to socially relevant stimuli and be a putative mechanism for delusions and hallucinations this is again a groundbreaking observation it means that this shared fantasy the which we call empathy which we call mentalizing which we call mirroring through mirror neurons this shed fantasy is is a close cousin the driver the engine and the fuel of psychotic symptoms in psychotic patients the shared fantasy is intimately connected to psychosis we are therefore obliged to ask the question does the architecture of the shared fantasy reflect what we know about psychosis is it Abino and ipsofacto a psychotic process a psychotic artifact and this is what I would like to dwell on in the continuation of this video so now let's proceed to study the connection between fantasy and delusions delusions and psychosis and whether the structure and architecture of the shed fantasy is in and of itself innately uh psychotic now fantasy is defined by the apaa dictionary American Psychological Association dictionary as any of a range of mental experiences and processes marked by vivid imagery intensity of emotion and relaxation or absence of logic fantasizing is normal and common and often serves a healthy purpose of releasing tension giving pleasure and amusement or stimulating creativity it can also be indicative of a pathology though as in delusional thinking or significant disconnection from reality in psychoanalytic theories says the dictionary fantasy is a figment of the imagination a mental image an ey dream or daydream in which a person's conscious or unconscious wishes and impulses are fulfilled this is known as wish fulfillment followers of Melanie Klein use the spelling fantasy pH to denote specifically unconscious wishes and before I proceed to Klein's version of fantasy with a pH not with an F I would like to emphasize um several things which emanate or are derived from this definition first of all fantasies are common and they're healthy and it is only the malignant form of fantasy which is pathological and problematic fantasies allow us to develop an alternative view um to predict the future or imagine it or reimagine it and therefore fantasy is connected intimately with creativity but we know from the work of other Scholars such as I I think H I think that creativity is equally intimately connected with psychoticism now psychoticism is not the same as psychosis mind you but there are strong indications that creativity involves some form of mental pathology some form of mental illness we are beginning to see the strands come together there's a Confluence of fantasy creativity psychoticism and some kind of let's use the the hyped word neurod Divergence some kind of abnormality put it aside bear it in mind as we plunge ever deeper into the psychotic Quagmire you remember that Melanie Klein used the word fantasy and spelled it or misspelled it pH on purpose Melanie Klein's fantasy with the pH in object relations Theory it's is unconscious it's an unconscious construction it it incorporates incorporates and encompasses unconscious wishes or impulses and these are presumed to underly thoughts and feelings it's as if thoughts and feelings were the tips of icebergs and the submerged part was unconscious in and it included mainly pretty primitive processes and Dynamics such as wishes and drives what Freud would have called the ID the pH spelling is used to distinguish fantasy with ph from everyday form of fantasy which can include conscious daydreaming now the narcissist shared fantasy incorporates both forms there is a fantasy with a pH that is the engine that drives the narcissist shared fantasy it is the inexurable reenactment of early childhood conflicts with a hope that the outcome would be different that this time separation would be allowed and individuation would ensue so this is the fantasy part the pH part it's totally unconscious and that's the engine then above it there's the chassis there is the the car if you wish and that is the fantasy with f it is totally conscious it involves uh planning it involves promises it involves confabulations it involves cognitive distortions such as grandiosity it involves self-enhancement of self-concept and so on so we have these two components the unconscious driver driving a totally conscious car and like in real life when your car is driven by an unconscious driver the end result is inevitably an accident okay there is something called fantasy play Fantasy play is pretend or make belief that it's a play so there are roles assigned to the participants everyone is playing and the fantasy play includes an as if orientation to objects actions other people so it is a bit like cosplay or role play Fantasy play often involves playing a distinct role such as a mother or a teacher or a doctor fantasy play also involves taking a position or a stance that is different from reality and using a mental representation of a situation is part of an enactment this is also called pretend play you see that fantasy play or pretend play is a crucial element in empathy when we empathize we fantasy play we pretend play we pretend to be the other person we put ourselves in the other person's shoes literally we occupy the other person's mental space and mental position and even physical to some extent so there's a lot of fantasy involved here and it is a role play empathy is a kind an extension of role play I have several videos on this channel regarding role Theory and roleplay but the shared fantasy and fantasy in general they are not the same as roleplay this is a common misrepresentation by self-styled experts online this is not a role play because in the shared fantasy and in fantasy in general the unconscious driver the unconscious engine the unconscious fuel is as the name implies unconscious whereas in all typical cosplays and role plays role playing everything is conscious you adopt a new role you put on a costume you play you act something or reenact something being a soldier in the Civil War or what have you or being a mother or whatever it is all conscious role playing and cosplaying are 100% conscious they involve conscious decisions and choices conscious behaviors and conscious adaptation to the roles of other people within the same environment role playing environment or setting this is not the case with shared fantasy or fantasy in general because they are mostly like 80 90% unconscious obviously the actions are conscious but the motivation is totally unconscious Dynamics the inexurable Dynamics behind the scenes are unconscious so any such comparison is completely spurious wrong fantasy is closer to symbolic play symbolic play is a form of play in which a child uses objects as representations of other things like Soki for example a child may put a leash on a stuffed dog and take this stuffed animal for a walk and then attempt to feed it because the animal becomes animated and Alive through the act of putting a leash on it this symbolic act sort of changes the nature of the stuffed animal into a real one symbolic play maybe or may not be social but it always involves a powerful element of fantasy and the fantasy is driven because it's a child mostly unconsciously that's why children have imaginary companions imaginary companion is a fictitious person or an animal or an object or a supernatural being that is created by a child or an adolescent in their minds the individual gives the imaginary companion a name talks to it shares feelings pretends to play with it may use it as a scapegoat for their own misdeeds the phenomenon is considered an elaborate but pretty common form of symbolic play this invisible Playmate and it's also connected to something known as transitory object but I will not discuss it right now the false self is an imaginary an imaginary friend an invisible Playmate that has gone out of control that went orai and became disorder and took over so it's like a horror movie the child who is subjected or exposed to a dysfunctional family dysfunctional parenting especially by the mother this kind of child would invent an imaginary friend and the imaginary friend would be everything the child is not the imaginary friend would be all powerful and all knowing and invulnerable and strong and you know you name it the imaginary friend would be Godlike whereas a child is helpless and vulnerable and usually has an internalized bad object and and so on so the imaginary friend compensates is compensatory but then in the case of pathological narcissism the imaginary friend consumes the child the child surrenders itself to the imaginary friend sacrifices itself as if the imaginary friend was some form of primitive deity a Moc and this also happens of course in politics where people surrender their autonomy their agency their independent thinking their decision-making capacity they surrender it to an authoritarian figure a strong man or woman a dictator and so initially the shared fantasy is a solipsistic individual Endeavor it starts with a compensatory process where the child invents an imaginary friend bonds with this friend and creates a shared fantasy with this friend this imaginary friend and then when the imaginary frame takes over it deletes it erases the child and the imaginary friend now it's the false self is ready to venture out into the world and find other playmates other children to play with remember that the narcissist is stuck developmentally at the age of two or three is looking for other children to play with and this gives rise to what used to be known as a shared psychotic disorder among the very few things in the fourth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual that I did like was this idea of a shared psychotic disorder it's a disorder in which the essential feature is an identical or similar delusion that develops in an individual who is involved with another individual or individuals this individual who is the originator of the delusion is known as the ucer or the primary case and usually such individual has a psychotic disorder or at least a delusional disorder prominent delusions and the narcissist fits this category narcissistic personality disorder is among other things a delusional disorder and the narcissist is the primary case is the inducer and he recruits other people in into the delusion into the Shar fantasy in a process very similar to Cults where a cult mind a hive mind emerges the shared psychotic disorder can involve as I said many people and or a political party even or a nation state but is most commonly seen in relationships of two or you know two or three so that's why the Shar Psych disorder is just another name for the shared fantasy and used to be known the previous century and the 19th century as F Madness in two in the fifth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual the disorder is not recognized it's not included as a distinct diagnostic entity it is a it is subsumed under delusional disorder and so what used to be called induced psychotic disorder or shared psychotic disorder is now called merely a delusional disorder and I think we have lost a lot of diagnostic finesse diagnostic details in this wrong Act of lumping together everything the same thing can be said about aspel when it was eliminated as a separate diagnosis and subsumed or consumed under level one autism spectrum disorder order this tendency to lump together things is not very helpful because individuals are not statistics each individual is unique anyhow fad is madness in two FIA is madness of the of many people together and there have been two Scholars L and F French Scholars L is l a s e g u e yes I don't know why in French half the letters are not pronounced and similarly is f f a l r and they come up with a syndrome and they call it folami Madness in the family which is essentially just another name for the sh fantasy it preceded the idea of the Shar fantasy but it's another name for shared fantasy so F or F pleas or F when there's Madness that is contagious that is shared by people is considered a psychotic disorder in which two people or more intimately related somehow simultaneously share similar or identical delusions fad means double insanity if you wish and it's the most common form of what used to be called shared psychotic disorder um so shared psychosis Bears such striking similarities to the shared fantasy starting with the fact that both are shared that we may well ask the question is the fantasy in shared fantasy psychotic in nature I mean we could have for example a shared fantasy which is paranoid in nature a shared fantasy which is suicidal in nature suicide packs a shared fantasy which is but could we generalize and say that all shared fantasies must have or do have an a psychotic ingredient what used to be called f adur pleasure and and a Shar delusional disorder sdd um is there some kind of transmission of a delusional belief from one individual to another when the narcissist first contacts makes first contact with a potential Target or victim or intimate partner or call it as you will a participant in the Shar fantasy is there a process of contagion is it like a virus does a narcissist transmit his delusion somehow is a narcissist like patient zero and when you come in touch in contact with the narcissist you get infected and you develop a case of the narcissist sh fantasy the whole thing was first conceptualized in the 19th century in in France inevitably the land of fantasies and one might add the land of psychotic psychotics um the major studies in this about this regarding dissociation and psychosis and so on were conducted in France in the 19th century Freud traveled all the way to study um um to study about this Association from Jan and about hypnosis and other issues from Shao and so so Paris was a a hub of of these kind of studies and charl L and jeul far far I'm sorry um came up with this idea of the l f syndrome and it's just as I said another name for sh psychotic disorder and induced delusional disorder so we agreed that such psychosis with an with an E such coures involve a collusion or a collaboration or a conflation or coalesence of two minds the melding of two minds into a joint mind or a hive mine and this is the core feature of narcissistic uh narcissistic uh sh fantasy and it means that reality testing is impaired when you merge your mind or fuse your mind with another person you take on the reality testing of that other person and if that other person happens to be a narcissist and his contact with reality is compromised his ability to gauge and evaluate reality is impaired it reflects on you and you acquire the same impairment the same disability which is a key feature in the shared fantasy and in shared psychosis and that is precisely what we call delusion um usually the people who develop a shared psychosis or a shared fantasy live together or in close proximity they have continuous contact somehow they may be intimate sexually or emotionally but they definitely in each other's lives usually these people are socially or physically isolated which is exactly why the first order of the day in the Shir fantasy is to isolate the victim or the Target or the intimate partner from her family her her close friends her workplace and Society in general the first thing the narcissist does he isolates you because it is much easier to maintain a shared fantasy or a shared delusion or a shared psychosis when you are socially and physically isolated your immunity is down your defenses are down you have little interaction with other people little corrective input and feedback from other people when you cut off from reality it's easy to play with your mind it's not gaslighting in the psychopathic sense it's not premeditated it's not intentional but it is gaslighting as far as the effects the impacts because your reality your ability to adjudicate when it comes to reality dies you no longer trust yourself you begin to doubt your own sanity over the years it's been 150 years plus there have been various subclassifications of fadu this madness in ton or joint insanity and the question the core question was how is the delusional belief or the delusional narrative communicated how is it transmitted how come two or more people share a common story that is evidently counterfactual not grounded in reality sometimes completely idiotic stupid so people Scholars at the time psychiatrist made a distinction between two types of shared psychosis what they call the F impose and the F simultane the imposed Madness and the simultaneous Madness the imposed Madness is when you have one dominant person and one submissive person the dominant person the primary person the inducer the principal forms a delusion belief because he has a psychotic episode or because he is a conspiracy theorist he has a psychological trait known as conspiracism or for a variety of reasons because he's under stress and he's falling apart or whatever he forms a delusional defense he forms a delusion so now there's a delusional belief and there's a dominant person charismatic and and so on and he imposes it on another person the secondary the acceptor the associate person this other person is described Asad in other words it's not true psychosis it is reflected illness reflected psychosis and so if the parties are admitted for example to mental Asylum separately the delusions in the person with the induced beliefs are typically abandoned when we break the physical contact the communication bridge between the primary inducer and the secondary acceptor the acceptor heals recovers her sanity her reality testing and becomes normal again loses the delusion this is what happens with Cults when we take people out of a cult and we debrief them and this is what happens with victims of narcissistic abuse when they are no longer in the presence of the narcissist and subject to The Narcissist ministrations they wake up they become woke sorry my apologies this is the F impose now the f simultane is the situation where two people considered to uh to be normal initially independently experience psychosis and The psychosis influence them in an identical way the psychosis creates delusional content which is similar very similar or identical so they become replicas or clones of each other strikingly similar um this is difficult to imagine but it happens a lot for example in political movements I'll deal with it a bit later in the video when I discuss Mass psychogenic illness another situation is when you have two people morbidly predisposed to delusional psychosis and they mutually trigger symptoms in each other there's no primary and secondary they're both equal but they trigger each other to develop a common delusion so here there's no dominant partner and when separate the two they retain their delusions they still defend it vehemently and aggressively these are psychiatric outlier conditions not to say Curiosities and delusionality according to current perception is um if the belief if the delusion the belief in question is one not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture end quote from the DSM this is where the shared psychosis comes in shared psychosis is definitely Shar fantasy I'm sorry the shared fantasy is definitely delusional and it's definitely in this sense a form of fully adur a form of shirt psychosis or Shir psychotic disorder um but it contains elements which appear to not be delusional like for example let's plan to get married let's have three children or let's become rich or let's take over the country I mean these are these appear to be programmatic life goals not delusions not delusional that is why the narcissist sh fantasy is so Insidious so subversive because it is a form of shared psychosis it is psychotic it is delusional but it masquerades as normal and that's precisely what hervi keley called The Mask of Sanity you see the shared fantasy its goals its content its direction its purpose its reson Detra they are or ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's Society culture or subculture they are the shoses is the sh fantasy is normative The Narcissist sh fantasy is conformist it's an extension of other people's daydreaming or planning so what makes the shared fantasy psychotic in which sense is it delusional in the sense of grandio it the shared fantasy may contain goals and plans and programs that are perfectly socially acceptable even condoned in this sense it does not appear to be delusional but these goals are grandiose these plans are totally out there The Narcissist does not possess the skills or the education or the capacity or the ability or the or the traits needed to materialize to actualize to realize the shed fantasy and this is where the delusion comes in the narcis is delusional not about The Narrative of the shared fantasy the narcis is delusion delusional and deludes other people about himself he succeeds to communicate his counterfactual inflated fantastic grandio self-concept he succeeds to infect other people to transmit to other people this delusional belief in the narcissist totally crazy self-concept narcissist in other words charismatically or magnetically or whatever you wish to call it succeed to deceive other people to regarding who he is and what he is reasonably capable of not about the shared fantasy which appears to be a platform political platform or romantic uh U plan for romantic uh Escapade or it appears to be normal NIS appears to be completely you know normal member of society but when you delve into the shed fantasy and you ask yourself who is able to realize it is it the narcissist you discover that you've been deceived you've been misled and you've been deluded when it comes to the narcissist personality and his core pathologies um when a large number of people come to believe obviously false and potentially distressing Things based purely on hearsay for example via social media these beliefs are not considered to be clinical delusions by the psychiatric profession and are instead labeled Massy psychogenic illness so I'll come to it in a minute we must make this distinction they are vectors of contagion vectors of infection via social media and mass media and so on that lead to the rise of beliefs that could be patently false and they're distressing and they motivate to action but because they are shared by so many we can't really call them psychotic religion is an example religion is a delusional dis disorder but because it is shared by so many and is so many vectors of dissemination we are forced to accept it as it is and regard it maybe as some kind of mass psychogenic Illness but not a shared psychosis not a shared it's a shared fantasy but not a shared psychosis the extent of type and type of delusions vary there's a spectrum of delusionality but in The Fad in the shared fantasy which is essentially a shared psychosis which is insanity in two the non-dominant person the acceptor the non-dominant person's delusional symptoms resemble reflect mirror the delusional symptoms of the inducer that's a major test of whether two people who share the same values and same beliefs are actually mired in immersed in something that is essentially sick delusional psychotic if the proximity and reflectivity of the two is infinite or exponentially large we are talking probably about the shared psychosis now the inducer typically doesn't realize that they're causing harm or that they are fantasizing and so and this is where the narcissist differs dramatically from the psychopath the psychopath knows what he's doing psychopath is premeditated goal oriented ruthless callous merciless the narcissist is a victim of his own delusions of his own fantasies naris is mentally ill simply he believes that he is helping the second person to become aware of vital or notable information to defel to grow to accomplish goals the narciss is convinced that the sh fantasy is good for the victim is good for the intimate partner elevates her completes her improves her somehow and so he is driven in a way altruistically to coer the intimate partner even more into the delusion and the shared fantasy and to penalize her when she de creates and diverges from the shared fantasy because the shared fantasy is good for her now we know that people who develop shared delusional disorders like shared psychos shared fantasy we know a few things about them people who are socially isolated tend to become dependent on other people on people who they're with so the narcissist isolates his intimate partner gradually incrementally imperceptibly glacially But ultimately the goal is to isolate her it's not a conscious goal but the goal is to isolate her and then she's isolated and she's much more vulnerable and susceptible susceptible to the emergence of a Shar delusion or a shared psychosis that has been established in numerous studies the inducer is able to influence people around him much more so when they're isolated and have have contact only with the inducer additionally people who develop shared delusional disorders don't have other types of social contact other people to remind them that their delusions are either impossible unlikely or manipulative or dangerous and so the treatment for Shar delusion disorder requires the removal the physical removal of the victim or the target from the shared psychosis from the shared fantasy the shared fantasy space common common space is infected it's toxic the air there is different it's another planet cetnik who was an Israeli author um he was as a survivor of aitz when he was called to testify in the ikman trial and he was asked about his experiences in aitz he collapsed on the on the podium he collapsed and he had to be attended to medically and so on but before he did he said that aitz was another planet not on Earth so every shared fantasy is a mini aitz not in the sense not only in the sense that the victim is ultimately exterminated mentally but also in the sense that it has its own inbred rules is isolated from any social contact and within its confines atrocities are normalized and legitimized another factor that we found that contributes to the emergence of shared delusions is stress stress worsens mental illness or even brings it about we know that by now and stress is weaponized within the shared fantasy within the shared psychosis people the majority of people who developed shared delusional disorders are genetically predisposed predisposed to mental illness and also exposed to stress stress is a risk factor for this for these shared disorders when an individual is stress there are physiological impacts adrenal gland adrenal gland effects cortisol I mean we'll not go into it but there are also uh mental outcomes of stress which predispose the individual to developing a calming anxiolytic anxiety reducing delusion and it is one that is a major characteristic of the delusional architecture and delusional Nar narrative that underlies shared psychosis in general and the shared fantasy in particular its calming its parental provides a simulation of a secure base in a safe environment reduces anxiety and inde sense is perceived as benign as good as helpful as wonderful as pleasurable um so stress and social isolation are the weapons the narcis is use in order to induce reduce immunity in his victim or Target and allow him to penetrate their defenses such as they may be and colonize them inhabit them it's a parasitic infestation in many ways um now the statistics are very clear women are more prone to Shared psychosis than men and people who have a slightly above average IQ are more prone to share psychosis than average and and not and less than average IQ people who are isolated from family and friends and social all social contact are definitely vulnerable and people who are in a relationship with a dominant person who has delusions about reality about or about himself in reality they're also typical victims majority of secondary cases people who developed the Shar delusion were infected with the Shar delusion usually majority usually also have dependent personality disorder which is the correct diagnosis codependency is not a clinical term it's a it's medy the correct term is dependent Personality Disorder so people who are coll known as codependents they're much more susceptible to the suggestion of let us share a fantasy you know it's going to be fun they're much more susceptible to this and they have a pervasive fear that leads them to need constant reassurance support and guidance and in this sense people with borderline personality disord similarly are subjected to the twin anxieties separation insecurity also known as abandonment anxiety or separation anxiety and engulfment anxiety an anxious people anxious people are natural prey to the narcissistic Predator who is about to establish or start a new shared fantasy anxiety is a great breeding ground for this 55% of secondary cases had a relative with a with a psychiatric disorder and that relative usually had delusions you could see either some hereditary genetic component at play or maybe contagion social contagion okay I would like to um move on to mass psychogenic illness now this has had many names throughout history m sociogenic illness Mass psychogenic disorder epidemic hysteria Mass hysteria etc etc ET it is simply the spread of delusional illness symptoms through a whole population where there is no particular infectious agent responsible for the contagion or there is someone who is a leader charismatic and so on and the delusion eminates from him and infects whole populations the rapid spread of the illness the signs and symptoms of illness is the basic Hallmark of M psychogenic illness the members are affected instantly almost instantly the speed of communication and they form a cohesive group it's as if the delusion is like a glue super glue and everyone becomes all the members become a single organism a hive mind a mob mind a mass mass psychosis M delusion many scholars have written about this and so we have studied people in the throws of mass psychogenic illness and we discovered pretty conclusive neurological impacts excitation loss of function alter ation of functions physical complaints were very common um complaints that had no organic causes and were definitely results of anxiety or or stress um Mass psychogenic illness is one type of a family one member of a family of collective or mass delusions and it is characterized by physical symptoms symptoms that have no plausible organic basis symptoms that are transient and benign symptoms with rapid onset and Recovery occurrence in a segregated group the presence of extraordinary anxiety symptoms that are spread via side sound or oral communication and a spread that moves down the age scale beginning with older people higher status people and it's a trickled down thing but as I said this is one member of a whole family of collective delusionality in populations the British atrist Simon Wesley distinguished two forms of mass psychogenic illness the mass anx mass anxiety hysteria and he said that it consists of episodes of acute anxiety occurring mainly in school children prior attension is absent and the rapid spread is by visual contact and he also identified Mass motor hysteria consisting of abnormalities in motor Behavior it occurs in any age group and prior tension is present initial cases can be identified and the spread is gradual the outbreak may be prolonged so there are outbreaks of mass hysteria that involve the body the shared fantasy could be could devolve into something like this victims of narcissistic abuse within the narcissist Shir fantasy often describe a multiplicity Monopoly of physical symptoms it's clearly a very powerful physiological neurological neurobiological physical Dimension to the shared fantasy it's not only a narrative it's not only a delusion it's not only uh uh cult it's not only this there is some weaponization of the target of victim's body against the victim there's some alienation some estrangement between the victim and her body the body keeps the score the DSM does not have a d a diagnosis for this condition but there is something known as conversion disorder and strangely you can find in the DSM the following paragraph in in epidemic hysteria shared symptoms develop in a circumscribed group of people following exposure to Common precipitant so many scholars have observed that this Collective hysteria or mass hysteria is more typical among children in adolescence they are the most affected groups but but there's been a considerable body of scholarship later scholarship that demonstrated that [Music] women sorry that women are also disproportionately affected which is where the narcissist comes in at least the male narcissist comes in when could generalize and say that the male narcissist uses women as targets as victims as intimate Partners as participants in the sh fantasy and these women are impacted by the delusionality of the Shar Fantasy by virtue of being women nothing else the female narcissist chooses men for the shared fantasy who are mentally ill to start with have some mental health issues to start with as socially isolated and highly stressed and anxious in same seex situations the members of the couple are assigned masculine and feminine roles and the same rules apply there is a hypothesis that people prone to extraversion or neuroticism and people with low IQ scores are more likely to be affected in the outbreak of of hysterical epidemia epidemy but there's no research that supports this balom and Wesley um state that it seems clear that there is no particular predisposition to mass sociogenic illness and it is a behavioral reaction that anyone can show in the right circumstances clearly though the main vectors are media traditional media mainstream media social media media they're the main vectors studies found that the more a delusion is covered in the media the more it is discussed the more it is even debated the more it is contradicted the more it is attacked the more exposure it gets negative or positive the more likely it is to spread and there are even recurrences of the same delusion the same uh illness so you could have a delusion it's debunked goes away and it raises its ugly head a few years later John Walker suggests that um once it is determined that the illness is psychogenic uh it should be considered differently should not be considered as typical classical illness okay um there is a close Affinity when we talk about impacts because the shared fantasy is delusional and psychotic on the one hand and on the other hand creates a narrative space that is self-containing and allinclusive and that isolates the victim there is an affinity between this and for example terrorism it's an act of Terror in effect because it modifies cognitions emotions and behaviors using implicit or explicit fear fear is a main motivation and Driver in the Shar fantasy fear of loss fear of consequences fear is always there in the air and it is denied the trauma there involves denial silencing it's a betrayal trauma in a way the victim or the target is not allowed to verbalize or even to recognize what's happening to her if she complains of anything of for example of being afraid walking on eggshells and so on she's penalized and punished heavily or she's invalidated her claims are doubted her very sanity is at stake um and so the shed fantasy is something very very serious it's not merely role playing it's not merely okay let's have fun it's it's a factory it's a factory for manufacturing Madness in other people it's a breeding ground for Insanity it is induced psychosis and the terror that goes with losing control over one's faculties and Destiny it is an external locus of control taken to extreme so there's a total loss of agency there's a regression to infancy where the dependency of the baby on the mother is so complete that the baby has to lie to itself the moral defense falsify things split them go crazy basically just in order to survive okay I promise you a small discourse about mirror neurons I refer you to the book The Myth of miror neurons by Gregory Hickok hi CK o c so there is initially there was a huge excitement when Mir neurons were first reported as a discovery but ever since then there are growing doubts about this construct among very very serious neuroscientists we're not talking about Fringe movement the consensus today is that the importance of mirror neurons has been widely exagger wildly exaggerated that they're not as important as they were claimed to be even their functions are contested scientists such as Hickok the forementioned Hickok pascolo denstein others uh they say it's not clear that miror neurons exist even clear that there is a class of cells a distinct class of cells that react in a highly specific way to observations of other people actions and so on they say that mirroring in neurons is an occasional phenomenon that it is seen in cells that have other functions as well there's no such thing as a specific type of cell called miror neurons there's a debate about mirror activity is it a distinct type of response or is it simply an artifact of an overall facilitation of the motor system like when you see someone moving in a certain way you want to imitate them you almost move the same way so is mirroring just an artifact of this in 2008 Elan denstein and others argued that the original analysis which gave rise to the discovery of miror neurons are unconvincing because they were based on qualitative descriptions of individual sell properties they did not take into account the small number of strongly mirror selective neurons in motor areas other scientists argue that the measurements of neuron fire delay are not compatible with standard reaction times something is all right here something strange in all these measurements they pointed out that nobody has reported that an interruption of motor areas produces a decrease in action recognition for example and so the debate rages on uh there are reports of disruption of these areas that cause action deficits without affecting other kinds of perception so maybe it's not the motor parts no one knows exactly 16 years ago uh link now and and his colleagues carried out an experiment and they compared motor acts that were first observed and then executed to motor acts that were first executed and then observed and they concluded that there was a significant asymmetry between the two processes that indicated that neur mirror neurons do not exist in humans they stated I'm quoting crucially we found no signs of adaptation for motor acts that were first executed and then observed failure to find cross model adaptation for executed and observed motor Acts is not compatible with a core Assumption of mirror neuron Theory which holds that action recognition and understanding are based on motor simulation the same year 2009 Kleiner and his colleague showed that if goal directed actions are used to stimuli certain regions show the repetition separation between observation and execution that is predicted by mirror neuron Theory same year Gregor Greg Hickok published an extensive argument against the claim that miror neurons are involved in action understanding it was titled eight problems for the miror neuron theory of action understanding in monkeys and humans and then he went on to publish his magisterial book recently which I quoted at the beginning it's a stunning book having read it I pretty convinced there are no such there's no such thing as miror n he he concluded in his 2009 article hiok said the early hypothesis that these cells underly action understanding is likewise an interesting and Prima fasi reasonable ID however despite its widespread acceptance the proposal has never been adequately tested in monkeys and in humans there is strong empirical evidence in the form of physiological and neuros pychological double associations against the claim so miror neurons are are doubted strongly Vladimir kosov said that um the proponents of miror neuron theory of action understanding postulate that miror neurons code the goals of other people's actions because they're activated if the Observer action is good directed if the observed action is somehow goal oriented for example someone you see someone reaching out to pick up something that's goal oriented action and then the mirror neurons activated and they code they code this goal of picking up something and this way you make sense of the action there is action understanding however the mirror neurons activated only when the observed action is goal oriented object directed action or a communicative G gesture which has a goal as well so not always not in all cases how do mirror neurons know asks kogo how do they know that the definite action is God directed who told them at what stage of the activation do they detect a goal of the movement or its absence so if I reach towards a shelf and then I don't pick up anything I don't do anything how do miror neurons know what would be the end end result of this movement how could they tell in cogo's opinion the mirror neuron system can be activated only after the goal of the obser the goal of the observed action is indicated attributed detected by some other brain structure in other words it's not the outside action the observation of the outside action that triggers neuron neurons it's another part of the brain that triggers neur neurons and that changes the whole picture of course it's not an empathy simulation thing neurop philosophers such as Patricia churchin Express both scientific and philosophical objection to the miror neuron Theory she said they can't be responsible for understanding the intentions of others in 2011 um she wrote a book called Brain Trust and she pointed out that the claim that miror neurons are involved in understanding intentions through simulating observed actions is based on assumptions that are clouded by unresolved philosophical issues for example cause and effect correlation is not causation and so on she makes the argument that intentions are understood coded at a more complex level of neural activity than that of individual neur neurons whole populations participate chesin states that a neuron though computationally complex it's just a neuron it is not an intelligent homus uh human being if a neural network represents something complex such as an intention it must have the right input and be in the right place in the neural circuitry to do that Cecilia Hayes Advanced a theory that mural neurons are the byproduct of associative learning as opposed to evolutionary adaptation Hayes argues that miror neurons in humans are the product of social interaction not an evolutionary adaptation for Action understanding so it's a relational thing kind of it's activated by social interactions hay rejects the theory Advanced by ramachandran that miror neurons have been the driving force behind the great Great Leap Forward in human evolution a grandio claim if I have ever heard one so we've come full circum from the brain to the brain and in between we visited the territory the dark and penumbral territory of The Psychotic super structure and infrastructure of the N is Shir fantasy and what this does to you when you're in it