So, I've been speaking with Ian Hughes, he's the author of a book in process, Imperfect Design about psychopaths, narcissists and paranoids. His website is disorderedworld.com and we're talking now about narcissists and paranoids and what they are. Go.
I.H.: Well narcissistic personality disorder is, people with narcissistic personality disorder see the world as belong to them and again this is both, this is a cognitive and an emotional disorder so in terms of their cognitive disorder, they really see things that, I guess the best way to describe this, I'll take a step back as they say, for most of history we've lived in societies that have been hierarchical so there have been princes and kings or high priests and so forth and it's only in relatively recent times that the idea of equality have begun to break through and I would say that's very much from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the social changes that have come about from that and most people can at least conceive of the idea of equality.
They can at least conceive of the idea that you are as entitled to something as I am and that you should be treated roughly the same and the same way as I am. People with narcissistic personality are only able to conceive of the idea of equality. For them they are always right. They are entitled more than you are and it's a fixed, as in all personality disorders, this is a fixed attitude and a fixed way of behaving so in discussions, I think narcissistic personality disorder, people will probably come across them quite frequently. And again it's a cognitive disorder also because of the way people think.
So with narcissistic personalty disorder, in a conversation, the narcissist's primary aim is to defeat you in the conversation. So if you're having a conversation or discussion with them, it isn't so important to them that they stick to a particular point, they can change their point, shift their point of view, as long as at the end of the conversation they have defeated you and proved that they are more important than you are, are more intelligent than you are.
So narcissistic personality disorders they are people who really are incapable of conceiving of the idea of equality. That has a huge implication if these people are running democracies or these people are in charge of societies or in charge of trying to you know, distributing goods and so forth. Paranoid personality disorder, in the same way that narcissists are unable to conceive of the idea of equality, people with paranoid personality disorder are only able to conceive of other people as anything other than a threat.
So in every interaction they will be looking to see what is it that you're trying to do to harm them and they'll be constantly hyper-attentitive, constantly super suspicious and if you try to persuade them otherwise then you are likely to become under suspicion yourself. So both of these disorders again if we go back to Freud and we go back to human development and personality development during the life course, both of these disorders are almost a frozen type of personality from childhood.
Now you can imagine as Freud said we all go through a narcissistic phase where we are the most important thing in the world and all of our needs should be met and so forth, most of us grew out of that. Similarly in paranoid personality disorder, that's at a very early stage, children at a very young age have what, what would psychologists call it? There's a, paranoid state of mind and a, what they call a depressive state of mind and the paranoid state of mind a baby is very hyper-attentive and very afraid of its environment. In a depressive state of mind they're more able to relax and be able to take in their surroundings.
R.K.: Okay so let me just recap a couple of things. There are a couple of things in your book that I would just like you to at least point out or go over. So what you're saying is narcissists and paranoids, at least those two personality disorders, they are p0eople who got stuck in early stages of child development and never grew up to be full people.
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