Daniel Shaw: What is Narcissism, Victim Process, How it Develops, Cults, Tea Party, Bush, Clinton"

Thanks to Tsara Shelton for help with transcript editing.

Rob: Welcome to Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township reaching Metro Philly and South Jersey. Sponsored by opednews.com. My guest tonight is Daniel Shaw. Daniel Shaw LCSW is a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist practicing in NY City and Nyack, NY. He is a training analyst, teacher and supervisor of analytic candidates at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in NY City. I've brought him on to the Bottom-up Radio show because he's written a book, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, which I believe helps us to better understand two of the major topics I cover-- top-down domination and the effects of psychopaths and related pathological people on our culture and on individuals. His website is danielshawlcsw.com. Welcome to the show Dan.

DS: Thank you Rob, nice to be here.

Rob: So let's get started with the basics. What is narcissism? And why call it traumatic narcissism instead of malignant narcissism as others have described it?

DS: Okay, good question. Well let's start with narcissism. In the psycho analytic world which is where narcissism first was introduced by Freud you know, over a hundred years ago by now. The narcissism has come to stand for a lot of things. If you talk about a person's healthy narcissism you're talking about their self-esteem and whether it's strong enough for them to be somewhat perseverant and able to be productive and creative. When we commonly speak of narcissism, I think what we really mean by it is vanity, self-centeredness, ego mania. Now that is one way of thinking about narcissism and it's valid, but the psychoanalytic way of thinking about it makes it more complicated. What it suggests is that grandiosity and exhibitionism is a natural developmental stage that you can see in your kids. You know my kids, I've got the little girl that wanted to be this ballerina or gymnasts. And I had the little boy that wanted to be Tarzan, like in the Disney version. So of course they go around showing off and acting out and, it's cute. It's their grandiose and exhibitionistic tendencies. It's when these tendencies get responded to inefficiently and with hostility or with suppression that the tendency to want to dominate and control gets stronger and stronger. And that happens developmentally. And then when we see that in adults we're seeing narcissism as it's come to be known more popularly. We're seeing that show off, vain, self-centered, all about me kind of attitude. And for the most part I would say that this is prevalent in a fairly broad way. You know most people will say they've worked with somebody, had a boss that was like that or dated somebody who was like that. Right? Why I've called it traumatic is because I've wanted to isolate and really talk about a deeper and more malignant kind of narcissist. Now you mention that previously there's been a term, malignant narcissism, right. I believe Eric Fromm probably introduced that somewhere in the 60's. And Eric Fromm was a psychoanalyst and a psychologist. Very interested in authoritarianism. You know, he came from the Frankfort school of critical theory. He developed his own ideas and his very popular books back in the 60's and 70's. And malignant narcissism for him stood for how to, well basically it was a way for him to explain dictators, tyrants, political insanely tyrannical people like Stalin, Hitler, and so on. And of course he saw all of that unfold in his lifetime during World War Two and after. So malignant narcissists would be leaders, in many cases leaders of nations, who sought to conquer and dominate and control and, of course, pillage and plunder other nations. And on a more micro level, the malignant narcissist could be a boss, could be a family member, could be a friend or a lover, or a partner. So I come in and I talk about traumatic narcissism. The reason for that, I'm sorry to be long winded but I hope that answers the question thoroughly enough. The reason I'm calling it traumatic narcissism is that I want to emphasis that there are victims of these narcissists on many levels. From the microcosm to the macrocosm. Whether it's a child being brought up by a parent who's traumatizing and narcissistic, or whether it's people living in the country ruled by a traumatizing narcissist. And those people, for example, live in North Korea. So you know, it goes the whole spectrum of human experience. It's possible to experience this kind of trauma at the hands of certain kinds of narcissists. And what I'm talking about as traumatic is subjugation, to put it most simply. And by subjugation I'm specifically referring, in this case, to a psycho- psychological kind of subjugation. Subjugation that means that a person's unique subjectivity is attacked. It's attacked and diminished and weakened so that the attacker can replace it with their own subjectivity. This, the attacker doesn't want anybody else to have their own point of view because they only want their point of view to be the valid one. And if they need to attack and destroy others to get them to submit, to be subjugated, they will do so. So you see this kind of traumatizing narcissist. Well my personal experience of this was most vivid for me during the time that I followed a guru whom I no longer follow and haven't for about twenty years. And, well that's a whole other story we can get into. So I hope that sets the stage for the, kind of spells out the basics.

Rob: Okay. So you use the term subjectivity and in your book you talk about intersubjectivity. It's an important concept in your model, can you describe it in a little more detail?

DS: Oh, yeah sure. I think of subjectivity as a way of describing the experience of being a subject. You know we can experience ourselves as our own self or we can experience ourselves as the object of another. So most of us are familiar with the idea of objectification. Certainly feminism has brought a great deal of attention to the way that women are objectified. Made into shiny attractive objects almost like commodities. Well, not just women but men can do very much the same. We can objectify ourselves. We can, or we can be objectified. And I don't just mean sexualized. It's much broader than that. For example, many people are familiar with Alice Miller's book, The Drama of the Gifted Child. She spells it out pretty well, that a narcissistic parent uses their child as their object. They want that child to gratify them. And they want to punish the child for developing their own sense of self, because it doesn't cater to them, the parent, the narcissist parent. So that child is made to experience herself as the object of the parent. She is meant to be the object of the parent's desires and needs and expectations. And if she fails to live up to the parent's need for gratification, she is punished. So her subjectivity is what gets punished. Her selfness, her being her own self. So that's what I mean by subjectivity. Subjectivity is the experience of having your own point of view. Of being a sense, of having a sense of yourself as a person in your own right and not as somebody owned by or objectified by somebody else. Now, intersubjectivity describes in the model I use a particular way of being in relationship. This is a model developed most fully by the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin. In the, in intersubjective relatedness, two people are relating to each other as separate individual people. They are not trying to dominate and control each other. Or one is not submitting to the other's domination. They are meeting each other as equals, as separate individual subjects who then can negotiate difference and sameness in a respectful way. Another way to think about that is the I-thou relationship that Martin Buber spoke of. There are many other thinkers who look at this kind of relationship, subject to subject. I am a separate subject in my own right and so are you and we're going to interact and relate, keeping that in mind. Now the lack of intersubjectivity in relationships is, as I see it, a failure of intersubjectivity, a breakdown of relatedness in the sense of subject to object. And here somebody has to hold the hot potato and be the object of the other. In relationships you might see this as a battle, a power struggle where one person is trying to get the other person to submit to them and it goes up and down like a see-saw. First you're up, then you're down. But there's only two positions there, there's only up or down. There can't be a third way in which there's equal equality and democracy in the relationship. So naturally in a country like North Korea let's say, that's a good example, it's the most horrifying example we have on the planet I guess, although there are of course many others. You know, there is a whole society meant to be subjugated to the leadership and in the particular leader who, of course, comprises a body of elites. And they are meant to feel themselves to be the object of that person. That leader in that country is the only self that's legitimate. Everybody else's self needs to comply and submit to that one. And that makes them the object of the leader. Okay, so I hope that makes sense. It's important to me because I had to struggle with understanding the relationship I had gotten into when I followed a guru in which I completely subjugated myself. And of course I was invited to do so by the guru in this group. And so were all the followers. So I had to figure out what had happened to me. Well I, one way that's helped me to understand it, is to see that I had tried to make myself the perfect object for this guru so that I would be approved of, I would feel legitimate. I had given them all legitimacy and them the power to.

Rob: We're going to get into that, but I wanted to take it a little slower there.

DS: Okay, Rob, no problem.

Rob: Your story about your experience in a cult is fascinating and important to discuss, but I just want to get some more basics together first.

DS: Sure just jump in anytime, stop me whenever.

Rob: When you talk about subjectivity and intersubjectivity, you're talking about a person being able to express who they are in a free and unchallenged, not unchallenged but in a healthy way. That's basically what it is, right?

DS: It's a negotiable relationship as opposed to a non-negotiable relationship. That's another way to look at it.

Rob: And when somebody is in a relationship, whether it's a parent or a partner or an employer where the one person is a traumatic narcissist, that traumatic narcissist basically controls the other person and totally squelches any attempts to express an idea or feelings or needs. And if the person does, you've written, and you describe it in your book how the traumatizing narcissist actually inflicts guilt and shame on the person as though just having normal healthy needs is totally selfish and inappropriate.

DS: Yes, exactly. Exactly. There's a, the narcissist. One way of thinking about narcissism is to think of it in terms of the need to maintain a constant intense sense of superiority over everyone and everything. A sense of total superiority. And in order for, and you know to feel as though you are superior to all others is delusional. It's actually psychotic. It's not reality. Nobody is perfect and nobody is superior to everyone else. But the narcissist literally is obsessed with maintaining a sense of their own perfection. And in order to do that, since that's already a delusional aspiration, they have to prove that everybody else is inferior. And in order to prove that everyone, but they also need everybody to prove to them that they are superior. So in order to get everybody to feel that they're inferior, let's say I'm the traumatizing narcissist, I need everyone to feel inferior to me, but I also need them to verify that I'm superior. So what do I need to do, I need to get them to recognize me as potentially lifting them up out of their inferiority and granting them superiority because I confer it on them. Does that make sense?

Rob: So it's not just that they have to make people feel inferior, but they have to get people to express and proclaim that this traumatizing narcissist is wonderful, and helping them to become better people.

DS: Yes. Absolutely.

Rob: And what you said in your book is that part of the delusional system of the traumatizing narcissist is they feel that they are helping everybody else and they are a gift to everybody else and that they are literally, if in any way challenged, their wonderfulness is being challenged and it threatens their ability to help the world.

DS: Yes exactly. They have superior knowledge, superior thinking, and to challenge them in any way is always viewed as an attack, and a malicious kind of attack, so that any kind of challenge that they. So actually the traumatizing narcissist creates a bubble in which they are protected by adulating followers. And they create this bubble so that they can maintain the sense of superiority and immediately dismiss any kind of critic. And they dismiss critics by discrediting them. So if you want to stay in the orbit of this traumatizing narcissist, you better fall in line, you better be subordinate, you better subjugate yourself because if you try to, you know, show your individuality or have any kind of deviation or criticism, you will be shown to be absolutely discredited. And it's like shunning or ostracism, you know. You dare to deviate, that's it you're out, shunned, ostracized. You know you this when, if I can just throw in a little, a quick anecdote. I know somebody who's kid married this lovely woman, but the woman's parents are extremely fundamentalist, Christian and very right-wing conservative. The kids are not. And so this woman was visiting these parents and they started really complaining about how much money people on welfare were collecting and what a disgrace and scandal it is. So this woman goes online and says well, you know, your numbers are all wrong, it's actually quite a bit less than what you're saying. And the response is, oh, well you got that off of the internet, that's just full of lies. So, you know, facts are immediately disputed and dismissed if they don't coincide with the traumatizing narcissist's position, with his or her ideology. And there's a way to discredit and disenfranchise anybody who deviates or criticizes.

Rob: Okay, so my understanding is most psychopaths or sociopaths also manifest narcissistic tendencies. The need to control, dominate, feel superior. How are narcissists different from psychopaths?

DS: Okay, well, again a good question. Psychopathy, the psychopathic personality disorder, is looked as, looked on as a separate personality disorder from narcissistic personality disorder. And there are a number of other personality disorders which, medically speaking, are psychiatric illnesses that are called axis 2 psychiatric diagnoses, okay. Now these personality disorders are fascinating. If you read somebody's book, for example Lawrence Joseph's book on character, you know, you get these amazing portraits of people who represent the different personality disorders, right. Well, one of the big experts in the, this area on narcissism was Otto Kernberg, still alive. And Kernberg's point was that you can look at different personality disorders, but all of them have a sort of underlying narcissism involved. So I agree with that. What you see with psychopaths is that they engage in criminal behavior and they feel justified and they rationalize justifications for that behavior. They are very much like narcissists, however traumatizing narcissists, in my view, and this is maybe an arbitrary distinction that I make, but I make it anyway because traumatizing narcissists may very well have psychopathic tendencies, but they may tend to really carefully find ways not to break the law. And well, I guess I'll give some of my leanings away here, I would say that the people who wrote the laws that said that it was okay to torture during, you know after 9/11 were flirting with psychopathology, flirting with psychopathy is the way we say it, flirting with that, but they're using the legal system to cover it. So those kinds of people who don't, who find a way not to be breaking the law in order to get what they want and exploit others and subjugate others, those people are in my category, traumatizing narcissists. The psychopath really actually just breaks laws period, and does so.

Rob: That's interesting. Because I've done a lot interviews about psychopaths. And one concept about psychopathy from Scott Lilienfeld, when I interviewed him, he's the president of the society for the study of psychopathy, is the idea of the successful psychopath. And that's the one who operates without getting arrested, without getting caught, without blatantly violating crimes.

DS: Yeah, well the personality disorders are useful in that they gather together all kinds of personality traits and they show that there are structures, personality structures that are common among different groups. And yet, most of us who work in this area recognize that these disorders often, these personality clusters, let's say, these clusters of characteristics, that they often overlap. For example, an obsessive compulsive personality disordered person is often also quite narcissistic, as is a psychopath. And you know, for my way of thinking, and this is again, this is not this---

Rob: We have lost the sound and I'm hoping once he figures it out he will call back in, this happens every now and then. What I do is try to fill the air time with a little bit of ideas and information here. So the book by Daniel Shaw is titled Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. Subjugation. And what's important here is his model is based on the idea that narcissism is manifested within relationships. It's not like somebody just does it all on their own. He focuses on people in relationships, primarily parents. And what's fascinating to me is the idea that this can get passed on from generation to generation. Some people who are victims of traumatic narcissists become traumatic narcissists and some become the victims in a different tacit, more passive kind of way. Where they quell and quench their feelings, and don't have any feelings. They don't allow themselves to have hope of having relationships of feeling good of feeling love, it's really a kind of a vampirish kind of a thing to be a traumatic narcissist. Sucking the life out of a person, demanding that the person give all caring and concern to the narcissist. And if the person expresses concern or caring or needs of their own, they are shamed and belittled and demeaned. This is a real challenge that is faced. So I'm hoping that Dan will call in in a minute, if he doesn't then I'll probably have to call him in myself. What's really kind of courageous of Daniel Shaw is he even talks about how narcissism can happen within the psychoanalytic relations. You're back.

DS: Hey Rob, I called back in, are we back on?

Rob: We're on, I've been kind of giving some overview of what you said in your book. So we can pick up where you left off.

DS: Okay.

Rob: The last thing you were saying is that there are personality clusters where the characteristics often overlap, like an obsessive compulsive person can often be narcissistic.

DS: Exactly.

Rob: What are the other diagnosis or categories within that axis 2?

DS: Yeah, I can try to get all of them, I'm not in front of all my texts but you know not in any particular order, there's the narcissistic personality, obsessive compulsive personality, the psychopathic personality. This was also known as the sociopathic personality. There's the avoidant personality. Schizotypal personality. What did I leave out, I'm sure there's something I left out there.

Rob: Borderline.

DS: Hysterical. Borderline personality, that's one of the most popular. Hysterical personality or schizoid. I'm sorry, schizoid and avoidant are often mixed together. And hysterical or histrionic are mixed together. Some of these personality disorders, in my view, reflect what's called iatrogenic cultural circumstances. Meaning that the culture itself can create this kind of disorder. Dependent personality for example, strikes me as a pre-Betty Friedan kind of description of women who were expect to really subordinate themselves to the male breadwinner. And to really just make their lives about keeping that husband happy. That dependent personality seems to, in some ways, reflect some pathology in the culture. And the same with histrionic or hysterical, back in Freud's day, women were often the sexual traumatized as children as they continue to be today, and they would then develop historical symptoms as they became older. Hysterical symptoms being like a pseudo paralysis of a limb or pseudo paralysis of speech. Freud's' method was to get them to just talk and talk and talk and one of his patients called it chimney sweeping. And then the symptoms disappeared because they were able to talk about what was beneath them. But until they had been able to do that, they were thought of as hysterical or histrionic. So you know at the time, in Freud's time, he initially considered trauma as the basis for this kind of disorder. But then he later rejected that idea, unfortunately. Because in fact today, most psychotherapists, even strict Freudians recognize trauma as the basis, traumatic developmental experience in relationship to traumatizing parents, or significant others, is recognized as the basis of these kinds of personality disorders. Now at the same time there's, I'm sorry Rob, just one more thought. At the same time there's likely to be a biological component in many of them which is of course mysterious and hard to pin down in terms of specific brain function or chemistry, but that's generally how it's viewed, that both environment and biology play a role.

Rob: I can clearly see that. I did an interview recently with a neuroscientist who wrote a book about discovering by looking at his brain maps that his brains maps looked just like those of psychopaths. And he went on to learn about all the 50 plus different genetic markers that can contribute to a person being a psychopath. I would assume that there are similar markers that are factors associated with narcissism as well.

DS: Yes, I'm sure.

Rob: But you talk about this idea of that the traumatizing narcissist basically doesn't recognize that the person that they're in the relationship with, as a person. And you say--

DS: Right.

Rob: The trauma of Inaudible neurecognition could lead one to desperately lead to connection through subjugation, and self-objectification. Or unrecognition could lead one to hyper idealize oneself and hold others in contempt. Now this is where I'm leading is, the victims of traumatic narcissists can either turn into traumatic narcissists or they can become victims who basically develop, go into relationships with traumatic narcissists that they find where they become subjugated and dominated. Is that correct?

DS: Right. Yes that's exactly my point. That while there may be other fates that are possible for people who have been raised and primarily developmentally exposed to traumatizing narcissism, traumatic narcissism, there may be other fates. But two that are very common are either, as you say, to replicate and internalize the traumatic narcissism and then go ahead and bring that out in yourself in a way where you become that to others, you subjugate others. And I've seen this often enough, or I've heard about often enough, many of the people I see in my psychotherapy practice will describe a couple of generations of narcissistic caregivers. Parents and grandparents. And in some cases the parents might be much better than the grandparent was, less traumatizing, or as traumatizing or more traumatizing. By the time somebody comes to talk to a therapist, it's usually because they've been pretty traumatized and they can't figure it out. It's not so much these narcissists that come to therapy. They think they're fine. They like how, they like who they are, they like how they are, that don't see a problem. And maybe they'll come because you know, they'll come for one reason or another but typically not because they need to change and grow, they'll come because they want to, the therapist to validate them and tell them they're right. The victim of the narcissist is the one who shows up. So then, right. Developmentally being exposed to that kind of traumatic narcissism you could, you can internalize it and replicate it, or you could become that person who is likely to get themselves into relationships in which they end up being subjugated and subjugating themselves. That's the basic concept there.

Rob: Now, this, you describe how if a person gets into therapy. First of all, you basically said that a traumatizing narcissist isn't going to respond to therapy.

DS: Typically not. Right.

Rob: Because you're going to challenge them, you're going to question their perfection and challenge their delusions of superiority basically.

DS: Sure, exactly. And that will just lead them to believe that the therapist is an idiot who doesn't know anything. And they'll sometimes just tell you that right out.

Rob: So does that mean that a traumatizing narcissist is not really, is one of those categories where therapy can not touch them?

DS: Well I won't say can not, categorically can not touch them. Because I do believe that there are, you know, this personality exists on a spectrum. And there's worst case scenario traumatizing narcissists and then there's traumatizing narcissists who maybe is not so irredeemable. Who might concede that they have, you know, underestimated someone or been unkind or belittling to somebody. So, you know, I would say that those people way down on the lower end of the spectrum are more treatable and that the higher up on that spectrum you go, the less treatable you're going to be. For example, nobody is every going to imagine having any of the dictators of the 20th on the analysts couch. They're not going to show up on that couch, right? You know, that's just not who they are. Whereas all the traumatized people who survived the reign of terror of these guys, most of them are living in a post-traumatic stress universe, which is intergenerationaly transmitted. So you see, yeah. The traumatizing narcissists at the far end of the spectrum, no they're not really treatable.

Rob: Well, let's say, you just said that the victims are living in a post-traumatic stress universe, and that this can go on for generations. I mean we've got a world--

DS: How does it go on for generations?

Rob: No you said, it seems pretty clear to me how it goes on.

DS: Right, right.

Rob: You've got this way that traumatizing narcissists produces someone who goes into a relationship with another traumatizing narcissist as a subjugated object, or you have a victim who becomes another traumatizing narcissist. And I would imagine that the person who goes in as a child of a traumatizing narcissist, who has grown up as an object without the ability to express and experience subjectivity, that person empowers and strengthens the traumatizing narcissist who he or she goes into a relationship with.

DS: Absolutely, that becomes the thing that they're good at. Is making that other person feel good, and they'll get into that relationship on that basis. But it's unsustainable in the long run, unless the subjugated person, in their own way. Oh I'm not sure what that noise is. Okay I may be running out of battery on this phone. And what I'm going to do is call in on my other line. I'll be right back.

Rob: Put it on hold and we'll wait for you. Go ahead.

DS: Okay, thanks.

Rob: Alright so he's hanging up and he's going to call back in one more time. So, this book is incredibly powerful. And I strongly recommend you take a look at it. It's written as a part of a series of books for psychoanalysts and people in psychoanalytical training, so there's a lot of jargon that is aimed at psychoanalysts. That's okay. It is digestible. I guess I have a little more experience with that because I have a degree in counseling. But this is just so, I kept thinking, oh, I've read enough of this book to get an idea of what's going on, and then I just delve into the next chapter and it is just powerful stuff. I was, hello.

DS: Hi Rob, I'm back.

Rob: I was giving your book accolades.

DS: Thank you, appreciate that.

Rob: So I want to get into one thing, just to continue where we were. You describe how when a victim goes into therapy, they have experienced a long trajectory of failed attempts at connection and a painfully broken and un-repaired connections. Now I have a couple thoughts about that. One is, the whole concept of attachment theory and attachment disorder. How does this fit in with attachment theory and attachment disorder?

DS: Well it completely fits. Of course, the language of attachment theory and disorders is specific, it's a specific vocabulary. It's very useful vocabulary. I have tremendous respect for that work. I personally speak in a slightly vocabulary. Somewhat more along the lines of trauma theory. Okay, but these vocabularies are useful ways of communicating to some extent. And in some ways maybe they put a barrier, so let me try to just say that a disorganized or insecure attachments, or an attachment disorder, reflects a traumatic rupture of the bond in development. So for whatever reason, but you see there are many kinds of ways that an attachment bond can be ruptured. You know, for example, the pre-mature death of a caregiver. Now you know this is not a traumatizing narcissist, this is a caregiver who may have been a wonderful caregiver but who dies pre-maturely. Now that's likely to create a certain kind of disturbance in the person's stability around attachment. The stronger the bond had been previously, the more that person will have internalized the strong, secure sense of self and sense of attachment. But if this pre-mature loss happens very early, well that may, in fact, be very disruptive to the security of attachment.

Rob: Well let's talk about - go ahead.

DS: No, you go ahead.

Rob: Let's talk about the traumatic narcissist in terms of very early attachment development. What does a traumatic narcissist look like in raising an infant?

DS: Well there's again going to be a range from subtle to gross, okay. So let's start with gross. Well the traumatizing narcissist immediately resents the infant because the infant is needy, and the infant is therefore being ungrateful and selfish. And the traumatizing narcissist parent lets it be known to the infant that their needs are selfish and greedy and they should be ashamed. They should be ashamed of themselves for needing to be fed, needing to be held, needing to be loved. That's the most extreme kind of example. And that can be communicated verbally and/or nonverbally, okay. So this is subtle. It's why infant research is so fascinating these days and has been for a while now because they can watch these interactions and break it down frame by frame to see that infants are related, from the get go, and they're looking to attach, they're looking to feel secure, and that there are many many little micro ruptures that occur. And some caregivers know how to jump right into and repair those little micro ruptures, so that the overall sense is one of security. And other caregivers create rupture after rupture after rupture, and so the child basically gives up or just becomes impossible to console. So you know, there are different kinds of personalities that could, in a caregiver that could cause different kinds of ruptures. But the narcissist specifically, you know, the narcissist makes the child feel ashamed of the fact that they have needs.

Rob: How about in a newborn, how would a narcissist behave with a newborn?

DS: Well look, a newborn wants to be held, wants to be left alone, wants to held, wants to be fed, wants to take a nap, and then wants to kind of wake up and sort of hang out, and then maybe wants to poop and then maybe wants to get fed again. Like there's a cycle, newborns just have a few basic things they're doing right, but they're all important. All of them are important. I'm hungry and I need to be fed, oh look there's mom. Or, oh look now I'm tired I'm going to sleep, oh mom is being oh so gentle and helping me go to sleep. Oh now I'm awake and I kind of want to hang out, look around for a little bit, mom's not going to be too intrusive or infringing she's going to just hang out there. Oh now I need somebody to come pick me up and change me. Well there they are. Okay so the narcissist resents having to perform any of those functions for the infant. The narcissist feels like the infant is just a needy, selfish, whiny kind of baby who is just being bad and a nuisance or a pain. And, oh you know, they just need one thing after another. Narcissist will say oh, you know I'm not, let the nanny take care of all of that. I just want the child to look adorable, I don't want to have to deal with all this other stuff. Now that's extreme versions, it sounds almost like a caricature, but it's out there. It's totally out there. I see many people who can describe that kind of upbringing. That would be the specific ways that a narcissist would be right there, right at the get go, traumatizing the baby in the sense of cumulative relational trauma. Not traumatizing like raping or murdering or blowing up bombs, but traumatizing in the sense of, impinging and either through invasiveness or through neglect. Like constantly, sort of, pervasively getting it wrong, making the infant feeling bad about itself. That's relative relational trauma.

Rob: You know, I recently learned of a problem that some infants have. They have the part of the tongue that is attached to the bottom of the mouth, it's attached with a thing called the frenulum, a narrow piece of skin. And some babies have too much attachment of the tongue there and because of that they are unable to breast feed successfully, they can't latch. And I can see where if it's not caught, that could lead to a child experiencing a feeling of not connecting, of not getting what is needed, and it could also affect the parent. That could be one of the roots of this, going back to the beginning of humanity.

DS: Ha,ha, well you know, very possibly. I'll say this. Most of my kids had trouble latching and because we're middle class white people we could hire a lactation consultant. And you know, believe me when I say middle class, I'm talking about the lower end there. But, you know, we can hire a lactation consultant, maybe insurance pays, maybe not. But the baby and the mother get helped so they start feeding well, and without pain and without agitation. And so that problem gets solved. And in my son's case it didn't take long, in my daughter's case it took like seven weeks. My wife was in agony, you know, from being bitten. But the consultant kept helping and helping and little by little it finally worked. The baby tried, the mother tried, and everybody's efforts came together and it was okay.

Rob: There's even a procedure to basically snip the skin a little bit, because the same problem, they call it tied tongue, it can also lead to speech defects as well.

DS: Yeah, I've heard of it.

Rob: I guess I just wanted to bring up, that's an example of a biological way that could lead to this developing in ways that go so far beyond just a simple problem of the skin being a little too much.

DS: Yeah. Well look. You know, my wife is an expert in the area of postpartum depression and she works with many women in counseling around those issues. And, you know, that's probably also been around from the dawn of time. And that reflect, attachment problems in the mother's own past, so in fact many psychologists would believe that to be the case and find that to be try. That unresolved attachment issues for a new mother can make attaching to her own baby very complicated and difficult and can lead a postpartum depression. Now, you know, there's already plenty of stress on mothers to begin with. And if the father is not helpful and supportive, that's a huge stress right there. Or if there is no father or not grandmother or no helper for the mother, if the mother has no support to raise the child, the mother is going to really be exhausted and feel inadequate and possibly resentful and angry. So I give a lot of credit to mothers who manage to successfully attach to their babies. Because the world, especially the United States, is not setup to help that at all. You know, maybe who work for Ikea, because it's a Scandinavian company, maybe they get maternity leave that's reasonable. But most of us don't in this country. And it's a true, it's a truly, I think catastrophic mistake in terms of raising our own children here in this country.

Rob: Alright I want to move on a little bit. You say a little further in the book that the heightened sadistic tendencies of the traumatizing narcissist may be masked in some cases by charisma and seductive charm. And this sounds like the characterization of a psychopath. So narcissists are also charismatic, is the bottom line question there.

DS: Absolutely. You know, they certainly think of themselves as a legend in their own minds. And they, so they can be quite persuasive about that. Narcissists can be very intelligent and very talented. You know and many narcissist, I think, are creative people who do amazing things. They might contribute a great deal to society. In which case they're able to put narcissism aside just enough so that they don't make everything about their own success. They actually also contribute something. A psychopath doesn't contribute anything to society, I don't think. I think in the end, psychopaths rip off everyone. A narcissist might be an artist or a business man or somebody in the military and they may do a great job at what they do. And they may serve others in what they do.

Rob: Can you site any examples of creative narcissists who have contributed to society?

DS: Well everyone would view Picasso in that light. I, the one I became very familiar with, which in many ways inspired, was one of the inspirations for my book, was Eugene O'Neil. I think Eugene O'Neil is rightly recognized as, perhaps the greatest American playwright. And I think his Long Day's Journey into Night is a masterpiece. And when I saw it performed, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman was in the cast and it was an excellent cast. And I've seen the film as well with, the film very well worth watching for people interested in family systems and family dynamics, dysfunctional families. O'Neil captures the narcissism of his parents brilliantly. And he captured the traumatizing impact of it and the tragedy of it. Now what O'Neil left out of his play about himself, because it's completely autobiographical. What O'Neil did leave out was that prior to the action of the play, he'd been off on a sea voyage and had a suicide attempt which was immediately proceeded by his abandonment of his first wife and his first child. He didn't bother to put that into the play. So he comes off, his character comes off as the tragic hero. Well you know, if all the facts were known, that character was pretty skeevy. I was horrified to learn how O'Neil treated his own children. He treated them exactly what I had described earlier as nothing but resentment. Resentment that they needed or wanted anything of him. That immediately made them in his eyes, selfish, greedy, shallow people. And he told them as much. He banished them, he disowned all of them eventually. He rarely saw them anyway. And in the end two of his sons committed suicide, and his daughter was quite a severe alcoholic for much of her adult life. You know, so the great playwright who was revered by the psychoanalysts Heinz Kohut who even, Kohut even felt like well, O'Neil did what he had to do to be the genius he was. I guess so. To me that's awful. And it's hard for me now, even though I can admire the genius of his work. It's hard for me now to watch knowing what I know about what he did to his own children. How he treated them. So yeah there's many examples. And I'm sure there's many others. And in my book I think I used Bill Clinton as an example of a narcissist. Now you know obviously, it should be apparent to your listeners I'm pretty heavily into the left side of things. But there's no denying that Bill Clinton was a jerk, and that he somehow ended up getting caught doing what he had been doing for many years. Now I saw that as rooted in his own early trauma. You know and I think as a president, although I object to his, the things he did around welfare and deregulation, I think in other ways he was a very strong president. And you know, did a good job, right? But it doesn't mean that he didn't also have a side of him that really was narcissistic and ultimately self-destructive.

Rob: And you explain it in your book how this probably came about because of the abusive stepfather that he had.

DS: Well, I can certainly see that his, Clinton's efforts to rise above the squalid and ugly upbringing with a stepfather, who was a drunk and abusive. You know Clinton had to get in-between the stepfather and his mother. The stepfather was violent. You know, for Clinton to rise above that, to use his intellect, to become a Rhodes Scholar, to become a governor. You know to being this brilliant, handsome and successful leader who had high ideals. He certainly didn't come to terms with traumatic aspects of his upbringing, in my view. And I see that as getting acted out by him in his objectification of women and his sexualization of women and his eventual self-defeating behavior because you know he wasn't going to get away with that stuff forever. And not get exposed. So I see his unresolved and unreflective relationship to his own traumatic history as very much a part of that narcissism.

Rob: Well I appreciate what you say. I am not as big a fan. I don't know that you're a fan--

DS: Not quite.

Rob: I do not give Clinton as much credit as you're giving him. But what I do get from what you just described is how a traumatizing narcissist who takes, who really can hurt people, can achieve very great levels of power, as you've described, including ultimate dictatorship, it is possible.

DS: Yeah. There's no question. That is, in my view, the character structure of all of these guys. And then of course there's, another example would be this guru in Japan. Shinrikyo, Aum Shinrikyo the name of his group and his name was, let's just leave it as Shinrikyo, we'll call him that. My mind isn't going to his name right away. So his group, he was a mostly blind person who somehow, without much educated, he somehow became the leader of a generation of very ambitious and talented and intelligent scientific workers from various, and engineers. And these were his followers. And these were the guys, men and woman, who decided they should release sarin gas in the subways in Tokyo, because the world needed to be purified so that, you know, the disease part of the world should be gotten rid of, and a new world could arise. That is a myth that is common to many many cult. Robert Jay Lifton called it, saving the, destroying the world to save it. And I think that's what are these leaders were doing. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot. Let's destroy and purify the world of what is viewed as malignant. And then we will establish a world that is pure and we'll control it so it stays pure. And that, more than outright malevolence, I would have to say that I believe that that is the psychotic delusion of most of these guys. Which makes them, did they behave as psychopaths, absolutely. But to me the belief that in their own righteousness is where the narcissism comes in. That is a clinging to the sense of absolute superiority from every perspective, including moral.

Rob: Wow. And now you've talked about how this is intergenerational.

DS: Yeah.

Rob: I'm always interested in pre-civilization or outside of civilization, indigenous culture. Are there studies at all of narcissism outside of civilization? Are there people in tribes who manifest narcissistic behavior? Is there any research on that?

DS: I'm not familiar, if there is I am not familiar with it. And remember the Narcissus myth begins with the Greek civilization. You know the paragon of civilization, in the western world, right? So narcissist is a character in Ovid's Metamorphoses and his fable, what it be worth reviewing the fable briefly?

Rob: Sure.

DS: Okay, well Narcissus is this exceptionally beautiful creature, and kind of unclear, is he a man, is he a woman? Is he some sort of a magical being? It's a little unclear in the myth. However he, let's call him a he, I think he's generally thought of as a boy. And he was irresistibly attractive to every single man, woman, beast, child in the forest, in the world that he lives in. Everybody wants him. Nobody can deny his exquisite perfection, his absolute superiority as an attractive being. And so Echo, a nymph, falls in love and follows him all over the place. And he scorns her and she is so devastated that she just becomes the echo that we hear when we call out in the mountains and you hear an echo, that's her. She stops having a body or anything else, and all that's left of her is that echo. Meanwhile Narcissus goes on his merry way. Doesn't give a damn about anybody else but himself. And then one day he looks in a pond and he sees himself reflected there and he just falls madly in love and he just can't, he's transfixed. And he's so transfixed that he stays there and stays there and stays there until he literally dies on the spot. That's the myth of Narcissus, in essence. There's some variations but that's kind of the main story line, right? And you know, I think everything about narcissism is contained right there. The cruelty of it. The diminishing of others. And ultimately the nihilism of it. That complete and total selfishness ultimately is the same as dying. And it's, you know according to Eric Fromm, sanity comes from love. Insanity comes from narcissism.

Rob: Wow. Now you mention Fromm a bit more in your book. Why don't you talk a little bit more about what Fromm has to say about it?

DS: Yeah, well I think Fromm is well worth having a look at. He was a smart guy, he was voluminous in what he was able to write. You know some of it's repetitive. But he was an early Freudian who recognized that Freud was going down the wrong path when he rejected trauma theory. And Fromm aligned himself with a lot of the more progressive psychoanalytic people who understood trauma theory and accepted it. And who recognized Freud's rigidity and Freud's ultimate inability to allow anybody else to have a real say in what psychoanalysis was. You know which in essence contributed to, I think, first the rise of psychoanalysis and then the fall of it. In the public imagination anyway. You know so at any rate Fromm was one of the sort of reform psychoanalysts, if you want to call it that. He was quite progressive, he was a Marxist. He also explored spirituality in zen buddhism and in Hasidism, at least traditional Hasidism. I don't believe he would have approved of some of the manifestations of Hasidism that we see today. The Satmars, for example or perhaps even Lubavitch. I'm not sure. Fromm would have been that pleased. But he did have a wide range of interests. He was extremely knowledgeable and he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And his most famous books, the first one was called Escape from Freedom. Which was his way of trying to explain just how it was that the whole German nation could fall under Hitler's spell and become Nazis and do what Nazis did. And it was so incomprehensible and so horrifying, but for Fromm it wasn't that incomprehensible. I think could see that there's a human tendency not to want to fully own one's own freedom but rather to give it over to somebody who feels stronger and bigger. You know Freud saw this as the primal horde where there was an alpha male and you know Freud built the whole oedipal complex around that idea that the young males have to overthrow the father if they're going to have any power. Or they have to align themselves with the father. And that's sort of a rough sketch of where the oedipal complex comes from, that's Freud's thinking. But for Fromm, I think what Fromm understood rather that there were two, he talked about this in terms of religion. And in every religion on the planet pretty much, there's usually going to be two very distinct strains of thought. He called one the authoritarian and he called the other humanistic. The authoritarian strain in religion, and these are ancient religions you're talking about, but we're definitely talking about early roots of mankind and civilization and womankind. You know, Fromm felt that there was the authoritarian line or authoritarian line and the humanistic line. The authoritarian line involved the angry patriarchal god who punishes and threatens and intimidates. And so you'd better be good, you better not pout, etc. And the humanistic strain in religion would be represented by Christ on the mount, for example, in which people are made to feel as though they are important and that they matter and that they should love one another and that that is, you know, the highest good. And he saw both of these things existing simultaneously in all of these religions. And I think he's right. And I think he's right in terms of not just religions but in terms of, you know, humans. We are not, we're complicated and we have dark instinctive, primitive forces within us that we control more or less. And certainly each of us, I know in my own life, I'm 60 something right now. I certainly see myself at different stages of life being either very controlling and dominating or being very submissive and subjugated. I've seen myself, you know, feel powerful. And I've seen myself feel powerless. We, I've you know I've seen myself be isolated and angry. And I've seen myself be connected and loving. You know I'm assuming that all of us can be all of these things. And if we're honest with ourselves, I'm sure we can see that we're quite multiple. That we're not always in control of who we are.

Rob: So are you saying that a normal healthy person can manifest a little bit of narcissism here and there--

DS: Oh, yeah.

Rob: And that might even be good in some ways? It's when it gets to the extreme end of the spectrum that it becomes pathological?

DS: I would say absolutely. I would say, you know for example anybody, somebody wants to write a book right? Let's say me. Well you know I have to think that it's going to be worth writing and that people might get something out of reading it. Otherwise why would I sit down and do that? Now I could be deluded about that. But you know actually I'm feeling pretty good about it right now, in fact people are getting something out of it. People write to me very sincerely. I'm very very honored to feel that I actually did it. But sitting down, the first time I wrote a paper for publication I sat down to it, and all I could feel was that I was stupidest person on earth and nothing I said would ever matter and why would I even bother. I had to kind of twist my arm to write each sentence, in fact go word by word. You know I developed my confidence as I went along and then I developed a sense of, yeah I think people are going to get something out of this. And that's a little bit of narcissism, right? If I didn't have that, you know, I wouldn't bother. I would just avoid, I would shrink back. So I think you know anybody who wants to create anything or be productive in any way, wants to feel proud of what they do, wants to feel like they matter. You know you can look at that as their self-love or their willingness to put themselves out there and perhaps a touch of grandiosity. But look, would the Wright brothers make an airplane without grandiosity? I can't imagine. Edison, all of these people, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. Without some narcissism they're not, they're just going to say, oh I'll just stay in my garage, nobody wants to hear what I have to say. So yeah, absolutely. Narcissism in and of itself can, you know, can be useful, productive. It can, and you know somebody told me once the writer Liz Harris who I know teaches at Columbia these days. She said that, I said, look, I was talking with her about this, I was asking her, is every genius a narcissist? She said no, Darwin wasn't. Read about Darwin. I said oh great, I never got around to it but I'll take her word for it.

Rob: Okay. So I just want to, I found a quote that you, from Fromm that you have in your book. "It becomes clear if we consider that these potential teaches of all the great humanist religions can be summarized in one sentence. It is the goal of man to overcome ones narcissism. The old testament says love thy neighbor as thyself". I'll stop there. And I think that's what the Dahlia Lama talks about when he says practice warm heartedness, which is about compassion.

DS: Yeah.

Rob: Narcissism does not have, does not include compassion, does it?

DS: I would say narcissism, narcissists may feel that they should appear to be compassionate. And they would think of themselves as compassionate, but they wouldn't hesitate to be cruel in the name of compassion. You know this is commonly seen in religions where very violent cruelty is often used in the name of righteousness. In the name of purification and for your own good, another book that Alice Miller wrote, For Your Own Good, about corporal punishment. And the general maltreatment of children. You know so, yeah, a narcissists does not have true compassion but will certainly imagine herself to be compassionate, absolutely.

Rob: And let's talk a little bit about religion. The authoritarian religion, is the authoritarian religion one that involves this traumatic narcissism?

DS: Well yeah, I would say so. You know this is, certainly stems from personally experience I alluded to earlier. In my own experience in a religious group. And also in my work I counsel many many people who leave authoritarian, high demand, religious groups. Other kinds of groups as well, but often religious groups. And there's definitely a tendency within these groups to view themselves as having total righteousness. These groups are often lead by someone who may suggest humility but who in fact, you know, sees themselves as the ultimate authority on what god wants and thinks and should do. And in these kinds of religious groups, they're all over the internet, they're all over the country, they're very very linked in many cases to right wing political funding and thinking. In these groups there's a kind of traumatic narcissism where cruelty is practiced in the name of righteousness.

Rob: Where, what is? What is practiced in the name of righteousness?

DS: Cruelty. The act of cruelty. Was that clear?

Rob: Yes.

DS: So what I mean by these kinds of acts of cruelty, in many of the smaller religious groups, members are expected to regularly confess their sins in front of everyone and to be ashamed in front of everyone. To be humiliated. Leaders in these groups often learn the intimate details of some of the members and then use that information to embarrass and humiliate them publicly. To shame them, to exhort everyone to greater dedication and devotion often meaning to harder work to recruit more people and get more money. And you know there are, there's a great deal of cruelty involved in cults. Can we get into that a little bit at this point?

Rob: Yeah, it's perfect, let's get into your story about.

DS: What I think many people don't realize is just how violent and cruel and traumatizing participating in a cultic group can be. Cult is a loaded word, a lot of people would object to it. It's too broad. I guess I'm talking about a group that is lead by an individual or group of leaders who are traumatizing narcissists. Now I have to use that term and define it to be able to say that, and now that everybody's familiar with it. But what happens in these groups is what happens in the traumatizing narcissist relational system. Which is that in order for the narcissist to establish dominance, he needs to feel ultimately superior. And in order for that to be possible he needs to diminish and subjugate those who follow him. He has to instill dependency in them when in fact it's his own dependency that leads him to position himself as a narcissist. As a narcissists he'd like to believe that he depends on no one, everyone just depends on him, but he depends on no one. Well in fact he depends on these followers to feel insecure, ashamed, and diminished so that they will look to him for redemption. So it's kind of a rigged game there. And you know the narcissist in these kinds of groups that I call cults absolutely is the only one who benefits. The grandiosity of the narcissist in these religious groups suggests that the group is going to save the world, bring world piece, bring about the apocalypse, you know there's a million different ways of thinking about what these goals are. Bring meditation to everyone so that everyone can see how divine they are within. You know those are all these grandiose goals that these kinds of cultic groups will set out as what they're all about. When, in fact, what they're actually all about is the leader's self-aggrandizement. And that's all that gets accomplished. Now you know, you might see a group set up a goal to, I don't know what's the, stop malaria. Okay sounds kind of grandiose but Bill Gates has the money, Bill and Melinda Gates have the money to do that. They're trying to do it. They've had some success, they're working on it. And you're seeing results. If that were a cult, their charity, there would nothing, none of the goals would be reached. Or they'd just be a little scratch on the surface for show. They only goal that would be reached would be the enrichment of the leader. So when a group is lead by somebody, you know, who's narcissistic and charismatic and it meets its goals, well terrific. That guy is not a traumatizing narcissist, he's maybe a pain in the ass, he may be a big mouth, he may be a know it all but he's actually getting something done. The traumatizing narcissist gets nothing done except enriching and enhancing his own self.

Rob: So, wait, let me ask you a couple questions now. You're saying that all cults are based on these traumatizing narcissistic relational systems?

DS: I do say that and it's been my experience so far. I can't say I've been talked to by people from every cult there is because there's just so many. But every time I've ever, you know for twenty years I've been talking to people who leave cults, or family members of people who got into cults and I've never seen it otherwise.

Rob: Okay. Now you described about how, what they're all about is self-aggrandizement. Is it just for the traumatizing narcissist or also for the cult as well?

DS: Well, the cult reflects the traumatizing narcissist's success. So to the extent that the cult looks great and seems like it's a good thing, I'm going to use an example for which I could get some flack. Okay maybe not. Maybe I'm going to be a little cautious and use a pseudonym. There was a leader in New York, let's call him Baba, okay, and yeah was a Hindu group. And Baba believed in world peace and did all kind of events and shows and brought in entertainment to celebrate and create world peace. And Baba's followers wanted him to get a Nobel prize and they got some luminaries to, sort of, write to the committee to nominate him. Okay what was going on in that cult actually was not that world peace was being, you know, promoted and established. What was going on was that Baba was grooming young girls to be part of his harem, and he managed to get them separated from their families just as they turned 18. And they would then be recruited into his harem which involved him watching them have sex with each other. That's what was achieved in that group by Baba, not world peace.

Rob: Wow.

DS: And this is a true story and I've changed the names to protect myself.

Rob: What about the cult you were--

DS: Yes, go ahead.

Rob: What about the cult that you were in? Can you talk about that?

DS: I can. That's the same group that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about in Eat Pray Love. And I long ago stopped being afraid of being litigated or suppressed. It hasn't been tried and I no longer think about it. Where I publish material which I've named the names and so on.

Rob: So can you name it here? Can you name the group?

DS: Yeah the group is called Siddha Yoga and it's run by the SYDA foundation the S-Y-D-A foundation. The current guru is a woman called Guru Mayi. She ousted her brother who was a co-leader at one time, now he runs his own group. He's Swami Nithyananda. She's know as Guru Maya. They don't talk to each other. Guru Mayi was the successor or she, some say she may have manipulated herself to be the successor to Swami Muktananda who was originally brought to the west by Werner Erhardt of EST and I think Baba Ram Das. The guy from Harvard, what's his name, Alpert? So anyway Muktananda died, Guru Mayi and her brother took over. She got rid of the brother. I followed her for more than ten years. I first got involved when Muktananda was still alive. I had very profound spiritual and mystical kinds of experiences at first. That felt quite extraordinary and quite beautiful. The type of thing William James talked about in The Varieties of Religious Experience. I made the unfortunate mistake of assuming that because I've had that kind of experience in that group that the group was where I belonged and where I needed to stay. And pretty rapidly I put aside my life, which at the time was rather disappointing. I had studied and trained quite rigorously to be an actor.

I had performed in various groups at various times but I wasn't able to really make a living at it. And I was pretty miserable and depressed and I was not psychologically prepared for the kinds of rejection you go through in that business. So I was ripe, and there were a lot of actors and show business people involved in through the yoga at the time. Celebrities. And they used to host introduction and meditation programs. So I got brought to one of those. I got hooked into it. I had my experiences. And not too long after my big mystical experiences I sold everything and sublet my place on the upper west side and went off to be with the guru. And I did that for about ten years. I worked my way up in the organization to become a leading spokesperson and teacher and writer and producer of events and promoter of tours for Guru Mayi's travels around the world. I had some success in managing these groups that promoted her tours, and brought in new recruits. I was put in charge of all kinds of things in that group.

And then quite suddenly one day Guru Mayi turned on me. I was actually defending someone she was berating and she gave me a look I'll never forget it, it was chilling, that you know I wasn't going to get away with contradicting her. And for the next six months, pretty much, she berated me and humiliated and embarrassed me and kind of tortured me in public, as well as in private, every day all at the same time while I had more and more responsibilities in the organization because at that time it was huge. It was international, up in the Catskills in their ashram, they'd have 4,000 people on a weekend. You know so it was really doing well back then. And I was busy, and I was being broken down, day by day, and finally she told me to leave, get a job, move out. She kept me in favor for a while but I was now on my own in the city, and you know I started to slowly, well I went into therapy thank goodness. And it took about three years for me to actually utter the words, I think that the Guru was cruel. And by that time I was married, I was already 40 something, 41. I got married. My wife also had been in the group.

We were not living within the group, we were on our own in Park Slope Brooklyn. And yeah, I could finally say it, I think she was cruel. And that was the beginning of leaving, it wasn't long after that that the New Yorker came out with a terrific article by Liz Harris who I mentioned earlier exposing the whole ugly side of Siddha Yoga, all the sexual abuse, all the criminality, all of the lies. And all well fact checked as anything in the New Yorker is usually. It was all true and I knew it and I was able to leave, my wife and I together, left. It was difficult in many ways because everyone we knew had become somebody in that group. So that experience and leaving it, I almost tried to pretend that it never happened and just go on with my life. I was going back to grad school and getting my master's degree in social work, planning to train in psychoanalysis. I tried to forget all about it, and then I read Steve Hassan's book, Combatting Cult Mind Control. And I suddenly realized, boy, I've got to do something, I can't just pretend this didn't happen. I felt so ashamed of what I had done to myself and how I had allowed myself to be so deceived. And how I had basically thrown myself away and tried to be this thing that would please this narcissist and I had to figure that out. And that was the genesis for me, of this book, because it was at that point that I began to really think about narcissism. What it meant to be the follower of a narcissist, or subjugated by a narcissist. And what the narcissist was doing. I wanted to figure it out from both ends. Because everybody know what the follower was, what the battered wife was doing, everybody had a theory about that.

The only thing they could say about the batterer was, oh well they're just a bad person. But then there was every kind of psychological theory about the masochistic submissive battered person. Well, I felt it had to be more complicated than that and I wanted to get into the psychology of the narcissist. So first of all deciding that this kind of person was a narcissist was the first step and then slowly over a long period of time I began to really try to refine what I was saying about narcissism and really look at it as a relational system that was traumatizing.

Rob: So you, in your chapter about traumatic narcissism and cults, you put up some concepts and ideas I want to explore with you.

DS: Sure.

Rob: You identify the most common dynamics and I'm just going to read the list real quick. Purification of the ego, is one. Two, only perfection is good enough. Three, incessant urgency. Four, violation of boundaries as a norm. Five, inner deviance must be eradicated. Six, defend the leader no matter what.

DS: Right.

Rob: You want to talk about any of those?