Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or "I, Psychopath"?

[Pierre]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

Hi.  Since the last time I posted, a thread about Narcissism was revived on the other site that I talked about. 

Here is the _http://www.allaboutcounseling.com/BBoards/BBContent.cfm?BBId=3&ThreadID=32884&UID=20806&DateSelect=-7&GO=0 you provided in a previous post.

 

[purplehaze]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

One of our members sent this:

http://www.drirene.com/catbox/index.php?showtopic=57319

Looks like another forum who's associated itself with Vaknin as an "expert" is having a meltdown. :/

 

[Laura]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

No forum or group can survive if care is not taken to identify and then exclude or contain pathological types. The minute that a pathological is perceived as "normal" and his or her words are accepted as a reasonable view of reality, ponerization has already begun.

The group dynamic is a little bit different from the dynamic say, between a psychopath and an individual victim, but not much. Such discussion groups on the internet are actually a good training ground to recognize the ponerological phenomenon on a larger scale. What is interesting is the number of so-called "experts" who claim to know about psychopathy and narcissism, and set themselves up to "help victims," and what they offer as help is just as psychopathic as what the victim just experienced. If you recognize pathology on the human scale and cannot extrapolate it to the group scale, and then the larger social scale (which includes religious and political ideologies) then you haven't really learned a thing.

Nevertheless, since we do have these groups out there (including Donna Andersen and Liane Leedom's "Lovefraud" website and Sam Vaknin and his followers and their websites) to observe, it might help to have a few of the rules of ponerology before us so we can scrutinize their activities and behaviors with the eye of the natural scientist.

One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic way. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people. The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis.


Another phenomenon all ponerogenic associations have in common is their statistically high concentration of individuals with various psychological anomalies. Their qualitative composition is crucially important in the formation of the entire union’s character, activities, development, or extinction. Groups dominated by various kinds of characteropathic individuals will develop relatively primitive activities, proving rather easy for a society of normal people to break. Things are different when such unions are inspired by psychopathic individuals. Let us adduce the following example illustrating the roles of two different anomalies, selected from among events studied by the author.

In felonious youth gangs, a specific role is played by boys (and occasionally girls) carrying the characteristic results sometimes left behind by an inflammation of parotid glands (the mumps). As mentioned, this disease entails brain reactions in some cases, leaving behind a discreet but permanent bleaching of feelings and a slight decrease in general mental skills. Similar results are sometimes left behind after diphtheria. As a result, such people easily succumb to a more clever individuals’ suggestions. When sucked into a felonious group, they become faint-critical helpers and executors of the leader’s intentions, tools in the hands of more treacherous, usually psychopathic, leaders. Once arrested, they submit to their leaders’ insinuated explanations that the higher (paramoral) group idea demands they become scapegoats, taking the majority of blame upon themselves. In court, the same leaders who initiated the delinquencies mercilessly slough the blame onto their less crafty colleagues. Sometimes a judge actually accepts the insinuation.

Individuals with the above-mentioned post-mumps and post-diphtheria traits constitute less than 1.0 % of the population as a whole, but their share reaches 1/4 of juvenile delinquent groups. This represents an inspissation of the order of 30-fold, requiring no further methods of statistical analysis. When studying the contents of ponerogenic unions skillfully enough, we often meet with an inspissation of other psychological anomalies which also speak for themselves.

Two basic types of the above-mentioned unions should be differentiated: Primary ponerogenic and secondary ponerogenic.

Let us describe as primarily ponerogenic a union whose abnormal members were active since the very beginning, playing the role of crystallizing catalysts as early as the process for creation of the group occurred. We shall call secondarily ponerogenic a union which was founded in the name of some idea with an independent social meaning, generally comprehensible within the categories of the natural world view, but which later succumbed to a certain moral degeneration. This in turn opened the door to infection and activation of the pathological factors within, and later to a ponerization of the group as a whole, or often of its fraction.

From the very outset, a primarily ponerogenic union is a foreign body within the organism of society, its character colliding with the moral values respected by the majority. The activities of such groups provoke opposition and disgust and are considered immoral; as a rule, therefore, such groups do not spread large, nor do they metastasize into numerous unions. They finally lose their battle with society.

In order to have a chance to develop into a large ponerogenic association, however, it suffices that some human organization, characterized by social or political goals and an ideology with some creative value, be accepted by a larger number of normal people before it succumbs to a process of ponerogenic malignancy. The primary tradition and ideological values may then for a long time protect a union which has succumbed to ponerization process from the healthy common sense of society, especially its less critical components.

When the ponerogenic process touches such a human organization, which emerged and acted in the name of political or social goals whose causes were conditioned in history and the social situation, the original group’s primary values will nourish and protect such a union, in spite of the fact that those primary values succumb to characteristic degeneration, the practical function becoming completely different from the primary one, because the names and symbols are retained. Individual and social “common sense” thereby uncovers its weakest spots.

This is reminiscent of a situation psychopathologists know well: a person who enjoyed trust and respect in their circles starts behaving with preposterous arrogance and hurting others, allegedly in the name of his known convictions, which succumb to an invisible process rendering them primitive but emotionally dynamic. However, his old acquaintances do not believe the injured parties and are prepared to denigrate them morally. This adds insult to their injury and pushes an already unreasonable person to commit further hurtful acts; as a rule, such a situation lasts until the person’s madness becomes obvious.

Ponerogenic unions of the primary variety are mainly of interest to criminology; our main concern will be associations which succumbed to a secondary process of poneric malignancy, to be dealt with somewhat on the following pages. At the present time, let us sketch a few properties of associations which have already surrendered to this process.

Within each ponerogenic union, a psychological structure is created which can be considered a counterpart or caricature of the normal structure of society or a societal organization. Individuals with various psychological aberrations complement each other’s talents and characteristics. This structure is subjected to diachronic modification with regard to changes in the character of the association as whole.

The earlier phase of the union’s activity is usually dominated by characteropathic, particularly paranoid, individuals, who often play an inspirational or spellbinding role in the ponerization process. At this point in time, the union still indicates certain romantic features and is not yet characterized by excessively brutal behavior. Soon, however, the more normal members are pushed into fringe functions and are excluded from organizational secrets; some of them thereupon leave such a union.

Individuals with inherited deviations then progressively take over the inspirational and leadership positions. The role of essential psychopaths gradually grows, although they like to remain ostensibly in the shadows (e.g. directing small groups), setting the pace gray-eminence style. In ponerogenic unions on the largest social scales, the leadership role is generally played by a different kind of individual, one more easily digestible and representative. Examples include frontal characteropathy, or some more discreet complex of lesser taints.

A spellbinder at first simultaneously plays the leader in a ponerogenic group. Later there appears another kind of “leadership talent”, a more vital individual who often joined the organization later, once it has already succumbed to ponerization. The spellbinding individual, being weaker, is forced to come to terms with being shunted into the shadows and recognizing the new leader’s “genius”, unless he accepts the threat of total failure. Roles are parceled out. The spellbinder needs support from the primitive but decisive leader, who in turn needs the spellbinder to uphold the association’s ideology, so essential in maintaining the proper attitude on the part of those members of the rank and file who betray a tendency to criticism and doubt of the moral variety. The spellbinder must repackage the ideology, appropriately, sliding new contents under old titles, so that it can continue fulfilling its propaganda function under ever-changing conditions. He has also to uphold the leader’s mystique inside and outside the association. Complete trust cannot exist between the two, however, since the leader secretly has contempt for the spellbinder and his ideology, whereas the spellbinder despises the leader for being such a coarse individual. The showdown is always probable; whoever is weaker becomes the loser.

The structure of such a union undergoes further variegation and specialization. A chasm opens between the more normal masses and the elite initiates, who are, as a rule, more pathological. This later subgroup becomes ever more dominated by hereditary pathological factors, the former by the after-effects of various diseases affecting the brain, less typically psychopathic individuals, and people whose malformed personalities were caused by early deprivation or brutal child-rearing methods on the part of pathological individuals. There is less and less room for normal people in the group. The leaders’ secrets and intentions are kept hidden from the union’s membership; the products of the spellbinders’ work must suffice for this segment.

An observer watching such a union’s activities from the outside and using the natural psychological world view will always tend to overestimate the role of the leader and his allegedly autocratic function. The spellbinders and the propaganda apparatus are mobilized to maintain this erroneous outside opinion. The leader, however, is dependent upon the interests of the union, especially the elite initiates, to an extent greater than he himself knows. He wages a constant position-jockeying battle; he is an actor with a director. In macro-social unions, this position is generally occupied by a more representative individual not deprived of certain critical faculties; initiating him into all those plans and criminal calculations would be counterproductive. In conjunction with part of the elite, a group of psychopathic individuals hiding behind the scene steers the leader, the way Borman and his clique steered Hitler. If the leader does not fulfill his assigned role, he generally knows that the clique representing the elite of the union is in a position to kill or otherwise remove him.

We have sketched the properties of unions in which the ponerogenic process has transformed their original content into a pathological counter-part thereof and modified its structure and its later changes in a manner sufficiently wide-scale to encompass the greatest possible scope of this kind of phenomena, from the smallest to the largest social scale. The general rules governing those phenomena appear to be at least analogous, independent of the quantitative, social, and historical scale of such a phenomenon.

It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes certain propaganda motives. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.

If such an ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke “moral outrage”, and not only among the members of the union; even normal people, who condemn this kind of union along with its ideologies, would feel hurt, deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality. Perhaps even some of the readers of this book will resent the author’s stripping evil so unceremoniously of all its literary motifs. The job of effecting such a “strip-tease” may thus turn out to be much more difficult and dangerous than expected.

A primary ponerogenic union is formed at the same time as its ideology, perhaps even somewhat earlier. A normal person perceives such ideology to be different from the world of human concepts, obviously suggestive, and even primitively comical to a degree.

An ideology of a secondarily ponerogenic association is formed by gradual adaptation of the primary ideology to functions and goals other than the original formative ones. A certain kind of layering or schizophrenia of ideology takes place during the ponerization process. The outer layer closest to the original content is used for the group’s propaganda purposes, especially regarding the outside world, although it can in part also be used inside with regard to disbelieving lower-echelon members. The second layer presents the elite with no problems of comprehension: it is more hermetic, generally composed by slipping a different meaning into the same names. Since identical names signify different contents depending on the layer in question, understanding this “doubletalk” requires simultaneous fluency in both languages.

Average people succumb to the first layer’s suggestive insinuations for a long time before they learn to understand the second one as well. Anyone with certain psychological deviations, especially if he is wearing the mask of normality with which we are already familiar, immediately perceives the second layer to be attractive and significant; after all, it was built by people like him. Comprehending this doubletalk is therefore a vexatious task, provoking quite understandable psychological resistance; this very duality of language, however, is a pathognomonic symptom indicating that the human union in question is touched by the ponerogenic process to an advanced degree.


The ideology of unions affected by such degeneration has certain constant factors regardless of their quality, quantity, or scope of action: namely, the motivations of a wronged group, radical righting of the wrong, and the higher value of the individuals who have joined the organization. These motivations facilitate sublimation of the feeling of being wronged and different, caused by one’s own psychological failings, and appear to liberate the individual from the need to abide by uncomfortable moral principles.

In the world full of real injustice and human humiliation, making it conducive to the formation of an ideology containing the above elements, a union of its converts may easily succumb to degradation. At this time those people with a tendency to accept the better version of the ideology shall also long tend to justify such ideological duality. {...}

For future reference, let us remember: ideologies do not need spellbinders. Spellbinders need ideologies in order to subject them to their own deviant goals.

On the other hand, the fact that some ideology degenerated along with its corollary social movement, later succumbing to this schizophrenia and serving goals which the originators of the ideology would have abhorred, does not prove that it was worthless, false, and fallacious from the start. Quite the contrary: it rather appears that under certain historical conditions, the ideology of any social movement, even if it is sacred truth, can yield to the ponerization process.


A given ideology may in fact have contained weak spots, carrying the errors of human thought and emotion within; or it may, during the course of its history, have been infiltrated by more primitive foreign material which could have contained ponerogenic factors. Such material destroys an ideology’s internal homogeny. The source of such infection by foreign ideological material may be the ruling social system with its laws and customs based on a more primitive tradition, or an imperialistic system of rule. It may be, of course, another philosophical movement often contaminated by the eccentricities of its founder, who considers the facts to blame for not conforming to his dialectical construct.

The greater and truer the original ideology, the longer it may be capable of nourishing and disguising from human criticism that phenomenon which is the product of the already known specific degenerative process. In a great valuable ideology, the danger for small minds is hidden; they can become the factors of such preliminary degeneration, which opens the door to invasion by pathological factors.

Thus, if we intend to understand the secondary ponerization process and the contents of human associations which succumb to it, our consciousness should separate that original ideology from its counterpart, or even caricature, created by the ponerogenic process. Abstracting from any ideology, we must, by analogy, understand the essence of the process itself, which has its own etiological causes which are potentially present in every society, as well as characteristic developmental patho-dynamics.

Observation of the ponerization processes of various human unions throughout history easily leads to the conclusion that the initial step is a moral warping of the group’s ideational contents. The contamination of ideology can be analyzed by means of its infiltration by more earthly foreign contents, thereby depriving it of healthy support in trust for and understanding of human nature. This opens the way for invasion by pathological factors and the ponerogenic role of their carriers.

This fact could justify the conviction of moralists that maintaining a union’s ethical discipline and ideational purity is sufficient protection against derailing or hurtling into an insufficiently comprehended world of error. Such a conviction strikes a ponerologist as a unilateral oversimplification of an eternal reality which is more complex. After all, the loosening of ethical and intellectual controls is sometimes a consequence of the direct or indirect influence of these omnipresent factors, along with some other non-pathological human weaknesses.

Sometime during life, every human organism undergoes periods during which physiological and psychological resistance declines, facilitating development of bacteriological infection within. Similarly, a human association or social movement undergoes periods of crisis which weaken its ideational and moral cohesion. This may be caused by pressure on the part of other groups, a general spiritual crisis in the environment, or intensification of its hysterical condition. Just as more stringent sanitary measures are an obvious medical indication for a weakened organism, the development of conscious control over the activity of pathological factors is a ponerological indication, something especially important during a society’s periods of moral crisis. {...}

Any human group affected by the process described herein is characterized by its increasing regression as regards natural common sense and the ability to perceive psychological reality. Someone treating this in traditional categories could consider it an instance of “turning into half-wittedness” or the growing of intellectual deficiencies and moral failings. A ponerological analysis of this process, however, indicates that pressure is applied upon the more normal part of the association by pathological factors in the person of their carriers.

Thus, whenever we observe some group member being treated with no critical distance, although he betrays one of the psychological anomalies familiar to us, and his opinions being treated as at least equal to those of normal people, although they are based on a characteristically different view of human matters, we must derive the conclusion that this human group is affected by ponerogenic process. We shall treat this in accordance with the above described first criterion of ponerology, which retains its validity regardless of the qualitative and quantitative features of such a union.

Such a state of affairs simultaneously consists as a liminal (watershed) situation, whereupon further damage to people’s healthy common sense and critical moral faculties becomes ever easier. Once a group has inhaled a sufficient dose of pathological material to give birth to the conviction that these not-quite-normal people are unique geniuses, it starts subjecting its more normal members to pressure characterized by corresponding paralogical and paramoral elements, as expected.

For many people, such collective opinion takes on attributes of a moral criterion; for others, it represents a kind of psychological terror ever more difficult to endure. The phenomenon of counter-selection thus occurs in this phase of ponerization: individuals with a more normal sense of psychological reality leave after entering into conflict with the newly modified group; simultaneously, individuals with various psychological anomalies join the group and easily find a way of life there. The former feel “pushed into counter-revolutionary positions”, and the latter can afford to remove their masks of sanity ever more often.

People who have been thus thrown out of a ponerogenic association because they were too normal suffer bitterly; they are unable to understand their specific state. Their idea, which constituted a part of the meaning of life for them, has now been degraded, although they cannot find a rational basis for this fact. They feel wronged; they “fight against demons” they are not in a position to identify. In fact, their personalities have already been modified to a certain extent due to saturation by abnormal psychological material, especially psychopathic material. They easily fall into the opposite extreme in such cases, because unhealthy emotions make the decisions. What they need is good advice in order to find the path of reason and measure. Based on ponerologic understanding of their condition, psychotherapy could provide rapid positive results. However, if the union they left is succumbing to deep ponerization, a threat looms over them: they may be the objects of revenge, since they have betrayed a magnificent ideology.

This is the stormy period of a group’s ponerization, followed by a certain stabilization in terms of contents, structure, and customs. Rigorous selective measures of a clearly psychological kind are applied to new members. So as to exclude the possibility of becoming sidetracked by defectors, people are observed and tested to eliminate those characterized by excessive mental independence or psychological normality. The new internal function created is something like a “psychologist”, and it doubtless takes advantage of the above-described psychological knowledge collected by psychopaths.

Spellbinders take care of “ideological purity”. The leader’s position is relatively secure. Individuals manifesting doubt or criticism are subject to paramoral condemnation. Maintaining the utmost dignity and style, leadership discusses opinions and intentions which are psychologically and morally pathological. Any intellectual connections which might reveal them as such are eliminated, thanks to the substitution of premises operating in the proper subconscious process on the basis of prior conditioned reflexes. The association enters the state wherein the whole has donned the mask of ostensible normality.

Observing the appropriate state corresponding to the first ponerological criterion requires skillful psychology and specific factual knowledge; the second, more stable phase can be perceived both by a person of average reason and by public opinion in most societies. The interpretation imposed, however, is unilaterally moralistic or sociological, simultaneously undergoing the characteristic feeling of deficiency as regards the possibility of both understanding the phenomenon and counteracting the spread of said evil.

However, in this phase a numerous minority of societies tend to consider such an association comprehensible within the categories of their own world view and the outer layer of diffusing ideology as a doctrine amenable to them. The more primitive the society in question, and the further removed from direct contact to the union affected by this pathological state, the more numerous such minorities would be. This very period, during which the customs of the union become somewhat milder, often represents simultaneously its most intensive expansionary activity.

This period may last long, but not forever. The group is internally turning progressively more pathological, finally showing its true qualitative colors again as its activities become ever clumsier. At this point, a society of normal people can easily threaten ponerologic associations, even at the macro-social level.

When a ponerogenic process encompasses a society’s entire ruling class, or nation, or when opposition on the part of normal people’s societies is stifled -- as a result of the mass character of the phenomenon, or by using spellbinding means and physical compulsion -- we are dealing with macro-social ponerologic phenomenon.

Studies in the genesis of evil which are based on observing small groups of people can indicate the details of these laws to us. ... Such observations may enable us to hazard a hypothesis to the effect that the general laws of ponerogenesis may be at least analogous, regardless of the quantity and scope of the phenomenon in time and space.

In studying a macro-social phenomenon, we can obtain both quantitative and qualitative data, statistical correlation indices, and other observations as accurately as allowed by the state of the art in science, research methodology, and the obviously very difficult situation of the observer. We can then use the classical method, hazarding a hypothesis and then actively searching for facts which could falsify it. The wide-spread causative regularity of ponerogenic processes would then be confirmed within the bounds of the above-mentioned possibilities. It is astonishing how neatly they govern this macro-social phenomenon. The comprehension of the phenomenon thus acquired can serve as a basis for predicting its future development, to be verified by time.

The study of macro-social ponerogenic phenomena meets with obvious problems: their period of genesis, duration, and decay is several times longer than the researcher’s scientific activity. Simultaneously, there are other transformations in history, customs, economics, and technology; however, the difficulties confronted in abstracting the appropriate symptoms need not be insuperable, since our criteria are based on eternal phenomena subject to relatively limited transformations in time.

The traditional interpretation of these great historical diseases has already taught historians to distinguish two phases.

The first is represented by a period of spiritual crisis in a society, which historiography associates with exhausting of the ideational, moral, and religious values heretofore nourishing the society in question. Egoism among individuals and social groups increases, and the links of moral duty and social networks are felt to be loosening. Trifling matters thereupon dominate human minds to such an extent that there is no room left for imagination regarding public matters or a feeling of commitment to the future. An atrophy of the hierarchy of values within the thinking of individuals and societies is an indication thereof; it has been described both in historiographic monographs and in psychiatric papers. The country’s government is finally paralyzed, helpless in the face of problems which could be solved without great difficulty under other circumstances. Let us associate such periods of crisis with the familiar phase in social hysterization.

The next phase has been marked by bloody tragedies, revolutions, wars, and the fall of empires. The deliberations of historians or moralists regarding these occurrences always leave behind a certain feeling of deficiency with reference to the possibility of perceiving certain psychological factors discerned within the nature of phenomena; the essence of these factors remains outside the scope of their scientific experience.

A historian observing these great historical diseases is struck first of all by their similarities, easily forgetting that all diseases have many symptoms in common because they are states of absent health.

 

[Filachi]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

I briefly browsed that catbox site about a year ago, but haven't been there since. Does anyone know what happened to start the "disrespect from both sides"?- or to cause all the "admins" to resign? This site uses a lot of the same catchphrases - like "safe place" and "our culture" - that AAC uses. Some of the timelines they discuss also sound familiar to me. e.g. 6 years since Dr Irene participated in the site? That's about the same amount of time that the Site Coordinator tapered off participating at AAC, and when the big "N", WD "joined" the site. He posts under different names, though - he can't hide his writing style. The topic of admins posting under new, unannounced names? All too familiar.

Laura, thank you for this - "What is interesting is the number of so-called "experts" who claim to know about psychopathy and narcissism, and set themselves up to "help victims," and what they offer as help is just as psychopathic as what the victim just experienced. If you recognize pathology on the human scale and cannot extrapolate it to the group scale, and then the larger social scale (which includes religious and political ideologies) then you haven't really learned a thing."

I have watched this at that other site. I have observed that there are little enabling cliques that form around a person who seems (to me) narcissistic. It's a perfect set-up for the perpetration of the dynamic, continuing it in the guise of "help". The "N"s (or whatever) put out the bait, and those that are "N" magnets make the circle complete. Both sides feed the need in the other sides. I hope that made sense. The ones that do move beyond it leave - or observe like I do, popping in occasionally. I'm still perplexed - I can't figure out if those "N"s are there for the attention they receive, or if it is for research.

Recognising the pathology on the human scale came first for me, I just didn't know the name! Recognising the dynamic at work came more slowly. I don't know why I never thought there might be some at work!!! It is starting to affect morale at work- there are little divided camps, and ones like me, who stay out of it whenever possible. It's a very unpleasant place to be right now. I have been struggling with how to deal with that. For many months, like I did as a child, I played possum - got real still and let them eddy around me, but their antics are starting to affect my job, and the way I feel about it, so I have some decisions to make. And I don't want to!!

 

[purplehaze]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

The admins all resigned when Dr. Irene herself started attacking, banning and blocking anyone who questioned her.

ala Femfree of the Vaknin sites

A number of members there are supposedly reporting the doctor for abuse to the APA and NY Psychiatric Board.

 

[Filachi]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

Hi.

That's interesting that she is being turned in. I thought everything that happened on the internet was fair game, c'est la vie. Is she, as a licensed psychologist, held accountable for her behaviour on that forum?

 

[purplehaze]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

MSN has closed its boards.... thank goodness... but Vaknin and his proxy 'Femfree' have new boards:

_http://www.runboard.com/bnarcissisticabuserecovery

Vaknin just can't get enough of himself there either.

 

[Onlooker]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

Hi! I'd previously been digging through this thread to try and get a better understanding of what it is about Sam Vaknin's teachings that some people object to. Now I see there's discussion of Dr. Irene's Catbox site as well:

I briefly browsed that catbox site about a year ago, but haven't been there since. Does anyone know what happened to start the "disrespect from both sides"?- or to cause all the "admins" to resign?

Yes, I saw what happened in the Catbox myself, in detail. It was very unfortunate, but there are also some serious misconceptions floating around about it.

The first is classing the Catbox as a "Vaknin" site. This is simply not true. And I honestly don't see how anyone could get that meaning out of the Catbox thread that was linked to here, number 57319.

In that thread, Dr. Irene started off by pointing out that (quite rightly) her site has a rule against slanderous posts. She then observed that one of the site's members (now an ex-member)--a woman I'll give the code name of "Mouthpiece"--had seen fit to slander her personally. She then listed four claims made by Mouthpiece in an attempt to smear her, all of them absurd and utterly baseless. This is the claim relevant here:

I am not to be trusted because Vaknin, a narcissist who writes on narcissism has articles on the main site. This person claims that he is not qualified yada yada. My comments throughout the site state the same. Like duh.....

[My emphasis in that quote.] Dr. Irene made her position clear. She recognized that Vaknin has no formal qualifications, and had said so previously on her own site. So I don't see how anyone could take this statement of hers to mean the opposite: that her forum has "associated itself with Vaknin as an 'expert.'" To make matters clearer still, she's even drawn attention to some specific points of disagreement with Vaknin. For instance, on this page about "inverted narcissism" (IN), which I gather is an invention of Sam's:

_http://www.drirene.com/yak/docs_answers20.htm

Narcissism is a bona fide diagnostic category. Inverted Narcissism is not! [...] Dr. Vaknin makes no bones about the fact that he is not trained or licensed/certified in any mental health profession! Personally, I have difficulty with some of the psychodynamic literature he uses to back his hypotheses, however compelling, and I'm not sure I buy into IN. [Emphasis in original]

Most of the articles on Dr. Irene's main site are those she wrote herself, but she's also published material there from numerous "guest" writers because they're useful for background. The fact that Vaknin got some of his own writing published there doesn't make it a "Vaknin" site or a Vaknin "associate" site, any more than a dog pissing on a lamppost makes it "his" lamppost! And it certainly doesn't mean Dr. Irene herself is "not to be trusted" on that account, the even more absurd implication that "Mouthpiece" was trying to convey.

Then there's this misconception:

The admins all resigned when Dr. Irene herself started attacking, banning and blocking anyone who questioned her.

ala Femfree of the Vaknin sites

I have to say this is a complete mischaracterization of what happened in that meltdown, which I witnessed myself. However, I do understand why such an impression exists.

Nearly all the publicly posted accounts I've seen of the event originate from disgruntled ex-members who were booted off the Catbox because of their own bad behavior. A few, to be sure, were inconvenienced in some way through no fault of their own, due to the confusion that always attends any such meltdown. And sadly, a great many were disrupted by the whole upheaval. But those aren't the biggest complainers. By and large, the loudest shouters I've seen are a few of the worst behaved ex-members of the Catbox (and their cronies) who were the cause of most of the trouble there and had been all along. Some of them had been banned long before this meltdown, not even by Dr. Irene but by the old admin team!

Yet this is absolutely typical. It's always the troublemakers, the misfits and the malcontents who shriek the longest and the loudest--usually about problems they brought entirely on themselves! Other people have got better things to do, and don't bring so many problems on themselves in the first place.

At least two of the moaners and complainers even started blogs about the meltdown, with hopelessly biased (not to mention fragmentary) accounts of what went on there. You'd think they'd get a life!

Meanwhile, I can't recall seeing anyone publish a more truthful or complete account of the meltdown. So there's absolutely nothing out there to balance all this spiteful nonsense. No wonder anyone trying to discover what happened on the board ends up with such a distorted picture.

I don't know how much anyone really wants to know about it--down to a blow-by-blow narrative, for instance. But starting from the top, if anyone had an impression of Dr. Irene as some kind of dictator who brooks no disagreement whatever, that's the reverse of the truth. She's always been very encouraging of people's right to express their opinion--as long as they do so respectfully!

Far from her being tyrannical, to the extent that Dr. Irene herself was responsible for this meltdown it's because she made the opposite mistake, of not exerting enough personal control over her board. She let the Catbox "get away from her" over the years, and problems developed that needed an owner's personal attention. When she got her wake-up call about this and took action, it meant (metaphorically) "reining in" the board with a sharp jerk. The shock caused an upheaval that probably couldn't have been avoided. That's the best way I can explain it in a nutshell.

It would be interesting to know if the problems on this AAC site (which I'm not familiar with) are due to a similar lack of executive attention.

To get more concrete about the details, I'd say there were two main problems in the Catbox. One problem was the slowly worsening atmosphere on the board, with more outbreaks of anger, rudeness and conflict in recent years. That was the general aspect of this first problem, and in my opinion the old admin team had not been controlling it as effectively as they might have been. Rather than confronting the problem head-on, the admins been fighting a rearguard action by (among other things) increasingly restricting discussion of certain subjects on the board. They were controlling "contentious topics" where they should have been controlling contentious posters instead.

But the more specific and critical aspect of this first problem was the emergence of a handful of bullies in the Catbox. They'd been intimidating posters they disliked or disagreed with for at least two years, often in a deliberate and coordinated fashion. Due to the activities of these bullies and others, an unhealthy "groupthink" had been developing on the board during those years. I've even seen the absurdity of Catbox posters being attacked by these bullies simply for echoing the same advice that Dr. Irene herself gave people--and on her own board, no less!

So here again that earlier impression of events is upside-down. The problem was not that Dr. Irene was intolerant of those who disagreed with her. She never was like that. It's the bully gang and their cohorts who were intolerant of disagreement.

These bullies were the central cause of the meltdown. On that score I can't do any better than point to this excellent thread from the "AdminZone" forum for managers of online communities. With one major exception, the posters there describe perfectly every aspect of the bully problem Dr. Irene found herself facing in the Catbox:

_http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26193&p=189571

The one major exception was this. The second problem I saw in the Catbox was that Dr. Irene did not seem to have the fullest support of her admins when she tackled that first problem. I'd say she'd left her admins to run her board entirely by themselves for too many years. When people are left alone like that, they often start imagining they're entitled to run things any way they want--though of course they have no such right. When the real owner returns to take command again, they resent it and resist it.

During these recent events I saw clear signs of a power struggle going on between Dr. Irene and some of her admins over who "should" be running her board. This was independent of any specific issues. That made dealing with the bully problem that much harder, especially since the bullies had been entrenched for so long and were far too cozy with some of the admins.

As the poster named Adamantium pointed out on that thread, when a bully problem goes on for too long it's very hard to eradicate. Often it can't be done without significant loss of posters. That's exactly what happened in the Catbox, with a vengeance.

Harishankar remarked how subtle bullies can be--though none the less devastating for all that--and how members surprisingly turn a blind eye to their bullying, not even recognizing it for what it is. That was very true in the Catbox as well. To be sure, the ringleader of the bully gang had done a lot to help and support various members, so she was popular with many as a result. It's just that this didn't give her or her gang any right whatsoever to intimidate other posters or to dominate Dr. Irene's board.

That's another way to understand why posters who left or were banned couldn't see the real cause of the problems. They imagined Dr. Irene was behaving "unjustly" by banning these bullies who were "buddies" to them. But observers who weren't blinded by enmeshment in their "in-crowd" had no trouble at all seeing why they were banned.

Along the way it's worth noting how harishankar's observations about "yes-people" gathering round a bully validate what Filachi said here about "little enabling cliques that form around a person who seems (to me) narcissistic."

As for the meltdown itself, that started with an argument about a link to a political video that Dr. Irene posted. Some genuine misunderstandings resulted for a time. That dispute was not the cause of the meltdown, and by itself it would certainly have blown over. What it did do was expose some of the rudeness on the board, as well as some of the admins' conspicuous failure to manage it. Dr. Irene was certainly not banning people just for "disagreeing" with her. On the contrary, she was remarkably patient in spite of rude remarks aimed at her personally.

One woman had been making an ungodly fuss over this video, creating drama out of all proportion to the issue itself. In talking this over with her, Dr. Irene in her capacity as therapist gave her a friendly piece of advice. There should have been no problem over that either. In another, later conversation this woman told Dr. Irene she had not taken any offense at this advice. But the ringleader of the bully gang chose to make trouble out of it, quite needlessly.

I'd seen Ringleader do this several times before in the Catbox. Although it was none of her business, Ringleader seemed to have deluded herself into thinking someone had appointed her to act as policeman, giving her the right to go around chewing posters out and demanding "apologies" for what they'd said to someone else entirely. She posted the most incredible broadside against Dr. Irene. I was amazed when I read it. I'd seen her pull this stunt on posters before, but I never imagined she'd be so brazen as to try pulling it on the board's owner! There was no way she was going to get away with that.

Dr. Irene called Ringleader on her attitude, and Ringleader could still have backed down. But she didn't. Instead she renewed her attack on Dr. Irene, challenged her to remove her from the board, and ended by making a veiled but unmistakable threat. Well, that was it. You can't negotiate with terrorists! Dr. Irene had no choice but to ban her.

Then Ringleader's bullying cronies stepped up one by one to mount their own attack on Dr. Irene for banning their beloved leader. One of them said to Dr. Irene: "Please pull the plug on this account before I can no longer resist the urge to rip you a new one." That's the kind of language she was dealing with. It was not about "respectful disagreement"! Naturally this crew got banned in their turn.

The trouble with these meltdowns is that they start a chain reaction. Once the first group of miscreants gets banned, their friends step up to protest in a similarly obnoxious manner and get themselves banned too, while others quit voluntarily. Then there are the agitators who keep complaining on and on and on about what's happened and just won't shut up. They disrupt the board's function, so to keep it running smoothly they have to be banned too, or anyway blocked out for a time. I think Dr. Irene tried her best to be reasonable about all this, but just as Adamantium pointed out, it can be hard to uproot entrenched gangs of bullies without losing a lot of posters.

I can't say definitively just why all the active admins quit (all except one), which didn't happen until a week later. That's because I don't know what might have been said behind the scenes. I do know that Dr. Irene did her best to show support and public praise for her admins, even though some of them had not given her all the support they should have done during the earlier dispute.

However, what I saw indicated to me that the admins resented their boss taking the executive action she did, even though it was necessary--in fact long overdue. I suspect some of them were too cozy with the bully gang and didn't like seeing them banned. In addition, Dr. Irene wanted to clean up the anger and disrespect that had been growing on the board, and at least one of her admins, possibly more, saw this as a criticism of the way they'd been doing their job. Dr. Irene took pains to explain that wasn't the case at all, but I imagine they took umbrage at it anyway. I've no doubt they wanted to go on running the show themselves the way they'd been doing for so long, and that wasn't going to happen. So they quit and started a board of their own somewhere else. For all I know, that could well be the real reason they quit.

They left Dr. Irene in the lurch by quitting without notice, leaving her with only one admin to manage a board already in chaos. So it's not surprising if mistakes got made later on by novice admins, once or twice with the wrong people being banned in the confusion. That's the kind of thing that happens in these scenarios.

There were issues over retrieval of posts by those leaving the board, and other incidents as well. For instance the woman I've called "Mouthpiece," whom I'd seen bullying Catbox posters before, tried rather futilely to smear Dr. Irene, presumably out of spite over the meltdown. She caused a lot of trouble and was banned too, of course.

All in all, the scope of this incident was regrettable. Some genuinely good posters were lost who'd been around in the Catbox a long time, and some good admins as well. But the Catbox was due for a cleanup, and despite these losses I think the board will be healthier in the future because of it.

 

[Filachi]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

Hey Onlooker, thanks for your explanation.

"By and large, the loudest shouters I've seen are a few of the worst behaved ex-members of the Catbox (and their cronies) who were the cause of most of the trouble there and had been all along. Some of them had been banned long before this meltdown, not even by Dr. Irene but by the old admin team!"

I have witnessed, experienced this shouting, too. Why does the squeaky wheel get the grease, and why do we just let those squeakers roll over us?

"Harishankar remarked how subtle bullies can be--though none the less devastating for all that--and how members surprisingly turn a blind eye to their bullying, not even recognizing it for what it is."

Maybe we do recognise it a subconscious level, but dismiss it. It kinda bugs us, but we don't want to think about it. If so, I wonder if that's because sometimes once is not enough when trying to get thru to a bully? If I continue to make my point, repeat myself, then am I doing the same as the person I am trying to communicate with? Because it's exhausting and the chances for success are nearly zilch? Why bother?

"It would be interesting to know if the problems on this AAC site (which I'm not familiar with) are due to a similar lack of executive attention."

Yes, in my opinion, for the last 5-6 years. There were regular posters , not listed as admins, who got away with some wild stuff, but that would post chidingly to others when fights erupted, invoking the name of the SC. Everyone knows, no one talks about it. In my opinion, of course. There are a couple of long-time posters that posted they were leaving due to health issues, and after that, there was even less evidence of any moderation. Those that assume that pseudo-authoritarian role aren't very well liked, and rarely get responses to their posts.

The official SC does not ban or rebuke bullying or abusive behaviour. It continues. Recently, possibly because of emails about the situation, SC posted that there was much to be learned from a thread that had gone bad from bullying harassment. She posted it in that thread, as if encouraging the exchange to go on. I have wondered if this is because the traffic through that site has decreased so sharply, and they just want the hit count on the threads. But I don't think they will ever get the types of posters that were once there back. The bullies say f**k you, so and so, call each other names and no one gets banned.

Many long time posters have left, or read silently, after these squeaky wheel flame wars. That's what newcomers see - sticky threads with name calling brawls on a support site. I watch sometimes because I believe it is what we do in our physical life. I want to see if I can see myself in the interactions of others and learn from it.

talk to you later-

 

[Filachi]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

Hey, sorry for the addendum, but I wanted to put in my two cents on this.



"what it is about Sam Vaknin's teachings that some people object to"



"For instance, on this page about "inverted narcissism" (IN), which I gather is an invention of Sam's:"



There are a few inventions of SamV, are there not? Supply? I think he coined that phrase. Those catchphrases that he coined have become commonplace slang in some internet communities. While it's great that he is willing to share himself as he has, what concerns me is that he, proclaiming himself a narcissist, has inundated the www with his version of narcissism. Narcissism from his perspective. While I am sure his contributions to the study of this behaviour disorder have some merit, I don't consider him to be an authority because he claims to be. Any more than I consider him to be a dr just because he claims to be.



That's what bugs me about him.

 

[mechanima]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

---------------------

 

[Filachi]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?



Hey Mechanima -


I felt the same way when I found this thread, too. Finally validated. I had looked all over to find a place that would discuss this issue. "It has always seemed to me that the support Dr Irene gave to this transparent conman and his toxic little cult clearly demonstrated that she was unfit to practice
(and she wouldn't be the first or only qualified therapist to fall into that category)."

Dr Irene addresses abuse and codep, doesn't she? I have wondered over and over if the site I look at is researching Narcissism and co-narcissism. Or rewriting the model of codependency. What better way to do that than to let some "N"s run wild and watch the enabling cliques form around them, the fights that ensue, and how peace is restored after the flame wars are over. Encourage posters to "share", claim it's a safe place to do so.

This is how my mind works. I can't get past the thought of research being done on the internet, and in these forums.

Remember Miss Evers Boys? They told those men they were treating them for syphillus, but didn't, only charted the pathology of their deterioration. They watched them die for years.

Woman savers or Manhaters was mentioned earlier in this thread - that the owner of the site hosted a forum, then wrote a book.


The developers of the AAC site? They also claim to have backgrounds in psychology and counseling. I guess it's normal to assume that anyone in a healing field such as mental health would only want to help people, but maybe it's not as altruistic as that.

 

[mechanima]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

-----------------------------

 

[Filachi]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

One thing I have noticed at that site, and at Careplace when I tried to talk about it was that there are those that really get bugged by any discussion of NPD that does not revolve around them, or that they initiate. That's pretty telling, in my opinion. At Careplace, a new member, I was corrected, then instructed to go to another group. After a week, not posting, with no explanation given, I wasn't able to log in to the site. Shoot, I was bein really nice, too!! At AAC, I searched for old threads in the archives and found the same posters correcting, over and over, those who participated in similar discussions, usually having the effect of killing the thread.

There is currently an ongoing thread about Narcissism that gets sockpuppeted (is that a word?) sockpuppeteered? pretty often, those sock monkeys telling the others that it's time for the thread to die, etc. Those discussions seem very threatening to some. I think it's a playground, too. The bullying goes on and on, sometimes it's a feeding frenzy. Those "N"s sure seem to have a long memory!

 

[mechanima]

Re: Sam Vaknin - Narcissist or Psychopath?

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