10 Examples of Narcissistic and Psychopathic Fantasy

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks if I can take a look at fantasies associated with personality pathology I've had a number of questions specifically about narcissistic and antisocial person idlers so I answer these questions in a few different ways look at the personality disorders all ten of them and go through just what types of fantasies we might expect with those personality sorters and then I'll look at ten examples of cluster B personality pathology fantasies so fantasy has an interesting place in personality pathology and counseling in some counseling modalities clients talk about their fantasies and what those fantasies mean to them they explore fantasy in order to get to some sort of therapeutic benefit this is particularly common in psychodynamic therapy and therapies that are similar to psychodynamic most fantasies are harmless and fantasizing is extraordinarily common technically a fantasy is when somebody imagines something that is improbable or impossible sometimes fantasies can lead to positive outcomes even though the fantasy itself can rarely be realized for example somebody might have a fantasy of becoming the best actor who has ever lived they might work hard at studying acting and going to a lot of auditions and they might become a good actor on the other hand sometimes fantasies can interfere with legitimate goals and every now and then fantasies can be destructive and frightening when it comes to personality pathology the personality characteristics that really stand out in terms of fantasy would come from cluster B so that would be antisocial narcissistic borderline and histrionic Personality Disorder z' the level of fantasizing is so high with narcissistic personality disorder that fantasizing is actually one of these symptom criteria fantasies of unlimited success power brilliance beauty or ideal love although as I've said many times in Prior videos I view the term unlimited as too restrictive here I prefer the term exaggerated because not every individual with NPD wants unlimited excess sometimes they just want a highly unrealistic quantity of success now the main trait associated with fantasy is openness to experience so if we look at this from the perspective of the five factor model if somebody is high and openness to experience they are imaginative creative and they tend to wander off into fantasy if we combine personality pathology with relatively high openness to experience we get fantasies that may seem unusual and in some cases antisocial it's important note here that there is a significant difference between having a fantasy and acting on a fantasy although the presence of troubling fantasies would indicate that counselling would be a good idea many of the severe consequences with troubling fantasies are realized when people try to make those fantasies into a reality so here I'm going to go through some of the fantasies that have been associated with personality disorders and then again really narrowed down to cluster B personality pathology and give some specific examples when talking about specific fantasies that I have become aware of information has been changed to protect the innocent so as I mentioned fantasies are fairly common and most of the 10 personality sellers have some relationship to fantasy just like all personality types would have some relationship so just quickly going through the person is orders and looking at the fantasy type that might be associated with that disorder from cluster a personality pathology paranoid person is order here we sometimes see fantasies of being able to see and know everything to satisfy fears about being spied on so somebody's paranoid they may fantasize about being able to detect when people are actually out to get them so they could have something like x-ray vision or an ability to read minds or just something that would let them know who's trying to cause harm to them moving one to schizoid I haven't noticed too much in the way of fantasy with this disorder individuals with this disorder tend to be unresponsive to social situations and they don't often come in for treatment so when I was kind of thinking through these 10 personal suitors I really couldn't come up with a fantasy that's specifically associated with I ran into the same thing with skits a tipple perhaps there could be some fantasies here of being accepted by others because of the social anxiety component we see sometimes what's a typical but in general I don't really see this one strongly connected to fantasy now moving on to cluster B personality pathology with antisocial we see fantasies of committing and getting away with crime and fantasies of domination again I'll talk more about this cluster as I get to the different examples for cluster B with narcissistic we see fantasies about being powerful wealthy being admired by everybody in the world about finding a perfect romantic partner about controlling other people so we see some overlap here with antisocial with borderline we see fantasies of finding one perfect mate who offers absolute security and with histrionic fantasies about being popular and being the center of attention moving on to cluster C personality pathology starting with avoidant sometimes here with avoidant we see fantasies of having close relationships now some of the time and people think about of Weeden personage sort of they think that somebody is trying to avoid social situations because they don't want to be close to people but usually people with this disorder do want to have close relationships they just have a strong fear of embarrassment and rejection with dependent personality disorder we see fantasies of finding one person that the individual can really count on to support them so somewhat similar to borderline and with obsessive-compulsive personality order we see fantasies of a world where everybody can be productive and everything can be productive and nobody's trying to interfere with that productivity so we really see fantasies of everything going perfectly everything running smoothly so now centering in on cluster B personality disorders and I'm really focusing here mostly on narcissistic to some extent antisocial and to a lesser extent borderline and histrionic what I've noticed about narcissistic fantasies from my clinical experience and from the research literature is that there's quite a bit of overlap with these fantasies and antisocial fantasies which actually makes a lot of sense given that we see a lot of co-occurrence between these two person these structures as well as comorbidity between the two personalities witters in the dsm so narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders the official diagnosis it's unusual for a narcissist to have psychopathic tennessee's and it's not unusual for a psychopath to have narcissistic tendencies at the sub clinical level these traits hold together fairly well this has been explored in the research on the dark triad the third trait of course being Machiavellianism now the official personality disorders only capture certain aspects of psychopathy and narcissism antisocial personality disorder really tends to capture impulsivity irresponsibility and criminal components of psychopathy this is referred to as factor to psychopathy or sociopathy the diagnosis really doesn't capture the superficial charm very well and it doesn't capture every aspect of the manipulation like we would see with factor 1 psychopathy now a narcissistic personality suitor tends to capture the grandiose side of narcissism characterized by dominance confidence being resistant to criticism and extraversion and it tends to miss vulnerable narcissism which is characterized by distrust shame resentfulness introversion and a hyper sensitivity to criticism as we'll see from these fantasies both factor 1 and factor 2 psychopathy play a role and both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism play a role so with all that in mind let's get started with the 10 examples of cluster B personality fantasies in these examples I'm going to alternate using a male and a female as the individual who is having the fantasy so the first fantasy is the fantasy of revenge and here I'm going to start with a male this fantasy is most associated with psychopathy and narcissism and occasionally with borderline especially when the individual is seeking revenge on a love interest so this fantasy this could be revenge on people who rejected the individual who bullied them doubted them or who ignored them so looking at the example here we see a man with antisocial tendencies with psychopathy who fantasizes about how he will attack who bullied him when he was in grade school or in high school and with his fantasy he is really striking fear into their hearts right so he targets the first individual and hurts them harms him in some way potentially even kills them and other people who bullied him start to see this like in the news or something and realize that he's going after everybody that bullied him so they're trapped they can't really do anything about it and they're stuck with a lot of fear and anxiety they're unable to stop his rampage so in this fantasy he may have some type of super power we can evade law enforcement and get away with these crimes moving to the second example this is a fantasy of beauty so again here I'm moving to using a female as the example this is associated with narcissism and to some extent borderline and histrionic Personality pathology so at this example we see a woman who thinks of herself as unattractive or average and in her fantasy she will suddenly be seen by others as being exceedingly attractive so it's not always about change in the individual but rather about change in how other people view the individual right so in this example she's not becoming more attractive she's been attractive the whole time along and people just can't recognize it there's something blocking them from seeing it and the fantasy of course is that obstacle is removed and everybody realizes how beautiful she really is moving to the third fantasy this is the fantasy of mind control this one is most closely associated with narcissism and borderline this is often to make somebody love the individual to establish control or to escape responsibility so at the example here we see a man who commits an assault perhaps as part of another fantasy like a fantasy of revenge and he's arrested and tried and he uses his mind control abilities to make sure the jury finds him not guilty so he's acquitted of the assault but he's only using the mind control on the members of the jury other people like the prosecutors and the police they know he's guilty right and they're not being controlled so they would think that he's guilty the whole time along so essentially the individual can smugly taunt the prosecutors and the police and confused them right how is he being found not guilty by this jury when the facts clearly indicate that he committed these acts of revenge these assaults interestingly I've actually seen this fantasy a number of times and when I first heard this fantasy I kind of wondered why the fantasy wasn't to have this mind-control ability over everybody involved like why even be arrested in the first place right just mind-control the police and be done with it but there's something satisfying to the narcissist or the psychopath to commit a crime and for some people to know that he's really guilty and then get away with it through his special ability whatever it is mind control or some other ability it's not really as entertaining for this individual unless they have this satisfaction of this group of people who again kind of realize that something bad really happened and the person's getting away with it so that's why I think the mind control in these fantasies is often restricted to just a few people like 12 people and jury for example moving to the fourth fantasy this is the fantasy of being accepted by all those who rejected the individual this is common with narcissism and borderline so the example here would be a woman who achieves a high level of popularity she becomes like a famous individual and this forces people who rejected her to admit her greatness and beg for her forgiveness so now she's able to hang out with those people and build all the friendships that she originally wanted so this one really isn't about revenge it's about restoring what the woman believes that she was entitled to the entire time along she wanted to be popular she wanted people to accept her they didn't and this fantasy her becoming exceedingly popular or famous this can set that right this can make the people who rejected her realize the error of their ways so this again kind of restores her back to where she wanted to be moving to fantasy number five this is a fantasy of doing something so helpful to society that people will admire the individual this is often known as communal narcissism right and of course this has a strong tie to narcissism and not so much of course to antisocial borderline or histrionic so the fantasy example here would be a man starts a nonprofit to help the underprivileged gets a great deal of media exposure everybody loves him for helping people he seems like he is beneficent he is magnificent he's an incredible person who's there to help Society now interestingly these fantasies of communal narcissism sometimes grow increasingly authentic meaning they start to become self-centered back toward what we normally think of with narcissism narcissism is often thought of it's much more authentic than communal so these fantasies of communal narcissism might be popular kind of early in somebody's life but then again become more self-centered over time that will be reflected in the newer versions of the fantasy fantasy number six is the fantasy of redemption and success this is more common with vulnerable narcissism and borderline and of course those two constructs have a lot of overlap between them so this one is really about being falsely accused and then vindicated so the example here a woman is accused of stealing money from a bank perhaps with video surveillance that captures her removing money from a bank vault but it turns out that she actually prevented the theft perhaps she was moving the money from the bank vault to a place where would be safe so the real criminals couldn't find the money they were trying to steal now this seems like an unusual fantasy but I've also encountered this one several times and I was really trying to think about why this fantasy occurs and in terms of my clinical experience and talking to people the only thing I could really come up with is that the movement is really tremendous when going from being hated to being loved right so we think about it on a scale where being neutral having people look at someone and just think really nothing about them that's a zero being hated would be a negative ten and being loved would be a ten what happens here at this fantasy is that somebody can go from negative ten all the way to ten instead of going from zero to ten so it's really about the change it's the amount of change that occurs so the fantasy is more satisfying because now people really have to change their perception a great deal instead of just again going from neutral to liking the individual so an unusual fantasy again but I have seen this many times this Redemption and success fantasy pattern fantasy number seven is a fantasy of being chosen as great right so I see this mostly with narcissism and every now and then with psychopathy among all these fantasies that involve unlikely outcomes this one seems to be particularly unlikely yet like many of these I've actually seen this particular fantasy quite a few times so the example here highly intelligent and incredibly advanced aliens come to the planet Earth and choose a man to be a great leader on earth they appoint him to be in charge of the whole planet and on top of this they give him super powers perhaps something like the ability to fly incredible strength being immune from any type of weapons that are available on earth so we see kind of again a fantasy that really stretches things now within this fantasy this fantasy being satisfied but the person being made to be a leader of the world this man now can address his other fantasies right so this one kind of sets things off it starts things he gains these superpowers and his power in general and now he can live out all of his fantasies on the planet so I think this addresses the sense of being special and unique we see with narcissism if people on earth refused to recognize how incredible the man is perhaps an advanced super intelligent alien race will recognize him and everybody on earth will have to acknowledge how they were wronged so we kind of see familiar themes in this fantasy right so people that rejected the individual will now be forced to accept him moving to fantasy number 8 this is a romantic fantasy we see this with narcissism borderline and histrionic we rarely see this with psychopathy and the research would assure this is sometimes referred to as the hysterical fantasy and the examples usually feature a narcissistic woman who has the fantasy which is kind of interesting because you would think would be more tied to histrionic Personality Disorder but again it's featured mostly around narcissism the example here a woman believes that one particular man who she has not met yet will find her see value in her that no one else could see and who loved her more than anyone could ever love her and this love will go on for a long time hundreds of years or even forever right as a fantasy so anything's possible this romantic partner will save her defend her protect her and even heal any types of difficulties that she has whether they're related to mental health or bad memories or trauma and of course medical problems could be addressed as well so this individual is really a savior to the woman now many times when I've seen this fantasy there's actually been a specific man in the fantasy so the woman has a person in mind and she believes that person will recognize her and again do all these different things protect her and save her so moving now to the ninth fantasy this is domination and we see variations of scenarios where a man has control over one woman or a group of women this is most closely associated with psychopathy and narcissism and this is kind of interesting because the degree to which those two traits are pronounced really seems to determine the type of fantasy we see in this context of domination so I'll provide an example from the narcissistic side and from the psychopathic side so looking at narcissism a narcissistic man fantasizes about women who live in an apartment complex he owns so he's the only male there and this apartment complex could hold potentially hundreds of other people and again other than him they would all be women now in the narcissistic fantasy the women are there of their own free will because they all love the narcissist they want to be with him and of course the narcissist wants that love so essentially in this fantasy the women are all competing to be with this one man so in this example he's not really using force he's not really dominating in a traditional sense but he is in a dominant position right they all want to be with them and in this fantasy again there's no competition from other men so as we move over to the psychopathic side of this there's some similarities but also some market differences so we see the same apartment complex the same math right we see one psychopathic man and a bunch of women except with the psychopathic fantasy the women are prisoners so the psychopath dominates them he can do what he wants and in his fantasy of course he often would now the more psychopathy we see the more this can get into the area of something like murder so it's some psychopathy here we see maybe some coercion but with more psychopathy it gets even darker again up to an including murder it extreme psychopathy it would really just be about murder right there wouldn't be any sexual relationships or anything like that it would simply just move right to murder so really when we look at narcissism and psychopathy we have to look at the levels of each one again and that kind of determines which way this fantasy can go I've also seen versions of this fantasy where the individual in the fantasy kind of starts out with being loved like the women are chasing the man but with some of the women the man is more aggressive right it's not where they're really chasing him he's chasing them so in the fantasy both of those types of approach and avoidance are occurring so the psychopathic Tennessee can dominate sometimes and the narcissistic Tennessee can dominate sometimes and that can move back and forth in the same individual again as expressed by the fantasies and the changes in the fantasies now this fantasy of course doesn't have to involve an apartment complex I've seen examples were involved an entire country where the man was the only male an entire country and the whole country is full of women I've seen it were involves a mansion a motel a town a Space Station another planet so I can entire planet other than Earth and I've seen it were involves an entire galaxy so again there really no balance at all on fantasy and we see these fantasies go to incredible extremes of course this particular fantasy is especially dark as compared to a lot of these other fantasies now moving to the last fantasy number 10 this is a fantasy of suffering so we mostly see this with narcissism and borderline it's an unusual fantasy and the goal seems to be to get attention so the example here a woman has sustained staggering losses of family members when she was the only survivor and a horrific multi-car accent this causes her to jaw sympathy from people around the world right so notice the suffering here is really the loss of other people the woman's not necessarily suffering physically like she wasn't necessarily injured in the accident so this suggests a possibility that she's actually callous right that those losses don't mean anything to her and this of course would be more common if the narcissistic tendency here and the borderline Tennessee also had psychopathy so we can see how this fantasy becomes darker as more psychopathy enters into the equation I've also seen examples this where the woman was hurt and where she did mourn the loss of the family members right so it doesn't have to be callous it doesn't have to be psychopathic that's just a possibility this fantasy also seems to have some overlap with factitious disorder right there's this idea that the person will voluntarily suffer even hurt themselves in order to attract sympathy and attention so there are some different fantasies some examples I covered the 10 personality sores very quickly and then took the more detailed look at cluster B personality pathology with those 10 examples again some of them quite disturbing and I've even seen many actually that are more disturbing than what I've talked about here again fantasies don't have any limits so somebody can start out with a fantasy that's a little worrisome and that fantasy can develop and grow over time and that's something that counselors we need to be on the lookout for when fantasy start out kind of mild or playful we're kind of within normal range and then start to become distorted and dark over time it's important to be on the lookout for increasing levels of aggression and violence and themes like revenge and domination so we know whenever I talk about topics like fantasy and personality pathology there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comments section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 405,432

Keywords: Narcissistic fantasy, psychopathic fantasy, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, covert narcissism, shame, anger, aggression, hypersensitivity, anxious, depressed, socially awkward, neurotic, shy, manipulative, blame-shifting, gaslighting, self-esteem, manipulation, arrogance, self-centeredness, jealousy, special, unique, fantasy, entitlement, grandiosity, requires admiration, lack of empathy

Id: g-172Dfkqc4

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020