Sam Vaknin's Articles

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  • Serial Killers
    Countess Erszebet Bathory was a breathtakingly beautiful, unusually well-educated woman, married to a descendant of Vlad Dracula of Bram Stoker fame.
  • The Madman and the Iraqi War
    It is the war of the sated against the famished, the obese against the emaciated, the affluent against the impoverished, the democracies against tyranny, perhaps Christianity against Islam and definitely the West against the Orient. It is the ultimate metaphor, replete with "mass destruction", "collateral damage", and the "will of the international community".
  • Containing the United States
    European intellectuals yearned for the mutually exclusive: an America contained and a regime-changed Iraq. The Chinese are more pragmatic - though, bound by what is left of their Marxism, they still ascribe American behavior to the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in capitalism.
  • Althusser - Competing Interpellations and the Third Text
    With the exception of Nietzsche, no other madman has contributed so much to human sanity as has Louis Althusser. He is mentioned twice in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as someone's teacher.
  • Titanic, or A Moral Deliberation
    The film "Titanic" is riddled with moral dilemmas. In one of the scenes, the owner of Star Line, the shipping company that owned the now-sinking Unsinkable, leaps into a lowered life-boat.
  • The Narcissist's Confabulated Life
    Confabulations are an important part of life. They serve to heal emotional wounds or to prevent ones from being inflicted in the first place. They prop-up the confabulator's self-esteem, regulate his (or her) sense of self-worth, and buttress his (or her) self-image. They serve as organizing principles in social interactions.
  • Addiction to Fame and Celebrity
    As far as their fans are concerned, celebrities fulfil two emotional functions: they provide a mythical narrative (a story that the fan can follow and identify with) and they function as blank screens onto which the fans project their dreams, hopes, fears, plans, values, and desires (wish fulfilment).
  • Pathological Narcissism, Psychosis, and Delusions
    One of the most important symptoms of pathological narcissism (the Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is grandiosity. Grandiose fantasies (megalomaniac delusions of grandeur) permeate every aspect of the narcissist's personality.
  • The Intermittent Explosive Narcissist
    Narcissists invariably react with narcissistic rage to narcissistic injury.
  • Is My Money Safe?
    Banks are institutions where miracles happen regularly. We rarely entrust our money to anyone but ourselves – and our banks. Despite a very chequered history of mismanagement, corruption, false promises and representations, delusions and behavioural inconsistency – banks still succeed to motivate us to give them our money.
  • Money Laundering in A Changed World
    If you shop with a major bank, chances are that all the transactions in your account are scrutinized by AML (Anti Money Laundering) software.
  • Corruption and Transparency
    The UNDP estimated, in 1997, that, even in rich, industrialized, countries, 15% of all firms had to pay bribes. The figure rises to 40% in Asia and 60% in Russia.
  • Critique and Defense of Psychoanalysis
    Harold Bloom called Freud "The central imagination of our age". That psychoanalysis is not a scientific theory in the strict, rigorous sense of the word has long been established.
  • The Fundamentals of Psychological Theories
    All theories - scientific or not - start with a problem. They aim to solve it by proving that what appears to be "problematic" is not. They re-state the conundrum, or introduce new data, new variables, a new classification, or new organizing principles.
  • The Revolution of Psychoanalysis
    Towards the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of psychology became entrenched in both Europe and America. The study of the human mind, hitherto a preserve of philosophers and theologians, became a legitimate subject of scientific (some would say, pseudo-scientific) scrutiny.
  • In Defense of Psychoanalysis
    No social theory has been more influential and, later, more reviled than psychoanalysis.
  • Britain's Real Estate
    The five ghastly "Jack the Ripper" murders took place in an area less than a quarter square mile in size. Houses in this haunting and decrepit no man's land straddling the City and metropolitan London could be had for 25-50,000 British pounds as late as a decade ago. How things change!
  • Wall Street, October 1929
    The atmosphere of the great boom was savagely exciting, but there were times when a person with my European background felt alarmingly lonely. He would have liked to believe, as these people believed, in the eternal upswing of the big bull market or else to meet just one person with whom he might discuss some general doubts without being regarded as an imbecile or a person of deliberately evil intent - some kind of anarchist, perhaps.
  • The Savings and Loans Associations Bailout
    Asset bubbles - in the stock exchange, in the real estate or the commodity markets - invariably burst and often lead to banking crises.
  • The Bursting Asset Bubbles
    Asset bubbles are not the exclusive domain of stock exchanges and shares. "Real" assets include land and the property built on it, machinery, and other tangibles. "Financial" assets include anything that stores value and can serve as means of exchange - from cash to securities. Even tulip bulbs will do.
  • Fact and Truth
    Thought experiments (Gedankenexperimenten) are "facts" in the sense that they have a "real life" correlate in the form of electrochemical activity in the brain. But it is quite obvious that they do not relate to facts "out there". They are not true statements.
  • On Empathy
    Empathy is predicated upon and must, therefore, incorporate the following elements:

    Imagination which is dependent on the ability to imagine;
    The existence of an accessible Self (self-awareness or self-consciousness);
    The existence of an available other (other-awareness, recognizing the outside world);
    The existence of accessible feelings, desires, ideas and representations of actions or their outcomes both in the empathizing Self ("Empathor") and in the Other, the object of empathy ("Empathee");
    The availability of an aesthetic frame of reference;
    The availability of a moral frame of reference.
  • The Science of Superstitions
    The debate between realism and anti-realism is, at least, a century old. Does Science describe the real world - or are its theories true only within a certain conceptual framework? Is science only instrumental or empirically adequate or is there more to it than that?
  • The Three Forms of Closure
    For her traumatic wounds to heal, the victim of abuse requires closure - one final interaction with her tormentor in which he, hopefully, acknowledges his misbehaviour and even tenders an apology. Fat chance.
  • Back to La-la Land
    Relationships with narcissists peter out slowly and tortuously. Narcissists do not provide closure. They stalk. They cajole, beg, promise, persuade, and, ultimately, succeed in doing the impossible yet again: sweep you off your feet, though you know better than to succumb to their spurious and superficial charms.
  • Traumas as Social Interactions
    We react to serious mishaps, life altering setbacks, disasters, abuse, and death by going through the phases of grieving. Traumas are the complex outcomes of psychodynamic and biochemical processes. But the particulars of traumas depend heavily on the interaction between the victim and his social milieu.
  • Eating Disorders and Personality Disorders
    Do narcissists also suffer from eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa or anorexia nervosa?
  • Personality Disorders
    Many of the symptoms and signs that you describe apply to other personality disorders as well (for instance, the histrionic, the antisocial and the borderline personality disorders). Are we to think that all personality disorders are interrelated?
  • Misdiagnosing Narcissism - Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
    Anxiety Disorders – and especially Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) – are often misdiagnosed as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
  • The Narcissist as Eternal Child
    "Puer Aeternus" – the eternal adolescent, the semipternal Peter pan – is a phenomenon often associated with pathological narcissism. People who refuse to grow up strike others as self-centred and aloof, petulant and brattish, haughty and demanding – in short: as childish or infantile.

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