Welcome to this Jungian life.

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee,

invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.

I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia.

I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod. Today we're going to talk about some area of interest that an analyst named Otto Kernberg brought forward.

Some time ago he wrote an article called Malignant narcissism Large Group Regression, but this was a topic that was particularly important for him.

So, Malignant narcissism is a kind of severe psychological syndrome, which is an amalgam of certain traits of narcissistic personality disorder with antisocial behavior and

paranoia and aggressive tendencies such a person is often extremely self-absorbed, manipulative, vindictive, unempathic, but ready to exploit

others at the drop of a hat. And those kinds of leaders can be highly attractive to large groups who are

experiencing an regression, a regression. So groups like this for a number of reasons

regressed to a more primitive state inside themselves, a less mature psychological state.

And this typically occurs when people are under an enormous amount of stress or perceived

threat.

And then the group collectively adopts

simplistic, even childlike modes of thinking and behavior

which make them more dependent on an authoritarian leader.

So we're going to roll up our sleeves, really talk about this in a meaningful way and as the listeners no doubt will guess

this seems particularly timely and I would say not just in the United States

but this phenomena of groups that collapse under the leadership

of a malignant narcissist is happening all over the world right now.

That's very interesting.

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