Transcription
I keep informing you in my videos that the narcissist is at least as dissociative as the borderline, or be it in a different way. Whereas the borderline dissociation is reactive; when the borderline finds herself under stress, duress, faced or confronted with abandonment and humiliation and rejection, she would tend to dissociate. She would tend to disremember certain events and certain precursors of events; she may depersonalize—in other words, she may remove herself from her body—or she may derealize, perceive reality as some kind of a dreamscape. All these are common in borderline.
The narcissist's dissociation is very, very different. It is not reactive; it is not triggered by any specific events, real, imaginary, or anticipated. It is not the outcome, for example, of narcissistic modification or narcissistic injury, rejection, humiliation, exposure. No, in the narcissistic condition, dissociation is a permanent background noise, a permanent state. The narcissist dissociates literally the bulk of episodic memory. Episodic memory is the recall of personal history, past events, and biography. The narcissist dissociates all these on a regular basis; it's like a some kind of dissociative engine humming in the background and eliminating memories as they emerge and as they are formed. In other words, while the narcissist may possess short-term memory, his long-term memory is very impaired—kind of a hippocampal accident or blackout in alcoholism.
Now, why is that? There are possibly brain abnormalities, structural and functional, which are involved in this kind of regular dissociation, but there are also psychological motives and psychodynamics involved. For example, the narcissist is terrified of intimacy and love and closeness and and sor and empathy and caring, and so he rejects all these. He rejects all these because, as a child early on, he has learned to associate positive effects, positive emotions with inevitable hurt and pain and rejection and humiliation. This association is very powerful. Whenever the narcissist is confronted with a human interaction, with an interpersonal relationship that involves any modicum of intimacy, any attempt to enter the narcissist's world and to somehow make sense of the narcissist, the narcissist rejects these and immediately cuts off the memory, buries it somewhere, represses it, forgets about it. Amnesia, therefore, is the dominant form of dissociation in narcissism, whereas depersonalization and derealization are more common in borderline personality organization.
And so the narcissist dissociates, whatever the reason may be; this is a well-established fact. But the narcissist, aware of these memory gaps, confabulates in order to somehow bridge these gaps with plausible, probable, reasonable explanations or narratives, pieces of fiction which plug into the immense holes in the narcissist's memory. That's confabulation; it's one way of coping with these dissociative memory gaps. But the narcissist feigns or fakes indifference; it's as if he couldn't care less about shared memories. Shared memories are a form of intimacy, and the narcissist rejects them because they're loaded with emotions—emotions to which the narcissist has no access, positive emotions or negative emotions which may destabilize the narcissist and force the narcissist to confront his internal mayhem and tumult and shame. Now, half of all narcissists are women, and I say "he," it's a "she," genders are interchangeable. So here's a narcissist in a relationship with you, and he can't remember a single thing: important dates, experiences you've you've been through together, um, special things that interest you or motivate you or make you afraid, or your dreams, your fantasies, your wishes. He he can't remember a single thing that has happened to the two of you. He does remember, he does accumulate memories which can and will be used against you in the narcissist's court. It's like an eternal Miranda warning: anything you do, anything you say can and will be used against you. But this is a sliver, this is a tiny fraction of the totality of sharing and commonality of experience and life together, and the narcissist tends to slice off these shared memories, cut them off, bury them, and repress them and pretends that this is the normal state, and he couldn't care less about any of this; he couldn't be bothered; it's a waste of his cosmically precious time.
And yet, simultaneously, the narcissist expects you to be his external memory, his external hard drive. He expects you to be a kind of glorified USB. The partner is saddled with the obligations of the memory bearer, the bearer of memories. The partner is rendered a repository of reminiscences: all the memories, episodic memories, biographical memories, shared memories, shared experiences, even conversations, even communication—everything is deposited with and in the intimate partner. The narcissist bails out; it's as if none of this is his business. And this arrangement allows the narcissist and the relationship to preserve a sense of, for continuity, fake continuity. It's as if the narcissist glues itself together through you; you are the superglue that is holding the narcissist's mind together. Because in the absence of continuous, contiguous memories, in the absence of cause and effect, in the absence of um a sense of being the same person throughout different experiences, there's no identity, there's no continuity, and the narcissist uses you as an external source not only of supply, not only of sex, not only of services, not only of the safety of your presence, but also as a source of personal continuity. You are the narcissist's outsourced core identity. The narcissist's self-concept, his imputed self, imputed core identity, rely on your functioning as a secure, based maternal figure. You are there, you're always there; you you witness the narcissist's life; you accumulate these memories; you're like a gigantic scrapbook, and you arrange his memories in a way which makes sense of life itself, your common life, definitely your relationship, and then you project it or you reflect it back in the narcissist so that the narcissist can access this enormous library at any time.
The narcissist would deny all this if you were to ask the narcissist about his memory; he would say his memory is exceptional, no one has a memory like him. And if you were to confront these confabulations and prove to him with hard evidence that they are nothing but fallacious renditions, pieces of fiction, he would go wild, he would go berserk, he would become aggressive. And yet the narcissist taps your memory time and again, slyly and not so slyly. It's not that you have the narcissist reality test, you are the narcissist memory test; you are this secure base, secure vault, the Fort Knox of the narcissist's memories. It is as if the narcissist outsources his memory to you, as if he is still suffering from what we call infantile amnesia. Infantile amnesia is when children can't remember anything that has happened to them until age two or three, and they have to rely on testimonies, eyewitness accounts by people who were in their lives at the time. So you can't remember anything that has happened to you until age two; you have to resort to photographs, family videos, and to your mother or father or cousins or uncles or aunts or neighbors or teachers, kindergarten teachers, in order to make sense of what has happened to you and who you were. Your memories are outsourced until age two or three; you don't have memories of your own. This is called infantile amnesia. Because the narcissist gets stuck developmentally at age three, because analytically, psychologically, is a three-year-old; he suffers from prolonged, lifelong infantile amnesia. He remembers through others, vicariously, by proxy. And there is a, as I as I said at the beginning of this video, is that memories are associated with emotions, and in the narcissist, experiences, emotions never end well; they always end badly. Not remembering, therefore, is a defense. The narcissist is terrified of being overwhelmed and flooded with memories which carry with him emotions which he doesn't know how to handle. So exactly as Kernberg has suggested, narcissistic personality organization is a defense against borderline personality organization. In borderline personality disorder and borderline personalities in general, we have a situation where the individual is overwhelmed by emotions, disregulated, becomes labile and volatile, drowns and ends up self-harming, self-trashing, and sometimes suicidal. The narcissist is terrified of this state, this borderline state, and one of the main defenses of narcissism is to deny the emotions. But there's no way to deny the emotions without denying the memories attendant on these emotions. Emotions are always contextual; they always emerge from some life experience; they're always connected to a place, to a period, to another person; there memories are not disembodied; they are grounded in a life history, an autobiography. Narcissist, therefore, in order to get rid of emotions because emotions threaten to overwhelm them and drive them into a borderline state, in order to get rid of these emotions, they deny the memory; they eliminate the memory so that they don't have to experience the emotions. When they import memories from other people, when they outsource their memory to other people, when other people serve as hard disks, external hard disk reservoirs of memory, the memories are merely cognitive. If you derive your memory from another person, that memory comes to you sanitized without any attendant emotions. If if you recall a specific episode with your intimate partner and it is your recall, your memory, it's likely to be infused with emotions, and if you're a narcissist, you wouldn't know how to deal with it, and you may devolve or deteriorate or default into a borderline state, which is not a good state to be in. But if the memory comes from your partner, not from you, there's no internal recall; everything comes from the outside, your from witnesses, then there are no emotions; these are mere cognitions; it's like reading a book or watching a movie. Not remembering is a defense. The partner is a thread that holds together the narcissist's beads of simple eternal present. Narcissist inhabits only the present; the narcissism is a collection of present moments which are not connected, which are not connected to each other in any way, shape, or form. And it is the partner that serves as the glue that puts all these moments of present together, creates the illusion of a flowing narrative, like in animated cartoons where we have stills that are animated, and then the narcissist experiences a sense of continuity and identity which is utterly fake but still is a substitute; it's better than nothing. You, therefore, reconstitute the narcissist on the fly in your interactions with the narcissist; in your absence, the narcissist disintegrates into a kaleidoscope of myriad presentism moments, moments embedded in the present, and to recover from this state of dissolution is extremely difficult. This is why the narcissist is hellbent on finding an intimate partner or friend immediately; that's why he cannot spend um prolonged period of time alone; he is capable of self-supplying, but he is not capable of self-generating an identity or a sense of continuity of being. There narcissist is disjoint, disjointed and discontinuous, a Humpty Dumpty, broken and can be put together only by you.