Transcription
The main problem with Sunday is that it is the day before Monday. My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of "Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited" and a professor of psychology in several universities, who shall remain unnamed.
Now, today I would like to discuss your roles, your functions within the narcissist's shared fantasy. And this means that you would have to first watch my other videos about shared fantasy and about magical thinking, because if you don't watch these other videos first, the first part of this video will make very little sense. To compensate for this, I have divided this video into parts. It's a Jewish thing, we divide everything in two parts. So, the first part deals with your functions and roles in the shared fantasy, and the second part is an introduction to shared fantasy. So, some of you may wish to watch the second part before you watch the first part to make sense of the first part. Did you get that? Because I didn't.
One good way to describe narcissism is as a breakdown in communication. Like every other human being, narcissists have internal objects and external objects. Now, it's very telling that in psychology, we call people objects. Primary objects in object relation theory, these are the parents or the caregivers. Mother is a primary object. When you love someone, when you fall in love with someone, when you're infatuated with someone, when you love someone, it could be your child, it could be a spouse, it could be a lover, it could be a date. You are having object relations with him. So, people in psychology are objects. How narcissistic of us! And so, narcissism is a breakdown in communication between between internal objects and external objects, among internal objects, and among external objects. So, we have three types of miscommunication, or should I coin a new word, discommunication, between these various objects.
Now, the narcissist, as you well remember, hopefully from previous videos, confuses internal and external objects. He internalizes internal external objects. He internalizes external objects, and then he continues to interact with these as internal objects. So, he would take a snapshot of you and he would continue to interact with your representation in his mind. He would continue to interact with an internal object that represents you, not with you. So, narcissists don't have external objects. They don't have, they don't relate to other people as autonomous, independent, self-efficacious agents or entities, but they relate to everything and everyone as avatars, as icons, as internal representations of external handles and objects. Everything happens inside the narcissist's mind, because according to the narcissist, he is the world. You remember the famous concept, "We are the world"? That's the narcissist. We are the world. So, everything happens inside his mind, inside his head. Everything is an abstraction, a symbol. The narcissist manipulates symbols the same way computers manipulate binary symbols, and he interacts only with these symbols.
But there's a breakdown in communication. His internal objects don't work well together, don't communicate well. The channels of transmission are disrupted. There are internal dissonances and conflicts among the internal objects. And in a nutshell, the reason is that each of these internal objects is linked intimately to a series of cognitions, a series of thoughts, and a series of emotions. And because narcissists have cognitive deficits, they don't know how to think well, they don't know how to think properly. Their thinking is unrealistic, is fantastic. And also, they have no access to emotions, to their emotions, or at the very least, to positive emotions. They don't have the tools to manage the internal objects in a coherent and cohesive way. They don't have the tools to integrate the internal objects into an internal narrative. It's like you would be a film director, and every actor is he does what he wants. Every actor is on improv. Everyone is improvising, and they don't care what you say. You're trying to direct the film, trying to direct the movie, and the actors don't give a hoot. They follow their own internal scripts and ideas, and you know, they're all over the place. These are the narcissist's internal objects.
Similarly, the narcissist cannot regulate well external objects because he immediately internalizes them. The minute he internalizes the internal object, it is subject to the same constraints that I've mentioned before: lack of access to positive emotions and cognitive biases and deficits, problems with thinking. So, objects generally are a big problem for the narcissist. It becomes even much worse when the narcissist tries desperately to correlate internal objects with external objects, to somehow create communication between internal and external, because the narcissist is subject to a lot of dissociation, to estrangement. In other words, the narcissist very often feels derealized, depersonalized, amnesiac, because the narcissist is discontinuous. He is unable to maintain a proper dialogue, ongoing dialogue between all the objects.
So, the narcissist is like in a maelstrom, in the eye of a hurricane, in a tornado, in a twister of objects, all swirling around him, about to collide with him, about to injure him, about to offend him, about to hurt him, about to challenge his grandiosity. No, these objects are swirling around like in The Wizard of Oz, you know, at the beginning with Dorothy, um, in Kansas. The old narcissists live in Kansas. And so there's this hurricane, this twister, and and all these objects are very menacing. They, they, they're threatening. It's frightening not to be able to control your internal environment when you have only an internal environment. And the narcissist, therefore, is in a constant state of anxiety. Indeed, during the '70s and '80s, there were a few scholars who tried to reconceive of narcissism as a depressive illness, as a problem with the management of anxiety and depression. Many of the behaviors of the narcissist are intended just to ameliorate and reduce anxiety, regulate it, and control it.
The narcissist is unable to communicate with the external, with external objects, with you, essentially, with his intimate partners. He's unable to communicate with you because he has no empathy. He has no empathy. He has no access to his emotions. He has primitive defenses like splitting. He doesn't see you, really. He idealizes you, and the idealized image, of course, is not you. Or he devalues you, and the devalued image is not you. The narcissist never interacts with you, with a real you, for better or worse, with your strengths and shortcomings, limitations and talents, skills, hopes, fears. He doesn't see you as as you, as as a separate, unique entity. He interacts with a snapshot of you, which is imbued with positivity, and then it's idealized. It's fantastic. It's unreal. It's imaginary. Or it's imbued with negativity, negative emotionality. In this case, it's devalued. It's equally unreal. So, primitive defenses like splitting make it very difficult for him to interact with with other people. And then he has cognitive deficits and cognitive biases. His grandiosity, for example, or the Dunning-Kruger effect, where he considers everyone to be an idiot, inferior to him, much more stupid than he is. Or there is confirmation bias, where he rejects information that doesn't sit well with his internal, grandiose, fantastic, ego-syntonic narrative. So, if you put all this together: lack of empathy, cognitive biases, primitive defenses, no emotions, you get a part-human. The narcissist is only partly human. The experience of what it is to be human is alien to him.
So now we come to the to the active shared fantasy. The narcissist is an active shared fantasizer. And he is, at first, his intimate partner is usually adulated during the grooming and the love bombing phase. You remember, the intimate partner is an admirer. Fulfills the role of an admirer. It's someone who provides the narcissist with two of the three S's: sex, supply, and services. And at that point, the narcissist experiences maximal grandiosity. The existence or the presence of an adulating, admiring intimate partner allows the narcissist the unparalleled experience of maximal grandiosity. I can compare this perhaps only to a drug high, a high of pure, unadulterated heroin or crack. It's, it's something out of this world, this feeling of maximal grandiosity, because grandiosity is expansive. It expands like the Big Bang. It creates a whole universe. Indeed, the narcissist subsumes the universe. He becomes the world. He becomes the universe. And so he becomes almost god-like, if not god-like. And only in the presence of an intimate partner is what makes this possible.
Of course, all this is backed by unconstrained magical thinking. To feel that you're God, to feel that you subsume, that you, that you have assimilated the universe, to feel that there's that there's nothing you cannot do, that you're omnipotent, to feel that you, that your intimate partner thinks the same, all these require magical thinking. All these require a divorce from reality and impaired reality testing. And the narcissist, at that moment, feels invincible, omnipotent, capable of anything and everything, miraculously perfect and blemishly accomplished, impeccable, perfect, brilliant, the epitome and culmination of creation. And it's possible. It's possible to attain this sensation. It's possible to experience this sensation. It's possible to go through maximal grandiosity in other circumstances, for example, winning an election, making a lot of money, passing an exam, publicly being applauded if you're an actor, being exposed on on mass media. There are many ways, many paths, many routes to maximal grandiosity. But all these routes, all these alternatives, require a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of work, a lot of investment, inordinate amounts of time and resources, and above all, they require repeated interaction with people. They require a lot of pretense, faking it till you make it, a lot of collaboration and cooperation and cooperation, um, surviving the inferior.
So, so as to let them enable you. So, the narcissist feels that everyone around him is is half-human, or intervention, intervention. Everyone around him is subhuman. The narcissist is superior, not only superior by virtue of special skills or special talents, superior by his mere existence. His intelligence is superior, his looks are superior, his accomplishments are superior, or could be superior. Everything about him is utterly out of this world and definitely out of the confines and remit of human affairs. So, to be forced to spend your time with inferior creatures just because it's a prerequisite for experiencing maximal grandiosity is a bit self-defeating. It's a contradiction in terms. It's almost mutually exclusive. How can you experience maximal grandiosity if you depend on other people to attain it, to obtain it, to secure it? And indeed, this is a conflict in narcissism. The dependence of their sources of supply. They're not. They need the sources of supply. They are utterly addicted to the sources of supply, but they also detest and hate them.
An intimate partner is a shortcut. It's simply a shortcut. You have to suffer the ineluctable existence of a single individual, inferior as she may be. You can idealize her much more easily. So you need not think of her as inferior. Actually, if you are interacting with the idealized image, you can pretend that she is not inferior. And then she provides a shortcut to magical, maximal, universal, god-like grandiosity. That's why narcissists are addicted, addicted to secondary supply, addicted to the kind of narcissistic supply provided only by intimate partners, mates, spouses, and so on. And that's why breakups with narcissists are very complicated. That's why there's a lot of stalking, a lot of hoovering, a lot of addictive behaviors, because narcissists can't just let it go.
Simply, the intimate partner who feels for the narcissist various roles, possibly the most important of which, it's a drug. She's a drug. She's the exact equivalent of a prescribed substance, class A substance. She's a drug. He consumes his intimate partner so as to experience the hallucinatory, mushroom-like, mushroom-like experience of maximal grandiosity. She is the puff. She is the Dao. She is the Tao. She is the way. She is the Logos. She is, she is the journey to perfection, to completion, to feeling whole, to feeling God. So, if you have to work hard for decades and then experience maximal grandiosity, you can shortcut this process and within three months find an intimate partner who would make you feel exactly the same.
And this perfect grandiose state is a regression, of course. It's a regression to an infantile state. It's a regression to very, very early childhood, when the narcissist was what, six months old? You see, at that stage, the child feels one with the world. There are no boundaries. Child, mother, world, they're all one entity. The child cannot make and does not make a distinction. I end here, the world begins here. The child merges, fuses seamlessly with his mother as a representation and an agent of the world. And so, this is an infantile state, a regressive state, a boundary-less state. And it can be accomplished only if the mother is good enough. A good enough mother is a term, phrase invented by the famous pediatrician turned psychologist, Donald Winnicott, to describe a mother who provides this environment, holding environment, accepting environment, unconditional love, the environment in which the child gradually can begin to disengage from her and separate and explore the world. We'll talk about it in a minute.
So, you need a good enough mother for this. She needs to be what is called in psychology, in child psychology, a safe base. She needs to be someone you can abandon safely for half an hour and go play with other kids. Someone you can walk away from in order to explore a flower or a puppy or a tree or just the sky with clouds, to find yourself in the world and to find the world in you. You need to feel that she has your back. Mommy, mother has your back, that she is safe, and that she is a base, someplace you can go back to. And so, the mother is critical in this. The mother is critical in this phase of childhood. And the narcissist is trying to parentify his intimate partner, to convert her into a safe place, into a good enough mother, to allow him to again experience primary narcissism, the unmitigated grandiose state of early childhood.
Because it's, it's enmeshment. It's fusion. It's merger, not only with the mother figure or with the intimate partner in this case, but with the entire world. It, it's an indescribable state, akin, akin, very much to how Nirvana is described. Nirvana in Eastern mystical traditions, enlightenment in Eastern mystical traditions, is described this way: a loss of the ego, and then merger, fusion with the world, with the universe, the realization that the, that all the distinctions and all the boundaries are actually very artificial. They're man-made. You made them, and since you made them, you can also undo them. You can remove these boundaries, these limitations, these fences, and you can be one with the world again.
In the case of the narcissist, this oneness is not about enlightenment. It's about control. It's about power. It's a power play. It's grandiosity. It's sometimes sadism, the ability to inflict pain, the gratifying ability to inflict pain. So, the narcissist's motivations are adulterated. He wants to regress to the child infantile state. He wants to feel maximally grandiose. He wants to feel one with the world. But he wants to feel one with the world so that he can mutilate the world, punish the world, control the world, tell the world what to do. Does Hitler come to mind? Probably should. Probably should.
And all this is accomplished instantaneously with the right intimate partner. An adulating, admiring partner. A partner who tells him, if he tells the narcissist he can do nothing wrong. A partner who tells the narcissist he's always right. A partner who tells the narcissist everyone is out to get him, people are envious of him, he is superior. This kind of enabler, this kind of codependent partner, is ideal for the narcissist. It's not that he seeks, he doesn't look for that intentionally, but if he comes across it, of course, it's best. It's a good enough, good enough safe base mother. And it allows the narcissist actually to feel safe enough, having gone back, having, having teleported, having transported himself back to childhood through the agency of this surrogate mother, his intimate partner. Now he finds himself a child. Now he is grandiose. Now he is god-like. Now the world is he. He is the world. Now, therefore, there's no risk. Because if he is in full control, and if he is the world, and if he is God, what's the risk?
So now he can allow himself to separate and to individuate. Remember that narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a disruption, an attachment dysfunction, and a disruption in the process, in the very critical process of separation and individuation. The narcissist's primary object, usually mother, does not allow him to become a separate individual. Does not let him develop his own boundaries. Does not, does not blackmail him into remaining with her, staying with her. Does not, um, untangle the enmeshment, fusion, and the merger between them. She insists on remaining a single organism with two heads. There's a lot of incest, ambient incest involved. But with the right intimate partner, the narcissist feels grandiose enough, strong enough, perfect enough, brilliant enough, omniscient and omnipotent enough, and everything enough to try now to separate, to try now to individuate.
And this, of course, explains the approach-avoidance repetition compulsion. Why he keeps coming towards you and then withdrawing from you. The intermittent reinforcement. Why one day he loves you, the next he hates you. Why the hot and cold. Exactly like a child. Those of you who have been, who are mothers, know what I'm talking about. The child, a child is like that. All children have repetition compulsions, approach-avoidance. All of them. Approach and then avoid. You cannot really predict a child because he's experimenting. He's experimenting with his individuality. He is creating himself, is generating himself in contrast to you. In comparison with you, you are the background against which he emerges and delineates and demarcates himself.
So, if you are the right intimate partner, if you are a functional intimate partner, the narcissist then feels safe enough to do exactly this. So he runs towards you and and hugs your leg as a child would. But then he runs away from you and explores the world, including other women. He separates from you and individuates because he sees you as a mother, and he begins to experience himself as a constellated, functioning self. That's, um, for the narcissist, as far as the narcissist is concerned, that is the unparalleled Disneyland of the mind. The narcissist doesn't have an ego. That's the irony. Is no, it can't be a negative because it doesn't have an ego. He doesn't have a self. Jung said that his introversion was unsuccessful. He did not succeed to introvert properly. But in any case, he doesn't have a functioning, constellated self. But through you, he can experience a constellated, functioning self.
It's a great pity, and it's ironic that this self that he's experiencing is actually the false self. In other words, you allow the narcissist to actually get in touch with his false self, to interact with his false self, to communicate and to interrogate his false self, sometimes to down his false self. And the narcissist never forgives you for this, never. You, you should realize this. If you are a truly good intimate partner, you will pay a dear price. No good deed goes unpunished. That you have enabled the narcissist, empowered the narcissist to own his life, to be in his life, to feel responsible for his life, and to interact with his false self. That is something the narcissist will never forget and will never forgive.
Exhilarating as this experience is, it also sows the seeds. It creates the foundation of mortification, which comes inexorably later in this process. So, the intimate partner can provide a full experience of the false self in the active shared fantasy and a direct experience of the true self via mortification. I've made, I've made the three videos regarding mortification. They're on this channel, and I encourage you to watch them. Mortification is simply when the narcissist comes face to face with himself as he is seen through others. So, when he no longer can deny who is the monster, that is the problem, that is the, the dysfunction, that is the illness, that is he can no longer deny it. He can no longer reframe it. He can no longer repress it. He can no longer invent stories and narratives and wish it away. Mortification is the end game, the last station in the line. The narcissist faces himself, and it is the intimate partner that provides him with this experience by abandoning him, by cheating on him, by humiliating him publicly, usually ostentatiously.
An intimate partner provides the full experience of the false self when she is admiring, when she is a playmate, and above all, when she agrees to play the role of a mother. But then, when she inevitably, and she inevitably abandons the narcissist, when she no longer is willing to pay the price of her own suppression, of her own vanishing, when she insists on finding a life and happiness in it, and therefore is forced to leave the narcissist, when this happens, there's mortification. And again, the narcissist gets in touch, this time with another construct, not with the false self, but with the true self. These are two unforgivable, unforgivable effects of the intimate partner. Therefore, not only the narcissist can never love an intimate partner. The narcissist will always hate his intimate, his intimate partner.
This is not what the narcissist has with this intimate partner. Is not real object relations, because in object relations, you should have an object. You relate to an object. That's why it's called an object relation. The narcissist doesn't have this. The narcissist doesn't see you as a separate thing, as a, as a thing out there. It's not you're not out there. You are in here. It's part of the narcissistic, narcissist's self-loathing and self-hatred. The more you inhabit, the more you occupy, the more you are resident in the narcissist's mind, the more he hates you, because the more he hates himself. The more he becomes aware of his false self through you, the more he hates himself. And because you're part of himself, the more he hates you. The more you motivate him. And because of the mortification, he comes to learn who he truly is, his true self. He hates himself for this. He detests himself. He reviles himself. No one hates the narcissist more than the narcissist. And so, because you're an integral part of his identity, of his mind, of his landscape, of introject landscape, of internal objects, he hates you as well.
The libido investment, as psychoanalysts call it, the investment of the life force, the libido, is in the self, not in the outside, not in you. The narcissist invests his libido. Libido is the life force. It includes also sex drive. The narcissist invests the libido not in you, but in himself. Think about the sex. The sex with the narcissist. Sexuality is not adult sexuality. It's not mature sexuality. It's a form of self-soothing, masturbatory, auto-eroticism. It's self-directed. Physically, literally self-directed. Unfortunately, I can't give you a demonstration right now. It's self-directed. It's auto-erotic. The narcissist finds himself to be very arousing. He is the narcissist is his own erotic object. Through you, he sees himself. Through you, if you find him attractive, if you find him irresistible, he is attracted to himself through you. It's actually self-love by proxy, and you are the proxy.
And the narcissist's sex is coupled with sadism. Sadism could be physical, could be psychological. It could be humiliation or kink or BDSM, but there's always an element of sadism. Objectifying you, using you as an object, using it as an animated sex doll. It's all for these are all forms of sadism. Dehumanizing you. It's aimed at destroying you. The narcissist is even in sex, even during the sex act, shows you that he wants to destroy you because you are an intruding, intruding object. Destroying your proofs of the narcissist that he has power over you, upholds and buttresses his omnipotence, god-like omnipotence. It's very mixed here. You're part of him. He hates himself, so he hates you. You allow him to communicate with himself, with his false self, with his true self. He hates you for this. He doesn't want to communicate with himself. He hates himself, so he hates you for this as well. And finally, you have power over him, so he wants to destroy you because how can you have power over him? He's God. He's omnipotent. And he's going to destroy you for this. He's proud of his utter independence. He's proud of the fact that allegedly no one has power over him. He is the most powerful person.
The narcissist somehow dimly is dimly aware that he cannot maintain meaningful communication with with the outside and with the inside. He feels, experiences, he, he lives through. This is his quiddity. This is his essence. Miscommunication is his essence. It's like all sentences end in the middle. No point is ever reached. There's no punchline except the narcissist's life. The narcissist tells himself he's trying to justify this. He's trying to explain to himself why he can't communicate normally with people, why he can't communicate normally with himself. And he says, well, probably because I'm too intelligent, or I'm too unique, idiosyncratic. I have nothing in common with these people. How can they ever understand me? Why try?
In an active shared fantasy, the intimate partner facilitates communication with the false self. And the false self is the only interlocutor, the only partner with whom the narcissist can communicate. It's the false self. Don't forget, is god-like. It has attributes of God. It knows everything. It's all-powerful. It's perfect. It's brilliant. It's infallible. Never makes mistakes. It's God. So, the narcissist deigns, agrees, accepts communication with the false self. It is equal. The false self is equal. But here again, here again, there's a contradiction in terms. To communicate with the false self, the narcissist needs a mediator. He needs a conveyor belt. He needs a transmission mechanism. In this case, the intimate partner. So, the only interlocutor amenable, acceptable to the narcissist, is the false self. But to communicate with the false self, the narcissist has to resort to a much inferior entity, you. And that pisses him off, irritates him no end. His dependence on you to talk to himself is very grating, grating and aggravating.
You also provide, obliquely, access to emotional and other modes of communication which are not goal-oriented. The narcissist has pronounced, usually pronounced anti-social dimension, psychopathic streak. So he's usually defined and this and that. But one of the main things about the narcissist is he's goal-oriented. Now, the goal could be irrational. The goal could be self-defeating or idiotic. The goal could be narcissistic supply, for example. But whatever else you say about the narcissist, most narcissists are self-efficacious, or they would not have survived. Narcissism is a positive adaptation in the sense that it allows the narcissist to survive and to derive, to extract and to extricate positive outcomes, beneficial outcomes from a very hostile environment. So narcissism works. As we are describing, on a civilizational level, I mean, we collectively are becoming narcissists, and we are becoming more and more narcissistic because narcissism works.
And so, narcissism is a goal-oriented. And suddenly, the intimate partner comes in, and she teaches the narcissist to communicate in ways which are not goal-oriented. To be more, for example, emotional, or just to loaf around and to slack around, and you know, just to enjoy life, to have a good time doing nothing, obtaining nothing, securing nothing. A respite, a respite from the rat race. And so, the narcissist's intimate partner encourages him to have what we call non-sublimatory libidinal investment in cathexis. Did I impress you? No. Let me explain. We all have urges and drives, and many of these urges and drives situated in the id, id, according to Freud, anyhow. Many of these urges and drives are socially unacceptable. You want to jump, you want to jump the drop-dead gorgeous sexy date of your colleague, but you don't. You don't because it's bad for you, but for him, probably bad for her. You don't because society frowns on such behavior. So you instead, what you do, you sublimate. You sublimate this energy. Sublimation means acting in socially condoned, socially conforming, and socially acceptable ways to discharge energies, drives, and urges which are normally not socially accepted or even criminal.
So, the intimate partner encourages the narcissist to actually look himself in the mirror in a variety of ways. Look his false self in the mirror. If, if she motivates him, she forces him to look his real self, true self, in the mirror. But one way or another, she forces him to not sublimate. She forces him to acknowledge, accept, recognize, and finally perhaps adopt the real drives and urges in a way that would gratify him or help him be more at one with himself. She makes him whole. She, in a way, she integrates the narcissist. If she's a proper intimate partner in an active shared fantasy and fulfills her roles, her functions as admirer, playmate, and mother, she helps the narcissist in other ways. In other words, grow up. She helps the narcissist grow up. Accept himself. She redirects his libido, the investment of his libido, his libido investment, and his cathexis, his emotional investment. She redirects them so in a way that is more congruent, more fitting, more acceptable, more ego-syntonic to the narcissist, in a way that would not feel alien and strange and wrong. And the narcissist, through the agency of the intimate partner, feels that it's okay. He is okay. The world is okay. You remember the famous book, "I'm OK, You're OK"? Everything suddenly is okay. It is this feeling of relief, relaxation, anxiety reduction, and amelioration. The intimate partner is like a good anxiolytic and antidepressant rolled into one pallet of appeal. Suddenly, the narcissist can open his eyes without wariness, without paranoia, without fear, without registers. Let's just open his eyes and just be, without any goal, just be. And it feels good. But it also feels ominous, because to just be is to be like everyone else. The narcissist cannot be like everyone else. And so he begins to regard his intimate partner as a threat, because she makes him, she renders him human. And whatever else the narcissist wants to be when he grows up, he does not definitely want to be human.