Emotional Incest is Lifelong

A few clarifications before you watch this potentially difficult video.

Number one, emotional covert incest does not have to occur between opposite sex uh child and parent. It can occur between a mother and her daughter. It can occur between a father and his son. Although more typically and more commonly it o does occur between opposite sex members. So it between a son and his mother and a daughter and her father.

Number two, when emotional covert incest happens between opposite sex uh participants. When the child is of one sex and the incestuous parent is of the other sex, it occurs in different stages of different phases of personal development and growth. When the incestuous relationship is between a son and his mother, it's typically before the age starts before the age of 36 months before the phase of separation individuation. When it is between a daughter and her father, it typically starts after age 36 months. And this is the reason of course that daughter father emotional covert incestuous relationships often devolve into actual sexual incest.

Point number three, this video that you're about to see, I made a mistake. I on one occasion I think or maybe twice I used the word homoerotic when I actually meant to say autoerotic. So throughout this video when when I talk about autoerotism the the the adjective should be autoerotic. But there is a connection between homoerotism and autoerotism. And I'm going to discuss this connection in a future video. So there is a connection between autoerotism and homosexuality and it's a very intricate and interesting connection.

Number four, emotional covert incest is lifelong. It's lifelong because it retards it prevents the growth and the development of the child. It hinders the separation individuation phase. It obstructs and definitely in many cases destroys the possibility for object relations, relationships, intimate and romantic and relationships with other people. But an even more potent, more powerful reason is that the child rehearses relationships with other people first with his parents. So up to age 36 months, the child is enshed or fused with a parental figure, the mother usually, and uses her as a dress rehearsal. So he directs his sexual urges at her. He creates intimacy with her. erotism, his his erotic drives are directed at her and so on so forth and he exercises he develops a skill set of interacting with future intimate partners. But an incestuous relationship, emotional covert relationship prevents this from happening. And so the child develops a shared fantasy with the parental figure. And I discuss in this video how this shared fantasy becomes the exclusive mode, the only way that the child continues to interact with other people in his life or her life later on. So the shared fantasy is born out of a an emotional covert incestuous relationship.

Number five, all children experience emotional covert incest. It's a healthy phase up to age 36 months. But if the parent reacts inappropriately to the covert, intimate, incestuous relationship, if the parent continues to perpetuate the shared fantasy with a child one way or another, and I explained the two ways that this happens, then it's a problem for later on in life. This kind of child when he becomes an adult is incapable of sexual relationships, normal healthy sexual relationships. He tends to dehumanize, objectify and degrade sadistically sometimes his intimate partners and I explain why in the video or he becomes totally asexual, experiences sexual dysfunctions. Similarly, this kind of child has an insecure attachment style and dreads intimacy. All this is in the video you're about to see.

So, emotional covert incest in my view is much worse than actual sexual overt incest because it's unspoken. It's forbidden. It's the unknown the unthought known in bolases the terms the term the phrase used by bolas it's something that's in the air it's atmospheric it's a hidden text it's a palimpsist it's and and the child is disoriented confused there confusion and this carries on into later life and this kind of child when he become when he grows up and becomes an out remains stuck. Remains stuck and repeats the same kind of dysfunctional relationship with his mother or maybe his father later on with other partners. And this is known as repetition compulsion. Emotional covert incest. Have fun.

Mama's boy, daddy's girl. There's a good chance that we are dealing with an instance of covert or emotional incest which is the topic of today's nonsprawing video. My name is Sam Baknin and I'm the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited. I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology in southern federal university in Russia. I am currently on the faculty of SEPS Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, which is the way I like it.

Covert emotional incest. Covert emotional incest was first described by Kenneth Adams. He described the victims of covert or emotional incest as angry, guilty. They feel guilty towards their parents. They have problems with self-esteem, addiction, especially substance abuse and sexual problems with sexual and emotional intimacy, which is a delicate way of saying that they are incapable of sexual and emotional intimacy. Alcoholism and other substance addictions are also associated with the occurrence of covert or emotional incest. So to summarize this segment, covert emotional incest is not a good thing. I hope you got that message.

Now covert or emotional incest is a part of a larger phenomenon known as parentifying or the word that I coined adultifying. It's also known as the atlas personality. When the child is forced to behave as an adult adult as a parent, when the child is denied the possibility of acting in an age appropriate manner, when the child is penalized, whenever the child tries to express his or her needs. So this leads to a situation of parentifying or adultifying when the child actually acts as his mother's father or his father's mother or some combination where the child is the parent and the parents are the children. The child affords the infantilized parent, the immature parent, the Peter Pan parent. The child provides such a parent with sakur but not sex. So emotional covert incest is a sexless intimate relationship. And it is this disjunction, this contra um I would say contradiction even between intimacy and sexlessness that has a long term impact on the child turned adult later in life. The child learns to associate intimacy with a lack of sex. He also learns to associate intimacy with forbidden taboo sex. So when he finds himself later in life involved in an intimate relationship, he is very conflicted about sex and about his own sexuality because on the one hand he feels attracted, besoughted, infatuated with an individual, the intimate partner. There is a lot of intimacy. There's a lot of vulnerability. Maybe there's some attachment, secure or insecure, but still there's some attachment. There's some bonding. And yet in the in this person's mind, the person who has been exposed to emotional covert incest early on in life, in this person's mind, if you're intimate with someone, you should not have sex with them. Sex is forboten to use my favorite German word. Sex is taboo. Sex is even dirty. The target of intimacy, the target of positive emotions such as love is also the forbidden the forbidden object of sexual thoughts, drives, and urges.

Now the child who is parentified or adultified tries to please because the child depends for its existence on the parent. The child needs the parent to provide food and shelter. But even more importantly, the child needs the parent to pro to cater to the emotional needs of the child. The parent is the source of support and sakur and holding and containing and acceptance and warmth and empathy and compassion and affection and love. These are the needs of a small child. The child is terrified to lose the parent. Children who are parentified and adultified have extreme separation insecurity aka colloquially abandonment anxiety. And the reason is that the child is forced to become the parent. And because children are children and they don't know how to be adults and they haven't been trained in being parents, they constantly feel inadequate. They feel that they're failing. They feel that their services as a surrogate parent. Their conduct as an adult is in this is insufficient. They feel they're trying, they're striving, they're trying very hard and they never make it. The parent who parentifies her child, the parent who adulifies his child. These parents are setting the child up for failure because children do a bad job of being adults and an even worse job of being parents, especially during the formative years 0 to six. But I would say even well into early adolescence let's say 12 or 13. So there is a very complex situation here. The parents abrogate their parental duties and obligations. They simply give up on being parents. They are too self-indulgent. They're too depressed. They're too absent. They are too emotionally cold and detached. They they have an insecure attachment style of their own. They may be narcissist etc etc. These are these are known collectively as dead parents. Not in the physical sense but the in the emotional sense. So these kind of parents parentify the child. They act childishly. They regress to an infantile phase whenever confronted with stress or conflict or a conundrum or a dilemma or they need to make a choice or a decision and they leave it up to the child to function as a parent. But this way they set up the child for failure. The child tries to please them and becomes a people pleaser. And yet there's always this ambient sense of I am not good enough. I'm a failure. I'm inadequate. In short, the parentification and adultification of the child create a permanent bed object. Such a child is likely to develop an insecure attachment style. The enshment with a parent because this is a state of enshment with a parent is self annihilating. The the child annihilates itself, negates itself, minimizes itself in order to cater to the overt and implicit requirements and expectations and needs of the parent. And of course in such a situation the intimacy is extreme and growing all the time. There are no boundaries. We'll talk about it a bit later. There are no boundaries. So the child doesn't know what is appropriate and inappropriate. Where to start and where to stop, how far to go and where to put its foot down and say no. Similarly, the parent is at a loss. This is the cognita. This is this is a a continent which both parent and child are exploring and the parentifying parent the parent who adultifies the child is herself a child. So she's incapable of exercising adult judgment and evaluation or estimation of the situation. She's incapable of enforcing establishing and then enforcing boundaries. These are two children. In effect, the intimacy in such a relationship is romantic intimacy. It is an intimacy common among boyfriend and girlfriend or more likely two spouses. And of course, it was Freud who first noticed this process. He called it the edypus complex. Jung later described a similar process in in girls and called it the electra complex. So the edypus and electro complexes are situations where the child develops extreme intimacy with a parent of the opposite sex and this intimacy translates in the child mind into eroticism erotism and into sexuality. So the the intimacy acquires sexual and erotic hues and overtones. That's the edipus and electra complex. The edipal the edypus and electro complexes actually have two ethologies two processes of causation. One was discovered by Freud and Jung and one hasn't been. Freud and Jung have identified only one of these ethological processes of these pathoeologies. They described competition with the same sex parent for the love and attention of the other sex parent. So the child the boy competes with his father for his his mother's love. The girl competes with her mother for her father's love. It's a process of competition. But actually there is even more compelling source of these complexes. Until the age of 36 months, the infant is genderless and pun pansexual. There's no sexual differentiation. There are no sexual preferences or orientations and there's no gender. Consequently, infants definitely into age 24 months are autoerotic. They are attracted to themselves as sexual objects. They're incapable of redirecting the sex drive, the errors, part of the liid libido. They're incapable of redirecting errors at other people. They're not capable of object relations. So, they have narcissistic libido. They are attracted to themselves as sexual objects. Libido is turned towards oneself as a love object. But remember on the one hand the infant again up to age 36 months is sexually attracted to itself is infatuated with itself. Its libido and aeros are directed at itself but at the same time it is merged and fused with the mother throughout this period what was what used to be known as the symbiotic phase or symbiosis. So even as the child is sexually attracted to itself, even as the child develops intimacy with itself as the primary object, as a primordial object, he also regards himself as mother because there's no distinction between himself and mother. Mother and the baby are one. So when the baby is attracted to himself, he is also attracted to mother because he is one with mother. When the baby is uh infatuated with herself, she is also infatuated with mother because she's one with mother. Later on this is transferred to father. So the narcissistic libido cexes the child but at the same time cexes the parents or at least the mother until age 36 months. It is only when the child begins to separate from mother. Only when he begins begins to separate that he transfers his libido from himself and from her as his extension to other people. So this is very important to understand that emotional incest or covert incest is an inevitable stage and universal stage in early childhood development. It is not the exception. It's the rule. All babies, all children, all infants, all toddlers develop emotional intimacy which is essentially covert and incestuous because of the fact that until age 36 months they haven't separated from mommy. There's no separation individuation from the parental figures. So the child directs his sexuality and his romantic feelings and his intimacy at himself and by extension at his parents because they are one and the same. His parents and him, his parents and her, they're one and the same. So emotional covert incest is not only an inevitable universal phase in human development. It's also very healthy. It's very healthy because it allows the child to exercise to rehearse relationships with other people with third parties with objects who are not mother who are not father. So the child the child develops a skill set of interacting with other people romantically and sexually by exercising or rehearsing safely with a secure base with mommy and much and a bit later with daddy. So emotional covert incest as a pathology is very similar to the ethology of narcissism. Until age 36 months, everyone is a narcissist. And this is what is what we know as healthy narcissism. It's the narcissism that later in life allows us to regulate our sense of self-worth to acquire and modulate self-esteem and self-confidence to take on the world until age 36 months. If we remain stuck in this phase when as adults then we have secondary or pathological nosis. It's the same with emotional incest. Everyone has experiences emotional incest. It's a rehearsal. It's a dress rehearsal for later life relationships. But if we remain stuck at this phase, then we have a problem. Then we have a pathology because emotional incest, covert incest prevents separation individuation. When the child acts as the mother's husband, when the child acts as the father's girlfriend, the child is unable to separate from mother. separation, individuation is disrupted because the child's needs are ignored and suppressed. The parents emotional needs, immature emotional needs, predominate. There are no boundaries. The parent is possessive and romantically jealous. This kind of parent much later in life is likely to convey the messages no one is good enough for you my child and no one will ever be as good to you as I am as I am and have been. So the immature infantilized parent, the dead parent, the selfish or self-indulgent parent prevents separation individuation does not allow the child to separate from her to become an individual because she wants to keep the child as her husband or her his girlfriend forever. This kind of mother has a spousal relationship with a child for life. And this kind of father has an incestuous romanticized and inappropriately intimate relationship with his daughter also for life. And these bonds, these bonds of um enshment and merger infusion and this need to act as the mother's husband or the father's wife. This need imposes on the child obligations and duties even if only implicit. Implicitly the child grows up and says to himself, "I cannot abandon mother. She is no one else but me. I am the man in her life. I should support her. I should advise her. I should protect her. I should cater to all her needs, emotional, um, financial, etc. Similarly, a daughter who has been exposed to emotional covert incest, a lack of boundaries, parentification, adultification, a daughter who has been treated by her father as a substitute wife or substitute girlfriend. This kind of daughter would feel that she holds a responsibility for her father's well-being and happiness. and that she has no right to walk away and have her own life because having her own life means her father's disintegration or unhappiness or worse. These children become hostages. Emotional covert incest is a control strategy or a control mechanism. It allows the parents, parents who are insecure, parents who are codependent, parents who are selfish and exploitative. It allows these parents to blackmail their children into a constant presence to not to prevent the child from venturing out into the world and exploring relationships with other people. The parent monopolizes the child. The parent wants the child to never leave home. Sometimes in the physical sense. The problem with emotional covert incest is that sometimes it degenerates and deteriorates into sexual incest. And it is usually the parents initiative. When the when this kind of parent and it's a very sick parent of course it's a very bad parent. When this kind of parent realizes that she's losing her whole she's losing her control over the child. The child is about to separate child is about to individuate and develop object relations. The child is about to get married. The child is having a girlfriend or whatever. This kind of mother may offer sex as a way to bind and bond the child, as a way to entice and seduce and tempt and reward the child for um a codependent peopleleasing behavior. So sex is the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of emotionally incestuous parents. And whenever there's a risk that the this very comfortable or convenient arrangement would be broken by a third party, the son finds a girlfriend, the daughter finds a boyfriend, and they're about to get married or not, never mind. There's a relationship in the in the horizon, and the emotional incest is going to end or be broken. Some some parents of this kind would revert to sex as a drug as a way to keep the child around.

Yungian analyst and author Marian Woodman described covert emotional incesters and boundared bonding. the parent or parents use the child as a mirror to support their needs rather than mirroring the child to support the child's emotional development and needs. So, it's reverse reverse memory mirroring. I deal with mirroring in one in two of my videos um recently and you may may wish to watch.

So, here we are. There's a parent who is immature, child, childlike or childish, selfish, self-indul indulgent, entitled, some sometimes depressed, has a bad relationship with her intimate partner and she converts her child into her new husband. The child is supposed to cater to her needs, look after her, protect her, listen, listen to her when she needs support and sakur sakur, give advice, she can cry on his shoulder, hugs, etc., etc. If she has a bit of conscience, this will not become a sexual type of incest. But incest, it is all the same, as we will see momentarily.

I mentioned homoerotism, narcissists and other other mental health disorders where homoerotism is is dominant or prevalent. But let's focus on narcissism for a minute. Narcissism is the pathological outcome of the inability to separate from a maternal figure from a mother and to individuate. That much is established in vast vast amount of literature. But why the homoerotism? One reason for the homoerotism I've explained the child is enshed symbiotically with the mother or later with the father. And so when the child directs its sexuality inwards, when the child when the child at an early stage of development is the love object of itself, when the child falls in love with itself is sexually attracted to itself, automatically he is also sexually attracted to mother because he is one with mother or she is sexually attracted to father because she's one with father. The process of symbiosis, merger, fusion and so on ensures the inappropriateness of sex drives and urges, romantic involvement and intimacy. Now until age 36 months, there's no harm done. It's just a way for the child to rehearse and exercise and develop skills when it comes to future relationships. But if it continues beyond 36 months, we are in trouble because the child hasn't separated, hasn't individuated, is still enshed, is still merged and fused with a mother and therefore is sexually affected, romantically invested and inappropriately intimate with the mother. So this is one source of autoerot autoerotism, I'm sorry. But there's another reason for auto erotism and it has to do with the forbidden object. During in emotional and covert incest, the child is having object relations with a forbidden object. It's taboo to have sex with mother. It's taboo to be father's wife. So there is an element of forbidden in in emotional covert incest and that's why we call it incest. Autoerotism develops or emerges as a solution. The child says I cannot have sex with mommy. It's not okay. It's taboo. The daughter says, "I will go that far with daddy, but I won't cross a certain boundary. It's taboo." But on the other hand, I cannot betray mommy by having a girlfriend. I cannot betray mother by getting married. I cannot betray mother by being sexually attracted to my classmates. On the other hand, I cannot betray father by having a boyfriend. I cannot betray father by getting married to a man. I cannot betray father by looking at boys in a certain way. There's a sense of betrayal. So the child says I cannot have sex with mother or father. I cannot be romantically involved with mother or father. My intimacy with mother or father is probably not okay. there's some taboo elements, some forbidden um component and the messaging from society is such that it's clear that something's wrong. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to I'm going to not cross certain boundaries. For example, I'm going to not have sex with mother. I'm going to not have sex with father. But I'm also going to avoid having sex with anyone else because I want don't want to betray mother. Because I don't want to betray father. I'm not going to have a relationship with anyone because if I have a relationship with anyone, it's like abandoning mother. It's like abandoning father and I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to do that because the well-being and happiness and life, prolonged life, longevity of my father and mother depend on me. My intimacy, my romantic emotions, feelings, our interactions as spouses, me and my mother, me and my father. These keep my mother and father alive, functioning and smiling. I can't betray them. I can't stab them in the back. I can't do this to them. I can't find a substitute to mother. I can't go with someone who will replace father. No way. So instead, what I'm going to do, I'm going to fall in love with myself. I'm going to be sexually attracted to myself. Autoerotism is the solution. I can have a relationship. I can be sexually attracted. I can even have sex. but with myself. And this way I'm not betraying mommy. I'm not stabbing daddy in the back. I'm not abrogating my responsibilities. I'm fulfilling my duties and obligations as a good son or a good daughter. If I never develop a relationship and never have sex and so on with others and only with myself, then I'm okay. Autoiritism is a defense, a defense against a a deep set sense of guilt.

Now this of course leads to sexual difficulties later in life and to emotional romantic dysfunctions also known as insecure attachment styles. I said that a parentified adultified child who has experienced or is in the throws of emotional covert incest and let it be clear that emotional covert incest is lifelong. It's not limited to the first years of life. It's a lifelong thing. The mother who has been enshed and entangled in an in ancestrous covert relationship with her son will pursue this relationship to her dying day and will prevent the son from separating individuating develop appropriate relationships with other women getting married and so on. And if he does any of these things, she will try to undermine and sabotage it to the best of her ability. Blackmail the child, extort the child, threaten the child and so on. So all these causes difficulties as I said in the sexual as far as sex is concerned. This kind of children turned adults this kind of people they need to objectify and dehumanize their intimate partners. Why? In order to have sex, they need to regard their partners as inhuman, as pieces of meat, as object, as sex dolls, as muratory dildos, anything but human beings. Why is that? Because if you owe exclusivity and allegiance to mommy, to your mother, and you are having sex with a woman you love, a woman you see as a full-fledged person, then you are betraying mother. You're cheating on mother. It's simply cheating. It's infidelity. But if you're having sex with an object, the equivalent of a sex worker, a prostitute, if you're having sex with a dehumanized, objectified body of a woman, there is no betrayal here because your relationship with money is an emotional insist. There's no sex there. It's covert insist. It's not open among the bed sheets. So, if you're having sex with a nonhuman, with a sex doll, then your mother won't feel bad. She won't be able to castigate you and criticize you and chastise you and berate you. She won't be able to complain because you're not having sex. You're not having sex with another woman. You're not getting emotionally attached to another woman. You're not betraying your mother emotionally. If you're having an emotionally incestuous relationship with your mother and you're having no emotions with any other woman, then there's no infidelity here. So this kind of parentified children who have undergone or are still undergoing emotional incest tend to render their partners nonhuman. They defeminize women. They emasculate men. They objectify. They dehumanize. They have sadistic punitive sex. and so on and so forth. But some of these parentified emotionally uh children who've been subject to emotional incest simply become emotionally dysfun sexually dysfunctional, erectile dysfunction or they revert to asexuality. They're they're not sexually active. they remain virgins for life or they have very scarce or rare sex or they have sex with sex workers they pay for it. So homo autoerotism and sexual dysfunction are an attempt to square the circle. I'm going to have sex but I'm going to have sex with myself. I'm going to I'm going to treat myself as a love or sexual object. Or I'm going to have sex, but I'm going to have sex with nonhumans, with pieces of meat, with sex dolls. I'm going to dehumanize and objectify and treat sadistically my partners. And I'm not going to get attached emotionally because that would be betrayal. That would be betraying the parent, betraying the mother, or betraying the father. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this because I love them. I want them to be happy and I want them to live long. And they keep informing me, they keep signaling, they keep telling me that without my intimacy, without my romantic attachment, without my my functioning as a spouse, they would die.

So you're beginning to see that emotional or covert incest is the primordial and prototypical shared fantasy. The narcissist, for example, develops a shared fantasy first and foremost with his mother of origin, with his biological mother. It's a fantasy that has very strong incestuous overtones and undertones. It's covert, but it's clearly inappropriate and forbidden and taboo in many respects. It is when the mother rejects the child within this shared fantasy that narcissism is born. Narcissism is when the child forms like any child remember it's a universal phase is the rule when the child forms symbiosis with mother merges with her fuses with her gets in mesh with her until age 24 to 36 months and then the mother on the one hand does not allow him to separate and individuate either because she is all over him, monopolizes him, doesn't allow him to breathe or to to interact with peers or to go out to play or whatever or idolizes him or pedestalizes him or instrumentalizes him. So either because the the parent is all over him or because the parent rejects the child. These are two developmental pathways. Initially the child develops a shared fantasy with the mother and this shared fantasy has very pronounced elements of emotional covert incest. And then if the parent is bad, if the parent is immature, selfish, uh depressed, absent, if the parent is a dead parent, dead mother, then the mother would either encourage the incestuous, covert um incest, emotional incest. She would encourage it. She would perpetuate the symbiotic shared fantasy by taking by by controlling the child by a takeover of the child by not allowing the child to develop his own identity and life his own individuality. Or this kind of mother can reject the child. Having rejected the child, the child remains stuck in the shared fantasy phase because it is trying to make it work. Is trying to make it to to have a good happy ending. He's trying to transition to separation individuation by putting the shared fantasy behind him. But the child cannot do this because of the rejection of the mother. The mother rejects the child and refuses to play game, refuses to collaborate. He refuses to it's as if the child is playing chess with the mother and then she upturns the board and all the pieces fall apart. So the child remains stuck. Either way, the child remains stuck in emotional covert incest in a in a primordial shared fantasy. If the parent encourages the incest, encourages the inappropriate forbidden emotional tie, the parent perpetuates the shared fantasy thereby preventing separation individuation. Or if the parent walks away, breaks up with a child, refuses to collaborate, and the child remains stuck in a repetition compulsion, constantly reenacting the shared fantasy, attempting to bring it to a bring it to an end to allow him to enable him to move on.

The problem with the emotional uh covert incest is that the communication is mostly non-verbal. The the the emotional incest subverts proper signaling and proper communication by creating a hidden forbidden text. something that is in the air is clear to both parties but can never be discussed. So it's a kind of ambient abuse. In my view and my view is in the absolute minority. In my view the effects of emotional covert incest are far worse than the effects of open overt sexual incest. Because covert incest, emotional in incest is not clearly wrong. It is very disorienting. There is a role confusion. It's unclear when each stage ends and another begins. It's unclear where the child ends and the parent begins. There no boundaries. The child cannot separate, cannot individuate. The shared fantasy becomes the dominant mode of organization and operation and the only relationship the child experiences. Both parties become habituated. the these very sick behaviors, pathological behaviors become habits and as I said they cause enormous damage to sexual functioning, to intimacy, capacity for intimacy, to attachment, to bonding, to uh going on with life, creating a family, having children, having a boyfriend, having girlfriend all this is massively disrupted.

Does the mother or the father occupy the object space? The child transitions from narcissism, primary narcissism, infantile narcissism. A child transitions from this phase to object relations. Infantile primary narcissism is when the child regards itself as the love object or the sex object because he's not aware of the existence of any other objects. And then when he becomes aware that other objects exist, other people exist. The child transitions to object relations, begins to interact with other people, learns skills, social skills, sexual skills, becomes acquainted with scripts, sexual scripts, for example, cultural scripts. All this is prevented. Emotional covert incense prevents all this from happening because the child is not allowed to exit the shared fantasy where the only object is the child mother the fusion the fused object. The self object is fused. So within the shared fantasy space, the only allowed object is the object that represents the fusion, the merger, the symbiosis between mother and child. So that whatever emotions the child directs at itself are also automatically and ipso facto directed at the mother. Much later this happens with the father. This could happen with the father as well. Um, emotional covert incest is different between men and women because the mother plays almost an exclusive role in personal growth and development until age 36 months. So uh covert emotional incest and shared fantasies of emotional incest prior to age 36 months are exclusively with only with a mother and therefore with boys. So boy children, male children are likely to develop emotional covert incest with a mother prior to age 36 months. And female children, girls are likely to develop covert emotional incest with the father after age 36 months. And that is precisely why sex, sexual incest is much more common with girls than with boys because they enter a shared fantasy of emotional incest much later in life and it continues well into adolescence where they are ripe for sex. So this is the picture. You see the intimate, no pun intended, connections between the narcissist shared fantasy and emotional covert incest. We can generalize and say that the narcissist shared fantasy is actually a reenactment of the covert emotional incest with his mother. He chooses an intimate partner. He converts her into a maternal figure and then he develops a an incestuous relationship with her. This leads in many cases to asexuality, sexlessness, because you can't have sex with your with your mother on the one hand and on the other hand in a desperate attempt to not betray the original mother by having sex or falling in love with another woman. The narcissist abuses his intimate partner sexually and emotionally as a way to distance himself from any possibility of betrayal. He says, it's like he's saying to his mother, he's signaling to his mother, you see, I haven't betrayed you. I'm treating her badly. I'm treating my wife, I'm treating my girlfriend badly. I'm not having sex with her. or when I'm having sex with her, it's sadistic and objectifying and dehumanizing and degrading and I definitely don't have any emotions involved. So don't worry. Don't worry. You're my first and only love. That's the message. That's the hidden occult message. And of course, this creates a lot of ambivalence in the child. These children grow up to love the mother in a very very sick dependent way. It's not really love as I said it's enshment and on the other hand to hate the mother because somewhere deep inside these children as they grow up realize that mother is holding them back. Mother is not allowing them to become mother is decimating their potential. mother is killing them and then mummifying them the same way the guy in Psycho Norman Bates did to his mother. And there's a lot of anger, helplessness, hopelessness, and rage because it's very frustrating to not allow to not be allowed to separate and become you. And it is a narcissist's hope that in the next shantism he will succeed. He will separate. He will individuate. And we will say goodbye to all maternal figures, the original one and all the substitutes thereafter. And of course, it never works. It never works because emotional covert incest never stops. Even after the parent dies, it never stops. It's a lifelong affliction. It paints the world and frames it in a highly specific way. And it prevents prevents the parentified adultified child who is forced to play the spouse prevents him from or her from actually being a spouse to someone else.