Transcription
Minnie is back from one of her trips with a mug. The way I look, I can't blame her. At any rate, no sooner had she settled down than she complained to me. She said, "He used to mean so much to me, and now we are just mean to each other. What's the meaning of all this?" This video is my attempted answer. I hope you find it meaningful.
The Narcissist: Five Stages of Emotional Investment Within the Shared Fantasy: The Cycle of Cathexis. My name is Sakin. I am the owner of Mini, and I am a professor of Clinical Psychology and the author of "Bignal Self of Narcissism Revisited." That was Shakespeare, of course, or my take on Shakespeare. And here's another thing Shakespeare had to say: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts." He was a wise chap, wise bloke, this Shakespeare. He knew his stuff, and his stuff was human nature.
Today, we're going to deal with a particular population, a particular group of people known as narcissists. What is typical of narcissists is that this, this switch between all-out emotional investment, emotional commitment, emotional displays, hyper-emotionality, and total absence, withdrawal, avoidance, detachment, coldness, cruelty even. And these pendular shifts between one state of utter immersion and intensity, and another which is essentially absence, are typical of the narcissist. I call it splitting cathexis.
Cathexis is just a fancy word for psychic energy, emotional investment. When you put energy into something, you know, during the love bombing stage when the narcissist is laser-focused on you, and you feel it physically. It's as if his gaze carries some kind of energy. And so, this energy is cathexis. And the narcissist switches between 110% cathexis and minus 110% cathexis. And this, the only human being capable of doing so. And today, I'm going to describe the minutia, the exact details of the cycle of cathexis.
In general, I call it splitting cathexis because the narcissist, um, pendulates. The narcissist shifts, oscillates between an all-good and an all-bad perception of you, all-out investment in you, and all-out absence. And this division of the world into "I'm all here" and "I'm out of here," "You are perfect, perfect being," and "You are decrepit and stupid and ugly and possibly demonic." These constant swings, these constant shifts between states of mind, these are, this is the outcome of a primitive, infantile defense mechanism known as splitting. And that's why I call the whole phenomenon splitting cathexis.
The narcissist, uh, as far as the narcissist is concerned, everything is a, is a stage, is a theater. The narcissist, in this sense, is a Shakespearean hero. Everything to the narcissist is role-playing. Narcissist plays a role, self-assigned role. He is now cerebral, tomorrow he's somatic. He is career-oriented, tomorrow he switches a career. He is in a relationship, and then he is out of the relationship. None of it feels real to the narcissist. It's all a simulacrum. It's all a kind of movie. He is just an observer, a tourist in his own life, in the landscape of his being. It's just passing through, non-committal, not as a matter of policy, but as a matter of inability to experience positive emotions.
Narcissists are capable only of negative emotions such as envy and hatred and rage. And so, in the absence of positive emotions, there's no attachment, no bonding, no commitment, and no investment. And everything appears to be unreal, surrealistic, nightmarish, dreamlike, fantastic, through a, a glass darkly, through a gauze. And so the narcissist experiences life secondhand, mediated and brokered via his cognitive distortions, defense mechanisms, and the absence of a self, a black hole where a self should have been. Because the narcissist does not exist in any meaningful sense of the word.
The narcissist imposes his own absence on everything and everyone around him. He does not really believe, there's no conviction there, that he is living a life, that what he's experiencing is external and objective, that other people have are separate from him, that the universe is really out there regardless of him. Everything to the narcissist is a projection. Everything is his mind writ large, and everything is subsumed within his mind in the form of internal objects. In this sense, of course, as I keep saying in many of my videos, the narcissist is psychotic.
This derealization, in the case of the narcissist, is constant. In the case of the borderline, derealization is episodic. From time to time, at this when the borderline is under stress, under duress, tension, anxiety, abandonment, real or imagined, engulfment, when the borderline is is exposed to torsion, to powers of tension, then she might react, or he might react, with a feeling of derealization. "This is not real," or depersonalization. "This is not happening to me."
The narcissist is in a constant state of derealization in the sense that he does not perceive reality as real. He does not perceive what's happening to him. Everything around him, animate or inanimate, is real. It's a prop in a theater production, the theater production of his life. He is walking, talking fiction, a piece of fiction, a story. And so there's no investment, no stable cathexis, no commitment, no emotions, and no grief, no mourning when something is lost. The narcissist does not grieve or mourn his or her losses. The narcissist doesn't grieve over anyone and doesn't mourn anything except for his, for himself or herself.
Half of all narcissists are women. Yes. So the narcissist, narcissism, as I keep saying in many of my videos, is a, a prolonged grief disorder. It's a process of mourning what the narcissist could have, could have been, and has never become, owing to bad parenting, dysfunctional family, abuse, trauma, and instrumentalizing, parentifying, and so on and so forth. For a variety of reasons, the narcissist did not self-actualize, remained in a state of potential. And the narcissist grieves this. He grieves his non-existent self, the self that could have been, could have become, and never did. But he does not grieve anyone or anything else because, as far as a narcissist is concerned, only he is real. He is the only object imbued with reality, with with an existential dimension. Everyone else, everything else, these are figments of his own mind. They are internal objects. And so this is why the narcissist doesn't grieve or mourn.
The narcissist is capable of nostalgia for periods of plentiful narcissistic supply, but that's the extent of his ability to look back in any meaningful, emotionally meaningful way. So no emotional investment, no emotional commitment, no mourning, no grief, constant switches between all-out and nothing, kind of splitting. The narcissist, in his shared fantasy with you, in his so-called relationship with you, and this relationship could be romantic, intimate, friendship, or collegial. Narcissists impose the same shared fantasy, structurally speaking and functionally speaking. They impose a shared fantasy on all their interpersonal relationships. And within the shared fantasy, the narcissist goes through stages we are all acquainted with: idealization, devaluation, discard, replacement, hovering. These are inexorable, inevitable stages because they reflect internal dynamics within the narcissist. For example, his need to resolve early childhood conflicts. But each and every one of these stages requires psychic energy, requires emotional energy. And so, in parallel with the stages of the shared fantasy, there are stages of cathexis, the cathexis cycle.
In the love bombing phase, in the infatuation phase, in the limerance phase, and again, this is not limited to intimate, sexual, romantic relationships. The narcissist gets infatuated and limerent with a prospective source of narcissistic supply, with a friend, so-called friend, with a colleague, with anyone who flatters him. And so, so shared fantasy is a universal pattern of interpersonal relatedness in the narcissist's life. And it starts with love bombing, which involves infatuation, limerance, and so on. In the love bombing phase, there's a lot of cathexis. There's a huge investment, inordinate investment of emotional energy. Normal people are incapable of such intensity.
The narcissist is in psychoanalytic theory, cathexis is the investment of psychic energy in an object of any kind. It could be a person, could be a wish, could be a fantasy, a goal, an idea, a social group, the self. So cathexis is there. It's like undifferentiated energy, ready to be invested or directed at a specific object. So when the narcissist commences the relationship, what he does, he simply, he simply creates a burst, a huge burst, a huge explosion of psychic energy. And this is the cathexis. The object is cathected. The narcissist attaches emotional significance, significance to the object. Again, the object could be an intimate partner, a friend, a colleague, and so so. At that point, when the object has been cathected by the narcissist, the narcissist actually appropriates the object because the narcissist is unable to perceive other people as external or separate. Any cathexis in other people is actually self-cathexis.
The narcissist perceives other people as internal objects within his mind. So when he invests in them emotionally, he is actually investing in himself. It's a process of autoerotic self-infatuation, actually, via the agency and the mediation of another person. Exactly like in sex, the narcissist masturbates with the body of his partner. It's all autoerotism. The narcissist is attracted to himself or to herself as a sexual object via another person, another person's gaze, another person's body, another person's touch, and another person's availability, submissive availability for sex. So similarly, when the narcissist directs, um, emotional energy and cathexis also includes sexual energy, by the way, libido, libido and eros, never mind that. But when the narcissist directs any energy at someone for whatever reason, with whatever goal in mind, at that point, the narcissist is actually cathecting himself. He is the sole, exclusive cathected object.
So the idealization is actually core idealization. The narcissist, by idealizing you, is idealizing himself. By emotionally investing in you, is emotionally investing in himself. By creating a shared fantasy for you, he's creating a shared fantasy for himself. You are just a prop in his theater, an instrument of gratification and pursuit of pleasure, among other things. At the same time, you fulfill maternal functions and so on. I recommend that you watch the playlist of, um, the shared fantasy playlist for more.
So the first stage of the shared fantasy involves what is known as object cathexis: the investment of libido or psychic energy or emotional energy or call it what you will, a life force, in objects outside the self, such as a person, a goal, an idea, an activity, a social group, a, a collective, religion, church, I mean, you name it. Object cathexis is always the first stage. Object cathexis is followed by hypercathexis: an excess of psychic energy invested in the object. And this is what is, this corresponds to the love bombing and idealization phase. So the narcissist starts by redirecting emotional energy, redirecting cathexis at an object. And that object could be a potential source of supply, potential intimate partner, potential friend or colleague or whatever. So, but could also be a potential leader, potential fan or follower, any, any external object. The narcissist cathects the external object and at the same time cathects himself via the external object. That is the initial phase. Then the narcissist idealizes the external object and love bombs the external object. Love bombs. And then this involves hypercathexis. Hypercathexis is cathexis on steroids. It's exaggerated cathexis, hyperbolic cathexis, crazy cathexis, insanely intense, insanely frequent, crazy-making cathexis, which kind of, kind of disorients and is also very addictive and very flattering. And so hypercathexis is, is a hook. It's a bait. It's intended to lure you in, um, by rendering you a, a perfect entity or a perfect object and making you fall in love with yourself through the narcissist's gaze. That is the second phase of the cathexis cycle.
The next phase of the cathexis cycle is hypcathexis: hypo with an 'o', hypcathexis. That is an abnormally low level of investment of psychic energy in an object. So the narcissist goes from a high, a crest of emotional investment, hypercathexis. He goes dramatically to hypcathexis, which corresponds roughly to the devaluation phase. So we have cathexis: identification of target. Hypo, hypercathexis: love bombing and idealization, co-idealization, actually, because the only object ultimately cathected is the narcissist. Then we have hypcathexis: devaluation. And then we have decathexis: the cathexis is the withdrawal of energy, of libido from objects, from other people, for example, from the external world. The cathexis, the emotional investment, the energy is taken in, redirected inwards. And so the cathexis is more or less the equivalent of discard. So we have cathexis, hypercathexis, ideal, co-ideal, idealization and love bombing. We have hypcathexis, devaluation. And we have decathexis, discard.
It's all a form of energy management. It's an energy account. It's like, think of it as a, as a bank, bank, bank account or bank deposit, a deposit in a bank. The narcissist deposits a lot of money on your name. No, first, a narcissist decides that you are deserving of a bank account. That's cathexis. Then the narcissist deposits millions of dollars on your name. That's hypercathexis. Then the narcissist decides that you're disloyal or stupid or what have you, devalues you, and there is hypcathexis. He, he withdraws most of the money. And then he discards you and closes the account. That's decathexis.
But there's a, a fifth, fifth stage, stage number five. And that is anticathexis. Anticathexis is actually connected to hovering, but not only to hovering. Changing loyalties, transitioning from one political party or persuasion to another, from one religion to another, etc. Anticathexis, psychoanalytic theory, is the process in which the psychic energy is withdrawn from certain wishes and ideas, and it is used in order to strengthen alternative wishes, ideas, people. In other words, the psychic energy is withdrawn from one object in order to strengthen the emotional investment in another object. But the other object is not chosen randomly.
In anticathexis, the other object has a role. And the role of the other object is to block the dethected material's entrance into consciousness. Let me break it down for you, translate it to English. The narcissist dethects you. He takes away all his investment in you. He's no longer, he no longer idealizes you. On the very contrary, he devalues you. He doesn't want anything to do with you. He walks away. He discards you. There's no energy invested in you anymore. He couldn't care less what's happening to you, who you're with, and what you're doing with that other. Nothing whatsoever. This stage, you don't exist as far as he's concerned. You don't exist. There's only an internal object that represents you in his mind. And that internal object is an enemy, a persecutory object. So the persecutory object tortures the narcissist, threatens the narcissist, generates paranoid ideation because it's an enemy within.
To prevent this discomfort, this dissonance, this growing entanglement and conflict with the internal object turned enemy, the narcissist chooses another object and then redirects all his emotional energy, all his libido, all his psychic energy to that second other object. And he chooses that other object so that the second object is the exact opposite of you, or the second object can somehow block your memory, block out, delete, erase you, the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind, or at least deactivate it. So the role of the second object, once the narcissist has discarded you, transitioned away from you, broke up with you, divorced you, walked away in a meaningful manner, at that point, the narcissist chooses another object. And that other object is either the exact opposite of you, so that together you neutralize each other, it's like matter and antimatter, you become zero. Or the other object has the capacity to somehow deactivate, somehow reduce the activity, somehow ameliorate or mitigate or control, control, or somehow be able to render the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind, to render it weak, inert, inactive, inaccessible.
So the choice of the second object is not random, actually. And I will dedicate a, a video to this. It is not true that narcissists transition from one object to another, from one intimate partner to another, from one spouse to another, from one, uh, social group to another, from one friend to another, from one workplace to another. It's not true that the transition has no rules. It's not true that the narcissist acts randomly, that anyone would do. That's absolutely not true. The choice has to be anticathectic. It has to allow the narcissist to experience anticathexis, to silence the persecutory internal object that now represents you in the narcissist's mind, is a kind of threat, ambient threat. The anticathected material may be similar to the original or opposite, but it somehow must be related to it, and that way it neutralizes it. It's a very interesting topic, the rules of choice of alternatives when the narcissist, for example, um, breaks up with you or divorces you and finds another partner, another intimate partner. Again, the choice of that other intimate partner is not random. It is dictated by highly specific rules of cathexis, which is a topic for another video.
This is the cathexis cycle. It represents the emotional allocation, the allocation of emotional energy, the distribution of psychic energy and libido, if you wish, within the shared, this various stages and phases of the shared fantasy. And now you understand many of the narcissist's behaviors or apparent, apparent choices and decisions. It all has to do with losing interest. One minute you are the narcissist, because you have become an internal object. Narcissist identifies with you, merges and fuses with you internally. It's a symbiotic relationship. You are like a maternal figure. So one minute you are the narcissist's world, the next minute you're nothing, nobody. Narcissist couldn't care less. It's as if you have never existed. And so this transition is, is very bizarre, and but it is fully explained once you understand the cathexis cycle, the cycle of energy.
Ultimately, we are all finite, finite beings. We have a limited amount of energy, and we have to allocate this energy. We have to use it. It's not infinite. We can generate an endless supply of energy, internal, internal energy, psychic energy, libido. We can't generate an endless amount of it. So we need to use it in a way that is self-efficacious, in a way that yields outcomes that we desire. And so the narcissist has X amount of energy at his disposal. And if he gives it to you, he can't give it to another. If he wants to give it to another, he has to take it away from you. And he wants to give it to another because you have become an enemy, a persecutory object. You have conflicted with the internal object that represents you in his mind in a variety of ways.
Watch the shared fantasy playlist. Also watch the two videos that I recommend. They are in the description under the video. One is titled "Victim Narcissist: Reality or Role-Playing?" and it deals with role theory in psychology. And the other one is "Self-Hovering Narcissism: Trauma or Role-Play?" And in addition to that, if you don't have enough time or you're bored by me, which is fully understandable, then watch the video "Seven Phases of the Shared Fantasy." It's a summary of the shared fantasy. But there's also a whole playlist with dozens of videos on various aspects of the shared fantasy. So I owe you one. I owe you a video on how the narcissist chooses his next, next victim, next target, next intimate partner, next friend, the next one. How does a narcissist choose the next one? Again, it's not a random process. Although you are interchangeable, you are dispensable. The choice of the next, next spouse, next girlfriend, next lover, next friend, the choice of the next is not random. It has to conform and to comply with highly specific requirements known as anticathexis. Stay tuned. Ministers, ministers, high and ministers, by.