Transcription
Okay, uh, welcome back to the Sam Wagnin Horror Show. And today, we are going to discuss the Humpty Dumpty narcissist. The narcissist is broken. We all agree on that. But today, I'm going to show you a mechanism. The mechanism that led to the disintegration, the fracturing, the fragmentation of the narcissist. It's an intricate mechanism. Why is it important for you to know? Why should you get acquainted with these intricacies and the inner cogs and nuts of the narcissist's machinery? Because you're an integral part of it. The minute you teamed up with the narcissist, the minute you became his intimate partner, his colleague, his neighbor, even the minute you've interacted with the narcissist, you have been body-snatched. You have been appropriated. And whether you like it or not, and whether voluntarily or involuntarily, you're in the game. So, better know the rules.
My name is, and I'm the author of... You see, you completed the sentences in your head when I said, "My name is." And an inner voice in your head said, "Sam Wagner." And when, when I continued inexorably and said, "I am the author of..." that same voice whispered in your ear, "Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited." Whispered or thundered, depending. Anyhow, this inner voice that had completed the sentences in your head, that's an introject. That is my voice inside your head. The more you are exposed to my videos, or anyone's videos, anyone's public persona, the more that person becomes an introject, a voice inside your head. We are going to discuss internal objects, external objects, and how everyone often gets confused. Most of all, the narcissist.
Now, the narcissist draws you into his vortex, into his whirlpool, into this tornado that swirls inside his head. Okay, a few administrative things. I just uploaded a video. It's a compilation of my videos on nothingness. I've made four or five videos about nothingness, the principle of nothingness, which is an antidote to narcissism, in my view, at least. These five videos are available on my other video channel, Vacnine Musings. And this compilation is courtesy the inevitable, inimitable Phoning and Yawning, Dorcas Williams. I'm gonna keep up this compilation for 24 hours, then I'm going to switch it to the playlist. And I'll remind you again, many videos you are looking for are not available on the general videos page, but you can find them in the various playlists. If you scroll across the page, you will find multiple links to my playlists. I think there are nine of them, maybe ten, I don't remember. Just go to the playlist, the relevant playlist, play list, organize alphabetically, they're organized by themes. Select the theme, go to the playlist, you're very likely to find the video you have been missing and pining for.
And a proper pining for. Have you seen the recent, recent Richard Graham take on hope? He, as he graciously makes clear in the, in the pinned comment under his video, um, he was inspired by two giants of human intellect, um, Nietzsche and Wagner, and by another guy who made some, who made some reference to Buddhism. So, in my video, videos on nothingness, a recurrent and important theme is that hope is a poison. Hope sets you up for failure, for disappointment. Hope generates expectations, most of which are unrealistic. And when they are inevitably frustrated, when they inevitably don't come true, what you have is heartbreak. So, hope is bad for you. Hope is the most toxic invention of the human mind. And it's pretty recent, by the way. "Abandon all hope, ye who are about to enter." So, Nietzsche said, a bit before me, "We are both nut cases." But he was much more insane than I am. He ended up in an asylum. And before he ended up in asylum, he wrote a few minor seminal works. And he said that hope is a very bad thing. Um, rush to Richard Graham's, um, YouTube channel and watch his take on hope. It's poetic, it's profound, and it's amazing. And there he makes a distinction between types of hope. He prefers a typology of hope. And he says that some kinds of hope are actually very positive and constructive, and others are not. I beg to disagree. That's not the point. The point is you should be exposed to multiplicity, multiplicity of reasoned voices. And Grannon is one voice I value.
Okay, another thing. I have two Instagram channels. Facebook, uh, disabled my access to one of them, so it's archive only. My active channel, Instagram channel, my active Instagram account is Narcissism With Acne, one word, Narcissism With Acne. So, go there, join. I post daily, sometimes two or three times a day. There is most recent studies, updates, advice, tips, musings, hallucinations, illusions. I act out deliciously. I disintegrate in full view. Don't, don't you miss it. I mean, just go there. And I propose disintegrating in full view. I read simultaneously, usually something between 10 and 15 books. I'm kidding. You're not. I read at the same time about 15. On a good day, 15 books. Yesterday, I opened a book about Christina, the King of the Queen of Sweden. And Christina invited Descartes, Rene Descartes, Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher, invited him to her court in the 17th century. He died there, by the way, because she exposed him to freezing temperatures. Very wily and histrionic woman, if you ask me. Not one of my favorites. Anyhow, there was a sentence in that book which really threw me off, gave me a bad mood for like six hours. The sentence was, "At 60, Descartes was already an old man." At 60. And old men, I'm 60. I mean, I'll be 60 in April. I'm 60. So, immediately I got discombobulated. "At 60, Descartes was already an old man." I'm 60. Does it mean that I'm an old man? Or does it mean that I'm Rene Descartes? I'm not sure. If you have the answer, let me know.
Today, I'm supposed to receive my letter of reappointment as professor of psychology in, in Southern Frederick University, into a stove on dawn. And I am on tenterhooks. I can't wait. I will let you know. I'll keep you posted when the letter is received, but it should be today or tomorrow. I uploaded corrected. Do you remember the images that I mentioned? The images with the relationship cycle, the relationship map with narcissists, white, purple, and blue? So, there were typos in these images. And Haley Martin graciously fixed the typos. And now I've uploaded the corrected images.
Now, one of you sent me a comment. It's not belfry, it's belfry. Because I, I said, you know, I use the word belfry. German. And as some of you know from my previous videos, I find German by far the most hilarious language imaginable. I'm sure it was concocted by a committee of psychopaths. And in German, it was belfry. And belfry was also how it was pronounced in Middle English. So, why do we say belfry? Americans blame it always on the Americans. And in 99% of the time of the cases, you would be right. Americans distorted the pronunciation of belfry and made it bell-free. As Americans are indolent and they like everything to be smooth and easy, not to work too hard. So now it's bell-free. And the British had adopted it, mainly after the Second World War. But the original was belfry. And the German is definitely belfry. And I was mocking the German. The colonies had corrupted the United Kingdom.
Okay, next. People ask me, the relationship cycle, you know, grooming, love bombing, psychosis. All this, is this cycle or is this map applicable only to intimate and romantic relationships, or to other things? To everything? This is a map of how narcissists interact with everyone. Intimate partners, colleagues, business partners, neighbors. I mean, you name it. This is the structure, the base structure, the foundational template of the narcissist's way of interacting with other human beings. Consider, for example, the famous case of Michael Eisner of Hollywood fame. He was the head of Disney, the company. And so, analyze the way he had interacted with his second in command, and especially with Michael Ovitz, who followed Katzenberg, with Michael Ovitz. You can see this relationship map, or relationship flow, or relationship structure in action. First, Eisner love-bombed him, groomed him. There were like numerous phone calls, promises, enticements, inducements, seduction, flirtation, business dinners, business lunches, business breakfasts, and branches and trips and junkets. United. Eisner was all over Ovitz. He was all over Ovitz because he wanted Ovitz to abandon a creative talent agency he was in, and to move to work with him in Disney. Even promised him to be equals, that they would be equals. Of course, it was a narcissist's promise. So, when Michael Ovitz had moved finally to Disney, he had entered Eisner's shared fantasy. Because by that time, Disney had become Eisner's extended, inflated, um, big-banged shared fantasy. And Ovitz stepped right into the shared fantasy. And Eisner tried, tried to test him. He isolated him, he humiliated him, he mutilated him, he insulted him, he sent spies to to monitor him and to supervise him. I mean, he made his life a living hell. It was all a test. Testing is a critical part of the shared fantasy abuse. In the shared fantasy, abuse is essentially meant to test and to recreate early childhood conflicts. So, he was testing Ovitz. And Ovitz, in his eyes, failed. Because 99% of of people fail the narcissist's shared fantasy testing phase. Narcissistic abuse type one, as I call it. And then, once Ovitz failed, you know, was primed to to move to the discard phase. He was primed to be discarded. And Ovitz made the mistake of posing conditions and terms. So he entered the bargaining phase. And then Eisner, Eisner fired him. They gave him a huge severance fee, a severance package, and he fired him. You see the classical grooming, love bombing, shared fantasy, bargaining, bye-bye, don't ever show your face again. Okay. And that's in business. Eisner and Ovitz were in Disney Corporation. It's business.
Okay, next thing. Before we get to the main topic of the, of today's thing, catastrophizing. Um, people ask me, why do women or borderlines, why do borderlines act out? Why do they decompensate and suddenly disintegrate when they are rejected or when they perceive impending, imminent humiliation, rejection, and abandonment? And one, one of the re-, I mentioned many reasons in my previous videos, and I encourage you to search the channel before you ask questions, or else exposed to my rudeness. So, one of the things I did not mention in the previous videos, and it's a dark mark on my otherwise perfect record, is catastrophizing. The borderline tells herself, once she had been, once she had been humiliated, abandoned, rejected, once she, once she misinterprets certain behaviors, reframes them as abandonment, humiliation, and rejection, or when she anticipates abandonment, humiliation, and rejection. There's a dialogue. There's a negative automatic thought. There's an introject, probably. There's a voice that tells her, "No one will ever want you again. You see, even he is rejecting you. No one will ever want you." So, she immediately needs to restore. She needs to prove to herself otherwise. She needs to prove that she is desirable, that she does have power over men, that she can make them, seduce them, or make them do what she wants. She needs to restore her sense of, uh, regulate her sense of self-worth and restore her self-esteem and self-confidence. And she self-medicates, usually with men. But not only with men. Borderline reckless behaviors, are you know, across a whole spectrum. Shopaholism is another example. Pathological gambling, reckless driving, drug abuse, substance abuse. I mean, they're all, they're all attempts to reassert control and restore a sense of self-esteem. Because rejection and humiliation is perceived by borderlines as total, as a critique, as, as poor. As they perceive humiliation and rejection as portending constant, everlasting humiliation and rejection. They catastrophize. And to reverse and counter the catastrophizing, they simply go and self-medicate with another person. So, if the borderline had been rejected by men, she would seek a man to restore. If she had been fired from a job, she would, she would be desperate looking for another job. She would try to self-medicate. Same with, same.
Okay, let's get to the topic of today's, um, today's video. And that is the Humpty Dumpty narcissist. Let's start with some basic concepts. Splitting. First of all, splitting is confused. It's one of the most confused topics in psychology. It's a bloody mess. Even scholars, which I hold in extremely high regard, like Bromberg or Stern, even these scholars often confuse splitting with repression, or even worse, splitting with dissociation. These are not the same things. Now, there are two types of of splitting, which makes it even worse, makes the confusion, uh, even worse, and makes conflating splitting with other issues more palatable, however wrong. So, there are two types of splitting. There is ego splitting, and there is object splitting. Ego splitting is when the ego, or the self, constellated self, whatever you want to call it, this core, this core which is you, this core which includes your identity, your roles, your memories, this reservoir, container, repositories of your quiddity, of your essence, let's call it ego for discussion's sake. So, when the ego fractures, fragments, and splits, one part remains conscious, and the other becomes unconscious. That's the split of part. And that was described by Freud in 1940. Klein added to it and said that when the ego splits, one part is whole, entirely good, and the other one is entirely bad. Bear this in mind as we continue a bit later.
Now, object splitting. Object, remember, in psychology, aptly, appropriately, we call people objects. So, primary object is mummy. The primary object is mother, or the caregiver, usually mother. That's the primary object. Objects are people. So, object splitting means simply splitting other people. Object splitting involves mechanisms like denial and projection, and so on and so forth. It's no, what is known as a schizoid defense. What does it mean, object splitting? It's when parts of the self, parts of our self, part of the self, and some internal objects we have, are disowned. We can't accept them. We can't tolerate them. We're ashamed of them. They make us feel guilty. We don't want these parts. So, what we take, what we do, we we take these parts and we throw them out. We project them, right? But we have to project them on a human being. We can't project them on a chair. If you project them on a chair, you're psychotic. But you, so normal people, I mean, people who do this object splitting, they use other people. And this is the classic projection. We attribute to other people parts of ourselves actually that we're ashamed of, or we feel guilty about, or we don't want to acknowledge. You to accept. Object splitting, therefore, is a kind of schizoid defense. It's like these parts are not mine. I am self-contained. I am self-sufficient. I don't need anyone. I don't need anyone because they are bad. They are evil. They are stupid. They are histrionic. They are oversexed. They are, they're hypocritical. They are men. See, see where I'm going with this? It's a splitting because others are all bad, and so you are all good. But if you're all good, why would you be with people who are all bad? So, it leads to a schizoid posture, schizoid position. We'll come to it a bit later. Remember that Klein modified Freud and suggested that when the ego splits, there's a bad part and a good part. And Bion and Kernberg continued her work. But the one who really revolutionized her work and forced her to revise it and to modify it was, of course, a British guy. No, not Grannon this time. Fairbairn. Fairbairn, who lived a bit before Grannon, suggested that there is a schizoid core in everyone. And this schizoid core is based on splitting. And it usually reflects, or is mobilized, or is created by childhood frustration. When we are frustrated as children, we withdraw. The first thing we do, we project, you know, and then we withdraw. And we we develop a schizoid posture. We become self-contained, self-sufficient. He suggested that when the frustration is seriously bad, when, for example, the child is abused, traumatized, neglected, parentified, instrumentalized, objectified, these are bad types of abuse, let alone classic abuse like physical abuse, sexual abuse. When the child is exposed to these traumatic experiences, the ego, said Fairbairn, splits into three. There's a central ego, the "I." This central ego is preoccupied with introspection, self-observation, consciousness. The second part is the libidinal ego. That's the ego with the force of life. That's the ego that later develops a sex drive. But not only sex drive. When the sex drive is sublimated, we have creativity. That's the ego that goes forth, goes out, is out-facing. And that's the ego that leads us to create life, to create love, to create art, to create everything, science, you name it. That's the libidinal ego. But in really, really impacted, impacted children, children who've been traumatized and abused, there is a third part. That third part is the anti-libidinal ego. That's an internal saboteur. It's an internal enemy. It's not the inner critic. It's an internal enemy. It attacks the libidinal ego. It's the force of death. And we call it the, the antonym of libido, we call it testudo or motido in psychoanalysis. Each of these three parts of the ego is paired with internal objects. Each one of them has his own cult, his own following of internal objects. And these internal objects are like voices. And they encourage this particular ego to fulfill its functions. So, there's a group of voices that tell you, you're bad, you're unworthy, you are, you're loathsome, you're disgusting, you're ugly, you're stupid. These voices collaborate, these introjects collaborate with the anti-libidinal ego. And there's another group that say, you're delightful, you're beautiful, you're creative, you, you're productive. And these collaborate with the libidinal ego. And there's a group of voices that are self-referential. These are voices that talk about you. They say, "Listen, you did this because of that. That was your motivation. Maybe you did this because you were sad." They talk. They constantly, there's this concept about monologue, dialogue inside, between the internal objects and the ego, the ego parts.
Okay, at an early stage of childhood, the child does not make a distinction between himself and mother. Cannot make a distinction. His brain is not insufficiently developed. Pregnancy continues for almost two years outside the womb because our brain needs to develop and our head needs to inflate. And had pregnancy been completed in the womb, we would have never been able to exit. The opening is somewhat tight. If we are lucky. So, children continue their brain development outside. And because the brain is highly underdeveloped when the child is born, the child is unable to tell that there is a reality that is distinct and different and outside and external to himself. The child is in a state of inflation. He, he subsumes the environment. He and the environment are one. It's a state of unity. It's a state of union. It's a state of nirvana, if you wish. It's a state of vanishing and nothingness. It's a state of being one with, with everything and everyone. And of course, above all, with mother. So, he cannot make a distinction. But mother is not always forthcoming. Sometimes she's upset. Sometimes she's sick and tired. Sometimes she doesn't want to feed the baby. He wants to eat. She, she doesn't want to feed her. In other words, mommy, from the first minute, sometimes is frustrating. Sometimes doesn't cater instantaneously to the needs and wishes and demands of the petulant, spoiled brat that is the baby. He wants it now. And if not, he will cry for six days and nights. But mommy is unrelenting. Sometimes she succumbs and fulfills the needs and gratifies the baby, and sometimes not. So, gradually, the baby begins to realize that there are two mommies. There's a good mommy and a bad mommy. Or, as Klein called it, deliciously and pornographically, there's the loved good breast and the bad hated breast. What an image. Any, let me recover. Anyhow, um, the baby begins to separate mommy into two mummies. But that's, of course, an intolerable, very threatening, terrifying horror movie stuff thing. How can mommy be two people or two entities? It's really, really terrifying. So, what the baby does? Baby says, "It's actually not two entities. It's one mommy. Mommy is all good. All the good things is mommy gratification, mommy satisfaction, mommy warmth, acceptance, food, tasting, uh, texture of the skin, everything I love mommy. It's all mommy. Mommy is 100 million billion zillion percent good and only good." What about the frustrating aspects? What about when mommy is not so good? When she's absent? When she refuses to feed me? It must be me. I am bad. I'm unworthy. It's something in me, says the baby. I'm dead. I'm all bad. Mommy is all good. Luckily for everyone, that's a transitional phase. It's a transitional phase for all healthy and normal people. They get rid of this splitting. This is splitting. They get rid of this bleeding. A bit later. So, you remember that mommy split baby, or bad mommy, or good mommy. On good. Gradually, as the baby grows, cerebral neuronal pathways are formed. The baby, baby begins to realize the existence of other entities. He develops concepts of internal and external. He realizes the limitations of his will. He gets rid of magical thinking. He understands that if he wishes something, it doesn't always come true. That reality has its own rules, not subject to his thinking and wishes and will. So, he matures. He matures. And he begins to develop really a realistic assessment of the universe. He switches from the pleasure principle to a more real, to the reality principle. At that stage, he merges the bad and good aspects of mommy. And he becomes, with the nuanced version, a more subtle and much more realistic version of mommy. And by the way, daddy and other figures. He is capable to see gray, not only black and white, good and bad, with me, against me. But he is able to merge these aspects and come up with something that allows him to function better and to feel a lot less frustrated. He reduces his anxiety, his ego destiny, his discomfort, his unhappiness, his rage, his aggression. He reduces all this negative emotionality by simply accepting that the world is much more complex than it used to be a year ago when I was born. That is normal, healthy development. But narcissists and borderlines get stuck. They are incapable to transition. Now, no one explained convincingly why. Why some babies remain stuck? Yeah, okay, there is trauma, there is abuse, get it. But why do, why do they remain stuck? Why don't they develop a reality test, testing? Why don't they introduce themselves into reality? Well, here's the issue. When the baby splits mommy into bad and good, good breast, bad breast, good mommy, bad mommy, it's because mommy has good aspects. And it's easy to do when someone has good sides and bad sides. Even today, as adults, you can make this distinction. You can say, "Well, he's an [ __ ] but he's a great scholar." Me. So, you, you can make this distinction. Or you can say, "Wow, he's seriously repulsive as a man, but his mind, his intellect is amazing." Again, me. So, but what to do?
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When the person you're faced with has no mitigating circumstances, no attenuating, in a, ameliorating aspects, nothing good about him, only bad. If the mother is dead, Andre Green's concept of a dead mother. The mother is emotionally absent, narcissistic, selfish, parentifies the child, instrumentalizes the child, uses and abuses the child, does not allow the child to separate, individualize, breaches the child's boundaries, objectifies the child, etc., etc. Kind of mother stunts the growth of the child, arrests the development of the child. It's a bad mother. And there is nothing good about her. How do you split? How do you split an object that is all bad, with not a single aspect of good? Doesn't even feed the baby. How do you, how do you do that? You don't. Children who become later narcissists, borderlines, could not split their mother. Mothers because the mothers were all dead. There was nothing there to split. And yet, the mechanism of splitting was there, you know, raring to go, eager to act. The mechanism was activated, turned on, enabled, and was looking for a target. And there were only two targets: mommy and me. Now, I couldn't split mommy. So, I split myself. Splitting has been inverted. Instead of externalized, it became internalized. You can't split an all bad mother because she's all bad. You can't break her into good and bad. There's no good. So, you split yourself. You split yourself into true self and false self. The true self is all bad. It's unworthy. It's helpless. It's hopeless. It's stupid. It's inefficacious. You don't want the truth. It's weak. It's vulnerable. Now you understand why narcissists hate, hate weak people. It's projection. Yeah, they hate the weak part in themselves. So, they project it on. They say, "You're weak. I'm not weak. You're weak. I'm strong. I'm a strong man. I overcome even COVID-19." Right? I have orangey. So, um, the true self is everything the narcissist doesn't want to be. And the false self is everything the narcissistic child wants to be. The false self is God. That's the invention of private religion. Initially, in early Christianity, in Judaism, of course, and in Islam, there was the assumption that man is all bad. There was the fall from grace. When man was expelled, had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. Men, men's desires and drives were all malevolent, corrupt. It was through God's grace that men redeemed and absorbed himself by obeying God, by adhering to the Son of God, by interaction with God. God was the redeeming principle because men was hopelessly, hopelessly beyond hope. So, the child does the same. Child cannot split mommy. So, he splits himself. And there's a God-like element, false self, and a corrupt, hopeless, doomed, expelled from Garden of Eden true self. And it is the false self who is going to save the savior, salvator, like Jesus. The false self is going to save the child. He's going to redeem the child. He's going to absorb the child. He's going to uplift, uplift the child into the kingdom of heaven.
Okay, Kohut suggested a vertical split. He said that in narcissists, especially, there are contradictory self-states. Today, we know that the same exists in borderline, and even more so. Borderlines have more, uh, demarcated and pronounced self-states to the point that borderline is very reminiscent of dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder. But, okay, Kohut in 1971 suggested that there are contradictions of states. And he gave an example of grandiosity and despair. Is that these states exist simultaneously? When healthy narcissistic needs are frustrated by caretakers, like mommy, and later daddy, when the caretakers of the child do not allow the child to gratify legitimate narcissistic needs, the child is desperate. He represses this despair. And to compensate for it, he creates grandiosity. He says, "Okay, I don't need you, mommy. I don't need you, daddy. I have my own imaginary friend, and he is god-like. He's stronger than you, more powerful than you. He knows more than you. He's omniscient. He's brilliant. He's perfect. He's beautiful. He is accomplished." So, the false self is compensatory. And when children are frustrated and traumatized and abused by caretakers, caregivers, parents, they react this way by creating vertical splits, coexistent contradictory self-states. Okay, you follow me until now? It's not an easy topic.
Let's talk about introjects. Introjects are part of the fantasy defense. Introjects are fantastic. They're not real. When you're faced with a, with a parent, with a role model, even with a peer group which you admire and want to belong to, you internalize these voices. But you know that they're not real. You know that these are not, these people are not inside you. So, you, it's a fantasy. You fantasize that their voices are still in your head. Your mommy is long dead. Your mother is long dead. But her voice is in your head. Do you really believe your voice is in your head? Do you really believe she's talking to you? If you do, you need medication. You're psychotic. Most people don't. And yet, they conduct dialogues with the dead mother in times of stress and anxiety. So, it's a fantasy. And these fantasies are not just, you know, pieces of fiction. The introject of mommy represents a real, real person with a real history, real mentality, real character and temperament and personality, memories. So, it's a very, very super complex fantasy, grounded largely in reality. And this, in, in this fantasy is a life of its own. It has its own motivations, its own intentions. It has a life of its own. It's important to understand introjects continue inside the mind to have independent dynamics which are independent of the person. That's the process of snapshotting. When the narcissist meets, comes across someone who can serve as a narcissistic supply, is not a source of supply, or when it comes across someone who can be become an intimate partner, the narcissist takes a snapshot. It creates an introject. Now, this introject has a life of its own. The analysis continues to interact only with introject, ignoring the real object out there. And the more the introject diverges from the real object, the more pissed off the narcissist is. And that's the main reason for discard. This is what leads to discard. When the divergence is too much, when the snapshot no longer resembles, even remotely, the real life person. Real life people go through changes. They evolve, they grow, they develop new interests and new friendships. And yet, the snapshot is stable. The snapshot is firm. Never changes. And it creates a divergence.
Okay, all introjects are like this. But the narcissist does not regard the introject as a fantasy, but as a reality. So, remember, everyone is introjected. Everyone interacts with introjects. Everyone talks to introjects. Everyone argues with introjects. Everyone is angry at introjects. For instance, the girlfriend who dumped you in favor of another man. You're very angry. You have her introject, and you're fighting with her years later in an attempt to obtain closure. I mean, it's normal. But you know that the voice is fantastic, is not real. The narcissist doesn't. The narcissist confuses introjects with reality. As his introjects interact, develop, I mean, are dynamic, he thinks it's real. He actually thinks that his introjects are much more real than you. He's introject of you is much more real to the narcissist than you are. You don't have real existence in his mind because you're not in his mind. What's in his mind has supremacy over reality. It's supreme to reality. This is the real reality, his mind. And so, in normal people, introjects interact with the ego because the ego is the reality principle. The ego tells you, "Hey, listen, call it that's a fantasy." Or, "Don't do this. If you do this, you'll be punished." It's the ego that keeps giving you reality testing. Keep telling you, "Listen, wake up. I mean, consider this is reality. Take reality into account." It's the function of the ego. And some introjects interact with ego so much that they become a part of the ego. And they're known as ego nuclei.
Here's the problem. Narcissists have no ego. They don't have a functional ego, at least. They don't have an ego. The narcissist outsources ego functions. He has no reality testing. He needs you to tell him what is reality. He has no access to reality because he has no ego. He doesn't have an ego to tell him, "Don't do this. Do this. This is real. This is fake. This is real. This is fantasy." He doesn't have this voice. So, he needs you to tell him. And it's, he's compulsive about it. He needs it every minute. Can you survive in reality without reality testing for one minute? Of course, you can't. Now you understand the analysis is compulsion, coercion, insistence, persistence. He needs you every minute. He outsources ego functions. He has a hive mind. He incorporates other people in order to form clunky, on-the-fly, just-in-time, improvised ego states. One ego after another. And because each ego created this way depends on another, on a separate group of people, ego number one will not be the same like ego number seven. Ego number one will depend on three people, one, two, and three. And ego number seven will also depend on three people, 14, 15, and 16. Of course, the input from one, two, and three will not be the same like the input from 14, 15, and 16. So, the ego seven will not be like ego one. That's why the narcissist is dissociative and dysfunctional and discontinuous. Because his ego states, his successive ego states, sometimes, very often actually, have little to do with each other. That's why he's shocked when he's confronted with the consequences of his actions. He doesn't feel he did anything. Definitely, he doesn't feel he did anything wrong. That's why he confabulates all the time. He's trying to bridge the gaps between ego one and two and three and four and seven. He's trying to create some continuity. He confabulates. And many people perceive this as gaslighting, which is actually a psychopathic behavior, not a narcissistic one. The narcissist does not exist. It's an emptiness. It's a void. He exists by aggregate, by assemblage.
And now, the ego ideal. What, what you want to be when you grow up? That's an introject. The superego, including punishing superego, internal critic, sadistic superego. These are, that's an introject. You see the critical role of introjects. And if you have introjects that cannot talk to the ego, because you have no ego, there's no core. There's no core. So, they also cannot talk to themselves. They also cannot communicate with them, among themselves. These introjects communicate with each other via the ego. The ego is like a switchboard. You don't have an ego. They can't talk to each other. So, the narcissist experiences some internal objects as good and real. These are ego-syntonic objects. And when he idealizes you, he converts you into an ego-syntonic introject, and also into a real one. Your introject becomes the only reality. And it's a good one. It's ego-syntonic. When he devalues you, or when he has introjects that he is not comfortable with, they are ego-alien. They are ego-dystonic. All at, or any given time, the narcissist has both these groups: ego-syntonic, good, real objects, and ego-alien, ego-dystonic, disturbing, discomforting, and ultimately projected, um, introjects, internal objects. And this creates a process called ego congruent incongruence. Ego incongruence. Despite it's very misleading, because there's no ego, but ego incongruence in principle means that some things, some events, some occurrences, some people, some places, some memories, will create such extreme discomfort that actually they will divorce the narcissist from himself. They will create a process called estrangement. This is very, very common in borderlines. That's why borderlines act out. That's why they go crazy. That's why they behave in ways which are at once abrupt and unpredictable and shocking, and on the other hand, very self-damaging and self-trashing. It's all what they do. Borderlines, especially, narcissists also, but borderlines especially, they externalize introjects because of ego congruence. Sorry, because of ego incongruence. The internal level of angst, anxiety, and discomfort is such, the inability to tolerate the intolerance of ego-dystonic, ego-tystonic objects, alien introjects, becomes reaches such a level, such a burden, that the, the borderline or the narcissist just take these introjects, these internal objects, and they throw them out. They don't even project them. They don't attribute them to other people. They just throw them out. And it's like an explosion. You know, there is these are externalizing trajectories. And because these objects are alien, discomforting, disturbing, frightening, menacing, destabilizing, disregulating, bad, horrible, introjects, when they are externalized, the borderline or the narcissist feel one step removed. They feel like they're outside, observing what's happening. They feel like they're on autopilot during the acting out. When it introjects, uncomfortable introjects, bad introjects, hated introjects, rejected introjects are externalized, it's like taking a part of yourself and throwing it out. And of course, that minute you cease to exist because you're not you anymore. Part of you is gone. It's like being amputated. You're not you anymore. And you're not you anymore. And you, you're still observing the process of becoming not you. You're observing this process of partial vanishing. It's like your upper part has had evaporated, like spontaneous combustion. Juice of photos or spontaneous combustion. Only part of the body is burned. The rest is intact. Same process. This is a spontaneous combustion of a part of you that you hate, that you want to reject at any cost, at the cost of acting out. And this creates estrangement. That's a clinical term. But it also creates dissociation. You don't want to remember that. You repress it. You deny it. You forget it. You, you become depersonalized. It's like you're not there. As I said, you're on autopilot. You're just watching. You're an observer. Or you become totally derealized. The whole thing feels nightmarish, surrealistic, not real. So, dissociation, amnesia, amnesia, depersonalization, derailation, all these phenomena, dissociative phenomena, have to do with externalizing alien ego-syntonic, ego-congruent incongruent objects, externalizing them.
How do you expel something? Aggression. These externalized objects come with a huge dose of aggression. And it feels like these introjects somehow projectiles, like guided missiles, like they have their own mind, like they act. They are the ones who are acting and operate. The agency is transferred from the individual to these introjects. If they feel autonomous, they feel independent. And the person, the borderline person or the narcissist, they sit back and say, "What on earth is happening to me? What is happening here? And who is me?" It looks like you are utterly not in control, not in the driver's seat. Something, someone took over you. And that's, I think, this is the source of the many metaphors of possession, demon possession. Also, of course, narcissists use and borderlines use two, two important mechanisms: projective identification and introjective identification.
In projective identification, the narcissist places himself inside an object. Remember, object is a person, another person in psychology. The narcissist, he places himself inside an object. Now, why would he do that? Why would he, uh, export his being, export his essence, export himself? Why would they teleport? Teleportation? Because it gives you an illusion of control over the object. If there is an object that the borderline or the narcissist is afraid to lose, there is abandonment anxiety. There is object inconstancy. This is intolerable. It enhances anxiety to levels that can no longer be countenanced, can no longer be coped with. And in order to cope, the narcissist identifies himself with the object. He says, "The object is me. I am the object." It's a mechanism also used by codependence, merger, and fusion. Projective identification is when the person finds himself inside another person and gives, gives the narcissist an illusion of control, a denial of helplessness and impotence. And the narcissist and borderline gain vicarious satisfaction from the activities of the object. So, convert an inverted narcissist use projective identification endlessly, relentlessly, callously, automatically, unconsciously, compulsively, all the time, all the time. Of course, projective identification has very strong passive-aggressive elements.
The second mechanism is introjective, introjective identification. It's identified with an introject. You remember some introjects are good, perceived as good, as real. The narcissist confuses internal and external objects. So, the internal object, your representation in the narcissist's mind, is mine. Is more real than you. And it's good. In the idealization phase, in that phase, the narcissist identifies with you. Identifies with the object. When I say identifies, it's not that he has sympathy for you, or he has empathy for you. He is you. It involves processes such as assimilation, incorporation. Don't ask. It's simply confusing his non-existent self and ego with your very much existent self and ego. He identifies with the introject, with a fantastic representation of you inside himself. And he imagines you.
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As being inside himself, um, being a part of himself, being an extension of himself, an organ. So, these are the two mechanisms. Either the narcissist teleports himself, exports himself into you, and becomes one with you. That's the codependent strand in narcissism. Many narcissists do that. Or he brings you into himself. He assimilates you, digests you, and identifies with your representation in his mind, with your introjects, and imagines that he is one with the introject, or the introject is part of him.
Here's the, the crux. The narcissist could not split his mother. She was all bad. She had no good or positive aspects. She was not a good enough mother. Helen Deutsch coined the phrase "false self," which Donald Winnicott later popularized. And so, splitting is a crucial phase in avoiding, uh, the need to develop a false self. Why does analysis develop for himself? Because he needs to split something. He can't split mommy. So, he splits himself. So, there's false self and true self. And, and that's, that's a temporary measure that keeps him alive. It's a positive adaptation. And then he meets you. He comes across you, you know, and you're perfect. You're his intimate partner. He wants to complete the process of maternal splitting with you. That's why he has to convert you into a mother. He needs to finish the unfinished business, the unresolved conflict of the inability to split his original mother. He needs to split you. We call this repetition compulsion. He needs to split you. Now, he couldn't split his mother. She had no good aspects. So, what he does in your case? He idealizes you so that you have only good aspects. You're all good. That allows him to regress to very early childhood. You remember the baby? What the baby does? The baby splits mommy. Mommy is all good. The baby is all bad. Narcissists go back to that period, believe it or not. I don't know, six months old, one year old. He goes back to that period. And he forces you to become his mummy so that he can proceed with the unfinished business of splitting. Render you all good. Render himself all bad. At that stage, you become all good. He becomes all bad. Now, that is not a tolerable state. Even the narcissist can't tolerate it. So, he begins, he begins to test you. Co-idealization. The process where he idealizes you, and through this process, idealizes himself. Introjection. The process where he internalizes you and incorporates you. These are the ways in which he, a nexus, appropriates your goodness. So, when he, when the narcissist meets an intimate partner, immediately it triggers the early unfinished, unconcluded maternal splitting. He then must convert you into a mother to complete the splitting. Splitting has several phases. Phase one: He makes you all good. He makes himself all bad. Which he couldn't do with his original mother. His original mother was all bad. He could not idealize her. But he idealizes you. He makes you all good. Which makes him all bad. That is intolerable. He moves to phase two. In phase two, he uses your goodness, your alleged imputed goodness, your idealized, non-real, not realistic goodness. Because remember, he's interacting not with you, he's interacting with your idealized introject in his mind. So, he then, he then uses your goodness to idealize himself. He says to himself, "If I'm with such a good, perfect, brilliant, amazing, beautiful, talented, intelligent, super incredible woman, it must mean that I'm the same. I'm also amazing, super incredible, talented. Is that she would never have, she would have never been with me. She would have never loved me. She would have never stayed with me had I not been equally perfect, equally brilliant, equally handsome, like equally everything." So, he uses, he idealizes you. And all, and then the process of idealizing you is uncomfortable. Because the more he idealizes you, the more he devalues himself. This is completing the classic maternal splitting, which he couldn't do when he was one year old. But it's a temporary state because it's very uncomfortable. So, what he does? He co-idealizes. He says, "She's ideal. That means I'm ideal." And then he interjects you. He internalizes you. Incorporates you. He metaphorically swallows you. He digests you. Because, you know, the in primitive, uh, in primitive people, they eat the liver and the heart of warriors, of, you know, they had a war, and then there are prisoners of war, and they eat the heart and the liver of the prisoners of war because this way they believe they can digest or absorb the courage and the bravery of the enemy combatants, combatants. And the enemy combatants, their traits and properties reside in body organs. The gnosis is the same with you. He internalizes you. He incorporates you because this way he can absorb your goodness and become good. Stage one: You are all good. He is all bad. Stage two: Co-idealization. If you're all good, means he's all good. To prove this to himself. Stage three: He internalizes you. He incorporates you. He swallows you. He digests you. He makes you disappear. Absorbs your goodness, thereby becoming an entirely good object. He now becomes all good. So, in this process, which is an intricate dance, two steps forward, one step back, and so on, he needs to test you. He needs to make sure that you're all good. This is post-traumatic hypervigilance. Maybe you are like his mother. Maybe all bad. Maybe you're just pretending to love him. So, he needs to test you all the time. He tests you by abusing you. This is narcissistic abuse type one. He abuses you to test you. He pushes you to the limit. He, he creates elaborate situations to trip you up, sets you up for failure. I want you to understand that very often this masquerades as benevolence. It's love. So, someone who gives 100% of himself to you is setting you up for failure because you cannot give back 100%. Someone who is too good to be true is setting you up for failure. You cannot be too, you cannot be that good ever. He sets the bar so high that you will never, never make it. You will fail. It's an example of testing. He puts you in situations where you will end up, you know, drunk and with with another man. That's testing. He constantly criticizes you and challenges you. So, that's testing. He wants to see, are you truly a good object? Because his mommy.
Deceived him. He thought his mommy loved him. He thought his mommy accepted him. He thought her love was unconditional. He was wrong. And consequently, for the rest of his life, decades, he could not complete the splitting process and could not grow up.
Now, he was his last chance, his second chance, his last chance. It is true that he will experience parenting and mothering, proper, good enough mothering. And to accomplish this, he needs to split you, and then needs to interject you, to absorb you, to incorporate you. Need to become one. He needs to become one with a good object. But it's very terrifying because becoming one with an object is disappearing. He needs to sacrifice himself. He's used only to sacrificing himself. He sacrificed himself to the false self. So he wants to sacrifice himself to you. But he wants to make sure that you're worthy of the sacrifice, that you're truly good. So he has to test you.
When you fail his test, he reverses the whole thing, reverses you. He splits you again. But now you're all bad. You're all bad. And he avoids code evaluation because, look, if you're all bad and you're still together, means he's an idiot. Means his judgment is poor. Means evil is not omniscient. If you're all bad, it challenges the grandiosity of his false self. So he needs to discard you the minute you fail these tests. And they are very, very surreptitious, stealth, subtle occultists. You don't even know that you you're being tested. You don't understand what are his expectations, what does he want. So very likely, you're gonna fail. The likelihood of failure is enormous. You fail, he devalues you, he evaluates you. He has to discard you because if he devalues you and you stick around, you are challenging his grandiosity and his false self, and that is absolutely intolerable.
Okay, I hope you got the picture. I want to make, um, I want to finish by, as usual, mentioning literature. And this time, a classic, Mr. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You know, we are so brainwashed by messages propagated, promulgated by the education system, mass media, experts, authorities, that we don't, it's extremely rare that we stop to think, actually critically think. For example, we all believe that Dr. Jekyll was the victim of Mr. Hyde. To remind you, Dr. Jekyll was a very vulnerable, well-respected, renowned doctor in the story by Stevenson. And he invented a potion, concoction, a kind of medicine that he that he would swallow. And when he swallowed this medicine, he became Mr. Hyde, not Dr. Jekyll anymore, but Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde was a psychopath, sadistic killer, horrible man, rapist. I mean, you name it, you name it, he did it. Horrible person. Dr. Jekyll, lover of humanity, medical doctor, savior of bodies and souls and so on. Swallows the medicine or the potion, becomes Mr. Hyde, the exact opposite, a psychopath, if ever there was one. So everyone says, "Poor Dr. Jekyll, he clearly is Mr. Hyde's victim because he had to pay the price." Of course, once the potion wore off, he reverted to being Dr. Jekyll, and he had to pay the price for the misdeeds and misconduct and criminal activities of Mr. Hyde. So everyone says, "Jekyll, his highest victim." I'm saying exactly the opposite. Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll's victim because the control was with Dr. Jekyll. Dr. Jekyll could have decided to not drink the potion. Hyde had no control over it. It was Dr. Jekyll who always invariably made the decision to manifest, actualize, and realize the poor Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde couldn't help it. He was a psychopath. There's nothing he could do about it. Dr. Jekyll could help it, and he made choices, and he victimized Hyde. Dr. Jekyll says in the book, "I knew before I left the hospital that I was not straight, that despite all that was available there, nobody was sharp enough to pick up my secret, and I didn't want anyone to learn my secret." That sounds pretty psychopathic to me.
Lamb in 1996 analyzed this argument and the complexity of of the argument and he asked the question, uh, could it be that the individual perpetrator is not blameworthy? Could it be the doctor? Hyde? Is that Mr. Hyde is actually not to be blamed because, you know, his actions, he was Dr. Jekyll's of their ego. His actions were not his own. They were fully controlled by Dr. Jacob. Dr. Jekyll took a drug that required premeditation, planning, preparation of the potion. Took a long time. It was a conscious act, and he took the drug, and he transformed him into Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde was an addict, in a way, and he was created by Dr. Jekyll's need to continue his experiment. He was an experimental creature. Hyde was a villain. He committed heinous, horrible acts. There's no disputing this. But who, who whose is the moral responsibility? Dr. Jekyll recognized, knew about Hyde. He knew about Mr. Hyde. He knew that Mr. Hyde is hiding inside himself. He could not refer to Hyde as "I" because Hyde was, yes, an ego alien, ego syntonic, ego dystonic, introduced. So he, he disowned Hyde. He rejected Hyde. He hated Hyde. He was referring to him in third, you know, "you," he used to call him Hyde as though it's not himself, but it was a part of himself. And to have continued to experiment, inflicting untold damages over hundreds of people, strikes me, how to put it gently, is extremely psychopathic. Perhaps after all, there was not much difference between the unscrupulous, relentless, ruthless, callous, disempathic Dr. Jekyll and his mirror image, Hyde. Perhaps Hyde was Dr. Jekyll's dark side, but definitely a part of him, an integral part of him, a perfect reflection of him. Dr. Jekyll was Mr. Hyde in hiding, that's all. As Dr. Jekyll himself states in the book, "I know I'm here, I'm not, I know I'm he, but he is Hyde." Yeah.
Very convincing. There was a guy called Dr. Hans Prinzhorn. He wrote interesting works in art history and psychiatry. He sort of conflated art history and psychiatry. And he wrote a book. He studied the art of the mentally ill, art created by the mentally ill. "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken," it's called, was published in 1923. He studied the psychology of expression. He, he came up with a fascinating list of six fundamental impulses regarding self-expression. Uh, he believed that people create art in order to make contact with other people, that art is an interface, a communication interface between people. Like the ancient moderns. The fifth impulse of six, um, he attributed to psychopaths. He said the fifth impulse is the tendency to imitate or copy. And he said this undeniable pleasure involved in this achievement. McGregor analyzes it in 1989, and it's very interesting that he believes that psychopathy consists of imitation or copying because when we act out, what is to imitate, to copy is to not be ourselves. When you image it, you are not yourself. When someone, someone makes an impersonation of me with meaning, he is not being himself for the in that moment. So imitation, copying is denying yourself. That's really the crux of psychopathy. It's, remember what I said earlier, externalizing introjects.
Meninga wrote in 1963, "The aggressive instincts lack discrimination, lack judgment, lack perspective, lack everything but power and the destructive goal." Test bonding, the serial killer. You know, he was interviewed by Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth in 1999, or at least they published the interviews in 1999. And they tried to talk to him about the murders, but he wouldn't. He didn't want to talk about emergencies. He talked about everything under the sun, politics, history, art. You know, he was, he was, by the way, a genius. He had, as far as I remember, 160 IQ. But he wouldn't talk about the murders. And so the interviewers were at, in any impulse, they were like a dead end and didn't know what to do. And suddenly it took her to them. They said to him, "Ted, would you, would you like to talk about the murders in the third person? Like it's not you, it's someone else. Use 'he,' don't say 'I killed her,' say 'he killed her.'" And Bundy agreed immediately to this arrangement and opened up and discussed the murders in full detail, using the third gender pronoun. Everything he said was clearly about himself, but it was presented in the third person. Depersonalization. Narcissists, anyone, everyone will always come across analysis or many psychopaths and many borderlines, they talk about themselves in third person. They don't say "I did it." They say "Vaknin did it," or "Vaknin is the victim of coaches' bad experts," or "Trump is hated." Trump would say about himself, "Trump is hated." Third person.
Okay, I will take this opportunity to answer a question of of yours in a single sentence. And I'll dedicate a whole, a whole video to this. Contempt. Contempt is a driving emotion, sentiment in narcissism, in psychopathy. Contempt. It's a crucial element of grandiosity. And there's contempt for weakness, perceived inferiority, inadequacy, emotions, vulnerabilities, neediness, clinging, attachment, and bonding, empathy, and altruism. How many? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, six, seven, eight, nine, nine or ten types of contempt. And I will analyze this in my next video. You have my full contempt, and I wish you full recovery from this video. If you made it to the end, YouTube provides me with an amazing statistic. Half of all viewers sign off after the rant and the jokes. They're utterly uninterested in the topic. So how can I give you my respect? Contempt. Contempt it is. Stay tuned for the next episode.