Welcome to my new YouTube.
Someone was brave enough to post a comment on one of my YouTube videos. And for a change, I did not delete the comment, nor did I ban or block or hide the unfortunate author. I must have been in one of my magnanimous, charitable, famously altruistic moods.
Anyhow, the comment survived. And here it is.
Question. Why some narcissists complete his-her fantasy with an intimate partner faster in weeks and others longer in years? On what?
It depends. Availability of potential partners, current partner beauty or status, etc.
Well, the answer is on the attachment styles of the narcissist, The length of the shared fantasy, whether it is rapid cycling or slow moving, depends crucially on attachment styles of the fantasy-prone personality.
And most amazingly, this happens to be the topic of today's YouTube.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of clinical psychology.
When the narcissist possesses an insecure attachment style which is almost a hundred percent of the cases it determines to some extent the nature of the shared fantasy, its structure, but most importantly, its longevity.
The shared fantasy, as you recall, is founded on an early childhood conflict with the mother of origin, with a biological mother.
So you could tinker with the shared fantasy, but you couldn't change it or alter it fundamentally.
However, the longevity of the shared fantasy, the intensity of the shared fantasy, crucially depend on attachment styles.
The more insecure the attachment style, the faster the cycling of the shared fantasy.
In other words, the more insecure in his or her attachment and bonding the narcissist is, the less skilled and versed in managing relationships, the more hypervigilant and paranoid the narcissist is, the shorter the duration of the shared fantasy, and the more intense it is.
There is an inverse relationship between intensity and duration. A high intensity fantasy burns out fast. A low intensity simmering fantasy takes years to finalize or to reach its final stages of devaluation and discard.
There are three types of insecure attachment styles, anxious or ambivalent attachment style, avoidant dismissive attachment style and disorganized attachment style.
Rapid cycling shared fantasies, shared fantasy which germinate and terminate within weeks, are typical of anxious and avoidant-dismissive attachment styles, but especially of avoidant dismissive attachment styles.
So when the narcissist in his fantasy has an avoidant dismissive attachment style, the fantasy or the shared fantasy would be very short, When he has an anxious and ambivalent attachment style, it would be midterm long, and when there's a disorganized attachment style, it may survive much longer than typically.
Narcissists do not possess, not one of them, a secure attachment style. So there's no point to talk about it.
Now there's one attachment style which I have proposed, I came up with this attachment style, it's not yet accepted widely, of course, and it is the flat attachment style. A lack of attachment in effect.
And that is very typical of psychopaths and malignant narcissists.
And in this case, it is very difficult to predict the longevity or duration of the shared fantasy because it crucially depends on utilitarian elements, how useful it is to the malignant narcissist or to the psychopath.
All narcissists, including malignant narcissists are fantasy prone personalities. Or to be more precise, type 1 fantasy prone personalities.
In this video, I'm going to discuss fantasy prone personality theory, and I'm going to discuss attachment styles, and I'm going to correlate them, put them together somehow.
There are two types of fantasy prone personality, type one and type two.
Generally speaking, a fantasy prone personality is a disposition or a personality trait or a trait domain in which a person experiences lifelong extensive and deep involvement in fantasy.
In other words, the fantasy is both cathected. There is an emotional investment, an investment of libido, if you wish, or life force in the fantasy, on the one hand.
And on the other hand, it has functional elements it replaces or substitutes for reality and within the fantasy there is a paracosm there is a recreation of some virtual or augmented or artificial reality.
Now of course people who abjure, people who renounce reality, people who cannot survive in reality, people who find reality intolerable and unbearable, these kind of people are incapable of attachment.
Because in order to be attached, you need an external object to be attached to. Attachment is directional. You are attached to someone. You love someone. It is a direction. And it's an outward direction. Love and attachment and bonding are directed at reality, at a real life external object.
When you have renounced reality, when you find reality utterly unacceptable, at that point, you are unable to interact with external objects and unable to bond or attach, let alone love.
This disposition of fantasy-prone personality is an attempt to impose imagination and creativity on reality, to create an alternative dream world and then inhabit this dream world, to live in it, to subsist in it and on it.
So it's not actually an absence of an internal or external environment. It's a substitution of an internal environment for the external environment.
And it is in this sense dreamlike or surrealistic.
A fantasizer has difficulty differentiating fantasy and reality. He cannot tell them apart in very, very extreme cases where there is, for example, under conditions of extreme duress or stress or anxiety or tension, there is reactive psychosis. And then there are hallucinations. Hallucinations are actually substitutes for reality.
But they are really extreme in the sense that the person who is hallucinating not only cannot tell fantasy from reality, not only he cannot tell them apart, but he remains locked in the hallucination. It's kind of there's no way back and it becomes a memory and part of the hallucination. It's kind of there's no way back. And it becomes a memory and part of the core identity. It's very difficult to get rid of.
In this strict sense, the narcissists confabulations are cognitive hallucinations. The narcissists creates a story, a cocted movie or fantasy and substitutes it for memory.
The narcissist has memory gaps and then to breach the memory gaps, the narcissists comes up with a narrative.
And then he is fully invested in the narrative. He believes in it. He defends it against any challenge and any proof to the contrary. There's confirmation bias.
And the confabulation in effect becomes a hallucination but a cognitive hallucination.
And so fantasy prone personalities engage in daydreaming or absorption.
Absorption is also a disposition. It's a personality trait in which a person becomes absorbed in mental imagery.
And of course, fantasy is comprised of mental imagery. It's not only mental imagery. It also involves internal objects and many other things. It's a defense mechanism.
But mental imagery is a crucial element of fantasy, especially emotional fantasy or fantasy involving emotions, cathected fantasy.
So, absorption is when the person prefers the mental imagery to reality, and then becomes absorbed in the mental imagery, is no longer in reality. It's no longer able to tell the difference. It's not psychosis. It's not psychosis because hyper-reflexivity is missing. There's no identification of the individual with the external world. But it's still very close to psychosis.
Dutch American psychologists, Anne Tellegen, studied absorption. And today we use absorption to explain hypnosis, for example, and it is highly correlated with other types of suggestibility, including, for example, in histrionic personality disorder. People are very suggestible, so they are very absorbed, and indeed, they are prone to fantasy.
Absorption can be triggered by the environment. Situational factors could kind of bring on absorption.
An example is hypnosis, but it's typically triggered from the inside. It's typically an internal dynamic process.
Similarly, daydreaming is comprised of self-generated thoughts and imagery, imagination, and their thoughts concerning the future and oneself, reflections on the past and others, emotional tones of specific experiences, they all involve daydreaming. Daydreaming typically includes or incorporates the daydreaming individual in the resultant daydream or fantasy.
Psychologist Jerome Singer established these three types of daydreaming and correlated them with different cognitive states and emotional experiences.
He said that there is constructive daydreaming. It involves constructive engagement, planning, pleasant thoughts, vivid imagery, curiosity. It's actually a healthy thing.
The same way fantasy could be healthy if it leads to planning and action.
Then there's guilty dysphoric daydreaming, obsessive, guilt-ridden, anguished fantasies, and there is poor attentional control daydreaming, difficulty to focus on either internal thoughts or images or external tasks. So this is the attention deficit kind of daydreaming.
And daydreaming again is highly correlated with creativity, which is highly correlated with psychoticism, according to Eysenck, which is highly correlated with fantasy and consequently a lack of an impaired reality testing. So this is the sequence.
Reality is too much. Reality is threatening, traumatizing, abusive, unbearable, abhorrent, intolerable.
So it is renounced, it is ignored, it is repressed, it is reframed, and then substitutes emerge. The substitutes usually include fantasies and or daydreams.
And these trigger absorption, the preference for the fantasies and the daydreams over reality.
Now, all of you are going to shout in unison, what about maladaptive daydreaming or excessive daydreaming?
Well, that's not a clinical construct.
In other words, we have still, 23 years after it has been first proposed by another Israeli, we have still to accept it as a clinical thing because we couldn't find any evidence to support the idea of maladaptive daydreaming, daydreaming that interferes with daily functioning and daily life.
Supposed maladaptive daydreaming is a kind of dissociative absorption involving excessive fantasy and could result in distress.
These kind of people avoid human interaction the way schizoids do. No social life. Sometimes they don't even work. They're unemployed.
Yet, early Somer suggested diagnosis of maladaptive daydreaming is, I remind you, not accepted. He defines maladaptive daydreaming as extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and or interferes with academic, interpersonal, or vocational functioning.
That's a great definition of narcissism, for example. We could say that all fantasy defenses do that, and that's a problem. It's very difficult to create a differential diagnosis for maladaptive daydreaming.
Now, I will go a bit deeper into fantasy-prone personality later in the video, but let's revert.
I told you that the duration, the longevity of the shared fantasy and the intensity of the shared fantasy crucially depend on the attachment styles of the fantasy-prone personality and that the avoidant dismissive attachment style leads to the shortest form, rapid cycling shared fantasy. One shared fantasy after another, after another, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Other insecure attachment styles of the fantasy-prone personality could lead to anything from mid-range shared fantasies to long-term shared fantasies.
We start with the anxious attachment style. The anxious or ambivalent attachment style is also referred to as anxious preoccupied, ambivalent anxious, or simply anxious or ambivalent. It's another way to describe people who are very needy. They're very clinging. They're anxious. They're uncertain. They lack a stable sense of self-worth and self-esteem. They crave emotional intimacy, but they're always worried, they're always terrified, that they might be rejected. They are socially, or more precisely, romantically and interpersonally shy and introverted. They are convinced that they have nothing to offer and no one would want to be with them. And they're highly embarrassed about themselves. They have a kind of what might be called an inferiority complex. They realize that they are clingy and needy and they're ashamed of their constant need for love and attention.
They're worn down by worry and fear and anxiety and distress, and they constantly catastrophize and anticipate abandonment and rejection, even by intimate partners who love them, or by good friends.
They want to be in relationships, they crave feelings of closeness and intimacy with someone, a good friend, an intimate partner, even a colleague. They crave this, but they struggle. They struggle because they can't fully trust other people to not hurt them. They can't rely on other people to reciprocate.
And so when they are in an intimate relationship, the anxious ambivalent attachment style takes over them. They are overwhelmed by it. They're occupied by it.
And so they become utterly fixated on the other person. It's difficult for them to observe boundaries. They regard any attempt to maintain some kind of personal space or personal time as a threat, as rejection, as abandonment, and this provokes in them frustration, aggression, panic, and anger, and fear, or even conviction that they are no longer wanted in the relationship, and it's about to disintegrate and just fade away.
The tendrils of the relationship always smoke life. So it's smoke and mirrors as far as they're concerned.
The sense of self-worth of people with anxious, ambivalent attachment style, rests on the way they are treated in a relationship.
They tend to overreact, especially when they perceive a threat to the existence or longevity or intensity of the relationship.
Then they overreact. They go haywire, they act out, they may become secondary or impulsive psychopaths, like in the case of borderline.
But as long as they feel that they are treated well, and as long as they are somehow reassured of the presence of the intimate partner, their self-esteem, sense of self-worth and self-confidence are up in the sky. They feel they can take on the world. There's nothing they cannot accomplish.
They feel anxious and jealous when they're away from the partner because they have difficulties to maintain introject constancy, exactly like borderlines. They cannot create an internal representation of the partner which is stable and with them at all times, even when the partner is physically away.
So out of sight, out of mind, out of mind creates anxiety, panic, even terror.
And they try to emotionally blackmail the partner to stay with them. They use guilt, controlling behavior, manipulative tactics, and so on.
And this is very common in codependency or dependent personality disorder. They need constantly reassurance, attention. They are gluttones for attention and reassurance.
And this is very, very exhausting. And partners typically burn out and simply run away.
When others criticize people with anxious, ambivalent attachment style, when they are criticized for being needy or clingy, they recoil, they feel very hurt, and they withdraw, not from the relationship but they withdraw inwardly. They withdraw, they de-cathect. They take away the emotional investment, at least for a while.
So this is the type of attachment style, typical of borderlines, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personalities, these are fantasy-based disorders, but as you can see, the attachment style is crucial.
The fantasy-prone personality, coupled with a specific attachment style, becomes clinging, needy and present. Coupled with another attachment style, the fantasy-prone personality, pushes the intimate partner away, becomes avoidant dismissive.
Avoidant dismissive attachment style is the next type of insecure attachment style.
So these are individuals who are the exact opposite of the ambivalent or anxious preoccupied attachment style.
It's also an insecure attachment style, but it manifests completely differently, and it's very typical of narcissists and psychopaths.
Instead of craving intimacy, they are so wary of closeness, they try to avoid emotional connection with others. They're hypervigilant, they're paranoid, they anticipate betrayal and worse.
So they'd rather not trust other people, not rely on others. And similarly, they don't want others to rely on them. They don't want dependence in any way, shape or form.
As the name suggests, they're avoidant. They'd rather be alone than with someone who has expectations, or poses demands, or attempts to create a relationship.
They regard relationships as both a prison cell on the one hand and a threat, a menace on the other.
People with avoidant dismissive attachment style find it therefore extremely difficult to tolerate emotional intimacy. They feel suffocated, they feel vaguely menaced. They feel something really bad is going to happen.
They value their independence and freedom to the point that they feel uncomfortable or stifled by closeness or by sharing or by togetherness in any kind of relationship, interpersonal relationship. Could be romantic, could be friendship, any kind.
And so they are fiercely autonomous. One could even say counterdependent.
So they care for themselves, they feel they don't need others. They're utterly self-sufficient.
On the very contrary, they believe that they give much more than they are able to take. That all the transactions with other people are asymmetrical and imbalanced.
So they feel used and abused constantly.
When someone tries to get close or intimate or to become a friend, or just to listen or just to share something, they immediately interpret this as neediness and clinging and they withdraw because they're terrified. They catastrophize the neediness and the clinging and they say, oh my God, this person is going to be all over me. Henceforth, I will not have a moment to myself. I need my personal space now.
And they just run away, literally run away in panic.
They're very uncomfortable with other people, but they're also very uncomfortable with their own emotions.
They're often accused by other people of being distant, detached, closed off, rigid, intolerant, cold, robotic.
And on the other hand, they reciprocate by accusing people of being needy, clinging, dependent, helpless, and generally dumb.
Now this sounds a lot like schizoid personality disorder. And indeed, this kind of attachment style is very common in schizoid, among schizoids.
People with this attachment disorder minimize or disregard other people's feelings and needs and wishes and expectations and dreams, they keep secrets as a management technique, a relationship management technique. They keep secrets. They engage in affairs. They can't be faithful. And they end relationships in order to regain a sense of freedom and liberty. They prefer fleeting casual relationships to long-term intimate ones. And they seek out partners who are equally independent, ones who will keep their distance emotionally and will not go into the game of commitment and investment and regularity and predictability and a rule-based relationship.
They don't want that.
They believe, they've convinced themselves, people with avoid and dismissive attachment style, convince themselves. They don't need close relationships. There's nothing they can do with intimacy, and there's nothing other people can give them, that they cannot generate internally or somehow outsource or secure without paying any emotional price.
But of course, this is not true. All human beings are hardwired for connection.
Even someone with avoid and dismissive attachment style, even schizoids, deep inside, imagine, fantasize about a close meaningful relationship, which is exactly the engine that drives the narcissist's shared fantasy.
This need to fantasize about love its antecedents and its outcomes.
So this type of attachment style usually engages in rapid cycling fantasies or shared fantasies, rapid cycling relationships that end, start and end within weeks, or sometimes even days, in rare cases.
And finally, there's the disorganized or disoriented attachment style. It's also referred to as the fearful avoidant attachment style, and as the name implies, it is founded on fear, or at the very least on anxiety. Usually, it's a reflection of a postThere's been some kind of childhood trauma or neglect or abuse. The child has been physically abused, sexually abused, emotionally, verbally, psychologically abused, or the child on the very contrary has been overprotected, pedestalized, instrumentalized, and parentified, which are also spoiling, pampering is also a form of abuse.
So, because the child is not allowed to be in touch with reality, with peers, and to develop boundaries. So the child's growth is stunted.
Children were exposed to this end up having fearful avoidant attachment style or a disorganized attachment style.
And when they're adults, they tend to feel that they don't deserve love or intimacy or closeness or togetherness in any type of relationship. They never learn how to self-soothe, how to emote safely.
So the world, the environment, people around them feel very frightening, very unsafe. They don't have a notion of secure base. They try to replicate the same abusive patterns of early childhood as adults to replay or reenact early childhood conflicts, especially with parental figures, especially with the mother.
These kind of people find intimate relationships confusing and settling. They swing between emotional extremes of love and hate.
In other words, they are ambivalent in many ways. They're insensitive. They're selfish. They're controlling. They're untrusting. They're explosive. They're abusive. And they're equally harsh on themselves. And so they're also self-defeating and self-destructive.
That's a great description of some types of narcissists, especially covert narcissists.
They exhibit antisocial, negative behavior patterns. They abuse alcohol and drugs. They are prone to aggression and violence. And everyone around them is given up on them. Everyone around them has despaired at the refusal to take responsibility to act in a mature way.
And while these people with disorganized attachment style crave security and safety and stability and predictability and a meaningful, intimate relationship with a good friend or a significant other. They crave all this. They fantasize about all this.
But deep inside, they're convinced that they're unworthy of it. They're terrified of getting rejected and hurt again because they have an internalized bad object, a primitive super ego, if you wish.
This bad object keeps informing them. Don't even try to have a relationship. You're bound to fail. You're not good enough for it. No one will want to be with you in the long term.
And so these type of people are also prone to rapid cycling relationship or at most mid-range relationships. They are unable to sustain a long-term shared fantasy.
All these attachment styles, insecure attachment styles, are very common in fantasy-prone personalities.
Fantasy-prone personality was first described in 1981 by Cheryl Wilson, Theodore Barber. And they suggested at the time that 4% of a population, gigantic number, 4% of population have a fantasy prom personality.
But if you take into account that fantasy-prone personalities include narcissists, for example, and borderlines and so on, then 4% sounds very reasonable.
Wilson and Barber described childhood antecedents, events in childhood, adverse childhood experiences that likely push people to become fantasy prone in later life.
So people who are encouraged to choose fantasy as a way out of reality, as an escape, would keep on adopting fantasy as a solution when reality becomes too tough and too unacceptable.
People who were subjected to trauma and abuse and so and so forth also are likely to choose fantasy over reality.
There was research in the 1990s by Barrett in Harvard that confirmed that, I mean she confirmed that people with a fantasy-prone personality who are also, by the way, highly suggestible and highly hypnotizable, these people have had traumatic childhoods and their fantasy is about spacing out.
So this created a classification of fantasy-prone personalities.
Type 1, these are people who simply prefer fantasy to reality because they have been brought up this way.
And type 2, and so type 2 is the people who have been traumatized and they react to fantasy this way.
Now, the people with type 1 personality often confuse or mix their fantasies with real memories. They tend to, after passage of time, in the fullness of time, they begin to identify their fantasy with reality. That's confabulation in narcissism, for example.
Type 2, people with type 2 can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Borderlines are like this. Psychopaths are like this.
So we have type 1, the people who are so immersed in fantasy, they have so renounced reality and have given up on it. They're embedded in a paracosm, in a virtual reality, and they cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. And this is most narcissists.
And we have people who like reality, a fantasy, choose fantasy, engage in fantasy, habitually, feel great when they are embedded in a fantasy, and yet are able to tell that it's a fantasy and not reality, and they are known as type 2.
Paracosm is a very detailed and structured fantasy world, and it is typical of type 1 fantasizers because they are compulsive and they are so immersed in the fantasy and they invest so much time and resources and mental energy and cognitions and emotions and you name it that they have no resources left for reality. And they end up prisoners of the paracosm.
Wilson and Barber listed numerous characteristics of fantasizers. And they said that they are excellent hypnotic subjects. They have imaginary friends in childhood. They fantasize often as children. They have an actual fantasy identity or identity in the fantasy. They experience imagined sensations as real. They have vivid sensory perceptions, very reminiscent of flashbacks or hallucinations. They receive sexual satisfaction very often without physical stimulation and so and so forth.
Fantasy proneness is at the core of fantasy defense-related mental health disorders, such as pathological narcissism. Large exposure to fantasy, self-induced fantasy, or fantasy enforced from the outside.
Because sometimes children find themselves the subjects and the victims of the parents' shared fantasy. They are the participants in the parents, for example, a narcissistic parents shared fantasy or a borderline parents shared fantasy. The child becomes an external regulator of the borderline parent. Or the child becomes the source of narcissistic supplyin a narcissistic parent shared fantasy.
So when the child is exposed to fantasy as the only reality, or when the child avoids and escapes reality because it's threatening and unbearable, and the child escapes into a fantasy, self-generated fantasy, internal fantasy, in both cases, a fantasy-prone personality emerges later in adulthood.
This is why it's very important as parents, even when the child engages in imaginative mental play or when the child comes up with imaginary friends, it's important to insist that the child be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
You should not suppress the child's creative capacity, you should not punish the child, you should not display discomfort or panic.
When the child talks to an imaginary friend, for example, you should appreciate the child's creativity and imagination.
But you should make clear to the child and insist on it, that imagination and fantasy are one thing, and reality is never the same thing. It's a separate thing.
People with fantasy-prone personalities were not exposed to such feedback from the environment. When they engage in fantasy, no one was there to tell, as children, no one was there to tell them, don't do that, don't do that or do that, but remember, it's not real. Limited in time, limit it in space. Don't make it so intense, so compulsive, don't get so involved. Pull them back to reality.
When children grow up in an environment where the adults themselves are prone to fantasy or where the adults do not provide constructive, countervailing feedback and input, which drags a child back to reality, these kind of children grow up to have fantasy-prone personalities.
And so we need to focus on the childhood element in fantasy prone personalities, because these people never grow up, they remain embedded in the childhood fantasy.
Now, there are many types of fantasy or fantastic activities in childhood.
For example, believing the toys are living creatures and relating to the toys as if they're alive, having imaginary companions and friends, the false self is actually a kind of imaginary friend until it erupts, expands and takes over the child as a godlike figure. But it starts off as an imaginary friend.
Reading fairy tales without making clear that the fairy tales do not reflect reality and can never be real under any circumstances and conditions.
Fantasy-based activities could include anything from piano playing, ballet and drawing to cooking. If these activities reflect some underlying or overriding fantasy, and if these activities are intended to lead to fantastic outcomes, for example in acting, when the child is supposed to act different people or different characters.
And so when reality becomes dreamlike, and dreams can be immediately translated in waking hours into actual fantasies, that creates a major problem. That creates a major problem later in life.
These people grow up thinking erroneously that what they've gone through is experience, is memory, and should therefore become a part, an integral part of their core identity.
And yet, it is not. It should be demarcated and delineated and placed in a reserve or a zoo isolated from reality.
When fantasy bleeds into reality, a problem emerges and it's a lifelong problem.
So, exposure to fantasy behaviors by adults or collusion in the fantasy of the child as a substitute for reality. Exposure to abuse physical or sexual or others.
Fantasizing provides a coping or escape mechanism.
Exposure to severe loneliness and isolation. Or fantasy provides a coping or escape mechanism from the boredom and the terror of being alone.
The imaginary friend, all these could lead, if not tackled sensitively and reasonably by parents and other adult figures, caregivers, role models, and even peers, could lead to a fantasy prone personality.
The inevitable, Sigmund Freud said that unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind fantasies. Every separate fantasy contains a fulfillment of a wish and improves an unsatisfactory reality.
Today we know this is only partly true. Wish fulfillment is one element in some types of fantasy.
It's not so much about wish fulfillment as it is about constructing a universe, constructing a world in which the child and later the adult can feel actualized, fulfilled, himself or herself, without fear of rejection, opprobrium, abandonment, hurt, attack, aggression, a fearless space within which the individual can become.
However, this space is not real. That's the problem.
And the whole process of becoming is deformed and thwarted by the unrealness of the fantasy. It's so real, a character.
Now openness to experience is one of the five domains that are used to describe human personality in the five-factor model. It involves six facets or dimensions, including active imagination, fantasy, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety and intellectual curiosity.
So fantasy-prone personalities usually correlate with the fantasy dimension or the fantasy facet of the personality trait known as openness to experience.
We have mentioned absorption where the person is predisposed to become absorbed in mental imagery, particularly fantasy.
But we also need to mention dissociation.
Dissociation involves alterations in personal identity or sense of self by deleting, removing certain memories, for example, or by depersonalizing, feeling that it's not you who is there, someone else, or by derealizing, denying the realistic nature of reality.
So dissociation involves sometimes a sense that one's self or the world is unreal or a loss of memory, forgetting one's identity, assuming a new self, like in fugues days, fragmentation of identity or self into separate streams of consciousness in dissociative identity disorder.
Dissociation is sometimes closely associated with fantasy because there is the fantasy self.
The fantasy self is comprised of two elements: the self that is fantasizing, which is not the same self embedded in reality, and the fantasized self, the self in the fantasy.
So there is a self that creates the fantasy and the self in the fantasy.
And this is the fantasy self.
And the fantasy self is very crucial because without the fantasy self, a fantasy cannot be maintained or sustained for long, if at all.
And a fantasy self always involves dissociation because you need to deny or reject reality before you can become who you are not, before you can become someone else, the fantasizing self.
And of course, when you as an intimate partner is embedded in the shared fantasy, the process of entraining is about converting you to a fantasy self, about denuding you or depriving you of your real self, of who you truly are, and replacing it with some kind of a fantasy self that corresponds to the narcissists' expectations or imagination or creativity in forming the shared fantasy.
Similarly, the narcissist has a fantasizing self, that's the false self, fantasizing self, and a self in the fantasy.
And the aim of the fantasizing self is to merge, to become one indistinguishable, from the self in the fantasy.
The self in the fantasy is godlike, perfect, omniscient, omnipotent.
And the aim of the false self, which is the self that creates the fantasy, is to become the self in the fantasy, the ego ideal, the self in the fantasy.
So that the false self and the self in the fantasy merge and create the perfect self, the godlike self.
Dissociation and fantasy proneness are highly correlated, quite a few studies about it. Dissociated selves, possibly, are some kinds of fantasy.
When a patient reports about having two selves or three selves, altars, and so on so forth, we could reconceive of the whole thing as an elaborate set of fantasies within a mega fantasy, the fantasy of multiple personality disorder.
It's a coping response to trauma.
And perhaps fantasy as a coping response to trauma involves a fragmentation of the self, or involves reorientation of self-states, or involves an imaginary merger or fusion between the fantasizing self and the fantasized self, often via the agency of a third party, the observer.
So you, when you're inducted into the shared fantasy, one of your main roles is to observe the narcissist fantasized self in the shared fantasy.
So there is the false self. The false self creates a shared fantasy.
So there is the false self. The false self creates a shared fantasy.
In the shared fantasy, there is a representation of the narcissist, which is the fantasized god-like self.
And there is you. The fantasized element or entity in the shared fantasy that represents you, kind of internal object that represents you.
Your role is to observe, observe, the narcissist fantasized self within the shared fantasy, confirm, that the narcissist is indeed God-like and perfect, to allow the false self to merge with the fantasized self.
Because if a third party confirms that the narcissist is perfect, godlike, omniscient, omnipotent, that lends credence and believability to these claims. They no longer sound outlandish or inane.
And then the false self feels comfortable to merge with the fantasized self.
It's one of the main roles of the shared fantasy is actually it starts with dissociation, but one of its main roles is to overcome dissociation.
By merging the false self with the fantasized self as confirmed by you, the intimate partner in the shared fantasy, this merger and fusion are supposed to overcome the dissociation that had created the false self to start with.
It is as if the false self, the fantasizing self were to merge with the fantasized self, they would become unitary, the elusive missing unitary self that never had a chance to develop in the narcissist early childhood.
It's a very complex dynamic within the shared fantasy and so fantasy-prone personalities with an avoidant dismissive insecure attachment style often lead to a rapid cycling shared fantasy.
Within the shared fantasy, there are three elements, or actually in the shared fantasy there are three elements.
The fantasizing false self, the narcissist's fantasizing false self, which is the fantasizing self.
The false self creates the fantasy.
Within the shared fantasy, there are two internal objects, two make-belief objects. One of them represents the narcissist's, and this is the fantasized self.
The false self creates a fantasized self within the shared fantasy.
Within the shared fantasy, the fantasized self is godlike, perfect, omniscient, omnipotent.
So this is the narcissist's role in the shared fantasy.
And there is an internal object that represents you within the shared fantasy, you the intimate partner, you the good friend within the shared fantasy.
And your role, one of your functions in the shared fantasy is to observe the narcissist's fantasized self within the shared fantasy and to confirm that it is perfect, it is God-like, it is all- knowing and it is all-powerful.
And so your voice within the shared fantasy provides the narcissist fantasized self within the shared fantasy with credibility, with believability, with a kind of scientific underpinnings or support.
So now the false self has obtained your confirmation that the fantasized self in the shared fantasy is as it claims to be, and the false self feels legitimized and safe to merge with the fantasized self in the shared fantasy, and to erase the dissociation of early childhood, and to become one with a fantasized self in the shared fantasy, become a unitary self, the very unitary self, which has been disrupted, unconstlated, non-integrated, not allowed to emerge and not allowed to become in the narcissist childhood owing to trauma and abuse.