Today we are going to discuss the black hole at the core of the narcissists and the borderline.
Where an identity should have been, where a person should have been, there is a void, there is an emptiness.
I have dealt with this issue in other videos. Please go to the description. There are links and you can watch these videos.
But today is a special twist.
Today I'll be asking the question, is this black hole at the core of the narcissist, at the very being and essence of the borderline, is this black hole actually a sign of autism, autism spectrum disorder?
But before we go there, I would like to comment on the connection between memory and identity.
It is well established. It's actually part of the diagnostic criteria that dissociation is an integral part of borderline personality organization.
In other words, both a narcissist and the borderline are dissociative. They have memory gaps. They forget things.
And then they cope with this dissociation. They cope with these gaps in memory in different ways. I will not go into it right now.
A common question that I'm getting is, if the narcissist is dissociated, if he has memory gaps, how does he succeed to function in society? How does he become a chief executive officer? A top-level politician, a scientist, a judge. How do narcissists function in the absence of a working memory?
The question is the outcome of confusion between several types of memory.
We distinguish between episodic memory, also known as autobiographical memory, procedural memory, which is unconscious when you ride a bike or when you drive a car, you're using procedural memory. When you recall events from your life, you're using episodic memory.
And then there is semantic memory. When you recall events from your life, you're using episodic memory. And then there is semantic memory. Semantic memory is the memory of facts, of skills.
So you could have excellent semantic memory. You could perform well, you could do your job, you could remember things, excellent semantic memory, and at the same time, severe disturbances in episodic memory. Autobiographical memory is disrupted. There's no continuity in memory and consequently there's no identity.
Again, watch the video, not identity without memory, link in the description.
So one could have excellent semantic memory, excellent procedural memory, but no or little or disrupted autobiographical memory, episodic memory. This is very common in certain types of dementia, in Korsakoff syndrome, and other mental health issues.
This is what's happening with the narcissists and the borderline.
They have severe perturbances, severe diffusion, severe disturbances of episodic memory.
Their autobiography is discontinuous, disjointed and disrupted.
And so this leads to extreme problems in forming an identity, what is also known as a self or an ego in psychoanalytic theory.
These do not coalesce, do not constellate, do not become integrated in the narcissistic and borderline personality disorders.
This is the black hole we are talking about.
Its inception is a lack of operating episodic continuous memory. Its continuation is a problem in the formation of identity.
And then its manifestation is in specific behaviors and traits.
And we're going to discuss all this in today's video and link it to autism spectrum disorders.
Now, if those of you who remember what I've just said, may proceed. You have good semantic memory.
Bad memories. No one likes bad memories, but bad memories are the tuition fee that we pay in order to learn from our mistakes and to grow.
Narcissus and borderlines are dissociative. They have vast memory gaps and are therefore incapable of growth and learning.
And this is the first affinity with autism.
Now stay tuned and let's review the history of the concept of black hole in the literature.
I have dedicated a few videos on this channel to the emptiness, the void at the very core of the narcissists and the borderline.
This void has been described by multiple scholars, most eminently and notably, Kernberg, but also Seinfeld, Schizoid, empty core, etc.
What is this emptiness? I recommend that you watch videos that I've already made.
But one metaphor that is commonly used is that of a black hole.
This emptiness is not passive. It's active. It consumes everything and everyone around the narcissists and the borderline. It has a life of its own, as if it has a will.
And so today we're going to discuss the black hole metaphor in borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm currently a professor of clinical psychology and business management in SIAPS, in Cambridge, United Kingdom. And prior to that, I served as a visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, in Russia.
It devastates me to admit that I am not the one who came up with the idea of the black hole as a metaphor for the emptiness that pervades the borderlines and narcissistic psyche.
No, I am not the one.
The person who came up with it, her name is Frances Tustin, TUSTIN in 1972. In 1988, she published an article in three associations where she expounded on this idea, on this metaphor.
And at first she suggested that black holes are common in autistic children.
Okay, we'll get to all this in due time if you survive this video.
But before we go there, many metaphors are used when we discuss narcissism and borderline personality and character disorders.
Some people compare them to a rot, a kind of decomposition. Some people compare narcissists to vampires or to viruses or to a form of cancer.
But again, one of the most common comparisons is to a black hole.
Black hole is essentially a quantum object. It's an object that is closely related to uncertainty on the one hand and information on the other.
When two quantum objects interact, all the information that these objects carry becomes scrambled.
Does it sound familiar?
That's exactly what happens in narcissistically abusive relationships. The information brought into the relationship, into the shared fantasy, gets scrambled.
And in physics, one of the most striking examples of information scrambling happens in black holes.
When objects fall into these super dense remnants of stars, these super dense bodies, some of the information that these objects contain re-emerges in the black hole's emitted radiation, but in a highly scrambled form.
So if you're an object and you get close to a black hole, you're likely to be swallowed and digested by the black hole. And all the information that you contain is going to remain trapped within the black hole.
But then it's going to be scrambled and it's going to be emitted in radiation from the black hole.
I think this metaphor captures the very essence and the critical dynamics of narcissistically abusive relationships.
In fact, for a very long time, physicists believed that black holes are the fastest possible scramblers of information.
But there are new studies by Ghalitsky and others which disproved this idea. They found that even quicker information scramblers could exist in the quantum realm.
Never mind all that. Those of you who want to pursue this particular line of inquiry, go to the literature in the description.
I just wanted to demonstrate to you that when we use the concept of black hole, when we borrow it from physics and applied to the psychology of cluster B personality disorders, especially to interpersonal relationships in Cluster B and with Cluster B personality disorders, the concept of black hole in physics provides us with amazing insights into the psychology.
So we can borrow from physics and learn about psychology.
In the Journal of Annals of Psychology in 2013, there was an article published by Sean Waldron. The article is titled, Black Holes, Escaping the Void.
And here is what the author has to say.
The black hole is a metaphor for a reality in the psyche of many individuals who have experienced complex trauma in infancy in early childhood.
The black hole has been created by an absence of the object, the mother, so there is no internalized object, no mother in the psyche. Rather there is a black hole where the object should be.
But the infant is drawn to this black hole, trapped by it because of an intrinsic instinctive need for a real object, an internalized mother.
Without this, the infant cannot develop.
It is only the presence of a real object that can generate the essential gravity necessary to draw the core of the self that is still in an undeveloped state from deep within the abyss.
It is the moving towards a real object, a mother, that revitalizes the absolute power of the black hole and begins a reformation of its essence within the psyche.
I'm going to read this last paragraph again, because it provides a few treatment directions, a few ideas which could develop into treatment.
It is only the presence of a real object that can generate the essential gravity necessary to draw the core of the self that is still in an undeveloped state from deep within the abyss.
It is the moving towards a real object, a mother, that relativizes the absolute power of the black hole and begins a reformation of its essence within the psyche.
This is precisely, and now it's me, this is precisely what the narcissist is trying to do.
The narcissist lacks an internalized mother.
Instead of a mother, what the narcissist has is a bad object.
The narcissist tries to replace the bad object, the abyss, tries to replace it with a maternal figure, with a new object, with a mother.
But he does it within a shared fantasy. And he coerces his intimate partners, his friends, even his colleagues. He coerces them to become maternal figures.
It's a repetition, compulsion, and it's doomed.
It's doomed because very few people are qualified and capable of acting in a motherly way, acting as a maternal figure.
For example, very few people are able to provide unconditional love, which is one of the hallmarks of a good enough mother.
And so the narcissist keeps failing time and again.
In his desperate attempt to separate from the new maternal figure, he devalues her and then discards her as a symbolic representation of the separation, individuation of early childhood.
If you want to learn more about this, watch the videos in the shared fantasy playlist.
By far, the most seminal and my favorite article about the black hole was written by Pecotic. It could be Pecottitz or Pesotzits. I have no idea how to pronounce this. Pecotic.
The article was published in 2002, and it's titled The Black Hole in the Inner Universe. It was published in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, Volume 28.
And here is what the author has to say.
The metaphor of the black hole has been borrowed from astronomy in order to describe a certain phenomenon occurring in work with autistic and psychotic children.
This metaphor is different from Tustin's concept, occurring in work with autistic and psychotic children. This metaphor is different from Tustin's concept of the black hole.
I shall attempt to describe another phenomenon, not that of the hole in the self, resulting from premature separation, but the hole in the object that the autistic or psychotic child is relating to, or rather turning away from.
This is very interesting. Pecotic or Pecotic'specotics or whatever is trying a different tack taking a different path he says let's not focus on the black hole at the core of the affected child the child who's been neglected who's been abandoned who's been mistreated the child who has been forced to separate from a mother prematurely because she was a dead mother.
Let's put this black hole aside for a minute. Let's study the black hole in the mother. The black hole in the mother gave birth to the black hole in the child, so we might as well study the origin, which is the primary object, the mother.
The Kotick continues to say, I describe an autistic boy's need to protect himself against the catastrophic experience of relating to an object with such a hole in its mind.
There is a particular kind of a depressed object which emits deadness instead of the lively, responsive effect that the child should get in communication with an object.
Object in this case is a mother, yes?
The author continues to say, it is not an intrusive object, but it sucks in and drowns energy, vampire-like, yeah?
If the experience of relating to the black hole in the object happens early and in such a powerful way that the child's energy feels insufficient to defend against it in any way, then the fear of annihilation becomes so strong that it may lead to the wiping out of the whole internal universe in order to escape its deadly gravitational pool.
That's an amazing paragraph.
It says that the mother's black hole is so threatening, so menacing, that the child annihilates itself, destroys itself, kills itself in effect, in order to not experience the mother's black hole.
And this is exactly the initial phase in the development of pathological narcissism, when the child sacrifices the true self, kills it literally, assassinated, to allow the emergence of the false self.
Hindered, the author continues, only when a different kind of relationship gets internalized, through therapy, for example, with an object that contains and returns life and energy, can the mind grow enough to be able to communicate the other darker side of the relationship from which it has closed itself away.
The metaphor of the black hole in the universe has been borrowed from astronomy in order to describe a certain phenomena occurring in work with autistic and psychopathic children. That much is true.
But I shall try to show how these phenomena relate to an early and profoundly damaging psychic experience which may be linked to, but is in my opinion different from those experiences that Tustin in 1972 described when she introduced the concept of black hole.
What Tustin called the black hole was a devastating experience in the child as well as the mother, resulting from premature separation.
She described the experience of a mutilating loss of part of the body, either in a child when separated prematurely from its mother, or in a depressed mother, when giving birth to her baby.
Tustin also mentioned a mutual black hole type of depression, when mother and baby have not been able to enliven each other, and each become stuck with this kind of experience inside themselves. They both freeze. They're both dead.
Equally, separation from the therapies during holiday breaks is not felt by such children as rejection, as with neurotic children, but as a mutilation, as an injury.
At first, says the author, I thought that some of the phenomena I encountered in long-term work with an autistic boy, as well as with a psychotic adolescent girl, were of a similar nature.
Later on, I came to see them as different.
So I borrowed a metaphor from astronomy, the black hole in the universe, in order to describe the different phenomenon, and not the hole in the self, but the hole in the mind of the object that the autistic child is relating to the mother in most cases.
This hole is perceived as malignantly active, sucking in the child's psyche, and thus making the child turn away and obliterate the awareness of its own existence.
Beautiful poetic article.
And then it goes on to describe two case studies, one with an autistic boy, one with a psychotic girl, highly recommended. Find it online and read it.
These are several ways to look at the black hole at the core of the narcissist and the borderline, possibly the autistic and the psychotic child.
Whether this black hole is a reaction to the black hole in a mother, whether this black hole is a reaction to constant frustration, neglect, abandonment and emotional absence, whether this black hole is the outcome of externality, some trauma from the outside, environmental, an environment, a dysfunctional family, for example, PTSD induced by witnessing events which are traumatic.
That's another question altogether.
What is certain is that once a black hole has taken residence at the very core of the child where an identity should have been, where a self should have been, where a representation of a loving, compassionate, holding mother should have been. When all these are vacated and negated and eliminated and obliterated, and what's left behind is deep space, its darkness, and its near absolute zero temperatures.
What emerges is a narcissist or a borderline or perhaps a psychopath.
Focusing on the emptiness is a crucial step, clinically, theoretically, as many adherents of the object relation school in the United Kingdom and later in the United States have observed.
If we were to focus on this substitute core identity in effect, we might be able, we may be able to come up with some psychodynamic and psychological solutions, some processes by which we can reanimate or reactivate something, co-opt maybe the black hole, use its energy, use its radiation, use the scrambled information that emanates from it to decode and decipher the suffering patient.
Hope springs eternal.
As I said, the idea of a black hole at the core of mental ill people is first been proposed by Frances Tustin in 1972 when she discussed autistic children.
She gave a speech and the title was The Black Hole, a significant element in autism.
And it was a group of professional workers which sort of collaborated among themselves working with autistic children.
And here is some of what she said.
First of all, she said, I would like to clear away certain misunderstandings.
For example, I have found that in certain circles to talk about the possible psychogenic origin of some types of autism and to suggest that some autistic children can be helped by appropriate psychotherapy is like showing a red rag to a bull.
I understand why this should be so.
In the early days after Leo Kanner differentiated the rare syndrome he called early infantile autism from congenital sub normality.
She is referring to studies in 1943.
The psychoanalytic child therapists made unduly optimistic claims for alleviating this said condition by the type of psychotherapy that they employed.
This was usually a modification of a classical Freudian technique.
Tustin continued to say, they, these people, psychoanalyst, raised hopes in parents, which were unfulfilled.
In addition, they blamed the mothers for their children's distress condition in a simplistic and unsympathetic way.
The autistic children were often depicted as innocent victims of an overly intellectual mother's cold, uncaring, unresponsiveness.
This was known at the time as refrigerator mothers.
Tustin says, In my writings, I have tried to redress the balance by seeing the mother's point of view, as did Dr. Tishler in 1979.
I have also tried to show the child's unwitting contribution to the autistic state.
After all, we are all flawed creatures and apportioning blame is a sterile pastime. Understanding is what psychotherapy is about.
A syndrome as rare as early infantile autism is likely to be the result of an unusual occurrence or concurrence of both the genetic and environmental factors, the balance of which may be different in each case.
So this was the first time that the idea of Black Hole made its appearance. And at the time, it was limited to the study of autism.
It is very telling that the very same metaphor or simile has now been powerfully and insightfully applied to borderline and to narcissistic conditions, it seems there is an affinity between borderline, narcissism, and autism.
I'm going to review some of the literature right now.
Eshel O wrote an article, Black holes, deadness and existing analytically. It was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1998.
This is the abstract.
In this paper, the author makes metaphorical use of the astrophysical term, Black Hole, to describe the impact of the physically dead mother.
You remember, the dead mother is a concept invented by Andre Green, described in 1978, and the dead mother is a concept invented by Andre Green described in 1978, and the dead mother is a mother who is absent, neglectful, depressive, selfish, etc., mother who is unable to cater to the emotional needs of the child, or to see the child.
So Ashel continues in his article, The Dead Mother constitutes a black hole experience in the interpersonal, intersubjective space of her child because of the intense grip and compelling pull of her world of inner deadness.
Individuals under her influence are either trapped in her deadening world, or if they succeed in detaching themselves, are petrified in their interpersonal space because of the imminent threat of being drawn back in again into the dead mother.
Consequently, these people are unable to form object relations of closeness, love and intimate bonding.
Can analysis provide the enormous counter forces needed for freeing these people from the grip of these powerful devouring forces?
The author describes the analysis of a man who grew up with a dead mother.
Analysis began with a patient who was emotionally disconnected, developed into patient and analyst being drawn into a black hole of deadness and dying, and eventually progressed to his extrication.
The emphasis here is on the analytic experience and analytic experiencing.
The author relates experientially and theoretically to the pivotal role of the patient analyst's survival of the deadening destructive processes in this analysis, and the analyst's capacity and struggle to both hold and contain the patient and remain alive while experiencing and going through annihilation and death along with the patient.
So as you see, Tustin proposed the concept of Black Hole to actually negate the belief that mothers are responsible for the mental illness of their children.
She confronted vehemently the idea of a refrigerator mother, a dead mother in effect, as the cause of autism, while Ashel has embraced and adopted this perception and is suggesting that a dead mother is responsible for the formation and the functioning of a black hole in her child.
Clark, G. Clark wrote an article titled A Black Hole in Psyche, published in the magazine Harvest in 1983.
Clark's paper attempts to make some sense of patients who present an anti-life attitude, and are unwilling to envisage themselves as viable human beings with a capacity for living.
The dead center, created in these patients by a sense of being an abortion intrinsically unwontable produces a defensive structure against life, against becoming, against being.
Clark asks whether this fear of annihilation can be dealt with reductively within the transference in terms of negative self-objects. And to what extent a viable self can be therapeutically engaged?
Clark distinguishes the threatening nothingness that cannot be integrated from death anxiety or phobia and nothingness that vaporizes the meaning of life.
Clark investigates carefully and with a sense of compassion, puzzlement and despair, patients whose defensiveness appeared more than as a flight from psychic reality or internal bad objects.
Clark views the patient's maneuvers as essential to their provisional survival, because they bring a temporary evasion of the real feelings of pointlessness.
Any mention of wholeness simply brings these patients closer to their own inner emptiness.
Clark talks boldly of the impotence he feels as an analyst when the unalive cannot receive the breath of life, when holding and not healing is all that can be attempted.
The massive depressive anxiety against which the patients are defending themselves seems linked with narcissistic character disorders and connects with catastrophic damage to the self and to its unity.
This article was written in 1983, and it presages, envisions, later developments in psychology.
We came to understand that the dead core of the narcissists has to do with a bad object.
The narcissist believes that he or she is unwanted, unloved, unlovable, unworthy, inadequate, has no right to live.
So the narcissist kills his true self and replaces it with a concoction, with a piece of fiction, with a false self.
Where the true self used to be, there's a black hole.
And these people are unalive. They are zombies because of this dysfunctional attempt to replace the bad object by destroying it.
And at the same time, exactly like a nuclear explosion, destroying every other structure inside.
So the bad object may be destroyed and replaced with the false self, but at the same time, the self itself is destroyed. It's non-unitary. It's fragmented. It's unconstellated and non-integrated.
Clark mentions that these patients are anti-life. This is reminiscent of Cleckley's rejection of life. They're unwilling to envisage themselves as viable human beings with a capacity for living.
The dead center created in them by a sense of being an abortion, intrinsically unwontable, and this produces a defensive structure against life, against becoming, against being.
Wonderful article, poetic, incisive, insightful.
A few years later in 1990 in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, volume 18, an article was published by one of my favorites, James Grochstein.
Grochstein was the one who explained that narcissism, a borderline personality disorder, is failed narcissism.
When the child attempts to become a narcissist and fails, this child remains stuck at the borderline stage where emotions are dysregulated, moods are labile, and the entire internal environment is vacated. Vacated, because it cannot be controlled.
Anyhow, Grochstein wrote an article, is much neglected, and much ignored, and the article is titled, the black hole is the basic psychotic experience, some newer psychoanalytic and neuroscience perspectives on psychosis.
So here's what Grochstein says about the connection between the black hole, the void, the emptiness, and psychosis.
He says, the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic disorders has had a long and complicated history because of the historic preference of psychoanalysis for neurotics rather than psychotics.
Nevertheless, it has survived the prejudice of psychoanalysts and empirical psychiatrists, and now enters an interdisciplinary phase in which psychotic psychopathology is understood as primarily an emotional disorder, but one that must also be considered from the point of view of neurobiology and neuropsychology as well as sociology.
In these contributions, says Grochstein, I offer the idea that perhaps the most important subtext in the psyche of the psychotic is what has been called the black hole.
This massive deficit is ultimately attributable to a precocious abruption of the mother's physical and psychical presence from the infant, a phenomenon that has hereditary, congenital, perinatal, and continuing developmental, reinterpretive elaborations.
The psychoanalytic treatment of the psychotic, says Groschstein, consists of reversing the direction of his over cataclysmic descent into the black hole, and at the same time, emphatically loosening the control that a protective psychotic alter ego has on the surviving self.
Further, the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia, in particular, as well as many of the other primitive mental disorders, now frequently involves both an interdisciplinary orientation and perspective and choices of interdisciplinary modalities extending across the whole biopsychosocial spectrum.
This contribution seeks to integrate the latest offerings from neuroscience with classical Kleinian object relations and self-psychological contributions to the theory of psychosis.
I differentiate psychopathology, which has primary psychological meaning, from that which neurobiologically originates without psychological meaning. I re-invoke Freud's notion of the actual neurosis versus the psycho-neurosis in order to emphasize this distinction.
Further, says Grosstein, I describe the black hole of internal mental space as an invariant phenomenon in psychosis, and I trace its connection with meaninglessness, which I hope to be the single most important factor in psychotic illness, reminiscent of Frankl and logotherapy, by the way.