As Kmoshit Halti Lasbiv, a fantasy we should...
We are not in Israel?
No.
Sorry.
Sorry. I thought we were in Israel.
Okay. Fantasy. Shared fantasy.
Before we proceed, I want to thank Ego, who has multiple camera disorder.
Yes, multiple camera disorder. Why is it so difficult?
Why is it so difficult for you to break up with the narcissists? Why the narcissist remains a figure of attachment when I've just told you the narcissists are incapable of attachment? Why do you fantasize on going back with or to the narcissists when I told you that narcissists are incapable of object constancy and that you mean nothing to the narcissist? Why do you persist in interacting with the narcissist, either in real life or if this is denied, then in your heads? You carry on dialogues with the narcissist, you argue with a narcissist, you convince the narcissist. You interact with the narcissist intrusively in your mind.
Why is all this?
Breaking up with the narcissist or being discarded by the narcissists, which is much more common, is the final phase in the shared fantasy but I would like to start with the grief, the mourning that occur after the shared fantasy.
A relationship with a narcissist within the shared fantasy is like no other relationship because it triggers multiple archaeological layers of your mind and psyche.
To start with, the narcissist grants you access to his so-called inner child, to his buried true self.
The narcissist lures you in, the narcissist baits you by displaying a vulnerable, fragile, hurting child, a child in need, a child in need of protection, a child who needs comforting and soothing, a child who can be nourished and nurtured with love, and perhaps grow up to become self-actualized adult.
So you're drawn initially to this child.
It's universal. Even when the narcissist displays a facade of adulthood, competence, self-efficacy, you see glimpses of the child behind all the time. And you get bonded with this child. Your maternal instincts are triggered.
And that applies to men as well. When we see a baby, men and women alike react similarly. They want to protect the baby. They cuckoo the baby. They do everything the baby hates. They pinch the baby, they cuckoo the baby. They do everything the baby hates, you know, they pinch the baby.
So men and women react identically to babies. In this sense, men and women have maternal instinct, a maternal instinct.
So whether you are the narcissist best friend, male best friend, or female intimate partner, as I call insignificant other, and so on so forth, doesn't make any difference.
The initial attachment is to the child. The child calls you. The child is like a siren call, you know, calls you from afar, and lures you into this isolated island of the shared fantasy.
When you break up with a narcissist, you give up on a child, on this child.
Do you know any grief bigger than a mother who loses her child?
I don't, I think it's the most profound form of mourning and grief.
And whenever you break up with the narcissist, you are a mother who has lost her child.
At the same time, the narcissist maternalizes you.
He forces you to become a mother, to him or to her, doesn't matter. Forces you to become a mother, and so you become his or her mother.
And the narcissist becomes your child.
And again, when you break up with the narcissist, you lose your child. It's like losing the child.
And again when you break up with the narcissists, you lose your child. It's like losing two children simultaneously. The child that the narcissist is and the child that you had become in the shared fantasy.
So you lose a child and you lose a maternal figure. You lose a mother. The narcissist becomes your mother. You become the narcissist mother. When you break up, you have lost the child and you have lost the mother.
But that's only the beginning. At the same time as you have lost a child and you have lost a mother, you have also lost a lover, you have lost a fantasy because you have subscribed to the fantasy. Otherwise, you will not be there. You have lost the fantasy, the daydream, the hope. And you have lost what you believed you both could have become. So you have lost your potential.
In short, when you break up with the narcissists, there's multiple grief.
Whereas in a typical breakup, there is mourning, mourning of the potential, mourning of the relationship, mourning of the partner. It's nothing remotely as deep as when you break up with a narcissist.
Because the narcissist regresses you to a state of infancy, becomes your unconditionally loving mother, and then rejects you and gives up on you.
And at the same time, you became the narcissist mother, and he forces you to lose this child, that you grew to love and to cherish.
And at the same time, there was this story of the two of you, this cult-like perception of you against the world, the thing that made you special as a unity, this specialness is taken away from you.
It's like being thrown back to earth, having been brought to heaven, being thrown back to earth.
You miss seeing yourself through the narcissist's gaze. You miss perceiving yourself through the narcissist's eyes, because the narcissist has idealized you.
It's intoxicating. To see yourself idealized as a perfect entity, it's intoxicating, it's addictive.
And so you have withdrawal symptoms, cold turkey. You need this drug of seeing yourself through the gaze of the narcissist because the way he saw you is the way a mother sees her a newborn baby.
Mothers idealize their newborns. If a mother was incapable of idealizing the newborn, many newborns would be given up for adoption.
Mothers need to idealize the newborn. He's, oh, isn't it the cutest? It's amazing as this. Ugly thing.
So, idealization is an integral part of mother-child interactions and relationships, and the narcissist plays on this.
He doesn't do it intentionally. Narcissists are not psychopath. They're not malevolent. It's not done in a cunning, scheming way. It's just the way the narcissist is.
It's like accusing a tiger or accusing a virus. It's just a narcissist how he operates.
But it takes away from you everything. When you break up with a narcissist, everything is taken away from you. Your identity is gone because you have been regressed. Your child is gone. Your mother is gone. Your fantasy is gone. Your dream is gone, your lover is gone, everything is done.
You are left bereft and with absolutely nothing to build on.
You're also completely disoriented. It's completely disorienting. You no longer know who you are. You lose the basic tenets of your identity because the memories were not real.
Fantasy is not real. The memories are not real.
When you realize the unreality of the memories in the wake of the breakup, takes away from you the possibility of establishing continuity.
And so it's a form of forced or coerced dissociation. It's really, really bad.
I was the first to describe narcissistic abuse and the first to describe the grieving processes following narcissistic abuse in the 80s.
And I have never come across anything remotely as damaging as the wake or the aftermath of narcissistic relationships.
It is wrong to believe that these kind of relationships are confined to narcissists because, first of all, there is a huge comorbidity. So many, many borderlines are narcissists as well. And many psychopaths are narcissists as well.
So we could talk about something like 40% in 40% of the cases there are comorbidities.
So it's not true, it's not okay to confine it to Cluster B. Whenever you come across someone with cluster B personality disorders you have a coin flip chance that you're faced with a narcissist.
It's really, really dangerous and problematic because to recover from this multiple grief, this is multiple grief.
There's a new diagnosis, a new diagnosis in the DSM text revision, edition 5, and will be expanded in the DSM 6. It's called prolonged grief disorder. Prolonged grief disorder.
I think it applies to relationships with narcissists. There's prolonged grief because you have to process so many types of grief in so many ways that contradict each other.
For example, if you want to recover as a mother who has lost her child, you need to be a mother. But at the same time, you're a child who lost a mother.
So what to do first? And then if you do act as a mother and you somehow overcome, can you go back to being a child and process the loss of the mother?
It's mutually contradictory demands of recovery, which keeps you paralyzed and locked. I call it a locked-in syndrome, like, you know, in coma, vegetative state.
And all this is the outcome of the shared fantasy. The way the shared fantasy is structured is comparable to a carnivorous plant, a carnivorous plant, you know, it's beautiful, it's colorful, it's alluring, it's smelly in the right way for insects, and then you as an insect, you enter, you're digested. You're assimilated. You become part of the texture and the fabric of the plant.
And this is the shared fantasy. It is constructed this way because it is a simulacrum or a simulation of the relationship between a child and a mother. That's how the shared fantasy is structured.
Let's go through the phases of the shared fantasy.
And then we will discuss, we'll discuss the phenomenology of philosophy.
So the phases of the shared fantasy, in phase one, there is core idealization. The narcissist or the cluster B who is narcissistic, it's not limited to narcissists, idealizes you.
He idealizes you, he projects to you an image of yourself that is flawless, perfect, unprecedented, unique, and so on so forth, and it captures you.
You begin to see yourself this way through the narcissist's gaze, through the narcissist's eyes.
And it's captivating, and it's intoxicating, and it's addictive, and you can't let go. You want more, more of it, more and more, and more.
You initiate contact with the narcissists just to see yourself that way.
And this idealization is of course core idealization because the narcissist idealizes you in order to idealize himself.
He says, you know, I have a perfect partner that makes me perfect. I have a drop-dead, gorgeous partner that makes me drop-dead gorgeous. I'm joking.
So it's a process of co-idealization. It's a kind of mirroring.
You remember that the narcissist's mother failed to mirror him. She did not provide a gaze.
The narcissist uses you at this very early stage. You've just met. The narcissist uses you to mirror.
He acquires your gaze and he bribes you. The payment for the gaze is you will gaze at me and I will gaze at you. That's an exchange of gazes.
In effect, that's why I call it co-idealization. This is known colloquially as love bombing. The love bombing phase, there's idealization and introjection.
The next stage is introjection or snapshoting. The narcissist takes a snapshot of you.
A snapshot is a colloquial way of describing an introject.
Narciss creates an internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind.
And this internalobject is initially idealized.
So there is an idealized internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind, and he doesn't need you anymore.
He doesn't. that was his initial experience with his mother. He interjected her because she was frustrating and painful and rejecting and so on.
By interjecting her he gained control over her. He could mold the interject in any way he wanted by idealizing it.
So he snapshots you, interjects you, and he begins to mold the internal object and you are in the way.
Because as the internal object shapeshifts and becomes ideal, you are not.
There begins to be a divergence. There begins to be a gap, a daylight, between who you truly are as an external object and your representation in the narcissist's mind, which is the idealized internal object.
So the narcissist gives up on the external object and continues to focus on the internal object.
This is the second phase of snapshoting.
From that moment on, the narcissist interacts exclusively with the internal object, never with the external.
The next phase is what I call the dual mothership. Dual mothership, double mothership. The dual mothership, double mothership.
The dual mothership involves converting you into a maternal figure, converting you into a mother, and of course, the narcissist becomes your child.
So there is self-regression, self-infantilization.
The narcissist becomes more and more and more childish, as the time goes. Not more adult, not more responsible, but more dependent, more unpredictable, more unpredictable, more stupid, more childlike.
Because this forces you to become maternal, forces you to become a mother.
But it is a dual mothership, because at the same time, the narcissist pushes you to become an infant, regresses you, forces you to become dependent on him, to become less autonomous, less independent, less independent, less agentic, less everything.
So he cuts you off family members, he cuts you off the social network, he isolates you, whenever you display any hint or sign of independent decision-making, or he punishes you, it's all intended to regress you to an infantile state.
So he becomes an infant, and you become an infant, and you are two infants who play maternal roles.
At that point, the narcissist makes use of two strategies.
By becoming an infant, the narcissist triggers your maternal instincts and creates bonding.
That's one thing. Later on it becomes trauma bonding, but it starts as bonding, as proper bonding, between mother and so-called child.
That's effect number one.
And the second effect is what I call the hall of mirrors effect.
Hall of mirrors is you see yourself through the narcissist's eyes. You are idealized and you fall in love with yourself.
For many people, this is the first time that they experience self-love.
But it is not self-love because this is not the real self. This is an idealized version. It's fake.
But still it feels like self-love. Finally I'm able to accept myself. Finally I feel complete. Finally feel whole. Finally feel perfect. Finally I feel pretty. Finally I feel clever.
And it's intoxicating. This is the hall of mirror thing. This is the hook.
These are the two hooks.
I'm your child, you can never abandon me. How could you do this to a child?
Hook number one, hook number two, in my eyes, you're perfect.
Because you're perfect, I will give you unconditional love the way a mother does.
I will love you as a mother does. I will love you unconditionally. Of course, you should love me the same. You should love me unconditionally as well. We are two children and two mothers, dual mothership.
And the love exchange is unconditional.
And how do I know that you are the right partner? How do I know that you're a good, that you love me as a mother? How do you know that you love me unconditionally?
I'm going to test you.
How am I going to test you?
I'm going to abuse you. I'm going to push the envelope. I'm going to torture you and torment you and, you know, God knows what else. And I'm going to wait and see, if you leave, if you abandon me, then you have never been a good mother to start with. If you stay, if you stick around, despite the abuse, I'm pushing the envelope, I'm doing horrible things to you, and you stay, that means that you are a good mother. You love me unconditionally, never mind what, as a real mother should.
Of course, it's an idealized version of a mother. It's not a real mother. It's how the narcissist, who is two years old, perceives a mother.
So narcissistic abuse is actually to start with a test, a form of testing. That's why narcissistic abuse starts very early in the relationship, which is a bit crazy, a bit unusual, you know.
I mean, abuse happens in other relationships, and not all abuse is narcissistic abuse. But narcissistic abuse can literally start the second day you meet. It's very early because there's an immediate need to test you.
So this is stage three.
Next stage, the narcissist now needs to move forward. He has established that you are a mother, he has established that he is being loved unconditionally. He has established that no matter what he does to you, you're going to stay because you love him as a child or you love yourself through his gaze or both, or God knows what, but you're going to stay. You're going to accept him as he is.
And so on. So now it's time to move forward.
And the next stage is separation, individuation. The narcissist now needs to reenact the failed separation with his original mother with you.
This time, hopefully, hopefully, this time, it will work, and he will be able to separate and become an individual.
This is a name in psychology. This is known as repetition compulsion. So the narcissist engages in repetition compulsion. He reenacts early childhood conflicts and early childhood wounds within a new relationship, repeating the patterns and hoping for a different outcome.
It is compulsive because the narcissists cannot help it. Even if a narcissist decides no, she's great, not going to do it, he's going to do it.
So, narcissists cannot help it.
And so we enter the phase of separation, individuation.
At this stage, the only way to separate from you is to get rid of you. It's the only way.
That's why when victims online and so on say, maybe I could have done something different, or maybe, you know, I wasn't loving enough or maybe.
That's nonsense. Never mind what you would have done or not done. And even if in the process you became a corpse, he would have tried to separate from you and individuate. It's not up to you, nothing to do with you actually. It's an internal dynamic, and that's why we use the word compulsion. It's a compulsion. It's nothing to do with you. It has other reasons which I'm not going to. It's a ritual in effect. It's a ritual that is intended to, but we're not going to it right now. It's a compulsion.
So at this point, the narcissist needs to get rid of you.
But how to get rid of you? You're idealized. You're ideal. Who gets rid of an ideal partner? Ideal friend, ideal boss.
Okay, remember, this applies to all relationships, not only intimate. Who gets rid of an ideal partner? And how to get rid of an ideal partner?
So you need to change your view. You need to consider her as less than ideal. You need to reframe or revamp or review or revise your view of the partner and say, well, she's not ideal. As she is not ideal, it is not safe for her to be my mother. I need to separate from her. And once I separate from her, everything will be great, her everything will be great, everything will be solved, this is the solution to all my problems.
She is all my problems. She's because of her everything bad that's happening in my life it's because of her.
Alloplastic defenses, remember? The narcissist is never guilty, someone else's.
So he uses alloplastic defenses and he offloads blame, shifts blame and so on to the intimate partner.
It's preparation for separation. Separation is known as discard.
So the narcissist prepares the ground.
The first stage, he devalues the partner. He transitions from idealization to devaluation.
You could do no wrong. When you were idealized, you could do no right when you're devalued. You are dropped dead gorgeous when you've been idealized. You are now just dropped dead when you are devalued. You are super intelligent when you are idealized. Now you're too stupid to realize how stupid you are, Dunning Kruger effect, yeah? When you're devalued.
So it's diametrically opposite.
And that's preparation for the separation, simulated separation. It's as if separation.
There was this concept of as if personality. As if separation.
But this creates a problem. Think about it.
If a narcissist idealizes someone, and then the next thing he needs to devalue her, then he was wrong. He has been wrong. Creates a problem. creates a dissonance.
And the narcissist needs to resolve this dissonance. And the narcissist resolves this dissonance in a variety of ways.
He says she has changed. Other people had a bad influence on her.
You know, I got it right the first time, but the situation has changed. She has changed.
And so now we are not talking about the same person and all kinds of stories, but the narcissists goes through a phase of dissonance.
In other words, the discard creates dissonance. It's a dissonant act.
So everything the victims or self-styled experts say online that discard is a happy-go-lucky moment, it's absolutely not. It creates big problems for the narcissist.
He needs to invent all kinds of convoluted stories.
The process continues and leads to physical discard in the majority of cases. Not always, majority of cases.
You could have sometimes very long-term relationships with internal discards.
So for example, you have a very long relationship and the narcissist suddenly vanishes for five years. Disappears. He is in the relationship. Same, but he disappears. So this is kind of discard.
But sooner or later one way or the other, the narcissist vanishes or the partner vanishes or there's a phase of discard and then there's a problem, because another problem, because the introject remains. The internal object is there. Getting rid of the external object does not solve the problem with the internal object.
And this leads to a behavior known as hoovering. Hoovering is when the narcissist tries to regain or reacquire the original partner, who has been discarded, because the introject, the internal object, is active, has energy.
And the only way the narcissist can quieten down is to put the two together.
And then the narcissist goes through a phase of re-idealization. He re-idealizes the partner.
So it is a perpetual mobility.
I have a whole playlist on YouTube with, I think, 127 videos or something about the shared fantasy. You can understand, therefore, that it is a much, much more complex topic than I can cover right here.
But it gives you a taste of the compulsivity, of the ebates, of the internal dissonances that arise when the narcissist is compelled to act in a way which he actually doesn't want to act.
He doesn't want to discard. He doesn't want to devalue.
In his mind, he found the perfect ideal intimate partner. Why do that?
But he's compelled. As he's compelled, he has dissonance. He's tried to resolve the dissonance, the cognitive dissonance, by a variety of nonsensical things. And then it doesn't help because there is an internal object that remains.
This internal object is now not idealized. It's persecutory. It's devalued.
So this internal object is threatening. It's a threatening object because it's devalued.
And so the narcissist needs to re-idealize this object.
But the only way to re-idealize is to reacquire the...
So you have hoovering cycles of the narcissist returning again and again to the same intimate partner.
It's very, very complex. It's a very complex thing.
But I gave you kind of a taste of it. For those of you who are contemplating having a relationship with a narcissist.
Okay, as if this were not enough.
No, a few more minutes. A few more things that I will let you go. Not forever. I will hoover you in 10 minutes. So a few more things.
I mentioned that narcissists resort or are able to use only primitive, infantile defense mechanisms. I mentioned splitting.
Splitting is black and white, dichotomous thinking. The clinical term is dichotomous thinking. Black and white, right and wrong, you know, I'm all good, you're all bad, I'm all white, you're all black, or vice versa or whatever.
So this division, which is unrealistic and doesn't take into account nuance. There's no nuance, no gray zone. Everything is this or that.
So this is splitting. This is what your child does, basically. Child, age two.
Projection, you know, projection is a part of you, a trait, something in you that you reject, that you can't accept, you can't live with. So you attribute it to another person. That's projection.
You say, I'm not stingy, she's stingy. I'm not, you know, envious. They are envious of me.
And so this is projection.
There is projection, projective identification. It's also a primitive defense.
Projective identification is when you project something and then you force the other party to accept what you projected.
So the best example that I give often is women who have been exposed to violence and abuse when they grew up, when they were growing up. They will look for a partner who will abuse them, physically usually. And if the partner refuses to abuse, they will project, they will say the partner is abusive, and then they will force the partner to abuse by being provocative, for example.
So you project what you don't like, and then you force the other party to behave that way. There's projective identification.
And another mechanism is rationalization.
Excuse me? There's a debate if rationalization and intellectualization are the same thing. But okay, rationalization.
It's when we invent an explanation for some behavior that makes sense of it in ways which we think would be acceptable to everyone. So we kind of invent a story.
Okay, these are normal things. Many people have this.
Even though they are infantile defenses, they are typical of babies and small children, many people have them, especially in politics.
But I want to discuss some things that almost no one has, and they're unique to cluster B.
And we distinguish between externalizing solutions in cluster B and internalizing solutions.
Solutions to one, solutions to dissonance, solution to internal conflict, solution to competing demands, solution to anxiety, anxiolytic solutions, solutions.
So we have two types. We have externalizing solutions and internalizing solutions.
Externalizing solutions usually involve aggression, aggression, anger, violence, and so on and so forth.
And the best example that comes to mind is the narcissist's narcissistic rage.
Narcissistic rage is an externalizing solution.
When the narcissist is confronted with narcissistic injury or narcissistic mortification or challenge or undermining of grandiosity or criticism or disagreement or whatever, some narcissists in some situations react by externalizing aggression. They become rageful. They're full of rage.
Much more interesting are internalizing solutions.
There are three major internalizing solutions. I will start with the most counterintuitive one.
Autoerotism. You heard of autoerotism? You know what is auto? Yes. And you know what is erotism?
So sexual attraction to cars.
No, no. I'm kidding.
You were like...
Autoerotism is when a person is sexually attracted exclusively to himself, mainly to his own body, but not only to his own body.
So we could have autoerotism and auto-romanticism, but mainly to the body.
So autoerotism is mainly sexual. So a person is attracted mainly to his or her own body. This is the sexual object.
Therefore, in Freud's terms, there is narcissistic libido. There's no transition to other libido.
Autoerotism is very common in cluster B personality disorders for the simple reason that these people are two years old. Mentally, psychologically, emotionally, affectively, in the most important ways, narcissists, for example, are very, very young children, two years old, three years old, you know.
Now a narcissist can acquire many skills because we make a distinction between types of memory. We have episodic memories, semantic memory.
So you could have, for example, very well developed semantic memory. Semantic memory is the memory of how to do things.
So narcissists can have a huge semantic memory on how to do things, skills, but has problems with episodic memory, doesn't have a personal history that he can recall, and emotionally is very thwarted, is very, very young.
Most narcissists I've met, most of them, are around 2-3 years old, most of them, and rarely 6 years old, one 9-year-old, but 6 years old maximum. Two is very common, two or three years old. That's the emotional age of the narcissist.
And in childhood, as Freud observed, there is auto-erotic attraction. The child explores its own body. The child masturbates, which is an auto-erotic activity.
So autoerotism is very common in Cluster B, and it is an internalizing solution. That's a form of self-soothing, self-aggrandizement, etc.
So it's one example of internalizing solution.
We have schizoid solutions.
Schizoid solutions is when cluster B confronted with tension and stress and anxiety and conflict, withdraws, withdraws, avoids, isolates himself or herself, especially socially.
So these are schizoid solutions.
And in essence, disappears. In a way, it's a kind of disappearing. I'm not here. I'm not here, so I cannot be touched. I cannot be hurt.
And schizoid solutions are very common, even in disorders which are essentially externalizing disorders.
For example, psychopathy is an externalizing disorder. Narcissism is an externalizing disorder.
The narcissist approaches people to obtain supply. The psychopath approaches people to steal their money or have sex with them or is goal-oriented and so on. The borderline approaches people to acquire external regulation, these externalizing disorders, but all of them have schizoid phases.
When the narcissist fails to obtain narcissistic supply, when the narcissist cannot obtain attention, it's a state known as narcissistic collapse. In narcissistic collapse, the narcissist becomes schizoid.
Similar with the borderline, where after a breakup or after a period of promiscuityfor example, or recklessness of some kind, a borderline would tend to become schizoid for a while.
So schizoid seems to be a solution, not a state of mind, not a disorder, but a solution.
Like if things get too rough, if I bungle it, if I fail, all I need to do is withdraw and avoid, lick my wounds, and in due time I will reemerge.
And finally there's self-supply. I mentioned self-supply. It's a whole huge field.
It's when the narcissists or people with narcissism use a variety of techniques to provide themselves with the attention that they need, with the supply, with narcissic supply, that they need.
And I call it self-audiencing. They become their own audience. So they don't need anyone.
There's self-referential ideation. There are many techniques. I will not go into it, into all of this.
So, we are nearing the last chapter. And the last chapter, I'm sorry, so nearing the end of my voice.
And the last chapter I would describe the various traits, trait domains of cluster B and then I will open the floor to questions and answers.
Dance macabre, questions and answers.
So now is 325 according to my gold watch. Gold, you know what he says? Gold watch? And 10 minutes? Okay? Okay.