Okay, guys and guyettes, girls and girlettes, today we have a seriously complicated video, but worth wading through, worth listening to, because it's going to expose the inner secrets of the narcissist's soul if he had one.
And this is the second part.
The first part is titled, secret reason narcissist devalues, devalues and discards you. It's a YouTube video available on my channel, secret reason narcissist devalues and discards you. I strongly suggest that you watch this video first and then continue to watch this video.
At any rate, I'll make a recap for those of you who don't want to spend the totality of your life listening to Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a handsome, devilishly handsome professor of psychology, at least if I say so.
Okay, Shoshanim, many of you have asked me, the narcissist devalues and discards his intimate partner because he wants to separate and individuate. The intimate partner is a mother's substitute. She's a maternal surrogate.
So the narcissist wants to reenact early childhood conflicts with his biological mother, with his original caregiver, with his primary object. He wants to reenact these conflicts with his intimate partner.
And so he needs to devalue her and he needs to discard her in order to separate from her and by separating, becoming an individual.
The problem is that the narcissist had failed to separate from his original mother. He had failed, therefore, to develop a fully-constellated self. He has no ego. Narcissists are selfless.
I've always been telling you this. We are selfless people.
Okay, no separation, no individuation.
The narcissist remains eternally enmeshed with his mother figure, with his mother, and he needs to try to separate. So he devalues you and he discards you as an intimate partner.
But then many of you have asked, and justifiably so, if he goes through all this, if he idealizes the intimate partner and then devalues her and then discards her just in order to separate individually, why then does he go on to another intimate partner? Or even worse, why does he try to hoover the erstwhile discarded, devalued intimate partner?
What's the secret of hoovering and replacement?
The answer is actually quite simple. You remember that when the narcissist first comes across a potential source of supplying or a potential intimate partner for a shared fantasy, the narcissist creates a snapshot of her. He takes a kind of photo of her, he creates a snapshot, and then he photoshops the snapshot. He works on it. This is the process of idealization, an integrant part of co-idealization.
By rendering his partner ideal, perfect, brilliant, handsome or beautiful, the narcissist renders himself irresistible, unique and special.
So there is this process of a mutual admiration society.
In the love bombing and grooming and honeymoon phases, the narcissist projects, communicates to his partner, you are special, and that makes me special. So the narcissist creates a snapshot of the intimate partner.
In clinical terms, he creates an internal object or an introject. And then he continues to interact exclusively with this snapshot, not with the external intimate partner, not with the real you, but with your representation in his mind. He continues to interact with this representation.
As you grow up, as you develop, as you acquire new friends, as you start to work in a new job, as you travel, you begin to deviate and diverge from the snapshot because the snapshot is idealized, is perfect, and above all is static.
The main role of the snapshot is to reduce the narcissist's abandonment anxiety. He is in full control of the snapshot, so he is not afraid of being rejected and abandoned.
But you, on the other hand, you deviate and diverge from the snapshot because you are living, breathing human being. And so this renders you an enemy and you become a persecutory object.
At that point, the narcissist needs to separate from you and individuate. He needs to complete with you the cycle that he had failed to complete with his original mother.
So he devalues you and discards you.
But pay attention. He devalues you. He discards you. He separates from you. You as an external object, not from the snapshot.
This is a crucial insight which had evaded and eluded most of the self-styled experts online.
The narcissist discards the external object, you, the real you. He devalues the external object, you, the real you.
But there is nothing he can do and there is nothing he does to the internal object, to the snapshot, to the introject. The internal object remains unmolested, unaltered, immutable, unchanged, pure, virginal, like the driven snow. The internal object is always there, perfection, reified, totally idealized mother figure.
The narcissist remains enmeshed with the internal object. So the shared fantasy ceases to exist externally in the environment, but not in the narcissist mind.
The narcissist is merged, infused with the internal object. The narcissist gets rid of you. He devalues you.
But at the very same time, he is cathected. He is emotionally invested in your representation in his mind.
So the long and the short of it is the narcissist separates, individuates from the real you, but the narcissist never separates or individuates from your representation, your avatar in his mind.
The connection between the narcissist and your icon in his mind, your representation, your internal object is a connection of enmeshment and engulfment and merger and fusion.
So he needs to hover you. He needs to hover you because he's still involved with you, not with you, but with your photocopy, with your snapshot.
And so he has something called repetition compulsion. It's a repetition compulsion.
He needs to approach you time and again, and then avoid you time and again in a vain, inane, crazy making attempt to separate and individuate from an external object while still remaining unseparated from the internal representation of that external object of you.
Another problem is narcissism is a missionary religion. It is replete. It's a religion that is replete with the deity, which is the false self. It has rituals, which are obsessive compulsive in nature and it forms an addiction.
The shared fantasy is a part of this religion. It's populated with idealized snapshot with idealized introjects or internal objects. These are the Olympian gods of this religion. You're one of them.
If the narcissist fails to hover you, he's going to approach another intimate partner, a substitute.
And so it's like the Russian matryushkas. It's a doll within a doll within a doll. There's the original huge doll of the narcissist, original mother. Then there are other dolls inside the big doll and these doors are his intimate partners, but he never gets rid of any of these dolls. Never. They all reside in his mind, populating it ever increasingly with idealized snapshot with introjects.
His separation and individuation is unattainable because he becomes enmeshed and he merges and fuses with a growing number of mother figures. He started off with one. He starts off with one. He's a regional biological mother, a primary object, a caregiver, a mother who had been a dead mother in the emotional sense, absent, selfish, parentifying, instrumentalizing. So he starts off with this mother. He's unable to separate from her.
And then he finds an intimate partner. He tries to separate from her and he cannot separate from her because he's equally merged and fused with her snapshot in his mind. So he finds another intimate partner and it's infinite regression.
And at the end of his life, when he is 61, like certain professors of psychology, I know his mind is full of 20, 30, 40 mother figures from which he is not separated and individuation becomes utterly impossible.
The shared fantasy, being a part of a religion, is compulsive in nature. It's a ritual. It comprises a regression to an infantile phase prior to separation and individuation from the mother figure. It involves merger, fusion, an oceanic feeling, enmeshment, engulfment. There's no self object or object representations. We'll come to it in another video, but it's about disappearing back into the womb, becoming one with mother or the mother substitute, you, the intimate partner.
In this sense, the shared fantasy is a mystical experience. Mystical experiences are also regressions to an infantile phase prior to separation and individuation from a god figure, from the cosmos, from nature. Mystical experiences are about merging, infusing and vanishing into a bigger role. And the same with the shared fantasy. It's about merging, infusing and vanishing into a completeness, into a unity, which is the union of the narcissist and his intimate partner.
The shared fantasy is the mystical experience within the religion of narcissism. Narcissism is a missionary religion. Narcissist converts you into his religion and then introduces you to this mystical experience where you are one with the narcissist, you disappear. And this works perfectly with many codependents. Borderlines react very badly to this because they have two anxieties, abandonment anxiety and engulfment anxiety.
And whatever you say about the experience with the narcissist, it's definitely engulfing. Borderlines resent this and they decompensate and act out. I have numerous videos about this topic.
So this is the reason that narcissists hover you and then if they fail, try to replace you with someone and they go through the same experience, repetition, compulsion, nothing changes. It's a carbon copies. Each relationship or pseudo relationship is a clone of the previous one.
There's no learning or evolutionary process here. The narcissist does not evolve. He is totally stagnant. He is static.
Now I'm going to make another video comparing mystical experiences to mental illness and especially narcissism and the shared fantasy of narcissism.
But suffice it to say, and I've dealt with it in many, many of my videos, that the best way to think about pathological narcissism is that it's a private religion where the narcissist is both a god and worshiper. It's a one man cult.
And then he's trying to convert everyone around him to the cult in order to obtain supply and to establish the mystical aspect of the religion, which is a shared fantasy within which he can reenact early childhood conflicts via obsessive compulsive rituals. One of these rituals is entraining via repetitive abuse.
And there you fit in. He takes over you. By taking over you, he again merges and fuses with you.
This is the first stage. He needs to merge and fuse with you. He needs to become one with you, a single organism in order to be able to separate and individuate as an individual. You can't separate if you're not first fused. You need to become one in order later to separate and become two. Individuation with the narcissist crucially depends on attaining the initial goals of the shared fantasy, eliminating you as an independent entity, digesting you assimilating you, rendering you an extension and an internal object.
And now the narcissist is one with you. And now he can separate and individuate by devaluing you and discarding you.
But what the narcissist fails to understand is the glitch in the coding, the glitch in the software. He can separate and individuate only from you as an external object by rendering you an enemy or a persecutory object.
But he can never separate individually from your representation inside his mind. He is a captive of his internal world.
In this sense, narcissism is almost indistinguishable from psychotic disorder, as Kernberg has suggested in the mid seventies. It's a sorry state. It's a sorry state of an adult who desperately tries to become an individual and keeps failing precisely because he refuses to let go of mommy, the original mommy for you.