A few clarifications before you watch this potentially difficult video.
Number one, emotional covert insists does not have to occur between opposite sex, child and parent.
It can occur between a mother and her daughter. It can occur between a father and his son, although more typically and more commonly it does occur between opposite sex members.
So between a son and his mother and a daughter and her father.
Number two, when emotional covert insists happens between opposite sex participants, when the child is of one sex and the incestuous parent is of the other sex, it occurs in different stages of different phases of personal development and growth.
When the incestuous relationship is between a son and his mother, it's typically before the age starts, before the age of 36 months, before the phase of separation, individuation. When it is between a daughter and a father, it typically starts after age 36 months.
And this is the reason, of course, that daughter-father emotional covert incestuous relationships often devolve into actual sexual incest.
Point number three, this video that you're about to see, I made a mistake.
On one occasion, I think, or maybe twice, I used the word homoerotic when I actually meant to say autoerotic.
So throughout this video, when I talk about autoerotism, the adjective should be autoerotic.
But there is a connection between homoerotism and autoerotism.
And I'm going to discuss this connection in a future video.
So there is a connection between autoerotism and homosexuality. And it's a very intricate and interesting connection.
Number four, emotional covert incest is lifelong. It's lifelong because it retards, it prevents the growth and the development of the child. It hinders the separation-individuation phase. It obstructs and definitely in many cases destroys the possibility for object relations, relationships intimate, romantic and relationship with other people.
But an even more potent, more powerful reason is that the child rehearses relationships with other people first with his parents.
So up to age 36 months, the child is enmeshed or fused with the parental figure, the mother, usually, and uses her as a dress rehearsal.
So he directs his sexual urges at her. He creates intimacy with her.
Erotism, his erotic drives are directed at her and so on and so forth.
And he develops a skill set of interacting with future intimate partners.
But an incestuous relationship, emotional covert relationship prevents this from happening.
So the child develops a shared fantasy with the parental figure and I discuss in this video how this shared fantasy becomes the exclusive mode, the only way that the child continues to interact with other people in his life or her life later on.
So the shared fantasy is born out of an emotional covert incestuous relationship.
Number five, all children experience emotional covert incest. It's a healthy phase up to age 36 months.
And if the parent reacts inappropriately to the covert intimate incestuous relationship, if the parent continues to perpetuate the shared fantasy with a child one way or another, and I explained it two ways, but this happens, then it's a problem for later on in life.
This kind of child when he becomes an adult is incapable of sexual relationships, normal healthy sexual relationships. He tends to dehumanize, objectify and degrade, sadistically sometimes his intimate partners and I explained why in the video, or he becomes totally asexual, experiences sexual dysfunctions.
Similarly, this kind of child has an insecure attachment style and drains intimacy.
All this is in the video you're about to see.
So emotional covert incest in my view is much worse than actual sexual overt incest because it's unspoken. It's forbidden. It's the unknown, the unthought known in bolasses, the term, the phrase used by bolasses. It's something that's in the air. It's atmospheric. It's a hidden text. It's a palimpsest.
And the child is disoriented, confused, this is real confusion. And this carries on into later life.
This kind of child when he grows up and becomes an adult remains stuck and repeats the same kind of dysfunctional relationship with his mother or maybe his father later on with other partners.
And this is known as repetition compulsion.
Emotional covert incest.
Have fun. Mama's boy, daddy's girl.
There's a good chance that we are dealing with an instance of covert or emotional incest, which is a topic of today's non sprawling video.
My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Russia. I am currently on the faculty of CEAP's Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, which is the way I like it.
Covert emotional incest.
Covert emotional incest was first described by Kenneth Adams.
He described the victims of covert or emotional incest as angry, guilty. They feel guilty towards their parents. They have problems with self-esteem, addiction, especially substance abuse and sexual problems with sexual and emotional intimacy, which is a delicate way of saying that they are incapable of sexual and emotional intimacy.
Alcoholism and other substance addictions are also associated with the occurrence of covert or emotional incest.
So to summarize this segment, covert emotional incest is not a good thing.
I hope you got that message.
Now covert or emotional incest is a part of a larger phenomenon known as parentifying or the word that I coined adultifying. It's also known as the atlas personality.
When the child is forced to behave as an adult, as a parent, when the child is denied the possibility of acting in an age-appropriate manner, when the child is penalized, whenever the child tries to express his or her needs.
So this leads to a situation of parentifying or adultifying when the child actually acts as his mother's father or his father's mother or some combination where the child is the parent and the parents are the children.
The child affords the infantilized parent, the immature parent, the Peter Pan parent. The child provides such a parent with sacchar but not sex.
So emotional covert incest is a sexless intimate relationship and it is this disjunction, this contra, I would say contradiction even between intimacy and sexlessness that has a long term impact on the child turned adult later in life.
The child learns to associate intimacy with a lack of sex. He also learns to associate intimacy with forbidden taboo sex.
So when he finds himself later in life involved in an intimate relationship, he is very conflicted about sex and about his own sexuality because on the one hand he feels attracted, besotted, infatuated with an individual, the intimate partner. There is a lot of intimacy, there is a lot of vulnerability maybe. There is some attachment, secure or insecure but still there is some attachment, some bonding.
And yet in this person's mind, the person who has been exposed to emotional covert incest early on in life, in this person's mind, if you are intimate with someone you should not have sex with them. Sex is forbidden, my favorite German word. Sex is taboo, sex is even dirty.
The target of intimacy, the target of positive emotions such as love is also the forbidden object of sexual thoughts, drives and urges.
Now the child who is parentified or adultified tries to please because the child depends for its existence on the parent. The child needs the parent to provide food and shelter but even more importantly the child needs the parent to cater to the emotional needs of the child.
The parent is the source of support and succor and holding and containing and accepting and warmth and empathy and compassion and affection and love. Theselove.
These are the needs of a small child.
The child is terrified to lose the parent.
Children who are parentified and adultified have extreme separation insecurity aka colloquially abandonment anxiety.
And the reason is that the child is forced to become the parent and because children are children and they don't know how to be adults and they haven't been trained in being parents, they constantly feel inadequate, they feel that they are failing, they feel that their services as a surrogate parent, their conduct as an adult is insufficient.
They feel they are striving, they are trying very hard and they never make it.
The parent who parentifies her child, the parent who adultifies his child, these parents are setting the child up for failure because children do a bad job of being adults and an even worse job of being parents, especially during the formative years, 0 to 6.
But I would say even well into early adolescence, let's say 12 or 13.
So there is a very complex situation here.
The parents abrogate their parental duties and obligations.
They simply give up on being parents.
They are too self-indulgent, they are too depressed, they are too absent, they are too emotionally cold and detached, they have an insecure attachment style of their own, they may be narcissist etc.
These are known collectively as dead parents, not in the physical sense but in the emotional sense.
So these kind of parents parentify the child, they act childishly, they regress to an infantile phase whenever confronted with stress or conflict or a conundrum or a dilemma or they need to make a choice or a decision and they leave it up to the child to function as a parent but this way they set up the child for failure.
The child tries to please them and becomes a people pleaser and yet there is always this ambient sense of I am not good enough, I am a failure, I am inadequate.
In short, the parentification and adultification of the child create a permanent bad object.
Such a child is likely to develop an insecure attachment style.
The enmeshment with the parent, because this is a state of enmeshment with the parent, is self annihilating.
The child annihilates itself, negates itself, minimizes itself in order to cater to the overt and implicit requirements and expectations and needs of the parent.
And of course in such a situation the intimacy is extreme and growing all the time.
There are no boundaries, we'll talk about it a bit later, there are no boundaries so the child doesn't know what is appropriate and inappropriate, where to start and where to stop, how far to go and where to put its foot down and say no.
Similarly the parent is at a loss.
This is terra incognita, this is a continent which both parent and child are exploring.
And the parentifying parent, the parent who adultifies the child, is herself a child so she is incapable of exercising adult judgment and evaluation or estimation of the situation. She is incapable of enforcing, establishing and then enforcing boundaries.
These are two children in effect.
The intimacy in such a relationship is romantic intimacy. It is an intimacy common among boyfriend and girlfriend or more likely two spouses.
And of course it was Freud who first noticed this process. He called it the Oedipus complex. Jung later described the similar process in Girls and called it the Electra complex.
So the Oedipus and Electra complexes are situations where the child develops extreme intimacy with the parent of the opposite sex and this intimacy translates in the child's mind into eroticism, erotism and into sexuality.
So the intimacy acquires sexual and erotic hues and overtones.
That's the Oedipus and Electra complex.
The Oedipus and Electra complexes actually have two etiologies, two processes of causation.
One was discovered by Freud and Jung and one hasn't been.
Freud and Jung have identified only one of these etiological processes of these patho-etiologies.
They described competition with the same sex parent for the love and attention of the other sex parent.
So the boy competes with his father, forgive him, his mother's love.
The girl competes with her mother for her father's love.
It's a process of competition.
But actually there is even more compelling source of these complexes.
Until the age of 36 months, the infant is genderless and pansexual.
There's no sexual differentiation. There are no sexual preferences or orientations and there's no gender.
Consequently, infants, definitely into age 24 months, are auto-erotic. They're attracted to themselves as sexual objects. They're incapable of redirecting the sex drive, the errors, part of the libido. They're incapable of redirecting errors at other people. They're not capable of object relations.
So they have narcissistic libido. They are attracted to themselves as sexual objects.
The libido is turned towards oneself as a love object.
But remember, on the one hand, the infant, again up to age 36 months, is sexually attracted to itself, is infatuated with itself. Its libido and errors are directed at itself.
But at the same time, it is merged, infused with the mother throughout the spirit, what used to be known as the symbiotic phase or symbiosis.
So even as the child is sexually attracted to itself, even as the child develops intimacy with itself as the primary object, as a primordial object, he also regards himself as mother, there's no distinction between himself and mother. Mother and the baby are one.
So when the baby is attracted to himself, he is also attracted to mother because he's one with mother. When the baby is infatuated with herself, she is also infatuated with mother because she is one with mother.
Later on, this is transferred to father.
So the narcissistic libido catheches the child, but at the same time catheches the parents, or at least the mother, until age 36 months.
It is only when the child begins to separate from mother, only when he begins to separate, that he transfers his libido from himself and from her as his extension to other people.
So this is very important to understand that emotional incest or covert incest is an inevitable stage, a universal stage in early childhood development.
It is not the exception. It's the rule.
All babies, all children, all infants, all toddlers develop emotional intimacy, which is essentially covert and incestuous because of the fact that until age 36 months, they haven't separated from mommy. There's no separation and individuation from the parental figures.
So the child directs his sexuality and his romantic feelings and his intimacy at himself and by extension at his parents because they are one and the same. His parents and him, his parents and her, they're one and the same.
So emotional covert incest is not only an inevitable, universal phase in human development, it's also very healthy. It's very healthy because it allows the child to exercise, to rehearse relationships with other people, with third parties, with objects who are not mother, who are not father.
So the child develops a skill set of interacting with other people romantically and sexually by exercising or rehearsing safely with a secure base with mommy and much later with daddy.
So emotional covert incest as a pathology is very similar to the etiology of narcissism.
Until age 36 months, everyone is a narcissist and this is what we know as healthy narcissism. It's the narcissism that later in life allows us to regulate our sense of self-worth, to acquire and modulate self-esteem and self-confidence and to take on the world until age 36 months.
If we remain stuck in this phase when as adults, then we have secondary or pathological narcissism.
It's the same with emotional incest. Everyone has experienced emotional incest. It's a rehearsal, it's a dress rehearsal for later life relationships.
But if we remain stuck in this phase, then we have a problem, then we have a pathology because emotional incest, covert incest prevents separation, individuation.
When the child acts as the mother's husband, when the child acts as the father's girlfriend, the child is unable to separate from mother.
Separation and individuation is disrupted because the child's needs are ignored and suppressed.
The parents' emotional needs, immature emotional needs predominate. There are no boundaries.
The parent is possessive and romantically jealous. This kind of parent much later in life is likely to convey the messages, "No one is good enough for you my child and no one will ever be as good to you as I am and have been."
So the immature, infantilized parent, the dead parent, the selfish or self-indulgent parent prevents separation and individuation, does not allow the child to separate from her to become an individual because she wants to keep the child as her husband or his girlfriend.
Forever.
This kind of mother has a spousal relationship with the child for life and this kind of father has an incestuous, romanticized and inappropriately intimate relationship with his daughter also for life.
And these bonds of enmeshment and merger, infusion and this need to act as the mother's husband or the father's wife, this need imposes on the child obligations and duties even if only implicitly.
That child grows up and says to himself, "I cannot abandon mother. She is no one else but me. I am the man in her life. I should support her. I should advise her. I should protect her. I should cater to all her needs, emotional, financial, etc."
Similarly, a daughter who has been exposed to emotional, covert incest, a lack of boundaries, parentification, adultification, a daughter who has been treated by her father as a substitute wife or substitute girlfriend, this kind of daughter would feel that she holds a responsibility for her father's well-being and happiness and that she has no right to walk away and have her own life.
Because having her own life means her father's disintegration or unhappiness or worse.
These children become hostages.
Emotional covert incest is a control strategy or a control mechanism.
It allows the parents, parents who are insecure, parents who are co-dependent, parents who are selfish and exploitative, it allows these parents to blackmail their children into a constant presence, to not to prevent the child from venturing out into the world and exploring relationships with other people.
The parent monopolizes the child. The parent wants the child to never leave home, sometimes in the physical sense.
The problem with emotional covert incest is that sometimes it degenerates and deteriorates into sexual incest.
And it is usually the parent's initiative.
When this kind of parent, and it's a very sick parent of course, it's a very bad parent, when this kind of parent realizes that she is losing her hold, she is losing her control over the child, the child is about to separate, the child is about to individuate and develop object relations, the child is about to get married, the child is having a girlfriend or whatever, this kind of mother may offer sex as a way to bind and bond the child, as a way to entice and seduce and tempt and reward the child for a co-dependent, people pleasing behavior.
So sex is the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of emotionally incestuous parents.
And whenever there's a risk that this very comfortable or convenient arrangement would be broken by a third party, the son finds a girlfriend, the daughter finds a boyfriend, they're about to get married or not, never mind, there's a relationship in the horizon and the emotional incest is going to end or be broken, some parents of this kind would revert to sex as a drug, as a way to keep the child around.
Jungian analyst and author Marion Woodman described covert emotional incestuous, unboundaried bonding, the parent or parents use the child as a mirror to support their needs rather than mirroring the child to support the child's emotional development and needs.
So it's reverse memory, mirroring.
I deal with mirroring in two of my videos recently and you may wish to watch.
So here we are, there's a parent who is immature, childlike or childish, selfish, self-indulgent, entitled, sometimes depressed, has a bad relationship with her intimate partner and she converts her child into her new husband.
The child is supposed to cater to her needs, look after her, protect her, listen to her when she needs support and saccord, give advice, she can cry on his shoulder, hugs, etc, etc.
If she has a bit of conscience, this will not become a sexual type of incest, but incest, it is all the same as we will see momentarily.
I mentioned homoerotism.
Narcissists and other mental health disorders where homoerotism is dominant or prevalent, but let's focus on narcissism for a minute.
Narcissism is the pathological outcome of the inability to separate from a maternal figure from a mother and to individually.
Very much is established in vast amount of literature.
But why the homoerotism?
One reason for the homoerotism I've explained.
The child is enmeshed symbiotically with the mother or later with the father and so when the child directs its sexuality inwards, when the child at an early stage of development is the love object of itself, when the child falls in love with itself, is sexually attracted to itself, automatically he is also sexually attracted to mother because he is one with mother or she is sexually attracted to father because she is one with father.
The process of symbiosis, merger, fusion and so on ensures the inappropriateness of sex drives and urges romantic involvement and intimacy.
Now until age 36 months there is no harm done.
It's just a way for the child to rehearse and exercise and develop skills when it comes to future relationships.
But if it continues beyond 36 months we are in trouble because the child hasn't separated, hasn't individuated, is still merged and fused with the mother and therefore is sexually affected, romantically invested and inappropriately intimate with the mother.
So this is one source of autoerotism.
But there is another reason for autoerotism and it has to do with the forbidden object.
During inemotional and covert incest the child is having object relations with a forbidden object.
It's taboo to have sex with mother, it's taboo to be father's wife.
So there is an element of forbidden in emotional covert incest and that's why we call it incest.
Autoerotism develops or emerges as a solution.
The child says I cannot have sex with mommy, it's not okay, it's taboo.
The daughter says I will go that far with daddy but I won't cross a certain boundary, it's taboo.
But on the other hand I cannot betray mommy by having a girlfriend. I cannot betray mother by getting married. I cannot betray mother by being sexually attracted to my classmates. On the other hand I cannot betray father by having a boyfriend. I cannot betray father by getting married to a man. I cannot betray father by looking at boys in a certain way. There's a sense of betrayal.
So the child says I cannot have sex with mother or father. I cannot be romantically involved with mother or father. My intimacy with mother or father is probably not okay.
There's some taboo elements, some forbidden component and the messaging from society is such that it's clear that something's wrong.
So what I'm going to do, I'm going to not cross certain boundaries.
For example I'm going to not have sex with mother. I'm going to not have sex with father but I'm also going to avoid having sex with anyone else because I don't want to betray mother. Because I don't want to betray father. I'm not going to have a relationship with anyone because if I have a relationship with anyone it's like abandoning mother. It's like abandoning father and I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to do that because the well-being and happiness in life, prolonged life, longevity of my father and mother depend on me.
My intimacy, my romantic emotions, feelings, our interactions, espouses me and my mother, me and my father. These keep my mother and father alive, functioning and smiling. I can't betray them. I can't stab them in the back. I can't do this to them. I can't find a substitute to mother. I can't go with someone who will replace father. No way.
So instead what I'm going to do, I'm going to fall in love with myself. I'm going to be sexually attracted to myself.
Autoerotism is the solution. I can have a relationship. I can be sexually attracted. I can even have sex but with myself.
And this way I'm not betraying mommy. I'm not stabbing daddy in the back. I'm not abrogating my responsibilities. I'm fulfilling my duties and obligations as a good son or a good daughter.
If I never develop a relationship and never have sex and so on with others and only with myself then I'm okay.
Autoerotism is a defense against a deep-set sense of guilt.
Now this of course leads to sexual difficulties later in life and to emotional romantic dysfunctions, also known as insecure attachment styles.
I said that a parentified, adultified child who is experienced or is in the throes of emotional covert incest and let it be clear that emotional covert incest is lifelong. It's not limited to the first years of life. It's a lifelong thing.
The mother who has been enmeshed and entangled in an incestuous covert relationship with her son will pursue this relationship to her dying day and will prevent the son from separating and deviduating, develop appropriate relationships with other women, getting married, having a family and so on.
And if he does any of these things she will try to undermine and sabotage it to the best of her ability.
Black male the child, extort the child, threaten the child and so on.
So all these causes difficulties as I said.
In the sexual, as far as sex is concerned, this kind of children turned adults, this kind of people, they need to objectify and dehumanize their intimate partners.
Why?
In order to have sex they need to regard their partners as inhuman, as species of meat, as object, as sex dolls, as masturbatory dildos, anything but human beings.
Why is that?
Because if you owe exclusivity and allegiance to mommy, to your mother and you are having sex with a woman you love, a woman you see as a full fledged person, then you are betraying mother. You are cheating on mother. It's simply cheating. It's infidelity.
But if you are having sex with an object, the equivalent of a sex worker, a prostitute, if you are having sex with a dehumanized, objectified body of a woman, there is no betrayal here because your relationship with mommy is an emotional insist. There's no sex there. It's covert insist. It's not open among the bedsheets.
So if you are having sex with a nonhuman, with a sex doll, then your mother won't feel bad. She won't be able to castigate you and criticize you and chastise you and berate you. She won't be able to complain because you're not having sex. You're not having sex with another woman. You're not getting emotionally attached to another woman. You're not betraying your mother emotionally.
If you are having an emotionally incestuous relationship with your mother and you're having no emotions with any other woman, then there's no infidelity here.
So this kind of parentified children who have undergone or still undergoing emotional insist tend to render their partners nonhuman.
They defeminize women. They emasculate men. They objectify. They dehumanize. They have sadistic, punitive sex and so on and so forth.
But some of these parentified emotionally children who have been subject to emotional incest simply become sexually dysfunctional, erectile dysfunctional, or they revert to asexuality. They're not sexually active. They remain virgins for life, or they have very scarce or rare sex, or they have sex with sex workers. They pay for it.
So autoerotism and sexual dysfunction are an attempt to square the circle.
I'm going to have sex, but I'm going to have sex with myself. I'm going to treat myself as a love or sexual object. Or I'm going to have sex, but I'm going to have sex with nonhumans, with pieces of meat, with sex dolls. I'm going to dehumanize and objectify and treat sadistically my partners.
And I'm not going to get attached emotionally because that would be betrayal. That would be betraying the parent, betraying the mother, betraying the father.
I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this because I love them. I want them to be happy and I want them to live long. And they keep informing me. They keep signaling. They keep telling me that without my intimacy, without my romantic attachment, without my functioning as a spouse, they would die.
So you're beginning to see that emotional or covert incest is the primordial and prototypical shared fantasy.
The narcissist, for example, develops a shared fantasy first and foremost with his mother of origin, with his biological mother. It's a fantasy that is very strong, incestuous, overtones and undertones. It's covert, but it's clearly inappropriate and forbidden and taboo in many respects.
It is when the mother rejects the child within this shared fantasy that narcissism is born. Narcissism is when the child forms, like any child. Remember it's a universal phase. It's the rule.
When the child forms symbiosis with mother, merges with her, fuses with her, gets enmeshed with her until age 24 to 36 months.
And then the mother, on the one hand, does not allow him to separate and individuate, either because she's all over him, monopolizes him, doesn't allow him to breathe or to interact with peers or to go out to play or whatever, or idolizes him or pedestalizes him or instrumentalizes him. Or because the parent rejects the child.
These are two developmental pathways.
Initially the child develops a shared fantasy with the mother. And this shared fantasy has very pronounced elements of emotional covert incest.
And then if the parent is bad, if the parent is immature, selfish, depressed, absent, if the parent is a dead mother, then the mother would either encourage the incestuous covert incest, emotional incest, she would encourage it, she would perpetuate the symbiotic shared fantasy by taking, by controlling the child, by a takeover of the child, by not allowing the child to develop his own identity and life, his own individuality. Or this kind of mother can reject the child.
Having rejected the child, the child remains stuck in the shared fantasy phase with which he's trying to make it work, he's trying to make it, to have a good, happy ending, he's trying to transition to separation and individuation by putting the shared fantasy behind him.
But the child cannot do this because of the rejection of the mother. The mother rejects the child and refuses to playrefuses to collaborate. He refuses to, it's as if the child is playing chess with the mother and then she upturns the board and all the pieces fall apart. So the child remains stuck.
Either way, the child remains stuck in emotional covert incest in a primordial shared fantasy.
If the parent encourages the incest, encourages the inappropriate forbidden emotional tie, the parent perpetuates the shared fantasy thereby preventing separation and individuation.
Or if the parent walks away, breaks up with the child, refuses to collaborate, the child remains stuck in a repetition compulsion, constantly reenacting the shared fantasy, attempting to bring it to an end, to allow him, to enable him to move on.
The problem with the emotional covert incest is that the communication is mostly nonverbal. The emotional incest subverts proper signaling, proper communication by creating a hidden, forbidden text. Something that is in the air is clear to both parties but can never be discussed. So it's a kind of ambient abuse.
In my view, and my view is in the absolute minority, in my view the effects of emotional covert incest are far worse than the effects of open overt sexual incest.
Because covert incest, emotional incest is not clearly wrong. It is very disorienting. There is a role confusion. It's unclear when each stage ends and another begins. It's unclear where the child ends and the parent begins, there are no boundaries. The child cannot separate, cannot individuate. The shared fantasy becomes the dominant mode of organization and operation.
And the only relationship the child experiences, both parties become habituated. These very sick behaviors, pathological behaviors become habits. And as I said, they cause enormous damage to sexual functioning, to intimacy, capacity for intimacy, to attachment, to bonding, to going on with life, creating a family, having children, having a boyfriend, having girlfriend. All this is massively disrupted.
It's the mother or the father occupy the object space. The child transitions from narcissism, primary narcissism, infantile narcissism. Child transitions from this phase to object relations.
Infantile primary narcissism is when the child regards itself as the love object or the sex object because he's not aware of the existence of any other objects.
And then when he becomes aware that other objects exist, other people exist, the child transitions to object relations, begins to interact with other people, learn skills, social skills, sexual skills, becomes acquainted with scripts, sexual scripts, for example, cultural scripts. All this is prevented.
Emotional covert incest prevents all this from happening because the child is not allowed to exit the shared fantasy where the only object is the child mother, the fusion, the fused object. The self object is fused.
So within the shared fantasy space, the only allowed object is the object that represents the fusion, the merger, the symbiosis between mother and child so that whatever emotions the child directs at itself are also automatically an ipsofacto directed at the mother.
Much later, this happens with the father. This could happen with the father as well.
Emotional covert incest is different between men and women because the mother plays almost an exclusive role in personal growth and development until age 36 months.
So covert emotional incest and shared fantasies of emotional incest prior to age 36 months are exclusively only with the mother and therefore with boys. So boy children, male children are likely to develop emotional covert incest with the mother prior to age 36 months and female children, girls are likely to develop covert emotional incest with the father after age 36 months
and that is precisely why sex, sexual incest is much more common with girls than with boys because they enter a shared fantasy of emotional incest much later in life and it continues well into adolescence where they are ripe for sex.
So this is the picture.
You see the intimate, no pun intended, connections between the narcissist's shared fantasy and emotional covert incest.
We can generalize and say that the narcissist shared fantasy is actually a reenactment of the covert emotional incest with his mother.
He chooses an intimate partner, he converts her into a maternal figure and then he develops an incestuous relationship with her.
This leads in many cases to asexuality, sexlessness because you can't have sex with your mother.
On the one hand and on the other hand in a desperate attempt to not betray the original mother by having sex or falling in love with another woman, the narcissist abuses his intimate partner sexually and emotionally as a way to distance himself from any possibility of betrayal.
He says it's like he's saying to his mother, he's signaling to his mother, you see I haven't betrayed you, I'm treating her badly, I'm treating my wife, I'm treating my girlfriend badly, I'm not having sex with her or when I'm having sex with her it's sadistic and objectifying and dehumanizing and degrading and definitely I don't have any emotions involved.
So don't worry, don't worry, you're my first and only love. That's the message, that's the hidden occult message.
And of course this creates a lot of ambivalence in the child.
These children grow up to love the mother in a very, very sick dependent way.
It's not really love as I said, it's enmeshment.
And on the other hand to hate the mother because somewhere deep inside these children as they grow up realize that mother is holding them back. Mother is not allowing them to become. Mother is decimating their potential. Mother is killing them and then mummifying them the same way the guy in psycho Norman Bates did to his mother.
And there's a lot of anger, helplessness, hopelessness and rage because it's very frustrating to not allow, to not be allowed to separate and become you.
And it is a narcissist hope that in the next share of fantasy he will succeed, he will separate, he will individually and will say goodbye to all maternal figures, the original one and all the substitutes thereafter.
And of course it never works. It never works because emotional covert incest never stops. Even after the parent dies, it never stops. It's a lifelong affliction. It paints the world and frames it in a highly specific way and it prevents the parentified or doubtified child who is forced to play the spouse, prevents him or her from actually being a spouse to someone else.
Okay.
Okay.