We've gone a long way and we have circumnavigated the globe and I've reviewed the death drive from as far as I know every possible angle and I think it all leads to the conclusion, the sad conclusion, that when a child is born it is given the choice between life and death by his mother and healthy mothers, loving mothers, caring mothers, Winnicottian good enough mothers.
Let the child choose, that is exactly separation and individuation.
Some children choose death regardless of the mother but the overwhelming vast majority choose life.
It is when the mother chooses for the child that she invariably chooses death. Even if she believes that she's choosing life, even if she thinks she's being protective and loving and caring and holding and containing, whenever the mother makes the choice she's choosing death for her child and once the child has become intimate with death there is no going back because death is the woman.
It's an oceanic feeling, it's nirvana, it's the beginning and the end. It is far superior to life, far more gratifying, far more engulfing and encompassing and soothing and comforting.
Once a child gets in touch and gets to know death it never lets go and it keeps choosing death into adulthood and into its own physical death, that is the mother's gift, poisoned gift, that is a legacy.
Mothers, a mother's main role is to push the child away, to reject the child in a loving manner, to serve as a secure base while the child is propelled by her, encouraged by her to explore the world out there, externally, separate from her.
A mother who is too insecure, too selfish to let the child go is a mother who chooses death for her child and her child will never ever revive.
All the self-styled experts online provide answers to your questions. The answers are rubbish but they still provide answers to your questions and I am here to question their answers and even more importantly yours.
So welcome to questioning your answers session.
Today I'm going to tackle four of your questions.
I'll start with the first one.
Do narcissists hold everyone in contempt?
The short and the long of it is absolutely. Narcissists hold in cold demeaning contempt, the very people that they envy and they hold in virulent sadistic contempt, people that they depend on for narcissistic supply, attention, adulation, admiration, and so on.
They also hold in contempt, people that they need for the maintenance of the shared fantasy with so-called love.
Let me summarize it for you.
They hold in contempt everyone. If it moves, they hold it in contempt but above all they hold themselves in utmost disdain, self-loathing, and they compensate for this with pretend godlike grandiosity.
So that's why we keep saying that pathological narcissism is compensatory.
The contempt is on 24/7/365, no letter and consequently so is the narcissism, the narcissistic defenses. They are also on all the time.
Next question. Are narcissists capable of love?
Narcissists are incapable of any positive emotion, not only love. It's because they are unable to access these emotions. These emotions are walled in, firewalled, buried, repressed, suppressed, out of reach.
This is the difference between the narcissist and the borderline. The narcissist is terrified of becoming emotionally dysregulated if he were to access his emotions, first and foremost, the shame.
So narcissists are incapable of love. They're incapable of loving but I think even more importantly they are incapable of being loved.
Consider this.
Okay, are narcissists lazy?
Narcissists appear to be lazy. They appear to be indolent slackers but actually they're not. Narcissists are very hard workers to obtain and to secure narcissistic supply. It's hard work.
Ask any junkie to ascertain or to make sure that you have an uninterrupted flow of the drug of your choice. It's a full-time job.
But narcissists perceive themselves as god-like, perfection, reified. So God created the entire universe in six days and eight short sentences utterances. God didn't have to work hard for it. He just, you know, spoke, said something and here we are.
So the narcissist perceiving himself as the absolute equal of God, the equivalent of God, a divine, a divinity, a deity of some kind. The narcissist believes that his words are more than enough. They don't have to be followed with action. He's a great believer in what the Greeks called the logos. He believes and this is of course magical thinking. The narcissist believes that if he were only to wish something, to think about something, to contemplate something, it would become true in reality. And so God is also entitled to special treatment, service and supplication.
And the narcissist is no exception. Being a god, he expects this from other people. He expects to be treated by special people in a special way. And he expects to be serviced the famous four S's, sex, supply, services, safety, and he expects submissiveness, obedience, the supplication part.
Other people should labor and toil, to realize, to actualize, to materialize the nitty gritty aspects of the narcissist's big picture vision.
Yes, the narcissist has the vision thing and he's above the tedium, above the boring stuff, above the pedestrian, the cotidian, the day to day. He sits in his armchair contemplating the universe, the big picture. He has a sbalmoramic and synoptic view of everything. And he hands down instructions and commands and orders to the lesser mortals that surround him.
Another question has like to do with narcissism. It's about intrusive thoughts. What to do with intrusive thoughts, thoughts that occupy your mind and despite your best efforts, you cannot get rid of them.
Here's the thing. The more you try to suppress an intrusive thought, the more pervasive and potent, strong, powerful it becomes. This is known in clinical psychology as ironic rebound.
If I were to tell you to not think of an elephant, the first thing that would come to your mind would be an elephant, of course.
So try the opposite. Force yourself knowingly and consciously to contemplate only the intrusive content. Focus on the intrusive thought. Dredge it up. Provoke it. Evoke it. Elicit it. Consider it. Analyze it. Think only about it. Put away from your mind anything that's not intrusive, anything that doesn't have to do with this in these intrusive thoughts.
Whenever another unrelated thought occurs to you, immediately recall the intrusive thought and focus on the intrusive thought in great detail. You will find out that gradually the intrusive thoughts will cease altogether.
And finally, I've been asked, some people are charitable, altruistic, helpful. They give a lot in a variety of ways.
Could this be narcissism?
Well, there is something called communal or pro-social narcissism.
But more generally, some people know how to love only by giving. Giving is their way of showing and expressing love.
But when the gifts of such people are rebuffed or ignored, they panic. They become control freaks. The giving of these people becomes compulsive, coercive, the very opposite of love.
So people who give in lieu of love, people who give as a substitute for love, people who are incapable of loving but are capable of giving, are actually control freaks. This is their way of mastering the situation and the recipient of their largess.
They cannot countenance being rejected. They take rejection very badly and then they become real monsters. And their giving is out of control. It's absolutely coercive and controlling and compulsive. And you have to take what they're giving. And if you don't, then you're the enemy or something's wrong with you, pathologize you, the bad mouth you and so on.
Okay, this is pathological giving, a sick kind of giving.
Okay, I hope I've questioned all your answers.
Stay with me for the next episode, which would be, I promise, a hell of a lot longer.
Because I love the sound of my voice.