A shocking event has happened today.
I received an intelligent comment. I was so discombobulated that I took two hours to think it over.
And here is my response.
But first, let us start with a comment.
If the narcissist only relates to an internal object, how is the narcissist able to hurt or to abuse or to disrupt or to change or to destroy a victim or the victim? How is the narcissist able to hurt his victim? How is the effect transferred? How does it reach or hurt the victim? Is it a form of voodoo?
Please answer this.
I couldn't resist. please did it so here is my response
In certain schools in psychology, the word object denotes mostly people. So people are considered to be external objects and that's why we have for example object relations.
When the narcissist comes across people, especially significant people, people who can play a role in the narcissistic fantasy, people who can provide the narcissists with narcissistic supply, people who can play a role in the narcissists shared fantasy, people who can provide the narcissists with narcissistic supply, people who fit into the narcissist scheme of entitlement, they provide services, they provide sex, they provide succor, they are there for the narcissist and so on.
When the narcissist comes across such people, what the narcissist does, he converts them in his mind from external objects to internal objects. This process is known clinically as introjection.
And in my work, I call it snapshoting.
So the narcissist takes a snapshot of you and then converts you into an internal object, a representation of you in his mind, an avatar, a placeholder, if you wish.
At that moment, or from that moment, the narcissist continues to interact only with the internal object.
You cease to exist. You no longer play a role in the narcissist's life as an external object.
Only your representation is psychodynamically active.
The narcissist continues to have dialogues with your avatar. The narcissist continues to argue with your snapshot. The narcissist has a relationship unfolding with your introject, but it all takes place in the giant playground of the narcissist's mind.
It's a paracosm, it's an alternative reality. The narcissist inhabits his mind the way you reside in the external world.
And so the question is really a good one.
If the narcissist is unable to recognize your separateness, your externality, the fact that you are out there, the fact that you are not inside his mind, if the narcissist is unable to accept that you are an external object, how and why does the narcissist seek to hurt you or to abuse you?
In which way does the narcissist affect you, change you, transforms you? How does the narcissist penetrate your mind and entrains you and installs an introject?
In other words, if as far as the narcissist is concerned, you exist only in his mind as a figment of his imagination, as a participant in his internal fantasy, then how does the narcissist have any type of interaction? How does he maintain any type of effect or impact on you as an external object?
The answer, as usual in pathological narcissism, is mind-boggling.
What the narcissist does, he infects you. He infects you with his inability to tell apart internal and external objects.
Let's go back one step.
I mentioned at the beginning of this video, when we were all much younger and much more energized, I mentioned that the narcissist cannot tell the difference between external objects and internal objects, and it is a form of pseudo-psychosis or reverse psychosis, if you wish.
The inability to tell the inside from the outside is a hallmark of psychosis, and it is known clinically as hyper-reflexivity.
What happens is the narcissist induces in you the same inability.
The narcissist disables your capacity to tell apart external from internal. The narcissist causes you to behave or to act exactly as he does. The narcissist converts external objects to internal ones.
And once you're exposed to the narcissist, you also begin to convert external objects to internal ones. You also begin to snapshot. You also begin to interject. You take on narcissistic, this dimension of pathological narcissism.
The narcissist induces in you a conflation of external and internal, you can no longer tell the difference.
And so, when you look at the narcissist as his intimate partner or as his best friend or as his colleague or whatever, when you interact with the narcissist, when you're in the presence of the narcissist, when you share a life with the narcissist, when you're embedded in a fantasy, in the fantasy of the narcissist, whenever you interact with the narcissist, what happens is you react to the narcissist's internal dynamics as if these were external dynamics.
You conflate and confuse internal and external exactly the way the narcissist does.
The narcissist goes through various stages in the shared fantasy, idealization, devaluation, discard, and so on.
These phases of the shared fantasy are autonomous. They have nothing to do with you.
They represent what Freud called a repetition compulsion. It's compulsive.
Even if you were not there physically, the shared fantasy would continue to unfold inexorably, leading to the inevitable end and denouement of discard.
So you have nothing to do with what goes on in the narcissist's mind. You have no impact or effect or involvement in the narcissist's interactions with his internal objects.
The narcissist is having a relationship with your avatar, with your representation in his mind.
And yet, as someone who is in the narcissist's life, you witness these dynamics. You witness the narcissist interacting with these internal objects.
You are there to observe the narcissist as he goes through the motions of the shared fantasy by having a dialogue, an argument, a debate, an interaction, and a relationship with his internal objects.
The narcissist's internal playground, the narcissist's internal space, the narcissist's internal paracosm, in short, what passes for the narcissist's mind.
This recess is open to observation.
And when you observe all these things, you misinterpret them as external, not as internal.
So when the narcissist devalues the internal object that represents you in his mind, you misinterpret it as if the narcissist were devaluing you as an external object.
When the narcissist idealizes your avatar in his mind, you misperceive this, you misinterpret this and you think that he is idealizing you as an external object.
You are confusing and conflating the narcissist's internal dynamics as if they were external dynamics and the narcissist's internal objects as if they were external objects.
So then you confuse the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind as if it were you, the external object.
And you misinterpret the narcissistic interactions with the internal objects as if these were interactions with you, the external object.
The narcissist's interactions with you, the external object.
The narcissist induces in you, creates in you a replica of his own dysfunctional mind. He distorts your mind.
I call it contagious snapshotting or infectious introjection.
And because you misperceive the narcissistic behaviors, the narcissistic utterances and speech acts, the narcissistic interactions, you misperceive them as if they are directed at you, you get traumatized, you get hurt, you get abused.
So everything that takes place in the narcissist's world takes place in his mind and only in his mind.
Narcissists do not interact with the external environment.
This is one reason they have an impaired reality testing.
They are totally immersed and scorned and cocooned within their own mind.
There's no exit. They're buried. They're entombed inside their minds.
And yet you as an observer misinterpret the denizens' behaviors as if they were directed externally at you when they're not.
And so you end up being in pain, angry, hurting, abused, traumatized, as if you were interacting with someone who is capable of perceiving your externality and separateness, and he treats you as if you are a separate entity.
Narcissus regards you as an extension, as an element, as an ingredient of his mind. Not as an autonomous, independent human being out there. There's no outside in narcissism.
And yet, you are incapable of perceiving this. So you misattribute the introjection, the internal dynamics of the narcissist, and you regard them as deliberate attempts to take you down, to put you down, to humiliate you, to shame you, to manipulate you, to transform you, to hurt you, to abuse you, and so on.
The truth is, from the moment the narcissist has introjected you, from the moment the narcissist has created a snapshot of you, you no longer exist as far as the narcissist is concerned.
From that moment on, everything takes place internally.
The plot thickens and the narrative unfolds exclusively within the confines of the narcissist's mind and you might as well have not existed, you might as well be gone.
And so don't take it personally. It's not directed at you. You are not the target.
And in the narcissist's mind, you're not even the victim.
Which is why narcissists feel that they are wronged, that it's an injustice when you accuse them of being abusive.
Because in their mind, in the narcissist's mind, he has never hurt you. If he has abused anything or anyone, he has been abusing the internal object, not you.
And yet you perceive this as abusive behavior because exactly like the narcissist, you confuse yourself as an external object with the internal object that represents you in the narcissist's mind.
All the abuse, all the mistreatment, all the rage, all of these, all the entraining, all of these are directed to the internal object, and yet you experience them as if they were directed at you, the external object.
That is exactly the confusion that regulates the narcissist's mind, and you have been officially infected. The contagion has taken over.